e-Commerce, Starting a Business Online

Doing business online is one of your best options to raise extra income. Success is governed by two main factors, visitor traffic and sales conversions. How many of the right people can you attract to your site, and how many of those people can you persuade to take a given action? There’s no rent to pay when starting a business online, unless you count yearly domain name registration and monthly website hosting, both of which are minor. Basically, you need to register a domain name describing the type of business you want to start, and then build the website using a template in HTML, adding a database and programming routines as needed.

The easiest way to start is by opening a WordPress blog, and monetizing with Google AdSense pay-per-click ads. If you’ve tried Adsense before, but only made a few cents per click, you have a lot of learning to do. Adsense works great, in fact, but you have to understand the concepts, especially how text-ad bidding works, and how the Adsense code interprets your page text. You can drive targeted traffic to your website at a reasonable cost, by learning search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, and writing hundreds of pages of high-quality content.

Just making a website isn’t enough, if no-one can find it on Google, Yahoo, Bing, or Baidu, which collectively account for 94% of all searches. You’ll then need online marketing skills, and the ability to drive conversions, like encouraging a sign-up for paid membership, purchase of an item, clicks on advertisements, or other money-making events. All of this takes work, and the learning curve is steep at first. Google Analytics provides free tracking of your visitor traffic, enabling you to monitor growth, and find out what works. After you copy the code to the header on each of your pages, this free stats package displays great graphs, going far beyond the number of visitors to your page, into user flow, what links they clicked on, how long they stayed, bounce rate, the percent of repeat visitors, search traffic, and referral traffic.

Building an eCommerce Website

HTML, HTML5 Guide HTML Examples HTML tutorial HTML5 HTML Reference CSS Cascading Style Sheets CSS Examples CSS Tutorial, CSS3 CSS Reference JavaScript Tutorial JavaScript Examples JavaScript JavaScript Tutorial

Domain Names, Web Hosting

Domain name registration at a low-cost registrar costs about $10 per year, and basic hosting runs about $6 a month, or less if you sign up for a two or more years. There are many cheaper places to register domains, or host your site, but these are the best value for the money that I’ve found.

Domain Names
– GoDaddy
– Learn more about domain names
– Keyword Research

Hosting
– BlueHost
– Compare hosting companies

Content Writing

– WordPress Themes & Plug-ins
– Woo Themes
– The THESIS Theme
– Color Palette
– How to Start a Blog
– eBooks & Kindle
– ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse
– Moonlighting on the Internet by Yanik Silver
– Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
– The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau
– Audiobooks
– Authorship
– Blogging
– Copywriting
– Dramatic Tension
– Personal Branding
– Public Domain Content

Images & Copyright Law

– iStockPhoto
– Flickr Creative Commons
– Digital Photography
– Sell Stock Photography
– Sell Stock Photos
– iStockPhoto Affiliate Program
– Photoshop
– Image size, clarity
– Google image search, tags
– Backlinks

Monetization Methods

– Google Adsense
– Advertising (high traffic sites)
– Graphics vs Text Ads
– Recurring Memberships (dating sites, for example)
– User Databases, Mailing Lists
– Sales’ Lead Widgets
– Sale of eBooks
– Shopping Carts
– E-Junkie
– Clickbank
– Paypal.com
– LeadPages
– Squeeze Pages
– Sales’ Pages

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Programs
– CJ – formerly Commission Junction
– Share A Sale
– LinkShare
– ClickBank
– Conversion Rate
– Call to Action

Affiliate Marketing Conferences
– Affiliate Summit
– Leads Con

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A/B testing Affiliate Programs Anchor Text Variability Authorship, Authority Sites Backlink Analysis Tools Backlink Growth over Time Bad Neighborhoods Beal, Andy Benchmarking Bing Search Engine Blog Directories Body Copy, Sales Copy Broken Links Browser Detection Case Studies CGI scripts Claiborne, Scottie Clickthrough Rates Code-to-Content Ratio Content Creation Content Distribution Content Indexing Content Management Systems (CMS) Conversion Tracking Cookies Copywrited Content Crawl Phase of Search Engine Indexing Data Mining Database Output Visualization Deep-linking, Internal Pages Directory Submission Domain Name Servers (DNS) Duplicate Content Dynamic Sites Dynamic Text Replacement Error Handling, Database Errors, Server Errors Error Pages Exact Match Domains Facebook Likes Firefox SEO Tools Flash, Mixing Flash with HTML Form-based Navigation Forums, Bulletin Boards Funneling Geo Targeting, Localization Google Analytics Tracking Google Authorship Google Blog Search Google Chrome Browser Google Search by Image Search Google News RSS feed Google News Search Google PageRank Google Plus Google Trends Grehan, Mike Hagans, Andy Headers, HTTP Headers Headings, Headline Copy Heiman, Stephen High Rankings Hosting Issues Human Edited Directory Dmoz HTML Compliance, Errors HTTP Acceleration Hubs and Authorities IE Browser, SEO Tools and Services Image ALT and TITLE text Indexing Sites, How Content is Indexed Internal Links, Menus, Breadcrumbs IP Cloaking IP Delivery Jarboe, Greg JavaScript menus Keyword Discovery Keyword Hierarchy Keyword Metrics: Competition Keyword Phrases & Modifiers Keyword Positioning on the Page Krug, Steve Landing Pages, Doorways Link Baiting Link Building, Articles, Relevance Link Directories Link Farms, Link Spam Local Search, LocalRank Long Tail Search Mailing Lists Mapping Search Phrases to Content

Meta Tags Metadata Microsoft Bing Ads Migrating Domains Mobile Sites Mozilla Firefox, SEO Tools Multiple Domain Names, Multiple Web Sites Negative Matching Network Optimization Newsletters Optimizing Web Pages Organic Search Page Layout, Tables, CSS, Page Elements, Images Page Size, Image Size, Loading Speed Page Title, 1 Title to a Page, 1 Page to a Topic Parker, Roger Parsing and Caching Patel, Neil Pay-Per-Click, Google Adwords Paid Search Personalization for SEO Phrase Matching Pinging Press Releases Prioritization, How Search Engines Prioritize Results Processing of Queries Product Listing Pages Professional Associations Public Domain Content Rackham, Neil Rand Fishkin, (Link Baiting) Rankings, How Results are Ranked and Retrieved Redirection Referrals Reviews, Social Impact Rewriting Content to Improve Rank Rich Snippets Robots Meta Tag RSS Feeds Sanchez, Daniel Sandbox Effect Sant, Tom Screen Size Detection Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Conference Search Engine Roundtable Conference Search Engine Spiders Search Engine Watch Search Queries, How Queries are Processed Search Terms, Stop Words Seed List Semantic Web SEO Centro SEO Factors SEO Periodic Table SEO Tools SEOmoz Server Issues Shopping Carts Singular and Plural Terms Site Credibility Site Navigation, Crawlability Site Relevancy Site Reviews Site Speed, Compression Sitemaps, Robots.txt Slade, John Social Indicators Sponsored Listings Stemming Subdomains, Add-on Domains Synonym Matching Targeting Audiences, Headlines, Description Testing Landing Pages Third-party SEO Apps Thurow, Shari Townes, Frederick TRAFFIC Conference TrustRank, Hubs Typefaces Usenet Newsgroups Website Design, Search Considerations Whalen, Jill Wordtracker Keyword Research Yahoo! Search Engine YouTube Video Search

Newsletter, Email Marketing

– Email Subscriptions
– Aweber
– OptinSkin, by Glen Allsop

Content & Programming Outsourcing

– Elance
– Odesk
– 99Designs
– SpeechPad
– Virtual Staff Finder
– Open Source

Social Media Marketing

– Facebook Pages
– Pinterest
– Podcasting
– YouTube
– Twitter Re-tweets

Site Protection

– McAfee (virus)
– Spybot (adware)

PPC Advertising

– Facebook Ads
– One-page Sales Site
– Text Ad Design
– YouTube Advertising

Multimedia

– 3D Animation
– Audio Files, .wav, mp3
– Flash Animation
– Java Applets
– Video Production
– ScreenFlow (for Mac users)
– Camtasia for PC
– Omnidazzle
– Bamboo Pen and Tablet
– SplashEO
– LeadPlayer
– YouTube Marketing

Mobile Applications

– Downloads
– iPad Mini Apps
– iPhone Apps
– Microsoft Surface
– Mobile OS
– Mobile Website
– Responsive Page Design (mobile devices)

Google Apps

Adsense  Make money from your website or App.

Adwords  Purchase targeted traffic from Google.

Google Docs  Open & edit documents online.

Google Translate  Translate text, web pages, and files.

Google Maps  Explore maps.

Google Play 

Developers  Developer tools, APIs.

Code  Software libraries, resources.

Google Blogger  Create a free blog.

Google Webmaster Tools. 

Mobile  Google apps on mobile 

Chrome Store 

WildFire  Create social landing pages, posts, and ads.

WebPage Test  Test a website’s performance.

Google Fonts  Open source fonts.

Web Designer  HTML5 design and motion graphics.

ReCaptcha  Clean, sophisticated CAPTCHAs.

Google TV  Send YouTube videos from Android OS to your TV.

AdMob Make money and promote your apps.

Google Trends See what’s trending on Google search.

HangOuts Live face-to-face video calls.

SketchUp Simple 3D drawing platform.

Google App Store

Scholar Search scholarly publications.

Finance Stock charting and financial data.