Easy Web development

Although you may not recognize the name, Squidoo is a popular website designed to make it easy for anyone to set up a single page on a topic they know or care a lot about, for free. It’s essentially a network of user-generated lenses (single pages that highlight one person’s point of view, recommendations, or expertise) which can be used to advertise products or services through affiliate marketing. Founded by author, speaker and notable blogger Seth Godin, there is already a huge fan base and Squidoo currently hosts over 400,000 lenses.

Profitable

Making a lens is not exactly rocket science and you can make money from it easily by ‘back linking’ to your affiliate websites, plus all revenue made from your page is shared with you, ‘lens master’. You can also add extra wealth creation devices such as Google Adsense to your lens, although this will probably generate lower levels of income than linking to your affiliate site.

Squidoo raises itself above the average blog site by getting people with genuine interests and knowledge to contribute back into the online community. Squidoo has done amazing things for online businesses and is therefore an indispensable tool for marketing your expertise, affiliate program and services. It is often used by niche marketers and some have been very successful as a direct result.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO or website optimization) refers to the process of purposely designing and structuring your website to rank well on the search engines and so it’s the basic part of the success of your website. It helps your site get higher targeted site traffic, improved conversion rates and return on investment (ROI). Although there are some people out there who will do anything to try and trick search engines into raising their site’s ranking, this is a very dangerous practice and can lead to your website being blacklisted. Real SEO is less of a black art and more a set of common sense procedures for businesses to follow in order to capitalise on the volume of traffic generated every day from search engines both in the UK and around the world.

SEO

The term SEO has been adopted by industry consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform these services in-house. SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site (a process that’s crucial to getting a high ranking).

SEO techniques are classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. SEO is a science in itself and requires a full time effort to make sure your pages are optimized with keywords and phrases that are Google-friendly and up to date.

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Once you’ve got your website or blog up and running why not use it to earn you money? By far the easiest way of doing this is to make it into an affiliate site. In many cases affiliates can carve out entire careers for themselves simply by delivering high quality traffic to merchant websites on a regular basis.

Using Content Management Systems like Joomla! means you’ll be able to choose designs that are fun and flexible to make your site just as you want it. Keep in mind that all you need to do to succeed with affiliate programs is to get your potential customer to click through to the affiliate website in an ‘open-to-buy’ mindset, so it’s crucial that you write compelling copy to a) attract the attention of people on Google who are searching for the items you’re advertising so they visit your site, and b) persuade them to purchase the items once they’re on your site. Learn more about writing compelling copy here.

Once you’ve learnt about Joomla! and/or WordPress you’ll find it easy to add product endorsements and links to other websites that sell the product or service that you’re promoting. Once you’ve done this you need to think about optimizing your site to bring as many visitors to your site as possible, to increase the chance of generating money from your web or blog site. Discover more about site optimization here. As well as getting your site known among the online community it’s best to publicize it as much as possible so many affiliates add a link at the bottom of their outgoing email so they can advertise their affiliate website to family, friends and business colleagues.

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Joomla! is a free, award-winning Content Management System (CMS, written in PHP), which allows users to publish their content on the world wide web and intranets without any fuss and virtually no knowledge of code necessary. It’s supported by a large online community and came into being in 2005 when it evolved from a similar web application called Mambo. ‘Joomla’ is the phonetic spelling for the Swahili word ‘Jumla’, meaning “all together” or “as a whole”. The name should be written with an exclamation mark at the end, but this is commonly omitted.

Simple To Use

Joomla! is exceptionally user-friendly and straightforward to operate, winning the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award in both 2006 and 2007. It has an official and many unofficial communities and there are a range of free tutorials available to get you fully acquainted with how it works so your website can be up and running in no time.

Unique

Joomla! is very robust, and once learned it is very easy to use. It’s run by individuals and teams of people who contribute their skills to its development as well as its support systems. Joomla! is different to the normal models of CMS as it’s been developed for everybody to use and anyone can develop it further. Users can adjust the settings from the ‘back end’ and also control the list of users who have access to the system.

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WordPress was created by the developers as weblogging or blogging software - a friendly tool for bloggers. It is 100% ‘open source’ so anyone can download and use it for free. One happy user is quoted as saying “Wordpress would have to be one of the most exciting programs that I’ve worked with in a long time.” WordPress, to spammers, is an unpredictable and moving target as long as its users keep update when there are developments. The developers have just released a new version of this blogging software, WordPress 2.5. A powerful personal publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible. It is blessed with an active community, which is the heart of open source software. There are a range of ‘themes’ available to choose from so you can decide how to present their sites to viewers and it is now easier than ever to add images or files to posts.

Blog By Email

You can send your posts as an email to appear on the blog. One user commented that “In the space of 24 hours I had a WordPress blog set up with all my content intact and when I needed help I found it on the support forums. Now all of my blogs are on Wordpress, and I’ll never go back.”

Dreamy

WordPress has loads of happy users: “It’s been a dream to use and any problems I’ve had (mainly figuring out how to tinker a theme to use my own graphic for a background) have been easily answered on the forums”, “It’s got a great team behind it, a massive community, a lot of big name endorsements, a book or two and a great future ahead”, “I think it’s great that you can add caching by using SuperCache, Wp-Cache, etc as plugins…”

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