Sitemap Submitted

I hadn't had a lot of time to write on my blog but I have been working on www.jhasmal.com

Now that I have three pages created on the site I submitted a sitemap to Google. This allows you to tell Google what pages you have on your website just in case it doesn't find them all. Considering I only have three pages for the entire site I'm not concerned about it not finding a page. The reason that I submitted a sitemap is to let Google know that my site is out there.

An example of the sitemap can be viewed by clicking the link below.
http://www.jhasmal.com/sitemap.xml

Let's Talk Site Numbers

If I didn't share any numbers this wouldn't be a valuable project. So www.jhasmal.com has been up for about three days now. On the first day I'm going to make the assumption there was probably one visitor which would have been myself. On day two I'm still not sure because I was just getting the analytics piece in place. On day three it reported there was 17 visitors. These are small numbers for what I'm used to dealing with. I know there is plenty of room for me to grow this site into a power house of traffic. I'm just getting started... Keep in mind that I have traffic without using Pay per click which many sites are doing. I'm still waiting for Google to come around and index the page for the search engine. Once Google comes around the number of traffic will increase.

Don't worry about a fancy site with bells and whistles

I'm on a budget and as you can see www.jhasmal.com is nothing fancy. I chose to keep it like that because most people won't be able to have a high quality site once they begin. I want to focus on the value of the content on the page. I'll go back and make it look pretty once I can justify the extra cost. I have about $20 invested in this site so far and have made about $3 in return.

Don't get caught up with hiring a graphic designer and having a $1,000 website. Right now your focus should be how do you generate the outcome that you want. If you are selling a product how do you get your niche market to come to your site and purchase your product. The answer is building a relationship with your customer prior to them coming to your site. If the customer trusts you they will already have their mind made up that they want to purchase before they get to your site. You don't believe me? Think about how many times you purchased something on the web or in a store. You already know what you want before you get there - you are just trying to get it for the right price.

I sent out a link to a couple of selected individuals. Some found nothing while others found typos. I did this to help me get some feedback. I needed them to recognize the issues that I couldn't see so I could have a chance to fix them before everyone else had a chance to see them.

Recommended Reading

I do a lot of reading and research. Occasionally I like to share the books that I believe are very valuable to the internet marketing industry. The New Rules of Marketing and PR is a book that I have a lot of respect for.

Late Night Wrap Up

So it's a little late but I needed to do a step before I would forget. I went to Google and registered my site so it would get indexed. You can do this by signing up in Google and then choose the Webmaster Tools. Since my site is fairly new I need all of the help I can get with Google. For sites that have been around for a while with a strong brand and a volume of link backs this step isn't as important.

I also went and set up Google Analytics so I can see what type of traffic I'm dealing with. These two items are absolutely free so they are a must.

Seth Godin on blogging

Are you still trying to figure out whether you should blog or not? Maybe this little clip will help you come to a conclusion.

Step Two

I'm in the process of writing my page to be shown on www.jhasmal.com. I'm not waiting for that to be completely done before I take another step. I had a minute and I went over Twitter and took the URL twitter.com/jhasmal and now we are making some progress. Remember, it's all about the brand. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the Twitter URL yet but I want to make sure no one else grabbed it as they see www.jhasmal.com start to gain exposure. There are a lot of people who try to make money off other people's brand so it's important that you protect yourself early.

Step One

The first thing I'm going to do is use a URL I've had for a while. The URL I'm going to use is www.jhasmal.com. The first thing I'm going to do is setup up an HTML page for myself. My goal is to get this web page in the top 3 search results at least in the next 6 months. I don't really care how pretty the page is I'm focusing on the text. The text on the main page will focus directly on "Jhasmal" the brand. Who is "Jhasmal", the internet business strategist and social media expert.

Why is this URL and page so important? This is the beginning of brand creation. Brand is something that you won't find is SEO books but it's so important. If you don't remember anything else from this blog keep in mind that BRAND is everything. If your BRAND is solid your website links pointing back to your site will be solid as well. You can try to do what those other books tell you to do but it's not easy to get a webmaster to link back to your site by sending him/her an email. In the real world a respectable website or company isn't going to give you a free link just because you asked.

The Project Begins

It seems like the same discussion happens over and over again with websites. How do you do SEO and how do you get people to your website. I've purchased many books over my career and many of them weren't really of any value. There were a few books that helped me tremendously. After many years of honing my craft I've figured out a system. As part of a project I will build a site using a system step by step to get the traffic and show how I did it. I'll explain on the way why to do certain things and why it's important. What makes my project different than the other SEO websites out there? My background gives me an advantage that most professionals don't have. I'm trained to be and Information Technology expert but I've transitioned to be a communications expert. Communications is the key to getting traffic - trust me. It's one thing to have cool tools like social media but you have to know how to communicate in a manner to get other people to use the tools on your behalf. I'm going to show you - stay tuned...

So, here are a couple of my tools. You don't have to use these tools but these are what I call my secret weapons. I'm going to use a Macbook, iPad, and Windows 2003 server. These are what I use to keep me on track. The server is used to keep my data safe that I'm writing. Content is the key and it must be worth while for your audience. The iPad is used so I can blog anywhere at anytime over the AT&T 3G wireless. When I have a thought I don't have to wait until I get home I can instantly communicate with my audience. The Macbook is my main tool - the device that is the window into my reality. I'm using Microsoft Word to type my thoughts and get them out. I'm not typing out HTML but working on a strategy. How to get from step A to step Z.