Sometimes you have a great idea, or your business is expanding but you could really do with a financial boost to reach the tipping point. (This is the point where you become truly successful). Nowadays it is not that easy to find investment, although there is still a lot of money out there waiting for a good project.

There is a website which puts start ups and investors together, almost like a very mini facebook for investors. Here quite a few venture capitalists and investors check all kinds of ideas and projects and choose the ones they are interested in.

It is well worth taking a look, especially if you have a great idea but need the funds.

The website is called Angel List and can be found here: www.angel.co

Facebook has already changed the way people use the internet in an incredible way.

Facebook has recently been valued at $50 Billion, that is more than Time Warner and Boeing. How can this be? What does this mean to me as a business owner? Watch the video below for more information.



You need to make sure Facebook is in your marketing plans for the future, and start building it now.

Cashflow is the key to success in personal finance. Monthly income is the best way to go. If you have ever played Cashflow 101 from Robert Kiyosaki, you will know what I mean.

10 years ago property was the best thing to own for cashflow. Especially a property that you bought for a relatively low price, could rent out at a lot more than the mortgage, and eventually sell for a tidy profit.

Recently property prices have increased so much that these gems are very hard to find.

There is a new real estate emerging, the internet real estate.

Internet real estate is similar to commercial properties, it depends where they are, what kind of footfall (traffic) they get and how appealing they are. Websites have the potential to draw in higher monthly incomes with a lot lower outlay at the beginning.

McDonalds restaurants sell hamburgers but they are in the property business, renting or owning prime locations all around the world.

What is a prime location on the web?

A top Google ranking for a popular keyword is like being in Times Square. With thousands of customers knocking on your door, this is a very valuable position and can be extremely profitable.

You can build a website and get it high up the rankings and own this important real estate, or you can actually buy a website that is already in a good position.

There is a website that focuses on flipping websites, much the same way people flipped properties a while ago. This site allows you to buy websites and some whole businesses many with established cashflow.

Its quite interesting check it out: www.flippa.com

The normal way to build relationships with prospects and clients is to go out and have a coffee, or if your lucky have lunch. This has always been the method of choice for most small business owners.

The trend is changing.

I want to tell a small story of how this is happening and how it can affect your business.

There are two web based businesses that I work closely with. I have never met any of their staff nor have I ever spoken to them on the phone. They are based in the USA and time differences and long flights mean that this is not really viable. But I have come to realise that it is not necessary either.

I found this company by just searching online for a software tool that I use. I visited their site, watched some videos, read the information and signed up for a newsletter with more tips on how to get the most out of the software. These regular tips included videos from their video blog, with personal guides on improving business methods. All this was free and actually incredibly useful and informative.

Over a period of time I became a customer and then began to receive even more information and more personal advice for free. Then I came across their facebook pages and got to see how they run the business and a little more of their real lives.

The strange thing is this, even though I have never met, spoken to, or even emailed the person in the videos I feel like I know him. I refer to him by his first name, I speak about him with other clients and friends. He has become a reliable reference and I like doing business with him.

There is a new type of coffee table and a new way of having lunch and it is a lot more informative, educational, useful and easier for you to manage. Its having a system do a lot of the work for you, it is the only way this person can 'have a coffee' with his 10,000 clients. It is the power of new media, the web and emails. Right now it is still at an early stage but soon this will become the norm.

This week we have launched the completely new Gibraltar Federation of Small Businesses website. Built on Dynamo CMS it now gives the federation full control over the content of the site. But the new system does not stop there, it also allows for management of clients and subscriptions. It includes a built in email marketing system to keep members up to date.

Visit the new site on www.gfsb.gi

Just before Christmas I realised how effective a long term nurture email newsletter can be.

Last year I purchased some really good photo calendars from Apple, using Iphoto. Whilst doing so I looked around at a few websites to compare pricing, I registered for an offer on a site called Photobox.

This began the continuous and automatic process of sending me regular emails with offers and discounts every 2 weeks. Whilst sometimes they were annoying, often they prompted me to take action, but as I had already bought these calendars and they last a whole year I really didn't need to buy anything else.

So Christmas came round again, I had been receiving these emails for almost a year without making a single purchase. What did I do?
I ordered this set of calendars from Photobox, they were in mind, they had given me offers, they were my friends...

I also recommended them to some close friends, before even seeing how good they were at their job.

There are many photo printing companies out there, and probably a lot of them are better/cheaper than Photobox, but Photobox had built a relationship with me, and their brand now occupied a space in my mind.

Now a question to you - is your business keeping contact with people continuously until they absolutely don't want to know anymore?

Do you have automated systems in place to keep contact and send offers to people that you have never actually met?

Is your website working as hard as it should be?

If not, you may be one of the many sites that loses out to the one who is constantly building a relationship and building confidence.

The websites I mentioned in the last post that were using incoming links to boost their rankings to the top of google, also knew another secret. This is secret number 3, and this is often over looked even by professionals.

Secret number 3:

You need your best keywords in your link text.

When you link to your site from someone else's the tendency is to do this:

Beautiful high-heel shoes at ABC Company Ltd

Here your company name is the link.

Or this:

For a large range of great high-heel shoes Click Here

This is really bad.

The link text is the text that is highlighted and is actually clickable. It is this text that google will read and check as to the relevance of the page it links to. This also affects the links on your website to your other pages.

The correct way to use these links is to make the keywords linkable.

An example:

Beautiful high-heel shoes

How to buy high-heel shoes

On your website instead of using Click Here, More Information links etc, use the title of whatever it is you are trying to link to.

This simple trick can help your site jump up the rankings and will actually make your site and each page easier to use.

So there you go, 3 little known secrets for getting high rankings in google.

There are a lot more tips and tricks but these are the core secrets you should focus on at the beginning, once these are done you are ready to go to the next level.

The first secret was to do with your title tag, the positioning and density of the keywords within that title tag can greatly affect your ranking. However this second secret has been proven to be the single most powerful tool for high rankings.

A few years ago in the property boom there was fierce competition for keywords such as Spanish Properties, Morocco Properties, etc. Whilst working on some optimisation for an estate agent we came across a phenomenon. A competitor was ranking first on loads of incredibly popular keywords without even having those keywords mentioned on the page. I started looking into this, I checked the source code and did some tricks in google.

What I discovered was this, (secret number two):

High quality links to your website can amazingly boost your rankings

These sites did not have a lot of content, they didn't have many keywords but they did have thousands of sites linking to them. It is these links that make all the difference.

Google has a way of ranking links and their relevance to your site, so a link from a well-ranked website which is relevant to your business has much more authority than your sisters personal website.

An example:

If you are an estate agent and you get a link to your site placed on another estate agent site in Spain, and this site ranks well in Google then that is like a qualified vote for your site.

It is well known that links from popular sites like Delicious, Digg, etc are also valuable.

Links from government and education websites are particularly valuable, especially if they end in .gov or .edu

You can check the links to your site by simply searching in Google using link:www.yourwebsite.com - You can also check your competitors links too!

You can get high quality links by simply contacting the website owners and asking them. The problem is they will want something in return and that is normally a link from your site to theirs. This is no good. Google can see that and will recognise it as a traded link rather than a real recommendation.

In order to get sites to link to yours you need to have good, compelling information or services that people are happy to recommend. Many sites use a free widget, or some unique information or a guide or a white paper. There are many ways to do this and I will go into detail in another email series. You can also pay for someone to submit your links and articles to a large number of websites for you.

So to recap:

Secret 1.

Use your title tag to its full power

Secret 2

Get high quality one-way links to your site

We all know that ranking well on Google can completely change your business. Many companies rely on Google for most of their leads and sales. I run a website for one particular client who does no offline marketing at all; all sales come from being well ranked on the search engines.

But this can be incredibly frustrating as you are competing with the whole world, and that sounds daunting...

Many of my clients ask me:

How can I beat my competitor on Google?

What can I do to go up the rankings?

Unfortunately there is no single easy trick that will boost your rankings, but there are some secrets that can definitely improve your rankings and these are easy to implement. It's just a matter of knowing what to do or ask your designer to do.

Ok, let's get into the secrets:

Secret 1

Your title tag is incredibly powerful. You need to know how to use it.

Every page on your website has what is known as a title tag, this is a small tag within the code of the page that tells Google and visitors what this page is about. Imagine if you had to organise the world's data, you need some kind of tagging system, your title tag is the starting point.

So what do I put in my title tag?

This is where the secret lies; most companies will do the following:

* ABC Company Ltd - Shoes and slippers for adults

* ABC Company Ltd - Homepage
* Welcome to ABC Company Ltd

All the above are examples of what NOT to do.

Google spiders will use the first words in your title tag to identify what your website is about. The closer the right keywords are to the start of the title tag the more relevant they are.

If you are selling shoes like the ABC Company above, then your title should be something like:

* Shoes, Slippers, High heels, trainers for adults from ABC Company

However you can still improve on this.

Here are 3 examples of title tags:

1. Gibraltar Accountants at GibAccountants.com

2. Gibraltar Accountants

3. GibAccountants.com - Gibraltar Accountants and Auditors

Which one do you think would rank best for the search "Gibraltar accountants"?

Well it would be number 2. Although all three include the keywords number 2 is more focussed. This means that the keyword density is higher. The more words in the title tag the more diluted the keywords become.

This is great if you know the exact keyword you are optimising for but you can also use variants and different spellings to your advantage:

Gibraltar Accountants - Accountancy in Gib

It is important to have 10 words or less in the title tag, but at the same time, you can use other keywords that help support the main keywords which are at the beginning of the title tag.

So whenever possible ensure the following:

1. each page in your site must have a specific title tag

2. that title tag should be focussed on the keywords

3. the keywords should be first and as undiluted as possible

This little known secret can make a huge difference to your websites rankings and its overall success on Google and the other search engines.

After years of optimising websites and learning the ins and outs, we have released an email series of 3 little know secrets for ranking well in Google and the other search engines. We will now be publishing them on this blog one item per week.

The basic secrets are:

1. The power of the title tag - you need to know how to use it correctly
2. High quality incoming links - links can be a huge deciding factor in your ranking
3. Link text - the actual text you use in your links is extremely important