There are millions of people doing just that: selling advertising space instead of any real product. Just look at sites like LifeHacker, TechCrunch, and ICanHasCheezburger. These are sites that are making a fortune on advertising revenue alone. They’re not selling any products, just web space that is viewed by thousands of people every day.
All it takes is a great idea, the desire to work hard to build your advertising site from scratch, and quite a bit of persistence. This is not an overnight type of deal, you really have to work to make a lot of money through advertising, so be sure that you know exactly what you are getting into before you begin the process of making your own ad funded website.
When you are sure that this is the direction that you want your business to go, you need to decide what kind of ad based website you want to make. Blogs, while the most popular, are not the only way to make money through advertising. You could run a news website or some kind of site that provides a service to your users. Those are just two of the hundreds of different options available for someone who is looking to make it rich through advertising.
Making it big through advertisements is not based on just a good idea, though; you have to execute it properly as well. You need a good, easy to read web design. You need to make sure that your ads blend seamlessly with the overall design of your website.
You need to have good server space that will not go down on you during even the slightest load. You need to be dedicated to your project. Eat while working on it, drink while working on it, and dream about it when you sleep. Only then can you hope to play with the big boys and really get your name out there in the advertising world.
To make your site profitable, you will have to bring in tens of thousands of people each day. A daunting task, but if you dedicate yourself to your goal and you work towards it every day, it will eventually happen for you.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
How to Take Advantage of Advertising to Find Traffic and Make Extra Money
Advertising is a great way to make money online. It does have its drawbacks, however. The main problem with advertising, especially if your internet business is merchandise related, is that you end up cheapening your store, making it look untrustworthy and making you look as though you are more interested in making money than selling high quality goods that your customers would want to purchase.
For this reason and this reason alone, it is a good idea to not use ads on retail, sales, or marketing website where you are trying to gain a potential customer’s trust so that they will stay with you long enough to make a purchase. After all, if you have a successful store, you will be able to make more than enough money and advertisements on your site will not be of any real value to you.
However, there is one way that you can take advantage of advertising and turn advertisements to your advantage. Instead of placing ads on your site, you should instead contact advertising sites, blogs, and other informational websites in your chosen niche.
By contacting advertising sites like Google Adwords, for example, you can arrange to have your advertisements displayed on websites around the globe. It can add up to be costly, but it is a very effective way of getting your name out. And any one click could be a sale.
Alternatively, if you contact blogs or other informational websites, you can see if they offer advertising space. Buying advertising space on a site in your chosen niche can bring in a lot of traffic, but it can also be costly depending on who you do business with. For example, an ad on a big name blog may cost thousands of dollars a month while an ad on a smaller, less developed site may only be a few dollars a week.
The best way to take advantage of advertising on other sites to increase your traffic is to set aside a particular budget each month for how much you want to spend for advertising. Keep this budget at a set amount for several months and see how far you can make your money go. If you are not seeing any results with your advertisements, then move on to another advertiser or up the amount you are spending.
The important things to look for are high click through and conversion rates. Are people clicking on your ads? Are those ads converting to sales? Just because thousands of people see your ads does not mean that you are making any money. Find your weakest advertisers and move on to something that will give you more bang for your buck.
If you find that you are uncomfortable in dealing with blog and website owners, you should consider finding advertising space with the big corporations. Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and a variety of other big name companies all offer advertising in some way or another. You pay their fees in either a pay per click or a pay per impression manner and your ads are hosted on websites across the globe. Advertising with one of these big companies is sure to net you a good amount of traffic, but the conversion rate may be somewhat low at first. Try upping your budget if you’re not noticing any big sales from AdWords, and try to get the best keywords for your niche. Don’t cheap out and you won’t lose out on customers.
Continue Reading
For this reason and this reason alone, it is a good idea to not use ads on retail, sales, or marketing website where you are trying to gain a potential customer’s trust so that they will stay with you long enough to make a purchase. After all, if you have a successful store, you will be able to make more than enough money and advertisements on your site will not be of any real value to you.
However, there is one way that you can take advantage of advertising and turn advertisements to your advantage. Instead of placing ads on your site, you should instead contact advertising sites, blogs, and other informational websites in your chosen niche.
By contacting advertising sites like Google Adwords, for example, you can arrange to have your advertisements displayed on websites around the globe. It can add up to be costly, but it is a very effective way of getting your name out. And any one click could be a sale.
Alternatively, if you contact blogs or other informational websites, you can see if they offer advertising space. Buying advertising space on a site in your chosen niche can bring in a lot of traffic, but it can also be costly depending on who you do business with. For example, an ad on a big name blog may cost thousands of dollars a month while an ad on a smaller, less developed site may only be a few dollars a week.
The best way to take advantage of advertising on other sites to increase your traffic is to set aside a particular budget each month for how much you want to spend for advertising. Keep this budget at a set amount for several months and see how far you can make your money go. If you are not seeing any results with your advertisements, then move on to another advertiser or up the amount you are spending.
The important things to look for are high click through and conversion rates. Are people clicking on your ads? Are those ads converting to sales? Just because thousands of people see your ads does not mean that you are making any money. Find your weakest advertisers and move on to something that will give you more bang for your buck.
If you find that you are uncomfortable in dealing with blog and website owners, you should consider finding advertising space with the big corporations. Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and a variety of other big name companies all offer advertising in some way or another. You pay their fees in either a pay per click or a pay per impression manner and your ads are hosted on websites across the globe. Advertising with one of these big companies is sure to net you a good amount of traffic, but the conversion rate may be somewhat low at first. Try upping your budget if you’re not noticing any big sales from AdWords, and try to get the best keywords for your niche. Don’t cheap out and you won’t lose out on customers.
Continue Reading
Monday, March 29, 2010
Designing Your Own Website
Although designing your own website is not the most difficult thing you will ever do, it is fairly time consuming. However, when you have finished with the design, you will have a great feeling about yourself - that you actually created something yourself, something that you can be proud of, something that will hopefully make you a lot of money in the long term.
Since you already have your template sketched out and your color palette chosen, the only prep work that you need before you get started on your site’s design is to download the necessary tools that will help you along the way.
You will need an image editor for creating the pictures for the site, a “What You See Is What You Get” site editor to design the website, and a text editor to modify the code as you see fit. If you’ve got the money, purchase a copy of the Adobe CS3 Web Design package which contains Photoshop, Dreamweaver and a bunch of other useful program.
Otherwise, for image editing, consider using the GIMP or Paint.NET on Linux or Windows, respectively, or Pixelmator on Mac OS X. Use KompoZer as a free WYSIWYG editor on Linux or Windows. Finally, consider using a text editor like Notepad ++ for Windows or TextMate for Mac OS X. Also, download an FTP client like FileZilla so that you can easily upload your site to a server when everything is completed.
Even though the tools will help you quite a bit on your quest to code your own business website, they will not be able to do all of the work for you. You still have to put in quite a bit of input, and it helps if you have some kind of reference material to guide you.
So, your best bet is to look up as much information online as you possibly can. Read tutorials and guides that can help you learn XHTML for coding the site’s framework, CSS for giving the site some style, PHP for some of the site’s functions, and JavaScript for the site’s inner workings and other various functions.
It may take a week, it may take a month, but when your website is finally finished, you should use your FTP client to upload it to a server and make sure that it works perfectly well.
Also, at this time, it is of the utmost importance that you check your website in a variety of web browsers, including Firefox, Internet Explorer (6 and 7), and Safari. All web browsers display pages differently, so you want to be sure that your site looks just as good in IE as it does in Firefox and Safari. Continue Reading
Since you already have your template sketched out and your color palette chosen, the only prep work that you need before you get started on your site’s design is to download the necessary tools that will help you along the way.
You will need an image editor for creating the pictures for the site, a “What You See Is What You Get” site editor to design the website, and a text editor to modify the code as you see fit. If you’ve got the money, purchase a copy of the Adobe CS3 Web Design package which contains Photoshop, Dreamweaver and a bunch of other useful program.
Otherwise, for image editing, consider using the GIMP or Paint.NET on Linux or Windows, respectively, or Pixelmator on Mac OS X. Use KompoZer as a free WYSIWYG editor on Linux or Windows. Finally, consider using a text editor like Notepad ++ for Windows or TextMate for Mac OS X. Also, download an FTP client like FileZilla so that you can easily upload your site to a server when everything is completed.
Even though the tools will help you quite a bit on your quest to code your own business website, they will not be able to do all of the work for you. You still have to put in quite a bit of input, and it helps if you have some kind of reference material to guide you.
So, your best bet is to look up as much information online as you possibly can. Read tutorials and guides that can help you learn XHTML for coding the site’s framework, CSS for giving the site some style, PHP for some of the site’s functions, and JavaScript for the site’s inner workings and other various functions.
It may take a week, it may take a month, but when your website is finally finished, you should use your FTP client to upload it to a server and make sure that it works perfectly well.
Also, at this time, it is of the utmost importance that you check your website in a variety of web browsers, including Firefox, Internet Explorer (6 and 7), and Safari. All web browsers display pages differently, so you want to be sure that your site looks just as good in IE as it does in Firefox and Safari. Continue Reading
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Designing Your Business Website
At this point, you should have an idea of what you want your website to be and what you will be selling on your website. Most of you will have chosen to make a sales, retail, or marketing website, so the rest of this article will be dedicated to those who decided to go in that direction.
The rest of you, consider investing in a high quality web designer and an even higher quality web developer - you will need all of the help you can get in making your own web application or informational business website.
Designing a website is actually a very simple process, even if you have never done such a project in the past. You really have two choices at this point, as far as the website design is concerned. Build the site yourself or hire someone else to do the heavy lifting for you.
Obviously, building the site from scratch by yourself is going to be the more cost effective solution, but if you have no prior experience or you need your website up as soon as possible, hiring a professional may be your better option. No matter which route you take, there are a few tips that you need to consider if you want to make sure that your website looks exactly as you want it to.
Whether you are building your business website yourself or if you have hired someone to do it, you need to make a rough template for how you want your site to look. If design is not your thing, there are plenty of resources out there that can help you get started. Take a look at websites like CSS Beauty, Design Snack, and Smashing Magazine for all of the inspiration that you could ever possibly need. These sites highlight some of the best in web design and are perfect for anyone who is having a difficult time coming up with some ideas.
When you have settled on a basic web design for your business website, you need to come up with a color scheme that would work well with what you’re trying to accomplish. A sales website, for example, will make use of a lot of whitespace and only a basic palette of three or four colors so as not to be too hard on the viewer’s eyes.
On the other hand, a marketing website will use big blocks of text with highlighted words here and there, often making use of brilliant colors like reds, blues, and yellows to attract the reader’s eye to important points. If you are having trouble coming up with colors, check out sites like ColorBlender and colordb to help you choose the perfect palette for your site.
Once the basic template and the color scheme have been decided on, you need to make the decision to build your site yourself or hire someone else to do it. If you hire someone, all you have to do is pay them the appropriate amount and submit your early designs and color choices.
The web designers will do the rest and you’ll pay them the full amount on completion of the project. Go ahead and skip to Step Three if you are planning to take the web designer route. Those of you, who want to go it alone, keep reading. Continue Reading
The rest of you, consider investing in a high quality web designer and an even higher quality web developer - you will need all of the help you can get in making your own web application or informational business website.
Designing a website is actually a very simple process, even if you have never done such a project in the past. You really have two choices at this point, as far as the website design is concerned. Build the site yourself or hire someone else to do the heavy lifting for you.
Obviously, building the site from scratch by yourself is going to be the more cost effective solution, but if you have no prior experience or you need your website up as soon as possible, hiring a professional may be your better option. No matter which route you take, there are a few tips that you need to consider if you want to make sure that your website looks exactly as you want it to.
Whether you are building your business website yourself or if you have hired someone to do it, you need to make a rough template for how you want your site to look. If design is not your thing, there are plenty of resources out there that can help you get started. Take a look at websites like CSS Beauty, Design Snack, and Smashing Magazine for all of the inspiration that you could ever possibly need. These sites highlight some of the best in web design and are perfect for anyone who is having a difficult time coming up with some ideas.
When you have settled on a basic web design for your business website, you need to come up with a color scheme that would work well with what you’re trying to accomplish. A sales website, for example, will make use of a lot of whitespace and only a basic palette of three or four colors so as not to be too hard on the viewer’s eyes.
On the other hand, a marketing website will use big blocks of text with highlighted words here and there, often making use of brilliant colors like reds, blues, and yellows to attract the reader’s eye to important points. If you are having trouble coming up with colors, check out sites like ColorBlender and colordb to help you choose the perfect palette for your site.
Once the basic template and the color scheme have been decided on, you need to make the decision to build your site yourself or hire someone else to do it. If you hire someone, all you have to do is pay them the appropriate amount and submit your early designs and color choices.
The web designers will do the rest and you’ll pay them the full amount on completion of the project. Go ahead and skip to Step Three if you are planning to take the web designer route. Those of you, who want to go it alone, keep reading. Continue Reading
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Selling one product at a time on Amazon
Selling one product at a time on Amazon can make you some money, but it is not exactly an online business website. If you want to go full bore and make as much profit as you can, then the Amazon WebStore is what you should focus your attention towards. The Amazon WebStore affiliation will allow you to sell your products right alongside of Amazon’s products, allowing you to sell your goods to over sixty million potential customers.
Just like setting up a store with eBay, an Amazon WebStore is a cakewalk compared to designing your own business website. But there are monetary drawbacks involved as well--drawbacks that may deter you from engaging in a financial partnership with the retail giant.
While you can build your own Amazon WebStore using Amazon’s easy to use storefront designer, it will cost you sixty dollars per month in hosting fees plus seven percent of each sale goes into Amazon’s pocket.
All in all, if you think you can move enough merchandise on Amazon’s site, this is really the business alternative that you should consider. It offers roughly the same exposure as eBay and slaps you with far less fees so that you can make more profit.
Finally, if you are considering marketing or publishing as an online business, you may want to take a look at what Lulu.com has to offer. As the leader in online self publishing and all things print, Lulu is the place to go if you are attempting to make your fortune with art or the written word.
From calendars to books to music, if it is artsy, it’s on Lulu. All you have to do is come up with a creative idea, get Lulu to produce it, and then you get some profits based on what sells on their site. You can even take your published works to an Amazon or eBay store for even more exposure.
While the market at Lulu is limited, it is the best place to get discovered if you are willing to put in the time and effort to write a book, create some art, or even record a song. Even if you are not into making one of these activities into a full on business, Lulu provides you with a great way to make some money on your hobbies.
Like photography? Make a calendar. Have an opinion on the presidential candidates? Write a short book and have Lulu publish it. Play in a garage band? Record your songs and Lulu will sell your CD for you.
Although there are plenty of other programs that you can enroll in if you are looking to establish an online business without making your website right away, the above listed companies offer three of the largest resources for you to start selling right away. Their fees are affordable, their web traffic is huge.
They can offer you everything you want about an online store except for your own domain name and full control over your profits. If you want to be completely in charge of your business, you need to create your own business website. Continue Reading
Just like setting up a store with eBay, an Amazon WebStore is a cakewalk compared to designing your own business website. But there are monetary drawbacks involved as well--drawbacks that may deter you from engaging in a financial partnership with the retail giant.
While you can build your own Amazon WebStore using Amazon’s easy to use storefront designer, it will cost you sixty dollars per month in hosting fees plus seven percent of each sale goes into Amazon’s pocket.
All in all, if you think you can move enough merchandise on Amazon’s site, this is really the business alternative that you should consider. It offers roughly the same exposure as eBay and slaps you with far less fees so that you can make more profit.
Finally, if you are considering marketing or publishing as an online business, you may want to take a look at what Lulu.com has to offer. As the leader in online self publishing and all things print, Lulu is the place to go if you are attempting to make your fortune with art or the written word.
From calendars to books to music, if it is artsy, it’s on Lulu. All you have to do is come up with a creative idea, get Lulu to produce it, and then you get some profits based on what sells on their site. You can even take your published works to an Amazon or eBay store for even more exposure.
While the market at Lulu is limited, it is the best place to get discovered if you are willing to put in the time and effort to write a book, create some art, or even record a song. Even if you are not into making one of these activities into a full on business, Lulu provides you with a great way to make some money on your hobbies.
Like photography? Make a calendar. Have an opinion on the presidential candidates? Write a short book and have Lulu publish it. Play in a garage band? Record your songs and Lulu will sell your CD for you.
Although there are plenty of other programs that you can enroll in if you are looking to establish an online business without making your website right away, the above listed companies offer three of the largest resources for you to start selling right away. Their fees are affordable, their web traffic is huge.
They can offer you everything you want about an online store except for your own domain name and full control over your profits. If you want to be completely in charge of your business, you need to create your own business website. Continue Reading
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
