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!)

Here’s a neat Tell-A-Friend Plugin that I use.

www.freetellafriend.com

or from the Wordpress.org plugin search pages:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tell-a-friend/

What does the “Tell A Friend” Plugin Do?

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Install New Wordpress Themes Help Page.

Ok, you’ve got your Wordpress Blog Installed and you’ve had a go at creating your first Wordpress Pages and WordPress Posts.

Now you want to intall a new Wordpress theme to your blog to give it a professional appearance. This page gives you the step by step instructions for installing a Wordpress Theme to your self-hosted Wordpress Blog.

As with all Wordpress Installs, the process is always the same.

• Find the object to install from an internet site
• Download it to your PC
• Unzip the files
• Upload the files to your Blog
• Activate it.

Read the rest of this entry »

What’s the difference between a Wordpress Page and a Wordpress Post:

Pages:

Wordpress Pages are the static pages of your website. They are the pages you want to display from your top level menu and will remain static within your blog/website.

By default when you first install wordpress one page is automatically created for you the “About” page. You can either edit this to give a quick biography to your visitors and start to build that all important rapport. Or, after you have created another page you can delete the default “About” page.

To Create a Page, login to your WP-ADMIN site and click on the menu options or “Write” and then “Write Page”…. give you page a title (keep this short as it will appear on the blog menu bar) and then enter the page detail in the standard wordpress WYSIWYG text editor.

Note: a couple of options on the right site of the page editor screen:

• Discussion: If you want to remove the comment option from the Page (these are often more relevant to posts) then remove the tick from this option.
• Page Parent: Use this option if you are creating “Nested Pages”. For example you may want a page for “Products” and then sub-pages for “Product A”, “Product B” etc.

Note: Categories do not apply to Pages … only to Posts!

Also, Pages are not Archived.

Posts:

WordPress Posts are the “articles” that you write for your blog. These are typically the daily/weekly (or what ever frequency) post that you will place to keep your blog fresh and updated with new content.

Each post you write can be assigned to one or many “Categories”. These give you an additional “Menu” in the Blog Sidebar to allow visitors to find relevant articles.

Wordpress will automatically Archive your posts so that over time you will have the latest articles available directly under each Category, and a seperate “Archive” menu for older posts. The options for how frequent (if at all!) articles should be archive is under your control from the “options” section of the WP-ADMIN pages.

To write a new post, login to you WP-ADMIN page and click on “Write” and “Write Post”.

What is the difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.com?

• You’ve had a look around the internet and decided that writing a blog is the way forward.
• You’ve looked at the available blogging solutions and have decided that Wordpress is the best blogging software for you.

But..

• You’ve heard about Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org… What’s this difference?

WordPress.com

Wordpress.com is an online service just like the google owned product blogger.com
With Wordpress.com you just register for an account, select a desired template and start creating pages and posts (articles).

Wordpress.org

Wordpress.org is the place to go to download the Wordpress software so that you can host the website yourself. Why would you want to go through the hassle of doing this when you can get a free site from wordpress.com?

Here’s a benefits for hosting your own blog:

1. You own the content, no-one can remove the content at their discretion. This has happened to a coupe of affiliate marketers I know who were marketing products in the online gaming arena. The terms and conditions of the online blog restricted this content, so after they had spent weeks building a content rich website and started to build traffic to their site… it was deleted overnight without their knowledge.
2. You can include adverts on your website to “moneytorize” you site.
3. You can add any number of “plugins” to your website to enhance its functionality.

What is a Blog and Why Should You Produce One?

The word “Blog” is word that grew from the combination of two words “Web Log”. Early Blogs were just that … a log of entries on a webpage that formed an Online Diary.

Blogs have now evolved into fully functional Content Management Systems (CMS). i.e. Websites that are owned and managed by individuals, where it is easy to create new pages (post articles) and use existing themes/templates to create great looking websites.

The basic structure of a Blog allows you to create pages that people can then comment on (although you can switch that function off, or limit the commentors to registered users), thereby making your website more interactive to visitors and they are more likely to return.

Why Do You Need a Blog?

You may want to create a Blog just for your personal about me/us pages to keep family and friends updated on things you’re doing. Create Photo albums to share, or just keep an online diary for yourself.

If you have a business to promote, a blog is a great way to keep customers and prospective customers/clients up-to-date on your products and services.

Here’s a recent quote from BusinessWeek Magazine:-

“Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business-including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)”

You will find the full article at BusinessWeek.