Helpful Business Forums

Digital Point This is the free forum I turn to for information about tools freshly launched on the net or to find out how to do something I want on my pages. I found out about CBMonster ads on Digital Point and these are exactly the type of ads I was looking for to promote ClickBank products on my pages. Before this, the only tool available had a steep subscription price tag and an affiliate program. I prefer to stay free and independent.

V7N Network Web Development Community Another very active, fun, stimulating and provocative webmaster forum. Lots of huge contests and much information sharing. I often get absorbed reading there and lost on interesting tangents. The people posting in V7N are so neat. I had a page in their v7ndotcom elursrebmem contest.

WebmasterWorld costs $89 for a 6 month subscription. It’s known net wide as an authoritative source on search engine optimization and marketing matters. I look to them for information about ways to monetize my pages. Even though I don’t have a subscription, I read the front page of their site and always look for any archived threads in search results when I’m searching on Google for stuff.

Advertising Tools

Piemoney Free Words This is a free version of Michael Cheney’s 500 Words. He charges $50+ for his words on a PR zero page just like this. Piemoney Free Words is not taking new words now, but the script is available and you can create a site just like it for your own use.

Webmaster Tools

Piemoney How-to video Tutorial showing a fast way to change from Google Adsense ad code to another company’s ad code on multi-page web sites. Don’t be overwhelmed when you need to change code on a thousand pages. This edit method will get the job done fast!

NVU (pronounced “N-view”) Is a free open source WYSIWYG HTML editor based on Mozilla Composer. I think it has a huge online following. You don’t have to know HTML in order to use this to make web pages. I use Dreamweaver, but before I got that I used either Mozilla Composer or NVU. Both are great.

Free Search Engine Submissions Draze (drz) is a metasearch engine, which means it has no local database. Draze goes beyond searching for just simple text characters and operates entirely by querying other major search engines.

Free AddMe Search Engine Submission A leading resource for webmasters and small-business owners specialized in website submission and promotion in the search engines, since 1996

Marketing Tools

Traffic Swarm is a traffic exchange which may be acceptable to Google Adsense terms and conditions (not sure about that). This works because the member pages are presented on a link page and selected from many links by the viewer as from a directory. Many successful online promoters swear by Traffic Swarm.

Secret Affiliate Weapon Just one idea from this package could make you the top affiliate for your promotions. I sincerely believe this membership is packed with
value and highly recommend it to all Internet marketers
and online business owners.

There are many scripts to try for adding a links directory to your site.

The two I am most familiar with are SuperChargedLinking, which requires installation of one MSQL database and LinkMachine, which does not.

Of the two, Linkmachine allows the most template editing to fit your website theme. LinkMachine automates the process of emailing other webmasters about their links or requesting links. Both automate the time consuming process of verifying that your link exists on the other pages. Linkmachine does it for a batch, while SuperChargedLinking requires links to be given individual push button attention.

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SupercChargedLinking is an inexpensive script, which contains obtrusive advertising from the author, which can be edited out after purchasing rights to do so. LinkMachine has one small “Powered by…” link at the bottom of every directory page, which is gone after a paid upgrade.

Linkmachine is a freeware download, which comes with a 10-day free trial of their premium service. If you like it you can continue using it, on up to three different web sites, for $89.95. (Additional web site licenses are $10 per site.) After purchasing Linkmachine Premium, if you’re dissatisfied for any reason, there’s a 30-day full money-back guarantee. They have 2 high premium services for $89.95 and $149.95, which incorporate SEO functionality.

These features would be nice, but most people only want or need the actual links directory, which is free! The free service has multiple valuable features including telling you the PR rankings of those pages listed in your directory. My suggestion would be to try the LinkMachine script and take advantage of the 10-day free trial of their service to fill your directory with links. Then when the trial expires it can continue to grow your directory more slowly and naturally.

LinkMachine is kind of boggy when told to fetch info for a site or add a new link. It takes a long time to run through the directory checking for reciprocals. This would be even more of a problem if someone had to do it with a dial up connection. In spite of these small problems, the free script has so many nice features that I can only highly recommend it.

Before August 2005, Google Adsense was indisputably the best way to monetize web pages. That was when Yahoo Publisher beta was released to challenge the Google giant.

Recently there have been a lot of people losing their Google Adsense accounts. If you are one of these unfortunates, the Yahoo Publisher ads mean you can get right back into the game. Others are faced with the question…. which is best?

While Google Adsense ads have been paying less over time, Yahoo Publisher ads have been paying very well. They have not been as well contextually targeted, though, and may not perform as well overall with your targeted traffic. I would suggest running a split test to see which is best for your pages.

Get your account at yahoo.publisher.com. See which one is better for your bottom line as that is the most important factor in any business decision.

The back office interfaces of the two are very similar. There is at least one ad group size (125×125 button) missing from the Yahoo listing and no banners option, but colors and tracking work the same and the script for the ads is very similar. Unlike some other optional ad networks, when first looking at it, there is a very short learning curve.

Yahoo Publisher can only get stronger and better with time. Right now they appear to have a limited ad pool to draw on, but that can change and will allow them to better match the ads to the page keywords. With such a strong challenger in the market, Google should get stronger too. Competition is good for the market.

See which one will pay you more and then stick with your particular winner. It’s possible that the result will depend on the type of webpages you have on your site.

Some web publishers just have no taste when it comes to getting their ads in front of targeted searchers. What defines “content rich” pages for them is totally different from what most think of as valuable content.

There is a current frenzy to churn out more and more pages with garbage content with mainly the purpose of trapping the unsuspecting searcher to click on ad links. Lists of 300 to 1,000 keyword related phrases are spun into as many individual pages for each phrase. Yes, for example, if the keyword of choice is “make money”, they will have a list of every conceivable combination pertaining to it such as:

make money
make money online
make money at home
make money on the internet
make money fast
make money from home
ways to make money
make extra money
make money on ebay
make money fast online….

They don’t publish one search engine friendly web page for “make money”, but they make one page for each permutation of the keyword. They provide “rich content”, either from public domain articles grabbed from directories, or from “scrapings” of keyword related nonsense from the web. There are now many software programs that will churn out these pages in a few seconds per keyword phrase. Some of these are ArticleSiteBuilder, TrafficHurricane, TrafficPanther and Articlebot + XsitePro. Some of the systems make ugly, plain pages while others help users to make truly lovely pages that serve only to suck the reader into clicking on the ad links there. Pretty pages can only be geared to suck in the unsuspecting as the search engine bots cannot see “pretty”,

Some of the companies selling the software to make these pages list search engine optimization of the targeted web site as a potential benefit for making these keyword sites. Where are the independent reports to support that claim?

The resulting pages make perfect sense to a search engine, but to the person searching the web for information these pages contain pure keyword-laced gibberish. The very worst of these would make none of the links clickable except the ones leading where the publisher wants to send the reader.

The unsuspecting customer has a choice to use the back button, select from the many advertising links on the page, or move forward into the web of gibberish - get lost in it to ultimately either use an ad link or close the browser window.

If the ad link is chosen, the publisher wins!

This doesn’t cheat the advertiser. The person clicking the ad is truly targeted to the keyword used; so it’s not really fraud. So, what’s the matter with this? As a search engine user, I don’t like to feel tricked. I remember when search engines contained information and I didn’t have to wade through gibberish to find it. Time is worth money and if I have to wade through ad-chummed search engine results when I need important information fast, I do feel cheated.

My response is to refuse to click on any ad link found on such pages. Why should I reward these publishers for what I feel degrades the value of the search engine? The spiders ranking our web pages need to become smarter to keep these ad-chummed garbage pages from ever being indexed – no matter how well optimized they are for the search engines. From what I have read, they day is coming when this will happen.

If you are making a website, watch out for duplicate content. Search engines will notice and you will have your rank decreased, or you may even be sandboxed for it.

How Do I Own My Own website?

Buy a hosting plan from a reliable provider. Sure, you can use free hosting, but you get what you pay for. These will sometimes put their own ads on your pages or will not show your pages when bandwidth (total usage by all users of the service) is high.

Reputable hosting comes billed monthly from $5 to $30 per month depending on how much traffic you have coming to your pages and how much information you store on the host. Hosting bills sometimes give you a discount if you buy an annual contract. You can buy the lowest one and then upgrade it periodically as Cashmound demonstated. Some hosts will also offer a lifetime hosting package. I have a lifetime one with unlimited bandwidth (traffic), MYSQL (databases for running scripts) and domains, which I sure hope stays in business for my lifetime This is my second paid hosting account. You should shop around a bit before jumping on anything so you get the most value for your money.

After you have your hosting plan, you will want to buy a domain name. Most of the short simple ones are gone; so think of some two or three word runtogethers that represent what you are planning. It costs from $5 to $13 per year to own a domain name. There are lots of endings available to choose from, but the best one for business is “.com”. Your domain name is hosted on a domain name server (DNS) You will need to learn how to use the DNS host control panel to “point” it to the server for your pages. You can shop around for a good deal on a domain name. Sometimes there are special offers. I own two domain names, but if I don’t pay my annual fees, someone else will take them when they expire. That could mean they might benefit from all my hard work to get my domain names indexed and ranked in the search engines. You might want to shop in an expired domain name list to find a name that someone else has already gotten into Google and then didn’t renew their annual payment.

There is a learning curve with all this. You have to learn how to use the hosting control panel and how to build pages and how to optimize those pages to attract people to your site. Then you must promote your site. You can pay someone else to do a lot of it, but I find it’s a great hobby as I love making web pages and learning what I need to know along the way.

There are several ways to “own” a website. You can buy it and pay others to do the work, it can be a strictly business machine or your own artistic expression. If you just want to learn how, start small with a cheap account. Learn how to compose a page using an HTML editor, how to upload pages using a FTP software tool, how to install and make a script work, how to use an autoresponder. All the instructions are out on the web. Learn how to use Google or Yahoo to find what you want to know.

If you want to start cheap, I don’t recommend Angelfire, but rather a place like Awardspace.com There it’s more like a paid host experience. I use Dreamscape, but NVU is a very good free WYSIWYG HTML editor. If you want to do this then get started and make it happen. You build a tower by placing the first block. Start getting your tools together and learn how to use them. Even if you decide to buy a website, you need to know how to edit it and FTP your pages.

Unless you buy something huge and expensive right away it’s going to take some time to get a website popular enough to make a nice income for you. So be patient while you learn how to grow your site. You will be expanding your abilities as you go.

- so what will the topic of your website be?