Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Essential Plug-ins
• Akismet
• All-in-one SEO pack
• Dagon Sitemap Generator
• E-mail users
• Exec PHP
• FeedBurner
• Google Sitemap Generator
• MaxBlogPress
• Navigation List
• Super Cache
• WP Users Online
• What would Seth Godin do?
• All-in-one SEO pack
• Dagon Sitemap Generator
• E-mail users
• Exec PHP
• FeedBurner
• Google Sitemap Generator
• MaxBlogPress
• Navigation List
• Super Cache
• WP Users Online
• What would Seth Godin do?
Conclusion
As I have attempted to make clear, there are plenty of things to think about when you are attempting to build your first moneymaking website. However, as long as you go through everything you have read of in this manual on a step-by-step basis, the actual process of creating your site, launching it and starting to make money is not especially difficult or complex.
Nevertheless, if you are coming to this for the very first time as a completely green rookie, there is undoubtedly plenty to take on, learn and mentally digest. There is also plenty of research and work to be done as well, but this in itself is no bad thing, because the more you know and understand about how running a successful online business works, the more easily you will be able to duplicate the same process over and over again in the future.
And this is the key point about achieving online success.
Everything you have read of in this report is scalable and replicable. Once you have done everything once, you can do it again in as many different markets as you want with few (if any) major deviations from what you have read of in this report.
What works for people who are interested in training boxer dogs will work for people whose passion is keeping tropical fish, photography or riding a BMX bike. Thus, what you have here is a blueprint for as many different businesses as you want to establish, run and profit from.
That being said however, there is still plenty to learn and even more to do. What you have read of is the basic plan, but you now need to expand upon this plan so that you can put the theories into practice to start making money.
Nevertheless, if you are coming to this for the very first time as a completely green rookie, there is undoubtedly plenty to take on, learn and mentally digest. There is also plenty of research and work to be done as well, but this in itself is no bad thing, because the more you know and understand about how running a successful online business works, the more easily you will be able to duplicate the same process over and over again in the future.
And this is the key point about achieving online success.
Everything you have read of in this report is scalable and replicable. Once you have done everything once, you can do it again in as many different markets as you want with few (if any) major deviations from what you have read of in this report.
What works for people who are interested in training boxer dogs will work for people whose passion is keeping tropical fish, photography or riding a BMX bike. Thus, what you have here is a blueprint for as many different businesses as you want to establish, run and profit from.
That being said however, there is still plenty to learn and even more to do. What you have read of is the basic plan, but you now need to expand upon this plan so that you can put the theories into practice to start making money.
Other Traffic Ideas
There are literally hundreds of ways that you can generate incoming visitors to your site, including writing keyword focused articles as highlighted in the previous section.
Traffic generation is in and of itself a massive topic on which hundreds of e-books and special report have been written. To go into detail about traffic generation is therefore beyond the scope of this particular guide.
Fortunately however, there are plenty of online resources we can find all the information you could ever need to kickstart your online marketing efforts.
For example, if you want detailed information about how to market using articles, the excellent Bum Marketing method will teach you everything you could ever need to know.
You can create simple, short videos and by uploading them to all of the major video networking sites like YouTube using the free up load resource of TubeMogul, you can literally drive thousands of visitors to your site from some of the most popular website in the world.
Create a free press release using the press release ‘format’ from the excellent Publicity Insider website before getting one of the free best release distribution services like PRLog to send it out on your behalf to the major news sites like Google News, Yahoo News etc.
To make this work, all you need to come up with is a newsworthy idea, and if you can’t immediately think of something, how about staging the competition online or setting up a local publicity stunt? Your news doesn’t have to be something that is world shattering, just newsworthy.
Every time you publish new content, whether it is on your site or published externally on an article directory or video network site, make sure that you submit information about that content to the major social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Propeller and Digg. When you do so, make life easy for yourself by using a mass submitter like OnlyWire instead of submitting information to each individual social site manually.
Submit free classified advertising to major online advertising resources like Craigslist and USFreeAds. Whilst you ad may not appear on these sites are very long, whilst it is visible it will drive targeted traffic to your site. And given that both sites are completely free, there is absolutely nothing to stop you submitting adverts two or three times every week.
Be under no illusions about it. Targeted visitors are the lifeblood of your business, the difference between making thousands and making nothing. Once you have your site up and running, you must therefore ensure that it becomes an integral part of your daily routine to learn everything you can about how to generate massive amounts of visitors for your site, because by doing so, you have taken a very significant step towards ensuring that your business becomes a long-term success story.
Traffic generation is in and of itself a massive topic on which hundreds of e-books and special report have been written. To go into detail about traffic generation is therefore beyond the scope of this particular guide.
Fortunately however, there are plenty of online resources we can find all the information you could ever need to kickstart your online marketing efforts.
For example, if you want detailed information about how to market using articles, the excellent Bum Marketing method will teach you everything you could ever need to know.
You can create simple, short videos and by uploading them to all of the major video networking sites like YouTube using the free up load resource of TubeMogul, you can literally drive thousands of visitors to your site from some of the most popular website in the world.
Create a free press release using the press release ‘format’ from the excellent Publicity Insider website before getting one of the free best release distribution services like PRLog to send it out on your behalf to the major news sites like Google News, Yahoo News etc.
To make this work, all you need to come up with is a newsworthy idea, and if you can’t immediately think of something, how about staging the competition online or setting up a local publicity stunt? Your news doesn’t have to be something that is world shattering, just newsworthy.
Every time you publish new content, whether it is on your site or published externally on an article directory or video network site, make sure that you submit information about that content to the major social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Propeller and Digg. When you do so, make life easy for yourself by using a mass submitter like OnlyWire instead of submitting information to each individual social site manually.
Submit free classified advertising to major online advertising resources like Craigslist and USFreeAds. Whilst you ad may not appear on these sites are very long, whilst it is visible it will drive targeted traffic to your site. And given that both sites are completely free, there is absolutely nothing to stop you submitting adverts two or three times every week.
Be under no illusions about it. Targeted visitors are the lifeblood of your business, the difference between making thousands and making nothing. Once you have your site up and running, you must therefore ensure that it becomes an integral part of your daily routine to learn everything you can about how to generate massive amounts of visitors for your site, because by doing so, you have taken a very significant step towards ensuring that your business becomes a long-term success story.
Promoting your affiliate Product
From the product information page about the dog food related e-book that you discovered earlier at Clickbank, you should be able to form a fairly clear impression of the main ideas and concepts behind that book:
You can also search the net by using the product name to find additional information about it.
I’ll gotArmed with all this information, it should be possible to write a reasonably cogent and informative review of this product. In this review, include a couple of minor weaknesses or errors if at all possible, because doing so makes it look far more like you are writing an objective, unbiased product assessment rather than a promotional piece.
Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of this review is to recommend the product you are promoting to your site visitor.
When you do so, try to encourage your visitor to buy a product from your link by offering them a related free gift or bonus for buying from your site. Depending upon what kind of product you are promoting, you should be able to find something suitable to give away by looking for appropriate PLR materials.
Materials of this nature are those which you can do almost anything with before claiming the finished product as your own. For example, you can download a PLR e-book, rewrite as much or as little of it as you want and then republished the rewritten product as if you wrote it from the beginning.
Hence, by using PLR materials, you can quickly and easily create a unique bonus product that you can give away to your site visitors to encourage them to buy the product you are promoting from the link on your review page. To find materials of this nature, either search Google using ‘your subject + PLR’ or see what is available at PLR Wholesaler.
Once your product review is complete, you need to add it to your site. However, you want to make this product review the main page of your site, one that is ideally a completely static page to which you can send a constant stream of targeted visitors, confident in the knowledge that what they are looking for will always be there.
In order to do this, go back to your WordPress administration area, click on the ‘Setting’ link (1) at the top right hand corner, followed by ‘Reading’ (2) at the top left before finally deciding how you want to create your ‘Static page’ (3) for your review:
With your review published on a static page on your site, you are now ready to start driving traffic to that individual page.
However, you should not send all of your site visitors to this page because as part of the process of generating targeted visitors, you will also generate incoming links at the same time.
Google uses these incoming links as one of their major considerations when deciding how highly they will rank individual pages of your site in the search results. One of the primary requirements they have when assessing the strength of your link network is that the link structure of your site should appear natural.
If every incoming link points at exactly the same page, it does not appear natural, meaning that you must introduce a degree of variety.
For example, if you write keyword targeted articles to promote your business before publishing them on an article directory site like EzineArticles, you will include a hyperlink in the brief biography added to that article which points at your site. Whilst a significant percentage of these articles should point at your review pages, others should point at content pages, specific articles, video is that you have embedded and so on.
This variety appears natural, which may mean that less people visit your review pages, but at the same time, it also means that Google will probably take your site far more seriously. If this is the case, you will receive plenty of free traffic from the natural search results which should more than compensate for a handful of people who never got to see your review pages.
You can also search the net by using the product name to find additional information about it.
I’ll gotArmed with all this information, it should be possible to write a reasonably cogent and informative review of this product. In this review, include a couple of minor weaknesses or errors if at all possible, because doing so makes it look far more like you are writing an objective, unbiased product assessment rather than a promotional piece.
Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of this review is to recommend the product you are promoting to your site visitor.
When you do so, try to encourage your visitor to buy a product from your link by offering them a related free gift or bonus for buying from your site. Depending upon what kind of product you are promoting, you should be able to find something suitable to give away by looking for appropriate PLR materials.
Materials of this nature are those which you can do almost anything with before claiming the finished product as your own. For example, you can download a PLR e-book, rewrite as much or as little of it as you want and then republished the rewritten product as if you wrote it from the beginning.
Hence, by using PLR materials, you can quickly and easily create a unique bonus product that you can give away to your site visitors to encourage them to buy the product you are promoting from the link on your review page. To find materials of this nature, either search Google using ‘your subject + PLR’ or see what is available at PLR Wholesaler.
Once your product review is complete, you need to add it to your site. However, you want to make this product review the main page of your site, one that is ideally a completely static page to which you can send a constant stream of targeted visitors, confident in the knowledge that what they are looking for will always be there.
In order to do this, go back to your WordPress administration area, click on the ‘Setting’ link (1) at the top right hand corner, followed by ‘Reading’ (2) at the top left before finally deciding how you want to create your ‘Static page’ (3) for your review:
With your review published on a static page on your site, you are now ready to start driving traffic to that individual page.
However, you should not send all of your site visitors to this page because as part of the process of generating targeted visitors, you will also generate incoming links at the same time.
Google uses these incoming links as one of their major considerations when deciding how highly they will rank individual pages of your site in the search results. One of the primary requirements they have when assessing the strength of your link network is that the link structure of your site should appear natural.
If every incoming link points at exactly the same page, it does not appear natural, meaning that you must introduce a degree of variety.
For example, if you write keyword targeted articles to promote your business before publishing them on an article directory site like EzineArticles, you will include a hyperlink in the brief biography added to that article which points at your site. Whilst a significant percentage of these articles should point at your review pages, others should point at content pages, specific articles, video is that you have embedded and so on.
This variety appears natural, which may mean that less people visit your review pages, but at the same time, it also means that Google will probably take your site far more seriously. If this is the case, you will receive plenty of free traffic from the natural search results which should more than compensate for a handful of people who never got to see your review pages.
Content and Product Promotion
One thing that makes WordPress site different to a standard HTML site is that everything you publish on your WordPress site appears chronologically. If you write and publish an article post on your site today and do the same thing again tomorrow, tomorrow’s article will push the one you published today further down the page.
On the other hand, one of the beauties of using WordPress is that it is incredibly easy to add new content to your site. To add new content, all you need to do is click the ‘Write’ link at the top left of the page, write what you want:
And then hit the ‘Publish’ button over to the right to have this content published to the net almost instantaneously:
You will note that you have the option of writing a new ‘Post’ or a new ‘Page’. If you choose a ‘post’, then whatever you have written will appear chronologically on the main ‘homepage’ of your site. If on the other hand you create a brand new page, there will be a link to that page from the homepage of your site, but the page that you have just created will not appear chronologically on that homepage.
In terms of the kind of content that you should add to your site, think about the kind of visitors you are going to attract. Anything that you can add to your site which will be of interest to your visitors adds extra value to it. Thus, adding written articles about training boxer dogs, videos that highlight dog training techniques, articles about various different types of dog food (don’t forget that you are promoting a dog food product) and literally anything that will be of interest to visitors is fair game.
If possible, a significant percentage of the content that you publish on your site should be unique, content that you create (or have created for you) which cannot be found anywhere else.
However, you can ‘bulk up’ your site with content that your visitors will nevertheless find valuable by downloading and republishing articles from major directory sites like EzineArticles and GoArticles on your site. As long as you leave the original author details attached to these articles, republishing them in this way to add extra content to your site is perfectly acceptable.
Nevertheless, you should aim to have a site that features content that is overwhelmingly unique. Creating content of this nature is not however particularly difficult, probably nowhere near as difficult as you might imagine. For example, visit the two article directories highlighted in the previous paragraph, read a few articles that are appropriate to your market and then re-write them in your own words.
Whilst content that other people have written is copyrighted, the ideas or concepts behind those articles are not. Consequently, there is no reason whatsoever why you cannot take other people’s facts, information and ideas and recycle them into your own unique content materials.
Look for appropriate video materials on sites like YouTube. These can be added to your site simply by copying the ‘Embed’ link that you will find next to any appropriate videos that you want to use:
Paste this link onto your site, and the video should appear, although if you have any difficulties, there are plenty of video plugins available in the WordPress directory that we considered earlier. If you cannot ‘Embed’ the video, use one of these plugins to help you.
The essential facts about the content that you and to your site is that it should be closely related to the topic of your site and it should be of interest and value to anyone who is interested in your subject matter.
On a site that is primarily focused on boxer dog training, the vast majority of your content should also focus on training boxers. However, even after adding all of this boxer dog related content, you still have no way of making money on your site as yet.
This is therefore the next step.
On the other hand, one of the beauties of using WordPress is that it is incredibly easy to add new content to your site. To add new content, all you need to do is click the ‘Write’ link at the top left of the page, write what you want:
And then hit the ‘Publish’ button over to the right to have this content published to the net almost instantaneously:
You will note that you have the option of writing a new ‘Post’ or a new ‘Page’. If you choose a ‘post’, then whatever you have written will appear chronologically on the main ‘homepage’ of your site. If on the other hand you create a brand new page, there will be a link to that page from the homepage of your site, but the page that you have just created will not appear chronologically on that homepage.
In terms of the kind of content that you should add to your site, think about the kind of visitors you are going to attract. Anything that you can add to your site which will be of interest to your visitors adds extra value to it. Thus, adding written articles about training boxer dogs, videos that highlight dog training techniques, articles about various different types of dog food (don’t forget that you are promoting a dog food product) and literally anything that will be of interest to visitors is fair game.
If possible, a significant percentage of the content that you publish on your site should be unique, content that you create (or have created for you) which cannot be found anywhere else.
However, you can ‘bulk up’ your site with content that your visitors will nevertheless find valuable by downloading and republishing articles from major directory sites like EzineArticles and GoArticles on your site. As long as you leave the original author details attached to these articles, republishing them in this way to add extra content to your site is perfectly acceptable.
Nevertheless, you should aim to have a site that features content that is overwhelmingly unique. Creating content of this nature is not however particularly difficult, probably nowhere near as difficult as you might imagine. For example, visit the two article directories highlighted in the previous paragraph, read a few articles that are appropriate to your market and then re-write them in your own words.
Whilst content that other people have written is copyrighted, the ideas or concepts behind those articles are not. Consequently, there is no reason whatsoever why you cannot take other people’s facts, information and ideas and recycle them into your own unique content materials.
Look for appropriate video materials on sites like YouTube. These can be added to your site simply by copying the ‘Embed’ link that you will find next to any appropriate videos that you want to use:
Paste this link onto your site, and the video should appear, although if you have any difficulties, there are plenty of video plugins available in the WordPress directory that we considered earlier. If you cannot ‘Embed’ the video, use one of these plugins to help you.
The essential facts about the content that you and to your site is that it should be closely related to the topic of your site and it should be of interest and value to anyone who is interested in your subject matter.
On a site that is primarily focused on boxer dog training, the vast majority of your content should also focus on training boxers. However, even after adding all of this boxer dog related content, you still have no way of making money on your site as yet.
This is therefore the next step.
Uploading the Theme
An FTP program is software that enables you to upload files from your computer to your website. There are many places where you can download a free FTP program but I would recommend Core FTP, primarily because it is extremely easy to use and of course, it is completely free.
With this FTP software installed on your computer, open the program so that you can upload the new theme to your site.
The first time you open the program, you should see one window that shows you the folders and files on your ‘local’ computer (i.e. your desktop or laptop that you are currently using).
What you therefore need to do is add information about your server (your site on your web hosts computer) so that the FTP program is able to create a connection between your computer and the remote server to which you want to upload the theme file.
Click the ‘File’ link at the top of the Core FTP window and then ‘Connect’ when it appears directly beneath the file link:
Clicking the ‘Connect’ link pulls up a window where you need to input the appropriate information that enables you to establish a connection between your local computer and the remote server:
The first thing to do is give this particular connection a name that will help you to remember which site this is (1).
This is important because an aide memoir to help you remember which site is which a little further down the line could be important. Because you can use one FTP program with as many sites as you like, meaning that it might eventually become difficult to remember which site is which if you do not use an easily distinguishable name.
Next, you need to add the domain name or IP address of your site (2) followed by the user name and password that you use to log into the cPanel for that site (3 and 4).
Finally, click the ‘Connect’ button at the bottom of the screen (5). All being well, the connection will be made between your computer and your server. Assuming that this is the case, you should now see two windows in the Core FTP client, one of which shows the files and folders on your desktop whilst the other shows the folders on your remote server:
Next, you need to find the unzipped theme file on your local machine. The easiest way of doing this is to leave the unzipped theme file on your desktop which you can then locate by clicking on the ‘Documents and Settings’ link on the ‘local’ side of your FTP program:
After this, you should be shown a list of users, so click on your own user name (I am PC User on my machine):
And then finally click on ‘Desktop’:
You should now be able to see the folder which contains the new theme that you want to upload on your desktop:
Generally speaking, you will need to open this folder to make sure that you upload only the theme and not any other files or information that might be contained in this main folder:
Okay, you have now located the appropriate theme information on your desktop. All you need to do now is upload it to your site.
In order to do so, open the ‘public_html’ folder on your remote server:
Next, look for and open the ‘wp-content’ folder:
Doing so should indicate that there are three folders in the ‘wp-content’ folder:
Perhaps not too surprisingly, you need to upload the new theme to the ‘themes’ folder. To do so is simply a question of clicking and dragging the new theme folder from your local computer across to the themes folder on your remote server.
Whilst the transfer is taking place, you should be able to see the individual files that are contained in the new theme folder ‘stacked’ at the bottom of the page. The list of files will gradually decrease as each one is transferred from your local machine to your web hosting account:
Of course, once there are no more files to be transferred across, the theme should be uploaded.
The next job is therefore to check that the transfer took place successfully and to activate the new theme assuming that the transfer has gone through.
To do this, you need to log into the Administration of your WordPress site by calling up the wp-admin login page. This can be found by typing your domain name plus wp-admin into your browser, which in my case would mean typing in boxerdogtrainingexpert.com/wp-admin.
Remember that when you were initially installing WordPress, you created a username and password as part of the installation process? This is the username and password that you need to gain access to the administration area of your WordPress site:
Once you have gained access to the administration area, click on the ‘Design’ tab at the top left-hand corner of your ‘Dashboard’ page to start the process of activating your new theme:
You should be able to see the current theme that your site is using featured at the top of page, together with the new theme that you have just uploaded further down:
If there is a screenshot of how the new theme looks included in the folder that you just uploaded, you will see this screenshot featured on the ‘Design’ page. In this particular case, because there is no screenshot included, the theme appears to be blank.
However, by clicking the theme name link underneath what would otherwise be the image, you can see an example of how the site will look before deciding whether to activate this particular theme or not:
If you are happy with the theme and want to activate it, click on the link at the top right hand corner of this page (as indicated) in order to complete the installation:
Here’s the site as it now appears, which looks considerably more like how a site that focuses on training dogs should appear.
There are a few final admin tasks that you should complete before starting to populate the site with content.
Firstly, remove the ‘Links’ that appear on the right hand of the page by default. They are not links to your sites and the only people who will benefit from them are the people to whom you are linking, so get rid of them.
You do this by clicking ‘Manage’, then ‘Links’. Check the box next to ‘Name’ (so that they are all removed at once) and finally, hit the ‘Delete’ button:
I would also recommend that in order to improve the functionality of your site and to make it more attractive to the search engines, you should download and install various plugins onto your site.
Plugins are small programs that add additional functionality to WordPress – based sites, and as the majority of them are free, there is no reason not to add them to your site.
You will find a list of all the plug-ins that I would recommend in ‘Appendix A’ at the end of this book, although as you can see from the WordPress plug-ins directory page, there are currently over 4200 plugins available:
Consequently, no matter what you want to do with your WordPress site, there is probably a plugin available that will help you to do it.
Once you have downloaded the plugins that you want to install on your site, uploading them to your site is pretty much the same as uploading the theme that you installed earlier.
Find the unzipped plugin folders on your local machine before clicking and dragging them to the ‘plugins’ folder on your remote server. You locate this from the ‘public_html’ and then the ‘wp-content’ folder:
To activate these plugins after you have uploaded them, click the ‘Plugins’ link at the top right hand corner of the ‘Dashboard’ page:
Then ‘Activate’ the plug-ins shown in the list on that page:
The next step is to change the ‘Permalinks’ structure of your site. Permalinks is the name given to the unique URL that is attached to every page or post you add to your site, which by default looks something like http://example.com/?p=N.
Not only is this a pretty ugly URL, it is also pretty useless as well because it gives no indication to either your human visitors or to the search engines what this particular post or page is all about. Most importantly, it does not include the all-important keyword phrase for which you want to achieve search engine rankings. Thus, using the standard, default URL serves very little purpose.
You should therefore follow these guidance notes for changing the Permalinks to change the Permalink structure of your site. In this way you ensure that the URL which is attached to every content piece you publish is keyword relevant and indicative of what that content is all about.
Okay, you are now good to go. The next step is to start adding content to your site, information of the kind that people who interested in training boxer dogs would find to be of interest. You also of course need to add information about the affiliate product that you are promoting as well
With this FTP software installed on your computer, open the program so that you can upload the new theme to your site.
The first time you open the program, you should see one window that shows you the folders and files on your ‘local’ computer (i.e. your desktop or laptop that you are currently using).
What you therefore need to do is add information about your server (your site on your web hosts computer) so that the FTP program is able to create a connection between your computer and the remote server to which you want to upload the theme file.
Click the ‘File’ link at the top of the Core FTP window and then ‘Connect’ when it appears directly beneath the file link:
Clicking the ‘Connect’ link pulls up a window where you need to input the appropriate information that enables you to establish a connection between your local computer and the remote server:
The first thing to do is give this particular connection a name that will help you to remember which site this is (1).
This is important because an aide memoir to help you remember which site is which a little further down the line could be important. Because you can use one FTP program with as many sites as you like, meaning that it might eventually become difficult to remember which site is which if you do not use an easily distinguishable name.
Next, you need to add the domain name or IP address of your site (2) followed by the user name and password that you use to log into the cPanel for that site (3 and 4).
Finally, click the ‘Connect’ button at the bottom of the screen (5). All being well, the connection will be made between your computer and your server. Assuming that this is the case, you should now see two windows in the Core FTP client, one of which shows the files and folders on your desktop whilst the other shows the folders on your remote server:
Next, you need to find the unzipped theme file on your local machine. The easiest way of doing this is to leave the unzipped theme file on your desktop which you can then locate by clicking on the ‘Documents and Settings’ link on the ‘local’ side of your FTP program:
After this, you should be shown a list of users, so click on your own user name (I am PC User on my machine):
And then finally click on ‘Desktop’:
You should now be able to see the folder which contains the new theme that you want to upload on your desktop:
Generally speaking, you will need to open this folder to make sure that you upload only the theme and not any other files or information that might be contained in this main folder:
Okay, you have now located the appropriate theme information on your desktop. All you need to do now is upload it to your site.
In order to do so, open the ‘public_html’ folder on your remote server:
Next, look for and open the ‘wp-content’ folder:
Doing so should indicate that there are three folders in the ‘wp-content’ folder:
Perhaps not too surprisingly, you need to upload the new theme to the ‘themes’ folder. To do so is simply a question of clicking and dragging the new theme folder from your local computer across to the themes folder on your remote server.
Whilst the transfer is taking place, you should be able to see the individual files that are contained in the new theme folder ‘stacked’ at the bottom of the page. The list of files will gradually decrease as each one is transferred from your local machine to your web hosting account:
Of course, once there are no more files to be transferred across, the theme should be uploaded.
The next job is therefore to check that the transfer took place successfully and to activate the new theme assuming that the transfer has gone through.
To do this, you need to log into the Administration of your WordPress site by calling up the wp-admin login page. This can be found by typing your domain name plus wp-admin into your browser, which in my case would mean typing in boxerdogtrainingexpert.com/wp-admin.
Remember that when you were initially installing WordPress, you created a username and password as part of the installation process? This is the username and password that you need to gain access to the administration area of your WordPress site:
Once you have gained access to the administration area, click on the ‘Design’ tab at the top left-hand corner of your ‘Dashboard’ page to start the process of activating your new theme:
You should be able to see the current theme that your site is using featured at the top of page, together with the new theme that you have just uploaded further down:
If there is a screenshot of how the new theme looks included in the folder that you just uploaded, you will see this screenshot featured on the ‘Design’ page. In this particular case, because there is no screenshot included, the theme appears to be blank.
However, by clicking the theme name link underneath what would otherwise be the image, you can see an example of how the site will look before deciding whether to activate this particular theme or not:
If you are happy with the theme and want to activate it, click on the link at the top right hand corner of this page (as indicated) in order to complete the installation:
Here’s the site as it now appears, which looks considerably more like how a site that focuses on training dogs should appear.
There are a few final admin tasks that you should complete before starting to populate the site with content.
Firstly, remove the ‘Links’ that appear on the right hand of the page by default. They are not links to your sites and the only people who will benefit from them are the people to whom you are linking, so get rid of them.
You do this by clicking ‘Manage’, then ‘Links’. Check the box next to ‘Name’ (so that they are all removed at once) and finally, hit the ‘Delete’ button:
I would also recommend that in order to improve the functionality of your site and to make it more attractive to the search engines, you should download and install various plugins onto your site.
Plugins are small programs that add additional functionality to WordPress – based sites, and as the majority of them are free, there is no reason not to add them to your site.
You will find a list of all the plug-ins that I would recommend in ‘Appendix A’ at the end of this book, although as you can see from the WordPress plug-ins directory page, there are currently over 4200 plugins available:
Consequently, no matter what you want to do with your WordPress site, there is probably a plugin available that will help you to do it.
Once you have downloaded the plugins that you want to install on your site, uploading them to your site is pretty much the same as uploading the theme that you installed earlier.
Find the unzipped plugin folders on your local machine before clicking and dragging them to the ‘plugins’ folder on your remote server. You locate this from the ‘public_html’ and then the ‘wp-content’ folder:
To activate these plugins after you have uploaded them, click the ‘Plugins’ link at the top right hand corner of the ‘Dashboard’ page:
Then ‘Activate’ the plug-ins shown in the list on that page:
The next step is to change the ‘Permalinks’ structure of your site. Permalinks is the name given to the unique URL that is attached to every page or post you add to your site, which by default looks something like http://example.com/?p=N.
Not only is this a pretty ugly URL, it is also pretty useless as well because it gives no indication to either your human visitors or to the search engines what this particular post or page is all about. Most importantly, it does not include the all-important keyword phrase for which you want to achieve search engine rankings. Thus, using the standard, default URL serves very little purpose.
You should therefore follow these guidance notes for changing the Permalinks to change the Permalink structure of your site. In this way you ensure that the URL which is attached to every content piece you publish is keyword relevant and indicative of what that content is all about.
Okay, you are now good to go. The next step is to start adding content to your site, information of the kind that people who interested in training boxer dogs would find to be of interest. You also of course need to add information about the affiliate product that you are promoting as well
Two Major site building options
As you saw previously, your Hostgator account includes a free site building program, and if the kind of site that you want to build happens to match what Hostgator are able to offer, then by all means go ahead and use their program.
Unfortunately however, it is almost certain that the type of site that you can build using the site builder that they offer is not going to generate the kind of website that you want to build.
After all, you are going to create a site that is focused on providing boxer dog training information whilst promoting a dog food related information product from that site.
Consequently, the first thing to consider is, what are you going to feature on your site apart from details of the affiliate product that you are promoting?
The answer to the question is, you are going to provide your visitors with information about dogs and dog training. Even more specifically, the majority of the content materials (i.e. information) on offer are going to focus on providing information that relates to training boxer dogs.
Thus, the type of site that you can create using the free Hostgator site builder program is probably not going to be particularly well-suited to what you want to do. You therefore have two choices of how you create your site.
Option one is to do things the ‘traditional’ way by building your site using HTML. This may sound as if it might be complex or difficult, but in reality, it is not.
If you have no experience of using HTML, it is not particularly difficult to build a site in this way because there are plenty of sites that provide free information about how to use HTML. Simply run a Google search for ‘HTML tutorials’ and you will find plenty of sites like this one where you can learn everything you need to know about HTML scripting.
Using the information from HTML tutorial sites like these, you should be able to create a simple web site pretty much as you want it to be, but it is not necessarily going to be a quick or easy process.
In order to do so however, it is definitely going to be easier to use a WYSIWYG (‘what you see is what you get’) site editor as an editor of this nature makes it far easier to see what you are doing as you are doing it.
Download the excellent (and completely free) NVU WYSIWYG site editor so that you can use it to build your HTML site quickly and easily.
Another HTML option is to start from a site template of the kind that can be downloaded free from OSWD or Free Web Templates. There are plenty of free templates available on the net and if you can find anything that appears suitable for the kind of site you want to build, using a template makes a great deal of sense.
Doing so obviously cuts down the amount of time and effort you need to expend on creating your website which is an important consideration. It is not until your site is finished and published that you can start to earn money, hence getting to that situation as quickly as possible is definitely something to aim for.
The only problem with the majority of free templates that are available on the net is that most of them are not really suited to online marketing sites. Consequently, starting from a template could mean that you would have to do so much work to modify it to make it ‘match’ your requirements that it might have been quicker and easier to start from scratch in the first place.
On the other hand, if you want a site that is perfectly matched to your own requirements, one that looks and does exactly what you want it to do, then creating your site using HTML should probably be your favored option. However, in this case, you will almost inevitably have to start from scratch, because using a site builder or a template is unlikely to come anywhere near what you want.
As previously suggested, creating a site using HTML can be a slow and relatively time-consuming process, particularly if you are learning how to code in HTML as you are going along.
For this reason, I would or most certainly recommend an alternative non-HTML site building option mainly because this alternative method is quick, easy and creates superbly effective websites.
The alternative that I would recommend, particularly to an online marketing beginner, is WordPress. This is a site building resource that was originally a blogging platform which has developed over the past two or three years to such an extent that it is now a highly effective (and extremely simple) site building tool.
Using this particular site building resource, even the greenest beginner can create a website within an hour or so in a ‘worst-case scenario’. It should in fact be far quicker and easier than this.
To install WordPress on BoxerDogTrainingExpert.com, you have two choices.
The first option is to download the program from WordPress.org before installing it manually by following what the site calls the ‘famous 5-minute installation’. Whilst I would suspect that the first time you are installing it, it will take a little longer than five minutes, it should nevertheless take no more than an hour to install and activate the site from beginning to end.
The alternative installation method does however genuinely take less than five minutes. Open the cPanel of your Hostgator account and look for the icon for ‘Fantastico’ or ‘Fantastico De Luxe’ near the bottom of the page under ‘Software/Services’:
‘Fantastico’ is a suite of programs that are already pre-installed on your site, ready to be activated whenever you decide that you want to start using that particular program. One of the programs that is included in the ‘Fantastico’ suite is WordPress. All that you need to do to prompt program activation you need to do is click on the WordPress link in the program list:
And then follow the step by step installation instructions. The first thing you need to do is click on the ‘New Installation’ icon (on the next page) that will transfer you to the main installation information page as shown below:
At the top of the page (1) will be the main domain name, below which you have the option of choosing a sub-directory of your site in which to install WordPress (2). However, because in this case, you want to install the software on the main BoxerDogTrainingExpert.com site, you would leave this box empty.
Next, you need to create an Administration username and password (3 and 4), after which you move onto the ‘Base configuration’. The ‘Admin nickname’ that you choose for yourself (5) is the name that will appear as the author every time you add new information or content to your site, with the e-mail address (6) being the one to which any queries or comments that are submitted to your site by e-mail.
Next, you give the site a name (7) and a ‘byline’ that will appear underneath that name at the top of your WordPress page (8). Finally, click the ‘Install WordPress’ button (9) and that is the installation essentially complete. Using the information from the previous screen shot, you now have a site that looks something like this:
It is plain and basically little more than functional but at least you have a site that is live and published on the net.
The next step is to change the appearance of your site by finding and installing a new site template – known in ‘WordPress-speak’ as a theme – to make the site look more relevant to your subject matter.
Unfortunately however, it is almost certain that the type of site that you can build using the site builder that they offer is not going to generate the kind of website that you want to build.
After all, you are going to create a site that is focused on providing boxer dog training information whilst promoting a dog food related information product from that site.
Consequently, the first thing to consider is, what are you going to feature on your site apart from details of the affiliate product that you are promoting?
The answer to the question is, you are going to provide your visitors with information about dogs and dog training. Even more specifically, the majority of the content materials (i.e. information) on offer are going to focus on providing information that relates to training boxer dogs.
Thus, the type of site that you can create using the free Hostgator site builder program is probably not going to be particularly well-suited to what you want to do. You therefore have two choices of how you create your site.
Option one is to do things the ‘traditional’ way by building your site using HTML. This may sound as if it might be complex or difficult, but in reality, it is not.
If you have no experience of using HTML, it is not particularly difficult to build a site in this way because there are plenty of sites that provide free information about how to use HTML. Simply run a Google search for ‘HTML tutorials’ and you will find plenty of sites like this one where you can learn everything you need to know about HTML scripting.
Using the information from HTML tutorial sites like these, you should be able to create a simple web site pretty much as you want it to be, but it is not necessarily going to be a quick or easy process.
In order to do so however, it is definitely going to be easier to use a WYSIWYG (‘what you see is what you get’) site editor as an editor of this nature makes it far easier to see what you are doing as you are doing it.
Download the excellent (and completely free) NVU WYSIWYG site editor so that you can use it to build your HTML site quickly and easily.
Another HTML option is to start from a site template of the kind that can be downloaded free from OSWD or Free Web Templates. There are plenty of free templates available on the net and if you can find anything that appears suitable for the kind of site you want to build, using a template makes a great deal of sense.
Doing so obviously cuts down the amount of time and effort you need to expend on creating your website which is an important consideration. It is not until your site is finished and published that you can start to earn money, hence getting to that situation as quickly as possible is definitely something to aim for.
The only problem with the majority of free templates that are available on the net is that most of them are not really suited to online marketing sites. Consequently, starting from a template could mean that you would have to do so much work to modify it to make it ‘match’ your requirements that it might have been quicker and easier to start from scratch in the first place.
On the other hand, if you want a site that is perfectly matched to your own requirements, one that looks and does exactly what you want it to do, then creating your site using HTML should probably be your favored option. However, in this case, you will almost inevitably have to start from scratch, because using a site builder or a template is unlikely to come anywhere near what you want.
As previously suggested, creating a site using HTML can be a slow and relatively time-consuming process, particularly if you are learning how to code in HTML as you are going along.
For this reason, I would or most certainly recommend an alternative non-HTML site building option mainly because this alternative method is quick, easy and creates superbly effective websites.
The alternative that I would recommend, particularly to an online marketing beginner, is WordPress. This is a site building resource that was originally a blogging platform which has developed over the past two or three years to such an extent that it is now a highly effective (and extremely simple) site building tool.
Using this particular site building resource, even the greenest beginner can create a website within an hour or so in a ‘worst-case scenario’. It should in fact be far quicker and easier than this.
To install WordPress on BoxerDogTrainingExpert.com, you have two choices.
The first option is to download the program from WordPress.org before installing it manually by following what the site calls the ‘famous 5-minute installation’. Whilst I would suspect that the first time you are installing it, it will take a little longer than five minutes, it should nevertheless take no more than an hour to install and activate the site from beginning to end.
The alternative installation method does however genuinely take less than five minutes. Open the cPanel of your Hostgator account and look for the icon for ‘Fantastico’ or ‘Fantastico De Luxe’ near the bottom of the page under ‘Software/Services’:
And then follow the step by step installation instructions. The first thing you need to do is click on the ‘New Installation’ icon (on the next page) that will transfer you to the main installation information page as shown below:
At the top of the page (1) will be the main domain name, below which you have the option of choosing a sub-directory of your site in which to install WordPress (2). However, because in this case, you want to install the software on the main BoxerDogTrainingExpert.com site, you would leave this box empty.
Next, you need to create an Administration username and password (3 and 4), after which you move onto the ‘Base configuration’. The ‘Admin nickname’ that you choose for yourself (5) is the name that will appear as the author every time you add new information or content to your site, with the e-mail address (6) being the one to which any queries or comments that are submitted to your site by e-mail.
Next, you give the site a name (7) and a ‘byline’ that will appear underneath that name at the top of your WordPress page (8). Finally, click the ‘Install WordPress’ button (9) and that is the installation essentially complete. Using the information from the previous screen shot, you now have a site that looks something like this:
It is plain and basically little more than functional but at least you have a site that is live and published on the net.
The next step is to change the appearance of your site by finding and installing a new site template – known in ‘WordPress-speak’ as a theme – to make the site look more relevant to your subject matter.
Web hosting is the next step
With your domain name registered, the next step is to set up a web hosting account, to ‘rent’ space on a computer (known as a ‘server’) from where your website can be presented to the world via the internet.
There are literally hundreds of companies in the web hosting market, each of them vying for your business. However, you have to be extremely cautious when selecting a web hosting company because it does not necessarily follow that the company or organization that immediately appears to be the best will in fact be the company who provide the highest level of service.
For instance, because the web hosting market is an extremely competitive place, many web hosts use rock bottom prices as their main point of attraction. The problem with this is that the majority of web hosts who charge what quite honestly represent uneconomic prices do so by cutting or skimping on the services that they provide.
This is a critically important point to grasp because you are always reliant on your web host to keep your website live and on the net. You want your site to be visible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and anything that potentially threatens that visibility is a threat to your business as well.
Unfortunately however, no matter which web hosting company you choose a, there is always a possibility that your site will occasionally have problems, times when for example it might ‘crash’ meaning that no visitor is able to see your site or learn about what you have to offer.
In this case, you must been 100% confident that your web host has 24 hour service so that they can repair your site no matter what time of the day or night it is.
The chances are that if you go for a web host who is charging rock bottom prices, they will not provide 24 hour service, working only normal working hours instead. In this case, your site and therefore your business could be offline for a period of 12 hours, during which time you could lose an awful lot of sales and money.
In short, choosing a web host because they are the cheapest is normally a completely false economy, a move that will save you a couple of dollars every month but might ultimately cost you several hundreds of dollars over the course of the year.
Most reputable web hosts guarantee a certain percentage ‘uptime’, meaning that they guarantee that your site will always be alive for a guaranteed minimum percentage of every hour, every month. Consequently, you should check with any web host you are considering using what their uptime guarantee is, because it is crucially that your site is up at all times.
You also need to consider the amount of disk space that the web host you are considering using offers. Check on the bandwidth that would be associated with your account should you choose this particular host too.
Whilst the majority of webmasters never come anywhere near using their full allocation of disk space (which basically equates to the number of megabytes of information that make up your site), bandwidth represents the amount of traffic or number of people who can see your site every month.
Hence, you need to make sure that the web host you’re considering offers sufficient bandwidth to enable everyone who tries to visit your website to do so successfully.
Another important consideration is that some web hosts are far more internet business friendly than others. This is important because if your host understands the demands and requirements of online business, they are far more likely to be flexible than would be a hosting company who are not particularly au fait with the world of online commerce.
For all these reasons, the web hosting company that I would recommend to get you started is Hostgator.com which is a hosting company that is used and recommended by many thousands of experienced online marketers.
They are a hosting organization that is well versed in the demands and requirements of the online marketing community, they offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee and they use the excellent cPanel through which you control your site:
As you can see from the screenshot, Hostgator even offers a free site building program resource. Although this particular site builder is not primarily focused on building the kind of website that you need for online marketing purposes, it is nevertheless a reasonable fallback option that you can use to construct a site extremely quickly should the need arise.
There are undoubtedly cheaper web hosts in the market than Hostgator but at $7.95 a month for their more-than-adequate ‘Baby’ hosting plan, this represents a deal that is pretty unbeatable when everything that is offered is taken into account:
You will for example note that the bandwidth and disk space is unlimited as is the number of domains that you can host under the same account.
In effect, you could construct as many websites as you want attached to as many domain names as you can afford and host every one of them on the same account. Were you to do so, the fact that there is unlimited disk space and bandwidth available means that you really only need this one hosting account at least for the foreseeable future.
There are literally hundreds of companies in the web hosting market, each of them vying for your business. However, you have to be extremely cautious when selecting a web hosting company because it does not necessarily follow that the company or organization that immediately appears to be the best will in fact be the company who provide the highest level of service.
For instance, because the web hosting market is an extremely competitive place, many web hosts use rock bottom prices as their main point of attraction. The problem with this is that the majority of web hosts who charge what quite honestly represent uneconomic prices do so by cutting or skimping on the services that they provide.
This is a critically important point to grasp because you are always reliant on your web host to keep your website live and on the net. You want your site to be visible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and anything that potentially threatens that visibility is a threat to your business as well.
Unfortunately however, no matter which web hosting company you choose a, there is always a possibility that your site will occasionally have problems, times when for example it might ‘crash’ meaning that no visitor is able to see your site or learn about what you have to offer.
In this case, you must been 100% confident that your web host has 24 hour service so that they can repair your site no matter what time of the day or night it is.
The chances are that if you go for a web host who is charging rock bottom prices, they will not provide 24 hour service, working only normal working hours instead. In this case, your site and therefore your business could be offline for a period of 12 hours, during which time you could lose an awful lot of sales and money.
In short, choosing a web host because they are the cheapest is normally a completely false economy, a move that will save you a couple of dollars every month but might ultimately cost you several hundreds of dollars over the course of the year.
Most reputable web hosts guarantee a certain percentage ‘uptime’, meaning that they guarantee that your site will always be alive for a guaranteed minimum percentage of every hour, every month. Consequently, you should check with any web host you are considering using what their uptime guarantee is, because it is crucially that your site is up at all times.
You also need to consider the amount of disk space that the web host you are considering using offers. Check on the bandwidth that would be associated with your account should you choose this particular host too.
Whilst the majority of webmasters never come anywhere near using their full allocation of disk space (which basically equates to the number of megabytes of information that make up your site), bandwidth represents the amount of traffic or number of people who can see your site every month.
Hence, you need to make sure that the web host you’re considering offers sufficient bandwidth to enable everyone who tries to visit your website to do so successfully.
Another important consideration is that some web hosts are far more internet business friendly than others. This is important because if your host understands the demands and requirements of online business, they are far more likely to be flexible than would be a hosting company who are not particularly au fait with the world of online commerce.
For all these reasons, the web hosting company that I would recommend to get you started is Hostgator.com which is a hosting company that is used and recommended by many thousands of experienced online marketers.
They are a hosting organization that is well versed in the demands and requirements of the online marketing community, they offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee and they use the excellent cPanel through which you control your site:
As you can see from the screenshot, Hostgator even offers a free site building program resource. Although this particular site builder is not primarily focused on building the kind of website that you need for online marketing purposes, it is nevertheless a reasonable fallback option that you can use to construct a site extremely quickly should the need arise.
There are undoubtedly cheaper web hosts in the market than Hostgator but at $7.95 a month for their more-than-adequate ‘Baby’ hosting plan, this represents a deal that is pretty unbeatable when everything that is offered is taken into account:
You will for example note that the bandwidth and disk space is unlimited as is the number of domains that you can host under the same account.
In effect, you could construct as many websites as you want attached to as many domain names as you can afford and host every one of them on the same account. Were you to do so, the fact that there is unlimited disk space and bandwidth available means that you really only need this one hosting account at least for the foreseeable future.
Finding a new Theme
There are dozens of websites where people make free WordPress themes available. No matter what the subject matter or topic of your site is, it is likely that you will be to find a theme that comes very close to matching what you want.
Try searching Google using a search term like ‘free WP themes’ or just ‘WP themes’ to see what you can find or try to shortcut the process of finding something you really like by searching for ‘your topic + theme’. Alternatively, try searching any of these sites to see what there is that is appropriate to your topic or subject matter:
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/
http://topwpthemes.com/
http://www.wptmp.com/
http://www.freewpthemes.net/
http://www.wpthemes360.com/
http://www.elegantwpthemes.com/
http://wptheme.net
http://wpthemeland.com
Many of these sites are searchable, so you should be able to find something that matches your requirements fairly easily. This would work for my dog related site, although the puppy pictured is not a boxer as I would prefer it to be (but is often possible to change the header graphics fairly easily in any case, so this will be fine to start with):
I would click the ‘Download’ link to grab this particular theme. When you download it, the theme will be zipped, so you need to unzip it once it is on your machine.
The next job is to upload it to my site, which necessitate using an FTP program.
Try searching Google using a search term like ‘free WP themes’ or just ‘WP themes’ to see what you can find or try to shortcut the process of finding something you really like by searching for ‘your topic + theme’. Alternatively, try searching any of these sites to see what there is that is appropriate to your topic or subject matter:
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/
http://topwpthemes.com/
http://www.wptmp.com/
http://www.freewpthemes.net/
http://www.wpthemes360.com/
http://www.elegantwpthemes.com/
http://wptheme.net
http://wpthemeland.com
Many of these sites are searchable, so you should be able to find something that matches your requirements fairly easily. This would work for my dog related site, although the puppy pictured is not a boxer as I would prefer it to be (but is often possible to change the header graphics fairly easily in any case, so this will be fine to start with):
I would click the ‘Download’ link to grab this particular theme. When you download it, the theme will be zipped, so you need to unzip it once it is on your machine.
The next job is to upload it to my site, which necessitate using an FTP program.
Changing the Domain Name Server
With your domain name registered and hosting account set up, the final job is to tie the two things together so that when people type your domain name or URL into their web browser, The Internet Company immediately ‘point’ that query at your site on your Hostgator account.
Incidentally, although you probably noticed when you are registering your domain name that The Internet Company also offer web hosting, the majority of online marketing experts recommend that you should never register your domain name and host your account with the same organization.
Whilst you can be pretty confident that doing so is not going to represent any kind of problem 99.99% of the time, you are nevertheless entrusting the whole of your business to one organization if you use the same company to register your domain name and host your account.
Consequently, if for whatever reason, the company concerned did have problems, your business could be wiped out by their difficulties. In this scenario, it is not impossible that your site would disappear and your hosting account might come inoperable for an indeterminate period of time, meaning that you are out of business with no idea of when you are likely to get back online.
This is obviously not a risk you want to take. It is therefore the reason why you should register your domain and set up a hosting account with different organizations, which is in turn the reason why you need to change the DNS.
In order to do so, open up your domain name registry account, find the specific domain that you want to make alterations to and click on it. When you do so, you should see a ‘Nameservers’ button at the top of the page that looks something like this:
On the next page, take the information that Hostgator will have sent you by e-mail concerning their own nameserver and copy/paste those nameserver details into the appropriate boxes on the detail change form as indicated here (you almost always need to change two nameserver addresses):
Click on the orange ‘OK’ button and you should see a message that tells you the changes will be made in the next few hours.
Generally speaking, it is never likely to take more than 24 to 48 hours before these changes are propagated although in my own experience, it generally tends to happen far more quickly than this.
Once these changes are made, you are now in a situation where anyone who types your domain name into their browser will be immediately redirected to your Hostgator web hosting account where they will see your site.
However, there is obviously nothing on that site at the moment, so creating your site is the next step.
Incidentally, although you probably noticed when you are registering your domain name that The Internet Company also offer web hosting, the majority of online marketing experts recommend that you should never register your domain name and host your account with the same organization.
Whilst you can be pretty confident that doing so is not going to represent any kind of problem 99.99% of the time, you are nevertheless entrusting the whole of your business to one organization if you use the same company to register your domain name and host your account.
Consequently, if for whatever reason, the company concerned did have problems, your business could be wiped out by their difficulties. In this scenario, it is not impossible that your site would disappear and your hosting account might come inoperable for an indeterminate period of time, meaning that you are out of business with no idea of when you are likely to get back online.
This is obviously not a risk you want to take. It is therefore the reason why you should register your domain and set up a hosting account with different organizations, which is in turn the reason why you need to change the DNS.
In order to do so, open up your domain name registry account, find the specific domain that you want to make alterations to and click on it. When you do so, you should see a ‘Nameservers’ button at the top of the page that looks something like this:
On the next page, take the information that Hostgator will have sent you by e-mail concerning their own nameserver and copy/paste those nameserver details into the appropriate boxes on the detail change form as indicated here (you almost always need to change two nameserver addresses):
Click on the orange ‘OK’ button and you should see a message that tells you the changes will be made in the next few hours.
Generally speaking, it is never likely to take more than 24 to 48 hours before these changes are propagated although in my own experience, it generally tends to happen far more quickly than this.
Once these changes are made, you are now in a situation where anyone who types your domain name into their browser will be immediately redirected to your Hostgator web hosting account where they will see your site.
However, there is obviously nothing on that site at the moment, so creating your site is the next step.
Choose an Appropriate Domain Name
Although you are going to attempt to generate income by promoting a dog food related products as an affiliate, the primary focus of your site is going to be on boxer dog training. The next job is to register a domain name that is relevant to the subject matter of the site that you are going to create.
Ideally, this domain name should be one that is directly related to the primary subject matter of your site, although that may be situations where you choose a domain name that is related to the product or service you are promoting.
This is important, because having a domain name that is appropriate or related to the primary subject matter of your site makes it easier for both human visitors and the search engines to understand what your site is about from that domain name.
It also helps when you are promoting your business a little further down the line, so choosing the domain name that is directly related to your topic has plenty of value to your business.
I mentioned that sometimes, you will choose a domain name that is related to a product or service that you are promoting. This is most appropriate if you were going to create your own product as in this case, you would try to give the product a name that is directly related to your subject matter.
Hence in this situation, the topic of your site, product name and the domain name you choose would all logically tie together very neatly.
For example, if you were going to make your own product that is specifically related to boxer dog training, you would choose a name for your product where the appropriate domain name is still available.
If you were going to create ‘The Boxer Training Bible’ for example, you would check that the same domain name is available before starting the product creation process.
As every domain name on the internet has to be unique (there is, for example, only one Google.com or yahoo.com), if someone else has already grabbed the name, you cannot do so.
Because every domain name is unique, you should try to come up with a list of the least half a dozen viable alternative names before beginning the registration process. By doing so, you ensure that a least one of the names which you are considering registering is still available.
In the current scenario, the primary thrust of the site that you are considering building is to give people information about dog training and in particular, how to train boxer dogs. Consequently, it makes sense to focus on boxer dog training when you are registering your domain name.
In order to register a domain name of your choice, you need to use an online domain name registration organization like The Internet Company. On their website, you simply type in the domain name that you want to register to check for availability.
This is a name that might work for the market in which you are thinking of building a business:
Click on the ‘Search’ button to check on availability and note that I have left the domain name suffix on the default setting so that I am applying for a ‘.com’ name. Wherever possible, you should always use .com in preference to any other suffix because despite the surfeit of new domain name suffixes over the past few years, the vast majority of net users still think of the World Wide Web as being a ‘.com place’.
This in turn means that when they vaguely remember a domain name, most people will type their best guess plus .com into their browser window. Consequently, if you have any other suffix rather than owning a .com site, you will lose visitors who are trying to remember the name or URL of your site.
As suggested, because every domain name is unique, you will undoubtedly find that many of the most popular names that immediately pop into your head when you are tried to think of something suitable for your new site will already be taken.
However, in this case, the name that I have selected is still available, so I would go through the process of registering the domain on The Internet Company website:
As part of the domain registration process, you will be offered a choice of how long you want to register the name for. Although you can register for as short a period as only one year, I would recommend that you register your new domain for at least two years. This is because it is generally agreed that Google and the other major search engines accord more credibility to domain names that are registered for more than one year than they do to those that are registered for the shortest possible time.
However, there is a counterargument to this, especially in a situation where you register a domain name that is very specific to one particular product (as many marketers do).
In this case, you have no way of knowing how long the product you are promoting is going to be popular in the market, and it becomes unpopular, no-one will be interested in buying it. It is therefore possible that you could end up with a product-specific domain name with no attractive product that you can realistically promote by using it. Thus, there is a degree of care necessary if you’re going to register a domain name that is very product specific.
Remembering however that the main target market for the site that I am creating in this particular example is populated by people who are looking for information pertaining to training boxer dogs and that I am not promoting a specific product in the domain name, this is not a problem.
I would therefore register this particular domain name for a period of at least two years, which is something I would always recommend you should consider. BoxerDogTrainingExpert.com it is then!
Ideally, this domain name should be one that is directly related to the primary subject matter of your site, although that may be situations where you choose a domain name that is related to the product or service you are promoting.
This is important, because having a domain name that is appropriate or related to the primary subject matter of your site makes it easier for both human visitors and the search engines to understand what your site is about from that domain name.
It also helps when you are promoting your business a little further down the line, so choosing the domain name that is directly related to your topic has plenty of value to your business.
I mentioned that sometimes, you will choose a domain name that is related to a product or service that you are promoting. This is most appropriate if you were going to create your own product as in this case, you would try to give the product a name that is directly related to your subject matter.
Hence in this situation, the topic of your site, product name and the domain name you choose would all logically tie together very neatly.
For example, if you were going to make your own product that is specifically related to boxer dog training, you would choose a name for your product where the appropriate domain name is still available.
If you were going to create ‘The Boxer Training Bible’ for example, you would check that the same domain name is available before starting the product creation process.
As every domain name on the internet has to be unique (there is, for example, only one Google.com or yahoo.com), if someone else has already grabbed the name, you cannot do so.
Because every domain name is unique, you should try to come up with a list of the least half a dozen viable alternative names before beginning the registration process. By doing so, you ensure that a least one of the names which you are considering registering is still available.
In the current scenario, the primary thrust of the site that you are considering building is to give people information about dog training and in particular, how to train boxer dogs. Consequently, it makes sense to focus on boxer dog training when you are registering your domain name.
In order to register a domain name of your choice, you need to use an online domain name registration organization like The Internet Company. On their website, you simply type in the domain name that you want to register to check for availability.
This is a name that might work for the market in which you are thinking of building a business:
Click on the ‘Search’ button to check on availability and note that I have left the domain name suffix on the default setting so that I am applying for a ‘.com’ name. Wherever possible, you should always use .com in preference to any other suffix because despite the surfeit of new domain name suffixes over the past few years, the vast majority of net users still think of the World Wide Web as being a ‘.com place’.
This in turn means that when they vaguely remember a domain name, most people will type their best guess plus .com into their browser window. Consequently, if you have any other suffix rather than owning a .com site, you will lose visitors who are trying to remember the name or URL of your site.
As suggested, because every domain name is unique, you will undoubtedly find that many of the most popular names that immediately pop into your head when you are tried to think of something suitable for your new site will already be taken.
However, in this case, the name that I have selected is still available, so I would go through the process of registering the domain on The Internet Company website:
As part of the domain registration process, you will be offered a choice of how long you want to register the name for. Although you can register for as short a period as only one year, I would recommend that you register your new domain for at least two years. This is because it is generally agreed that Google and the other major search engines accord more credibility to domain names that are registered for more than one year than they do to those that are registered for the shortest possible time.
However, there is a counterargument to this, especially in a situation where you register a domain name that is very specific to one particular product (as many marketers do).
In this case, you have no way of knowing how long the product you are promoting is going to be popular in the market, and it becomes unpopular, no-one will be interested in buying it. It is therefore possible that you could end up with a product-specific domain name with no attractive product that you can realistically promote by using it. Thus, there is a degree of care necessary if you’re going to register a domain name that is very product specific.
Remembering however that the main target market for the site that I am creating in this particular example is populated by people who are looking for information pertaining to training boxer dogs and that I am not promoting a specific product in the domain name, this is not a problem.
I would therefore register this particular domain name for a period of at least two years, which is something I would always recommend you should consider. BoxerDogTrainingExpert.com it is then!
Final Market Analysis Steps
There are a couple more jobs to finalize before moving on to start creating your site. First, you should establish that there are products and/or services available which you could promote to people who want to learn to train their boxer. After that, you need to make sure that there is money being spent in the market.
As far as online marketing is concerned, the easiest products to promote are generally digital information products mainly because products of this nature can be purchased by your prospect and immediately delivered to them via the internet. Hence, in a world where instant gratification is becoming the accepted norm, promoting and selling digital information products makes a great deal of sense.
The biggest repository of digital information products of this nature is Clickbank.com, a place where there are over 10,000 information products listed. Thus, almost irrespective of the market place you’re working in, you will be able to find a product to promote on the Clickbank site.
For example, if you were targeting the boxer dog training market, this would be a product that would work, because no matter what kind of dog individual pet owners have in their home, it needs feeding:
Alternatively, there are plenty of sites where you can find tangible, physical products and services to promote such as Commission Junction, Link Share and Share a Sale.
Promoting or selling tangible products or services is often a little more difficult than pushing digital products because by their very nature, physical products have to be delivered, whereas services are often geographically localized.
Because of these slight disadvantages, most new affiliates tend to prefer to promote digital products, so I am going to ‘run’ with the information product related to dog food that we discovered earlier at Clickbank.
The final thing to consider is the money aspect. Is there money being spent in this market?
To establish this fact, you usually need to do nothing much more than run a standard Google search. If there are plenty of advertisers shown on the search results page, it is a market where there is money being spent because advertisers do not waste money on advertising that is not paying:
There are obviously plenty of advertisers in the dog food market, so there is money being spent.
As far as online marketing is concerned, the easiest products to promote are generally digital information products mainly because products of this nature can be purchased by your prospect and immediately delivered to them via the internet. Hence, in a world where instant gratification is becoming the accepted norm, promoting and selling digital information products makes a great deal of sense.
The biggest repository of digital information products of this nature is Clickbank.com, a place where there are over 10,000 information products listed. Thus, almost irrespective of the market place you’re working in, you will be able to find a product to promote on the Clickbank site.
For example, if you were targeting the boxer dog training market, this would be a product that would work, because no matter what kind of dog individual pet owners have in their home, it needs feeding:
Alternatively, there are plenty of sites where you can find tangible, physical products and services to promote such as Commission Junction, Link Share and Share a Sale.
Promoting or selling tangible products or services is often a little more difficult than pushing digital products because by their very nature, physical products have to be delivered, whereas services are often geographically localized.
Because of these slight disadvantages, most new affiliates tend to prefer to promote digital products, so I am going to ‘run’ with the information product related to dog food that we discovered earlier at Clickbank.
The final thing to consider is the money aspect. Is there money being spent in this market?
To establish this fact, you usually need to do nothing much more than run a standard Google search. If there are plenty of advertisers shown on the search results page, it is a market where there is money being spent because advertisers do not waste money on advertising that is not paying:
There are obviously plenty of advertisers in the dog food market, so there is money being spent.
Finding a market and a product to match
In the previous example, I assumed that for someone who is running a hotel in Singapore, the nature of their business activities on the internet would be clear, with their primary objective being to establish connections with people looking for Southeast Asian hotel accommodation.
If however you have no specific business notion in mind, the first thing to do is to find a market into which you can launch a successful website.
The golden rule when it comes to launching a new web-based business is that, firstly, you have to find a market which is active and secondly, you must ensure that there is money being spent in that market.
Most of the people who use the net every day do so to seek information.
Hence, if you establish what kind of information those people are looking for, you have taken the first step. By establishing that there is money being spent in this particular market, you satisfy the second necessary criterion too.
There are literally dozens of websites that you can refer to in an effort to discover what people are looking for. Some of these sites are places where people buy products or services, whereas others are sites which visitors use to either ask questions or to give an indication of their interests and hobbies.
Sites like eBay and Amazon fall into the first category, because with both of these sites, it is a fairly simple process to find out what people are looking for and buying.
This is because eBay offers their Pulse page where you can see the most popular products on the site in the previous 24 hours:
Click on the ‘Category’ drop down menu at the top of the page to discover what the most popular products or services are in each market sector. In this way, you can grasp some idea of what people are looking for when they use the world’s biggest auction site.
Amazon on the other hand have a ‘Bestsellers’ feature that you can use to generate a picture of the products or services that people are buying from one of the most popular online retail sites.
To find these ‘Bestsellers’, click on any of the categories at the top left hand corner of the homepage:
Click your chosen selection – books is always a good starting point if you have no particular idea in mind – and then look for the ‘Bestsellers’ link at the top of the page:
Other sites where you can gain an idea of the sort of information that people are seeking, giving or discussing are Yahoo! Answers, 43 Things, MySpace Groups and the DMOZ Directory site.
After researching all of these sites, you should have some ideas for your first business website.
Let’s say that based upon your research, you have seen that there appears to be a good number of people searching for information related to dog training on the net. Hence, your initial thought is to create a website that focuses on dog training.
Before you begin to do so however, you need to extend your research a little further. In order to make money online, you give yourself the best chance of doing if you find a market sector or niche where there are plenty of people searching for information but not too much competition.
For example, whilst there are certainly plenty of people searching for information about dog training, there are also quite a few web pages where they can find this information already:
As you can see, Google have 6.25 million pages listed for ‘dog training’. Thus, the chances of you being able to successfully promote a site that is focused on dog training would be extremely limited.
If however you were to narrow this down to something more specific, you might find that there is considerably less competition.
For example, were you to decide to create a site that focuses on training just one particular breed of dog, you would stand a significantly higher chance of achieving success and making money from that site:
Any Google search that indicates less than 30,000 competing web pages for an exact search term match (with your chosen search term in inverted commas – “.”) is one for which competition is acceptably limited. You could therefore reasonably expect to achieve a top search ranking relatively quickly.
Consequently, rather than trying to compete with 6.25 million other web page owners by building a site focused on dog training, it would make much more sense to build a site focused on ‘boxer dog training’ instead.
If however you have no specific business notion in mind, the first thing to do is to find a market into which you can launch a successful website.
The golden rule when it comes to launching a new web-based business is that, firstly, you have to find a market which is active and secondly, you must ensure that there is money being spent in that market.
Most of the people who use the net every day do so to seek information.
Hence, if you establish what kind of information those people are looking for, you have taken the first step. By establishing that there is money being spent in this particular market, you satisfy the second necessary criterion too.
There are literally dozens of websites that you can refer to in an effort to discover what people are looking for. Some of these sites are places where people buy products or services, whereas others are sites which visitors use to either ask questions or to give an indication of their interests and hobbies.
Sites like eBay and Amazon fall into the first category, because with both of these sites, it is a fairly simple process to find out what people are looking for and buying.
This is because eBay offers their Pulse page where you can see the most popular products on the site in the previous 24 hours:
Click on the ‘Category’ drop down menu at the top of the page to discover what the most popular products or services are in each market sector. In this way, you can grasp some idea of what people are looking for when they use the world’s biggest auction site.
Amazon on the other hand have a ‘Bestsellers’ feature that you can use to generate a picture of the products or services that people are buying from one of the most popular online retail sites.
To find these ‘Bestsellers’, click on any of the categories at the top left hand corner of the homepage:
Click your chosen selection – books is always a good starting point if you have no particular idea in mind – and then look for the ‘Bestsellers’ link at the top of the page:
Other sites where you can gain an idea of the sort of information that people are seeking, giving or discussing are Yahoo! Answers, 43 Things, MySpace Groups and the DMOZ Directory site.
After researching all of these sites, you should have some ideas for your first business website.
Let’s say that based upon your research, you have seen that there appears to be a good number of people searching for information related to dog training on the net. Hence, your initial thought is to create a website that focuses on dog training.
Before you begin to do so however, you need to extend your research a little further. In order to make money online, you give yourself the best chance of doing if you find a market sector or niche where there are plenty of people searching for information but not too much competition.
For example, whilst there are certainly plenty of people searching for information about dog training, there are also quite a few web pages where they can find this information already:
As you can see, Google have 6.25 million pages listed for ‘dog training’. Thus, the chances of you being able to successfully promote a site that is focused on dog training would be extremely limited.
If however you were to narrow this down to something more specific, you might find that there is considerably less competition.
For example, were you to decide to create a site that focuses on training just one particular breed of dog, you would stand a significantly higher chance of achieving success and making money from that site:
Any Google search that indicates less than 30,000 competing web pages for an exact search term match (with your chosen search term in inverted commas – “.”) is one for which competition is acceptably limited. You could therefore reasonably expect to achieve a top search ranking relatively quickly.
Consequently, rather than trying to compete with 6.25 million other web page owners by building a site focused on dog training, it would make much more sense to build a site focused on ‘boxer dog training’ instead.
The Business idea comes first
Each and every day, there are millions of dollars being spent and received via the medium of the internet. Because the net is a truly global phenomenon, there is absolutely nothing to stop the average householder in Los Angeles buying products or services from a business or an individual in Sydney or Auckland whilst of course, it works exactly the same the other way round as well.
Nevertheless, in practical terms, there are limitations to the effectiveness of the net as a medium for the transaction of business. It would not be particularly practical or logical for our friend in L.A. to buy a four-poster bed from the other side of the world as an example.
Hence, the first concept to grasp about setting up a website to make money from the net is that you must promote or sell something that is easily transportable or deliverable. Furthermore, it has to be something for which there is already an established demand, because satisfying established demand is far easier than creating demand from nothing through your own efforts.
As long as you are in a position to satisfy these initial requirements, you have the basis of a truly global business, one that ignores international boundaries and datelines.
In essence, setting up a website that is designed to sell products or services is a little like setting up a shop in your local high street or shopping mall. Your website is your shop window, but in the case of a net-based business, it is a shop window that is available to any internet surfer at any time of the day and any place in the world.
From all of this it follows that the first thing you have to decide upon when setting up your new online business is, what are you going to sell from your shop? It is all very well having a vague idea about setting up a website as the bases of the business but the initial business idea or concept has to come first.
Fortunately, there is plenty of online help available in this respect, because millions of would-be entrepreneurs all over the world have already set up successful online businesses from which you can take a lead.
For instance, most new online business beginners tend to start off with a business that is designed to make money in one of two ways.
Both of these ideas or concepts are relatively straightforward and simple to implement, hence their popularity with people who are just starting out.
Option one is to feature advertising on a webpage which generate an income for you, while the option to is to promote other people’s products or services in return for a sales commission. We will consider both of these options in more detail a little later, but before doing so, there is one other concept to take on board.
This is the idea that which ever did was model you decide to follow, you have to have an idea of the market sector or niche that you want to operate your business in.
This choice is a critical one because whilst there are billions of people coming online every day to search for information, products or services, they do not do so in a totally haphazard, willy-nilly way. When these individuals use the net to search for whatever it is they need, they already know what they are looking for in advance. Hence by definition, their search activities are predicated upon what it is they want.
For example, they could be looking for a hotel in Singapore or the best place to buy a Gucci handbag in New York. In both cases, it is most likely that unless they already have a particular idea in mind, they will start their search for the most appropriate information by using a major search engine like Google, Yahoo or MSN.
When they do so, they start by typing the most appropriate phrase or term that you can think of – ‘hotels in Singapore’ or ‘Singapore hotels’ for example – into the search box to begin the process of drilling down to the information which they are seeking.
If in this scenario you happened to be a Singapore-based hotelier, the person who is searching for this information obviously represents a prime prospect for your business, someone with whom you want to make contact or a connection as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
You would do so because you understand that there are people using the internet to search for information about your kind of business and therefore your primary task is to find these people to show them what you have to offer.
Exactly the same principle applies to any website based business you decide to launch. You have to have an appropriate subject matter around which your business is built because in this way, you have a clear idea of the kind of people who are most likely to buy from or do business with you.
Thus, deciding upon the topic or subject matter of your business is the all-important first decision you have to make.
Once you have done so, then and only then you can begin to build your site. When you do so, there are as mentioned a couple of ways that you can generate cash from that site almost immediately.
The first option is to feature third-party advertising on your site that is placed there by an online advertising company, amongst whom the biggest and best-known is Google.
If this were to be your moneymaking option of choice, the ‘set-up’ pattern that you would follow looks something like this.
Firstly, you create a site on which you can feature advertising before applying for an account with Google AdSense. Although it may seem slightly contrary, you create your site first rather than applying fur account because Google want to review your site to check on its acceptability to the program.
This is however something that only ever happens once, and as long as your site is in some way business focused and already contains a degree of content – half a dozen articles that are focused on your topic should do it – the chances of your account application being accepted extreme good. If however it is not accepted, and more content to the site and then reapply.
Once your AdSense account is open, you create appropriate advertising materials within the AdSense member area before finally placing those advertising materials on your site by pasting the JavaScript code created within the member area onto your site.
The primary attraction of placing these advertising materials on your site is that the AdSense program ensures that the actual adverts that appear on your site are targeted.
For instance, if in our earlier example, you had a site that features articles about hotels in Singapore, the advertising that would appear on your site would be from companies or agencies who offer hotel accommodation in this particular part of Southeast Asia.
What you therefore need to do is ensure that people who come to that particular website are interested in obtaining information about hotels in Singapore. You do this by using the targeted promotional and marketing strategies that you will read of later in this manual.
Hence, the advertising that appears on your site is 100% matched to the kind of people who will visit your site. As a consequence of this ability to target the advertising at your visitors, Google ensure that some of those visitors will click on the adverts shown on your site. When they do so, you will be paid for every click, hence the moneymaking opportunity.
The advantage of this particular business model is that your site visitor does not need to spend any money for you to earn an income from your site. As it is the advertiser who is paying you (via Google) to send visitors to their site, all that is necessary for you to get paid is for your visitor to click on the targeted adverts that Google have placed on your site.
On the flipside of the coin, the downside of this particular model is that in the majority of cases, the amount of money you are paid for every individual click is likely to be measured in cents rather than dollars. It is therefore a fact that if this is the business model you choose to work with, you need to create many websites if you want to generate the level of income that you would probably like to achieve.
The alternative to operating a site that features advertising is to build a site that promotes a product or service that someone else has created as an affiliated sales person for the original product creator.
There are plenty of distinct advantages to working with this business model.
Firstly, there are products and services available which are appropriate or relevant to almost every market you can think of, so no matter what kind of business you are correct, there will be something that you can profitably promote from your niche targeted website.
Secondly, the amount of money that you are likely to earn per transaction from this kind of business is likely to be far higher than you could ever expect to generate from advertising revenues if you adopted the AdSense model.
The disadvantage is of course the fact that the individual who visits your website has to spend money on the product or service that you are promoting for you to earn anything. Nevertheless, as long as the product or service is sufficiently well targeted, you will undoubtedly generate some sales and therefore earn reasonable levels of sales commission.
Because this second business model tends to be more profitable for the majority of online to beginners, I am going to assume that this is the particular business model that you follow.
However, as far as the process of creating your own website is concerned, there is not a great deal of difference between adopting business model ‘A’ and model ‘B’, so if you want to start by advertising rather than as an affiliate, most of what you read here will still apply.
Nevertheless, in practical terms, there are limitations to the effectiveness of the net as a medium for the transaction of business. It would not be particularly practical or logical for our friend in L.A. to buy a four-poster bed from the other side of the world as an example.
Hence, the first concept to grasp about setting up a website to make money from the net is that you must promote or sell something that is easily transportable or deliverable. Furthermore, it has to be something for which there is already an established demand, because satisfying established demand is far easier than creating demand from nothing through your own efforts.
As long as you are in a position to satisfy these initial requirements, you have the basis of a truly global business, one that ignores international boundaries and datelines.
In essence, setting up a website that is designed to sell products or services is a little like setting up a shop in your local high street or shopping mall. Your website is your shop window, but in the case of a net-based business, it is a shop window that is available to any internet surfer at any time of the day and any place in the world.
From all of this it follows that the first thing you have to decide upon when setting up your new online business is, what are you going to sell from your shop? It is all very well having a vague idea about setting up a website as the bases of the business but the initial business idea or concept has to come first.
Fortunately, there is plenty of online help available in this respect, because millions of would-be entrepreneurs all over the world have already set up successful online businesses from which you can take a lead.
For instance, most new online business beginners tend to start off with a business that is designed to make money in one of two ways.
Both of these ideas or concepts are relatively straightforward and simple to implement, hence their popularity with people who are just starting out.
Option one is to feature advertising on a webpage which generate an income for you, while the option to is to promote other people’s products or services in return for a sales commission. We will consider both of these options in more detail a little later, but before doing so, there is one other concept to take on board.
This is the idea that which ever did was model you decide to follow, you have to have an idea of the market sector or niche that you want to operate your business in.
This choice is a critical one because whilst there are billions of people coming online every day to search for information, products or services, they do not do so in a totally haphazard, willy-nilly way. When these individuals use the net to search for whatever it is they need, they already know what they are looking for in advance. Hence by definition, their search activities are predicated upon what it is they want.
For example, they could be looking for a hotel in Singapore or the best place to buy a Gucci handbag in New York. In both cases, it is most likely that unless they already have a particular idea in mind, they will start their search for the most appropriate information by using a major search engine like Google, Yahoo or MSN.
When they do so, they start by typing the most appropriate phrase or term that you can think of – ‘hotels in Singapore’ or ‘Singapore hotels’ for example – into the search box to begin the process of drilling down to the information which they are seeking.
If in this scenario you happened to be a Singapore-based hotelier, the person who is searching for this information obviously represents a prime prospect for your business, someone with whom you want to make contact or a connection as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
You would do so because you understand that there are people using the internet to search for information about your kind of business and therefore your primary task is to find these people to show them what you have to offer.
Exactly the same principle applies to any website based business you decide to launch. You have to have an appropriate subject matter around which your business is built because in this way, you have a clear idea of the kind of people who are most likely to buy from or do business with you.
Thus, deciding upon the topic or subject matter of your business is the all-important first decision you have to make.
Once you have done so, then and only then you can begin to build your site. When you do so, there are as mentioned a couple of ways that you can generate cash from that site almost immediately.
The first option is to feature third-party advertising on your site that is placed there by an online advertising company, amongst whom the biggest and best-known is Google.
If this were to be your moneymaking option of choice, the ‘set-up’ pattern that you would follow looks something like this.
Firstly, you create a site on which you can feature advertising before applying for an account with Google AdSense. Although it may seem slightly contrary, you create your site first rather than applying fur account because Google want to review your site to check on its acceptability to the program.
This is however something that only ever happens once, and as long as your site is in some way business focused and already contains a degree of content – half a dozen articles that are focused on your topic should do it – the chances of your account application being accepted extreme good. If however it is not accepted, and more content to the site and then reapply.
Once your AdSense account is open, you create appropriate advertising materials within the AdSense member area before finally placing those advertising materials on your site by pasting the JavaScript code created within the member area onto your site.
The primary attraction of placing these advertising materials on your site is that the AdSense program ensures that the actual adverts that appear on your site are targeted.
For instance, if in our earlier example, you had a site that features articles about hotels in Singapore, the advertising that would appear on your site would be from companies or agencies who offer hotel accommodation in this particular part of Southeast Asia.
What you therefore need to do is ensure that people who come to that particular website are interested in obtaining information about hotels in Singapore. You do this by using the targeted promotional and marketing strategies that you will read of later in this manual.
Hence, the advertising that appears on your site is 100% matched to the kind of people who will visit your site. As a consequence of this ability to target the advertising at your visitors, Google ensure that some of those visitors will click on the adverts shown on your site. When they do so, you will be paid for every click, hence the moneymaking opportunity.
The advantage of this particular business model is that your site visitor does not need to spend any money for you to earn an income from your site. As it is the advertiser who is paying you (via Google) to send visitors to their site, all that is necessary for you to get paid is for your visitor to click on the targeted adverts that Google have placed on your site.
On the flipside of the coin, the downside of this particular model is that in the majority of cases, the amount of money you are paid for every individual click is likely to be measured in cents rather than dollars. It is therefore a fact that if this is the business model you choose to work with, you need to create many websites if you want to generate the level of income that you would probably like to achieve.
The alternative to operating a site that features advertising is to build a site that promotes a product or service that someone else has created as an affiliated sales person for the original product creator.
There are plenty of distinct advantages to working with this business model.
Firstly, there are products and services available which are appropriate or relevant to almost every market you can think of, so no matter what kind of business you are correct, there will be something that you can profitably promote from your niche targeted website.
Secondly, the amount of money that you are likely to earn per transaction from this kind of business is likely to be far higher than you could ever expect to generate from advertising revenues if you adopted the AdSense model.
The disadvantage is of course the fact that the individual who visits your website has to spend money on the product or service that you are promoting for you to earn anything. Nevertheless, as long as the product or service is sufficiently well targeted, you will undoubtedly generate some sales and therefore earn reasonable levels of sales commission.
Because this second business model tends to be more profitable for the majority of online to beginners, I am going to assume that this is the particular business model that you follow.
However, as far as the process of creating your own website is concerned, there is not a great deal of difference between adopting business model ‘A’ and model ‘B’, so if you want to start by advertising rather than as an affiliate, most of what you read here will still apply.
How to make a profitable Website
Introduction
Building your first website is a challenge but it is also an incredibly exciting adventure as well. And as with all adventures, there are many things to be learned and a great deal to be done to carry your initial website idea from the drawing board to fruition.
This step-by-step guide is going to show you exactly how to move from having an idea to being the owner a fully functional site that is actually making money. As you will discover, there is fortunately nothing particularly difficult about creating your first website but at the same time, there is a step-by-step logic to the process that you should follow.
This guide is going to demonstrate exactly how you build your first website and briefly highlight some ideas about how you should promote your site to start making money from it.
Once again, although there are hundreds of ‘how to’ guides that suggest or indicate that making money online is difficult or somehow troublesome it does not in reality have to be this way. Notwithstanding this fact, without targeted visitors coming to your site, making money is always going to remain a pipe dream, so make sure that you learn whatever you can about traffic generation from where ever you can.
In creating this guide, I have assumed that you are starting at the very beginning of the online marketing journey. I have therefore included everything necessary to move from a position where you have little or no idea about creating a site to being the owner of a slice of internet real estate that is already making money.
Of course, there are many other ideas and concepts that you will learn about how you can improve the effectiveness or profitability of your business as you go along that I am not going to cover in this guide. This is a guide that is designed to get you started, to set you off on your online marketing journey because it is often the case that the hardest part of undertaking any venture is actually getting started.
The final thing to say before launching into how you start setting up your first website is that, whilst there is nothing especially difficult about setting up that site, there is nevertheless a degree of necessary work involved.
Although there are dozens (maybe even hundreds) of guides and manuals on the market that promise to show you the ‘secrets’ of online success or offer ‘magic bullets’ that will suddenly transport you from being a new-to-the-net nobody to an instant multimillionaire, it is an unfortunate truth that none of them work. There are no secrets to online marketing success nor are there any magic bullets that will enable you to earn thousands of dollars a day from five minutes work.
Especially in the early days, success is all down to the amount of work and effort that you are willing to put into building your business. The truth is, unless or until you can afford to pay other people to do your work for you, it is all down to you to make sure that everything that needs to be done gets done.
And perhaps not too surprisingly, what you ultimately get out of your online based business is always in direct proportion to the effort that you are willing to put in. In effect, in 99.9% of cases and situations, the success levels that your first website-based business achieves will be in direct proportion to the amount of work and dedication that you sink into it.
However, don’t view this as a negative. In fact, it represents a fantastic opportunity to prove once and for all that you have what it takes to be a success because whether your business makes millions of dollars or nothing at all, everything comes down to you.?
Building your first website is a challenge but it is also an incredibly exciting adventure as well. And as with all adventures, there are many things to be learned and a great deal to be done to carry your initial website idea from the drawing board to fruition.
This step-by-step guide is going to show you exactly how to move from having an idea to being the owner a fully functional site that is actually making money. As you will discover, there is fortunately nothing particularly difficult about creating your first website but at the same time, there is a step-by-step logic to the process that you should follow.
This guide is going to demonstrate exactly how you build your first website and briefly highlight some ideas about how you should promote your site to start making money from it.
Once again, although there are hundreds of ‘how to’ guides that suggest or indicate that making money online is difficult or somehow troublesome it does not in reality have to be this way. Notwithstanding this fact, without targeted visitors coming to your site, making money is always going to remain a pipe dream, so make sure that you learn whatever you can about traffic generation from where ever you can.
In creating this guide, I have assumed that you are starting at the very beginning of the online marketing journey. I have therefore included everything necessary to move from a position where you have little or no idea about creating a site to being the owner of a slice of internet real estate that is already making money.
Of course, there are many other ideas and concepts that you will learn about how you can improve the effectiveness or profitability of your business as you go along that I am not going to cover in this guide. This is a guide that is designed to get you started, to set you off on your online marketing journey because it is often the case that the hardest part of undertaking any venture is actually getting started.
The final thing to say before launching into how you start setting up your first website is that, whilst there is nothing especially difficult about setting up that site, there is nevertheless a degree of necessary work involved.
Although there are dozens (maybe even hundreds) of guides and manuals on the market that promise to show you the ‘secrets’ of online success or offer ‘magic bullets’ that will suddenly transport you from being a new-to-the-net nobody to an instant multimillionaire, it is an unfortunate truth that none of them work. There are no secrets to online marketing success nor are there any magic bullets that will enable you to earn thousands of dollars a day from five minutes work.
Especially in the early days, success is all down to the amount of work and effort that you are willing to put into building your business. The truth is, unless or until you can afford to pay other people to do your work for you, it is all down to you to make sure that everything that needs to be done gets done.
And perhaps not too surprisingly, what you ultimately get out of your online based business is always in direct proportion to the effort that you are willing to put in. In effect, in 99.9% of cases and situations, the success levels that your first website-based business achieves will be in direct proportion to the amount of work and dedication that you sink into it.
However, don’t view this as a negative. In fact, it represents a fantastic opportunity to prove once and for all that you have what it takes to be a success because whether your business makes millions of dollars or nothing at all, everything comes down to you.?
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