For anyone who is looking to make money from any form of Internet marketing, be that affiliated sales, network marketing, e-book/information product sales or direct selling the basic requirements are the same.

• Provide informative website content, that builds rapport with your website visitors.
• Produce Internet content (web pages) that are accessible to the website search engines so that visitors can find your content.
• Create an email list of visitors to your website, so that you send further information anf offers. This is THE most important aspect to your marketing activity. If you can build an email list from your website visitors, ie. from people to whom you’ve already provided valuable information, then you have a potential gold mine for future marketing activity.
• Produce content for your website based on known search statistics, i.e. know what searches people are already making, provide content that meats this demand and you will be guaranteed free visitors direct from the search engines.

OK, so what tools do you need to use to provide this website content, and start building your list of interested visitors.

• Website Authoring Tool - e.g. Wordpress
• Website Host Account - e.g Bluehost or HostGator
• Keyword Search tool - e.g. Wordtracker
• Squeeze Page Generator - e.g. Squeezetheme for Wordpress

First and foremost you need a website authoring tool. The one I recommend, if you hadn’t already guessed is WordPress.  Why Wordpress? Primarily because it’s free (open source) and has lots free tools you can bolt on to help you market your website. There is loads of online help (including this blog) for advice hints and tips on using Wordpress to build your income generating website.

Secondly, you need somewhere for your website to live, i.e. you need a host for your sites.  Here I recommend a Bluehost account.  This is not free, but is definitely good value for money. It will cost you around $100 per year, but his account can be used to host many websites, so you can have your main website/blog hosted here plus several others for additional marketing and sqeeze page activity. The beauty of a Bluehost account is the almost instand Wordpress installation scripts that are provided, at the click of a few buttons you can have a new blog installed and available for editing/viewing.

Thirdly, to help build content that will attract visitors you will need to know exactly what people are already searchng for. If you can provide content that matches the search words and phrases that people are entering into the search engines, then provided you’ve also done some research on the competition, you’re going to get some hits to your site. One of the best tools available for keyword research is:  wordtracker - Learn Wordtracker Here.

Finally, to help pull all things together and to create a great looking site for your content, and where you can quicly and simply build “squeeze pages”  so you can start building you contact list of potential buyers… then you can’t go wrong with sqeezetheme.com (for WordPress of course!)

Help with Getting Listed on Google Quickly

Check out this site from Aaron @ Fultiltblogging.com, he has a new video course about to launch on Friday (14th November) that will demonstrate how he got a niche website listed #1 on Google in less than 24hrs.

http://www.fulltiltblogging.com/fastniche/

Aaron uses a for the demo Fun Home Theater as the niche.

This article attempts to show how the components of Wordpress fit together to help you build your “living blog”.

1. The Wordpress Base Code:

When you first decide that you want to produce a website or blog, and you select Wordpress as your choice of authoring tool, then imagine this as the conception and the “birth” of your Blog. When you first install Wordpress, then your baby blog is now born… it has everything you need to start your blog growing, but you need to nurture it, feed it and love it to help it grow and build it’s character.

2. The Wordpress Theme:

Selecting a Wordpress theme gives your blog two thing’s.

• Firstly the templates for Pages and Posts that provide the Structure of your blog, the living blog’s skeleton.
• Secondly the theme will have a stylesheet, this is the look and feel of your site, it’s Clothes, style and part of it’s character.

3. The Content. Pages and posts.

As you start to add pages of content and posts to your blog, this is where you add the muscles, the living tissue, the brain, nerves, organs, veins and arteries. The content you add gives your blog it’s life blood and it’s spirit. Without your content, your blog is lifeless. As you build the content, your blog will develop it’s character.

4. The Plugins:

Plugins are snippets of code written by smart people that help to add specific functionality to your blog. They give your blog special skills to do new tasks and tricks. Adding Plugins are like sending your blog to school and university, or sending it on a specialist training course. Some Plugins can help to make your blog more productive, help it to connect with other blogs. They can help your blog to earn money. They are the working tools for your blog to use.

5. The Theme Stylesheet (or CSS)

Previously mentioned in the Theme section, the Stylesheet defines how pages and posts are displayed, which fonts and font sizes are used for each section. It defines color and any background images to use and everything related to how your blog looks. The Stylesheet is your blogs fashion sense… It’s spirit, soul and character will be defined by the content written in posts and pages, but the way it appears is defined by the Stylesheet.

I hope this light hearted article can help you picture the bulding blocks for your Wordpress Blog.