Archive for the ‘Starting a Business’ Category

Free Web Hosting with Heart Internet

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

I have been using Heart Internet as a web hosting provider for a number of years now to host both personal and business websites and I have been very impressed with the level of services I have recieved from them.

Heart Internet are constantly bringing in new features and facilities to help with managing your websites and domain names and I have recently found out that Heart Internet provide a free web hosting service for those individuals and companies are in need of ways of reducing costs, which is ideal for small start up companies.

Unlike a number of other free web hosting services Heart Internet does not need you to purchase a domain, does not have any popups and the free web hosting account is allowed for commericial use.  In addition to this the Heart Internet free web hosting account has a decent amount of websites, mailboxes, FTP access but is a little lacking in the bandwidth and does not have any database support but there has to be some incentive to upgrade to a paid for package.
Read the full blog…

Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Free Stuff, Starting a Business | No Comments »

Affiliate Marketing – What is it and what can it do for me?

Sunday, September 21st, 2008

Join today and make money from your website!If you’re considering starting a home based business then you’ve probably spent a good few hours on Google searching for idea about what your new business could sell or services it could provide and I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of scam sites (see article: Working From Home – Avoiding the Scams). One thing you’ve probably come across a few times is “Affiliate Marketing” but what is this and what can it do for you?

Affiliate Marketing is basically referring someone to a product or service that you feel they would like to (and hopefully will) buy, and for each sale you generate you will receive a “finders fee” for finding the customer.

There are so many companies that use affiliate marketing including some big names such as Tesco, LoveFilm, Sky, Skype and many many more. I think a large proportion of companies which advertise on TV also use affiliate marketing as one of there advertising methods.

I’m sure that most websites would be able to earn income from affiliate marketing but you just have to think carefully about what and how you want to promote the products.

For example… if you run a golf club website you may wish to advertise a company who sells golf equipment or a website that offers discount round fees, or if your website sells chocolates when why not set up an affiliates with an online of offline card company to allow your customers to send birthday cards to the people they’re buying the chocolates for.

Read the full blog…

Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Starting a Business | 1 Comment »

Boosting Your Website Traffic and Getting More Visitors

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008

Boosting Your Website Traffic and Getting More VisitorsIf there’s one question that I get asked by my clients more than any other it’s “How do I get more traffic to my website?” and unfortunately there’s no clear cut answer to it.

An additional problem to this is ensuring that the traffic generated is “quality” traffic and many clients fail to distinguish between general, incentivized and quality traffic, although I believe each have their own uses.

Quality traffic is essentially visitors that are interested in your product or service and there is a chance they will purchase, sign up or refer it on to a friend or colleague. General traffic could of traffic from countries that you don’t offer your services to, and incentivized traffics comes from people clicking on links or adverts in order to complete some kind of offer and this type is generally frowned upon.

Visitors arriving to your website as a result of incentivized traffic usually don’t want your product but are just there to meet the minimum requirements in order to achieve the incentive they’ve been offered. An example of this may be a website which has a section stating “Help keep our site free by click on one of our sponsors”. The visitor is only click the ad in order to keep the services on the referring site free and results in your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign paying out for a useless click… another $0.10 down the drain and each $0.10 will soon add up and cost you considerable money… none of this is any good for you!

Read the full blog…

Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , ,
Posted in SEO, Starting a Business | No Comments »

Working From Home – Avoiding the Scams

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

How can you really tell what could earn you money??There are literally thousands of websites out there which supposedly tell you how to make “thousands of dollars” in a matter of days or weeks with little or no effort but could this be you?

I my honest and blunt opinion… no! While I’m sure someone along the line is earning that income from the programme I’m also sure that 99% of people who use these programs end up of out pocket rather than rolling in money.

If you’ve been using the internet for a while you’ve probably come across a good few of these sites and they follow a general formula

  • Title – Tells visitor how much they can earn using their system
  • Proof it works – Screenshots of PayPal payment records or cheques
  • Tell you what you could do with they money… buy a car, go on holiday
  • Insist it’s not like all the others you’ve seen
  • Tell you it’s 100% guaranteed
  • And finally how much the program is going to cost!

Now looking at that list there I find that there is one major thing missing… what is it that you do? You know it’s a system but you’ve got no idea what the system is or what it is to do!

Read the full blog…

Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Self-Employment, Starting a Business | No Comments »