Blog ~ A great Way To Start Online!

How can you get started with an online business without any cash layout? There is an easy way to generate sales without a website.

First, let's discuss some terminology.

• What is a blog? Blog is short for weblog. It can be used for just about anything, including starting or promoting your business. Blogging can be described as an online diary with the most recent topics showing on the homepage of the blog. You can archieve your posts so that they can be retrieved later. You can also publish your blog. This method of publishing your blog is a way to make it available for the whole world to see. If you can type or henpeck you can create a blog. In short, a blog is an easy, instant, free website that can focus around a topic, industry or personality.
  
  
• What is ping? Pinging lets dozens of services know you've updated your site and increases traffic to your blog. There are a number of services designed specifically for tracking and connecting blogs. However it would be expensive for all the services to crawl all the blogs in the world all the time. By sending a small ping to each service you let them know you’ve updated so they can come check you out. They get the freshest data possible, you don’t get a thousand robots spidering your site all the time. Everybody wins.
  
  
• What is RSS? RSS stands for really simple solution. “Everything that is timely and valuable on the web will be available as an RSS feed” Feeds are a way for publishers to syndicate content and for people to easily receive it. A feed is simply a file in which a website (such as a blog or news site) lists their latest content on; each item is known as a post. A news site, for example, may list their latest headlines (or entire articles) in their feed; every time a new article is published, it is added to their feed and the oldest item on the feed is removed.
  Feedster is first and foremost a search engine, however unlike a general web search engine like Google, Feedster includes only a certain type of content, called feeds, which provide many advantages.
  Feedster’s proprietary technology platform crawls the web continuously fetching updated posts and RSS feeds. This enables delivery of a fresh index of information from millions of sources more frequently than traditional search engines. As a result, Feedster has the largest index of RSS feeds.
  

So, now that you know a few simple terms, you are ready to explore the possiblitity of how to use a blog to start your business online. There are endless possibilities, but here a few things to spark your creativity:

• If you sell Avon or anything similar, or have a catalog that you promote offline, you can use a blog to make more sales.
  
  
• Use Amazon.com as an affiliate program, and you'll have endless products. Amazon was the first to come up with an affiliate program back in 1996 and is the largest affiliate program today with over 900,000 members worldwide. You can earn up to 10% commission. But realistically, just starting out, you can earn 5%. Commissions increase with the volume of sales. This was my first sign-up and it can be yours.
  When you open a new affiliate account, be sure to change the payment threshold information to $10.00 threshold for monthly commissions. The default is set at $100.00. That way after you make $10.00 in commissions, they will pay your commissions, and you won't have to wait indefinitely.
• Find a couple of products fromClickbank to promote. Clickbank is the leading online source for Digital products representing over 10,000 online digital products (e-books). Earn sales commissions from 1% to 75% by linking customers directly to your choice of over 10,000 digital products ClickBank sells. Sign up free and start earning commissions today! It will be easy to find a category or subject that you can promote thru a blog. There is no inventory to stock, each program will usually have it's own sales page that you can link directly to, or you can right-click and save the cover of the e-book, and create your own sales message. Clickbank is reliable and pays monthly.
  
  These are some of programs that I highly recommend. I belong to Amazon and Clickbank and can personally guarantee you that you will not be taken in. Whatever you choose to do on the internet, research it first, and don't be taken in by scams.
  
  You might want to take a look at this article on Making Extra Money by purchasing reseller rights to some E-books. The results would be that you can resell these e-books over and over and keep all the profits.
  
  Ready to Create A Blog?
  
  Let's get started. Just follow these simple steps one by one.
  
  You are going to set up a blog. If you already have one just follow along, and if there is a step that you have not previously done, then do it as you come to it.
  • Go to http://www.blogspot.com and sign up for a new account.
    Blogspot is a free service, and they host the blog on their server.
    
    
  • Give your blog a name. Make a note of the name for later use. One point here, you might want to give it the name of your website minus the www. or use your major keyword.
    
  • Navigate to settings and then choose "Site Feed"
    
  • Check and make sure the "Publish Site Feed" option is "YES"
    
  • Copy the site feed URL to your clipboard or notepad,(you'll need this information in a few minutes.)It will look something like this:URL http://amomsshop.blogspot.com/atom.xml
    It will have the atom.xml on the end of it.
    
  • Save the Settings
    
  • Navigate to the "Posting" and create your first blog.
    
  • What should write about, type a few paragraphs about your website and it's theme. Work in a reference to each page on your site that you want indexed. Remember to type them as real links (Hyperlinks) with exact URL of the page, and you can tell a little bit about that page if you want to.
    
    You don't know how to do a hyperlink? It goes like this:
    
    

    <p><a href="http://www.amomsshop.com.com" target="_blank">A Mom's Shop </a></p>

    just replace the amomsshop.com with your URL and the A Mom's Shop with the typed out name you want for your site.
    
    

  • Publish your blog by hitting the "Publish" button.
    
    Ready To Ping?
    
    Remember about Ping? You have your blog created and looking good now it's time to make it available for the whole world to see and try your hand at selling thru your blog.
    Most modern blogging packages ping at least one update service out of the box, and there are likely plugins or extensions to ping more, but often this requires more work on your part and can slow posting down to a crawl if the service is slow to respond. So I usePingomatic to ping my blogs. Enter your blog name and URL of your blog www.something.blogspot.com and then check all entries under Services to Ping. This will send your updated blog to fourteen different services including Feedster, which is the largest. Now push the Submit Pings button, and you'll see messages relating to successful pings.
    
    Update your blog regularly and remember to ping it.
    
    Barbara King
    Owner/Operator
    Connecting Women To Direct Sales
    A Mom's Shop Online Shopping Mall Everything for your family and home. Body of page