5 Steps To A Successful Internet Business

STEP 1. Find something you feel is a good business opportunity. You can scour the internet for all sorts of different business ideas and opportunities. Doing a search on any search engine with the keywords Work At Home, Business Opportunities, Home Based Business, Affiliate Programs, Make Money Online, etc., will produce 1000's of different search results. Affiliate programs are THE ABSOLUTE BEST business opportunities out there because the ONLY thing you need to do to run your internet business is to market your affiliate link. With a traditional business you must deal with inventory, storage, packing, shipping, complaints, returns, phone calls, emails, checks and credit cards just to name a few! Not so with affiliate programs, once someone has clicked on your affiliate link your only job is getting the next person to click on it. Sweet deal!

STEP 2. Get your own webpage. You want to put your internet business on a webpage of your own. A webpage is like a store front. It projects respect to your business and who you are. Think about it. Do you feel the same about buying from a vendor on the street as you do about buying from a person in a store? They’re both vendors, but the store gives you a certain feeling about the person you are buying from that a street vendor just can’t give you! Your webpage dose not have to be fancy. If you only have a brief description of what your webpage is about along with individual descriptions of your product or products people will respect that. If it is affiliate programs you have decided upon, simply put a BRIEF description of what is being offered along with your affiliate link. Do not disclose too much in your description because people might THINK they know what it is all about and not click on your link. You want to let your affiliate website do all the selling for you. These sites are professionally designed to maximize the number of people who buy or join so a brief description, just enough to spike their curiosity, is sufficient.

STEP 3. Get your own Blog and make one post a day. A Blog, short for, “Web Log,” is a great way to establish yourself as an authority figure on whatever topic you decide. As people return to read your daily articles, they will eventually come to view you as an authority on whatever your Blog is about. They will eventually develop confidence in what you are saying, and will begin to trust you. As a result some people will check out your webpage to see what you have to offer them, and people tend to buy more from people they know and trust. Their confidence in you will be an additional factor that will compel people to buy from you. There are many places online that will host and let you set up your Blog for free.

STEP 4. Put Cost-Per-Click(CPC) advertising such as Google AdSense on your website. Having Cost-Per-Click advertising on your website is a way to earn additional income that can be VERY substantial. Most people who visit your website will not buy from you. If people are going to leave your website, wouldn’t you rather them leave through a link on your website that will pay you money every time someone clicks on it? Google makes putting their AdSense on your website E-A-S-Y! The ads are relevant to the content of your website. Google can even put its AdSense on your Blog as we’ll.

STEP 5. Write and submit articles to article submission sites. This is the most important advice you need to know. This is how you will get FREE advertising! People are searching the internet for free information. When you submit your articles online, the search engines will eventually find them and will spider every word. When people do a search using keywords or phrases that are in your articles, they will turn up in the search results, so be sure to insert highly searched for keywords and phrases into your articles! You will need to include at the bottom of all your articles your bio. Your bio will contain a brief description about who you are along with a link to your website. It might read for instance [ John Doe is the owner of yoursite.com. John helps people to work at home using various business opportunities that include affiliate programs. If you desire your own home based business visit http://www.yoursite.com] The more articles you write and submit, the higher the chances are of your articles keywords and phrases showing up on search results. The more links you have pointing back to your website, the higher your websites page rank with the search engines will be, meaning the higher up on the search results will your article turn up, so don’t stop writing and submitting articles! I do want to stress however, quality over quantity. Take your time and check your spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, etc. No one will take what you have to say seriously if you don’t write correctly.

So there you have it! Having a successful internet business is simply a matter of understanding how things work, and applying that knowledge. It dose not take any special skill or any great intelligence. If you follow these five steps, you cannot fail. The most important thing, as with anything in life, is persistence. Continue following steps three and five and watch your internet business grow!

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How to Start an Internet Business without Capital

I often meet new Internet marketers on various forums and they aspire to earn the big bucks like some of the well-known personas out there, such as Yanik Silver and Bryan Kumar. However, most of these new marketers have only the slightest ideas on where to start, and a lot of them are not willing or able to invest a startup capital in their online business. However, it is almost impossible to start an Internet business without spending some money on basic infrastructure such as web hosting, domain names and so on. Hence, here is a rough guide on how to build an Internet business starting with $0.

The first and most important thing to do is to list out all your skills. What skills do you have? You may have picked up these skills through daily life (for example languages), through your job (hands-on knowledge on a specific niche) or from your hobbies (for example fishing). It is most vital to list down skills or knowledge that you have and might be in demand elsewhere. For example, you love fly-fishing and you do it every day after work. You may build your Internet business upon this: writing an instructional guide on fly-fishing, teaching people how to do it, etc. Best of all, you do not need to spend money to acquire this knowledge: you already have it.

So, the very first option, if you have no money to start off your online business, is to earn some capital using your already existing skills or knowledge. You can give tuition to students on your dominant subject in college, you can teach stuff about your hobby to people who are interested, you can write guides on knowledge or skills you picked up through experience and cannot be found in theoretical books.

Okay, let's say if you just can't think of any skills or knowledge that people might be interested in. Then, it's most important that you locate a workable business model and focus on that alone. You can obtain almost everything you need through bartering, web hosting, domain name or credit card processing, to name a few in exchange for your product (if you own one) or services like copywriting, ghostwriting and website designs. There is always some mundane job that people don't want to do, and you can do that for those people in exchange for things you need. You just need to ask for it!

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What is Blogging?

Blogging is something that is very much in flux, as the new technologies that appear everyday redefine what a blog is, what a blog can be, and what a blog should do. For many years, blogs were defined as text-based websites that kept records of days, similar to a captain's log on a sailing ship.

However, this started to change as the group of people who kept blogs became more diverse. The more bloggers began to explore the limits of the medium and of the technology that made it possible, the more the boundaries of what could be called a "blog" expanded.

Today, there are an abundance of photo blogs, and there are even video blogs as well. Mobile blogging devices may well change the definition of blogging entirely by making it possible for bloggers to create new kinds of posts. Another element of the blogosphere that is starting to redefine blogging is the corporate blog. As more companies hire writers to keep blogs with the sole purpose of creating positive buzz about their brand, bloggers across the globe are arguing about whether these manufactured blogs are really worthy of the name.

Between all of these different forces that are constantly expanding and reshaping the blogosphere, it is difficult
to imagine that the definition of what is and is not a blog will ever remain fixed for very long.

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Part 10 – Interactions Between Blogs

As your blog’s content increase, people in your niche will definitely mention you for intelligent or interesting discussions. This is, in a sense, an initiation of an interaction. When people speak of you, you should thank them for the mention and build up the interaction!

When you use a traffic tracking script such as the free www.statcounter.com, you can see where traffic comes from. If a large number of visitors come from a certain blog, you can be sure they have mentioned you in their latest post or linked to you from their sidebar or links page. What you should do is pay them a visit, leave constructive comments on their posts and build up a conversation!

As you continue doing this, you will start to gather a lot of friends in your niche. This is helpful later on when you decide to do collaborations such as interviews. In fact, when you’re out of ideas for writing on your blog, you can interview other blog owners in your niche! Human beings are curious creatures, so naturally they would like to know more about a person whose writings they read so often.

If you’re using Wordpress, Textpattern, MovableType or any other advanced blog engines, you can also post trackback links on your posts. This means you can post an article about what other people have posted! Your particular post will then appear as a link on that post you have written about. This is definitely a great way to get traffic if you post brilliant insights about a post on a very famous blog. Since the famous blog already has a per-existing pool of readers, this is like a shortcut to hog their visitors! The only thing you would want to observe is to keep your posts sensible and insightful, or you’ll be viewed as a spammer.

On the other hand, if you’re using Blogger, you would not be able to use trackback links. However, you can post insightful comments on other people’s blogs and subtly include a link back to your blog. You can make it seem like you’re pointing to your blog as an extra reference to the subject of discussion. Of course, this technique is not only limited to Blogger users and users of other blog engines can employ this strategy as an additional traffic source.

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Mobile Revolution

iStormer - Harness The Mobile Revolution

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Part 9 – More Monetizing Options

We’ve discussed about using Google Adsense programme and other merchants’ affiliate programmes to generate profits from your blog. However, we have a lot of other options ot monetize your blog, so we’re going to look into that today.

The first option we’ll be looking at is Chitika . Chitika is a very innovative contextual advertising programme because it can serve very detailed advertisements. For example, on your technological gadget blog, Chitika will show advertisements for tech gadgets such as iPods. The way they show it is in different tabs: one for “Best deals”, another for “details”, another for “reviews” and so on. This way, it is more of an informational section for your visitor rather than an advertisement, and naturally the click-through will be higher. You can apply here: https://chitika.com/application.php?type=mm

You can also be an affiliate for Amazon.com. Amazon offers a wide range of products but its predominant domain is in books. Whatever your niche is about, you can probably find a book about it on Amazon.com. Join their Associate programme here: https://associates.amazon.com/gp/flex/associates/apply-login.html/

Once you join them, you can refer visitors to them and earn up to 10% commission. It’s not a lot but if you can manage to refer big volumes of visitors, Amazon is for you. This programme really shines when it comes to the ways you can refer visitors: you can use their predefined templates to pull up recent items that match a certain criteria you set, you can target your ad to show a specific item on sale or you can just simply weave your referral links into your blog posts.

Last but definitely not least, you can sell advertising space on your blog if your blog is truly popular. Just take a look at blogs like http://xiaxue.blogspot.com. That blog receives over 10,000 pageviews every day and naturally merchants will want to strike a deal with the blog’s owner to post their advertisements there. If you manage to pull in huge amounts of traffic like that blog, you can definitely get people to buy ad space on your blog for prices from $150/month upwards, depending on your blog popularity.
To gauge how much pageviews and visitors you get everyday, just use the free tool available at www.statcounter.com. They have a very detailed setup guide there so I won’t go into it.

If your blog has not acquired large amount of visitors yet, you can still sell ad space on your blog on a per click or per impression basis. Just visit sites like www.adbrite.com. For a complete list of these sites, visit http://performancing.com/node/60.

Hopefully, that will help you maximize earnings and profits from your blog!

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All About Merchant Account Processing

In any credit card transaction or application, the merchant account should always be paid attention because it this will define how advantageous the future transactions for you would be.

As defined, merchant account is the account wherein a specific merchant deals with a certain bank to be able to make credit card payments possible. Without such account or contract, no transactions can be made because there will be no order in processing the payments made for purchase or orders.

Today, more and more banks as well as independent financial firms and companies are becoming merchant account providers because they have seen how much the credit card and its usage among consumers have grown. Many of them join the bandwagon because of its being lucrative. While others are getting into it to ensure that they will provide options for credit card users as well as the companies or business establishments will have smooth sailing business transactions in terms of payments and other financial processing.

How a merchant account is processed

With the advantaged of modern technology, there have been so many attempts to make merchant account processing easier. As many people would know, when one uses a credit card, he or she allows the funds to be transferred to his or her bank account in short span of time, usually not more than one week. This is to ensure that there will be smoother yet tighter cash flow. When something goes wrong along the way of transactions and payments being made, there will be a disruption in the cash flow which will cause everyone involved delay as well as loss of investment.

To ensure that there will be lesser hassles in this type of payment system, merchant account processing has been made easier by eliminating the invoice payment system, which is among the primary causes of delay. When there is an efficient merchant account processing, the credit card payment system will be in its proper place which will enable one to have easier purchases either online or on physical stores.

More and more companies today are coming up with their own ways to be able to develop a merchant account processing system that can offer the clients the best option they will have. Some of these companies go through outsource companies and ask them to handle the bulk of the workloads in terms of credit card processing so they can pay better attention to business details that will give the clientele much satisfaction.

When it comes to qualifying for a merchant account, the first thing that the merchant account providers question is the legitimacy of your business. This is because they would not want to encounter problems in terms of fraud and other related charges that might be filed against them. If you are applying for a merchant account, expect that merchant account providers will start with a basic background check including the assessment of your business's credit history and a review of the owners as well as the officers that are listed on the application.

During this background check before the merchant account processing, the most important aspect that should be paid attention to is the incidence of the business's "chargebacks" or the reversal of a certain sale which was credited to the owner's account.

Most of the time, chargebacks come up because of certain errors which are either made by the bank of the card holder or a certain misunderstanding made by the customer him or herself.

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Part 8 – Monetizing Your Blog

You have been working hard to produce good-quality, original content on your blog and you have attracted a decent amount of traffic by doing so. However, money is not going to appear out of thin air just because you have traffic. You have to turn your traffic into money.

There are several ways to generate profits from the visitors of your blog, and Google’s Adsense programme allows you to do so with ultimate ease. First, visit their website at http://adsense.google.com/. You’ll find out more about their advertising programme there, but here are some extra bits I’d like to tell you.

First, Google’s Adsense programme is a really useful way to monetize your blog because when users finish reading your newest post, chances are they want to leave your blog because they have nothing else to do on your blog. If your Adsense advertisement block is visible on your blog, they might see advertisements relevant to them and click on them to exit your blog. Ka-ching! You’ve just cashed in on your first virtual cents!

But yes, your profits will only be cents if you don’t “do it right”. This involves placing your Google ads in the right places and ensuring they blend in to your site so that they appear more like links rather than advertisements to your visitors. Consult the page https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html to see the “heat map” of your blog. The “hotter” a certain area, the greater the chances of someone looking at your blog.

Once you get a Google Adsense account, you can change the colour of your advertisement text and links. You will want them to match the colours on your blog. If your blog’s text is black and the links are red, do the same for the ad blocks too! It’s that simple.

Another way to earn profits from your blog is to recommend products to your readers. When your visitors buy from the merchants you recommend, you get to keep a little commission too. This is known as affiliate marketing and it is very easy to start because you don’t have to create your own products or services.

Anyway, let’s refer back to our technological gadgets blog example. Let’s say you discover this Gadget X on a merchant’s website, and they offer an affilliate programme. What you would do is to create a post in your blog and do a mini-review on this Gadget X. Rip it apart and point out its benefits and bad points, if any, and include a link (which is given by the merchant) for the visitor to purchase the Gadget X online.

If your visitor clicks and purchases the gadget, the merchant will track from the link that the purchase is referred by you, so they will send you your share of the profits. Imagine if 1 out of every 100 visitors you get purchases this product, and you earn $27.00 commission from each purchase! If you get 10,000 visitors in a month that would be a $2,700.00 paycheque for you just for writing about ONE product.

Now, affiliate programmes are very nice ways to generate profit, but how do you find affiliate programmes that are related to your blog’s theme? Easy, just go to Google and search for +”affiliate programmes”. Another slightly better way is to go to http://www.associateprograms.com/search to look for affiliate programmes in your niche.

The two ways mentioned above are basic ways to generate profits from your blog. We’ll be discussing other great, profitable ways, so keep your eyes peeled!

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ABC’s of ECommerce Merchant Account

What are Merchant Accounts?

The process of buying products through the internet has become so convenient that we become unaware that there is actually a complex system of commerce that goes with it. With the birth of the credit card, business owners have realized its potential on making their products more accessible to their target consumers. This is when merchant account providers come into the picture. Merchant account is way for business owners to accept payments through credit cards.

What are Payment Gateways?

Aside from the merchant account provider, there is also a middle party that oversees how the actual exchange of payment information takes place. It is the online version of a cash register. Upon payment, the consumer enters encrypted information into the merchant’s web browser. The payment gateway then sends another encrypted information from the merchant account provider then into its acquiring back and lastly into the issuing bank. The seemingly complicated process of exchanging encrypted information between the different parties takes only around 3 seconds.

What should business owners look for in an eCommerce merchant account provider?

Reputation, integrity and compliance are some of the important characteristics that a merchant account provider should have. Business owners may study the history of the company by looking through the company’s financial statements, tax accounts, credit returns and its Dunn and Bradstreet credit file. The merchant account provider should also be properly registered to the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS) and is insured to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Business owners may also inquire with the Better Business Bureau (BBB) to look for any complaints, if any, that have been filed against the merchant account provider.

The merchant account provider must also offer a reliable technical support. The technical support must be available for 24-hours through the net or the telephone. Most preferably, there is a qualified technician that would personally respond to any problems associated with either the software or hardware. A few seconds lost through a technical problem would also mean loss of profit.

Business owners should also look into the cost that the merchant account requires from them. There are additional costs to consider other than the typical costs that goes with merchant accounts like interchange fees, transaction fees and monthly fees. There are hosting fees, website maintenance and design costs and website start up fees. Most of the time, the less you pay for these additional costs, the less is the quality you get and the poorer service you give to your costumers.

What are the risks associated?

The risks associated with an eCommerce merchant account provider are basically the same as with the traditional merchant account provider. Fraud is the most common scam in online transactions. Hackers may enter into the system and transfer credits into their own accounts. They may also steal the customers’ personal information from the merchant account system and use it for other fraudulent transactions.

Other risks may also be accounted to the part of the costumers. They may falsely claim that the product was not properly shipped, that it was not accurately described as it was on the website or that they may not actually have received. The customer may also complain of unfair or incorrect billing.

What are some of the best eCommerce merchant account providers?

Charge.com easily tops most of the reviews of merchant account providers. Some other highly praised merchant account providers are Merchant Account Express, CyberBit and Electronic Transfer.

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