There are several ways to make money online, I have tried and tested different online business models, some were successfully, some were not, but its down to what you feel comfortable with doing. I have shared methods that have worked for me. Hopefully this article will help you decide which method is best for you.

1/ Offer Or Sell A Service

The best and the least expensive way to make money online is to provide a service to other people, whether you are a dog groomer, programmer, seo expert everyone needs something done for them, you can do this by advertising your services offline through friends and family, make sure you set up your own blog or site advertising your services and promote your brand online using social media.

2/ Create And Sell Your Own Products

You would need a bit of capital if you are going to create your own products, unless you have graphic design and programming skills, you would need to outsource the work if you want quality and professional looking products. You can create ebooks, training materials, webinars, software and much more. Read my free product creation report for more details – Download Free Report

3/ Set Up Your Own Retail Store

I have sold products via Ebay its a great way to make extra income, but depending on what product you are selling, Ebay can be very saturated and you would need to stand out from the crowd, the alternative to this is to have your own retail store. I use and recommend Niche Blueprint 2.0, its a step by step training course that teaches you how to market and set up your own online retail store quite easily.

4/ Set Up Your Own Social Networking site

Creating your own social networking sites is not difficult at all, there are free scripts and paid scripts you can used to create a social networking sites you could use scripts like Ning, Kickapps, phpfox and many others. If you need to make changes to a script just hire a programmer from many of the freelancers websites such as Get A Coder.

Other Ways To Make Money Online
Here are some other ways to make money online – click here

Before you start creating your online business, make sure you do your market research first check out pervious Posts: Find Product Ideas , How To Choose The Right Niche (part 1)

In the pervious posts I talk about how to find a niche and how to preform indepth keyword market analysis. Check out pervious Posts: How To Choose The Right Niche (part 1) ,  How To Choose The Right Niche (Part 2)

Get to know your competitors better, Who are your competitors? What are customer needs and preferences are you competing to meet? all this shapes your business decisions. Competitor analysis identifies the strengths and weaknesses of competing products or services. Find out exactly where your competitors traffic is coming from. Find out exactly which keywords are sending them the most traffic.

Here are some tools that is great for competitive analysis.

KeywordSpy

KeywordSpy – SEO & PPC Keyword Research software tool, that unveil your competitors most profitable Ad copies and keywords.

Quantcast

Quantcast.com -presents the demographics of web sites as well as the estimated monthly unique visitors, similar sites and the profile of a typical visitor of the site. Unfortunately, the results are sometimes unusable, because there are simply too many sites quantcast doesn’t know yet.

Compete

Compete.com – provides information for every site on the internet including site traffic history, competitive analytics, visitors, keywords that are driving traffic and more.

Google Adplanner

Google Adplanner – Free research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. Provides statistical profile of visitors to any website.

I hope you have found this post useful, let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.

In the last post I talked about how to pick a product / niche idea and keyword research. Now you can take the keyword research to the next level and do a indepth keyword market analysis which will give us the evolution of interest over time and keywords that our competitiors are using.

SEO For FireFox

SEO For FireFox – Once you have install the plugin, their are lots of features you have access to:

A couple keyword research tools are located just below the search box including:

* Google Insights – compare search volume patterns across specific regions,
categories, time frames and properties.

* Google Trends – shows historical search volume trends.

* Google Sktool – The average amount of traffic the keyword matches each month
on Google.com

* SEO Book Keyword Research Tool – cross references many popular keyword research tools.

* Google Traffic Estimator – shows top bid estimates and click volume estimates
associated with Google Awords.

* Google Keyword Sandbox – Google’s keyword research tool.

In addition to pulling in this valuable marketing data this tool links to the resources where the data was pulled from, so it makes it easy for you to verify the data and further analyze it by citing the source. You can click on any of the data points to dig deeper.

Other SEO Tools for serious market research :
15 Useful SEO Tools

The first thing you need is to have a product or niche ideas, the best place to get ideas is yourself, what are you interested in and what knowledge or skills do you have, read this article “How to find product / niche ideas”

Once you have some ideas, you want to look deeper to make sure there is a good market for them before you even think about creating a product or service.

The best resources I use to ascertain if their is a market for my idea, are places that tell you what people are searching for.

1/ Google Search based tool

Google Search based tool – Enter your niche or product idea in the word or phrase box, or select a niche from the categories on the left handside.

From the keyword ideas list copy a keyword or keywords that you want to analyse more.

2/ Google Adwords Keywords Tool

Go into Google Adwords Keywords Tool and paste the keyword or keywords into the box.

Try and look for keywords that have around 2 – 3  words in them. With between 2000 – 5000 or more per monthly searches using exact match phrases.

3/ Google

Next I like to see what sort of competition there is for those keywords. Just look at page 1 of Google. You really are only competing against the first 10 websites. Type your search term (without quotes) into Google search engine. If the top ten positions have a page rank of three or less, then your niche will have a good chance of ranking in the top ten of Google. Use SEO for Firefox plugin, to check the page ranks..

More Niche market resources to try:
More Niche Resources
10 hot Niche Market Research Sites

Part 2 is going to talk about indepth keyword research….

Running and building your own online business can be very rewarding, but at times it can also be extremely challenging. Luckily, there is a lot of advice and lots of great resources to help you make your business dream come true. Here is a list of the best resources that I use most of the time to help build my online business.

These resources will help you learn how to start your business from scratch, help you find great ideas and help you stay motivated and make your business successful.

Entrepreneurs Journey

Entrepreneurs Journey – is a blog (weblog) website aimed at those interested in Internet business and Blogging. Entrepreneurs Journey provides useful content and interviews from entrepreneurs from around the world.

The Warrior Forum

Warrior Forum – Is the best place to learn about internet marketing, ebook selling and home based business.

Entrepreneur.com

Entrepreneur.com – Great content on how to start an online business, also a great place to network with entrepreneurs just like you.

Think Big Magazine

Think Big Magazine – is a free online business magazine which shares stories that inspire and motivate people.

Meet Up

Meet Up – This is a great place to meet like minded entrepreneurs and business owners, which can help form mastermind groups, plan meetings and form offline clubs in local communities around the world.

Mixergy

Mixergy – Mixergy is where the ambitious learn from a mix of experienced mentors. Mixergy holds events were business people take some time out of their schedules to help teach others what they learned from their own experiences.

startups – uk based

startups – Startups.co.uk is the number one leading source of information for UK entrepreneurs. Whether you are a budding entrepreneur ready to start a business for the first time or you are an established entrepreneur looking to do it a second time, Startups.co.uk have all the news and information you need to get your small business starting on the right foot.

Other links to resources

Top Social Networks for entrepreneurs: visit website

101 Useful Resources for Online Entrepreneurs: visit website

10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs: visit website

I hope you have found this post useful, let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.

You know the saying “Everyone has at least one good book in them”. Which I think is true!!! The internet has opened the doors to would be writers to enable them to self publish their work. Gone are the days were you had to appoach offline publishers, begging them to read your work and publish it, ok not quite gone!!!

Self publishing is a great way to get exposure, connect with fans, and make more money with your written words. There are loads of self-publishing sites out there ready to take your master piece, to share to the world. Who knows you could be the next Stephen King or J.K.Rowling…

I am going to share with you self publishing sites I have used and personally think is worth trying.

Issuu

Issuu – is very cool, its for online publications where you can see the digital versions of print magazines, catalogues, and documents. This site is more for professional publishers than for individual users. Issuu also allows you to embed your publications on your site.

Yudu

Yudu – produces digital versions of your brochure, catalogue, newsletter or magazine. Yudu also allows you to add multimedia elements such as video, hyperlinks and sound to your publications.

Lulu

Lulu – is great, lets you publish and sell print-on-demand books, e-books, online music, CD/DVD’s, software, artwork and calendars.

Scribd

Scribd – Alot of small businesses uses this site to share documents and promotional material. Scribd is the world’s largest document sharing community. Visited by 17 million people per month.

here are some more publishing sites:
Sites to share documents online
10 self publishing sites

In the last post I talked about The 6 key points you need to be a aware of when creating a logo for your business. Now am going to talk about how businesses advertise and the consumers perception of your advertising.

What is advertising?

IPA says advertising is “the means of providing the most persuasive possible selling message to the right prospects at the lowest possible cost”

Kotler and Armstrong thinks “advertising is a paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods and services through mass media such as newspapers, magazines and television”

I personally think its both definitions..what do you think?

Check out some advertisements below that are creative and clever..see what the key persuasive selling messages are.

What determines the key advertising messages?

The advertising message is often more important than the amount spent. The advertising message must be carefully targeted to impact the target customer audience. A successful advertising message should have the following characteristics:

Meaningful- customers should find the message relevant
Distinctive – capture the customers attention
Believable – which is hard too do since most consumers doubt the true authenticity of an advertisement

What makes a consumer take action?

In advertisements, action words in present tense are used and visual imagery is use to illustrate that action. Also Important benefits to the consumer is highlighted in the advertisment, that sometimes will make a consumer want to take action, especially if they know they will get alot of value from it.

Advertisers also like to use persuasive techniques to play on consumers emotions such as fear, guilt, insecurity, shock and even humour.

I hope you have found this post useful, let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.

A logo is essentally a graphic representation or a symbol of your business. It also convey’s the style and recognition of your business.
 
You can learn a lot about good logo’s by looking at some of the logos for top businesses. These logo designs says alot about a business. Without a word most people can recognize famous logos when they see them. That is a good logo that will represent a business in the best way.

Examples of good logos:

More examples of great logos:
60 exceptional new logo designs
Creative logo designs

The 6  key points you need to be a aware of when creating a logo for your business

1 / Is it right for your business

Is the design of the logo appropriate to your business or market, does it send out the right message? will people remember your logo? does it illustrate what your company is about?

2/ Keep it simple stupid (K. I. S. S)

Keep your logo simple, have know complicated symbols or imagery as this will lose integrity when reduce in size. You need a logo that will be scaleable in any size and for any medium.

3/ Color

A good logo will retain impact and power in black and white. A logo should have know more than one to two colours (white is not considered a colour in a logo), if your printing out your logo and has lots of colours it will be very costly to print. Something to think about!!

4/ Font Typefaces

Using the right fonts in your logo is important, try not to use handwritten fonts or fonts that is difficult to read. Your logo most be readable to everyone.

5/ Is it Distinctive

Don’t try and have your logo look like any other business. Your business is unique  it has a distinctive culture and market presence.

6/ Transferable

Will your logo look good and be able to transfer to other mediums, such as books, magazines, t-shirts, video, memorabilia etc.

I hope you have found this post useful, let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.

Favicon which stands for (favourites icon) is a small square 16×16px icon integrated in blogs and websites. Favicon is displayed next to the address bar in webpages and the links in bookmarks. Favicon gives a personal and graphical feel to the website, users can easily locate bookmarks with the help of favicons.

Example of a Favicon

How to create Favicon

1. Open up your image editing Program, such as Photoshop or Gimp. Create an image that’s 64×64 pixels in size. It should be a simple image, so that it’s instantly recognisable. Save image as a JPG or GIF file

Example of a 64×64 pixel image

2. Convert the image to a favicon.ico file. It must be called exactly this, or the browser won’t recognise it. An easy way to do this is to use The Favicon Generator or any other favicon generator.

3. Save Favicon and make sure you name the file favicon.ico

4. Upload your Favicon.ico file to your website. You must place it into the same directory as your home (index) page, and leave it loose or put it in the images directory or any other folder, but you must include the path to that directory folder within your site.

5. Add the following code to your web site’s HTML. You should put the code after the <title> tag , and make sure the path to the icon is correct, relative to the web page. Code follows:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

6. Refresh the page  and admire your web site’s beautiful new icon.