Free websites and blogs can only take a serious entrepreneur so far.  They’re a great sandbox for getting your feet wet and figuring things out, but they’re full of advertisements, gaudy templates and themes that reek of “free”.  It’s like doing business out of the back seat of your car – with a Hannah Montana sticker on the bumper.  Few people, if anyone, will take you seriously.

If you build your business on free sites, you risk losing everything because you do not own the site and it can be taken away from you for any reason.

In May 2009, Facebook disabled accounts with, what it “assumed”, were fictitious names.  People with legitimate accounts that have spent years building personal or business relationships had everything disappear in the blink of an eye.

When I first started using free blogs, Blogger shut down one of my blogs and to this day I don’t know the exact reason why.  It could have been because I was using it to pre-sell affiliate products.  It could also be because I hyperlinked every occurrence of my main keyword to my main website and they considered that spammy.  What did I know, I was a noob.  I couldn’t get back into the blog to fix it.  No amount of contacting them ever got an answer and I was forced to abandon it.  Can you imagine if I had built an entire business around that blog? 

I also know that using free WordPress.com blogs for business purposes is a violation of their terms and they will shut you down, too.

Many people starting out don’t know that because they never read the terms of service.  Stay away from free blogs.  You need to own your own blog or website.  Always remain in control of your business.

Before you can run your own website or blog you need your own domain name and web hosting.  The good news is, it’s cheap to get started and I’m going to give you my personal tips for doing it.

Warning:  Do not take advantage of “free domain names for life” when you buy web hosting.  They are only free if you keep your hosting account with them.  Plus, you will not own the name, the web hosting company will.  Always remain in control of your business.

Domain Registration

I’m not going to get real deep into selecting a domain name because that’s beyond the scope of this material.  However, I will leave you with a few guidelines. 

If you want to be found in the search engines, it only makes sense to include a keyword or two that people are using to find what it is you’re selling.  So if you’re an affiliate selling outdoor furniture, incorporating “outdoor furniture” into your domain name is nothing but beneficial.  BestOutdoorFurniture.com beats TomsDeals.com.  No one is going to be searching for outdoor furniture using the words “toms deals”, but they will be searching with “outdoor furniture”, even “best outdoor furniture”.

Only use a .com name.  Stay away from .net, .biz, .info and all the other dots if you can help it.  People don’t remember extensions so when they type in your domain name they will be typing your domain name and automatically adding .com to it.  So get found.  Don’t be invisible. 

Make a list of several domain names because the chances of finding something that isn’t already taken is going to be slim.  Oh, and to stay out of legal hot water, do not use trademarked names in your domain name. 

A great example of that is new businesses that come on board at Commission Junction or other affiliate networks frequently have no restrictions on their name.  Then affiliates will go hog wild snapping up domain names with the vendor’s name in them and spend weeks or months promoting and establishing an online presence.  Then sooner or later the vendor modifies its terms and suddenly bans the use of trademarked names.  It’s happened to me more than once.  It’s a knife to the core of your business.   

Hot Buying Tip

• Get your domain name at NameCheap.com. 
• $9.69 for a .com name, but use the coupon code and get it for $8.81.
• They don’t sneak stuff into the shopping cart during checkout like other registrars.
• They have a very easy to use Domain Manager interface.
• NameCheap is a great domain registrar, but don’t buy web hosting there because you pay too much.  Just get a domain name.
• Be sure to enable the free privacy manager on the domain.  It will hide your personal details from spammers.  goDaddy charges $8.99/year for privacy protection.  At NameCheap, it’s free for the first year and renews at only $2.88/year after that. 

Web Hosting

In order for your new domain name to be seen online, you need to have it hosted by a web hosting company.  It pains me to see web hosting companies take advantage of their customers, so I will only recommend companies with outstanding customer service and reliability.  I also wouldn’t recommend something I don’t use myself.

Hot Buying Tip

SuperGreen Hosting- Unlimited green hosting with cPanel.  Very reliable.  My WordPress blogs run at lightning speed and customer service is quick and courteous.  Easy blog setup.

I hope you found these tips helpful for getting your business off on the right foot.

And if that number doesn’t wake you up and have you sitting on the edge of your seat, consider for a moment that he reached this level in less than a year. His company only started using AdSense in September 2004.

Calacanis runs Weblogs Inc., a network dedicated to creating trade weblogs across niche industries. And he’s quickly proven that AdSense is a credible advertising partner.

As their network has grown, so has their AdSense revenue. In January 2005 they earned an average of $580 per day. In March it was $737. In May it was $1,585. One day in July, just before he made the blog entry referred to above, they earned $2,335. Remember that is just for one day.  If they can take that daily average to $2,740 they’ll be earning a rate of $1 million for a year. And Calacanis predicts that reaching daily earnings of $3,000 or even $5,000 is quite achievable.

That’s quite an achievement. Keep in mind that Calacanis has 103 bloggers on the payroll and nine staffers. Even so, many webmasters would give an arm or a leg to have even a third of that.

Google’s AdSense has been revolutionary. It has become firmly established as the darling of the online advertising industry. Although rumors are heard of major competitors launching a similar service, AdSense’s premier position seems secure for now.

In essence, AdSense has made it possible for almost anyone with a web site or blog to earn some revenue from advertising, without having to employ sales people or spend precious time searching for advertisers. 

AdSense works like this. Webmasters sign up for an account in just a few minutes. They receive a small snippet of code to include on their web pages. Google will then automatically serve advertisements that are relevant to the content on the webmaster’s pages. When someone visits the webmaster’s site and clicks on one of Google’s AdSense advertisements, the webmaster earns a fee. Advertisers can pay anywhere from five cents to a hundred dollars per click, and the webmaster receives a percentage of that fee.

Many webmasters are content with earning five to ten dollars from AdSense to cover the cost of web hosting. But many, unsurprising, have higher ambitions. At a popular WebmasterWorld forum, participants share tips and encouragement on reaching a goal of $300 per day from AdSense. So it is no wonder that Calacanis created quite a buzz when he made his million dollar blog entry.

Google have proven once again that they excel at designing innovative Internet services. If you are in the web industry and have not yet used AdSense, then perhaps you should try it out. Or if you are already using it, perhaps Calacanis’ impressive results will encourage you to track the performance of your AdSense units more closely, fine tune their positions and formats, and take your earnings to a new level.

Calacanis’ million dollar blog entry can be viewed at: http://calacanis.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000403051129/

Blogs need NO “HTML” experience, making it straightforward for anybody to start. Most “Blog” communities online use what is known as a “WYSIWYG” HTML editor.

Did I lose you there with the “WYSIWYG” shortening. That simply stands for… “What You See Is What You Get”. A good way to make public “Information”. This is perhaps ONE of the most important advantages to Blogs because you’ve got the capability to post educational information in the shape of “Articles and / or Reviews” for your customers and / or readership that will make you appear to be a leading name on the topic and giving you INSTANT credibility in the eye’s of your reader. Reason six. You get your own URL. That is right, you get your own URL you may use in all your promotions and / or on your private site if you have one.

Need help marketing?  One marketing firm in Tampa will help you.

Article Marketing is a very important traffic generation strategy that have been discussed all the time. We have also heard of RSS feed Submitter to attract traffic. But this is something really fresh, the concept of getting traffic through Blog Carnivals.

What is a Blog Carnival

A blog carnival is a type of blog event. It is similar to producing a magazine, focusing on one niche topic, and is published on a regular schedule, often weekly or monthly. Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of a blog article that contains permalinks to other blog articles on the niche topic.

Blog Carnival posts are generally summarized by the author by soliciting relevant contributions from interested bloggers. The author collects links to these submissions, edits and annotates them and publishes the resulting round-up to his or her blog. Many carnivals have a home page or principal organizer, who lines up guest bloggers to host each edition. This means that the carnival travels, appearing on a different blog each time.

Attract Blog Carnival Traffic

Communities of blog readers, writers, and edition hosts form around specific carnivals. The carnivals provide an compilation of recent posts by the community on a given topic, and the host provides a level of editing and annotation that helps readers find posts they are interested in. Writers who submit their articles to blog carnivals are rewarded with traffic (if the host decides to give them a backlink and, perhaps, a positive review).

Blog Carnival List

Blog carnivals are being launched all the time from different blog owners for different topics. Some websites host a list of blog carnivals that were and currently active. You may browse through the large list and find suitable carnivals, that is related topics to your blog and submit your related blog post to these carnivals.

Since there can be many blog carnivals with similar topics occurring at the same time, you will want to maximize your effort by submitting to as many of these blog carnivals as possible. However, the process of going through the list of carnivals and submitting your blog posts to each and everyone of them can take an awful lot of time. To save your precious time, you could use a Blog Carnival Submitter that has a function to easily find related carnivals based on keywords and lets you submit your articles to all the related blog carnivals all at once!

What to Submit to Blog Carnivals

Submitting content or articles to Blog carnivals are somewhat different than submitting articles to Article Directory. With article directories, you do not really need to host your article in your own blog and simply include a link to any websites you wish.

With Blog Carnivals, you will need to actually submit articles that are written in your website. In other words, you are not submitting articles but submitting a link to your blog posts that contains your articles.

You can enter the web url of your blog posts into Blog Carnival Submitter and submit them to all related carnivals all at once. Hence saving the repeating time-consuming process of doing it one by one. You can also submit more than one blog post to all carnivals all at the same time.

If you have submitted a good article, you will be instantly rewarded by blog carnival owners with a reference to your blog post and attract unlimited amount of traffic for years to come.

Hence making use of Blog Carnival is definitely a good way to support your article marketing, search engine optimization and traffic generation effort.

For more information on traffic generation, internet marketing solutions and Free Download of tools, keyword research softwares and ebook, visit Internet Marketing Consultant website at www.BOBmarketing.com

Blogging for Profit Begins With a Long Term Plan

Many people dream of blogging for profit, and this goal
is not far beyond the reach of someone with average
intelligence, a willingness to work hard, and a basic
grasp of blogging technology. However, very few
people can easily make a profit from their
blog. Most people who attempt to make money with
their blogs do not succeed for two reasons. Often,
bloggers have unrealistic expectations of how fast their
readership will grow and how much money they will
make, and when these expectations are not met the
disappointment can crush the desire to continue
blogging. The other trap that many bloggers fall into
has to do with lack of planning. If you want to turn a
profit as a blogger, the key to success is to make a
realistic plan and stick with it.

To make money from blogging, the main thing that
you will need is a large readership. The higher your
traffic, the more advertisers will agree to pay you.
However, cultivating the regular visitors that you will
need in order to make a profit isnt easy. As more and
more blogs appear each day, having a great idea or a
wonderful writing style is no longer enough to get
attention. You need to be able to market your blog
effectively.

Too many bloggers waste time creating their own posts
and almost no time marketing their project. To be
certain, updating as often as you can is a great way to
keep your blog high on blogrolls and high in blog
search engines like technorati, and once your readers
know that you update frequently they will return to your
site on a regular basis. However, it does not matter how
often you update if nobody is reading your page, so don’t
skimp on the time that you spend drawing visitors to
your site. To make your dreams of blogging for profit a
reality, try decreasing your number of posts and using
some of that time to draw new visitors by setting up
link exchanges with other bloggers, making contacts in
the blog community, and following other established
modes of winning traffic.

Of course, even if you are a marketing genius or have a
really great idea for a blog, success is not going to
happen overnight. Building the kind of readership that
blogging for profit requires takes time, and in all
likelihood it will be at least several months before you
are able to turn much of a profit. Try to stay committed
to your blogging project during this initial rough period.
To stay motivated, set goals for how often you will
update and how many readers you want to attract, and
then reward yourself for sticking with your plan.

However, there are now some excellent software sollutions
to some of the above stated problems.
It is quite easy now, for a small fee, to turn your “Hobby”
blog into a successful “Home Based Business” opportunity.

If you have the desire, the need, and the time, to dedicate
yourself to learning how to market your blog, it is quite
possible to turn your blog into a full time money making
venture. But be warned! There are no “Get Rich Quick”
solutions. Running any business whether online or off
takes time, some cash, and patience!