Your Skills:

If you’ve come this far, you’ve learned a lot. It includes including Setting up your web page, understand how SEO works, getting links, creating great contents, some Photoshop and some Google Analytics.

Chapter 2- Check the Market

Know that you have the elementary technical skills, it’s time to combine that with some business skills.

There are a couple of questions you want ask yourself such as what are my goal with this website? And should I continue with it or not?

If you are having your web site for pure self-enjoyment, then continue to Chapter 3. But most people hope to get a financial benefit form their site. To check if you have something to win, first check if your site has a market.

Way to many people get blocked by their idea and stick to it. The approach should rather be: If something doesn’t work, try something else…

Step 1- How to check if your website has a market

Learn Google Analytics

Google Analytics course
A very good approach to test if you have a market is with Facebook Ads and Google Adwords. And then to check the bounce rate of your ads! The bounce rate is the number of sessions to your page, where people arrive at your page, but don’t click on anything.

If the bounce rate is over 90%, you should consider stopping your website. If the bounce rate is less than 60%, it means that you probably have a market! The fun fact is that the gap between 60 and 90 percent is a black valley. Either you have a bounce rate lower than 60% or a bounce rate higher than 90 percent.

To analyze your bounce rate correctly, you should have had at least 2000 visitors. The thing is that there are many “bots” that automatically crawl your website, and these visits skew your numbers. To check your market without bias, first create a landing page and then run Facebook and Google Adwords Ads. Elearnhero Analytics

Step 2- Create a landing page specific for testing

Before you can run Facebook and Google ads, you have to create a landing page you want your visitors to see. The point with the landing page is to check if people are interested in the product you want to offer. You, therefore, have to pretend as you already have a product. You create a landing page to convince people to communicate your message. When you want to check a market, that message is to normally to buy your product or to sign up to our newsletter.

In order to convince, your page has to follow a very nice sales flow and has to be nicely designed. To understand more about landing pages, I recommend checking out General assembly’s Landing page basics page.

Landing page Basics

How to create your landing page

Create a landing page

Learn the basics of landing pages
Landing page Basics

Step 3- Launch your Facebook And Google Ads

Adwords fundaments

Learn to use Adwords
To Adwords fundamentals with Lynda

Facebook advertisement

Learn to use Facebook
Learn Facebook ads on Lynda
Learn Facebook ads on Udemy
Isn’t it great to know that you can check if you have a market in less than a week? Some people spend years on their idea to figure out the same thing! With this approach, you’ll save time, money and energy! So how do you do it?

Let’s suppose that you have your landing page, and then it’s time to run some Facebook Ads and Google Ads!

Facebook Ads: The magic with Facebook is that they have precise sociological and demographic information about users. In our example, let’s say your landing page is targeted at selling Japanese knives to restaurant chefs over 30 in France. To use Facebook, we:

  1. Create a nice Facebook page targeted at this group
  2. Create ads purely for restaurant chefs over 30 with the intention of them liking your Facebook page!
  3. Create a new ad on Facebook only targeted at the people that liked your Facebook page that redirects them to your landing page.
  4. Check how many people clicked on your ad, clicked on your landing page, and how many wanted to buy what you had to offer. These numbers will determine whether you have a market!

Google Adwords: The magic with Google Adwords is that you can check out people’s intentions! When you create a Google Ad focused on intention “how to lose weight” or “how to stop smoking”, you already have people that are ready to purchase stuff.

  1. Have a landing page ready to convert people searching for “how to lose weight” to buy the product you want to offer
  2. Create Ads focused on purchase intentions keywords in your market
  3. Check how many of the people that clicked on the add wanted to buy your product!

I numbers are poor, close your idea, and explore your next idea!

Think of it like exploring mines hoping to find gold. Instead of spending your entire life digging after gold, you now have a robot that can scan the mine in a matter of days for gold. If there is any gold in that mountain, you’ve found your mone. If there isn’t, go to the next mountain.

You’ll spend a couple of hundreds of dollar on Facebook and Google Credits, but you can save yourself years of wasted work. By the way, you typically get free Facebook and Google Adwords credits when you use it for the first time.

Task:

  • Create a landing page focused on converting visitors to buying from you or signing up to your newsletter.
  • Create your Facebook and Google ads

To learn how:

  • Get an introduction to Google Adwords in this post by Thomas Larrieu .
  • You can check out the Facebook Ads and Adwords course we’ve found!

Step 4- Analyze results and take a decision

It’s time to Analyze your Facebook and Google Ads. If your bounce rate is high (over 90%), you probably don’t have a market. If the case, you stop your website, or start over with another idea.

Remember, you have teh skills to quickly create a landing page and to test new ideas. And you have the skills to quickly get started with your new website!

Remember, Analytics is key to SEO. I recommend spending time using Google Analytics. Knowing your Analytics will help you improve your business skills as well as better analyze your SEO efforts.

GO TO CHAPTER 3

SEO tools

Great resources to analyze your on-page SEO: ———————————————————————
  • SEO Site Checkup: Checks your website’s SEO problems for free.
  • Hubspot Marketing Grader: Grades your marketing.
  • Quicksprout: Does a complete analysis of your site.
  • Woorank: Page and SEO review
  • Nibbler: Analysis your page
  • Site audit list by Moz: Checklist for site audits

Checks your Keyword rankings

  • SERPs Rank Checker: Checks how your keywords are ranking

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Website Analytics

Checks all website analytics- Is used to check website’s analytics before establishing partnerships

  • Alexa Ranking : Analyzes any site’s rank
  • SimilarWeb: Analyzes website statistics for all domains
  • Searchmetrics: Paid option, but much better than Alexa and Similarweb
  • Sistrix: Paid option, but much better than Alexa and Similarweb

Website Page Speed

  • Pingdom Website Speed Test: Test website’s loading time and suggest improvements
  • Google page speed insights: Test loading time and suggest improvements

SEO reporting Tools

  • SEMRush
  • BrightEdge

Link checkers
  • Mozbar (a must): Checks links, Domain authority and Page authority
  • Open Site explorer : Tool for link analysis
  • Check my links extension: Finds Broken links
  • OpenLinkProfiler: Finds all your backlinks and shows the quality of backlinks

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Finding great content
  • Google Keyword Planner: Finds interesting keywords to target on Google
  • SubReddit: Allows you to check for popular topics, as well as ask for feedback
  • Quora: Allows you to check for popular topics and ask for feedback
  • Google Keyword Planner: Finds interesting keywords to target on Google

Creating great content

  • Grammarly: Corrects your English
  • Copyscape: Searches for copies of your page content on the web
  • Copyblogger: Inspiration for creating good post titles

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Posts and SEO Blogs to follow

You won’t find many people more qualified in SEO than these guys (they live for SEO):

  • Smartpassiveincome.com with Pat Flynn: About SEO and how to earn passive income
  • Quicksprount by Neil Patel : Learn to get more traffic
  • Backlinko by Brian Dean: The backlinking expert
  • Ali Mese: How to present content

Ranking factors:

  • Ranking factors for 2014 Searchmetrics : Google ranking factors of 2014
  • Ranking factors of 2013 Moz: Shows the biggest ranking factor influencers in 2013

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WordPress SEO Plugins:
  • WordPress SEO by Yoast: Have a fully optimized WordPress site
  • XML Sitemaps: Sitemap generator that creates XML & HTML variants (to be uploaded to Google Webmaster tools.
  • WP super Cache : Makes website navigation faster for users
  • Bwp minify: Minifies HTML, CSS and Javascript files
  • Smush.it: Image optimizer WordPress plugin

I recommend compressing images on Photoshop, Iphoto (on Mac) or Tinyjpg . Too many plugins slow your site down.

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Online course platforms
  • Lynda.com: Courses by professionals (covers all types of courses)
  • Udemy: Courses by professionals (covers all types of courses)
  • Generalassemb.ly: Business courses
  • Teamtreehouse: Coding classes
  • Coursera: Online University classes (covers all types of courses)

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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5

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