If you’re brand new to website ownership, your site is launched and you’re not getting any visitors or website traffic… It’s time to tell the search engines your website exists. These numbers are not exact by any means, but depending on your market, 40-60% of all search engine traffic that is sent by any website will come from Google. Yahoo will send another 30-40% and MSN will follow closely behind Yahoo. There are a number of smaller search engines that both humans and the search engine robots use to create listings and links, but these are the big three. Perhaps the easiest...

Submitting your website to search engine directories is an on-going task that should be revisited bi-annually at least – no matter how well established or aged the site may be. If your site is new, set aside 20 minutes per week to submit to a few more directories. Most of the directories I’ll point you to are reviewed by actual humans so take care with your submissions and make sure your site is in top shape before you submit it. If you can afford the time and care, your website will see plenty of traffic for years to come. If you’re short on time don’t buy into software...

It’s time to switch things up a bit on makemoneywithyourideas.com. For the next few weeks I’ll be talking about website traffic; getting qualified and targeted visitors to your online business and a few tricks to website promotion. You know, whether you’re building your site for advertising revenue (you create content and your advertisers pay space to be ’seen’ on your content), you’re building your site for affiliate revenue (you promote other people’s products or services for a commission), or you’re building your site to make sales of your products...

Here’s another in the question and answer series of Ask Laura regarding Getting Started. This gentleman wrote me because he wanted to start a side business online and return to a rural lifestyle away from the city. However, he couldn’t think of an idea for his online business! Although this email is quite old (2004) and has focus on info-products and ebay selling (two areas which are harder to make money at now), the premise still stands. You must have a passion and an interest in your business to really make it online. ‘Making it online’ could be making money, making a...

Making IT Online is not as easy as it was just a few years ago. When I first began, back in 1996, you could just slap up a website, throw some traffic at it and start making sales. Of course it was also a lot more expensive to get started back then as well. Domain names were $35/year and hosting costs were out of this world. Back then I traded my website designer hours in exchange for hosting fees. Today however you can start your online business for less than $13! An $8 domain name and a $5/month hosting account and you’re set to go, get some content up and start selling! But with the lower...