Saturday, January 23, 2010
National Do Not Call Registration
Register your cell phone before your number is give out to telemarkers. Stop annoying phone calls! Call 1-888-382-1222. It takes less than 30 seconds.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
How to Make Money Online: Top Ten Websites
So, I'm not David Letterman and these sites are not necessarily in order one way or the other. I've made money on each of these websites. Most of the sites are free to join and user friendly. Effort is equal to payout, and patience is key to reward.
Ten - Ebay
The dragon of auctions, and of course, you can "buy now". You probably know about Ebay. You've probably even sold a thing or two or Ebay, but do you know how to maximize your efforts for better results? See my post on Top Twenty Ebay Seller Tips.
Recommended Reading: eBay 101: Selling on eBay For Part-time or Full-time Income, Beginner to PowerSeller in 90 Days
Nine - Amazon
There's more than one way to make money on Amazon. You can set up an associate account and post affiliate links on your website or blog. You can even set up 100 online bookstores powered by Amazon with books picked by you. Have you checked out The Information Lady Bookstore yet? You can sell books you finished reading that are now cluttering up your bookshelf space. Check out Bottega Books - my preowned, once loved bookstore. You can even sell various products on Amazon. And of course, you can publish a book and sell it on Amazon (print or a Kindle version).
Recommended Reading: Aiming at Amazon: The NEW Business of Self Publishing, or How to Publish Your Books with Print on Demand and Online Book Marketing on Amazon.com
Eight - Cafe Press
You do not have to be artistic or a graphic designer to create designs on t-shirts, hats, bags, and dozens of other products. I've made designs (or just cute sayings) on PowerPoint, saved it as a picture and uploaded it to my shop. Apple Boutique
Seven - Squidoo
Pick a topic. Create a lens. Search the Internet for information to add to your topic. Monetize your lens. Go back and add to your lens on every once in awhile. It's that easy. I have links to my lenses on the side of this blog. Check them out!
Recommended Reading: How To Squidoo
Six - Etsy
Do you enjoy working with your hands and making things? Etsy is for everything handmade. You get your own store, and your listings stay up for four months (you can renew before they expire) at only .20 cents each. You can't beat that! Enchanted Beading
Recommended Reading: Etsy Exposed: 50 Ways to Start Making More Etsy Sales Than You Can Handle: Tips and Tricks for Selling on Etsy.com
Five - Ecrater
Set up a free Ecrater store and sell virtually anything. See my blog post about selling on Ecrater: Set Up a 100% Free Online Store. You can see my example at Rummage Cart.
Four - Google
Google is the king of search engines, and the king of advertisement online. Join Google and place ads on your website. Visitors click and you make money. See my ePage (The One Page Wonder): How to Get More Clicks on Your Google Ads for simple instructions on optimizing your ad placements.
Recommended Reading: The AdSense Code: What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense
Three - Teachers Pay Teachers
Are you a teacher, retired teacher, or former teacher? Start putting together your original materials and selling them on Teachers Pay Teachers by Scholastic. You can even sell materials you no longer use in your classroom. What a great way for teachers to recycle, reuse, and make a little money! I have two literature units listed at this time: The Pumpkin Blanket and A River Ran Wild.
Two - CreateSpace
Do you dream of publishing a book? CreateSpace provides the most economical way to get published, and to get your books on Amazon quickly. This is an Amazon owned company. They now have a Published by You program for $39 a title. This gives you a great break on purchasing copies of your book (the most economical POD around), and gets your book into Ingrims. You can choose to take a free ISBN from CreateSpace and allow their name to be listed as publisher, or purchase your own ISBN and establish your very own publishing company. Either way - you are in control.
Recommended Reading: The Step-by-Step Guide to Self-Publishing for Profit!: Start Your Own Home-Based Publishing Company and Publish Your Non-Fiction Book with CreateSpace and Amazon (Volume 1)
One - Payloadz
Are you looking for a simple and economical way to sell your ebooks online? Payloadz makes it easy. Just list your ebooks and sell them on their site and your site by adding their simple shopping cart (at no cost). The customer makes the purchase and automatically downloads it. You don't have to do anything but sit back and collect the money! (Okay - it wouldn't hurt to market yourself).
Ten - Ebay
The dragon of auctions, and of course, you can "buy now". You probably know about Ebay. You've probably even sold a thing or two or Ebay, but do you know how to maximize your efforts for better results? See my post on Top Twenty Ebay Seller Tips.
Recommended Reading: eBay 101: Selling on eBay For Part-time or Full-time Income, Beginner to PowerSeller in 90 Days
Nine - Amazon
There's more than one way to make money on Amazon. You can set up an associate account and post affiliate links on your website or blog. You can even set up 100 online bookstores powered by Amazon with books picked by you. Have you checked out The Information Lady Bookstore yet? You can sell books you finished reading that are now cluttering up your bookshelf space. Check out Bottega Books - my preowned, once loved bookstore. You can even sell various products on Amazon. And of course, you can publish a book and sell it on Amazon (print or a Kindle version).
Recommended Reading: Aiming at Amazon: The NEW Business of Self Publishing, or How to Publish Your Books with Print on Demand and Online Book Marketing on Amazon.com
Eight - Cafe Press
You do not have to be artistic or a graphic designer to create designs on t-shirts, hats, bags, and dozens of other products. I've made designs (or just cute sayings) on PowerPoint, saved it as a picture and uploaded it to my shop. Apple Boutique
Seven - Squidoo
Pick a topic. Create a lens. Search the Internet for information to add to your topic. Monetize your lens. Go back and add to your lens on every once in awhile. It's that easy. I have links to my lenses on the side of this blog. Check them out!
Recommended Reading: How To Squidoo
Six - Etsy
Do you enjoy working with your hands and making things? Etsy is for everything handmade. You get your own store, and your listings stay up for four months (you can renew before they expire) at only .20 cents each. You can't beat that! Enchanted Beading
Recommended Reading: Etsy Exposed: 50 Ways to Start Making More Etsy Sales Than You Can Handle: Tips and Tricks for Selling on Etsy.com
Five - Ecrater
Set up a free Ecrater store and sell virtually anything. See my blog post about selling on Ecrater: Set Up a 100% Free Online Store. You can see my example at Rummage Cart.
Four - Google
Google is the king of search engines, and the king of advertisement online. Join Google and place ads on your website. Visitors click and you make money. See my ePage (The One Page Wonder): How to Get More Clicks on Your Google Ads for simple instructions on optimizing your ad placements.
Recommended Reading: The AdSense Code: What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense
Three - Teachers Pay Teachers
Are you a teacher, retired teacher, or former teacher? Start putting together your original materials and selling them on Teachers Pay Teachers by Scholastic. You can even sell materials you no longer use in your classroom. What a great way for teachers to recycle, reuse, and make a little money! I have two literature units listed at this time: The Pumpkin Blanket and A River Ran Wild.
Two - CreateSpace
Do you dream of publishing a book? CreateSpace provides the most economical way to get published, and to get your books on Amazon quickly. This is an Amazon owned company. They now have a Published by You program for $39 a title. This gives you a great break on purchasing copies of your book (the most economical POD around), and gets your book into Ingrims. You can choose to take a free ISBN from CreateSpace and allow their name to be listed as publisher, or purchase your own ISBN and establish your very own publishing company. Either way - you are in control.
Recommended Reading: The Step-by-Step Guide to Self-Publishing for Profit!: Start Your Own Home-Based Publishing Company and Publish Your Non-Fiction Book with CreateSpace and Amazon (Volume 1)
One - Payloadz
Are you looking for a simple and economical way to sell your ebooks online? Payloadz makes it easy. Just list your ebooks and sell them on their site and your site by adding their simple shopping cart (at no cost). The customer makes the purchase and automatically downloads it. You don't have to do anything but sit back and collect the money! (Okay - it wouldn't hurt to market yourself).
Friday, January 8, 2010
Placing Alt Tags In Your Website Images
Alt tags are added to images to help search engines index websites and surfers to know what is behind the picture. I have a picture as a logo on my website. My logo has a hyperlink to my homepage. I placed an alt tag on my logo in order for Google and other search engines to be able to "read" it. My visitors see a little pop-up box that tells them what I've labeled the logo.
If you have a website on low carb dieting, and you create a logo, you would want to create an alt tag that says, "Low Carb Diets". This tag is keyword specific. It helps to move you up the ranks in search engines. You can add alt tags to any image on your site. I have cute pictures with links to different sections. I created alt tags that describe the contents of the sections with keywords.
How do make an alt tag? It's easier than you think. If you know a little bit about HTML code (or a lot), you probably know what to do, and now you know why you should do it. If you are like me and run a simple website using Microsoft Frontpage, then you might not know too much about HTML code. I know enough to copy and paste. I simply clicked on my picture in my WYSIWHG editor, and then clicked over to my HTML code editor. The picture was automatically highlighted allowing me to find it quickly.
Alt tag code looks like this: img src="logo.gif" alt="Low Carb Diets"
I looked for the end of the gif or png, and then typed in the code (after the ") alt="Low Carb Diets /> The code in bold is what I added to the end of the image code.
The > symbol was already there. I had to add the / symbol. You can change the words (Low Carb Diets) to whatever you want your tag to read. I recommend using keywords that describe the picture or page to where it's linked. Try to use the most relevant string of keywords possible to help in your search engine rankings. I am slowly, but surely adding alt tags to all of my pictures on my website. The time and effort should be worth the results.
If you have a website on low carb dieting, and you create a logo, you would want to create an alt tag that says, "Low Carb Diets". This tag is keyword specific. It helps to move you up the ranks in search engines. You can add alt tags to any image on your site. I have cute pictures with links to different sections. I created alt tags that describe the contents of the sections with keywords.
How do make an alt tag? It's easier than you think. If you know a little bit about HTML code (or a lot), you probably know what to do, and now you know why you should do it. If you are like me and run a simple website using Microsoft Frontpage, then you might not know too much about HTML code. I know enough to copy and paste. I simply clicked on my picture in my WYSIWHG editor, and then clicked over to my HTML code editor. The picture was automatically highlighted allowing me to find it quickly.
Alt tag code looks like this: img src="logo.gif" alt="Low Carb Diets"
I looked for the end of the gif or png, and then typed in the code (after the ") alt="Low Carb Diets /> The code in bold is what I added to the end of the image code.
The > symbol was already there. I had to add the / symbol. You can change the words (Low Carb Diets) to whatever you want your tag to read. I recommend using keywords that describe the picture or page to where it's linked. Try to use the most relevant string of keywords possible to help in your search engine rankings. I am slowly, but surely adding alt tags to all of my pictures on my website. The time and effort should be worth the results.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Website Content: What Does It Really Mean?
I had an "a-ha" moment today. I realized something I should already know, but for some reason I didn't connect the dots. I decided to search on Google using keywords for my site. I wanted to see the sites that came up first. What do these sites have in common? What are they doing that I'm not doing?
I half expected the top sites to be run by corporations with SEO guys plugging away 24 hours a day. I was surprised to find simple sites run by individuals providing information simply because they enjoy sharing. I decided to study these sites to determine the common attributes.
I know content is king. I've read it, heard it, viewed it, believed it, and optimized my site for it - so I thought. The homepage of every site that came up first was packed with words. The words have meaning and make a connection with the reader. No wonder blogs are so popular with the search engines. They are made up of words, and words are content, and content is king -that is, updated content is king.
I recently updated my homepage. I have cute pictures to link viewers to the different parts of my site, and I feed my blog articles on to the front page. And today I realized what I did wrong. The majority of my homepage was pictures. I just spent the last hour reworking the page. I moved the "pictorial links" to the side and created new links with annotations. I added "alt" tags to the pictures (okay, I've know for awhile I needed to do this, but hadn't gotten around to it), and an introductory short paragraph packed with keywords. The search engines will need to reindex the page, and I suspect it will take a few weeks to see the results of my work, but I have a feeling I'm onto something. I have plans to add more "words" throughout my site in the form of mini articles. I'll report back in a few weeks on this topic. Please share your experiences with adding content to your website in the comments section of my blog.
TTFN,
The Information Lady
I half expected the top sites to be run by corporations with SEO guys plugging away 24 hours a day. I was surprised to find simple sites run by individuals providing information simply because they enjoy sharing. I decided to study these sites to determine the common attributes.
I know content is king. I've read it, heard it, viewed it, believed it, and optimized my site for it - so I thought. The homepage of every site that came up first was packed with words. The words have meaning and make a connection with the reader. No wonder blogs are so popular with the search engines. They are made up of words, and words are content, and content is king -that is, updated content is king.
I recently updated my homepage. I have cute pictures to link viewers to the different parts of my site, and I feed my blog articles on to the front page. And today I realized what I did wrong. The majority of my homepage was pictures. I just spent the last hour reworking the page. I moved the "pictorial links" to the side and created new links with annotations. I added "alt" tags to the pictures (okay, I've know for awhile I needed to do this, but hadn't gotten around to it), and an introductory short paragraph packed with keywords. The search engines will need to reindex the page, and I suspect it will take a few weeks to see the results of my work, but I have a feeling I'm onto something. I have plans to add more "words" throughout my site in the form of mini articles. I'll report back in a few weeks on this topic. Please share your experiences with adding content to your website in the comments section of my blog.
TTFN,
The Information Lady
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Free Webtools for Your Website
Free is a good thing. I like free. I especially like free that doesn't require me to stand in line, fight the crowds, and gives me something of value. Here are few webtools I've found to kick your website up a notch:
1. Copyright Auto Generator - This is my favorite new webtool. Every year I spend hours on end changing the copyright on my website. I have about 150 pages of content. I spent the hours again this year, except this time I used this amazing tool. I simply pasted my generated code in and when it turned 2010, my pages automatically updated itself. I love it! Next year I can focus on content rather than changing the copyright dates.
2. Banner Fans - I've tried a lot of different banner generators, but this one is my favorite. It's easy to use. You can upload your own images, change fonts and sizes, and customize your banner size. You can even set your banner to link to your site.
3. Social Network Button - The "add this" button is the coolest. Your visitors can bookmark your site and add it to oodles of different social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Digg and over 200 more! One button - lots of options.
4. Feed Blog Posts Onto Your Website - I feed one of my blogs onto the front page of my website. It was simple to set up, and easy to maintain. Operating a blog on my website is complicated and more expensive. Feeding my Blogger blog archives my articles, yet it gives me the ability to put them on my website homepage.
5. Free Search Engine - This is a nice little search engine you can place on your website. You receive weekly emails giving you an analytical information about your visitors and the keywords they use on their searches.
1. Copyright Auto Generator - This is my favorite new webtool. Every year I spend hours on end changing the copyright on my website. I have about 150 pages of content. I spent the hours again this year, except this time I used this amazing tool. I simply pasted my generated code in and when it turned 2010, my pages automatically updated itself. I love it! Next year I can focus on content rather than changing the copyright dates.
2. Banner Fans - I've tried a lot of different banner generators, but this one is my favorite. It's easy to use. You can upload your own images, change fonts and sizes, and customize your banner size. You can even set your banner to link to your site.
3. Social Network Button - The "add this" button is the coolest. Your visitors can bookmark your site and add it to oodles of different social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Digg and over 200 more! One button - lots of options.
4. Feed Blog Posts Onto Your Website - I feed one of my blogs onto the front page of my website. It was simple to set up, and easy to maintain. Operating a blog on my website is complicated and more expensive. Feeding my Blogger blog archives my articles, yet it gives me the ability to put them on my website homepage.
5. Free Search Engine - This is a nice little search engine you can place on your website. You receive weekly emails giving you an analytical information about your visitors and the keywords they use on their searches.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Open a FREE Amazon Bookstore (aStore)
Did you know you can open up a free online bookstore powered by Amazon? In fact, you can open up 100 stores. Simply sign up for an Amazon Associates account and begin building your store. You get to name it and populate it. Do you have a website on parenting? Populate your store with parenting books and children's books. Do you have a blog about politics? Populate your store with political books. Do you blog about business, electronics, writing, or marketing? Whatever you blog about, whatever your website is about you can find books and products to populate your astore. For examples, check out my astores on my sidebar.
Once you get your astore up and running you can link to it from your blogs, website, email, and social communities. If someone clicks through and buys a product you earn a commission. It's that simple! The nice thing about astores is that you take the time to search Amazon for products to suit like minded people. For example, I have a store called Book eVentures. I took the time to search for quality teaching resources for K12 teachers, and children's books. My astore acts as a resource for teachers. The Information Lady Bookstore has books and products chosen for my readers. Check it out! You might find something you want to read. The nice thing about astores is that it doesn't cost your visitors anything extra to click through to Amazon from your site, and it doesn't cost you anything to set it up. You help Amazon by promoting products, and Amazon helps you by paying you a commission. They pay out commissions monthly. You can choose to have your extra money dropped into your bank account, in the form of a check, or as an Amazon gift card.
Amazon astores are a great way to share books and products you love and make a little extra income on the side.
Once you get your astore up and running you can link to it from your blogs, website, email, and social communities. If someone clicks through and buys a product you earn a commission. It's that simple! The nice thing about astores is that you take the time to search Amazon for products to suit like minded people. For example, I have a store called Book eVentures. I took the time to search for quality teaching resources for K12 teachers, and children's books. My astore acts as a resource for teachers. The Information Lady Bookstore has books and products chosen for my readers. Check it out! You might find something you want to read. The nice thing about astores is that it doesn't cost your visitors anything extra to click through to Amazon from your site, and it doesn't cost you anything to set it up. You help Amazon by promoting products, and Amazon helps you by paying you a commission. They pay out commissions monthly. You can choose to have your extra money dropped into your bank account, in the form of a check, or as an Amazon gift card.
Amazon astores are a great way to share books and products you love and make a little extra income on the side.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Five Simple Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
You've opened your website's virtual doors, and now you wait. When will the people come? As a tiny needle in the world's largest haystack. you must find ways to bring the people to you. You have to go out and get them. Start with these simple steps.
1. Optimize your website daily by continuing to add content. Content is king when it comes to search engines finding you.
2. Write articles and submit them to article sites like Ezine Articles. Your article is syndicated when other webmasters pick it up for their websites. It's all in the byline...your website link.
3. Use social networking to "get out there." Now don't spam anyone, but contribute to online communities. Set up accounts with relevant forums, Facebook, My Space, Twitter, Ning, and others. Devote a little time each day to posting in your community networks.
4. Spend time finding other websites that complement your website by drawing the same target audience. Shoot the webmaster an email and offer a link exchange. The more inbound links your website has the higher in the search engine rankings you will go.
5. Create a newsletter. Allow your visitors to sign up directly on your site. Send out a newsletter with quality content once a month, bimonthly, or once a week. Don't spam people's email - spam is not cool.
Here are some recommended books to read on driving traffic to your site:
1. Optimize your website daily by continuing to add content. Content is king when it comes to search engines finding you.
2. Write articles and submit them to article sites like Ezine Articles. Your article is syndicated when other webmasters pick it up for their websites. It's all in the byline...your website link.
3. Use social networking to "get out there." Now don't spam anyone, but contribute to online communities. Set up accounts with relevant forums, Facebook, My Space, Twitter, Ning, and others. Devote a little time each day to posting in your community networks.
4. Spend time finding other websites that complement your website by drawing the same target audience. Shoot the webmaster an email and offer a link exchange. The more inbound links your website has the higher in the search engine rankings you will go.
5. Create a newsletter. Allow your visitors to sign up directly on your site. Send out a newsletter with quality content once a month, bimonthly, or once a week. Don't spam people's email - spam is not cool.
Here are some recommended books to read on driving traffic to your site:
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