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How Much Would You Pay To Run An Online Business?

Terry — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:54:37 +0000

There are lots of people out there who say they would like to run their own business. They are usually, though not always, referring to running an online business.

It is no surprise that so many people see this as a real possibility. They are constantly being sold on the idea that you can buy a make money online product and be swept into a world of Ferrari sports cars, glamorous yachts and be surrounded by beautiful women, or men, whichever takes your fancy.

Many of these prospective entrepreneurs are to be found on various online marketing forums asking for advice and giving their 'knowledge' gained from reading far too many sales pages. Nothing beats experience and unless you walk the walk you should be cautious about talking the talk. Inexperienced people frequently seem to mislead other beginner online marketers and prospective online business owners but that is the downside of everybody having a voice on the internet. With so much general babble it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the genuine, experience based knowledge from the chatter of the enthusiastic but inexperienced.

We are all entitled to an opinion but when we are saying emphatically that something is the case we should be talking with knowledge and experience of putting those ideas into practice and making them work for us. Too many seem eager to relay what they have read elsewhere that may or may not be correct and they wouldn't know because they never tried it.

They say we now live in the information age and that knowledge is power but when there is so much chatter it is difficult to hear clearly. Most of everything you need to know about online marketing is available for free online, somewhere.

Marketing is hardly a new business and the old established ideas of marketers of old generally still work today, albeit that the system has been updated to work online. It is still about having a product or service to sell and finding a customer who might need that product and then convincing them that they would be happier with your product than without it.

So, if you want to run an online business for free you can. Get yourself a hubpage and write about a product. Get a blogger blog and tell the world about your service. Just be careful what you read and don't assume that because someone has a gazillion posts on a forum they must know what they are talking about. It is interesting to see many people with a lot of posts to their name writing about how they plan to set up a blog soon and start making money online. To those people I say, Stop wasting your time writing forum posts and start writing some content on your own blog.

The cost of setting up your own website with your own domain on your own rented hosting space is minimal. We are talking around $20 to get started and $75 tops, for a year. It is not a huge amount of money yet we see people grumbling about the cost of it. OK, I know times are hard and some people dream of having twenty dollars left at the end of the month. I understand that. If that is you go the free route. Set up Hubpages, Squidoo lenses and write articles for EzineArticles, Goarticles and Article Dashboard. You can make money using free resources and if you are really short of cash start that way.

Most people can afford $20 dollars to spend on various different things and it is only a question of priorities that prevents them. If you can afford to go to a movie you can probably afford to own your own website, run your own online business and potentially make a bit of money. It will cost you around $9 to $10 dollars to register a domain name, from $5 per month for server space. (My server recommendation Is Hostgator. Click here for more info) You might possibly make a lot more than your twenty dollars and you might multiply that number by ten, hundreds or even thousands of times. It is possible but that is not to say it is easy and it requires work, knowledge and dedication together with a slice of good luck.

If you decided to run a real brick and mortar business, how much do you suppose that would cost you? You probably need finance of around $50,000 to $100,000 to run just about any serious realworld business these days so what is twenty dollars? $20 is what it would cost you to get your shop window cleaned before opening. It is a tiny and insignificant amount of money to run a business with.

I know what it is like to struggle to pay the bills. I know how hard it can seem to get an online business generating decent returns that enable you to live a comfortable life but if you want to run your own online business and build something worthwhile that can earn you real money you have to be prepared to invest something into your business.

Now I am not saying you should spend the rent money on internet marketing products. I say exactly the opposite. Do not spend money you cannot afford to lose buying ebooks, guides and courses. Spend time researching for free instead but don't avoid ever getting started. Use the free route. It works and it can earn you some money to invest in your own domains and server space.

Note I said invest. You are not in this to spend money for the sake of it. When you buy a product or a service for your internet marketing business you should be buying with a purpose. Figure out how this new purchase will fit in with your business and how it will improve your efficiency, your returns or your visitor numbers.

What is an online business? IT'S A BUSINESS. Businesses are there to make money, not to keep spending money on the latest hyped up idea that everyone is telling you is essential to your business. It may be essential and it may be effective but it also could just be that these guys and gals promoting it will make some money from convincing you to buy it and they may never have even seen the product before.

I must declare an interest here. I have my automated offers blog attached to this site and while I do like a reccommend the wordpress plugin that runs the publishing of these offers which only costs about $5 if you are interested, I have no idea what is being published on there. It has new products and offers appearing most days. I look at them now and again but they appear as if by magic and I have no experience or knowledge about them. Most seem pretty good and they are usually priced very reasonably but you have to make the choice and decide if they are suitable or not. Don't listen to me or trust the salespages to tell you if you should purchase or not. Use your own judgment and make up your own mind.

There is a lot of good information out there for free and lots of good reports and guides available for just a few dollars. If you want to run your own online business then you should approach the whole thing as a business person and be prepared to invest, what you can afford, in yourself and the business. Avoid the temptation to buy everything out there. Be selective, think about your reasons and benefits for buying anything and how it can help you make money online.

If you had a real bricks and mortar store you wouldn't buy everything from every salesman who walked in and offered you their goods and nor should you do that online. Spend more time working on your websites and less time reading sales pages and participating on forums and you might actually find you are beginning to build an online business.

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How Do I Get Backlinks For Traffic To My Website?

Terry — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 19:27:56 +0000

One thing about the web is that it is so darn big. How the heck are you supposed to get your website on the first page of the search engines when there are a million other website owners trying to do the same thing? There are two answers to this question. The first, and arguably the most important, is that you must have content that gives the search engines a reason to rank a page on your site highly. If you want to rank for dog training then your webpage had better say a lot about dog training with lots of related words like puppy training, dog treat training or other similar sorts of terms. This is all food for the search engine robots and you need to convince them your site is a good place to send their traffic.

The second important thing you can do to boost the importance of your webpage is to get plenty of backlinks.

You will probably have heard this many times before. You may have got yourself a few backlinks from blog commentating and maybe a few hubpages links, even a few from squidoo or some blogger blog links but it takes a lot of time and it's hard work and while we don't mind a bit of hard work on the road to success with our internet business we would prefer to do more productive things than to numb our brains to death looking for blogs to comment on wouldn't we?

Ah yes, there is something else we can do. Write articles and fire them off to article directories to get some juicy backlinks. Yes, that works and it is a decent long term strategy to build the reputation of your website by having some decent backlinks but once again, it can be brain numbing. How many articles can you write about dog training before your head explodes? Mine does as soon as I even think about writing twenty articles on the same subject. Is there an alternative? Well, yes it would seem there is, read on.

I have been trying out a package of two programs. You can buy them separately or save a bit by purchasing both together. Believe me, the package together makes an amazing combination that will get you lots of backlinks and will save you hours in writing and rewriting articles. The main program is MagicArticleRewriter and having looked at a few article spinning programs I can tell you this one is a goody.

A lot of the cheaper article spinning programs will try to replace words for you and frequently make a real hash of it. The trouble with the English language is that it has similar words with very different meanings, even the same word with different meanings, so when you try to change a word automatically you end up with an article that reads like it was written by an idiot or a martian, or a combination of the two.

This program doesn't try to do everything for you but what it does do is make it real easy to find alternative words and phrases and then simply enter them into the spinnable formatted article. It also allows you to use your own mind and make alterations as you see fit. It is fast and easy to do and there isn't much more can be said about that. It just works.

The real icing on the cake comes when you add the second program in the package. This one is an articlesubmitter and it will automatically publish your unique articles, which it gets from the article spinner program, to about 700 different article directories all over the internet. Not just that but it does a lot of the signin and confirm operations that are required when you first sign up with an article directory. You don't have to send the articles all out at once either. You can set a schedule for how many you want to be sent out each day or every few days or whatever.

Together these two packages make getting backlinks almost fun. You can get a lot of backlinks over a fairly short period of time without a lot of effort and the content you are publishing is good stuff. None of your robot written junk here. Just good articles that you have written or, if you use PLR to start with, edited. This is a great package and you have a 60 day money back guarantee so check it out. I think you will love it too. There's a video on the salespage that shows it in operation so you will see how clever and simple to use it is. Go take a look here ...<MagicArticleRewriter>

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Add A Second Blog To Your Domain

Terry — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:43:08 +0000

You will have noticed I have been raving about the commission automator plugin that I am super impressed with. I think you should buy i if you have any blogs that sell stuff. Anyway, the plugin has several options for how often you add offers to your blog.

Since I wanted to see it in full action I had it posting a lot of offers to this blog over 24 hours. Trouble with that was that it made the real articles get buried way down under all those offers. Now the sensible thing would be to switch to just publishing an offer every couple of days or maybe once a week but I started thinking about another possibility. What if I could add a second blog to this one that only published the offers and let you switch between the two!

I started to experiment and installed a second blog in another directory and set it all up and whilst it appeared to work just fine there was a problem with the fact that if you clicked on the header of a post on the Offers blog it took you back to the main blog,

I did a quick search online but the only thing I found were questions from people who had suffered a similar problem and hadn't apparently solved it. So, I put my thinking cap on and had a lightbulb moment. You know? One of those moments when if life was a cartoon a big speech ballooon with a picture of a lightbulb would have appeared over the top of my head.
The solution lay in the htaccess file.

If you use permalinks to change the name of your post as it appears in the address bar the server relies on the information in the htaccess file to tell it where to find the files and mine was reverting to the domain htaccess file which told it to look at the main blog installation.

So, to solve the problem all I had to do was to edit a copy of the htaccess file and save it to the new blog folder. I did this and bingo! Everything started working properly as intended.

So, now if you want to find the offers you can click on a link on the side menu and it opens a new window to the second blog on this domain with just the juicy offers there and I can keep all my, hopefully, interesting articles here and easier to find.

So, can you add a second blog on a domain, yes you can. In fact you could us the same database but I don't really see the need. I have always believed you should KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). I still recommend the commissions automator plugin for your blogs but it might be best if you only add offers every couple of days which is easy to set up which just one click. If you do want to publish more you can simply add another blog and do as I have done which keeps things tidy and uncluttered. I hope this has helped. Feel free to comment below.

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Commissions Automator – Puts Offers On Your Blog

Terry — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 08:48:10 +0000

UPDATE: Offers are now listed seperately here..Products For Sale (opens in a new window so you can easily return after looking)

I want all my visitors to be aware that I am currently running a wordpress plugin on this site which publishes offers for products automatically. I don't even see the offers before they are published and so you should not consider them recommendations from me. If they are listed as being in the 'Auto Posted Offers' category I may not even have seen the offer myself so you should do your own due diligence and decide if the offer is right for you or not.
The offers are for fairly low priced products that fulfill a specific purpose and if you feel that would benefit your website it may be a few dollars well spent.

The plugin appears to work very nicely. Released by Ken Reno and Richard Wing it is in the beta stage at the moment while they finalise the code ready for full public release. It's called Commissions Automator and it automatically makes posts to your Wordpress blog of various offers for products related to websites and internet marketing. It also posts to your Twitter account, and even then the link contains your own affiliate ID, so you earn instant commissions, directly to your PayPal account on any sales made through your links.

The shocker is that instead of $67, they are letting BETA users get access right now for less than $5! For that money I am inclined to say you can hardly go wrong. One sale could easily pay for it and from what I have seen so far the offers are pretty good too.

There is another neat thing about using this tool and that is that your blog gets fresh content added regularly. They may only be offers but at least your blog won't be gathering dust if you leave it alone for a few days, or weeks. The only other thing to think about is how many offers you want to publish each day or every few days. It could easily swamp your own posts and bury them several pages deep in your blog if you have it posting too many offers but that is all part of experimenting what works best for your own blog. So far, I am very impressed and it gets my fullest recommendation and at the current price, it is, in the marketers words, A Steal!

You can take a look here and read more about it Commissions Automator

UPDATE: Offers are now listed seperately here..Products For Sale (opens in a new window so you can easily return after looking)

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Some Great Plugins For Your Wordpress Blog

Terry — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:17:00 +0000

If you run a wordpress blog you will probably already be familiar with plugins. These are little mini programs that run within wordpress and are capable of extending the capabilities of Wordpress in some remarkable ways.

There is a great list of some really useful plugins with a brief explanation of what they do over at Blogging With Success and I suggest you take a look.

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How To Avoid Virus Attacks On Your Server

Terry — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:16:43 +0000

It is not something that happens every day but a virus attack on your server is not something you want to experience. It happened to me last summer and it took me days to sort out the problems it caused. It can be problematic doing the normal things we have to do to build and maintain our websites but dealing with a virus on your server has to be one of the most irritating and frustrating tasks you are ever likely to have to do.

Ever since I experienced that problem I have been looking for a comprehensive solution to server virus problems and finally, I think I have found it.

WebServerGuardian is a program that you can install on all your websites and it sits in the background watching for a virus attack. If it finds a virus has infected your files it cleans them out and replaces them with clean copies of the files. All this is done with no action from you, it simply automatically deals with the problem and your website is back up and running in next to no time.

Having your website down due to a virus or, even worse infecting your visitors computers, is about the worst thing you can have happen to your online business. You have the downtime when your website is not earning you any income and you have the nightmare of first having to discover that your website is infected and then having to tear your hair out while you try to deal with the problem. It may take you hours or days and in some cases it might be impossible to reconstruct it and you would have to rebuild your website from scratch.

It is not a prospect anyone would want to face so I recommend you take a look at this product. We are often happy to spend money buying the latest internet marketing product but we often neglect the basics. Keeping your website safe and online is essential to the success of your online business so don't let it be ruined by a virus attack. Take a look at WebServerGuardian right now. It could save you an awful lot of heartache.

Take a look by clicking here WebServerGuardian

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Are You Building A Business Or Buying A Dream?

Terry — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:44:55 +0000

There are a lot of confusing features about the internet when you decide you would like to build an online business. Nothing seems to be as simple as you have been led to believe and the days of putting up a website and it straight away appearing at the number one position in the search engines are gone. These days you have to work on developing your website and having a strategy to market your website to the world.

It is very tempting to buy guides and products that offer to help you in all sorts of ways. Many of them offer good advice and not all are expensive. We accept that building a business may take an investment of both time and money so buying courses and guides seems like a perfectly justifiable expense. It may well be considered a business expense and be tax deductible too. (Check with a qualified tax advisor since this is a suggestion not advice and the laws in your country may be very different to mine)

So having decided we are prepared to invest in our business we may buy some sort of business development product. Man, that feels good. I can feel the business doing better already. Meanwhile you glance at the information provided and decide to put it into practice another day.

Next day comes and then the next but you don't make the time to put the info into practice. Next week, or month, another product is released. This sounds superb so you decide to buy it. You are, after all, investing in your business so it is a perfectly sensible thing to do. You purchase the product and have a quick scan through the contents. It looks like it could help promote your websites and build your business. Boy, does that feel good. You feel like you are really building your online business now.

The next day comes and you decide to put off putting this new advice into practice. It may look a little complicated to put into practice or appear to be rather time consuming. Maybe leave it until another day but at least you are building your online business up.

Wrong. You are not building your business by spending money on information you don't put into practice. If you do something with it you can consider it an investment but if you do nothing with it, the money spent is wasted.

It can give you a positive feeling when you buy something . The credit card industry knows all about this and encourages us which is partly what brought on the financial crisis around the world. We all feel good when we get something new. Buying a product that could help you build your online business is a positive step towards success. It makes us feel positive that we are doing something but it is just one step. Buying a guide to building an online business does nothing to bring you success unless you make use of the product and put it into action.

Action is what builds your website's success. If you are not going to make use of anything you purchase it is money down the drain so stop kidding yourself that simply buying things helps. It doesn't. If you are impressed by the sales pageand feel it suits your needs, buy it, study it and then put the plan into action. Even if the product is not brilliant, taking action will almost certainly achieve results. Doing nothing gets you nothing.

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Blogging From Your Desktop With BlogDesk

Terry — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 06:29:09 +0000

I have just come across a really neat little desktop program to use for writing a post and publishing directly to your blog. No more logging in and editing in a restrictive editor.

The program is called Blogdesk and it is a free download. You can read about it and download the program from www.blogdesk.org

I'm really impressed with it and I am using it now. I just noticed it has automatically made the domain address above a live link too. It also has an in build image management program to insert, edit and alter pictures in your blog posts.

What a cracking little program. I'm really pleased to have discovered this one. Did I mention that it is FREE? A really handy little program that will save you lots of time writing and publishing your blog posts. Thoroughly recommended.

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Sales Funnels And The Art Of Persuasion

Terry — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:02:16 +0000

You will come across the term 'Sales Funnel' quite often in internet marketing guides and discussions. It describes the planned process of converting a visitor to a buyer by gently guiding them down a path from 'interested' to, 'I want this'

The idea is simple to understand but putting it into practice is a little trickier. It's as though you were to take the hand of a visitor to your website and take them around your site showing what it has to offer and slowly but surely persuading them that they need what you have to offer.

Sometimes it is done very blatently and you feel the salesman pushing you around and most of us object to that. Other times it is done more subtley and while we may be aware it is happening we don't mind because we are happy to be guided along the process.
The best sales funnel is one that convinces the customer. Not just pushing them to buy something but rather, converting them to become a believer in what you have to offer. If they give you good things you will feel that here is someone who has something valuable and if they are prepared to give you this for free, how much more would you get if you were to pay them money.

I came across what I think is one of the best sales funnels I have seen for a while, the other day. This is a site where if you sign up for their newsletter you get a report that is worth more than many paid courses, for free. I reccommend you go and sign up just to read the report as I am sure you will learn a lot about sales funnels and the selling process.

Yes, you will be offered one time offers and other things and they all seem to be offer great value and opportunities to make money in the future but, even if you don't want to spend a single penny, there is still a great deal of value here.
Yes, I may make a commission if you go there, sign up and eventually spend any money but regardless of that, you need to read this report. Seriously. I was blown away by the information contained in this free report and I have no doubt you will be too.
You don't have to spend any money at all and you will learn a lot about sales funnels and the art of persuasion so take a look and if you decide it is not for you it has cost you nothing. Click the image below to find out more.

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Follow-up To Number One On Search Engines Post

Terry — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:18:27 +0000

I just wanted to do a quick update to my previous post about getting to number one in google. The unusual phrase I used meant that It did in fact go straight to the number one position for a search on that phrase and it did that within a few minutes of being published on his blog.
It wa first out of no less than around 80,000,000 pages!

Now that does sound pretty impressive and it is exactly the sort of claim made by people who are selling courses and guides to building a successful online empire but you need to look a little more closely at what this result really means.

It actually means nothing. If you do a search on the same phrase but this time do the search with the phrase in quotes, which means the search is for that exact phrase with the words in that order, there are currently just two results and both refer to my page on this site.

What happened to the other 80 million results? They were pages that had some or all of the words I was searching for but not necessarily in the right order nor in one group. They were pages that had some of the words somewhere on the page.

So look carefully when you see claims made about how someone got to number one in the search engines and how they could do the same for you if you give them some money. Things are not always as they seem.

I don't want to give the impression that all guides to being successful are a sham because they are not but do take care to examine any claims of success with results in the search engines to see how much of a challenge they really are.

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