In my opinion it is very important to establish a network of contacts on the internet. These people should be honest, charge a fair price, be willing to help and give advice and be happy to work quickly with good communication.

A few years ago I started to develop an interest in the web and thought that it would be a superb way to promote my speech coaching business. I must admit that at this point I knew nothing about the ins and outs of the net and did not know anybody who could build or promote a website.

I spent quite a long time phoning people who were advertising in places such as the yellow pages, the newspaper and of course the internet itself. The prices some of these people quoted were a lot higher than I could afford. I now have come to realise that these prices were basically a rip off as I have now met some brilliant web designers who are happy and willing to build a website at far cheaper rates.

As an example a contact of mine now builds me a type of information portal site for Ł150 plus free lifetime hosting. An example of one of these websites is at increase-pagerank.com. I have been working with this contact now for a number of years and he is extremely reliable and has taught me a lot about how the web works etc.

I have also met other contacts who are experts in website promotion. I have learnt a lot from these people and would now like to think of myself as some kind of expert. I now think that I know quite a lot about how to promote and a market a website. I have around eighty sites myself, which I constantly attempt to attract more visitors to each of them.

The way I attract this additional traffic is by attempting to build up the amount of one-way backward links to each site. One way of doing this of course is by writing articles like the one you are reading. This writing can be quite tiresome but there are sites such as articles-submission.com, who are happy to help you with this project.

In conclusion, be careful not to pay over the odds for web design, web marketing or web promotion. Meet and build up a network of web experts who you can learn to trust and establish a long term business relationship with.

So, what did I do?  I started a search for an easy website creator.  My thinking was surely some ambitious entrepreneur had already realized the earnings potential of a website builder for the do-it-yourself person?  As you can probably guess, I found one.  Well, actually, I found quite a few.  Of course, back then there weren’t nearly as many options on the fiber optic highway as there are today…so my selection was a bit limited when compared to today’s market. Back then was approximately six years ago, which at the speed of changing technology might as well have been the ice age.

I made my selection and started building a website.  Was it easy?  No.  Remember I was inexperienced and soon learned that not all site builders are alike.  My first attempt was definitely with a stone age product in a modern day world.  Believing that all products, from a well-known company, are surely quality was my first mistake.  While this company offered several affordable services and quality products, their easy website builder wasn’t one of them.

I began my search again.  This time, however, I relied on the feedback from other website builders like myself.  Hence, ask someone who has already been there, done that.  After garnering a few referrals, I set out to try the mentioned services and finally settled on one.

Am I happy with my choice?  Absolutely! So happy in fact I saved my money, earned on the web, and purchased a partner’s program with the company.  You see, I was referring so many people to their services, I finally wised up and realized I might as well be earning from all those referrals….and now I am.

After much trial and error, I did learn a few important keys to online success and building a website.  Here are a few tips to help you get started and stake your claim on the world wide web:

•Target your market.  Don’t try to be a website for everything.  Find your niche and fine tune your site to match.
•Stay away from dark background colors and wallpaper.  Keep your site clean and easy to navigate.
•Add quality content.  Keep your site content fresh and updated.
•Quality link exchanges do work.  Exchange links with websites that fit the demographics of your site.  Stay away from link farms.

Now that you have your website online, marketing and maintaining your site will be the key.  It’s not like the movie, “The Field of Dreams – If you build it, they will come.”  If you don’t market your website, guess what?  They don’t come.  It’s that simple.

Marketing is such a big and hot topic that I won’t go into it in this article, however, I do suggest doing a search on the web for keywords, “website marketing.”  You will discover there are millions of responses and endless information and debate on what is the best solution.  My experience: there is simply no one solution for this issue as the internet is ever changing and updating.  Make time to read and learn about marketing your business online and locally.  There are many great resources on the web which can help you stay informed and updated.

There are many types of directories including general directories and niche (often reffered to as vertical) directories. There are also many ways these can be structured.

The first step in planning to build a directory is deciding what it will be a directory of. You could choose to be general and have a vast array of categories and sub categories where a website on any topic can be submitted or you can choose to have a niche directory which are often reffered to as vertical directories. Vertical directories are becoming popular with users and webmasters due to the entire site and it’s listings being related to one topic.

Your next choice is whether to have static pages and create each page manually or use a script that creates pages, manages your listings, site submissions and more. Using a script is the popular and sensible choice and if you have programming skills you may choose to build your own. Otherwise there are numerous directory scripts available and some are even free, for example: PHP Link Directory, Barracuda Links Directory or WSN Links to name a few.

Once you have your directory up and running with all the categories relevant to a general directory or your chosen topic the next task is get listings as without those it’s not much. For other webmasters to submit their link they need to be able to find your site so getting links from ‘directory of directories’ sites are a good place to start in promoting your site. Although there may be catch, those sites may not want to list yours if it’s not populated with listings to some extent so choose some quality sites and add them to your categories and sub categories.

For a start you may need to give free listings to get things going although there’s something to watch in who you list on your directory which is summed up by quality attracts quality and trash does trash. Screen your listings and be sure they aren’t banned by search engines,low quality sites, scrapper sites or just plain spam. The quality of your listings will reflect the quality of your directory to users, webmasters and to some extent search engines.

Your next choice once your directory starts to grow is how you will benefit from your work. Choices here can be running Pay Per Click advertising, banner ads, affiliate ads or charging for links or maybe both.

To get submissions from quality sites and maybe payment for links webmasters will be looking at or for Higher the Google PR the better, well keyworded title and category description, low density of links/listings per page and the quality of the other sites listed. Here is a neat trick, add top ranking sites under the appropriate categories and other sites trying to achieve top ranking for that particular keyword/category title will probably submit to have their site listed.

From there it is a matter of constantly promoting your directory via links to your site, advertising and marketing.

There is a very bright future for ecommerce websites. As long as there are needs that should be met, there will be customers. For ecommerce website owners, earning money online can be so easy. If people need your products and services, your website will stay alive as long as you want.

<b>Online Competition For Ecommerce Websites</b>

Because of the increasing numbers of online shoppers, there is a need for more ecommerce websites. The problem, however, is that there seem to be several ecommerce websites now. A lot of business persons have answered the call to sell something online. This makes online competition very tough.

Just think about this, if you sell health and beauty products online, there are hundred more several websites like yours. They also offer the same products and services. If there is one customer looking for a health product, he has a hundred choices to choose from. So how can you increase your website’s chance of getting that customer?

<b>Plan Ahead And Market Your Ecommerce Website</b>

This is one thing that most ecommerce website owners do not completely understand. Most of them think that once they have set up their websites, they don’t have to do anything anymore. They will just sit and wait for sales. This may be true ages ago, but with the tough competition now, if you don’t do anything, you won’t get any sales.

Ecommerce websites need two things to consider. First is planning and the second is marketing. Before setting up the website, there must be a thorough planning first. In planning, you must consider the target market, budget, design and other factors that will affect the overall performance of the website.

Second is website marketing. After you have set up your website, you need to work on a marketing campaign. Through marketing, you can make your website more popular and visible to your target market. There are several web marketing options which you can use. The choice of the web marketing option depends on the need of your website.

Remember not to stop working on your website after the set up. If you stop working on it, the sales will also stop. Continually market your website for continuous sales.

First things first, you should conduct some form of market research. Ascertain any niche corners of the market that may still be available and aim to take advantage of them. There are fewer niches now than there once were, but there are still some. Look at your competitor’s websites, in particular the value added services they are offering or any special offers. Try to match, or preferably beat, these offers when you do set up your website. Offer Internet only deals.

You should have your site designed by a professional; only this way can you ensure that your website will be appealing to visitors and to search engines. You may also want to consider having a logo and some advertising banners designed.

There is an alternative to paying somebody else to do all of this. There are many different Internet software packages available to help you with each step of this process. There is Internet software that will help you design your site quickly and easily; there is Internet software to help you design your own logo. In fact, there is even software that will help you to market your website once it is established. If you are opening an e-commerce website you should look for shopping cart software that can be integrated into your website too.

To succeed at blogging for profit, the main thing that
you will need is a large readership. The higher your
traffic, the more advertisers will agree to pay you.
However, cultivating the regular visitors that you will
need in order to make a profit isnt easy. As more and
more blogs appear each day, having a great idea or a
wonderful writing style is no longer enough to get
attention. You need to be able to market your blog
effectively.

Too many bloggers spend all of their time writing posts
and almost no time marketing their project. To be
certain, updating as often as you can is a great way to
keep your blog high on blogrolls and high in blog
search engines like technorati, and once your readers
know that you update frequently they will return to your
site on a regular basis. However, it does not matter how
often you update if nobody is reading your page, so dont
skimp on the time that you spend drawing visitors to
your site. To make your dreams of blogging for profit a
reality, try decreasing your number of posts and using
some of that time to draw new visitors by setting up
link exchanges with other bloggers, making contacts in
the blog community, and following other established
modes of winning traffic.

Of course, even if you are a marketing genius or have a
really great idea for a blog, success is not going to
happen overnight. Building the kind of readership that
blogging for profit requires takes time, and in all
likelihood it will be at least several months before you
are able to turn much of a profit. Try to stay committed
to your blogging project during this initial rough period.
To stay motivated, set goals for how often you will
update and how many readers you want to attract, and
then reward yourself for sticking with your plan.

The W3C accessibility guidelines, or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as they’re officially known, could go slightly further however. Fulfilling the guidelines will give you a very accessible website (remember though, they are just guidelines so shouldn’t always be taken literally). For ultimate accessibility though, try implementing some of these techniques too:

Hidden text

Hidden text can be very useful for screen reader users. If there isn’t sufficient text for these users to gain an understanding of a particular section, then you can simply create this extra information and hide it from sighted users.

The most common and useful page items to insert invisible text for screen reader users include:

- Headings – Every single section on each page should have a heading placed immediately before it. This way, screen reader users always know that the preceding section has finished and a new section has begun. So, before the main navigation begins, you should insert a heading labelled, ‘Site navigation’. Although this heading is extremely useful for screen reader users, it may look rather unsightly visually, so you can just make the text invisible.

- Form labels – Every form item must have a label immediately preceding it – otherwise, screen reader users won’t know what the form item is about. Date of birth fields, with three separate fields for date, month and year, are common culprits of not providing form labels for each form field. So, place the date of birth label before the three form fields, and then insert an invisible label before each of the other two form fields, ‘Month of birth’ and ‘Year of birth’.

- Skip links – A skip link is an invisible link that’s placed at the very top of the HTML file. It’s a relative link within the page, allowing users to jump straight to a section on the page, usually the main content. Skip links are really useful for both screen reader and keyboard-only users who can jump straight to the content, without having to work through the navigation.

Succinct, front-loaded and conventional link text

As a method of browsing through a page, screen reader users can call up a list of links on a page and jump to the link in which they’re most interested. It’s common knowledge that link text should make sense out of context, and this is indeed a W3C guideline. Link text such as ‘Click here’ would obviously make no sense in a list like this. It’s also crucial that link text is:

- Succinct – so that it’s quick and easy for screen reader users to work through this list
- Front-loaded – so that screen users can understand the meaning of the link straightaway and jump down to the next one if they’re not interested
- Conventional – so screen reader users can alphabetise the list and jump to the link they’re looking for (e.g. if the ‘Contact us’ link was labelled as ‘Enquiries’ it would be harder to find the website’s phone number)

Link text is additionally important for users that finds it difficult to read online, such as screen magnifier users and those with learning difficulties and dyslexia. For these users when they scan through web pages, they’ll often be unable to make out specific words – instead, they’ll see shapes and colours. Anything that’s in a high contrast colour is obviously a link, so they can stop and read it.

By making link text succinct and front-loaded, and using conventional link text, it’s far easier for users that finds it difficult to read online to immediately comprehend links and what their destination is.

Visible font resizer

It’s crucial that text is resizable for web users with poor or limited vision – or so the theory goes. In actual fact, user testing has shown time and time again that few web users actually know how to resize text, or that this functionality even exists.

By providing a visible font resizer all users are of course made aware that they can resize the text should they need to. To find out how to put a font resizer on to your website, read this article about stylesheet switching at http://www.alistapart.com/stories/alternate.

(Incidentally, if you don’t know how to resize text simply select ‘View > Text size’ in either Internet Explorer or Firefox; alternatively, scroll with the wheel of your mouse whilst holding down the control key.)

Place instructions first

If you provide instructions for any kind of functionality on your site, make sure that the instructions are placed before the functionality. This of course sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how many times this rule isn’t adhered to.

Screen reader users listen to pages in the order that they’re written in, so if any instructions come after what they’re relating to then that’s obviously going to be too late.

Placing instructions first is also crucial for screen magnifier users. Screen magnifier users can only see a small section of the screen at any one time, so if instructions are placed in an out-of-the-way place they’ll likely be overlooked.

Web forms are perhaps the most common type of functionality to contain instructions. Do be sure that any instructions are placed above the form and not below it. Mis-placed instructions usually include explaining which fields are required and error messages.

Large headings

Headings are crucial for all users to find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently. They are however particularly useful for any user that finds it difficult to read online, such as screen magnifier users and those with learning difficulties and dyslexia.

When these users scan through web pages, they’ll often be unable to pick up words and instead will see shapes and colours. By using a large font size for headings, these users will easily be able to spot these important headings.

Focus state for links

Keyboard-only web users can navigate through web pages by tabbing from link to link (and form item to form item). It can however sometimes be difficult to know exactly where you are on the page when relying on the tabbing method. By assigning a background colour to the focus state of each link, it becomes much easier for these users to orientate themselves on the page.

Large link target

Many web users with dexterity problems will use only the keyboard to browse through a website. Some will still continue to use a mouse but with rather limited control, so wherever possible do try increase the area of the link target. This is of course not possible for regular links, but for vertical based navigation lists it’s easy to extend the clickable area to the full width of the column by assigning the style, display: block to each link.

Conclusion

The W3C accessibility guidelines are of course important, but if you want your website to be truly accessible then there’s more that you can do. Following the advice in this article is of course a great start!

Cheap web design services.

You do not have to spend thousands of pounds to have an internet prescence. In my opinion you should only have to pay between Ł50 and Ł100 to have a website built. The websites at the bottom of this page only cost me Ł42.50 each! The amount of competition in the internet web design sector means that there are some great deals available.

You can find these cheap web design companies by looking on internet auction websites, internet search engines or in the Yellow Pages.

Website promotion free tips.

Everyone would like an increase in traffic to their website or an increase in their PR rating. In general the higher the page rank you have the more visitors you are likely to get.

To increase this page rank it is important to build up the number of backward links your website has. You can do this by e-mailing other websites preferably in the same business sector as your own and asking if they would be willing to swap links with your site.

Writing articles like the one you are reading here is another way of obtaining backward links. By submitting these articles to article websites, other webmasters are then able to use your article on their website, thus giving you an extra link. This is because you are able to add your information and web address in the author bio at the bottom of the page.

You may also want to consider google adwords. This is a form of pay per click where you pay to appear on the right side of the search results in the paid advertising section of the google search engine for a specific key phrase. Always remember not to spend more on the advertising than you are likely to earn from the website.

If you would like to earn extra money from your website you may want to consider google adsense. This is where google put ads onto your website. When your visitors click on the ads you get paid.

Web Site Templates

For many people, it makes more sense to use a pre-designed web template instead of creating a site from scratch. Using a pre-designed site template allows you to get a professional design at a fraction of the price a custom design would cost. A good template is automated or has HTML tags to show you exactly where to put your text. This saves you precious time. Also, a web page designed by someone just learning HTML is more likely to have mistakes than one designed and tested by professionals. Mistakes in web site code can prevent some users from being able to see a web page or can even cause lower search engine rankings.

There are millions of web sites on the Internet and there are more being born every second. Even though there may be more than one web site using the pre-designed site template you choose, the likelihood of a visitor seeing both sites is not great. Every site is unique in the data it presents. Web templates present data quickly and professionally without the hassle of designing anything.

Being that many web templates are under $50 and many custom site designs are well over $5000, it is easy to see how web templates can save money and time. Web templates are a good way for someone to learn HTML. By becoming familiar with code that has been written professionally, a webmaster can pick up on things along the way. Instead of having an amateur web site at the start, an HTML novice can have a professional site from the beginning with a pre-designed site template.

Search Engines also play a factor in choosing web templates. Sites with HTML mistakes do not fair well in search engines. Particularly in older versions of Netscape, forgetting one “table” tag can mean the whole page won’t show. A good web template has been designed and tested in many environments, to W3C standards, for maximum compatibility. Instead of thrashing your way through mistakes, take advantage of competent template designs.

If you are just starting out, a web site template is almost always the way to go. There are thousands of sites offering them for sale for very low prices. Why waste your time when you can use a template to get off to a quick, professional start?

The only set back most people run into when wanting to start one of their own online business is How and Where to get started.

I did a search under the keyword term “home based business” and the search results returned 575,000,000 results for that keyword alone.

That’s a pretty intimidating number for someone wanting to start their own home based business on the web wouldn’t you say?

These were the same obstacles I was up against when I first ventured into the online world of business.

But I didn’t let that stop me and I hope that won’t stop you either from wanting to start your own online business.

So, I saved you the hassle and put together 3 of the quickest ways for ANYONE(that’s You) to start their own online business with next to no investment required and can get started in less than 24 hours.

Are you ready? I hope so.

Business Model #1. Affiliate Programs.

Affiliate Programs are simply programs set up by the business owner for others to sign up for and promote for the business owner for a agreed upon commission(usually between 10 – 75%).

The great thing about Affiliate marketing is it doesn’t cost you a single penny to get started, you don’t have to worry about refunds or customer service that come with owning your own product.

All you have to worry about is generating the traffic to your affiliate link and collecting your commission cheques.

This is the quickest way to get started online… Period!

Here’s a few Affiliate Directories to give you a start:

Associate Programs – http://www.associateprograms.com

Refer It – http://www.refer-it.com

Business Model #2. Resell Rights.

Resell Rights are simply products that have already been created and are available to anybody who is willing to pay for the Resell Rights to market them.

The upside to this is you get Ready-To-Go websites with PROVEN sales letters that convert. The best part of all is… you get to keep 100% of the $Profits$.

The draw back is you can’t claim those products as your own. The original creator of the product maintains full rights. You just get to keep all the profits.

Not such a bad trade off wouldn’t you say?

Business Model #3. Private Label Resell Rights.

Private Label Resell Rights are simply products that are ready to be branded with your name to it.

What I mean by that is you get full rights to the product or products and are able to claim them as your own even though you didn’t create them yourself.

This is the fastest way for anyone to start a online business who really doesn’t have any experience or knowledge on how to create their own products.

The other really cool thing about Private Label Resell Rights products is they come with Ready-To-Go websites which then again saves you time and money in having to create them yourself.

Well there you have it, 3 Quick Ways To Start Your Own Online Business In Less Than 24 Hours.

The easiest way to locate any of the above via the search engines is by entering something like this into there search engine web form:

affiliate programs + “what your niche is”

(Note: make sure you use the quotations around what niche you want to target. Very Important!)

This will save you time and target your search much better, where as if you were to just enter ‘affiliate programs’ into the search engine web form you would get a gazillion results, leaving you frustrated.

Now, the only thing left for you to do Right NOW is make a decision on what you would really enjoy doing as a business online.

Once you’ve figured that out the only thing left for you to do is put together a… Plan For $Profit$.