First Step: Killer Articles (1 hour per day)

Spend one hour brainstorming, researching and writing killer articles (also called linkbaits, pillar articles and so on).

Notice that your goal is to release one killer article every week. If that is not possible aim for one every 15 days. So the one hour that you will spend every day will be dedicated to the same piece. In other words, expect killers articles to take from 5 up to 10 hours of work.

If you are not familiar with the term, a killer article is nothing more than a long and structured article that has the goal of delivering a huge amount of value to potential visitors. If you have a web design blog, for example, you could write an article with “100 Free Resources for Designers”. Here are some ideas for killer articles:

• create a giant list of resources,
• write a detailed tutorial teaching people how to do something,
• find a solution for a common problem in your niche and write about it, or
• write a deep analysis on a topic where people have only talked superficially

When visitors come across your killer article, you want them to have the following reaction: “Holy crap! This is awesome. I better bookmark it. Heck, I better even mention this on my site and on my Twitter account, to let my readers and friends know about it.”

Second Step: Networking (30 minutes per day)

Networking is essential, especially when you are just getting started. The 30 minutes that you will dedicate to it every day could be split among:

• commenting on other blogs in your niche,
• linking to the posts of bloggers in your niche, and
• interacting with the bloggers in your niche via email, IM or Twitter.

Remember that your goal is to build genuine relationships, so don’t approach people just because you think they can help to promote your blog. Approach them because you respect their work and because you think the two of you could grow together.

Third Step: Promotion (30 minutes per day)

The first activity here is the promotion of your killer articles. Whenever you publish one of them, you should push it in any way you can. Examples include:

• letting the people in your network know about it (don’t beg for a link though),
• letting bloggers and webmasters in relevant niches know about it,
• getting some friends to submit the article to social bookmarking sites,
• getting some friends to Twitter the article, and
• posting about the article in online forums and/or newsgroups.

If there is time left, spend it with search engine optimization, social media marketing and activities to promote your blog as whole. Those can range from keyword research to promoting your blog on Facebook and guest blogging.

Fourth Step: Normal Posts (30 minutes per day)

Just like a man does not live by bread alone, a blog does not live by killer articles alone. Normal posts are the ones that you will publish routinely in your blog, between the killer articles. For example, you could publish a killer article every Monday and normal posts from Tuesday through Friday. Here are some ideas for normal posts:

• a post linking to an article on another blog and containing your opinion about it
• a post informing your readers about a news in your niche
• a post asking a question to your readers and aiming to initiate a discussion
• a post highlighting a new resource or trick that you discovered and that would be useful to your readers

While killers articles are essential to promote your blog and bring new readers aboard, normal posts are the ones that will create diversity in your content and keep your readers engaged.

Source: DailyBlogTips

Firstly, What Is An Authority?

I would define an authority as someone who is looked to for knowledge about a particular niche.  They are people that are trusted to give an unbiased opinion on certain topics.

They have the knowledge, but they are also looked at as people that are honest.  In other words, they are people that are trusted to deliver the goods.

Why You Should Be An Authority

There are two simple reasons for this.  To make money and to help people out.  It is two simple reasons, but two very good reasons.  There is nothing better than making money online and helping people out at the same time.

We can break it down even further.  In order to, run a successful online business, you need to obviously start making money online, but you also need to maintain that.  Being an authority is a great way to do that.

One of the problems that people have is that they make some money and just can’t sustain it going forward.  If you’re an authority and you keep delivering, it is easy to maintain your income online because it is an ongoing process.

What You Need To Be An Authority

A good authority has to have a number of assets in their niche.  The more assets you have the better.  Websites, blogs, products, mailing lists etc.  These are all good things to have.  Many authorities have all of these assets.  Just make sure that you allow yourself plenty of time to promote them, I’ll get into that later.

You need to have platforms for which people can see your opinions and get a chance to see what you’re talking about.   The more eyeballs that you get yourself in front of, the better.

Reputation is everything for an authority.  You must be thinking that from day one.  You want to always be honest.  If you offer a money back guarantee and someone asks for a refund, then give it to them.

All it takes is one unhappy person to really damage your reputation.  News travels fast online, it can spread a lot quicker and a lot more than an offline business.

People won’t buy from you if they don’t trust you.  Furthermore, they won’t buy anything that you’re promoting if they don’t trust you.

They have to trust in your judgment and your ability, but also that you don’t view them as a dollar sign.  That is one of the worst things that you can do, believe me, people hate that when people treat them that way.

If you have a blog, just recommend good products and services.  If you have a mailing list, just recommend good products and services.  If you’re building relationships of forums don’t try selling stuff – just post useful, relevant information. Try to answer people’s questions and help people out.

It isn’t rocket science, but I have a rule.  In my authority niches I will never, ever promote anything that I haven’t tried and haven’t liked or found useful.  That sounds simple and it is, but you won’t believe how many people don’t do this.  It is about long-term gain and not about short-term gain and long-term loss.

Here are some of the steps you can take to become an authority:

• Find a good profitable niche – preferably one that is evergreen (for long term profits), is a ‘desperate’ niche, and has lots of good quality products that you could promote. Niches such as dating and weight loss are examples.
• Get an auto responder and start building your mailing list.
• Create a website or blog and start adding content.
• Once you’ve determined which affiliate products are selling well to your niche you could create a product of your own.
• Do joint ventures with other marketers in your niche. Finding influential people in your niche to promoting your products or business can really take your business to the next level.

Once you have a decent size mailing list built you can go on to promote all kinds of different products or services (or course you should also provide good solid information and tips to your subscribers as well, rather than hitting them up with promotions all the  time).

Don’t be afraid to give out lots of quality free information to your subscribers, because if they see you know what you’re talking about and trust you they won’t be afraid to spend money on your products or recommendations.

Keep Growing and Improving

Your knowledge of a niche will continue to grow and evolve.  You must stay on top of things and stay on top of your game. Always keep an eye on your competitors and what they’re talking about and selling.

It doesn’t matter what niche you’re in or what niche you plan on being in, you always have to keep a close pulse on the niche and stay up to date.

Of course this post is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to becoming an authority in your niche, but hopefully it will motivate you in the right direction.

So where do you go from here? PLAN your niche domination strategy and start taking action!

1. Make easy money online naming domains. The original idea comes from Dane Carson’s blog. While you can earn money as a contributor for services such as PickyDomains.Com, here is a better idea. Go to Google or any other search engine, find sucky domain names and contact their owners directly, offering them your services. The key to success is to make it 100% risk free. Inform your prospective clients that you’ll accept money only if they like your domain name. If you come up with one approved domain name a day and charge what PickyDomain charges, you can make $1500 a month. Another twist – come up with cool domain names, like SiteToRemember.Com or ItsMe.Com, register them yourself and sell them on the aftermarket.

2. eBay arbitrage. A lot of people like buying stuff on eBay, because it’s cheap. And some people never buy on eBay, because they are afraid of being ripped off. Here is your solution to making easy money on eBay. Go to Craigslist.Com and see what items people buy and sell most often. Look at prices. Then go to eBay and see, if you can get it cheaper. Once you find your niche, you can buy things on eBay (or better yet, act as a representative for an eBay powerseller) and sell them for a profit using local classifieds and Craigslist. You can do this online as well. Set up a proxy store, and when you get an order, simply buy the same item on eBay for less, substituting shipping address from your own to that of your buyer.

3. eBay copywriting. If you are good at copywriting, go to eBay and look for highticket items, like boats. Find auctions with totally sucky descriptions. Contact an owner and inform him or her that good description of his or her item is likely to increase the chances of that item being sold. Then offer your services for a 1% of the selling price. You can use free eBay software

4. Get Paid Writing Reviews. This idea comes from a blog called Business Ideas That Work. A site called SoftwareJudge.Com pays up to 50 dollars per good review. However, if you are good at reviewing software, you can do this on your own. Go to CNET or any other site that lists software. Find sites that don’t have any reviews or testimonials. Contact developers directly, offering them your review services. Good reviews and testimonials increases sales, so you shouldn’t have any difficulties convincing developers that they need your services. And you get free software and games too! Oh, and you don’t have to limit yourself to software alone.

5. Social Bookmark Whoring (oops, I meant to say PR). This is really easy money online. RedDit and Digg can bring a crapload of traffic. And traffic means money. If you have experience creating linkbate titles and getting to the top, why not offer your services? Say, you charge 10 dollars for submitting news to RedDit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Furl, NewsVine, Fark and all the other social bookmarting sites. The key is to work only with interesting stories, so you don’t become a spammer. 10 news a day and you are 100 dollars richer. You can probably work out a deal with online PR agencies, because they are totally clueless about this.

6. Writing Google AdWords Ads. Every time I see “Cake Icing. Used And New. eBay.Com” type ads or “Four best sites on killing your wife”, it makes me wonder. Aren’t there any GOOD AdWords ads copywriters? Look’s like a great job to me. The ads are only three lines long and if you charge 10 bucks per ad, you can make a lot of money. And the customers are easy to find, too. Just look at all these terrible ads that Google displays on their search engine and contextual network.

7. Wacky blogs. Steve Pavlina gets over 300 dollars a day from AdSense alone, writing on wacky topics, like polyphasic sleep, astral projection and psychic development. Or take David Icke, who claims that president Bush in an alien and a reptilian. Your blog doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be interesting.

8. Blog whoring. There are a number of services, like PayPerPost.Com, that pay for promotional blogposts. Once again, you can do the same thing, cutting the middleman out.

9. Unique Personal Ads. Write memorable personal ads for online daters. Most personal ads suck. “Hi, my name is Bambie, I’m a Vergo, I’m 19 and I love dogs.” Here is my favorite personal ad. If people pay for resume writing, they might pay for a great personal ad.

10. Poet For Hire. This is nothing new. Still, if you love writing poetry, why not make some money with your rhymes.

1. Write and submit your articles to the article directories.

2. Leave comments on other people’s blogs with a backlink to your site.

3. Answer people’s questions on Yahoo! Answers’ homepage.

4. Post in forums and have a link to your site in your signature.

5. Write a press release and submit it to PRWeb (The Online Visibility Company)

6. Advertise your website in the appropriate category websites’ Free Ads.

7. Give an unbiased testimonial on a product/service that you have used in exchange for a backlink to your site.

8. Start a blog and submit it to the 100′s of free blog directories.

9. Manually submit your website to the major search engines.

10. Optimize each page of your website for a particular keyword or search phrase.

11. Add a link in your email signature to your website. It’s a free and easy way to get a little more traffic.

12. Make a custom 404 error page for your website redirecting people to your home page.

13. Use PPC search engine advertising.

14. Add a “bookmark this site” link to your webpages.

15. Have a tell-a-friend form on your site.

16. Send articles to ezine publishers that includes a link to your website.

17. Hold a crazy content and make it go viral.

18. Give away a freebie (ebook, report, e-course) to keep people coming back to your site.

19. Add an RSS feed to your blog.

20. Submit your site to any related niche directories on the net

What is duplicate content and what do search engines do about it?

• Duplicate content is if two or more different web pages contain the same or nearly the same content.
• Duplicate content can occur within a single website and across many different websites.
• Web pages can be considered duplicate even if they are not 100% identical.
• Search engines want to list only one version of duplicate content on their search result pages.

Search engines want to return as many different options as possible in their result lists. That’s why they filter all duplicates in the search results and display only one version.

How do search engines determine which web page will be used for the search results?

• When search engines find a web page, they compare it to previously found web pages to determine whether it is a duplicate or not:
• Web pages that are hosted by known spam sites will be removed from the list:
• The remaining web pages will be sorted based on the number and the quality of their inbound links:
• The web page with the best inbound links will be chosen for the search results

How to avoid duplicate content on your own websites

• Hide duplicate content from search engines
  If you offer different versions of your website content (regular view, mobile view, print view, etc.) then search engines might pick the wrong variation for the search results. Add a noindex meta tag to your duplicate content versions so that search engines don’t index the duplicate content (you can use IBP’s website optimization editor to do it).
• Require backlinks if you syndicate your web page content
  If you syndicate your content to third parties, search engines might favor the version published by one of your partners. Require a back link from your partners to the original document on your own website so that search engines can find out from which web page the content comes. Duplicate content can cause problems with your search engine rankings. If you follow the tips above, search engine spiders should index your web pages correctly. Also make sure that the web page content that search engine spiders index on your website has been optimized so that search engines can give your web pages the best possible rankings in the search results.

How many keywords does Google consider?

It’s absolutely certain that Google considers the words in the links to your site. The question is, how many words or characters does Google count in a link? Is there an optimal length for text links? Blogger Shaun Anderson did a test to find the answer.

The test set-up

Shaun Anderson created a long text link with 50 nonsense words. Each of the nonsense words was 6 characters long. For example, he might have used a link like this:

wergsd woivsd mliwdc woiuby 3245sc plorxc werxcd …

Then he added that link to the home page of a website that has good rankings on Google.

After some time, Shaun did a search for a keyword that the linked website ranked number one for and added the nonsense words to the search. By doing so, Google would only list the site in the search results if links to the site contained the nonsense word.

For example, if a website has a number one ranking for "buy used cars in dallas" then the website will only be returned by Google for "buy used cars in dallas wergsd" if Google has indexed a link with the text "wergsd" that points to the website.

The result: the perfect length seems to be 55 characters

Out of the 50 words in the link text, Google counted eight. Everything after the eighth word was ignored. Eight words that consist of six characters make 48 characters. The seven spaces between these six words add up to a total of 55 characters.

What does this mean for your website?

You should make sure that the important keywords come in the first 55 characters of the links that point to your website.

As many websites use the title of a web page to link to it, you should also consider the way you write your web page titles. If your important keywords are at the beginning of your web page titles, chances are that these keywords will also be used in the links to your site.

Objectives

Nothing will hinder you more than if you set out not knowing exactly what it is you are trying to achieve – clear, concise objectives will keep you focused, across all aspects of the site creation process. Indeed, you ought to be continually referring back to these objectives as your site development progresses. Objectives might include "selling a product" or "building a mailing list" or "communicating your brand" or perhaps simply "providing information about you, or your business". Whatever your objective is, online, write this down and pin it to the wall where you can refer back to it on an ongoing basis.

Topic

With your objectives set, you need to pick your topic.
Now, this might seem obvious (after all, you may think you already know what your site is going to be about, right?) but with such huge competition online for certain keywords and phrases, and within individual niches, it pays to give due thought to the niche in which you’re planning to compete – it can make a huge difference to the quantity and quality of traffic you’re able to generate and, ultimately, to your chances of success.

Research

When creating an online business, you need to do plenty of research, just as you would if you were setting up a bricks-and-mortar business.

The great thing on this front, of course, is that the information you need is all readily available online, at your fingertips – you just need to know what to look for.

You need to be performing simple searches for the following information:

1. Who is competing in your proposed niche?
Who are the top-ranking sites for your niche’s primary keywords and phrases?
If you were looking for your own product, in a completely natural way, what sites would you likely come across, first and repeatedly?

2. Who is succeeding in your proposed niche and how/why?
By succeeding, we of course mean "achieving their objectives". Evidence of success is likely to be a little opinionative so you’ll need to check out authority sites, forums, blogs and reviews in your niche, and try to pick up a feeling for who the key players are.

With an idea of who the most visible, and most successful, players are, ‘go to school’ on them – try to unravel the secrets of their success. Pick apart their marketing, sales-process, product offering(s), site configuration and also their follow-up (to sales inquiries/purchases).

This research, more than most, will give you some great ideas and likely save you weeks (or months) of work. Piggybacking off proven, successful models.

3. Where is there traffic coming from?
You can use simple tools like Google’s "link:" operator when searching for a domain (i.e. searching for "link: www.site.com" to see back-links to that site), or more advanced tools such as Compete.com, to give you a more accurate indication of referring sites. The obvious step (in due course) will be to approach these sources and attempt to redirect traffic to your own site (see the section on “redirection”, later in this mini-report).

4. How are they monetising their site? (If indeed monetization is important to you).
This is simple. Put on your "mystery shopper" hat and check out the top sites in your niche. You’ll quickly spot the points at which these sites are taking money, grabbing e-mail addresses or getting some other kind of ‘action’ from you (perhaps getting you to download a trial, or a free report, as a long lead-in to a possible future sale).

5. What other goals do these sites have?
Successful sites tend to have pretty clear objectives that have been set over years of testing and experience. There’s a good chance that the reason the top-performing sites are focusing on a particular set of goals/objectives is that they’re the most profitable.

6. How have they structured their site?
Site structure can be a very important part of your site design, overall. When checking out the top-performing sites in your niche, check out what pages (quantity and types) are featured. An easy way to do this is by viewing a site’s "sitemap".
Make notes on what you find, ideas for your own site structure.

7. What content do they have?
Within the pages of the successful sites you have identified, within your chosen niche,
.    What is the content mix?
.    Is it predominantly text?
.    Do they feature audio, video, RSS?
.    Where is there content coming from?
.    Is it all unique, or are they featuring third-party articles and press-releases?
.    How ‘fresh’ is the content?
Looking at the content-mix of sites can give you some super ideas on how to plan for the long-term growth of your site’s content.

8. How are they generating repeat visitors?
When looking at the content on successful sites, ask yourself what, if anything, is likely to keep visitors on a site and/or to get them to return. This "sticky" content helps you balance your customer acquisition cost (after all, it’s far cheaper to keep an existing customer than to find a new one…).

9. What approach have they taken to design? Does it work, in your opinion?
Design can play an incredibly important role in the success or failure of your site – not design in the "fine art" sense, but in the way you approach layout, colors, headings and so on.

These fundamental aspects of your site will help you to direct visitors to your intended actions, to convey a sense of professionalism and quality, and to ensure a positive visitor experience.

So once again, look at these sites specifically to identify what it is that makes these sites successful from a design perspective – have they got clear graphics drawing you to the intended action? Do they use high-quality imagery to instil confidence? Do they have a simple layout, making navigation easy? And so on.

The above list is by no means exhaustive, but it gets you into the mindset of the sorts of things you need to be looking for when you’re researching your niche.

Keywords

Once you’ve got your topic chosen, and some research under your belt, it’s time to choose some keywords. Keywords (and/or key phrases) are the lifeblood of your web site page content – once set they should underpin everything you feature on individual pages, even the structure of the site itself, so it’s important you get this part right too.

To find out what keywords to use you might want to try a few different things:

1. Use Google’s keywords tool to figure out which primary keywords (and related, or "LSI" keywords) for your site (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal);

2. Use other tools, such as "Wordtracker" to make a keyword selection;

3. Reverse engineer other, successful sites’ keyword selections (within your niche, of course). To do this you can again use Google’s keywords tool (this time looking up a competitor’s web page to see what keyword themes Google finds) or by checking out individual pages’ meta-tags (by viewing the source of a web page you can see these tags in the upper part of the web page HTML code).

The key point here is that your keyword themes should be 100% relevant (i.e. they should make sense, given your existing/planned page content) and clustered so that overall your site is focused on the main keyword theme(s) you have chosen but that on page-by-page basis you are either choosing different selection of related keywords, or are refining the keyword theme for your page to better match it’s content.

Once you’ve set your keyword "themes" you should work around these when creating your page content. So that means featuring the keywords in the page copy, using keywords in the alt-tags (for images), file-names, links, link-text, headings and page descriptions.
You need, in as natural a way as possible to ensure that your pages are rich in the keyword themes you set above, without being ‘over-stuffed’ – using keywords in an organic or natural way will prevent your pages from being seen as ‘artificial’ or overly optimized (as if they’re deemed overly-optimized, this can actually have an adverse effect on your ranking).

Structure

Setting your site structure is very important, not only from the point of view of ensuring that the pages that need to be featured are featured, and so that visitors to your site can find your content easily – it’s also important because of the impact it can itself have on your search engine ranking.

For example, you ought to make sure you feature certain "standard" pages (contact, privacy, legal terms, etc.). Equally, you need to make sure you have a site-map so that your pages can be readily indexed, by passing search engine spiders. And if you want to take your site structure to the ‘next level’, to maximize the benefit from your keyword themes running through your site, then you should consider setting up a silo structure (more on which in another report).

Silos, briefly, extend keyword theme clusters into the actual structure of your site, by ensuring that pages within your keyword theme are grouped together in there own (appropriately named) directory.

Content

The content you feature within the site itself has to be one of, if not the number one, most important parts of the site-creation process.
Quite simply, the content (perhaps in conjunction with your traffic generation efforts) will determine the success of your site. It’s as simple as that. Whatever you’ve come up with for your site structure, you need to populate that with high-quality, relevant, keyword/phrase-rich content that is totally focused on the specific objectives for that individual page.

Sound complicated? Not really. Just use that last sentence as an aide memoir when starting your page-content creation process:

1. Am I adding quality content?
2. Is it relevant to the visitor/topic?
3. Is it rich in keywords/themes (but not over-optimized!)
4. Am I pushing the visitor to the intended action for this page?

Keep these points firmly in your mind when adding content and you won’t go far wrong.

As for what content to actually include, well… there are literally hundreds of sources of great quality content available to you. Not only can you originate your own content, you could have content generated for you (using services such as ODesk, or Elance) or grab readily available content from sources online, including:

.    Articles
.    Press Releases
.    Videos (embedded from sites such as YouTube or DailyMotion)
.    RSS feed content
.    Quotes/Sayings
.    Public Domain Works
.    User Generated Content (comments, testimonials, forums)
.    Reviews
.    Surveys Polls
.    and much, much more…

Just keep it quality, relevant, keyword theme-specific and only use it if it helps achieve your page objective(s).

Setting ‘Actions’

Ok, so the site and its pages are coming together. It’s worth spending a moment discussing actions (or page objectives). There’s little point in spending all that time researching and planning, building a great-looking, professional site, generating traffic and persuading your visitors that you’re the ‘best thing since sliced bread’ only to miss out on the last step:

Give a clear, concise action for them to carry out.

This action might be to purchase your product, request a brochure, watch your sales presentation, send you an e-mail, join your mailing list, recommend a friend, download a free report or even just learn about your company.
Whatever your action is, for your individual pages make sure the page content drives the visitor to that intended outcome as much as possible.

Building your site

With your planning done, keywords chosen, objectives set you will need to choose a web site design tool at some point in the proceedings, so that you can actually put all of your ideas down and publish them to the Internet.
There is a wide range of web site building software available, some on-line (or ‘server-side’) and some off-line (often referred to as ‘client-side’). The general rule of thumb is that online tools have to sacrifice a degree of power, control and functionality for being web-based.

Publishing / Hosting

Once you have built your site, you’ll need to publish it. To do this you need:

1. A domain name
2. A hosting account

Promotion / Traffic Building

With a web site published, you might be forgiven for thinking the work was done, and that now you could site back and watch the traffic come flooding in – the orders to pile up, the mailing list grow.

But sadly, you’d be mistaken!

The next step, once you have your initial web site up and published, is to drive traffic to it. Traffic generation is a whole science in itself (and far too large a topic to cover fully in this mini-report) lest to say there are a number of key areas you ought to focus on initially, to get the ball rolling:

1. Search Engine Submission.
This is an essential first step and involves ‘informing’ the search engines, proactively, that your site is published (for the first time).
Depending on whether your site has search-engine site-maps inbuilt you may or may not have to put this XML sitemap file together by hand (or using some of the free tools out there like www.xml-sitemaps.com).

2. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising.
This is another great source of traffic (often profitable, long-term traffic, too). It’s really only applicable if you’re prepared to spend a bit of money generating the traffic though (so if there’s a chance you’ll sell some product to the visitors who click through your advertising).
Google’s Adwords service is by far the most popular, and so is a good starting point for you in this regard (www.google.com/adwords).

3. Link-building Campaign.
This might perhaps seem a little obvious, but link-building campaigns are often not carried out with sufficient vigour and proactivity by site-owners. You need to build links to your new web site, inbound, from as many possible sources online as humanly possible!

This is a key determinant not only of traffic from these links themselves but also of the ranking Google gives you as a site within your niche. The simple formula is this:

More links into your site, from quality, related sites makes your site more ‘important’ in the eyes of the search engines, and so you ranking is enhanced.

So, getting your links out there needs to become a priority. Here are a few ideas for getting inbound links for starters:

a. Contacting related, but non-competing, sites within your niche and asking for a link (usually best to reciprocate on that front, placing a link to their site in exchange).

b. Updating your ‘signature’ (sig) at the foot of all your communications (e-mails, blog posts, forum posts, social networking communications, even business cards! etc.) to include your web address, to your new site.
c. Submit Articles, Press Releases and Video content (to places like YouTube), all featuring links to specific pages (ideally) within your site (i.e. not all just pointing to the home page).

d. Get creative! Give away free reports with your e-mail address in them; post comments on related sites with your web address in the comment text; Call up your local radio station and plug your site – in short… find relevant sources of traffic and get your address in front of them!

4. Traffic redirection.
This is kind of a composite of the points 1, 2 and 3 above, but worth mentioning in its own right. Redirecting traffic is about thinking of "where your traffic is right now…". That is to say, right now there are thousands-upon-thousands of would-be visitors to your site – potential customers – browsing and shopping online.

Your task, in promoting your online presence, should be less about finding "new customers" and more about "redirecting existing ones". It’s kind of like finding that pond full of hungry fish (hungry for your product, service and/or information) and dropping your baited hook (using just the right bait of course!) into the water right there, rather than bobbing about on the vast blue ocean, hoping the fish will swim to you.

In other words, find the highly-trafficked, relevant forums, blogs, groups and other meeting-places for people in your targeted niche and get involved. Join in discussions, post your service-offering as a (relevant) solution to other peoples’ problems, where you come across them, build relationships throughout the community of customers you’re trying to attract.
You’ll soon find a steady stream of traffic coming from a reasonably low level of time-investment on your part.

Follow-up / Testing

So, your site’s got traffic, they’re buying off your site (or at least carrying out the desired ‘action’ you specified in your objectives) and all seems to be going well. Is that it? Can you now retire and sit on a beach in Hawaii? No! Still not there yet… Time to test, refine and improve your site’s performance. First off, you need to get measuring. To do this you’re probably best starting off with free tools like "Google Analytics" and "Web Site Optimizer". Analytics will enable to not only to analyze how many people are visiting your site, and where they came from but also a whole lot more information besides.

Web site Optimizer lets you test variations on your key web-pages (such as your home page, or sales page) to identify the optimal page design, or elements within the page, so that you are maximizing the ‘conversion’ ratio of visitors to paying customers.
This testing process is open-ended – really you should never stop testing (certainly it’s a key feature of almost every successful Internet Marketer’s site you’ll find). The more information you can gather about what works, and what doesn’t, the more ‘goals’ you’ll score from your inbound traffic.

Hopefully this short guide has given you plenty of food for thought. As mentioned in the outset it’s intended as a simple introduction to getting started with your first web site (and you second, third and fourth for that matter!) and if you can follow the advice within these pages you’ll doubtless be well on your way to online success!

• http://www.marketleap.com/siteindex
  Search Engine Marketing Tools
• http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/
  Web Master Tools
• http://googlerankings.com/positiontracking/
  Free GoogleRankings Account
• SEO According to Google
  Free Google Guide to SEO
• Free SEO Tools
  From SEOMoz.org

Affiliate Marketing Web Designing Tools and Templates

• http://xheader.com/
  NEW: Xheader: Free Header Graphic Creator
• http://animoto.com
  Animoto: Create Your Own Free Short Videos
• http://www.odiogo.com
  Odigo: Convert Your Dynamic Webpages Into Audios.
• http://www.socialtwist.com
  Tell-A-Friend – Free Web 2.0 application.
• http://www.logomaker.com/
  Logomaker
• http://www.opendesigns.org
  Free CSS website templates
• http://www.oswd.org/
  Free website templates
• http://www.widgetbox.com
  Free widgets for your blog

Other Webmaster Tools

• http://www.pdf995.com/
  Free PDFmaker (great for making newsletters or eBooks that you can imbed your affiliate link into).
• http://www.cli.gs/
  Cligs (great for making shorter affiliate links and it includes analytics!).
• http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/
  Great webmaster tool collection.
• http://www.marketleap.com/siteindex
  Easy, free online search engine marketing tools.

Internet Marketing and/or Affiliate Marketing Resources

• http://blog.affiliatetip.com
  Affiliate marketing news and opinion from Shawn Collins
• http://www.wickedfire.com
  Wicked Fire – SEO & Affiliate Talk
• http://www.aBestWeb.com
  aBestWeb.com – Trusted Affiliate Forum
• http://www.affiliatetip.com/affiliate_newsletter.php
  AffiliateTip.com – From affiliate marketer Shawn Collins
• http://www.revenews.com/newsletter.html
  ReveNews – Affiliate portal and newsletter
• http://www.marketingsherpa.com/newsletters.html
  MarketingSherpa.com – Premium Internet Marketing studies and research
• http://www.free-seo-news.com/index.php
  SEO news – Weekly search engine optimization news
• http://www.marketingnewz.com
  Marketingnewz – Assorted marketing headlines
• http://www.searchenginewatch.com
  Searchenginewatch – Top search engine news
• http://www.mediapost.com
  MediaPost – Professional online marketers news and resources
• http://www.WebmasterWorld.com
  WebmasterWorld.com – Developer Topics
• Digital Web Magazine
  Web Development Topics

Did I miss something? Please let me know in the comments!

What you can do to create powerful articles

Content is the basic building block of the Internet. Without it, there would be no need to browse the web. The value of a site is based upon its content and the better the content, the better the perceived value of a website. The more valuable a website is viewed by its visitors, the more people online will consider it a resource, and refer to it and link to it.
So the key in creating a resource website is to produce content that people will think is valuable. One way to do that, is to write articles that are informative, interesting, solve a problem, or answer a question, and are well written. We will go over the basic and necessary elements that are required to write an article that will get people to respond and seek you out for additional information.

Once you have a powerful article, you can then move into the phase of promoting your article, or publishing it on your own site. This lens will only focus on creating a powerful article. Follow along for a step by step process.

Steps to writing a powerful article 

How do you create an article that people want to read? How do you entice them into wanting more? It’s not as difficult as you might think.

1. Determine the topic of your article.
   You will first need to decide what general subject want to write about. Will it be about cars, real estate, horses, e-commerce? Once you have a basic area, you will need to focus in on a more specific subject. There are several ways to do this and this lens will cover one specific way.
2. Research your market for the topic you have selected.
   Once you determine a topic, research your target market to determine a specific topic for your article. What specific questions are people asking, or what specific problems are they experiencing that you can help with?
   Perform a search online in your area of interest and see what they are talking about. You can also so a search for forums and blogs in your area of interest and see what is being discussed there.
   The easiest way to create an article that people find valuable is to actually answer questions that real people are asking.
3. Find the keywords used by the people of your target market.
   This step is important because it tells you how your target market is looking for answers to their questions. You will want to use these keywords in your article.
4. Brainstorm topics for your articles.
   Once you have the information from the previous steps, brainstorm some specific topics you can write about. This process is vital because it will help the creative juices begin to flow. Just begin writing down a bunch of words and phrases that relate to some of the problems people are experiencing, or questions they are asking. You can find a good book about brainstorming from the list below.
5. Create a Title for the Article
   Once you have a good list of topics based on the keywords, and problems/questions of your target market, create an effective article title that will get a reader’s interest and entice them to read your article. Good titles include “How To” lists, “Top 10″ lists, “Things to Avoid” lists, and many others.
6. Begin Writing
   Now that you have the topic, title, foundation and structure of your article, you can begin writing. Start on the body of the article first. If you have a “Top 10″ type of article, then write a paragraph for each of the items in the top 10. Your paragraph should explain why for that item in at least 2 to 3 sentences.
7. Write the introduction of the article.
   Once you have written the entire body of the article, It will be easy to write the introduction. Remember, a basic article starts out with telling the reader what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you just told them. After you have written the article, it should be easy to tell them what you just wrote about.
8. Write the conclusion of your article.
   This should be easy because you are re-capping what you just wrote about. If you are promoting a product or service, I find that leaving a question, or giving the reader a teaser of something more is very helpful. I know it isn’t proper ‘etiquitte’ (etiquette), but it helps in leaving the reader wanting more.
9. Proofread your article
   Once you have written it, look it over for grammar, spelling, flow, and if it speaks to the level of your audience. Double check for factual accuracy. If you can, get someone else to read your article
10. Step away from the article
    Don’t look at your article for at least 1 day.
    Step away and do something else.
11. Re-read your article and proofread again
    You’ll be amazed at the way your article reads to you when you look at your article again after some time off. Make the appropriate changes and then you are ready to finish it. If you still aren’t happy, repeat steps 9 and 10 again.
12. It’s now time to create your resource box.
    The resource box is the place you want to direct the reader to a specific call to action, like signing up for your mailing list, calling you, sending them to your website, or buying a product or service. A good structure for the resource box is to state a problem and what they need to do to avoid it. If you have enough space, it is helpful to leave credentials about who you are, and why they should listen to you.
13. Let the world know about your article! You can find places to promote your article.

Source: Squidoo

Blogging

The best way to share your prowess in knowledge is to start Blogging it. High-quality will magnetize heavy traffic flow, and in turn better quality of advertisement. You can actually entertain higher financial benefits through Google Ad sense and other advertisements.

Moderating a forum

You can submit an application to labour as an arbitrator for the generally known as moderator for a forum. There are a variety of forums on the Internet which require moderators. If the job benefits you, it provides you with the best work from home opportunity. Generally moderator will be paid basically on the revenue reaped by the firms.

Graphic scheming/Designing:

This is an imaginative field which requires awareness in imagination and clear sense of understanding to use the software. All commodities starting from visiting cards to the spiky stickers on you vehicles need loads of graphical adoration. So this could be an interesting option for all those who are inclined more on the imaginative sector of the design and as well as the one who has a clear flair for the software used. A single design of a normal A4 size should fetch you somewhere around $100 to $150.

Typing

Every organization requires loads documentation and in turn lots of documents are to be typed. You can meet with some organizations to spot if any of them are prepared to contract out the typing work to you. Price range of $1 to $10 per page is decent bet.

Content writing / Copy Writing:

Many online and publishers hire freelancers to continually write for them on a regular basis. If this is of interest for you, this field provides some truly meaningful prospect.

You can witness loads of websites, who advertise looking for freelancers to cater to their writing needs. The earnings in the article vary from one service seeker to the other.

The individual personas you will require to make certain that you are triumphant in your functioning from home obligation are:

* Self-control

* Dedication

* Mellowness

* Efficiency

* Self-inspiration

So if you challenge yourself to possess these qualities that home based employee should need, Go ahead and work on your options right away.