Web Business Resource

By Rasheed Ali

These days, anyone who wants to start an Internet business can download a template and fill in their information. However, are these cookie cutter web sites really the image you want to present to your potential customers? Using a template can cut costs, but it can also make you look unimaginative and unprofessional.

Templates can have coding errors that make your web site work incorrectly, the graphics can be inappropriate for your business, and the layout may not be the best one to promote your products and services. So how do you get a great web site? Follow these basic tips for setting up a web site and you’ll be on your way to an attractive and useful marketing tool.

Choosing a Suitable Domain Name

The domain name of your web site is the address that points visitors to your site. One example of a domain name would be www.yourbusiness.com. You can use your domain name to your advantage in two ways. One way to effectively use your domain for marketing purposes is to use your business name as your domain. If you start a business called “Joe’s Printing,” try to see if www.joesprinting.com is available. You can also use keywords in your domain to help your web site get ranked higher in the search engines. Joe’s Printing might use www.affordableprinting.com if “affordable printing” is a popular search phrase. No matter how you choose your domain name, remember to keep the name easy to remember and easy to spell. Inventive spellings might show your creativity, but they won’t help people remember how to get to your web site.

Keeping Layout and Graphics Simple and Professional

Unless you are a graphic designer or other creative professional, your web site does not need many graphics. The layout should also be kept as simple as possible to keep people from having difficulty navigating to the areas of the site that they want to visit. According to many web studies, people want to find the information they need within 8 seconds of visiting your site. If they have to wait for large graphics to load or for long Flash intros to play, they’re going to get frustrated and go to another site. Colors are also important in designing an effective web site. Don’t you just hate it when you visit a site and you can’t read the text against the background or the whole site is neon yellow and you need to squint? People will hate your web site if it looks like that too. Use professional colors that can be seen easily by many users. If you really want to make your site accessible, use colors that can be read by those who are colorblind. If you make your site accessible for everyone, you’ll increase the opportunities you have for making sales and building customer relationships.

Providing Informative and Accurate Content

If you get past having a great domain name and getting a good design, you’ll need to provide visitors with content that they can use to keep them coming back to your site. No one will visit your site again and again if there is no information to keep them interested. Good content will keep customers informed and let them know about any advances or new products and services in your industry. An added bonus of providing informative content is that you’ll create a professional image for yourself as an expert in your business.

Your web site speaks volumes about your business, your level of professionalism, and your experience. Taking the time to build a great site will boost your profits and skyrocket your online business success.

Copyright 2006 Rasheed Ali

by Adam McFarland

Here’s the scenario: one morning you open your email and your inbox is flooded with emails that your site isn’t working properly. Maybe your text or images don’t look right, or even worse maybe your site isn’t properly processing credit card transactions. How could this happen when you didn’t change a thing? Well, that morning could be the morning later this year that Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 7.

How are people going to get IE7?

According to Kevin Yank in a recent issue of the SitePoint Tech Times:

“Word on the street is that, upon its release (before year’s end), IE7 will be pushed out as a forced update to Windows XP users everywhere, as was done for Service Pack 2. The move to IE7 among the end-user masses will not be a gradual migration, but a sudden and significant shift.”

One night Windows XP users will go to bed using IE6 and the next morning they’ll wake up, install a routine update, and just like that they’ll be using IE7 to browse the web. That means, that as a site owner, you need to begin preparing immediately for IE7’s impending release.

What’s different about IE7?

From a user’s perspective, improvements include tabbed browsing, better printing, RSS feed integration, more advanced searching, and better security features, as well as a plethora of add ons to enhance the user experience (similar to Firefox extensions).

However, the most important changes that will have a more direct impact on how your site is loaded and displayed are:

• RSS integration – IE7 automatically detects RSS feeds and asks you to subscribe. It also gives you the option to have IE7 auto-check for feed updates (even when it’s not running). Is your feed properly recognized by IE7?
• Updated CSS behavior – the IE7 team worked very closely with the W3C workgroup to ensure standards compliance. They made over 200 changes from IE6 to become compliant with CSS2.1. Even if your site is standards compliant, it may not be rendered exactly the same as it is in IE6 or Firefox.
• AJAX XMLHTTP Request changes – the IE blog states: “to have your cross-browser AJAX work better with IE7, you really should be invoking the native XMLHttpRequest (the cross-browser one) first to see if it’s available before instantiating the ActiveX control, instead of the other way around”
• Added security features – everything from more secure SSL defaults to disabling most Active X controls by default has been changed to help make the user’s browsing experience more secure. These changes could drastically change your users browsing and purchasing experience.

You can get full details on all of the changes by visiting the IE Blog.

What should you do?

The only way to know for sure how your site will work in Internet Explorer 7 is to download it and try. The IE7 team recently released Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1 (RC1), which can be downloaded on the Internet Explorer web site. I’d recommend downloading IE7 on a computer other than your primary machine (you still want IE6 on your primary machine at least until IE7 is officially launched). RC1 is essentially the final version of how IE7 will display sites when launched, so if your site passes the test now you’ll likely be OK when IE7 is released for real.

In testing my sites there were a few instances where my site worked flawlessly in Firefox and IE6, but had small problems in IE7. The changes I needed to make were minimal, but regardless of how well you code there could still be some potential problems. It’s better to find and fix them now than to wake up one morning and have hundreds of customer complaints!

by Alex Smith

Many companies claim that they are “Web 2.0”. But do you know what it really means? Web 2.0 is a brand new concept that sets up certain principles. This article is not aimed at thorough description of the Web 2.0. The purpose is just to show the principles which may be interesting for users, to show why it’s worth using resources sticking to the Web 2.0 concept.

The one which really deserves our mentioning is user positioning. Now the user is concerned as a co-developer, he can control his own data and even influence the site itself. For example, site announces some new feature and asks for a feedback from its users. If they like it, the feature is developed and expanded to the site, if not – it’s immediately removed.

A lot of internet resources have some kind of database. Some spent a lot of time and money on making researches, analyzing and syndicating of data. Others, who clearly understand the advantages of the Web 2.0 concept, encourage user contribution of data. The more users take part in this the better the service becomes. The better the service becomes the more new users join in. And as long as this process is alive, both users and owners of the resources get benefit.

Users are given the ability to review, explore and change the data. It helps to maintain the data and achieve the greatest results. This concept is now used by some file-hosting sites. Users upload their files to the site, post comments and descriptions. Some sites offer catalogues of files with users’ comments and reviews. Moreover, tags can be added to the file, so that it could be easier found. Tagging (choosing keywords) allows some kind of associations that the brain itself uses, instead of strict categories. And as a result, it provides better search results. So again it is a collaborative work of users and site owners that makes the quantity and quality of files up to the mark. Now file-hosting sites become not only the hosting place for files but also the place for enrichment of user experience. Comments help to avoid troubles or show how some bugs can be fixed.

As Tim O’Reilly says, “The competitive opportunity for new entrants is to fully embrace the potential of Web 2.0. Companies that succeed will create applications that learn from their users, using an architecture of participation to build a commanding advantage not just in the software interface, but in the richness of the shared data.”

Today more and more companies stick to the Web 2.0 concept and examples of these successful stories can be found on the Web.

Alex Smith, Pr Officer for www.oxyshare.com You may contact me anytime via e-mail pr-manager@oxyserver.com.

Everyone may take advantages of our free service at www.oxyshare.com, that includes unlimited disk space, an endless amount of file downloads and e-mail file delivery. Free registration also gives access to upload files using your favorite FTP client and opportunity to edit or delete files. Using our partnership program registered users may earn money for their files downloads. Uploaded files are accessible for 30 days if there was no request to download. Go to www.oxyshare.com

by Jens du Plessis (Copyright Protected)

People often ask me to review their web sites and advise them on how to generate more sales. The mistakes made most often can be divided into three main categories and by fixing these you can dramatically change the success pattern of your web site.

While these three steps are simple they do involve a bit of work.

1. Targeted web pages:

People tend to regard their web sites as a unit instead of looking at each web page seperately as a mini web site. Many of the web sites I visit may have a semblance of search engine optimisation on their front page and nothing on the rest.

By targeting each of your web pages to specific keywords or phrases you are creating a net that will generate traffic from all over the place.

Each page should be optimised seperately for search engines using generally accepted search engine optimisation techniques:

focussing each page on up to three keywords or phrases
a targeted tag
using META keyword and description tags in the section
using headline tags ( to ) to highlight your headlines and sub headlines
using the image alt tag to add more keyword density
using descriptive text links
to name a few.

Treat each page as a mini web site.

2. Funnel your traffic to your sales pages:

Whether you want people to buy online, to request a quote, to make an enquiry or to subscribe to your newsletter the process is essentially the same.

Decide what is the most wanted response (MWR) you want from your web site and then each web page must be designed to achieve that response. Your most important web page is the web page where you will get your MWR, whether it is your shopping cart, your quote request form or subscription page.

Every page on your web site should channel visitors to this page - in effect you create a funnel with 5, 10 or 100 pages designed to funnel people to the pages where you get your MWR.

3. Build your mailing list:

When a vistor fulfills your MWR, i.e. buys your product, requests a quote, makes an enquiry, you have achieved your initial goal. However, what if they don’t? You’ve lost them. Unless you have an second best MWR in place.

This will normally be to get their email address legally so that you can follow up with them and promote your products or services. So have an alternative ready. This could be a free ebook about your business, your products or services. If you are in, say tourism, it could be a guide to your area. Whatever is suitable to your audience.

But get their email addresses!

As I said the steps are simple but it will take some work to impliment it

Success

Jens

About The Author: Jens du Plessis is an Internet marketing consultant and trainer, basd in South Africa. Visit http://www.webmarketingsa.co.za for a FREE basic web site review.

by Jens du Plessis

Are you targeting your web site to your visitors?

I have a question for you:

Are the visitors coming to your web site the visitors you want?

Many businesses on the Net are working in the dark.

Web sites are designed and published. Traffic is generated. But sales are not happening.

Why?

Because the visitors they get may be the wrong visitors!

Let me tell you what happened to me.

Some years ago I set up a web site that sold pewter pendants of Celtic and Egyptian designs.

Within a few weeks the site was generating 10,000 visitors a week. Great!

Not so great! I wasn’t getting any sales.

When I went checking my stats I found that the majority of people came to the site looking for information on Celtic symbols. they were not coming there looking to buy Celtic symbol jewelry.

When last did you check and really analyse your web site stats?

Your stats can be very revealing, you know?

What keywords and key phrases are visitors using to find you?

If they do not find you through your main keywords, either you must change the focus of your web site, or you must go back to the drawing board with your search engine optimisation.

Where do your visitors come from?

This one is easy. If the majority of your visitors are from outside your targeted geographical area a large part of your efforts are wasted.

Alternatively, look at how you can offer products to accommodate these people, either through affiliate programmes and drop ship arrangements, or by adding a payment sytem in their currency.

What screen resolutions are your visitors using?

Are you designing in 800×600 when the majority of your visitors use 1024×800? if so you are wasting 25% of your screen space!

Which day of the week are you getting your most traffic?
This would be the time to put up your special offers, your new products, etc. This is the time you will probably get the best results the quickest.

How long does your visitors stay on your web site? And how many pages does a visitor look at on average?

Which pages are they visiting? And if they visit your sales pages are they clicking through to the order page? And if they are clicking through to the order page, why aren’t they buying?

Which pages are not loading, giving 404 errors?

By working your stats you can probably increase your sales by 20% to 40% with very little effort.

Go check you stats!

Jens

******************************************************
Jens du Plessis is an Internet marketing consultant and webmaster of a number of marketing web sites. Visit http://www.webmarketingsa.co.za

by Scott Hughes

Make a good website layout by keeping it simple.

Many webmasters seem to think that flashiness, complexity, and uniqueness make a good website. They couldn’t be more wrong. The key to designing a good website is simplicity.

The customers want simplicity:

Customers and surfers do NOT surf websites to see webmasters flex their ability at making flashy sites. Customers and surfers search the web to find information, products, & services. These surfers want convenience, speed and quality. They do not want to be bothered with pointless showoffs. Keep the layout simple so the customers can find what they’re looking for. Keep the delivery simple and direct, or else your customers will get it elsewhere.

The search engines want simplicity:

I’ve often seen webmasters who have websites filled with animations, videos, audio, and flash. Perhaps these methods can be used sparingly to increase the quality of the surfers’ experiences, but search engines can’t read movies, audio, and other multimedia. For example, if a webmaster builds a site in only Flash, that site will probably never receive traffic from search engines. You not only will waste your customers’ time with too much showiness, but you’ll lose traffic.

Web Browsers want simplicity:

Another huge downfall to using complex programming, showiness, and multimedia is browser incompatibility. Many customers with older browsers, higher security, or slower connections cannot watch or hear animations, audio, and video. Even out of the customers with compatible browsers, many will not wait for your multimedia to load. As a webmaster, you’re greatest fear should be the browser back button. A slow loading page due to complex flashiness is a great way to cause surfers to click that back button.

Although in moderation a special object such as a complex program, audio file or video may make surfers experience a little better, generally it causes more harm than good. Make your site a little snazzy, but keep most of the site focused on the actual point of your website.

About The Author: Scott Hughes creates and runs many successful e-businesses. Read more articles like this on his website, Web Business Resource, at http://www.webbizresource.com/.

You may republish this article if you keep all links intact and keep this “About The Author” footer.

by Scott Hughes

I’ve heard many people say, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. Despite that old cliché, business is inherently superficial. Appearances count more importantly than anything. In fact, any confidence man can tell you that in business it is no exaggeration to say appearances are everything.

Offline, you always see successful business-people that are clean, well-groomed, and well-dressed, usually in suits and ties. These successful business-people ensure to keep good posture and a kind, trustworthy expression. You never see successful business-people who look scruffy & shambled that wear old dirty clothes. Customers judge a business and a business-person by their superficial appearance.

On the internet this is even more the case. On the internet customers only have your impersonal website to judge you, and they can do that judging in a matter of seconds.

Here’s some tips for increasing your aesthetic appeal on the web:

1. The first and foremost feature a viewer of your website will judge your business on is page loading. A page that loads slowly or is offline will instantly ruin your potential customer’s opinion. Many times, a potential customer won’t have the patience to wait for a long page load; the surfer will close your slow-loading website and never return. A page that fails to load is even worse. What reason could a surfer have to come back to a website that they never even saw in the first? None, the surfer won’t come back. Make sure your page loads quickly by working with a quality web-host and keeping the file-sizes of your website to a minimum.

2. The layout of a website is the online equivalent of a business-person’s dress, clothing, and hygiene. Surfers won’t do business with a sloppy website that’s full of errors. Demonstrate your professionalism to your potential customers by designing a sleek and attractive website that doesn’t have errors.

3. Order your own domain-name (e.g. www.yourdomain.com), make it simple and memorable. Don’t put your website up on a free or cheap host, especially one without your own domain-name. Firstly, people won’t be able to remember your website’s address if it’s just some folder on someone else’s website (e.g. www.someotherdomain.com/freewebsites/yoursite/). More importantly, potential customers will assume that you and your business are cheap and unprofessional too.4. Display contact information on your website. Give potential customers a phone number and/or mailing address where they can reach you or your business. Would you do business with a business-person who didn’t give you their full name, phone number, address, business-card, etc.? Of course not. Similarly, a website without contact information seems sleazy.

by Scott Hughes

So, you learned HTML and now your ready to design your website. Well, as an experienced web designer let me share some tips.

1. Use CSS (cascading style sheets). If you do not know CSS, learn it. CSS allows you to keep the formatting of your site (e.g. the color or size of a piece of text) on a separate single page - a CSS document. Thus, with CSS you can change the formatting of a common-element by simply updating one piece of code on one page, rather then updating all the pages of your site. For example, if you want to change the back-ground color of your website, you could just change your one CSS sheet and your entire website’s background color would change. Another great aspect of CSS is that you can use it to set the default properties of HTML tags. This can be used to counter browser compatibility problem - that different browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.) use different default settings.

2. Test your website in all browsers. Just because your website displays a certain way in one browser, doesn’t mean it will display that way in another browser. You should check that your website displays properly in all of the major following browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Netscape, and Opera.

3. Use open source software and freeware, if you want to create a dynamic website. Even if you know dynamic languages (such as JavaScript, PHP, and CGI) well enough to create your own software and features, you do not want to do that if you are a beginner. There’s no reason to create your own dynamic scripts (e.g. shopping carts, chat-rooms, etc.), if you can find full-functioning customizable freeware. A great benefit of this method is that the customization options will separate the code that changes your website’s look and feel from the functioning code. If you design the code yourself, you’ll be tempted to mix the look and feel with the functioning aspects. So, if later you want to update the look and feel, you’ll have to dig through the long software scripts. If you’re going to be using freeware or any other code that you didn’t design yourself, you should still be familiar with that language.

4. Don’t use free or cheap web-hosting. Okay, this isn’t necessarily a design tip. However, hosting is related to design. Free hosts may scatter your website with annoying ads. So, you won’t be able to load your site as is. Also, free and cheap hosts often don’t support dynamic websites. Unless you’re website is supposed to be a joke, don’t use a free host.

5. Don’t write your email address on your website. If you have a phone number or mailing address that your customers can use to reach you or your business, publish that on your website. Website’s with a phone number or mailing address appear much more reliable and honest than websites without contact information. However, don’t publish your email address, because spammers will use web-crawlers will to pick it up. Instead, design a form on your website that customers can use to send messages or questions without giving your email address.

6. Take it slow. Unfortunately, the only way to become an expert designer is through experience, but your business can’t afford sloppy pages. Don’t attempt to design complex and dynamic websites without the ability. If you try to design a code, but find it hard and the code begins to come out sloppy, don’t hesitate to just throw it out. It’s better to have a simple, sleek, and functional website, than to have a complex, sloppy, dysfunctional website.

About The Author: Scott Hughes creates and runs many successful e-businesses. Read more articles like this on his website, Web Business Resource at http://www.webbizresource.com/. You may republish this article if you keep all links intact and keep this “About The Author” footer.

by Barry Fenning

1. Optimise every page on your website

The major search engines are not looking at individual websites and ranking them, they are ranking pages from every website in the world. This means that if your website contains more than one page you should optimise for the specific content that is found on each page.

Optimising each webpage is overlooked by so many websites within Ireland and can be the difference between competing for a highly competitive keyword phrase such as “Irish Hotels” and competing for a much less competitive keyword phrase such as “Hotels in County Galway”. After that they can check out the rest of your website that is all about “Irish Hotels”.

2. Pick appropriate keyword phrases

This is the single most important thing to do when it comes to optimising your website for search engines. The keywords that your potential customers type into Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves are the keywords that your site should be using within the specific areas of your webpage (see below; Optimizing your Page Titles and Optimizing your Content). There are a number of useful keyword research tools available on the web. The most recommended and user-friendly are Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. Both offer trial versions.

3. Optimizing your Page Titles

All of the major search engines have 100’s of different algorithms that compute where your webpage should be listed for different keyword searches. Putting your keywords within the Title description (the blue bar you will see at the top of your screen) of your pages is one of the most important SEO techniques and will help your website climb through the rankings and allow your visitors to remember exactly what your page is all about when they save it to their “favourites”.

4. Optimizing your Page Content

It is sometimes very difficult to write content for your website. Not only do you need put the information that you want the visitor to see in front of them in an easy-to-read style, you also have to keep in mind the keywords or keyphrases that your page is targeting so that you can rank better within search engines.

One of the best pieces of advice that I have come across is to write for your visitors and include the keywords and keyphrases as much as makes sense. Read what you written out loud to yourself and a few others. If it sounds stupid… lather, rinse, and repeat.

5. Create an inbound linking strategy

Submitting your site to online directories is a very beneficial way to drive targeted traffic to your website. People will find your listing in a directory and click on the link to go directly to your site.

This not only brings visitors to your website, but it also creates links for search engine “spiders” or “robots” to find your website and index your pages within their results. If your site doesn’t have a link pointing to it on the World Wide Web the search engines will never find it and you will never see any traffic from Google or the other big ones.

6. Descriptively labeling your links and images (aka the anchor text)

This technique is both common sense and good practice. Telling your visitors what the link that they are going to click on allows them to know exactly what they are going to be directed to. Saying “click here” is not enough to help them understand what they’re going to find once they click through. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes to be descriptive is that you can almost always describe the page you’re pointing to by using its main keyword phrase which is another one of those many factors search engines that into account when it comes to ranking your web pages.

7. Make sure your site is spider-friendly

Your website may look fantastic. You and your web designer may be talented graphic designers that can make Flash and Javascript dazzle your visitors with a show that would put RiverDance to shame. However, if your website contains Flash and Javascript it’s important to know that search engine spiders can’t read this code (or appreciate the effort you put into the design). The way around this is to provide navigation alternatives to allow the spiders crawl deep within your website and index the web pages within their results.

8. Create Fresh Content

When you are optimizing your website properly you will see a trend. If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it.

Search engines do tend to like websites that create fresh content regardless of the format. If they know any given site is adding new articles on a frequent basis, they will come around often to index it.

Blogs and forums are effective and easy ways of adding new information to your site on a regular basis.

However, if your only purpose of setting up a blog or a forum is for better search engine rankings then there really is no point in doing it. Only add a forum if it contributes something beneficial to your website and if you have the traffic to make it interactive enough for visitors to return to it. And, only add a blog if you have something of interest to say on a regular basis.

9. Do not think that you can trick Search Engines

As noted before, “If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it”.

If you try to trick the search engines by hiding keyword phrases in your pages by making the text colour the same as the background colour, hiding keyword phrases in tiny font, joining link farms, or any other sneaky practice your sites will be removed from the search engines and it will take you a long time to get back in (and you will also have to spend more time cleaning up your website before they will accept you).

10. Offer something unique

If your website offers something that is unique and interesting to your target market and it is properly optimized (by applying all of the techniques that are listed above) you will not only rank well within the major search engines, you will also get the added benefit of people linking to your website in forums, blogs, and through other websites which will send your site more visitors and create more inbound links which will help it rank higher.

About the Author: Barry Fenning is the owner of Website Promotion Articles - A website that is aimed at people that are new to the area of online marketing. The articles available on the website are suitable for people that want to learn how to conduct effective SEO campaigns. There are also a number of more “advanced” articles suitable for experienced webmasters.

by Aaron Walker

The best way to start this article is to highlight its purpose with a relevant quote - and of one of my personal favourites: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail” - Benjamin Franklin. We don’t always pay enough attention to the wisdom of those who have come before us. This idea rings as true today as it did back then especially in business issues. Realistically nobody is going to deliberately set out on a new business venture planning to fail almost entirely. That, however, is exactly what many new online entrepreneurs actually do. They’re totally and utterly unprepared for what lies ahead of them and 95% of them will never achieve anything above a few dollars per month income. So what exact steps do you need to take to fail at making money online?

Do not attempt to research your market under any circumstances. Don’t even dream of checking how competitive or profitable a market might be. Simply pick the first idea that pops into your head and design a product or website around it and then hope that the money comes pouring it. Market and keyword research is for suckers right?

Now you need a webhost for your new “creation”. Never research the forums and messageboards for feedback on great webhosting. No just go ahead and find the cheapest, most unreliable, most akward, free web hosting package on the ‘net and upload your work to that. Who cares if it’s covered with annoying banner ads, shuts itself down for hours at a time and the tech support guys never get back to you? A webhost is a webhost and your potential customers and visitors won’t care will they?

Do not focus on a single niche market. Build a website that has information on everything in the universe and that is purely random in nature. While you’re at it sign up for as many flashing, rotating banner programs as you can and just paste them all over the place. It doesn’t matter if they’re for dating, viagra or lasik eye surgery - your visitors are sure to just keep clicking on them so you can get paid.

Forget about mailing lists. All the guru types are full of crap when they say “the money is in the list”. Never set up a sequential autoresponder series on your website. Basically do everything you can to avoid collecting customer and visitor information. Oh and never offer any kind of incentive for them to give you this data.

Search engines? Smearch engines! You’ve spent at least an hour designing your website and you have it stuffed full of the right words. That’s what search engines love don’t they? I mean your website is such a work of art that Google, Yahoo and MSN will be beating a path to your door to send visitors to you. Title tags, Meta Description tags? Pointless! Building incoming links? Why bother! Somebody said that SEO was all hocus pocus anyways…. so they’re probably right aren’t they?

Do everything yourself. Spend weeks learning html, php and graphic design. Create all your own templates, write every single word of content yourself and never, ever stop. Never invest in any tool which might make your life even a little bit easier or make you more productive. Nobody can do it any better than you right? Why outsource your work and pay somebody else when you’ll get it all done… eventually… one way or the other.

Never finish any project you start - no matter what. Once you get 50% of the way through any online project just stop and leave it there. Start on the next project because you’re bored with the last one. Your ideas are so utterly brilliant that they’ll generate money regardless of whether or not you finish them.

Never try anything different. Don’t create a new line of products or even dream of becoming involved in a different market. Do not create a mixture of Adsense and affiliate sites. Create an information product to sell online? Why would you even try? Don’t attempt to learn anything new and do not, under any circumstances, find a mentor that you can learn from. You know best after all.

Does the above seem overly sarcastic and cynical? I’d agree - it is. The shocking part is that I’ve personally made all of the above mistakes to some extent over the years - as have the vast majority of online business people. Use this article to help you avoid making the same mistakes. Now that you know where all the pitfalls are you can just sidestep them on your way to success.

by Scott Hughes

Online businesses vary in almost every way possible - from who they serve to how they make revenue. However, one basic similarity connects all internet businesses: websites. If you don’t have a website, you’re not doing business on the internet. An online entrepreneur must choose between designing a website himself or herself, or hiring a professional web designer.

Studying the latter option first, professional web designers vary in many aspects, most notably style, ability, size, experience and price. If you plan on hiring a professional web designer, you want to ask the designer for examples of his or her work and for references. You don’t want to just review the web designers past work without also consulting references, because no matter how good, stylish, or well-coded the designer’s work is, how do you know the websites were made according to the directions of the customers? You also want to consult more than one designer, so that you can compare and contrast the work of different designers. By researching the references and past work of designers, you’ll know their respective abilities, styles, and experiences. Never just take a designers word that he/she works “very well” and has “a lot of experience”.

Once you’ve researched some designers’ styles, abilities, and experience, there are two other important things to check: price and size. For price, more may actually be better. Your website’s appearance and functionality will determine the success of your online business. Saving a few bucks on web design often will cost you in the long run, perhaps terminally. So, when choosing a web designer, avoid cheapness. However, size works the opposite, less is better. You want a unique, customized site that’s built & designed according to your directions. A large impersonal designer-company mass-produces generic websites, and isn’t interested in meeting the special needs of individual single-sales. Going to a large web design company for a quality site is like going to McDonalds for a quality hamburger. All you’ll get is a generic flavor-less product.

An expensive professional designer is needed to outsource, so I recommend that online entrepreneurs build and design their own websites. Even if you know nothing about designing websites, it’s probably better to learn to design websites rather than outsource the design of your website. An entrepreneur’s time is very valuable, but, in the long run, the cost of learning is lower than the cost of outsourcing. By building and designing your own website yourself, you can change, update, and add to your website anytime without rehiring a web designer. Wise people say that it’s better to teach a man to fish, than give him a fish. Well similarly, it is better to teach yourself to fish, than to buy a fish… especially when fish are websites.

About The Author: Scott Hughes creates and runs many successful e-businesses. Read more articles like this on his Web Business Resource blog at http://www.webbizresource.com/. You may republish this article if you keep all links intact and keep this “About The Author” footer.

by Kevin Stith

A logo is the graphic element of a trademark or brand, which is set in a special typeface or arranged in a particular, but legible, way. The shape, color and typeface of a logo have to be different from others in a similar market.

A logo is a tangible reflection of an organization’s personality. In recent times, the term ‘logo’ has been used to describe emblems, signs, symbols and even flags. It has to be unique to avoid confusion in the marketplace among clients, suppliers, users, affiliates, and the general public. One of the most effective ways of protecting it is through registering your logo as a trademark, so that no unauthorized third parties can use it, or interfere with the owner’s use of it.

While large corporations spend thousands of dollars to update and implement their logos, many small businesses will turn to local graphic designers to do a corporate logo. These days there is a lot of software available on the market which can help you create your own logo. You can also download basic graphics from different sites. You can choose the design template of your choice and create your own free logo design. The process requires you to download and install logo design software. You then need to choose a logo template, add new logo objects, customize colors and designs, adjust the overall logo and print your new logo at no cost.

Remember that a good logo is unique and is not similar to any other company’s. It has to be functional and should look good on a business card and on products. An attractive logo creates a unique identity for a company, and a little research and effort can help you develop a beautiful logo at the lowest possible cost.