There is a side to a home business that is based around making money from the Internet that can be quite lucrative if you do it right. That’s getting up some hosting and then selling it to other people. if you aren’t familiar with this concept, its really pretty simple to get up and running, just not so simple to get it into a profitable state. But if it was so easy, then everyone would be doing it!

The first thing you’re going to need is a solid reseller hosting package. One of the best providers of this are Hostgator, who provide some of the most reliable hosting on the planet. Their basic reseller account starts at $24.95 a month and for that you get a pretty usable package where you could easily recoup the cost by sub-selling hosting on your own reseller. Its easy enough to do that and set upi individual accounts, each with a cpanel and all the add-ons that come with it, like Fantastico for setting up CMS such as Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla blogs and websites and other scripts right out of the box. You get stats, as many subdomains and add on domains as you want to give them, MySQL databases, email accounts, the whole none yards. You control all the accounts from your computer and manage it like a part of your business.

How much you want to charge for the service is up to you, but you’ll have to be as cheap or cheaper than the big hosting companies out there that offer shared hosting for as little as $5 a month. But that’s fine. If you charged only $4 a month, you only need to sell 7 packages and you’re in profit. Sell 20 and you’re making some nice profit. Sell 100 and you are getting into good money.

So how do you sell a hosting package to people who probably already have hosting elsewhere, or even with Hostgator themselves?

One way is to flip sites and sell them complete with free hosting for, say the first 6 months and after that they pay if they want to stay with you. Most people are too lazy to change and end up as your customers. Doing this over time can make you some nice cash from the site flipping plus build up a residual income for a long time.

Another way is to advertise in IM forums where members are aware of Griz style SEO tactics of building your own network of sites all on different IPs. People will be interested in cheap hosting if your IP is different from the ones they already have.

Lastly, you could also attract organic search traffic by doing yoru own SEO on a site that promotes your own reseller hosting. That is a little harder. but another useful aspect of attracting business your way. you will need to create your own network of sites to provide the links to get you onto the first page of the search engines index and for that you’ll need a reseller hosting package that gives you lots of different C class IP addresses. One such company that does that is HostNine. if you want some more info on how they work, there is a really good review at: best blog host that will set you right in that department.

So consider this as another potential stream of income of which you should aim for as many as possible to bomb proof your online business. Good luck!

Make Money

Welcome back to this growing Make Money blog and its with wanting to look at how to start an Internet home Business that takes us into this post on the subject.

Now, the first thing you should realize about any kind of business, is that money does’nt grow on trees and in orgder for you to get your hands on it, you need to put in some work. With any new business venture, be it online or in the real world, the resultant value of your return is generally equivalent to the amount of effort you put in during the first couple of years.

Did he just say years?

Indeed he did! If you’ve come onto the Internet and seen all the hyped up ads promising that you can make several thousand dollars in just a few week, better go take a rain check because you’re in for a nasty surprise. There is one thing that is commonly true about all those type of ads and the products they promote:

They are all full of bullshit.

Think about it with a common sense head on your shoulders. If you were to walk into a bank with $97 in your hand and tell them that you are going to start up your own business and make three thousand dollars in your first month, chances are you’d get laughed out of the place. It just doesn’t happen like that. How far do you think $97 or $197 is going to get you in the real world of business.

Will it pay the rent on an office, or buy you the stock to sell on at a profit?
No it will not!

Will it pay for sufficient advertising to attract customers to your door, assuming you have a door top attract them to?
No it will not!

But you say the Internet is different. You don’t need to pay for rent, or stock, or get a loan from the bank. You don’t have any setup costs apart from your Internet connection, a computer or laptop. That much is true. But then where do you go?

Ok, you can create some free blogs and slap up some ads but that won’t get you very far. You can buy into Mr Scamster’s $97 “I’ll Make You Rich In Three Weeks” product, then you find out that its all bullshit because you followed it to the letter and three weeks down the line you haven’t made a red cent.

That’s because to make money online takes work, time and patience with a good slice of perseverance thrown in for good measure. To make it quickly just doesn’t happen, unless you already have a huge following, your own product packaged and ready to sell and the promotional help of an A-lister who will market it for you. Doesn’t happen to a noob!

So the way you start your own Internet home business is with a definite goal, a business plan and a business forecast based on reality. You might find you break even or are just about in profit in a year or so if you’re lucky. You stick at it and work hard building your websites and blogs and promoting the hell out of them using SEO techniques and all the marketing know how you can lay your hands on and then with some good fortune, you will eventually make a successful Internet home business that will allow you to quit your job and work from home secure in the knowledge that your income will continue to support you and provide a decent standard of living for you.

Now does that sound like its worth some hard work and effort to achieve?

Good, because that’s what will happen when you work towards a definite goal, persevere and above all, never give up!

Make Money

My introductory post which was creatively entitled Make Money,got the ball rolling here in this new blog that I’ve put together to help people to learn how to make money online using what they have in front of them and without having to spend any money on useless eBooks or products that they don’t really need.

This post will look at one of the most important factors of making money online when it comes to monetising a free blog and that’s what’s known as search engine optimization, or SEO.

SEO is just a fancy way of describing the methods used to cause your free blog to rank well in the search engine results pages, or SERPs. OK, you’ll get to learn some of the jargon and mnemonics that go with this whacky online business too as we go along! You see, its one thing putting together your very own free Blogger blog with the intention of slapping up some adsense ads and expecting to make money right off the bat, and the reality which is far more disappointing.

In fact its the reality of blogging which causes around 95% of would-be Internet marketers to fail, simply because the Internet did not meet up with their expectations.

The reality is a little harder to swallow, but a determined person can do well in this business with a combination of tenacity, persistence (ok they’re similar), patience and knowledge. Not necessarily in that order. You see once you’ve built your first blog and written a few posts on there about its main topic, you’re going to start wondering why no one is reading it. Except you, your partner and maybe your dog if you bribe him to sit still long enough.

Enter Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short (I already did that).

By using SEO techniques, you can get your little blog to feature in Google’s index for the main search terms that people will find your blog by. The main search term is what a surfer would type into Google’s search box when looking for relevant sites. Say, for example, your blog was all about how to make money. Ok, a really bad choice of niche as its one of the most competitive, but as this is only an example and I need to use these keywords in here too, it’ll suffice!

Ok, someone looking for information on that subject would, in most cases, go to Google and type into the search box: how to make money online and see what they got. That phrase is known as a keyword phrase, or simply a keyword (even though there’s several words). What they’d get is probably in the realm of millions of competing pages. Told you it was competitive.

Your little blog wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell against so many other sites. But say your blog was more about how to make money selling junk on eBay and all your posts were reviews of certain items of junk you’d successfully sold for a good profit. Now a person searching for that kindf of thing would go to Google and type in: how to make money selling junk on eBay and he’d get far less competing sites. Ok, there is a trade off here, as there would be far fewer people keying that particular phrase into Google’s search box in the first place. But for the purposes of this example, let’s say there are 100 people a day that do that.

To attract those 100 people a day, your blog would need to be right at the top of page one for that search term, or keyword. Here’s where SEO comes into its own.

Google ranks websites and blogs according to several criteria, not least of those being a site containing original and relevant content for the keywords. Also it ranks sites according to authority. Sites with more authority are those that have acquired links from other authority websites and blogs. Those links are special kinds of links in that they are what is known as keyword anchored links. A keyword anchored link will link to your blog using your blog’s main keywords in the anchor text.

In SEO terms, the simple equation here is whichever website or blog gets the most of and the highest quality of these links, gets to the number one spot in the SERPs for their keyword.

If you want to know how to get these links, that’s a subject for a future post. See you next time…

Make Money