There are people who still care about their website’s PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar or other PageRank Checking Tool. Well, it’s definitely a factor for gaining a better search rank, but it’s not wise to have eyes for that thing only. A few days ago Google published an official statement that made it clear that you should focus on other things than PageRank.

What is Google Thinking about PageRank?

Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst on Google was pretty clear on this issue..
“The Webmaster Central team has been telling webmasters for years that they shouldn’t focus so much on PageRank as a metric for representing the success of one’s website.”

“The most famous part of our ranking algorithm is PageRank, an algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google. PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system.”

“PageRank may have distinguished Google as a search engine when it was founded in 1998; but given the rate of change Manber describes—launching “about 9 [improvements] per week on the average”—we’ve had a lot of opportunities to augment and refine our ranking systems over the last decade. PageRank is no longer—if it ever was—the be-all and end-all of ranking.”

Okay, so what should we really care about?

Three things that Susan suggested are:

1. Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors to your site who converted in a sale or lead or whatever you want them to do.
2. Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors to your site who left your page without visiting another one or just left your page immediately after landing on it.
3. Clickthrough Rate (CTR): CTR is the percentage of clicks on your site out of all the times your site gets shown in search results.

Those are the things you should focus on improving, but how to set course to them?

Set a Goal and Make Plans

It’s clear that a high PageRank is not what you really need. If you really want to make more money with your website, then you probably want to generate more sales or more leads or more signup to your newsletter. Let’s see what can be seriously done to achieve those goals:

1. Choose the Right Keywords: Do not go for a high traffic keyword, instead start with low competitive keyword but highly targeted keyword (Often called ‘long tail keywords’). It is easier to get high rankings for this type of keywords and traffic from those keywords tends to convert better than the high stream of general traffic.
2. Get as many Backlinks as you can: There are plenty of statements from Google mentioning that backlinks is what matters most. However, you need to choose your backlinks wisely as backlinks from ‘blacklisted’ niches like Gambling, Porn or Warez can do more harm than good. Try to get backlinks from within your niche.

Okay.. Here I am telling you once again. Do not be obsessed with PageRank; rather focus on other metrics, which can make you real money.

This post is written by Abhik, who talks about Online Marketing and Make Money by Blogging at ItsAbhik. If you like to know how he makes money online, go subscribe to his newsletter and follow him in Twitter.

Many aspects of Web hosting affect SEO, from the choice of a backend like cPanel or Drupal, to server downtime, to shared hosting and geolocation. These four elements affect SEO to one degree or another, depending on the actions you take and don’t take. Let’s explore a few options in these categories, the upsides and downsides, and separate fact from fiction.

1. Choosing a Backend UI

Two of the most widely adopted backends are cPanel and Drupal, each with a following as diverse as that of the Linux and Mac operating systems. Most users choose to remain with either CMS out of habit or because of company policy, while a handful of vocal users religiously advocate one while staunchly opposing the other. What matters ultimately is the usefulness of a particular tool for specific circumstances; in this case, SEO.

A module named SEO Checklist is available for Drupal users. The latest stable release for version 6 is 3.0. The beta for version 7 was released May 27, 2011. This module is maintained by Volacci. The module contains a checklist of SEO-related tasks to accomplish, but does not perform these duties on your behalf. Another module named Vertical Tabs improves the interface of SEO Checklist, allowing you to expand and collapse portions of the checklist.

For cPanel users, there is SEO Tools, maintained by Attracta. Unlike the SEO Checklist for Drupal, this tool does more than make a checklist. It runs some checks, generates a dashboard report, and creates an XML sitemap. It can upload the XML sitemap to the search engines for you.

2. Effects of Server Downtime and Stability on SEO Efforts

When Googlebot tries to crawl your pages, but the site is down because of server issues, this impacts rank negatively. It only takes two occurrences before Google starts to lower a downed site’s rank. Google doesn’t know if the site saw any uptime between crawls, and that is bad news. A quick tip: In robots.txt, make sure there is no “Disallow:/” on pages you want indexed.

Server stability issues affect SEO. One technique used by malicious hackers who compromise Web servers is inserting Iframes into your pages to download malware onto visitors’ computers. Keep updated with the latest security patches, and check for such Iframes. Google’s Safe Browsing Diagnostic tallies downloaded malware, and this will harm your site’s rankings until the issue is resolved. Google’s resolution process is not very swift, so always keep on guard against tactics that could compromise your server.

Another stability issue is the improper use of redirects. Intermediate and hanging redirects can cause problems with rank as well. When moving several pages, Googlebot needs to encounter a 301 (moved permanently) code, and you can forward PageRank with basic HTML links. Also, try to avoid “hanging” redirects. This is when a URL issuing a 301 redirect points to a page giving a 404, or not found, response. Lastly, Bing especially doesn’t like redirect chains; i.e., from URL1 to URL2 to URL3, or the destination. Try to redirect in just one hop.

3. Shared Hosting and SEO – Fact vs. Fiction

A number of problems that arise in a shared hosting environment are not due to the shared hosting model per se, but to administrator choice. For example, 200 domains share the same server. The problems arise when every one of those sites crosslink to each other. That is suicidal in terms of SEO, even if the content of those sites is closely related enough to justify linking to each other. That may be unfair to those who have a legitimate reason to link those pages, but that’s just the way it is currently. This rule may change in the future.

The “bad neighborhood” argument has been around for a while. The premise is that if your website lives among spammy IPs on the same class C subnet, your rank is in danger. This isn’t entirely true, but you can use this tool to check your links at any time. Google and other search companies understand that shared hosting is a reality for a large number of people, and that condemning an entire subnet hurts only legitimate users. Why? Because, once penalized, the spammers will migrate to another subnet and continue their deeds. These “bad neighborhoods” shift among different IP addresses all the time. Penalizing the good websites along with those who flit about the system, as it were, is simply an ineffective method of rooting out spammers.

The Caffeine update Google released in June of 2010 added website speed and performance to ranking factors. Make sure the host you choose, or have chosen, can meet your website’s current traffic demands. Equally important is ensuring that your host provides the scalability that will meet future increased traffic needs. If the memory footprint of the CMSs and other processes on a shared IP is too much, then “premature end of file” errors pose a problem. Many shared hosting plans give you the option to increase memory, so that’s a good investment if you are happy with your current provider.

4. SEO and Geolocation

The argument that physical server location affects SEO states that if your site is hosted in one country, but targets the market of another country, this discrepancy impacts rank negatively. In other words, geolocation matters. Opposing arguments exist, but the truth is somewhere in the middle. You can give Google information about your site.

Two factors that Google uses in this regard are the website’s IP address and top level domain (TLD), unless you provide Google with specific information via Webmaster Tools. If your website’s TLD is country-coded (a ccTLD like .co.nz), Google relies on that instead of geolocation. If your website’s URL is international or generic, such as .com or .net, then location is indeed a factor.

To inform Google about the location of your website, open Webmaster Tools. Click on your website, then click Settings under Site configuration. Choose the option you desire in the section labeled Geographic target. Use the “Unlisted” option if you do not want your website to be associated with a specific geographic area.

One sure effect webserver location has on SEO is the “speed and performance” factors the Caffeine update added. You want to deliver content as fast as possible, so try not to host files on a slow server, no matter where it’s located.

This is a guest post by David Murton.

The other day John spoke about how much he loved the WordPress.com Stats. This great plugin was developed together by WordPress owners Automattic and developers Andy Skelton and mdawaffe.

Earlier this year in March the original WordPress.com Stats plugin developers teamed up with Andy Peatling, Beau Lebens, Hugo Baeta and Joen to release it’s natural successor Jetpack. Jetpack is not a plugin that just tracks stats, it is a collection of 8 different plugins though has been setup so that more can be added in future updates.

Each plugin can be activated or deactivated from the main Jetpack page in your admin area.

My two favourite plugins are WordPress.com stats and ShareDaddy. The stats option works the same way as the dedicated plugin John spoke about the other day, though the graph is presented slightly differently.

ShareDaddy is another plugin that has been incorporated under the Jetpack umbrella. The plugin allows you to easily add social media voting services to the bottom of your blog posts and pages. I love the simplicity of it and it’s clean design. My only criticism is that they have not included Google +1 with the plugin yet, though I emailed them a few weeks ago and they are taking it on board for the next update.

The 6 remains plugins in Jetpack are:

• Twitter Widget – A simple Twitter widget that displays your latest tweets.
• Gravatar Hovercards – Shows a pop up of a commenters Gravatar information when you hover over their name (The person needs to have a hovercard setup for pop up to appear).
• WP.me Shortlinks – Allows you to use WP.me shortlinks within your posts and pages.
• LaTeX – A markup language for mathematical equations.
• After the Deadline – Allows you to check your spelling and grammar within your post editor.
• Shortcode Embeds – Embed media from websites such as YouTube, Vimeo and Flikr using shortcodes.

Jetpack is one of the most useful free plugins available for WordPress. Even if you only plan on using WordPress.com Stats or ShareDaddy, I believe it’s worth installing as some of the other features such as shortcodes and Gravatar hovercards are incredibly useful.

More information can be found at the links below

Good luck,
Kevin

Links: Official Jetpack Website | Jetpack by WordPress.com (Download Link)

Kevin Muldoon is a webmaster and blogger who lives in Central Scotland. His current project is WordPress Mods; a blog which focuses on WordPress Themes, Plugins, Tutorials, News and Modifications.

I’m not one of those people who checks stats several times a day, but when I do check how my site is progressing I found it much easier to do it all through the WordPress admin area as it saves me having to login and out of different services all the time.

Today I would like to show you three plugins for WordPress that let you check your social media performance, your RSS growth and your overall traffic levels according to Google Analytics. I hope you find them useful

Social Metrics

A new plugin from Rizaz.net that tracks your websites performance on social media websites Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Google +1, StumbleUpon, Digg and Linkedin.

Once installed, you will find a link to your Social Metric page in the dashboard area of your admin sidebar. The page displays a table of all of your blog posts and shows how many times each post has been shared through each social media service.

I’ve only been using the plugin around a week however I’ve found it to be an incredibly useful way of quickly checking what articles are being shared around the web.

Download Social Metrics

Feed Stats for WordPress

A reworked version of an older plugin that is no longer supported, Feed Stats for WordPress is a fantastic way of viewing RSS stats via Feedburner through your admin area.

The number of subscribers, hits and reach are shown in table and graph form over a set number of days (which you determine on the settings page). The number of clicks and views are also shown at the right hand side of the stats page.

RSS subscribers remains one of the most reliable ways of tracking a blogs growth so I used to login once or twice a week to find out more about my RSS traffic. Since installing this plugin I simply check through my admin area. It shows the main stats that Feedburner provides therefore once installed, you will not have to login to your Feedburner account unless you need to edit settings.

Download Feed Stats for WordPress

Google Analytics Dashboard

I reviewed 5 Google Analytics plugins last month and Google Analytics Dashboard was by far my favourite.

The plugin adds a widget to your dashboard that displays the number of visits you’ve had recently, your top posts, top searches and top referrers. This section is obviously limited compared to logging into your own Google Analytics account though it’s a great way of quickly checking your websites traffic levels over the previous week.

What sets this plugin apart from others is its post integration feature which adds a new column called Analytics to your post and page areas The column displays a graph next to every one of your blog posts and pages and shows the number of pageviews, unique visits and exits that occurred on that page.

Stats can be embedded into posts and goal tracking is supported too though unlike some other Analytic plugins that are available, it does not insert your tracking code into your site, though this isn’t really a major hassle anyway. All in all it’s a great plugin for those who check their traffic through Analytics regularly.

Download Google Analytics Dashboard

Kevin Muldoon is a webmaster and blogger who lives in Central Scotland. His current project is WordPress Mods; a blog which focuses on WordPress Themes, Plugins, Tutorials, News and Modifications.

I’m sure most of you have heard of bbPress, the side project from Automattic that never seemed to get as much attention as their flagship product WordPress .

bbPress always marketed itself as ‘forum software with a twist’, but the reality was very different. In reality, it was one of the most basic forum scripts available and lacked what many forum owners would call basic features. Updates were sporadic at best and due to very few people using it, the support community for people who did use it was never great (a few good developers seemed to provide all the support).

When I launched my WordPress blog about a year or so I tested out several forum scripts. For years I had used vBulletin, which most people recognise as the most advanced forum script available, though I felt a strange sort of duty to use bbPress due to it’s close association with the WordPress platform. One of the advantages of using bbPress was that I could use the same user database from my blog, which saved people from having to sign up twice. I was also looking for something simplistic to power my forum so I was ok with the basic features it had.

Unfortunately, bbPress was a stand alone script which meant that it worked independently from your blog database. The script was setup to integrate with WordPress though most people found the integration process difficult and even when it was installed correctly, the integration seemed to play up every now and then (cookie issues). Another stumbling block from the script being separate from WordPress was the design. If you were competent with CSS, HTML and PHP then you would have found integrating your forum with the rest of your websites design fairly straight forward. Though WordPress was built on making things easy, and having to go migrate the design from your blog to bbPress (which used a different template system) was a pain.

All this is about to change as in a few weeks time as bbPress will no longer be a stand alone product. Version 2.0 has been redesigned to use the custom post type feature in WordPress and will therefore be released as a WordPress plugin.

This means that bbPress:

• Can be installed in seconds
• Will integrate with your existing WordPress design
• Will integrate with your existing WordPress user base

The first beta release of the plugin was released on May 21, with the second and third being released on May 27 and June 12 respectively. The first stable release of the plugin is earmarked for the end of June though I am currently using the third beta on my live site and it seems to be working ok.

The developers are still working on removing all the bugs though. I installed the first beta in my test area and got it working right away though it caused a lot of problems on my live website. I had to deactivate all plugins, install bbPress and then reactivate them one by one to find out what plugins were causing the white screen of death in the admin area (two plugins seemed to conflict with bbPress). I’m sure the majority of conflicts will be removed over the coming months.

At the moment the plugin comes with one design which is based on last years Twenty Ten theme. I’m surprised that they never based it on the Twenty Eleven design, given it’s imminent release in a few weeks when WordPress 3.2 is released, though it should integrate with your existing design very well. The documentation currently available for modifying your own theme is minimal though this should also improve over the next month or so; plus I expect lots of designs to be released by theme developers over the coming months once bbPress is used by more and more users.

So why should you all be pleased about a simple forum script like bbPress being released as a plugin? The answer is simple. All WordPress bloggers now have the option of adding a forum to their website in seconds. You don’t have to worry about integrating a stand alone script with WordPress, you don’t have to spend time customising the forum design; all you need to do is search for bbPress in the plugin section of your admin area and click install and you will have added a community to your website in seconds.

I encourage you all to try the plugin out if you have time. Those of you who are using the older standalone version of the script on your website will be pleased to know that the plugin comes packaged with an importer that makes migrating over to the plugin version of bbPress incredibly easy.

If you have any questions about the plugin that I have not covered in this article, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them

Thanks,
Kevin

Related Links: bbPress Homepage | bbPress 2.0, Beta 3 Announcement | bbPress WordPress Plugin

Kevin Muldoon is a webmaster and blogger who lives in Central Scotland. His current project is WordPress Mods; a blog which focuses on WordPress Themes, Plugins, Tutorials, News and Modifications.

Did you know that the average person can make an excellent second income writing articles about some of their favorite subjects? It is a well known fact that the ability to write is directly tied into the degree of a person’s success in just about any kind of career he/she chooses.

And for aspiring entreprenuer, the ability to write effectively can mean the difference between success and failure. Yes, you too can write for income. Just make the decision and do it! It is really that simple.

1. Write children’s stories: Writing children stories requires a vivid imagination, enthusiastic creativity and ability to put something in the mind of a child. For many writers, writing children’s book successfully will require some effort to step back into the shoes of the very young and see the world from a very fresh and curious point of view.

For those who are always young at heart, writing children’s stories can be a very satisfying craft. A good story usually has some sort of conflict or obstacle that the main character has to resolve after which everyone lives “happily ever after”.

2. Campus newspaper: The fact that most universities and colleges already have campus newspapers doesn’t mean that they are good papers or there isn’t room for other campus newspaper. Creating and producing an unofficial campus newspaper is very straight forward.

The paper can be published on a weekly or bimonthly basis and distributed free of charge throughout the campus community selling classified and display advertising space to local businesses wishing to gain exposure to the paper readership base would support the paper.

Information and articles featured in the newspaper can focus on campus issues and events and most of the information can be obtained for free from students, readers and freelance hobby writers.

3. Organize a writing competition: You can organize an essay competition in secondary schools and universities and rake in entry writing competitions. Collaborate with a newspaper, radio station, magazine. Specify word count, genre, topic, terms and conditions. Enlist respected, unbiased judges. Publish entries.

4. Employment and career publications: Starting a deskstop publishing business that specializes in producing a monthly employment and career guide newspaper is a fantastic new business venture to set in motion. The paper can be distributed throughout the community free of charge and supported by charging companies advertising fees to list their employment and career opportunities in the paper.

Additionally, the paper should also include useful information and tips for readers on subjects and topics pertaining to securing gainful employment. The tips could include information such as how to prepare for a job interview, ten secrets to writing a winning resume and more.

5. Healthcare newspaper: Are you seeking to start a unique business in the healthcare industry? If so, perhaps you should consider starting a monthly healthcare newspaper. The paper can feature stories and articles about healthcare in general as well as new healthcare procedures and products that are being introduced.

The paper could be distributed free of charge throughout the community and supported by selling adverts space to interested local healthcare professionals and companies. Local healthcare professionals covering all segments of the healthcare industry can supply the information featured.

6. Providing special information: Do you know that you can make a lot of money by just providing special information on small pamphlets. You don’t need to be the owner of that information, all you’ll do is contact the people who have the information. For instance, if you are good at writing music lyrics, you can compile series of music, package it well and sell it to the general public especially music lovers.

7. Script writing for movies: He visualizes a scenario in his mindset and he put it on paper, he must also be a good storywriter, he uses the method calls, sequence, description and plotting.

He must have a creative mind and it is what the scriptwriter put on paper that will be translated on the tube by actors and actresses. Attend a seminar on script writing, get other movie script and ask expert in the industry for more information.

8. Continuity man: A continuity man is like a secretary on location, he follows the sequence as the shooting progresses and takes all records of all the activities that takes place during the shooting of the film.

This is imperative so that the director can have the history or records of the past scenes, a continuity man must have great deal of concentration as he take records of all the details.

9. Business plan writing: If you are convinced that you can write a good business plan then there is a market out there for your services as a lot of Nigerians want to start their own business and to easily have an access to loan facility they must be able to put a good business plan in place.

To excel in this income opportunity, you must have a good business background, an accounting and marketing knowledge is an advantage.

10. Be a romance writer: No special education or experience is neccessary to break into this field. Successful romance writers merely require independence, creativity and a determination to succeed. If this sounds like you, then liase with publishing houses and work out an appropriate sharing formula.

11. Writing non fiction: Although many people like to write fiction, few are able to get paid for their efforts. Fiction writing includes the writing of short stories, novels, screenplay, soaps and stage plays.

Besides being creative and having a good writing skills as well as having the perseverance to complete a work of fiction, you must also be able to find places to get your work published.

12. Recipe booklets: If you can prepare a well laid out information on how to prepare a particular food recipe, you should consider writing a cookery book and sell it.

There you have it friends! You can actually be making money while doing what you love the most which is writing. I hope this article has helped widened your horizon as there so many more writing opportunities waiting for you tap into.

Joseph Eleyinte is an experienced online marketer who loves to help people, he has purposely dedicated a free blog that assist beginners in making money online. Visit his blog @ www.makemoneyonline2dy.com.

One of the most important aspects of managing a blog is keeping tabs on your analytics and tracking your visitors. This type of data is useful in planning your marketing strategy, SEO campaigns and most importantly for creating content. On our psd to html website we used to write many blog posts and relied only on comments to discover what were the most popular topics. But no more.

With the following analytics tools you’ll be able to see just what your visitors are looking for and are interested in reading. These reports are great for seeing which of your posts are getting the most hits. You can use that data to help you create quality content and focus on the topics that will help you generate more traffic.

The 5 analytics tools listed below will focus on showing you just what your visitors are reading when they visit your blog. You’ll also be able to see their location, which comes into play for PPC campaigns because it will help you determine which regions to focus on. Best of all, these 5 tools are sure to help you boost not only your traffic, but also revenue.

Google Analytics

Most bloggers have a Google Analytics account, which is used to give in-depth information and statistics regarding their blog traffic. While many opt to simply use the tracking code provided by Google, there is actually a better option and that’s using the Google Analytics WordPress plugin. This user-created plugin adds numerous additional features that are not available by simply using the basic Google tracking code. First of all, this plugin “uses the asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code, which makes it the fastest and most reliable tracking code.”

With it you get: automatic site speed tracking; outbound link and downloads tracking; the ability to use custom variables to track metadata; the ability to ignore any user level; Google AdSense integration (if desired); optional link tagging and hashtags for campaign tracking; debug mode; tracking and view sorting by author; and much more. So as you can see, it’s definitely worth using this plugin over the basic Google tracking code.

Visitor Maps and Who’s Online

This WordPress plugin focuses on how many people are viewing your blog and showing you where they’re located. You’ll get a visitors map with location pins, city and country details. There is an optional sidebar widget as well as a dashboard widget that will show you how many people are online at the moment. The sidebar widget is customizable and can show things like the number of guest and members that are currently viewing your blog and also their location. Additional options in the admin area include host lookup for IP addresses, online time, Who Is lookup and much more.

WassUp

Automatically updated statistics are great, but real-time is even better and that’s what WassUp offers. You can see visitors as they’re viewing your blog and see what they’re doing while there. It’s a great way to see which of your posts are getting the most hits. Tracking is all done in real-time and there is also an optional customizable sidebar widget that you can use to display your visitors’ activities to the world.

This plugin is not for those who want to know things like how many visitors you’re getting per day or how many pageviews per month, etc. Its main focus is to let you keep track of your visitors and get details about what they’re actually viewing on your blog. There are 4 different types of views that you can use to see your visitors activities along with a “dashboard widget that shows a line chart of hits over time and count of current visitors online and their latest activities.”

WP SlimStat

This is another plugin that lets you track visitors in real-time on a world map, but it’s very lightweight and won’t slow down your blog at all. It’s simple yet powerful and is great for “spying on your visitors and tracking what they do on your website.” Features included are: spy view, screen resolution tracking, browser and OS (operating system) detection, location tracking, IP address restricting, along with numerous filtering options.

Zamango Analytics

This plugin can be used to add trackers for various analytics tools like Google and GoStats without slowing down your blog. This plugin is very simple and not for those who want to view in-depth charts and statistics right on their blog. This plugin simply adds the needed tracking codes for you; you’ll then have to go to that respective site in order to view your reports and data. This plugin is not for statistics maniacs, since it only contains the required functionality needed to add any type of custom counter or tracker.

When choosing the right tool it’s important to keep speed a top priority. While many tools offer tons of features, ask yourself if you really need all of those features. More than likely you don’t and the more features offered the more it will slow down your blog. So be sure to pick a tool that offers just what you need and nothing more.

You don’t want a plugin that will significantly slow down the load time of your pages; this is the easiest way to lose readers. Any one of the 5 tools listed above are more than capable of providing you with all the necessary data with top speeds to match.

This was a post by Lior Levin who works for a psd to html company and also advises to an applicant tracking software company from New York.

We all have the dream – to start making money online! After all, that’s why you’re reading this blog right?

The most common problem holding people back is that they don’t know how or where to start. Unfortunately most of the strategies require spending money to make money, or investing a lot of time upfront and waiting months to see results. These are huge deterrents that hold people back from realizing their dreams of making money online. Today that’s going to change.

There is a way you can start earning money today without spending a penny.

I started working online full-time 2 months ago, I made $500 in my first month, and I am on track to make over $1,000 in my second month. I had no existing contacts, no website and I didn’t have to spend a single dollar to get started.

So, what did I do to start making money so quickly without spending any money?

Make Money Offering Webmaster Services

I started making money from my first days working online by simply offering services other webmasters. Instead of spending hours reading forums and blogs, I spend hours working for other people. I have no special skills, I simply have time that I am trading for money. And you can do it too.

Read the marketplace sections of the major webmaster forums and you will see and endless number of ideas of services you can offer, a majority of them not requiring any special tools nor skills to get started.

The money is not great, but doing this provides me with immediate cash flow that I can use to invest into my own websites and grow my business. With the money I have earned I have already developed 20 niche websites, which in turn have started generating their own income. I will keep investing and building my own sites until the generate sufficient income that will allow me to stop offering services to others and focus 100% of my time and energy on developing my own properties.

Do you see it? I can build my entire online business without spending a single dollar to get started!

Don’t rush off just yet to go start offering your own service, let me share with you a few tips to ensure your success.

The secret – Quality!

Ground breaking isn’t it? Well as obvious as it may seem, if you take a look at the major webmaster marketplaces, quality is not a word I would use to describe a majority of the services being offered. It’s the nature of the industry and there will always be a short supply of cheap quality service providers.

Why? Because the good ones stand out and quickly run out of availability as webmasters fill up their time with orders. These service providers must choose to either keep their prices cheap, and never have availability (making room for you!), OR they raise their prices taking them out of the “cheap” service provider category (making room for you!). Either way, there is always room for new quality service providers on the webmaster forums.

Offering quality is the easiest way for you to break into and succeed in the service provider marketplace. Before starting my own service I read over 100 sales threads of various service providers (both for ideas and to see what other service providers were missing that I could offer). The common trend I noticed across the majority of sales threads was that they fail to offer the service they promise, they have terrible customer service, or worse, they disappear with client’s money.

If you can simply do a good job offering a quality service you have an opportunity to stand out from your competition!

What if I don’t have any special skills?

If you are still doubting that you can do this – just take a look at the marketplace sections on all the major webmaster forums. You will see a majority of the services are not complicated and can be performed by almost anyone with a computer and an internet connection. After two quick minutes of browsing here are some ideas to start you off:

• Content writers (simlple articles, re-writes, reviews, spinning. etc.)
• Link builders (web2.0 properties, link directories, article directories, social bookmarking, etc.)
• Website setup (WordPress installation, theme and plugin installations, etc.)
• Account creation (too many to list!)
• Designs (sites, landing pages and banners)
• Programming (sites, scripts, apps, etc.)

Most of the above jobs don’t require any special knowledge (except design and programming), rather only require your time. Find something that you can do, put a twist on it, combine it with other services and deliver a quality service that provides a solution to webmasters problems. You do this and you will start seeing Paypal payments to your account today.

Tips for starting your first service provider business

I have only been providing services full-time for the past 2 months, but the quick success I have found was based on these basic principals:

• Practice the service first! Contact senior forum members and explain to them that you would like to offer them a free review of your new service, in return for their feedback. This will allow you to practice your service AND start your sales thread with some social proof when seniors members leave you a glowing review.
• Put some effort into your sales thread! Nothing is a bigger turn-off than seeing grammatical and spelling errors in the sales pitch for a content writer! If you can’t put effort into your own business, why would other webmasters trust you with theirs?
• Offer quality customer service! As I said above, just doing this will help stand out from the crowd.
• Be accessible and respond to customer questions quickly. When webmasters are looking for cheap service providers, they will often send out multiple PM’s asking for more information. If you aren’t the first to respond, you may lose the sale!
• Don’t take on more work then you can handle. If you do run into time troubles, make sure to let your clients know.
• Under promise and over deliver!

The Benefits

Besides making money right away, you also get some other valuable benefits by offering webmaster services:

“Free” financing for your business – It’s not really “free” money (as you have to trade your time for it), but this is a great option for people who do not have capital saved up, are not eligible for loans, or simply those whom are risk adverse and want to start their business without investing any capital. I have been able to take funds from my service offerings and re-invest them into my business to start 20 of my own money making sites. Next month I plan to add another 30!

Network of contacts – I have developed a strong relationship with every client contact I have made so far. It can be difficult to develop relationships when working online, and this is a perfect opportunity for me to grow my network of contacts. Oh, and I’m getting paid to do it!

Getting paid to learn – Everyone here knows that you learn the most when you take action. Well I’m taking action, learning AND getting paid for it! I am seeing lots of different niches, different monetization strategies and SEO strategies from other webmasters through my service offering that I can use on my own sites. This is information I should be paying for, but instead clients are paying me to learn!

I haven’t written anything revolutionary here, but the concept of working your way into the industry is an option often overlooked when trying to break into the world of making money online.

This blog post was written by an ExSuit who recently quit his corporate job to start working online full-time. If you are interested in following his progress and seeing his business plan unfold, check out http://www.takingoffthesuit.com. He posts daily blog updates of his actions, his income and strategies like this that will help him grow a successful online business.