Right off that back there were a couple things we wanted to attend to:

• Make archive content easier to access.
• Easier ways to change ad banners from admin panel.
• Liven up the website with color.
• Create a “Trading Handbook” that lists all resources, articles, and products good for traders.

As part of any redesign/face-lift project, there is a flow that ASANT Media always follows:

1. Requirement gathering – lists exactly what needs to be done.
2. Archival of previous design – package code snippet of different features for use on future projects.
3. Wireframe - mockup a layout in Photoshop. Basically the blueprints of the new design is created here.
4. Coding - Ensure the design is created as specified while paying attention to search engine optimization standards.
5. Implement – Publish design, make sure design is supported in all popular browsers, and make any tweaks as needed.

As part of the redesign, new features include:

• Enhanced admin options to change look and feel of website directly from the admin panel and no need to dive into the actual code.
• Use of jQuery to display Trading Handbook.
• Increased usage of the Menu functionally released in version 3 of WordPress.
• Turned current Archive page from list format to calendar display.
• Added more green color to the design, emphasized sidebar content, and freshened up logo.
• Added individual information pages for affiliated programs. In progress
• Create “bookshelf” page to display all book reviews. In progress

Some before and after screenshots can be seen below:

What about you? How can we help you with your redesign?

For this particular project, I have a website, a Twitter account, and an email list. In the survey I asked the email subscribers do they visit my site more than once a week and do they follow me on Twitter. The responses were 60% don’t visit my website more than once a week and 80% of list doesn’t follow me on Twitter.

What does this mean?

Don’t assume your visitors know about all your services and actively visit the ones they know about.

Promote, promote, promote.

Somebody who signs up for your email list may not know anything about your Twitter account. Somebody who follows you on Twitter may have no idea you have an email list. Make sure you actively engage and notify all mediums of any new content otherwise you might leaving a big bulk of potential customers in the dark.

Learn more about email marketing.

In the whole online marketing/make money online field, you can never stop learning and adapting. Because so much of it deals with how people use the internet, understanding social tendencies is a great concept to grab a hold of.

There is definitely no shortage of business models to make money online. Of the top of my head, you can sell an information product, create a membership site, run a blog, or create a review site. My latest project, Stock Brokerage Reviews (SBR), fits under the review site category.

What is a review site?

This type of site focuses around one main topic, and just spits out reviews of similar products. Obviously, in this case, SBR focuses on stock brokerage reviews. They are great SEO content builders and highly optimized because most visitors of this type of site have come for a specific reason.

On the backend, money is made by using affiliate links to refer people from your review site and make commission once they sign up or take the necessary action. Check out my  recommended affiliate networks. So if you can get affiliate links for majority of your review subjects, then you are likely to get a conversion regardless of the users choice, thus, giving the option of choice to the user.

The key to a good review site

Probably the biggest factor of a good review site is to be completely neutral. Don’t give a bad review just because you don’t have an affiliate link for something. Its best to develop some type of review format or template and just plug away. This keeps things aligned through the site.

Create SEO how-to content. While the reviews themselves are great SEO content, create solid how-to content. For example, on SBR I have articles that tell people what they need to sign up for a stock brokerage, how to sign-up for one, and so on. Odds are that people searching for those topics will like to see the reviews as well.

Allow some type of social integration. Whether it be through comments, some sort of rating plugin, or social network integration, try to give voice to visitors. If readers can see other perspectives, then it will make them more likely to take action.

Yes, this site is barely 1 month old, but it has already created over a hundred dollars in commissions, while distributing valuable content to visitors. I still have some tweaks and addition to make to the site, but overall it has definitely been a good experience so far.

In this following list, we will be looking at some of the more popular articles throughout ASANT Media’s portfolio of sites, and try to figure out what exactly made these pages popular… (no specific order)

1. 4 Stocks To Buy In 2009 (TWI) – I can tell you right now that this is my most visited page throughout the entire ASANT Media network. Why? Because it is the first site on the first page of many different variations for the search term “4 stocks to buy in 2009″ on Google. This alone will get you hundreds of views a day.

Obviously as we are now in the latter half of 2009, so this search term is starting to die, but we can see how time relevant articles will boost your chances of being found in the search engine. Some future post could be “4 Stocks To Buy In Last Of 2009″. Find what people will be searching for, and go after that term. Check out 7 Effective Ways To Increase Your Search Traffic.

This article was also part of a contest with about 8 other sites, so that was 8 free quality link backs. While there is no real prize to the winner, we all win by linking to each other and boosting our link juice and traffic.

2.To Buy Or Sell (TWI) – This article was some how picked up and linked to by Reuters.com and StumbledUpon heavily. Although this site experienced tons of traffic, it was only for about a span of about a month. Unlike search engine traffic, that can be steady for a while, social network traffic is in and out. Yesterday’s hot story is today’s back page. The bounce rate on traffic from social networks is also much higher than search traffic ranking.

3. 4. 5. 8 Best Free iPhone Stock Trading Apps, 6 Best Free Stock Resources, 10 eBooks That Will Maximize Your Returns (Speak Stocks)  – I’m pretty sure you can see what all 3 of these articles have in common just by the title… they all list a bunch of resources. When it comes to making great link bait articles (meaning people will link back to those articles) list are by far the easiest. It really does not take much know how or time. You can see that these titles also aim at some popular search terms people might look up, “best free iPhone stock trading apps”.

Interpreting This Research

So now that we know what some of the popular articles are what do we do with this new found knowledge? There are two things. First, replicate the article format. Come up with another topic related to your niche and follow the formula. If it works again, then you know you have a great resource on your hands now.

Second, use these popular articles to your advantage. If you are fortunate to still be receiving traffic to these articles (i.e. search traffic), then tweak the articles to highlight some of your other articles or projects. Seamlessly embed internal or external links you want to promote and that you think visitors should check out.

P.S. I used Google Analytics to research these traffic numbers.

I first noticed the change once I altered the look of the theme on my stock market site. The 468×60 ad now seamlessly blends into the theme, but instead of just putting it at the bottom the location is even more specific.

I placed it right under the post, and then have it followed by the article meta information and related articles. Because of this placement, I think many people often think it is either part of the site and/or they see something interesting and click on it. The clean look also gets the ad to stand out.

This placement is also working well with other types of ads that I have tried, but they need to be very targeted ads. That is why I think the Adsense campaign works so well there. Creating custom post templates will help with targeting your ads.

You can see a picture of the placement:

There are numerous arguments for both sides, but the one I like to use is that people can’t complain about something they have never experienced.

There are many stories of successful ventures, companies, or whatever that eventually needed to throw up ads. Customers obviously complained about this because now they had to deal with all these advertisements.

If readers experience your site with ads from the beginning, then they know what to expect and won’t be surprised. Again, you can’t complain if you never experienced it another way.

Proponents in favor of adding ads later in your site’s life say that you should focus on customer experience and building your content and readership before jumping into the world of advertisements.

I see a couple problems with this:

• You are throwing away money. For every visitors with no ads is wasted money. Time is money; visitors is money.
• My previous argument – can’t complain about something never experienced. How will your current visitors feel about the new “ad” experience?

Now I do need to ad a disclaimer to this. Less is more. Do not bombard your visitors with ads, and make sure they are quality ads. Avoid pop-ups and other intrusive campaigns. Less is more.

To most people doing business online seems like a isolated position, but, for the most part, that couldn’t be further away from the truth. In fact, many of the top online businessmen are there because they developed a solid network.

Back to my database errors. I was in the process of updating all my sites to wordpress 2.7, but instead I copied over one wrong config file and suddenly everything went crazy. Sites were down here and there. Being the holiday time, professional support was obviously hard to come by.

Luckily, I have developed a network of other online peers who were able to bail me out of my situation. Once the site went down, I sent an email to all of them. Within 15 minutes, I had people who were more than willing to help me out.

Again, many people often compare computers to anti-social. We work online so we could avoid human interaction; however, while it may be email or telephone, this is still interaction. Without a strong network, being successful at anyting you do online would be quite a hill to climb.

Besides tech support, networks can help you market stuff, bounce ideas off each other, and even create new partnerships you may have not done one your own.

How to Build a Network

The way I started my network was by contacting other people running blogs or businesses within my own niche. The Wild Investor was my first site and it was a finance site, so I found other people in the same market and simple emailed them. The more we email each other, the better relationship that will be built.

Bottom Line: Whether you want to believe it or not, you don’t know everything. I may be good at picking stocks, but I might not know everything about working with databases and building sites. With a strong network, you don’t have to know everything. Your peers are there to help you.

About a year ago I was telling one of my friends about The Wild Investor, and just like everybody else he wanted to have a stab at it. Since we were both huge sports’ fans, I recommended that maybe we should start a sports’ blog. I would buy the domain, create the site, and then together we would write the articles and market the site. He was on board and we set our profit distribution ratio (which you should always do before starting a partnership).

It was barely a month before his article creation diminished to nearly 0 and his marketing was nonexistent. While I can’t say I didn’t see this coming, it proved my point that there are no true step by step formulas to creating a successful online venture, rather it depends more on the person using them.

Sure, we can have our usual steps, but just like any formula there are always tweaks that need to be done. The main problem my friend was having is that he lacked the creativity it takes to make money online. Although I told him the steps that needed to be done to help market and create articles, that is all he would do. There was no “big picture” for him. It was just do this, that, and the other, and it should all work out. Whether I am marketing a financial site or a sport site, there are obviously going to be adjustments in schemes that need to be done.

Bottom Line: While you can be given the steps, tools, and knowledge, it is up to your to decide how to properly use them. I can give you 8 steps to start your online venture or 5 steps to dominate your niche, but it is up to your to figure out how to make these steps work best for your specific niche.