If you want to make money online more quickly, choose your domain name wisely.  Domain names that help you make money can be hard to come by just on the name alone. A few of the obvious domain names that make money are insurance.com, realestate.com, and bible.com. Yet, domain names that make money can be a lot easier to find, and a whole lot cheaper than names like these.  You might come up with a ‘catchy’ name like SmartRags.com for a cool clothing website.  It’s not necessarily a common name, but catchy enough that it can be remembered, and it’s easy to spell – two words – smart and rags.

Choosing the right domain name can make all of the difference in the world for your business brand.

Domain names that make money are most often the ones that  are easiest to remember, like SmartRags.com for instance, but if someone were to spell the name SmartRagz.com with a “Z” at the end, it would not be so successful since it is not a normal spelling of the word ‘rags’.  Here is another example but where the domain names are much longer, yet still memorable.  The truth is, a good domain name might very well be a longer domain than even a few short words.  It could quite possibly be a descriptive phrase that someone might type in a search engine to find something.  Examples of these might be like “chiropractors in Charleston” (chiropractorsincharleston.com), “auto repair shop in Atlanta” (autorepairshopinatlanta.com), or “women’s legal services” (womenslegalservices.com).

You might be surprised to learn that having a name like insurance.com or realestate.com, as short and as sweet as they are, are not the only kinds of domain names that get a lot of attention.  If you want domain names that make money, you will need to spend a little more time in finding them.  I own over 100 domains – not that I will ever use them, but I just liked the names and thought they were catchy.  Yet, you can make money in unsuspecting ways with domains that don’t even relate to what you are selling, IF they can get ranked well.  After all, top page rankings are what you want, right?

Of course, it should go without saying that your choice for a domain name should be both descriptive and memorable.  It is an absolute must unless you are planning to have an aggressive online marketing strategy to promote it.  Take our domain name for instance - SDWard.com.  It is the short version of my original name, SDWardCompany.com. I mean, by shortening it, people would not have to type out the whole domain name with ‘company’ attached to it – S.D. Ward versus S. D. Ward Company.  Makes sense, right?  Sadly for me, neither of these names have really anything that sticks out other than my name in them.  And, I mean, how many S. D. Ward’s could there be in the world?

Would you believe over 25,000,000 or so references to my name – yes, over 25 MILLION from a Google search. I tried S. D. Ward, SD Ward, and S D Ward … it didn’t matter.  Even if someone typed in my name, there is really no great hope someone actually finding my Website out of the millions of other references to my name.  I remember when we first changed our name over to S. D. Ward & Associates and dropped the ‘company’ off of our domain name, our Website was buried on something like page 11,500 and something on Google.  Not exactly top page rankings, huh?  It could have been worse though.  I used to own DavidWard.com, but let it lapse years ago (by accident).  Bad mistake, but as for number of instances online, SD Ward paled in comparison to the number of references to David Ward which had over 40 million references.

If you are one of those who don’t fully understand the hopelessness of a domain being buried 1500 pages away from the first page of google search results for S. D. Ward, it simply meant that unless someone typed in my actual domain name “www.sdward.com,” I would never be found by anyone who was looking for me.  I was completely off the map for getting found when I first launched sdward.com as a teaching and coaching Website.  I would have had better success in getting traffic to my website by sticking flyers on windshields than to have someone find my website using Google.

Anyway, I felt that I was destined to be beat out in page rankings by someone else named S. D. Ward that was no doubt one of my distant Ward relatives that have populated the earth like rabbits.  In my defense, the truth be told, most company names are just not real powerful in getting organically ranked with search engines based just on their domain name alone, so the average business owner must work to build page rankings through content and related strategies such as proper indexing, linking and SEO, as well as through that of having a personal or business branding strategy that will drive traffic to their site beyond that of just search engine traffic.  There are other smarter ways to generate traffic to a Website than using a generic company name as a domain name. Our rankings for S. D. Ward have improved significantly, but then I digress here.

If you are open to considering a slightly different and somewhat unorthodox approach to gaining exposure on the Internet without having to pay big bucks to do it, consider the following tips and ideas the next time you are thinking about buying some domain names:

1) Word of Caution as my number one step!  Be careful where you search for your domains when doing research, especially if you do not plan to buy right away.  There are some domain registrars (will not mention names here) who skim search queries from their domain search pages and if the domain someone is checking on has potential, they will purchase it through a dummy company or third party who works for the registrar, and then turn around and put it up for sale to the highest bidder it there is an interest in the domain by more than one party.  This trend is growing as domains become more and more scarse.

2)  Write out a list of short questions that start with ‘how to’ and ’where to’  that relate to your business.  If you are in the pet industry, you might have a question like, ”how to research pedegrees’ or ’where to find non toxic pet shampoos’ or ‘how to trim a cats claws’ or ‘where to find a cat casserole recipe’ (juuust kidding).  These questions that you have come up with may very well be the very questions that an average Internet user might type into a search engine who has the need of finding this information, i.e. www.howtoresearchpedegrees.com or www.wheretofindnontoxicpetshampoos.com.

4)  If you like the numbers you see in page references as well as average monthly searches for the phrases you have chosen, take the time to do a domain search for those phrases.  Here is why.  One of the very first rules in the Google ranking process is the relevance of a domain name to the actual search inquiry done by someone searching for that phrase, i.e. ‘where to find a cat casserole recipe’ (no, not really… please don’t be searching for this).  If that key phrase is available, you are on to something that could bring several thousand people to your website if you apply even a few of the other general rules that Google (and other search engines use to rank pages).  I personally recommend smartycatdomains.com because of their commitment to give 50% of their profits to causes that help, encourage and empower single moms (one of the highest densities of those living at or below the poverty-level).

5)  Once you have purchased the domain, the rest is pretty straight forward. You want to host it with a company you feel offers the best product to promote your Website for the money.  One big precaution is to watch out for those cheap ”UNlimited” sorts of accounts until you have read the fine print.  They are NOT unlimited, and you could very easily have your site either suspended for too much use or have your credit card charged a penalty for abusive use of the system.  Hint:  Unlimited bandwidth does not mean unlimited data transfer (what happens when people visit your Website and your Website downloads to their computer).  Bandwidth is how many people can visit your Website at one time without crashing your site or slowing it down considerably. Big difference!

In closing, most of us have heard the old adage, “It’s all in the name.”   When it comes to choosing the right descriptive domain name that will give you faster and better page rankings, this descriptive domain name, fast traffic building strategy, may be just what you need to get paying customers to your Website.  Just make sure you have something to offer or sell them when they show up!

As always, we would be grateful to you if you would leave a comment. If you would, please also take a moment and share this article with those you think could benefit from it through your favorite social media network! Hit that LIKE button below too for FaceBook if you are a FaceBooker! We will be sooo pleased if you would. Thanks!

Google is an amazing company. And, as always, the ability for Google to out-do themselves never ceases to amaze me. After Google’s purchase of YouTube, they immediately went to work on speech recognition interface with audio and video so that now they can convert video speech into contextual written content that can be indexed by their search engine. How cool it that!? This is great news to Internet marketers since now getting top Google page rankings using video can be possible for the first time.

This is great news for all the ‘talkers’ out there in Cyberville who are much better at speaking than they are in writing. Although speech to text and text to speech recognition is not new, Google has done what they always do, and put technology to work for them in better building their brand as the premier search engine of choice by most online marketers.

It makes totally good sense to use the technology that many professional speakers and Webinar presenters have used the speech to text technology to generate transcripts of their presentations for several years now. By converting video to text, Google can index the video just like the written copy of a blog post, like this one for instance. It can’t be confirmed or not if Google offers transcripts of video that they transcribe, but it would be a great feature to add to their already success filled basket of online marketing and optimization goodies. I would love to have the ability to access my Google user account and or my YouTube account and be able to grab a written copy of my video or Webinar that I might post after a presentation.  All this aside, just think of the powerful nature of this technology adpatation and its ability to get top Google page rankings using video over that of written text! This is a game changer in the minds of most Internet marketers.

In case you didn’t pick up on what I just implied in all of this, Google can now use your spoken words (spoken text) to categorize and rank your video. For those of you who are still learning about page rankings, this means that when you do a really good video on some subject that is widely searched for, your video could get ranked in top search results, placing you on the first page of Google search results! We did some testing over the ffew months to test this new technology by writing a script on small business finance, and this is what happened in our test:

1)  The first video we did was presented off of the the straight-forward script as written without any research as to potential keywords that might be associated with the subject. Honestly, the rankings were really really bad over the next two weeks and the number of visits to the page were never more than 150 unique hits on any day of the two week period. Most of the higher page hits were in the second week of the two week test. As a part of the test, we implemented a specific channel promotion we use to help promote clients so that we could use it again on our future test videos. In defense of Google, it is fair to say that the video was not written with any keyword or keyphrase research, and we know that this is an important part of the overall formula for getting good page rankings with Google.

2. Our second video was the same content, but we implemented a standardize SEO and SEM practice that we use with our clients on a regular basis. We researched and chose our desired Google keyword and keyphrase choices on the same subject (small business finance). We integrated those Google keywords or keyphrases into our second video on the subject verbatim as listed with Google Adwords listings. At the end of the second week of promoting the second video in the exact same way we did the first video, we saw a dramatic improvement in our video page ranking, and our average daily unique hits were never less than 360 unique hits in the second week of promoting it. We were totally impressed. Just by finding specific Google Adsense keywords and keyphrases, and inserting them into the same script on the same subject, we were able to generate over double the organic traffie to our page. The technology really worked! Very cool!

3) In our third video on the same subject with almost identical content using the Google keywords and keyphrases from video test two, we rewrote our 3 minute video script to include the keywords and keyphrases at the front end of our video as if they were in the first and second paragraph of a written blog post. We used them at the same density of Google keywords and keyphrases in the video, but placing about 75% of them in the first minute of presentation.  The page rankings of our third video were outrageous! In our second week of promoting our third video, again, using the identical promotion we used with video one and two,  by placing the main keywords or key phrases up front we were able to see our page ranking hit in the top 60 pages of Google results using our keywords and keyphrases. Keep in mind that at the time we did this YouTube video, that there were over 130,000,000 results for small business finance. Our number of unique hits increased to over 700 on an average day in week two of the two week promotion with one day being almost 1000 unique hits.

Our conclusion is quite simply this. Google’s new romance with their new bride YouTube, and Google’s amazing technology and their ability to capitalize on the video search engine market, is a homerun for Google of course. But the big winners will be average people using video in a smart way to promote their personal or business brand, product, service, or cause. As popularity of video blogs catch on, it will be a whole new ball game for the online marketing industry as new services emerge to script effective video for those wanting high page rankings and increased traffic to their Websites.

If you would like coaching in how to properly script your next video, contact David Ward and his team at SD Ward & Associates. They offer comprehensive assistance on script writing that can make an impact on your audience. Write them at coachme (at) sdward.com. If you have found this article useful, please take a moment and buzz it up on Google, Tweet it, or share it on your favorite social network to your followers (spread the wealth).  And as always, do leave your comments and hit the LIKE button for FaceBook for us!

If you own a business that is not primarily an online based business (like S. D. Ward & Associates for instance), then you must have an online presence that reaches your local market in search engine rankings.  One of the ways to reach your local market aside from spending time and/or money on search engine optimization for overall page rankings is to register with and utilize Google Places optimization in the same way you do search engine optimization.

Google Places is the local market search engine tool that Google has that allows local businesses to advertise to local searchers for the business or service a searcher is looking for locally. Google Places optimization allows local businesses to generate increased local hits – people in your local area clicking on your Website link from Google that are interested in your specific services or products.

In other words, local search results from people who are looking specifically for a company or service in their area mean that you can specifically focus on local search engine optimization and generate local business if you are after local business in your area.  From the consumer side, if you live in St. Augustine, FL and do a Google search for “plumbing repair” in the middle of the night when a pipe breaks behind the wall in your bathroom, you are most likely NOT looking for a plumbing repair business that is in Denver Colorado, right?

Google Places allows you to have this ability to type in plumbing repair and your search engine results will be for plumbing repair wherever you live (or are accessing the Internet from).  Yes, Google (or anyone for that matter) can know exactly where you are accessing the Internet from when you do.  That is how they know to search for plumbers in your area – they have your IP address (a sort of internet postal code).

Now, if you are a business – let’s say a plumbing repair business – and you want to be found by people in your area where you operate your business, one of the best ways now to do this is to get listed with Google Places since it literally will put you on the map for the world to find you.  The great news about this is that you can register your business or service with Google Places for free.  I love free advertising, don’t you?  As one who has been in business for far longer than he would like to admit, advertising in business is like food is to our human existence. If you do not have it you will die.  I love them both!  The only thing better than advertising and food is FREE adverting and FREE food!

If you want to get your business activity moving in your local market, here is how you go about it with Google Places.

1. If you don’t have a Google email, get one.  They are free (I love that word).  You will need to have a Gmail account in order to get logged into Google.

https://www.google.com/accounts/newaccount

2. Once logged in, this link will get you to the “List Your Business” option you need.

 http://places.google.com/business

You will be escorted through several pages and asked various information including your phone number and address.  This allows Google to distinguish the unique nature of your business for classification in Google’s listing.  Once finished with this basic registration, you will be sent a PIN number to verify your listing.

3. After you have gotten registered, you can complete your Google Places profile by adding photos, video, details about your business, a description, and your best 30 second sales pitch (or 60 second, whatever works)!  When it comes to Google Places Local, the more information you provide the better your likelihood of a higher positioning in the local listings.  In a way, your Google Places profile is sort of like a Website all its own.  The more information you have to share with Google and those who are searching for what you offer, the better your rankings will be in the search results for local businesses like yours – generally speaking.

If you list your business correctly, you will show up in local search engine results and get more customers to your Website.

I cannot overstate the importance of a well-written business description for your Google Places listing.  This is where you really have the opportunity to catch the attention of a passer-by and build the ‘sticky effect’ for your listing.  The sticky effect is the ability to keep someone on your Website (or in this case, your Google Places listing) for as long as possible.  If you need help writing a strong company description, let one of our staff know by writing coachme[at]sdward.com, and we will be happy to help you – BOY!  Do WE have a DEAL for YOU!!!? Seriously, don’t negate the importance of a well crafted description for your business.  It’s part of what we do best, in the same way – if you are that plumbing repair business I was just talking about – you do what you do best.

SUCCESS HINT:  Once you have your Google Places listing done, duplicate it with other search engines as well, starting with BING.com.  Bing is Google’s largest competitor and not to be negated when it comes to user popularity.

If you do everything  right in listing your business with Google Places, you will end up on a Google Places map at the top of the search page with a little button right on top of where your business is located (see picture inset).  Talk about putting yourself ‘on the map’ – this is one of the best ways to gain local exposure to anyone in search for your business or service.

This is a Google product that allows you to place advertisement on Website that have content relevant to your advertisement and only pay for the number of clicks on your advertisements. Like almost everything Google does, and what their brand has become famous for, they never lack in service and that of helping those who use their products be as successful as possible when using them.

Understanding how Google Adwords works for you can mean the difference between financial success and failure online. How Adwords works is not difficult to learn; however, many people are not willing to take the time to learn.  This is probably why still only 3-4% of the people who are attempting to make a living online are actually doing it. They take the time to learn. Most people who have been dong online marketing for a while – or at least those who are serious about online marketing – have heard of Google Adwords.

The following video is a great beginner tutorial for those who want to promote their business online through pay per click advertising through Google Adwords. If you find it interesting and useful, please tweet it or share this blog link with your friends.

Google remains the giant of internet advertising. It’s hard to see how any business or marketing effort can succeed today without at least a little nod towards working within the constraint’s placed by this internet behemoth and yet, there are some things that can be done to improve your rankings with Google, without major cost. Here’s just a couple that, when implemented properly, will have a major effect on your Adwords marketing and your bank balance.

1) Don’t just pick out the top keywords. Expand your list to include lots and lots of other keywords that may relate to your specific site. This may sound like a waste of time, and money, to you, but it works. As you can specify an amount per keyword to be spent per click thru, you don’t have to have each new keyword with a huge budget, simply a small amount to get the program running per keyword, see which one’s work for your site, then compare the returns per cost. You will be shocked at the difference in spending $3000 per month on your main keyword with maybe 20 or 30 returns from it, while you’re little cheap Adwords marketing may only have 2 or 3 returns, but your cost per return will have dropped considerably.

2) Work on the negatives. So your ad has an awesome amount of click thru’s – that’s great. Then you ask “Where’s the sales?” and you’ll find that you probably don’t have enough to really justify your costs. Like any sale, what needs to be done is to pre-qualify your click-thru’s, and the easiest way to do this is to add negatives in your Adwords marketing campaign. True, this can backfire on you if your ads aren’t getting the clicks you need anyway, but it is something that you can experiment with to see what works for you.

3) Use the tools supplied by Google. Too many people don’t use the tools supplied for them. Within each Adwords account, you can have up to 25 different campaigns, and under each campaign you can have up to 100 different groups. This allows you to split down each single campaign into specific areas, which in turn allows you to better control those campaign’s that work, and those that don’t. It may be a little work, and it may take a bit of time, but utilizing what Google gives you for free can help every site, be they international giant’s or mom and pop site’s.

4) Confine your campaign’s to only search results. Google Adwords marketing allows both content and search network results, so allowing only active searchers to find your results, as opposed to your click thru ad appearing on every site with even the sniff of your keyword on it, will reduce your costs and give you a better ROI on your campaign.

Let us know how this benefits your SEO marketing efforts, and if you have a story to tell, please share your experience with us at opportunity (at) sdward.com, and if your story is chosen you will entered in to our monthly drawing for all sorts of freebies and coaching services!

If you’re new to Internet marketing, then you’re probably a bit overwhelmed by all the different options you have for promoting your brand. From banner ads to text links, sponsored blog posts, and old school pop-ups, there are a lot of different ways to advertise online, and all of them have their positive and negative points. But one of the most popular, effective, and affordable ways to get your product or service noticed is to use a pay-per-click (PPC) model. Here’s a short list of some of the best sites and programs available.

Nobody can talk about the best pay-per-click sites without mentioning Google. Google AdWords is far and away the number one PPC program out there, so it’s definitely worth your while to figure out how this works. One of the major factors in determining what the best pay-per-click sites are is overall traffic, and in this regard, Google trumps them all. This of course makes AdWords popular with marketers, and makes the bidding wars for top keywords pretty fierce. Before jumping in with an all-out campaign, it would be a good idea to read some AdWords strategy guides to see how the big boys play the game.

Trailing closely behind Google AdWords on the unofficial list of the best pay-per-click sites are Yahoo and MSN – now known as Bing since Yahoo and MSN cut  a deal to have MSN’s Bing search engine as the shared search engine between the two of them. The PPC of both, i.e. Yahoo’s PPC program, Search Marketing, and MSN’s called Ad Center have merged as well, for all practical purposes, in an effort to keep up with the ‘new kids on the block’ at Google (good luck Bill). Between Yahoo and MSN, the Bing search engine pulls an extremely high volume of traffic, and most experienced marketers would agree that the quality of visitors from these sites is much better than at Google since people clicking on your ads with Bing tend to be actually interested in buying, which is of course the ultimate goal, right?

After the Big Three or rather two, there’s a steep drop-off in search traffic volume for the rest of these best pay-per-click sites. But there’s still a sufficient number of visitors to make getting acquainted with these other programs worth your time, especially if you’d like to feel your way around the whole PPC scene before taking the plunge with Google and Bing. To get an idea of how PPC works on a smaller scale, you can try Marchex AdHere, MIVA, ABC Search, and SearchFeed. There are another 50 more out there trying to make a run for Google, but really, they come up short in providing you with any great ROI (return on investment). All of them operate under the same general principles, so don’t worry about the learning curve for the different programs.

When you take the time to learn how PPC advertising can add to your bottom line, and start to play around with it some, be careful! It can get addicting! I heard one story not too long ago about a high school student that wanted sell an eBook on how to decide on a college that she had written.  She did a little studying on the PPC advertising concept, took her graduation money (I think I remember it being $500 or something like) and investing it into pay-per-click advertising to sell her book. The $500 she spent on PPC advertising generated her over $4000 in eBook sales, which she reinvested $2000 of it back into her pay-per-click  campaign and when the dust had settled after her rolling part of her profits back into her campaign about 4 months later, she had earned over $82,000, that is eighty-two THOUSAND dollars (incase you thought those zeros were a typo).

Yes, there is nothing like a really good organic lead generation campaign for your Website or the products that you want to sell, but IF you have a niche market and take the time to learn a bit about PPC marketing, you will quite possibly find it the best investment you have ever made. Happy selling!