Starting Out On Internet Business?

What advice can I give to those who are starting out?

Maybe that I am a technical guy — HTML, programming, Photoshop, graphics are all my expertise. And people come up to me saying that they don’t know how to build a website.

Yes – you can build a business on the Internet without a website – have been done and proven. But I knowing how to build a website is still an important skill.

On good news is — your website don’t have to be super cool with all the bells and whistle. Clean simple design would do best. I know because most of my sites (not this one) are UGLY. Well, maybe ugly is too much, but I can say that they won’t win any design awards.

So — One thing, you must learn how to build a website.

Now you can learn how to build a website with Frontpage or Dreamweaver for just $10. It’s a great interactive learning CD from Help.com. Just go over there and check it out — http://www.help.com

And another place that you can check if you are about to start an online business is Lynn Terry’s dedicated page on that. She compiled good information and you may want to check it out. A lot of online business ideas there.
http://www.selfstartersweeklytips.com/ebiz/business-ideas.htm

And another note — consider visiting my DIY Minisite – htt://diyminisite.com — I have a series of videos on how to build minisites using NVU. And also some minisite templates in there.

Adsense – Making any sense?

Not that I don’t earn from Adsense. Doing fairly well across 10 sites (some are new, almost no traffic). But what Phil Wiley mentioned in his newsletter recently make sense.

What is it … it’s about how Adsense income is so fragile. And I agree with that. It has happened to me as well.

One time ago I was rocking Google with my computer case website. But after that Florida update – it was washed away with the waves. Luckily for me, almost instantly after that, Yahoo and MSN picked up my site. So now I am still doing good with the computer case website. But I see how fragile it is.

And another time, I have a website specifically about a paintball brand. Not big – just 7 pages or so. Didn’t do well in Google but it was rocking MSN and Yahoo. Yahoo contributed most traffic. But somehow, now Yahoo put me in 3rd page from 1st page previously. Luckily MSN didn’t do much.

And I heard another story I read from a search engine forum. A lady who was earning good income from Adsense wanted to move her website to another domain name. So she did all the 301 permenant redirect — and her ranking is now no where to be found. Because she doing very well previously, she even hired people. Now she has to lay-off those employees. And Google is ignoring her when she contacted them.

And I heard another story from a fairly known marketer here in Malaysia. He said that his earning from Adsense dropped 70% this month. He’s smart that Adsense is not his main income source.

Maybe I have been lucky all these while … but I don’t like to depend on luck.

So I have been thinking – what else should I do?

Perhaps it’s time to look into recurring commissions, or online MLM, or create more products of my own. Hmmm … I like creating products because I feel that I have control over it. But as of right now, if I have to do a lot of PPC, I don’t think that I can afford it yet.

Why?

Well, I go with a payment processor. And when I have my credit card charged for the PPC, my earning from the payment processor will only come like 2 months later. They’ll keep it for a month as safe deposit — in case of fraud, refunds or chargebacks. Then only they’ll send me a check, which takes about 14 days to arrive. And then when I deposit it to the bank, there another 30 days to clear.

BTW – it the same thing with Adsense — only that I don’t have credit card charges to clear.

If you have any comments about this, please share … would love to hear from you.

My site was indexed by Google in just 48 hours!

My latest site that I launched on the weekend has been indexed by Google. If I remember this correctly, this is the fastest ever that I have indexed by Google. I know – nothing new here. Feels great though, so that’s why I am sharing this.

I think the best thing that you can do, if you want to be indexed by Google quickly, get in high PR link partners. Having a link from a PR5 website should increase your chance of getting indexed.

But one thing though – getting indexed does not mean getting good rankings. That’s a different thing. But getting indexed is a good start.

In case you are wondering, I only have one page in Google’s database for now. To see whether you are indexed and how many pages you have indexed, try this query on Google.

site:yourdomain.com

You can also click on the cache link to see more details – like when Google crawled to your site.

I hope by next month, Google has crawled and indexed the rest of my new website.

Are You the Coolest Guy on the Planet?

There has been some competition for that spot. So are you going for that spot as well.

If you don’t know what I am talking about, try typing ‘Coolest Guy on the Planet’ (without quotes) in Google and see the SERPs.

You can find a number of pages by top SEO experts – Brad Fallon, Brad Callen, Andy Jenkins and Jason Brashear.

I know that these people are picking on each other. On some week, one guy maybe top, on another, the other guy may be top.

I just find this thing amusing, and entertaining – just feels like sharing this.

DIY Mini Site went live

Finally …

With work, the little adorable new kid and getting DIY Mini Site up and running, it was such an adventure. I took 2 days off on Monday and Tuesday to oversee the launch. And stayed up to 4am to put in final touches. And I was up by 6am, 4 hours before the launch.

DIY Mini Site did encounter some hiccups as the registration form was not working. But all went well. I had to fix that and sent an email apologizing for the troubles.

Anyway, if you want to learn more about building profitable minisites, then head over to DIYMiniSite.com and just join in.

I plan to add more content there. One thing for sure is that I will add in 2 more new templates – I promised subscribers because of the earlier form problem. And since I got a few more stories that came in a bit late, I’ll add that too … at a special place in DIY Mini Site ;).

To this moment, there are 75 subscribers … hope that will increase more …