April 2nd, 2009 by Brian Armstrong

Making money online is the goal of tens of thousands of would-be internet entrepreneurs. For many people, this is easier said than done. For others, making money online seems to come easy. The difference between these two groups of people is not in the skill set alone, but also in the mindset. Now, positive thinking alone will not make you a ton of money, but once you have your website all set up, you can follow some of the following advice to make sure your mom isn’t your only visitor and hopefully you’ll be able to move out of her basement.

Reason 1: You forgot about marketing. This is kinda one of those “duh” moments, but if you build this amazing site (or even a totally lame site) and don’t have a marketing plan, your likelihood of making money accidently is virtually non-existent. Basically, don’t forget about marketing. With every business plan you ever come up with, there should be a detailed marketing plan included.

Reason 2: You’re too focused on the look and feel of your website. Some of the ugliest websites ever are making more money than your website. When I first started making websites, I would spend hours getting a template ready which usually included the graphics for the various pages. The problem was, these templates would never be just right and the websites would always be “under construction”. Don’t make the same mistakes I did. Your entire focus when it comes to the design should be setting up a website that doesn’t distract people from why they are there. I use templates with a light background and dark text. This makes the site easy to read.

Reason 3: You website doesn’t sell. When visitors actually get to your site, does your site do an effective job at convincing people to give you their money? Does your website have an irresistible offer? Have you tested this offer? These are a few questions that you should keep in mind while you’re designing your site. One mistake webmasters make is that they assume their visitors think like they do. Test all of your assumptions. If you aren’t testing, you’re losing money. This is the reason that in some niche markets, certain internet marketers can make money while others lose money.

Reason 4: You don’t write any articles. Outside of paying for each visitor to your site through something like pay per click, writing articles is one of the very best ways to get traffic. Articles help with not only traffic from some of the larger article websites, but this also produces several links back to your website which is one of the main factors that determines where your website will rank within the search engines.

Reason 5: You don’t do pay-per-click advertising. Of all the ways to get into a market, pay-per-click is one of the very best simply because its so scientific. There’s definitely a component of art and psychology that goes into marketing, but all of this is very testable meaning you can test it. You can test which keywords produce sales, which advertisements produce sales and which landing pages produce results. This is something you can’t achieve with any other method as quickly.

Making money from your website doesn’t have to be complicated. Remember that succeeding in business is a matter of consistent effort applied to correct principles. In a big way, business is a numbers game. A certain amount of visitors are going to click on your link and a percentage of those will convert into customers. Increasing your percentages at each stage can be achieved through statistical analysis and testing various components of the ad copy.

internet, Internet Business, Internet Marketing, make money online, Marketing, online marketing, small business

March 24th, 2009 by Ricardo d Argence

Creating a professional-looking web site can be a difficult task. Really a complex animal is E-commerce web design. Many web hosting companies are offering web hosting templates or hosting with templates to cut the development time.

Your hosting company should be able to provide you with a web template that can help you whether you’re looking to create a simple website or a fully functional e-commerce website. For less than $30 you can purchase a web template, however a professional designed e-commerce site costs a couple of hundred dollars up to the thousands.

The cost of web templates is still cheap comparing to custom-made e-commerce websites when Web designers charge anywhere from $40 to $120 per hour.

Other than the requirements of most web hosting programs, Web hosting templates that are designed for e-commerce have to have a shopping cart, and it most support an online catalog as well as payment processing. Web templates for e-commerce often include common pages and navigations for online shopping, searching or browsing products, adding items to shopping carts and making payment. The types of e-commerce templates you will find are stand-alone and don’t come with or use a particular shopping cart. It’s up to the webmasters to add shopping cart to the site.

An e-commerce turnkey operation is a different option to e-commerce web hosting templates. EBay Stores, Yahoo! and GoDaddy.com are the most popular turn-key e-commerce solutions for small businesses that want to setup online stores easily. Web hosting plans have varying fee structure. The price of the hosting plan is based on the number of transactions.

There’re many questions to ask, when comparing functionality: 1) whether there’s a limit on the number of products and categories that you can setup; 2) whether a shopping cart accepts online check or debit card; 3) whether it automatically sends out an email notification once an order is placed at your web-site.

When looking at the cost of commerce operation, you’ll need to ask questions about: 1) how much it charges for each transaction; 2) is there’s a setup fee for a new online store; 3) how about handling taxes; 4) what’s the basic monthly fee for transactions.

It is important to speak with the hosting service that you use regarding e-commerce issues and the best options that are available to you.

Business, computers, Converting Traffic, e-commerce, internet, Internet Marketing, search engine optimization, seo, site promotion, web design, web development, Web Hosting, webmasters