Buying a home based franchise opportunity business as a way of starting a new business is seen as a lower risk alternative to starting from scratch on your own.

As with any business it is important to properly evaluate the opportunity before jumping in. With an existing franchise, you will be better placed to ensure the market and the business model is sound before starting your new venture.

If franchising is a path you would like to go down, here are some tips to help ensure your success.

• Look for BFA accredited franchises. See the International Franchise Association  website . Membership isn’t a guarantee of success but at least you know you are associating yourself with an organisation who has met reasonable  business and ethical standards.
• Smaller less proven franchises can be very profitable and a bit cheaper but will have a higher potential risk. Larger more established franchises tend to be more expensive to offset the reduced risk. If you already well understand the market you are thinking of getting into then you can lower your overall risk
• Always visit the Franchisor’s headquarters, talk to their staff and get a feel of what it would be like to work with them. If there is an option of a trial period and you can afford the trial conditions always take advantage of the opportunity.
• Be sure the Franchisor runs you through a vetting process. A sign of potential looming disaster is a franchisor whose only interest is ensuring you have enough money to find the setup fee.
• Get a list of all the franchise outlets currently in operation and interview a random selection. Don’t be guided on who to interview by the Franchisor, you need to make the call. A good operator will let you speak to any of their operating franchises. In your interview look for the franchisees perception of the strengths and weaknesses of the operation.
• Be aware of potential competition. Unless your product is unique and protected by patent, then at any time a competitor could open up business right next door to you. This is especially so for products which are new to the market. For older more established products the chance is less if there is already a reasonable amount of competition in your area. How would you business survive if someone opened next door and turn-over halved.
• A good franchise will be offering some sort of unique product or service. Get a feel for how easy it would be for a competitor to duplicate your proposed offering.
• Even if you are a financial wiz, get someone independent to review the financial projections. This is because everyone looses a bit of objectivity when looking to buy a business. A fresh set of eyes will pick up on items you may have met and will not be scared to challenge you on any obvious weaknesses in the financial projections.
• Ensure the proposed product has a good profit margin. Not only will you need to feed yourself but most likely you will need to pay the franchisor a percentage of the turnover too.
• To stay in business and remain competitive the Franchisor needs to be continuously innovating, finding new products to sell and looking for smarter, cheaper ways of running the existing operation. Ask the franchisor what strategy they have to innovate within the franchise.
• Be careful of operations that are totally dependant upon one person, most likely the founder. How would the franchise as a whole operate if any one of the franchisor’s team left the business? If the franchise as a whole was sold, is it likely the business as a whole would continue to operate effectively? The business must be resilient to change within the management structure. This usually comes back to how systemised the franchise is.
• Think also about how well the franchise (if buying a new territory) will work in your area. It may have well been a success up country where the socio-economic mix is different but it is important to understand why it has been successful and satisfy yourself that it will suit your proposed are also.
• Consider how well the business will survive in different economic conditions. How would it fair in a recession, would people still buy its products or services? When starting out always look for something which is recession resistant. It won’t be as exciting or glamorous but at least you will still eat if the economy turns down for an extended period.
• Most franchises establish a promotional fund where a percentage of the turnover is used to promote the product in your area. Be very clear on how much say you have in how this money is spent. Over time you will have a very good idea of the best use of this fund and will want to have a good say in its use.
• Don’t ignore the chemistry between yourself and the franchisor. If you take this opportunity you will be working closely with your franchisor over an extended period of time. You must operate off similar principles to them or every decision into the future will be fraught with difficulty because of the variance of approaches.
• Lastly, don’t pick a business which just appeals from a financial perspective. Look for a business that you are genuinely interested in. Something which is or can become your passion. Its your love or not of the business which will be picked up by your customers – they will keep coming back to someone who constantly provides great service, and to do that day in, day out you just have to love what you do!

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

This post is about how to get a low risk, quick setup home based business.

One of the most common methods of starting an online business is to build something up from scratch.

You find a niche, do some research then build a site, add affiliate links and that’s the easy stuff.

Now comes the hard part. Hours and hours of SEO, tweaking your pages, finding suitable link partners, testing different advertising options etc etc.

When you start you generally spend most of your spare time doing it all yourself – to keep costs down.

Pay per click can bring good results but it takes quite a bit of work to build a series of campaigns which make good money. Lots of trial and error and usually a few dollars invested to learn how to make it all work well for your market.

Usually there is a good period of time – often a year, before a reasonable revenue stream is achieved.

Don’t get me wrong, my first site (this one) was built this way. It is very satisfying once the results start to kick in but in reality its not a model that gets you there quickly.

And guess what if you pick a niche that isn’t profitable you will do all that work for nothing.

So there is another way of building a decent income stream online which brings much more reliable results and get’s them almost instantly.

What I’m referring to is buying an existing site. Yes it would appear to be  “expensive” as most premium sites sell for 3 -4 times net profit.

However the upside is that you are buying something with a track record for success. All the development work has been done.

You know what your profits will be, because the seller will disclose their profitabiltiy as part of the sale

You know where to market the site again because it will be disclosed.

What most people don’t realize is that these expensive sites are actually quite cheap once you take into account the value of your time which would go into developing a site from scratch and the time which goes into all the sites you might develop which turn out not to be profitable.

The websites I’m referring to in this article aren’t those for sale in forums. Those listed in forums are at the lower end of the scale. You certainly can pick up bargains there but you generally will get what you pay for.

The sorts of sites to look for are like those listed at Website Properties. You will see sites there which are listed from $50,000 to $1.5M and while the price is high so too is the quality of earnings.

If you do decide to look at this seriously, its also worth checking out The resource Center for Buying an Online Business which along with their book which is available for purchase also has some useful articles on the subject of buying an online business.

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Nicole from Business.gov wrote to tell me about the US Government Business Resources they have on their site. If you are based in the US, and have your own business, this is a site worth bookmarking.

Business.gov is a site designed to help businesses save time and money by providing a portal to business laws, government regulations, forms and agency contacts.

The site has the backing over 21 Government Agencies and is managed by the US Small Business Administration.

On the site you will find small business guides, state & local guides, a business search engine, a License + Permit finder, Government Agency Contacts along with Government forms and Faqs.

They have also created The Business.gov Toolkit which a “gadget” that you can place on your website or iGoogle homepage, giving access to many online tools and resources to help you run your small business.

With the toolkit you can:

• Search for information, forms, and contacts from federal, state and local governments
• Find topics of current interest to the United States small business community
• Get a listing of licenses and permits that apply to your business
• Watch videos featuring expert advice from successful entrepreneurs and small business owners

I’ve placed a copy below so you can see it in action. The Gadget can be downloaded or added to your iGoogle page by going here or by clicking the Google icon under the gadget.

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Theres been a lot written about dofollow blogs. This post is about dofollow forums. That is forums which don’t have nofollow in their signature links.

I saw an interesting post at Digital Point today about dofollow forums which provided inspiration for this post.

Making posts in forums is a good way of promoting a site.

Most forums allow you to post links in your signature (a little box after every one of your posts, where you can put a message of your choosing). Usually people put links back to their site so if readers are interested they can easily check out the writers other material.

Some forums have quite good page rank, so when you participate in the forums you not only get a little bit of free advertising but also a little page rank.

The usual rules apply. Don’t spam – make a relevant, on topic post that genuinely adds value to the discussion.

If you are looking for a few forums to become active in here are are a few suggestions:

• Digitalpoint Forums
• v7n Forums
• SitePoint Forums
• Harmony-Central Forums
• Search Engine Round Table
• Submit Express Forums
• Start Ups
• Comic Book Resources Forums
• Web Design Forum
• Acorn Domain Name Forums
• Book and Reader Forums
• Ableton Forums
• 6Pins
• IQ69
• Adobe Forums
• Adobe RSS Feed Submittal (This may be hand reviewed – But if your blog talks about Adobe products, you can get excellent exposure)
• MSDN Forums
• MySQL Forums
• AMD Support Forums
• Intel Software Network Forums
• CNET Forums
• Payment Processing Forums
• Directory Junction Forums

This list is taken directly from the DP topic and a few other sources I found while checking the forums out.
Here are the links to original posts:

• http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=644815
• http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=672932
• 7 high PR do follow forums

Let me know if you find any more and I’ll add them to the list.

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve been told that video websites can be a good money earner. After finding a post on the topic in the Digital Point forums that was such good value I decided to reprint the whole post here.

The post is rather long and now old, but contains some excellent information.

Kudos to Mark Cook from Digerati Marketing for publishing such an excellent reference.

Now here is the post …………………

An Introduction to Video Websites
There’s a lot of them about, a lot. Apart from the old-timers like ebaumsworld, Google’s acquisition of YouTube has really seen them starting to eat up this market. The great thing is, that doesn’t matter, videos are a disposal media – people look at them once, show their mates and then it’s old news. You’re only as good as your last video! What we’re going to look at doing here is setting up a video website with minimal cost & time and maximising our profit.

Now, I’m not claiming this will make you a millionaire, but you can earn around £500 ($1000 to our American friends) per month without too much trouble. So it’s well worth it for the day or two it will take to set up!

Step #1: Monetization Strategy
Okay, for this site we are going to make our bucks from a couple of different sources. Our main income will be made from Google Adsense. If you haven’t got yourself a Google Adsense Publisher account, click the big button below and sign up. Adsense will display contextual adverts which you can neatly blend in with the design of your website, to make them non-intrusive, yet a natural click away. For this website we are aiming at generating a 25% click-through rate while staying well inside the Adsense Terms Of Service.

An important note: I’m going to give you some tips on optimising your Adsense placement and layout later, if you want to take the optimisation further, you may be pushing the limit on what Google does and doesn’t allow. The Adsense team can be merciless at times if they think you are breaking their ToS, which can be quite “grey” at times. So, stick to the guidelines and you’ll be fine, cross the line at your own risk!

Step #2: Setting up the website with Wordpress
Yay for Wordpress and its many uses! Wordpress gives you an off the shelf platform for out video blog (vlog). It allows comments, pings, trackbacks, easy archiving, it’s SEO friendly and has loads of plugins. For this kind of mission, it’s definitely the number one choice.

There are two ways you can go about getting Wordpress up and running:

1) You can go to wordpress.com and sign up for a wordpress account, they will provide you with a hosted blog such as myvideoblog.wordpress.com

or

2) You can go wordpress.org and download Wordpress and install it on your server. This is really the preferred option as it will give you the power to use some neat features in the future, which will smooth out the money making process! If you haven’t got web hosting, I use Site5 and they’ve always been good to me and are fairly priced.

Once you’ve uploaded Wordpress to your server, follow the installation guide (it’s pretty simple) to get your Wordpress installation and database up and running.

Step #3: Choosing a domain name
Probably the hardest part of building any website is finding a domain name! Don’t worry too much about getting keywords in there, organic SEO isn’t how we’ll be doing the bulk of our promotion, try and focus on getting something short, snappy and memorable. (That means no hyphens!). If you can get something with a keyword or two (funny, video, comedy, humour – reach for your thesaurus) all the better, but as I say – don’t sacrifice the name for it. Once that’s sorted, point it at your server so it will have resolved by the time you’re ready to launch.

Step #4: Plugins Galore
There are some great plugins for Wordpress that will save you a hell of a lot of time and coding. I’ve experimented with quite a few and whittled the list down to some essentials.

Viper’s Video Quicktags – This plugin will save you having to rip out all the embed code from videos on major sites like YouTube, all you need to do is paste in the video ID and this plugin will do all the rest of the code & alignment for you. It’s essential to make adding videos as quick as possible.

WP-Email – This plugin adds an “E-mail This To A Friend” option at the bottom of every post (which will be your videos). I’ve been using these for a while and although you don’t get loads of people use them, personally recommendation is the best kind of marketing your website could hope for.

WP-PostRatings – This will add the “rate this video” 0-5 stars function at the bottom of each post. It’s a nice addon to get people to try and interact with your site if the can’t be bothered to post comments. Interaction is good – it’s the first step in relation building with your visitors and ultimately trying to get them to come back.

Sociable – Adds a mini-bar of just about every popular social bookmarking site worth mentioning at the bottom of each post. Digg, Reddit, Bloglines, they’re all there. Optimisation Tip: From experimenting, I found it is best not just to select all the social sites going, choose a maximum of 5 major ones, then rotate to see what is most successful. Having a line of 20 social bookmarking icons looks a bit confusing and seems to ultimately put people off using them.

StumbleUpon It! – StumbleUpon is a really great way to promote sites with entertainment and disposable content. This plugin gives you a “stumble it” button at the bottom of each post, which will play a part in our future marketing strategy.

Did You Pass Math? – Did you? This is just a basic anti-spam measure that puts one of those sums before you’re allowed to comment. Spam is a major problem, so I’d recommend this one, just to save you some time.

Akismet – This should be present in your default Wordpress installation, you require a Wordpress API key – but this little gem has stopped more spam than anything else I’ve ever tried.

Step #5: Get Feedburnt
Okay, with further promotion in mind it’s time to sign up to Feedburner. RSS is going to be one of the main ways we keep in touch with our readers, letting them know we’ve put more videos on our site and Feedburner offers a load of other ways to let people subscribe to your content.

Step #6: Theme Design
There are loads of great Wordpress themes at themes.wordpress.net. Have a good look through them until you find something you like. I would generally recommend going for something fairly simplistic and neat with an either 2 or 3 column design. Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, you could always design your own!

Once you’ve got your theme and uploaded it, I’d suggest tweaking some of the graphics to make it your own. Get your branding up there, design a logo and base your site around the domain name. This is why we wanted something easy to remember and relevant earlier, it’s no good calling your site “Video Hustler” then having www.my-funny-internet-videos.cc and hoping people will remember it.

Some Wordpress essentials
There are a couple of other tweaks you can do in Wordpress to make your job easier.

1) Add a few categories, I used “Funny Videos”, “Extreme Videos” and “Sexy Videos” just so I could tag my content as I add it.

2) Use custom permalinks! This will make your URLs easier to remember and will help various bots crawl your site. To do this go to the “Options” menu, then “Permalinks” and at the bottom check the “custom” radio button and put /%postname%/ in the field.

3) Change page titles.

What we want to do is to swap the position of “Post Title” with “Blog Name”. This is because:

* Search engines uses your Page Title as the linking text in its search engine results page (SERP).
* The search keywords are bolded for page titles in search engines
* It makes it easier for search engine users to know right away if what they are looking for is correct

Now, this will involve some editing to your template files, which is normally called “header.php”. Find this:

and replace with:

And you’re done!

I’m not going to tell you how to design your layout pixel by pixel, because one of the keys with maximising your profit is experimentation. Here are some guidelines:

Adsense Placement & Optimisation
This is how you’re going to make your money, so it’s pretty important! On your main index page you want to have an Adsense content unit at the very top, below your site header, but above the first video. This for me, is by far the highest click though, achieving around 30-40%, with the right keywords later on we can marry these adverts up with your content beautifully.

In your Adsense control console, under Adsense for content, go into your “Ad Units”. These will get you paid after 1 click, whereas link units require a click to bring you to a results page, then a click on the results to get paid. So select link unit and leave “text only” (default) selected. There is 468×60 pixel size which fits perfectly above your standard Google or YouTube Video.

You second biggest earner will be the ad unit which will create a gap between the first video and the rest of the videos on the site. Your first video will obviously be visible above the scroll, but being an average 10-30 second long funny clip, people will never be able to resist at least looking at the other videos on your front page. You must exploit this human curiosity! The 336×280px “large rectangle” unit fits the bill perfectly. Again it will fit in nicely below your video and will give a nice chunk of adverts. This ad unit must only be displayed below the first video as there are limits on the amount of ad units you are allowed on 1 page. You will however, want this ad unit again on the “single post” page. So, if somebody links directly to one of your videos, you still have max Adsense coverage.

I would recommend showing the first 5 videos on the first page. Having less, will reduce the chances of people looking at anything but the first video on your site and will effectively reduce the page size – minimising advert space. Having a lots of videos will distract people from using other parts of your site navigation (well, by this I mean will keep people too amused to click on your ads!). It’s a fine line between wetting their appetite but then keeping them hungry for more.

It’s also worth having a vertical unit (skyscraper) near your navigation. You want both of these units clearly visible without scrolling down, so you’ve got the top of the page and the central part covered in lovely adverts, which is where people’s mousey clicks tend to go!

It is important to blend your Adsense into your site and there are two schools of thought on this. The default “blue” hyperlinks on websites will get the most clicks, always. This colour has been drilled into our head since the dawn of the www and your brain just says “click”, so if any of your other links on your site use this colour, you will need to use this colour for your Adsense titles. I however, think this colour is ugly, so I refrained from using it anywhere on my site at all. If you follow this approach as well, then you simply want to make your Adsense units the same colour as your standard hyperlinks. If you’re using Firefox there is a great Colour Picker addon, which gives you the hex code for any colour, live on a web page. Since you’re allowed a link unit on the page as well, I tend to put one of these in the footer, just because it looks okay and it does earn a few pennies every now and again.

Beating Adsense Smart Pricing
“Smart Pricing” is Google’s way of trying to keep its advertisers happy by lowering the cost of junk traffic. Unfortunately, they do this at your expense. Having poor advertisers on your site, will lead to you users clicking the adverts, then leaving the horrible site they land on almost instantly. When people do this, Google will think you’re sending out junky traffic, when actually it’s the advertiser’s site that is at fault. This will lead to the money you get per click, going down.

Fortunately, Google offer a “competitive ad filter”, which allows you to block certain advertisers from showing ads on your site. Login to your Google Adsense account and go to “Adsense Setup” and you’ll see a “Competitive Ad Filter” tab. Click this and you’ll be given a box of URLs to block.

Copy & paste this list into your competitive ad filter and this should help you keep a strong amount per click.

Google Coop
Google Coop is a custom search engine (CSE) which basically allows you to click a few buttons and make a custom search engine. The great thing is, you can tie this in with your current Adsense account and it will pay out when somebody clicks on a sponsored result from your custom search engine. So, rather than leave in the standard Wordpress search, you might as well make some money from it!

Find the bit of code in your theme that shows the default Wordpress search box and comment it out. Create a Google Coop account and you will be presented with if you would like your search engine to search the entire web, with preference to selected sites, or simply search specific sites. Choose the option to select specific sites and just add your own URL. Don’t forget to enter your Adsense Publisher ID!. Google will then generate a chunk of code for you, which you can paste in place of your current Wordpress search. Voila! Monetized search! My search box generates around an extra 30% of my site revenue.

Get Feedburner on there
Login to your Feedburner account and get it to give you the code for an e-mail subscribe box. I’ve found I get more e-mail subscribers than RSS readers. I believe this is because RSS is really only embraced by the more “web savvy” user and they will be fully capable of finding videos on Digg, YouTube, Google and are more likely to be aware of the bigger sites. So for your regular Joe Blogs (heh), e-mail a nice, easy to understand way to get them to sign up to updates. If you can squeeze your Feedburner RSS subscribe button in above the scroll, all the better – but I have found people that want an RSS feed will find it.

Feedburner also offer “chicklets” which is a little button that shows the world how many subscribed readers you have. Generally, I’d advise not to install this until you have 100 or so readers, there’s no point showing people how unpopular your site is to begin with! Leave it for bragging rights later. It is quite possible to achieve 500-1000 readers within 6-12 months.

That’s most of the design info covered.

Step #7: Sourcing and adding video content to your website

Okay, so how do we go about getting videos onto your site? Well there’s a quick and profitable way and a longer but more profitable away.

The quick and profitable way
I don’t recommend this method to begin with, even though it’s quicker, this is only something you should be doing after your site is established, or if you are very short on time.

Go to digg.com/videos and see what other people find funny. Follow the link through to the video site, grab the video ID and pop it in a post.

When you are post a video, make sure every 2-3 videos you have the words “funny” and/or “video” in the post title. Wordpress uses header tags for these titles and it will help make your Adsense adverts more relevant. Below the video, type a couple of lines explaining the video (without giving too much away!). Be as funny/sarcastic as you like, but keep it short and interesting – and write your own descriptions!

The longer but more profitable way
Okay, this takes a bit more work, but will really, really help you promote your site. One neat thing about Google Video is that they allow you to download the videos. So, go have a search around Google Video and download 20-30 videos that you think are funny. Download them in “PSP” format which will give you a .mp4 format file.

If you have some decent video editing software that can handle mp4 files you can skip this step:

If you’re stuck using Windows Movie Editor you’ll have to convert the file before you can edit it. Now, if you can find a free program, let me know. I’ve been using Riverpast Video Cleaner, which will convert the mp4 files to avi without any real quality loss. It’s $30 but it will be your only expense in this operation. Riverpast will be able to convert all your videos in batch, so go make yourself a cuppa.

Once you’ve got your video in .avi format, create yourself a bitmap image with your site logo and site URL on it. Use your video editing software to show your logo for 5 seconds at the beginning and end of your video, so it’s all branded to you now!

Get your branded videos out there!
Once you’ve got branded videos, you’re really onto a winner. I pull in around 500-800 visitors per day from YouTube alone. Google have a batch video uploader, so your first port of all is to re-upload your newly edited videos onto Google Video.

Once they are uploaded you can add the video information. Generally in the title I again try and get the words “funny video”, “extreme video” or similar in. These help pick up a bunch of generic searches. I’ve found the description doesn’t make a huge difference to whether the video is viewed, as long as the title is good. If you’re uploading to Google, using the batch uploader there is a separate field to link to your website, which becomes an active link, so you may as well type a description. Keep it short and snappy to try and get as many views as possible. For tags, I use a set of standard: funny, video, humour, humor, comedy, laugh, lol, cool, extreme, stupid, insane, accident – then add a couple of video specific keywords on the end.

Repeat this process with YouTube. The only difference with YouTube is that there is no separate field for your own site URL. If you just pop your URL into the description, this will automatically become a clickable link. YouTube is a bit more of a pain because you can only upload 1 video at a time, but you can always do other stuff at the same time! The sheer amount of traffic that YouTube gets makes it worthwhile doing this.

Once you have a “base” of around 30 videos, you don’t need to keep finding new ones. You just create a new YouTube account under a hotmail address every week or so, since you’re a new user and uploading new content, your videos will more often or not appear on the front page briefly which will get you spurts of traffic.

Using your imagination, there are loads of places that accept video uploads that you can use. MySpace anyone? MySpace Video is taking off big-time at the moment, so if you have access to some large MySpace accounts, this can be a great way to get traffic. One other technique is taking a screenshot of your video at 00:00 then posting this picture on a MySpace profile or bulletin, so it looks like an embedded video, but will take people through to your site with the video on. Hey, that’s pretty scrappy – but it works. Make sure you use the border=”0″ attribute on such images so you don’t get a blue border around them!

Step #8: Kick Starting Promotion
Following this recipe so far, you’ll probably make $5-$10 per day. If you want to get up to the $40 per day mark to make your $1,000 a month, you’ll need to give your site a kick up the backside. Here’s how:

Go to www.stumbleupon.com and register yourself with an account and install their browser toolbar.

Once you’re all ready to rock with StumbleUpon, make your way over to www.stumblexchange.com. Stumblexchange is a system where you sign up, stumble a whole list of other people’s sites, then in return they stumble you back. StumbleUpon is fairly simple – the more stumbles your site gets, the more traffic they send you. StumbleUpon has a ton of users and this step will get you 200 more uniques a day for months to come. So login, register your account details and stumble everyone’s site. (If your so inclined, you could script this). Well done, you just added another $200 a month onto your earnings! There’s also a diggxchange and deliciousxchange in this network, however I haven’t experimented with them to comment on this.

Get some links
Everybody loves links, especially Google. There’s a massive list at RSSTop55 of directories and blog aggregators. I would start with these:

*** Yahoo
*** Open Directory
*** Globe of Blogs
*** Blogarama
*** Blog Universe
*** Feed Shark

Next Steps
Now you’ve got some readers and some regular traffic, you can sign up for a CPA advertiser.

Above all, experiment, experiment, experiment! Let me know how you get on!

Here is the link to the original post: A Guide To Making Money With A Video Blog

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

A while ago I wrote a few post about the dofollow movement – Comments DoFollow

At that time I removed the “no-follow” tag from comments on this blog as a way of saying a small thank-you to reader who took the time to comment. Feedback is always welcome and appreciated.

While this has lead to a little comment spam, the majority of comments are on topic and relevant. So I have been prepared to remain with status quo.

In keeping with the principles of the DoFollow movement I like to keep up with what other blogs are writing in the home business niche and make a contribution if appropriate.

There are over 200 blogs to cover, so just loading them into an RSS reader isn’t that useful.

What I eventually did was create a Google Custom Search Engine which allows me to quickly search all the DoFollow blogs by keyword. This very quickly throws up posts relevant to a topic of interest and displays them in order of importance.

As a service to readers I’ve embedded the search engine into this post. To use it simply enter the keywords of interest and press search. Google does the rest.

As a feed to the search engine I have imported the list from Courtenay Tuttle’s Do Follow List. If you know of blogs who should be added or alternatively have put Nofollow back on their comments please leave feedback below & I’ll update the search engine accordingly.

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Content Spooling dot net offers a service which super charges your article marketing – but more on that in a moment.

Article marketing is still one of the most effective methods of site promotion. Cynthia Minnaar mentioned it as one of her key strategies in this post

When executed correctly it generates many backlinks on a variety of on topic sites, delivering increasing traffic and link juice to the target site.

Chris Compton from ContentSpooling.net has released a free report which offers tips to help you get the most from article marketing.

The report covers:

• Key mistakes folks make when Article Marketing
• How to write your article
• Recommended keyword densities
• How to make your article stand out from others in article directories
• An easy to follow article marketing plan

Chris is also the owner of the Chamber of Online Marketing Intelligence where every month he shares his secrets to online marketing with his membership.

Having reviewed the material provided in the Chamber, I can report that Chris provides indepth material with step by step instructions to assist with the marketing of any product.

This material isn’t just theory, its the same techniques Chris has used to market his own online ventures.

If you’d like to know more, Chris provides further information with his free report.

Click here to get the free Article Marketing Report

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Its essential for every internet home business to keep finding ways of getting free blog traffic by adding more links and to increasing the distribution of RSS feeds.

One way to do this is to submit your blog to RSS directories. There is nothing new in this advice but most people don’t do it because either it takes far too long or they aren’t prepared to pay others to do the job.

The job of completing the RSS directory submissions is made much simpler by installing a free Firefox Add-on called Submitemnow.

This Add-on makes the job almost painless, by stepping you through a database of RSS directories and for each one, automatically filling in the submission form. All you need to do is fill in the gaps (if any), hit the submit button, then hit “next url” in your browser to go to the next directory in the database.

The database comes with approximately 100 directories. A few of them don’t exist any more and a few weren’t taking submissions. Given the price of the Add-on and the ease of use this is a relatively minor downside.

Using the Add-on is very simple:

• First download and install
• Second “Click Projects” then “New”
• Fill out the details for your blog – these are used to autofill the subscription forms on each directory
• Then hit “next url”. This brings up your first submission.
• Complete the form for the first submission and submit it.
• Then hit “next url”
• Repeat

When encountering a site which doesn’t exist, or has stopped accepting submissions, click the “database” tab, mark that site as skipped then move on. Same goes for sites which charge a fee and you don’t want to submit to.

The database keeps a track of all sites including showing those already submitted and those yet to be done.

If you have multiple blogs you can save the current project and just open a new one. This allows the tracking of submissions for each.

After submitting this blog to all the directories in the Add-on it occurred to me that this may also increase RSS readership numbers, a key metric used by advertisers and blog rating sites.

Thanks to Affiliate Watcher.Com for the heads up.

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Picky Domains is a service I wish I had known about when I first wanted to pick domain name.

The concept is simple. You first send them $50 and information about the type of site, keywords etc. They then forward your notes to their contributors, who then suggest names for your site.

If you pick one of the selected names then they keep the $50. If not your $50 is refunded.

But wait theres more………

As a contributor, if your domain is selected by the client you pocket $25. If the domain isn’t selected by the client but Picky Domains think it has commercial appeal, they will register and sell it – giving you one third of the listed price.

If you have a talent for picking popular and memorable domain names then you could make some easy money. Joining as a contributor is free.

Even better, as a blogger, if you write a post about Picky Domains, you get one free use of their service :-)

Heres the link to their site.

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

How to get a free SEO website check.

Now and again its a good idea to check your site to make sure its not going to frighten off the search engines.

I use these tools once a month or so. I also use them when my traffic is dropping off and I don’t understand why, just to ensure its not an on-site or link-age issue.

Here’s the list:

Website Grader

This online checker looks at your page from a broader SEO perspective. It uses a combination of Google page rank, Web Structure, Domain Info, Heading Summary (<h> tags), Image Summary, Google Indexed Pages, Google crawl date, Inbound links, Technorati rating, del.icio.us bookmarks, readability level and search engine rankings for keywords.

From these it gives your site a rating out of 100.

In return for a free registration it will also compare your site to those of a few of your competitors.

A good all round first check.

Meta Tag Analyzer Tool

This little tool gives your web page the once over and highlights any problems in red. At the time of writing it checks the following:

• Analyze most common meta tags.
• Analyze keyword density from the page content.
• Analyze page load time from the page.
• Analyze size from the page.
• Analyze title meta tag relevancy to page content.
• Analyze description meta tag relevancy to page content.
• Analyze keywords meta tag relevancy to page content.
• Check for adult keywords in the description, keywords and title meta tag.
• Check for adult keywords in the webpage.
• Check robots.txt file if user agent is allowed to spider the page.
• Display meta tags returned from the web server.
• Display headers returned from the web server.
• Search for keywords on the page.
• Search for keywords in the anchor (URL) tags.
• Search for keywords in the images alt tag.

This script is also for sale, check the link for further details.

SEO For Firefox

A handy firefox plugin which can be used to check-out any web page. A quick way to find duplicate content problems by looking at the number of pages with supplemental listings. By double clicking the link it also shows more detail are affected. Plugin lists the following information:

Pulls useful market research data right from Google’s and Yahoo!’s search results.

• PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
• Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
• .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
• .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
• .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
• Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
• Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
• Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
• Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
• dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
• Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
• dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
• WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

Google Webmaster Tools

You need to sign-up for this one but well worth the effort. A host of stats showing how Google looks at your site. If your ranking is dropping quickly then more than likely you will find the answer in here.

While a sitemap is expected its not necessary and Google provides you with a free site analysis anyway.

See also:  Webpage  Optimization

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.