Starting an Online Business

The first step in starting an online business is coming up with an idea of what you are going to do. You could sell items or services outright or even generate income through advertising or affiliate sales. Possibilites are endless.

My favorite way to generate income online is through information rich pages. Find a topic that people want to know about that will be respectably easy to get traffic from the search engines for. Create a very specific website that aims to bring information to the visitor in a way that is very accessible and user friendly. If you do your job right you can pull traffic from the search engines onto your page and monetize the trafiic through an advertising program like Adsense and maybe a couple discreetly placed affiliate ads.

Whatever you do realize that the more specific you keep your subject the faster you will be rewarded in the search engines. Don't try to take to much of a bite off an industry. When you design your site make sure to take some time to learn how search engines work. There are a few huge pitfalls that could cost you a couple years of wheel spinning. Read our article Search Engine Placement and Optimization 101

After you get your site up and running and well designed with all unique content and keyword optimized it's time to launch it out onto the web! You have a few choices for this too of course. I personally employ a combination of article writing, directory submission and pay per click advertising.

As I rule I usually try to steer away from submitting my sites to search engines through forms. Sometimes it's helpful but I've found that many times my results are better when a search engine just finds my site. The way to do this is to convince other sites to link to your site. You do not want search engines to find your site until its absolutely ready! This may do harm to your hope of ranking well for awhile.

If you have everything complete on your site one thing I like to do is to write an article specific to the industry and subject of the web site and submit it to ezinearticles.com. Make sure the article is helpful and not just advertising and that a link to your site is in the resource box. If you did your job right it will get posted to ezinearticles home page and get you crawled by the major search engines within a few days. Much better than waiting months after submitting to search engines via forms!

Morever web masters on ezinearticle.com may appreciate your article for the excellent informative content it contains and post it on their site along with the link to your site. You are now building up link popularity which is critical to rank well in the search engines.

To Be Continued...
I'm still working on this article and it will soon branch off into tutorials for Adwords, Yahoo SE, search engine optimization, monetization of traffic and more.