Creating Your Own Website - Making Money Online

I have been a little bit slack when it comes to documenting my online money making journey but this Aussie Internet Marketer has been quite busy with a new plan. My own Websites! It feels incredibly awesome to be able to create your very own website where you choose the colours and words and best of all, you make the rules.

Creating your own website may sound daunting but it really isn’t that hard. If you have ever used wordpress or a similar program then you should be ready to give your own website a crack. If you have learnt how to make money, even just a little bit, on squidoo or zujava, then you are definitely ready to make your own site.

I started writing and creating articles known as lenses on a Revenue sharing platform called Squidoo. It was a great adventure where I learnt a lot about writing for readers and Search engine optimisation among many other things. Making money on squidoo was quite easy and I had only just really grasped how to make it happen when squidoo started to lose authority with google and very rapidly started to lose traffic.

Squidoo still brings in some cash for me each month but nothing at all compared to my favourite revenue sharing site. Which in my opinion is far better than squidoo. As I have mentioned in a previous post Zujava has standards and that really helps keep the site full of quality content. I have had a really good month leading up to Halloween on Zujava with sales numbering in hundreds.

I get side tracked easy, so back to building your own websites. It took me quite a few months to see my first sale on squidoo, on Zujava it was quite a bit quicker, but within four weeks I had seen my first sale on my own site.

The first thing you need to do is think about a domain name and a Host. If you shop around you can find some great deals on domains, sometimes for as little as $2.95 a year. Hosting can be a fair bit more expensive. I bought a Host plan for just one year while I experimented and tried it out, I really wanted to see if I would make sales before buying a 3 year plan. Now I really regret not buying the 3 year plan up front. I used Hostgator as my host as a lot of my online colleagues had told me that it is a lot less buggy and far less likely to crash than a lot of the other hosting companies. You can check out hostgator using this link Hostgator. When I paid for my host I decided to go for the babycroc option which gave me the option to register and host an unlimited number of domains and subdomains. It is by far the best value for money plan I found.

I used Godaddy as my domain supplier because they were offering domains a lot cheaper than Hostgator. You then need to redirect the domain from godaddy through to Hostgator. If you want to keep it a lot simpler you can always just buy both the host plan and domains through Hostgator that way you won’t need to do any redirections.

Once you have purchased your host and domain you will be given access to your Cpanel. Your Cpanel is where you need to go to set up your name servers for your domain and also install wordpress or whichever webpage building program you like. Skeffling has a really good step by step and even has fancy screenshots to help show you exactly how to do things like setting name servers and installing wordpress.

Now you probably feel like it was a mission to even think of a domain name let alone building your site. The building of your site is a lot easier than you think due to there being a lot of wordpress themes out there. I use Theme Junkie and they have great professional looking themes with a great support system in place. Once wordpress has been installed it comes with some nice themes such as TwentyTwelve. You can also get some great themes from sites such thinkupthemes and themejunkie. You just need to download your theme as a zip and then go into the themes section of your wordpress dashboard and then upload the sip file directly. Wordpress unzips the file during upload. Now you have a really cool looking website but it is completely empty and eagerly awaiting some content. Using your wordpress dashboard you can go right ahead and start creating excellent high quality articles. 

For now, have fun with trying to create your own website.

Zujava My New Favourite Writing Platform

What is Zujava?

Zujava is a new revenue sharing writing platform a lot like the well known Squidoo. Except the really great part about Zujava is the fact that they have "standards".

Squidoo has been in a lot of trouble lately and the traffic from google has decreased by 50% in a lot of cases. Squidoo themselves have also been alienating a lot of their veteran contributors by trying to repair damage that they have let get worse for years.

For years squidoo let everyone join and create lenses (web pages) and never really put a lot of restriction on what people published to the internet. A lot of these pages were spammy and damaging to squidoo's reputation. Google finally decided that a lot of squidoo's content was now undesirable and "slapped them" with a significant decrease in traffic being sent their way. This is hurting squidoo even more because in trying to manage the poor content issue they have put algorithms and filters in place that are seemingly faulty and are snagging perfectly reputable authors and their pages. I haven't been touched yet and all my pages are still intact, but who knows for how long.

This is where Zujava is fast becoming a place for talented lensmasters from squidoo to migrate to. Zujava has standards and before you can publish leaves (web pages) you have to create 3 leaves and then submit the for a quality review by Zujava editors. If they believe your pages are up to scratch you get released from what they call the "petting zu" and you are free to publish your pages for the world to see.  

This is great news because Zujava is going to be the next big platform to create quality content for the internet. The fact that Zujava have created standards from the start is going to look really good to search engines as the quality content produced on Zujava grows. 

At this point in time If you are looking to start writing or move platforms then I would definitely suggest Zujava. Squidoo still has good authority but is very unstable at the moment and while it will still produce decent traffic, you won't really know where you stand.

Check out this link to see what Zujava is all about. 

Create a free account on Zujava

Writing For Profit - Squidoo, Blogger and More

Writing can be good fun but unless you can manage to get a book published or a good job with a paper or magazine then what is the point. "For fun" you say. Well yes but wouldn’t it be great to make some money at the same time?

Of course it would but how can you do this? Well you can use sites such as Squidoo and Wizzley to write great information and sales pages, or you can write factual or fictional pieces on yahoo contributor network. Ezine Articles is also another great site where you can write some great articles that you think need to be heard, but Ezine articles work best when you have another page to link to.

So let’s talk about Squidoo and Wizzley.

First my favourite....

Squidoo.

Squidoo is a very easy and user friendly platform for writing articles as well as being a great community full of lots of friendly people. When first starting with writing your articles, it is a great idea to search Squidoo pages on how to write Squidoo pages. I have written a previous blog post on Squidoo being my favourite. Here are a couple of examples of great Squidoo lenses to help get you started.

http://www.squidoo.com/fisher-price-walker

http://www.squidoo.com/squidtips

http://www.squidoo.com/experiments-magnets

http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-be-an-archer

http://www.squidoo.com/outstanding-photographers-from-around-the-world

http://www.squidoo.com/the-solar-system-planets

There are two ways to make money on Squidoo:

1. Is to create great lenses that get lots of visits and have a good lensrank. Having a good lensrank will determine what tier you end up in. What tier your lens is in, is important because it will determine what sort of payout you get from the Adsense pool. On each lens Squidoo apply Adsense ads and all the proceeds from the click-throughs go into a pool. Squidoo takes half of this pool and the other half gets split up between the lenses, but not equally. The lenses that are performing well will be in tier 1 and then mid performers in tier 2 and low performing lenses in tier 3. A good lens in tier one could sometimes get up around $50 on a good month, tier 2 possibly 50 cents or so and tier 3 possibly a couple of cents.

2. The other way to make money on Squidoo is by using sales modules such as Amazon and Ebay. You can add related products from these sites into these modules and earn commission when someone purchases something. Squidoo also take 50% of the commission on these sales as well, but since Squidoo traffic so many sales to amazon these modules attract about an 8% commission. This means you end up with about 4% of the sale, which as a new amazon associate with no sales history is the maximum you will get anyway.

Wizzley.

Wizzley is very similar to Squidoo, you create articles with all sorts of different modules that you need to add content to. If using sales modules the situation is pretty much the same as Squidoo. Whereas Squidoo has an Adsense pool on Wizzley you use your own Adsense ID number and anything clicked through on your pages goes towards your Adsense income. This could be a good thing if you have high traffic to your Wizzley page but if you don't then you get nothing.

Yahoo Contributor Network.

Another way to write online is by joining the Yahoo Contributor Network. This Network gives you a platform on which you can write about anything you want and get paid for it. People who live in the United States are able to submit articles in a couple of ways.

1. You can earn money for completing writing assignments usually between $5 and $25 sometimes for some yahoo partners up to $100.

2. You can also submit articles for upfront payment and if they are accepted the payment is typically between $2 and $15.

3. Articles submitted are also eligible for unlimited and ongoing performance payments. These payments increase as your popularity and traffic increases. The performance payments are relatively small and are around $1 per 1000 visits and can get slightly higher. Some people make hundreds and thousands of dollars from performance payments with the right type of content.

On the Yahoo Contributor Network you can write all sorts of content including fiction, reviews, politics, opinions and pretty much anything you can think of. If you have a look here you can see my first 2 articles on Yahoo Contributor Network.

Ezine Articles.

Another great site for writing articles is Ezine Articles and it is a very professional site. Each article goes through numerous reviews and quality control to keep the whole site and its content high quality and professional. You don't get paid directly by Ezine Articles or by the performance of your articles, but Ezine Articles is very good for sending targeted traffic to your other paid sites such as Squidoo. So although on its own there is no income from writing on Ezine Articles there is the benefit of possibly increasing your income on other sites.

Here are the links to 2 of my Ezine Articles:

Help Your Baby Learn To Walk

The Toughest Iphone Case

Blogger.

Then of course there is this amazing site, Blogger. This Blogging platform is very easy to use and as it is connected to Google it is very easy to monetize your blog posts by using your Google Adsense ID.

You can also use the other method of posting affiliate links in your blog to make commissions as well. Using a Google blog like this works well considering you can use your one log in for Gmail, Google+, Youtube, Adsense, Adwords and Blogger.

So many options to choose from!

I don't by any means think of myself as a good writer, in fact I am very bad with grammar, but I do enjoy writing. So if you enjoy writing as well and want to get it to work for you a bit, then in my opinion these are some of your best options.

Remember whatever you decide to use, Have Fun with it.

One of my Favourite Methods - Squidoo

Squidoo is an awesome way of making some cash online. You can write about anything you want basically, except for a few small things that have been flagged as spam. You can write sales lenses which are primarily for making sales in a review style lens such as Fisher Price Walker. Pages on squidoo are called lenses by the way, so when I refer to a lens I am talking about a web page. You can also just write about topics that you love and create a great information lens that will attract traffic because of the expert knowledge you are sharing. One of my favourite informational lenses is my lens on the The Solar System Planets.

So far I am up to 23 lenses and I am currently just concentrating on making more and more links to my lenses. In a follow up post I will go through some of the best places to post your links to.
I am relatively new to squidoo and I have already made my first sale. Squidoo takes a fair amount of work and the cash doesn't start rolling in over night. It will take a a few months at least before you even see one sale. I have been sticking with it and asking question after question on the squidoo forums. Asking questions of the veteran lensmasters has really helped me a lot. There are a lot of great lensmasters willing to share their knowledge and help you to be successful with squidoo as well.

Here are a few basic tips that I have picked up so far about creating great lenses.

- Always write great content, don't ever just copy and paste information from web pages as this is a big no no with squidoo.

- Take the time and do some keyword research, it will help you out with getting traffic from google. Try and stick to what they call long tail keywords like "fisher price toys for baby boys" instead of "fisher price toys". Long tail keywords won't have as much competition. A good free place to check keyword popularity is Google keywords Tool

- Use lots of photos, I love to use my own photos whenever I can, I even go out of my way to try and get the perfect photo. If you can't take your own photos then Allposters is a great place you can get images and also earn 20% commission each time someone buys a poster. You can post a link from Allposters straight into a text module to show a great photo, plus if any one likes it they can click on it and buy it as a poster on the allposter website.

- One last major point to get you started and it is always remember to review your lenses before you publish them. Spelling and grammar mistakes look extremely unprofessional and it is something that I still have to remember to do.

I am really enjoying writing on squidoo and although my sales are yet to build up significant momentum I can definitely see the potential to create some serious income. Quite a few of the long term  lensmasters that you can chat to in the squidoo forums make a pretty tidy sum each month. You can too if you want to put in some effort. Remember if you want to give making money online a go then keep in mind it never happens over night regardless of what all the get rich programs tell you. Give Squidoo a go, I am sure you will enjoy it as much as I do.

If you would like to join Squidoo, you can sign up here
If you want to sign up for some good pictures with Allposters, Sign up here