Thanks to Gideon Shalwick, who has published a video that shows you his top 7 tips of setting up a mailing list. The video is included at the end of this blog post. The 7 tips are summarized as follows, in case you have not had too much time to view video.

1. Increase value of the thing you give away As we’ve told you to get someone to sign up, you have to give away something such as a free e-book, a useful software or reports. So you’ll have to find a way how may the things you’re gonna give away useful.

2. Have a news letter sign-up on your blog Just like what we’ve done on this blog, now you can sign up to our news letter, which we use AWeber service to deliver the newsletter to you!

3. Have lightbox hover on your blog – While you’re configuring your Aweber subscription web form, choose the “lightbox hover”, as this will at least double your opt-in rate as what we’ve just done here.

4. Use ultimate footer ad – Use pop up ad at the footer that draws attentions of others to sign up.

5. Get sign-up from blog commentators – use WordPress plugin called Optin Comments to get your commentators to sign up.

6. Get signups from RSS readers Add to feed footer to get your subscribers to sign up

7. Get signups from Facebook Create a Facebook Fan Page, add your subscription form in your fan page and turns those fans into your mailing list subscribers.

And watch the video below for more information!

1. Whether you’re running a blog or an online store, it’s best to capture the emails of your visitors as well as their names. Even though you’re running an online store, the visitor may not buy from you right away on his or her first visit. But you’ve managed to capture his or her name and email, you’ll be able to reach them by sending any of your future promotions or new products, which will then turn into sales.

2. Use service like AWeber.com to build your mailing list. If you’ve been running a blog, you may have been used to using FeedBurner to get people to subscribe using their emails. But the problem with FeedBurner is it never takes the name of the subscriber. With only email that FeedBurner captures, you can’t personalize the email such as by calling the person with his or her name which proves to be more appealing to get the newsletter opened. AWeber starts at $19 per month if you have a mailing list less than 500 subscribers.

3. How big your mailing list needs to be in order to make lucrative income from the Internet? (whether you’re doing affiliate blogging, your own online store etc). People like John Chow having a list of 100 over thousands, which earns him about $50K USD a month. But this list sounds very far away from being achievable if you’re a beginner. But a list of 5,000 subscribers could be lot easier, and having such a 5K-list sounds pretty promising of allowing the earning of $100K USD a year, which has been proven by Yee Shun Jian, having made that much from being a number of affiliates of CJ, Clickbank and Amazon etc!

4. Of course, to build a 5k-list, it’s definitely not easy at all. You’ve gotta have something free to attract people to subscribe, and it’s being built day by day. If you’re able to write good e-books, you can offer a copy or more to your visitors for free after they’ve entered bith their name and email and subscribed your newsletter!

Such a tool that helps you manage your customers is generally called CRM (Customer Relationship Management system). If you want a free one or one that allows you to manage your customers wherever you go, the FreeCRM is a great choice. FreeChoice in a nutshell provides you the following features.

And they offer two versions, Free and Pro which you can sign up online. If you do not wanna see some banner ads, go for the Pro version which starts at $15 per month dependent the level of supports. And the Pro version has SSL encryption for the web access that ensures your data transmitted over the web is highly secure.

Now FreeCRM even offers Business Web Hosting, which they allow you who has a Pro account with them to integrate business-class domain hosting, so you can host your business web site, have your email accounts under your own business domain name, and FreeCRM has also integrated e-commerce, social networking and easy web design template features to let you more easily promote your Internet business online. Read more about it here.

The idea of creating niche web stores is to sell niche products online that have little competitors. But it’ll not be an easy way to setup a niche store. You’ll need to be concerned and consider the following 5 factors:

1. What niche products are niche enough and will make you lots of money online? Since you wanna make money online, you’ll of course wanna make at least $1,000 as a side income or even more up to $10,000 which you can make a living and quit your day job. So, the very first thing you need to know, what niches that are popular and attract sales and bring you with tons of money online.

2. How to I find suppliers/wholesalers for those niche products or do I need to keep stock for them? – This is crucial. Since you’re talking about selling niche products online. Lets say you’ve found your niches e.g. selling Water purifiers online. But you need to find suppliers to supply you with the products. And you’ll probably need a small store to keep these products. And of course the best is you could find some suppliers that would drop ship those products for you, so you do NOT have to keep any stock and keep your costs at minimal. But how to do that? This is the big question.

3. So now you have your niche products, then how to setup the niche web store? Well, you do not wanna spend another couple thousands of dollars to get someone to build a web store for you. This is a web store that you plan to make some money online. The initial control of your costs is crucial, so you won’t overspend and will see ROI (return of investment) in just a few weeks’ or months’ time. So, you’ll need a niche web store that is well designed and cost effective enough to you to start rolling out your niche products online.

4. Now I need traffic for my niche stores – Yes, you need traffic to convert into leads, so you can generate money online from your niche products. Of course, you can make use of PPC advertising such as Google AdWords. But if you aren’t careful on how to control your budget or how to exercise the best keywords to rank well in Google with higher CTR, you’ll then easily burn your own butt.

So you should learn a way to master the skills to create keywords and write effective ad campaign on adwords that will generate huge sales for you. And also the best is you could build more Organic Traffic or search engine traffic by building incoming links and to get your website to rank well on search engines that will bring in lots of sales for you.

5. Now, you have all the above set up properly. You’ll need solid knowledge on how to take order, accept credit cards and ship your products to your customers. – This is the most crucial part of your niche store. Since now you have sales, so you need to know the fulfillment part which will make your niche store a long-term money generator for you and your family. So you must fulfill every sale you capture and also add some effort of supporting your customers online in order for your business to stay long term.

So, now you need some simple tools in order to get the above 5 factors going well to make your niche stores successful. The reason that you need some simple tools is of course, you’re most likely to do everything on your own as to maintain cost as low as possible. And you want quick profit/result to show and less time to maintain the niche store, so you could have more time with your family and friends.

In order to cope with all the 5 factors mentioned above, you just need one tool i.e. The simple tools bundled – Niche Blueprint 2.0 – The Niche Blueprint 2.0 is one of the effective packages that bundles a couple of effective tools and information to get you going well with the above 5 factors that determine your success in your e-commerce nice store.

The 5 tools that Niche Blueprint 2.0 bundles are as follows:

1. Discover Niches tool – This helps you in factor 1, as you do NOT know what popular niches to sell over the Internet. The Niche Blueprint 2.0 has this great tool that helps you discover what niches to rank and sell well over the Internet.

2. Dropship Blueprint – Now you know your niche. You’ll need suppliers for your niche. And you do NOT want to keep stocks of those products as you wanna maintain costs as low as possible to maximize profit (Note: if you keep stocks, you’ll need to maintain a small warehouse that involves running costs such as store keepers, and product maintenance etc). So the Dropship Blueprint presents you a huge database on where you can find and sign-up with suppliers for drop-shipping your products for you and you earn the profit margin without having to keep stocks or worry the degradation, aging of the products etc.

3. Keyword Blueprint – Discover how you can rank well on Adwords or search engine for keywords you’d like to target and get more visitors to your website and get converted into leads or sales. With this you can control how to spend minimum to max out traffic to your website and capture more leads or sales.

And you’ll get video walk through on how to do Internet marketing, how to setup your own web store easily and in lower cost manner, how to write great articles to build organic traffic and even to make use of Web 2.0 social media sites to pull traffic to your website.

Well, the Niche Blueprint 2.0 doesn’t come cheap, it costs $500. But it’s the only tool that will get you to excel and make money from Internet niches. A $500 investment is definitely much cheaper than any other investments you have to make to setup bricks and mortar physical store. If you think that this is what you wanna go for then Click Here! to go ahead and purchase and learn the techniques that it teaches. Please note the decision is all yours!

One of the pioneers in cloud hosting is RackSpaceCloud. I did have a quick chat with RackSpaceCloud. The answer I’ve got is cloud is almost like dedicated hosting, where you don’t get CPANEL. You’ll only be given SSH shell access. If you wanna have a blog hosted there, you have to install your own WordPress, MySQL. These could be lots of hassles for those who lack of technical capabilities. To me, these are all fine as I’ve been supporting lots of Linux environments and web hosts.

But after googling around for “rackspace cloud server reliability” and having read the what WebDevNews have posted about their experience with RackSpaceCloud, I’ll need to think twice and do more research before moving to cloud.

Apparently, WebDevNews didn’t have good experience with Rackspace Cloud, when they moved their blog onto cloud servers on RackSpace cloud and they had very bad problems with the WP Cache, MySQL and .htaccess – the essential elements on a popular WordPress blog. And their blogs had about 600+ pageviews a day (about less than 10% of my gadget blog) during the time when they were on RackSpace cloud.

So shall I move to cloud after reading the bad experience of WebDevNews? I guess I need more research before making the decision. The RackSpaceCloud starts at a basic of $11 per month and the bandwidth is additional cost that costs 7¢/GB in and 22¢/GB out. So, how much bandwidth do you need for a blog that has 5-6K daily unique visitors? It seems like you’ll only know once you’ve got onto cloud for a start first then you’ll be able to know how much you need. And increase from that on……

Btw, does PageRank matter? Yes Pagerank does matter!!! When you have higher pagerank, your blog posts or articles tend to get into Google index faster and rank pretty high, normally on the first page of the search results. So Pagerank also means better traffic to your blog or website. Of course, you will need better contents and continue to add more contents to keep more traffic or visitors coming. Now you have higher pagerank, it’s so much easier for your articles or blog posts to be indexed by Google faster and they will appeared on the search results much faster.

But once you’ve gained certain pagerank value, avoid doing the followings:

1. Do NOT sell text links. Something like TextLinkAds is very attractive lets say you have a pagerank 5 and above which you’ll lots of buyers of text links and place on your blog or website homepage. If you do not know textlinks, they are simply hyperlink with the anchor text to certain keywords that the advertisers wish to rank in search engines. By selling text links, you’ll then be de-ranked by Google or may finally get penalized down to pagerank zero!

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2. Do NOT exchange links excessively Don’t exchange links. The old time’s of exchanging links is over. Google no more values reciprocal link exchanges. If you have more links carried on your homepage or the blog roll in your homepage, you’ll be considered as link farm, or spam link farm, which Google will finally lower your pagerank. When you lose your pagerank, you’ll also lose your organic traffic that brings you sales and income.

But you’ll need to have more incoming links to maintain or go for higher pagerank, how to do that? Submit more articles to article directories, embed a hyperlink back to your website or your blog with the anchor text you want. If you operate a website, selling interesting products such as gadgets, do consider ask some bloggers to blog about your products by sending tips to them. They’re hungry for contents!

But if your website is new, your budget is slim and it’s just a small business, PPC can easily burn your butt if you ain’t know the know-how on controlling cost or twisting keywords or bidding for better ad position by paying less.

Lucky are those in the old days, which you could pay search engine to include your website in search engine indexes. Once paid your website will appear in the search engine in about 24-48 hours. And the paid search engine will come back to reindex your website and web pages every 48 hours throughout the entire year.

Paid Inclusion could have been all gone these days but there are some which’re still doing it, such as ExactSeek. I’ve been a subscriber of ExactSeek newsletter, I’ve recently received an email saying that their Paid Inclusion Program costs you only as little as $24.95 for full year for the first URL and additional URLs for $14.95 a year. And the ExactSeek will re-index to ensure your website and web pages in their search engines in every 48 hours. And also ExactSeek claims that your website and web pages will appear as organic search results of their search engine network that consists of 50+ search engines that have about 120 million searches a month.

The 50+ search engines of ExactSeek are those like ABCSearch.com, ExactSeek.com which are very very much smaller than Google and Yahoo. But 50+ of them bring about 120 million searches (average of 4 million searches a day), which could be only 1% or less what Google is getting. According to Wikipedia, Google is getting several hundred searches each day.

But a 4 million searches a day could be pretty significant for a small business which may be able to get you few hundred visitors each day. So I decided to folk out $24.95 to try out this website/blog HaveYourBusinessOnline.com. And I’ve setup Google Analytics to measure the traffic and continuously to add good content. So In maybe a few days’ time or a month or longer, I shall be able to add a few blog posts as follow-ups to this blog post, to track the effectiveness of the ExactSeek Paid Inclusion. So, stay tuned with me, if you’d like to know if a small investment of as little as $24.95 per year is worth and what is the percentage like in return you could get compared to PPC.

CPanel is the main control panel that is given to a Linux web hosting plan. If you’re on a Linux web hosting plan, you should have been given a CPanel that lets you manage almost everything you need. There are lots of small tools within a CPanel, ranging from a Preferences to Advanced sections, which shall get you little dazzled if you are a beginner. But for simplicity, you just need to master the 5 small tools we’re going to tell you here then you should be able to manage almost everything for your website.

1. File Manager – grouped under FILES section. This is an online File Manager that presents you almost the same look and feel of a Windows File Manager. You can use it to browse, edit, delete, upload new files and create new folders instantly within your web hosting file directory. To upload file into your web folder, you just need to use this File Manager to browse into the public_html or www folder within your home directory. The File Manager is an alternative to FTP software for managing all the files online by using a web browser only.

2. Backups – also grouped under files section, this is the essential tool to carry out your full backups either locally or remotely. It’s highly recommended that you always need to access or click on the backups icon and generate your own backup frequently. And it’s best you do a remote backup. The remote backup allows you to set a remote FTP server for remotely backing up all the data and web pages in your web hosting account to a remote FTP server. The backup will be generated in a .tar.gz compressed format and remotely transferred over to your FTP server.

3. MySQL database wizard If you’re using a CMS such as WordPress for your website or blog, you will definitely need to configure MySQL database that is required by almost every CMS software. The MySQL Database Wizard that is under the Databases section, allows you to create a database and assign a database user with password to the created database, which you can then use to configure your CMS config file.

4. phpMyAdmin While you’re on a CMS, occasionally you may need to use phpMyAdmin to administer the database used by the CMS. Such as using it to create certain indexes to improve speeds of certain SQL queries of your CMS or using the phpMyAdmin to export your database file as a backup or to be transferred or imported to other databases within other web hosting account. (Please note, the same exported file will also be included when a full backup is carried out as mentioned in Backups)

5. Logs Lastly, the logs section which has a few useful tools such as latest visitor and bandwidth that allows you to know latest visitors that have just visited your website and what bandwidth has your site consumed respectively. And also the awstat allows you to view the access log of your website in highly graphical manner including various charts by days, months and countries etc. And also on the left side bar of your CPanel, you can also have a quick glance of the total bandwidth and storage capacity that you web site and web pages have consumed before it’s too late that leads you get suspended by your web hosting provider.

The MIVA Merchant shopping cart software is now available as an add-on, which customers can add to to the existing web hosting plans of LunarPages including dedicated, VPS and shared hosting at a price of $19.95 per month, plus a setup fee of $75. This saves about $700 per year. The package also includes an online credit card processing system which will also be added to LunarPages hosting plans which are using Miva Merchant 5.5.

If you haven’t heard about Miva Merchant 5.5 yet, it’s claimed to be the best e-commerce storefront software which allows an online store to customize their own shopping cart and integrate it to their online web store. It also includes credit card processing on the checkout page. Currently, the MIVA merchant 5.5 has been deployed on more than 200K online storefronts worldwide.

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In order to be successful using Twitter to promote your products and services, you need to have tons of followers. The number of followers more than 10,000 will be kinda little sufficient to have your products and services known by your followers and in return, it could generate lead or sales. The more the better.

As simple as that your followers are simply your listeners of what you’re gonna say or introduce everyday. Here are a few simple tips below that tell you how you can get more followers:

Industry Tips – If you have expertise in one field, you can make use of Twitter to showcase your expertise and build your credibility. For example, if you’re an expert in how to make money online, you can create a list of high value tips to send out one or two everyday. If you have the time, you can do it manually or alternatively you can have a free tool such as TweetLater.com to schedule and send it out for you everyday. If those “Tweets” sent out by you are interesting, you will get “Re-tweet” by others, which will then send to their list as well and in return get you lots of followers.

Tweet your business – Once you have sufficient followers, you can consider tweeting about your Business, your products and services on Twitter. But DON’T overdo it. If your Twitter account is full of tweets about your products and services, it’ll definitely be considered boring, people will stop following you. You need to keep your followers, a 80/20 rule of Tweeting about your products and services should be good enough. Such as you have eight tweets about things other than your business and two tweets about your business, which should be just nice to keep your Twitter account active with followers.

Send Thanks to Retweets – When you get “Retweeted”, it means what you’re tweeting is worth to be shared by the person who re-tweeted you to his or her list of contact. It’s always best to send the “Retweeters” a short tweet of thanking them.

Quotes – Quotes are useful on Twitters and it’s also a way to get you more retweets. Similarly, you can use TweetLater.com to setup quotes for a month and watch your retweets happen. An example of quotes:

Invitations – On Twitter, you can open an online seminars and invite others to join. If you could provide useful, high value, low-cost info, then people love to join you and you will get lots of retweets.

Personal – The last thing is include some personal things in your life. But you don’t have to share your deepest inner thoughts or too much detail about your family. Tweeting about pets, food or hobbies shall be just nice and fruitful.

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