[Lawrence] Cathy, could you briefly describe some of your online business operations and products/services?

[Cathy] Sure, I am a one woman operation working out of my home. My site, http://www.onestopinternetbusiness.com is designed to help anyone build an online business with straight forward information, tips and recommendations.

In addition to writing articles and providing tested recommendations, I am also available to all members (free and paid) for questions, advice and live interactive marketing discussions. I really like to talk to members and it feels great when I can help others by telling them how I overcame an obstacle that they are now facing.

My free membership is designed for beginners who really need to learn basics of promoting their offer (whatever it is) online. It includes recommendations for most effective free advertising sites, live discussions and support I mentioned, plus my ebook which explains what you need to start an internet business and gives a comprehensive overview of most common forms of free online advertising and how to get most out of them.

My paid membership is for those who have been around for a while and are looking for new ways to get their offer to more people. I have compiled over 50 recommendations for a wide variety of free and low cost tools, tips and services that range from handy pc and web design tools to low cost, quality advertising sites and free information on advanced marketing strategies.

The low cost of membership, diversity of my recommendations, and interactive aspects of my site are what makes it different from other marketing information sites I have seen, and believe me, I have seen a lot!

[Lawrence] What made you decide to start a business? What was your inspiration or motivation?

[Cathy] My husband is a contractor and we relied solely on his income when our two children were first born, so I could stay home to care for them. While it is good money, it is not always steady and it became quite clear that we needed another stream of income to carry us through lean times. Because it was important to us that I stay home with kids, we built my pc piece by piece and I started with my first online business opportunity a little over 2 years ago. [Lawrence] What have been your major challenges or obstacles so far? How did you overcome them?

[Cathy] One of biggest challenges I have faced was my lack of experience when I started. My first business opportunity made it sound so easy, but everywhere I went for information wanted so much money or gave poor quality information.

I overcame this by doing my own research and tracking my results. I continue to do research today, I am always looking for new and better ways to promote ONE STOP.

Do you use a side navigation bar on your website? Many of us do - it makes for an eye-catching, easy-to-use navigational layout. The received wisdom is generally to place these sidebars (constructed by using tables) to left of page. The main reason for doing this is that visitors reading western scripts read from left to right, and are therefore more likely to be drawn to text at beginning of a reading line. This is great, but unfortunately, search engines don't read like us humans. If a page has tables in it, a search engine robot will read from left to right, yes, but it will read entire contents of a table before moving on to next one, since it treats anything after tab as main body text, even if we don't intend it to be. Chances are that your web pages are laid out with tables; first containing a logo, then second containing navigation bar, and subsequent tables (appearing to right of navigation bar) with text WE view as main body text. This means that your keyword rich text often doesn't appear until some way down page as far as search engine robot is concerned. Since search engines determine relevancy by analyzing occurrence of words, particularly at top of page, this type of layout is ultimately going to hurt your rankings. I've struggled to find ways of overcoming this problem in past; e.g; introductory keyword rich text above logo and keywords in side bar. I achieved some success using these methods, but as a webmaster in a competitive sector, I've been unhappy about with leaving my carefully honed body text so far "down" page, when maybe competitors had edge. Then I discovered a way to arrange table layout so that text you want humans to see also appears first to robots. You simply ADD ANOTHER VERY SMALL CELL to your table layout. It's difficult to illustrate exactly what I mean in an e-mail text - easiest way is to take following HTML examples, cut-and-paste them to them into text editor, and from there, into your HTML editor, then compare results; First an example of a typical table layout, which leaves The body text in wrong place;

Home Product 1 Product2 Links Contact Us< d>	lots of body text with selected keywords< d> < r> < able>
Cont'd on page 2 ==>