It’s time to take a look at another online business. Being featured in this type of study on Court’s Internet Marketing School is a paid service that I created to help businesses to reach the next level. Most sites never get there, and these reviews can help you to expose the errors that are holding you back. You should be able to learn a lot by reading these studies, or you can buy your own review if you would like me to take a look at your site.

I’m impressed by a lot of different aspects of the site discussed in this case study, and have also found a few things that could use some improvement.

Writing Ability

It won’t take you long on MakingSalesMakingMoney.com to realize that Don is a gifted writer. By taking a look at just the articles he has written recently, I can see that this site has a lot of upside. Here are a few of the articles that tackle issues that I face almost every day of my life:

• Content Writing with Prejudice, Procrastination, and Perfection
• Running a Home Based Business Like a Business
• So When Do You Make Money

When you have a flagship site, the writing ability has to be there and in the case of this site, it is. I would like to encourage Don to take this ability to the next level by using a technique that I like to call ‘same words, different format‘. When an article gets in front of a new set of eyes, that new visitor (keep in mind that this person has never been to the site before) will have to make a determination as to whether that article is worth reading or not. The person will scan the page before reading it.

In order to get the person to read an article, you have to impress them with what stands out to them first. That means bullet lists, and bold sentences.

Company Brand

I would consider Making Sales Making Money to be a very brand-able name for an online business. Combine that with a good writer and it makes for some great potential. Right now this site is very new - it was started in Sept. 2007.

One of the biggest things that will make a flagship site stand out from the crowd is a unique design. Although this theme is quite clean and nice looking, I would recommend hiring a designer to craft a unique one once the budget is there. In the meantime, here are a few ways the branding on the site can be improved with the existing theme:

• Move the ‘Most Popular Posts’ section up so that new visitors can find it. This will give them a look at some of your articles that they won’t find otherwise.
• Add a signature line that appears at the end of each blog post. Invite them to subscribe to your RSS feed. The existing link for RSS at the end of the posts is quite hidden at the moment.

SEO Strategy

Since this blog is centered around home based business opportunities, it would make perfect sense to target that keyword. The blog is doing a good job overall of targeting the keyword, but there are a few areas that I would make some SEO changes:

• Using the All-In-One SEO plugin, change the title of the home page to ‘Home Based Business Opportunities at Making Sales Making Money’.
• Change the home page description using the All-In-One SEO plugin to include your keyword: ‘home based business opportunities’.
• Whenever you use a term related to home business in a post, you need to link that term back to your blog home page. This will give you more link authority for those keywords by increasing your blog home page’s relevance for them. This will also create links on scraper sites that steal your content, and this has a positive SEO effect.
• Delete either the ‘Featured Sites’ or the ‘Blogroll’. Many of the sites are on both of those lists, and this is giving away unnecessary link juice.

Overall I’m excited about the future of this site. I’ve provided some constructive criticism here because with a few minor changes, this site has the potential to really speed up its growth rate. Knowing Don, that will happen in the next few days and then he’ll be well on his way.