Starting an E-Biz - Part 2: Choosing Domain Names and Hosting

Welcome back fellow Blogtrepreneurs to the 2nd part in my series of How To Start Your Own E-Business. In the previous issue, we looked at How To Plan Your E-Biz.

In order to start any type of business online, you need to have a website, or a “virtual address” where potential customers can come and visit you to find out more about your product. The domain name of any company is their online address, and it is this address which needs to be just as appealing or recognised by others who may buy your products.
The key to success in choosing a domain name is to firstly always buy a .com name. In most cases, especially with common terms or niches, your desired domain name will already have been bought buy someone else. If this is the case, try and contact the owner to see if they are willing to give up the domain name for a set amount of money.
If this fails, then .net or .org extensions are the next best. Finally if these names are taken to, then there are 100s of TLD’s that are of course less popular. Extensions such as .us or .co.uk lack credibility in my opinion, however, it can appeal to customers from the same country.

To register a domain name, I personally prefer 1and1.co.uk, they are friendly, their customer support is pretty good and their services online are easy to use. Pricing for a .com name at the moment is only £8.89 per year, but that price can only decrease over time. For a cheaper solution .co.uk are a breathtaking £1.99 per year, a bargain!

Once you have registered your “virtual address”, you now need a “virtual residence” where you can place all your information regarding your business in one place,
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Starting an E-Biz - Part 1: Planning your business

Welcome to my four part series on How To Start Your Own E-Business. In these series of articles I will cover Planning your Business, Securing a Domain Name and Hosting, Site Design and Content and Marketing your E-Site.

So, let’s focus on Planning your first E-Business. To start any business, especially an online, I would recommend focusing on what you enjoy doing. It might be playing golf, knitting, reading books or cooking. To be an entrepreneur in this field, you need to be genuinely interested in what you are selling, otherwise, you may lose interest and that will result in a loss of sales and money.
Now, using this category (eg. golf), jot down some rough ideas on the type of golf-related item or information that you could use for your site. Don’t get me wrong. Information can sell just as well as a physical golf product, things like Ebooks have become famous for their ease in creation and for their cheap manufacture and shipping. However, you will still need a website in order to sell your final product.

Once you have a few ideas, for example golf tees and balls, try and think of a way in which you can stand yourself out from the crowd. If you search for golf tees on Google, there are hundreds if not thousands of small or large businesses hoping to make it big by selling these tees. However, they are faced with too much competition, resulting in lower sales prices, and lower profits. If you can come up with a novel concept or an idea which has little competition then you could be onto a winner. I came up with the great idea of selling personalized golf balls and tees. Although there is competition, this is limited, allowing me to make a good profit on my items.

Planning your website before creating it, will also help you focus your goals, and avoid useless information on the site. I recommend making a site flow, i.e. draw a simple page which shows links, and navigation around the site, no images or content, merely the site frame.

Once you have planned your site’s navigation then things such as layout, colour schemes and content will be easier to add, however we will cover this topic and other more thoroughly in my next articles.

In order to take your business to the next level you need a exchange 2007. Share all of your company files and documents with outlook exchange. Exchange hosting and business email hosting can take your business to the next level.  A popular form of exchange hosting is coldfusion hosting, which can speed up business email systems.

What’s New on Google Adsense?

I thought that I should just update what’s going on in the world of Adsense.
The Adsense staff have now added a single page “Make an Adsense Code” for all the Adsense veterans amongst us. I think this was because they received a large number of complaints from the more experienced Adsense users.
AdSense have also introduced a referral program for AdWords so now you can earn $20 for referring a new advertiser to the program (once they spend their first $100).
Although I myself have not had much success with Adsense or any other referral programs from this particular blog, I do have some more ideas in the pipeline so that I can get my first $100 cheque!!!
Anyway, keep blogging away!

Selling Niche Products

I regularly hear from Internet entrepreneurs (such as Robbin Tungett and blogger Yaro Starak), that selling Niche products is the key to success.
But what is a niche product to start with?
A niche is a category, not one of those diverse categories such as “sport” or “films”, but a more defined and generally speaking, a niche which appeals to less people. A few examples of this could be “dog food” or “wallets” or “car exhausts”.

According to a wide variety of sources, it is niche products that can cause repeat buying (i.e. buying multiple items from the same person), and an increase in sales. Also, another advantage is less competition from similar sellers.

Let me take a real life example from what I have been selling on eBay recently. Every month I acquire too much contact lens solution, and so I decided to research this on eBay. I listed an item of this solution, and the item attracted bids and sold at around £5. Since then, every contact lens solution I have listed has attracted bidders, and there are at any one time only 20-30 items online at a time = less competition!

I would recommend to anyone to start researching a niche product which they can sell on eBay or on their website. Start by going to www.alibaba.com to research an item. Then go to eBay to find the potential profit on an item (use completed listings function to help), and then finally, search on google to find any competition from other websites.

To your success…

How To Make Money on the Internet - Part 3: Affiliates

In previous posts I have covered various money making sites and opportunities for example Part 1: eBay and Part 2: Google Adsense.
However, for many people, it has been the use of affiliate links on websites which have provided the largest percentage of all website revenue. So I’ll try and explain the major points surrounding such a vast topic.

What is an affiliate scheme?
You have a website and want to make money, so you enroll yourself in an affiliate or associate scheme. Let’s take Amazon.com for example. In return for signing up, Amazon asks you to place a piece of html on your site, which enables their ads to be seen on your site. Then every time one of your visitors click on the Amazon link, and buy a product from Amazon, you get commission from that sale. These percentages range from 5% to 7.5% of the product price. Amazon then sends you a cheque or money can be sent by Direct Debit (why can’t Adsense have this?!).

The amount of money you can make through Affiliates like this are endless, and all of the thousands of schemes out there offer you different commission fees, so shop around for the best payers.

Affiliate Optimization Tips…
Although I do not use any affiliate schemes on my Blogger site (as it does not allow me to do so), I have read articles from other bloggers on how to benefit the most from placing associate ads on your site:

1) Place affiliate ads that are relevant to your website genre/content: If like me, you are running a Business and Entrepreneurial site, with loads of information about how to make money, you don’t want ads around your pages showing products for Table Tennis or Horseriding. Target your audience. Put yourself in their position. What would I buy if
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