Web Business Resource

A few times when listening to business-related shows, I have heard a businessperson advise that aspiring entrepreneurs get funding for their good ideas from friends, family, and other personal associates.

I disagree with that advice. I recommend that you avoid taking investments from friends and family. And definitely avoid asking for them!

These businesspersons did also specify that you needed to have a good idea with full business plans and financial projections that showed that you would most likely make profits. However, if you have such a good business plan, you could gain investments from professional investors. If your business is such a good investment, you could gain investments from people other than your friends and family.

Your friends and family may invest in you even if it’s a bad financial investment because they trust you or simply because they feel obligated by your personal relationship to them. When the business and investment fails, it will hurt both you and your friendly investors. Additionally, it will strain and possibly ruin the relationship.

If you cannot get impersonal, professional investors (such as a bank or a venture capitalist) to invest in your business idea, then revise your business idea or give it up completely. Do not try to get funding for your bad business idea by taking advantage of your personal relationships with your friends and family.

What do you think?

I hope you have all had a very happy holiday! I usually see a noticeable dip in web traffic during the weekends and holidays, but I didn’t today.

Anyway, the holiday season has made me think of a quick tip for you all. If you want to promote your website, use the holidays to have special promotions. Most importantly, you can run holiday contests. If you have enough time, maybe you can work something out for this New Year’s Day. Of course, the year will have many other holidays if you cannot make New Year’s Day.

When making a new website or business, you need to pick a niche. In other words, you choose the subject or topic of your website.

You want to make the topic of your website specific. By focusing on a specific subject, you can become an “authority website” on that topic. Obviously, a single website cannot become an “authority website” on every subject.

You want to find an underdeveloped niche. In other words, you want to find a niche that has less websites about it in relation to its popularity. If enough websites and online businesses about a certain topic already exist, then we call that market saturation. You generally do not want to get into a saturated market because you will have stiff competition. You want to provide something that people want but cannot already get just as easily.

If you think of a good subject but notice websites like that already exist, you can try going for a sub-category in that niche. For example, say you wanted to make a website about dogs but notice many already exist; you could then check the subcategory of dog training; if no websites already existed specifically about dog training, you could make one.

Most of all, you want to find a niche that you like. Try to think of what interests you and what you already know.

What do you think?

Running an internet business may sound simple enough, but running any business takes a lot of mental skills. As a business owner you have to make decisions about all aspects of your business. This differs from being an employee who just has to do manual labor or specialize in a specific task for the business. If you want to improve your business skills you may consider taking a business intelligence course, such as the online ones offered by Saint Joseph’s University.

When taking any online courses from an online school, you want to make sure the school is accredited. The degree from an unaccredited school means little to nothing because anyone can issue a degree. A degree from an unaccredited school will not do your resume any good, and the education probably won’t be as good (or otherwise the school would probably have gotten accredited).

School can be expensive, but it can also be worth more than it costs. It can help you earn more money throughout the rest of your life. Also, some employers will help pay for their employees’ college courses. If you currently have an employer, check with them to see if they have any programs like that.

If you want to get started with making money online, then you might consider a service such as pclink.co.uk which can sell you a ready-to-go internet business. For example, you can buy an out-of-the-box computer shop or internet dating site. The site would be mostly automated, so your main job would simply be to market and promote it.

I personally like to build my internet businesses from the ground up, but I could see how it would be much easier for a person without as much technical knowledge to start with an out-of-the-box solution.

Of course, starting any business is a risk. Do not spend more money than you can afford on a new business, and do not count on any income from the business because it may not work out. Try to avoid making business-related decisions on a whim. Think long and hard about any business decisions or other major financial decisions.

Do you know about Coupon Chief? It’s a website that offers many coupons to various online stores. I think it can be a very useful way to save money on your holiday gift shopping. If you are going to buy from a store anyway, why not just check to see if they have a coupon?

I will probably use one of their Best Buy coupons in January, because I am buying myself a new laptop. Of course, you can get whatever you want or need.

They also have coupons for department stores if you do not have anything in particular in mind. For example, they have coupons for Target. From a store like that, you can find items of all different categories.

Don’t get too carried away or anything. Don’t buy something just because you have a coupon for it. I recommend you just use coupons to buy things that you would buy anyway.

I have found a trick for making a website popular. If you have a great website but still need to increase your regular traffic this method may work for you. You just need to have the site monetized well enough that you can make more in revenue than you will spend on PPC advertising. You can do this by making the minimum bids for long tail PPC key phrases. Most PPC will let you set your maximum bid at $0.10 or even lower. Then just make sure you make more than $0.10 per visitor. If you have a great website, you can most likely do that because your visitors will stay on your website long enough to buy something, click on your ads, or do whatever causes you to earn money.

If you make more in revenue than you spend on the visitors, then you can keep reinvesting the revenue back into even more ads. That will keep increasing your budget and thus your total amount of visitors. If you have a great website, a lot of these visitors will continue you to return and will tell their friends. They will sign up for any newsletters you have, subscribe to any feeds you have, and join any membership system that you have.

Remember, the two main things you need for this method: You need to have a great website, and you need to have monetized the website well.

What do you think?

Whether you blog for fun or purposely blog for money, you probably want new ways to monetize your blog. There are many ways to get paid for blogging. Today I want to tell you about Smorty.

Smorty is a service that will pay you to make posts on your blog about other websites. The advertisers on Smorty pay to advertise on blogs because they want hype and publicity.

You still get to post your regular blog posts. When you want to earn some extra money, you just go to Smorty and look through the available offers. You do not have to accept any offers, so you never have to blog about anything. Also, when you accept an offer, you still get to write the blog post. This way your blog is still yours and still only contains your opinions.

I have already used Smorty and received a payment from them. Overall, it took about 10 days for me to receive the payment for the blog post after I posted it. The payments are made by PayPal. No PayPal fees were taken out of my payment, which is an added bonus.

Any way to get paid to blog is good, but be careful when using blog advertising services. You don’t want to turn your blog into one big ad collection, or else you will lose your readers.

What do you think?

Business people often have to travel a lot. If you spend a lot of time traveling through Europe, you probably stay in hotels there frequently.

Cheaperthanhotels.co.uk is a website that will help you find inexpensive hotels in Europe. Even if you do not ever travel to Europe, I want to post this site as an example of an internet business. This site offers a useful service and as such they probably make a good amount of traffic and revenue.

They offer information about London Hotels. Staying in London offers the advantage of the English language. You will find it easier to stay in a country with the same language as you.

They also offer information about Paris Hotels. Paris seems like the most popular European destination for tourists to me.

Also, they offer information about Berlin Hotels. Berlin is in Germany. Germany has a sour but interesting history. If you go to Germany, you will probably stay in a hotel in Berlin.

If you travel to Spain, you will probably want the information about Barcelona Hotels. Many people like to travel to Spain, but you may also have to go there on business. It would be easier if you speak Spanish, but it can be fun regardless.

I imagine it is getting more expensive for people who use the US dollar to pay for hotels in Europe, because the dollar has fallen greatly in relation to the Euro. Luckily, you can find a wide variety of prices. Don’t spend out of your means.

Gaining a lot of links to your website takes time and effort, but it greatly affects your website’s success. Having a lot of good links will gain you more traffic and higher rankings in the search engines. I often discuss link popularity on this blog, but there is a blog dedicated to link building strategies at linkbuildingbestpractices.com.

Major search engines such as Google determine the value of your page by the number of links it has coming to it. Additionally, they can use the words and phrases in the links to determine your website’s topics. For example, if your website has a lot of links with the anchor text ‘dog training books,’ then your website might come up when someone searches for dog training books.

You have to be careful when trying to gain links. Search engines have spam filters to stop people from gaining artificial links for their websites. If you gain links in an unusual or exceptionally rapid way, the search engines’ algorithms may flag it as spam and your site will get dropped down or out of the search engines’ listings.

In my opinion, the best way to gain links is the natural way. Try your best to have a great website that is very useful. Then other webmasters will choose to link to you on their own.

What do you think?

I found a useful website today called Coupon Chief. The website offers online coupons, coupon codes, and other deals for a large assortment of stores and products. As far as I can tell, the coupons are free to use and you do not need any type of membership with Coupon Chief to get the deals.

The Office Supply Coupons probably interest us online business owners and webmasters the most. They have coupons for stores such as Staples and Office Depot. They also have special offers for online-based office services like Stamps.com and VistaPrint.

Coupon Chief also has another category of especial interest. The computers category has coupons for brands including HP, Sony, Dell, and more. These savings can add up significantly if you buy a major item such as a laptop. For example, 30% off of a $1,000 laptop would be well over a $300 discount.

I’m sure these coupons can come in handy for the holiday season. However, do not get carried away. Sometimes good deals can entice people to spend money they otherwise wouldn’t on things they don’t need. Do not make any impulsive orders. Think carefully before purchasing anything.

What do you think?

If you spend a lot of time on computers or if have your own business, you probably deal a lot with printers. When it comes to computer printers, the biggest annoyance for me is ink cartridges. They can be very expensive. Also, if your ink cartridge runs out of ink when you do not have a spare cartridge on hand, then you will find yourself without a functional printer in the middle of a printing job.

Inkshop.co.uk is one web store that offers discount prices on ink cartridges. If you do not live in the UK, you will probably need to find a web store in your own country. I recommend shopping online to save money. You can compare prices from different web stores and find the best deal.

Always keep at least one or two extra cartridges on hand so that you don’t get stuck with an inkless printer when you need to print something. Of course, I would also be uneasy about buying too many cartridges at once. They are expensive, and you wouldn’t want to find out you wasted your money on them if your printer breaks down before you use them. Also, remember to be careful when ordering from any online store. Make sure the store is legitimate, and make sure you get the right cartridges for your printer.