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One of the best things you could do when planning to start a website as an online business is to make a plan for it. If you have a bit of experience with running a business, you will understand me right from the start.

Planning should not take too much of your energy, but don’t forget about it since it is one of the most important things and it will save you big time and money on the long term.

You should plan a few things from the start, and even if many won’t recommend starting from the money point of view, allow me to start right there:

1. What’s your minimum profit you would like to have from your website? How much would you like to get back from your online business each month. By the way, think realistic, not optimistic!
2. How will you make that money? Are you going to sell products or services? How much that product costs, how many should you sell per month based on your proposed profit? (Research needed)
3. What’s your market? How large is the competition? Are there many sites offering the same product you are offering? Is it possible to find a smaller niche, to be easier for you to make a name there? (Research needed)
4. Based on 1 and 2, how many products should you sell per month to reach the target? 5? 10? 500? 5000?
5. How many visitors you need to make a sale? That’s a tough one and I am afraid I can’t answer you this question since it depends heavily on your market, on your products, on discounts, on price, etc. Just as a tip, don’t think in terms of offline businesses. Let’s say you have a regular store and for every 10 persons entering your store you make a sale!Well, it won’t happen in the online environment. Depending on how targeted your traffic is, it may take you 10000 visitors to sell a product or it may take you 50. Pretty large range, I know, but that’s the situation.I can tell you that the more targeted the traffic is, the more you’ll sell. I have a site selling a particular baby product and I sell a product every 100 people visiting the site, which is pretty good and I have another site where I sell a product every 1000 visitors, offering discounts and other advantages to go with the sale. (Research needed here too)
6. How are you going to bring those visitors to your website? Another one that you will need to figure out for yourself. I will explain you various ways to bring visitors to your site, but you will need to tweak this to match your site and your market. It will be a never-ending story and a long road to go, but you will learn a lot on the way!

These are just a few points I suggest you think about when building an online business, it will make your life easier.

I learned it the hard way, I started quite a few websites without thinking about such things, and I must admit sometimes I get carried away by my enthusiasm and also have the impulse to start a website thinking well, I’ll see on the way.

That’s always a bad idea. Think about it this way: you want to start a website selling shoes, you put it online, but you don’t succeed to bring many people to your site or to have sales. After a while you decide to turn your site into a niche store, selling only leather sport shoes. Changing the site, reorienting it, will be a difficult task, more difficult than doing it from the start. It will need people to get used to your site, search engines will need time to reposition your site in search engine results sets, etc.

Just a few basic things, not fancy, but on the long term you will come to thank me for reminding you this! You will see!

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A lot of times I have heard people around me speaking about launching a site to boost their business.

That is good and I always support such an idea.

But, in most of those cases, the persons speaking about it doesn’t know much about the subject and he or she expects a pretty fast response in terms of business benefits.

I am sorry to disappoint you but it doesn’t work quite as easy as it sounds, there is more to it that meets the eye and you’d better learn everything you can on this subject before jumping the wagon.

I am not going to tell you to stop, I am not going to do this, but I will tell you to pay attention to what I am going to say further,  because it may save you quite a lot of money, time and work.

So, here we go:

1. A website does not bring visitors just because it exists. Pretty obvious but many people forget about this so I had to put it here. You need to bring visitors to your website, as many as possible and as targeted as possible. This is not an easy task to do and often this is THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE of your site. If you build the site let’s say in 2 months, promoting the site and bringing visitors to your site will be a never ending story! Period.
2. Not the quantity of traffic but the quality really matters! Or said in an other way, you need a targeted traffic in order to have sales. Let’s say that you manage to bring 100.000 visitors on your website, general traffic, people surfing on the internet and you think that you are going to sell a lot of products, yet you barely sell a couple of products. Why is that? Because the traffic was not targeted. You’d better manage to bring 10.000 people that are interested in what you sell and you will sell a lot more products. Trust me, this is how things work!
3. Not every traffic is the same, search engine traffic is the best in terms of conversions. This is related to the above and in strong relation to it. There are more types of traffic, like traffic from search engines, direct traffic, where people know you and come directly, traffic from social media sites, like Digg or StumbleUpon, traffic from emails, etc. Which one is better? Well, the best traffic ever is the one from search engines. And you know why? Because is answering a question. When somebody searches on Google for red shoes size 10, means that he really wants that item and if you provide that, then it is likely to buy. It is a psichological thing, they ask Google for something, and Google sends the searcher to you and you are going to provide the product or service. Social media traffic does not convert well since it is made of people spending time on the internet, not looking to buy something.
4. If your business is local, get local with your site! I optimized sites for local businesses here and people asked me to promote them for some general terms. For the sake of this discussion, let’s say “industrial cleaning”. The business was local, providing local cleaning services, so I asked how somebody coming from searches from the other side of the country will become a client of a local business? Well, it won’t happen so I tweaked the promotion for targeting local searchers and this was way better in terms of conversions! If you fix cars, if you build furniture, you probably provide these services to people around your area, then get local!
5. Don’t make plans on short terms based on your website! Your site won’t bring you wealth right the very first day you launched it! A website is an investment, it’s something that you start and work on and in time it will bring money or clients but don’t bet your house on an online business, especially when you don’t know the rules of the game! This is a simple tip that will save you from a lot of issues! I have a friend that decided to start a website because he saw one of my websites that he thought he could handle. I tried to point him in the right directions, I explained him about what promoting means, how it will pay on the long run, but after a while he quit. Why? Because this was not for him, does not bring money fast…Think about it, think how much time you are going to invest in this and make sure your life does not depend on this site. Making money online is not as easy as experts makes it sound! Again, trust me on this, I should know!

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A few days ago I have been asked if one should use a CMS such as WordPress to build a site or to develop the site from scratch on a custom platform.

Well, personally I used to be a fan of building websites from scratch by hand.

I like to know I have the power and knowledge to do whatever I want there, I have built a lot of websites from scratch and I am happy with almost every one of them.

However, developing these sites on a custom platform took a lot of resources: time, work and first thing first, I am a professional software engineer, I know to do this kind of things, because I do this for a living, but not everybody is a developer, isn’t it? And, beside that, during the lifetime of my custom built websites I have needed some new features that I had to also implement by hand, taking as example the way WordPress plugins were built so I got to the conclusion I would have better started my site on a blogging platform.

At that moment I took some time to study a bit the way WordPress was built and what you can do with it. For this, I have also built a few sites using CMS as a platform, to have a complete understanding. After these tests, I can tell you the following:

1. Seting up a website on WordPress platform is fast and easy compared to a custom website. Just think about it, developing a custom website takes time and money (you need to hire somebody to develop it for you) while WordPress is available for free download at any moment. All you need to do is install that copy of WordPress on your shared server and you are ready to go.Most hosting companies provide WordPress installation by default, as a feature. You want a WordPress copy installed? No problem, we’ll take care of you! There, now you have your own blog set and ready to go. No extra fees, no development money, no waiting time!
2. There are so many free plugins for WordPress that you can set your site to do almost whatever you want in no time. Think about this: I have wanted to install on one of my custom websites a social bookmarking toolbar, so people can stumble and digg my articles. Of course, since it was my own custom site, I had to write my own custom toolbar for this!Oh, wait, on WordPress is very easy, there are a lot of free plugins that do exactly this feature! Want another one? I needed a Tell a friend script for my custom website. Of course, I had to find one or write it by hand.Fortunately I have found an open source script on the internet so I didn’t have to spend time to write it myself, but, I have spent half an hour to tweak it and install it on my site and I was able to do this because I have developed my site so I knew everything about it. How can you do this on WordPress? Well, simple, you just download and install a plugin for it! There!
3. But I do not want a blog, I want a static site!! Well, there is no problem, my dear friends, WordPress is above all a very customizable CMS (Content management system/software) so you can adapt it at any moment just from your WordPress theme to look like a regular, static site and not as a blog. You can do this and people won’t even be able to tell you what’s the platform behind your site!
4. Google and WordPress work together. That’s another white ball that you will surely learn to appreciate! Let me tell you a story…There is this little robot called Googlebot, working for Google, that comes from time to time to take a look on your website to see if you have changed anything. If you want to give a hand to this great little robot you will need to create what is called a “sitemap” and point Google to it. Of course, you need to manually rebuild that sitemap and tell Google you updated it each and every time you do so. This is not mandatory but it helps a lot. Why am I telling you about it? Because there is one great little plugin for WordPress that does that for you without even telling you about it. Yep! Every time you write anything on your site, this little plugin rebuilds the sitemap and then tells Google automatically about it so you won’t have to! Isn’t that great? Now ask yourself what would it take to do this on a regular, custom website.
5. SEO for WordPress is accesible to everyone. Of course, what could it be? Yet another plugin! There is a plugin, actually there are more plugins doing this for you. You install one of those plugins and they will change the titles of your posts in a SEO compliant way, they will add fields for keywords, description, etc. These are little things with great results when it comes to being found by Google. And being found by Google mean free traffic…free money, right?
6. So many free WordPress themes to chose from, there’s got to be one for you! I think you know what I mean, you don’t need to pay for a template, you can just pick one for free out of those 5.098.253 themes available on the internet. And you know what? There are some great ones out there, trust me on this one! You can check for ex this site about Karcher pressure washers or this one about ride on mowers.
7. WordPress is continuously evolving so new features will appear every single day, giving you more and more power over your website. Usually, new features mean new bugs, but the huge number of users will assure immediately reliable live testing and the very team that developed it will remove those bugs. Still want more?
8. Never underestimate the power of subscriptions(RSS&mail). WordPress comes with the capability to offer syndicated posts through the use of RSS. This way you can have quite a good base of people receving you posts right in their mail or in the RSS reader. Think how difficult would be to do this on a custom website!
9. WordPress is so easy to update! I don’t think I need to speak much about this, we all know that using the online interface we can update the content of the site so easy! Imagine if you build a custom website, you would need FTP, you need to update the files by hand. Not so user friendly, isn’t it?

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Some time ago, somebody asked Shoemoney if he would accept him as a “student” and Shoemoney said he will accept the guy as a student after having 1000 posts on DigitalPoint forum.

Just as a short tip to those of you that want to know more about web, websites, SEO, marketing, making money online, whatever else you want: go to DigitalPoint.com forums and start reading and posting. I guarantee you that you will soon understand things you never thought about before. I can tell you only one thing, that at one moment my revenue increased by more than 100% in 1 month just by being a part of this forum. Really, I am not kidding!

There is no trick, you just spend time with professionals in this large internet business and spending time with the guys who know how to do things makes you learn a great deal.

Over and out.

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Today I realized what I miss when it comes to Google Chrome browser. Here’s a short list of things I miss:

• Google Toolbar for Chrome (especially for Google Bookmarks and Page Rank, I think these two are the main features I use from the toolbar)
• StumbleUpon toolbar for Google Chrome. Yep! A definitive need here, since I like to give thumbs up to pages I like and I like to do it easily without looking for a stumble that button on that particular page. I like to have my own, OK?
• I don’t know why, I miss the main menu that I actually never use, but somehow the browser looks kind of under-construction without it. Or it may be just me…
• A home button, that usually leads me to Google. I know I have that “New tab” button that usually lists Google there because I visit it often, but hey, old habits die hard, OK? Later edit: the fact that the address bar acts also as a search field somehow solves this issue…
• A stats bar. I don’t know why but I don’t like that status bar that comes and goes when something happens. And I also don’t like the location of the search field. But again, it may be just me…

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I have been asked about SEO a lot of times, tricks, tips, how to, etc. Well, the fact is that there are rules to follow, there are things to do, but beside following a few basic rules that you must learn and apply, the most important 2 things to do are quite simple: build content on that particular topic and link to it with appropiate links from appropriate sites. Pretty obvious, in my opinion. I came to the conclusion that after a while, if you continue doing this, you will manage to bring your website where you want. Of course, reading about SEO really helps, but come on, people, start doing, not just reading!

So, my most important advice in this area is to start applying everything you learn, to write content and add links, this way, sooner or later you will start to understand what really helps and what doesn’t and you will start to feel how things work in this business. after a while you will develop a certain feeling for it, and you will write content without thinking too much about it, already half optimized for search engines.

So, get on it! What are you waiting for?

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As you probably know, Google just launched his own browser, Google Chrome, not just a browser, but more of an application platform. Very interesting to note a few technical features like a new and improved virtual machine developed by a team in Denmark, multi-process behavior, not just multi-thread, etc.

The fact that the browser is multi-process is an advantage in the case one of the tabs is busy with something, waiting for a script to load, this won’t affect how other tabs will work, you will not have to wait after the blocked tab. That’s an advantage.

Another one is the fact that memory management will be better in case of multi-process than in case of multi-threading, where after a long day working on the same instance of browser, after repetedly opening and closing tabs memory gets used and not released. It happens, really, a lot of time. If you don’t buy this, think of how much memory the browser takes at the end of the day. Am I right or what?

What I would like to say more about this is the fact that Google has a very interesting testing procedure, they test on around one million web sites, but WHICH WEBSITES? Well, they know which are the most visited websites in the world, right? They know it because they practically own the internet, so they test their new browser on the first most visited web sites in the world, making sure that at least these sites won’t crash on you!

What I didn’t like at this moment, but I am sure they will fix it, is the fact that my loved Google bookmarks are not there yet. Yeap, Google supports Google toolbar for Firefox and IE but not yet for Google Chrome…Damn!

At this moment, I can say that Google Chrome is not yet a powerful browser, it is actually in beta testing, it is more of a browser released to face and scare the competition.

One more question still bothers me: why after supporting Firefox for such a long time with AdSense, paying for downloads, promoting it on Google homepage, why are they hitting it so hard? Because in my opinion, the main loser here will be Firefox, not IE, because IE is attached since a long time and until losing the winner position it will take a while, but Firefox will probably be soon forgotten because of Google Chrome, because, in my opinion, Google Chrome and Firefox have both the same profile of users.

So, will actually Firefox users migrate to Google Chrome? What do you say?

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