Mom Makes Money

If you are looking for places where you can host your website, you are at the right place.

First off you need a domain, if you do not have one already you can get one at 1and1.com.

When you have your domain you need to host that somewhere.

When I first started I got my hosting with Hostgator, but to be honest with you I cancelled it after a couple of weeks.

It was just too overwhelming. I am not very computer savy, I am still learning.

So to solve my problem, because I really wanted my own website,  I became a member of Wealthy Affiliate. There I could put my website together in SiteRubix (a webdesigner program) and then I hosted it right there at Wealthy Affiliate.

Why was this easier?

Having the website made and hosted with the same company just made sense to me, it was easy. Plus all the information I needed to make it happen was just there. The tutorials for beginners like me was very easy to understand, step by step directions, just what I needed.

Today I still host some of my websites at Wealthy Affiliate but I also have an account with Hostgator. Yes I went back with Hostgator (it was not their fault, I could not make it the first time)

I have now figured out more about cpanel, file manager and email hosting.

Where to host your website?

Hostgator is great, they offer unlimited hosting for a very reasonable price and I highly recommend them.

But if you are just starting out and need step by step instructions on how to get your website up and running I would recommend Wealthy Affiliate.

I will put together a tutorial on how to host with both Wealthy Affiliate and Hostgator so that you can chose what suits you the best, so you can pick where to host your website.

Because I work from home, I could this morning spend time with my (almost) 2 year old on the playground. J

To your success,

Vicky

What is a domain name?
Domain name is your address to your website. It is what goes after www. And ends with .com for example.

For this site my domain name is mommakesmoney.net
The url is http://www.mommakesmoney.net/
Every domain name has a suffix that indicates which top level domain it belongs to. For example:
.gov – Government agencies
.edu – Educational institutions
.org – Organizations (nonprofit)
.com – commercial business
.net – Network organizations
.ca – Canada
.us – USA
.se – Sweden

If you are looking to get control over you pages, your sites you need your own website. The first step is to get a domain name. You own it you have total control of it!

What is a good domain name?
Use your keywords, not the fancy cool stuff. When I first started out I put together an interior decorator store. My first domain name I bought was avecdeco.com, cool name I thought  but has nothing to do with my key phrase. A better domain name would have been interiordecorating.com.

It will make it easier to rank in the search engines if you have your keyword phrase as your domain. You want to target your key phrase.

Buy your domain
So when you have figured out what kind of domain you want, you need to check and see if that domain name is available. Go to www.1and1.com and type in your domain name. If .com or .net is not available you might want to add something after your domain name like interiordecoratingstore.com or interiordecoratingonline.net.

Another mistake I did when I first started out was that I did not write down where I had bought my domains from. So I had several domain names bought through different companies and when I wanted to change something I did not know where to go… I know not very organized but today I buy all my domains from one place  and I host all my sites on one place. It is a lot easier to keep track on things then.

It is hard in the beginning when all the “gurus” tell you what  to do, and a lot of times you just do it, I know that is how I was.  So anyway now I get all my domains through www.1and1.com they have worked great for me.

When you have bought that domain you need to host it somewhere.
Your hosting is where you upload your website, now do not freak out. I know this was very confusing for me but I will show you how to do it.

So I took 3 weeks off. I just now logged in to my ezine article account.

I am amazed – the power of article marketing.

It is free you do not have to pay anything to write your articles and publish them, but what they can generat for you is thousands and thousands of potential customers.

I have been doing this for a couple of years now so yes I have added 270 articles to my ezine account.

Now some of you might say is that it and some might say that is a lot.  But if you think about it, it is only 2-3 articles / week, not very much at all.

Here is the power of article marketing, close to 44.000 url clicks, 44.000 FREE clicks to MY websites.

You submit the article ones and then it works for you week after week, month after month, year after year.

The articles bring you potential costumers.

If you are just starting out, see the power of what you are building, do not give up do not quit. See what article marketing can do for you over time!!

Just wanted to share,

Because I work from home I saw my son build a Ben 10 watch today

Keep working, keep building your business!!

Vicky

You might wonder where I have been the last couple of weeks. This is the beauty of affiliate marketing if you want vacation, you take vacation. I had my brother and his family here from Sweden for 3 weeks.

I do not even know how many times I thought about how thankful and grateful I am to not have to go to a 9-5 job, to be able to control my time.

We took some of the money I have made with affiliate marketing and we went to Disney World for a week. To me the money is great, but the best thing is what you can do with it. There is no money in the world that can buy the smile on your little girls face when she sees Minnie for the first time or the excitement in you 6 year olds eyes when Indiana Jones runs from the rolling rocks… priceless.

To me it is important to get some time off, spend quality time with the people I love and recharge my batteries. That is exactly what I did. I am now very excited for fall, I have been thinking about new projects.

Even though I had vacation, affiliate marketing is a way of living I guess, you see new opportunities every where. I will continue with how to set up a website, where to host it and so on.

I am back!
Vicky

If you have thought about getting your own website but still work with free alternatives then this is for you. Are you asking yourself why do I need my own website?

Well for me it was two main reasons:

Control – If you have your own domain you set up your own rules. You are the boss nobody tells you what to do. You control all the material on YOUR site. You can add as many links as you want.

If you use Hubpages as a landing page you have limited links you can add to the page. If you use Squidoo, they tell you can only write about certain topics. WA is for an example not accepted there anymore. Blogger is very limited.

If you use free landing pages the rules can change immediately. Squidoo might decide that the niche you are in are no longer welcome there, their site their rules.

With your own site you control the layout, the pictures, the links… YOU control YOUR site.

Money – All the free websites that you can use to put your landing page on use ads that is how they make their money. Squidoo are pretty nice because they share some of that money with you. If you have your own domain your own site you get all that ad money ( if you want ads on your page). Even better those ads might lead to purchases and you will get the commission.

So how do I get started with my own domain and website?

The problem I had when I started was that I had to figure everything out for my self when it comes to where to get a domain, where to host the domain… Heck I didn`t even know what hosting was when I first started.

I am sure that some of you may ask those questions as well so I will for the next blog posts put up step by step HOW to do this. WHERE to get your domain, HOW do you actually do it, WHAT is a good domain name, WHERE to host your domain, how to set up a WordPress blog on your domain and more.

Because I work from home I today saw my two kids poor sand all over each other.

Talk soon,
Vicky

I just summarized my sales for July and YES I do see the power of recurring affiliate commission.

Last year I started to promote a product, software, with recurring affiliate commission. If the customer sticks with the software they get billed every 3 months, which means I get paid commission every 3 months from that same customer. Awesome I know .

Let me give you an idea how this grows.

January 23 sales
April 34 sales
July 45 sales

In July I had 17 recurring sales, the rest were new sales.

If I can keep the momentum going I will have 56 sales by October and 67 sales by January 2011.

Now there were sales in Feb, March… I just wanted to give you an idea of the recurring commission, what it can look like every 3 months.

Now where do you find the recurring affiliate commission programs?
I would search google to see if there are any programs in your niche.

Say you are looking to promote dog training. Then I would search for “dog training recurring commission”. Maybe there is a membership site for dog owners…

Just searched that and there is a couple of membership sites for dog owners.

A site that you can check out as well is www.lifetimecommissions.com. I have not used any program from there but it might give you an idea.

I am not saying that recurring commission is the only way to go. But if there is a product that fits in with your niche, why not.

Because I work from home I today got to see my 6 year old color Ben 10 papers.

Best of luck to you!
Vicky

Learn more about affiliate marketing and recurring affiliate commission here.

Today I was trying to figure out what ”must web pages” I need to include on my blog. By “must web pages” I mean the pages that include all the legal text, the pages that are sooo long that you hardly read them. I am talking about Disclaimer, Terms of Use, Privacy…

Be honest how many times have you just scrolled down to the bottom and just clicked in Terms of Use without even reading it??? I know, I might have done that too.

I do not mean that in a disrespectful way, it’s just that those pages are not my favorite thing to put together.

I was expecting a couple of hours of work but then I went over to Wealthy Affiliate’s Forum and VOILA within 30 minutes I had figured it out or to be exact members of Wealthy Affiliate had informed me on WHAT pages I needed to include. WHERE I could find standard documents for this, and what Wordpress PLUG INS to use.

I tell you what, Wealthy Affiliate have saved me lots of TIME and MONEY.

The best investment I ever made!

The pages we came up with that we thought should be “must” pages on my site is:

• About
• Disclaimer
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use
• Contact

This does not mean this is right for you and your website, but it is a start.

You can see the pages on the bottom of this page and see what I included on the different pages as well.

Hope this helps if you have a website and wonder what pages to include.

Because I work from home, I today could take my kids to the Zoo. It is awesome to be a mom.

Best of luck,

Vicky

Yesterday we talked about 3 places where you can find niche ideas? Well it is actually all around you.

But there are niches that are “hungrier” than others. So what is a good indicator if the niche you have chosen is a hungry niche?

If your audience thinks about his or her problem more than ones or twice a day, then you know that you are on to something.

So what could this be, what could be a few niche ideas where your audience is thinking of a problem daily?

If you have terrible problems with acne, it might be so bad that you are afraid to go out and talk to people. It might stop you from doing certain things that you enjoy well if that is the case I am sure you would be thinking about that daily.

Another problem could be if your boyfriend left you. You love him and you thought that you had a future together. All you want is to have him back in your life. I am sure that woman will be thinking about how to get her boyfriend back at least a couple of times a day.

Or if you have financial problems, you lost your job and now you are trying to find a job to be able to feed your family. I am sure that person thinks about that more than ones, twice or three times a day.

This should give you some niche ideas. A guy named Travis showed me these 3 niches to promote and he for sure knew what he was talking about.

3 Niches to promote:

Health

Love

Wealth

Do I promote only these 3 niches, NO, not at all. You can make loads of money with other niches, as long as you match the right product with the right costumer. But these 3 niches have good sub-niches with hungry crowds.

Because I work from home I today could have lunch with a good friend and watch our toddlers dance in our living room. Swedish kid pop music, have to love it. 

To your success,

Vicky

This is where I learned how to make my $2000 /month.

When you start out with affiliate marketing it is hard to know what niche to go in to. A common question is how to find a niche. I know I had a hard time when I first started I had questions like “what niche is going to be profitable?”  “where can I find a targeted customer” “where is there not too much competition”.

Well the truth is that you can make money in any niche. I know, that will probably not help you but it is true. There is no “magic” niche that will make you rich in no time, the most important thing is to do your research and pick a niche.

When you do get started you will see new opportunities everywhere and when you have been doing this for a while you will have more great niches to work with than you have time.

There are niches though that is “hungrier” than others. There are niches where the costumers are more willing than others to spend their money to find a solution to their problem.

One of the first niches that I started working with was in the health market. I found a product to promote that helped mothers ease their baby’s pain. Imagine this, your baby is crying your baby is in pain for hours every day.

Would you as a mother try to find a solution to your baby’s problem, YES. Would you as a mother think of this daily until your baby is feeling better, YES.

I gave those mothers a solution; I helped them help their baby. No pain no crying means a happy baby. Happy baby means a happy mother, you know. To be honest I have not worked with this campaign for probably 2 years and it still bring in about 10 sales a month. For a campaign I set up 2 years ago.

Anyway today we where going to talk about HOW to find a niche. Here is 3 Ways on How to find a Niche:

1. Amazon

Go to amazon.com and look to the left where it says shop all departments pick a department. For this example lets pick “Beauty”  it is under “Groceries, Health and Beauty” I will then have a lots of options to digg down in to a niche so I pick “skin care”. But we will not stop there “skin care” is way to broad to target so lets continue and click on “face” under categories.

Now lets see what we can come up with. We have neckline slimmers (never heard of ) I guess they slim your neck, acne products, recovery treatments, anti-aging products, scar treatments… This is where we find a niche.

Another way to use amazon.com to find a niche is by going to the book department and look at best selling books. If they are a top selling book you know people are looking for that kind of solution.

2. Look at your own problems  / products

Look at your own life, look at the problems you have and want to find a solution to. Do you have a snoring husband that drives you crazy at night? Are your kids on the computer way to long, do you need a timer to make sure they do not fight and that they share the time to be online? Find a niche in your own problems.

What products do you use around your house? Camera, TV, dryer, diapers… You can pretty much find a niche anywhere. It is often easier to start out with a niche where you already have some knowledge about the problem or product.

3. TV advertisements

The amount of money that is spent on TV advertising every day is crazy. I am sure the companies have done their research. They know that people will buy their products, which means you know that people buy these products as well.

You can easily find a niche by not leaving the advertisement break. Medicines for all kinds of things, cars, dating sites, diapers, clothes…

How to find a niche? I hope these 3 little ways will help finding your niche.

Find a hungry costumer and give them what they NEED.

But the most important thing is that you take ACTION, find a niche any niche, it does not have to be perfect, and go from there.

Because I work from home I did not miss my sons comment “It is really awesome to be a big brother” It made my day.

Best of luck to you,

Vicky