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How did it all start? This crazy affair with the Internet?

Well, I suppose that for me it was a little thought that maybe somehow I might be able to somehow find my way through the complete and utter maze of information and misinformation that is out there on the Internet and somehow how to make a living from doing my own thing instead of having to always be working for the man!

I had been a freelance writer for some years writing articles for various boating magazines and had quite a few article published over the years so I knew people liked to read my stuff, I’d had some positive feedback, so that was a good start.



I had also been designing a small range of boats known as the Dolphin range of frameless boats and rather than pay for expensive ads that didn’t really work I decided that I would need a website to sell them from, so a website was the first step!

Trouble was though, I didn’t have a clue about how to get one started. I did go to a company that promised me the earth but was really crap and then to my amazement I got a huge bill for what amounted to half an hour’s work for over six hundred bucks! I refused to pay them so they shut down my site and put a block on it with the server.



However, the site name was legally mine and after a month or two of really frustrating dealings with the Company that originally issued the domain name it culminated in the threat of legal action by me and it was eventually released! Not good!

However, Undeterred, I did a bit more research and finally settled with a host server called Austwebsites who were at least in the same country as I was so I could contact them if I need to!



Next I needed a web site !

If you are anything like me I realised I didn’t have the faintest clue about how to build a web site.. My little niece could … but not me! I tried a few trial downloads of Frontpage and Dreamweaver and realised they were amazing programs, but were way over my head!

What now? I began a long search and looked at quite a lot of them including Coolpages which seemed fairly good. But for me the one that seemed to click was a program called Webstudio .

This cool program was great for me because basically it is a W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G. ( what you see is what you get!) and for me that was exactly what I needed.

This program simply turns all what you see on the pages into html ( html is the special web format used in website construction,a kind of web language) automatically, but does have the option to do it yourself if you know how to, but let’s face it, what beginner does?

Webstudio and I hit it off straight away! It took me a couple of days to work out what went where at first but really it’s a very sophisticated program I still am discovering new things about it. Don’t just think it’s just for beginners, it’s not and you can do just about anything that you need to to produce the most professional of websites that you will need. I am really pleased with how easy the drag and drop features are and importing photos, text, music and video even is a cinch! Yeah, Webstudio is great!



My two sites that I built were with Webstudio and you can see them at http://www.buildaweissenborn.com and http://www.dolphinboatplans.com and they were my first attempts!



When I had chosen my domain names, paid the two year subscription fees for them and got my websites public I need then to know how many hits I was getting.

For http://www.OTDolphinboatplansDOTcom I downloaded a free hit counter from a site called Easycounter where you can have a choice of different kind of web site hit counters and a condition of that is that they reserve the right to put a small ad on you page if they want. Well, it’s been six months now and they haven’t so we’ll see!

On the other site http://www.buildaweissenborn.com my host server has a control panel page that you log into with a password and if you want to see your daily hits and many more statistics from a program called Awstats.

This program is amazing and will tell you just about anything you need to know about your site visitors. When they arrived, how long they stayed, how many pages they visited and which ones, and which countries they came from… incredible!



Incidentally, on the http://www.OTdolphinboatplansDOTcom site I have had about 14,000 hits so far and about 75 average unique visitors a day.

The http://www.buildaweissenbornDOTcom site is about half of that with an average of 50 hits a day but growing quickly each month



Get a PayPal and Clickbank account

I was really confused when I first heard about these internet companies but as they say familiarity breeds contempt but never be contemptuous of these babies as they can help you earn money, lots of it without fuss!

The amazing thing is that anyone can open up an account with these guys without any fuss whatsoever if you have a normal bank account and perhaps a current credit card. ( although I’m not sure if you actually need one!)



There is no fuss about ‘Merchant accounts” five minutes on the net and that’s it, you are in business. They both have great facilities, shopping carts, email payment and above all they are beyond reproach. They deal with millions of dollars an hour worldwide and they simply leave you alone to your own devices. I can tell you when I made a few mistakes in setting up my payment page Paypal reps who man the phones 24/7 calmly steered me through to the end of my problems! They are great, no kidding!



Clickbank deal solely with ‘digital’ goods that people buy in the form of downloads…e-books, PDF file downloads and so on. They also deal with thousands of ‘affiliate’ sites and will even point you to ‘affiliate’ partners. This means if you sell their product to a customer who has arrived via your site, blog, info or wherever, you get a healthy cut of the profits. It would appear that many people are growing wealthy this way.



Incidentally, both companies pay you in different ways. Paypal will pay you directly and immediately a sale takes place having already taken their ( small) commission and Clickbank posts a cheque every two weeks or when it reaches a ‘specific’ previously requested amount. It’s a great way to do business on the net and it’s a must if you want smooth, trouble free transactions to happen 24/7 this the way to go.



There is nothing so quite exciting to open your email each day and see several emails from Paypal each headed with “ You have received new funds” I love it! I only wish they had the sound of a cash register dinging as you read it! Oh Bliss! Oh ecstasy! It’s the only time I ever want to kiss my computer!

( and that’s saying something!)



Driving traffic to your sites



Aaah, the big question that everyone needs to know!

Since I started I have had hundreds of emails from a dozens of different web gurus all claiming that their way of making a squillion dollars by driving customers to your site using their product is the only way!

You really have to take it all with a pinch of salt and you must remember I am just a normal guy who is nowhere like a computer techie! I wish I didn’t even have to learn any more about it! Confused? you will be!



Suffice it to say there have been some programs that I have been tempted to buy or subscribe to that I feel are really logical and didn’t try to oversell themselves too much…there’s nothing like oversell to put you clean off the product! Don’t care how good it is! Don’t want it!

Although I am far from being an expert on this ( I’m still learning daily) There’s one inescapable fact that BACKLINKS are the bread and butter of the Internet traffic success unless you are giving away free twenty dollar bills at your site!



So how do you go about getting these precious backlinks? It seems there are many methods both fair and foul but what is certain is that most web search engine spiders that automatically search your site at regular intervals have ways and means of knowing if they have been purchased or not… and they don’t like it at all!



Google, bless their little electronic socks, have set themselves up as the Cops of the internet and have many rules ( many of which they seem to have double standards about) and if you flout their set rules they can impose a ‘slapdown’ on your site which amounts to being sent to the sandpit and not allowed to play any more with the other kids.

If you have happen to have an adsense account for example, with them and they can freeze it and can cause thousands of dollars lost revenue for a successful site owner.

So, be warned, do everything above board and play it by the rules at first…you can if you want, try to bend them later if you learn how!



INTERNET ARTICLE SITES

The surest way to get exposure and Backlinks over time is with internet article ‘ezine’ sites which means ‘electronic magazine’ sites. The theory is simple. You write a small but informative article about a subject you may know (even) just a little about. You send this article to one of the better ezine sites such as



Ezinearticles

Your article, which should be about 500 words or so is then ‘posted’ to the magazine and it is then reviewed by a ( human) entity at the Ezine site.

If, and this is important, if you followed all their guidelines it will be accepted and will be made public for all the world to find. “So what?” I hear you say? Well, this site has tens of millions of visitors per year and why? Because these articles are sought after and ‘downloaded’ to other website owners for content on their own site…”But I don’t get paid” I hear you wail, No, you don’t but it is a worthwhile investment and again you get more exposure for your own website( via the author bio box that contains your sites’ address) and that effect is ,that if your article has some appeal or is interesting it will be used countless hundreds of times for months or perhaps years to come! This in turn drives more visitors to your site.



“ But I can’t write!" Oh yes you can!

Believe me you only have to type one word of a subject into any internet search engine and you will be led to a thousand different sites on that subject….get the idea? You don’t plagiarise but you ‘research’ your subject taking notes as you go…hey presto! A few hours and even a few minutes later you will have the basis of a short, compelling article.

There’s a million subjects, “how to’s..” are great favourites, or “ How can I…” for example, “How to grow and harvest pure lavender oil” What? Lavender oil?



Go type in “lavender oil” into Google’s search engine and prepare to be staggered, last time I looked there were approx 762.000 entries… If you cant write a 500 word starter article on that then you’d better apply for another job……Your only problem is finding out what not to write about! Ok, it’s hard at first… but you’ll get better, believe me.



Now, here’s a little secret and I can prove this too…

I have written around 25 articles only and posted them on ezinearticles and to date, bearing in mind, that’s in about 7/8 months I have had my articles read at least 14,000 times so far…Why? because article posting although it takes a bit of time and work ( hey, you don’t get anywhere without the four letter word) does actually work!!



Here’s some proof: Go to Yahoo search engine and type in “Building a weissenborn guitar ”

There were 500 entries last time I looked all under my name or my nickname terryb, in fact I’m on the second line of the page!! Now that isn’t much by web standards but it didn’t cost me anything at all and according to ezinearticles that article has been read around three thousand times.

Multiply that by twenty thirty or even fifty articles and you start cooking with gas.



With practise you can easily write three or four short article a day if you want…..Hard yakka for a few months but the visitors start knocking on your web site door, and if you are selling stuff there...Boom Boom! Is that cash I hear a ‘tinkling?? You bet!



So, let me repeat, I ain’t an operater, just a guy who needed to get a presence on the net and maybe earn a few bucks along the way, but I am pleased at the results so far…. And I’m just a beginner, believe me!



The biggest shot in the arm so far was a program that I bought that allows you to post that article you just wrote to 450 web sites in TWO AND A HALF HOURS automatically! It’s true!

It’s called Articlepostrobot and it is amazing. There is some hard work to be done at first getting all of the sites into the program because you have to visit each site regularly and ‘sign up’ with that site but boy, oh boy is it worth it!



It takes a few weeks but we are in this for the long term and as I say, you wont get started sitting on your butt, right??

Do you know how much I wish that I had an article like this to read when I first started on the internet?

Fact is, I would have gladly PAID for this info, I’ll tell you that for nothing!



The second big thing that I am finding out ( after all this is all new to me) that the new WEB 2.0 as some folks are calling it is really all the rage, big time! Why, well it seems that the time is coming and we are all to be held accountable for our own actions and I agree…people are fed up of unsolicited emails and spam and Facebook and MySpace don’t allow it to happen.. if you spam, you run the risk of being shut down..there’s other ways to get your messages across…more of that later.

It seems that everyone is eager to be a part of the ‘new internet’ rage and basically if we have a presence on Facebook for example, we will not get assailed by porn, sleaze and all the other usual spam annoyances we get bombarded with on a daily basis.



That’s not the only reason, these sites like YouTube are attracting millions of visitors on a daily basis… Posting a video on YouTube has the potential to pull in possible tens of thousands of hits a day, and if you make a real cool video possible tens of millions of hits! You had better be prepared!



In fact I am so sure that getting a video presence onto the net is so important I obtained a copy of one of the best e-books I have ever seen called TubeTraffic

This great book explains how simply and easy it is to create a simple, short, snappy and effective video in a really short space of time using the simplest of gear and equipment, in fact it’s a must !

Terry Buddell is an enthusiastic article writer and builds and plays guitars in his spare time. Terry recently finished building his first Weissenborn lap steel acoustic guitar and has written a book How to build a Weissenborn and CD containing the plan and step by step photos of the build that he sells from his website http://www.buildaweissenborn.com for further information and articles about Weissenborn guitars why not visit the site now?

About the author

terry is a freelance writer and lives on his Yacht in Queensland Australia terry designs and builds his own boats and has several websites out in the net at present!

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