Have you ever outsourced your website job only to find the website limp or worse? Many of you have. Jack Levisan a business friend of mine is totally against outsourcing any website work. He has an in house team to do it personally under his supervision. The last time he outsourced his website for routine maintenance work the outsourced company made a mess of it. He had to pay another company a huge amount to rectify his website. Jack is not alone. Lot’s of business owners have had the same experience.

Most website maintenance and design companies work on low profit margins per client and make their money by attracting volumes. In fact, many well known website companies outsource their work to smaller companies and make bigger margins. These small companies have low skill sets because they are not paying much to their staff.
So, low quality work is a natural outcome of this process.

Jack has an excellent website. It works well and he has become a success story. But friend don’t see him enjoying it. He is always supervising and overlooking xyz aspect of his business. He is never around for a drink or a tee or to a movie. His friends have moved on and he is not making new friends. I met him when a common friend told me that Jack was becoming maniacal.

When I met him he looked too harried and was not so pleased to meet me. Here’s a brief transcript of the conversation

Jack: I wish I could take you to lunch but I’m tad busy today.
Sangeeta: Sorry, we are going for lunch, we’ll take a grab and be back in 15. I’m sure your business can do without you for 15 minutes?”
….
Sangeeta: So, how do you spend your day? Do you still make those exquisite miniature landscapes. I still have the one you gifted to me on my wedding.

I hear Jack mumble that he longer had the time to be bothered with such things.

Sangeeta: Oh yeah, how do you spend your mornings then, are you working out?
Jack: No longer. Need to check mails and other stuff. My day begins very early.”
Sangeeta: How early?
Jack: 6 AM
Sangeeta: Phew!
…………
Sangeeta : Tell me, you are a success story now. Did you and Renita go to Bahamas on your dream vacation?

He looked stricken. They were on verge of a divorce.

It is hard to look at a miserable friend and leave him at it. I dug deeper. He was in office 15 hours a day!

Sangeeta: Jack, You are working too much. You need to give yourself some time. Your family needs you.

He said he could not. His business flourished because he was involved in all aspects.

Sangeeta: But look at others. They outsource their work to others.

It doesn’t work he fumed. “I had tried it early.”

But I knew it worked. I had done it myself.

Sangeeta: It does, you just need to do things properly.

Jack: What things?

Sangeeta: Verify the antecedents of the company you are hiring.

• Do they have quality control?
• How many years have they been in business?
• Talk to them over the phone or video conference with them?
• Get their background information from them and verify it online.
• Ask for testimonials.
• If a service is cheap, ask them how they manage it and why it is cheaper than other websites.
• Do they have a money back option in case you are dissatisfied?
• Look at their range of work, is it basic or is it a wide range?

Jack I’m sure you made a mistake in selection of the company. You can free yourself for 6 hours if you don’t manage this web thing yourself and outsource customer service.

I left after that. My 15 minutes with him were more than over.

I don’t know if Jack took my advice, but a common friend told me that he had met Jack and his wife in the Bahamas.

Moral of the story is that control and detailing can give you success but you’ll burn up. Delegation and outsourcing help to keep creativity alive within a company.

Fortunately Jack did not burn out.

There is an unfamiliar trend that has been in progress on the internet called horizontal content web sites. This is the technique of creating a website that can dominate all niches. This is something that would be hard to do for a low budget site but for major businesses with deep pockets it could work.

A perfect example of a horizontal content website would be Wikipedia. But you are not confined to developing encyclopedia websites to do this. This kind of site can have old, current and new information about all. A website that big could get overabundance of hits and unique guest. All you need is a lot of authors constantly sending in page after page about every niche market.

Horizontal content web sites are deleloped with the use of long tail keywords. They use an algorithm that searches for 100s even 1000s of these and build content for each one. Then you can display an item or program to all pages. This kind of goes against all the professionals who say that you should keep your site zeroed in on a particular topic is the best way to go. But I would not be concerned to much about your niche websites right about now. But it can make you wonder about how sort after the lower end of search results will become. Since long tail keywords are good for small websites to get their foot in the door how will this chance their visitor count in the coming days?

You can believe that an authority site may have a good shot at this but there is a down side to it. This will require lots of optimization and it would be very time consuming to construct each page for best search results. Some pages may do well while others will never get seen. So there is a good chance that the big companies that will try this will spend big bucks on building links to all of their pages. Not something a typical site owner can do.

You might want to begin this on a miniature scale and make it a part of your search engine optimization before the big dogs dominate them all. The internet will only become more busy and that means you need to pick up the pace. You do not have to have a site about all topics just all things that is similar to your niche. Start with one and build on it until you own the whole topic. Become the authority when someone searches for any information that similar to your website.

Since there are new niche ideas being created all the time their is no need to be too concerned about horizontal content sites. It does not make a difference how much a webmaster can write it would be nearly impossible to report on everything known to mankind. There will always be a silver lining available for you if you keep your eyes on the latest trends.

If I were you I would continue to focus on creating multiple niche sites. Be taught how to build them by going over to our residual income businesses page. If you need web space for your new websites then visit our cheap web space page for the best hosting around.

Oops…..  Sangeeta, is revealing our business secrets on the GMR Web Team Blog. I won’t tweet this. But readers who are followers of our blog can check it out here—-> http://www.gmrwebteam.com/blog/index.php/internet-strategy/tweeting-for-business/.

Online markets revolve around search engines. Your competitor is optimizing their online business too. It seems like there is no longer a niche. The competition is intense and nerve racking.  So getting a target audience is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea.

The only way out of this competitive market is a killer campaign that will enhance your position in search engines. SEO services are not that important these days rather what holds importance is effective SEO techniques. Gone are the days when hiring a professional who could make your website search engine optimized, was enough. Today’s world calls for exclusive and successful SEO techniques.

Persuasive SEO content has been of prime importance in improving search engine results of a website. Search engines are fond of original and fresh content. By putting new content you ensure that search engines come to your website. If you add relevant and targeted keywords, you can get better search engine rankings. You would need a professional for assistance because these keywords should not be stuffed and should look irrelevant in the website. Apart from using apt keywords, other optimization techniques like text optimization, image optimization and flash optimization can be used. It is generally known as on site optimization techniques.

New trends in SEO include geographic optimization. It includes web pages that are apt for search engine rankings for users that look for services in a specific geographic region. Include your address in your website footer. Signup here at the mother of all search enginesà www.Google.com/LocalBusinessCenter

Social bookmaking is another trend that has been there for a while now. There are endless social media websites that can be helpful in improving link popularity. You will be able to get quality and focused traffic by doing so. Use of social bookmarking sites ensures that you are being read. So get your team into bookmarking your content!

Tweeting is a good SEO technique. You can capture your target market well by using twitter. Twitter provides valuable search engine tools that can help you find potential clients easily. Make use of keywords that represent your business and get a list of prospective consumers as your followers. You can start following them and there would be a lot following you too. Start posting information about your services and products once people start following you. This is a great way to create awareness about your brand while improving your search engine rankings. So get a Tweeter account today.
 
Here is a Case Study of how Twitter helped a small business owner:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/twitter-drives-traffic-sales-a.html

Here is something very interesting happened with the help of Twitter:
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/traveltips/08/06/travel.social.media/index.html

Videos get organic traffic to one’s site too. Now, marketers look forward to universal traffic. Websites these days need to contain more than just text- more content and even videos. Podcasts let the marketers beat competition with flying colors. These podcasts are part of audios and videos and are present all over web. A website is required to fill up the niche and provide high quality and useful content in order to taste success. Using podcasting can be useful as means of delivering content while assisting webmaster to meet both these goals.

You can easily increase your authority by podcasting. You will be able to be the market leader. Podcasting lets you connect with the new audience. You will have a great opportunity to connect to a new type of audience. A lot of people are not interested in blogs and information on your website. By podcasting, you can connect with this set of people.

Wait no more, if you want to rule the search engines, do not just use SEO techniques rather make use of revised SEO techniques.