Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Blog Moved

When the spam filters shut this blog down I decided to use paid hosting. You can find my new place at Online Business 101 and if you would like to sign up for the feed head to Online Business 101 Feed. I hope you like the new look.

Monday, August 29, 2011

Finding Hosting For Your Online Business

If you think you would like to begin making money online with affiliate marketing, ppc publishing, or product creation you will need to find a host. This is where your presence will be and what will decide how much traffic you can receive to your presence. Before finding a host you should decide on a topic for your new online business. The reason for this is you want to know the possible amount of traffic. If you decide to take on a popular niche with over a hundred thousand visitors monthly it would be best to use paid hosting to support the large amount of traffic. When trying to decide on a topic some things you should take into consideration include your passion for the topic and possible traffic. The reason passion is important is the majority of online businesses fail when the creators get bored. To avoid this happening to your online business make sure you choose a topic you have interest in and have had interest in for quite some time.

There are many types of hosting both free and paid on the web. If you are interested in free hosting then the three major types of hosting include regular hosting, blog hosting, and single page hosting. All of these will allow you to create a presence for free, give you a free domain name, and allow you to earn money for free. For regular hosting one of the most popular is 000webhost.com. This resource gives you 1.5 megs of storage and 100 gigs of bandwidth. To many this may not sound like a lot, but you can easily host a website with a few hundred pages and receive over thirty thousand monthly visitors while remaining within these limitations. A couple of the free blog hosts include blogger.com and wordpress.com. These resources will give you a free domain and hosting allowing you to make money free as well. For those wanting something smaller to perhaps test a niche or online business thought out you should check out hubpages.com or squidoo.com. These hosts are a bit different because they allow you to create unlimited single page presences.

When trying to decide on a hosting service to use one factor for the decision will be your knowledge of HTML and your want to learn the web language. If you do not want anything to do with HTML the blogging platforms and single page platforms have integrated what you see is what you get editors meaning you don’t need to know HTML to use these platforms. It is still a good idea to start learning HTML if you want to become a professional online business owner and if you are interested in learning the language visit w3schools.com for free tutorials. For those that are completely sure this is what they want to do you may want to go a step further and purchase a book from amazon.com. If you decided to use a regular host a couple other things you will need is an HTML editor and a ftp program. The editor I have used for years and recommend is the free coffee cup html editor which you can find by searching. For your file transfer needs one of the best is file zilla and can be found at filezilla-project.org.

Once you get your presence up and running if you are interested in monetization check out these paid surveys affiliate programs.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Meeting Organic Traffic Goals

Many people hope they will be able to earn money online free by ranking well in search engines which will bring targeted web traffic to their presence who are looking for the products or services the specific person is selling. To rank well in search engines for any given term you will need to learn search engine optimization. This is the process of using on site and off site techniques to improve search engine position. Before you can meet organic traffic goals you should create some organic traffic goals. When creating these goals the first should be the biggest. This will be your ending goal which means when you reach this goal all you need to do is maintain position rather than increase it. On a basic income scale one thousand unique visitors daily will earn you around one thousand dollars monthly. This is of course a very rough estimate and can change dramatically depending on how targeted the visitors coming to your presence are and what monetization techniques you are using.

Personally my end goal is around two thousand unique visitors daily which will bring in around two thousand dollars in monthly income. It is also important to set goals along the ways toward this final goal. Once you know your end goal which should correlate with your end income goal pick some simple goals that can be met in a couple months. These should be keywords that are exactly what you are promoting. If you are promoting get paid to take surveys affiliate programs then the first few goals you should be looking at include “get paid to take surveys”, “paid to take surveys”, and “high paying surveys”. Ranking in the top spot for these will start bringing in some extremely targeted traffic. The only people that would be typing these terms in to Google and the other major search engines are those who are actually wanting to begin making money by taking surveys. As you begin reaching your goals and ranking in the top spot for these targeted terms start moving onto other targeted keywords. Continuing with the example the next set of keywords that have higher volumes of traffic would be keywords such as “paying surveys” and “paid surveys”.

When wanting to rank well for keywords it will be important to begin optimization. The first step is placing the words you would like to rank well for on your presence. You should also make sure your navigation is optimized by replacing generic terms with keywords when they are interchangeable. Once you have your website optimized the next step is going off site and building keyword optimized links. This can be done from multiple resources, but when building links remember not all links carry the same authority. Look for links which are from high page rank sites, relevant to your topic, and willing to give you a one way link which means you do not need to place a link on your site. One of the major problems with link building is finding these three things is extremely difficult so you will need to be willing to build links with only one or two of these things. Some of the places you can begin building links includes article directories, forums, and free web directories.

Working From Home Full Time

Many people who are wanting to make money would like to do so from the comfort of their own home. The prospect of being your own boss or not having hours is quite nice. What few understand though is when you are trying to earn enough from home to make a full time income in the first few years you will be expected to work harder than any real job you have had. The hours of a new business owner are extremely long compared to the hours of someone working forty hours per week. I personally spend up to a hundred hours weekly on my online business constantly trying to increase income. This is of course my personal road to working at home full time you may not need to spend nearly as much time. If you are wanting to begin working from home full time one of the best ways is to begin an affiliate marketing business. This is when you create a presence, market the presence, and sale other peoples stuff for a commission. The reason this is better than many of the other monetization techniques out on the web is for a sole person actually creating a product may be a issue.

To begin you should create a website. There are many hosts out on the web that will host your site for free or for a small charge. The free hosts you should check out include 000webhost.com, wordpress.com, and blogger.com. To create the website on a regular host such as 000webhost.com you will need to learn HTML or by a what you see is what you get website creator. HTML is one of the easiest codes to learn and if you would like to do so I recommend heading over to w3schools and running through the free tutorials. It will also be important to pick a topic for your presence. This will decide the amount of income and traffic you can generate with a website. The more popular the topic the more traffic volume, but also higher traffic will mean higher competition. For a beginning business start with something small.

Once you have your website up you will need to monetize the traffic that comes. Like I said earlier affiliate marketing is one of the best monetization techniques a new webmaster can use. One of the best things about affiliate marketing is almost all major websites have affiliate programs. Some of the ones you may have already heard of and should check into include clickbank.com, walmart.com, and amazon.com. These are not all the affiliate programs possible and it is a good idea to also look for some of the smaller websites since they will offer higher commissions. My personal favorite type of affiliate marketing is paid to take surveys because they allow the visitor to join free and make money. You will actually be paid from the work that they do for the survey website.

How To Begin Working From Home

Many people attempt to make money online, but few will actually succeed. One of the main reasons for this is the amount of scams out across the web. Scams are everywhere and in the beginning it is extremely easy to fall victim. The absolute best way to avoid scams during the first year is not spending money on anything whatsoever. This will be difficult since the scammers are able to blend with legitimate websites flawlessly. When working from home there are two different ways to begin building an income. The first way to begin building an income from home is performing services for webmasters or websites. It is possible to earn a couple thousand monthly this way, but you will need to work consistently to do so. One of the most common ways to earn money this way is using paid surveys websites.

The second way to start building an income from home is starting an online business. This income source will be a bit more difficult, but the possible pay off is unlimited. There are millionaires all over the internet who made it big either through product creation, affiliate marketing, and ppc publishing. To begin you will need an idea and a host to begin building your online business. You can find free hosting at websites such as blogger.com, wordpress.com, and 000webhost.com. If these will not fill your needs then search Google for directory of free hosts or simply search for “free hosting”. Once you find a free host it will be time to think of an idea for your presence. Don’t think of anything besides what topic you want to create your site in. Online business can easily overwhelm a new webmaster when they begin if they start thinking about marketing, monetization, and other online business factors. In the beginning lock your idea down and then move onto these ideas. When picking a topic make sure that it has enough traffic to help you meet your online income goals. You can find the traffic of keywords by going to Google Adwords and using their keyword tool.

The final steps are placing monetization links on your presence and internet marketing. When trying to decide what types of monetization you should use the main online income sources include ppc publishing, affiliate marketing, selling adspace, and selling your own products. I recommend trying different techniques when monetizing. Internet marketing can’t be learned with an article or even a hundred articles. This is something that takes months to learn and is impossible to master since internet marketing is in a constant state of change. Personally I have found the best place to learn internet marketing is v7n.com/forums. You can also search Google for free Search Engine Optimization Tutorial. The basics on all of these tutorials are the same.

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Understanding Google and Search Engine Optimization

For those who are trying to make money online by ranking their presence well in Google there are a few things you should understand. First and foremost not everyone can rank in the top ten for a given keyword or term. The only way you will ever rank in the top ten for a competitive keyterm is if you actually take the years to learn everything you can about search engine optimization. Not only will it take years to learn, but also years to implement an internet marketing campaign which will see these high results. The most important rule of internet marketing is persistence. You will need persistence both when learning about search engine optimization and implementing search engine optimization. No one gets it right on their first try so expect to fail the first few times you attempt to rank for any keyword. After the first failed attempt many think earning money online is impossible and abandon their online dreams. Don’t give up on yourself or online business because of one failed attempt.

To begin ranking well for major keyterms you will need to first optimize your website for the terms. This means placing the terms densely on your presence making sure not to overdo it. If you place the terms too many times on your presence Google will think you are trying to manipulate the search and drop you down deep in the serps (search engine ranking pages). When implementing keywords on your site the density you should shoot for is around 5 percent repetition. If you think you are going over that then try using other words that mean the same thing. One good example is if you are ranking your presence for “make money online” a keyword that you could use instead is “earn money online”. These two keywords are very close so they will help push you presence up for both. You should also be making sure every internal link on your presence uses keywords rather than generic terms. Get rid of the word home and use your website title instead.

The final step of search engine optimization you should be working on is building external links. This will be the most difficult part of running an online business so learn everything you can about this subject. One of the very best places you can go if interested in learning more about link building is v7n.com/forums or Digital Point Forums. It is here you can ask thousands of helpful webmasters for the link building lists they use. Some of the link building techniques you should be using for a new online business includes link exchanges, article marketing, blog posting, blog commenting, and free directory submission. Whenever I create a new presence the first link building resource I utilize is the thousands of free directories over at directory critic. Just be sure you use the keywords you would like to rank well for in the “site name” input box.


Taking Part In Your Online Businesses Niche

The majority of people out across the web that are trying to make money online will usually see their competitors as those who are trying to beat them by out ranking them in the major search engines. They will also see people who are taking their targeted audience away which usually leads to unpleasant feelings towards other businesses within ones niche. If you remember one online business rule which is you can’t make it online by yourself then you may see these other businesses in a different perspective. Remember that no matter what niche you created your business in links and other promotions on external sources will be necessary for success. The best promotions and links come from relevant websites within your niche. What this means is when you see a competitor to your online business try thinking about them as a cross promotional partner.

There are many different ways two websites in a single niche can promote each other. If you are running a static website then you should pay close attention to websites that are dynamic in your niche such as blogs and forums. These websites will not have the same marketing techniques or monetization links which means you will not be direct competitors even though you may be targeting the same audience. With these websites try thinking of ways you could promote each other. A few ideas include the basic link exchange on the top pages of each site. You may want to consider doing something like direct banner advertisements for each other. Usually these banner advertisements are sold, but if you are targeting the same traffic and are both doing well in the major search engines then it would be worth the extra traffic to switch banner space.

Even though you may be attempting to market with other websites in your niche there will be some who see you has the competition and would sacrifice their own potential to hurt yours. Skip these websites and webmasters moving onto marketing with others. Working with a few competitors will produce decent results, but you should not forget about other free internet marketing techniques. Some of the techniques I use consistently and have placed my websites at the top of Google for extremely competitive keyterms includes article marketing, forum posting, link exchanges, free web directories, and forms of marketing which you find while surfing. What I mean by that last statement is internet marketing has not been perfected which means there are still forms of marketing even an expert internet marketer has not heard of. You will not find these forms of marketing in the blogosphere or forums, but rather on those pages across the web not widely read. These different forms of marketing will also come to you rather than you learning them from some source.