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“How would I be doing this differently if I were willing to let it be easy?”–Alan Cohen

This is a great reminder because too often I make things much more difficult than they need to be. I don’t think I’m alone. In fact I think many businesses could benefit by getting back to basics,

If you are operating an online business always keep your customer in mind. The best way to keep your customer in mind is to go through the motions. Begin by searching for your product using the key words that come to mind. Did your site come up on the first page of Google, Yahoo or MSN? If not, how do your customers find you? Do they type in your company name? Unless you’re “AMAZON”, that’s highly unlikely. Most online shoppers will search using phrases rather than just key words, such as:

“Women’s Clothing”

“Ideas for decorating kid’s room”

“Crafts for Christmas”

It takes a lot of work to ensure your site is relevant and search engines will direct traffic your way.

When visitors arrive are they greeted with a pleasant, profession site? Shoppers will appreciate a clear and simple design, with easy navigation and access to help.

What is your first impression of your site? Is it cluttered? Too much clutter on the front the page will appear to be spam. Is it easy to read? Black letters on a white background is still the best option for legibility.

Some shoppers still have dial up access and if your site is budging with images it’ll take a considerable amount of time to load.

Can you quickly find what you came for? If not, is there an option to search your site, or a site map to assist visitors?

Once you find the product on your site BUY IT! Does your shopping cart operate correctly? Is all of the required information requested? Collect only the information you need to speed up the process. I have encountered sites where I wanted to buy something and couldn’t. Statistics indicate ~50% of customers abandon their shopping cart before making a purchase. A major factor in this is a poorly designed checkout.

There are also annoying forms that don’t save the information so if one required field is overlooked, you’re back to square one. When the purchase is complete, do you receive feedback that it was successful, such as a receipt or email confirmation? If you are using PayPal, you want to verify the funds were correctly deposited, confirm the transaction numbers, customer information and amount are all correct.

When the shopping experience is complete, what follow up do you offer your customers: a thank you message or a coupon for future purchases? If a customer is unhappy can they reach you and what remedies can you offer?

Walk in your customer’s footsteps through the entire buying process and eliminate any unnecessary delays. It’s just good business to get your site back to basics.

I think I am addicted to starting new websites. I have enough websites now to keep 30 people busy but I continually start new ones. I love to buy new domain names and if I have a great domain name I just can’t let it be I have to start a website on it. I guess there are worse things to be addicted to, but this really is a problem. It keeps me from dedicating the time that is necessary to maintain each one and they become neglected.

So what am I going to do about this addiction? I have no idea, but if you are looking to start your own website and don’t have the money to put everything together then contact me and I will gladly let you use one of mine. I have a few people who are running websites that I own the domain and provide the hosting. They get to monetize the site any way they see fit and add whatever content they want.

As long as they keep up with the site they can run them forever as far as I am concerned. I really have no use for this many websites, so take one of them over today and you can have a fresh startup without any of the costs involved. Meanwhile I will probably find another domain name that I just can’t live without and have a fresh idea that just can’t wait. I had better get some help for this condition.

In the Internet marketing game there are a few realities that are too hard for some people to face. The first is that an Internet business takes every bit as much work to build as any regular brick and mortar business you can think of. The second is that Internet businesses fail at an even higher rate than offline businesses. Internet businesses fail at such a high rate because of the lack of commitment from their owners. There are some other factors involved also but we will get into those in a few minutes. My belief is that because the entry cost is so low that there is either a lack of commitment or a lack of belief that the business is real for the new owners.

When you don’t spend very much money to start a business it is easy to walk away and say to yourself that you gave it a shot, but it just didn’t work out. Regardless of the reasons why, you are still giving up on your dreams. Why would anyone give up on their dreams of owning their own business? I believe it is because they don’t take the time to really learn how to make their business work. They can’t figure out how to actually capitalize on the work they are doing for their business. Even worse is that they don’t bother to ask the right questions and really try to make it work at all. When all they are looking at losing is a few bucks and a little time it makes it far too easy to just walk away. Don’t be one of the millions of people who walk away from their Internet businesses every year, take the time to learn how to run your business right and then use that knowledge to build your dream.

Other factors that play into Internet businesses failing are scams and schemes. There are so many scams on the Internet that directly play on people’s desires to run their own businesses it can be very discouraging when you are trapped by one of them. Then from fear of being trapped by another people avoid or are leery of real opportunities. If you have ever been trapped by a scam and lost some of your hard earned money, the only way not to lose your dreams to it is to get right back up and keep going. Losing money sucks, but we all do it every day, we throw good money after bad and sometimes lose too much. It happens, so what, don’t let it deter you from achieving success. Find the right opportunity and grab hold of it. After you have been burned once it will be a lot easier to tell what is or isn’t a scam in the future.

Nobody knows everything there is to know about Internet marketing, Technology and people change so fast it would be impossible. But it does help to be a part of a team or organization that is willing to help. That is why we are here to help people succeed who aren’t willing to give up on their dreams. Join us at the forum and be a part of a team that is willing to help you succeed and learn how to market your business. Just don’t give up.

I am going to follow up this article with a few about scams on the internet, just to point out a few obvious things to avoid. But remember that not everything is a scam and any golden nuggets of information you can pick up along the way will help you down the road.

I don’t know how many of you are a part of a mailing list, but I am on a bunch of them. I join mailing list for the very few free bits of information that may be useful. I have also become a part of mailing list because of items or information I have purchased in the past. Being a part of those mailing list becomes a real nuisance once in a while because I just get plain old sick and tired of people always pimping something. I know you have to let people know about what you have to sell, but do you have to become an affiliate of ever Tom, Dick , and Harry and then pimp all of their crap too?

My problem with all of the pimping is that is makes these people seem like all they care about is the next dollar they can earn off of your back. Real world businesses are bad enough but Internet businesses are getting to the point that they look only at peoples wallets and don’t really care what is good for them. Constantly pimping other people crap through your mail list is not “customer service” as they would like to believe. The argument would be that how do people know they do or don’t need it if they don’t know it exists? My argument would be that if I need it I will look for it. And the people who earn my business are going to be the people with the best search marketing and long term business, not someone who threw together a product and had a bunch of affiliates send out an email about it.

Well that is my grip for today and remember that just because someone you may like or even halfway trust send you an email about a product doesn’t mean that they actually know what the product is or if it is even any good. Usually the emails are written by the person with the product and not the peson who sent the email.

Every once in a while an idea comes along that you believe will make you the next great internet millionaire. You think about it really hard, plan it out and know exactly how you are going to implement your great idea. The next thing you know it’s been a month since you had this great idea, you’ve done nothing with it, and can barley remember how exactly the idea was supposed to work. If I had a nickel for every million dollar idea, then I wouldn’t need million dollar ideas. The good thing is that if everyone acted on their ideas there wouldn’t be any left for the rest of us. So be glad that other people procrastinate and be happy that you are no longer going to procrastinate.

Now is the time to put some of those ideas into action, and we are here to help. We understand the hesitations that you have when you have a great idea but don’t know how to let people know about, or buy, or use your idea. Netrat.com is here to help you make your idea succeed. If you need help with programming, promotion, implementation, or just want to pass an idea by someone, we have many years of experience that could prove very useful to you. Please visit our forum and post your question there. You can also find very helpful information in our many articles about running and maintaining your website.

Nothing here is really ground breaking information, but for new internet marketers it is a valuable step by step introduction to doing things the right way. The best thing about netrat.com is that we are here to help you through every step of the process. We can help you with all of those small questions that come up during the process. We know how important it is to have someone to bounce ideas off of. Keep in mind though that this is real marketing and not some get rich quick scheme. We don’t believe that there is a shortcut to building any real business and we are building real businesses, not trying to make a quick buck.

Now let me tell you what you won’t find on our site. You will not get a bunch of useless information that will not help you promote or finish your website. You also won’t find us ever trying to steer someone in the wrong direction because we are afraid of competition. The World Wide Web is an immense place where everyone should be able to succeed. Just remember us when that million dollar idea turns to gold.

First let me say that for the most part I really love hubpages but there is one reason that the community there is for the birds, and I will get to that in a moment.  But first lets me say that as a marketing tool it doesn’t get a lot better than hubpages.  You can build relevant links to your site for the keywords you are targeting and build just about any website up using only links from hubpages.  The owners have done a great job of building a world class platform for not only promoting other sites but for making a decent amount of money from the traffic you receive there.

So if you are unfamiliar with hubpages, it is a publishing platform that allows you to publish what they call a hub about any subject you choose.  So you choose some great keywords and write and article about that subject, add some relevant pictures or video and publish the hub.  If you have done a good job with the article it will get picked up very quickly by the search engines and you will get traffic.  The traffic equates to probably some of the best traffic on the internet and hubpages through one of their other sites has done a great job of optimizing the Adsense ads that appear on the site.  You get a share of the Adsense by adding your Adsense code and receiving 60% of the impressions.

I have published 60 hubs and make between 3 and 4 dollars a day with Adsense just from hubpages.  That may not seem like much but over the course of a year it is one less mortgage payment I have to worry about.  But more than the money is the opportunity to build relevant links to your site using great keywords.  The opportunity in that regard is worth thousands of times the amount that you will make with Adsense. 

But here is where the problem with hubpages comes in.  Hubpages is mostly a group of writers who don’t promote other sites and focus singly on their hubs for making money.  Not really a problem until you realize what a backbiting group of shit heads they really are.  I have made the mistake of calling out some of their self proclaimed experts and written a few hubs that showed the rest of the community why they shouldn’t listen to people who don’t understand what they are talking about.  These experts claim to be Internet marketers but barely understand how to make hubpages work and really believe that if they get a hub on the first page of google that they have accomplished something.  I have also written some hubs about pit bulls that offended the other half of the community.  And because of that every time I publish a new hub a group of these infants decides to flag it as too promotional or deceptive.  And I have to go through the trouble of resubmitting it and waiting 3 or 4 days for the owners to look at it and approve it once again.

This in itself is just a hassle and tiresome.  I don’t write spam and I don’t mislead or deceive anyone, so I find it offensive and childish.  But I know by know that that is what happens with most groups on the Internet.  I should just let it go and deal with the babies, but quite obviously I am getting annoyed with the situation.  But I know that to rise above the trash you have to be the better person and just let it go.  At least the children gave me an excuse to write another post for my blog.

I added a few articles to the site this week that may be of interest to anyone just starting out and looking for some advice on how to build a website.  The first article is a primer on setting up a plan before you actually get started building your site.  I think most people either skip this step altogether of just have a plan in their mind without actually putting it on paper.  I hope that article will help in pointing people in the right direction.

The second article is help with the first article and is about how to develop a linking strategy.  If you will follow the mind map outlined on that article you will reap rewards for years to come.  The article shows you how to build long term valuable links to your website and get paid for doing it.  That may sound funny to you, but there are 3 great site mentioned that will all pay you for placing your content on their site and build great links to your site.

The last article is for people looking for the best ASP shopping cart.  I have used VP-ASP extensively in the past and know it to be the finest shopping cart solution made.  In the article I have outlined some of the benefits of VP-ASP and hope you will consider using them if you are in the market for a great shopping cart solution.

That’s it so far but I hope to be putting up lot’s more articles for you in the very near future and always welcome anyone that has questions about marketing their site or building their site to drop in on the forum and leave your questions there.  I will get back to you as soon as possible and hopefully find a great solution for you.

There are 2 certainties about being a web developer that you can always count on.  The first is that you will have days of complete frustration.  The second is that when you actually accomplish something you will have to celebrate alone, because everyone else has gone to bed.  I have been having one of those days of frustration, trying to get a site put together.  It is one of those things that there just isn’t a simple solution for and getting everything to work just takes time.  I get a lot of satisfaction when it actually works, but when it is that hard to implement I am always weary of when it is going to break.  But like everything else we will just cross that road when we come to it.  I spent the better part of 2 complete days setting up a site that should have taken 4 hours or less and now that it is so far behind schedule it is going to have to wait some more.

Following will be the best advice I can possibly give to a new developer about how to make a website, and that is:  Don’t take on too much at one time.  If you are looking to build your own site and not someone else’s then build 1 site and that’s all.  Don’t ever think that you can build site after site and give them all the attention that they deserve because it is just flat out impossible.  Don’t take on site number 2 until site number 1 is not only up and running but is virtually self sustaining.  Not that there isn’t always maintenance and tweaking to do, but wait until you are happy with everything right down to the amount of traffic that site 1 is generating.

This is my personal site and I have a ton of fun with it, but it gets neglected way more than it should.  I had plans to have this site completed during the month of January and maybe I should clarify that is 2008, since at the rate it is going it may not be complete until 2009 or later.  But I digress, I am in the process of changing priorities so that this site and a couple of others can get the attention they deserve.  The funny thing is that once they hit that magical point you really don’t need to do much to them to maintain the traffic they get.  One of my blogs was getting right at 1400 visitors a day at the beginning or February.  The last post I made to it was February 2^nd and since then traffic has actually gone up to right under 1800 per day.  2 and a half months without posting to it and I have probably only seen the site 4 times since then and the traffic is increasing.  So keep heart if you are working diligently your time will come it is just a matter of time.

It is time to stop playing around and get serious about making money with your website. The answers to how to make money online are as varied as the number of websites there are online. If you are ready to get serious and start testing the market then you have to know a few things about your website first. How many visitors do you get per day? Where do your visitors come from? Why are they visiting your site? As a webmaster you need to take great care in tracking your visitors so that you understand why they visit your website. It is important to know what draws any person to a certain site.

I use Awstats to track my visitors. Awstats is an easy to install, easy to read, and comprehensive stat program. I like the fact that you can install Awstats directly from your c-panel and it gives great data. Awestats will give you visitor history by the month, day, day of the week, and time of day. The most important stats to me are the stats that tell me where my visitors come from and what search phase they used to find my site in the SERPS. With that information you can also search for the same terms and find out where your site ranks. You can also use that information to either continue to use that same terminology or change your keywords to garner the audience that you are trying to attract. Don’t be afraid to change things up a little to find the right keywords and audience. Making money with your website is much easier to accomplish once you understand your site and your visitors.

Take care to understand your visitor’s wants and needs, and then you will be able to give them exactly what they are looking for. It doesn’t matter if you are selling batteries at the lowest price in the word if your visitors are looking for candles. If you can’t do the copywriting yourself then hire someone who knows how to build great content. Hiring out your content work may be expensive but so is having a site that doesn’t sell. A good copywriter will only cost you money once, but the work lasts forever. You can potentially have an everlasting stream of income from one very well written piece of copy.

I often use test sites to test new software, scripts and ideas. To me it is essential to test things before you actually implement them on a working site. I know that it can be difficult for some to have this luxury, so I would like to extend the offer to anyone who is a member of netrat.com that I will set up a test site for any script or software you would like to try out before you implement it on your site. Or it may just be you want to try a new script to see if you would like to use it on an upcoming site.

The idea came to me today when one of our members Jinesh asked a specific question about a shopping cart function with Joomla. I set up the test site for him to work with and hopefully that will answer a lot of his questions about using that particular component of Joomla. Of course I am always here to answer questions but if you want to get some hands on with a new piece of software then just let me know what it is and I will do my best to get it set up for you.

Please make your request on the forum instead of emailing me directly. Forum post don’t get lost or put into the junk pile.