Setting Goals

So it’s Christmas Eve, I have a ton of things to do today to prepare for the holiday festivities, and as usual I’m side tracked by an e-mail I received from one of the Blogs I subscribe to (Noble Samurai).

You see, when you are in business for yourself, business is always on your mind. We don’t have the luxury of getting a paycheck every two weeks like most people that work for someone else. This time of year is typically slow for wedding season (Oct-Dec). Two of my other businesses are The Southern Maryland Wedding Guide magazine and the Beach Theme Wedding Shop online e-commerce store. So it is a time that I take on website design and development projects. I successfully completed 5 of these in the past two months and now have about a week to gear up for wedding season to start in January.

Anyway – back to being sidetracked – since business is always on my mind, I have been thinking about two of my most recent projects: Charles County Real Estate Network and FindWeddingCoupons.com. My goal is to create a social media following, get these two sites to rank well in Google, and to get lots of website visitors. So far, this is what I have done with both over the last month or so (between other projects):

• Designed and built a website
  (My favorite are WordPress websites now. They are easy to build, easy to manage, and Google loves them!)
• Gathered content for them and have devised a plan for keeping them updated
• Created Facebook and Twitter accounts for each (and connected them to the website and eachother so that we only need post content in one place and all accounts are updated)
• Created a way for website visitors to sign up for e-mail announcements to start building my database of prospects

And now, I need to start thinking about search engine marketing and a link building campaign so that I can start getting incoming links to the websites. Getting the e-mail from Noble Samurai reminded me that there is no better time than the present to get started on my SEO Blueprint. (They are the creators of Market Samurai. It’s a software product that no one that does internet marketing wants to be without.)

So here is where I will begin with my seo campaign:

1. I am going to explore my current market (local real estate and wedding coupons) and see where we all stand in Google rankings
2. I’m going to see who the competitors are for each of my keywords (i.e. who is in the top 10 for first page of Google results for my keywords)
3. I find out how many incoming links (and what Page Rank) my competitors have and set a goal that I want to accomplish in order to increase my rankings. (There are a lot of other things to consider such as domain name, on page content, etc. – but I have already addressed these and continue to build on them.)
4. I will analyze the actual links (especial the ones with higher Page Rank) that are coming into my competitor’s pages (their link network) and determine if I can acquire links to those pages as well.
5. Then I will take action!

This week I was also introduced to two other backlink building programs that I will be testing over the next few weeks as well:  SocialMonkee and AutoTrafficBuddy.