Optimo. Optimo Strategy.

Adventures in internet development and marketing

There are literally millions of blogs out there, but the vast majority of them don’t make any money. Most blogs don’t get all that much traffic, so their potential to make money is fairly limited.


A lot of people who are new to internet marketing will try to put up ads on their website and write as much as they can – but most people don’t get too far with that method either. To make any appreciable sum through ads on your site you’ll need to get tens of thousands of visitors per month and have your website represent valuable keywords.


Ads are probably not the best way to make money blogging, although once your blog gets popular they can definitely supplement your montly income.


In my opinion, the best way to make money blogging is to find a niche, develop a reputation as an expert in that niche, and sell highly relevant products directly to your visitors. Here’s an article I wrote about choosing a niche. (well, it’s about starting a profitable website but that’s a big section of it)


Once you develop your blog in your niche, you can start to build a mailing list from your readers and make sales by emailing them offers. The products you sell on your blog can either be your own, or they can be affiliate products. An example of your own product would be selling an eBook you wrote, or some physical product. An affiliate product would be one that you are selling on the behalf of an affiliate program.


You also need the traffic no matter what you’re selling, and the best way to do that is through high quality link building to your main page and internal pages of your blog. Just remember to stick to blogging for a while before you expect to make much money, it takes a while!

You need money, but you know nothing about how to make a website, you’re wondering “How can I make money online without a website?”


I’m going to pretend you didn’t just ask that! That’s like asking a homeless person how to make money without holding up a sign – sure, it can be done, but it’s probably not recommended.


Homeless jokes aside, there ARE ways to make money online without a website, but even in those cases, having a website will dramatically increase your earning potential there. Why exactly? Because a lot of these other opportunities involve freelancing, and freelancers who don’t have a website showcasing their work and capabilities seldom do too well.


I’m going to list a few great ways to make money online without a website… or, without a website directly – but first I’m going to show you how easy it is to actually have a basic website to promote yourself, and I’ll do it on one paragraph.


Just sign up with a host like Hostmonster that gives you a free domain when you sign up. Log in to your host’s admin cpanel and find the ‘wordpress’ icon. Click on the icon and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the install. You’ve now got a website, one that you can customize with free themes and plugins – just log in to the wordpress admin screen and start posting and customizing. Write a little bit about yourself and your capabilities, etc.


Now you’re ready to go out and make money online without a website… but what, you DO have a website now! You’re not going to make money directly through your website, but it will help you land the gigs that will make you money.


Craigslist is one of the first places to look – go directly to the ‘gigs’ section and see everything that’s available. Reply to anything you’d be willing to do, and make sure to tell them to check out your website – you’ll be much more likely to get the job. You can also make your own craigslist posts advertising whatever service you can provide, and drop a link to your website.


You should also check out fiverr.com – basically, you perform a very small or quick service and get $5 each time. Learn about fiverr and set up a few gigs – make sure you link back to your new website in the description, it will give people a lot more confidence in what you have to sell. You can also promote your fiverr gigs directly on your blog.


Another great way to make money online “without a website” is by writing and getting paid for it. While you don’t need a website to get writing jobs, it sure makes it a lot easier. If you make regular posts to your own wordpress site, you can demonstrate your writing abilities to potential buyers. You can find people looking for writers and forums lke warriorforum.com or you could apply for a writing gig at a place like brighthub.com and get paid $15-20 per article you write. Either way, you’re more likely to get the gig if you can show them your own writing on your own website.


Now you know. There are a lot of methods for making money online without a website, but EVERY ONE of these methods is a lot more successful when you do actually have a website to help promote yourself.

Getting started in blogging is a lot easier than you’d imagine, and if you’re wondering how to start a news blog, you’re in the right place! By the end of this article, you’ll know how to start a news blog on your very own domain and start to spread your opinions all over the web immediately!


There are a lot of free bloggin solutions where you can blog on someone else’s domain, however I always recommend that people purchase theoir own domain and
hosting when trying to set up a news blog – the simple reason is that you have far more control over it, and you ACTUALLY OWN the blog, whereas if you use a free blogging website and your blog ends up getting really popular, you don’t really “own” it.


So the first step in starting your news blog is to sign up for your own domain and hosting. Fortunately, this is an easy and affordable process nowadays – if you use Hostmonster, you’ll be able to register your domain and set up a hosting account all in the same step – so I recommend doing that ASAP!


Once you sign up for your domwain name and hosting, you need to actually instally our blog on your website. Fortunately, with a host such as hostmonster, you can automatically install wordpress with the click of a button: simply navigate to your hosting control panel and fine the icon that says “wordpress” – follow the on-screen instructions and your blog will be ready to go in a matter of minutes!


Once you install your blog, you can login by going to yourdomain.com/wp-admin (if you decided to install the blog in your root directory, which is the default setting). The wordpress admin panel allows you to add posts, pages, plugins and more to your news blog.


You can also select a theme that fits your style. There are a lot of free newspaper and magazine style themes you can test out – just go to the themes section of the admin panel and you can search thousands of free themes and activate them with a single click.


Now, all that’s left for you to start your news blog is for you to add content, and do it on a normal basis! If you create news articles that people are interested in, your readership will grown and your blog will have achieved its first goal – become popular. Once your news blog gets popular enough, you can start to think about making some money, but don’t get ahead of yourself, it takes a bit of time and patience!

Nowadays, getting set up with your own website is easier than ever – if you’re wondering how to publish a website then you’re in the right place.


The first step in publishing your website is to obtain a domain name and hosting account, fortunately you can do this in the same step – by signing up with Hostmonster, your domain name is provided for free when you sign up for hosting. Hostmonster also gives you tools like 1-click blog installs that make setting up your website a breeze.


Once you’ve signed up for Hostmonster, you’re ready to publish your website. If you’ve already got HTML files that you want to upload, you can use an FTP program to transfer them to the site (FTP login information should be emailed to you when you sign up for the host) – make sure your homepage is labeled index.htm and is located in the root folder.


If you don’t already have a website designed, I suggest you install wordpress. WordPress is an easy to use platform that will allow you to manage your entire site from a simple admin screen.


To install wordpress, simply login to your Hostmonster admin panel (cpanel) and look for the icon that says “wordpress” amd click on it. Fill in the information and follow the on-screen instructions to install your wordpress website. When you’re finished, you’ll receive an email with details of the install.


You can now login to your websites admin panel (yourdomain.com/wp-admin) and start adding posts, pages, and more. You can also choose from thousands of free themes and plugins to make your site awesome.


I suggest you check out codex.wordpress.com whenever you get a chance and learn more about how wordpress works. Now you know how to publish a website, now just add content and market it!

The idea of making money online is an enticing one – just sit back and watch the money roll in, right? WRONG! Well, yes the idea is enticing, but don’t fool yourself about it not being a lot of work, because it is.


If you expect to make any appreciable amount of profit from setting up a personal marketing site, you’ll need to commit yout time and energy to creating content, doing keyword reasearch, building links, performing SEO, interacting with visitors, etc. If you’re committed to doing the work, the first step is to actually set up your personal marketing site – but before we do that, let’s go over what exactly a personal marketing website even is.


A personal marketing website is a spot on the web where you’re trying to profit by selling products or services to your visitors. You can either sell your own products or services, or you can sell affiliate products on behalf of larger companies. One of the most powerful parts of a personal marketing website is its mailing list: getting your visitors to sign up for mailing lists will eventually lead to a powerful revenue stream.


So, time to actually set up a personal marketing site. There are so many ways to do this – and if you have web development experience, these are all open to you. If you have zero web development experience, setting up a personal marketing website from scratch can be quite difficult. The solution for the inexperienced is to install a content management system such as wordpress – it allows management of the website from a simple online control panel and doesn’t require HTML/CSS knowledge.


The best way to install wordpress for beginners is to perform an automatic install which only takes a few minutes. To do an automatic install, you need a web host that supports it. Speaking of a web host, you’ll need one to get your personal marketing website online. You’ll also need a domain name. FORTUNATELY – there’s a webhost that does all of these things – Hostmonster. (just click here to see for yourself) Sign up for hosting and get a free domain, and automatic wordpress installs are included.


So after signing up for hostmonster, simply log in to your hosting control panel using the login name and password you were assigned when you signed up for hosting. Once in cPanel, locate the ‘wordpress’ icon and click on it to begin the automatic install process. Follow the on-screen instructions and complete your install. You’ll also receive an email confirmation.


So.. you’ve installed wordpress. Now login to the wordpress admin panel (yourdomain.com/wp-admin if you installed in the root directory) and you’re ready to start customizing your site.


You can start by choosing a theme you like – wordpress has thousands of free themes to choose from and you can install and activate them all right from the wordpress admin panel. You can also set up your wordpress plugins directly from the admin panel – I recommend finding a good mailing list plugin to start collecting emails from visitors. Set up some pages, some posts, and get some content going. Sign up for some good affiliate programs and start promoting their stuff until you start making sales!

So you’re looking to start your own blog, but you don’t know exactly how to install it on your own? Well, you definitely don’t need to pay someone to do it, because it’s so cheap and easy that you can do it in your own in a matter of minutes.


Like many things, there is both an easy and a hard way to install a blog – I’m going to go over the easy way in this article (the hard way is a manual install that requires you to create a MySQL database).


First step is to get a domain and hosting with a webhost that provides one-click blog installs. For this I would recommend Hostmonster – they include a free domain name whenever you purchase hosting with them.


Once you sign up with hostmonster, simply sign in to the hostmonster admin panel (cpanel) with the login information that you provided (links to your control panel will be emailed to you by hostmonster upon signing up). Once in cpanel, look for the icon that says “wordpress” and click on it. Fill out the requested information and follow the instructions to complete the installation of your blog. Upon successful installation you will receive a confirmation email which includes some login information.


And there you go, you’ve installed a wordpress blog on your site. Now you can login to the wordpress admin screen (yourdomain.com/wp-admin) and add things like posts, pages, etc. You can even choose between thousands of free themes and plugins to enhance your site’s appeal.

You see so many awesome websites every day and hear about how much money they’re making (kind of wishing you could be making it too!) and you say to youself “Why the heck is it so darn hard to set up a new website!?!”


Well… it’s not! Setting up a new website is actually a very simple process that most people with even a little bit of computer savvy can handle. Now, as a professional web developer, I’ll be the first to tell you that if you want a professional looking website or anything too complex, you’ll need to hire someone or study for years. BUT – for many many purposes, a professionally designed website is not necessary: personal websites, hobby websites, simple blogs, basic money-making websites, etc. come to mind.


So, maybe after learning how to set up a new website and actually making an attempt at it, you’ll decide that you need to take on a professional to finish the job. Even if you end up doing this, knowing how to set up a new website and actually getting the basics in place can save you A LOT on development costs. You’re less likely to be taken advantage of if you know your basics, and you’ll be more able to clearly convey your needs to whoever you hire.


There are 3 main steps to setting up a new website:


1) Obtain a domain name
2) Obtain hosting for the website
3) Design/Upload your website in HTML OR install wordpress on your website with a one-click install.


Number one and two above are pretty simple. I recommend you go with Hostmonster because when you set up hosting, they let you register a domain name for free and hook it up to the hosting account for you. Furthermore, Hostmonster allows you to do one-click wordpress installs. Number 3 above is where it starts to get a little bit trickier. If you don’t know any HTML/CSS, et. you’ll either need to learn, or just install something like wordpress instead.


Wordpress is a content management system that doesn’t require you to know any HTML at all – you can add content and customize the site in a manner that’s as simple as updating a facebook profile. The cool thing about wordpress is that it allows you to choose from thousands of free themes, or even create your own if you have the skills. It also have a lot of free plugins that immediately enhance the functionality of your website. WordPress is also known as a blogging platform, so making everyday updates to wordpress websites is a breeze.


So, how to set up a new wordpress website: if you signed up wtih Hostmonster, simply log in to your hosting admin panel with the login information you set up when you signed up. Your cpanel is located at yourdomain.com/cpanel and it gives you the ability to install wordpress in just a few minutes.


Once logged into your admin cpanel, find the icon that says ‘wordpress’ – click it and follow the on-screen instructions to set up your website. I recommend you go into the advanced options and set up your own username and password. When you complete the install, you’ll receive an email with more info about wordpress.


There’s now a website on your domain! You can start customizing it by logging into your wordpress admin panel (will be yourdomain.com/wp-admin if you installed int he root directory which is default).


Explore the admin panel, create new posts, edit the blog name, etc. I recommend you check out http://codex.wordpress.org to learn more about wordpress. It is a very flexible system.

I’m a web developer, so one of the most common question friends ask me about the industry is “what do I need to set up a website?” Nowadays, setting up your own website is a piece of cake – so easy, in fact, that after reading this article you’ll know exactly what you need to do.


The simplest and easiest to update websites are often based on content management systems like wordpress, and this is usually what I tell beginners to us.


When people ask me “what do I need to set up a website,” I tell them they need to register for a domain and obtain a hosting plan – this is a lot easier/cheaper/faster than it was 10 years ago. I recommend my clients sign up with Hostmonster becuase it’s such a simple process – the free domain registration when you sign up for service means you don’t need to worry about changing DNS servers to get your site working. Additionally, they provide a one-click wordpress install, which will allow you to create a website with the greatest of ease.


Hostmonster includes all the tools one would need to set up a website and manage it: the first thing I’ll show you is the simple wordpress install.


Sign in to your hosting control panel (yourdomain.com/cpanel) and locate the icon that says “WordPress” – give it a click. You’ll be taken through a few basic options (choose ‘advanced options’ in order to set your username and password for the blog) and install it. You will receive an email with the wordpress information after the install. You now have wordpress installed and you now have a website!


The next step is to customize wordpress and add your desired content and information – you can find more information on all of that
at http://codex.wordpress.org

What’s up surfers! If you’ve never felt the rush of making a sale online, you’re missing out! Making money online takes a lot of time and learning, but it’s so damn satifsying that it’s all worth it. When I say it takes time, I mean it – in the beginning you’ll be making pennies. But if you don’t burn out and quit (which I am sad to say a lot of people do) you can put yourself in a position to make a lot of money.


If you’re inpatient you’ll probably skip over this paragraph and go straight to the list, big mistake. The 10 ways to make money online that I list below all require that you have your own website. Why? Because by investing your time into your website, you’ll create long term value.


What if you don’t have a website?!? Well, I don’t expect most beginners to. I suggest you get Hostmonster Hosting (which includes a free domain) and use their automatic blog install capabilities to set up your own wordpress blog and jazz it up – I have a ton of guides on doing that here. WordPress is insanely easy to use and by setting it up, you enable yourself to make money online in the following ways:


1) Write reviews for Amazon Products – Amazon.com has a great affiliate program that lets you get a cut when your visitors buy their products. Write reviews on books and other items to entice your visitors to click the link to whatever product you’re reviewing.


2) Set up an affiliate-based shop – There are a ton of great affiliate programs online, just do a simple google search. Check out Commission Junction, they’re one of the biggest affiliate programs by far. Try to maintain a theme for your store and promote it by blogging.


3) Set up google adsense on your site – Google Adsense lets you display ads on your website. Google chooses the ads to display based on the content of your pages. Whenever someone clicks on the ads, you get a payment. The payments can be anywhere from a few cents per click to a few dollars per click. How much you get depends on the keywords of the ads – so research high value keywords for adsense and create a website based on those keywords – then drive traffic to it.


4) Sell ads directly to local businesses – If the content of your website is locally based, and you have a lot of loyal local visitors, you can sell ads on your website to local vendors at a much higher rate than you’d receive from adsense.


5) Sell your own physical products on your website – If you have physical products to sell, you can integrate paypal into your wordpress blog with many free wordpress plugins. By selling your own products, you set the price and therefore the margin, unlike affiliate products.


6) Develop a website and sell it – You can spend a little bit of time developing websites that get a small but verifiable amount of traffic, especially from search engines. Even bigger bonus of you’ve started a mailing list on the site. These can sell for a few hundred each on sites like flippa, and if you can create a few each month based on the same template, you’ve created a steady income stream.


7) Create digital products and sell them – Can you write an interesting ebook or make an informative video guide? If so, you can easily sell these to visitors for instant download after making a paypal payment. I use a plugin called s2member that lets me do this, but there are many others. Of the 10 ways to make money online, this is my favorite.

Sell your own services on your website – can you offer a service that other people would pay you money for? What kind of skills do you have? Maybe after a bit of practice you could write blog articles for a fee, or set up blogs for a fee!


Wait, that’s only 8 things… I promised you 10 ways to make money online, right! Okay, the last 3 are things that won’t make you money directly, but will enable you to build traffic to your website – more traffic = more money.. any complaints there?


Number 9 – Build links to your site to increase search engine traffic. The more links pointing to your website, the more popular your website looks to google, and the mosre traffic you’ll get. Build links from high quality sources only, and avoid ‘nofollow’ links, which don’t help search engine rankings.


Number 10 – Perform SEO duties on your site – Make sure your pages have good meta descriptions, do keyword research with google’s keyword tool, fill in alt tags for all your images, etc. Learn about SEO, it is vital!

You’ve probably visited plenty of blogs, never really thinking much about what went in to creating them – but it’s actually a pretty interesting process. WordPress is by far the most popular blogging platform – technically it’s a content management system (CMS), meaning it provides a user-friendly way of updating/adding content to the website, and customizing the look of the website itself.


I’ve show a lot of people how to set up a wordpress blog, and almost every time they are surprised at how quick and (seemingly) simple the installation process is. Once I show someone how to install wordpress, they can do it on their own the next time with little trouble. One thing to remember about blogging though, is that it’s very easy to install a blog, but it requires a lot of effort to maintain a popular blog, and even more effort to maintain a reasonably profitable blog.


That being said, since the actual installation process is so simple, I’ll show you how to do it in this very article. Yep, read on and soon enough you’ll understand how to set up a wordpress blog.


Step 1 is obtaining a domain name and hosting. Fortunately, if you use Hostmonster, the domain name is provided free with the hosting plan. Furthermore, Hostmonster provides 1-click wordpress installs from it’s admin control panel – this means you won’t have to do a manual installation. I won’t go into too much detail about manual wordpress installations, but they require the creation of a MySQL database and uploading the core WP files and setting a few of them up. But, fortunately, if you use Hostmonster you don’t need to worry about that.


After signing up for Hostmonster, you can sign in to the admin cpanel (should be something like www.yourdomain.com/cpanel) and locate the icon that reads “wordpress”


Click on the wordpress icon and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation. I recommend you click on the ‘advanced options’ to set up your own custom username and pssword for wordpress. After you complete the install you will receive an email with some brief documentation and a link to your wordpress admin area.


At this point you can take a look at your installed wordpress site, although it’s still jsut a vanilla generic installation. Sign into your wordpress admin panel (usually yourdomain.com/wp-admin) and check it out. From here you can add posts, pages, etc. You can also add themes and plugins, which I highly recommend doing.