Blog TigerTom
Contact TigerTom
   
TigerTom HOME PAGE
-
   

To advertise on this page, email info@tigertom.com

Efficient Ways To Set Up A Website.

  1. Selling Something Direct? Use A Simple Means Of Purchase. A middleman service like PayPal is perfectly good to begin with. If you have just a small number of items, their HTML buttons are an effective way to test demand. When you make over $1k a month, acquire a merchant account of your own.


  2. Pay Freelancers To Make Software For You And Give It Away Free. This may work very well indeed. Research the most popular freeware PHP scripts; could you think of a script you could get programmed and have your own link inserted into it?


  3. Put At Least 500 Words Of Paragraphed Text In. If your web pages have duplicate header, footer, left side-bar, right side-bar, and only a sliver of text in the middle, you may incur a duplicate content penalty. You can get a freelance to write 500 mediocre words for $10, or 500 words of marketing copy for a good deal more.


  4. Automate, Automate, Automate! The effort involved in web marketing can be very boring. Prior to getting caught up in some lengthy promotion or submission process, think about whether you can get a software or a freelancer to do it for you. Or whether it should be done that way at all.


  5. Have More Than One Web Host. Have more than one net hosting account if you have many websites. Spread the websites out over different accounts. That way, if one web host goes 'splat', it will be a minor annoyance in place of a twelve-hour slog getting twenty websites back online. You may put the resource-intensive stuff on the good, costly host, and the less important websites on the $5 per month hosts. You may then, using SSH and FTP, backup one site on-server and FTP it to another account directly. This could save a lot of time. It's also much speedier than downloading a backup to your PC and re-uploading it somewhere else. Have you got a 2MB broadband connection? The 2MB is the theoretical download speed. Ever try uploading a fat file? A lot slower, isn't it?




  6. Install A Blogging Software Easily. Wordpress can be installed in moments from the Fantastico section of Cpanel. It allows a non-pro to put their thoughts on the web easily. You should acquire a search engine optimised theme for it; this will make Google index it properly. Such softwares are free; you needn't pay for 'em.


  7. Useful Software:

    • 1. Easy Text To HTML Converter. This software might batch convert text files to HTML. See also: dirHtml. WordCleaner may convert Microsoft Word documents to HTML.

    • 2. WinSCP. This is a very clever piece of FTP software.

    • 3. Putty Telnet/SSH Client. A simple-looking, but sophisticated, freeware telnet and SSH client.

    • 4. CGI-Telnet. A cgi script that allows you to run commands on your server, even if your internet host won't give you telnet access.

    • 5. AXS Visitor Tracking System. A very high-spec hit counter.

    • 6. Port 2096. If you have CPanel on your webhost, https://YourDomain.com:2096 is the net address of your email accounts.

    • 7. GetColor! This is a small, simple program to find out the colour code of any page or software on your desktop.

    • 8. Arctan Bulk Replacer. This is a rare thing, a search and replace program for the Windows desktop.

    • 9. '1-4a Rename'. A batch file renamer.

    • 10. Netscape Communicator 4.8. This has a very effective email client (Netscape Messenger) and a decent WYSIWYG HTML editor (Netscape Composer) in it.


  8. A Super-Simple Site: Use a text-to-html generator to make web pages from text files. Then use an index generator to create an index HTML page of these files. Clean these pages up in a WYSIWYG web page editor. Then FTP upload them to your webhosting account. Voila! A super-simple web site. Want something more complicated? Get a web hosting account with Cpanel and Fantastico. Look for the 'Wordpress' option in Fantastico, and install it. Then get a search engine optimized theme for your blog; the default install isn't search engine friendly.


  9. Use Freelances For Jobs You Lack The Skills For. Is money tight? Try scriptlance.com or rentacoder.com. The key to acquiring premium work is to a) be as clear as possible as to what you want and b) write your spec in simple, concise terms. Your work will likely be done by someone who's first language is not English. Most web marketers give a vague specification and get work they're unhappy with. Pick someone who's had a lot of positive reviews recently. Pay in stages. Use the freelance site's escrow facility. Do not expect to acquire more than you coughed up for, and don't be cheap; if someone does a good job, they deserve a bonus, not carping.


  10. Make A Better, Faster, Cheaper Version Of A Popular Product. You can walk a trail someone else has blazed. You may learn from their mistakes. The only down-side is that the opposition will have first-mover advantage and brand-recognition. However, you might also use them to publicise your stuff e.g. "My SnarkWodger 2.1 is faster and cheaper than Big_Name_Brand"; cue controversy, which equals publicity.


  11. Beware The Latest $49/$97/$149 Software. There are many web marketers who've realised that a good method of making cash on the web is to exploit other web entrepreneurs, as there are millions of them. This usually takes the form of packaging up, in a software or service, a trick that was novel six months ago. By the time Joe Webmaster gets wind of it, it's dead. Study it thoroughly before plonking down cash for it. Seek out independent reviews.


  12. Use A Popular, Inexpensive Web Host. Here are a few filtering criteria:

    • Google PageRank of at least 5. Send them an email or two. See how long it takes to receive a response.

    • They should have a forum (another indication of popularity and customer support).

    • Umpteen features offered (MySQL databases, Cpanel, Fantastico).

    • Recent positive reviews in webmaster forum.

    • Offers Linux servers (Windows costs more, and offers less).

    • Cost per month might be as low as $10, and still have all the features above.


  13. Clean Up Your HTML. Dreamweaver adds lots of extra blank space to HTML code, and breaks lines. This is especially annoying in meta tags. Use EditPad's 'Find and Replace' function to get rid of newlines and double blank spaces in your pages.




  14. Submit Articles To Article Directories. What you need is a service or a software that will do this for you automatically. Submission by hand is soul-destroying. Ask in web marketer forums about the best softwares and services.


  15. Submit To The Top Web Directories, like Yahoo and DMOZ, but don't spend much money or time. Only a few are worth a damn for SEO purposes. You'll only get an occasional visitor from these.


  16. Post In Popular Discussion Boards And Blogs, if they'll let you use straight links in your signature. This is a short-term measure if you want to acquire back-links. It's a long-term method if you want to sell to forum members.


  17. Be Controversial; whip a few sacred cows. The web is used by many people who delight in pointing out how other people are wrong. You might use this to your advantage to get publicity. It would help, of course, if you truly believed what you were saying.


  18. Be First With A New, Popular Good (or a smarter second). MySpace wasn't the first social networking site, but they improved the model. They designed it to be viral. Members could compete to get 'friends', and everyone wants new friends, right? Users could put whatever they wished online, even if it looked like rubbish. Censorship was minimal. Result: Huge popularity, without needing the search engines.


  19. Do A Press Release, and consider prior to doing do how you can make it more attractive to journalists. Spammers have lately taken to releasing poor-quality news items to just get backlinks. A better notion would be to investigate how to write a good-quality release and then consider what would be truly interesting to put in it.


  20. Beware Of The Guru! There are lots of semi-famous marketers and their fans out there selling videos, courses and books on how to earn lolly in internet marketing. They're marketing tips on how to do marketing! Nice work if you can get it. The best advice you might get about web marketing is on webmaster message boards. Even then, you need to use your own personal noise filter to winnow out the gems from the dross.


  21. Web Host Technical Support. Technical support is as important as the software a web host offers. Some web hosts charge $10 per month and respond to support enquiries in 20 minutes. Some charge $40 per month and get back to you next day. As long as the query gets answered, this may not be a problem. If the quality of the support declines, however, it isn't. One day you'll need a quick answer to a very urgent problem. You will thank your god you took pains to find, and pay for, a responsive web host.


  22. Webhost Features. Most geeks prefer Unix. It has a longer history, and is more stable. Web hosts offering Unix variants like Linux have always been less expensive. They also seem to offer a wider range of toys. I require SSI (Server Side Includes), SSH (secure Telnet), 10 MySQL databases, Cpanel, PHPMyAdmin and a UK IP number. And you can get this for $15 a month. Things like MySQL databases, Cpanel and SSH access are real stumbling points for many internet hosts. If they're generous with these, you've found a rare jewel.


  23. Useful Freeware:

    • 1. NVU Web Editor. This is a pretty good freeware web page editor.

    • 2. GIMP Image Editor. This is a good image and photo manipulation package.

    • 3. OpenOffice, an alternative to the Microsoft office suite. This can save you thousands if you need to buy multiple licences.

    • 4. SimplyMepis. This a Linux operating system package. Like Damn Small Linux, it might be run from a CD; useful in emergencies.


  24. Come Up For Air Occasionally. It's very easy to get mired in the minutiae of this or that web project. There are folks whose lives revolve around fiddling with addons to open-source software. You should keep your eyes on the prize; what do you want and what's the most simple, legal way of getting it?
I hope these few simple tips will be of some use to you in getting a nice-looking website done quickly.







 















Time now: 17:58:32 | Saturday | December 21 | 2024.
.