Online or off line the formula for success is the same.

These are a couple of good articles about starting your own business. Online or off line the formula for success is the same.

Dr. Phil on starting a business: passion is currency, patience is crucial

Chef Ming Tsai's keys to success

My First $100 Dollar Day with Google Adsense

Today is a good day.  Today I had my first $100 dollar day with Google AdSense. 

  

This is great achievement for me. 

I started this journey back in 2007. It has taken me 5 long years to get to this point.

I remember in the beginning, I never thought it would have taken this long. I was like a lot of people, thinking when I build they would come. But they didn't.

I have learned from this experience. I learn there is no short cut to making money online, if there is I have never found it.

I must admit, the early years where rough. Looking at my Google AdSense and see I have only made $3 dollars all day was pretty depressing. Many times I felt like quitting. Making a decent amount of money online seemed impossible.

But I am glad I didn’t quit. I am glad I kept creating quality pages. I believed in what I was doing and I that I was making a difference.

My biggest motivation (Inspiration)

The visitors to my site where my biggest motivation. Every time I thought about quitting I would get one of does feedbacks, telling me how much they like the site and how helpful it been to them.

The feedbacks I received where like blast of fuel. 

I know lot of you have been doing this for a while and still stuck on a few dollars per day. I know how frustrating it is because I been there.

My advice to you is not to give up. Keep working hard. Keep believing in what you are doing.

Listen to your visitors (your audience). If they tell you something is wrong, then it probably is. Fixit don’t ignore your visitors.

Recommit yourself to your site. Stay within your niche, don’t try and do everything. Stay focus on your topic. Don’t look at someone else success and try and do what they are doing. Do what you know best.

I know this is not the end. This is really just another mile stone. I know I will not make $100 dollars every day. Some days I will still make $10 dollars because my niche is school education and it is very seasonal. But just like winning a championship I will have to defend it. For me to continue making $100 dollars day I will have to work harder. Every day there is more competition online. More websites are being created every day. Trying to maintain and grow traffic is getting harder. I will have to find different ways to grow my business.

I don’t look at this as work. This is something I wanted. This is why I spent so many hours creating my site. To me this is fun.

Goals

You have to be realistic when you are setting goals. You can’t expect to make $100 a day if you have never made $50 in one day.

You have to celebrate every mile stone. Your first $5 day, $10 day, $25 day, $50 day and so on.

I would love to make $200 a day, but I know that will not happen this year. This is a goal I will set for next year.

Fear

A type of fear has come over me. The fear of losing everything that I have worked so hard for. The fear of waking up one day and all my traffic has disappeared and taken my AdSense earning with it.

But I read somewhere that this is a fear that many successful business people have, the ones who have started their own business.

I read that this is a healthy fear. It is a type of fear that keeps you motivated. A fear that makes you wants to work harder to keep what you have achieved.

But today will take a time out. Today will have breakfast at my favorite café then take a slow work over the Brooklyn Bridge.

Finding Your Niche - Google Hangout Video

I came across this Google hangout video last night. They where interviewing David hobby and Patrick smith (two photo bloggers).
                                                                                                                           
There are some really good points made here. I specially like the part about how many blogs do you own? and starting your own site and finding your niche. This question start at the 28:00 of the video.

One said, "about a dozen", the other one said", "about six.

The point is, none of them succeeded on their first try.

There is no guaranty that the first site you start will do well.

I only wish it was that simple. I myself have started about half a dozen sites before I had one successful site.

My biggest problem was, I trying to be a generalist with my websites. I was trying to cover too many topics all at once. No wants to take advise from a generalist. They want the best person to help them serve their problem. They want a specialist (an expert).

You have to present your self as an expert by building a niche website.

A niche site is where it’s at. With I niche site you can be more focus. You can be laser like focus on one subject.

Time to Buy a ipad?

I am going to buy an ipad.

I don’t like the closeness of apple. I prefer the openness of Google, and all the other tablet makers, but like they “it’s only business” and the numbers don’t lie.

I know get about 10 percent of my traffic from smartphone and tablet. 80 percent comes from apple ipad. And according to most of the studies that I have read, this will not be changing any time soon.

For me to continue to make money online my website has to be tablet ready.

I have gotten a lot of feedback lately about the way me site looks on an ipad. For me to address does problems I have to take a trip to the apple store. This is becoming a big in convenience.

Things are changing.

The world is changing. We know live in world of smartphones, tables and apps.

As niche website owners we have to adapt to changes or get left behind.

Remember, as much as things changes one thing will always remain the same, that is quality content, content will always be king.

Yahoo Web hosting, the Best Kept Secret.

Yes yahoo provides web hosting and domain services just like Godaddy and network solutions.

I am always amazed that every time hears someone talking about web hosting they never mentions yahoo. I have been using yahoo web hosting the past five years and never had a problem. My website has never been down in the five years. To me that is a pretty good record.

The few times had a question they got back to me right away.

Their web hosting and domain pricing has remain the same over that period of time, which is about $10-20 dollars for a domain name and $14.00 a month for web hosting.                                                 If you are a new customer you can get a discount. The purchasing process is strait forward. They do not try and sell you everything under the sun like Godaddy and some of the other web hosting companies.

I am not endorsing the whole of yahoo because I think they miss the boat on a few things, like search. If I had to depend on their search engine for traffic I would starve to death.

But as fore as web hosting goes, I must say, they are simply the best.

Whats your web hosting provider like? Let me know.

WHEN IT COME TO website TRAFFIC SIZE DOES NOT MATTER

I was looking at my Google analytics report for my website mathatube.com.   Get 75% percent of my traffic from the first 100 pages and %90 percent from the top 250 pages. This website has over 1500 page index by Google.

The point is you do not need to by the biggest website to be successful.  Don’t look at the other websites with thousands of pages and feel you have to try catch up to them.

Take your time and build quality pages.

Google webmaster YouTube channel, a great resource

Google webmaster YouTube channel is a great resource for anyone who owns a website or blog.  There are currently over 390 videos.  Personally I have watch all 393 but you can choose which ones you are interested in. Google YouTube webmaster channel

If you built and maintains your own website like I do, then this channel is a must.

Google, Please Fix Your Analytics

I wish Google would bring back their old analytic report. It was a lot easier to find what you need. Maybe it is just me but I don't think so. Use to be able to click on a page and see the path to links. Now finding that is like looking for a needle in haystack. The home page have a lot of useless graphs.

This is just a couple of the problems. There are a lot more. Any way, I hope they do something about it soon. 

A Great S.E.O Guide from Google.

Google publish a very good Search engine optimization (E.O.S) guide. It is part of their webmaster tool help. There is a lot of useful information in those 32 pages. The pdf guide is located top left of the help center page. This is the direct link to the pdf file

Let me know what you think about the guide.

These are very good articles from blog.hubspot.com I think worth reading.

·  12 Quick Tips To Search Google Like An Expert

·  Free Advertising on Google

·  How to Create a Facebook Business Page in 5 Simple Steps(With Video!)

·  20 Examples of Great Facebook Fan Pages

·  Create a Facebook Business Page and Tap 53 Million Users (For Free!)

·  Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing

·  How to Create a Facebook Page Vanity URL

·  How to Use Twitter for Marketing & PR

·  Did You Graduate From Link Building High School Yet?

·  The Importance of Google PageRank: A Guide For Small Business Executives

Don’t Try to Create Another Facebook

facebook image credit flickr

With all the talk and excitement surrounding Facebook these days, you probably look at facebook and say ‘I think I could do that'. But the truth is you probably can’t. I know I can’t.

There is a lot of programming that goes into building a sit like facebook. You will need to be a programmer or hire one, which can be very expense. I don’t know the price of hiring programmers to do the type of specialize work that it will take but I’m sure you will be looking at thousands of dollars.

Facebook was started by only a couple of guys but does guys where computer programmers. Mark Zuckerberg might have been a college dropout but he was a very gifted programmer at the time.

You have to be realistic when starting a website. You will probably be working a regular job everyday and building your site alone on your spear time. So you need a site you can manage yourself. It is best to choose a topic (a niche) you know something about and build a content rich site.

There lots of websites out there making money that does not require the type of specialized ability facebook takes.

If you do decide to build a social network then build a niche social network, a social net that caters to a specific group of people. Like a social network for soccer moms, a social network for taxi drivers in n-y and so on.

One of the big problems with starting a social network site is getting traffic to the site. All the pages are pass word protected so you probably won’t get search engine traffic. Without search traffic, you will have to spend tones of money to attract visitors.

If you have the time, money and specialize skills to build a social network, great, if not move on.

So what do you think? Do think it's a good idea? Let me know.

Why is my Website so Slow?

According to Google webmaster tool my site is on the slow side. The chart below shows my page speed on 5-16-12

Google us page speed as one of the metrics for grading websites. Your site can loose page rank if Google determine your site is to slow.

I can understand why, they want user to have the best serving experience. No one wants to site and wait for a website to load.

As small websites owners we are at disadvantage when it comes to speed, because we all use shared servers. So some of our speed problems comes from how busy the server is or how much activity is on it at a certain time.

Google give recommendations in webmaster tool to analyze and fix page speed. I am going to work on my site. I will let you know if anything changes.

What's your speed? Let me know how your site is doing with speed.

Attracting More Visitors? Produce Great Content.

I would like share an article I read a couple days ago. The article is by Jack Herrick  of wikihow.com. He shared three tips about growing your business. The tip I fine most interesting is the first tip title, producing great content. 

                                                                                                                                                                   

“When you can produce the single best page on the Internet on any given topic, people will find it and share it with their friends. Don't settle for acceptable content always strive to produce amazing content that your readers can't resist sharing”. You can read the inter article here.

I think this is something you should always keep in mine when you are creating pages to your website. You can always make changes to a page if the page is not right. Big websites can get away with low quality pages because they might have 3000,000 pages so having a few hundred bad pages will not hurt them. But when you are a small website with a few hundred or a few thousands pages every page counts.

Make sure you are convertible with any page you create. Look at other websites that covering the same topic. If your page is not the best, then make what ever correction you need to make the best. Learn from someone else's mistakes. Take advantage of the fact that this is a digital media; web pages are not written in stone.

You Are Never Too Old To Start An Online Business.

Yesterday I was going through my feedback emails. I do this every once in while. It helps me to refocus on what I need to do to move my site (mathatube.com) forward.

The following email got me thinking about age and starting an online line business.

email received Sun, Apr 22, 2012 10:10 pm.

comment = I am a sixty-one year old woman doing college online. I am going for

my BA in Psychology. Needless to say it has been a v-e-r-y long time since I did

anything like geometry! I am now in College Math and this site has helped me

tremendously, especially in finding formulas for area, etc. You are now in my

favorites.

Thank you

Kathleen Wilhelm”)

You can not let age stop you from starting your website or blog. I was 45 when I started my first website. There are a lot of sites started by people a lot older than me. With age comes experience and that is what online business is all about. Teaching what you know.

I know you keep hearing about all these 21 year old starting website and getting rich. But there are over 30 million websites online all of them are not started by college age students.

Social security

You can not just depend on S.S any more. A lot of retirees are taking part time jobs. If you start your website today, in about 5 years you can have a nice residual income. Your website will be your part time job.

Think about starting an online line business instead of going back to school.

I applaud people like Kathleen. I have family members that are doing the same thing. My sister is 53 and working on her bachelor degree in teaching kids with special needs. My mother is 70 and is about to take the California bar exam to become a lawyer. But that is not for everyone I know it’s not for me.

So if you are more like me why not think of starting your own website (your own business).

There are a few reasons why I think you should consider doing this.

First, you learn by doing. When you're in a school you are learning through theory. With your own website you are learning by creating your own content.

Second, you get a wide range of experience. You will become an expert on what ever topic you choose (your niche). You learn marketing, branding, designing when you are doing that part of your site. You get to learn all these areas instead of just focusing one.

Third, it could be a better investment. It cost a lot less. For less than $50 dollars your website could be up and running. The amount of time it takes to go back to school and spend a couple years there, you could take that time and start your website. In a couple years your will be generating a decent income.

I started my main site 5 years ago. I made a lot of mistakes in those 5 years. But it’s been a great learning experience. Know make enough to consider it my part time job. There is nothing like knowing you have built something people fine useful.

But like I said going back to school is not for everybody. Take a chalenge a start your own website. Your biggest investment will be time.

Remember, age is just a number.

Big Drop in Traffic.

I received a message from Google in webmaster tool. The message said I had I drop in traffic. This was the first time I ever got a message like that.

The chart below shows the message.

This is a big concern for small websites like mine. Any change in traffic can effect my earning.

 A few other website has gotten this message. 

I watch a video by Matt Cutts, a Google engineer, discussing cause of traffic drop.

I was hit by the Piquin

After going through the possible causes, I concluded it was probably an algorithm change. Yes this even affects the little guys.

Word Press or Blogger Which is Better?

There is always a debate about word press and blogger which is better?

After only using blogger for a couple of days I concluded that blogger is 100% easier to get started with than word press.

My blogger blog was up and running in less than 5 minutes. Hardest thing will probably creating a Google account if you don’t have one. Which anyone who is serious about making money online should have.

With blogger there is no need to pay for webhosting because Google provide hosting for free.

Using blogger is like going into your email and start typing. But instead of hitting the send button you hit the post it button.

Word press require down loading a zip file. Right away this is getting technical for a lot of people. The time it takes to down, fine and on zip the file you could of written your first blogger post.

below is word press handy guide with their famous 5 installation instructions.

(Famous 5-Minute Install

Here's the quick version of the instructions, for those that are already comfortable with performing such installations. More detailed instructions follow.

If you are not comfortable with renaming files, Steps 3 and 4 are optional and you can skip them as the install program will create wp-config.php file.

1.     Download and unzip the WordPress package if you haven't already.

2.     Create a database for WordPress on your web server, as well as a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it.

3.     Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.

4.     Open wp-config.php in a text editor and fill in your database details as explained in Editing wp-config.php to generate and use your secret key password.

5.     Upload the WordPress files in the desired location on your web server:

§  If you want to integrate WordPress into the root of your domain (e.g. http://example.com/), move or upload all contents of the unzipped WordPress directory (but excluding the directory itself) into the root directory of your web server.

§  If you want to have your WordPress installation in its own subdirectory on your web site (e.g.http://example.com/blog/), create the blog directory on your server and upload WordPress to the directory via FTP.

6.     Run the WordPress installation script by accessing wp-admin/install.php in a web browser.

§  If you installed WordPress in the root directory, you should visit: http://example.com/wp-admin/install.php

§  If you installed WordPress in its own subdirectory called blog, for example, you should visit:http://example.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php)

 Yes I know word press have more plugins and themes but what does that have to do with success online. There are lots of successful boggers using google blogger. Like Richrd byrne at www.freetech4teachers.com/. He is doing very well in his education niche.

Video - Why I chose Blogger Instead of Word Press

If you have never create a blog before then I think you should go with blogger.

I will be starting a word press blog as soon as I can fine the zip file i downloaded. Wish me luck!

Unemployed? I have good news.

Like it or not, you have a lot of time on your hands. Sure you are looking for a job everyday, wink, wink.                                                                 

This is when most people start thinking of doing there own thing. They start thinking of starting their own business.

They look around wondering what type of business to start. What can I do to make money? They start thinking of ebay. But after you sell everything in your house, then what?

Good news

This is the best time to start a online business. A niche website or blog is perfect for someone out of work. Think about it, when are going to have so much free time. With unemployment extended, your site could be up and running before you have to go back to work.

What’s Niche website?

A niche website is a site or blog that targets a very narrow defined group of people. Like soccer moms in n-y, parents with kids with special needs, etc.)

In 6 months you can start make money with Google adsense, selling space, affiliate marketing, selling your own product, etc.

Don’t sit home and listen to all does people on T.V telling you how to get

rich. They get rich by convincing you that you can get rich. 

This is not a work from home scheme. This is something you will build yourself.

I built my on site, www.mathatube.com and I am now making over a thousand dollars per month from Google adsense program.

I took me five years to get to this point. I learn the hard way, by making a lot of mistakes. 

Soon I will put together a honest assessment of building my website and where I went wrong. Hopefully by reading my story you can avoid making the same mistakes I made.

Let me know how you are doing with your niche site.

More Domain Diversity-Help for the Llittle

More Domain Diversity

Help for the little.

 Google is finally addressing the problem of the same domain showing up multiply times in search.

                                    

Think this is good for small websites. It will give us more opportunity to be included on the first few pages of search results.

This was always frustrating to me, the big companies with two or three domain on the first page of search results. This help to lower the playing field a little bit.

This update is part of a list of up dates for the month of April that Google made public.

 Code name domain crowding.