1. Design

Having a unique design for your website is very important. The first look of your website should tell the user what will he find here. Avoid using free themes/templates, but also don’t go for paid/premium themes as they are used by multiple websites. For starters, you could hire a designer to get a unique simple theme for $200-250. There’s no need to spend a bomb to get a jaw dropping design for the start.

2. Content

You need to have good content. By “good content”, I mean easy to understand, free and original. Everything is about information and content on the internet. The whole point of the internet is to find useful, relevant and free information. If you’re content is better than the others in the pool, your website will automatically stand out of the crowd.

3. Basic SEO

You don’t have to be a SEO expert to rank higher in search results nor do you have to hire a SEO expert to do that for you. Just do a bit of basic SEO for your website and you should be good to go.

• optimal and natural usage of keywords
• include meta title tags
• simple navigation through out the site
• provide good link bait article titles
• include sitemap
• proper usage of H1, H2 and H3 tags
• use robots.txt file
• use Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to gain insight on what works and what’s not
• avoid duplicate content (CMS issue)proper permalink structure
• use canonical tags.
• read the Google SEO Starter Guide (PDF).

4. Competitors

Why make enemies when you can make more money by being friends? Your competitors teach you a lot. You can learn from their mistakes and strategies. Win them by making them your mentors, don’t try competing with them while you have just started. Investigate, where is their presence and who is linking to them, etc. They rule your niche right now, learn what they did to  achieve what they are right now.

5. Promotion

Promote your website where ever you can. While meeting people, posting online, comments etc. Just don’t become a spammer.

• comment on other blogs related to your niche,
• use Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or any other social platform popular at the moment,
• guest post frequently on well established blogs,
• be active on forums,
• pay for ads if you really have to (Adwords).

This will surely get you a good exposure on the internet. If you’ve got the first 4 right, you can’t go wrong.

Wrap up

Of course these 5 tips are not the only one’s to build a successful website. You also need to work on speed (of your website), monetization, building RSS subscribers and readers etc. The above 5 are essential tips to get started. Try, make mistakes, learn is the only way to survive on the internet.

So now you are on Google+, Facebook and Twitter and struggling to keep all of them updated with pretty much the same updates. I prefer being on Google Plus more because it is much more cleaner than Facebook (Well, at least for now). Being said that, I am struggling to post my status updates on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus separately.  There’s already an application available for fetching Twitter updates and posting them to Facebook, but what about getting updates from Google+? (I could post an update to Google Plus –> (sent to) Facebook –> (sent to) Twitter at the same time!)

The trick is simple. As some of us who are already on G+ know that we can insert an email id or circle whom we want to share a particular update with. So that’s what we do here, we share the update with our Facebook email address and it gets posted.

Step 1:

Visit https://www.facebook.com/mobile/ and copy the email address under “Upload via Email”. It would be something like xyz123abc@m.facebook.com . (NOTE: Do not give this email id out to anybody, it is an unique email id given to you by Facebook. If anyone gets this email id, that person could update your Facebook status)

Step 2:

Now paste the email address in the space where you need to add ‘Circle’ or Email id in the Google+ update box. It would look something like this…

That’s it! Hit the share button! The update would be posted to Facebook. You could also add the email address to one of your circles whom you share most of your updates with and it would be shared on Facebook as well. You could also create another circle just for Facebook updates with the email id.

Also, if you still aren’t on Google+, I’m giving out invites here.

Google has started rolling out Google Plus to more users as you read this.  Google had announced the +1 button last month and had released the code to add it to your website.

How does +1 affect search results?

I have never blogged about Facebook Marketing before, however, after some research and reading, here is what I have for you. Facebook currently has over 350+ million users and over 70% are active on the popular social network. Facebook connects users from all over the world under one single domain, which is why it becomes a great platform for marketeers. I am sitting here in India, but I can still connect to users in the US or in Europe via Facebook.

How can Facebook help marketeers?
Facebook provides a great platform to market your product for free — Fan pages. A fan page is a page created by a user (usually the marketeer) to promote his product. The marketeer then uses this page to connect to more people all over the world and displays his product/services to interested users.  Normal users like you and me become a fan of the product/service if we’re interested in it. But to make your page visible to normal users the marketeer has to use another Facebook platform known as — Facebook Advertising.

Why use Facebook Ads?
Facebook ads is a great way to reach your target audience. Your target audience might be college students, singles, men, people between the age of 25-35 etc. Facebook ads make  it easier for you to get more customers/fans towards your services/products. Setting up an advertiser account with Facebook  is easy, just sign up for a regular Facebook account and then visit their advertising page. Facebook’s advertising program converts way better than any other advertising program because it allows you to select the age, gender, occupation etc of the target audience.

What’s next?
Many marketeers try to gain more fans (by black hat/spam or legit advertising methods), but it always doesn’t guarantee you better results. A good marketeer would always try to keep users engaged by holding contests, asking questions or posting stuff which interests users (quotes, offers, images, videos, news etc). User interaction is always needed on a fan page or it won’t convert well. Having a large number of fans doesn’t guarantee sales or conversion. The best is to allow your fan page to grow on it’s own while you keep posting content on your fan page on regular basis.

Tip: Run your campaigns on international holidays, for example Christmas. Facebook was the most visited website on 25th December 2009. Conversion is higher on holidays (according to my research).

This is a Guest Post blogged by Annkur P Agrawal from OnlyGizmos. Views and opinions are entirely as expressed by  him.

If you are one of those who visits FIP to notice the blazing traffic and thousands of comments and still don’t read the blog posts? you had a thought of cashing in the next time there is a fakeXYZ blog possible? the moment you hear of a new online service/blog/website, do you start to think –  “why didn’t I make this?” If yes!! then my friend you are in good company here 😉

Money making over the internet is not easy, but if you have the right approach and the right advice – you will do just fine. Often money making on the internet is mistaken for just getting that idea and launching the product. Thinking that you have a domain name that gives you an edge over another company, doesn’t mean that you will beat it to glory. And in most (and by most I mean 99.9% cases) you would give up before you even make that first dollar out of the venture, thats if you get started at all.

As you enter the world of making money online, you realize that you have entered a cave with no sight of an exit on the other side. Its easy to stray and get lost within the darkness. There will be hundreds of ideas for you to start a reseller business, get into affiliate or monetize your ideas with killer products. But that doesn’t mean that you jump on it with the idea of making a million dollars every month and end up quitting your job! Not everything on the web is meant to be started by you, pickup your strengths and work towards it. Starting a hosting service or a link shortner might not be a great idea. Why get into the hammered competition zone? Innovate, rather than just doing something for the sake of doing it!

Making money on the web has two simple ways:

1) Without investing
2) With investment

If you are just looking to start a blog and put good content there in your free time, go ahead. Spend some time marketing it as well. But if you are looking to invest a decent sum into a website? be the next twitter? than beware – don’t get lost in the darkness. I don’t mean to discourage you but the point remains simple, start something only if you are genuinely passionate about it, only if you feel a need for it. Ask yourself  “will I be a user of this service?”, answering that honestly might automatically give you the green light to go ahead with your plans. Else quit now!

P.S : I didn’t read FIP much, I don’t know what appam ******* is but sounded good 🙂