When I first started building websites, if you didn’t know HTML, you were screwed.  In fact, it used to be the cornerstone of every site, and without it, you just were not going to have a web presence.

But now thanks to the quick and easy website design software that I purchased, I don’t have to be a coding genius anymore.  In fact, I would argue that it has allowed me to take my sites to the next level and do cool effects like having a JavaScript menu on each site.

I have even taken it one step further, and I have taught my wife how to use the software.  Now, I leave the designs up to her, and it has made my life that much easier.  Now, I can spend more time focusing on quality content instead of the design and I can make that many more sites in a shorter period of time.

My husband, who runs his own online business from home, and I sat down to have a business meeting last night. As we are now into this together and rely on it as our sole income right now, we think that it is important for us to be on the same page when it comes to the business.

One of the things we discussed was the possibility that we could buy expired domain names. We thought that we could build pages and promote them, giving us some passive income each month. He is very smart when it comes to this type of thing and I trust him to know what he is doing and what is best for the business and our family.

He is really interested in the expired domain names, as it is something that was probably up on the net at one point and it would probably be easier to promote.

I have been trying to get an ecommerce solution in place so that I could sell my artwork online.  I have tried quite a few different scripts and I have had little luck setting them up myself.  In fact, with the amount of time that I have wasted trying to do it on my own, I could have just paid someone to do it in the first place.

So, now that I am fed up with trying to get the shopping cart software to work, I have decided to outsource the store setup to another company that actually knows what they are doing.

I searched for a company that specialized in asp shopping cart scripts and contacted them to see if they could help me out.  As it turns out, they were happy to have me as a client and we have discussed what I am expecting out of my store.

Hopefully in a week or two, I will be able to sell something to my first customer – I bet that will be the best feeling in the world.

Once a week I work for an online help service for a hosting company based out of my hometown.  It is a very convenient job as most of the help I give it is typed in a window.  I am only Level 1 support, so I answer basic questions about difficulties that our customers are having with our hosting service.

Once in awhile we get customers that are contacting us, praising us for our great service.  Today though, I did get a request that was different than any I have received before.

It was from an older lady that ran a little e-business selling makeup she created.  She told me that her sales were going great but that she was looking for a local web designer to redo the look of her website.

She was based out of New York, so I went online and did a search for "web design New York" and found her a couple of companies to check out.  She was very happy that I took the time to help with her question and I told her that it was all a part of our customer service.

I thought that I would try my hand at making a simple web page for the chess club that I belong to.  It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate, because all we really need is a details of when our meetings and tournaments will be occurring.

Since I’m not a computer programmer, I’ve decided that I would use some web page maker software to make the site.  The neat thing with the software that I’m using is it is basically drag and drop and it should only take a couple hours to come up with the final design.

Before I get that far though, and what a fool around with it a little bit and maybe make a personal website for myself.  This way I will know how the software works and what to expect for the final product before I take the time to create the chess club website.  If it turns out that the software makes ugly websites, I will have to find some other way to go about it.  Wish me luck!

I don’t consider myself an expert when it comes to Internet marketing – in fact, I am a bit of a novice.  Sure I have done some article marketing, but beyond that, I have done little.  In an effort to change that, this week I decided it was time to learn how to market my websites.

You would be surprised how many products and websites deal with the topic of getting higher search engine rankings – there are a ton of them.  Some of the sites I read where useful and some of them were junk.

But in my quest to learn, I decided to try out some other online media because I am more of a visual learner.  I checked out a couple of video sharing sites to see if they had any videos on how to promote a website, and they sure did!

I have watched a couple now, and I have a better grip on the whole thing.  But I think I will try to watch at least one video each day – by learning a bit each day, it will stay interesting and I will be less likely to get bored.  At least I hope that is how it works out…

Have you ever planted a garden and gone out everyday to watch what you have planted grow?

Well, you can think of your website as a garden.  You plant it, feed it some links (through link building strategies) and watch it grow.  The growth can be as simple as traffic, or as exciting as extra money in your pocket.

How do you go about your link building?

Let me give you some link building ideas.  You can use some of the more conventional ways to market your site through directory submissions, signatures on forums that you participate in, or even write and submit articles to article directories.

There are also some other, newer methods to generate links to your sites as well.  Think about contributing to blogs that are in the same niche as your site – you can create many high value links in this manner.  You can also use some social media marketing or social networking sites to get the word out about your sites – but that will be material for another discussion.

I have really become fascinated with article sites. I have, for a long time been writing articles to promote my websites and I find it to be so time consuming. That is why I was interested in finding article sites, where I could pay someone to write my articles for me.

This was a big step for me in my business, because it freed me up a lot of time to be able to do more things like adding more words to my keyword research. I knew that my biggest problem in marketing was the lack of time and this would certainly free up a lot of it.

I also utilized some SEO services that are available on the Internet. This helped me to free up even more time. I now have so much time, that in the last week, I have added two more sited to my network and am promoting them already.

My website advisor emailed me and let me know that he was impressed on how well I have been doing lately. I am proud that I took the steps to become what I need to be to make my sites the best they can be.

Sometimes, you have to wonder if you can get too much of a good thing.  For example, too much candy, and you don’t have much for teeth.  Sometimes too much of something can be overwhelming – like having to pick a name for your newborn child out of the millions of possible combinations.

For example, I came across a website that had 8000 web directory listings!  Well, I try to submit to a general directory or two each day, but at ten per day, it would take me 800 days just to submit to their current list – and chances are that when I was done, there would be even more to submit to.

Picking out a good links directory from a bad one is tough.  Thankfully, some of these sites have a rating system that lets you know a good one from a bad one.

If you are feeling overwhelmed like me about the number of directories, you can look at it two ways:  there are too many directories, or there are never enough.

Well I decided that maybe I should setup a website about Scrapbooking – it is my passion and I thought it would be nice to share that with the world.  Being new to the whole "website thing" I really didn’t know where to start except I needed to get a domain name.

I read online somewhere that I would need web hosting as well.  I looked around and found some free web hosting, but I don’t care for them putting ads on my site.  I should be in control of what is on my web pages, and I quickly decided against the free option.

I did manage to find some affordable web hosting for just five bucks a month.  They even had a tutorial to show me how to setup a basic website – and so far it looks okay.  Even though I was overwhelmed at first, it really was not that hard – all I had to do is read about my options and pick from there.