The Million Dollar Domain

Beginner Intro: Traffic

August 28, 2008

So you have a brand new website or blog. Now how do you make people visit it? On this post I’ll outline some of the ways you’ll get your traffic count going.

Traffic is the number one thing on the online marketing business. Once you have traffic, you can think about monetizing that traffic and start making money. Until you reach a steady traffic flow, you shouldn’t even try to place ads or anything on your site because if you don’t have traffic, then you can’t generate clicks and therefore placing ads on such a new site is superfluous. Read the rest of this entry »

Begginer Intro: Blogging Tips

August 12, 2008

So to finish up our blogging related beginner posts we’ll discuss a little about the wordpress platform, themes, our recommended plugins and some tips.

If you have just started blogging, there are a few steps you should take.

1. Activate the akismet plugin. This plugin comes preinstalled with wordpress but you have to activate it and get a wordpress key (which takes 2 minutes). Akismet blocks spam comments on your blog, so if you choose to enable comments on your posts (which you should) then this plugin is a must, and best of all it’s a set and forget.
2. Choose a theme. You could use the default theme, but it’s way overused. The ideal is to choose a theme that is very user friendly, with good link visibility, nice color contrast, and a nice and attractive layout. If you know how to design a theme or can change a free theme to your liking, then you should do so, unique content and layout designs are always a better choice than free themes that are probably used by hundreds or more. A good place to get themes is the Wordpress Theme Directory. Another one is searching google for “free wordpress themes”
3. Decide on a permalink structure, permalinks are the actual links to your blog posts, and wordpress gives you a lot of flexibility here. For maximum SEO performance, you should simply choose “yourdomain.com/blog-post-title” but this really comes down to personal preference as I personally don’t think it makes that much of a difference, so you might prefer “yourdomain.com/year/month/blog-post-title” that is also search engine (and user) friendly. Whatever you choose, do activate the permalink feature because otherwise you’ll have those ugly query strings all over your urls.
4. Download and install the Google XML Sitemaps Generator Plugin. This plugin takes care of updating and submitting your sitemap to Google and other search engines. This allows search engine to know more about the structure of your website.
5. Dowload and install the All In One SEO Pack Plugin. This plugin optimizes your blogs output for search engine optimization. Optimizes keywords, page titles and more.
6. Install the ShareThis plugin or a similar social bookmarking plugin. This should go right after your posts along with a reminder letting visitors know they can subscribe to your feed. This way visitors have some options when they finish reading your posts. If they like your post, they will be able to quickly submit it to whatever social bookmarking sites they use or e-mail to a friend.
7. Create an About page. You should use this page to introduce yourself to the visitors, your background, your work, what you do and like and what people should expect from your blog. This gives your blog a personal touch that helps visitors to identify you as an actual human behind the blog. Also consider placing one or several pictures of yourself on the about page (or on a photos page if you prefer) as this also greatly increases the human awareness of the visitor.
8. Create a Contact page. You can simply put up a page with e-mail instructions or use a contact me plugin like Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form. This gives confidence to the visitor that he can reach you if he so chooses and, like the about page, gives the human touch.
9. Create an account on FeedBurner for your blog and give your visitors a visible option to subscribe to your blog by RSS and by e-mail (FeedBurner takes good care of all this). This allows users to use an rss reader or just get your posts by e-mail. Most visitors never return so you should make it easy and worthwhile for them to subscribe to your blog and receive future updates.

Well, those are 9 of the things that Read the rest of this entry »

Beginner Intro: What blogging platform to choose?

July 21, 2008

So on our last post we hopefully gave you some encouragement and you’ve decided to start a blog. Now which blogging platform should you choose?

You have some options here:

You can choose one of the free ones, and here you have a whole range of offers like Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog.com and you can search google for more if you want. Any of those sites allow you to quickly register and have a blog going in less than 5 minutes, all sites also have extensive help and support and overall it’s really very simple.

The other option is to go for a blog hosted on your own webspace and with your own domain. This will set you back about $5 or $10 per month for hosting and another $10 per year for a domain name. But once you have your own hosting account you can install from a whole plethora of blogging platforms, content management systems, forums, wikis, simple HTML sites, anything you want. Most of the times you can install those applications on your webspace just by clicking a couple of menu options on the hosts administration panel. Read the rest of this entry »

Beginner Intro: Blogging

July 10, 2008

When you’re just starting to get into the online business you’ll pretty soon get overwhelmed by the amount of information and offers, tons of different ways to make it, and each promising more than the other. Now it’s very important that you take action as soon as possible and don’t get stuck in reading and researching everything. Taking action can sometimes be hard, and a lot of people never even make it through this phase, so in my opinion the first thing you should do is start a blog immediately.

If you have the gift of writing, whatever it may be about, poems, stories, lyrics, recipes, game or product reviews, a personal diary, etc, then you should have no problems starting a blog right now and continue posting to your blog with relative frequency. If you don’t have the gift of writing, well, i would recommend you start a blog anyway and try it out for a month or two. Maybe with time you’ll learn to enjoy blogging, like millions of others. A blog is extremely easy to start, it’s completely free and you can be blogging in less than 5m.

What will you blog about? Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to The Million Dollar Domain

June 25, 2008

Welcome to The Million Dollar Domain, here you’ll find articles, guides, reviews, valuable offers, tips, and much more about the make money online universe.

If you reached this site, you are probably searching for ways to make money online or be your own boss. Maybe you’ve heard of quick profits when making a living online, instant millionaires and all that. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but while that sometimes happens, it’s not too common, most of the time you have to research, read, review, optimize, test, and fail. You have to actually commit, and do the work. And once you get over this, you have a very good chance of succeeding.

There must be thousands of ways to make it on the net. New businesses start everyday, a lot more fail everyday. It’s not hard, but it’s definitely not easy. It takes work and self discipline, but with time and once you find what works for you, everything will be easier, you’ll be more experienced and specialized, you’ll outsource and grow, or maintain. It’s a different experience for everyone. It can be really fun, and the next day really hard. But if you do it right, with time, the fun times will hopefully overcome the hard ones.

So we’ll try our best to provide you with valuable content and resources to make it through. We won’t promise you riches, but we’ll supply you with the tools and some knowledge to do it yourself.

Over our next posts we’ll start discussing the most popular ways to make money online. So that you can have a general idea of what’s ahead, we’ll discuss blogging, contextual advertising, affiliate marketing, domain and site flipping, pay per action, online auctions, traffic generation, search engine optimization and much more.

And if nothing of the previous paragraph made sense to you, don’t worry because we’ll start off easy with some beginner intros and guides.

So stick around and make sure to bookmark us, subscribe to our rss feed or subscribe by email. Thanks.