Web Empire

Building your own web empire begins with a single profitable website. On this site, and hundreds more, we talk in bits and pieces about how to produce that first profitable site. If you have searched and searched, and are getting nowhere fast — if the deluge of information you find is so full of contradictions that you can’t make any progress because you don’t know who to believe — we have a simple solution.

Take a step back, and follow one reliable and education process, through which you can learn all the basics, and profit at the same time. Ken Evoy is the grandfather of how-to-make-money online guides — but unlike modern gurus, his approach is basic commonsense, no hype, thorough and effective. He wrote an ebook guide to making profitable websites back in the 1990s that many of today’s gurus used as their starting guide. You hear it all the time when phrases like ‘over deliver’ or ’site monitization’ pop up.

Now you can download an updated version of that ebook for free, because Ken is no longer selling ebooks — he is selling a complete process for profitable website building. Now, if you are a veteran webmaster, you do not need his service — but you can still benefit from the tons of free information he provides to help people make money online. And if you are just starting out — there is no better way to learn than by purchasing a Site-Build-It website, and following the step-by-step instructions to make money.

I explain all this on another site, in much more detail. Also, I produced a free downloadable report listing and analyzing 101 SBI websites, so you can see exactly what others have done with the system. Check it out at Site-Build-It Review.

I’ve opened a new website using Pligg software, to see how it works. The site is called The Ads Broker and it allows users to advertise text links, banner ads, or other sorts of advertising, including free exchanges. There are three categories, Exchange, Buyers Seeking Ad Space, and Ad Space for Sale.

Pligg is a ’social bookmarking’ enabled content management system (CMS), so people can rate offers, comment on them, even comment on comments. The Ads Broker site does not allow postings from spam sites, or for gambling or other non-family-friendly type sites.

Check it out, and post an offer. It is a free link to your website, and may bring in advertisers if you are seeking to monitize. I’m not expecting a lot of action in the ‘Buyers Seeking Ad Space’ category, but if you have special needs — like a particular type of site to advertise on (for SEO purposes), it might be the way to find the right sort of ad space.

UPDATE: The above site was removed. The amount of monitoring required to delete spam was more than the effort was worth. I created the site mostly to try out Pligg and see what it did — it works fine, but you need a large and vigilant community before installing it, or the spammers will just move in and make it unattractive for real users. I’ve replaced it with a blog that posts current news and other information about the advertising industry.

My brief sojourn into writing posts for beginners has generated no response, so I’m dropping that unless you tell me otherwise. I haven’t posted in a while, in part because I was busy moving, and part because I’m not sure what to say.

What should I talk about? How I made my first million? — Maybe next week, I’m sure that’s coming, but it hasn’t happened yet. But I have been earning a living from the Internet for the past ten years or so, and that should count for something.

I centered my efforts on personal interests (ajmorris.com) thinking that would be the road to profitability. Everyone says so. Do what you love. That didn’t work. Trying to sell anything to genealogists is like charging for sex — so many people are willing to give it away for free, it’s hard to find a reason worth paying for.

So I’m leaving it up to you. What should I say? I have learned a lot in recent years about making money, and am doing much better than I did when I was only an on-line genealogist. But I’ve not yet gone beyond a decent income and into great wealth. I see it coming. I have a plan, and so far it working better than I could have hoped.

But I’m also in the position of having dozens of web sites, of varying profitability. This is one of the more labor-intensive and least profitable. Should it continue? If so, what direction should we go?  Leave a comment on this post to have your say in the future of this site.

In our previous series, you learned how to set up a free WordPress blog on their site, and got your first taste of blogging. Your frequent updates to that site ensure that the spiders visit often, so now when you create your second website, a link in the blogroll of the first site will ensure it gets crawled within the first few days.

The goal for this second website will be to create a profitable site, and lay the foundation for your web empire. This site can be another blog, or it may be a static site, or even a combination of the two. Whichever you choose, you can use WordPress software. Yes, WordPress is blogging software, but it will work fine for a static site as well! Most people don’t realize that, so one post in this current series will be all about making a static website using WordPress software. But first things first.

You need a server (web host) to put your site on. There are hundreds of thousands hosting services available. Many of them are resellers, offering no services directly, but selling hosting services they buy, and reselling them at a profit. Most of these hosts, both original and reseller services, provide good service — but some really stink. You need to do your homework before choosing one.

First, avoid hosts offering ‘unlimited’ hosting — meaning you can have as many websites as you want under one account. Such systems may work fine at first, but in short order someone will come in on the same shared server you are using and put hundreds of websites. The service will slow to a crawl, there will be service outages, and before you know it your site is being penalized because it was not available when the search-engine spiders tried to crawl it.

Do look for a host that will allow you have more than one website, but there should be a limit of 5 to 20 such ‘Addon Domains’ as they are called. Don’t buy the cheapest service, they will be over-sold. Expect to pay $15 to $25 per month for your account. Be sure the host offers ‘VPS’ packages (Virtual Private Servers) — even though you will not be using those more expensive accounts yet, you may want to upgrade in the future. Also, it is an indication of a serious hosting business that they offer those. Make sure the service comes with cPanel — that is the most widespread control package, and there is no sense your wasting your time learning how to use more than one system.

If you do not already have one, open a PayPal business account. You will want to accept payments through them for your business, and they provide the easiest means of paying for your hosting. Most hosting services will let you pay through PayPal’s subscription service, which automatically subtracts the hosting fee from your account (or bank account or credit card if you don’t have funds in your PayPal account) each month. That way you don’t need to give the hosting service your credit card information, and you can cancel the payments at any time directly through PayPal.

Search the web for mention of your hosting service by other users. Be suspicious if there is no mention of them outside their own site. Look for negative comments. A few complaints can be taken with a grain of salt, some people whine about everything, but a lot of complaints indicates there may be a problem. Very large hosting services may get a lot of comments both good and bad, look for the bad comments to be refuted by satisfied customers if it is a large company.

Once you have your hosting account set up they will send you the details of how to log-in to your cPanel, and they will provide information on the address of the ‘DNS’ or Domain Name Server, which you will need when you register your domain. The domain is the alpha-numeric version of a website’s name, such as www.yahoo.com. The DNS program converts that to the numbers the Internet really uses to identify sites, called the IP Address, such as 74.6.8.104 — originally it was always four numbers between 0 and 255, separated by periods. Now there is a new type of IP that allows for more address, since the mere 4,294,967,296 addresses originally available were found to be too few!

Your next step will be to register your own domain name … but before you can do that you will need to do some keyword research, to make sure your subject matter is sufficiently popular and profitable. That keyword research will also identify good candidates for keywords to include in your domain name. That will be subject of our next post in this series.

OK, you are now a published author, a blogger and an Internet entrepreneur. Well, not quite an entrepreneur yet — you need to make some money to qualify for that title. With your very first effort, you should not expect to make any money in the first month or so. So long as you are using free hosting, you should not have any great expectations of making money at all.

Your next site will be the one designed to make a profit. So why bother working on this ‘practice’ blog? In part it is to ‘learn the ropes’ so you know what to do next time, and don’t have to waste a lot of time on learning the mechanics. But a more important reason is that you need to have a site indexed by the search engines in order to ensure your next site gets indexed quickly.

What do I mean ‘indexed’? — simply that the content on your site is included in the search engine’s database. There is a simple technique to see if a site is indexed:

Copy a line from the middle of the text on a post that has been on the site a week or more. If there is a period in the middle of the line, so much the better. Thus you have the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next. Just highlight it with your mouse and press Control-C to copy. Then, go to the search engine (like Google or Yahoo) and type a quotation mark; then press Control-V to paste your copied line in, then another quotation mark. To the search engine, this means you want the exact phrase within the quote marks. It is unlikely anyone else has used that exact phrase, so if your page is in the index, it should come up as the only results for the search. If it is not in the index, some search engines will show a small message saying the exact quote was not found, then show results as if there were no quotes — which means the same words were used but not all in one phrase.

This technique is important, and has several uses:

1. It will tell you if your page has been indexed in that search engine
2. It will show you if someone has copied your work without your permission
3. You can use it on expired-copyright text to see if anyone has published that material on-line yet

Beginners may not realize the benefit of that last option yet, but it is important if your goal is to build a web empire, rather than have a single site you focus on. To build multiple sites you need lots of content, much more than you can write yourself. A great source of such content is the public domain, where you can find expired copyright works. Many of these, however, have been copied so often that the search engines won’t show your pages if you are the umpteenth person to use the same text. Finding un-indexed public domain text allows you to get traffic from search engine search results.

Once your first site is indexed you will have a resource you can use to get your next site indexed within days of putting it up — just add a link to it from your blog. A good place for such a link is the ‘blogroll’ which you probably noticed while looking around at the various pages — both on your site and mentioned in the control panel.

That section has default values you probably don’t want to leave, so go to Manage and Links and delete all or most of those. Then put in links to blogs that cover the same topic as you do.

Hey! But isn’t that driving traffic to my competitors?

Well theoretically yes, but at this stage you have no traffic, so don’t worry about it. In the world of blogging, it helps to show your readers other blogs that you like, even when they cover the same ground you do. Your readers appreciate it, and the other blog is more likely to link to your site. If they don’t it is still better to have the link than not, for your readers and for search engine optimization (SEO) which is something you will no doubt read a lot about, but not in these introductory posts.

For the first few weeks, you should add at least four or five posts to your blog each week. If you can manage more, even better. You will not have readers until you provide them with something to read!

Once you have a dozen or so posts it is time to go out in the world and begin promoting your blog. There are dozens of techniques for doing this, but for a beginner three or four are best. Get used to using these, then go on to learn some of the other, more advanced, ways of getting links and traffic.

One technique to promote your blog is to leave comments on other blogs who discuss the same, or related topics. Even participating on blogs that are not related at all in subject matter can have some benefit, so if you already post comments, go ahead and use your website on those. Most blogs ask for your website when you post a comment, and if the comment is published your name is linked back to your site. If people find your comment interesting, they may click on that link to see your site. So don’t just post ‘Great site’ or some other inane comment, be responsive to the content of the post you are commenting on, and try to contribute something worthwhile to the discussion.

There is a similar technique available on many discussion forums. A few of the more popular ones no longer allow footers on your posts, but most let you put a line or two at the bottom of each post that can include a link back to your website. So you write interesting posts, or reply to other people’s posts, and your link appears under your message.

Free article marketing is also a good method for promoting your site. You write an article similar to the content posts you put on your blog, but not an exact copy of one of those. Go to a free article distribution site (you can find several using any search engine) and submit the article, along with an ‘about the author’ box that goes at the bottom of the article. That box should include a link back to your site (don’t put the link in the article itself). Publishers are then allowed to use your article on their websites or in their newsletters free of charge — so long as they leave that ‘about the author’ box and its link back to your site. The link-back is your payment for allowing them to publish your article.

There is one final method of site promotion suitable for the beginning blogger: write articles reacting to something you read on someone else’s blog. Generally this works best if you liked the article, and can recommend it to your readers. This is like commenting, but since it is on your site it can be more beneficial to the other blog since it brings in potential readers that may not have known about their site. The Wordpress system will generate what’s called a track-back, so part of your post appears like a comment to the original post you referred to (if they have track-back enabled — sometimes they need to approve the track-back so it may not appear right away). Also, the other blogger may add your blog to their blogroll.

So that’s all there is to starting and promoting your first website, a free blog on WordPress. In a future post in the ‘Beginners Corner’ we will discuss your second site, this time using WordPress software on server space you rent, under a domain you purchase. The purpose of that site will be to make money! And it might not even be a blog…