Here we will discuss how you can lay a solid foundation for your internet based business by building relationships online

As is evidenced by some of the large social networks available online Social Networking is very popular. We are referring to places like My Space, eEntrepreneur, Facebook a many more.

Social networking can be used to build your internet based business, for example by combining blogging and social bookmarking to post blog articles to various social directories. There are thousands of sites and you can quickly do this in directories such as Stumbleupon, Propeller and Digg.

Through these social networks you will meet people with common interests. Posting articles on your Blog will create search engine bait as well as traffic from various social directories. This is an easy way to make new contacts and build up your internet based business on the Internet.

Another great way to meet people with common interests is in the Discussion forums and although they are not commonly referred to as social networking sites they serve a similar function. It is best to join discussion forums that relate to the theme of your internet based business so that you can offer your expertise and exchange ideas with the other forum members.

You will find that joint ventures are formed every day in discussion forums. The key to making discussion forums work and building your internet based business is to become involved and join in the discussions as opposed to being viewed as a spammer or a person who is just trying to sell something to the forum members.

If you like people this really isn’t that hard to do. Discussion forums are excellent places to keep up-to-date with what is going on in the Internet and in the internet based business arena also!

You will certainly enjoy the interaction and banter back and forth that occurs in the different threads if you like interacting with people. Most forums allow you to create a signature file which will promote your internet based business passively. You will get tips on how to set up your signature file for greatest effect if you have a look around at other members’ signature files. You’ll be amazed at how much traffic you can get from a well worded signature file.

As long as you are willing to work getting to know people and build relationships then the social network sites and discussion forms are two ways to combine social networking with your internet based business.

The advent of Web 2.0 has given rise to the Social Networking evolution. It has transformed web interactivity to a whole new realm. The forces and its impact are still being carefully, apprehensively and sometimes skeptically monitored by corporate marketers globally.

Factors holding back Social Network Marketing Corporate Spending

Sadly, at this stage of social networking evolution, corporate marketers are merely monitoring with much inertia towards adopting some form of social network marketing. The reasons are obviously, non-existing business model and returns measurement system to convince corporate decision makers to commit big budgets.

To understand the inertia is to understand the psychology of the corporate decision making which is fundamentally financial based, to say the least. Without a convincing business model and ROI measurement system, companies who dare to venture into social network marketing is seen as shooting in air.

What Corporate Marketers Really Need for Social Networking Viability

The public relations professionals, corporate marketers, CMOs and CFOs of even the largest corporations are only now starting to grapple with the real impact of how the social networking platforms. Until they are able to derive a strong business model and financially viable strong business model supported by convincing ROI measurement system, corporate decision makers will be staying on the sidelines, merely monitoring the scenes and not getting their hands dirty.

This has broached an age old chicken and egg issue. One should spend in order to enable the success of social network marketing or wait at the sideline until someone develops a viable business model is developed as an industry standard and miss out on the first movers advantage on massive business opportunities. CMOs and CFOs, this is some food for thought.

While currently, there are corporate commitments in Social Networking spending, these are expenditures mainly by related industry major players or big budget spenders like IBM, Reuters, Nike, Adidas, Proctor and Gamble etc with vested interest as first movers testing the system. There is much convincing work to be harnessed before others jump onboard the bandwagon.

However, there is at least one fact which we can ascertain to be true, that Social Networking, with its more than 300 social networking sites worldwide, and cumulative membership of close to one billion people, is definitely a future if not current consumer force waiting to be mined for gold.

Every webmasters love traffic and like it to flood as much into their website because the more traffic they received, the more potential revenue they are going to generate out of it. But traffic generation is hard especially for new webmasters and internet marketers. Many webmasters failed in their online businesses mainly due to insufficient traffic to generate enough conversion for revenue.

Don’t let this happen to you, you should smartly use the available resources to continue generate enough traffic to your website and social networking can be one of the resources for free internet traffic. Here are 4 tips to drive free internet traffic from those popular social networking sites.

Tip #1: Become the Member of Popular Social Networking Sites

Social networking is the key player today’s web 2.0 world where people around the internet meet and create relationships with each others. There are many social networking sites and you might not be able to join all of them, but you must not miss out the popular social networking sites such as MySpace, FaceBook & Friendster. MySpace is one other bigger social networking site with over 70 million visitors and 9 million members. With such a huge potential market for you online business, you can’t afford to exclude MySpace from your marketing plan. If your MySpace profile gets notice by MySpace visitors and members, imagine how your website will be flooded with free internet traffic.

Tip #2: Create Professional & Nice Member Profile

If you want people to trust you and follow links to your website to buy what you are selling at your website, you should create a professional member profile. There are many nice templates available on internet which specially designed for certain social networking site and best of all is most of these templates are free. Replace the default theme with your selected template so that your profile looks outstanding.

Don’t overlook the writing of your member profile, because people who do not know you and when they land at your profile page of the social networking sites. Your informative and well written profile may drive them to visit your website for further information.

Tip #3: Get Trusted By Building Relationships with Other Social Sites’ Members

Social networking site like MySpace allows you to add up to 450 new friends to your friend list. Use such feature provided by social networking site to build your prospect list and grow it every day. A good relationship with your prospects will help you to drive more traffic to your website because you could invite them to visit your website or refer your product to their friends.

Tip #4: Use Video to Broadcast & Get Notice

YouTube, the most popular video sharing site is the best place to broadcast and get noticed. You either share your own videos with the YouTube community or you could make a Video Blog (one of YouTube feature) with the collection of other people videos that look interesting to you and share it to other members. You should see traffic flood in to your website after some time because people who visit your VBlog at YouTube may want to get further information about your website and they will follow the links at your YouTube profile and land at your website.

In Summary

Internet traffic is important to any internet marketer and you can drive tons of free internet traffic if you know how to use the advantages of the popular Web 2.0 resources: the social networking sites to flood your website with traffic.

This is the first article in a series that I plan to write about trying to build a website and generate a positive cashflow from it. 

The Plan:

I like to play casual games on the web, so I decided to go with what I like.  My plan is to create a series of websites that host casual flash games.  Each website will have a targeted URL with a targeted home page.  The first in the series is Golf Arcade the url is www.golfarcade.net.  On this site the home page contains all games related to golf, but like all the other sites I intend to create, the site will include other game types.  I have decided to take the targeted approach on the home page with hopes to be more successful in getting ranked in search engines….I’ll let you know how that turns out. 

I will place advertising on the website to generate some revenue.  I’m not really sure what kind of revenue I can expect, but I don’t expect to get rich off the idea.  I think right now I would be happy just to make enough to pay for my morning coffee.

I’m using two advertising services to try to generate revenue from my site(s).  The first is adbrite and the second is google ad sense.  Both are very easy to setup.  You just create an account, and paste a little snippet of code into your web pages and voila, you are now an advertiser.  I’m going with two different advertisers to compare how well they pay.  My research on this topic gave me mixed results, so I just decided to try it for myself.  If one tends to pay out much more than the other, I will ditch the least paying one.

I’m using google analytics to track the traffic to my site, if you have never used google analytics I would strongly suggest you get an account, it’s free and gives you loads of great information.

I am using 1 and 1 hosting as my hosting company, they offer 250gig of storage space with unlimited transfers, that is a big bonus if you intend to host files that have any significant size to them.  My hosting costs are $10 a month.

To build the actual website I did some searching around the web and found a good site that has a very large database of games and offers a nice xml feed.  I wrote some software to read the feed and download all the information I need for each game, so far that is working well.  I’m writing the software in Java and using Apache Velocity, a templating engine, to create the actual html.  I then upload all the static html to my domain.  Why don’t I just create a dynamic web app instead?  Well the answer is quite simple, I took this approach so I am not tied to any one hosting company.  If I decide to switch hosting companies then I don’t have to worry about wether or not that company offers jsp/.net/php service.

I launched Golf Arcade about a week ago, and I’ve already made several changes since it’s first inception, and learned a lot.

What I’ve Learned So Far:

I started working on the first website about 3 weeks ago, and have launched the first version of my website about 1 week ago.  Immediately after I launched the website I started thinking about how I can spread the word without having to spend a ton of cash (read: spend no cash).  The fist thing I decided to do was post a link to some of the games on my facebook page.  I figured that all of my friends that spend way too much time playing games on there would love to get another gaming site.  I posted the links and waited until the next morning to look at my analytics.  First thing the next day I looked at my analytics expecting to see hundreds of referrals from my facebook links, and of course I had 2.  At that moment I learned that this is going to be a bit harder than I thought.  For the next few days I spent a lot of time reading about website promotion and seo.

The second thing I’ve learned is that I should have done some research into the actual games before I decided to begin with a targed golf gaming site.  As it turns out, there are not a lot of good golf flash games available.  I chose the domain and the theme because I like golf, not because there are good games.  As a result of this, my first website really took a hit because the home page has just terrible content. 

SEO Tips:

Here are just a few of the tips I’ve found over the last few days.

Use the meta keywords tag Make sure your meta keywords match the actual content of your site Use the meta description tag Add as much unique content as you possibly can to your page Make sure all your images define values for alt and title, these two attributes are the ‘content’ of your images.

Over the next week or two I intend to go through my website with a fine tooth comb to make sure my keywords are relevant.  I’m also goin to focus on creating another website in my series of flash websites.  As of right now I’m leaning towards a site that is targeted toward Solitare games.

At the time of this writing my analytics show that I have had 153 visits to my golf website, which would be great except that 80% are from me testing things out.

These days, a lot of people do not like the idea of getting a 9 to 5 job and spending all of their time staring at a computer monitor at the office.  Of course, a lot of work is done in front of a computer.  However, you can stand to make a much better living and more money if you do that with data entry jobs from home.  By doing these small tasks at home, you can relax and make even more money for more companies instead of just one.  Here are some examples of how you can do just that.

Maintain Blogs

There are many companies that have blogs and this is how they present their products and services to their customers.  Of course, you have to wonder who actually types in the entries for all of these blogs.  This is where data entry jobs from home come in.  Some companies are willing to pay money to people just so that they can have their blogs maintained with the content that they want.  Of course, you will have to stick to a specific subject matter but this can be a very easy job and won’t take up too much of your time.

Maintaining Websites

Slightly a little more complicated, you might need to know a little HTML.  Otherwise, the whole idea is that you maintain the content on a certain website.  Some sites have dynamic or changing pages and therefore need specific content changed in those pages.  Now, some companies actually hire a web developer to do this for them but for the companies that want to save a little money, they give the job to those who would like data entry jobs from home.  It is not too difficult a job and they just need people to change content in the site.  Sometimes, they even provide the content ready-made.  All you have to do is place it in the code.

Social Profiles

Some companies extend their services and advertise on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.  Of course, they can’t be bothered with putting the entries in themselves so they hire people who are willing to do data entry jobs from home.  If you want to be the one to update Facebook profiles and add simple 140-character entries on Twitter, you can do just that and get paid for it as well.  This is one of the most recent types of data entry jobs that actually pay really well.

Mills & Boon have announced a new social networking site along the lines of Facebook.  It will launch next week and will hope to build up a community for book lovers.  Users will be able to upload photos, set up their own profiles, make friends and also chat with authors and focus on forums for book lovers.

Mills & Boon is one of only a few widely recognised publishers in the UK and although admittedly it won’t be as big as Facebook, it will attract many fans of the Mills & Boon books as well as anyone interested in novels, short stories and other published works.

Although not expecting to create a social networking site anywhere as large as facebook, Mills & Boon do realise that there is a more select market of Internet users who enjoy reading and writing their own works.

There will also be a book challenge se tup from launch.  If the community of registered users can read 5000 books by the end of the year, Mills & Book will donate 5000 books to charities across the UK.

You can read articles similar to the above at the You2Book website.  This website offers a place for new authors to write their work online and share with others.  Writers can also develop novels and short stories with friends.  You can even write a book with any of the registered users on the You2Book site and discuss the novels in the forums.  

Why not try out You2Book and start your writing online.

http://www.you2book.co.uk/newsarchive.aspx

1st way – buy low, sell high
Very simple strategy. Timing is key to success for this strategy. Opportunity for buying low is during recession, when sentiments in job market and economy are low (the lower the better). This is a great time to enter the market ‘coz prices will be depressed. Some investors like to buy when prices are “relatively attractive” or “affordable” according to their means. Some investors may choose to buy in only when there’s signs of uptrend (so they are buying at the base of the upturn).

So how do we know whether it’s the bottom? During the bad times, many will say “it’s too risky, it will go lower, let’s wait”. Do understand that real estate is inherently an illiquid investment, as opposed to the equity market. The periodic charts / graphs / data presented (on a macro scale) will be good indicators of how the real estate market is moving. The stock market chart may show volatility (up 1 day, down the other, up 1 week, down the other) but real estate market data will trend for quite some time before peaking or bottoming (we also won’t know exactly how long, that’s a question which only the market has an answer to).

Many home buyers like to think that today’s prices are “too expensive” relative to last month / last year’s price. We will only support such thinking if the broad data shows “all-time highs”, otherwise smart buyers should understand that its not only you who is buying at this “higher price”. If others are buying around the same price, then it is only natural that the market forces will continue to push the prices even higher because each buyer-turned-seller will continue to ask for higher prices to gain profit, and that is how everyone plays the game (well, at least until the bubble bursts).

2nd way – buy at a discount
Simple strategy but often neglected. So, you may be curious as to where exactly can you find properties at a discount? Most real estate articles will teach you to look for foreclosures (auctions), urgent sales, etc. So, we won’t say more about those.

There’s another type of property which we believe can be considered as “discounted” – old apartments in worn-out condition. A word of caution – you should be somewhat interested in doing renovation works, talking to designers and contractors if you are interested in trying out this type of discounted properties. And always remember the 3 golden rules of real estate – location, location, location.

In fact, you can also find discounted properties in new condo projects as well. How so? … stay tuned to our updates and we will tell you more =)

3rd way – buy to lease out
Rental yield (your rental returns on your property purchase) is a fundamental way many people make money from properties. If you are looking into this strategy, may we suggest purchasing 99 year leasehold properties (in a great location) instead of freehold (in the middle of nowhere)? Tenants are willing to fork out higher rental for (1) convenience, (2) comfort. Tenants will not pay you more because your property is a Freehold tenure (even if you had to pay the seller / developer more). Tenants will pay more if your property is near a subway (MRT), or has wonderful facilities, is nicely furnished and lets them hugely enjoy their limited period of stay in Singapore.

We have a list of properties near subway (MRT) which will be updated onto our blog soon. Your can stay updated on our blog via email or you can see the updates on our twitter page and facebook page as well.

The internet has provided an incredible opportunity for moms who want to stay at home with their kids. Surprisingly you can get started making money with online marketing with minimal technical skills. The reality is that if you can cut and paste, you have the necessary skills to make cash online.

Most people wrongly assume that you need your own product or web site, but you can easily start making money without either.

First of all lets talk about the need for your own product. Having your own product to sell online can definitely be an advantage, but there are literally thousands and thousands of referral programs around to choose from, that basically pay you a commission for recommending products to people. When you sign up to a program, you receive very simple pieces of code that you have to copy and paste on to the web page you are going to promote the product from. The code then tracks visitors who leave your page and go to the product’s sales page, and then if they actually buy the product, you get paid the agreed commission. Depending on the product type, you can get paid a commission typically ranging from 5% to 80%, even a 100% of the sales price in some instances.

In fact you don’t even have to find someone to buy a product. There are plenty of programs around whereby all the person you send to a site has to do, is simply fill in a short form that could just require an email address, and when they do so, you get paid for supplying the site with a lead. And if that sounds simple, wait for this. You may have noticed lots of blue links on some web pages with the words “sponsored ads” typed next to them. If you place these ads on your page, you get paid an amount every time someone simply clicks on one of the links! How cool is that!

So you can see that you don’t need your own product at all, you can simply promote other peoples products and earn yourself nice commissions!

You should now be asking how can you actually promote the products if you don’t have a web site to do so from? This is easy to answer, let me throw some web sites at you and see if you recognise any of them; MySpace, Facebook, YouTube? You can literally sign up with any of these and promote from them. Then there are social sites like Squidoo and Hub Pages, that allow you to create your own content on their sites that can include your promotional links. Or how about having your own blog or blogs? You can literally set up your own blogs free of charge on sites like Blogger.com and Wordpress.com. There are tons of places online that you can publish your own content free of charge and make money by promoting other people’s products!

So if you are a work from home mother wanting to make some cash online, internet marketing could be just what you are looking for!

Finding an online home base business opportunity that makes money can create an income that you didn’t have before or can increase your current income. The challenge for most people who are considering this path is finding an online opportunity that works. Use this three-step process to find, start and run a home based business that helps you accomplish your goal.

Understand the Home Base Business Market

If you type the search term for home base business into your favorite search engine, literally millions of results appear. This can be overwhelming when you’re looking for a legitimate way to work from home and make money at the same time. Conducting a search of business opportunities can, however, help you get a handle on the different ones that are out there.

Identifying these opportunities and aligning them with industries or tasks that interest you can quickly help you to narrow down the choices to the ones you want to pursue.

Learn from Home Base Business Experts

After you accumulate a list of possibilities, then it’s time to turn to the experts for help. If you were having surgery on your foot, you would want to consult with the best foot surgeon available to you. Finding an online business opportunity isn’t any different.

You want to turn to the experts in this field to learn from them, consult with them and use the advice they give to find, start and run the right home based business for you, and to do it successfully. The Internet makes finding these experts simple and easy.

First, you can use online social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Search these websites using keywords that relate to the industry you’re interested in starting. Follow these experts and what they’re saying in order to learn from them.

You can also search for and read articles written on topics that relate to the industry you’re interested in and the home based business industry in general. When you find a helpful article, look at the author’s name and research his or her business. Typically, you can find this information in the author box at the bottom of the article.

Put Your Business on Autopilot

Once you get your business up and running, the main ingredient to continuously earning more and more from it is to figure ways to put your business on autopilot. With online businesses or businesses with an online presence, it’s simple and easy to earn passive income because your website is up, running and selling 24 hours a day, seven days a week—even when you are fast asleep.

There are several ways to put your home base business on autopilot. Again, these are methods you can learn and implement by researching your competitors and by turning to online business experts for the answers.

Can you make money in an internet income MLM work from home MLM business opportunity?  Of course!  However, I am not going to lie to you and say that it is going to be easy.  There is definitely a lot of competition online, so you have to have the knowledge (or be willing to do the research to find it) to really succeed.  Also, it would be very wise to find a mentor is willing to walk you through, step by step, how to make money online.

The most popular (and successful) way right now is to use Web 2.0 marketing.  This includes using social networking like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook (there are hundreds of other social networking websites as well).  Another popular way of using Web 2.0 marketing is using video sharing sites like YouTube and Google Video.  Videos are valuable in online marketing because it allows you to connect more personally with people you may never meet.  They can meet you, see you, and feel like they know you without you having to talk to hundreds of people every day.

 Another thing using videos for building your internet income MLM work from home MLM business opportunity does, is get your message across to more people and you can ever talk to you in a day without you having to say the same thing a hundred times.

You can absolutely make money online, if you are patient and winning to learn the ropes.  This does include making mistakes (sometimes mistakes that will cost you money and devoting time (and a lot of times money) to figure out what works and what doesn’t. You probably will not just make thousands of dollars overnight in your internet income MLM work from home MLM business opportunity.  But, if you are willing to put in the work necessary, it can pay you massively for your efforts!