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Three Ways to Make Money Online without a Website

Three Ways to Make Money Online without a Website

Despite what some people may say there are plenty of opportunities for people too make money online without ever having to own a website. There are of course more opportunities if you own your own website, but if you don’t want to have to worry about hosting and domain costs then you can still do some things to make an online income. Thousands of people currently make thousands per month on the internet and none of them own a website, and we’re going to take a look at three things you could do to join this group of people.

Offer a service or product

If you have a service or product then you can make a lot money selling either on forums. For instance if you can write or design websites then you can use webmaster forums to find clients for your services. If you own a book then you can sell your product on classified websites and also forums. You may generate more sales if you own a website, but it’s not at all necessary if you don’t want to. Typically you’ll have more luck earning steady income offering a service rather then selling a product, but it also requires that you have a strong work ethic.

Complete online surveys

I’ve seen countless websites that pay people to complete online surveys for money and you could earn yourself a decent part-time income completing this type of work. Some of the websites are scams and you should avoid any website that asks for money. There are plenty of websites that don’t ask for money though and these are the legit services. Many people currently are making a couple hundred extra bucks a month through services such as this and it’s a great income to add to your arsenal. It’s very relaxing to complete surveys and you make money doing it so there is no reason not to really.

Sell on Ebay

The biggest money maker for people without websites is by far Ebay and you could earn an unlimited amount of money on this website depending on how hard you work. You can sell basically anything on Ebay so as long as you’re turning a profit then it’s a good product to sell on Ebay. Don’t just jump into Ebay and start trying to sell any item as it won’t earn you much. You need to research the market and see what’s becoming more popular and has little competition. Many products have lots of competition so you don’t want to try selling these when you’re starting out. Look for low competition items that will turn you a profit and work on establishing sales for those.

As you can see there are plenty of ways for you to make money online without a website, and the other thing in common between the three is that to succeed you’ll need to work hard. There is no easy road for people who work online and despite the stories you hear on the television you’ll be required to work long hard hours if you plan on making a living from the internet.

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There Are Many Shopping Cart Types Merchants Can Choose From

There Are Many Shopping Cart Types Merchants Can Choose From

There are several different types of shopping cart options for online business owners to choose from including merchant service shopping carts, hosted shopping carts, and fully integrated shopping carts.

Merchant service shopping carts can be managed through your administration area. They provide an interface to manage product catalogue, define your prices and to change the prices. You can use “Buy” links or buttons located near the product descriptions. These links and buttons when clicked on by the customer bring the customer to the merchant’s site where they enter the personal data and credit card number to complete their transaction. This financial information is obtained off your site thus allowing you to abstain from having to have a secure site. The fact that the customer is directed away from your site may make your customer uneasy. The redirect tells your customer that you are a small business, and they may not like being taken to another site where they may not be familiar with the company that will be solicitation their credit card number.

A hosted shopping car generally needs little or no programming and allows your customer to stay on your site for the financial part of the purchase experience. Hosted shopping carts are a good deal for both the small and medium sized online businesses that do at least $1,000 USD worth of business each month. The fact is that the customer will still be redirected to the hosting site but with interfaces being able to be configured to look just like your site they probably won’t know that they are being redirected. You keep your integrity and look just like the “big corporate guys” but with out the cost of being one. Some programming may be necessary to be able to set up the hosted shopping cart and you want the ability to keep your color scheme to stay the same as your website. In the hosted shopping cart you are able to use your payment gateway and merchant account so that the customer’s credit card statement will contain your company’s name, and not the name of the merchant service. The ability to have your company’s name on the statement is that it avoids charge backs that occur when the customer sees a different name from the one they are expecting.

The fully integrated shopping carts are the best choice for online business owners who can afford them. They have the ability to configure them with extended features that are not possible with the other two options such as allowing for discounts, certificates, ratings and comments from visitors, and the ability to define product categories and subcategories, to calculate shipping costs, and tax. Fully integrated shopping carts do require some good programming skills and can also be used with your own merchant account.

The shopping cart that you choose to use on your Website will help to determine how professional you appear to your customers. The more professional your site appears the more customers will be drawn to your site. The more customers you have, the more sales you will generate. Research all your shopping cart options carefully before deciding.

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How to Build Your Traffic on a Blog

How to Build Your Traffic on a Blog

Blogs have become a webmasters best friend and it’s allowing everyone with or without programming skills to create very appealing websites. With the content management system so flawless on WordPress and so many different themes that you can choose from, a lot of the work is already done for you. Most people had to design there websites by scratch which limited them in the amount of time they had to build the traffic on their websites. With blogging you’ll have lots of time to build the traffic on your blog and it will be one of the main projects of making your blog successful.

Traffic doesn’t magically appear, well it could I suppose but if you want targeted traffic then it’s going to take time and work too accomplish. The first thing you need to do as a blogger is make sure you have added a nice amount of content onto the blog, you should also be posting new content on a daily basis in the beginning so that people can see you’re adding new content regularly. A lot of people will just leave the blog if they notice that there hasn’t been much activity going on, and this is what you’re trying to avoid. You want the traffic to stay on your blog and come back in the future so you need to offer lots of great content to do this successfully.

Once you have the content generation down to a science then you need to work on the actual building of the traffic. This will consist of building links in high traffic areas and also in areas that will help increase your search engine rankings. Traffic from the search engines is the most targeted and valuable traffic that you can get for your blog and you should be focusing on ranking for keywords that will bring you traffic. It’s not easy to take over search engine rankings and you’ll need to do a lot of link building in order to take over your competition, but in time it’s definitely possible.

There are also some other traffic generation methods that you should look at for your blog which consist of social bookmarking, article marketing and traffic trading. Sometimes trading traffic isn’t the best choice, but it’s an option so always keep it in mind because you’ll never know when it could work out for your blog. Social bookmarking and article marketing are both ways to increase your traffic and also increase your search engine rankings, so doing these two things are very important. The traffic you get isn’t the best, but it all helps and the backlinks you build from doing it will also help you get traffic from the search engines.

Your blog traffic is always at risk, which means if you decide to stop posting for some reason then over time you might lose all of your traffic. People go back to blogs because they like what you’ve written in the past and want to see what else you have to say, but if you don’t post then people will quickly stop coming. A blog takes constant work, and even though you might like the idea today in a week you may have changed your mind which is what most webmasters do. If you’re in it for the long haul though then you’ll find it takes at least three months before you notice any steady traffic from your blog.

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The Importance of choosing the right WordPress Theme

The Importance of choosing the right WordPress Theme

Once you have set-up your WordPress blog one of the first things everyone does is chooses the theme for their blog. You don’t need to keep the same theme and can change it anytime you would like. In the beginning when your blog is new I would just use a free wordpress theme that is related to your niche. There are hundreds of different free wordpress themes out there that you can use and many of them are very well done with great graphics.

As your blog starts to get older you’ll need to determine whether or not you want to keep using the free wordpress themes or if you want to adapt a custom wordpress theme to your blog. Normally what will determine this is whether or not your blog has any traffic or revenue. If you have traffic and are making some money off of your blog then I would recommend getting a custom wordpress made for your blog. Once you have a custom wordpress theme it’s like jumping up the ladder in blogging and makes you almost like royalty. Most readers will stay on custom theme blogs longer than other blogs as well because when you use a free wordpress theme people see those everywhere, but when you adapt a custom theme your readers will have never seen any blog like yours before.

WordPress themes have come down in price over the past couple years and you can get a great custom wordpress theme for under $200. This isn’t a small investment for a blog that isn’t making money and isn’t a very wise investment either. If you have traffic on your blog though, and making some money off your blog then spending $200 won’t seem nearly as bad. It should also help increase your traffic and revenue so it’s a wise investment in some situations. Make sure you have established traffic and revenue before spending money on any theme though, this is because a lot of blogs will never make any money. The last thing you want to do is spend a couple hundred on your blog and it never make any money.

If you look around the blogosphere you’ll notice that most of the established and authority blogs all have custom themes that look amazing and unique. It helps to retain traffic and also assists in increasing your return visitor traffic. If you’re a designer and coder then you can most likely make your own wordpress theme and if you can do this then you should definitely do it for all of your blogs. You don’t need to wait for traffic and revenue if you can do the work on your own time because it isn’t costing you any money.

When you decide to implement your own custom wordpress theme to your blog make sure that it stands out and is unique. You don’t want to spend money on a theme that looks similar to another theme because that defeats the purpose. The purpose of a custom theme is to stand out to your readers and to retain the traffic you build to your blog. Try to add some new features to your theme that you can’t find on other blogs or try changing the layout of the conventional style and making your own style. Always make sure that you use a custom logo or mascot for your theme as well because this will help brand your blog, especially a mascot.

As you can see the importance of your wordpress theme is very important and there are many reasons you should be considering when choosing a theme. If you’re choosing your theme for looks only then you aren’t doing enough. You need to think about how many people are doing that as well, because many do and end up with the same free wordpress themes. If your blog can afford to invest some money into it then I would first spend it on a custom wordpress theme.

A custom wordpress theme will also help you sell your blog if you ever decide to sell it in the future, and you’ll be able to fetch top dollar for your blog. So your themes is more of an investment then anything else, but if money is tight then wait until your blog is making money before spending money on a custom theme. If you’re using free wordpress themes then you should consider switching your theme every month or so, this is so that your readers don’t get bored of the same theme. You should try switching your theme with a newly released free theme each month as then your visitors will be less likely to have already seen the theme.

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How Do You Go About Comparing Shopping Cart Software

How Do You Go About Comparing Shopping Cart Software?

Anyone who desires a successful Internet business understands the importance of a good shopping cart. There are so many shopping carts online now that it can be difficult to wade through all your choices to locate the one that will work best for you.

One way of knowing which shopping cart is best for you is to read shopping cart product reviews that you can find online and in IT magazines. Read about what others think of the shopping carts, make note of the features discussed and compare what is offered to what you need.

Another way to find what is the best shopping cart software for your business is to do some comparison-shopping yourself using a list of what you need in a shopping cart and your budget.

When you have pared down the possible candidates to just a few, then it is time to look at live stores that use each of the candidates shopping cart programs. Notice how easy or not it is to navigate, search for products, add to or delete products from the shopping cart and the features available for the customer. Look to see if the shopping cart software companies offer a customer service and give them a try to see how they respond to you.

When you are paring down your list of possible shopping cart candidates do it by comparing price, feature, and by reading the reviews of each shopping cart. Look for the shopping carts that seem to be up to date on the latest technology, are easily integrated with payment processors and your Website. Make sure you discard the shopping carts that are older or have lower quality.

When investigating live stores that use the various shopping carts that you have pared down your candidates to you want to get a feel for how the shopping carts work when in use. Typically the shopping cart companies will provide a list of several online stores that use their shopping cart. Some of the things you will be looking for are how well the shopping cart blends in with the Website and does each store look different from the others? Actually use the shopping carts on these stores to see how the carts perform.

When filtering out the candidates use a list of the top 3 things that you are looking for in a shopping cart and if a candidate does not have one of the top 3 than cross it off your list. Make a list of the features that are important to you and which ones you cannot do without this will help to narrow down your list of candidates.

If you know you will be using electronic certificates that cross off any shopping carts that do not offer this feature.

Make sure you investigate how good each company’s customer service department is by sending them each an email asking some pre-sale questions and make notes about how fast they respond, if they respond with a canned reply or really give you individual attention.

Do the candidate shopping cart companies have technical support? Take a look at the FAQs and index of help topics to see how helpful they are and if they are easy to understand. Download the user guide and review it to see if it is understandable.

Read shopping cart review from respected sources to see what is recommended. See if you can find user reviews on each of the shopping carts that you have decided are the biggest contenders for your money.

Once you have your list narrowed down to just 3 or 5 shopping cart software companies than it is time to look at the total cost of using each shopping cart, and also look at what the strong points are for each of the remaining carts.

Look at price, features and support and make your best decision.

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The Best Ways to Monetize your Website

The Best Ways to Monetize your Website

Once you have built a website and you have some traffic coming in to your website then you’ll probably be looking at the ways you can make some money with your website. There are plenty of opportunities out there that will allow you to make a great income, but you’ll need to find out what works best for your website. All niches will require different types of monetization and some will be more difficult then others to monetize so make sure you consider that before making your website. If you can’t find many ways to make money off of the traffic you’ll be targeting then you might not want to choose that niche at all and move on to something more profitable.

There is a huge list of different ways to monetize your website and you should try using as many of them as possible. Some of the methods used to make money off of your website can be used on basically any website and topic where some of the methods will need a specific website to use the type of monetization. The more diversified you can make your website the better shot you have at making a long time income. This is due to the fact that sometimes some methods will not earn as much some months and you’ll need other methods bringing in income to cover the losses. Never rely on just one form on monetization on your website or else you’re just asking for trouble. We’ll now take a look at some of the ways you can monetize your website.

Adsense

Adsense is by far the most popular and most widely used platform for webmasters. You simply register an account create an ad in whichever size you need and then add it to your website. Every time someone clicks one of the ads in the box you’ll get paid. Depending on the advertiser will reflect how much you get for your click but generally health and finance are the highest paying topics. Adsense pays out monthly as long as you meet the minimums, but in the beginning don’t worry about this as you probably won’t make enough the first month.

MaxBounty

MaxBounty has both leads and sales offers for website owners, and you simply place a link or banner on your website to make money this way. You find the offer you want to add to your website then get the code for the link or banner and implement it into your website. They pay by Paypal every month which is a great way to get some extra money coming in every month.

Commission Junction

Commission Junction is one of the leading affiliate platforms on the internet where many name brand advertisers offer affiliates a chance to make money. You can sell products for almost any niche you can imagine which means this is a network you should join. Each advertiser has there own rules and commission payouts so make sure you read everything about each affiliate you sign-up for.

There are plenty of other ways to monetize your website out there, but these three will definitely keep you busy. I would recommend only joining these three at a maximum in the beginning because you want to build up your money on only a couple networks. This way you don’t need to wait for the minimum payout on a bunch on networks as it will take longer to do so. Once you reach minimum payout on the above networks then you can try out some other networks the next month to see if they convert.

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Steps to Successful Blogging

Steps to Successful Blogging

There are many individuals who are owners of extremely popular blogs
but do not believe in the commercialization of the blog. These proud
owners of these admired blogs somehow feel that it is unethical to use
their blog as a source of marketing and income. At the same time, it is
important to add here that there is no dearth of individuals who plunge
into blogging with the sole purpose of converting the blog into a
constant source of income for them.

This chapter comes to the aid of all those who want to become
successful through blogging. Discussed below are some steps which
will take your efforts towards successful blogging to the next level.

Start with a free blog hosting service

It is best for the beginners to start their blogs with a free web hosting
service. It can certainly help in the initial stages of the blog as it allows
one to concentrate on the content of the blog or rather than focusing
on the technicalities of the blog. The best part is that once your blog
takes off, you can easily upgrade it to a paid one. Not to forget that in
the worst scenario of your blog being ignored by the web, you do not
have to incur any financial loss.

Determine on a popular niche

When people talk about popular niche, it is very crucial to understand
that the determined niche should generate huge interest and passion
among the readers. And for that, it is very important that you yourself
are passionate about the niche and have a very good understanding of
it. Before deciding on one particular niche it is better to have a good
idea of the target audience generated by it. One can use tools like
Google Zeitgeist or Yahoo Buzz to find the most frequently searched
topics.

Blog as frequently as possible

Updating the content of your blog on a regular basis will keep the
loyalties of your readers intact. Any negligence on your part can lead
to loss of readers for your blog which is nothing but loss of potential
clients.

Generate traffic by promoting your blog url

A successful blogger does not leave any opportunity of promoting
one’s blog. It is important to promote your blog through various
means and methods including word of mouth. However, when it comes
to promoting one’s blog, the best method is to submit articles to
reputed article directories with back links to your blog. This is one of
the best ways of increasing the visibility of the blog on the web.

There are numerous methods and strategies for becoming a successful
blogger and one can go a long way in blogging, provided they are open
to new trends and ideas. Other than that, simple steps like tracking
one’s blog on a regular basis, adding quality and interesting content,
proper keyword research, using multiple blogging accounts and
displaying non-advertising digital graphics can make your blog
interesting and popular. Once your blog has gained popularity and has
regular visitors, the next step is to monetize it through contextual and
graphical advertising.

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