On Saturday I taught a class at the MLK Library Digital Commons on how to how to promote your web-based business.
I had targeted the class to people who had already launched a site and were looking for ways to market it, but the students tended to not have sites up yet but wanted to dip a toe in the water.
Even still, it’s a good idea to be aware of these concepts before you start building your site so can tailor your site’s content to what people are searching for and find the right venues to help promote your site.
Here my slides from the class and a fast writeup of some of the resources I talked about:
Resources Mentioned
- The $3,900 per day pitch coach for foreign entrepreneurs – A fascinating Business Insider article on a communications consultant who charges big bucks to help foreign entrepreneurs refine their pitches for American VCs. A great example of how to “niche down” your idea and dominate by being ultra specific.
- Google Keyword Planner – Google’s tool that lets you read the minds of the millions of people searching the web every day. This is still free but now requires an Adwords account to access the data. I also made a video walkthrough of how to us it which is here.
- Google Discussions Search – This tool lets you find current discussions about any keyword. Great for finding forums etc for participating in. It recently disappeared from Google’s additional search tools listing, but you can (still) access it from this link. Hopefully the big G won’t kill it entirely.
- Google Pagespeed Insights – Free tool to tell you how fast your website is loading and get suggestions on how to make it load faster.
- Mailchimp – A tool I use for email marketing and auto-responders. It’s free if your number of emails stays below some threshold.
- Xmarks – A search engine that tells you influential blogs and other websites in your niche.
- Matt Cutts’ Blog – Written by the director of Google’s anti-spam team, reading this site is critical for keeping up with Google’s opinions on what is good content and what isn’t (ie spam).
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SEO Toolbar for Google Chrome – This is a free tool I use that will tell you the PageRank (a measure of authority) of any site you are visiting along with some other useful stats.
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Will’s Copywriting Crash Course – This is a free email course I developed on copywriting, which is the art of writing messages that convince and sell.
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Mixergy – For entrepreneurial inspiration you have to be watching Andrew Warner’s in-depth interviews with successful online entrepreneurs.
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Ben Settle – If you’re serious about learning to sell using email, you should be signed up to his daily newsletter on email marketing.
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Quicksprout – Probably my favorite blog on SEO and online marketing also has a free site diagnose tool that.