An Experiment of a Webmaster

I don’t like to haggle, but I really like the “marketplace” type feel of buying services. A forum that I frequest has a section where people can announce their services and buyers reply in the post. Its a chance for people to promote their services without having any real established presence like a dutch auction on ebay for services. You can even read feedback on people and they have reputation based on not only their sales, but what people think of all of their posts.
Continue reading ‘Haggling for services’

Ok, that headline is a little blatent, but still I meant it. Link to me. I have no problem with blatently asking people to link to me I am interested in getting the word out on my blog. Receiving links to your web site home page is critical for the search engines to start considering me to be an authority on a topic. If someone takes the time to add a link to me, then google believes that this is the websites attempt to suggest a link to their readers. If I am good enough to suggest a link to, then I’m good enough to rank a little higher in the search engines so many more people can be exposed to me. So by deciding to link to me, you’re not just sending me visitors from your site. You’re convincing google to link to me more often also.

So far Google Sitemaps is really interesting me. For those who don’t know, Google Sitemaps is googles attempt to let a webmaster describe the characteristics of their site, how often the pages change, and most importantly what pages exist at all. Googles crawler is extremely effective at browsing your whole site and indexing it, but like any automated system it has some issues. It has to recognise and avoid loops so it doesn’t keep requesting the file with just different things on the end like ?sid=. phpBB, the forum software, adds the ?sid= to your address if the user doesn’t have cookies enabled so they can track this person login. Google doesn’t use cookies so they’ll be given session IDs in their url unless you fix it. When this happens google thinks they are all different pages and has to sort it out, which is hazardous to your site since it may just give up and leave.
Continue reading ‘Google Sitemaps’

This is another article in my series on starting a web based business. The first article was all about finding a cheap web host with php and mysql. The second told you where to get cheap domain names and set them up quickly. This article is going to take a step back from really being a tutorial and get you into the mindset that you need to be in, mainly thinking about how to turn your idea into a web business, or how to come up with an idea.
Continue reading ‘Starting a Web Business: Part 3, Whats your site about?’

I am not a patient person. I tend to be very impromptu person on top of that, which makes for some interesting times. When I really want something I am borderline obsessive about it. Take web site creation for example. I am constantly researching new methods for traffic generation and promotion. When I can’t get instant gratification I normally freak out and the value of whatever I was doing goes down in my mind.

Unfortunately this means for SEO too. I know that traffic takes a while to build, but I am a stat watcher I don’t just mean this site either, since it just started and expecting it to have traffic would be crazy. I have a site thats fairly well established, its been around for few years now. I constantly use google analytics to figure out where my users are coming from and how I can direct them at my sites registration.
Continue reading ‘Patience - The useless virtue’

In our previous tutorial I rambled on about the best places to get hosting. If you missed that last post, you can find all about cheap php and mysql hosting here. Finding a domain name goes right along with that, and you’ll probably get it set up at the same time or shortly after your hosting is set up. This article isn’t going to be about how to choose a domain name, though I may write one of those later, it’s about how to get the domain name and set it up quickly.
Continue reading ‘Starting a Web Business: Part 2, Domain Names’

I’ve never actually used blog software before because I’m not a person who normally likes to talk about my personal life, and thats what I’ve always thought of blogs as for. After dipping more into the search engine optimization and content targeted advertising, I began to understand why a blog could be useful for something other than social grandeur.

Truthfully, my first thought upon accepting the idea of using a blog was to just use an existing content management system that I had written. The system is not fully functional yet, but includes the basics that a blog system would need. The downside is that its designed for the publication of news articles rather than blogging. While a lot of the features are the same, I wanted something more tailored to blogging so I could have that happy funtime integration with the great blogosphere web 2.0 value added blah blah blah…. sorry, snapped into buzzword land for a second.
Continue reading ‘In search of a blog’

For someone that does not have experience getting a hosting account, this can be a daunting step. People expect to see things a little pricey and are afraid to even look because they think a fairly large investment will be involved. When they find out that you can get a quality web site for under $10 a month the natural fear of being taken for a ride kicks in. It just seems like you can’t possibly get a good deal for that price, so they gravitate towards the expensive for no reason hosts.

Luckily any of us who’ve been around for a while know this isn’t the case. You can easily get an entire year of hosting for under $100, rather than the one month people expect. Cheap web hosting is not a bad option either. The cheaper web hosts used to have poor customer service or features to make up for this, but now they have full blown service any business would love.
Continue reading ‘Starting a Web Business: Part 1, Getting Online’

I decided to make my experiments with internet business a public affair. This opens me up to the criticism associated with making stupid mistakes, but at the same time hopefully I’ll be corrected when I make them.

I’m not inexperienced when it comes to the internet as I’ve been a professional web programmer off and on since 1999. Along with some people more talented in the grammatical arts than me, I also currently run The Dark Grimoire, an online roleplaying game.

I have a lot of knowledge from a business perspective about how to run an online service business. What I’ll be learning, along with everyone who tunes in, is how to add search engine optimization and affiliate marketing to my bag of tricks.