Home Page Tips

10 Steps To Setting up your blog as your web site.

Setting up your blog does not have to take days or weeks. It can be done in as little as few hours or a few a days if you simply have a good idea of what you want to accomplish with the blog, and the right header, images, software and web site host.

Here are my 10 steps to building and marketing your blog.

1.       Register domain name.

2.       Set up hosting for your domain.

3.       Use the Fantastico interface to save time installing the Word Press blog software.

4.       Create header image and upload it.

5.       Install plugins to make your life easier!

a.       Adsense manager – Control and arrange your AdSense & Referral blocks on your Wordpress blog. With Widget and inline post support, configurable colors.

b.       WP_ContactMe is a free WordPress plug-in that provides you with a very configurable contact form. Allowing multiple subject and also SPAM protection By DCoda Ltd.

c.       Multi Author Comment Notification – Get email notifications for comments made at other author’s posts as well.

d.       Article Templates – Enables template support for posts and pages.

e.       My Page Order – Allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. The default method of setting the order page by page is extremely clumsy, especially with a large number of pages.

f.         Insights – Allows you to quickly access and insert information (links, images, videos, maps..) into your blog posts.

g.       All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog.

6.       Set up your google Adsense if you want to generate Adsense income.

7.       Create ads on the side of the blog if you want to generate ad income.

8.       Start posting articles to your blog.

9.       Start posting the articles to Article submission sites to drive traffic to your site.

10.      Add your tags and key words to your All in One SEO Pack plugin to drive traffic to your site.

If you feel you learn better by watching videos of me building a blog, you can check out my  videos showing you how to do all this at http://www.howtobulidablog.com if you learn faster by watching it done!

My best business ideas to you,
John Davin

So, you’re building your own home page. Here are the tools and resources that will help you to:

• Save time
• Save money
• Automate every step
• Make more money, today and in the future.

Let’s get started!

My best business ideas to you,
John Davin

Your homepage is generally the first thing that people see when they visit your website. That’s why it is so important to make sure that your homepage quickly engages the visitor and lets them know exactly what your website has to offer.

If you have a business website that offers a product or a service then it is your homepage’s job to let people know exactly what you are offering and what solutions you can provide to help solve their problems.

The overall design of your homepage is very important as well. The design of your website is one of the first things that people will notice, and as a general rule the design of your homepage is going to set tone for the look and feel of the rest of your website as well.

As you can see the home page of a website is an extremely important, often times the most important, part of a website design. It needs to communicate to visitors the purpose that your website serves, have a design that is pleasing to the eye, and have an intuitive navigation system in place of visitors can quickly and easily find the information they’re looking for on your website.

If your website is designed to sell a product or service it is also a good idea to have a lead capture mechanism on the home page of your website. This allows your homepage to collect highly targeted leads from your customers and give you the ability to market to them for a long time even after they leave your website.

A good service to use for building an e-mail list is Aweber. Simply sign up for the service, they will generate a small piece of code that you can put on your website to create the opt in form, after that it’s simply a matter of writing e-mails. Everything else is handled automatically by Aweber.

One of the very first decisions that you’ll have to make before you build your first website is which web hosting company to work with.

Choosing a web host is an extremely important decision. There are literally hundreds of companies to choose from, and every hosting company has their own unique benefits and drawbacks.

There are many companies that offer free Web hosting as well. If you are building your site for commercial purposes, or expect to receive reasonable amount of traffic, then choosing a free web host is probably not in your best interest.

Free hosts will usually require you to let them place advertisements on your site, have strict restrictions on the amount of traffic that you are allowed to receive your site, and are generally counterproductive for a website that is commercial in nature.

On the other side of the coin there are many hosts out there who charge $100 or more per month in order to host your website. These companies generally offer dedicated servers for a high monthly fee. These hosts are a good choice for established websites that receive high volumes of traffic, but provide much more space and bandwidth than a typical website is going to use.

For the majority of websites it’s a good idea to choose the middle ground. Hostgator is one of the most reliable web hosts in the industry. They offer a 99.9% up-time guarantee, and they have plans starting as low as $6.95 per month. They also provide bigger plans for high traffic websites, making it easy to scale your hosting as your website grows.

Hostgator provides easy-to-follow video tutorials, an intuitive user control panel, and life support 24 hours a day, 365 days a year making them a great choice for both new and experienced webmasters.

The importance of having a lead capture system on your home page cannot be stressed enough.

Let’s take a look at a couple of very common scenarios. Let’s say a visitor stumbled across your site for the first time, they’re like what you have to offer so they go-ahead make a purchase. This is a great scenario right?

The answer is yes and no. The obvious benefit is that you have made a sale, and that’s great. But if you don’t have a way to capture that person’s name and e-mail address, there is a very good chance that they will purchase your product and never return to your site again.

You just let the most valuable kind of lead slip out of your hands. That person was a buying customer. They came to your site ready and willing to spend money, and now you have just let them walk away never to be seen again.

If you take the time to collect their name and e-mail address in the process, you could send out a weekly newsletter letting them know about special promotions, new products, and encouraging them to visit your site and make additional purchases for years to come.

Let’s take a look at the second possible scenario. A person visits your website, they liked what you have to offer, but they can’t make a purchase right away for one reason or another. Chances are they going to leave your website, and even though they liked your product, more than likely they going to forget about you, never return again, and never spend any money with you.

Had you taken the time to collect their name and e-mail address you can keep your business fresh in their minds. So when the time comes that they are ready to spend some money, they’ll return to your site and purchase your products or services.

That is why having a lead capture mechanism on your website is absolutely critical. The easiest way to get this is by using a service called Aweber. Aweber makes it easy for anyone to collect names and e-mail addresses, easily integrate the form it into your website, and automate your e-mail marketing campaigns.

Aweber is the industry standard for collecting names and e-mail addresses. They make it easy for you to do, easy for you to automate your e-mail marketing, and ultimately keep your customers coming back for more.

If you are collecting names and e-mails there is no doubt that you are leaving untold amounts of money on the table. Go ahead and sign up for Aweber right now. You’ll be glad you did.

Using a blog as your website’s content management system is more popular now than ever before. Blogs are extremely easy to update, are highly versatile in terms of design, and are very easy to optimize for the major search engines.

The most popular blogging platform is Wordpress. Wordpress is open-source, meaning that it is free to download. It also has an extremely large community of people who produce plug-ins, themes, and other add-ons, many of which are free to use.

So if you want to use a blog as your content management system, then Wordpress is probably the way to go.

There are two different ways you can go about installing Wordpress. The first way is completely automatic and literally takes about 20 seconds.

If you have a host that uses Cpanel and Fantastico, you can have Wordpress automatically installed at the push of a button. Hostgator is a great choice if you are looking for hosting provider.

Simply log into your Cpanel, scroll down to Fantastico, click on “Wordpress”, fill out the required information and you are done.

If you do not have access to Fantastico, Wordpress is fairly easy to set it manually as well. First you’ll need to create a Mysql database, as well as a user for the database and a password.

Next you’ll want to download the latest version of Wordpress from Wordpress.org. Open up the config.php file with a text editing program, and plug-in your site details in the appropriate fields. After you do that you will want to upload all of the files to your server using an FTP program. After you do that navigate to yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php.

Assuming that you’ve correctly set up your database and config.php file, you should be able to run the installation script and have Wordpress up and running in no time at all.

For more information on using Wordpress including help with installation, installing themes and plug-ins, and other Wordpress tricks and tips please take a moment to visit howtobuildablog.com.

Unless you are building a personal homepage to share with family and friend, chances are that you probably want to make money off of it. Here we are going to tell you how to do just that.

If you are selling your own products or services you’re already one step ahead. You have something to offer to visitors and that should be the focus of your home page. Whether you want to sell your products or services, or monetize your home page by selling other people’s products and services as an affiliate, it’s a good idea to have a lead capture mechanism on your home page.

By building a highly targeted mailing list and providing your subscribers with valuable information, you’ll be able to continue to market to them long after the website. A good choice for this service is Aweber. Aweber is an extremely easy way to capture names and e-mails of your prospects while they’re on your website.

If you don’t have your products and services to offer, there still plenty of different ways to monetize your homepage.

Affiliate Programs

There are literally thousands of different affiliate programs on the Internet, as it should be easy for you to find a product or service to promote that will be a good fit for your specific niche. Here’s a few affiliate networks to you might want to look into.

Azoogleads.com
Neverblueads.com
Marketleverage.com
Clickbank.com
CJ.com

Between all of the networks listed above you should find an offer that ties in nicely with the niche of your website.

Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising are services that allow you to be paid every time somebody clicks on one of your ad’s, or in some cases on a CPM basis. CPM means that you get paid a certain amount for every thousand visitors that see the ads on your website. Here are a few of the most popular contextual advertising services.

Google Adsense
Yahoo Publishers Network
Adbrite
Kontera

Contextual advertising services can be a great fit for many websites because the advertising networks read the content of your website and display highly relevant ads catering to your specific website niche.

Direct Advertising Sales

Some websites may perform better with direct advertising sales. This is where you actively seek out relevant advertisers and work out a deal where they can directly purchase advertising space from you on your website.

In most cases the only way to find out the most effective advertising model for your website is to test several different options, monitor the performance of the ads and the overall income generated in order to find out which advertising method is going to generate the most revenue for your website.

A website doesn’t do anyone any good if nobody ever sees it. That’s why it is critical to make sure that your website can be found by your customers in the search engines.

There are a few different ways you can go about this. One is pay per click advertising. You simply sign up for Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, purchased relevant keywords, and start driving traffic to your business.

The problem that you will run into is that there is a huge learning curve to paid search engine advertising, and you might not achieve the return on investment that you were hoping for.

Another option is to take advantage of online visibility programs such as the one offered by web.com. Web.com offers Internet visibility packages starting at around $70. These packages will get you listed in the search engines, get your site listed on major Yellow Pages business directories, and help to ensure that your website starts to receive natural, organic traffic from the major search engines.

There is no point having a website if nobody ever sees it. That is why it’s absolutely critical to make sure your website has as much exposure in the search engines as possible. Another great way to do this is take advantage of free online traffic services such as Traffic Swarm. Traffic Swarm is a very fast and efficient way to drive highly targeted traffic to your website without spending a ton of money in the process.

Other options include article marketing, directory submissions, blog commenting, purchasing links or hiring a professional SEO company to make sure that your customers easily find your website in the search engines.

Making sure that your site is ranks well in the search engines is a critical step to ensuring that your website is serving its purpose, and that is to drive additional leads and sales for your business.

If you want to design a website it is important that you understand the fundamental building blocks of web design.

Even if you’re using a content management system such as Joomla or Wordpress, or using premade templates with a what you see is what you get HTML editor it’s still important to understand how HTML and CSS work together to create web pages.

This article isn’t designed to teach you everything you need to know about HTML and CSS, but after reading it you should have a pretty good idea of how the two work together and how important a basic understanding of them is when you’re designing your websites.

HTML stands for “hypertext markup language” and has served as the basic building blocks of websites since the World Wide Web was created.

HTML is used to create the content, layout, and navigation of webpages.

CSS on the other hand stands for “cascading style sheets” and is used to apply decorations to a website. CSS is generally used to dictate the styles of text and positioning of elements on a website. An easy way to think about how CSS and HTML work together is that HTML is used “create” the website and CSS is used to define how the website is displayed to the end user.

CSS files are generally linked to the HTML document through an external style sheet.

CSS and HTML can seem extremely confusing at first. But the truth is if you spend a weekend or two studying HTML and CSS should have a basic understanding of how both languages work in no time at all.

If you’d like to build a website but don’t know how to code CSS and HTML by hand don’t worry. You still have a few options to choose from.

Many people have used what are commonly known as “WYSIWYG” HTML editors. “WYSIWYG” is an acronym for “What You See if Is What You Get” and these editors let you design your website and visual environment without having to edit the HTML code by hand.

There are quite a few different HTML on the market to choose from. Over the years the two most popular choices have generally been Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft Frontpge. Another popular choice is called XSitePro and is designed to be an easy-to-use alternative and is intended for use by people who do not have the time to learn all of the ins and outs of the more advanced HTML editing programs.

More recently open-source alternatives to the higher priced programs have become available. Nvu, now known as “Kompozer” is a free alternative to higher priced applications such as Dreamweaver and Frontpage.

Kompozer is free to download and has most of the same features as its high a priced alternatives.

While what you see is what you get HTML editors can be a great timesaver, it is still a good idea to have a basic understanding of how HTML and CSS work in order to use the editors effectively. You may run into problems throughout the design process that cannot be fixed unless you know how to edit the HTML files directly by hand.

If you want an HTML editor that is easy use even without knowledge of HTML then I highly recommend that you take a look at XSitePro. XSitePro was designed to be the easiest to use HTML and are on the market. You don’t need any HTML knowledge to get started, and even an absolute beginner can be working on their first website within a few minutes of installing the program.