Fire Your Website Designer

This is probably the most important lesson so read through it a couple times and really take time to digest and think about it.

In this lesson we are going to discuss establishing your niche or target market. You can define a niche or target market as a segmented group of people that can be classified as possible customers.

A niche market is generally smaller and might not cater to the masses. Let me put it to you this way: A majority of athletes that need specialized sporting goods would go find a Dick’s Sporting Goods or family-owned shop before heading to Wal-Mart to get what they need. The family owned shop’s niche would be specifically sporting goods.

What I want you to start thinking about is what niche market you want to target for your online “store”. This is the hardest part of this whole process and typically where many attempts at making money online will stall out, but I KNOW you can do it!

Many people start businesses after becoming somewhat of an expert in a certain interest, field, product or service.

I want you to consider your whole life right now. Think about what you are passionate about. Think about what you could easily talk for hours about. At this point, this could be ANYTHING.

Maybe you are a die-hard sports fan or play a sport at your college. You could be perceived as the expert in a certain genre of music. You may LOVE politics and be known as the political guru.

I want you to think broadly at this point. Brainstorm and write down your interests. Most of you probably belong to social networking sites such as Facebook or Bebo. Think about what you talk about on Facebook or what groups you have joined.

Consider this entire project an assignment. The difference is at the end of this project, you will have a LIVE money-making website! I want you to designate a folder on your computer or student server space to store information you will gather in upcoming weeks. I have a Yahoo mail account and I use the Notepad to store my notes. I have pages and pages of information. I like this because I can access this information from ANYWHERE at ANYTIME.

I believe in making lists. I want you to make a list of your top ten ideas that you have brainstormed. Now, I want you to rewrite the list and this time rank the list based on your interest level and level of knowledge on each topic. This is the beginning of your research project.

I know you are probably saying to yourself WTF, I don’t want anymore homework! This is such a crucial step in the process. I have failed numerous times by trying to be everything to everyone. I would immediately put up a site that I knew nothing about and you could tell that I had no passion and didn’t know what I was talking about.

Please take the time to think about this list.

In Lesson #2 we will discuss how to narrow down your list even more and begin researching the popularity of your subject. This will help us determine how much potential traffic you could drive to your website or sites when we are all done.

I encourage you to post any comments or questions on this site. I believe that we will all benefit from sharing information that we have.

Thanks for reading and have a great day! If you haven’t yet, please sign up for the email newsletter for more tips and tricks. Also, tell your friends about the program.

I’ve been developing websites utilizing Flash, PHP, .asp, MySQL and other important technology and software for the last 8 years. I got into the affiliate marketing game in July of 2008. For the past 6 1/2 months, I’ve been learning a great deal about affiliate marketing, blogs, social media, seo and a host of other technologies and theories.

I am beginning a series of posts now that will walk through my process for establishing a website that earns me money passively. This simply means that people can be visiting the website and clicking links while I am doing other things and I earn a commission while they do that.

When I started, this seemed like a foolproof, easy way to make money. I believe that many people start out thinking they can easily earn thousands of dollars doing this with little effort. I’m here to tell you 1) It’s not easy, and 2) you can earn money if you are diligent and you focus.

Ahhhh, focus.

That word pops up again. Focus is essential in this business. I learned the hard way and probably cost myself thousands of dollars during my learning process.

I’m going to take you through the process I have developed for creating a website that will get a great amount of organic search traffic and will earn passive money.

I will be featuring one of my websites, http://GetYourCellPhones.com. In the beginning(July 08) I got crazy and made a bunch of different sites and this was one of them. If I had focused soley on this site, I would have been much better off. Please read this post about focus to understand what I mean.

This will be a work-in-progress as I am nowhere near done with the site. In the end, you’ll know EXACTLY how to create the same kind of product and earn passive income.

I am going to cover the following topics extensively through blog posts and video:

1. How to choose a niche
2. Researching your niche
3. Choosing a domain name and hosting
4. Building your website
5. Choosing and signing up for affiliate programs
6. Targeting certain keyphrases for great traffic
7. Making posts to your website
8. How to utilize social media
9. How to maintain your site
10. How to analyze your traffic for better results

Please sign up for my blog post updates via my feed. Feel free to leave comments or questions below.

This series of tutorials will teach you to be a better marketer, search engine optimizer, social media maven, web developer and all around good person.

I’ve had tons of requests from readers to see what my ebay affiliate program niche websites look like. I’m planning a post that will show you EXACTLY how I generate these sites in no time at all. The nice thing about these sites is the RSS feeds provided by ebay are FULL of search terminology that will get you search engine boostings in no time. I have come up with the perfect Wordpress set up with the right combination of plugins to get websites up and indexed in search engines quickly.

Let me show you a few of my successful sites.

WonderfulHandbags.com - This site has had an explosion in search traffic. I am getting hundreds of long tail search terms and it’s all because of the RSS feeds. The content is ever changing because these auctions end in one hour.

SmartphonesUnlocked.com - I have seen a huge boost in the search traffic for this site as well. Again, tons of long tail search terms have helped me earn a decent amount of commission selling other people’s stuff.

GoldSellers.net - This was the first site I created. The bulk of the traffic I get is people looking for Gold Bullion.

Setting these sites up has helped me realize the enormity of ebay. I’m here to tell you that you can make a very decent extra or full time income setting these sites up. Once you get the site up and running with the right plugins, it’s essentially a money earner on autopilot!

If you want to be one of the first people to know exactly how I set these sites up, sign up to receive updates via my rss feed!

I can still remember my first time I realized I could make money on the internet.

Making money on the internet is quite simple. There are literally thousands of different ways you can make money online.

I am going to show you a simple method that I have perfected after years of trial and error.

This training package is the culmination of 1000’s of hours of work/time I have put in to make it PERFECT!

I can still remember the days of working an extra job to support my family. I would spend 2-3 evenings a week and 1/2 of my Saturdays mowing lawns. I would make about $150.00 extra per week and life was great. This was extra money that my family could not live without. This money, of course, was seasonal and didn’t help in the winter months. In the winter, I would take a part time job at a restaurant which would essentially take up the same amount of time.

I GOT TIRED OF THIS! I wanted to see my family. I was newly married with twin babies and all I wanted to do was be home with them. I decided I would do whatever I could to earn extra money working from home part time. I began researching website design. I became completely infatuated with it. I would check out books and do tutorial after tutorial learning as much as I could. I became confident enough to place an ad on ebay. Someone purchased my web design service and I never looked back! My first website design auction sold for $50.00!

I was elated!

I would be able to earn money from my home. I would have taken me 5-6 hours worth of work outside of my home to earn the same money! $50.00 was nothing. I continued to hone my skill and learn new skills and was able to charge even more money. Eventually, I was earning $200-$300 extra per week!

This was even better. I was making twice as much as before and I was at home doing it! I was on a constant quest to get more efficient and to try to earn the same amount of money or even more in less time. After all, I had a family and wanted to spend as much time with them as possible.

I was ready to move on. I was having a great time working from home, but I was putting in many hours. I wanted to find a way to make money while I was doing the things that I wanted to do like taking the kids to the park or even sleeping! Well, after years of trial and error, I have perfected the ULTIMATE way to earn extra money while doing the things I love.

This is referred to as passive income.

I know what you must be thinking… How in the hell can you earn money when you aren’t even there. It’s amazing how simple it really is! Imagine being able to do the things you love… eating, sleeping, vacationing, going to sporting events, etc. while earning an amazing supplemental income.

With my methods, working only part time, I am able to supplement my family’s income by $800-$1200 every week! The beauty of it is I spend no more than 1 hour per day doing it! So, lets do the math: 5-7 hours per day earning $800-$1200 every week. That adds up to over $100 per hour! Tell me what other part time job that will pay you that kind of money!

I will show you step-by-step exactly how I do this.

This is a completely legitimate business that ANYONE CAN RUN out of their own home. The only thing you need is an internet connection. You could conceivably run this business from anywhere, including your cell phone!

My methods are perfect for:

Stay-at-home moms who want to earn extra money.
College students who need extra cash at school.
People with a full time job that need a supplement.
Anyone trying to earn extra money for the holidays.

I earned $300.00 while writing this! This was after spending all day with my family, then coming home and checking my email. I put in a little over 2 hours worth of work to earn that money! Not too bad, huh?

Please bookmark my site or sign up for my rss feed now. I will be posting my exact methods in an upcoming series.

This tutorial explains how I quickly and easily find keyword enriched domain names for blogs or websites that I put up.

As you may or may not know, Google bases their ranking system on relevance. When your blog or website is indexed it determines your ranking based on how relevant the content is in comparison to your domain name and the keywords you are trying to get ranked for.

The domain name is one of the first places that google looks. Google figures that the domain name that you purchase should give potential visitors to your site a clue as to what your site is about. Anytime I buy a domain name or suggest a domain name to a client, I use the methods that I am about to show you to find incredible domain names that WILL improve your organic search engine optimization.

Ok, so we’ll assume you know what your website is all about. Now, think of a keyphrase people will be typing in to find your future website. Now, take that keyword and visit this address: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Type your keyword into the textbox, type in the code and press submit.

Google displays a bunch of relevant keywords/phrases that are similar to what you have typed.

I did the same thing with a website idea that I had. I typed in funny video clips and the tool returned over 200 different keyword/keyphrase ideas.

Now, I’m going to tell you how to find incredible domain names using this information.

At the bottom of the list you will see “Download all keywords”. Choose the link for “text”.

On a Windows machine this will open up in Notepad by default. In Notepad choose Edit, then Replace. This brings up a box that asks you what you want to find and what you want to Replace it with. For the “Find what:” box, push the spacebar one time. Leave the “Replace with:” box blank. Now push Replace All.

This has taken all of the spaces out which leaves you with a list of one line key phrases with no spaces.

Now for the fun part! Lets find out what domain names are available for these keywords/phrases. Open a new browser tab or window and go to the

CheerfulDomains.com bulk domain look up tool. This allows you to paste up to 500 different domain names to check. Now copy the keyword list and paste it into the Bulk lookup text box. On the right you can choose chich domain extensions you want to look for. (Secret: you don’t have to have a .com to get your domain name/website ranked in Google!)

Now press submit and you’ll be amazed at what’s available.

Check the popularity of that search term
When you see a domain name that you like, go back to the keyword listings on Google and check the popularity of that keyphrase. This tool shows you how many times your key phrase is searched per month.

By doing all of this, I found that “funny clips” was searched 368,000 times per month! I bought FunnyClips.me due to this research and it has paid off.

I am getting substantial amounts of traffic because the search terms that are being typed in have “funny clips” in the key phrase.

By doing this, I am able to come up with domains in 10 minutes or less when it used to take me hours and sometimes days to find a domain name!

Good luck finding your next great domain!

Wordpress is an incredible blogging platform that allows you to get your thoughts out for the world to see very quickly and painlessly. Wordpress offers two flavors to choose from. You can set up a completely free blog at Wordpress.com. The disadvantage to this is you cannot use plugins or alter themes which can completely transform the user experience on your site.

The other version of Wordpress you can download from Wordpress.org. This allows you to create or modify themes and use plugins that I will tell you about in a minute. Many hosts allow you to set up Wordpress in a few clicks through automatic software. I’ll tell you more about that in #1 below. This saves you time by automatically creating the database and establishing the file structure for you.

This is the only way I create Wordpress blogs or websites. Let me explain why.

1. Ease of implementation
I host my Wordpress websites and buy my domain names at CheerfulDomains.com. Setting up Wordpress on a CheerfulDomains.com account is very inexpensive and easy to do. Once you have purchased a domain name and a hosting package you can implement Wordpress in a few short clicks. You can literally have your blog up and ready to go within a few minutes!

Being a Wordpress developer after coming from many years of hand-coding websites in Notepad really helps me appreciate the ease of implementation. The feeling is probably similar to that of a photographer going from traditional film and dark room techniques to going completely digital.

I love being able to instantiate a blog site in minutes and to be able to start generating content immediately. Sites take time to get indexed by search engines, so the faster you get it up with content, the quicker it will be indexed.

I now want to tell you about some of the useful plugins that I use for my Wordpress sites.

2. Powerful plugin selection
http://www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins

Share-This
You have probably seen the Share-This link on other blog sites if you are familiar with blogs. Share-This allows you to include social bookmarketing and Social networking links at the bottom of each of your posts. This gives your users the ability to post your links on these sites to let other people view them. The great part about this is if one of your articles get popular on a bookmarking or networking site, it can go viral and drive thousands of visitors to your site in a very short amount of time.

This is a great way to drive instant traffic to your blog before it even gets indexed on search engines.

Google Sitemap Generator
This plug-in notifies Google, MSN and Yahoo instantly when you post on your blog. I wrote about the importance of having a site map for Google to find in an earlier post. This plug-in automatically builds a brand new site map once you publish a new post in addition to instantly notifying the big three search engine sites.

This plug-in is a critical addition to ANY Wordpress blog if you want people to actually visit your site!

All In One SEO Pack
The All In One SEO Pack allows you to choose your own titles, description and meta tags for your posts. This is incredibly valuable and highly recommended. If you do not have this plug-in, Wordpress chooses whatever you use for the blog post title and tags that you chose for that post.

Modifying this information will help you with organic seo.

3. Get your thoughts out there fast!
Wordpress allows you to get your thoughts out on the web very quickly. Writing blog posts using Wordpress is as easy as writing an email. You pick a title, create your body using a WYSIWYG editor or HTML, choose some tags and categories and you are done.

One key to getting a huge following to your blog is by creating many relevant posts on a regular basis. Wordpress makes it as simple as possible to do this. Wordpress also allows you to publish your articles at a later date. Wordpress will auto publish your post on any date that you wish. You can also save drafts of your posts and manually publish them when you are ready.

4. Create a following
The beauty of blogging is in RSS technology. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication is exactly what it says. People click RSS icons on your blog site and are able to be notified anytime you post something new on your blog.

People can also set their RSS Readers to pull blog posts based on certain content. Wordpress is programmed to make syndication of your website using RSS easy. Just about all themes that you find come with a RSS button of some kind to allow people to easily subscribe to your blog.

Once your blog is established, you’ll be able to check the stats and realized that you get many repeat visits because of RSS. Imagine the days before RSS… You would get a one-time shot at selling your product or service on your site. Now, you can engage readers over and over by allowing them to sign up for a continual feed to your site. It’s essentially like having a newspaper delivered every morning. Think of the paper boy as the RSS technology behind it. Because of him, the content from the newspaper is getting to you from their presses. Pretty sweet, eh?

I also wanted to talk to you about quite possibly the most amazing thing I have found out about since entering the blogosphere myself. Using AWeber, I am creating a following similar to the way I am through RSS, except people sign up using their email address and name. AWeber allows me to send emails to my list of subscribers in addition to newsletters. I can also create a blog broadcast function that will broadcast my blog posts to whomever signs up for my service.

AWeber allows me to send different types of marketing messages versus simply notifying users that a new blog post is up as RSS does. I will be writing a follow-up post about AWeber and share some of my methods for increasing sign ups and how to utilize my lists. I have AWeber implemented on multiple blog sites and have created multiple lists.

5. Amazing selection of free themes
Maybe you want to use a pre-existing theme. Maybe you want to create your own or modify a theme. I started out modifying existing themes. It doesn’t take much to transform the look and feel by changing a few things in the css and xhtml code is written for the themes.

Wordpress users have created many themes and you have free access to all of them here: http://www.wordpress.org/extend/themes

In posts to come I will go over in more detail how to modify your theme/blog to make it more personal and less like everyone else’s blog.

Next week I will take you through my step-by-step process for modifying the very website you are at right now and show you how easy it is!

Could there be a worse feeling of losing your job? Isn’t it amazing how we depend on “the man” to provide the main ingredient to our survival - money? When the man can’t figure out how to make ends meet he HAS to cut expenses. Guess what? Your jobs are going to be cut and you had better be ready.

I’m going to tell you about some of things I am doing to offset a possible sudden loss in income. I am slowly building an online business and my goal is to get it to the point that I am making what I currently make monthly at my J.O.B. and then some.

Worst case scenario - I lose my job and have my online business to fall back on.
Best case scenario - I keep my job and have doubled my income!

I have established many different methods for generating passive income online. Passive means the money is made while I do other stuff. I actually make money while I’m at my job and I don’t even work at it!

Let me revisit a point I made earlier. I am “slowly” building my online business. I want you to know that this stuff takes time. You hear of people successfully earning money utilizing the internet, but I guarantee it took each and every one of them time to get it going.

Follow me and I’ll show you EVERYTHING I am doing to earn money online.

There’s no greater feeling than getting an unexpected check in the mail or an email that says I’ve just been paid and there is money in my PayPal account!

The first opportunity I want to discuss with you is how I established an online business that allows me to offer domain name registration and website hosting off of my site. I have generated a great deal of extra money with this business.

I purchased my domain name and hosting reseller business from GoResell.com.

Lets face it. Everyone needs domain names and web hosting. The secret to my success has been to target specific groups of people. I have had great success working with real estate agents. I have multiple agents right now that have purchased over 50+ domain names.

Let me tell you why I love this business model. When you purchase the domain name registration site from GoResell.com it is yours for as long as you want it. I have had my store for 4 years now. It is COMPLETELY worth the money to renew each year. The best part is your clients are going to renew their domain names and web hosting each month/year. This means residual income for the life of their domains.

GoResell.com provides all of the technical support for your clients. All you have to do is drive people to the site that are primed for purchasing domain names and web hosting. You can see my reseller site at CheerfulDomains.com. Not only can you sell domains and web hosting… there are 40+ products that can be offered on your store!

Sign up below and I will show you how to drive traffic to your store and build up a nice collection of customers that will be lifelong clients!

Is the information on your site relevant?

How to increase web traffic with targeted traffic.

How do people get to your website? Is your website search engine optimized? Are you getting traffic that is relevant to your site? If your site offers flowers for sale and you are getting search queries for local hardware stores, then you might need to take a hard look at your web content.

Getting the right people to come to your website on a regular basis is critical if you plan to earn money using the internet. Imagine owning a flower shop that was located in a local strip mall. Lets say the outward appearance of your store looks to be a place to find tools, nuts and bolts. Who is going to walk into your store? Probably not too many people looking for flowers.

You may get lucky with 1 out of every 100 visitors, but that would make it pretty difficult to stay in business.

Writing appropriate, search engine optimized content for your website will help you increase your traffic in the targeted and relevant variety.

Are you keeping your website fresh with new content and information?

Search engines eat up new content and will gladly index your site based on the new content. Google is a big fan of new and original content that is relevant to your website. You will score big points with fresh and unique content which will provide you with an increase in targeted traffic.

Are you making life easy on Google?

Google awards you when you make life easier on her. The nice thing about Google is she tells you everything you need to do to please her here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Google’s goal is to help you make your site more relevant and easier to find. Two of the easiest ways to get your site indexed faster and more often by Google is to create a sitemap of your site and to verify your site.

You can read more about that here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

If you write relevant and original content for your website you will be rewarded with visitors that will be very interested in what you have to say. Be sure to tell Google what you are doing with your site and when you add new pages. It makes her happy.

This is Part 1 in a series that describes how to build a website you can earn passive income with.
Passive income is money you earn while you are away doing other things like eating, sleeping, playing with your kids or whatever it is you do for fun!

This step in the process of creating a website and monetizing it is the hardest part for most people trying to earn money on the internet. Many people fail at this point and never realize their dream because they are stuck on deciding “what” there website or blog should be all about.

I also see people try to jump on the next best thing that is out there and fail miserably when they are not bringing traffic to their site. I began with going nuts and deciding that I needed to make 100 websites about 100 different things.

I fell hard and fast.

It was agonizing trying to keep up with all that and I stopped for a solid month before I wrote another thing.

Defining a niche market is one of the MOST important steps in earning money online. What has helped me is writing top ten lists. I start with a top ten list of things that I have know a great deal about. I then write a list of ten things I am passionate about. Once you have your lists you have to decide which of these items you could drive the most relevant traffic with.

In the next post, I will describe how to find out what you can offer these people once they get to your site using affiliate marketing techniques. I’ll show you what has worked the best for me.

Feel free to comment and let us know what you are thinking in terms of a niche market.

… and hire me!

I am a professional website/graphic designer with over 9 years of experience.

I have a rare understanding of both graphic design and the technology behind website design.
Somehow, my right and left sides of my brain have been connected the right way.

How does this benefit you? Great question!

Without tooting my own horn too much it essentially means I can design you a nice looking site while making it technologically functional.

Your site is going to look good and it’s going to work!

Sorry website designers.
Here’s the problem. Chances are if you are reading this you probably have a business and you are needing a website designed or redesigned.

Let me tell you what you will get from 95% of so called “website designers” that you encounter. You are going to get a “hard coded” website that is almost impossible to change. I know this because I used to be that website designer and I didn’t know any better. I would build a website for clients that was essentially like chiseling out an ad on a piece of granite. It was a website that was fixed in that if any other information needed to be added the entire thing would have to be reprogrammed.

I have no control!
In my years of experience designing websites, I hear a common theme from my clients.
People are frustrated with having to wait on their “website designer” who has other clients and can’t service them right now.

When someone wants to make a simple change to a site such as changing the address or even adding some content, they don’t have 3 days.

Now, you don’t have to wait for your website designer to update your site.

If you can type an email, you can manage the website I’ll build for you.
You are given complete control over your site. I build my websites using a Content Management System or CMS for short.

This allows you to add, edit and delete the content that is on your site with the greatest of ease.

Websites you can update yourself from anywhere.
I offer complete training to help you update your own site with email support included anytime you get stumped.

Websites that can be found.
I keep up on search engine optimization trends and I know what works and what doesn’t in helping you get your site found on the internet.
What good is a website that can’t be found when your potential clients are looking for your product or service?

With my years of experience I have perfected the right technology and construction of a website to make it “search engine friendly.”

Tell search engines about your site… instantly.
Google, Yahoo and MSN are told every time you make an update. I have fine-tuned my websites to make sure they broadcast the right signals to the big search engines to insure their spiders come crawl all over your website!

Smart, Intuitive design.
I have learned the many different sides of design. When I design your website, I get to know you and your business.
I immerse myself in your category of business and get to know your competition. I find what will make your web presence stand out from the rest.

From there I meticulously craft your site beginning with a pencil and a piece of paper. This may sound old school, but the most important thing I learned from design school is to start with a pencil and paper, even if you have a computer right in front of you!

I consider many factors for your website that many other “website designers” do not. Usability is a huge factor. When people come to your website, there needs to be a clear path to all of the sections that you want your visitors to see.

Template Free. Custom design.
Professional web and graphic design from scratch. My websites are template free. Like I said before… I build your site from the ground up starting with pencil sketches. In the end, you have a modern website that is not chiseled from stone, but molded from Play Doh if you will. What I mean by this is the website will be elastic enough that if you want to add pages to it down the road, you’ll be able to do it without completely redesigning the site. Can I get a double Huh Huh?

Mobile Friendly.
For your clients that are on the go.
One thing that I love is statistics. I monitor web stats for MANY websites and there is a trend in web surfing that is getting more popular everyday.

People are surfing the web using their mobile phones. Many websites are very mobile unfriendly. When someone visits these websites using their cell phones, they become frustrated and leave because of browser limitations on a cell phone. The sites I build make it very easy to see all of your content on a mobile browser
and the users can navigate with no problem.

Domain name and 1 year of hosting included.
If your website is hosted with me, I will include the registration of your domain name for free in addition to one free year of hosting.

How can I build your website if we live in different parts of the Country or World?
Another great question, I’m glad you asked!
The world wide web is an amazing place. Communication radically changed with the prevalence of the internet. Let me explain below.

A majority of my clients live hundreds of miles from me.
Through email and phone communication I am able to find out exactly what I need to build your site exactly the way you want it built.

I get to know you.
I will provide an email survey to get as much information as I can from you about you and your business.

Using my right brain.
With that I will rapidly generate thumbnail sketches of ideas that I have. I will send you these sketches and get your input.
From there, I will develop more enhanced compositions for your review.

And then, my left brain.
When you are satisfied with the “look and feel” of the website design, I will build the website using XHTML and CSS code. Once the site has gone through testing and you are 100% satisfied, we will launch the site and make it live for the world to see.

I won’t vanish. I promise.
I will also provide you training on how to maintain the site for yourself. I will provide support via email and will help you with any issues you are facing with your website.

For more information, drop me a line at matt @ fireyourwebsitedesigner.com