Get your visitors The proven way to get visitors to your site is LINKS. This is when another website has a link pointing to your site. So, how do you get these without spending hours? LinkMetro has an easy sign-up and has just introduced an excellent value automated links process - it's so easy I got over 200 links to my site in the first month without really trying. Links are also the key to getting a higher pagerank within Google - which is a key factor to ranking well on Google. Other search engines also considering incoming links to your site.
Submit to the search engines - or not!? You could spend hours and lots of hard earned cash on getting your site submitted to the search engines. For the last five sites I've created I've not even bothered to submit to the search engines. Just get those incoming links and the search engines will find you! The main search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, Alltheweb) are crawling other sites all the time, and they'll pick your site up quickly if you get those incoming links.
Which search engines to target & why Why, oh why, do people regard Google as the only search engine worth being listed on? It can take months to get a worthwhile listing on Google, yet I have found that listings on other search engines, such as MSN, can be quicker and far more profitable. A Christmas website that I set up in mid-October made excellent Adsense revenue just through MSN visitors and has only just been listed by Google!
How to get found by the search engines As mentioned above, the best way for the search engines to find you is to get incoming links from other sites. LinkMetro is an easy and quick way of doing this, especially if you use their automated link building.
Joining a marketing program - Google Adsense? This is a good way to make money from visitors to your site. Google Adsense pay you for each person that clicks on an advert placed on your site - from as little as 2cents a click to $25 per click. It's worth doing the research on how much people are paying for particular keywords so that you choose a profitable site. That being said, my best site attracts literally thousands of 10cent clicks per day - so just make sure that people are prepared to pay something for the subject you are so keen about. Find out more about Google Adsense with our secrets & tips.
Accepting online payments on your website Unless you've been living under a rock for the past five years, you'll have heard of Paypal. It's easy to set up and account to take payment for ebooks, subscriptions without the need to set up an expensive merchant acccount. This online payment system is the quickest and easiest way, without a doubt, to accept payment online with cards such as Visa, Mastercard, Maestro, etc on your site.
Get your affiliate links Another revenue stream is to be an affiliate. You refer people to a related site and get paid when they buy something. With Clickbank affiliate site, you can find out which are likely to be most profitable for you. Some of the higher paying products will make you over $50 per sale. I make a nice income from some $7 sales in a niche market. Again, go for what interests you and is related to your site.
Watch your site statistics Keep an eye on the visits to your site. This is where Yahoo really score. Download your site logs on a regular basis and use Weblog Expert to analyse which pages people are visiting, which search engines they are using and what keyword phrases they have typed in. This is all very valuable information to help you find what people are looking for and create more pages that they might be interested in.
Be patient - it may take a month or two to see the money start to come in. Meanwhile, add a page to your site as often as you can, keep doing your keyword research, optimize each of your new pages and keep getting those links back to your site.
Now sit back and watch the money start to come in - or set up your second, third or fourth site.
Email me and tell me how it feels the first time you wake up in the morning to find you've been making money while you sleep!
Best wishes, Jen
By following these principles you can build your own successful home-based internet businesses
How to start your internet businesses
Step by Step - how to start your own home-based business
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Choose your business You may wonder what you might choose as a business? Pick up a pen and paper and write down all those things that interest you - you don't necessarily need to know a lot about them - but simply have an interest in those areas. This will be the starting basis for your research later on - to find out which of these areas is likely to be most profitable for you.
Do your keyword research A keyword is the phrase used to describe a word which people regularly search for on the internet. Find out which keywords or subjects are likely to make most money. Using Overture and Wordtracker, together with Clickbank affiliate sales programs site, you can find out which are likely to be most profitable for you.
Choose your website name Once you have found out what your best keywords are, try and include them in your website name. For example, the research for this site indicated that "best home based internet businesses" was a good key phrase, but would include several very popular keywords.
Build your website There are literally thousands of companies keen to host your new website. If you are not sure how to set up a website, but are looking for a simple way to set it up, try Yahoo Small Business. You can set up a site with them quickly and easily and they also provide the Yahoo Sitebuilder software which is easy to use and included free. They also provide an online store facility with payment via Paypal, if you are actually going to be selling goods.
Optimising your website This is the way that you let the search engines know that your site is really all about your keywords. As well as including your keywords in the Title and names of your pages, you need to use the keywords in the first and last lines of your text, as well as any ALT tags on pictures. The best piece of software that I've found is Web Position 4, this checks that you have optimised your pages for the search engines. You'll come higher up the search pages and that means you get even more visitors.
Publish your website Once you've got your site up and running, optimized the pages - you're ready to go live! I'm sure you'll find it as exciting as I did watching my own website appear for the first time. This is where Yahoo Sitebuilder is really easy, you don't need a special uploading program, you just click the "Publish" button and it's all done for you in a matter of seconds.
