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
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
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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
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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.