In this guide I’ll break down all the sources I’ve used to get my sites to where they are today, some of which get over 1 million people per month. First I’ll cover free traffic sources then paid ones.

Free Traffic Sources

Don’t confuse free with useless, because that’s not the case when it comes to getting free traffic. Most of the money I make online is from free traffic.

Forums / Message Boards

You might be thinking, hey it’s 2012 who in the hell still uses message boards anymore? From my experience millions of people still use them everyday, even with the emergence of Blogging and Social Media, message boards have stood the test of time and remains a great traffic source.

The way to get traffic from message boards is not to blast a bunch of messages across hundreds of forums, that’s a sure way to get your ass band. What you should do instead is pick 3 of the most popular forums available for your niche or topic and actively participate on those boards, many forums have different requirements to participate in their boards. When I just started forums were the only source of traffic I had before search engines started paying attention to my site, before word of mouth got out, before Twitter or Facebook became the giants they are today.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia and other sites like it have been my best kept secret to getting none stop traffic, I’m still getting traffic from links I posted years ago on Wikipedia, in fact my newest site Video Game Player, it has been receiving consistent traffic from Wikipedia 12 months straight from just one link. There is a science to marketing on Wikipedia, I’ve written a guide on how to do it correctly and get long lasting traffic.

StumbleUpon

I’ll be honest with you, I get allot of traffic from StumbleUpon but I’ve yet to figure out exactly how I’ve been doing it, all I know is users have been submitting my links to my sites and they’ve been doing very well. I’m in the process of working on a guide on how to get traffic from StumbleUpon, that will provide a more clear and precise way of getting traffic from the service. I’m currently doing tests, so stay tuned. For now my advise is submit all your links to StumbleUpon and get more followers, unlike most of the other sites like StumbleUpon that started out before the social media explosion StumbleUpon has become a service that users find very useful and it continues to grow. This isn’t something you should overlook.

Twitter

Twitter drives over 10,000 visitors per month to my sites and it continues to grow, it’s really a no-brainer that this service would drive traffic to your site, since pretty much everyone has a Twitter account for their website. I have quick little guide I wrote about getting traffic from Twitter, so check it out.

Facebook

The biggest of the biggest when it comes to getting traffic and keeping them coming back. Just to one of my websites (iHipHopMusic.com) I receive over 30,000 visitors per month. With the help of a Facebook fan page you can market to the users that “Like” your page over and over again, it’s literally like having social media mailing list. Checkout my guide on how to get 1,000 visitors per day from Facebook. Also I’ve been doing some really cool things with Facebook lately and I have a few tutorials coming up.

Yahoo Answers

This site along with it’s competitor AnswerBag.com and few others can be really resourceful, but it’s a hit or miss with these type of services because you have to answer the right questions within your niche, but the thing is you never know which answers will drive traffic, for more on getting traffic by answering questions, I have a definitive guide on how to get traffic from Yahoo Answers. It’s quite the guide.

One of the best ways to get traffic from these answer websites, is to ask the same questions you find on those answer sites on your own website and then answer them. They would then show up in the search engines when people search for the answers.

Mailling List

The last but definitely one of the most important things for getting long term traffic is having a mailing list, even though I have over 40,000 Facebook fans and and over 5,000 Twitter followers for my various sites, in reality that’s not my list. You never know what can happen your account, you could get banned for whatever reason, these sites can change their policies and terms of service at anytime and you could end up loosing that entire list.

That’s not the case if you have your own mailing list hosted by a email marketing service provider, you can contact this list as much as you’d like and send that traffic to wherever you want. Everyone of my major sites have a mailing list which I blast out a email to at least once a week.

This is the end gold, you should be using Message boards, Wikipedia, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo Answers and any other traffic to ultimately drive traffic to your site so they can sign up to your mailing list.

They don’t say “The money is in the list” for nothing.

I personally use Madmimi for my email marketing, it’s the most affordable and has allot of cool features, but I also highly recommend Aweber and GetResponse as well which are two of the biggest and oldest in the Email marketing industry. There is over 70 email marketing services to choose from, check out our other site AllEmailMarketing.com to see them all.

That about raps it up for how to get traffic to your website, everything I mentioned above is something you should be working on daily. You never stop trying to find new ways to get traffic to your site and when you find news ones, add it to your list of traffic sources you already have.

It’s a system and you need to work at it consistently.

Thanks  for reading, stay tuned for more.

….Chozen.

If  you run a website that receives a substantial amount of traffic then you’ve already experienced one of the worst things that can happen to a website, and that is it goes down and you don’t know about it.

You notice how most web hosts say 99% uptime? The reason why you don’t see 100% as often is because they simply can’t guarantee that. If your running dynamic CMS platforms like WordPres, Joomla and Drupal then you most certainly know those tools kick the shit out of a unprepared server. Even with the help of Cache technology and CDN support sites still go down, and the worst part about it is that you don’t know when it does.

Just 2 weeks ago one of my servers was down for an entire day, it was a Sunday so I wasn’t even online. It wasn’t until Monday morning that I found out about it from one of the regular visitors to my site. So for a whole day 3 of my sites were down and thus lost me a ton of money.

And it’s not like web hosting companies don’t offer website monitoring, they do but it’s not very good and if it’s a server issue then the notification tool that’s running on the server is down as well.

I wrote about this on Facebook and as soon as I posted it a ad showed up about a website monitoring service called Site24x7 (good job with the ad targeting Facebook).

Of course I immediately checked it out, and the service is straight forward, they monitor your website 24×7 in frequencies of minutes, hours or day the choice is yours. They go even further than that by offering monitoring services for Web Applications, DNS, Mail Server, WPA, Port, POP, SMTP, Ping and SSL Certificate. One of the best things about the service is that as soon as your site goes down, within a minute of the downtime you receive a text message to your mobile device letting you know.

Some screen shots of the back-end of the service below:

Site24x7 Detailed Page

Site24x7 Summary Report

Site24x7 Downtime Alert Configuration

If you’ve experienced downtime on your website more than 3 times then a service like Site24x7 is definitely worth a shot.

Check them out,  Site24x7.

We’ve covered how to start a website or blog and how to set them up and now it’s time to publish your content to the world, but not just publish it but publish it so that that it can get the most exposure. To do that, requires perfect and very precise website optimization. Don’t be scared of the words “website optimization” trust me, with WordPress things like SEO and optimization are child’s play.

Setting Up Category Pages

Remember that keyword list I told you to put together in Part 1 of this guide? Well now it’s time to turn those  keywords into pages, category pages to be exact. WordPress has a category function that allows you the place whatever content you are publishing into a category. These category pages will be accessible by visitors that come to your website, this helps with organizing your content not just for users but for the search engines as well.

Take a look at my blog iHipHopMusic.com and you’ll notice that in the sidebar there is the option to browse by topic, those topic links are category pages. These pages overtime will bring more traffic to your site.

Take a look below at some search results that some of the category pages on iHipHopMusic.com ranks for. These pages bring in thousands of visitors per month to the site. Now you can see the importance of doing the keyword research. In many cases the competition for these keywords are very minimum.

Publishing Content, Making A Post

Before category pages can be visible on the front end of your WordPress blog or website, you need to add content to them first. At this point your blog should be setup and ready to go, now it’s time to make your first post. Publishing a post is the easiest part of this whole thing, if you’ve ever used Microsoft Word or written a email then you will have no problem making a post using WordPress, the page you are looking at right now is a WordPress post.

Syndicating Your Content

RSS (Really Simple Syndication): You know even though I know what RSS is, to this day i still don’t have simple answer for when people ask me what it is, so I always point them to the Wikipedia description. The best way I can describe it is that it’s a type of news feed for your website that is dynamic and lets people know what’s the latest activity on your website, people usually keep track of your site’s activity by adding your RSS feed to their Feed reader. They’re thousands of different feed readers available online for people to use for free.

Feedburner: Most website publishing tools nowadays have RSS functionality built into it but they usually don’t have a way of tracking your RSS subscribers and readers, this is where a service like Feedburner comes in handy. Feedburner is a free service which Google acquired that allows you to track and manage your RSS subscribers. There is a 9 out of 10 chance that you’ve come across a site that uses Feedburner.

Email Marketing: This is a no brainer, if you don’t have a mailing list for your business then your not truly in business. If I was suppose to loose it all tomorrow and had a option of keeping one thing, that one thing would be my mailing list. With my mailing list I can get it all back, rebuild my business. Your website content needs to visible everywhere not just on your website, even with all the developments in Social Media, email marketing is still the number one and most effective way to keep in contact with your audience.

The best way to manage your mailing list is by using a Email Marketing service provider, over the years many email marketing services have emerged, so it’s virtually impossible to not be able to find a service that meets your specific needs.

A few of my different recommendations include Aweber, Get Response, Vertical Response and Stream Send.

By now you should have a fully functional website ready to go, and you should now be thinking of the type of content your going to be providing to your website. In part 4 of this guide I’ll cover ways to get traffic to your website.

Part 1: How To Start A Website Or Blog

Part 2: How To Setup A Blog Or Website Without Technical Skills

To learn more about WordPress, I’m writing a WordPress guide right after this guide is finish to cover everything a beginner needs to know about using WordPress.

So far you should have already chosen your niche, created your keyword list, and registered you domain name with GoDaddy.

Now it’s time get into setting up your website, so grab a drink, turn off all distractions and pay attention because we’re getting into the good stuff.

Web Hosting

Ah yes the ever pain in the ass topic of web hosting, ask any Internet entrepreneur that runs his own website what’s the one thing that will always be an issue when running a busy and successful website. It’s web hosting, the more popular your website becomes the more problems arrive, most popular websites run into at least one problem per month with their web host.

All web hosts are not created equally, and to minimize your site running into problems you have to start off with the right web hosting company. Here is one thing you should never do; don’t ever use a web host that only offers shared hosting.

A shared web hosting service refers to a web hosting service where many websites reside on one web server connected to the Internet. Each site “sits” on it’s own partition, or section/place on the server, to keep it separate from other sites. With this type of hosting you are at the mercy of many other sites, so if another site has problems it could affect your site and vice versa. The only way to solve this problem is upgrade to Virtual Hosting or Dedicated Hosting. The problem with upgrading from a web hosting company that only offers shared hosting only is that you will have to transfer your site to another web host. A list problems can and most likely will arrive when transferring a website to another host, so why bother with going through those problems.

Instead of this method, you should go with a web hosting company that offers multiple web hosting services. this way whenever your site has surpassed the limitations of shared hosting, then you can simply upgrade your site to a more powerful server without having to move your site to another web host.

The web hosting service I use to host many of my more popular blogs and websites is HostGator, they offer everything from shared hosting to virtual and dedicated web hosting. These guys are great, no hidden fees, clear and precise pricing and they offer many upgrades. The best thing about them is that they are much cheaper and affordable than most of the competition.

Choosing A CMS (Content Management System), Just Use WordPress

A CMS is designed to simplify the publication of web content to web sites and mobile devices-in particular, allowing content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files. In other words a CMS makes it easy for you to publish a website and it’s content.

They are few very popular and powerful CMS out there such as Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress. The best thing about these platforms is that they are well documented, fully supported and best of all FREE. For this guide I’ll cover WordPress, Why? Because it’s the most popular CMS today, used by over 13% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites.

The great thing about WordPress is that most web hosting companies including HostGator offer a 1-click installation for WordPress which makes it easy for people with no technical skills to install and setup WordPress.

How to Install WordPress on Hostgator Using Fantastico

1. Log into your Hostgator cPanel (control panel).
2. Scroll down until you’re near the bottom of the page.
3. Locate the section entitled “Software/Services.”
4. Click on the Fantastico icon. It’s the one with the blue smiley face.
5. On the Fantasico page, click the “Wordpress” text link on the left sidebar.
6. Click on “New Instillation.”
7. Choose which domain you want this WordPress install to be on. If you’ve got an individual site hosting plan, this will default to your one domain. If you have a shared hosting plan, choose which domain you want this WordPress install to be on.
8. In the section that says, “Admin access data,” is where you’ll put the login name and password you want to use to log into your WordPress blog dashboard.
9. Fill in the “Base Configuration” fields with the name you want to be associated with all the posts you write in your new blog. Also, add in your email address and the website’s domain name for your new blog.
10. Click “Install WordPress.”
11. You will be given the domain information, to make sure that it’s being installed on the correct domain. If it looks good, click “Finish Instillation.”
12. You’re done. You’ve just installed WordPress on your new website. Make a note of your login information and/or print out the information on the screen so that you can remember how/where to log in so that you can access your new blog.

WordPress Themes

After you’ve successfully installed WordPress, it’s time to give your WordPress site it’s own unique look and feel. WordPress has a template system that makes it easy for you to change the look and feel of your website. You can actually find thousands of free themes in the WordPress theme directory. If your really strapped for money this is a great resource to find a theme and not spend any cash.

If your looking for a more original and professional look then a premium theme is the way to go. They’re hundreds of sites out there that sell premium themes for WordPress, some of the better ones include WooThemes, StudioPress, ElegantThemes and my favourite SoloStream which is the one I use the most. You will spend allot of time using your theme and it will be a major part of your so spending a little cash to make it as professional as possible is well worth it. Another good option for finding a WordPress theme is to check out our theme directory which is updated frequently with new themes.

To learn how to install a WordPress check out How To Install A WordPress Theme

WordPress Plugins

WordPress has a plug-in architecture that allows you to enhance and add functionality to WordPress, so pretty much whatever it is that you want to do that the default WordPress install doesn’t provide can be done with a plugin. Below are some plugins that are essential to your WordPress blog or website.

Akismet – comes installed with your WordPress by default. All you have to do is get an API Key to activate it. It prevents your blog from comment spam.

All-in-One SEO – This is an ultimate necessity for your blog if you want to have any chance of ranking high in search engines. All-in-One-SEO Pack allows you to add unique meta description, keywords, and titles to each page of your blog and blog posts.

Contact Form 7 – When running a blog you need to allow your users to contact you. This is the best free contact form plugin to this date. It makes everything easy.

W3 Total Cache – This plugin makes a copy of your web page on the server and by doing so it increases site performance and reduces the resource consumption. It is essential that you have this plugin just incase if your site hits the Front Page of a social media network such as digg or stumbleupon, without this plugin, your server will most likely crash.

WordPress Database Backup – This plugin lets you make backup for your blog’s database as often as you need. You can set this process to be automated and have it deliver to your email or a safe spot in your webhost. By having this plugin, you can always stay on the safe side because if anything goes wrong, you have the latest backup in your possession.

Simple:Press – The feature rich, completely integrated and fully scalable forum plugin for WordPress. This is one of the best message board software I’ve ever come across, WordPress or otherwise. It’s hard to believe it’s free.

To learn more about installing plugins check out Installing Plugins

This concludes setting up your website or blog. At this point you should have already purchased your web hosting from HostGator, installed WordPress, chosen a WordPress Theme, Installed the plugins mentioned and ready to publish your content. In the next guide we will be covering publishing your content to the world.

Stay tuned…

Part 1: How To Start A Website Or Blog

With so many well built websites on the web today you’d think that everyone would know how to build a website correctly, but the reality is that only around 15% of the people who start websites do it the right way. That explains why website failure rate is at 90%.

Now please note that this guide covers how to build and make money with Blog or Dynamic website, these are content websites usually built in a news format that are updated on a regular basis. If you want to build a online store or subscription based website, we have different guides for those.

Enough rambling from me, lets get this thing started.

Choosing a Niche

This is the most important part of building a website, no matter how complex or how simple you want your website to be, it all starts with your niche and how popular it is. There is 2 ways and 2 ways only you should choose a niche, you must either have a passion for the topic or be very knowledgeable and interested in the topic.

Trust me on this one passion and interest will be the deciding factor for how successful your website project becomes, now when I say interested I don’t mean “wow that’s a popular niche I could make make mad money with that.” No that’s not interest, If you enter a project with that perspective you will fail, never lead with the money the money is a by product of the success of your website which will be dependent upon how much passion or interest you have for the topic you choose. Passion and interest is the life blood of your site, it’s for this reason why a small one man powered website can come along a disrupt a major conglomerate website.

Just look at the majority of my websites, I love Hip Hop and thus started iHipHopMusic.com, I’m a video game addict so I created VideoGamePlayer.tv. YOU GET THE POINT.

OK so so you have the passion and knowledgable part down, but that’s just the beginning. Along with having a passion for the niche or topic you’ve chosen they’re 3 other factors you need to have down before launching a website. These 3 things apply to any type of website you want to start whether it’s a blog, online store, service etc.

1. Usability

The service has to be easy to use, it has to be interesting and something people want to use. Interesting and usability could be due to a service being simple or complex, a good example of this would the comparison between the 2 social network giants Twitter and Facebook. Twitter does one thing well and is a very simple service which is why it’s popular, Facebook is on the opposite side of the spectrum it does many different things very well and is a complex service by definition. Both services are able to co-exist because people like to use the services and because the services are needed.

The same rules that apply to those big guys also apply to small blogs and websites as well. Your site’s content needs to be in demand, interesting and usable. No one wants to read a blog about your day to day life (unless your famous), that’s not interesting, in-demand or usable content and won’t make any money.

2. Virality

The site must have the ability to go viral, this is very important for the longevity of your website. This is dependent on how big the niche is that you choose. If you choose a micro niche that has low search volume and a small audience then going viral might be a problem. But this doesn’t mean that your micro niche won’t make money especially if that niche has high priced and in-demand products, but remember your building Blogs and dynamic content websites here so for that purpose you shouldn’t be in a mirco niche since you will need to write about the topic on a regular basis.

3. Monetization (Making Money)

Oh yes, making money. At the end of the day making money is the name of the game. Though when building a website you shouldn’t lead with how much money the site will make, you must still research the profit potential of your topic or niche. Once you’ve got the passion down, usability, and viral aspects now it’s time to get a business model together. Your site has to be able to make money, period. One thing to always remember is that your business model could change, so how you start out might not be how you finish.

Keyword Research

keywords are also known as search terms, the terms people use to find something they’re looking for via search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Most people completely avoid this when building content websites especially when building Blogs. Back in 2005 I was fortunate enough to be coming from a internet marketing background when I started my first blog, so I knew enough to do some keyword research for my blog iHipHopMusic.com . I did about 2 hours worth of keyword research for my first blog until I came up with a list of 20 both competitive and not so competitive keywords, a healthy balance of both is good.

These keywords or search terms will later become pages on your blog or website.

To find popular keywords or search terms in a niche, I use the Google Keyword Tool, this is always the first place I go to when I’m thinking about starting a new site. To take the research a step further and find out more details about search terms and the competition I use tools like KeywordSpy, GoodKeywords and WordTracker, these tools provide so much information about search terms, I find it strange that everyone doesn’t use these tools. It gives you such a edge over the competition.

Choosing A Domain Name

People always get a domain name before they do anything else, including keyword research. Me on the other hand I do the keyword research first and then I choose a domain, I recommend using this method. Let the keywords determine what your website will be called, I use this method in order to rank in search engines for a certain search term. You see if you use a name that isn’t a name that is being searched for then it’s harder to rank for a targeted search term when it comes to SEO, and easy is what we want right?

Here are some examples, my websites HipHopMusicDotCom.com, Mixtapes.tv, MusicVideoCast.com and even SiteBuilderTips.com were built specifically to rank for a certain search term.

HipHopMusicDotCom.com though a stupid sounding domain name now ranks number 1 in Google for “hip hop music,” MusicVideocast.com is in the top 10 results for “music videos,” Mixtapes.tv is now in the top 10 “mixtapes” and SiteBuilderTips.com which is a new website is already ranking number 8 for the search term “website building tips” and eventually I will rank for all the above search terms except for maybe “music videos,” I’m ambitious not crazy.

I’m not writing about my websites to impress you but to impress upon you the importance of doing the keyword research before you pick a domain name, and hey if later after you’ve achieved the ranking you desire you can always change the domain name of your website to a cooler domain name the way I’ve done with HipHopMusicDotCom.com which is now iHipHopMusic.com. You will still get to keep the rankings you achieved with your old domain name.

Where to Buy Your Domain Name

Godaddy.com, there web hosting sucks but as a domain name service provider they are the best in the biz. One thing you should never do is register your domain name the same place you host your website because in many cases whenever you stop hosting your website with that provider you could end up loosing your domain name. When you host your domain name with Godaddy it makes it easy to host a website anywhere you want.

Since I mentioned iHipHopMusic.com it will be the example I use for explaining the importance  of keyword research. Below is a list of search terms I gathered after research.

“hip hop songs”

“hip hop news”

“hip hop music videos”

“listen to albums online”

“hip hop music downloads”

Above are some of the keywords I used on my site, I used both short keywords like “hip hop songs” to long tail search terms like “hip hop music downloads.” Any keyword that has 3 keywords or more are called longtail keywords and are much easier to rank number for in search engines that short term keywords.

For example “music videos” is a highly competitive search term which is very difficult to rank for, it would be much easier to rank for “hip hop videos” and to go even further it would be even easier to rank for “hip hop music videos” than “hip hop videos.” I will go more into this once we get to the SEO part of this guide.

That’s it for this guide, the only thing I want you to do at this point is do research and then choose a domain name and that’s it. In the 2nd guide I’ll cover setting up hosting and picking the right CMS (Content Management System).

Until next time.

Part 2: How To Setup A Blog Or Website Without Technical Skills

Actually it’s my second month running a membership website but the first month I didn’t have a payment option set up yet because I wanted to test everything to make sure there were no bugs, security issues etc. On May 1st was when I launched the Premium part of my website Mixtapes.tv. The business model I used for my membership site is the Fremium model aka the “try it before you buy it” model. In this day and age plus the type of audience I’m selling to, this model works great. I believe my product was good enough so I didn’t have any issues with offering it for free and then later offering a upgrade to unlock more features.

A little bit about my membership site.

It’s called Mixtapes.tv, it’s a site where DJs, Artists, and A&Rs can upload and share there mixtapes for free. Users are able to sign up and download these mixtapes for free as well. The key to this site is knowing what parts should be free and what parts shouldn’t be. For example users can sign up and download 5 mixtapes a month as zip files but  a premium member can download unlimited mixtapes, another feature is premium members can download individual tracks but free users can’t. The method here is that you have to make the free service good enough for them to want to upgrade to the premium service. For example a user can use the site forever as free member to listen and download unlimited mixtapes. This creates user retention and will eventually lead to upgrades.

The money is in the re bill.

Don’t know how many affiliate marketers are reading reading my blog but if you’ve ever promoted ringtone offers, you must have wondered how some of these companies are able to pay affiliates $16 to $30 per lead on a $9.90 offer, that’s because within 3 months they’ve regained 100% return on there investment. Most users will not cancel there subscription because it automatically gets added to there cell phone bill and they forget about it, and since it’s only $9.90 they don’t really pay attention to the charge. This is why low subscription pricing is so valuable. Jeremy from ShoeMoney.com touched on something similar when talking about Gym memberships and how it’s the perfect business.

My First Month Running A Membership Website

The Premium part of my site went live on May 1st, and the first 7 days no one upgraded, LOL. I was like oh shit no one likes the site but then on May 8th my first premium membership came in. I was so excited even though it was only $5.99, it feels really good when someone wants to buy something you are selling. After that first sale the upgrades started coming in with a average of 2 sign ups per day. So far I’ve had one disgruntle customer which was not my fault but as a result of a server side issue between PayPal and Wishlist Member.

Results after 30 days

I know it’s not Yacht money but that’s not my aim at this point, right now all I’m doing is focusing on making the service the best it can be. If I achieve that then I won’t have to worry about making money because the product will sell itself. Now remember these members are now in a billing cycle and this month an estimated 30 more Premium upgrades will occur which will double the earnings the following month, the real money will be made months down the line with the compounded revenue generated through subscribers singing up month after month. So far over 8,000 members have signed up 32 of which are premium members, keep in mind that 60% of those members signed up the 1st month before the premium option was available.

Not to mention I really haven’t dialed this thing in yet, I’m still testing. I haven’t implemented follow up via email marketing,  special offers, advertising, affiliate program or anything else for that matter. 90% of the traffic going to the site right now is coming from my other websites HipHopMusicDotCom.com. and a little from ComeWatchMe.com, once the traffic from search engines starts to really pick up in a couple months I’ll start to look more like the competition, who has a whopping 20,000 premium members, so I know the market is very healthy.

In conclusion.

Don’t treat a membership website like a regular eccommerce website, it’s not a sprint it’s a marathon.You think of it that way and you’ll see the real profits in the long run, I’m going to be writing a post soon about how to set up a membership site and the right tools to use to get it done.

I’m out……Chozen

Since the year started I’ve been doing my internet business full time, and it’s been pretty good, I’ve launched two new sites one is a video site and the other is a membership website both of which I can say had successful launches. Below is run down of how my sites have been doing.

First of all let me address my original site HipHopMusicDotCom.com, this site has sure become quite the blog going from a ugly blogspot blog to now averaging over 2,000,000 page views monthly. Yesterday I did 33,000 unique visitors and almost broke 100,000 pageviews and the traffic isn’t showing any sign of slowing down. Even though the traffic is crazy that really isn’t where the success is with the website. The real success is the two new revenue streams I’ve able to create for the website, originally most of my earnings came from Google Adsense, InfoLinks and Adbrite but now I’ve been making money with selling direct ads and video ads.

If you have video content and haven’t incorporated video ads yet into your site, you need to because the payout is far more lucrative that contextual based ads. So far I’ve been working with LongTailVideo Adsolution and ScanScout, I’m going to be writing a post that covers video advertising, video ad networks and pretty much everything else you need to know regarding making money with video ads.

The second revenue stream I’ve unlocked on HipHopMusicDotCom.com is direct advertising, since this year started I’ve been getting quite a few advertising offers. With the help a little Ad Manager plugin called OIO Publisher which I use to manage all my direct ad sales, I don’t think I’d be able to handle direct ad sales efficiently without it and you can expect to see a post about that coming soon.

Between those two new revenue streams and my existing ones I’ve been able to double my monthly earnings and I needed it since I’m on more expensive servers now.

As far as Music Video Cast is concerned, I haven’t updated since the year started and will never update ever again not since I’ve launched ComeWatchMe.com in January of this year. Music Video Cast will be deprecated and all the posts will be moved to ComeWatchMe.com after running MusicVideoCast.com for almost 3 years I think it’s safe to say it’s reach it’s limit as far as growth potential. It had a few big moments in it’s life span but I just couldn’t take it to the next level the way I did with HipHopMusicDotCom.com one of the reasons being that it’s just about music videos which is a very small niche with allot of other sites people would rather go to. I did manage to get it to the top of the second page of Google for “Music Videos” which brought it allot a traffic and continues to but that’s the past and ComeWatchMe.com is the future.

ComeWatchMe.com was lunched on January 15th and since then it has been doing very well, in only 4 months it’s doubled the traffic that Music Video Cast receives. In about 3 years video ads will be everywhere this will be a multi billion dollar industry so I’m gearing up and preparing for that growth from now. Video ads will be in 2013 what Google Adsense was in 2003 and just like Adsense it’s the niche sites that are going to really benefit from this market, instead of trying to be the next YouTube people should focus on building niche on demand video sites. This is what I’m doing with ComeWatchMe.com at the moment, I’m focusing on video ads on the site currently but there is one contextual banner ad on the site but the focus is video ads and it’s already showing good numbers. I expect big this from this site in the future.

The other site I launched was MixTapes.TV at the end of March, this site has been something I wanted to start two years ago but didn’t have the tools or money to do it until now. The original name was MixtapeCast.com to match MusicVideoCast.com then I changed it to MixtapePlayer.com which was a great name until the end of last year I saw MixTapes.TV for sale on Sedo, I won it in a auction for $150.00 which is a steal for a top level domain, with this name combined with my SEO and Social Media skills I guarantee you I’ll be number one in Google for the search term “mixtapes” by September. It’s a subscription based (my first one) site built around the very popular niche of “mixtapes”. The launch was pretty crazy so crazy that I ended up moving to a new server because it just couldn’t handle the traffic. In one month I’ve already had 3,300 sign ups, I was on the second page of Yahoo for “mixtapes” in less than 2 weeks, 70,000 unique visitors, 160,000 pageviews and 200,000 media streams. Currently this site is my main priority and I’m working very hard to make it profitable before the summer is over.

I also officially have my company name now which is called “Covanant” not to mistaken with Covenant though they have a similar meaning, Covanant stands for a “Solemn Promise To Excel In Business”, yeah I invented (patent pending). I’m going to be launching that site soon. The logo is below..

That’s pretty much what I’ve been up yo since the year started, which is why I haven’t been able to update this site as much as I would like but I’ll promise that from this point I will try my best to do at least one post per day. After all I do plan one day to turn this site into big business as well.

That’s it for now, later………….

Chozen.

First of all I’m not big on Joomla, WordPress is my weapon of choice when it comes to building websites not because WordPress is better but it’s just the tool I started with on the web and I’ve always been satisfied with it so I have no reason to change it. Since I run a website called Site Builder Tips I can’t make it all about WordPress, Though I don’t use Joomla for any of my projects I do use some there theme designs, meaning I’ve seen some great CMS themes for Joomla that I then convert to WordPress themes, I have a membership at Joomlart which is a Joomla premium themes site that has some really great themes that I convert to WordPress themes.

It’s on Joomlart where I discovered a site called JomSocial which is a Joomla social network website builder plugin, I have to say this is the first time I ran into a tool that I couldn’t find for WordPress, I mean there is BuddyPress but JomSocial is a whole other level. The cool thing about JomSocial is that the site it self is a social network that allows you to see the extension in action, a couple months back I joined the site and I completely forgot that I was trying out a demo because It was a real social network where I was interacting with other members. I think that’s a great way to sell a tool, the look, feel and functionality of JomSocial reminds me of being on Facebook.

JomSocial does a good job with this tool and they’re quite a few successful sites powered by JomSocial, 3 of which are GibLink.com that has 113,380 + members, OnlineRadioStations.com with 49,500 + members and KenyaHub.com with 120,583 + members just to name a few.

A few features and Specs that stood out for me.

Facebook Connect

Facebook has now eclipsed MySpace as the #1 most popular social network on the planet. With over 350 millions active users worldwide, chances are someone registering at your community will already be a member of Facebook.

To make the registration process hassle-free, JomSocial even included our new Facebook-Connect login-module in JomSocial, so your members can log-in to your JomSocial-powered community using their Facebook account details.

Profile pics, status updates & more are “pulled” in safely & securely from Facebook, making it easy for new and existing users to sign up and stay logged into your community.

Twitter Integration

If Facebook Is the king of social networks then Twitter is the prince, I’ve watch the service bloom from the very beginning (I was one of the first to use it back in 2006) when it was just a side service to Odeo to now being one of the most talked about services on the web, I mean you can’t even go a day on the internet without seeing something regarding Twitter.

JomSocial allows you to integrate your community with Twitter allowing your members to show there Twitter updates as well as there friends updates on your JomSocial community profile pages, also members of your community also have the option of automatically updating there Twitter account with status updates they make on your JomSocial community.

External Applications Support (Apps)

This is a really important feature for tools like this because it allows you to integrate your community with pretty much any third party service out there, thus giving you more flexibility with your community.

I’m really considering building WordPress plugin that does exactly what JomSocial does for Joomla because there is nothing out currently for WordPress that does this and I think a tool like this would be great for WordPress.

Anyways check out JomSocial, sign up to there community to get a real life demo of JomSocial in action.

Check em out, JomSocial.

BigCommerce is a new comer (well sort of new) to the list of ecommerce solutions BigCommerce is a hosted, fully managed version of Interspire Shopping Cart that was launched by Interspire in June 2009. With the Interspire Shopping Cart software being so highly popular and successful they the decided to launch a full blown hosted version of it, it’s a hosted solution meaning they take care of the servers, security, upgrades and backups for your online store so you don’t have to, this is great for small and large size businesses that looking to run there business and no worry about managing a server. Not I know I said ProStores was the The Best Ecommerce Website Builder, but I think BigCommerce could give them a run for their money and here is why.

BigCommerce does a pretty good job of describing all the features that are included in there service so I won’t do their job for them but instead I’ll touch on only a few of the key features and why they’re important in today’s web environment.

Reporting and Analytics

One thing you should always remember when running a website, whether it’s an affiliate site, blog, ecommerce site, or a subscription based site is that “the money is in the stats”, this will be where you spend most of your time after you’ve finished setting up your online store. Stats will tell you exactly what works and what doesn’t as well as what’s making you money and more importantly what’s costing you money. Of course if you don’t have a stats system with enough features to help you know how each and every part of your website is performing then you’ll just be wasting time. Big Commerce has 20+ performance reports some of which include daily conversion rates, inventory report, best and worst performing keywords, order location (Google Maps) just to name a few. You can also integrate your store with Google Analytics which is one of the best site tracking services available on the web not to mention it’s FREE!.

Built In SEO

SEO is important but it’s not something you should spend all your time on, most services out there coming with basic SEO features included while others completely ignore them, stay away from website building services that don’t have SEO features built in. BigCommerce web pages are optimized by experts and make proper use of title tags and search engine friendly SEO links, of course there a tons of other things to know about SEO but most of them are not worth the time to learn, trust me the search engines are smart enough to rank your site for accurate search terms.

Google Merchant Center (Formerly known as Google Base)

If there was ever a source for getting free traffic to your store this would be it, if your not familiar with Google Merchant Center it’s where you can upload your store’s product feeds and make them easy to find on Google Product Search. The thing is most store owners or people looking to start a online store don’t even know what a store feed is or how to create one, basically a store feed is a XML file (don’t need to know what it means) that is automatically generated for your site that allows you to automatically syndicate all your products across product search engines and comparison shopping sites like PriceGrabber.com, BizRate .com, Shopping.com, Yahoo Shopping and much more. This is a untapped way of driving traffic to your website because most store owners are not using this free source traffic simply because they are not aware of it or their site isn’t equipped to create store feeds. BigCommerce automatically generates store feeds for your site that can be submitted to Google Merchant Center as well as other product search engines and comparison shopping sites.

The best thing about the features is that Product results show up above natural search results, so you don’t have to worry about ranking for search terms in the search engines just list your products in the product search section and your good to go. (Example Image below)

Affiliate Tracking System (Affiliate Marketing)

Apart from Reporting and Analytics, this is by far the most important part of your business at least in my business, for those not familiar with Affiliate Marketing it’s an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliates marketing efforts, usually that affiliate is paid a commission when a sale is made, or if a lead is generated. It is also known a performance based marketing in other words you only pay for results. Imagine if you launched a website and you had a thousand people advertising your site for you for free and the only time you would have to pay those people is when they refer a paying customer, that’s power of affiliate marketing and if you don’t offer  affiliate programs for your store in this day and age then your definitely at a huge disadvantage. The problem here is that most website building solutions do not come with affiliate marketing built in, BigCommerce however comes with a built in affiliate tracking system that allows you to track, manage and pay your affiliates. 75% of my sales come from affiliate referrals, this is not a feature that should be overlooked.

There are a bunch of other great features such as drag and drop layout design, support for 50 plus payment gateways, Google Awords and Yahoo Search Marketing export, Single page checkout and the list goes on, but I’ll leave that up to BigCommerce to list all the features.

Here are A few live sites…..
YuBo
Christine & Taylor
Pro Golfer Gear
Report Collection
Baby and Me Gifts

In Conclusion

Apart from ProStores this is by far one of the best online store builders that I’ve seen on the market, they both have pretty much all of the same feature sets with a few differences, it all depends on what your looking for.

Visit:BigCommerce

The ability to automatically calculate shipping and tax information for various states and carriers such as FedEx and UPS. An easy way to mange your customers, inventory and orders as well as keeping track of your profit and expenses.

To achieve all this you would need a variety of tools and services that could possibly cost you thousands of dollars, and you haven’t even gotten to marketing and promoting your business. These are the obstacles that ecommerce business owners face and the reason why 90 percent of them fail within there first year. This dilemma created a demand for more efficient, less time consuming and a more cost effective ways of getting and online store up and running.

ProStores is one of the the few tools that has attempted to solve this a problem and has succeeded at doing so. ProStores an eBay company is a all in one online store solution that combines all the fundamental tools required to operate an online store and then kicks it into overdrive by offering many more features and add-ons that makes running a online store as simple as writing a email.

So what’s some of the benefits of using a solution like ProStores?

Easy Store Design

lets face most individuals looking to start there own store are not web designers, with ProStores you can choose from more than 150 professionally designed eCommerce templates, easily upload your logo or create one with ProStores built in logo creator. If you do have some design skills you can custom design your store with 3rd party HTML editing tools. You can also have a custom store designed by one ofProStores certified web designers.

Sell on eBay Automatically

Obviously ProStores being an eBay company gives you the ability to sell your products to over 250 million potential customers on the web’s number one marketplace. You can automatically list to eBay fromProStores, everything such as your inventory, shipping and tax cost will be synced with eBay.

Accept Payments

Easily take payments online with web’s leading payment processors such as PayPal (Also a eBay company), Authorize.net, Quick Books, Link Point and more.

Automatic Search Engine Optimization

By using ProStores you can rank higher in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN with the use of search engine friendly URLs that are automatically tuned for the best search engine performance. Automatic site map creation and customizable product keywords.

Quick Listings on Shopping Sites

ProStores will automatcially submit your products to Google Base which is a free service that can quickly drive drive targeted consumers to your website. They also provide tools for you to submit your products to the three major shopping comparison search engines Shopping.com^®, Yahoo! Shopping^®, and Shopzilla^®.

Who is ProStores Mostly Suited For?

ProStores is suitable for both small to mid sized busniesses whether your selling a few hundred products or a hundred thousand products, ProStores can scale to meet your needs.

Screenshot of few different stores powered by ProStores.

In Conclusion

Now more than ever business owners are looking for the most cost effective ways to build an online business and get the biggest bang for there buck,ProStores breaks down most of the walls you will run into when running your online business and provides the service at a fraction of the cost if you were to do it by other means. Of course there is no truly end all be all solution for running a business but you definitely benefit from starting out down the path with the least amount of resistance.

Check out the service at ProStores