As I waded into the ‘Make Money Online’ waters on the Internet, I felt I needed to do some research on what keywords might help me generate traffic for my websites. I am very, very new to this whole Internet marketing arena but at the simplest level it seems that the keys to generating income are:

Blog >>> Choose Target Keywords >>> Write Articles Incorporating Keywords >>> Create New Pages For Articles >>> Link Article Pages To Blog >>> Link Article Pages To Each Other >>> Populate All Pages with PPC Links >>> Submit Articles To Outlets >>> Submit All Pages To Search Engines

Did I say it was simple? As I said, I am new to this area so there may be a step or two (or 5, or 10, etc…) I’ve missed. Your end goal is to get your links to appear on the first page of the major search engines when someone searches on your targeted keywords.

Smithutopia.com (http://www.smithutopia.com) was developed utilizing one of the leading blogging systems today, WordPress. A blog is a great place to cut your teeth writing articles. As you post your ideas, situations, actions and events you will notice that some of your items start to resemble articles. All it takes is a little polish at that point to have a finished product. In fact you can read this very blog entry at it’s own page of http://www.smithutopia.com/good-ways-to-make-money.html

How does all of the above steps help you achieve the goals you have set forth? The magic word is ‘backlinks’. Backlinks are the links that people have placed on their websites that lead to your website or any of the pages of your website. Several of the major search engines place a high value on the number of links that go to your website from out sites and thus place you in their search engine accordingly. Here is a simple example.

Site ‘A’ has 1000 sites that link back to it.
Site ‘B’ has 10 sites that link back to it.

Site ‘A’ should place higher in the search engines when someone searches for a targeted keyword/phrase that both sites covet.

At this point, some of the more ’seasoned’ web gurus are crying foul at my above statement. Relax, I realize there is more to it but I’m just taking one step at a time.

Next time…Quality of backlinks, Placing targets on keywords

If you have ever used EBay then you know how important pictures are to a listing. By nature, people tend to pay more attention to the items that have pictures in the items for sale. The old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” has never been more true but in EBay’s case a picture is worth $1.00, $2.00 or more…to EBay! If you want to add more than one picture to a listing or want additional features then you must be willing to pay EBay. Here is just a small list to illustrate the point:

Additional Pictures: $0.15
Picture Show: $0.25
Supersize Picture: $0.75
Picture Pack: $1.00

These fees mean less profits for you. You already pay EBay for inserting the listing or selling the item. An alternative is to use an image hosting service. Quality image hosting sites, such as Image4U.org (http://www.image4u.org), will allow you to upload your pictures and link to them on EBay. This type of service can save you a lot of fees and increase your profits. You pay a set monthly rate and can host as many pictures as you need, up to the limit of your account. Image4U.org even offers unlimited bandwidth so you can be assured that your images will always be available.

What is the difference between bandwidth and disk space? Disk space is where the image is stored within your account. It is fixed to the size of the images that you store. If an image is 250 KB in size then it will always take up 250 KB on your account. Bandwidth is the amount of space it takes to transfer an image to the requesting user each time they want to view an image. Bandwidth used grows larger the more times an image is viewed. Using the previously mentioned 250 KB image, the first time someone views the image it takes 250 KB of bandwidth. The next time it takes another 250 KB for a total of 500 KB. The next time your total is 750 KB and so on. To put this into perspective, If you account allows 500 MB of bandwidth per month then this picture could be viewed approximately 2000 times (250 KB x 4 = 1 MB) before you used up all of your bandwidth for the month.

Services such as Image4U.org allow unlimited bandwidth. Take advantage of the service to post as many images on your auctions as you can. It will help you increase the number of bids received by making the sale more attractive. You simply have to copy and paste the image URL into the EBay form.

Best of all, perhaps, may be the online photo gallery options many sites offer. You can take advantage of this feature to set up an image gallery to display all your items on one page. It will provide a convenient way for customers to browse your offerings. Whether you are a high volume seller or a newcomer to online auctions, take advantage of the service to reduce your selling expenses. Experiment with different techniques to learn what works best to increase sales.

Image4U.org (http://www.image4u.org) is an image hosting service that can be used to store pictures online. Enhance your EBay auctions without paying the EBay picture hosting fees. The service can also be used to upload pictures for myspace, live journal, and other blog websites. Users can create custom photo galleries to be shared with friends and family. Visit the site to learn about all the other features.

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Donnie Smith is a technology enthusiast. He specializes in un-complicating the complicated world of the Internet. You can read more about this subject and others at his online blog, Smithutopia (http://www.smithutopia.com). Copyright 2005, Donnie Smith, All rights reserved.