Resources
Throughout this website, I recommend a number of tools that will help make your online venture successful. Here they are all in one spot for your convenience.
Getting Started
The 4-Hour Workweek
Revenue-Sharing Article Sites
Especially when you are getting started making money online, it is a lot easier to write content on a revenue-sharing article site than it is to create your own site from scratch. The best option is Infobarrel, as writers get 75% of all advertising revenue. Associated Content is another revenue-sharing site that is open to US-based writers. eHow is another option, although they have largely closed the service to new writers.
Promote Other People’s Products Online
Promoting other people’s products is another way to make money online. Essentially, with the affiliate sales model, your job is to get traffic to your website and add enough value that people want to purchase a product on your recommendation (such as through a product review).
Clickbank is probably the first place you will want to start. As you become a little more versed in affiliate sales, Commission Junction and PatDotCom are two other affiliate services worth looking at.
Testing
Most people will find that Market Samurai is pretty indispensable for testing which keywords are getting the most traffic, and which keywords you can realistically hope to achieve a first page search result. Try the free trial before purchasing. If you do end up purchasing the full product ($97), you’ll find that it is worth every penny.
You will also want to use the affiliate marketplaces mentioned previously to test your online business ideas. In the Clickbank Marketplace, for example, you can see all the possible products that you can promote as an affiliate. You can also see whether an area of interest to you is likely to be profitable, based on how much that area is selling right now.
Advanced Testing
You can use Google AdWords both for purchasing ads to test the market demand for a proposed information product. You can also use the excellent Keyword Tool that comes in the AdWords suite to determine which search terms are getting the most traffic.
Buying Domains and Web Hosting
I use GoDaddy to purchase web domains and to host my web sites. Their prices are competitive (usually the cheapest for domains) and their customer service is great. (They’ll spend as much time as you need with them to get your website set up and going). When purchasing web domains, note that if you buy 5 or more, you get free Private Registration. Before you buy, do a quick web search for “Godaddy promo codes”. You can often get 10-20% off with one of these codes.
Industry Standards-based WordPress Theme
A good WordPress theme will serve as the anchor for your entire website. It provide your site with its own style, plus some themes have “under-the-hood” functionality to make your life easier as a webmaster (especially if you thought you would never be calling yourself that). The WordPress theme that I use is Standard Theme. It has a clean design interface, but more importantly, has a lot of one-click functionality that you would otherwise have a hard time replicating.
Standard Theme is so named because it is built on web-industry standards that are designed to be fast, reliable and search engine ready.
Getting a Logo and Other Graphics
A good looking website can go a long way, and graphics are at the heart of any good looking website. Most of us have pretty basic design skills, and need outside help for our web graphics. A fantastic place to turn is 99designs
. At 99designs
, you make a list of what you want and set a price for what you would be willing to pay for a suitable graphic. The community out there then submits, entirely at their own cost, designs to you. You indicate which ones you like or dislike, and enter into a dialogue with any designers that have given you something with potential. A few back and forths exchanging ideas and designs, and BINGO, you’ve got a winner. You only pay IF you get a design that you like.
The higher the price you would be willing to pay, the more designs you will get, and you’ll get them from more skilled designers, but when I got my Digital Homes logo done for $200 (plus transaction costs), I got somewhere between 50 and 100 designs submitted. (Hence, the name 99Designs.) I find there are a lot of good designers from developing countries willing to compete for pretty modest rewards, and so starting by offering a low price is not a bad thing.
99designs does pretty much any type of design — logos, WordPress themes, t-shirt designs, stationary, clip art … you name it. You can get some great looking art work for your website and have a blast doing it.
Finding Freelance Help to Write Content
If you don’t have the inclination or time to write your own website content, then you can find freelancers who are prepared to do it for you. oDesk
is a popular site for finding contract writers. You can get an article written for $5-7 usually.
Finding Outsourced Full-Time Workers
Another alternative is to engage an outsourced contractor on a full time basis. In essence, you are hiring a full time contactor without all the hassles of having a full time employee. If you are interested in having someone work full time for you — for about $300-400 per month — then ReplaceMyself is a good place to start. ReplaceMyself teaches you how to find and hire people from the Philippines, and then, critically, how to hire them. I’ve had two workers with me that I found, trained and generally managed with the help of ReplaceMyself. Both of them are highly competent, and in the $300-400 range. Outsourcing seems daunting at first, but ReplaceMyself makes it easy. In fact, they have some free training on their site that anyone considering getting any full time, part time or single job contract help you watch. They provide a huge amount of free learning that will help you understand how to go about engaging a contractor.
Spinning Your Blog Posts and Articles
To improve your Google placement, you will need to publish as much content as you can around the internet and point it back to your website. Google, however, looks poorly on copied content, and accordingly your content needs to be original.
Normally, coming up with this much original content would be a major challenge, especially for individuals or small operations. Luckily, The Best Spinner is a tool that you can use to “spin” different versions of your posts and articles, which you can then submit to different sites on the internet. The Best Spinner costs $77 per year.
Getting Backlinks from Other Blogs
Backlinks to your website are the most important factor in achieving a high Google placement. Blog Blueprint can get you a large number of backlinks to your site quickly, including links from quality sites with a higher PageRank. Blog Blueprint costs about $60 each month, but can generate up to 1,200 backlinks over this period. That can work out to as little as 5¢ per quality backlink.
Mass Article Submissions
Posting your articles to article directories is a great way to get backlinks to your site and to climb up in terms of search engine rankings. Unique Article Wizard is an excellent tool to allow you to publish to multiple article directories at the same time. With Unique Article Wizard you can submit your article to hundreds of directories all at once, or dripped over a number of days. Unique Article Wizard costs $67 per month, and can be used to submit an unlimited number of articles.