Whether you plan to start your Website to add a bit of extra income or to become a multimillionaire, when you put a lot of effort into a project you want the best returns. 
The Web is the newest gold rush and like the prospectors of old, there are plenty of people who are making a fortune in online business. Everyone wants to get in on the windfall profits, but most wind up a bit poorer for their venture into the online commerce world. What's the secret to the sites that actually can claim an amazing success?
The reality is that an successful online business is a combination of luck and work. You've probably heard the old saying, "Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." That's the formula for making a good income from your web site. Millions of sites go live every day and only a few realize that it's a business. Online or off, running a profitable business is hard work.
Do Your ResearchThe Internet is a great big library. You don't have to actually sell anything to make a good income online. Many of the most successful sites are places where the only thing offered is good advice and it's given away for free. The sites make a good income from showing visitors ads that feature goods and service that others are selling.
Don't think that success is as easy as buying a domain name, putting up a site and running ads. Before you start, give some thought to the things you like to do.
Are you great in the kitchen? Think about starting a site that shares your cooking tips and recipes. Add a new tip or recipe every day whether anyone is coming to read them or not. Add a couple of links to sites that you like in every article.
Do you have kids? What about a spot online where parents can come for tips on kid's activities? Planning birthday parties and play dates takes an endless source of ideas - and you can help with that. Tips for getting kids to go to bed, eat their veggies or stop fighting with each other are great - even if they don't work so well for you. Look at how successful the TV show about Super Nanny is. Parent's are looking for good advice. Put up one small idea every day with links to sites that offer more information and watch as your advice starts to grow a following.
Is your lawn the picture of well groomed care? Do you think about it at least once a day? Planning the winter care, the best grass seeds, weed killers, fertilizer, water, pests... all of these are simple tips that anyone who has a lawn will be glad to read. Link to a few articles on each topic to add "expert" standing to your ideas and you'll earn the gratitude of countless homeowners.
This works for gardeners too. If you are into vegetable gardening and you preserve your own foods, you can combine the gardening and cooking recipes into a fantastic resource.
Is music your salvation? Make that the theme of your site. You can add a song a day - review it, add some info about the artist, tell people why it's good and where they can buy, dowload or listen to it. Link to a few other places that add more information and you'll see music lovers coming in to find out what you said today.
Are you into partying? How about a site based on what to wear, where to go and what to watch out for when you go clubbing. A daily dose of hot dances, music, fashions and insider advice is easy to put together. These are your strong points -- share them with the world. Add links to other sites that you find helpful and you've created a monster resource.
Get the idea? Start with what you know and love to talk about. Add one small piece of information every day. Add links to make your resource the best place to find out everything on your topic. Keep your site simple. Make it easy for your visitors to find things. Don't add tons of flashing lights and dancing graphics. Just fill it with one page a day, every day, and when you have hundreds of pages of great advice, you'll be the 'go to' site for your topic. The more good content you have, the more the search engines will feature your site and the more other sites will add your link to their vistors an extra resource.
When it gets to be easy to add a page a day... think about the next topic. You can do your simple one page a day on as many sites as you can handle. But always remember, it's like brushing your teeth. If you don't do it every day, your site will not stay healthy!
Start On A Free Site
If you've never run a site before. Start off easy. Just do a search for free web site hosting and find a place to set up your site that won't involve spending any money. It will take a few weeks of playing with your site before you have enough content and a good enough design to draw paying customers. While you get started, keep your expenses down. If you use a free site, all it costs is the time it takes you to add your daily article and find a few good links. Search engines don't usually list sites that are hosted on free servers, so once you have a good idea of what you are doing, go look for your own domain.
What's the Domain
The Web is the newest gold rush and like the prospectors of old, there are plenty of people who are making a fortune in online business. Everyone wants to get in on the windfall profits, but most wind up a bit poorer for their venture into the online commerce world. What's the secret to the sites that actually can claim an amazing success?
The reality is that an successful online business is a combination of luck and work. You've probably heard the old saying, "Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." That's the formula for making a good income from your web site. Millions of sites go live every day and only a few realize that it's a business. Online or off, running a profitable business is hard work.
Do Your ResearchThe Internet is a great big library. You don't have to actually sell anything to make a good income online. Many of the most successful sites are places where the only thing offered is good advice and it's given away for free. The sites make a good income from showing visitors ads that feature goods and service that others are selling.
Don't think that success is as easy as buying a domain name, putting up a site and running ads. Before you start, give some thought to the things you like to do.
Are you great in the kitchen? Think about starting a site that shares your cooking tips and recipes. Add a new tip or recipe every day whether anyone is coming to read them or not. Add a couple of links to sites that you like in every article.
Do you have kids? What about a spot online where parents can come for tips on kid's activities? Planning birthday parties and play dates takes an endless source of ideas - and you can help with that. Tips for getting kids to go to bed, eat their veggies or stop fighting with each other are great - even if they don't work so well for you. Look at how successful the TV show about Super Nanny is. Parent's are looking for good advice. Put up one small idea every day with links to sites that offer more information and watch as your advice starts to grow a following.
Is your lawn the picture of well groomed care? Do you think about it at least once a day? Planning the winter care, the best grass seeds, weed killers, fertilizer, water, pests... all of these are simple tips that anyone who has a lawn will be glad to read. Link to a few articles on each topic to add "expert" standing to your ideas and you'll earn the gratitude of countless homeowners.
This works for gardeners too. If you are into vegetable gardening and you preserve your own foods, you can combine the gardening and cooking recipes into a fantastic resource.
Is music your salvation? Make that the theme of your site. You can add a song a day - review it, add some info about the artist, tell people why it's good and where they can buy, dowload or listen to it. Link to a few other places that add more information and you'll see music lovers coming in to find out what you said today.
Are you into partying? How about a site based on what to wear, where to go and what to watch out for when you go clubbing. A daily dose of hot dances, music, fashions and insider advice is easy to put together. These are your strong points -- share them with the world. Add links to other sites that you find helpful and you've created a monster resource.
Get the idea? Start with what you know and love to talk about. Add one small piece of information every day. Add links to make your resource the best place to find out everything on your topic. Keep your site simple. Make it easy for your visitors to find things. Don't add tons of flashing lights and dancing graphics. Just fill it with one page a day, every day, and when you have hundreds of pages of great advice, you'll be the 'go to' site for your topic. The more good content you have, the more the search engines will feature your site and the more other sites will add your link to their vistors an extra resource.
When it gets to be easy to add a page a day... think about the next topic. You can do your simple one page a day on as many sites as you can handle. But always remember, it's like brushing your teeth. If you don't do it every day, your site will not stay healthy!
Start On A Free Site
If you've never run a site before. Start off easy. Just do a search for free web site hosting and find a place to set up your site that won't involve spending any money. It will take a few weeks of playing with your site before you have enough content and a good enough design to draw paying customers. While you get started, keep your expenses down. If you use a free site, all it costs is the time it takes you to add your daily article and find a few good links. Search engines don't usually list sites that are hosted on free servers, so once you have a good idea of what you are doing, go look for your own domain.
What's the Domain
The domain is the name of your site. In www.google.com, google.com is the domain name. In www.chiff.com, chiff.com is the domain name. In www.you-best-kept secret-to-success-on-the-net.com...well you see the pattern.
Keep the domain name you choose simple. In the last example, it will take forever for someone to type in your name to visit your site...if they even remember what it was. Use hyphens as little as possible. Try to keep your domain name to one word or two separated by a hyphen.
Make sure that your domain name reflects the subject. A name like mary-lou is cute, but it doesn't tell anyone looking for advice on lawns that they can find it. Something like perfect-lawn or beautiful-lawn is much more descriptive. This is important to the success of your site.
Stick to .com endings...that's what everyone looks for and if there is a .com with your name already live, you don't want to make your site an advertisement for them! If the name you really want is already taken, don't use the .net, .info or any other extentions. Just think of another name that is available. Look around for domain registrars. You can buy a domain name for under $10 for the year.
Make sure that you own the domain. Some of the inexpensive domain registration sites make up their money by charging you to host your site and if you don't like the service, you can get stuck paying hefty fees to get your own domain released to your so you can find another host. Read the fine print. Since you're in this for the long run, it's a good idea to buy the domain for at least three years - you may even want to pay for a ten year lock on the name. You'd hate to start doing well and find that you've skipped reregistering the domain --- and someone else has bought your name!
Hosting Is Important
Once you get your own domain, you'll need to find someone reliable to serve it to the world. The folks who maintain your site on their server are called your hosts. Most web site owners will start out with one host and if they have problems with the service shop around for another one. You can check forums for web masters to see what others have to say. Watch out for salespeople posing as webmasters to drive traffic to hosting services that pay for the referrals. They don't always provide the most objective information.
Search Engines Bring Visitors
That's true and you may see plenty of advice on lots of ways to get to the top of the heap fast. take most of the advice with a grain of salt... You are building a good resource that will have all of the elements that the search engines are looking for. You will provide lots of content, good solid links to reputable sites and a site that is updated frequently. You will need to learn about keywords and meta tags, but there are plenty of places online to give you quick tutorials on those. If you've locked your domain for 3 years or more, it will help with search engine rankings. A good, descriptive domain name also helps. When you write your articles, save the files with the same idea. An article about winter lawn care could be named winter-lawn-care.htm. A recipe for canned tomatoes might be called canned-tomato-recipe.htm. DOn't go crazy with the hyphens.Keep the file names to two or three words at the most.
If you're talking about kid's bedtimes make sure you use the keyword phrases "kid's bedtimes," "children's bedtimes, "putting the kid's to bed" and other key phrases often enough to let the search engines know that your article is about bedtime -- but not often enough to make your article sound wierd. Use the phrase in the title and at most twice in each paragraph once if it's a short paragraph. Make sure your first and last sentence has some variation of your keyword phrase in it.
Put Ads On Your Site
Go to the Google Adsense program once you get your own domain name and have a bit of content. It's easy to sign up and easy to add to your site. Don't make the ads the focus of your site - it's your content that people are coming to see. Welcoming visitors with ads instead of a good article will turn off your visitors and cost you the long term health of your site. Make you visitors feel happy to have found you and they'll come back often and tell their friends about your pages.
Don't expect to make a million immediately. It will take a while, maybe even a year or two, before the money gets serious.
If you stay with it, you'll be one of those overnight success stories...
Then you can write an e-book to let everyone know how easy it was to make your fortune overnight!
About the Author...The Chiff.com Editorial Team
Keep the domain name you choose simple. In the last example, it will take forever for someone to type in your name to visit your site...if they even remember what it was. Use hyphens as little as possible. Try to keep your domain name to one word or two separated by a hyphen.
Make sure that your domain name reflects the subject. A name like mary-lou is cute, but it doesn't tell anyone looking for advice on lawns that they can find it. Something like perfect-lawn or beautiful-lawn is much more descriptive. This is important to the success of your site.
Stick to .com endings...that's what everyone looks for and if there is a .com with your name already live, you don't want to make your site an advertisement for them! If the name you really want is already taken, don't use the .net, .info or any other extentions. Just think of another name that is available. Look around for domain registrars. You can buy a domain name for under $10 for the year.
Make sure that you own the domain. Some of the inexpensive domain registration sites make up their money by charging you to host your site and if you don't like the service, you can get stuck paying hefty fees to get your own domain released to your so you can find another host. Read the fine print. Since you're in this for the long run, it's a good idea to buy the domain for at least three years - you may even want to pay for a ten year lock on the name. You'd hate to start doing well and find that you've skipped reregistering the domain --- and someone else has bought your name!
Hosting Is Important
Once you get your own domain, you'll need to find someone reliable to serve it to the world. The folks who maintain your site on their server are called your hosts. Most web site owners will start out with one host and if they have problems with the service shop around for another one. You can check forums for web masters to see what others have to say. Watch out for salespeople posing as webmasters to drive traffic to hosting services that pay for the referrals. They don't always provide the most objective information.
Search Engines Bring Visitors
That's true and you may see plenty of advice on lots of ways to get to the top of the heap fast. take most of the advice with a grain of salt... You are building a good resource that will have all of the elements that the search engines are looking for. You will provide lots of content, good solid links to reputable sites and a site that is updated frequently. You will need to learn about keywords and meta tags, but there are plenty of places online to give you quick tutorials on those. If you've locked your domain for 3 years or more, it will help with search engine rankings. A good, descriptive domain name also helps. When you write your articles, save the files with the same idea. An article about winter lawn care could be named winter-lawn-care.htm. A recipe for canned tomatoes might be called canned-tomato-recipe.htm. DOn't go crazy with the hyphens.Keep the file names to two or three words at the most.
If you're talking about kid's bedtimes make sure you use the keyword phrases "kid's bedtimes," "children's bedtimes, "putting the kid's to bed" and other key phrases often enough to let the search engines know that your article is about bedtime -- but not often enough to make your article sound wierd. Use the phrase in the title and at most twice in each paragraph once if it's a short paragraph. Make sure your first and last sentence has some variation of your keyword phrase in it.
Put Ads On Your Site
Go to the Google Adsense program once you get your own domain name and have a bit of content. It's easy to sign up and easy to add to your site. Don't make the ads the focus of your site - it's your content that people are coming to see. Welcoming visitors with ads instead of a good article will turn off your visitors and cost you the long term health of your site. Make you visitors feel happy to have found you and they'll come back often and tell their friends about your pages.
Don't expect to make a million immediately. It will take a while, maybe even a year or two, before the money gets serious.
If you stay with it, you'll be one of those overnight success stories...
Then you can write an e-book to let everyone know how easy it was to make your fortune overnight!
About the Author...The Chiff.com Editorial Team
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