JKL Small Business Marketing Solutions - Site Updates

21 July 2009

There have not been a lot of updates to this site in the last 18 months or so.  Offline work has taken priority.  However, small business marketing and growth remains close to my heart so I have given the site a full 'look and feel' makeover.  I am also clearing out a lot of the defunct links so that you will find a lot less dead ends.

21 October 2007

It's clearly a sign of approaching old age - I cannot believe that a full year has gone by since I moved this web site away from Site Build It. It has developed hugely with article databases added on topics relevant to small business marketing as diverse as Referral Marketing to Mulitlevel marketing and from Affiliate Marketing to Direct marketing.

Editing the site is certainly much easier and much more flexible.  I still rate Site Build It for beginners to web site development.  For those with more experience I cannot really say enough good things about XSitePro or about BlueHost where this site is now hosted.

21 October 2006

Move to new web host now complete.  Quite a bit of work to do to structure the site.  New host provides pretty much all the functionality offered by site sell but without the constraints.

It is a joy to be editing the site in a decent web editor again.

Watch out for more updates.

10 September 2006

Time to move on from SiteSell.  JKL is moving to a new host.

20 June 2006

Removed - business links no longer valid

15 June 2006

This week I have been experimenting with a wordpress blog mass installer. The interesting thing is that it allows you to install lots of blogs on the same domain.

Edit:  I have decided that mass creating blogs is simply spam by another route.

30 May 2006

Reading through the posts on this page and it is very obvious just how much all of my business interests have moved online. This process is continuing.

A key foundation to a successful online business is web site traffic. The cheapest traffic comes from 2 places:

• The Search Engines
• Links from other web pages

And that's partly what I am doing with this post now. Almost every page on this site has a Google Page Rank.  I have  I have a number of additional sites:

• The Digital Switchover starts in the UK in 2008

Finally for this post, I am embarking on selling my own niche products. Sensual Massage This site has not been launched yet so why provide a link? Well all the search engines can take quite a while to list a site. The earlier you start the process the better.

8 May 2006

There have been a few changes to this site - mostly to increase its monetarization. Although I no longer provide direct consultancy (selling products and information is more profitable) I believe that the information on this site provides real value to my readers. So, I will keep adding pages and articles for the foreseeable future.

You can let me know what you think by using the JKL Contact Form.

If you have a web site and have never used Google Adsense it could be worth your while taking a look - just click on the button above.

218 March 2006

One week between site updates. It's a minor miracle :)

If you have visited before you cannot fail to notice the change in look and feel. The revised focus on core small business marketing techniques is also beginning to filter through. Keep your eyes open.

4 March 2006

No site updates for 3 months - it's really not good enough.

First things first. My wife has started her own business. It is a unique and wonderful concept for children of all ages. Take a look at StarGazer Ceilings.  It is an amazingly realistic depiction of the stars at night on your bedroom ceiling.

So, to business.

Delve into this site and you will see that the content is predominantly home grown. Or in other words, I have written most of it. There are just a handful of guest articles covering highly pertinent, comlementary information.

It's not that the concepts are new. They come from the greats such as Jay Abraham, Claude Hopkins and Dan Kennedy to mention but a few.

So why is this significant?

Well it comes down to the latest internet obsession with content oriented web sites.

There are now hundreds of sites offering private label rights content. These provide hundreds of new articles for you to use and publish on your own web site as though they are yours.

No problem. And very useful if the articles match the theme of your web site.

Yet there is a problem. Allegedly, Google is now penalising web sites with duplicate content. So the thousands of web sites springing up using plr articles cannot hope to rank highly in Google.

I say allegedly because there is absolutely no concrete evidence to support this conjecture. What is almost certainly true, and has been true for years, is that where obviously duplicate content is used teh first instance of that content indexed by the search engines is likely to rank higher than any subsequent posting.

For instance, if you print any of the articles from the articles pages on this site, as you are quite free to do, you will not rank as highly as the articles do on this site.

So what's that got to do with this site?

Simple really. I am experimenting with the use of private rights articles and blogs. So much so that the long promised updates to this site are once again on hold (or still on hold if you need the full truth). You can see an example at Ebay Buying

As I have so many PLR articles to use you are sure to see many more sites like this. I'll let you know how successful they are.

18 December 2005

Several more articles have been added to the marketing articles page. Go over and take a look.

I have also managed to develop another niche site on Effective and Safe Ebay Buying. Please do take a look and let me know what you think.

8 December 2005

It is quite a shock to see the gap between this and the previous post. I could have sworn it had only been a couple of weeks.

At least this post is to report some progress. 7 new articles have been added:

  Business Strategy

• Customer Loyalty
• Why Customers Buy
• How to Become a Powerful Public Speaker
• Determine your optimum market positioning
• Make the most of your advertising spend
• Press releases - the free way to massive publicity

There are more to come.

24 October 2005

Yet another month slips by. Nothing done on the change of direction for the site yet. There have been a few additions to pages here and there though.

25 September 2005

This site is at a cross roads. When started the aim was to provide a comprehensive set of simple to apply marketing solutions specifically for small businesses. The reality is that there are just too many brilliant solutions and just too little time to produce this site.

The scope is just too broad. Therefore, over the coming weeks the theme of the site will be changing.

Coming soon - promote your small business on the internet.

9 August 2005

Even better - 2 posts in one day. This site has been running for 18 months. I know because the renewal notice has come from SiteSell.

It is an interesting situation.

I have learned enormously from building the site. If I am honest it is still no more than 20% complete.

I get some great reviews - some leading marketers tell me that I "put my heart and soul into it" and, "deliver amazing value for your readers".

But, average visitors are only 25 per day.

One of the lessons is that 'Small Business Marketing' is not sufficiently focussed. There is some amazing competition including major government departments from the USA and UK. For practically none of my keywords have I made high ranking pages on any of the search engines.

My major promotion has been through article writing. And it is through my articles that I have attained my highest search engine rankings.

I have over 600 incoming links - mostly from the articles.

But still not a lot of traffic.

On the other side, every page has a page rank of 4. It seems to be a good site to link from.

The question: should I renew the web site?

It's a tough one.

9 August 2005

Wow, 2 posts in 2 days. Things are looking up.

Not entirely, I have just managed to complete a niche marketing web site that I have been working on for some time.

Choice Teak Furniture is a single page site. Not too surprisingly it is all about Teak Furniture. It is built after the Phil Wiley, "Mini Sites Secrets", 'Micro Site' (if that is not too big a contradiction) model.

It is all pointed at a single affiliate partner. Wouldn't you just know it, I complete the site and the affiliate partner is short on funds.

Not to worry. I just won't promote it for a while.

7 August 2005

All references from this site to XSitePro have moved to XSitePro http://www.xsitepro.jkl.co.uk

11 June 2005

Aw shucks. No matter how hard I try to keep the updates log up to date I seem to default to an entry every 2 to 3 weeks.

I have posted a couple of articles in the last couple of weeks. Well actually, they are almost the same article factored to meet a specific market niche.

What am I talking about? There's an explanation at my blog Business Growth Solutions. You don't have to go there to read it though. The post is repeated below.

It ought to be hard to find anyone marketing their business on the internet who do not know of the power of writing and publishing articles. Write an article on a topic of general interest pertinent to the theme of your web site and distribute it to lots of article directories.

Whenever your article is referenced or used in someone elses web site and you get a rush of traffic.

But how do you keep on producing articles? Many authors seem to write new content each time.

Nothing wrong with that of course. Except that there is an easier way. That way is article factoring - or in plain english - tailoring each article you write for a specific niche market. There are 2 samples below:

• 6 steps to success for independent consultants
• 5 steps to success for small business owners

These 2 articles are in turn based on a root article, 4 Steps to Success to Life, the University and Everything

A cursory glance at all of these articles will show that the bulk of them is essentially identical. The opportunitie for further factoring is pretty much unlimited:

• 5 Steps to Success for Journalists
• 4 steps to success for college students
• How to achieve success in internet marketing
• Secrets of successfully marketing small businesses online
• And so on

So why work harder than you have to?

Factor your existing articles to address specific niche markets pertinent to your web site theme.

What could be easier?

21 May 2005

Look anywhere for making money on the internet and you will be inundated with information about niche marketing. Somehow there is some idea that the internet invented niche marketing. The truth is that most small businesses would benefit from identifying and dominating a niche.

However, for this post I am going with the crowd. If you have spent any length of time browsing this site you can't help be realise that I am passionate about small businesses promoting themselves through the web.

One of the great difficulties is knowing the best way to get on line. Web site designers charge large sums for highly variable work (if you find a good one stick with them). One alternative is to build your own web site. Lots of tools claim to help you to do this with no knowledge of the web, html, search engines or any other related topic. Perhaps the only one that really does do this is the one this site is built with - Site Build it (try the link at the bottom of the page).

Until now.

Recently I bought a copy of XsitePro. It came with a 365 day money back guarantee so I thought I'd give it a try.

In all honesty, I have been blown away. XsitePro is not only easier than SiteBuilIt to use, but it also offers much more flexibility and control.

To start with I have used it to collect a whole bunch of my articles together in one place. Now, I can publish them all on a web site at the touch of a button.

But that's not the point.

Using XsitePro's search engine optimisation tools, each and every article is now optimised for the key words it features. I have continued to place these articles with article and ezine directories. I will wait to see the results.

Of course, SiteBuildIt could be used to do this. But to be fair, SiteBuildIt's block building approach is pretty slow and clunky in comparison to XsitePro.

As confidence increased I decided to have a little experiment with a niche web site myself. You can see the early results here Choice Lift Chairs. Using XSitePro's built-in templates, a couple of hours research on the internet and a few hours writing the content, and you have a pretty good looking web site in 2 evening's work.

Click here to view the "7 Reasons Why You Need XSitePro Now!" video

2 May 2005

Not too bad this time - only 2 weeks between site updates. In fact, I have been doing quite a bit of work on the site. Hopefully most of it is pretty transparent to most users.

What I fail to get around to is including a note here on just what has been happening.

For the last couple of weeks I have been systematically adding adsense to many pages. In the past I had experimented with quite a few different advertising methods:

• CB Mall - still one I like - my CB Mall page ranks in the top 10 on most of the major search engines
• Searchfeed
• Searchfeast - even I got confused with these last too. They never made any money so they are gone.
• Affiliate Sensor - delivers adsense type ads. You only get paid when someone clicks and then buys. Great potential. No Sales.

So back to adsense. I don't make a lot of money. But I do make some.

In the forums there has been a lot of discussion of the best placement of adsense ads. Most of this months site updates are experimenting with left and right aligned skyscrapers. I will let you know which does best.

17 April 2005

Removed

4 February 2005

Removed

17 January 2005 Another 10 days shoots by.

Most work recently has been off site and off line. Delivering consultancy has taken priority over building this site further.

However, I have had time to build a niche site to try my hand directly at internet marketing. Have a look at www.mypromhairstyle.com and let me know what you think. (you can use the contact form on this site.

Forays out into building simple sites using html outside of SBI also extend to building a site for the Muskham Art Group. This is much more my wife's interest rather than mine. But it has been an interesting exercise.

Again, please do let me know what you think. Please also let me know if you know of any other art groups that might be interested in exchanging links.

That's all for now. I have a whole mass of articles to optimise, upload and link. They all need publicising. Where does all the time go?

7 January 2005 Wow, it's a new year already. Time for another site update.

This site has been in existence for 10 months. It now consists of 50 pages. There are another 20 waiting for me to load.

Adding a page to the site now takes longer than ever. That is no reflection on SBI - more the case of more complex intra site linking.

For example, today I added 2 new articles Public Speakng for Small Business Owners and The Importance of Article Writing for small business owners. While each was already written I spent some time checking on the best keywords to use in the headlines. Then I used the SBI search engine optimisation tool to make sure the pages could score well with the Search Engines. Each page then needed to be linked to the marketing strategies page and the Marketing Articles page.

Each of the articles was then added to the breakthrough growth blog

All in all, about 4 hours work. And then another 15 minutes adding these activities to this record.

Traffic is slowly building. For the last 3 months is has increased by about 30% per month. Heading towards the 1000 unique visitors per month mark.

OK, that's all for now. More pages to add over the weekend.

29 Dec 2004 No site updates for over 2 weeks - yikes I am slipping.

Even with the Christmas break - 2 weeks is much too long between site updates. Not that it means that there has been no activity in that time. There has been quite a bit of subtle (we hope) but significant restructuring going on.

Our aim has been to provide a more consistent structure for the ongoing expansion of the site. We also want to improve some of the search engine optimisation for a few pages.

A new page - Marketing Strategy - has been added. This page should provide a logical hub to access lots of different marketing tactics and techniques. Work is well advanced on content and one supporting article has been added.

The title of the internet marketing page has been changed to 'Marketing Online'. Marketing online is much closer to the ethos of our site - we really don't want to be internet marketers competing with the likes of Ken Evoy, Corey Rudl, Yanik Silver and the like. Marketing online also sports a much better supply demand ratio (the competition is not as fierce :-)

The articles and download page has been split. The Article page is titled 'Marketing Articles' - again a phrase with much improved supply demand ratio.

Articles will remain free to download, copy and redistribute as long as full attribution, including a live link back to this site, is retained.

The downloads page will require registration and log-on to use in future. An offsite auto responder account has been set up with getresponse.com. The flexibility provided is much better than most of the competition and at a keener price.

Visit the marketing strategies page and take a look at the articles and pages accessible from there. The latest update concerns how to get the very most from your attendance at trade shows.

Slightly less positively, the RSS feed has been put on ice until SBI provides a native RSS solution. The work around, while highly functional, required just a little too much work. Most of the updates that would have been posted there will be posted here and in our blog Breakthrough Business Growth . Why not subscribe? You will get all the site updates and all new articles as they are posted on the site.

You will even get the chance to read this post again :)

Wow, all that in 2 weeks of part time work. And much more to come. See you soon.

12 Dec 2004 Where does all the time go to?

It's mostly been a week of article production and promotion. Took advantage of the offer fromwww.ezinearticle.com to post a further 5 articles for free. Ezine articles normally charges quite a bit for the service so it seems like a good deal. Grow your business by getting your customers buying more often is currently featured on ezine articles. The other 4 should follow.

Also followed Marc Liron's guide and created an RSS feed. Right click on the link and paste into your mail reader to see just what information this site provices.

Registered the feed with a few high Alexa and Google Page Ranked sites. It's all very exciting.

A number of additional links added to the resource and associated businesses pages.

Received the first batch of articles from the outsourced writer this week. They are OK but seem to have been written down to a word limit rather than to address the topic as given. They need some considerable work but watch out for a whole batch of updates in the coming days.

6 Dec 2004 Investigated a batch of highly ranked google sites this weekend. Noticed that many do not have many external backlinks. Some quite highly ranked sites only have backlinks to internal pages. As an experiment I have added site updates for a text link back to my home page on each tier 2 page.

Just another thought, how long does it take for the google toolbar and page rank to update. This site is listed with more than a dozen directories, there are a few site links (far less than there ought to be) and still the PR sits stubbornly at 1. A check of the backlinks shows no pages linking in.

4 Dec 2004 Got a whole batch of articles ready for uploading. Need to find the time to work on the site structure to make sure the articles add to the site overall. Doing site updates certainly takes all the time you can spare.

Also created blog on google's blogger. Breakthrough Growth. I am going to list all of my articles there with links back here obviously.

28 Nov 2004 Extra links added. Lots of work in the background on preparing more content. Look out for major updates soon.

20 Nov 2004 Articles listed in article city providing back links.

6 Nov 2004 Web Traffic Building page added.

6 Nov 2004 Link exchange page added. The plan is to create a local business directory with links to sites further afield in the UK and across the World.

5 Nov 2004 JKL solutions page added. Getting visitors to the site but not telling them how we can help them. Bit of a pointless exercise :)

4 Nov 2004 FREE articles and downloads page added. Includes links to free sitesell 'masters' courses. They are the best available on the web after all :)

3 Nov 2004 Added search page with site map search this site now

2 Nov 2004 Listed site in free business directories

31 Oct 2004 Active participation in a number of small business, marketing and internet forums. Immediate boost in traffic.

31 Oct 2004.Site promotion started. Been fiddling with site content since March this year. Have launched a bit of a blitz in the last couple of weeks. The site is still only around 20% complete but I feel that it is starting to add value. Time to get a bit of traffic.