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Is Your Site Getting Votes But Wasting Traffic?
Filed Under SEO
One of the most important ways to optimize your site and get good rankings with search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN is to get links coming into your site. Think of links to your site as votes — if you have a lot of links coming to you, that says “this site is importantâ€. And common SEO practice is to create inbound links for many different keywords from several types of sites – the more popular the better.
But . . . once visitors arrive at your site, it can’t throw away that traffic by not being structured correctly. And although your content should mention your keywords, it can’t be so keyword dense that it’s written for machines.
A simple analogy is through word-of-mouth getting a lot of people excited about coming to a store grand opening for a shoe boutique and when crowds of people arrive they discover you’re a clothing store with a rack of shoes in the back. If you’ve got links relevant to shoes, then make sure your site sells plenty of shoes.
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Outsourcing – You Can't Do It All!
Filed Under General Biz
You can’t always do it all! I know, I know . . . sometimes you just have to. I’ve been there, done that, so I know exactly where you are coming from.
There are two problems with trying to do it all:
First, you just don’t have the time. One thing that small business owners can be really bad at is . . . assigning a reasonable value to YOUR time! You may have a really good understanding of the value you put on the hours of everyone around you. But we tend to feel that there is nothing we can’t make time for – there are 24 hours in a day, right? 
You need to assign a value to your own time. If you are working on the most important aspect of your business, what would that be? Marketing, Sales, Consulting? Only you can answer that question. But then assign a value to that activity. $75, $100, $250 per hour? Once you have assigned a value to your time, you can assess whether you should be performing a specific task.
For example, if you can pay a company the equivalent of $15 per hour to answer your phones and your time is worth $150 per hour when you are working on mission-critical tasks – that’s a no-brainer, right?
The second problem with trying to do it all – - no matter how intelligent and business savvy you are, you CAN’T be great at everything. You have to admit to yourself that there are many cases where an expert in a certain area can do a better job than you can. They have applied themselves and focused on a specific area of expertise and can devote their time to knowing everything necessary to be really good in that field of study. For example, a CFO or a CPA will do a much better job than you will of managing your business finances (unless of course you run a CPA firm, in which case, switch out “Web Designer” for “managing your website” above 
)
I learned this lesson when I was working on my first eCommerce business. One thing I am not that great at is Web Design. When I finally decided to bite the bullet and hire a web designer for my site — My Sales Quadrupled!! When I did another Site Redesign 1 year later – guess what – My Sales Quadrupled AGAIN! What did I learn? My skills at web design were holding us back. If I tried to keep “doing it myself”, my lack of skills in this area would have hurt our business.
I LOVE to learn and master new skills. I am passionate about learning. But I realize I can’t learn and master everything – not even with 24 hours a day
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