Sabtu, 26 November 2011

How To Start an Internet Business – The First Step

The vast majority of web sites are destined to fail before they are even built. Why? Because people building sites almost always put the cart before the horse. Actually, most don’t even include the horse.

Evolution of Your Site

New sites follow a typical evolutionary process.

1. The first stage involves slaving over the design of the site to get just the right look;

2. The second stage is the publication of the site;

3. Third comes the first thought about how to get traffic to the site;

4. Fourth, the discovery of pay-per-click options;

5. Fifth, the pursuit of PPC campaigns and realization of sales!;

6. Sixth, the “misery stage”, occurs with the realization that sales are being made at a loss!;

7. Frustration, frustration, frustration;

8. The “extinction stage” - With profitability seeming impossible, the PPC campaigns are closed and the site just sits there.

Does any of this sound familiar? You need not suffer this evolutionary extinction! Taking one step before you build a site can save you a lot of wasted time and money.

If You Build It, Will They Come?

The first step to developing a successful web site is keyword analysis. Keywords are the anchors of each page of your site, a collective summary of your products and services.

The first step to developing an online business is to identify whether there is sufficient traffic for your business product or service. Let’s look at a very simple example.

If your are selling boating products, each page of your site should incorporate boating-related keyword phrases. You must analyze whether there is a sufficient number of searches each month to make your boating site a viable entity. A free method for doing this is to use the Overture inventory tool:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

In our example, we would do a search for “boating” to see how many searches there are for the keyword as well as other boating-related keyword phrases. A quick search shows there were over 100,000 searches for “boating” and over 4,000 searches for “boating supply” in March 2005. These numbers suggest that there clearly is enough traffic to build a site selling boating products.

Alternatively, assume that we want to build a site promoting our hiking guide service in Nevada. If we do a search for “Nevada hiking” using the Overture inventory tool, we find that there are only 100 or so searches a month. Should we go ahead and build the site? Probably not. There simply isn’t enough interest to justify spending the time and money.

Unfortunately, we often talk with site owners that have spent significant amounts of money building a site only to find that there is little interest in their product or service. By performing keyword analysis, you can determine whether a site should be built before you spend the time, energy and money on it. There is little reason to build a site that has no chance of success.

Jumat, 25 November 2011

How to install and use phpList

In this article I will explain how to install phpList and how to use this great PHP script. First, let's answer the question what is phpList good for. PhpList is free script written in PHP which can be used as a newsletter manager. With the double opt-in subscription system you can be sure that your subscribers are really interested in your newsletter.

Web hosting requirements for phpList:

Before you start the installation process, ensure that your web host support PHP and MySQL database and you have at least 10 MB free disk space (more space will be necessary when your newsletter will grow and more data will be stored in MySQL database). PHP version must be at least 4.3.x or higher and MySQL version must be 3.23 or higher. Developers recommend to run this script on Linux servers with Apache Webserver. They highly recommend to run phplist with "safe mode" in PHP off too.

How to install phpList:

Download the *.tgz or *.zip package from developers website. Unpack the archive files using WinZip, Total Commander or similar program. Then upload files in public_html folder to your web host. Edit the lists/config/config.php file and setup variables like Mysql database server (usually localhost), database name (if you have not created the database yet, you should do it through your web hosting control panel), database username and password. Other settings you should leave intact unless you are sure what are you doing. Then point your browser to http://www.yourdomain.com/lists/admin and follow the instructions on the screen. That is the last step, when done the installation should be finished.

Another and easier solution how to install this PHP script is to sign up for a quality web hosting service which offers pre-installed PHP scripts. Then easily go to your control panel, find the section with pre-installed scripts and select phpList. The installer will do all the job for you. All you need to do is to choose the script you want to install.

How to use phpList:

Login to admin interface and look at configuration functions. From this place you can setup e. g. mailing list url, how often you want to check for a new version, url where users can subscribe and unsubscribe etc. Then check out links under list and user functions. This is the section where you can see and manage current lists, users, eventually import or export users. Under administrator functions it is possible to add, edit or remove administrators and configure attributes for administrators.

The most important section is called message functions -- from this place you can send messages to your subscribers. You can choose between HTML format, plain text or combination of plain text and HTML, pick some of the templates, set up criteria (e. g. send email only to users that answered "yes" particular question when they signed up) and other options.

I hope the installation and settings will be easy for your. Anyway if you will have any problem you can visit developers website where is extensive documentation and forum.

Kamis, 24 November 2011

Good Shopping Cart Scripts

You may be wondering what a shopping cart script is, could it be a script for a movie about shopping carts – not likely. Scripts track what a consumer chooses to buy from your online store. The scripts will track their choices all the way through to the checkout process. Often online consumers think that the shopping cart is a neat little icon that holds all their purchases until they are ready to checkout – just as they do in a real store but this is not the case. The shopping cart icon is used as the first part of the financial transaction. Then a gateway will send the information to the area where the customer will pay for the items that they have chosen. This process is completed through a secure connection.

The payment gateway will then send the requests, which have been processed thus far along with various other transfers throughout the financial networks as necessary. This includes the Internet merchant account that your bank has with the online store. When this is completed, the gateway will then send confirmation or denial to the shopping cart software. How do you know which shopping cart package is appropriate for your business? There are literally hundreds of packages to choose from, searching through them all can be time consuming as well as confusing, and then it may become more difficult to determine what is best for your online business.

Free or Premium Shopping Carts:
Before you begin to look at what is available make sure you have a clear idea of what it is you want the shopping cart to accomplish. Look at your online business and the products you are offering. If you are just beginning, you may not need all the fancy extras that come with a high-end shopping cart package. If that is the stage you are at in your business, you may want to consider a lower end package. However, remember, nothing is ever truly free is it? Always read the fine print and acknowledgments before you decide on anything.

Free e-Commerce Solutions:
Paypal is a great e-commerce solution. The services that Paypal offer have become quite popular among the Internet businesses. Paypal integrates the necessary shopping cart functions with the payment gateways and includes the merchant account. This is very convenient. The drawback is that your consumers are required to use Paypal and become Paypal account holders, this is not difficult because when they purchase your product they will automatically be taken to a page that will have them set up their Paypal account. The only cost to you is a small percentage that is taken out of each transaction and you pay no monthly fees for this service.

Rabu, 23 November 2011

The Trend You Must Take Notice Of!

Have you noticed it already? What is the biggest change on the internet in the last five years? If you haven't already noticed it, it is the growth of audio and video on ordinary websites.

How often recently have you browsed onto a webpage and an audio track has started instantly? Until about a year ago it required an expensive studio setup to be able to stream audio across the web. Now there are free open source programs that will let you record straight to your hard drive. The quality is good enough, without any editing, to be used online. The piece of software that is used to create the streaming audio file is inexpensive enough for anyone. In fact members of my site have access to it included in the resources section.

Video is now taking the net by storm as well. Within the very near future you will begin to see the sort of "info-mercial" that currently appears on late night cable channels appearing on the web. New compression technology means that videos can be streamed within the web page, making them accessible to almost anyone with web access. At the other end of web video check out the "mobloggs" already appearing with video uploaded straight from mobile phones!

Recently the increase in the use of "Screen Capture" videos to demonstrate the way to use programs on your computer has been credited with the growth of a new type of surfer. The Non Reader.

The younger generation as a whole do not read books. Recent statistics in the UK show that over 60% of twenty year olds have not read a book in the last twelve months. 27% claim not to have even read a newspaper! American figures are probably not dissimillar. Yet most of these people are comfortable using computers, frequently for gaming. These are the people who would not read a web page. The Television generation. Yet these are the people that are surfing frequently on their mobile phones.

If you haven't heard of The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) you should take note. It is their strength that is driving the market. Through their work no one platform has gained the upper hand, so the speed of change is accellerating all the time, without being held back by competing standards.

Check out FoneBlog, the world's first and leading mobile blogging solution designed and built for the mobile operator with the focus to drive MMS revenue and build mobile communities. It allows users to instantly send and post content, including text, photos, audio and video from a camera phone to a personal website that can be set as a private location or shared with the world.

Imagine a generation that sets up as a matter of course personal websites running from their mobile phones. Multi media diaries that they can share with anyone or everyone.

If you cannot see that embracing the use of audio and video are essential to the continued growth of your web business then you are going to be like the president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp, Ken Olsen who famously said in 1977
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."

Selasa, 22 November 2011

Google Wants To Help You Succeed

All too often, we see Google pictured as the "evil" company who’s just out to get you, and to make your life miserable.

While at times it might seem that way, it's just not true.

No… Google is not going to come banging on your door to sit down next to you and help you design your website, but they do provide a wealth of traffic assistance for the webmaster who’s willing to look for it.

Take the Google sitemaps program for example.

Google wants to know about ALL your pages. When you consider the billions of webpages that are on the Internet now, that’s a daunting task. The way that they discover YOUR pages is by "spidering" your website. This is also called crawling. This is done through automated robots that will look through your website and follow the links to discover other pages. When it does, it puts those pages into a database, which they will use to ultimately decide which page will get listed and which one doesn’t.

If you make this process easy for them, they can reward you with much faster spidering of your website. This is especially advantageous if you have a large website.

Google has a program called their "sitemaps" program. What you do is place a specially formatted XML file on your computer that includes links to all of your web pages, and other information related to your website, such as how often you update your website and so on.

We’ve found that compiling the datafeed the way Google requires it can be a little bit intimidating.

There are programs available that will help you to do that.

When you’re building a website, it’s very easy to make a mistake in a link, especially when building a large site. This can be disastrous when Google comes around to view your website and it can hurt you tremendously. The better programs not only spider the site as Google would and builds your Google sitemap.xml file automatically, but if it encounters errors, it gives you an error log so that you can correct the errors BEFORE you submit your sitemap to Google.

This is VERY important. If Google tries to spider a site that has bad or missing links in it, then your chances of being listed in their search engine are VERY slim.

Google’s official website on this subject is at this URL: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login you’ll find a good explanation of their sitemap program.

Google sitemaps should be a part of every webmaster’s website submission plan. It does not necessarily help with your search engine positioning or ranking, but it will help you to get all your pages spidered quickly, which is the first step to getting your pages listed in the search engines.

Senin, 21 November 2011

Get back to what you love and increase your bottom line with these time savers

Title:
Get back to what you love and increase your bottom line with these time savers

Word Count:
463

Summary:
You can fall in love all over again – with your business – and increase your bottom line at the same time. But in order to do that, you’re going to need to free up some time. Time-saving systems, customer relationship software and maybe even extra help around the office are all good bets. It’s worth it; getting back to basics and
It’s the same old story. You don’t spend as much time together as you used to. You’re trying to get that “loving feeling” back, but, as usual, you’ve got too much on your plate. There are leads to follow, faxes to send and business trips to plan. It doesn’t leave room for much else.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. You can fall in love all over again – with your business. And doing that means that you’ll be able to spend more time at what you’re really good at – which means you’ll also be making more money! And isn’t that the whole point? But in order to do that, you’re going to need to free up some time.

Here are a few tricks:

· Put systems in place to save you time. Even looking for passwords or addresses can eat up valuable hours. A system can be as simple as getting into the habit of always sending new customers a thank you note. To be certain the system will work, make sure you get in the habit of inputting new customers in your marketing database so your customer relationship (CRM) software program can remind you when to follow up next. You can also have your CRM program remind you to send incentives or thank yous for referrals.

· Don’t try to do it all. You went into business because you had a dream. So why are you still your own secretary? Thanks to cyberspace, a virtual assistant can help you clear your plate. Working from remote locations, virtual assistants provide small businesses and entrepreneurs secretarial support and office management. Unlike on-site employees, they take up no space, will work on a retainer and can do as little or as much as much as you need, from project planning to event and meeting coordination.

· Let software work harder so you don’t have to. You know that in order to keep the customers coming, you have be rock-solid in following those leads. So once you get those phone numbers organized, a good CRM program will remind you when you need to follow-up with customers. An even better one will send your emails and faxes according to prompts, leaving you more time to do what you love. When shopping for a CRM program, stick to companies that offer web-based software. According to the author of The CRM Handbook, Jill Dyche, web-based CRM software is more flexible, accessible and secure than PC-bound software, saving you not only time, but headaches and needless worry.

Getting back to basics and making a few changes allows you to spend more time increasing your bottom line and as a bonus, you might just get back that “loving feeling”!

Minggu, 20 November 2011

High Search Rankings Means More Cash

Title:
High Search Rankings Means More Cash

Word Count:
487

Summary:
In the internet marketing business there are many different buzzwords that float around and around. Words like "targeted traffic" and "search engine optimization" and "affiliate income." Most of them have a lot to do with the internet search engines, because after all if you can figure out how they operate than you have 99% of the game figured out. Basically if you are selling something than you need buyers, and the portal that the buyers come to your sales page through is al...


Keywords:
search rankings


Article Body:
In the internet marketing business there are many different buzzwords that float around and around. Words like "targeted traffic" and "search engine optimization" and "affiliate income." Most of them have a lot to do with the internet search engines, because after all if you can figure out how they operate than you have 99% of the game figured out. Basically if you are selling something than you need buyers, and the portal that the buyers come to your sales page through is almost without exception the search engines. The higher your site's search rankings are the more people will come to your site and the more sales you will make.

Given the fact that most peoples pages are on a level playing field as far as desirability for the customer, it really is the search rankings that separate those who have to work another job because they are barely making enough to pay for hosting, and those who work very little and own several houses all over the world that they rotate through on a month to month basis. It's simple math really, the higher the rank the more customers, the more customers the more sales, the more sales the greater the profits, the greater the profits the more home that you own around the world.

So how do you achieve these valuable high search rankings? A great question and one that doesn't really have a good answer because no one really knows who. Why is that? Well thats because the search engines don't post a month-to-month bulletin that details the criteria they are using to grade topic relevancy. Why not? Well they don't because if they did people would exploit the system so that they could get high rankings (and therefore more traffic) even if their relevancy sucks. Well doesn't that happen anyway? Of course it does but it takes us all a lot longer to do it the guess-and-check way.

Anyway there are many different ways that people have found that help promote their site to the search engines in such a way as to get good search rankings. A lot of it has to do with keyword research, and diversity of page forms, amount of information, and the amount of information on related topics, and the number of links that the page has, and on and on. This is valuable knowledge and the guys that have it are willing to give it and the tools that they have made to automate these procedures away for a price. Let me tell you if you haven't been doing this for the last 10 years than you have no choice but to bite the bullet and purchase your knowledge. I will also tell you though that when you finally start to get it and understand the potential for income generation that you have you will be so glad you threw the cash down. It's out of this world baby!



In the internet marketing business there are many different buzzwords that float around and around. Words like "targeted traffic" and "search engine optimization" and "affiliate income." Most of them have a lot to do with the internet search engines, because after all if you can figure out how they operate than you have 99% of the game figured out. Basically if you are selling something than you need buyers, and the portal that the buyers come to your sales page through is almost without exception the search engines. The higher your site's search rankings are the more people will come to your site and the more sales you will make.

Given the fact that most peoples pages are on a level playing field as far as desirability for the customer, it really is the search rankings that separate those who have to work another job because they are barely making enough to pay for hosting, and those who work very little and own several houses all over the world that they rotate through on a month to month basis. It's simple math really, the higher the rank the more customers, the more customers the more sales, the more sales the greater the profits, the greater the profits the more home that you own around the world.

So how do you achieve these valuable high search rankings? A great question and one that doesn't really have a good answer because no one really knows who. Why is that? Well thats because the search engines don't post a month-to-month bulletin that details the criteria they are using to grade topic relevancy. Why not? Well they don't because if they did people would exploit the system so that they could get high rankings (and therefore more traffic) even if their relevancy sucks. Well doesn't that happen anyway? Of course it does but it takes us all a lot longer to do it the guess-and-check way.

Anyway there are many different ways that people have found that help promote their site to the search engines in such a way as to get good search rankings. A lot of it has to do with keyword research, and diversity of page forms, amount of information, and the amount of information on related topics, and the number of links that the page has, and on and on. This is valuable knowledge and the guys that have it are willing to give it and the tools that they have made to automate these procedures away for a price. Let me tell you if you haven't been doing this for the last 10 years than you have no choice but to bite the bullet and purchase your knowledge. I will also tell you though that when you finally start to get it and understand the potential for income generation that you have you will be so glad you threw the cash down. It's out of this world baby!