Technology has made it a great time to be an entrepreneur, the Internet is making the world a smaller and faster place than ever before. You now have access to more information that helps you make informed decisions so much faster.

As a small business, you are more flexible, faster and lighter on your feet than your big business counterpart. New markets can be targeted more quickly and you can make decisions on a dime.

Here are some practical tips to help you when you first get started in the ‘business of your dreams’.

Don’t Quit Your Job

If it’s an online business, consider starting out online and part time while you have a steady income. It takes approximately 6months – 1year to get a business going and you don’t want to run out of money before you’ve even started!

Start with what’s in your means and scale up as your business grows.

Find a Niche

Not everyone can make money with a personal blog, so try and find a niche to sell to. Online, people are looking for stores that specialize in specific products. You can’t compete with the ebays and Amazons so choose a very niche product/ service and milk it for all it’s worth.

Have a Presence Online

Even if you’re not starting out an online business, having a website is a must. It broadens your customer base and may bring in leads that you would never have considered before.

That’s the power of the Internet, being in places where you can’t be yourself and sometimes in mainstream media can’t get to either.

Don’t Quit. Keep on Trying.

Yes I know it sounds so cliche, but the problem that most Internet marketers or new entrepreneurs face is the urge to quit when the going gets tough.

Learn from your mistakes and use them to better yourself and your business. Quitting before you’ve really given it a chance would mean that you would have just wasted your time and your effort.

Some people don’t realize that when bil gates became big with Microsoft 3.0, he failed with Microsoft 1.0 and 2.0 first. But he kept on trying.

And so should you.

-William Lee

And if you find one that works better than the others? Then rinse and repeat…

Blogs are a very popular ways of promoting your product or service. They are easy to install, easy to administer and easy to update. And search engines love them too. But what is a blog without traffic?Exactly. Here are five quick ways to boost traffic to your blog and start seeing those big sales.

1.Have A Ping List Ready

There are hundreds if not thousands of blog services that you can ping to let them know that you’ve made an update to your blog. These services then take your new post and display it in one form or another on their site. Just search ‘blog ping list’ in Google or try a few of these:

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://bitacoras.net/ping

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php

Although there is of course alot more available. This is just to get you started.

2.Add RSS Buttons For The Most Popular RSS Readers

Yahoo, Google, Feedburner, bloglines etc are all popular feed readers that your visitors may be using. So make sure you give them the option to add your RSS feed to any reader that they may be using. This way readers can easily subscribe to your feed. Speaking of which, have you subscribed to my blog yet?

3.Regularly Update Your Blog

Search engines love a regularly updated blog. They consider it fresh and new content and favour those that do update often. You should try and update your blog at least once a day, although don’t go overboard. Too many updates in a day has the opposite effect and isn’t liked (10 posts a day or more).

4.Post in Forums

Post useful comment in forums that are talking about your subject matter. I’ve personally never been very good at getting traffic from forums because you have to stay very engaged to get a good amount of traffic from them. But traffic does come, so keep at it and be patient.

5.Use Blog Search Engines

Blog search engines such as Google Blog Search are plentiful out there, from blog search engines targeted at health blogs and a range of other topics. Just do a search for ‘blog search engine’ and add your site to their directory.

These are just a couple of the things you can do to slowly drive more traffic to your blog and hopefully start making more money online.

Keep trying,

-William Lee

Continuing from where I left off telling you about WordPress as a blog platform, I’ve put together a short tutorial on how to install WordPress onto your own server using Fantastico in Cpanel.

First off, you’ll need to a) buy a domain name and b) purchase hosting on a webserver, may I suggest:

(Yes I admit I’ll make money if you decide to buy from Hostgator, but I use them myself and find it to be good value for money.)

For the rest of the tutorial, I find that putting the information in a video format or a slideshow (powerpoint) format gets the message across the easiest as you can see exactly what to click.

You’ll need flash installed on your computer to view the presentation or the youtube video, so for you reading this at work, you’ll have to go home and check out the tutorial… sorry.

Feel free to share the video/presentation with friends and embed it on you’re website/blog as well if you want.

Hope you find these useful:

Video

Presentation

Blog blog blog and blog some more,

-William Lee

“From Wikipedia.com: WordPress is an open source blog publishing application. WordPress is the official successor of b2\cafelog which was developed by Michel Valdrighi. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of lead developer Matt Mullenweg. The latest release of WordPress is version 2.7, released on 11 December 2008.”

Above that, WordPress is the next evolution for people who currently have their blogs on free blogging services such as (@Blogspot.com) www.blogger.com or WordPress’s own free blogging platform, (@Wordpress.com) www.wordpress.com.

The main functions of the WordPress blog CMS (Content Management System) is that it allows you to edit, create and modify your blog posts directly from your web server rather than log on to a 3rd party site such as Blogger.

WordPress is also highly customizable, with the ability to modify the entire look and feel of the site as well as usability functions via themes and plugins that are readily available for WordPress.

Just type in ‘Free WordPress templates’ or ‘Wordpress Plugins’ in Google.com and you’ll see what I mean.

Templates

The use of many of the free templates out there can give your blog that look that you’ve always wanted it to have but could never quite achieve in your free blog host.

Better still, you can modify an existing template to give yourself a more unique look, or create a theme from scratch for a one of a kind blog.

Plugins

WordPress plugins or widgets give your blog more functionality for both your readers, and for yourself.

You can add plugins to show the most recent comments, the most popular posts, add polls and more for the benefit of your user and their interaction with your site.

For yourself, in the backend, plugins can automatically make your site compatible with Google Analytics, automatically place Google Adsense for you and even catch spam comments from flooding your site.

All in all, WordPress is a must for those who want to start blogging seriously and want and added bit of functionality to their blog. For Internet marketers, it is a must, period.

In my next post I’ll make a quick tutorial on how to install WordPress on your server via cpanel and fantastico.

Gong Xi Fa Chai,

-William Lee

Messy Messy Messy

Some websites I’ve been to have adverts, affiliate links and text links EVERYWHERE. Yes, all these are ways to make money and yes, some people can do it quite well. But try not to flood your website with too many methods of trying to make income.

The long term success for a website depends on the loyalty of the brand, as well as the SEO to bring people to your pages. Unless you are one of those websites which have been SEO optimized to get high ranking, only to find a site full of Adsense links to elsewhere, then don’t cram too much on your blog/website!

And when I say brand, I mean how people perceive your website. If you claim to be the authority in all things ‘dog grooming’ for example, and you website is full of text links that take them to FOREX sites, you’re slowly going to lose those visitors.

Even now, I’ve got some Googe Adsense Link Ads at the top of each post, but realistically I think that I won’t get all too much money from Adsense on my site. Even if I manage to get thousands of visitors a day to my site, it may not convert to people clicking through, but I have to get those thousands of visitors in the first place. Then I’ll let you know.

Rather than flood your pages with links, why not try selling an affiliate product? For example, something like Comission Blueprint, which I’m going to start trying to sell on this site.

Selling an affiliate product can leave your pages a lot cleaner as it doesn’t need links everywhere, as well as the fact that an affiliate product can give you upwards of USD20 per sale. Which is pretty good when you start making a few sales a day.

So try and keep the site clean, don’t make it look like one of those bulletin boards you see at universities/colleges.

But then again, there are people who can make tonnes of money from Google Adsense, but they still don’t flood their pages with adsense everywhere. It takes more than adverts everywhere to make money with Adsense… Things such as placement, content, SEO etc.

Time to clean up your site?

So try and keep things clean! It might help out more than you think… [Photo from Flickr elliottcable, pokoroto]

Bye now,

-William Lee

What is a blog anyway? To me, blogs are an expression of one’s inner feelings, an online journal, a place to air your dirty laundry, a place to talk about your passions in life, a place to be known. A blog is also a great place to make money on the Internet.

A blog can be created on a free service such as Blogger or WordPress or as your own, hosted site. Either way, it’s so easy to pick up the habit now a days. If you know how to use a Microsoft Word document, you have almost all the skills necessarily to start a blog.

Everything in life is WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get), ok not everything, but that’s how you input text, pictures and videos into your blog. Point and click, how hard is that?

I’m no Internet marketing expert (yet) but to me there are only a few types of blogging styles out there, yet each of them has the potential to make money.

Personal Blogs

Personal blogs come in many shapes and forms. From political satire, daily life and even anonymous ranting about how much they hate life, or hate this person, or hate school etc. This type of blog far outnumbers almost every other style of blog, with people super eager to start telling the world what they had for breakfast, what movies they watched recently and how much they hate work.

I myself have been guilty of the above, but if you are interesting enough, beautiful enough or maybe you’re already a celebrity; a personal blog can bring in quite a comfortable side income via things such as sponsored posts and onsite advertising.

The downside? You need to be interesting, beautiful or a celebrity and it takes time to post regularly and in an interesting manner. But hey, as an online outlet for your thoughts, feelings and emotions, a blog is a good way to go.

Hobby Blogs

Hobby blogs are completely focused on a single hobby that the blog creator loves. I’ll give you an example from one of my ex-colleagues. He loves making models (the ones made out of plastic) from WW2 era soldiers, to anime robots. He documents some of the steps he takes and even sells his completed works. That’s a nice side income for him already, although it takes him a lot of time to do.

Have a look at his blog http://blog.castlebrimstone.com/ (the power of Greyskull! Get it?)

Business Blogs

A business blog is just another avenue of marketing a product or a company. The benefit of a blog is the personal interaction that users feel they have when reading a blog rather than a business’s corporate website. Some examples of business blogs include:

Nike http://insidenikerunning.nike.com/

Google http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

Yahoo http://www.ysearchblog.com/

Barack Obama has a blog http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hqblog/

And even John McCain has a blog http://www.johnmccain.com/Blog/

OK those last two weren’t really business blogs, but what could be a bigger business than the US economy?

Niche Blogs

The term niche marketing is used a lot by internet marketers. This is the action of finding a niche segment in any market, finding a product to sell and creating good content around that niche topic to try and entice people to buy the product.

You can also make money from niche blogs through things such as Google Adsense paying words and other similar forms of income generators.

I myself am trying to set up a few niche blogs and target keywords and traffic to them, but it’s been tough going. The first one I tried was The Dell XPS M1530 blog, you can’t get any more targeted can that can you? But after some advice from an Internet marketing coach that I went for a seminar at, he told me that I had just missed the up trend and it was falling now.

I’m going to keep trying to create these niche blogs/ websites and hopefully get myself a good keyword and get ranked highly in Google. If anybody has anything more to add to my article, please add on in the comments, I’d really appreciate it.

-William