gainfully unemployed » online business

How to Plan Your E-Commerce Website

chris — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 23:37:02 +0000

I think I am writing this short post about how to plan your e-commerce website so that I can sort of “bookmark” this article at 6 Revisions, so that when I build my e-commerce site in the future, I can find this article.

That’s how good I think this primer on e-commerce site planning is. If you are working on a site that is going to sell anything at all, then you should check out this article at 6 Revisions.

Here are the points this article hints you should pay attention to:

What do you want your site to do?

Who’s going to buy from you?

Do you require special features?

What E-Commerce Platform are you going to use?

Have a look at this article. It should help you get your head around all the steps necessary to getting your online store set up. It also has some great examples of successful and well-made sites.

6 Way to Make More Money with Your Website

Message to Those Who Hate Their Blogs

chris — Mon, 17 May 2010 22:28:50 +0000

Do you like your blog? Or do you hate your blog?

I think there are a lot of people out there who decide a few months in or even a year or so into a new blog, that they hate their blog.

I’m here to tell you that if you hate your blog, drop it like a bad habit. Forget about it. Start a new blog in a new niche. Don’t worry about any of the work you put into your blog, just move on. Life’s too short. It doesn’t mean that you failed, it just means that you are moving on to a new project.

People do this all the time. It’s called growing. It’s called learning.

You may even be able to sell your old blog. Check out flippa.com, the best place to sell blogs (and all other kinds of websites) online. Digital Point forums also has a way to sell your site, but I’m not that familiar with it.

Just don’t feel like you need to work on a blog that you can’t stand anymore. If you have a blog you can’t stand, tell me about it. Heck, I might want to buy it from you.

Building Online Businesses Takes Patience

chris — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 17:35:05 +0000

There is nothing in the world more frustrating than writing a great blog post or making an insanely helpful video–that no one sees. Well, besides your mom and your significant other. One of the main things that nips online businesses in the bud and frustrates internet entrepreneurs is the fact that it can take a long time to get any traction with search engines and readers.

When you create a great piece of content that you want to share with everyone you meet, you’re only a half way there. Next, you need to get out there and expose it to people. Nothing’s going to happen if you just let it sit there. Online search is getting more crowded every day and search engines aren’t going to give you a ton of love if your site doesn’t have much authority.

That being said, your work can take off like a rocket if you know how to get it out there and are willing to work. Read a few tips on how to build traffic to your blog.

The single most important “skill” in online business is having patience. You are going to have to get used to waiting for a while–at least in the very beginning. If you have a new blog, it’s not unusual to go six months with limited traffic–a year even. But again, it’s really a function of how hard you work and how focused you are.

Being patient will give you the strength to get through the lonely dry spells when you’re doing everything you can to create a successful online business, be it a niche blog or an online store, and no one seems to care. But you will care. And that’s why you’ll succeed…eventually.

Can You Make Money with Internet Marketing?

chris — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:54:51 +0000

The answer to this question is, yes you can. But it isn’t easy. Well, it isn’t as easy as people seem to think it is.

It’s pretty funny how many people out there start blogs, websites, or even internet video series and think that just because they put their content up on the web and splash a few keywords around that thousands of people are going to find their content and fall in love with it.

The truth is that making money with internet marketing is probably as hard as making money in any other kind of job. Just because internet marketing involves the internet doesn’t mean it’s easy. But for some reason many people believe it is.

One of the reasons is that the barrier to entry is so low. Anyone can log into blogger.com and start a free blog. You can choose a domain name, write a post, and publish it in minutes. We are used to things happening quickly on the internet.

The making money online part takes some time. But if you put the effort into it and work at it you will be able to achieve your goals of creating income streams on the internet.

What does it take to make money online?

In short, it takes getting a lot of traffic to your website or sales page and converting that traffic into an income stream either by selling something or displaying advertisements to your visitors. You are either selling a product or selling your audiences attention to a third party advertiser. ?The advertising networks you might use are Adsense or Chitika–there are quite a few. ?It’s important to test several to see which ones work best.

I’ve simplified things here, but essentially this is how you make money with internet marketing. The real thing you need to do is attract an audience. In my next post, I will write about how to gain traffic or an audience to you website.

But if you were wondering, yes you can make money online. But it’s not easy. It takes time, effort, knowledge, and the ability to figure out what’s working for you and what’s not. Some people have difficulty letting go of a project that’s not working for them, but sometimes you have to let go. It is amazing how quickly your time can disappear when you are trying to tackle too many things at once.

The best internet marketers figure out what’s working and multiply their efforts, while discarding the things that are only taking up time and aren’t profitable. Successful online business entrepreneurs also find partners to work with, which is a great thing to do so you can focus on your strengths while your partner can focus on his or hers.

Subscribe to this site so you can read more posts like this one. I have a lot of good stuff planned, so stay tuned.

PS. ?If you’re getting traffic to your website from Bing, read this article about Bing vs. Google ad revenue.

How Do You Make Money with Internet Marketing?

chris — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:46:00 +0000

Internet marketing is such a broad term, that it really would take a long post to explain exactly how to make money with internet marketing. It would take a book. Heck, it would take several books to start to crack that subject. I am definitely not an internet marketing expert per se, but I do know a little bit about it.

The reason I decided to write this post is because I spoke to two people today who both asked me this very same question. I thought it was a sign that there are a few people out there who just have no idea how people go about making money online with internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogging, etc. They understand that you can sell advertisements on a blog or earn referral fees for products sold from links on your site, but their understanding stops at how people actually get to your site, how you set up a site, how you decide what to write about, and how to increase the traffic to your site.

This post will tackle a few of the basics of how people make money internet marketing.

Getting Traffic to Your Site is Key.

The real thing that helps people earn money online is website traffic. There are basically three way to get traffic to your website. The first is organic search, which is when web surfers find a page of your website or blog from a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or the brand new MSN search engine Bing. If your site is relevant to a search query, there is a chance that it may pop up and will earn a new visitor who is looking for information or has a problem that needs solving or is looking for a service.

If you’ve done your job, then you may get a new visitor to your site.

The second way people bring people to their site is from links. If you get links to your site, then that is another chance for people to find your site from another site. It’s crowded out there on the WWW, so the more links you get back to your site, the better. Search engines may also start to give your site some more relevance if you get links from related and relevant sites, which means your pages may appear higher in search engine results pages. Obviously, link building is something that people who are trying to make money online through internet marketing pay a lot of attention to. Getting relevant, high quality links is one of the keys to internet marketing. Look at it as your website or blog receiving a vote from another site that pushes it higher and makes it more popular.

The third way to create traffic to your website is by purchasing advertising. A typical way people do this is with the Adwords PPC program. PPC stands for pay per click, which is exactly what you do. You agree to pay a certain amount every time an internet surfer clicks a text ad that appears on websites (through the Adsense advertising program) or in the search engine results. The blue text ads you see at the top of the major search engines are PPC links. If you can pay a low per click rate, and can sell advertising at a higher rate, you can make some money off of a transaction of this kind.

Now that You Have People Visiting Your Website, How Do You Make Money?

To make money with internet marketing, you need to have traffic to your site and you need some way to monetize that traffic. People monetize their sites in many various ways. Some webmasters and bloggers simply broker their own deals with people who pay a certain amount for a link or a banner on their site.

Others use affiliate product links on their sites and earn when a visitor makes a purchase through their site. CJ.com, Clickbank, and Amazon all provide ways for you to earn money from the traffic to your website.

Perhaps the most popular way people make money online–especially in the beginning–is with the Google Adsense program. This is a fairly simple ad network to implement on your site, but it’s not necessarily easy to make money online with this program. As I mentioned above, you can earn money with internet marketing schemes that involve paying for traffic and then converting that traffic into a sale or a higher priced click on an advertisement.

The amount of money you earn online also depends on the niche that your site falls into. If you run a blog about cars, you may earn more money than if you run a blog about movies. If your online business makes and sells antenna balls, you may earn less than if you sell real estate classes. The reason is that the products associated with cars and real estate are more expensive than the products associated with movies and antenna balls. A muffler can cost a hundred bucks, while a DVD costs $19.99. Logically, the money you can earn from a more expensive product will be greater because the person selling that product has a larger margin (usually!).

Making money with internet marketing also takes diligent work and a lot of trial and error, just like in any other kind of job. If you have money to invest in your online business internet marketing efforts, you will be able to get up and running a little bit more quickly than if you have no money to put into your business.

People earn a living in many different ways online. You can find all kinds of businesses and services on the internet, as you most likely know. The internet marketing angle really comes in after you know how you want to make money online. If you have a service to offer–for example, you are a lawyer who represents people who have been in accidents due to drinking (or whatever it is you may do)–then you can start to try to target keywords in your PPC campaigns. Say you live in the city of Austin. If you could get visitors to your site who are looking for a term like “Austin DUI Lawyer” then that is highly targeted traffic that may convert into a sale or a consult. The person who searches for this term in Google and gets to your site may have their cell phone in hand ready to dial a number.

So make sure you have your office phone in big lettering on the front page. The internet marketing is what you do after you know what you want to sell or what service you have to offer. Some marketers are more like “information entrepreneurs” and set up blogs that are built around specific keywords and have strong SEO qualities to them. The goal is to create traffic and then convert into ad clicks and make money online that way.

As you may be able to tell, there are many ways you can get started in your quest to make money internet marketing. Some people go the content site route and monetize with affiliate links and ppc ads. Others go directly to pay per click campaigns and “push” affiliate programs.

Email Marketing

One thing that is unanimous in the internet marketing business is that use of email lists and email campaigns is effective if you do it right.

For your own information (as at this point you may not be ready for this kind of software), there are several choices when you decide to start email collection and email marketing. One company is Aweber (read an Aweber review) and another is GetResponse. Many people look at highly targeted email lists as the holy grail of internet marketing. Maybe it will help you in your business!

6 Online Business Myths that are Way Off

chris — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 03:27:33 +0000

Just like any other human venture, online business is burdened with collective beliefs, common knowledge, and myths that just are not true. Here are a few of the myths.

1) Succeeding in online business is easy. This may be a point that I haven’t quite hammered home on this site. In fact, I may make internet business seem a little easier than it really is. This is far from the truth. Internet business is just as hard as any business out there, just as competitive, and can be just as demoralizing. That being said, if you are a superstar or a hard worker with great ideas, you will climb to the top.

2) Online business takes a different skill set than “normal” business. Online business is just that, business. Everyone who has a website talks about “social media” and “web 2.0″ and the amazing benefits tools like Facebook and Twitter create for online businesses. These tools do create a lot of amazing opportunity for those who know how to use them to stay connected to their audience.

But if you don’t know how to connect to people in the first place or have a valuable service or product to offer, then these tools are not going to magically help you get your message out and make sales for you.

If you have sales skills or marketing skills or the ability to rally people around you, then you will be able to transition right into the internet business world. The same rules apply. Create a great product, give great service, and find the people interested in your product. Hit it out of the park for people, and you will win.

The only difference is that instead of having customers come into your store on the street, your store is now visiting your target audience via computer screen in their living rooms. Or on a beach in Jamaica that has wifi.

3) Online business is for tech people. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Sure, it helps to have someone who knows their way around a computer, but internet tools are so easy to use that you really do not need much technical or design expertise. If you can use a keyboard and a mouse and are willing to put in the effort and learn about things you don’t know much about, then you will be able to create a viable online business.

Working on the internet can also consist of your direct skill set. ?If you’re a writer, you can start a freelance writing business, and if you are a web designer or social media pro, you can do the same. ?You can even become an information entrepreneur and create informative blogs based on different themes and monetize them in many different ways. ?For the content writers out there, read my post about how to make money with Hubpages.

4) Internet marketing is just spam. Sure there is a lot of spam out there, but there are hundreds of thousands of legitimate companies doing business online. Every single brand name company has an internet presence. If they don’t, then they don’t exist. There is nothing shady about doing business online. In fact, I would be surprised if in two years you will be able to do any business at all without using the internet.

As people gravitate more and more to the web to do their shopping, to find their directions, to communicate with their friends, and to plan trips and flights, there will be more opportunities for online businesses of all kinds. If you aren’t preparing your small business for an all-internet world, then you may be left behind.

5) I can’t start an online business because the Internet is too crowded. The internet is crowded and it gets more crowded every day. But guess what, the streets of your town are also crowded with businesses, but new businesses start and old businesses fold every day.

Google and other search engines are becoming better at weeding out the fraudulent, worthless, and spam sites, which makes it easier for the high quality online businesses to shine. Search engine traffic is a huge part of success on the internet and if you play by the rules and create a great product, service, or entertainment, you will rise to the top, as the cream often does.

6) I don’t have time to start my online business. Building an online presence for your small business is vital to your success going forward. There are few companies that will be able to avoid doing business online. A website or an e-commerce store selling your product should be a priority for you.

A good (and easy way) to start is by creating a blog. You can even do it for free. Start a free blog at blogger.com or wordpress.com, find a custom theme online so it looks a little more professional, and start pumping out content and your message. There are so many things you can do with a blog to promote your company and your brand. Even just getting out there and promoting yourself will help you a great deal.

Just like in anything, the people who work the hardest and test different ways of doing business to find what works will be the most successful. The thing that the internet does for business is the same thing it does for communication–it speeds it up. This means that you can rise quickly, but you can fall just as quickly.

One of the best things the internet provides though is free access to your target audience. You can find and reach out to your community on so many fronts, it’s ridiculous. And you can do much of this for free because all it takes it time and the willingness to do good work. Getting your message out and driving targeted traffic to your web presence are both important element in the online game. But having an amazing product or service is the most important thing.

Create an amazing product with a great story behind it and that fulfills a human need or solves a problem in an interesting or new way, and you just might be the next online success story.

Make Money Online with Hubpages Part 2: Backlinks

chris — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:15:21 +0000

This piece is about one strategy you can use to help you make money online with Hubpages.

Hubpages, as you may know, is a website where you can publish content and earn money for your work. Read my first article about the site at the link above, then come back to this one. Or just read on.

You can write about anything you want and have the option edit your content anytime you feel like it. One of the best parts about making money with Hubpages is that you can earn residual income for as long as the website is around, and it will be around for a long time.

There are many reasons why writing at Hubpages is a worthwhile endeavor for you if you are trying to make money with an online business, or have a blog you want to create links to, or just want to write some content and earn some income from it.

First of all, Hubpages is a well-respected site that gets a lot of love from search engines. Writing at hubpages is like having a head start in the search engine wars. This brings up an important point. One of the main elements that will allow you to make money online is traffic. Traffic is the lifeblood of internet marketing and online business.

Look at it as a store owner would. The more people you get to come into your store, the more sales you will make. This can be translated into Adsense clicks, affiliate sales, or referrals in the online environment. Traffic is a key part of the game. And the more targeted this traffic is, the higher the probability you have of getting a conversion or having an action occur. Obviously there is more to making money on the internet: copywriting, branding, actually having something of value to provide, or in this case, providing useful well-written and highly searchable content. But high traffic numbers is how websites become online money-making machines.

One of the strategies to writing on Hupbages and earning money from your efforts is to write more than one “hub” on the same topic. The more you write about the same thing, the more likely you will look like an authority on that subject. Obviously, to write a lot of content about the same thing, you probably will actually have to be an expert on that subject. But you can also learn as you go. Writing is one of the best ways to learn things and solidify ideas in your mind.

Writing about the same topic will also give you more opportunity to increase the rankings of similar content. Say you have an 800-word authoritative hub about the best ski resorts in California. You spent a lot of time researching keywords, reading about the resorts, and clearly presenting the information to your readers. This can be a very good piece of content for you. If you have three or four other related hubs, you can use them to create anchor text links to give your authority hub a little bit of a boost and create some more traffic to it.

Your “support” pages should be directly related to the main authority page you are looking to link to. In the example I use above about ski resorts, these can be pieces more specific to certain resorts. One could be about Mammoth and another could be about Vail. If the main keyword phrases (and related ones) you are working with are also strong in these pages, and even in the title, then links out from them will be even stronger.

When you create your links, you want to create anchor text using the phrases you are focusing on. In the example used here, the phrase you would want to link out to your main hub would be “best ski resorts in California.” It is much better to be descriptive in the hotlink you create, rather than just linking with text like, “see my other article about this topic here.”

You can do this with several of your hubs to create several relevant links that will give the page you want to promote more direct traffic and relevant keyword links that will help move it up the in search engine rankings. The more targeted keywords and links are, the more likely they will be of interest to web visitors and the more money you will make online.

Websites (and web pages) that adhere to web standards of copywriting, search engine optimization, and linking practices are more valuable than those that don’t. If you think from the point of view of a potential web surfer and do your best to create informative, well-written content that is useful, then you will be successful.

Remember that content is king and high value content will gain more natural links from other websites and more return traffic. The more effort you put into your content on the front end, the easier the entire process will be for you. When writing your hubs, take the time to make them as helpful, informative, and unique as possible.

3 Reasons to Start an Online Business

chris — Sat, 16 May 2009 02:46:47 +0000

Many people starting a small business today are gravitating to the internet as their main “front” of doing business. I’m sure this shouldn’t surprise anyone reading this.

There are myriad reasons why starting an online business is a smart move for entrepreneurs. Here are three.

1) Websites are highly scalable. This means that you can get your product, message, or service out to anyone around the world without leaving your desk chair. And thousands of people can look at your ecommerce store or your informational blog or your sales page without leaving theirs.

2) No brick and mortar. You don’t need a physical store to sell your goods. There are associated costs especially if you make your own product, but you don’t have to pay rent for a storefront or pay the heating bill. You can run your business from your living room (or a beach in Jamaica that has wifi.) You don’t even need to pay for an office. More money can go into development of your product, content, or service.

3) The legitimacy of the online marketplace is increasing. Many people shop exclusively online due to the convenience and ease with which you can compare products and prices. ?As shopping online becomes more ingrained in our society, as safety measures increase, and as people become more comfortable buying products on the internet, this kind of business will become even more popular. If you create an online business, you can rest assured that there will be plenty of opportunity to make sales.

I don’t mean to say that starting a successful online venture is easy by any means because it’s not. But never before in history has it been easier to disseminate your message to the people of the world for such little cost.

The real trick is coming up with something interesting to say or an amazing product. Once you have that down, it’s just a matter of showing people. And that’s what the internet is so good at helping entrepreneurs accomplish–in fact, the high speed transfer of information is just what it was created to do.

Read another post about online business myths.

6 Way to Make More Money with Your Website

chris — Sat, 02 May 2009 02:23:11 +0000

Make Money with Your Website

I’ve made a commitment to write at least a couple of posts a week over here at Gainfully Unemployed, your Online Business Inspiration blog. How about that for a tagline?

Anyways, I realize that it is Friday and I have yet to achieve my two post a week quota.

Earlier today, I read a great article at Dosh Dosh, a fantastic internet marketing blog. Maki goes into 6 highly detailed steps you can use to make more money online.

The focus is on using your pageview and search data to find the most popular pages on your site. From there, the next step is to optimize these pages in order to achieve the goal you are looking to achieve.

Do you want the viewer to sign up for a subscription to your feed or to your newsletter? Do you want a qualified lead for an affiliate program? Or are you simply looking for a quick ad click-through?

I found this to be a very helpful and useful article about how to make more money with your website. If you are getting some good sustained traffic at your site, the steps Maki explains may help you. If you aren’t there yet, read step 6 about increasing your search engine ranking. Good luck. ?

Read another article about how to make money online. ?I got a bunch of ‘em. ?This one is a general one. ?Another piece you may be interested in is one about how to make money with Hubpages.

Build Your Online Business Slowly

chris — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:34:47 +0000

I read a great post today at Zenhabits.net (read it here). It’s about living life to the fullest by being “mindful.” Essentially, Leo writes that you can achieve more happiness and satisfaction–and even get closer to achieving your professional goals–by slowing down (just a little bit) and appreciating the world around you just a little bit more.

The process of becoming more mindful, he writes, will help you become more effective, as you will do each thing in your life with more heart and attention to detail.

In many ways, I think the ideas Leo writes about can be used in creating your online business.

If you are on the internet only for an hour a day, then you already know how much “stuff” there is out there. By “stuff” I mean “crap.” Often, you have to wade through a bunch of junk just to get to any information of value.

You also may know that everything on the internet these days is about speed. How fast can I tell my friends about this new article or video? How many twitter users can I simultaneously blast my message to? What’s the new social media tool I can use to sell my product? What’s my status???!!!! This page better hurry up and load or I’m out of here!

These are just two elements that I notice every single day in the cluttered online business space. I think that the thing that will win going forward is first, quality of content, and second, actually caring about your audience, fans, or friends. This is where I think being “mindful” comes into play.

If you focus completely on creating quality, worthwhile content or services, and at the same time actually care about your audience or market, then you will absolutely succeed. You will win in terms of being self-satisfied, and you will win professionally. Instead of worrying about where you want to end up, concentrate on the steps that will get you there.

Quality matters. Caring matters. These are the elements that will help you pull ahead of the competition. Take your time to create your online business by focusing on quality and your audience’s needs and you will reap the rewards.