Archive for the ‘Work From Home Tutorial’ Category

Work From Home Free Training Pt.3

You are probably noticing that just about everything I do revolves around WordPress blogs. There are plenty of other ways to get a website online – you don’t even need a hosting account if you sign up at somewhere like WordPress.com or Blogger.com – but the amount of work involved in building a site with something like Joomla or a traditional HTML/CSS site is much greater. The learning curve is also much steeper.

Let’s face it – your aim is to have an attractive, functional money making website and WordPress is the easiest way to get a professional, easy to update site on the Internet. Period.

I can vividly remember many of the ‘self published’ websites from ten years ago. Compared to the sophisticated and stylish look of most business sites today, they looked like they had been built by a pre-schooler. The first impression anyone gets of your website is the front page, so it is important to make sure that you present a professional look. Fortunately there are several great and quite cheap options for those of us who never got past basic stick figure art.

One of the handy things about WordPress is that it uses themes. A theme is a complete design and you can upload as many themes as you want to your WordPress blog and then switch themes with a few clicks of your mouse. It really is that easy.

Here are a few places I use when I’m looking for a new theme for one of my blogs:

WordPress Themes - This is a great place to start looking. WordPress has a gallery of themes that you can use and change – and they are all free. At the time I wrote this post there were well over 1200 free WordPress themes available in the their gallery.

Elegant Themes - These are the next step up and incredible value at just $39 per year. You get access to over 50 of the most unique premium themes and new themes are added each month. Nick Roach really is a very creative designer and his themes are top quality. I’ve been a member at Elegant Themes for the past six months or so and use many of his themes on my other blogs.

WooThemes – Another of my favourites. WooThemes are a little pricier but their themes are also quite spectacular. You can buy the themes individually or purchase a monthly subscription. Right now they have 77 themes available and more added each month.

ThemeForest – ThemeForest is part of the Envato market place which includes other sites that sell graphics, audio, scripts and just about anything related to website appearance and sound. It is a bit different to the other two – the standard license for each theme is for a single website and you are buying from one of several thousand designers who advertise their work via the marketplace. There are some very unique and attractive themese here and it’s well worth a look.

So there you have it. Plenty of places to source free and cheap designs for your blogs. You can also do a search on Google for ‘free WordPress themes’ to find a bunch of other sites that provide free themes.

Work From Home Free Training Pt.1

I’ve seen a lot of links and reviews around the Internet that relate to free training, but a lot of those links and sites have an ulterior motive. They are created by online entrepreneurs, mainly for the purpose of ‘upselling’ you a product. So I thought that it might be useful to compile my own list of free resources, but without the upsell. Some of the following videos may endorse products or services but they have nothing to do with me :) . In part 1 we will look at niche research and registering a domain. So, lets see what we can find!

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Lesson 6: Domains And Your Own Website

Now that you have narrowed down your niche, figured out how much competition you have, how many monthly searches there are and you have a pretty good idea of what kind of traffic you can expect, the only thing left is to actually create your business.

We’re going to have to take a few liberties with this series if we’re going to have any chance of getting it off the ground. So, these lessons will be geared towards people who have decided to put up their own site and promote either their own products and services or promote other products and services as an affiliate. Therefore, at least for the time being, anybody who has decided that they want to dropship on Ebay or simply join a “program” and promote it in order to get members and make commissions off of those members, most of what you’re about to read won’t apply to you.

Okay, let’s get started.

The first thing you’re going to need is to find a domain name for your business. This is where you’re going to have to use a little imagination. Let’s say you decided to sell CDs through Amazon and you decide to focus on the ones that are sold at a big discount, which is usually the older stuff. You might want to get a domain name like www.cheapcds.com, or something like that. You want the domain name to be as descriptive of what your business is as possible. If it’s a band review site then maybe you might choose something like www.rockbandreviews.com or something like that. I seriously doubt either of those domains are available, but you get the picture.

To get your domain, simply go to Google and type in “Domains.” You’ll find about 95 million places to get domains. Lots of people use GoDaddy and Namecheap. Domains are cheap – about $10 or so per year.

After you get your domain, the next thing you’re going to need is hosting. I always recommend HostGator. It’s cheap and their service is second to none!

CREATING A WEB SITE

Now that you’ve got your domain and your web hosting, you’re ready to start working on your site. Yeah, I know, web design. Yuck! Don’t get me wrong. I love it. I actually started designing web sites before there were any HTML editors (I used to use a Unix editor called ‘vi’). My first site was…well, by todays standards probably at about primary school grade 3 level (though I suspect there are grade 3′s around now who could pump out a pretty impressive site!)

But web design isn’t for everybody. For those of you who don’t know the first thing about HTML, there are alternatives to designing your own site from the ground floor up.

  • Get somebody to do it for you. This is the easiest, and the most expensive. Web designers, good web designers, don’t work cheap. Depending on how many pages you require for your web site, you can spend thousands of dollars on one. But be darn sure, if you get a top notch designer, you will get a top notch site.
  • Get a template. This will still require you to do a little bit of work but templates are, for the most part, a breeze. Most come in a zip file with all the graphics you’ll need. The HTML is already done for you. All you need to do is add your own unique text and links. The amount of HTML you’ll need to learn to do this is minimal. Yes, you will still need to do a little work yourself, but in comparison to doing your own site from scratch, it’s a relative breeze. If you want, you can get some really nice templates from themeforest.net for under $30. These are top notch designs at a really low price.

Regardless of which way you go with this, even with a template, you still have to decide what your site is going to be made of. In other words, what pages? How many? Will the site be static (never changing) or will you constantly be adding pages to it as it goes along?

All of this will greatly depend on what kind of site you have. For example, if you look at http://www.natures-healing-remedies.com/ it basically has 5 main pages.

1. Home or Index Page
2. About Us Page
3. Products Page
4. Articles Page
5. Contact Page

1. The home or index page is where people first come to the site. This is where you want to give them a basic idea of what they will find on the site. In my case, I also offer a free report. This is great for getting people to opt into your list. But that’s for later in this series.

2. The about us page is kind of like a mission statement. It tells people what we’re trying to accomplish with the site.

3. The products page is self explanatory. This is where you sell your various products, whatever they may be.

4. The articles page is a list of all the articles that a visitor can read at the site about the related topics.

5. The contact page is where people can email you from if they have any questions. Some sites put a contact form on the page instead of an email link.

Now, even though there are only 5 main pages, the articles page actually turns this site into a never ending growth site. Each article listed on the page is going to have its own article page specifically for THAT article. So if there are 100 articles listed on the articles page, the site itself now has over 100 pages. This is how a site builds popularity. Writing is a big key to making money online. Don’t forget that.

So what’s the next step? Well, the next step for YOU is to sit down and map out what you want your site to look like. Use the example above as a guide if you want. But ultimately, depending on what you are promoting, your site will have its own unique characteristics.

Lesson 5: Starting Your Online Business

Okay, so you’ve picked a niche to make your killing in. You’ve done your research, found something that has lots of monthly searches and not a ton of competition. The only thing you have to do is put together a game plan for promoting your niche to the masses. Of course, before you even do that, you have to figure out how you’re even going to get your niche up on the Internet. But before you even do THAT, you better be prepared to do business online.

This is where most people get caught with their pants down.

Why?

Because they don’t realize all the things that they can run into.

Why?

Because they’re brand new to this. They’re entering a world that is so foreign to them that the things I am going to list here wouldn’t even dawn on them. So, in order to keep you from waking up one day and wishing you had this stuff, I am going to outline for you a few things you may want to get BEFORE you actually start thinking about building a web site and advertising it to the masses.

1. You’re going to need a backup for your computer. I don’t care whether you get a zip drive or an online service or dual RAID drives. If your PC crashes and you don’t have all your important files saved somewhere, you are going to be in for some serious hurt. I am speaking from experience. I never thought of these things until they happened to me.

2. You’re going to want to get an email account at YOUR domain. You’ll normally get one of these with a hosting package – all you need to do is go into the email section of your hosting control panel and you can create it yourself. Why do you want an email account at your domain? Without going into a long boring rant about spam and spam filters and how tons of email just simply doesn’t get delivered to these free email accounts like AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo and on and on, just do yourself a favor and set up your email account. The last thing you want to happen is somebody writing to you inquiring about your business and their email either lands in your bulk folder or doesn’t get delivered at all. Get an email account at your own domain.

3. Get a safety deposit box. If your house burns down, no backup is going to save your valuable papers and contracts, not to mention all the passwords you’re going to accumulate for all the sites and services you’re going to subscribe to. And make no mistake about it, you’ll have TONS of passwords. Write them all down and maybe once a month, go to your safety deposit box and put the updated papers in it. This way, if you have to start from scratch, you’ll at least have every site you belong to, along with your username and password on a sheet of paper. Saves a ton of time.

4. Get a business phone. If you’re going to communicate with potential JV partners or customers, the last thing you want is for somebody to call home and have your kid answer the phone. If you’re going to run a professional business, get a business phone. Even a private cell phone is fine.

5. Anti Virus and Firewall protection. The Internet is a nasty place. The last thing you want to do is go online to any site and risk getting hit with a trojan or worse. It happens. Not to mention some of the things you’re going to find in your email. In today’s Internet, going online without anti virus and firewall protection is like sending a blind man through a mine field.
My personal recommendation is Kaspersky Anti-Virus. They are one of the most respected names in the Anti-Virus industry and it doesn’t cause all sorts of slowness or crashing that I’ve experienced with some other products. I’ve run Kaspersky on Win XP, Vista and Windows 7.


Kaspersky Internet Security 2010

There are other things that you’re probably going to want to get over time such as a text editor, a budget and expense program, a filing cabinet and high speed Internet connection, but the 5 things I mentioned above are a must. It’s just plain suicide not to have them and they’re not very expensive.

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