If you’re new to online businesses, I HIGHLY recommend taking my course “The complete guide to creating an online business“

This course is designed for people with limited knowledge, and takes you through everything from market research, to building a site, to marketing it online.

It is NOT a get rich quick scheme (which I like to call “get poor slowly” schemes).  It is a practical, step by step guide to building an online business that will earn you money right into the future.

People think that there is some magical way of earning money online quickly – but the truth is running an online business is just like running any other business – it takes time, dedication, and patience. However – there is one VERY important difference. It is A LOT cheaper to get started!  All you need is a computer, an internet connection, and a few hundred dollars for hosting, domain names, website design, etc.

My course is not only for online businesses – it’s also perfect for those people who have a bricks and mortar  business they want to promote online.

Click here to start the course now!

Different types of online business options:

I like to break websites down into 3 different kinds: those selling products/services, those selling information, and those selling advertising.  Of course, there is often some cross-over, but it’s handy to think of things in these terms.

Options for online businesses:

1) Selling products on www.Ebay.com

Ebay.com is the classic way to make money online, and one of the easiest.  I actually made my first online income using ebay, and many others have done the same. My business was importing video projectors from the United States and selling them on ebay in Australia (back then they were a lot cheaper in the US, as many things still are).  I would buy them in the US (on ebay), ship them over, make sure they were OK, and then take photos of them and sell them on ebay in Australia. I made a few thousand dollars doing this, which at the time seemed like a lot for not much work.

What a lot of people do these days is buy things on www.alibaba.com, which is a site with links to manufacturers all over the world (mainly in China), get them shipped over by the container load (shipping a container is actually not very expensive) and then sell them on ebay.  Depending on the product, and the demand, you can make a lot of money doing this.

A good way to research demand first is by having a look at what’s selling on ebay, and how many people are selling it, and how many bidders there are.  Then, once you’ve found something you think might sell well, buy a few of them first (you don’t have to buy a whole container load) and see how they sell.  If they sell well, buy a few more next time and sell those, and build up from there.

2) Websites selling physical products or services

This is a little bit like ebay, except you create your own website to sell your products or services through.  You can then drive traffic to the website using search engines such as google.com, and people can purchase your products or services directly from the site.

Whatever you want to sell, this is one of the best ways of selling it.  Almost everybody uses google.com these days to search for anything, and if you have a well designed website that people can find easily on the search engines, then chances are you are going to sell quite a lot (depending on the demand of course – have a look at my “search engine marketing” blog posts to work out how many people are searching google.com for a particular product or service and see how big your potential market might be).

If you don’t already have products or services to sell, you can either buy products from somewhere like alibaba.com, create your own product, or sell services that you or someone you know is good at.  I have a friend who installs solar systems, so I created a website for him to sell solar systems through.  He now sells quite a few a month.  My wife is a Spanish teacher, so I created a website offering Spanish courses, and it’s now one of the biggest in Australia (see www.thespanishcat.com)  If you don’t know someone who offers the service you’d like to sell – find someone and outsource the work to them, and make a cut for yourself.  You’ll be earning money online in no time!

One great place to find people to outsource work to is www.odesk.com or www.freelancer.com  On these sites you can find people in India or the Phillipines or pretty much any country in the world willing to do almost any type of computer based work cheaply.  Say you want someone to create a website for you, or do some data-entry, or compile a database or spreadsheet, or even produce a report or article.  For $4+ per hour you’ll be able to find someone to do the job.

Maybe you decide you’d like to start a new business selling websites, but you don’t actually know how to design them.  Well, you sell the websites and get someone on odesk.com or freelancer.com to do the design work. You can even find people on there to answer the phone for you! Their English isn’t always perfect, but often as not it’s pretty damn good! These sites are especially useful once you start building your online empire and need people to work cheaply for you.

3) Websites selling Information 

This is actually quite a good way to start making money online.  If you know a lot about a certain topic, you can create an ebook, an e-course, or just a blog about that topic and either sell it or sell advertising on your site.  Imagine if you know how to make fantastic cakes that for some reason are super special and nobody else knows how to make them (maybe they taste great but don’t make you fat, for example).  Well – write a blog, an ebook, or just create a website about it.

If it’s an ebook or an e-course you can sell it (in the same way I sell my course on this website), or if it’s a blog giving away information for free you can sell advertising on your site or become what’s called an affiliate marketer (basically advertising other peoples products and earning a commission).

4) Affiliate Marketing

This is a great way to make money online.  You don’t actually have to have any product or service at all – all you do is create websites with great content that people like to read, and then put links on them to other people’s products or services and earn a commission when people click your links and buy from them.

One of the best affiliate websites is www.clickbank.com  This has a huge list of products or services that all offer commissions for referred sales.  Imagine you’ve created a website about cakes – well, on clickbank you’ll find hundreds of people who will offer you a commission when you refer people to their website who buy their cake recipe books, or maybe their weight loss programs!  This way, you don’t need to create the product yourself, you just make money from referrals.  All you do is create the website (for a full guide on how to create a website – try my “complete guide to making money online” course).

5) Google Adsense

Google adsense is another great way to make money without actually having a product or a service.  All you do is create  a content rich website, about something that you know a lot about or are interested in, and then put Google ads on it.  Have you ever been surfing a site and seen google ads on the side?  That’s what I’m talking about.  Each time someone clicks on these ads, google will pay you for it!  You can make anywhere between a few cents and $5-$10 per click!  Google even automatically selects ads relevant to your website content – so you don’t have to worry about anything.  You just paste a bit of code into your website and then start making money from them!

Of course – for this to work you have to have a website and get traffic to it.

6) Infolinks

Infolinks.com is another site that enables you to monetize your content.  Instead of displaying ads on the side of your content infolinks chooses certain words on your page automatically and makes them into links to their advertisers websites (relevant to your topic, of course).  Then, when people click on them, you get paid!  Installation is very simple, and payouts are usually higher than they are with Google adsense.

7) Websites selling Advertising

Many websites don’t actually sell any products or services themselves – they sell ADVERTISING space.  That’s right, nearly every really successful e-business sells advertising.  Google.com makes all their money from adwords (the paid ads at the side of the search listings), facebook makes their money from ads (and from selling information – but that’s slightly different!), classified sites make money by selling advertising space and getting lots of visitors to their site, dating sites sell memberships that allow people to connect to one another (basically advertising – except you’re advertising yourself!)  Get the idea.

Google is at the top of this pyramid of advertising, but there are lots of sites under Google that make a lot of money by offering searchable directories of a particular product, and charging people to advertise in this directory.  A car sales site is specifically designed to be searched on for cars, or a job site for jobs.  They make people’s lives easier by allowing them to narrow down all the possibilities and find exactly what they want.

Now, you may think that this is the best type of online busines – you set it up and it runs by itself.  And in some ways you’re right – these sites, once working, can make a LOT of money for not much work.  However, they are VERY DIFFICULT to set up and to make them start working.  There is a lot of competition in this arena, and if this is your first online business I would not recommend starting off with one of these types of businesses.  It’s difficult to build up enough traffic and enough paying customers to make it work.

8) Amazon.com 

If you have a good knowledge about a certain subject, and the ability to write and explain things clearly, why not try writing an ebook?  Through Amazon.com you can convert it to kindle format and sell it through the Amazon website. I’ve never tried this myself, but I have a friend who’s doing it and he makes around $1000 a month just from one small book he wrote.  Not bad for the few weeks work it took him to write it!

If you’re interested in learning more about creating websites, making them convert visitors to buyers, and driving traffic to them through search engines, then try my “complete guide to making money online” course.

Welcome to Netgooroo.

If you are looking at creating an online business for the first time, or even if you are experienced with website design and marketing, this site will provide you with lots of great information.

If you are new to this business – I highly suggest you try my “Complete Guide to creating an online business”  It will provide you with a very solid foundation of knowledge in almost every aspect of online businesses.  If you’re sick of wading through forums and blogs and learning things haphazardly – then this course is for you!

If you’re a veteran webmaster – check out my blogs for tips and tricks and answers to many common problems in the webmaster world.

Many of you may have heard of a phenomenon called the Google dance. The Google dance is when your website starts jumping around wildly in the rankings.  One day it might be at position 5 for a certain keyword, and the next day it might not even be in the rankings, or might be right down at position 350!

This can be a very stressful time for people new to SEO, as they usually suspect that they’ve done something wrong.  This, however, is not always the case. The Google dance often happens with new websites, and can also happen with old websites when you start on a heavy link building campaign.

Traditionally the Google dance was attributed to differences between Google’s servers, but these days that is no longer the case. It seems to be a time of instability when Google is trying to work out where to place your site, and may even be a purposeful affect of the algorithm to dissuade those who are using dodgy link building tactics or have spammy sites.

I’ve found the Google dance happens much more frequently with new sites, and also when targeting keywords with very high traffic. It may be Google’s way of “testing” a site before allowing it to the top of a high traffic keyword.

Whatever the cause, here are my tips for avoiding the Google dance, getting out of it, or at least limiting its duration:

- Make sure you have good quality, original content.  A few thousand words at least of good quality, original content should keep Google happy. If you’re in the Google dance you can try adding more good quality content to your site.

- Make sure there is no duplicate content on your site – this is especially possible if you’re using a blog like wordpress.  Blogs automatically create duplicate content by placing the same post on the homepage, on its own page, in categories, archives, tags and many other places.

- Keep building good quality links.  Good quality links are links on high PR pages with few outbound links (OBLs).  The links should preferably be embedded in text which is related to the link anchor eg. if the link is “computer parts” it should be in an article about computer parts.

- Diversify your link profile.  If you’re targeting computer parts, use other keywords as well such as parts for computers, hard drives, RAM, components, etc.

- Don’t try to aim for really high traffic keywords to start with.  Go for a few keywords with less traffic, and build up from there.  The dance seems to happen more frequently when you start off by targeting very high traffic keywords.

- Don’t use spammy links. Cheap links can often do more harm than good for your site. Try to get high quality links only.

- Don’t stress: if you do the above, your site should come out of the Google dance from anywhere between a few days to a few weeks, and you might even have a better position than you did before!

For more information on any of the above, please try my totally FREE course on creating an online business!

WordPress is the CMS of choice for many websites these days.  It can be set up in minutes, and configured as a blog or as a normal website. It’s incredibly simple and easy to use, even for people with no technical experience, and it looks nice!  Not only that, but there are thousands of themes and plugins available to change the way it looks and add functionality.

Here is a list of all my favourite WordPress plugins:

Akismet: If you are writing a blog on your website and allowing people to comment on it, Akismet will filter out almost all of the spam comments.

All in one SEO: This is a great plugin for easy Search Engine Optimisation.  It allows you to easily add SEO metadata to your page, and configure things like all important page titles to make your site search engine friendly.  It also has a range of settings which allow you to do things like make the archives or categories “nofollow”, which will stop Google penalising you for duplicate content.

Woocommerce: If you’re thinking of creating a shopping cart, woocommerce would have to be one of the best options. It’s a full shopping cart, with easily configurable and customizable payment gateways, inventory monitoring, shipping calculators, and pretty much everything else you’d expect from a shopping cart.  There are lots of great themes for it, and best of all it’s FREE!

Wishlist Member: If you’re creating a membership site, it’s hard to beat wishlist member.  This plugin transforms your wordpress site into a membership site, allowing you to easily set different levels of membership, protect some pages and leave others open to the public, and pretty much anything else you’d want to do with a membership site.

Google XML sitemaps: This little plugin will create an XML sitemap for you.  Google loves these, as it allows their robots to easily crawl your website.

S3 Video: If you want to put videos on your website using Amazon S3, then this plugin is indispensable.  S3 is a much better option for putting videos on your website, as there are no youtube ads displayed (which might potentially lose you traffic), and the quality and reliability is better.  It’s easy to configure this plugin but one problem I found with it is that it always wants to put the video at the top of the page if you use the shortcode (found by clicking on the video you want in the S3 video menu).  To get around this, I chose the “embed” code, and pasted that directly into my HTML at the point I wanted the video to appear: voila – problem solved.  To see how it works have a look at my course (the first section is free and contains a number of videos).

Commentluv: This automatically inserts a link to someone’s most recent blog post when they post a comment on yours.  It’s a great way to encourage comments and get more traffic to your site.

TinyMCE advanced: This greatly enhances the WYSIWYG editor in wordpress posts and pages, enabling more control over your text.

If anyone can think of any others, put them in the comments below!