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36. You should probably also take checks and money orders depending upon what you sell. We sell nutritional products. We always have taken personal checks and money orders. We have only had two bad money orders (and never a returned check!) in many hundreds of orders paid for with checks and money orders. Also, we have never held checks until they clear. We always ship right away. Maybe if we were selling higher priced items, we would reconsider this policy, but for now it works well for us.

37. USPS has the best rates for shipping smaller sized packages. UPS, DHL and FEDEX have better rates for larger packages. Do some research in order to determine what your best shipping choice is. Always use free electronic delivery confirmation labels with USPS. Always ship the same or next day if possible. Your customers will return time and again if they know they will receive their orders quickly! Send a delivery notification email for every order. I still send a personal mail to every one of our customers who place an order. People love this kind of personal service!

38. Keep a list of your customers’ email addresses. The list is like money in the bank! If your site ever falls out of favor with the search engines, at least you will have your customer list which you can market to. In this case you want to MAKE SURE that you treated those customers right in the first place! Customer service is your number one priority after the sale!

39. Do not pay more than $8.95 per year for your domain registrations. I have all of my domains registered with GoDaddy. They only charge $8.95 per year and have the best tech support of any Internet company I have ever dealt with. Also, since GoDaddy has great hosting packages too, (which I use for many of my sites) it is much easier to have your sites registered and hosted with the same company. Other companies offer higher cost domains with other “free” features such as hosting and “instant” websites added to the offer. The best deal is still to register and host with GoDaddy.

40. Many hosting companies offer special deals which offer such things as a five page site which is easy to create. These are template sites which they have scripts which make them easy to create. But you will be very limited with what you can do with your site. Learn web design yourself and do it all the right way. Again, there are no free lunches when it comes to Internet marketing.

41. Keep your file structure as simple as possible with your site. Unless you know for sure that your site may eventually contain many hundreds of files, I suggest just putting all the files on the root. The only exception to this is that you may wish to have an image folder for all your images.

42. DO NOT put your .htm files into subdirectories! Keep all your individual web pages on the root. For young sites, Google is not likely to index any pages which are deeper than the root. If you think you site could contain many hundreds of pages some day, you may think about going ahead and start categorizing them in folders. This is not something you can do later. What structure you start with you must keep due to the way the search engines index pages.

43. A warning about DUPLICATE CONTENT: Your site will be penalized by the search engines if they see too much duplicate content within the site. For example, Cactus Canyon sells two types of liquid glucosamine products. They are both designed to do the same thing. I simply can’t copy and paste the benefits of using one into a page about the benefits of using the other. I have to REWRITE the benefits into original content for the other product. It must be UNIQUE. Also, say you want to move a page from this path, yoursite/dogs/dog-collars.htm to yoursite/dog-collars.htm. You can’t simply delete the first files location and put the file into the new location even though it is the same file. The search engines will think the new location is a new file. They will not immediately blank out from their memory the other files location. They will still consider this situation to be two files. And since they are both the same, the new location will be considered duplicate content and penalized. It is best to leave the other page where it is and rewrite a new page for the new location. Be careful about duplicate content. Always think about the consequences of doing things which the search engines may perceive as being duplicated content.

44. Use Digital Point to keep track of how your pages rank in the search engines. You may register for free and then track as many of your pages as you like for free. You simply type in the URL of a page and keyword you optimized it for. It will then tell you how the page ranks for that keyword in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. And best of all, the entire list of pages you create is saved for you. Simply login, click a button and all the page ranks for the keywords are checked. You can easily see how all of your pages rank for specific keywords at any time.

45. The VERY BEST place to read about, study, research, and ask questions about all aspects of Internet marketing is webmastersworld.com. Register for free and you will have access to the best forum of webmasters on the web!

46. Another site I check out on a regular basis is Matt Cutt’s blog. Matt is a top Google engineer and is well known for “almost” giving away some good secrets about Google search. I don’t know about any secrets, but his blog is dedicated to search and is very interesting!

47. My hard drive is FULL of files; all kinds of files. Once your Internet business has been going for a while you too will have more files accumulated than you ever dreamed. Sometimes finding a specific file is a big problem! I finally discovered Google Desktop. This search software is so cool! You download it free from Google and install it. It spends a few hours indexing your entire hard drive. After that you can go do a Google search on your desktop and actually find any file you look for. This search program is MUCH better than the built-in Windows search feature. I highly suggest it. It will save you a LOT of time.

48. Do something EVERY DAY for your business…no matter what. I have succeeded with this almost every day for the past several years. There is so much work to be done, that if you think about it in large terms it is too overwhelming. But if you decide to do at least something every day, it will all add up. Some days you may only be able to spend time browsing WebmastersWorld. Other days you may be able to spend 6 or 7 hours writing new content. But it is important to do SOMETHING every day!

49. Before deciding to sell a product online. Make sure you ask the manufacturer if you are allowed to sell online. Some manufacturers forbid it because they are afraid it will cut into their profits. Others welcome you to. And still others may allow it on the Internet but not on eBay. Don’t spend any time on an idea until you find out for sure you are allowed to promote it online.

50. If you are planning on putting AdSense on your site, don’t put it on there right away. Wait until you are getting significant traffic. Google won’t care if you have it on there from the start, but there are some webmasters who believe that Yahoo may penalize a brand new site which has AdSense on it. The site won’t make any AdSense money anyway at the start, so there is no use in putting it on there until it is indexed well in all the major search engines. Simply have it designed so it will be easy to insert the code where you want it later on.

I have plenty of free information and video tutorials to help you get started with your own Internet business at: http://www.WeberInternetMarketing.com

Steve Weber
Weber Internet Marketing

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