1. Forum.

   Forum is great for people looking to share their knowledge and share information on the stuffs they love the most and get feedback and opinion from other people sharing the same interest. In a forum, visitor can even provide high quality content by starting a post on a certain topic.

2. Blog.

   Blog is also one of the great way to stimulate visitor's participation. With the commenting feature available in almost every blog, not only visitors are able to share their piece of thought, they could also start off a new conversation altogether based on the blog post.

3. Mini Site.

   This type of site pops up a whole lot more lately. The most common usage are for sales pages and squeeze pages. Normally this type consists only of 2 to 3 web pages. The sales letter, a thank you page and affiliate page if applicable.

4. Web Store.

   Exactly as the type says, this type of page is an online store. The product type sold can be virtually anything. This type of sites are equipped with a shopping cart and a complete listing of their products.

5. Informational Site.

   This is the most common sites created. This type of site covers news website, corporate website, and all types of site that provide useful information for visitors.

6. Hybrid Site.

   Webmasters are now getting more adept in combining these types of sites together. Not only the combination helps with the search engines, but also provides wider variety of ways for them to interact with the site visitors. The most common scenario is an informational sites setting up a blog and evolved further by taking a forum into the mix. Bigger sites are combining all these types of sites for their growth.

What type of site will you be creating should you have the chance?

The Most Common Symptoms

1. Feeling as if you know only a fraction on your topic.
2. Constantly researching new lessons and information but never apply them.
3. Afraid that your work will be mocked after seeing all the better work out there.
4. Feeling lost with all the information
5. Do not know where and how to even start

How to Overcome Them

The first you have to do is to start focusing. It is true that there are too many things that you will need to do, but you have to be able to decide. Which one is your main target at the given moment, and focus on doing only that. For example, you decided to promote an item from clickbank; spend at least 1 week to solely focus on promoting it. Do not even try to promote any other things or look into any other opportunities, you will only get more input which will confuse you further.

The next best thing to do is to get yourself a mentor or enroll in a mentoring program which has a step-by-step approach to do just what you are trying to do. This action will not only boost your productivity but also your self-assurance that what you are doing is right.

Third and the best piece of advice that I receive from my friend was "Just do what you want to do. Do not think about what others might say, just do it the way you like it!!".

It is all about focus, guidance and self confident. Any better ways to overcome information overload? Fill me with your opinions in the comment section. Cheers

After a while, I only realized that it is IMPOSSIBLE to get anywhere without proper direction. I was basically following every famous person with no clear clue of what I was doing. I was trying my best not to get lost. Not only I was overloaded with information, all these infromation are not structured as well and there is no way I can make sense out of fractions of information that is available out there.

Then it dawned on me after three full months of trying to do worthless things. I have just realized that I have to focus on what I am doing to actually get somewhere. This is where MENTORING takes turn. Although I did not make money at that time, I was finally able to get TRAFFIC. You would know by now that traffic is vital to any websites survival.

That is the first time ever that I was willing to part away with my hard-earned money for membership site. Everything started to make sense after I have a mentor. Mentoring does not always have to be a conference call or 1-to-1 tutoring though, it could be as simple as an organized and focused materials that guides us step-by-step in trying to achieve what we want.

Do yourself a favour, get a mentor for yourself. Find the one with teachings suitable to your beliefs. Do not jump on 2 or 3 mentors with different believes and teachings, pick one and stick with em. Have fun studying folks!

Sometimes, you were given a long jumbled up URL as a referral link such as http://www.example.com/exa/example.php?theurl=dxg_32zxxd345; not only it is hard to remember, but it also reduces your chance of growing your customer base from word of mouth or offline advertising. Imagine if you look at an advertisement in your local newspaper, the business is online based and thus, they are dropping in this kind of URL. How many people do you think will spend their time actually typing this kind of link word-by-word? Most probably they will google it away instead.

How to Start Redirecting Links

There are three most common approaches that I use to redirect links.

1. Using META Redirect. By this method, you should create an HTML page that contains a meta refresh tag. The tag is written in this format <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=your URL">. For example, you wanted to redirect a request to http://www.example.com/about-us.php using the URL www.example.com/about.html.  What you need to do is create an about.html page and pu the content as  <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.example.com/about-us.php"> and upload it to the root of your site. Now, anytime there is a request for about.html, it will be redirected to about-us.php.
2. Using 301 redirect. If your web hosting is providing you with a cPanel control panel, you can easily do this by accessing "manage redirect" menu or anything similar.
3. Using 301 redirect through an .htaccess file. If your web hosting allows you to modify and use .htaccess file, you can easily redirect using an additional Redirect 301 <source> <destination> in your .htaccess file. Using the same example as META redirect, you can simply add the line "Redirect 301 /about.html http://www.example.com/about-us.php" to your .htaccess file and voila! you're done.
4. If you are using wordpress, use goCodes plugin. GoCodes plugin will redirect specific requests to your custom URL. You can download goCodes plugin from webmaster source website

Now start making your redirection beautiful! And this site obviously needs some clearing up as well =p

How does XML sitemap look like

A very basic XML sitemap that contains one URL will look something as follow:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>

Check out sitemaps.org for further details on all the available tags and how to implement them.

How to Generate Sitemaps Easily

Depending on the system and the hosting you are using, there are different ways to generate sitemap.

1. Create it yourself. This option is only good when you do not have a lot of pages in your site. But if you have more than 10 pages, I do not recommend creating the sitemaps yourself. It is a headache.
2. Use readily available sitemap generator. This is the better option, and moreover it is freely available, so why not?

Easy to Use Sitemap Generator

If you are using Wordpress, it is quite easy to get a sitemap. Just install the sitemap plug-in for wordpress and your sitemap will be generated and submitted automatically to search engines.

For others, use the tool provided by XML Sitemap. This is a very good tool that will crawl all the available location in your site and generates the corresponding sitemap. Remember to check the generated sitemap though, since there are some pages that you would not want google, yahoo or MSN to index.

What To Do With Generated Sitemap?

After you have a sitemap, it is time to submit it to the search engines so they can start crawling your site. See the procedure on submitting web pages to Google, Yahoo and MSN. Although there are more search engines out there, most probably you just need to submit your sitemap to the biggest search engines.

1. Does not even know where to start
2. Thinking that online business can make money overnight
3. Lack of dedication in personal time
4. Information overload especially when starting
5. Picking a very tight niche and failing

How to overcome them

Truth be told, all of us that jump into affiliate marketing without enough research beforehand are guaranteed to have encounter those pitfalls. After we open our eyes, then only we realized that these can be overcome in simple ways.

1. Does not even know where to start. This is quite easy, there are a lot of people and organization out there that offer courses and lessons on affiliate marketing. This blog is trying to help in elaborating the most common issues, so read up. And don't forget to contact me if there are any specific question that you want me to cover =D
2. Thinking that online business can make money overnight. Snap it, if you still think this way, big chance you will never earn money online. It is a lot better to just buy lotto, cross your fingers and pray. =D
3. Lack of dedication in personal time. Related to make money overnight believe. Without enough dedication, you will go nowhere at all. Although lesser time and dedication needed compared to brick and mortar business, you still need to give your affiliate marketing business enough time and resources to grow.
4. Information overload especially when starting. Get your hand on a comprehensive guide (my recommendation would be the Super Affiliate Handbook by Rosalind Gardner) or get a tutoring on affiliate marketing through any of the best affiliate marketing courses available (the best course that I find so far is Wealthy Affiliate University which I have reviewed here).
5. Picking a very tight niche and failing. This can be overcome by researching more using free keyword tools available such as google's keyword external tool or free keyword tool from wordtracker.

Share away your stumbling blocks as well on the comment section, I will try my best to include them in this post. Cheers

Here is the full list of resources offered in Wealthy Affiliate:

1. Free website builder.
2. Free hosting provided.
3. NicheQ - A service provided in Wealthy Affiliate which includes custom websites, Article PLR pack, email PLR pack, PLR guides, low competition keywords and more based on the niche you selected in NicheQ.
4. Comprehensive action plan to get your affiliate marketing business up and running without getting lost.
5. Friendly forum with helpful and informative members.
6. Free keyword research tool
7. Free article writer tool
8. Learning center with properly ranked materials for newbies to advanced marketer.
9. Many more to come

Check out the best training course available in the web at Wealthy Affiliate University and have fun.

1. Not enough time to write their own articles for SEO purpose
2. Hiring a freelance is expensive
3. Cheap freelance normally does not produce good enough quality articles or e-book.

Due to those reasons, people tend to look for PLR content that are readily available. With PLR content, writers and webmasters can twist these articles, e-books and other types of PLR contents to their liking. These tweaks could be re-writing the content, claim the PLR as their own by putting in their name as author and even sell these PLR content with their own pricing.

The downside of using Free PLR contents

Although the possibility seems endless, there are several downsides to Free PLR content. Since it is readily available, hundreds and thousands of people might be using the same article or e-book. In order to be distinct, you should rewrite these free PLR content before publishing. Re-writing a PLR content is actually 3 times easier than writing your own article from scratch since the layout and the topic has already been made available.

Where do I find good quality free PLR content?

The best one in the market is Sure Fire Wealth. They provide a lot of free PLR content with giveaway rights. Sure Fire Wealth provides silver and gold membership program for further benefits.

Silver program allows you to take full advantage of all the free membership advantages plus audio/video, e-books and software downloads with resell rights.

With the gold membership programs, access will be open to even better rights; including master resell rights, access to free and silver membership advantages, free 10 MB hosting account, and great selection of more professional PLR e-books, videos and audio.

For starters though, I strongly recommend you to check out their free lessons on PLR usage first and join their membership program. Get a FREE ONE YEAR SILVER MEMBERSHIP today in Sure Fire Wealth and make use of their Free PLR contents to your advantage.

Payment type consideration

Going on further; once you have found your target market, you would want to consider the payment method offered by the product (service) provider. For the payment method, you want to be quite particular on how you get paid (unless you are a great authority figure in your field whereby even a small commission will become really big through the sheer power of the number of people you refer. Even then, you would still be selective now, wouldn't you?). There are several types of payment possibility:

1. one time commission
2. residual income
3. growing residual income through MLM (Multi Level Marketing)

One time commission

A one time commission is the most common way of payment if your affiliate partner is selling a product or a one time service. You will be paid a certain percentage of their profit as commission. There are a lot of great product listed in affiliate networks out there. Or you can get an affiliate partner by going straight up to the product or service provider that you like.

Residual Income

To grow a great business, you have to try your best to get a lot of residual income whereby you will get paid over and over again depending on the product you sale. This type of payment normally occurs in membership program, whereby member of the program will pay the same amount over and over again to the content provider. You as the affiliate of this content (or service) provider will be paid over and over again as long as that particular member stays with that content provider.

Growing residual income

An even better option is to promote services that has a possibility giving you a growing residual income. Get your hand on a free MLM business opportunity out there whereby you will get people to join the service or content provider under your affiliate ID and further, when these people managed to get more people to join under their ID, you will get a part of their commission. Although the commission is not as big as the one directly under you, this network will grow when the third tier of recruit recruited more people. Thus, this will give you a stable source of income.

Be warned though, there are a lot of pyramid scheme out there that disguise themselves as MLM company. Compared to MLM, pyramid scheme operates with the same method as MLM, the only difference is that in pyramid scheme, they do not have anything at all to sell. Pyramid scheme based their income on amount paid by new joining members.

Did I miss out anything? Or is there anything that you want to know more? do leave me a comment and tell me what you think =D

The internet world has been swept by Web 2.0 storm. Blogs and blogging in general is one of the main contributor in the web 2.0. phenomena where social media are getting more attention. Blogging starts of only as a way to express oneself; call it an online diary if you like. After tweaking and exposures to the internet world though, blogging has shifted in direction. Nowadays, more and more blogs are going live as a way of self actualization in the internet world. People get more focused and blog in a specific direction, not as general as it originally was.

A free publishing method

Blogging could also be considered as a free publishing method. With blogs in hand, we are able to release contents without going through the hassle of contacting a publishing company, reviewers and all those traditional rushes that traditional publishing have. Even better, for bloggers, we are giving out information in the form of opinions and personal experiences which resulted in a more intimate relationship with readers.

Blogging also leverage social communication through the means of commenting. By commenting, bloggers and site owners get to know each other. And who knows, a joint venture might just sprung

Looking forward

Due to this leverage, more and more information can be attained through blogs. Be it through the original article that was written by the blog owner and even more resources from the comment section where visitor actually left their thought. In response to these high quality contents, people and companies are starting to advertise in blogs relevant to their field. This resulted in some people actually making huge amount of full-time income through blogging.

Some bloggers are really going big and become an authority figure in their respective areas, take for example Yaro Starak who gain his success through entrepreneurs-journey, Jeremy Schoemaker in his blog shoemoney, Brian Clark through copyblogger and Daren Rowse through ProBlogger. These people started off doing what they love and blog about it.

Starting Out to Blog

How do you start blogging? there are a lot of blogging platform out there. The most popular at the time of writing is blogger and WordPress. These blogging platform not only offer ease of setting up, they also offer free hosting to start with.

If you are really interested in becoming a professional blogger, join the blog mastermind program by Yaro Starak, there's a ton of great information and helps provided. If you want to know the quality of Yaro's material, feel free to download the blog profit blueprint here. It is free and available for public.

Hope you have fun if you plan on blogging