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This is a demonstration of how to install wordpress MU.

Here is a guide on How to install WordPress on a Server via FTP. My Website: iphonehelpsupport.com Twitter twitter.com 000webhost.com Leave a comments on this video, and I will answer them to the best of my ability. http

Free Blogging PlatformsThe first kinds of blogging platforms are the free variants of popular applications. Blogger.com is the one that is owned by Google and it’s very straightforward to use and completely free. The only drawback is that you don’t really own your blog as it is hosted by Blogger. While the software is great, you’re pretty much out of luck if they decide to pull the plug on you.

The other major, free blogging application is WordPress.com (not to be confused with WordPress.org, which is self-hosted). This is also very easy to use, and it is hosted by WordPress. Be very careful if you are going to do a lot of affiliate marketing on your blog. WordPress.com has been known to shut sites down without warning!

Hosted Blogging PlatformsAs you can see, it is generally a good idea to self-host your blog so you have total control over it. As you begin getting good traffic you’ll definitely want to ensure that there is nothing that can be done to take your blog away. Setting up a free hosted blog is like putting all your eggs in one basket, and that’s never a good idea. Of course that doesn’t mean you cannot set one up that is secondary and meant to help you get backlinks.

Hosted blogs are much better for most people. One of the oldies but goodies is the Moveable Type software. You do have to pay for this, but many people think it’s worth it. It’s a very powerful way to blog.

The Bloggers Blog?Most bloggers, however, seem to favour WordPress.org blogs. You host these on your own server, so you have total control! It’s similar to Moveable Type in that it’s very easy to use, but the variety in the support and plugins available is incredible.

There is a massive community set up based around WordPress. You can find plugins to help you with SEO, to run a membership site, to backup your blog for you, to sell eBay items, and a lot more! There are also a large number of themes you can choose from to make the blog completely your own.

The Decision Is YoursSo, which one should you select? Again, most Internet marketers tend to choose WordPress. You might want to as well since it is phenomenal software and offers everything you need. Better yet, it’s so easy to use that you can have a blog up and running very quickly and easily.

It is also important to note that most tutorials written in the Internet Marketing arena are focused on WordPress. It seems to be the gold standard for bloggers, and you might want to select it if only to avoid the hassle of trying to learn another system that not many people use.

This is an excerpt from the free Guide To Blogging E-CourseIf you are determined about earning money with blogging and would like to get the rest of the “Guide To Blogging E-Course” visit www.internetninetofive.com/guide-to-blogging

Twit coupons· Increase sales for your business by giving exclusive coupons to your followers· Use http://twtqpon.com/ to distribute coupons via Twitter· Get your tweets indexed in http://cheaptweet.com/ by using cheaptweet hashtag and increase exposure for your dealsTwitter promotion· Now you can run sweepstakes offers via Twitter to create brand awareness, increase sales, etc.· Set the objective for Twitter promotion· Make sure that there is no bias in your promotion and be transparent in what you offer· To participate in the offer, ask users to include hashtags in their tweets· Track the performance of your campaign using this trend-tracking tool:http://www.trendrr.com/· Make sure that you do not spam your followers and avoid sending too many tweets about your sweepstakes offers· Calculate the ROI of the campaign by breaking it down into: Number of new followers gained, products sold, new visitors to the websites, etc.Blog sync· Increase traffic to your blog by using this auto-feed tool, http://twitterfeed.com/· Tweet the comments in your blog using this wordpress plug-in: http://www.jonbishop.com/commentwitter-plugin-page/· Include your Twitter conversations in your blog using this wordpress plug-in: http://www.paulmc.org/whatithink/wordpress/plugins/twitter-friends-widget/· Include a retweet button in your blog to spread it virally using Twitter. You can install the retweet button from here: http://tweetmeme.com/about/retweet_buttonFacebook sync· A Facebook page is a marketing channel for most brands. A marriage between Facebook and Twitter will initiate greater engagement and conversations· Integrate your Facebook page with Twitter using this Facebook application: http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/· Avoid spamming your fans in your Facebook page with too many Twitter updates· Use this application: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=115463795461 to post selective Twitter updatesPress Release Optimization· Get more exposure for your Press Releases (PR) by sharing them on Twitter· Use keywords in the first 30 characters of your PR tweet for SEO· Ask your followers to retweet your PRs to spread them virally· Use hashtags to track the PRs· Deliver your PRs to top journalists on Twitter using this paid service: http://muckrack.com/press_releases· Analyze the number of tweets your PR receives using: http://www.trendrr.com/Direct messages (DM) for direct marketing – DM’s are new way to market your product via Twitter· Avoid sending DMs to all of your followers· Analyze the interests of your followers before sending them DMs· Customize your offering in DM based on followers’ demographics· Avoid using automated tools for sending DM’s· Always maintain a human touch while sending DMsBrand monitoring· Monitor real-time conversations about your brand in Twitter to understand customers’ linguistics· To start with, use a simple tool like Twitter public search· Monitor various keywords associated with your brand using this tool: http://monitter.com/· Manage multiple Twitter accounts and brand monitoring using one single tool: http://splitweet.com/· Paid tools like Radian6 provide many insights along with real-time brand monitoringCustomer support· Sometimes your brand will get punk’d in Twitter and customer support plays a vital role to protect your brand from crisis· Monitor your brand in real-time and respond to various customer tweets before a brand crisis occurs· Assign different queries to employees in concerned departments usinghttp://cotweet.com/· Set up a 24/7 automated response for customers’ tweets by using this tool: http://www.localbunny.com/· Analyze the number of issues solved via Twitter to measure ROITwitter Insights· Measure your Twitter performance using parameters like retweet rank, Click Through Rate (CTR) of your tweets, follower count etc.· Find your retweet rank using: http://www.retweetrank.com/· Track the CTR of your tweets by using short URL services like: http://bit.ly/· Analyze your web traffic from Twitter by adding UTM parameters in each tweet link using this tool: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578· Analyze your follower count at: http://twittercounter.com/· Find which tweets help you gain or lose followers, using: http://www.tweeteffect.com/· Measure your share of voice by using tools like Radian6Security tips· Never use third party Twitter applications that do not support Oath authentication· Use strong passwords to protect your account from hackers. Use this tool: http://strongpasswordgenerator.com/ to generate strong passwords· If any security lapses occur on Twitter, change your password immediately· Do not click any links in DMs from strangers.

The Easiest

Step by Step Guide

to creating your own Online Business



another product from www.durban-property-searcher.co.za



Index of contents





Legal Notice



While all attempts have been made to verify the information in this publication, neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretations of the subject matter herein.

This publication is not intended as a source of legal or accounting advice. The publisher wants to stress that the information contained herein may be subject to varying state/local laws or regulations. All users are advised to retain competent legal counsel to determine what state and /or legal laws or regulation may apply to the users’ particular business.

The purchaser or reader of this publication assumes responsibility for the use of these materials and information. Adherence to all applicable laws, local and otherwise, governing professional licensing, business practices, advertising and all other aspects of doing business in South Africa or any other jurisdiction is the sole responsibility of the purchaser or reader.

The author and publisher assume no responsibility or liability, whatsoever on the behalf of the purchaser or reader of this publication.

Any perceived slights of people or organizations are unintentional.

1. Introduction:

Well, first off, congratulations on downloading this step by step guide to creating and starting your own online business.

In a nutshell, we will explain how to setup your very own business online and also give those of you who simply do not have the time at present to create the business, the easy format of selling this product. We’ve made it easy enough to use in the South African and world marketplace and have provided some copies for free in order to get some of the less fortunate beginners started. In order to protect those who decide to sell this e-book, we may limit or remove this free offer at any stage.

For those who are merely going to sell this e-book to existing clients, we will be submitting it to www.Clickbank.com as an affiliate product for ease of directing your clients. The process will all be explained at a later stage. For the time being, we are going to focus on the actual step by step business model of creating your own product, or building your website around your chosen product, in this e-book. Good luck and have fun.

The most important factor here is that you grasp the entire process before starting to formulate your business plan. In order to get the big picture, please read through this e-book in its entirety before you start clicking the blue linked text so that you don’t get confused by any sites you may choose to visit. For those of you with minimal internet knowledge, it may sound a little overwhelming and confusing at first, which is why we encourage you to read through the e-book a few times if necessary. When you follow the blue link to Bluevoda, you will arrive at the home page and if you scroll down to the bottom of the page you will find the discussion and assistance section to take you to the free website builder which we will be using in our business. Try to join the help section as soon as possible and watch the tutorials guiding you through the web building process. The help forum is very casual and you will find loads of kind hearted folk eager to help the beginners getting to know the software.

This E Book product is the result of years of research into an ever expanding business known as internet marketing.

In order to make this product successful, it was an essential element to establish the website on which you have found this product.

It was a case of sitting down with all the information that I had gathered and speaking closely with friends, family and business associates about where their frustration lay with the E-commerce industry. Most of them had this in common.

Why should I have to pay Dollars for a product that could potentially be available in the South African market for a fraction of the price?

The solution was the following. I decided to set about creating an online business template that could be applied very easily if one had access to the same information that I had gathered over the years.

In the world of Online Marketing there are literally millions of potential clients each and every day, in the marketplace, who are qualified buyers. Where else, except online, can you find this scenario? This is why I have switched over to an Online business for the flexibility that it offers in terms of home business structure and personal time to do the things that you enjoy doing.

Well let’s get started in setting up our new online business.

You will need:

2. What are we going to be doing :

Step 1. Firstly we will figure out how to build an online central place where all our clients can be directed to in order to purchase our product. This is going to be our virtual storefront. We will do this by using our free website builder Bluevoda (click here to see). Remember that the rental for your store should be reasonable. Try and read the whole book first before clicking.

Step 2. We will need to decide on our product or products. Don’t worry if you have not thought of one yet, because you may change your mind as your business takes shape.

Step 3. We will need to name our business in order to refer to it in our marketing and defining our online links back to the website.

Step 4. We will need to provide marketing for the product to create awareness of its availability. This needs to be cost effective or free in order to get your business going.

Step 5. We will also need to become involved in the networks of people with their ears to the ground in terms of new developments regarding marketing online. This will ensure we keep our product in front of the consumer.

Step 6. We will need to make the purchase for our customer as convenient and easy as possible by automating our     website and product system. This will be our product support system.

Our Aim: I will share with you in this e-book the research regarding an online business and any other helpful and relevant topics that you may want to search on your own.

3. Step 1 – Developing a website using a free website builder

Now you may or may not have your product in mind yet, but you will at some stage have to decide on the basic subject matter for your site. Most people will choose something they know in order to have little problem in creating the product review and marketing of the product that follows later. If you decide not to use something you’re familiar with, it is not a problem as the internet is the perfect place to research a topic.

We are going to try and do this though for as little or no cost as possible. It is going to be a great challenge, but it can be done. Read on.

The first thing that you will need to do before you even think of contacting a web-design or web-hosting company is the following:

Take a blank sheet of paper and a pencil and jot down some ideas on the type of items you will like to see on your home page (a.k.a. index page). This will give you some direction on your site map which will enable your customer to navigate their way around your website.

For example you will need to have a “contact us” section, a newsletter or articles section, other sites of interest, space for your heading and site name. Look at the site www.durban-property-searcher.co.za or that of your competitors to give you an idea of possible layout. Whilst researching on the internet you will get some great ideas from other websites in terms of interesting click options in the menu bar on the left hand side or top of the page. Type in your intended product and do a search in the search engine. See what the top 10 “page 1” ranked websites are using in their index (home) page.

By now you are probably on your second sheet of paper and have started to get a vision of what you are trying to create. Make as many notes as possible and keep the names of the sites handy that you think are similar to what you want your website to look like. This is going to give you a better understanding of your concept as you design your websites pages.

Remember to allocate a section of each page to Google advertising and possibly some advertising space in the top right corner for the companies whose products you are offering or some supplementary products to your main product. For example, if your hobby is to make moulds of tin soldiers, you may wish to have paint supplies, brushes, holders for the finished product, magnifying glasses, tweezers etc. as your additional products. You will be amazed at how many suppliers will be interested to be a part of your product marketing campaign.

If you have a site with good content to visitors, the amount of traffic you are generating through your site will be of particular interest to companies who offer products that are complimentary in nature to the products you are selling. This in itself is a revenue stream for you. You can now offer advertising space. Once you have read through the Google Analytics section explained later, you will understand how the search engines will monitor the type of traffic through your site and offer their clients advertising space in the Google Adverts section of your website pages.

This is now your second revenue stream from your website. The first source being your actual product you intend to sell. It is now clear how important it is to plan your site on paper before you go through the cost of employing the service of a web design company if you have chosen to go the more expensive route. You will however need to consider maintaining the relationship with a reputable web company as and when you need to add extra functions to your site. This may include your payment section for your products. One piece of advice that was given to me by a site analyst, was to try not to make the site look like a flea market by implementing all sorts of advertising as it may detract from the effect and reputation you desire from your customers. We have all been zapped suddenly by some sort of advert for an online casino or similar site which changes the whole experience of a site. You are able to prevent these adverts by notifying Google of the types of adverts you wish to exclude from being allowed to display on your website. This step is done when inserting the code into the website for the Google Adsense facility.

There are many free web-builder sites on the internet that will allow you to download a free program, to use to design your new website. We have chosen BlueVoda due to its offering of the free programs needed for this business as opposed to using other web builders which need you to purchase the add-ons separately. Not everybody may wish to use this method. However, the object of this business model is to do it on a budget. Remember how it was mentioned that your start up costs and virtual storefront rental will be determined by the web-hosting company you have decided to use for your business.



Using Bluevoda as your free Website Builder



Should you wish to jump directly to this step to get started, you can go to the BlueVoda site which was used to design the site on which you found this e-book. Their system is a pleasure to work with for the following reasons;

Even though the monthly charge is in Dollars, the conversion still works out much cheaper than South Africa and is irrelevant as the technical support is always via internet anyway, as well as there being no charge for the CMS or Control Management System which you will need to upload new content to your website and also administer any changes you may wish to make to your site. Most South African web hosting companies will not provide this and it is costly to acquire locally. On BlueVoda it is free.

They also send regular emails notifying you of functions you may wish to add to your site.

Last but not least are the video tutorials which give you free step by step video tutorial instruction throughout the site building process which is also free.

An in depth amount of researching was carried out in order to source the easiest method for anyone to do this with little or no knowledge of computers and we hope you have fun in testing different options.

Spend some time gong through their templates until you find one that works well for your intended product or design one from scratch. Please remember to make your site as easy to navigate as possible and get an unbiased opinion from a friend or family member if your colour choices are easy on the eyes to read. This could be the make or break of your site. Blue is always an easy colour on the eyes to read. Just see how your toolbar looks above.





4. Step 2 – Choosing your Product :





The Right Product will have the following Characteristics

The greatest thing about back end products is that you always have a greater profit margin. It happens that as mentioned above, your customers are now more confident in your delivery that your back end products are more successful than your front end product.

So now you have a potential product and a website in progress. A helpful time saver is to copy your heading and menu bars and paste it to each new page you design as you go along so that you only need to do your home page and then when complete you are pasting with all the page-links and characteristics already intact. I learnt the hard way.

5. Step 3 -  Giving your business a name



Securing a domain name

There are many websites which enable you to reserve and purchase domain names. Some consideration will need to be put to the type of domain name that you choose as some domains are specific to certain types of industries similar to the need for a government website to end in a .gov.za. or an organization to end in a .org.za …..etc.



As mentioned previously, where we prefer to keep the services of an overseas hosting facility as they are able to offer better packages to suit your website function and have larger servers, the opposite is applicable to your domain name.

Although some web-hosting companies do offer a free domain name, it is a lot easier to renew your web domain annually from a local domain registrar and to receive post locally. The complications arrive if and when you may decide to change hosting companies, as it is difficult to show ownership of the domain name when all the important information is held by an overseas company and you need to retrieve hard copies of important documents when it is a few years down the line. For this reason, it also makes decisions easier when you don’t leave the entire control in the hands of an overseas supplier of services. Most local domain registrars will try and convince you to host with them, but they just cannot compete with the offering of the overseas servers’ bandwidth. Maybe in the future this will change for South Africans.

It may be of consideration at this point to remember that a name that has multiple words should be split using a hyphen as it is often unreadable to a user who does not already know your product. For example, the name “durbanpropertysearcher” seems like a bit of gobbledy-gook. However when read as “Durban-property-searcher”, it is more easily read. This will help the search engines allocate merit to your website title as well us the individual words when being searched by a user.









6. Step 4 – Marketing your Product



The 3 General Types of Online Marketing:



You are not limited in terms of how you would like to market your product or products, however, I would recommend that you choose one and try to master it in order to exhaust all the potential opportunities that each type of marketing has and then implement them into your marketing campaign.

The benefit of trying each as an individual concept will enable you to see which methods are working most effectively in your marketing campaign and to decide where your efforts should be focused.

The type of product you have chosen may determine which method would be of more value in its ability to send your prospective clients to your website. You may have different tactics for each product, but remember that the end result is the customer arriving at the place your product is available.

Remember that once you have isolated a winning formula it will become easier to implement each campaign collectively and let your business run on auto-pilot. This is our aim here. We want each product to maintain itself so that you can then duplicate the result with another product. You may learn something on your next product that will increase the potential of your first product. Go back and implement it.

We want to know that each business idea is only the cost of the hosting each month which should not cost more than R 100.00 plus Vat as we can design our sites now for free. Sure the domain name may cost a few rand, but it is owned by you now and can be sold later if not used.

Internet Marketing

I want you to keep foremost in your thoughts that this type of marketing is invaluable because of the nature of the World Wide Web. The internet is a priceless form of marketing in that anybody can offer their products to a world market. For now though, we want to stay local whilst we set up. Fortunately, the effort that is put into your marketing invariably will remain there until such time as you decide to delete it. What I mean here is that your product may be found by a customer on the internet in 5 years from now and if you have created your business to accept them as a client indefinitely, they will still be able to generate a profit margin for you. This example is to show you what type of potential your business has and to enable you to decide about the level of effort you can put into it. You may decide to work flat out for 6 months and take a break if you are happy with your cash-flow statement, or even retire after 5 years of establishing your campaigns and let the business run itself. This is the joy of having a virtual business in that it is accessible from anywhere, at any time of the day and it allows flexibility of time management.

Direct reponse Marketing

Once your have generated interest with your customer, they will need to be able to correspond with you or provide you with a means to contact them. This is a request for more information on your product. You may now include the option to purchase your product at the end of your information presentation of the product. Most websites will have a page that allows a customer to opt in to a mailing list for future contact. This request from the customer will usually stem from a blog which we will be discussing or possibly a post on a bulletin board or other advert that you have used in your campaign. This will be the foundation of your business as you will need to be able to offer future products to these potential customers. You may have a newsletter that you wish to send out to your mailing list with your latest products. Remember that it will become integral to establish an automated system eventually to take care of this scenario. As your business grows, you will need to surround yourself with the right systems to take care of your business when you cannot. These are potentially lost sales.

Direct Mail Marketing



South Africa seems to have forgotten the effectiveness of a well written postcard. Direct mail marketing could be the only method that you decide to use in your campaign if you need to market directly within your neighborhood. Your product may be such that you have a well established network already and just need to direct these potential clients to your new website. Do you remember the days when you got back to your car at a shopping centre and it was covered in flyers. Do you find that you will more likely take a flyer from somebody at a traffic intersection if they are wearing a T-shirt with the logo of the product that they are promoting. By the time you arrive at the person who is handing out the flyer, you already know that it may be of interest to you and you gladly request more information by taking a flyer. This shows willingness to buy. By capturing the market and directing them to your website, they are able to consider their purchase in comfort and obtain the important aspects of the product. Remember that marketing is really a teaser in essence and the first step in the sales process. Most consumers rarely buy on first inspection unless they already know the product. Try not to sell within your marketing campaign. Traffic to your website is the key to its success.

Affiliate marketing



Affiliate marketing is a mutli-billion Rand industry worldwide and has been the saving grace for many an internet savvy person. We are going to attempt to provide a broad understanding of this subject in order for you to decide if this avenue is something that you would like to try as an additional or alternative means to generate a passive and/or secondary income.

This is by no means a miracle cure to financial freedom and does take an intense amount of research and writing in order to remain in the top 10% of internet affiliate marketers.

The basic principle of affiliate marketing is such that a company or individual provides their product to a marketplace whereby affiliate marketers are able to offer such product to consumers in exchange for a percentage of the sales price received by the company/individual selling the product. In essence an affiliate marketer will carry the risk in terms of advertising costs and use various internet marketing strategies to channel potential buyers to where the product is offered.

In South Africa there are currently only two companies that I would recommend as having properly entered the market in terms of offering local South African internet affiliate marketers a Rand based product that they could sell. I encourage you to look at the potential offered on www.trafficsynergy.co.za and www.offerforge.co.za.

We are going to be setting up your business to cater for the local market and as such would like to stay away from the overseas based Dollar and Pound markets for now. We will briefly discuss Clickbank as an overseas marketplace to source products, purely for information purposes. If you choose to attempt to enter this market, I wish you only the best of luck but have noticed a lack of activity in our local market and am confident that we are still in the beginning stages of this trend in our country. Finally a market we can get into at ground level.

Some of the products mentioned on Offerforge and TrafficSynergy, you may recognise from www.durban-property-searcher.co.za. It is a good idea to decide for yourself which of the advertisers you wish to exclude from your website as some of them may not be relevant to your product offering and may discourage your customers if they feel that the adverts are confusing to your site content. As the site that I have developed is a business site and is reliant on a specific provincial marketplace, it is suitable to offer air flights and accommodation advertisements on the website. This is a recurring income for as long as the site is active and the company is an affiliate advertising partner.

Due to a recession type of attitude in the corporate environment at present, it is a great way for companies with budget restraints to use affiliate marketers as they will only need to pay on successfully concluded sales and as such is a win-win for everybody. As this is still in its infant stages in South Africa, I believe that it is only a matter of time before the majority of larger corporate advertisers follow suit and the SME business firms realise that this is a strong mode of advertising within a reasonable budget. It means that those wishing to begin changing the way in which we approach a work from home opportunity and online income, will be able to establish themselves now for the new trend taking off in South Africa.

So let’s recap on your income stream. You have paid advertising space being assigned on your website by Google through your Adsense campaign. We have an allocated space for permanent advertisers on each webpage in your website who may be in the same or a similar field to that in which your chosen product is located. You have the actual product sales themselves which have increased by using your various advertising campaigns. We have also covered a means to build a client base for continual sales of additional products by using the auto-responder.

You can find the program for your auto responder in your Bluevoda Cpanel (control panel). Hopefully by now you have designed your fist page and are reading this e-book for the second or third time making new notes as you go along.





7. Generating Traffic To Your Website



Foundational Business Building

This type of traffic is meant to establish your foundation and solidify your spot on the internet. Foundational Traffic is more time consuming to do, but is extremely effective at delivering really qualified traffic to your business. The more you stick to doing it, the more stable your business will become for the long term.

Here are some basic methods of Foundational Traffic.

Articles:



Article marketing is a way of marketing yourself as an authority online. When you are promoting your business products using internet based marketing techniques, you are able to redirect traffic online to your business website where you then make sales. Always remember to try and use an information capture sheet on your website to enable you to record the details of the visitors to your website. This is extremely valuable to add to your mailing list so that you are able to introduce secondary products to your visitors at a later date. Just keep building your list of prospective clients.

Try some of these ideas to start with. You will be provided with some websites later on to help you get started.



This is one of the most easiest things to write about because it is highlighting your core products and the business that you offer people. What can you do for them? Remember your aim is to add value and content.



People like to read articles of interest from like minded people. There are many forums and discussion groups out there that rely on regular support to expand and maintain their reader base. It is often found that these discussions lead to business support and backlinks are created to and from each others websites. Remember its all about traffic to your website.



It is always wise to choose a product that relates to your passion easily. This will enable you to speak passionately in your articles and discussion groups from the heart. It will also enable you to link with other websites that interest you.

There are many reasons for which you should create articles as a direct marketing technique, but the most common is probably for a boost in site traffic. You may not yet realise how much good this type of direct marketing can do, but if you focus on a couple of hours a day and get some great articles going, then you are well on your way to creating a great traffic driving machine, just from articles.

Remember that if you are already writing them for discussion groups, you may as well not duplicate the work, but save them to a section of your website called “other topics of interest” or the likes.

You may also want to add your websites’ hyperlink to the bottom of each article and submit them to e-zines websites for other website owners to use them as content. This will create valuable links back to your website giving you excellent search engine optimization by moving your pages up in rank to the first few pages for keyword searches by online users.

www.Ezinearticle.com

www.Goarticles.com

www.Articledashboard.com

www.Searchwarp.com

www.Articlebase.com

www.Isnare.com

www.Selfgrowth.com

www.Buzzle.com

www.Articlecity.com

www.Ideamarketers.com

www.Articlealley.com

www.Web-source.net

www.Selfseo.com

www.Amazines.com

www.Articletrader.com

www.Searchguild.com

www.Webworldindex.com

www.Articlesphere.com

www.Businessknowhow.com

www.Promotionworld.com

www.Articlesfactory.com

www.Excellentguide.com/article

www.Contentdesk.com

www.Articlecube.com

www.Articlebiz.com



Blogs and other means of Social Networking



Blog is a shortened word for web log. A blog is a form of an online journal wherein you get to write whatever you feel like writing about at that moment. If you have a blog that is both interesting and informative, you will find that a regular reader base will start to emerge as readers enjoy your writing.

The reason why a blog is such a great means to market your products and services is that you are able to reach a wider audience, build a community of loyal readers, interact with them, create market awareness and even enter into a bit of pre-launch hype for your products.

This clearly shows that a Blog is more than an online diary. Blogs work as a marketing tool because they are interactive. They allow you to share information with your visitors on a regular and personal basis. This method is also extremely beneficial for feedback as your visitors are able to leave a comment on your Blog.  This communication process turns the Blog into a forum and discussion platform which allows you to showcase your expertise in a certain field and discuss your products and your business.

BlueVoda has included a free blogging platform or choice of Bulletin Board style called phpbb which you can incorporate into your new website. You will find this in your CPanel (Control Panel). Use this Blog as a forum for introducing experts in the field that your product is sold or traded. This adds substance to your content and is looked upon by the search engines as beneficial to readers. Your Page ranking on the internet search engines will improve and you will be able to ensure that you stay in the top ten on the first page so that your customers will be able to find your site effortlessly.

As with your articles, you may wish to submit your blog entries for reference to the search engines which may generate traffic as people read your blog posts on other sites.  Some webmasters may choose to use your articles as content. Make sure to include your signature in the form of your website or page address in the section provided at the bottom of a blogpost or article. This signature will send highly qualified and interested clients to your products and website.

Try out,

www.Squidoo.com

www.Hubpages.com

www.Wetpaint.com

www.Bumpzee.com

www.Quizilla.com

www.Experienceproject.com

www.Clipmarks.com

www.Blogowogo.com

www.Weebly.com

www.Tumblr.com

www.Terapad.com

www.Pownce.com

www.Jaiku.com

www.Usfreeads.com

www.Scribd.com

www.Slideshare.net

as a means to create extra signatures referring traffic back to your products. The search engines will credit your website with better page ranking as they find more and more sites with your website name on it as it shows qualification in your content written.

Viral marketing

Viral marketing is the internet term given to word of mouth type of marketing by those who have found interest in your articles or products and is by far the best method to increase exposure of your product. It stands to reason that a product you believe in is always the first one that you would recommend to friends and family. If you are writing sincere product reviews for your products in your blogging and article campaigns, you will most definitely have others on the internet placing great value on what you have written and thus receive many links to your page and indirectly boost your page ranking in the search engines for your product.





Free advertising websites and Bulletin Boards



There are too many sites to mention and it would be easier to find those in your home town or area of your target market by just typing free classifieds into the search engine and adding your town name thereafter.



Backlinks from other sites



There are various companies who offer an exchange link system or often called reciprocal links which you can obtain to increase the number of links pointing back to your website. This is a means of search engine optimization and does help to a certain degree in increasing your page ranking in the search engine for certain keyword searches which will put you in the top 10.

See which back links your opposition have on their website and approach the same or similar companies for their assistance in linking to your site. They are not in competition and would wish to sell their own products and thus the more the merrier. You never know unless you try.

RSS Feeds and RSS Feed Aggregators



One often overlooked tactic is the use of a blog RSS Feed syndication. Simply put, every time you update your blog, a subscriber is notified by your registering the blog with a RSS Feed Aggregator.

There are many RSS Feed Aggregators online for you to choose from. The easiest blog or discussion template to use is probably the one that comes free with the BlueVoda Webbuilder package which is a wordpress blog platform. The platform has numerous plug in products available for free in cyberspace and a simple search will reveal these plug-ins which allow customization of the function and appearance thereof.

If you are using a wordpress blog, your feed address is simply;

www.yoursite.co.za/blogdirectory/feed

Where “yoursite” is the name of your website and “blogdirectory” is the name of the directory where your blog is located on your website. For page naming, there is a wonderful tutorial in the BlueVoda webbuilder.

This is a list of some of the more preferred RSS Feed Aggregators and they are all free to submit to. You will only need to submit your blog to them once and they will update automatically every time you add content to your blog.



Search engines



Please remember that whilst Google has over 200 million users on any given day, this is not the only search engine which is being used throughout South Africa and the rest of the world.

For this reason it is wise to submit your website to as many search engines as possible in order to increase your traffic analytics to your site. Think Yahoo, MSN and so forth. The list is endless. Just Google Search engines and see what comes up. But remember that there are more pages than the first 10 results and you may want to go through them at your own pace. This is an ongoing process and you cannot be expected to do everything in one day. After all, this e-book took three months to put together.

Newspaper publications and other means of advertising



Gumtree. What can I say? Most South Africans have heard of Gumtree and Junkmail. If you have not heard of the free advertising newspaper publication or classifieds website, you are missing out on a load of free advertising. A recent advertisement that was placed on Gumtree netted a response of 250 people in the first hour. These were the replies by email, nevermind how many times the advert was viewed.

As South Africans we are fortunate to have so many diverse cultural backgrounds that the number of ideas we can imagine are boundless. Each and every community uses some form of publication that is extremely cost effective to run an advertising campaign. The fortunate fact is that in the past it was necessary to utilize full colour advertisements in an advertising campaign, whereas now we are able to utilize our websites for the glossy supplements and merely direct the consumers to our websites. You don’t need to be extravagant with your advertising budget to generate interest in your products.

I am honestly amazed at how few cars have their website address across their rear window or rear bumper in a world that’s crying recession. We are going to think out of the box in this business plan.

Clickbank



Clickbank was possibly one of the first and most popular marketplaces for affiliate marketers to use on a regular basis to obtain products for their Google Ads campaigns. It was found however, that during the compilation of this e-book, the majority if not all of the products offered on Clickbank are for the overseas market. By this statement we mean that as mentioned earlier, it is extremely difficult as a South African to attempt to sell a product on a local website that is paid for in Dollars. We strongly recommended Offerforge and TrafficSynergy for this reason and hope that in the immediate future more local product members join up and understand the concept of utilizing affiliate marketers in this country. We also believe that Cape Town based company Adgator is helpful in being able to monetize your blog. Perhaps the introduction of an undersea cable system due to improve bandwidth and internet accessibility in South Africa in July 2009 is the key to this.



If you have decided to use a .com website address as opposed to a .co.za website address, then Clickbank might appeal to you as you are able to use a .com address a lot easier in the international marketplace. The product you have chosen may be easily accepted by international consumers and as such it may make no difference if your secondary products are sold in Dollars.

If you are interested in the affiliate type of marketing, then a simple entry of your desired product followed by the words “affiliate program” or “associate program” will reveal companies that offer affiliate marketers the opportunity to market their products.



Some additional information on using Google Adwords for Affiliate marketing

Google Adwords are the short 4 line advertisements as mentioned earlier which you may wish to allow Google to display on your website for an additional revenue stream. Some of these adverts are placed by internet affiliate marketers attempting to direct traffic to a site where a product is sold. The affiliate marketer is paid a commission for each sale that the owner of the product makes. This is the other side of the coin to Google Adsense.

As this is a paid service which is offered by Google, there may be a profit margin in it if the affiliate marketer is able to sell a product for more than it costs to display the advert somewhere on the internet.

In the same way that a searcher uses keywords to find the relevant pages for their search in the search engine, the affiliate marketer will pay a certain amount to have their advert displayed on the side of the page for that particular set of keywords or a website allowing Google Adsense.

This method is sometimes enough to generate a substantial income, but does carry some risk in that a sale is not always guaranteed every time somebody clicks on your advert and the costs of running multiple advertising campaigns can quickly add up.

The Google Adwords service works on a bidding system whereby the affiliate marketer will bid a certain number of cents and sometimes Rands for highly successful keywords, for each time that someone clicks on their advert.

If this method is of interest, then we would suggest investigation into the following;

Keyword search tools such as

www.overture.com

www.wordtracker.com

www.googlekeyword.com

www.keyworddiscovery.com and

www.keywordelite.com

You can also use www.adwordanalyzer.com to determine the number of keywords bid on for a specific topic and use this to find a landing page that you can copy for your product.

You can also use this sales copy landing page to build your list for backend sales. This topic has a large amount of detail and is an entire e-book on its own. We will not go too in-depth into this at the moment as this topic is discussed in more detail on the discussion forum which we encourage you to join for help with creating your online business. Log in at www.durban-property-searcher.co.za/online-marketing-discussion-forum.html

8. Step 5 -  Keeping up to date on New Trends and  Product Improvement



Below are a couple of forums which you my wish to investigate as they are updated regularly and also follow trends in the industry as far as search engine optimization go.

www.maketingterms.com- Online Marketing terms and useful links

www.seochat.com – SEO forum and seo tools

www.searchenginewatch.com – search engine optimisation

www.alltop.com – a site focusing on current world buying trends http//:tools.seobook.com  – a site on keyword analysis for your marketing campaigns

www.blogger.com – a free blogging platform

www.iblog.co.za – a free south African blogging platform

www.blogspot.com – a free blogging platform

www.twitter.com – the latest in social blogging media

Some more great ideas for promoting your products



Create a review page for the products you are selling so that you can write a bit about each product. This product review behaves like multiple sales pages all rolled into one on a single review page. Your customers could be able to rate or rank your choices of a selection of products. The interesting thing is that all the products sell, just some better than others. It’s all good for your business. This allows you to sell similar products without being biased to your customers. If they wish to obtain a certain brand name, they can. They key is that they obtain their products from you and your business.

If you are using affiliate programs for your secondary products, make sure to carry out your research on the products home pages or even purchase and test them before hand to enable you to write honestly about them.

If you set up one review page on your website a week and of the 7-10 products on that review page even one of the products is effective and sells, you get a passive income of let’s say R500 per month and you do this for a year, by the end of year 1 you will have 52 review pages on your website with say an average of R500 per month from each review page, you now have a passive income of R26 000 from 52 review pages per month and climbing. Once you have the formula, you merely plug in and play the products.

You will recall that it is not merely the number of products you have though, but the act of creating the marketing support for those review pages by talking about them in your articles.

Search engine optimization



There are many schools of thought on what makes for good search engine optimization. This term has and still is much debated in various forums and Blogs on the internet. Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO as it is more commonly known, refers to the ability for the search engines to find your website and provide it in the first page of a search for your clients to be able to find you easily if their keyword search describes your product.

Search engines allocate a page rank to your website as and how it determines the relevance of your content and products to be for those specific keywords. This means that for a specific set of keywords, your website may appear on page 1 and for a different set of keywords, your website may be found on page 100. This has given rise to a culture of trying to ensure that your website is optimized to appear at the top or on page 1 of all search keywords relating to your product or content.

Once you have read the section on Google Analytics you will have an understanding of page ranking with search engines. The one school of thought relating to optimization is to flood your site with backlinks to other websites in order to boost the amount of content that you are able to offer or link to in order to assume huge amounts of traffic through your site.

I feel that this is flawed in that it detracts from the impression you will be creating for you customer base as a website. The customer wants to know that it is easy to navigate and find the suitable subject related content for which they might be searching without being directed to another site where your product can be found. The traffic is not the only criteria by which a website is ranked and much importance is placed on the subject content.





Google Analytics



Google Analytics is the means by which Google is able to monitor the amount and type of traffic which reaches your website. Originally it was an internet company which offered this service for a small fee to website owners in order to ascertain where their customer base was originating from and what type of customers they were. This tool was eventually bought by Google and is now offered as a free service in order to improve their offering as a search engine.

Once your website is place on the World Wide Web, it is imperative that you sign up for this free service as it is able to provide you with a tremendous amount of helpful and useful information regarding your customer base and visitors to your site. This is the basis for analysis which gives you your page ranking and inadvertently your profit margins.

The system works by a code which Google provides to you on signup which is implemented into each page on your website. This is an invisible code which is used on a daily basis by the Spiders and Searchbots ( Googles’ analysis programs) which invariably identify any changes in your website. This may be the IP addresses of your visitors computers needed to determine what type of Adsense to use for their geographical location. It may also determine what pages are most visited which is useful for your marketing strategy improvement. You will also want the Search engine to know immediately of any new content which you have placed on your website. Imagine if at the same time a search engine user is typing in their keywords, you have just uploaded a new product catalogue which has the product  which they are searching for, you would want them to know about it. It’s genius. I love it and it’s free to all website owners.





Google adwords



If you were to search for an item or subject matter on Google for example, you will notice a shaded area at the top of the search results. There are usually only three websites listed for each page of search results. These website owners are making use of a tool offered by Google which provides a bidding system for each of the keyword (search words) that you have typed into the search bar in order to arrive at the resultant website list. The tool is called Google Adwords and is available to anybody who wishes to pay per word that users may use to find their product. Over time this can build awareness for your website, but can be a costly exercise if no sales are made to counteract the cost of Adwords advertising campaigns. The entry level is a minimum of a R500 budget allocation upfront and R50 activation cost.





Google adsense

Using the same example as used in the Google Adwords search, you will note that some advertisements appear in the right hand side of your screen. These are Google Adsense campaigns and work on a similar bidding system for the keywords that someone may use to search for a product or subject matter. These advertisements are however only billed to the advertiser on a pay per click system which means that only once someone clicks on the relevant four line advert which directs the searcher to their website, will Google bill the advertiser for that searcher to click through. This method requires constant monitoring in order to maintain the advert on the first page by ensuring bids for each keyword is in the top four bids. Some advertisers will purposefully try to be the forth or fifth advertiser as this is a persons natural line of site to be searching in the middle of the page.





9. Step 6: Support systems

In order to be successful in business, it is imperative that as you grow your business, you start to implement systems which will improve, if not maintain, your levels of service and quality to your customers. This will lead to automation of your website activities and client correspondence by using an auto-responder which allows you to pre-write your email responses to an action that takes place, e.g. an order for your product.

If for example you are spending time in a banking hall queue unnecessarily, you may decide to implement internet banking in order to carry out your business at home. It is also critical to understand that if your product is downloadable, it is a benefit to a customer who wants it now. This reason is why many online sales are focused on internet based products or product delivery handled by a third party.

The idea is that you continuously research and find better methods for running your business and also try to establish contacts who think similarly to you in terms of business. I am not saying that you need to reveal your secrets, but it often occurs that the best ideas are generated by like minded individuals discussing strategies and new products they have found to be successful or even unsuccessful.





Opt in pages  and Lead Capture Pages



The basic idea of the opt in page is to build your data base of clients and their email addresses to enable you to keep them updated on any new product offerings that you have, any new ideas or even as a support mechanism for the products they have purchased from you. In the autoresponder section you will be able to add an email that you would like to send to your database of clients all at once. Now if you have thousands of clients in your database, you can not possibly spend the time keeping them individually informed.

So the Opt in page and lead capture is designed to capture your new clients information at your first point of contact.

We will need to create a page for this using a page creator asking for their name and primary email address.

In order to get your clients to give this information freely as some people are scared of receiving large amounts of spam, you may want to provide some information in exchange for this, maybe a free report, a software program, a discount coupon for your products etc.

Use www.instantsqueezepagegenerator.com to build squeeze pages and use one of their free offers to get the opt ins or use www.resalerocket.com for free giveaways.

You may also try to use re-brandable e-books and products so that you can insert your own affiliate links to have multiple potential sales portals around cyberspace as you build your own business. Get tips on how to design your squeeze page for maximum use by visiting some of the Google Adsense adverts in your product field. Try to identify the call to action and see if they have used a nice picture of the product etc.

If you would like to use the traditional opt-in page, go to your BlueVoda control panel and use the email section to set up the email capturer and plug in a message to your auto responder to reply to the sender of their email, in very much the same way that you downloaded this e-book.

Building your list



You may want to use this e-book as your free download or be able to help friends and family get started once you are happy that you are well on your way to creating your own business.

You may wish to set up a means where people can ask you how you made money eg. a blog and then monetize it using Adgator.

Thank you pages

Make sure you send all your new subscribers a welcome or thank you email and stay in contact once a week if you can. You may decide to send your mail out on a Friday so that customers can view your products in the comfort of their own home on a weekend without the pressures of their work. Statistics show that most sales occur from personal home computers as opposed to during office hours.

You may even decide to create a learning forum for new-comers as a follow-up to the downloaded purchase. This can be plugged in to the auto-responder as a link to a forum or blog on your website

Let your new clients know you have an open door policy by providing a personal email address or help line for your products.

The Sales page



Your products should never be sold in your marketing campaigns. Always try to have a sales page on your website incorporating the information regarding the purchase process of your product.

The sales page is your call to action for your client. They are on your sales page because they have shown an interest in your articles or content. They are now here to buy. Give them the facts and the instructions necessary to purchase your product. Once they have purchased, you can now direct them to your thank you page. Keep it simple.

10. Tips for your email autoresponder



After your first email, you need to try and gauge at what stage your subscribers or customers will be in your product offering. This will be helpful to them when they open their most recent email to find some more useful information.

Try to never include more than one product in your email as it becomes confusing to find the link to the information that you are suggesting. It also starts to take on a spam feel and may irritate your customers. Keep your system consistent in your offerings.

Rather send a secondary email. Make sure that your customers look forward to receiving you email.

If they get u

A great way to quickly create a website is using a pre-designed website template. You can easily find free or paid templates on many websites through the web.

Free Templates.

If you’re really determined to get a template for free, a better way of doing it is to use the ones that come for free with whatever software you’re using. WordPress or Joomla, for example, has some very clean, attractive templates. However you do it, though, you have to realise that free templates will never be unique: your website will look just like hundreds of other websites out there that found the same free template you did.

Cheap Templates.

Once you start to get into the territory of paid-for templates, things start to look up. The idea behind sites that sell templates is that they can pay designers a proper rate to do something good once, and then resell it as many times as they want for a relatively low price. This lets designers be paid for as many designs as they want without ever having to deal with customers, and it lets customers buy and use the designs for a much lower price than they’d usually pay for something a lot worse – and that they can’t see in advance.

Exclusive Templates.

After realising how much some people dislike other sites being able to use their design, many template sites started selling exclusive templates – ones that are only sold once, to one website, and then taken down. They found themselves with a runaway hit on their hands.

This way, designers are free to create something great, and customers can take it if they like it or look at hundreds of alternatives if they don’t. It takes all the uncertainty and negotiation out at both ends, and leaves both the designer and the customer much happier than they would have been. Of course, if there is something small you want changed, most sites are happy to get the designer to do it for you for a small extra fee.

The choice is upto you on which path to take with designing your website. We hope this article has helped, good luck and happy designing..

Welcome, my name is Philip King. In this guide we will be installing WordPress in a local development environment using a method that will allow multiple blogs on multiple MySql databases. WordPress is well known for its easy five minute installation but as we are installing WordPress on our local server (localhost) we will do a manual install so we know where everything is and what everything does. This video tutorial, is also available as a HD PDF file for download….

Ever thought about having your own web site? Do you have your own website but looking for some affordable solutions for improvement? The freedom of working from home and being your own boss that becoming a webmaster or affiliate marketer offers is very attractive to many. More and more people are turning to the internet as not only a source of information, but as a source of income as well. I thought I would share with everybody some tips and coupons for webmasters and affiliate marketers that I have come across as I am learning how to become one myself.

 

Webmasters know that developing a good site is much more than just programming. You need a wealth of knowledge that deals with more than just codes and html. I feel it’s important to focus on what you do best, in my case sales and affiliate marketing, however understanding the big picture of creating an effective website should not be overlooked.

 

Finding a niche that you can be successful at can be difficult, but it is very important. Try using a keyword tool to find the popularity of your potential topic and use that information to judge if it’s something worth pursuing. One of your goals should be to become an authority on a topic so that people will trust you enough to buy things based on your recommendations. Once you figure out what your site will be about, you’ll need to pick a domain name and set up your hosting which usually costs around $50-$100 a year for both.

 

Creating good copy and content is probably the single most important aspect in web development. It’s often said that “content is king”. Writing about things you are passionate for is widely recommended. In other words, don’t just write about making money because it’s something that you think people will want to know about. If you know a lot about flower pots, then the information you create will be much more useful to your audience and thus much more effective for you. Implementing high quality photos, images, widgets, videos and other useful media to help convey your points can be very effective as well.

 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is another important aspect for webmasters. Optimizing your sites for search engines like google and yahoo will allow people to find you on the internet much easier. This involves creating title, meta and description tags that mention the keywords you are trying to target, along with on page optimization and link building. For example, if your site will be about Chicago restaurants, you would want to mention those words in all of the tags and about three to five times on your actual website page depending on the amount of content. You’ll want to mention these keywords at least a couple times as this helps google determine what your site is about.

 

Link building is also very important in determining your site’s rank in search engines. The more high quality related sites that you have linking to you the better. Good places to start would be any associations or organizations that you are a part of. General directories, article directories like this one, facebook, myspace, craigslist, google maps and yahoo local are also great links to have. The age of a site is very important in the eyes of google too, so the sooner you get started the better!

 

If you are not a designer or not familiar with website design at all, it might be easiest for you to get started with a free blog from google. They supply many free templates and everything you need to get started with having a web presence for free. Otherwise you can find a plethora of high quality template choices from joomla or templatemonster. As time goes on if you want to be taken more seriously, you should consider upgrading your blog to a wordpress and using a custom coded site.

 

Now it’s up to you on how you would like to monetize your website (not as easy as it sounds). Most people don’t make or sell anything themselves, so affiliate relationships have been growing rapidly in the past couple years. The way this works is pretty simple; you send traffic to a merchant that sells products or services via a text link or banner placed on your site and in return they pay you a percentage of each sale that comes through your site. One website I came across offered a very affordable solution to getting started with affiliate sites for only $49.95. I would also highly recommend the AbestWeb forum. You can learn from some of the best affiliate marketers in the industry and stay abreast on current webmaster and affiliate trends.

 

Websites are widely regarded as the best marketing tool available nowadays. Whether you have a small business or just looking to make some extra income, gaining a web presence is very important and will only continue to increase in effectiveness as the popularity of the internet grows. Getting a website is much more affordable than most people think, especially with the help of some coupons and deals. It could prove to be one of the best investments you have ever made.

One of the first things you will notice if you are starting out in the online industry is that you have a constant and always expanding need for fresh content on your websites. The more sites you own, the more content you need. While many people think about “videos” and “pics” when they hear the word content, search engines value text and links with much more weight than any images.

One way you can maximize your content is by syndicating some of it to your other sites. The concept is very similar to the days when newspapers dominated before the internet existed – when one good writer would sell an article to many publishers, who would each reprint it in many different newspapers all over the country. Syndication allows you to write less new content and to reuse some of your best content on more than one website.

There are major negative implications of using duplicate text and links on many sites involving search engine traffic, but the algorithms do allow for “snippets” of content to appear in multiple places without harm, so long as the overall content of each site remains substantially different from any other website. It’s very important to point out that original content is absolutely, without a doubt, always far better than syndicated content when you have a choice of using one or the other.

Creating your own syndication system involves setting up an RSS Feed. You have probably heard the term RSS before, it stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” RSS was originally pioneered in the late 1990s, but several different versions were being created at the same time and that is part of the reason why some of the terms and tags used in RSS are less uniform than other aspects of web development. RSS is often used to share content more easily between websites or to allow surfers to be alerted by feeds they subscribe to when new content is added on their favorite websites.

At its heart, RSS uses many of the same programming elements as HTML source code. Webmasters with a strong grasp of HTML will probably be able to reverse-engineer their own feeds from an existing example pretty easily. However, for webmasters with a less code-centric set of skills, there are alternatives that work almost as well. For example, WordPress.com and other build-your-own Blog sites offer free services, including RSS Generators, to help site publishers get their content syndicated.

Pre-fabricated Blog sites do allow basic RSS feeds to be generated with a just a few clicks, but as with any other aspect of website publishing, you can always do more when you are the one hosting and customizing your own content to suit your own needs.

The reason RSS gets a little tricky is that the RSS feed tag and code work needs to work in harmony with both the database you are drawing the information from and the Reader you are sending that content to on another website or browser. For experienced coders, RSS may stand for “Really Simple Syndication”, but for novices trying to sort it all out, RSS can also be seen as “Really Sucky Syndication” as well.

There are many trustworthy sites with “How To” RSS tutorials, which give a more in-depth set of instructions and examples along with advanced feed tips for webmasters seeking to educate themselves. One of the best starting points is SearchEngineWatch.com, which offers useful basic information and links to more in-depth examples.

Once you believe your RSS Feed is properly constructed, you can also visit a Feed Validator site like: http://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html to check the feed and make sure it is at least minimally compatible with basic RSS standards.

Many site owners have started to offer more complex RSS Feeds for affiliates to use, given the increasing demand and competition. If you recall earlier, I mentioned that duplicated content is a strong negative factor for search engine optimization. So, in an instance where a large sponsor is making text blocks available to vast numbers of affiliates, the amount of duplication across sites that publish the feeds becomes significant.

One way sites deal with the duplication issues is to create “morphing” feeds. These advanced RSS feeds actually re-order words or substitute a variety of sentences each time an entry is pulled by a user so that each feed becomes at least slightly different from all other versions of the feed being used by other webmasters. While morphing feeds do partially answer the problem of duplicate content, they often fail to generate text that humans would enjoy reading.

The simplest way to make an RSS Feed is of course to hire someone. Competent third party coders charge $100 or less to create a feed for you and any coder you hire should be able to easily explain what they have done so that you can create additional feeds or amend existing ones on your own. With an ever-growing need for content and a very small expense to have your RSS Feed generated correctly by a professional programmer, it really is the simplest way to get your sites syndicated.

You have probably heard of all the good stories about blogging. If you are considering blogging for money, then chances are you have heard how others have made it big just by blogging. Well, as a reality check, you have to know that blogging is not a get-rich-quick scheme. On the brighter side, it is highly possible to make money out of it as long as you hit the right spots.

If you want to start blogging for money, then here are some important point you need to consider so you can start your success on how to make money from your blog.

Step 1: Choose a blog platform.Each one of us has the choice what type of blog platform one can use. You can start out with free blog platforms such as Blogger or WordPress. If you have the budget, you can start right away with a paid domain and hosting.

Step 2: Choose a blog niche.Once you have your blog platform ready, you can now think deeply on the niche that you will be writing about. Choose a niche that interests you, one that is popular and one that you can sustain in terms of content and credibility.

Step 3: Start writing.In order to have an active blog, you have to write quality posts on your chosen niche at regular intervals. Your available time can dictate as to when you will be posting. You can choose whether you want to post write ups everyday or if you post a few times each week.

Step 4: Start monetizing.Once your blog has already been published for some time, you can already start monetizing your blog. You can take on paid posts or write ups or you can accept sponsors and paid ads.

Blogs are a great way to share information with the external world. You might be enthusiastic in starting a blog website to showcase your knowledge, preferences and suggestions about a niche. Everyday thousands of new blog sites are established. They can be tweaked and customized in a variety of ways. And the best part from a user’s perspective is that they are extremely user friendly. So if you have been hunting for a blog hosting service provider stay tuned and explore through us the provider who can meet your business requirements. Blog Hosting Blog hosts allow you to showcase your blogsite on blogging platforms. Some of the most popular blogging platforms include WordPress, b2evoulution and Nucleus. These platforms can be located in the control panel of your hosts. As the end user you need not worry about the end user license cost or any updates. These will be provided to you at no additional cost whatsoever. Installing and configuring a blogging application on your web host is simple and easy. It would hardly take a minute to install the application on your web host. Top Reasons to Choose Blog Hosting Services 1 It can provide you more secure environment to host the content. You can choose an administrator user name and password of your choice. 2 You can easily manage the user privileges of read or write in a blog hosting environment. For your readers and contributors you can set up and assign privileges in just about no time. 3 Customers can jazz up their website by changing the themes. The look and feel can be easily altered in a blogging platform. Themes can be downloaded from the Internet for free and installed at the click of the button. 4 Blogging applications and themes can enhance the overall scalability through easily downloadable plug-ins and affiliate programs. 5 One can manage SEO in a better way in blog hosting environment 6 Blogs offer a rich multimedia platform where in one can embed text, images, video and other high resolution graphics at the same time. Blog Hosting – Essentials 1 While negotiating online for a competitive blog hosting service provider, quality must not be foregone 2 Ensure if zeroed upon service provider can offer 24X7 support on email, voice and Internet. In case you are lost somewhere you can raise the ticket online to resolve. In case of business exigency such resolution mechanism needs faster addressals in order to avoid customer churn or dissatisfaction. 3 You should also ensure that you end up taking a deal from a secured host. It is imperative to note that blog hosting environments can be prone to malicious attacks. In case your hosting service provider has not up the security ante it may harm your website. 4 As a best practice you should regularly take a backup from your blog host Blogs have emerged as a powerful communication media. You should explore through us in order to discover the best blog host service provider to meet your needs.

The purpose of this brief article is to leave you with several beginner’s tips to blogging.  If you are considering starting up your own blog, you will hopefully find the following information useful.

Blogging is becoming increasingly popular these days, and it seems as though nearly everyone has their individual blog. From adolescents to seniors, everyone seems to feel the need to share their opinions with others. People may have very different reasons to create a blog, including connecting with other people who share synonymous views, sharing new knowledge, providing themselves with an outlet for their ideas and writing, and increasingly, to earn money.

There are two evenly significant concepts involved in creating and sustaining your own blog. The first is the creation of the blog itself; the second is checking that your blog stays current and does not simply fall off the grid from negligence. The second is very important if your intention in creating your blog is to make money. For many, making money is the sole function of the blog.

The first needed step to creating a blog is to sign up with a blogging service. Examples of these are WordPress or Blogger. If your aim for the blog is to establish revenue, the appearance of your blog is very important – no one will want to look at your blog if the website is unappealing to the eye. In addition, many blogging services make it simple for you to use Google Adsense on your blog, a bonus that should not be ignored if you are trying to make money from your blog.

The second step to successful (and lucrative) blogging is keeping your blog fresh by updating your blog on a regular basis with new entries and images. This will help to keep those who have seen your blog interested, so that they come back regularly. There are a couple of methods you can utilize to help you in maintaining your blog. One such method is creating a blogging schedule, or creating certain dates to add original content. It is important that you follow your schedule. This is easy to do if you write new posts beforehand, instead of waiting until the last minute. Try brainstorming and writing down all of your ideas, then pick the best idea from among them.

These tips are introduced as the tip of a very large iceberg, but can start you on your path to creating your own blog.

Ok, you’ve heard its possible and decided to give it a try; Making money online… Made easy. You hop on the train to catch the jolly ride, thinking it’ll come out as smooth as you’ve been made to believe. You dabble from one site to the other, even threw in a few bucks here and there; just to hasten the “get rich quick” process. You eventually find out you’ve been going in circles and things are not always as easy as proposed in those “guru” adverts you’ve so gullibly followed.The online money making scheme is a vast empire; one with so much potential. The economic situation worldwide and the ever insatiable want of man have helped trigger the foray of demands for alternative means of livelihood. The Internet, being a mega source of information transfer/exchange, naturally became a major target for information on ideas and solutions. Unfortunately, lots of scammers are also cashing in on the information craze; devouring unsuspecting victims in the process on a daily basis. You start off with the intention of “making money” but end up with “a hole in the pocket” after greedy, hurried, ill-informed attempts.Now you’re back (maybe wiser), deciding to do a research first before venturing into the terrain (wise move). I’ve got news for you… You’re not alone; we’ve all gone through this at one point or the other during our pursuit of online wealth. You may have heard that making money online is as easy as ABC… Well, I’m sorry to shock you… THERE’S MORE TO IT! The only so called “easy money making” schemes out there could be “Pay per click” or maybe “survey” programs. You’ll find out too soon that even that is not as easy as it seems; after working your fingers to the bones from clicking for peanuts.Take it or leave it, making money online is just like any other serious daily endeavor in life geared towards success. It involves Dedication, self motivation, self-belief, passion, interest, persistence and lots of patience; if any of these characteristics is missing in your life right now, you might do well to try and improve on it before you step into the online dungeon… If not, you’ll be frustrated out before you could say… “My money”!Now, having said all these, there are websites you can join and make your own for free that allows you to trade and make money as a starter without financial investment. Good examples would be Weblog sites (blogs) like Blogger or WordPress (to mention a few). With this in place… you have a launch pad to promote your activities online. However, there are some basic requirements needed for this trade:1.Finding an informative Niche of interest (for you too)2.Researching on keywords for the niche3.Creativity, Frequency and conceptual Originality4.Promoting using multiple channelsIn all these, you’ll need to be “web savvy”, which means you need to have some basic ideas of web terminologies like URL, HTML, SEO, BACKLINKS and MONETIZATION… Etc. If you are confused about these terms now, don’t fret, do a search and read up on the terms… I’ll be elaborating on these in subsequent posts.Some Ways of Making Money Online:Let’s now delve into some ways of making money online. There are lots of ways of making money online, a few is listed below:•Taking online surveys: some websites like YouGov pay you for completed surveys•Pay-Per-Click campaign: Google adwords and Microsoft Adcenter stands out here (not a fan of the auto surf PPC programs though some are pretty lucrative on a long term).•Affiliate Marketing: Clickbank, Amazon, Adtrader and Ebay come to mind here.•E-commerce/Reseller Programs: Create, buy, sell or collect resale right from authors of products and services for sale/purchase.•Online Real Estate: Domain name sales and acquisition•Social Network Bookmarking•Online auction Sale•Message Board Posting: Webmaster-Talk and DigitalPoint pays for posting contents of interest on their message boards.•Blogging: Blogger, Worpress is free… create a niche site that can generate money using say, AdSense, Bidvertiser or Kontera etc also, you get paid to blog on BlogiTive and PayPerPost • Photography: IsTockPhoto and Fotolia pays for uploaded original photos of interest.• Freelance and Virtual Jobs: eLance and oDesk allows members to sign up for advertised outsourced jobs and get paid on completion.• Games: If you are a “games freak”, you could test your skills online and get paid while winning and collecting points. Try SecondLife or MooLaNote this: Most successful Internet enterpreneur started off with a free blog. Success is not overnight… It is gradual and involves patience. Don’t give up before your money starts rolling in. Be Smart and creative, People Centric, Focused and Dedicated… Success will surely come.All in all, three major factors stand out in fueling the engine of online money making…1. Finding a profitable niche (Think of it as your passion for providing solutions to problems in specific area of interest)2. Creating a “landing Pad” for your would be customers (website, Weblog/Blog or VideoLog/Vlog will do just right)3. Generating relevant traffic for conversions. (Where promoting comes to play).If you are really serious about making good money online, you’ll need to invest a little of your time and resources in pursuit of these factors… They constitute the spring board for online success.The Need for an e-mail list:The three factors mentioned above is born out of the eventual overall target of having a LIST. Quality and relevant e-mail list for your chosen niche is very important for online business success. With good quality e-mail list of relevance and quality recommendations from time to time on your part, trust will be established and you’re virtually on your way to success. Ever wondered why most programs request that you enter your e-mail address for “newsletters”, “subscriptions”, “10-day introductory course” etc? LIST GENERATION! This will prove useful when other ideas on money making hits the stands and you have a ready market in your list.Stay focused.

Are you just starting out in internet marketing? Are you planning to build a membership site after hearing all the benefits of having one? Are you wondering where and how to begin?

If you answered, “yes” to the above questions, then this article will prove to be beneficial.

There are several steps and factors to consider if you want to make your membership site a successful recurring income machine for years to come.

Choose A Topic

This is obviously the most basic step but can be the most vital. Not all topics lend themselves to the membership site model, but many do.

Jot down a list of topics you have an interest in, as it’s always easier to continue creating content if it interests you. Even when you outsource, you will be doing much of the research yourself.

What Will You Deliver?

Will you deliver videos, text content, audios, courses, newsletters, or software? There are so many options as far as what to offer your members, so it is important to have a plan so that you can promote these aspects on your sales page.

Study The Competition

Are there any competitors in your niche running a membership site? If so, sign up and see exactly what they are doing. All you then have to do is do it better! By studying successful competitors, you can pave your own way to success.

Formulate A Content Delivery Plan

Will you deliver new content weekly, monthly or quarterly? Members will want to know when the updates are coming.

Sticking to a certain date each month is a good way to keep members interested and excited for the next installment. Of course, this means you must be reliable and prompt when delivering new quality content.

Membership Model

Will it be a free or paid membership, or will you offer both? Many marketers use a free membership to gain subscribers, and then send them offers to upgrade to a paid membership. You could offer a discount as an extra incentive, or perhaps some bonus products.

Limiting your membership to a certain number of people can also fuel more interest, as people love to be part of an exclusive club.

Technical Set Up

There are a few options when it comes to software for creating a members area. You can use a script like Amember, or you can set up a WordPress blog and utilize a membership script plugin.

You might also choose to simply password protect the members directory. Hiring a programmer can make this stage easier.

Promotion

This is a big step and must start once your site is ready for the public. Write down benefits and points of interest about your membership and track down some joint venture partners to help you promote the site.

You may also engage in other promotional methods such as pay-per-click, article marketing, press releases, social marketing, ezine marketing, video promotions, and even offline methods such as advertising in magazines and newspapers.

Keep Your Members

The best way to keep your members is to continually provide new content and have regular communication. A member’s forum is a good way to encourage interactivity and a community feeling.

Setting up a new membership is not difficult, but it takes work and dedication. You can outsource many of the above stages to various people.

The technical side of things, in particular, should be rock-solid to avoid hacking and unauthorized access. Your content delivery needs to be reliable and of high quality every time you send new materials for members, so that they feel they are getting their money’s worth.

Running a membership site is highly satisfying and potentially very profitable. As a newbie, you are in a great position to set up a unique membership site that will earn recurring income for many years to come.

shows how to install WordPress (blog software) on a remote Lunux shared server. It’s a complete coverage of everything that one needs to know in installing WordPress on a remote Linux server. We discuss what file to edit, how to create a database, how and what file to upload… We show some common mistakes that people make in installing WordPress. In the first part of the WordPress installation tutorial series, we start off at the point where we just signed up for a web hosting plan and …

It is logical for a beginners guide to blogging to begin with information on how to start a blog. However, first a brief introduction to what a blog actually is. A blog is nothing more than your online diary or journal, in which you can express your feelings, thoughts, and opinions or even advertise your products. There are few rules apart from keeping it clean. For that reason they come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and designs, and your blog page is literally yours to anything you want with.
You can include pictures, hyperlinks to your websites, MP3s and videos. Much depends on the type of blog you have and who is the provider, but WordPress allows more than Blogger or Blogspot, especially if you have downloaded it to your own website. However, it is also more complicated and you might prefer to start off easy and then work your way up as you become more familiar with what you are doing. Many cPanel web hosts offer WordPress facilities.
The basic components of a blog are:
Title: You can use the title to label your posting.
Category: You can add a category to keep blogs on similar topics together.
Body: This is the main content of the blog.
Trackback: This allows other sites to link back to your blog.
Permalink: This is the URL that goes with every blog that you write.
Comments: This allows readers to make comments on your blog – some good, and some bad.
By means of just one or two templates you can easily create new pages. It’s a bit like having a website and copying your home page as a template for all the rest of the pages, only the blog template is blank with spaces for the title, category and all the other aspects of your blog. The blogging websites that you sign up with offer a number of templates and you can choose one and literally start blogging immediately.
Blogging can be more that just your own personal thing, and you can join groups that blog about specific topics, such as football, movies, music, blogging, etc, etc. You can all share your expertise and knowledge and some are literally operating as forums. You can also use your blog to advertise a product, and to drive traffic to your website, while others have no website and use their blog as their sole communications window on the internet.
I could go on all day about what you can do and, sometimes, cannot do with a blog, but the best way is to get started and then find what you are capable of. The best way is to log onto the blog provider of your choice and sign up for a blog. Most newcomers to blogging find it easiest to start blogging from a provider’s website, and then graduating to installing blogging software on their own website
This is a bit trickier, but it allows you use all the plugins that allow total personalization of your blog so that it is completely unlike that of anybody else. You cannot use plugins when you run your blog from the provider’s site, whether it is WordPress or any other blog. You cannot beat having your own blog software and being able to design any page that you want.
However, although this sounds great to be able to do, on the whole you are likely best to start blogging from the blog hosting site, and then graduate to your own website once you are comfortable with blogging. You will have enough to take in and learn when you upload to your own web space without having to worry about how blogging works.
Blogging is fantastic fun, and it can also be very profitable. However, there are specific techniques involved in making money using blogs, and it is very easy to get your fingers burnt if you are unaware of the pitfalls and the right way to do it. Nevertheless, blogging can be very rewarding, both personally and financially, so best of luck, and get blogging now. Don’t leave it a minute longer because you might have a lot to learn yet.
Once you have learned how to start a blog, then you can think of running your own from your own website.

WordPress is a very useful and powerful platform for blogs. WordPress themes are the best design solution for your website. People might find it difficult to customize if they are new to blogging or using wordpress themes. This article is a beginner’s guide to customizing wordpress blog. In this article, I will tell you some simple tips that will help you to customize your wordpress blog and make it look unique without hiring a web developer to do your job. Read on to find out these tips.

Fist of all, you need to find the perfect theme for your blog. There are a lot of themes available on the internet. These themes are like web site templates and they give your blog the look that you want to give it. If you are not satisfied with the available themes on the internet then you can also get a custom theme designed as you like it.

If possible, make sure that the theme that you are choosing is widget-ready. This allows you to add, remove, arrange, and rearrange your sidebars easily and quickly. This makes it easy to experiment with different arrangements. You can install one or more themes. Installing the theme is easy and all you have to do is to upload the theme and all of its contents on to the wordpress-content directory. You can easily change the themes by logging into your administrative control panel and choosing from the presentation tab.

Plugnins are very useful for adding a wide range of functions in your blog. So find the plugins for your blog.  The basic wordpress theme comes with a few basic plugins, which will help you to get started, but the plugins are also available on the internet so find them for your blog. The plugin file will also be uploaded in the same place as the theme to install it and to activate it, go to your administrative control panel and click the appropriate “activate link” in the control panel.

If you have been contemplating whether a Joomla-based website is right for you, you may want to check out Joomla’s “Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Joomla.” Much of the information found in the rest of this post will be condensed from this informative web page, so if you desire more in depth knowledge, visit Joomla’s site.

One nice feature that Joomla allows you to do is take a “test drive” with their system. They let you go to a demonstration site, sign in as a backend Administrator, and change some options to see what an end product will look like. This feature helps you to get familiar with the content management system so that you can test out whether it is something that would be right for the needs of your own web site.

Joomla recommends something that you should do no matter what system you use to manage your website, and that is to plan in advance. You will want to look at the big picture. Joomla poses 4 questions that may help you to do this:

* What do you want to accomplish with your website?

* What is the nature and quantity of content you wish to present?

* Who is your audience, and how do you want to interact with them?

* What types of budgets or timetables are you working within?

Regarding any of these 4 questions, the last thing you want to do is get “web site happy” and go in without a plan. You will end up spending a great deal more money than you would had you simply sat down and focused on the answers to these questions.

So, unless you already know somebody who has explained how Joomla has benefitted their own web site, you are probably asking yourself “What can Joomla do for me?” Joomla allows the user to:

* Edit the content of every page of your site through a word processor-style interface.

* Add new pages to your site using a point-and-click interface.

* Add images and other media through Web-based uploads.

* Control site elements like navigation menus and page layout.

These are only a few of the features you will get with Joomla’s Content Management System. The company makes it beyond easy to create and manage your web site. You do not need a web site designer at your disposal to have the kind of web site you see other companies have. In fact, there is a good chance that the other sites you see from various companies are managed through someone using the Joomla system.

Although Joomla does use the PHP programming language within its system, as a user you do not need to know and understand this language to install it and create the web site in the way you want.

In the last article we began looking at Joomla and, more specifically, the handy “Beginner’s Guide to Joomla” that the makers of this content management system provides at their web site. Hopefully by this time you have taken the time to sit down and really ask yourself what you want out of your own web site, as this is always the first step. Without this foundation, your web site may become a scattered assortment of pages that have no rhyme or reason.

Per the “Beginners Guide to Joomla” recommendations, an extremely helpful thing to do after you have figured out what you want out of your web site is to check out the Joomla v1.5 Quick Start Guide. Much time was spent in creating this helpful 49 page guide, and it is full of guidance, screenshots, and everything you need to get started. Once you install the program, the guide then teaches you how to configure extensions and work with components, modules, and plugins. The guide is an asset to beginning your web site, especially if you have never used Joomla’s system before.

For each component that you wish to configure, there will be both an administrator side of it and a site element. As the Joomla site states, “Components are the major portion of your page because a component is driven by a menu item and every menu item runs a component.” Next, you have your modules. The login component of your web site is a module, as well as the footer. Modules can be integrated into the components of your site, or they can stand alone. Plugins handle the events on your site. “When an event is triggered, plugins that are registered with the application to handle that event execute.”

Site administration is a crucial component to understand, as you will need it when you find it necessary to backup and restore your database. You just never know when these instances will arise, so it is best to know how to handle them prior to even getting your web site going.

One tip that Joomla cautions against is adding anything and everything to your site at the onset of starting out just because it “looks cool.” Here is what Joomla specifically says about this: “It’s best to maximize the use of the core code before you add extensions to your site. With each extension that you install, you complicate your site administration requirements and slow your site down. Upgrades are also more complicated. Extensions are great but make certain you really need them, first.”

This is an important tip because you really do not want to complicate your web site from the beginning. This undue frustration can be eliminated simply by taking some precautions and determining what it is you really need. The extensions are there for you to utilize. However, just like every web site is different, what you will actually need for yours will be different, too. Keep this in mind as you move ahead.

These tips, and many others, can be found at Joomla’s web site. Countless guides are available so you do not have to go through setting up your web site blindly. Simply taking some extra time to learn a bit about this content management program will save you time in the end.