The whole enchilada, through the back door

Moneymaking tip #137

Do you like designing websites?

Often it is easier to make money on the internet "through the back door", so to speak. Instead of simply trying to sell their design services, many web designers have learned that selling websites (already designed and ready to go) seem to sell more easily, even though they end up costing the customer more money. You may have noticed that several webhosting companies do this as well.

For some reason, probably simply because it is very convenient, a lot of people look for a "turnkey" operation when it comes to getting a website up and running. Since you like to design websites anyway, why not go ahead and do it before you even get the customer? Make a variety of styles. Construct templates so that you can offer certain variations to the theme without causing you too much trouble.

Basically, you just display your work (from which the customer may choose) on your website. Later, if you want to get involved even deeper with the client, you can become a reseller for your favorite webhost. Then it would truly be a turnkey operation.

NetMax reviews HostICan

Overview

In just a few short years from when it was founded in 2003 in a small home office, HostICan has today grown into a company that is able to handle and service thousands of happy customers from all over the world. Located just outside Richmond, Virginia, HostICan offers excellent quality and guaranteed satisfaction at an unbeatable price, 24 hours a day and seven days a week to all its customers. According to HostReview, HostICan is one of the top ten fastest growing companies in the world today.

Customer Support

Online customer support is an interesting feature of HostICan, and the unique guarantee states that your site will be up and running about 99.99% of the time, and that if it does not, the company will credit your account with one month of free hosting. Technical support is offered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and a thirty day money back guarantee is also provided to all its customers.

Awards

HostICan has caught the attention of industry and customer watchdogs, and the company has managed to snag innumerable awards over a very short period of time. For example, HostICan was one of the first domain providers who won acclaim for ethical business conduct by the "Web Hosting Stuff". The company was the recipient of the CNET Award for the best-certified service and support, and the "Approved Host Award" from "FindMyHost.com". HostICan is also a proud member of the "Better Business Bureau" of Richmond, Virginia, and has been named by the HostIndex, one of the toughest domain reviewing sites, as the top web hosting company today.

Conclusion

HostICan is an excellent choice for your web hosting needs. They have proven themselves as a capable and strong willed company that will work hard to ensure their customers are supported and are happy. This really is the true hosting company of the future and we give it a score of 10 out of 10.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED HOST!

HostICan Rocks!

Funnel blogs

A funnel blog, or funnel web site, is one whose sole purpose is to redirect traffic to a "point-of-sale" website.

You should have interesting, useful, and entertaining information on your website. You know that and (I hope) you do that. But have you ever considered that you should be putting the interesting, useful, helpful, shocking, entertaining information on other websites as well?

You see, with your primary website -- your online store -- you pretty much have to stick to one subject. Your primary niche. The whole general idea of your website must revolve around a pretty specific theme. Otherwise, your visitors won't have a clue about what your website is about. When that happens, they leave. Boom. Gone. So your site needs to be direct and clear about what your subject is and easy to navigate. But you already knew that too.

Funnel sites solve the theme restriction problem. You can set up a website on any subject you want. Just make sure your funnel site is targeting a particular segment of your desired audience. If you are monetized only with pay-per-click rather than affiliate products, your choice of subjects is even wider.

The point is to get people interested in the information contained on the funnel site, and then, after they are "warmed up" so to speak, you "funnel" them over to your main website. As long as you have a variety of things to sell (or affiliate products you represent) there is practically no limit to the number of funnel websites you can set up to direct specialized traffic to certain pages of your main website.

Why are you so different?

What’s the difference between your online income and the online income of somebody like John Chow or Darren Crowse or Jeremy Schoemaker?

What’s the big difference between your blog and their blogs, attractiveness-wise and writing quality-wise?

If you are blogging about a subject that you care about, the writing quality of your website is probably as good as theirs. (English was not even John Chow’s first language.)

And if you have honestly put in the effort, then the format and attractiveness and even the monetization may well be as good as theirs, too.

One possible difference is that none of their blogs is less than a year old. If your blog is just a few months old, then hang in there and keep plugging away. Keep doing the things you know will bring more traffic to your site. Success doesn’t come overnight. Not even for these guys.

But if your blog is more than several months old and you still are not making any money to speak of, consider that you might be hiding your candle under a basket, and that the world doesn’t know you exist. It isn’t that people don’t like you or that they don’t like what you are writing. Maybe they just don’t know who you are and where you are.

Preposterous, you may say. After all, there are eleven zillion people surfing the web at any given moment.

Perhaps. But there are a heck of a lot of blogs and other website choices available for those surfers, too.

Consider the possibility that your low-traffic problem may have something to do with the fact that you don’t advertise. I have honestly never met anyone who truly put forth the effort to publicize his web site (using all the tools at his disposal to do that) who hasn’t been able to dramatically increase the traffic to his or her website.

Is it time you made the financial decision to really go into business, instead of just pretending to go into business? On the other hand, If you are a good writer, but have no desire (or discipline) to learn and execute promotional skills, then I humbly suggest you go out and find a publisher and let them worry about promoting your writing. Take the ads off your site and blog for fun.

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The web sites referenced in this post are:

John

Darren

Jeremy

John is johnchow.com
Darren is problogger.net
Jeremy is shoemoney.com

Your own art store

At no cost, you can have a professional-looking internet poster and art store designed for you, effortlessly and automatically. You will receive a high commission for all art sold as a result of your mechandising efforts. You will also have an opportunity to earn recruitment commissions. If you like working with graphic art, this may be something you want to look into.

For more info, click on the "making money with art" link in the column at right.

Linkbait

Linkbait is anything on your site which induces visitors to return to your site on a regular basis, thereby making it desireable for those people to link to your site rather than type in your address in their browser every time.

Like what?

A list of current sports scores. A picture of a pretty girl that gets changed every day. News of movie stars and other entertainers. A blog on a specialized subject. Any site that provides a specialized reference tool.

Number four is what I personally do. But remember, with regard to incoming links, search engines are rating you in large part by the QUALITY of the incoming links.

All of the examples on the above list of examples might get you some regular traffic. Any social media traffic can generate a substantial amount of links to a web page. But how important are these links to Google? Often, not very.

I’ve said it before: sustainable quality traffic and quality linking is, over time, rooted in quality content. Period.

Early to bed, early to rise...

Mailing out catalogs and advertising flyers is (of course) a euphemism for suggesting that you continue to advertise all the time, even though your mail order store is on the internet instead of in a mall. Although direct mail will still bring customers to your website.

The point is, don’t just sit there and wait until nothing happens for so long that you go out of business. Spend some money on advertising. Adwords. Popular websites that you can afford. And leaving bread crumbs all over the internet on the sites you visit.

Why do some people assume that just because their store (or affiliate catalog) is on the internet, they are magically exempt from advertising their business?

What rhymes with “rise”? Go back to the beginning and read the title of this post. Ah, yes.

Early to bed
Early to rise
Work very hard
And...

Advertise.

Remember "Mail Order"?

There used to be businesses that were called “mail order” businesses. The way they worked was, they would mail out catalogs or advertising flyers in envelopes, and then a certain percentage of people would mail in orders and enclose a check. When the mail order business received the customer’s order, they would mail the product to the customer. Or they would notify the company who actually stocked the product to “drop ship” the merchandise to the customer.

How quaint, you say. That wouldn’t work today. Hmmm. Or would it?

If a business has a website, and they sell merchandise on that website, and they mail the merchandise to the customer (or have another company “drop ship” the merchandise), exactly how is that different from old-time mail order?

The main difference is that, in the old days, the mail order companies where constantly mailing out flyers and catalogs, and constantly placing little ads in newspapers and magazines. The internet mail order business of today doesn’t seem do that. Instead, he opens a website and puts up pictures of his products and then he sits back on his behind. Did you catch the subtle difference? Can you guess why such a modern mail order business might fail?

If you are really in the mail order business, why would you stop mailing out requests for orders? It seems like that is a pretty important step in the process. But I may be wrong.

Happy hunting.

Putting up signs and leaving trails

Shortly after its original inception, the internet became known more commonly as the World Wide Web, with “web” being the operative word. With more and more people being connected and cross connected and cross-cross connected with one another, a metaphoric map of the internet soon looked like an airline route map, and then even more complex, like a spider web.

You know all that, but I remind you that the innate purpose and value of the internet is interconnectivity. The fact that you can visit hundreds of websites and be a voyeur or get otherwise entertained, or the fact that you can quickly access the information you are looking for, is indeed a cool thing. But if you are a person who is merely strolling down the corridors of a huge mall, you are missing ever so much. The whole point is not to just look through the windows, although that can be fun in itself, but to go inside and interact with the other people who are also shoppers and lookers.

Blogging, a relatively recent addition to the web, captures the spirit of what I am talking about perhaps more than any other example. Blogs suck you inside them. Blogs satisfy your desire for new information as well as giving you a nice shot of voyeurism and titilation. Above all, blogs offer the easy opportunity of participation and interaction. In fact, blogs practically BEG for your participation.

Participation means commenting on the posts or other comments. Commenting is certainly a step in the right direction, and certainly a step above simply “windowshopping” from the outside. To be sure. But there is more. Much more.

The very nature of the Web is interconnectivity between people. A big part of that interesting and useful interconnectivity is the referral and other linking that goes on between blogs. When you think of the World Wide Web, you should think “link” or else you are sort of missing the point.

Do you desire more visitors to your own website or blog? There are many ways to increase traffic, but I can think of no BETTER way than going out every day to visit people and make new friends. These comments and links and social networking are the “signs” I spoke of in the last post.

There are many proactive things you should be doing every single day in order to build traffic to your blog or other website. Traffic equals money. If money is not your object with your blog, then traffic equals more people to read your thoughts and more people to have the joy of interacting with.

Of those many proactive things you should be working at every day, probably none are more important, or more effective, than putting up signs on the turf of your fellow bloggers (and returning the love in their direction as well.) Overcome your shyness with the knowledge that they very much WANT you to interact with them. Honest!

Creating traffic to your website

Asking how to create traffic to a website is not the same as asking how a new store gets customers. The difference is in location. A store is usually on a busy street or in a mall. Traffic is therefore built in to a certain extent. Of course, there should still be advertising going on.

Creating traffic to a website requires a different strategy. A website is like a store that is located way out in the sticks on a country road. You have to work very, very hard to tell people where to find you. Another, perhaps better, analogy, is that your "store" is located in a very busy mall, but it is a tiny little store on the third level of the mall located down a long corridor, tucked away where few people happen by. Advertising becomes more important than ever and, in addition, there must be “outside selling” going on. Outside selling refers to a business which hires salespeople to go out and sell its products rather than waiting for customers to come into the store. In the case of a website, “outside selling” means becoming proactive about bringing people to your website rather than sitting back and waiting for them to find you.

With a website, “outside selling” can take several forms, but they all have the same end-purpose: to send people to visit your website rather than simply waiting for people to find you. Some peope have made a fortune by calling these techniques “guerilla marketing” but they are really just things you need to do, logically, to help people find out where your website is and what they will find there. Let’s talk about a few of these techniques I call “outside selling.”

One of the first things you will want to do, I think, is go out and put up some signs. Signs are good advertising, because signs can be placed where the people are. You know what a sign is. You see them everyday in your travels. Billboards. Signs on taxis and buses. Signs on poles and walls. Signs are everywhere. In this sense, TV and radio advertising is a kind of sign that goes to people instead of waiting for them to come in.

With regard to advertising a website, signs are a metaphor, of course. I mean you don’t really go out and nail signs to people’s computer screens. When I talk about signs, I was thinking about you going out like an outside salesman and posting signs on other people’s websites. With their permission, of course. But real traditional advertising, whenever you are able to afford it, is very effective as well sometimes. By this I mean advertising your website address by using traditional advertising media such as TV commercials and magazine ads. But that kind of advertising will usually come much later, if at all, for most web entrepreneurs.

What does “putting up signs on other people’s websites” mean? Let’s continue that thought in the next post.

Hint: concentrate on being a “visitor” rather than a “stay at home” manager.

If you can't fight them...

I used to get upset at the supposedly honest and upright people with legitimate info-packed high-traffic blogs who allow that get-rich-quick crapola to be advertised on their websites. You'll even see a bunch of that false advertising on Google's Adsense. And then I thought about it, and I don't get quite so upset anymore. If Google and others can find a way to take some bucks back from these predators...why not?

Get rich quick on the internet

Do you want to start earning more money than the world's top-paid corporate CEOs? Do you want to start earning a lot of money without doing any work? Do you want to get rich in less than 10 days? If you are in the mood for some snake oil today, here are a few Get Rich Quick claims we have seen making the rounds lately:

*****
1. The world's most fantastic false advertisement:

"The 12 Month Internet Millionaire. The Amazing Money-Making Secret Of A 28-year-old Convicted Felon Who Earns More Money Per Year Than The CEOs Of FedEx, eBay(R), Amazon, Time Warner, Apple Computer, McDonalds, Microsoft, Nike, Yahoo, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, And Goodyear Combined!"

*****
2. Meet Andreas, the Super Forex Trader. He wants to share his secret with you:

"Please let me introduce myself, my name is Andreas Kirchberger and I make an extrordinary living trading the forex market. I used to work for the Deutsche Bank as a forex advisor but i had to quit because a question kept nagging me and even haunted me in my dreams: Why should i work, sweat 8 hours a day, making other people rich, researching reports and monitoring market movements? That`s why I and 2 colleagues developed the Forex Killer, the only working forex signal generator on the market today. I`ve already made hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here is a screenshot of my swiss bank account. Would you believe that all I did to generate this sum is spending a few MINUTES a day adjusting some easy BUY & SELL ORDERS???"
*****

3. This guy tells how easy it is to sell Google ads:
"I made $57,317.01 in just 87 days..."

[The 1 cent is what makes this believable.]
*****

4. And here's Michelle...advisor to corporate giants. Very believable indeed:

"My name is Michelle McAllister and I have to share my life changing story with you. I'll tell it to you straight: The CEO's of Nike...Ebay...Amazon and Walmart are tripping over their own feet to give me money! These million-dollar-a-year fat cats, know squat about their customers! So they pay 'normal' people like me to tell them the word on the street."

[Have you no shame, Michelle?]
*****

(Caution: be prepared to be bombarded by sticky and relentless popups, confusing exit choices, and audio-video headbeaters. [And, surprisingly, none of these fabulous multimillionaires have learned to spell.] Have fun, if you think this kind of thing is fun.)

These claims (and many, many more) were found at the headquarters for this kind of thing, Clickbank.

Here’s the thing: they work. They really do. They have always worked. These kinds of ads have worked for decades (centuries?) before anyone ever thought of the internet.

I don’t mean the PLANS will work. I mean the outrageous ads work for the sellers of the ebooks, because you (and me, sadly) buy them. It seems to just be human nature to want to believe there is some inside secret to easy riches.

Here's one final one for you:

*****
The Rich Jerk. Blah Blah Blah. Who Cares.
*****

Who, indeed.

Getting people to visit your website

By now you have certainly descovered the real “secret” to making money on the internet is traffic. Visitors. Customers. In fact, instead of writing about “how to make money on the internet,” perhaps we should retitle this blog to “how to get people to visit your website.”

Once your blog (or store website) is set up and ready to go, a large percentage of your time from then on out will consist of thinking up ways to increase your traffic. You will advertise, of course. You will find ways to get successful websites to link to you. You will make friends. You will create a following of regular repeat visitors by making sure your blog is informative and entertaining (or that your store catalog offers a great selection of merchandise.)

And, all along the way, you will work to improve your ranking with the search engines. And don’t forget newsletters and forums and RSS feeds. Whew! It really is work. Running a blog or an online store is certainly no “lazy way to quick riches.” Which leads us to our next bit of entertainment: we are going to test your credibility by reviewing some internet get rich quick schemes that are currently making the rounds. You’re gonna love it.

Put product reviews on your website

With your site up and running for a while, it is time to get serious about your initial monetization, even though you don’t have much traffic yet. Of course, if you will be selling your own merchandise, you will have already set up your catalog and payment center during the website setup process.

If your website is a blog, and you have decided to monetize it by offering advertising space and by promoting affiliate advertisers’ merchandise, then you will be wanting to start placing your ads and product reviews tastefully throughout your website.

Remember there are two types of ads, and that you will be most probably be using both. Pay per click ads create revenue for your website if you have high-traffic, and affiliate ads (in the form of product reviews, not banners) will earn you a commission on products sold through your website by that advertiser.

Be aware that many advertisers require a certain level of traffic on your website before they will become affiliated with you. That makes it a little harder for you at first, but there are very many other advertisers who don’t have this requirement--so don’t worry. Pay per click advertisers are especially picky about not advertising with low-volume new sites, so you might just concentrate on affiliate sales at first, until your site traffic increases.

Once you have established relationships with advertisers and have written and posted your product reviews, it is time to concentrate fully on building traffic to your website.

Setting up your blog

After you are clear about what you really want to do, and have a plan on paper, then you can go ahead and start setting up your website. Knowing exactly how you want it to look, or nearly so, will make this job a lot easier.

Get a descriptive domain name for your blog or store, then choose a webhost after doing research. Choose a webhost that offers the features you need, offers decent service, and is reasonably priced. In general, don’t expect much help from your webhost in setting up your website unless you are willing to pay extra for this help.

There are several ways to set up your website using software that doesn’t require you to know how to code, but it is to your advantage to learn how to code anyway, since that puts you much more in control of how your site looks. You can do this little by little though. Making little changes to the existing css is a good way to get your feet wet.

After your site is up and running, with the basic elements in place, it is time to begin monetizing. Actually, if your site is a blog, you don’t have to monetize right away. You can start blogging and get in the habit of regular writing. But at the same time, you should be visiting the blogs of other people so you can be getting monetization ideas.

Steering by the wake, not

This also involves two things: creating a business plan, and executing that business plan.

I’ll bet you would be surprised at the high percentage of would-be entrepreneurs, both online and in the real world, that skip part one and go straight to the execution part. This is good news for their competition.

I have put execution before the plan several times in my life, to my personal grief and financial loss. I remember one time when I was very young when I was working in a job that I absolutely hated. More than anything, I wanted to be independent. To me, that meant I wanted to be self-employed.

Without really thinking about what I wanted to do, much less how to do it, I went out and rented a building. Incredibly, that seemed logical to me. After all, no matter what business I chose to open, surely I would need a building. Talk about putting the cart before the horse!

So there I was with a building. It came with some fixtures and equipment left behind by the previous bankrupt owner. An ice cream shop. All I had to do was clean it up, buy some product, turn on the lights, unlock the door, and begin to count my money. Of course the next step was equally as logical: I quit my steady job right away. I had realized my dream. I was independent.

Are you laughing? Don’t. Just look around at all the unplanned blogs and other websites on the internet. The ones that look terrible, have nothing to say, and are monetized so ineptly. They have rented a building. They have dragged some undesirable basic “stock” into that building—stock that they may know nothing about. They have pasted a lot of signs in the front windows. Now they are sitting back and waiting for people to bring them money.

What could I have done differently? What important step did I leave out? Have all these new internet store owners already quit their day jobs? I hope not.

I think it was the great American sage Yogi Berra who once made the comment, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up somewhere else.”

Blogging for dollars

The actual mechanics of earning a good living from a blog are very simple and straightforward. In fact, there are only two things you have to think about and work at. It is HOW WELL you do those two things that determines whether or not your blog will make you any money or not.

Everything you do will fall under one of these two major categories:

1. Setting up and maintaining your blog
2. Driving traffic to your blog

There are many specific things you have to do, and there are many subtleties and variations as to how you decide to do them, but they will all fall under one of those two main categories.

Interestingly, the actual act of blogging—of writing posts—falls under the second category, not the first.

In order to understand new concepts, it is often helpful to compare these new ideas to things we are already familiar with. With that in mind, let’s compare the opening of your new blog with something you may be more familiar with: the establishment of a “regular” business—say a grocery store.

In such a comparison, setting up your blog will include pretty much all the things you would need to do to open a grocery store. Driving traffic to your blog would include all the things you would do to induce customers to come into your store.

Here we should pause and note the difference between the two words “shop” and “buy.” The word “shop” implies you have induced people to come into your store to look around. The word “buy” means they have purchased something from you and given you money. In the blogging business, this distinction is important because you can make money either way.

POSTED BY RELAX MAX AT 6:00 AM

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LABELS: BLOG, TRAFFIC

More popups

When I talk about popup windows, I am referring to the kind that appear unexpectedly and uninvited when you least expect it. They fill the whole screen, or nearly so. They interrupt your train of thought. They actually attack you. They have one purpose: to put the high-pressure sales pitch on you.

We have discussed how some businesses—like big-city new car dealers—treat their customers like they were a piece of meat to be devoured, giving no thought to the feelings or humanity of the customer. All they see are dollar signs. I hope you have decided not to be like this with your online business.

One of the rudest things you can do, if it is your object to be rude, is to use big ol’ nasty popup windows on your website for things other than the helpful amplification of information. The kind of popup we are talking about takes over the whole page and tries to manipulate the customer or beat them into submission. It doesn’t offer unobtrusive and helpful information--often you don’t even have to click on anything for the popup to appear in all its blinking rude glory.

When you start to read the message on the homepage of a website, and you get to the second sentence, and a huge offensive popup window opens on top of the information you are reading, what does that say to you? What does it say about the person who wants you to spend your money with them? What does it say about their opinion of you and your feelings?