Tag: internet marketing

How to be a Digital Nomad

You’ve probably seen the videos on youtube or other platforms showing the adventures being had by seemingly overly lucky people, while travelling the country or world in a van or yacht or motorbike etc., and you’ve dreamed of doing something similar.. just living where you want, how you want, and somehow making money online along the way to keep you going. Well the good news is you don’t need to be overly lucky, or rich, or look like a supermodel.

There are many ways to become a digital nomad, and in many ways it is now easier than ever (and also harder). Read on to find out how you too could live the dream and make bank from home, even when your home is constantly moving…

Corona

Of course these days we’re still in the middle of the Covid pandemic, which has brought certain challenges to those wanting to live the digital nomad lifestyle. Many international borders are closed to tourists, proof of vaccination and/or negative covid tests are required to enter many places. This can limit your nomadic options in terms of where in the world you’d like to travel or live, but the lifestyle can be done in your own country as well, and in fact doing that can be a great way to do a trial run in a safer place until restrictions are lifted.

Additionally, the pandemic has forced many employers to allow their staff to work remote, which is just what a digital nomad needs. Companies that previously were against having remote workers, have now embraced it, and found that it works and in many ways can be better than the old way.

So Covid has been both a curse and a blessing, a challenge and opportunity – reach out and grab that opportunity!

How to travel

There are many kinds of digital nomad, some more mobile than others. Some nomads may stay in one location for months at a time or longer, while others are constantly moving from place to place, often with their own transport which doubles as home and office.

Van Nomad
YouTube is full of videos of people living in vans and travelling all over. Often the videos will show the whole process starting from converting an old Transit van into a campervan (or just outright buying a campervan).

These days a van can be made quite comfortable with all the luxuries of home, as well as being a mobile office or workshop. Some people go for a more minimalist van conversion, perhaps just a mattress, portapotty, a few jerrycans for water storage, and maybe a solar charger to stick on the roof when parked.

Either way is fine if it gets you where you want to go and allows you to live the nomad lifestyle. You can and surely will adapt and upgrade along the way, so don’t delay your journey just to get the van “perfect”.

Bike Nomad
For the more intrepid nomad, a motorbike can get you to those exotic faraway locations that a Transit van could never reach. It’s also going to be a lot cheaper to buy a bike, maintain it, and fuel it.

Of course there’s a very limited carrying capacity on a bike, you certainly can’t live in a bike, but with a decent set of panniers you can carry quite a lot – including a tent, which you can live in.

For the solo digital nomad adventurer, a bike may be all you need – just get yourself an adventure bike like the Royal Enfield Himalayan, and hit the road.

Boat Nomad
For those nomads that dream of the deep blue sea, spending their days sailing the world and exploring exotic islands, a yacht is the way to go, or a boat of some kind, and there are many kinds.

There’s an old age along the lines of “a yacht is a hole in the water you throw your money into”, which can be uncomfortably close to the truth, as boats cost a lot to buy and a lot to maintain and require lots of special equipment that helps keep the crew alive on those epic ocean crossings.

However, there’s another adage that says “go small, go now”, which basically means don’t spend your life saving up for that megayacht you think you need, just get something small and affordable now and go forth. Of course it still needs to be safe and suitable for the type of voyages you plan to take, but there are people who have spent years travelling the world on tiny sailboats.

For some inspiration, check out “Sailing Alone Around the World” by Joshua Slocum, or the 8 year voyage in “Shrimpy”, an 18 foot sailboat, by Shane Acton. Another old but good one is The £200 Millionaire.

Plane/Train/Bus Nomad
Not every nomad brings their house with them, or has their own transport. Many, perhaps even most, simply travel on public transport in the usual way. Just hop on a plane (COVID restrictions permitting), to whatever part of the world you want to hang out in for a while, then train, bus or taxi to a hotel, hostel, or airbnb and get to work.

Hoof It
For some, the best way to travel is on foot (or maybe bicycle) because you get to see more along the way, you’re not in a hurry, and you keep fit! Sure you can’t cross oceans on foot, so may have to take a plane or ship to reach the next continent on your route. You can still make epic journeys though, and build a huge social following along the way, which brings in the money to keep on living the digital nomad lifestyle.

Where to travel

The world is your oyster (subject to the latest pandemic waves), so go wherever your heart desires. Perhaps an exotic island in Thailand, or a misty mountain in India, or maybe jungle is your thing, or the desert, or a big metropolis like London, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, Delhi, Seoul…

These days it’s relatively easy to apply for visas from anywhere, as many countries allow you to do that online, and all the info you need regarding travel to and in a country, and where to live while there, can be found online.

Where to live

Wherever you decide to go on your nomad journey, you will need a place to stay while there. If you brought your home with you, such as a van nomad or boat nomad, then most of the time you won’t be looking to rent a room anywhere, you just need a place to park your van or an anchorage or marina for your boat, or even a campsite (organised or wild) for your tent.

For everyone else, you will be looking for a room, apartment or house to rent for a while.

Backpacker Hostels
If you’re travelling on a shoestring or just like the backpacker vibe, there’s always a cheap, character filled, hostel to be found. You may just need a bed in a shared room, and that’s one of the cheapest options. However I’d recommend getting your own room if you plan to work while there, which is likely as a digital nomad, rather than just someone on a long holiday. Most hostels do have private rooms as well, so just make sure they have decent wifi and go for that option.

Hotels
If your digital nomad business is doing well, you could go for a proper hotel room with room service and all the luxuries. For longer stays, you can often negotiate a significant discount, making it far more affordable. A decent hotel typically provides benefits such as improved security, professional management, reliable wifi connectivity, peaceful nights, and sometimes even business networking opportunities.

Airbnb
Of course airbnb is ubiquitous these days, and you can find some great deals in cool locations. Longer stays usually provide big discounts, and you can “live like a local” to some extent. In the big cities, they can be very expensive though, but probably you can find something suitable even if it means being a little further from the city center. Perhaps even get a house or villa and share the cost with other nomads.

Couch Surfing
Who doesn’t like free? Couch surfing can be a great solution when you need a place to stay while on your journey. However, this is more suited to short stays of perhaps one or two nights. Most people won’t really want digital nomads moving in for weeks or months (unless they are paying).

How to make money

A true digital nomad makes a living while wandering the world. Otherwise you’re just on an extended holiday and living off your savings. It’s now easier than ever to work remotely. That is partly due to COVID forcing employers to allow staff to work from home, and partly due to advances in technology, particularly communications and social networks.

There is a somewhat skewed impression that digital nomads all make money with video channels and live streams, since those that do are the only ones actually seen, but there are in fact many more who make a living is other less public ways.

There are of course many ways to finance the digital nomad lifestyle, but here are a few…

Video
By its nature, one of the more visible ways to make money as a digital nomad is with videos and streams on YouTube, Twitch and other such platforms. People love to follow along with adventures, dreaming of doing the same, and so you can earn money just by recording your travels.
But of course there are other ways, often far more lucrative, to make money with videos. Do videos talking about or teaching what you know, or even what you eat (mukbang is a mystery to me but hugely popular), or gaming, or tech, or crypto or tech and crypto (TechLead allegedly makes around $50k/month from his channel!).

Blogging
If writing is your thing, rather than video streaming, you can easily create a blog using a service such as WordPress. Publish articles regularly and build up a following there, tied in to your social networks as well. Stick some ads on (Google Ads, WordPress ads, Adroll for retargeting, Amazon affiliate links, etc), and also start your own mailing list using a service such as MailChimp to give you greater reach beyond your web site.

Freelancing
If you have a skill that can be offered online, such as graphic design, web development, marketing, translation, audio production, teaching, writing, etc etc, you can easily do that from anywhere in the world. Freelance marketplaces such as Upwork and Fiverr provide all the tools and resources you need, as well as a built-in pool of potential clients.

Merchandise
Many digital nomads sell their own branded merchandise as a sideline income source. This is of course harder when you are just starting out and nobody knows you. When you have built a sizeable following though, you can sell these things to your fans. Services such as CafePress and Zazzle make it easy to do – you can create and sell your own branded facemasks!

Temporary Jobs
Of course online money making is not the only way. There are often places you can pick up casual work or temporary jobs to earn some money to keep you going until the next stop of your journey. Jobs in agriculture, or Amazon warehouses, or perhaps offering some service of your own – maybe you are a sailmaker, mechanic, carpenter, or teacher of some kind. Once you find a place you want to stay for a while, put the word out and see if you can pick up some odd jobs.

Busking
Are you musically inclined? If you’re staying in a busy place, and have a guitar or some other instrument, or even just your voice, you could earn a nice income just performing on the street (where allowed).

Cryptocurrency & NFTs
Disclaimer: not financial advice – crypto trading is very high risk. Never spend more than you can afford to lose!

Most people have heard of Bitcoin these days, and if you’d heard of it 10 years ago when it was in its early days, and had actually bought some and held on to it, you could be extremely wealthy now.

These days there are many more crypto coins and tokens available to “invest” in. Ethereum is another popular one, and you can see thousands more at CoinMarketCap.

It’s getting easier than ever to get into the crypto space, but still not exactly simple and there are many dangers, many scams..

You’ll need a wallet such as Metamask, and a way to buy whatever crypto you are interested in – centralized exchanges such as Binance, Crypto.com, Coinbase are popular choices – note that they will require identity verification due to “KYC” laws (know your customer), which can be off-putting to some.

You can even earn interest on crypto by “staking” it – this is offered by many exchanges (such as those mentioned above), and some wallets. The interest is typically paid in the same cryptocurrency though and the value of that can go either way. But it’s potentially a nice source of passive income.

There are various strategies to potentially make money with crypto – day trading, scalping, or just holding (“HODL“) for the long term in the hope that value increases (as it did with bitcoin).

NFTs are another facet of the crypto world which is very hot right now – you can buy and sell NFTs (non-fungible tokens) which are typically digital art works of various kinds such as pixelized avatars, photographs, or even just bits of text. They can be traded on platforms such as OpenSea, and can even be used in games. You can easily learn how to create NFTs and make money with them, even if you are as artistically challenged as me!

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – multiple income streams help ensure you can keep on your journey. You never know when once source will dry up so don’t pin everything to that.. diversify.

Gadgets

There’s so much fancy tech around now, making it relatively easy to get online anywhere in the world, keep in touch and make a living, and stay healthy wherever you may be.

Pretty much every smartphone nowadays can function as a mobile hotspot, allowing you to connect your laptop or tablet to the net using WiFi. But you can also get dedicated mobile hotspot gadgets that allow you to keep your phone free for other uses (and not drain its battery), and work with simcards all over the world.

If you’re going to be off-grid, in a sunny part of the world, a portable solar charger can be a life saver. They can be small and foldable, and quickly deployed to charge up your phones or other devices.

Staying healthy is critical and clean water is not always easy to find. A portable water filter can save the day – these can be very small, such as a “life straw”.

If you’re camping, or even living in a van, a portable shower may be needed. There’s loads on amazon, but basically they consist of a hose pipe, a pump (often manual), and a curtain/tent.

If you plan to busk along the way to make some money, or just like to play guitar, a travel guitar is invaluable.

You will of course need a laptop of some kind. Whether you’re an Apple fan or Windows, or even Linux, I recommend something with at least 16GB of memory and the longest battery life you can find. One of the new Macbooks with the M1 processor for example.

If you do get into cryptocurrency, you should probably get a hardware wallet for safety. Popular choices include Ledger and Trezor.

If photography is your thing, you may want to invest in a decent SLR camera, rather than rely on your phone camera, perhaps also a GoPro for those action shots, and perhaps a camera stabilizer.

Health

When your health fails, your journey ends. Make sure to take care of it! Keep fit, eat a healthy diet, don’t smoke or drink too much alcohol, wear sun screen… the usual things. Take care of your mental health as well.
It is also very important to have suitable health insurance if you are travelling abroad. If you need emergency medical treatment, or even just routine in some parts of the world, you can quickly end up out of money or worse…

Hit the Road

What are you waiting for? Make a plan for earning on the journey, get some starter funds saved, and go for it… escape the rat race, quit the 9 to 5 (not financial advice), and live your life the way you want, while you still can.

If you are a digital nomad, or planning to be, let me know in the comments!

September 16, 2021
I Tried this Viral Content Marketing Trick and You Wont Believe What Happened Next!

There’s a lot talked about viral content marketing on the web these days but you probably think from the title of this article that the trick I am going to tell you about is some kind of strategy which involves catchy viralnova style titles, right? Well that certainly does have its part to play but there’s more to it than that, much much more and the real meat of the trick is a dark and dirty secret of content marketing, something that really makes it work and separates the men from the boys or women from the girls if you like or to be extra PC the responsible adults from the reckless kids.

In short the secret is what is known as paid amplification and I’ll explain much more in this article about what that means and how you can use it, so read on to get the details and learn how shockingly powerful it actually is.. you will be amazed and you may even cry! 😉

The Old Way

So a fairly typical plan followed by many, possibly including you, when writing and promoting a new article goes something like this..

1. Keyword research to find a topic worth writing about (ie. gets plenty of google traffic) and not too hard to rank for.

2. Write a 500 word (or whatever length you decide on) article around the chosen keyword (or phrase) and include it in the title, meta tags, image tags, the body of the article and maybe a few other places too (while being careful not to fall victim to keyword stuffing).

3. Publish your article on your site, ping it and then post a link to it on Twitter and Facebook in the hope that it will go viral.

4. Possibly do some “blogger outreach” – not just sending it to your mum!

5. Try to get some backlinks through various means.

6. Check Google every hour to see if it has been indexed yet and watch for it to rise in the serps.

7. Sit back and watch those traffic stats as the visitors flood in!

A week, two weeks, a month later and still no viral love and just a trickle of traffic.. you just assume that’s the way it goes and so you will just try again with a new article and another new one and another and surely eventually your time will come and one of your articles will finally go viral!

Only it doesn’t.

Sure your traffic may well be slowly creeping up, you’ve been posting quality content regularly, you’ve made fancy infographics, informative videos and great articles.. you’ve followed all the guidelines, you’ve been tweeting madly, you’ve been posting comments on relevant blogs and forums and you’ve been trying to get known by the influencers in your industry.

The Long Game

All these things (and more) certainly do work but that’s the long game.. for many people that may be fine, your blog is your passion, your hobby, you don’t care about going viral, you do it for the love of the game and over the years you will build up an enthusiastic audience if you keep producing the good stuff and engage them. Eventually you will have enough traffic to make some money from it, possibly even a lot of money. If you are really focused and work really hard on your content marketing and all your ducks are in a row, you may be able to reduce this to a matter of a few months before you see a decent amount of success. If you are an SEO wizard or wear a hat of a darker shade, you may even be able to do it much sooner, however not everyone can do it that way or even wants to. There is of course more than one way to do it, as Tim Toady says.

But what if you really need to make it now? You’re trying to start a business and that means it has to make money as soon as possible, even more so if you’re financed by OPM (Other Peoples Money) or the Bank of Mum & Dad and they demand results sooner rather than later, or if you need to pay the rent next month or put food on the table.

Is there a shortcut? In a word.. YES!

The content marketing secret that every online marketing agency knows and which every marketing professional in successful companies knows.. you have to pay to play. It really is that simple. Of course it is not just a matter of paying for some advertising to send traffic to your site in the hope that it will convert, that is a different kettle of fish and not what this article is about.

The Secret to Success

The real secret to viral content marketing is what is known as paid amplification. In other words you pay to amplify your content, to extend its reach on the web, on social networks, wherever the people are who can spread the word for you. Unless you are incredibly lucky or well connected, the only sure(ish) way to make your content go viral is to make sure that enough people see it to start the ball rolling.. you have to overcome the inertia somehow, to reach that tipping point where it is being shared by enough people to take on a life of its own.

Of course just throwing money at the problem is not going to fix all the worlds problems, or even just yours, if your content sucks then nobody will share it and so it will only be seen by those you’ve paid to reach.. that may be enough for some people but you’re just putting lipstick on a pig which is a wasted effort (unless you have a thing for pigs). Quite simply if you’re going to spend money on paid amplification you better make sure the content you are amplifying is top notch unless you have money to burn. There is no point doing this for a basic 500 word article you just whipped up (or outsourced) and threw out there. Take the time to plan and create something really good, something actually shareable both from a quality and technical point of view. By technical I mean you include things which make it easy and likely for people to share.. social sharing buttons, appropriate calls to action and psychological triggers etc.

Make your content awesome and people will want to share it – if they know about it. Again this is why you need to pay to amplify – too few will know about it otherwise and so your chances of going viral are massively reduced. You need to seed your content widely and appropriately.

So how exactly do you amplify your wicked content?

Well as above, Tim Toady applies here too but I will outline a few methods and places you can go to for paid amplification. It is really quite simple and not even that expensive – you do need to have funds available for this method but we’re not talking millions here, you can start with a small amount like $50 or even less if you just want to test the waters before jumping in but for as little as $200 you can have massive reach which can quickly springboard you to success.

Everyone online should know about Reddit by now and it is a great source of free traffic if you approach it right but there are strict rules in place about self-promotion there so you walk a fine line when using it for traffic generation. However they also provide an advertising platform which works very nicely for getting the word out. It takes the form of a paid post which means not only do you get your link on Reddit but people there can actually comment on it so you can directly engage with them which makes it much more likely they will take notice an even share your link with others on Reddit and of course elsewhere.

You’ve surely seen Outbrain links even if you didn’t know what they were – at the bottom of bazillions of news articles there will be a list of possibly related content on other sites. Those are put there by Outbrain (amongst others) which is a paid discovery service and which you can use to put your links on loads of high traffic sites such as CNN. Yes you can actually have your article linked on major sites like CNN!

Another paid content discovery service is Taboola which also has massive reach on a network which includes some of the biggest and most prestigious sites online such as Time.

Disqus is a popular commenting plugin used on millions of sites, often replacing the commenting section on blogs for example, and as such this provides them with millions of places to place links or ads. They call it promoted discovery but by now you will get the idea so I wont dwell on the details.

But wait, there’s more.. in case you didn’t have enough places for paid content discovery, have a look at Zemanta! Their content and link suggestion system can push your links out to millions of people.

The Social Networks

Besides the above content discovery platforms there are of course the big social networks which also sell advertising. The biggest of which these days is Facebook and fortunately they have a self-service advertising system which you can use to quickly “boost” your articles to a very targeted audience. Rumour has it that it costs less to show your ads to people who are already your “fans” so it can be worth building up your Facebook page first – but it is extremely important to make sure all the Likes you get are from real people who are actually interested in your content – Facebook will actually reduce your exposure on the network if their system detects low engagement and of course buying cheap (ie. untargeted or in particular fake) likes will kill your reach and end up costing you much more!

Twitter is also a great place to amplify your content and their self-service ad system is being gradually made available in other countries besides the US and a few EU countries so go check them out – their promoted tweets are an excellent and affordable way to get the viral buzz started!

Also on Twitter you can buy credits on services such as JustReTweet which will get your tweets retweeted by loads of people – imagine 1000 people retweet your message and they each have 1000 followers on average.. that’s 1 million people on twitter that will see your tweet!

Stumbleupon is a smaller social platform but also a great way to get eyeballs on your content by means of what they call “paid stumbles” which cost about 10 cents each and can easily end up with many more as people push your link out to their networks.

Retargeting is a great way to maximize your ad spend. While not strictly speaking a paid amplification method, what it does do is give you a second (and third and..) shot at converting all the traffic you got as a result of your big amplification campaigns. How it works is simply showing your ads to people who already visited your site – in other words when someone came to read your content then left without buying or registering, you can show your ads to them when they are on other sites. Since they already saw your site they are familiar with it and will more likely notice your ads and be more inclined to come back.

Putting it all Together

Using all the above systems you can extend your reach to literally hundreds of millions of people, limited of course only by your budget. However even with a relatively modest budget you can reach a huge number. For example with Outbrain they recommend paying 15 cents per click – you can of course pay less but you may get less exposure so you have to experiment to find the sweet spot for your content. But lets say you are paying 15/click on average and lets say you get a click through rate of 1%, that means for just $15 your link/snippet is going to be seen by 10,000 people and you will get 100 actual visits (ie. clicks) to your site from those 10k. The actual CTR could be very different, you could get 100,000 views for those same 100 clicks, it really depends. Needless to say you should try to maximize your return on that – it doesn’t have to be just based on clicks – 100k people seeing your article snippet along with domain/site name for example is a nice way to get some branding.

Of course you need to carefully craft your article titles and snippets and/or visual media previews to get the most benefit from all this content amplification activity. You could and indeed should take a leaf from Upworthy and write something like 20 versions of your title, then split test them and only then choose the best one to run with. To test them you can just do small runs of a few thousand views on several platforms and keep tweaking and testing until satisfied with the response rate.

Paying for ads of any kind is a quick way to lose your shirt if you are not careful so you must, I repeat MUST, make sure to carefully target your ads – don’t just go for the quick fix “click to boost” types ads that Facebook and others offer to the unwary. Dig deep into their targeting options and test small scale campaigns while learning the system before expanding your campaigns to extend your reach further.

Get Coupons

Here’s a quick tip – if you are a namecheap customer, they actually have a page of deals which offers all sorts of freebies such as $50 Twitter advertising coupons and even a $150 retargeting coupon which is a fantastic offer. All you need is to be a namecheap customer so if you are not yet then go now and register a domain or get some cheap hosting so you can take advantage of the coupons and discount codes they offer – the more you spend at namecheap the better the deals you get (ie. you get more!) but you don’t have to spend much to get some great deals. They also have other deals besides advertising coupons, such as free content (stock photos) you can use on your sites and more so it is well worth it. Using these coupons allows you to test the waters with paid content promotion without risking your own hard earned cash, so you can now easily and safely learn the ropes before moving to the big leagues.

Hopefully you will find the above tips useful, just make sure to test everything carefully and make a plan of action which you can follow each time you publish great content. Do you have any favourite places or methods to amplify your content? Feel free to share in the comments section below.

February 17, 2014
Internet Marketing for Newbies: an in-depth guide for the bewildered and technically challenged
The purpose of this article is not to teach you specifically how to make money online, it is to present the fundamental knowledge required before you can even start building an internet based business with which you could then hopefully make money. It will explain the terminology in simple, clear language. It will tell you what basic infrastructure, software tools and utilities and web based services you need and perhaps even more importantly – what you actually don’t need right now (but may need in future).

The knowledge presented here should enable you to go from zero knowledge, beyond the ability to use email and browse the web, and take you to a point where you will better understand what is talked about in more advanced internet marketing or ‘make money online’ guides you may find online and that includes the tips and tricks and methods presented in the “Bank of Home” ezine.

After you have completed reading this you should be better able to make informed decisions about your future internet marketing activities, choose the right software and services and not waste money on things you simply do not need right now, while also helping you to not waste valuable time doing things the hard way when there is a faster and/or better system you could be using. So let’s get started..

Domains

Perhaps the most fundamental of all fundamentals for web users and internet marketers is the domain name. Every server (computer) on the internet has an address called an IP address which is just a series of numbers and dots such as 192.168.1.123 which is not exactly easy to remember so the domain system was created to add user friendly names instead. So for example google.com is simply an easy to remember address which behind the scenes maps to an IP address (actually a great many ip addresses but that is not important for you now).

Domains have what are called ‘extensions’ which in the case of google.com is the ‘.com’ part. Traditionally .com was for commercial web sites (and is the most popular) while .org was for organizations and .net was for techy stuff. These days people grab whatever they can get because all the good names were taken years ago.

As well as the big three extensions there are also country extensions such as .co.uk for United Kingdom, .ie for Ireland, .us for United States etc. and even .eu for European Union. There are also others such as .biz and now a whole array of new extensions is being created. So there is in fact a huge choice of domains and extensions which you could use (subject to trademark restrictions and such like).

To get a domain for your own site you simply go to a domain registrar such as Namecheap and use their search form to find an available domain (which can take a while!) then when you find one you like which is available you register it there and pay a small fee of around $10 – it is important to understand that you only ‘own’ that domain for as long as you keep paying for it and that $10 fee is per year.

Once you have registered your domain name you need to point it to your web site, wherever that may be. To do this there is a system called DNS or Domain Name System which just maps easy to remember domains to hard to remember IP addresses. Any time you type in a website address in your browser, such as http://google.com, your browser is actually doing a DNS lookup (often cached) to find out where the actual location of that site is on the internet so it can present you with the content hosted and served from there. DNS is actually a distributed system and DNS records (the thing that translates your domain to your IP) are propagated around the net and can be cached locally by your ISP for example to enable faster domain name lookups.

Your web site hosting company will tell you what IP you can use and it may be dedicated to you alone or it may be shared with other users on the same hosting server. You will need a minimum of two DNS servers (also called nameservers) to point your domain to an IP – this is to ensure if one DNS server crashes, your site can still be reached.

Web Hosting

When you’ve registered your domain name you need to point it somewhere, a place where your actual web site will be “hosted” on the internet – for this you need a web host. Hosts usually provide a number of options going from the simplest shared hosting account to the full dedicated server.

Shared hosting – this is the cheapest and simplest option and consists of an account on a server which is shared with many other people. It is basically just a directory on a computer where you can upload your web site and related files. Then your domain is pointed to that directory and you can usually install wordpress and many other web applications through a simple site management interface (control panel). Shared hosting will also usually provide you with email accounts using your own domain and a database (MySQL) and file uploads would typically be done using an FTP application (file transfer protocol) or through the web based control panel.

Shared hosting accounts are somewhat limiting but they do hide much of the complexity of managing your own web site or server and as such they are useful for beginners or anyone who simply wants to get a site online with the minimum fuss but who does not require the deeper level of access and control provided by more advanced hosting packages.

VPS – a Virtual Private Server is the next step up the hosting ladder and well worth getting. It is still sharing one server between many users (but less than the above type) however it provides all the functionality, access, security and control that a full dedicated server provides but for less money. With a VPS you have what is called “root access” which means you can access the superuser or administrator account on the server and you usually use an SSH application (secure shell) to login instead of FTP. SSH is much more secure than FTP and gives you command line or console access where you can run commands, install software and of course break stuff.. 😉 You may also have a control panel which in most cases allows you to avoid the somewhat riskier and more complicated SSH access method to manage your server although more experienced server admins generally prefer to use SSH and the command line.

Cloud – “the cloud” is a buzzword these days but functionally a cloud “instance” as far as hosting is concerned is pretty much the same as a VPS with the major difference being you pay by the hour and you can create (and shutdown) multiple such instances at the press of a button which allows for sites to scale up when traffic rises and scale down again when it drops. Cloud hosts usually offer all sorts of additional cloud services for more advanced uses such as load balancers, databases and more. Probably the biggest and best known cloud services provider is Amazon with their AWS system. While cloud hosting is certainly convenient it can actually cost much more than just a regular VPS or other monthly server rental so don’t go rushing head first into the cloud just because it’s cool – crunch the numbers to see if it is worth the cost for what you need.

Dedicated Server – when you outgrow (or plan to) your VPS a dedicated server is the likely next step. You rent an entire server just for your use – nobody else has access to it (although your host could gain access if they needed and of course the NSA!) and none of the resources it provides are shared with anyone else. Your server is hooked up to the network either with a 10Mbps, 100Mbps or sometimes even 1Gbps connection and hosts will often say you get “unlimited bandwidth” subject to the size of the network connection your server has, in reality the small print will likely have a fair usage restriction or something like that, however the cap will still be quite high and most people will not ever manage to use it all.

Co-Location – this is basically the same as a dedicated server except you actually own the server and instead just pay for “rack space” and network connection in a datacenter. A datacenter is a hosting facility where thousands or sometimes even tens of thousands of servers are stacked in racks and connected to the internet. Rack space is usually priced in units of “U” with servers typically being 1U, 2U, 4U or sometimes more and a full size rack will contain up to 42U although not all of that will be used for servers as other networking equipment may also be there such as routers, switches, power strips and others. Note also that these days you can get high density systems with multiple servers squeezed into each ‘U’.

Control Panels – servers can be complicated to manage which is why sysadmins get paid lots of money, however most web hosts these days offer web based control panels which make the whole process much simpler. Panels such as WHM/CPanel, Plesk, Webmin and several others are commonly offered although mostly for an additional fee. With a good panel you rarely, if ever, have to deal with the command line and logging in with SSH or anything techy like that.

Operating Systems – hosts offer servers with a range of operating systems but for the most part there are two main offerings: Linux and Windows. Within each there are multiple variations such as Centos Linux v6 or Windows Server 2008 Web Edition. It can be somewhat confusing with all the strange variations but my advice would be this: for hosting your website you should choose Linux and preferably the latest version of Centos (currently v6) or perhaps Ubuntu Server.

A common use for Windows Server amongst internet marketers is just as a remote “always on” desktop to run various internet marketing research and SEO software such as the excellent Ultimate Demon – these are programs you might normally run on your own windows PC but since they can run attended for days or weeks performing scheduled tasks it is better to simply rent a VPS with Windows and install all your marketing applications there so you don’t need to leave your own PC running all the time using precious computing power, electricity and bandwidth by constantly running such apps.

Once you have chosen a server or hosting you will need to configure it and install any software you require. For web sites this typically means you need a LAMP configuration – LAMP simply means Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python which form the basic technology stack for a web server. You don’t usually need to worry too much about the details as your host will frequently provide such a stack pre-installed (certainly if you choose shared hosting or have a control panel installed since that also depends on a LAMP stack!) or worst case you can install it easily using the operating systems package management system – if case you are not quite convinced how easy it is to do that, here is the process for Centos.. login to your server and on the command line just type this and press enter:

yum install httpd mysql-server php

Mainly you just need to make sure you have Apache (the http web server software) so that web pages will be displayed, MySQL which is a database server software widely used for web sites and applications including WordPress and PHP which is simply a programming language that many such web applications are developed in – you do not need to know any PHP, just that it is installed. Linux of course is the server operating system – you could use a similarly setup Windows server and in that case such a stack is known as WAMP instead of LAMP.

This may all sound complicated and indeed there is much to learn but you do not need to know everything to get started – go with a ‘shared hosting’ option from a good hosting company and all the technical stuff is taken care of for you so you can focus on building your business and making money. You could even build your entire internet business without ever having to deal directly with this stuff so don’t worry about it now.

Blogging

One of the fundamental components of an internet marketing business is the blog. A blog (short for web log) is simply a web site where you publish articles, traditionally as a form of diary online. Such articles are generally displayed in chronological order with the newest article showing at the top although that can be changed and in many cases the date is not shown at all so there is no indication of when an entry or article was posted. Blogs are very simple to create and manage these days thanks to the existence of free platforms and software such as WordPress.

While you do not actually need a blog since you can just build a site using static HTML web pages, or even a fully dynamic database driven site if you know how, using a blog system such as WordPress makes it very easy to build and manage a web site without having to worry about the technical stuff that makes it all work.

WordPress

Probably the most popular blog software (sometimes also referred to as a CMS) in use today is WordPress which is offered both as free software you can install on your own server or site hosting, and also as a web based service (again free) which requires no installation – you just fill in a form and click a button to get your very own wordpress blog online and ready to use.
- WordPress.com – this is the web based service where you can signup for free and get a blog with an address (URL) in the form: http://yourcatchyname.wordpress.com and for a hobby blog this is fine but for serious internet marketing you will need your own domain name such as http://bankofhome.com You can actually pay a fee to WordPress to use your own domain name with their service but it is generally far better to have your own copy of the WordPress software installed on your server where you have more control and fewer restrictions.
- WordPress.org – this is where you can download your own free copy of WordPress to install anywhere you like. Installation is quite easy once you are familiar with the basics of web site hosting and they provide a “5 minute install” guide. With an installed copy of WordPress you will need your own domain name so people can find your blog online.
Once you have your wordpress blog installed you then choose a theme (how it looks) from the many which are available free or for a small fee, or you can get a custom theme made by a designer. You can also install a number of plugins which extend wordpress by adding new functions such as better search engine optimization, integration with social sites (Twitter, Facebook etc) and countless other handy features. All of this can be done through the WordPress admin panel – no messing around with the command line, just a nice simple point and click through the panel.

This is the beauty of a powerful CMS such as WordPress which has been around for long enough to mature and become what it is today – once installed it is trivial to manage your entire site, even multiple sites, everything from changing the design to adding new content and even updating wordpress itself is done through the web panel. After all, the purpose of a website or blog is for you to place your great content online so you can make money – not to waste your time with technical trivialities.

HTML

This is basically the language of the web, Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a very simple language used to construct web pages and the links between them. If you go to any web page with your web browser and (right click) select “view source” you will see the html used to construct that page – usually.. some sites, such as Google, use a lot of Javascript which is much more complicated and hard to read but which your browser understands and converts to html in the background, but don’t worry about that as you do not need to know anything about it. Basic HTML knowledge though is good to have as it allows you to quickly make changes to your web pages and add links or images or other features. Here is an example of the HTML used to create a very basic web page..
```
<html>
 <head>
  <title>Some Title</title>
  <meta name="description" content="A description of the content of this page">
 </head>
 <body>
  <center>Hello World!</center>
  <br />
  <a href="http://bankofhome.com">this is a link</a>
 </body>
</html>
```
To use the above html code you just copy and paste it into a file with any text editor and save it with a .html (or .htm) extension such as mypage.html then you can open that page in any web browser such as Firefox or Explorer.

You will notice that the page is made up of “tags” such as <center> and that there is always an opening tag and a closing tag (although in some cases the closing tag can be left out and the browser will still know what to do). There are also two sections – the header and the body.. the body is everything which appears between the <body> and </body> tags and is what will actually appear on the web page when it is viewed in the browser. The header section is everything between the <head> and </head> tags and contains meta data which is not visible in the web page but is important and it is useful to search engines – page title and description for example. The entire page is then wrapped in <html> and </html> tags.

That is really all there is to it, now you can (if you want) use raw html to construct a web page! You can find the full list of valid html tags online on many html tutorial sites. To make web pages look pretty you would also use CSS (cascading style sheets) which tell your browser how certain elements of the web page should by styled, for example what fonts to use, what colours, where to place things.. when you install a theme in wordpress it comes with a CSS stylesheet which handles all this so you do not need to worry about it – it is the job of web designers to fiddle with CSS unless you really want to also dig in there.

End of Part 1 – tune in next week for Part 2 which contains even more essential fundamentals to get you off to a running start! Got any questions or suggestions? Feel free to post them in the comments section below..
January 17, 2014
Get Unlimited High Converting Free Traffic Without Google

It is a common problem with internet marketers who spend all their time trying to get traffic from Google and work through every SEO trick in the book only to find one day that Google moved the goalposts and slapped their site down the ranks into oblivion, taking away all that hard earned traffic forever.

The important thing you must understand is that Google is NOT the only source of traffic, in fact search engines in general and SEO are not the only places you can get traffic and you must work on building traffic from other places so that if Google ever does drop the ban hammer on your site it wont matter so much and wont put you out of business.

But where else can you get traffic without paying for it? Well there are actually many places but this article will cover one in particular – Reddit.

Reddit is an extremely popular social bookmarking/discussion community and getting your article on the front page could bring you gazillions of visitors and probably melt your server in the process! However getting on the front page is no easy task since there is massive competition plus a lot of that traffic is not going to be targeted and wont convert so is just burning through your bandwidth for nothing – there are still ways to convert that though!

The Key to Success

The key to success on Reddit is to pick a relevant niche – a so called subreddit. If you browse around Reddit you will find hundreds of subreddits, many have very little traffic but some have tens of thousands of subscribers many of whom would be interested in your content and will click through to your site if you do it right and even better – they WILL click your ads and they WILL buy stuff – I speak from experience..

For example I recently spent a few hours writing a good article, targeted to a subreddit and posted it on my blog (not this one) then spent the whole night babysitting my server as it struggled to cope with the sudden increase in traffic – many thousands of visitors poured in over the next 24 hours and I got about 800 clicks on my affiliate ads and lots of sales.. it was a good day. 😉 Even better, the link got shared on facebook, twitter, forums and elsewhere which all sent even more traffic and sales over the following week. All this from just a few hours work spent on doing the job right.

Do it Right!

Doing it right means creating good quality content, relevant to the subreddit and not spamming them! There are rules on Reddit (and more on subreddits) which you should try to stick to as much as possible – they generally do allow you to post links to your own site as long as that’s not all you post – the ratio should be around 1 in 9 or 10. So go find 9 other decent sites/articles to post and then post yours.. also make sure to post good comments. Reddit has a voting system for links/articles submitted as well as comments and so the more you post the higher your score – as long as you don’t get down-voted too much. Over time you will build up a good reputation. (hopefully!)

Just posting a link to your article there doesn’t mean you will get massive traffic though – it needs to get upvoted enough to make it to the front page of the subreddit and the subreddit in question needs to have enough traffic. The amount of traffic is easy to find – on the right side of every subreddit it will show you how many subscribers it has AND how many are online at the moment.

The trick is first to find one with enough subscribers (at least thousands) and then to monitor it for a while to see what time of day and what day of week has the most people online and then you post your article at that time so it has a greater chance of being noticed and getting enough upvotes to strike gold. The reality is if your post doesn’t get noticed fast it will never make it to the front page and will quickly sink into oblivion.

Timing is (almost) everything with a Reddit post – when more people are online there you can get more attention but you could ‘cheat’ a little by getting your friends to upvote your post to give it a little boost at the start.. with luck it will then take on a life of its own. It may be somewhat against the rules to get your friends (or you with other accounts ;)) to upvote your posts so it is up to you if you want to do that.

The other key to success is researching the subreddit to see what sort of posts get attention and upvoted to the front page and study the culture of that subreddit – learn what works and then model your articles on those (but don’t just copy – be unique!). It does involve a certain amount of trial & error but that’s part of the fun and even your failures will still get some traffic, perhaps even a few hundred visitors over the course of a week instead of thousands on the first day if it is a success. It all adds up.

You should also make sure to babysit your reddit posts and reply to any comments there, even the bad ones.. that way you don’t look like a hit & run poster and there’s a better chance it will get some traction.

It is worth noting also that none of this involves using any fancy, expensive tools.. all you need is your eyes and brain to do a bit of manual research on Reddit and then write a suitable article and submit it. It doesn’t cost you a penny, just your time and the payoff is potentially huge.

How to CONVERT this Traffic

There is another very useful way to make sure you actually benefit from all the massive traffic which Reddit (and others such as Stumbleupon) can send you and that is with retargeting. This just means you will show your ads to these people AFTER they leave your site – you know they are interested in what your site is about but it is very hard to convert these visitors to buyers or members on that first brief exposure. However if they then see your advert on other sites they will be reminded or nudged repeatedly and the chances of them coming back to your site is very high and then they are much more likely to convert.

Personally I use AdRoll for retargeting as it is one of the biggest ad networks specializing in this sort of thing and it is very simple to setup on your sites. It is also very cheap and they provide great stats so you can see exactly what converts and how much each click and each conversion is costing you – probably a lot less than you think! Not retargeting your hard won traffic is basically leaving money on the table.

Over time you can build up a lot of links on Reddit which will also be indexed by Google and others and you can get a steady stream of traffic many months and years later so you win twice!

Reddit is a potential goldmine if you do it right, play within the rules (mostly) so you don’t get banned and produce good content targeted to the specific subreddit subject and culture.

As mentioned before, there are other places to get traffic as well which we will cover in other articles so subscribe to our free newsletter or rss feed to make sure you don’t miss those.

November 15, 2013
St. Patrick’s Day Killing

In the business of internet marketing there is one “ring” to rule them all and that ring is traffic, or eyeballs if you will, for without people seeing your site and your offers you simply wont make money and not making money is generally not a good thing for any business!

Of course not all traffic is created equal and there’s no shortage of junk traffic out there, particularly the cheap stuff pedalled by traffic brokers of dubious repute – if it seems too cheap, a helluva bargain, it is probably junk and more than likely not even real (bot created) so don’t fall for it! Having said that there are ways to convert cheap traffic as long as it is not just bot traffic, but it is harder to do so you really need to know what you are doing.

But what has all this got to do with St. Patrick’s Day and what’s that about the killing?! It will all make sense soon, but fear not as the killing in this case is in the context of “making a killing” or in other words making money! Read on..

For the savvy internet marketer every day brings new opportunities to attract fresh and high quality traffic and make more sales and one such way is to take advantage of holidays. Somewhere in the world where your potential customers live, there is very likely to be a holiday no matter what day of the year it is! Today for example it is St. Patrick’s Day and the Irish and Irish at heart are soon to be heading for parades and/or pubs to celebrate as only the Irish know how – it will be green and involve alcohol, of that you can be sure!

If you had consulted a calendar ahead of time you could (should) have prepared for this day with appropriate offers and themed blog posts or mailings or even paid ads. There will be much buying of holiday specific gear and much interest and subsequent googling for all things Irish and with proper planning you could be reaping the benefits now, starting even from several days (or weeks) before and until several days after – you could have been selling and making a real St Patrick’s Day killing!

If you act fast you may still be able to get some ‘luck of the irish’ before this holiday is over so go ahead and take action NOW! However in the worst case there will always be another holiday soon, perhaps somewhere there is one tomorrow which you could pounce on and in fact soon it will be easter – are you ready for that? If not then get planning!

Find a good calendar of holidays around the world and start thinking of how you could target those days, what you could offer, how you could make a holiday killing. Don’t just restrict yourself to the national holidays of the US or the specific country you are hoping to sell to because the world is a much smaller place now and there will always be a local community of people from all corners of the globe who will be celebrating even the most obscure holidays and you could be making bank on that!

Until next time – Sláinte!

March 17, 2013