Boost up your earnings with discussion boards.

Not too long ago I received this email:

Message sent Sunday, May 20, 2007, 12:01 am [EST] From: elisabeth
Message: Hey there! I've read a couple of your contributions to the Amazon affiliate boards. I like the layout of your site. I'm planning to set up a community website and want a discussion board like what you have here. Did this come with your webhosting plan? I'm still trying to figure all this out. I read somewhere that you need mySQl or something like that. Also can't figure out best way to design a webpage. Go for dreamweaver (hard to learn, I think), Spinmaster gets good reviews on Amazon. Did sign up for and play a little with Yahoo's webdesign software. Not thrilled with it. But nothing to compare it to. Yikes! So much to figure out. Any advice you give would be greatly appreciated! I like your nice clean look! - Elisabeth

I answered her questions in a fast reply, and told her that I had set up my discussion boards with a hosting company. She was very happy to hear this type of reply. This is actually a very easy way to set up discussion boards on your website.
You have various options:

• Add categories related to your website's content only
• Add categories related to your website's content and other categories that might interest other readers.

You can visit my discussion boards located in my website. This way you can have an idea of which forums you can add to your main categories. There are great monetary benefits when adding discussion boards in your online business:

• When you opt to add your own advertisements (by signing up with any "Ads" program") to your boards you are gaining the absolute power to earn money while other visitors (not members) just simply read a message.

Remember that...

• discussion boards might take years to get developed successfully.
• you might want to start posting interesting messages to attract more visitors.
• you should place your logo at the top of the page.
• you should invite friends and family members to join.
• you should add your boards link to traffic exchange programs and link exchange programs that I have previously mentioned to you.
• setting up rules in your boards the right way will help other users feel safe where they are at.
• offering a free advertising section in your forums will attract the attention of new members, adding even more useful information to your boards.

If you are patient, and let your discussion boards run without giving up, you will see how your earnings will increase and get multiplied as the months go by. Thanks for reading. I will come back next week with some more useful tips!

The importance on getting related to other businesses.

There is nothing more influential in attracting more customers than getting related directly to other businesses. Companies that do not necessarily must have been established for a decade but have developed a decent amount of customers and a good traffic to their websites are an excellent target for your online business.

You need to have in mind that the customers:

• See you featured and they will most likely trust you more than any other new businesses out there.
• Will subconsciously keep your website's name in their minds forever.
• Judge. They will understand that you are really important and that they will consider you as a highly repectable business.

But how can an entrepeneur do this and how will another company take you seriously? The following are very important points to remember when forming these type of relationships.

• Create different things: Anything that is out of the ordinary in your website is being searched by many businesses. (Example: contests)
• Be professional: Do your best in doing a clean job on your website's layout and content.
• Do not beg: There is a 95% chance that this business will let you know that it is interested in doing some type of network with you. Be natural.

I will tell you a little bit about my own experiences. A few months ago I had started to observe that video contests were now so much popular than a few years ago because nowadays most of the people own a regular videocamera or just simply a webcam. Furthermore, many people have become computer literate, making them capable of adding very basic special effects to it.

So I started a free topic video contest at YouTube, and I had no one upload a video for it. One day, I saw and ad of a website called Votigo (multimedia contests). I wanted to try it out, so I created a personal profile with them. I opened up a new contest there just so that my contestants could embed their video in it and get a vote, making it a potential resource on my decision towards who would become the winner. Once the administrator went over it, he wrote me a letter saying: "Your contest sounds interesting. Why don't you move your contest completely out to my website and I feature you there"? I accepted immediately. However, before taking my decision I thought about various factors that could affect my decision:

Factor: 1. Is this a really popular website?

Action: I made a page rank check and went over everything on the website to verify if it had a large audience.

Factor: Will the people really notice me?

Action: I realized that my promotion would be only one click away from the homepage.

Everything I thought was measured very carefully and positively.

It is very important that once you develop a business relationship with another website you demonstrate that you are a highly trustworthy person, respectful, and that you stay firm in your decisions and your determinations. Please think about various ways of doing something a little out of the oridinary in your website and showing it to the world. This is the way of people to noticeand trust you more every day that goes by. I hope you found today's post easy to understand. Please do not hesitate in emailing me with questions or posting comments in this blog and be sure to check back next week with a lot more interesting ways in your journey to success!

Now let's talk about Page Rank

Once we start generating some traffic, we need to think about ways on increasing our page rank. Page rank is a function that measures quality and the number of links pointing to a website. Larry Page and and Sergey Brin (Google founders) developed this algorithm while at Standford University in 1998. This is a topic widely discussed by SEOs, which are search engine optimization experts. The google's page rank works on a scale of 0 to 10. Now, you do not necessarily need to hire a SEO to start working on increasing your level in this matter. Before continuing, you might want to bookmark this page for future reference since what you will be able to see now will make an impact in your business forever.

The first thing you need to do is check your page rank. Xenyo's website offers a very good tool. All you need to do is type in your homepage in the box, and you will get a report on your rank level and on the indexed pages for your domain.

The next thing you need to do is to analyze your metatags. You can do this by visiting the website of submitexpress and use their tool. Type in your homepage, and you will get a full report on the keywords found in your webpage. You will be able to find out whether your keywords, title and description are highly related to the content of your website or not.

After viewing the results, you need to act upon them if it is necessary. For example, you need to do your best to keep your keywords to a maximum of 20 in quantity (search engines act like a magnet with this). Have your main keyword appear both in the description and title. Your main keyword is basically what your website is mainly consisted of. When you have added your main keyword in both the title and description, you have already made a huge step in speeding up the process of increasing your page rank. Furthermore, if you would like to enhance it, add it to your slogan.

These are the following steps you should take before, during, or after analyzing your website's metatags:

1. Give reasons to others to publish positive things about you. You can create a new trend in business. In other words, you do not need to be an ordinary online store. Spice your business up! (We will go deeper in future posts about this). When people see you are doing something unusual for a business like you, it calls their attention and they make you part of their own website's content (which you shouldn't mind, of course). You can see an example of this in my discussion boards (special forum called: "What others have to say about us")
2. Sign up for automated link exchange programs. Unlike normal traffic exchange programs, There are some automated link exchange programs that allow you to simply upload a document containing a web directory in one of your pages. Your website will be automatically connected directly to thousands of others. That means that in just a matter of days you will notice your website all over the world once you type in your address in a search engine browser. Nevertheless, sometimes it takes months for some of these websites to show up on a search, but eventually they do. If you are still unfamiliar with uploading these type of documents, and you would like then to have the website's administration host the directory for you, then you need to sign up with these types of automated link exchanges and in no time you will have a special link to paste on your website that will identify you as a unique member. On the other hand, you can opt to sign up also for automatic link exchange programs that will offer you credit in major search engines' "sponsored search" services just for signing up with them.
3. List yourself (manually) in traffic exchange directories. There are many websites out there looking to trade a link with you.This is something good, because this gives you the chance of selecting the websites that are similar to you in order to create content related to your website's theme. (This will eventually get you even a better place in the search engines). However, there are other websites, that offer to feature you in theirs without having to link back to them for a very low one time fee. These are all very good options in gaining exposure, and most importantly, a higher page rank.
4. Get your website listed at the top. Remember when I was telling you about placing your main keyword in your title and description? Do this: Make a search with this keyword. Do your very best in getting your website listed on the first page (or in any of its main subpages) that comes up. Get in touch with the webmaster to see what they can do for you. Keep trying for the next ones, in case the first one does not work out. Once you get this set up, check back often ( if possible everyday) to make sure that your website is still listed there. Once you have done this get ready to see very good things in a nearby future.
5. Get registered in discussion boards. There are still some discussion boards that get their pages indexed quickly by google and Yahoo and that will allow you to add your website's link to your signature. All your messages will count towards your increase in page rank because for every single response or message that you type down, the search engines recognize them as what they are; single links pointing to you!

In my next post I will be talking about a very important and rich topic that is the main key to exposure. "The relevance and the "how to's" in forming relationships with ... ". So check back, and remember that I will always keep you in my mind!

Building Traffic

When starting an online business the first thing that will come up to your mind is: "Where will I get my visitors from?" Building Traffic is one of the easiest things that you will be able to do once you begin this wonderful and profitable step in your life. The only thing that you need is time. Here are some points that you should remember before taking any action as far as obtaining traffic is concerned.

• Natural and fast flowing traffic cannot be generated in a blink of an eye. This is a process that can take a few months. You need to understand that every entrepeneur has gone through the same process as you have and what works best for this goal is to marry: "Patience".
• People need to get to know you and absolutely begin to trust you. Some customers will love your website, but they will wait some time to see if ou are a real business.

I will offer more explanation on these important points in some of my future posts.

You might want to consider adding your website to traffic exchanges. It has great advantages:

• Impressions: Everytime someone visits your website they will search for the title. This is a very important connection. You need to make sure that your title is easily visible to others and matches the layout and colors of your website. An impression is a lot more worth than you can imagine.
• Search Engines: Whether your visitors are buying your product or not on a specific day, the search engines will still be able detect the continuing increase of visits and this will help your website in obtaining a faster and higher rank.

One of my favorite traffic exchanges are those that allow webmasters to create questions about their websites in order to make sure that the visitor actually has read part of its content. These types of link exchanges have an exclusive method of evaluating these questions. They want to make sure that the visitors read in part the websites, but at the same time they will work on having answers that are easy to find. In other words: you create the questions, and the multiple answer choices. As strange as it might sound to you, look for yourself and you will be amazed on how these type of traffic exchanges work. Try one today, and you will witness how your traffic will start growing from the very first day that you sign up. I hope that you found my first post very useful and believe me, I will not forget about you.