Making Moves

It has been a little while since my last post. A lot has changed sine the last posting as well. Google has finally come around to take a look at my home page. Now if someone goes to Google and types in "Jhasmal" in the search box my website is the first listing they will see. I need my website to be first because my name is going to be my brand. I have also spent a little bit of money by going to flashden.com and purchasing a pre-made template and making changes where I see necessary. I want to spend more on the writing of content instead of the design.

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.