Starting a home based business can be quite a chore if you are not sure where to start. There are many options to consider regarding web hosting, site development, and especially what products to sell. Well, today is your lucky day, I am going to get you started on the right track, without having to blow hundreds of dollars on useless tools that really don't work.
First of all you are going to want a website. This requires purchasing a domain name and some preferably cheap web hosting. Then you are going to need to learn how to create a website. That means you need to either have it done by someone else, or you can use a what you see is what you get editor such as netscape composer, which is what I use. It is simple, you just create your site how you want it to look, then there is a tab along the bottom where you can grab the html code and paste it into your hosting account.
What should you put on your website?
That is a great question that deserves alot of attention. First of all you should brainstorm about what kind of things you like. For example maybe you really like golf. That is great, you have a topic for your website. So maybe you could design a site that shows people how to improve their golf game. Wow, this is easy, so now you have a site topic and something to write about. What you want to do here is give people a good source of information. So, start putting some content on your site about golf. Now you need a way to make some money with your site, after all that is why you are reading this in the first place. What I am going to suggest here is affiliate programs. These are programs that allow you to promote other people's products and earn commissions without ever having to store, ship, or talk to customers. Here are some good sites to sign up with:
www.clickbank.comwww.amazon.com
These are just a few of the several out there. There are more you can find in the future, lets just keep it simple for now.
Sign up for these programs and then find some products that relate to golf that you can promote from your website. Great now you have a way to make money when people visit your site.
Website Promotion
There are numerous ways to promote your new website. I am going to explain the free, or low cost ways as I stated earlier. The best way to get traffic is to get a good ranking in the search engines. What you want to do is pick out some keywords for your website. Now the keyword golf will probably be very difficult to get a high ranking for so lets try to brainstorm and figure out some different keywords.
golf shoes
golf swing
good golf clubs
improving at golf
golf tips
golf tricks
you can probably think of some more.
Now what you want to do is visit www.overture.com and use their keyword search tools. Click on the Keyword Selector Tool. Type in your keyword. The result will be how many times that word was searched for last month. I can see golf shoes was searched for about 32,000 times last month. Now just for example sake, say you choose golf tips as the main keyword on your site. You want to scatter that word throughout the page in a readable manner that won't look like you are spamming. A good tool to check this is keyworddensity.com. Just type in your website address and then the keyword. You want a density between 2-9%. This will help you in your rankings. You can also choose other keywords for your site, I would keep it around 3-4 keywords though.
Now you want to promote your keywords by getting inbound links to your website or exchangine links with other "similiar website". You don't want to join any Free for all or link farm. Just look for sites that are consistent with yours. This is a chore, but it does pay off. I'll prove it. Here is my keyword: Internet Home Business Go to msn.com and search for this keyword. You will find my site www.internet-business-at-home.com ranked at #8 (as of 5/11/2006). So obviously my linking strategy has paid off.
How to find people to exchange links with
Search for your keyword golf tips in a search engine, then take a site on the first page and type in link:the url of the site.com , this will bring up every site that has a link pointing towards that site. Contact those sites and see if they will exchange links with you
Write articles and start a blog
Write atricles and include a link to your page in the article. There are several sites where you can post free articles. Just do a search for article websites on any search engine. Make sure you include a link to your website in the article or at the bottom, it depends on the rules of the particular site.
Submit your site to the search engines
Now go and submit your site to the major search engines, they will spider your site and pick it up pretty soon, don't be discouraged it does take some time for the search engines to get your site, but if you follow these directions you will get there.
For more information and some free resources visit Work at Home
