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Beginner Bits and Pieces

There are all kinds of little tips and bits of information that needs to be gathered, learned, and implemented before you can successfully market on the Internet. And the most important of those words is ‘implemented’. If your life is spent in learning mode, you will never accomplish anything. Take risks, see what works and what doesn’t. When I fail, those are the lessons I learn the best. Here are some of my beginner pieces of advice:

• Register your domain. I use Netfirms for that. Choose a catchy domain name, preferably one that contains a keyword or two that describe your site. Mugsandmegs isn’t the greatest example, since I often have people asking me if I sell mugs – which I don’t usually. But you must admit it’s catchy.
• Always try to purchase a domain name with a .com ending. Stay away from .info extensions- they are cheaper, so often used by spammers. And you don’t want to be included in their number. Note: the www is not included in your domain name, since it will automatically be added. I mention this because one of my students wanted a particular name, say it was’ fastcomputers.com’ and that wasn’t available. When he typed in ‘wwwfastcomputers.com’, that was. If he’d registered it, the domain would have looked like ‘www.wwwfastcomputers.com’ – not what he wanted. If you absolutely have to have a specific name, try hyphens. For instance: fast-computers.com.

• Find an inexpensive hosting service that has all kinds of neat features, really easy to use, and has fast, reliable servers . My favorite is Hostgator. Show off your photos, display your ebay or craft items for sale, share valuable content and build a community of people who have the same interests.
• Add an autoresponder. By using a service such as Aweber, you can add an opt-in form so people can subscribe. Opt-in simply means that a person signed up for your newsletter or website updates. Double opt-in is the term used when they not only sign up, but they click a link sent in a follow-up email to confirm that they did indeed want you to send the material.
• Include adsense ads on your site as a bit of extra income. Adsense are those little ads by Google that you often see at the top, bottom, side, or in the middle of the content of a page. When you click one of those links, the person running the site -me, in this case – will get a few cents. When I say a bit of extra income, that’s exactly what I mean. Unless you have hundreds of sites, don’t expect to get rich that way.
• Become an affiliate for products and services advertised on your website. An affiliate link sends your readers to a page where if they purchase a product, you get commission on it. For instance, the above links to Netfirms, Hostgator and Aweber are my affiliate links. You pay the same price either way, but by purchasing through my link, I also am paid a small amount. To do this, you first sign up for an account with the merchants you want to represent. Often, that information can be found by scrolling to the bottom of a merchant’s site and looking for a link that says ‘affiliates’.
• Of course, to sell online you also need a way to collect money. The easiest thing to do is sign up for an account with Paypal if you haven’t already. You will need a Premier account in order to accept payments. That way people can easily pay you using a charge card without you having to fork out money for an expensive merchant account.

• Technorati Tags: hosting, selling online, beginner Internet marketing

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