The website you are now visiting
is my fifth. I started my first website four years ago with high hopes about
making money - after all, at that time it seemed everyone was doing it. I
remember seeing an article in The Times about a group of students who were all
apparently going to be millionaires before they left college; and I thought, hey
wait a minute, I can do that too! But I was wrong.
My first real attempt (www.azgold.co.uk)
was a Yellow Pages for the Worcester area of the UK. My plan was simple, make a
site that gives free advertising to local traders & sell advertising to anyone
who wants to buy it; just like the Yellow Pages model. I wrote a great site, but
it didn't get much traffic & after two years I decided (painful decision) to let
the baby die so to speak - no real infants involved, you understand!
So I finally gave up the attempt
to make money & instead decided to concentrate on writing a site that would help
people; a site that would support my efforts to achieve my Personal Goals; and a
site that I would just find fun to create. That's how this site came about. Then
the strangest thing happened, the site, slowly but surely, began to make money
In building my sites, I have
inadvertently accrued quite a bit of useful information which I really wish I
had found out before I started, but anyway, I eventually learned it all the hard
way. And occasionally, I get asked how to go about building a web site; and how
to make money on the web. Well, if you are looking for one of those supposedly
fantastic, never-to-be-repeated (thank goodness), once-in-a-lifetime offers,
then you've come to the wrong place!
My experience of such offers is
that many are based on the pyramid principle: that is, you pay them some money
to join the club, this buys you access to their promotional tools and then you
use them to persuade others to part with their money. There are loads of these
schemes on the web and one or two of them are bound to find you through e-mail
at some time. I remember someone once telling me that if an offer seems too good
to be true, it probably is!
On the other hand, if you are
ready for some hard work, then it is really possible to make money on the web.
And, although it is not the primary reason for the existence of this site, I
have put together a list of services which you may find particularly useful.
Web Hosting
Doteasy.com
You need a company to host
(store) your web site. You can get this service free from many providers but all
the ones I tried had drawbacks; most of them place advertising on your site. I
didn't want that; and I also didn't want to pay too much; and so the best
service in my view is the one I use which is
Doteasy.com.
They charge a one-off fee (I
think it was $39) and that's it; you get an excellent service with 120 Mb of
space & there are no other costs. You can, of course upgrade your account for
extra space when you need it. Over the past couple of years, I have twice
upgraded my account as traffic to the site has grown and I still think this is
the best service on the internet.
Your Own
Products
Someone once told me
there are only three ways to make money on the internet: either you sell your own
products, you sell someone else's products or you make money on advertising.
Well, I think he was basically right. You can indeed do all three if you wish.
Our
Sensational New
eBook Compiler
Firstly, you could
write your own eBooks using any wordprocessor software and then compile them for
distribution using our eBook Compiler - of course, that's exactly what we do.
And, by the way, you will be amazed at the price. I have personally bought three
eBook compilers - they each have their pro's and con's but this one is excellent
quality and it is the cheapest I have found on the net.
A second solution is
to obtain Resale Rights to other people's existing products. This might sound
like an expensive option, but you will be amazed at how little you can pay to
obtain resale rights. As an example, take a look at the Webmaster's Profit
Pak below. You get full resale rights to 50 software packages for a very small
one-off payment.
Complete
Software Business
with Master Resale Rights
The Webmaster's Profit Pack
is a complete software business
with a huge array of software all with full Master Resale Rights. Not only that,
you only need to publish one single page to your site (which is ready-written
for you) and link it to your payment processor PayPal or ClickBank (more about
that later)
and that's it! You get full access to the Download Area to fulfil your orders,
so it couldn't be much easier to get started.
Resale
Rights to Every Item of
Software You
Will Ever Need
Another resale rights offering which
bundles 336 Software Packages again for a nominal, one-off payment. You can sell
the software as individual items or you can sell them as a complete bundle.
However, if these
resale rights products appeal to you, then you should take a look at our sister
site Whiggle which is running a Special Offer at present. Basically you can get
resale rights all 336 software packages completely free. Full details are
available through the above link.
Accepting Payments
Paypal.com
Once you have your own products, you just need a method of accepting
online payments. Well I couldn't believe how easy this is with Paypal. As you
can see from the banner, you can accept 4 x major credit cards & it's all done
electronically; you just need an email account.
Paydotcom.com
If you want to start your own Affiliate Program,
you can do it through ClickBank who
are probably the market leaders at present; or you can try Paydotcom - a new
Affiliate Program provider. Because they are new, they are trying really hard at
the moment & one significant advantage over ClickBank is that a new vendors
account can be opened for free - unlike ClickBank who charge $49. A second
advantage is that they provide secure access to your download pages - this has
always been a problem with Clickbank. I am using ClickBank but I am also
trialling Paydotcom at present & I like what I see.
Affiliate Programs
If you don't have any products of
your own, you can consider making use of Affiliate Programs. An Affiliate
Scheme is simply a method of receiving payment for a referral. You put a
link on your site to someone else's; and if the visitor you send to that site
purchases anything, you get a commission - easy!
The real secret to
working with Affiliate Programs is to carefully vet and choose the schemes you
offer. Don't necessarily go for the big money commission offers (remember, they
may be doing the old pyramid thing); instead, offer products & services you
think your visitors will benefit from. How will you know? You know because you
attracted these visitors with the theme of your site.
So only offer good
and related products and, if possible, try them yourself first. I have found the
Affiliate Future site to be an excellent source for products which are related
to the theme of this site - they also provide access to many other types of
offerings you may find useful.
e-Zine
Subscriptions
Another excellent
service. You give your visitors a chance to subscribe to e-zines that are
related to the theme of your site - which is a service they might like - and
then, in return, your e-zine gets automatically advertised on other people's
sites - completely free.
Here is another e-zine
traffic builder I also use. In fact I actually cascade the two so that people
see the second pop-up if they sign-up for the an e-zine offered by the first
one. Seems reasonable I think because you are simply providing a service & not
intruding on the surfing experience too much by only displaying the second
pop-up to interested parties.
Building
Traffic
There are many programs on the web
for Building Traffic to your site. But the one principle that you need to make
sure you make use of is Viral Marketing. Now This has nothing to do with
viruses; it simply is a type of advertising that multiplies itself and that's
where the name comes from. I have tried several, but there are a couple of
schemes that are working for me
You can submit a free ebook to
The Free site and get traffic in return. You need to be prepared to add a link
from your own site to get listed. But this site is ranked as PR7 (very high) and
gets around 1M visitors per month, so it seems like a very good idea to me. I am
presently testing it out & will report back in more detail.
This scheme is free
to join. Every time you open your Browser you can earn points. For every two
points you earn, you get a visitor. Doesn't sound like much, but the scheme has
a few things going for it. Firstly, you are genuinely getting traffic for doing
nothing; second, the scheme is viral which means that, as people sign-up from
your referral, you also earn points through their traffic. So in time, you could
build up quite a bit of traffic this way.
Another downline
scheme. Each person in the downline gets
to display your site. There are 6 levels i.e. people you refer then refer
others. Apparently, you only need to get 10 people to sign up (and its a
completely free traffic-building system so that doesn't sound hard) and that
ultimately results in 1 million visitors. I am trying this service at the
moment.
Free Web Services
All of the
following sites provide free services which I personally use and
have found to
be excellent.
This service is
excellent. Basic package is completely free & I did use it to send out the White
Dove WEBSITE. You can use HTML and they don't even put advertising on the
outbound mails. You can only create a smallish list in the free version, but it
is enough to get you started.
If your ISP doesn't
provide one (actually Doteasy now does but it didn't when I set up my site) you
will need a hit counter. This one is free & I like it because it provides a
whole wealth of information about visitors such as how much time they spend on
your site and how many pages they access.
A completely free
auto-responder. Excellent service: I have tested it and found it works very
well. I am now using it to follow-up people who have downloaded our free gift.
Search Engines
There are only about
7 search engines worth paying attention to: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves,
Lycos, AltaVista, and AOL. I use the following web-master tools for checking my
own site.
This utility is
excellent for checking what terms people are actually searching for on Overture.
You type in a term like
7 habits
and it then reports all the search terms for
the month that have actually used the phrase, together with the stats.
Obviously, this is very useful when it comes to optimising your site for the
search engines.
