Jan 23

Make Money From Your Site

Posted by: Prince in Busienss 4 Comments »

Making money is one of the main reasons that a lot of people make their own web sites. A lot of people make mistakes with this, though, and end up never making any money or making such a small amount they never get paid. Before I begin explaining this you should understand that this article is about making money from a website. It is not how to create an online store. If you are already selling something on the web or your site will be selling a product, you will get your revenue from this and it is not a good idea to try these other techniques.

To make money from your site you will need some advertising. Before telling you about getting advertising I will explain how most people go wrong with trying to make money from their site. There are hundreds of sites on the internet that do this and I have done it in the past. Usually sites which go wrong are personal sites with no real content. You will find a bit of information about the person and the rest is banner adverts, Amazon.com search boxes and popup windows. There is no way you are going to make money like this as (if people even bother visiting your site) they will probably leave before all the adverts have loaded.

To make money from your website you should have a few, highly targeted advertisers and a site which people will want to visit. You do not necessarily have to have a lot of visitors, but the more visitors you have the more money you will make. What you have, though is a site which people will be interested in and which has the potential to get some visitors.

There are two main ways to get advertisers for your site. You can have banner adverts and affiliate programs. Banner adverts are extremely common on the web and are very easy to get for your site. There are two types: pay-per-click (CPC) and pay-per-view (CPM). Pay per click will pay you money every time someone clicks on the banner. Pay-per-view will pay you every time the banner is loaded into someone’s browser. It is obvious that pay-per-view is going to make you a lot more money but, unfortunately, it is only available to large sites. Pay-per-click advertising will not get you as much money but if you can get well targeted advertising you should get quite a lot of clicks. Recently, many advertisers are starting to use pay-per-action (CPA) banners, where the user must do something on the advertisers site (like sign up to a newsletter) for you to earn the money, similar to affiliate programs.

Affiliate programs usually are where you advertise a product or a range of products on your site (like an Amazon.com search box). You will then be paid a percentage of sales you make. This is good if you have an audience who are very likely to buy from an affiliate program you are publicizing as you will earn a lot more than from a banner. For a list of thousands of programs you can join visit AssociatePrograms.com

To actually make a decent amount of money you will need to target your advertising and have only a few advertisers. By targeting your advertising I mean that you should have advertisers related to your site e.g. advertising Microsoft on a computer software site or linking to appropriate books on Amazon.com. Banner companies will look at your site and target the advertising for you. You should only have a few advertisers as they will have a minimum pay out (usually $25). You will not get paid if you don’t reach this amount so you should concentrate on a few to make sure you get paid. Some companies, like Commission Junction work as an agency where you can earn from many advertisers and all the money is pooled into one account, which is very useful.

Just remember that you are very unlikely to make a lot of money from your site. Your income might cover web hosting costs but, unless your site is very popular or you are selling a product, you are unlikely to be able to live on the income from it.

Google 

Just a few years ago no-one had heard of Google. We were all searching with Altavista, Excite and Inktomi (through Yahoo). Searching the web was a difficult process. Search engines were incaccurate, they had very small databases and it was difficult to know which results were actually relevant. The big search engines had turned away from searching and were concentrating on their huge portals, with news, horoscopes and TV listings. It was accepted that the difficulties in searching the web were something you had to put up with.

It was in December 1999 that Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page published their document ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine’ that everything began to change. This document showed the workings of their new project, a search engine called Google, which at that time, held data on 26 million web pages. Over the 2 years since then, Google has changed the webbeyond recognition.

Finally, there is a search engine which is fast, powerful, accurate and has an enormous database. Today, Google holds over 2 billion pages in its index, the largest search engine ever. Results are accurate and, using Google’s ‘Page Rank’ technology, and the masterful idea of showing a snippet of the site’s text containing the search term instead of the META description, the user can easily see which ones are relevant. Google’s huge cache of every page in its index has made ‘Error 404 - Not Found’ from listings a thing of the past and the total lack of large images on the site means it is one of the quickest sites to load on the web, even when showing 100 results per page. Now, Google offers web search, image search, directory search (based on the Open Directory), Directory Search (with the world’s biggest Usenet archive) and catalogs search (mail order catalogs online).

This sucess has immense implications for webmasters. Google is now the search engine of choice for most of the web and it handles over 150 million queries a day. With that sort of popularity, a webmaster’s first promotion task should be submitting to Google. Although it is highly likely that Google will pick up your site anyway on its next crawl, its always best to be safe. Getting into Google is simple, but getting a high ranking isn’t. Traditional methods just don’t work. Repeating your search term is useless, as is carefully planning out your META tags (Google doesn’t use them). What you must pay attention to is Google’s PageRank.

Google Page Rank Formula

This is the method used to rank search results. Each page is given a PageRank based on this formula:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Although this looks extremely confusing, in essence it means that your PageRank is based on the following:

  1. The number of sites linking to yours
  2. The PageRank of sites linking to yours

This means that a site with 500 links to it from other sites will get a much higher rank than one with 5. Also, if two sites, each with 100 links to them, but one of them has links from Yahoo, CNN, the BBC, Amazon and Microsoft, the one with the links from the more popular sites will get a higher ranking.

So the only way to guarantee a high ranking with Google is to exchange links with people, which is exactly what makes the web so powerful anyway. All Google is really doing is returning to the roots of the internet. Exchanging links is free (usually) and, now Google powers Yahoo’s web results, it seems to be the best way to build up traffic. But is a good PageRank the only way to get a higher listing. It probably is, but here are a few other tips which may or may not work (they appear to have given quite good results in some cases but this may be coincidence).

  1. Get a keyword filled domain name. If someone searches for ‘free advice’ and your site is www.freeadvice.com, you should get higher up the search results
  2. Put keywords in your title. If your site has the title ‘F
    ree Advice’ it should appear higher up the results for the above search
  3. Get your site included in the Open Directory (www.dmoz.org). Google appears to rank these pages higher.

Getting a high ranking in Google is not the only way you can benefit from it, though. Take a look at the design. To many people, Google is the best designed site on the web now. Its fast loading and easy to read. You can also learn an important lesson: If you see something wrong with the internet and can provide a good fix, you are well on the way to success. Thirdly, take a look at the Google Zeitgeist. Even if it doesn’t help your website, its an extremely interesting page, and you may just be able to change your site to take advantage of highly searched queries.

Google is a revolution. Its changed the way the web works, and its changed the way webmasters promote their sites forever. If you still don’t take Google promotion seriously, you’re making a big mistake, and if you’re considering spending thousands on promoting your site, take a week or two to exchange links with other sites first. I guarantee you won’t regret it.

For any webmaster developing a new Website, there is a lot to think about - design, content, promotion, backend development and satisfying the client. The problem is that many seemingly unimportant items don’t get the attention that they deserve, and a site’s name is one of these.Why Does It Matter?

OK, so you know that your site is built around the name. You’ll use it as a domain, as a page title, in your logo and possibly in the design. A name is much more than this, though. Your site or business name will be the way in which people find your site, the way they will refer to it and, most importantly, the thing they’ll remember when they leave.

If you don’t really believe this, think about it for a moment. You want to buy a book on the web. You don’t go on to a search engine and type in books, you go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble, and of course when you want webmaster information, you go to SitePoint. Similarly, when you have a good experience on a site, you might say to your friends ‘I read a great article on SitePoint’ or ‘I found great book prices at Amazon’.

Whatever the name of your site and however you promote it, it’s vital to realise that the name is going to be a major part of it.

What IS A Good Name?

So now you know that your name is so important, how can you pick a good one? The first thing you must think of, obviously, is domains. There’s no point in having a great name for a site if you don’t have the domain, so the whois databases are the place where you’ll be doing your research.

So what makes a good domain then?

  • Good Extension
  • Short
  • Easy To Spell
  • Descriptive
  • Keywords

Good Extension

If you believe the spam which arrives in your mailbox every morning, .ws is the new .com. .us is the new .com. .tv is the new .com… It’s simple. There is no new .com. Whatever develops in the internet industry, the .com domain will always be synonymous with the top websites. If you are looking for a site and you know its name, you try .com. If at all possible, get a .com name.

It’s not always possible, as many of you will know, to get a good .com name relating to your site. So what extension should you pick instead? I would say that .net, .info and country level domains are also viable for a website, but only in certain circumstances.

  • You can use a .net for most types of site, but it works best for technology. If you can get a short, snappy .net it is almost as good as a .com, but don’t bother with anything long or complex.
  • Use .info if your site is an informational one. For example, if I was looking for the web host HostRocket, I’d go to the .com site, but if I wanted to get more information about using it, I’d try the .info version of the domain (which just happens to be the customer driven informational site). Don’t bother setting up a non-informational site on a .info domain, though. It will just annoy people.
  • Country level domains are useful for particular websites. If you’re building a site for an established business in a country, or if you are planning to aim at a specific county’s audience then you may be better off with this than a generic .com (although I’d buy them both to be safe). As with .net, it’s really not worth buying a country level domain for a worldwide site, unless you can get something very short or memorable.

Short

I’ve mentioned this twice before, but it’s important to cover why short domains are so good. Firstly, of course, they are easier to remember. Anyone who has tried learning ‘Hamlet’ quotes will tell you that a word is easier to remember than a phrase. Two word domains are probably fine, three at the most, but if you have a really long domain it just gets confusing, especially if
the words aren’t capitalised.

A simple name will also roll off the tongue easily in conversation, look more professional and have less chance of typing mistakes.

Easy To Spell

Ever heard an advert on the radio where a web address is spelt out to you? The lack of good domains over the past few years lead many companies to get what could be regarded as ‘nonsense’ names. If you find yourself spelling your site’s name out to people, you’ve got it wrong. If you want people to remember you, they must be able to remember your site as a word. Again, words are easy to remember. This immediately outlaws the use of ‘unnatural’ spellings, of course, so don’t replace S with Z under any circumstances!

When deciding on a name, you should also be careful about double letters. Take CyberRadio2000, for example. Their domain uses a double R, as you might expect, but there is an uncertainty there. The two Rs together look a bit strange if written without capitalisation, and a good name will not force the user to assume anything about the name. Of course, if you really must have a double letter, the best solution is to buy both versions of the domain, but it’s not perfect.

Avoid lots of dashes in your domain name. It’s a great way of finding a better name that hasn’t been registered, but can make your domain harder to remember. Keep to a maximum of one dash and, if at all possible, none.

Descriptive

A good site or business name will describe exactly what the site is about. Take the ‘real world’ example of the Royal Mail in the UK. In an infamous marketing move the company was renamed Consignia. Now what does that mean? If I said the name Consignia to you, you wouldn’t associate it with letters and parcels. In fact Consignia have since discovered this, and renamed themselves, ‘The Royal Mail Group’! It just goes to show that with some ‘made up’ corporate name, it isn’t obvious what you do, and surely that is the whole point of a name.

Of course, many companies have succeeded using a non-descriptive name: ‘Egg’ the online bank, ‘elephant.co.uk’ (car insurance) and ‘Orange’ the mobile phone firm. How did they do this, though? Through huge marketing campaigns and brand awareness. Surely it’s better to have an instantly recognisable purpose than to have to spend millions on telling people what you do?

Keywords

An interesting use of domain names is starting to appear, and that is keywords. To give an example, I started the site Free-Webhosting.info and within two months it was number two on Google for a search on ‘free webhosting’. I had very few links to my site and hadn’t done any real optimisation for the search engines. It wasn’t just a fluke. Other sites I have worked on have had very high search engine rankings by having a search term as their domain. With no real technique for getting high rankings easily on engines like Google, this could be just what webmasters are looking for.

Finding A Name

Now you know what to look for in a name, its time to search for one. You might already have an idea of a name you could register, but unless you are very creative, you’ll probably find it’s gone (unless, of course, you are registering a company name which isn’t made or generic words). You could spend the next week typing names into whois searches, or you could try a domain generator. Nameboy (www.nameboy.com) is a good example. Just type in your keywords and instantly you will get 60 or more suggestions of domains you could buy, all checked and marked for availability in .com, .net and .org (and sometimes .info if the system is working). Using your newfound knowledge you will soon be able to find a name.

Register It!

So that’s it. You’ve bought a domain for your site. It’s easy to remember, spell and type. Its short, memorable and descriptive, and best of all, its yours. Now you have your key to website success, and all that needs to be done n
ow is the design, content, promotion, backend…

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Jan 23

Future Business Success

Posted by: Prince in Busienss No Comments »

Anyone who wants their website to do well nowardays must be very forward thinking. With over 2 billion web pages battling for the (relatively) small number of people online, the internet has become a cuthroat industry with developers resorting to desparate tactics to get more visitors. The simple fact is, though, that the way to be truly successful, is to be the first at something, and this is what webmasters should be looking to do.Practically all the good ideas are gone. Unfortunately this statement is, in some ways, very true. There are still websites that innovate, but now that most of the offline shops and ideas have been taken online, it is only the real visionaries that can create completely new ideas to take online. Because of this, everyone else need to find other ways of innovating. Surprisingly enough, though, there are new markets which are emerging which are growing, but under-exploited. It is these new markets which should be embraced by today’s webmasters.

China and IndiaOne of the new markets which is quikly developing on the internet, is that for Chinese content. China is the world’s most populous country with over 1.3 billion people, but only 33.7 million of them are online. Thats just 2.5%, compared to roungly 55% in the UK and USA. Its obvious, from looking at these figures, that internet usage in China is going to grow hugely over the next few years. Currently there are just over 500 million people online worldwide. Within the next 5 to 10 years, there could be that many people online from China alone.Although Chinese web users have for a long time been regulated online (and the government still puts filters in place to stop them from viewing some sites) they are getting more and more freedom and hundreds of thousands of sites in Chinese have been set up. There is still a huge amount of information which is online, though, which is only available in English, and this makes it difficult for the Chinese to use it. There is a huge market over the next few years to market your website and information in China, so it might be time to consider finding someone to translate your website.

A similar view could be taken of India. Here, internet access is even less widly spread (only 5 million of the 1 billion people are online (0.5%). Hundreds of other countries around the world like China and India also have huge populations and will be massive markets once the internet becomes widly spread. A shrewd webmaster will begin thinking about targetting these markets soon.

The ElderlyThis is a second market which is already gaining huge popularity, and will continue to do so over the next few years. Practically every developed country (for example the USA, Australia, the UK and other EU memeber countries) has an ageing population. Because people are living longer, larger proportions are over 60 and retired. Already, these people have begun to start using the internet, as it provides a huge amount of information without them having to leave home, and can allow them to keep in touch with friends and family easily.Although many sites are providing information directly to older people (and they can easily use the majority of internet sites in their native language), there is still an emerging market which should be targeted. Aiming your site towards the older generation of ’silver-surfers’ is much easier than translation. Things like offering alternative methods of payment, allowing larger font sizes, providing telephone numbers and postal addresses, can all impove the experience for older people and make them more confident about using your website.

There are many emerging markets, and to succeed on the internet you must be sure to consider and, in some cases directly target, them. This article has just covered two, but a bit of research can find many more. The internet will grow hugely over the next 5 years, and webmasters must be ready to take advantage.

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Introduction : Career Point Study Material is prepared by a team of famed academicians and experts who have been preparing IIT-JEE since a decade. They have indepth knowledge of their subject, capability to devise JEE level questions and a complete familiarity with IIT-JEE & Engineering examination trends. The Career Point Study Material comprises of systematised course ware on each JEE subject, specially designed exercises both for IIT-JEE screening and mains, a self monitoring stage by stage system helping you analyse your own success on a rating scale and boosting your confidence gradually. The Study Material is self sufficient hence, there is no need to refer any other book.  

The basic objective of Career Point’s study material package is to make you academically strong, temperamentally sound, methodical in approach, quick and accurate in applying the concepts and psychologically tune you with the examination pattern - all the factors collectively culminating in your success in IIT-JEE. 

The Career Point Study Material is a comprehensive package consisting of the following sections arranged logically and sequentially :  

SMP comprises of the following : (1) Topic wise theory notes  (2) Inchapter Examples 

(3) Inchapter exercises  (4) Miscellaneous examples  

(5) Exercise Sheets [1 to 5] The Career Point’s SMP details are as below : The Career Point’s SMP details are as below : (1) Topic wise theory notes : There are topicwise theory notes on each subject written in an interactive manner. Theory notes convey the basic concept to a student in classroom coaching manner. The basic objective of topicwise theory notes is to make all the concepts of a chapter easily understandable to the students. The highlights of topicwise theory notes are as under.: There are topicwise theory notes on each subject written in an interactive manner. Theory notes convey the basic concept to a student in classroom coaching manner. The basic objective of topicwise theory notes is to make all the concepts of a chapter easily understandable to the students. The highlights of topicwise theory notes are as under.

: There are topicwise theory notes on each subject written in an interactive manner. Theory notes convey the basic concept to a student in classroom coaching manner. The basic objective of topicwise theory notes is to make all the concepts of a chapter easily understandable to the students. The highlights of topicwise theory notes are as under.

These theory notes are the same which we use in our classroom coaching.  

 
Every minute detail of the concept is well explained.   

 
The theory notes are interactive and if you go through them methodically,they will convey the impression as if you are virtually reading in the classroom.   

 
The theory notes are self sufficient. There is no need to refer any other material.   

 

(2) Inchapter Examples : After topicwise theory notes, there are certain illustrations which are termed as inchapter examples. These are based on the same topic to which they follow. The basic objective of inchapter example is to explain the application of theory of that topic in details to the students. The highlights of inchapter examples are as under.

Inchapter examples play the role of a teacher for you. These example server the  purpose of illustration which a teacher usually opted to further explain the application of a topic to his student.
Inchapter examples explain in detail the application of concepts and fundamentals which are discussed in a topic.
They help you understand the topic and its application quite deeply.
(3) Inchapter exercises :Succeeding inchapter examples, there is an inchapter exercise. It comprises of questions of the same topic which it follows. The basic objective of inchapter exercises is to ensure your understanding of the topic and its applications. The highlights of inchapter exercises are as under.
Inchapter exercise plays the same role which a teacher does in the form of asking  questions after having taught the students the theory with related illustrations (inchapter examples).
Inchapter exercises help you to check whether you are capable of applying concepts and fundamentals discussed in the topic. (4) Miscellaneous examples :The theory part of the chapters proceed ahead as per the above three stages and when the chapter finishes, there are 25-30 miscellaneous illustrations. These illustrations perfectly explain you how to use different concepts in a question. The basic objective of miscellaneous examples is to develop the capability to solve complex questions. The highlights of miscellaneous examples are as under.
The miscellaneous examples give you a perfect idea about the methods of solving complex questions.
They also make you familiar with how to apply concepts from different topics and chapters  in a question. 

(5) Exercise sheets : The exercise sheets are designed after thorough research and analysis of examination pattern. That explains why every year approximately 70-80% questions in IIT-JEE screening and mains examination are from our exercise sheets. Career Point is fully conversant with the IIT-JEE pattern and develops it’s exercise sheets on the very pattern of the JEE examination.
There are five different exercises in Career Point Study Material Package :
Exercises 1, 2 : For IIT - JEE Screening
Exercises 3, 4, 5 : For IIT - JEE Mains 

Solutions to exercise sheets : To help students, we also provided answers to all problems with solutions and hints for selected problems.

For More Deatils Visit:
http://www.careerpointgroup.com

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