Web Business Resource

by Colin Meunier 

The Internet is probably the main place people turn to when they want to look for a way to make extra money or start an home based business. The Internet can be a great place to turn to when starting a home business; however you do still need to handle it with the same attitude as traditional business.

First thing you want to do when researching home business opportunities is to keep the reality. You want to sift through and ignore all the hype that’s out there on the Internet when it comes to having a home based business. The hype that includes does nothing, pay nothing, and just stay at home in your Pajamas and get rich stuff. I tell you yes there are people that make a lot of money online, but they do a lot of hard work and they spend money on their business. Successful people also get dressed in the day too.

Think about people who have gone a head and started a franchise business, a barber shop, or even a contracting business. These people probably work very hard with their business. You need to take the same attitude with a home business as you would if you would start the same as one of those businesses.

Now having your own home business can be very profitable in both money and time freedom. Having your own home business can allow for you to make your own time for your business, just as long as you do your work, as long as make time during the day to help a friend or family move. Where you in a normal job situation you would not have that flexibility.

The journey with a home based business can also be very exciting and rewarding. If you have that entreprenual spirit then you will love it both the ups and down times of your business. Lets face it, there is going to be ups and downs in the business. If you are a business minded person you just may love it.

Colin Meunier is a Successful Home Business Coach and Mentor! Visit: http://www.whoiscolinmeunier.com/

by Luke Blaise

Blogs have grown tremendously over the years and are now mainstream. It seems almost everyone has a blog these days, but not many people are earning money off these blogs. Just by utilizing a few free resources you can start earning some money from blogging.

The first thing you need is to set up a blog. You can do this for free in many places, but the easiest place to get one is on Blogger. Setting up a blog with Blogger is easy and it only takes a couple of minutes. Blogger is great for beginners because since it belongs to Google it gets much more traffic, which is vital to earn money, and also the Google search engine will rank you higher compared with other similar blogs, another thing vital for traffic.

Before we move on the earning money from your blog, remember that you need quality content. Give people a reason to read your blog and come back. If you have a low quality blog, no one will read it, and you will likely earn no money.

The easiest ways to monetize your blog is with Adsense. You can do this through Blogger. The way Adsense works is you get paid just for people clicking on ads placed on your website. Another great way to monetize your blog is with affiliate programs. Most large companies have affiliate programs, like Ebay and Amazon.

You earn money through affiliate programs when people click a link on your blog that leads them to another website where they can purchase the product.

The great thing about Adsense and affiliate programs is all you have to do is add great content to your blog, you don’t have to really work at selling anything at all.

Most people who earn money from blogging have several blogs in order to earn decent money. Write blogs about what you are passionate and the money and people will follow. Regular posts to your blogs will lead to large amounts of traffic over time.

Fierce Personal Finance

by James Krawder

The language a computer uses is numeric in nature. If the language of a computer is displayed in front of the internet users, many of the frequent users may not be able to distinguish one web site from the other. Every website has a numeric address on the World Wide Web. As it is difficult for people to remember the numeric names or URLs of the web sites and web pages, domain names are used. Domain names are the names which are used commonly for a website in place of its actual numeric web address. Domain names are very important for the success of websites. A common domain name, which is easily memorable, increases the chances of getting more web traffic which in turn increases the chances of getting more business.

Making profit through domain names is possible only if you happen to find a domain name which is easy to remember and which is related to the content and nature of your website. For example if your website is related to providing gardening services and the domain name used suggests that is has some thing to do with groceries, your web site will not work well for you. Find a domain name which is both related to the nature of your web based work and which is easy to remember. Choosing a search engine favorite key word as a domain name is also a very good idea. All these techniques will help you in making money through choosing good and just the right kind of domain names.

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Your web site is a direct reflection of your product and that is why you must have a well designed website that make sales, time after time after time.

Your website is your grocery store; your car lot. You must have an atmosphere that is pleasant to buyers. One that tells that buyer that you are not an amateur, but instead a trained, seasoned professional.

Surf ability:
Take a few minutes a look around at several web pages. What makes them appealing? Were there some that you closed out immediately? Why? Take notes and do your research. Keep in mind that when a person visit your site they have a goal in mind. They are either seeking information or shopping for a product. Give the person what they want without having to search for it. Be sure that all the information on your site is relevant to your product. Make the buyer think that they need your product to solve their problem.

Main Page:
Your main page serves a very specific purpose. It should be an avenue by which the customer can see your site. It should be easy to view. The main page is your first impression and we all know that first impressions can either close the deal or loose the deal. Make it simple. It is best to have links that are easily viewable by the reader and navigate them to where they want to be.

Your main page should load very quickly, chances are if it takes too long to load, you will loose your customer, he/she will click away to save time hoping to find the information or product elsewhere. To increase the loading speed of your main page avoid large graphics or excessive graphics. Too many banners or special effects can cause a page to load slowly as well.

Stick to mild colors. If your site is a content site where the user will be doing a lot of reading, it is best to stick to black and white. Color can be added when using tables, as a way to brighten up the page, but remember to keep the look of the page professional and appealing to the audience that will be visiting most often.

It is a great idea to set the pixels to a standard 800×600. You should also choose to set the tables in your web page to be a percentage of the page rather than a set number or inches. This will be sure to accommodate all screen sizes. Remember that a lot of Internet users will not use the same browsers as you, and therefore you should be sure that your site looks good on other browsers as it does your own. You do this by downloading several browsers to look at your page.

The overall look of your website is a way to make money. If designed properly, your site can be an excellent marketing strategy for your product or service.

About the author: Agatha Reynecke can help YOU start your own profitable business on the Internet. To learn more, get free info of our 2007 TOP Picks, visit: http://www.workingfordreams.com

by Rebecca Beltran

1. Write down a very clear description of the purpose of the website before you begin any work on it.

Most people skip this step because they think it’s obvious, but trust me, it’s important and your main purpose will make a HUGE difference in how it should be coded.

2. Stay objective.

I know it’s tempting to fall madly in love with your new virtual ‘baby’, especially if you built pieces of it yourself. But beware… On that path there be dragons.

I once had a client who built her entire website by herself. She was very proud of her baby, however it was not converting very well and she was getting very few clients from it.

I showed her what needed to be done to fix her conversion problem, but in the end she lost at least $22,000 worth of new business because she was too close to the project.

3. Decide early if it’s important to get free search engine traffic.

If it is important to get free traffic, then your designer/developer needs to know that as early as possible, as it will affect how they code the website.

4. Be prepared to work a bit.

I know, everyone says that building a website is a must and it will really help your business, but the real truth is that you get out of a website exponentially how much you put into it.

If you spend 1 hour getting it up, don’t expect that anyone who calls your number will trust you yet.

5. Do some homework.

In my opinion, most of the unfortunate websites out there are due to the website owner not being educated enough to know what to ask or how to chose the right people to work on the site.

You don’t need to learn HTML or PHP, but spending some time learning to differentiate between different kinds of websites and what is required to make them work will be time well spent.

6. Don’t spend 80% of your time tweaking the design.

Design is important as long as it looks clean, professional and easy to follow, then let it go. Trust your designer’s eye to make everything else work the way it should and go work on the content.

7. Pick a good designer/developer.

Learn what the difference is between a graphics designer, a developer and a programmer (hint: there are multiple answers depending on who you ask).

Would you like to learn more about making your website work for you instead of you working for your website? Sign up for the Rise Above newsletter at http://www.seattle-small-business-website-design.com/newsletter-signup.html and receive a free report on “7 Steps to Finding Your Muse Business Idea”.

By Florie Lyn Masarate

A blog is not written just so it can be left there to rot. Aside from the fact that you want to share some relevant information to other people, you also probably want to have more and more readers interested in what you have to say. In addition, blog commenting is also as important to make your blog appear more active.

It is a fact of life that not all your readers will readily post a comment to your blog. Even if they find that it helped them a lot, not many can spare some time to put on a simple comment. This happens all the time. You could either make your blog more interesting or have friends and other acquaintances make some comments to get the ball rolling.

The thing about having a few comments into your blog is for your other readers to see that it is not dead and not being read. Nothing like a dead-looking blog to take the interests off potential readers who will stumble into upon them.

This is more so for blogs that have the sole purpose of advertising their business. You can tell these blogs apart from the links that are embedded into them. If you try to click on those links, you will be directed to another website which is more or less related to what the blog is all about.

Blog commenting also have the intent of gaining more relevant links to have in your site. It can be noted that like forums, leaving comments on blogs is a way of placing links which people can also go through. Blog commenting had long been a form of free advertising that businesses take advantage of. All that needs to be done is to find a blog that is interesting and is known for their readability.

Blog comments does not have to be positive all the time. There are no rules that state that negative comments should not be put into blogs. This is because readers will not always agree on what you have to say. There will be those who need to voice out their opinions about your post. If this happens, do not feel put down. Accept negative comments as something to learn about. You can learn more from negative comments rather than positive ones.

Blog commenting has also become a source of income for some people. For posts that needed all the publicity they could get, they pay other people just for commenting on their blogs. These are those who only makes use of blogs to optimize their websites and gain more visitors to whatever it is they are marketing on their blogs.

Overall, people have realized the value of what blog commenting can do. In time, you will be able to see and reap the benefits that comments can do to your posts if ever you are intent on pursuing it early on.

As far as blogs go, people do read them. You just have to find out what other people think about it through the comments that they will make.

For comments and inquiries about the article visit: Outsource Blog Commenting

by Richard Burckhardt

The first step is to brainstorm and make a list of, say, 25 of what you think might be keywords and phrases a web searcher would use to find your page. Come up with both single words and phrases. We’ll use some neat tools to narrow these down and even discover some nuggets you might not have thought of.

As a rule, optimizing for a single word is a lesson in frustration. For instance, can you imagine how many pages on the web would be competing for a single word like cars? Millions!

However, using a single keyword to search for those hidden nuggets is, well, priceless!

Keyword Research Tools Next, you will need some tools to help you find those perfect keyword phrases for your site. Although there are tons of commercial tools on the market, I am going to concentrate on some freely available tools that I have found of particular value. These will help you find out how popular your keyword phrases are (how many times they are searched for in a given time period) and how much competition you will have with your phrase. And, because this article is targeted to the newbie SEO, these free tools give you a chance to kick the tires before you buy the top of the line model. My favorite is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. What? You say you are not running any AdWords pay per click campaigns! Why would you use this tool?

The answer is that it is free for anyone to use. You do NOT have to be running any AdWords PPC campaigns and the tool gives valuable keyword research information in a graphical, easy to understand format, perfect for the newbie!

And, yes, this tool is based on AdWords, so the search volume reflects PPC search and competition, but these estimates will apply to organic search as well.

Here’s a perfect example of how what you think you want to rank for might be in opposition to reality.

I live in Palm Springs, California and have done web design for real estate agents in the past. We must have 10,000 real estate agents in the desert and each and every one of them has a web site and each and every one of them would like to rank #1 for the keyword phrase palm springs real estate.

To demonstrate how difficult and impractical a task that would be based on the competion, take a look at the screen shot I took after running the Keyword Variations tool of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (be sure to check the Use synonyms box for a more comprehensive list).

The trick here is to find more green in the Search Volume bar and less green in the Competition bar. In this example, you’ll see 100% competition for a moderate search volume for the phrase palm springs real estate. This tells me that optimizing for that phrase is probably not worth the effort. It would be better to try to target other phrases with less competition for the search volume.

For instance, the Palm Springs area has a large gay population and there’s no competition (no green bar) for palm springs gay real estate which has a moderate amount of search volume. If this is a community that you’d like to target, then this is the kind of search phrase you want to look for - search volume with little or no competition. Look around. You never know what targeted keyword phrases you will discover.

See how you can think you know what to target as far as keywords and how easy it is to be way off?

Try running your single keyword ideas through this tool and you are likely to find good keyword phrases with little or no competition for you to target as well. And, the Google AdWords Keyword Tool makes downloading the keyword lists you generate a snap for offline use.

Then, select the keyword phrases that look like they might work for you and run each of them through the tool again to create a list of even more highly targeted keywords.

Another free, non-graphical tool you might want to try is the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from WordTracker. WordTracker also offers a good paid version, but the free tool is enough to get you started.

Unlike the Adwords Keyword Tool, this tool takes data from DogPile.com and Metacrawler.com, so the results are more organic in nature, but, as you will see, somewhat similar.

Using the same test phrase palm springs real estate, we get the following results - screen shot.

As you can see, you get a list of keyword phrases and the volume of searches for them in the past 90 days. This gives you a great place to start looking, but it does not give you any idea of the competition as the Adwords tool does. My suggestion is that you use both tools, comparing the lists to see what you might have missed on one or the other.

This should get you started in your keyword research. This article is intended as a companion piece to SEO 101 which can be found on my blog. I go into more detail in my SEO 101 workshop, offered to web site owners and small businesses. Check my blog for more information or contact me to set up a custom workshop for your business group of five or more people in the Palm Springs area of Southern California. Travel is possible for large groups.

Richard V. Burckhardt, also known as The Web Optimist, is an Internet marketer and trainer based in Palm Springs, CA with over ten years experience in web site development, optimization and marketing.

The Web Optimist blog can be viewed at http://www.weboptimist.com

by James Krawder

Many people create website thinking to make a killing on the net but the fact remains that very few are actually able to make anything out of it. If you really intend to make profit with your website the one thing that you would have to consider would be active promotion of your site. Without site promotion you won’t achieve much online. Here are a few tips that could help you in this endeavor of promoting your site and making more money.

Make use of discussion forums. Yes, it is a site that allows you to post your views and comment on the views of others. This means that you get to discuss on topics that are relevant to your site. If you have the resources to start a forum on your site that is quite well otherwise you can always make use of forums on the site of others. You just need to find a forum that is related to the topic of your site or is related to the product you sell. You just need to read a little bit and then post some interesting reply to someone else’s views. Never forget to put a link of your site at the bottom of your post. It would promote your site quite well and you won’t have to spend a dime for it.

Joining some social bookmarking site would also work quite well. You would find that social bookmarking communities have great networks that have members having different tastes and different views. You can take advantage of it and use it for your site promotion.

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