Colm C. Maher

Developing My Business Website

My venture into website creation was motivated by my desire to build my home based business. I figured that the web was way to big to be ignored and that some out there must share an interest in a health and wellness business. Essentially, I was and am looking for leads which would hopefully turn into customers and perhaps business associates.

I chose to build websites but many people use blogs for esentially the same purpose. They are relatively simple to set up and many are free so that can be very attractive especially at the beginning. Good places to start for free blogs are WordPress and Tumblr.  I prefer the combination of website and blog.

My internet story starts about three years ago. I was basically uneducated in anything to do with websites other than using hotmail for e mail and google for searching. It has been a slow self taught learning process and I am far from being an expert. But I have found some very useful tools that have helped me get to where I am now. This is my 10 th website built using XSitePro. I was just at the point where the old 1.6 version was not quite up to date with new things like RSS feeds and video when I found out they just released a new updated version which has all I need and more, at least for now. I have just started using the program and the SEO is much improved over the original program.

My SEO story began when  I decided that it might be a good idea to have a website for Bread Roots Inc. in order tp attract more customers and perhaps supliers. One of my employees was website literate so he registered the name and arranged hosting. He then proceeded to design a website with help from me. I would often suggest changes which were done on an ad hoc basis. Sometimes these changes were made quickly, other times, they were made slowly. Sometimes, changes took so long I forgot about them. The bills I got for this work were ok. I didn't really know if I was paying too much or getting a great deal. I was told it was the latter. Being the kind of person who likes to have more control, I started looking for ways to do some web design myself. The only problem with that was I had no clue where to start so I searched on the Internet and found something that was to become a major part of my seo story.

The first real web page design tutorial I studied was conducted by "Site Build It". I'm  probably one of the few people that actually went through their website course when you buy into the program which costs about $300 per year. I learned a lot about keywords and many other things that were foreign to me at that time. At "Site Build It", I build 2 websites "wellness plus for you" and "wp4u.net". As you can see by these names, I still had a lot to learn. Content, content, content was the SBI mantra. I thought I had lots of content. I just never got any rankings on Google that I'm aware of nor did I get very much traffic or leads or customers. I certainly got no sales or any business associates. My SEO story started looking like a few other money losing things I had done to promote my business. It was a painful year, going from high expectations to no expectations. As a result, I let the SBI program expire after the first year. It's an excellent place to learn a lot about website design, keywords etc and it is an important part of my seo story and education. Check it out. It may be just for you. If you like detail and a thorough website design course I cannot think of a better program. Are you thinking about having a blog or a website? Read the pros and cons at Site Build It.

I still had BreadRoots.com which is my main business and which was still handled by an outside webmaster. I started doing some internet research and then did something that wasn't too bright in hindsight: I changed my web hosting service and tried to do all my website design myself except I didn't know how to use this new C Panel control centre that was supposed to be so easy.  I ended up losing my website in cyberspace for months just because I was very frustrated by the whole experience.

Again searching the internet, I came across XSitePro which sounded a bit like SBI in that beginners could do it. It also had a lot of features that SBI did not offer at that time.  I just couldn't see how I could build a Bread Roots website using SBI but I could see that XSitePro would do the job. It was also a one time fee for the program which appealed to me rather than paying SBI $300 per year. So I solved my immediate problem, then I got my son to design a new Bread Roots website using XSitePro. So my son got all the experience on the program and I got none. Slowly, I started playing with it . At about the same time, I found a new hosting service, Canadian Host which uses a Helm control panel which looked a lot more customer friendly than the C panel which I was desperately trying to understand. I had my problems with the Helm panel but now they are all worked out just fine. Kevin has always been available by phone to help me out.

Somewhere along the line through Linda my sponsor in Send Out Cards, I found Arbor Domains. I really like them a lot for the ease of searching for new domain names, ease of domain and e mail forwarding and the ease of changing Nameservers. They just don't do .ca extensions. (I use Canadian Host for .ca domain name extensions) But Arbour Domains does offer most domains.

My first website under this new arrangement was www.ybltd.ca  which I no longer have except as an email address. A cute, "too smart" name which had no significance except to me. I had built the website but somehow I just couldn't upload it to the net using Canadian Host. I was really busy at Bread Roots driving my bread truck that I didn't do anything for 4 months. When I finally got back to the office and off the road, I telephoned Kevin and within hour the website was up. Canadian Host uses the Helm panel which is really easy to use once you master a few basics.

The problem with the Helm control panel system is that is gets kind of expensive when you have multiple websites. I was up to 20 websites at one time so I was forced to look elsewhere. I went back to the C Panel. This time I was determined to figure it out. When I took this second or third look look the configuration panel looked friendlier than before but it took me several weeks of trying before I was able to upload my websites to my CPanel using Xsitepro. It's not hard when you figure it out--you just need to know the combination.

Great, the websites up, now where's the traffic. Right. In the summer of 07, I played around with buying leads but after sending out over 200,000 emails that didn't work, I felt this isn't for me so I quit buying leads and starting thinking of better ways to build my business. 

At about the same time, I found Veretekk advertised on a K2Net leads site. I checked it out, and used it. I found it very complicated at first and I quit that too. Six months later, I started looking at Veretekk again but this time I learned a little more and saw that it certainly had potential and it was doing something I certainly could not do alone. I was also learning more and more daily about marketing on the Internet. A lot of what I thought was true or reasonable went straight out the window. The Internet has its own rules and conventions which can be a lot different that what you might expect.

  As I said in the beginning, I am still learning and feel I am going in the right direction. 36 months  ago I did not know what SEO stood for but I do now. It's definitely in the tools I have found and my stubborness to keep pursuing a goal that was highly frustrating and time consuming not unlike going to college. It definitely feels like I'm going in the right direction.

My Websites

In the learning process, I have had multiple websites all focused different aspects of home business or small business. The best way to illustrate this is give you some of the domains I have used.

home-business.bz, small-business.bz, homebusinessfordummies.bz, colm-maher.com, seosoho.net, leads.bz, leadsleads.net, sausagerecipes.biz, prospecting.bz, wellnessopportunity.org, healthandwellnessopportunity.com, timefreedommoney.org, beachmoney.net, immunotecdistributor.com, weightlosspillsreport.com plus many others.

Each of these websites were focused on keywords. It's a good idea to have a matching blog for your keyword website. A practical problem arises when you have multiple websites -- you should have a separate blog for each. Keeping each blog active with good content can be a challenge. I am setting up one main blog (with video) now which will comment on anything within the colmcmaher.com website. I may also have blogs at Veretekk and Prospex which I will use to describe  membership benefits.

 While each website had its strengths, the weaknesses were less obvious. I did not feel they worked so I kept reworking them. Many times I used Veretekk to promote the website keywords (most often the name of website) and many times I cancelled my subscription. I hope they don't get tired of me doing that. I am almost embarrassed.

I now have put all my website content under one roof as colmcmaher.com. I picked this version of my name because I could get all my Social Networks with this username.  Since I am the only common denominator that makes sense. It's also about branding yourself on the internet. Branding yourself is all about offering people sufficient value so they may possibly follow your blog or Twitter feed or Facebook page. If people see you as an credible expert, then you will succeed. The downside to this is anything and everything you do must be credible or you're done.

I use Veretekk to promote my website, and attract leads. The new version soon to be released will also tie in the Social Networks which will be really important. I am also using Prospex. It is also a lead generation system and like Veretekk, it is a tremendous source of small business internet marketing ideas.