Hi everyone,

The chapters I’m posting here on the blog today are part of the upcoming release of my Mini Web Design Business eBook. They’re just the introductory remarks and are in addition to the 8 core chapters of content. You will get your money’s worth, folks. Not long now…

Mini Web Design Business Preview Chapters

Introduction

Hi, my name is Josh Kohlbach. Thanks for purchasing my eBook!

I’m going to take you through how to create a mini, self sustaining web design business that you need little to no programming skills to run, and can begin by canvassing your friends and family.

But first, a little about my self. My journey started all the way back at the beginning of 2009.

For those that don’t know me, I spend my days working as a professional programmer. It’s a craft that I’ve been learning and working on since I was 13 years old.

When I started this mini website design business idea I didn’t really have any other streams of income other than my day job.

I started to think about what I could do with my computer skills that could create some extra income on the side just as a backup plan if things took a turn for the worse.

At the time, a few friends and some family members were asking me what I knew about websites and since I’d created a few in my time I felt like I could fumble my way forward with helping them.

It’s important to note at this point that while I’ve created a few websites before, I’m not a designer by any stretch of the imagination. It’s something I’m working at, but art isn’t my strong suit.

Anyway, back to my friends. Taking a looking at some of the quotes they were getting from professional design firms I was seriously shocked at what they were charging for just a simple 5 page website.

I hate seeing people get ripped off. It makes me hulk-angry when I know that it’s really not that big a deal to whip up a simple website these days.

So now that I’ve done this a few times, I decided to systemize it and put it in an eBook so people like yourself could enjoy a little extra income from their computer skills as well. The beauty is you can take this as far or as little as you like.

What This eBook Covers

1. Pointers to all the tools and resources you need to create websites.
2. Tips on where to find your customers. As I mentioned, I started with my friends and family and got a few referrals after that. Really, you shouldn’t have to spend anything on advertising unless you want to.
3. How much to charge your customers and my suggestion on how to collect money.
4. How to put things in place to automate parts of your business so you don’t have to work on it all the time.

Let’s get stuck in!

I’m in the process of finalizing my plans here so that I can roll this out as smooth as possible. Subscribe to the newsletter over there on the right if you want to get in as soon as I launch. They’ll be the first people to be notified – other than that, I’ll do a post on the blog to let you all know it’s available for instant download.

For those that already have a copy of version 1.0, I’ve not forgotten you. You’ll receive an email from me prior to launch with your new copy of version 2.0.

All the best!
Josh

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http://www.codemyownroad.com

Belated Weekender

This is a bit of a belated CMOR Weekender this week, I didn’t schedule anything ahead of time so I’m typing this on Sunday evening and I’m just going to post it live. Last week I missed the weekender because I was living it up on the Sunshine Coast north of Brisbane where I live on a much needed break.

The Origin Of My Sore Legs

This weekend has been equally hectic, culminating with today’s 10km fun run race (Oh, you better believe I’m paying for it). The race starts at the twin Gateway bridges and leads us all the way through to the RNA showgrounds where the famous Brisbane EKKA is held.

Every year there is a free car giveaway that you get to enter just by showing up. The funny thing about this year’s draw was that the 10 year old kid who won the Suzuki Swift last year managed to win the car again this year!?! What the!!

There was about 45,000 people running the race last year and around 40,000 this year.

This Month’s Posting

Over the past two months I’ve been posting on a pretty strict schedule of Tuesday to Saturday every week. I’ve been quite proud that I’ve stuck to it for two months so far, but I’m going to have to break that untarnished record (told you I would have to at some stage!).

I’ve got quite a few projects on the go this month and don’t think I could really commit to that posting frequency while keeping the quality at an acceptable level. I’m planning on relaunching my Mini Web Design Business eBook v2.0 this month, I’m launching a new WordPress related service on my freelancing site, and I’ll be continuing a few other projects including an offline one that will take up quite a bit of time.

My intentions will be – instead of posting every day – to post a few longer more inclusive articles including the summary to my lowering your bounce rate series that’s been going for the last month or so.

So I hope you’ve had a good weekend, and that you’re legs aren’t as sore as mine. I’ll see you about the place!

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http://www.codemyownroad.com

Here’s some interesting facts about MWDB v2.0:

• It’s now over 4100+ words long
• There’s 8 core chapters of killer website creation content, tools and advice on how to build your mini biz
• Loads more links to resources, plugins, and help that’s just a click away
• Detailed information about charging your clients – how to go about it, how much to charge and more
• New information on travelling with your biz, outsourcing, and letting things go on autopilot

A Mini Web Design Business is more than just something you read in an eBook. It’s a thriving little system.

Next post I’ll publish the introduction chapter to give you a taste for my writing and see if you’re interested in maybe purchasing it. I’m not going to high pressure sales-pitch you, I’ve never liked that agressive selling style.

At this stage I’ll be looking at selling the eBook for $19.95 and I’m considering chucking in a few things to sweeten the deal (although I don’t have any clue what they might be – contact me if you want to do a joint thing!)

The current version has now been withdrawn from sale. Anyone who has a copy of version 1.0 will be receiving their copy of 2.0 via email when 2.0 launches. I’ll let you know when in the next post!

Exciting stuff folks!

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Simply visit my site and enter your email on the right hand side and I'll send you a free copy of my comprehensive guide to lowering your website's bounce rates (valued at $19.95)!

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http://www.codemyownroad.com

I’m fascinated by the simple (or, sometimes not so simple) art of pricing and the psychology behind it.

I was reading one of my favourite blogs on money by Ramit Sethi (I Will Teach You To Be Rich) and he’s talking about raising your charge out rates.

Down near the bottom he makes a really valid point that I wanted to share here on shifting your customer’s mindset from deciding to buy to deciding what to buy.

“Do you know why it’s critical to offer more than one package? There are 2 reasons, actually:

1. He might actually pick a higher tier, which would be money in your pocket — and a new hourly rate
2. By offering 3 options, she’s shifted the prospect’s decision from “Should I buy her services or not?” to “Should I buy $50, $60, or $75/hour?””

Shifting The Way Your Customers Think

As you as you present multiple options this shift of thinking “whether I should buy your services or not” is changed to “which one of your services should I buy?”

Let me explain.

• I offer a programming service at $50 per hour.

Immediately the question becomes, “Should I purchase Josh’s service which he offers at $50 per hour?”.

The shift happens when I tell you I offer:

• Basic programming service at $50 per hour.
• Priority programming service at $150 per hour.

With a few optional extras such as after job support:

• Basic after job support at $35 per hour
• Priority after job support for $90 per hour.

What’s the question in your mind now? You’re working through deciding if you need priority or not, whether you will need after job support or not and a range of other questions that will need to be self-answered.

Now obviously this is an example I’m not quoting my exact rates (It’s pretty close to this though), but you can apply this to other pricing games as well.

How about products?

eBooks are popular among bloggers right? Most people throw out a price like $19.95. Buy the eBook, it gets delivered, transaction over.

But what about the upsell? Instead of giving away those bonuses, why not price them fairly? Give you customer options.

• eBook  – $19.95
• Upsell 1 – $9.95
• Upsell 2 – $9.95
• eBook + Upsell 1 + Upsell 2 – $29.95!

That sounds like a good deal right?

Now all of this so far is theory, but it’s something I’m dead keen to explore in the coming months.

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Simply visit my site and enter your email on the right hand side and I'll send you a free copy of my comprehensive guide to lowering your website's bounce rates (valued at $19.95)!

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I just finished listening to a fantastic podcast by Pat Flynn over at Smart Passive Income blog whose exploits I follow quite regularly. Pat is a smart guy and has really had some great success in creating multiple streams of income and trying to turn them passive. Basically, his goal is to create recurring money with little ongoing effort.

Anyway, he has an interview up with another bloke I follow from England (they’re buddies online and you can tell from their repeated comments on each other’s blog). Glen Allsop is the affiliate marketing and SEO guru behind the popular ViperChill blog.

Here is their interview together:

Affiliate and Niche Site Interview With Glen Allsop

My Notes On Creating Successful Affiliate and Niche Sites With Glen Allsop

At the start of the interview Pat encourages us to take notes (something I almost always do anyway) and since I’ve posted my notes on this kind of thing before with a speech by digg creator Kevin Rose I thought it might be helpful for you guys to do it again.

So if you haven’t got the time to sit down and listen to the podcast, file it away for later and read my notes below:

Glen takes us through the 5 exact steps he’s using today that has helped him create over 30 successful affiliate niche microsites which generate all of his 6 figure income.

1. Write down your passions, fears, and problems

If you work on something that you’re passionate about you’ll maintain your interest. If you’ve got no interest in knitting, then your chances of long term success in the knitting niche is low.

Fears and problems will be something you share with other people. People pay money to get past their fears and problems.

2. See if there is a market or people with similar interests

Google Keyword Research Tool – try typing “learn [your phrase here]” or derivitive and you’ll get an idea of how many searches are being made per month on this topic. This will let you know if you’re onto a big enough market.

Google Trends – If the industry you’re planning on entering isn’t going up in search volume you can expect that it’s dying out.

Talk to friends/family/online buddies/people in forums. Just ask people if they think a product like the one you’re thinking would be worthwhile for solving their problems.

Search on Twitter – Twitter is a search engine and a very powerful one at that. You can see if people are talking about their problems online in a realtime manner.

(Josh: I have a couple of these tools in my tools section)

3. Find a relevant product to promote

ClickBank has loads of information products. You can also see how well they are selling by looking at sales and gravity, etc.

Amazon is probably the biggest source of products, but it works best for higher ticket items because of the low commissions (as low as 3%~). Pat suggested that Amazon was good because of the upsell factor – people will generally buy multiple items to save on shipping and you get a commission on all of them).

Personal Recommendations work well because if you’re willing to buy and use the product or service then others will be too. Think about what you’re using and check for affiliate programs. Thesis, Market Samuri, etc all came up.

Other affiliate product aggregators you can use are AzoogleAds and CommissionJunction. I’m sure there’s loads of others such as ShareASale and eJunkie.

The final option is that you can create your own product. If you can’t find it online then you might have more success creating a new product rather than giving up.

4. Build a website around it

Buying the domain is an important step to get right. Try to get the .com domain for the phrase. This can be hard if it’s a popular niche and can get expensive if you go around purchasing domains from others. You can try adding “my” or “hq” to the start of end of the phrase to help with uniqueness. Try to avoid hyphens and go the .com if you can.

5-10 pages is all you need on your website to make it look legit. It’s rare for a 1 page website to rank really high in the search engine results. Try writing some articles, filling in FAQ pages, about, contact, etc. The main purpose should be to get them off your home page and onto the product page.

WordPress is the easiest platform to setup fast.

You can pay people to build links, add content, etc if you want to tackle more than one website and have limited time.

5. Get traffic to your website

A site is only as good as the traffic you get to it. Glen spends his time building text links to increase the SEO value. Focus on quality text links from websites in related industries. Go for quality over quantity.

That said, he did suggest you can purchase a whole bunch of directory submissions quite cheap on forums which can give you a good kick start in the rankings (he gave an example of 500 directory back links for $10).

Work on reciprocal linking. If you link out to people you’ll hopefully get a return link via reciprocity.

A great tactic is to search for the backlinks in Yahoo from what your competition is ranking for and try to gain links from the same sources.

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Image by Iñaki Saldaña via Flickr

The look and feel of your website says a lot about the company or service using the website as a forefront.

In my free eBook (which you can get by subscribing to my newsletter over there on the right), I go through a case study about my client Nick The Painter.

Nick was after something very specific with his website. Something he could only attribute to a “homely” feeling. Which is why when my original design ideas based around a crisp and clean look and feel didn’t wash well with him.

Browns aren’t usually the kind of colour you’d think of when you’re thinking of a painting company which is why it wasn’t immediately obvious to me what a good choice it was. As soon as I saw Nick’s design idea it clicked.

It’s an inviting colour scheme, one which makes you feel like you’re standing in his living room and he’s showing you around.

Colour says more, in less time, than words ever can.

I’ve been going over lots of tips and tactics to do with lowering your bounce rate over the past few weeks. This information has mostly come from my personal experience with it in working for clients and doing web designs for myself. I’m hoping to throw in a few practical exercises here and there now and some of this will focus around fixing design elements.

Coming from a programming background, design can sometimes feel a bit foreign to me. Web design has a multitude of concepts all rooted deep in artistic drawing, painting, sculpture and even achitecture and other classic areas of the arts. Finding what appeals to people of a certain audience really has more to do with art than IT.

I’m interested in hearing what some of you professional designers think about this, leave us a note in the comments and tell us your experiences with how colour changes and influences people’s ideas.

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When it comes to problem solving why you might not be getting the desired bounce rates, or visitors sticking around on your website sometimes it helps to imagine you are the user or customer. Putting yourself in the user’s or customer’s shoes is a fantastic way to visual the things that are wrong with your website.

Ideally, the real conclusive way to identify things wrong with your website design (and what they’ll tell you to do in any user interface design course) is to actually get someone that is unfamiliar with the site to sit down and use it in front of you – timing them, taking notes, making observations and all that.

But, failing that, putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and pretending to be a user coming across this site for the first time comes a close second.

See if you can answer these questions:

• What are the elements that stand out to you?
• If you were looking for contact information where would you go?
• Are the menu names obvious enough for you to know what’s there before you even click on it?
• Can you tell what the website owner wants you to do?
• What is the point of this site?
• Give yourself a few tasks of finding information, how long does it take you to do them?
• Is the layout intuitive and obvious?
• Can I interact with the website? How?
• … etc

I’m sure you get the idea. Come up with 10-20 questions along these lines and answer them giving yourself a true and honest rating. Note down things that need improving to revisit later.

If you have access to a person to act as your crash test dummy site operator ask them to complete several scenarios where they need to locate things on your site and get them to explain how they went about it. Video tape them in action if possible – this is going to be the most raw way to gain this very valuable feedback.

Things you (the designer) should be asking yourself out of this might be:

• Was there anything off putting about the design?
• Do things line up nicely?
• Does portray the correct feel? ie. “homely” compared to other sites we’ve already identified as “homely feeling”
• Is it clear how to navigate?
• Is it clear where to find information?

Good web design is all about the user, not the designer. This is something I think more than a few of us are guilty of, sometimes it helps to step back and take a look from another perspective.

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Do you know what you are wanting your visitors to do once they come across your website? How effective are you at doing that?

Not knowing why (and hence how) people use your website is a major cause of high bounce rates. For every website you design, a primary purpose should be in mind. That is, what are you hoping to achieve by having the website?

This is the first question I ask my clients.

“What are you hoping to achieve by having the website?”

Invariably, 90% of the time the answer is “to get the phone to ring more”, “to gain more customers”, “to get people to contact us for information” or some variation. The way you architect your website will change slightly depending on the answer to this question.

For most business websites that represent offline businesses they want the customer to discover information about their products and services, then get them to call and order.

Be aware of the effects of displaying information too early

One interesting problem I have with smaller business customers is displaying information like phone numbers too early on to the customer which removes our ability to track information about our visitors.

While this isn’t necessarily a devastating thing to do, it makes it very difficult to track the effectiveness of changes to the website. By checking how many people visit the contact page coming from blog posts and services pages we have a way to measure how effective using a blog can be for a website.

I’m personally a fan of centralizing important information such as contact details in one place on your website, this enables better tracking of when visitors are converting and performing actions that you want them to perform and provides a logical point to lead your visitors.

Displaying information too early can also have a dramatic affect on your bounce rates. If you’ve incorporated a blog and a more personal interactive quality to your website design this can be disaster. You want your visitors to click around your site, consuming information and when they are ready to buy (or subscribe, or enter their details, or whatever) then lead them to the place you want them to go.

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Simply visit my site and enter your email on the right hand side and I'll send you a free copy of my comprehensive guide to lowering your website's bounce rates (valued at $19.95)!

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Once you’ve figured out your best traffic sources you might be wondering what you need to do to build a stronger connection with them and how you can milk more traffic from those sources. These are important people! You’ll be working with them to make your blogs better, it can’t hurt to get to know them right?

This article will take you through 4 ways your can build your relationship with these websites. If you haven’t read my recent article on finding out your best traffic sources then you should go and read it now otherwise I’ll sound stupid.

4 Ways To Build A Better Relationship With Other Bloggers

Once you’ve done your identification of the site you want to connect with there’s a few tactics you can use to increase the amount of traffic you get from them.

1. Commenting

By leaving relevant and thoughtful comments on their website you’ll provoke their attention, especially if they don’t normally get lots of comments.

Make sure the comments you leave a relevant. “Good post” just isn’t going to cut the mustard. By connecting with these people by regularly commenting on their content you’ll begin to see increase response rates, more traffic, and increased discussion both on their blog around your comments and on your own blog from visitors looking to keep the discussion with you going.

2. Emailing

Got a question about something they recently wrote? Instead of leaving a comment try emailing instead. Most bloggers appreciate their audience reaching out to them. If you want to be remembered then you can connect with people by talking to them directly.

I’m recommending emailing here and there just to keep your face fresh in their mind – don’t spam them and avoid direct messaging on Twitter, it’s not a good substitute for an email. Personally, I think Direct Messaging in Twitter’s stupidest feature. I don’t think I’ve ever received a genuine one.

Being in direct contact with someone has the added benefit of the “I know you” factor and they are therefore more likely to link to you in the future in their writing.

3. Linking To Them Frequently

Reciprocation is a huge player here. If you give, give, give you’ll eventually receive. This strategy works best with people who aren’t quite A-Listers, but apply it however you will.

I like linking to my friends online, I read them because I enjoy their content and if my visitors are coming here for me then it’s not so far a stretch that they might like what I like. It’s good both ways and Oh So Good when you finally get that reciprocal link back.

4. Guest Posting

Guest posting is a great strategy that more than a few A-Listers have used to leverage other people’s audiences. It’s like having the temporary attention of thousands of people you don’t normally talk to. It’s your opportunity to be fresh and exciting.

Writing guest posts can be a lot of work, but it can also be easy if you know the person and what they like. I’d recommending doing the above strategies for a while first as it’s all about building repore.

It’s All About Building Rapport

Building a relationship with someone takes time. In sales this is referred to as building a rapport with your customer. Once you’re in, you’re trusted and working with them becomes a lot easier.

Remember though, at the end of the day you’re dealing with people. It helps to not come across like a robot trying to gain something. Be genuine, pay attention to what their needs are and be there for them. Turning up and being present is half the battle won.

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Recently though, I found the urge to change it up a bit and see what a bit of focus could bring to this website. I put my tasks here into rotation on my tasks list – this is something that was long overdue as running a blog can be a bit of a time sap. It was definitely time to put some measurable effort in around here.

Getting some regular visitors and seeing my subscriber count, newsletter subscriber count, and daily traffic numbers edge ever so slightly skyward means a lot for what I’ve been doing.

This website is small. It’s small, but I liked it that way. I had a few regulars, most of which I email personally and get along with really well on and off the site, we chat like friends even though we’ve never met. In a way I’ve been afraid of losing that. But it also feels equally good to see my articles being read by more than just a small circle.

In the past I was lucky (and happy) to receive 10 or so visitors per day – something that’s not too unfamiliar to a lot of new website owners.

Over the last month or two I’ve been working on these figures by employing a few strategies – most of which have been successful and some I can still work on.

5 Reasons Why My Traffic Has Measurably Increased In The Last Month

1. Write Daily – I’ve feircly avoided doing this because I hate being tied to a schedule. Sometimes I don’t feel creative, like right now for instance my scheduled posts have dried up because I haven’t felt like writing in the last week or two. Don’t even get me started on what happens when you get ultra busy. If life gets hectic, writing a blog doesn’t tend to take priority.This all said, writing daily has been very rewarding for me for a number of reasons:
   • I get more stuff in the search engines.
   • I can stick to a topic for a while (lately talking about lowering bounce rates has been a fun past time for me).
   • By sticking to a topic I can draw more people into a conversation than a one off piece.
   • By sticking to a topic over time I can saturate a niche. Not many folks are writing about bounce rates with any regularity.
   • Writing daily brings daily visitors, fresh content keeps your subscribers happy.
   • Did I mention the search engine benefits? Not only does it mean more content in their databases (more entry points to your site if you want to think about it that way), but the keyword intensity for the articles you’re writing on your topics is multiplied even faster.

   To make it slightly easier on myself I’ve taken to a schedule that involves writing Tuesday through Saturday. This means I can write a fun post on the weekend and only have to find four days worth of content for the week. That one less article means a lot to me time-wise (I’m a busy dude with my projects)

2. Use Your Influence Wisely – I’ve never been huge on social media, I went through a phase of adding everyone I could to twitter. Then subsequently when through another phase of culling all the hype driven crap these guys were trying to ram down my throat.My twitter account therefore is mostly people following me, it’s about a 1:2 ratio and that’s the way I like it. I follow the people that truely interest me (when I remember to go back and add them, don’t feel hurt if you’re not on my list) and therefore my following isn’t that big (only around 500 last time I checked).I am bigger on StumbleUpon however as some people know. So I’ve been working on using my influence there for the better. Even though traffic has a higher bounce rate from StumbleUpon due to the nature of the service, it’s still a good people mover for a small site like mine.Because I’ve built my StumbleUpon account up over time I’m able to shoot through spurts of 100-200 visitors at a time as you can see in my graph above for popular content. The bad side of this is that if you’re recommending your own content all the time you really have to work on discovering new content that’s not on your website and stumbling other folk’s stuff – good for them, but time consuming for me. It’s been worth while though.
3. Comment More – I’ve always loved the idea of commenting frequently to get lots of return visitors to your site and the amount of success I’ve had with it so far is inspiring. One of my bigger traffic sources is ProBlogger because I went through a phase of commenting on Darren’s articles quite regularly. If you have something important to say and stand out, then commenting is a great strategy for increasing traffic as a lot my regular readers would agree with.I’d say 40%+ of my non-search engine traffic is coming from comments I’ve left around the net and I’ll be working on doing this more often especially for those who leave a comment on my website as it’s a great way to connect with people and go that extra mile.
4. Zemanta is a great referral tool – I’ve been blogging about Zemanta a little bit lately because it’s really taken my fancy and is one of my favourite new blogging tools.The way it works is by giving you valuable references to content around the internet you can link to, images you can use in your posts, and tag suggestions based on your content. You can no follow the links to blog posts you choose to put at the end of your posts, but I think it’s a nice gesture and enticement for people to visit and link to me in return and it’s already working.My traffic sources have increased over the past month simply by linking out more. If you’re afraid of linking out to other sites and your blog is still small (ie. receiving less than 100 visits per day) then you should really drop the facade. You’re not popular enough yet to hold all your links to yourself – share some of the love and you’ll get much more in return than you would gain by holding all that link juice to yourself.Look out for an experiment write up in the next month or two discussing my findings on Zemanta.

   Even if you don’t join Zemanta, joining some sort of referral group can really boost your influence in the blogosphere. Getting those natural links is hard work – it can mean lots of hours writing guest posts, building relationships, etc. This is a way to shortcut the process and it works.

5. Design – Finally, the last point is to have an enticing design. This is more about keeping people on the site and turning them into visitors than increasing traffic. But it also increases that sharability of the site if it looks good and more importantly looks legitimate. This is really true for those giving advice.The design of Code My Own Road was something I just threw together in a few hours one weekend as a temporary design. I didn’t really put any of the effort into it that I should have.While it’s still not perfect (look at that ugly comment form down there) it’s a damn sight better than it was. At least I have a proper menu, a sidebar (sort of) and can feel okay about saying to my friends “Hey, check out my website”. In this way design is important for traffic building.

Well that’s it folks, I’ve got a lot of work still ahead of me, but I felt it was time to give a little update on what my plans are here and reassure you that I’m in it for the long haul.

I’ll be going on holidays next week for a week (it’s my first wedding anniversary – can’t forget that one!) so hopefully I’ll be able to line up some content for you all to enjoy while I’m away.

In the mean time, tell us what you think about my traffic strategies above. Do you do any of these? Can you testify to their traffic building powers? I’m especially interested in those people who get a lot of benefit from time consuming activities like commenting and stumbling. Let us know in the comments!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Exactly How To Get More Visitors To Your Blog (ronmedlin.com)
• 7 Surefire Means To Improve Your Visitors Commencing Yesterday (ronmedlin.com)
• 9 Ways to Make Your Blog Work Harder for You (blogherald.com)
• StumbleUpon – Social bookmarking to generate quality traffic (globalthoughtz.com)
• Blog Marketing 101: 5 Ways To Promote Your Blog (bloggingot.com)
• 12 Sure-fire Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog (shoutmeloud.com)

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