Inspired by my recent Geo development plans I wanted to share my personal thought process when creating an online business. Take notice of the phrase “online business”, not website.

So what is the first step?

Step one for me, is setting my first year goals and determining how I am going to achieve them. Using TampaBay.tv as the example, I begin with research. I need to know the ad rates not only for similar websites but print, television and radio. I need this information to set my pricing and create my sales presentation. Once I’ve finished the research, I take my goal ($xxx,xxx) divided by the ad rates and that tells me how many ads I can offer. I then want to develop my site around the money, making sure not to alienate my site visitors with tons of ads.

Take this same advice for mini-sites. Write the articles around the products you intend to link. Research the products first, determine what you want to sell on your mini-site and then start writing.

Tip: If you do not have the time to do the research yourself hire a virtual assistant. Their fees range anywhere from $5-$35 an hour or you can pay per job. This is how I was able to get the research done for TampaBay.tv.

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I am often asked what WordPress plugins I am using and which I suggest. Here is a list of the ones I am using in alphabetical orders. I have labeled the MUST HAVE plugins with *** at the end.

Askimet – A must have comment spam blocker!!! 1,764 spam comments caught since January of this year***

All In One SEO Pack – Automated SEO***

Brian’s Threaded Comments – Gives the ability to reply to comments below the original, better flow for conversations

Contact Form 7 – Exactly what is says

Flickr Photo Album – Showcases my Flickr.com photos

Google XML Sitemaps – Generates a sitemaps.org compatable sitemap***

MaxBlogPress Strip Ad *Paid plugin* – allows me to post text ad/links to the very top of the site

My Twitpic’s – Showcases my twitpic.com photos

PodPress – Podcast player

SexyBookmarks – Bar with pop-up images below each blog post used for social bookmarking*** (Social bookmarking, retweets and so forth have become extremely popular and can increase your blogs traffic tremendously. Because of this reason I suggest getting a similar bookmarking tool to the one I use. Feel free to use the same one but I’d suggest picking one that fits with your blogs layout/theme)

Subscribe To Comments – allows your readers to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. This is a great plugin to grow your blog community by letting your readers stay up to date in the discussion that they already are interested in***

Top Commentators Widget – Shows top commentators, mine are located in the site’s footer

WP Cumulus – Flash based tag cloud located in site’s footer

WP Polls – Adds an AJAX poll system to blog

WP Polls Widget – Controls WP Polls display

WP Greet Box – Show a different message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from. For example, you can ask Digg visitors to Digg your post, Google visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, and more!

WP Super Cache – This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. Basically speeds the load time for visitors.

Although this is not a plugin I wanted to add OpenX Ad Serer. I use this free tool to manage and rotate my advertiser banners. Visit OpenX.org for more information.

So that was my list, what are you using that’s a must have?

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Last week I wrote about buying my first .us domain name. After losing a Bido auction for SuicideHelp.org which sold for $207 I hand registered the .us version. As promised I would create a mini-site to help those that may be suicidal.

My future plans are to do some SEO work and continue adding articles maybe once or twice per month. I may also solicit people to submit their real world suicide stories via text or video. At this point I have no plans of monetizing the site in any way.

So what do you think? I know the header is a shocker. That’s the goal, want to get the point across.

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By Jen Tanzi – Marketing Communications Manager at BuyDomains. In addition to premium domain name sales, BuyDomains offers exclusive services for website hosting, design and marketing as well as registration of names that are not currently owned.

Okay, you’ve got your brand figured out. You know you’ve got the best product or service out there, and you think you know how to sell it. You’ve honed your message and fine-tuned every detail of your pitch, and you finally hit “send” to launch that big email marketing campaign. And then you wait. And wonder.

What’s happening on the other end of that email? What catches your client’s attention when she sits in front of her laptop and clicks through your site? If only you could watch over her shoulder and see whether she caught the link to that terrific discount you’re offering, and the free shipping details. She might have missed that one because it’s tucked in the corner of a busy page. Or maybe she clicked on it, and clicked on it again, because it DID catch her attention. Short of setting up elaborate customer focus groups — or hiring a psychic — there’s no way to really know what your customers are thinking, right?
Continue reading…

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The following article is a guest post by my friend and fellow domain blogger Morgan Linton. Morgan is the publisher of Domainvestors.tv as well as author of Domain Flipping available at DNFlipping.com.

When developing a domain, good SEO can go a long way towards generating consistent traffic and revenue. While search engine algorithms are changing all the time, there has been one methodology that continues to dramatically improve search engine placement – anchor text. The great thing about anchor text is that this technique applies to hand-coded websites and blogs alike. If you aren’t an HTML-wizard and instead use a tool like WordPress to develop your domains – this technique will work exactly the same way.

The idea behind anchor text is simple, however a bit of research must be done on your part to make sure you are using anchor text as efficiently as possible. The basic idea behind anchor text is to place links to carefully selected keyword phrases that you would like to rank well for in search engines. An example would be writing a blog post about fishing and including a link in your post to “Catch a Fish” which then leads either to another post that you’ve written or a highly accredited website about fishing.

Search engines rank websites higher when they have keywords that are linking to content that the keywords themselves describe. This makes sense since the web visitor will get more value from a keyword phrase if they have the ability to click it to learn more. Many web developers overlook this step and instead repeat the same keyword over and over in their text. While keyword repetition is a good strategy, having linked keyword phrases will go much further in the SEO-game.

So how to do you know what keywords to use? Using a tool like the Google Adwords Keyword tool can help you determine exactly which keywords are the most popular related to your subject area. Using my fishing example – you know that “Fishing” is one keyword you want to use as anchor text, but what related keywords are the most popular? By entering the word “fishing” into the Google Adwords Keyword tool you will see what the most popular search terms are related to fishing. I usually take the top ten and try to have at least one piece of anchor-text related to these keywords somewhere on my sites.

Anchor text is a great way to improve your SEO while providing your visitors with even better access to information. Whether you are developing a mini-site, a complete website, or just a simple blog post anchor text will help rank better and get more visitors to your domain.

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