Are you a small business owner? Simple, Effective and Affordable steps to increase and monetize your web presence.

Are you a small business owner? Do you have a web presence? Is your Website related to the product or services that you sell?

If the answer to any of the above is Yes, then chances are you are missing on a big opportunity to monetize your Website and increase your sales.

Read the full article to learn about Site Monetization and How to increase affiliate conversions and thus increase sales.

As a small business owner, we can categorize Site Monetization into two key areas-

• You can optimize your site to increase sales of your current products and services. And can use your Website to promote your brand and improve relationship with your business clients and customers.
• You can use your Website to promote the products and services that complement the kind of products and services you already sell. This way you can expand your web audience and can also earn affiliate commissions thus monetizing your Website traffic.

Now lets dig down deeper into the first point about optimizing your Website. (Second bullet about promoting products and services that complement your existing services - needs a full article of its own, so I will touch back on that in a separate article within next 3-4 days. So stay tuned to coolwebdeveloper.com and click to Subscribe to my Email Feed, Newsletter or RSS feed).

Optimizing your Website - The first two important steps are:

• Make sure that your site has a Blog
• Make sure your site and blog are Search Engine Friendly.

“For many businesses, a Web site is the first way that your clientele will look at you, even if it’s just to find your address and phone number,” says Rand Fishkin, founder of Seattle-based search engine optimization consulting firm SEOmoz, which aims to increase the odds that search engines will happen upon a given site. “The quality of your site is often a measure of the quality of your business.”

As a small business owner it is costly to maintain and blog and to update and optimize your Website for Search Engines. Well, luckily enough, WordPress comes to the rescue.

What?? Not familiar with WordPress??

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging tools available. But what many people don’t know is that it is a powerful Content Management System (CMS) that can be used for more than just blogging. With WordPress you can build a blog, a Website, or both.

Top Five Reasons to Use WordPress for Your Small Business Website -

• SEO - WordPress provides good search engine optimization (SEO) right out of the box. There are many SEO benefits that WordPress provides for free. In fact Google’s own Matt Cutts says WordPress is “made to do SEO well” in this video: Matt Cutts gives tips to small business owners.
• Content - It is super easy to update content on your Website without knowing HTML.  Do you hate the idea of having to learn to use a complex HTML editor tool like Dreamweaver? Do you have to “ask” your webmaster every time you want to make a small change to your Website? Well no longer - once
  WordPress is set up for you, you can easily create new pages or edit existing pages using a simple rich text editor.
• Extensions - There is a thriving ecosystem of developers creating themes and plug-ins - imagine free design themes, or the ability to extend your Website with polls, contact forms, ratings or hundreds of other cool features without having to hire a web developer.
• Support - If you do have problems, or want to add very custom features, it is easy to find support and developers who can help you. There are literally thousands of WordPress developers out there. And there are so many people writing about WordPress that help is only a Google search away!
  One-click-installation - Quick installs are provided by many hosting providers, including Bluehost, 1and1 and Thinkhost.

Thesis WordPress Theme has the following functions automatically built in, so you do not need to use these plugins if you are using this theme. Just as an FYI - This theme is already getting some great reviews around the blogosphere (you can see some testimonials here). You can download Thesis WordPress Theme here.

But if you are using other themes, the following plugins will give you a similar look/effect.

• All in One SEO Pack - This plugin makes it easy for you to optimize your article titles and other meta tags. 
• Google Analytics - This plugin makes it easy for you to insert your Google Analytics code and start tracking your blog visitors.
• WP-Note - This plugin lets you insert notes in your article to make them stand out. Kind of similar to the yellow colored notes I have twice in this article.
• WordPress Gravatars - This plugin lets you display Gravatars of your readers in the comments section and can put your Gravatar on top of your article to show who the article was written by.

Even if you are not using WordPress for your Blog or Website you can still follow these important and useful SEO tips for an enhanced web traffic -

• Start early. It can take up to six months for competitive search terms to see results through Google.
• Content really is king. Make a list of the top 20 search keywords relevant to your business and create content that’s thematically linked with those terms.
• Don’t use the same keywords over and over. Search engines have gotten smart enough to weed that out.
• Focus on Google. The magic formula is relevance and popularity. Having a well-written and well-structured Website is a big part of the battle. Mentions and links from blogger’s and other Websites can be a big boost as well.

If you choose to work with an SEO consultant, find one that specializes in the needs of startups and growing businesses. If he or she tries to guarantee you an instant #1 ranking in Google, run the other way.