These are but Ten of many thousands of Websites that have gone from scratch to Millions of Dollars value in a few years of operations. You will find similar examples in every country, for, the Internet is truly global - your customers are people from all over the world, the thirst for knowledge is global and the infrastructure for accessing the Internet continues to grow! Surely, you have something that you can (and want) to share with fellow-human beings? If Yes (and we don't know a SINGLE human being who has NOTHING to tell the world - do you?!), then going online is the CHEAPEST and MOST EFFICIENT way to reach millions!

All the above Ten Websites have the following things in common:

1. They were started off on shoestring budgets

2. These online enterprises grew - and continue to grow - at phenomenal rates. Rates that are ten, hundred, even a thousand times faster than conventional, offsite enterprises!

3. Their owners went on to become multi-millionaires in a few years of operation

There are many, many other such online success stories, cutting across niche of operations, countries and whatever else you can think of!

Before you get carried away, consider the following facts:

• Over 90% of Online start-ups fold up within a year of operations

• There are any number of frauds/ cheats online, who would love to sink their teeth into your money

• Online opportunities are short-lived - typically, mere months! A clone of, say Hotmail, would not be a success today - its time has come and gone. So too, something like YouTube or Wikipedia. However, each of these were multi-million-dollar ideas when they were first conceived!

• The Internet is today filled to the brim with "schemes" promising instant success and quick money. Almost every one of them is a fraud, their perpetrators are merely eyeing your money! Therefore you need to be astute, to sift through the frauds and zero in on the genuine opportunity

• You need to create your own opportunities and at the same time, constantly scan available opportunities, to grow your online business. You are also likely to be constantly buffeted by the thought that the opportunity you recently skipped (for whatever reasons - whether you thought it was a fraud, whether you did not have the budget, whatever) might have been your ticket to success!

The following Chart summarizes our Words of Caution:

We list below, the Six most important ingredients of successful online businesses:

1. Competency in the Core area of your Online business. Thus, a Tourism website MUST have competency in the geography and tourist spots of the land they operate in, a website offering online tutorials for, say the GRE, MUST have in-depth knowledge of the GRE and so on. Competency in the chosen field is something that all successful online entities share - from Google downwards!

2. Thought, Care and Innovation you put into your online business. These are what make your online business grow faster than others in the same or similar areas. Additional investments may come in at a later stage, once your business proves successful. However, you will need to demonstrate that your concept is good, before you can find investors!

3. Robust Infrastructure. Online businesses are heavily dependant on infrastructure, unlike brick-and-mortar businesses. Your Website should remain 'up' for your clients to see. And since your addressable market is global, your Website needs to be up 24 x 7, 7 days a week, all weeks of the month and year!

4. Multiple Revenue Streams. Unlike most brick and mortar businesses, online businesses usually exhibit multiple revenue opportunities, big and small. All of them should be tapped. Following are some of the most common revenue streams that online businesses are likely to have:

   1. Sale of Products and Services - where you sell your own products and services to the world

   2. Online Advertisements - where advertisers pay you for every visitor from your website to theirs or for every sale they make, due to visits from your website to theirs

   3. Affiliation to sell products/ services manufactured by your principals - you are paid a decent commission for every sale you make for your principals

   4. Content Syndication - where you sell your content to other Websites interested in it

   5. Sell your Website to the highest bidder - like Sabir Bhatia sold his Hotmail to Microsoft, 2 years after startup, for US$ 400 Million!

5. Innovative Marketing. You must have, hire or outsource the ability to bring in ‘footfalls’ to your site, the ability to notch up ‘eyeballs’ for your pages, day-after-day-after day

6. Your rankings on Search Engines. Successful Websites invariably have high Search Engine Rankings for their chosen Keywords. They constantly work on retaining and improving their "Search Visibility", thus remaining highly profitable

Websites have been around for as long as the Internet. However, Blog sites are an important development that has happened in the online world, during the last 2 years or so. Social Networking sites have been around for longer than 2 years, but their popularity has gone up many-fold, during the last few years. Most of us visit Websites, Blog sites and Social Networking sites without really bothering about what the site is, technically. That's just fine, as long as you are a visitor. However if you plan to set up your own Website/ Blog site, you need to know the differences! So here they are - do note that these are not water-tight differences: it ought to help you decide what exactly you should go in for

There are hardly any differences between online and offline businesses, really. All the core concepts of traditional businesses are important in growing an online business too. Look at the following Checklist:

• A Quality product/ service is still central to success

• Management Strategies have not changed

  • Demand - Supply rules continue to apply

  • Economies of scale continue to prevail

  • Attractive packaging of products and services continues to be vital

  • Staying ahead of the competition all the time continues to be critical

• Accounting principles have not changed

• Business Ethics have not changed

• You still need to retain old customers

• You still need to attract new customers

• Obviously, you still need to work within the laws of the land – some of them Globally-applicable laws - for example IPR, Patents, etc.

Therefore, nothing really has changed - only, whatever you do needs to be done quickly (and correctly), to succeed in an online business! Having said that, here are the differences between an offline and an online business:

• The Initial Cost of setting up an online business are a fraction of that required to start up an offline business. As a result, the following are the differences between starting up an online business and starting up an offline business:

  • Entry barriers are very low for starting up an online business. What you plan to start up can be started up by someone in your neighborhood too, provided the person has sufficient knowledge as well. Even after you have started up and have seen excellent growth, someone else with more money to invest can begin - and overtake you - in your chosen online business! In the online world, this is called the "Five Hundred Pound Gorilla" - such gorillas can easily obliterate your successful online business!

  • You need to grab the right opportunity and get going quickly - online opportunities typically are good for a few months alone: someone else 'latches on' to the opportunity and sets up his/ her inline shop by then! Once that happens, your chances of success are severely dented!

  • Your dependence on infrastructure (your Website services provider, Internet Service provider, computer and software vendor, etc.) are very heavy, in comparison with your dependence on Infrastructure vendors (Raw Materials suppliers, Electricity supplier, Transportation vendor, etc.), in an offline business. This is primarily due to the fact that you can always stock your finished goods, in an offline business. In an online business, your Website (including Database and everything else) needs to be up 24 x 7 x 12 months yearly, for visitors to be able to visit it and buy your products/ services.

As with any business, there are many one-time steps and many that need to be done continuously. Here is a flow chart that shows you how to go about setting up your online business!

We now look at each of the stages - "Lets start at the very beginning! A very good place to start!", to quote from Sound of Music!

Identify Concept: If you want the single most important stage in going online, this is the one. If you do not have a concept/ do not have a sound business concept, your efforts are doomed for failure. Every other stage flows from here!

Procure suitable Domain Name: Once your concept has crystallized and you are ready to take the plunge, it is time for you to purchase a suitable Domain Name. A Domain Name is your Web Address - that which your visitors will type into their Browsers, to reach your website. For example, our Domain Name is www.welloiledpc.com - you, every member and visitor to our website and the search engines - everyone needs to know this address, to come to our website!

Clearly, choosing an appropriate Domain Name is important, to maximize visitors! Here are some pointers to choosing an appropriate Domain Name:

1. Your Domain Name should be indicative of what your website is all about. If you are setting up a Website to sell your paintings, a Domain Name like www.artstudio.com would be a lot more successful, than, say, www.bomberman.com! Once again, if this were 100% true, websites like www.google.com and www.yahoo.com have no business being in the Top 10 list of online businesses!

2. Choosing a Domain Name that is your name is fine, if you are not too bothered about visitors or members or sales. Unless of course you are a world-famous personality! For, the number of people who know you is a minuscule of the potential number of visitors (and therefore, revenue) your website can generate! You may ignore this point if you are Elvis Presley or someone equally famous - not otherwise...!

3. Domain Name suffixes are also important. When the Internet was young, there were certain "Unwritten Rules" for Domain Names. However, with the Internet booming in a manner that nobody had predicted - and the very chaotic nature of the Internet itself, these distinctions have become less binding. Following is a listing of Domain Name suffixes and what they were initially meant for:

Note that the above is only a sample of Domain Name Suffixes available today!

4. Your first choice for a Domain Name suffix should be .COM, since this is the Domain Name suffix with the maximum number of sites. When people have incomplete information about a website's address, they instinctively choose the .COM suffix, while searching for it online. Many do not check any further, when their results do not find them the site they are looking for... At WellOiledPC, we have purchased the following four Domain Names:

   • www.welloiledpc.com

   • www.welloiledpc.net

   • www.welloiledpc.org

   • www.welloiledpc.info

Click on any of the above and you will land up at www.welloiledpc.com, since we have purchased each of these Domain Names and have redirected them to www.welloiledpc.com. This is done to safeguard your website - if you are the owner of abcde.com. you wouldn't want someone with ten times the funds you have at his disposal, to start up abcde.net, would you now!

If you do not get your first choice of Domain Name - and this is quite likely too - do not worry, pick something that is similar and reflects your proposed online business equally well! The organizations that sell Domain Names (more about them after these 5 Points) usually also have a facility for generating similar-sounding/ themed Domain Names that are not yet allotted. Many a time, you actually get a more suitable Domain Name by browsing these lists!

5. DO NOT choose a Domain Name that is too long. Experts are of the opinion that a Domain Name should ideally be in the range 8 to 12 alphabets, to be successful. A Domain Name such as www.doctorkentslaboratory.com can of course be easily saved in a Browser's Favorites listing, but is a lot more difficult to remember than www.drkentslab.com!

To answer the question "Who sells Domain Names": The Internet (and therefore, Domain Names) is controlled at different levels by different organizations. At the very top is Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN. Click on the link above to reach the ICANN website. By their own admission, "ICANN is responsible for the global coordination of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers. These include domain names (like .org, .museum and country codes like .UK), as well as the addresses used in a variety of Internet protocols. Computers use these identifiers to reach each other over the Internet. Careful management of these resources is vital to the Internet’s operation, so ICANN’s global stakeholders meet regularly to develop policies that ensure the Internet’s ongoing security and stability."

Apart from ICANN, you have a number of Domain Registrars in every continent and country. They check with ICANN and are empowered to allot you your preferred Domain Name. Check up on Google for a listing of Domain Registrars in your area! Make sure they are authorized by ICANN, pay up and purchase your Domain Name! Domain Names are quite cheap - you can buy a .COM Domain Name for under US $ 5, usually. Domain Names like .INFO and .BIZ are even cheaper!

Identify Hosting Services Provider: If you thought that your Website files are best kept on your own Computer, you guessed wrong. For, your Website needs to be up every second of the day and night, so that visitors living in different time zones may access it during their working hours and not yours! Some of the largest companies - IBM and hp and other multi-billion dollar companies in the IT segment itself - have their Websites on servers that are owned by professional Hosting Service providers! Usually, Hosting Service Providers guarantee 99.99% Uptime

Are you the best person to run a Web Server? What would you do when something does not work, for your visitors would not return again and again, to see if your website is up again!

Again, coming to bandwidth: if you get a few tens of visitors at the same time, your home/ office bandwidth may be sufficient for all of them to view your website at reasonably good speed. However if you have more visitors every second, your bandwidth will simply crack up! What you need is Megabits of Bandwidth, big enough to handle hundreds of visitors swooping down on your website, all at the same time! You DO want people to visit your website in large numbers and buy your products and services, don't you? So why half measures?

On to Security now: do you have the budgets or knowledge to secure your Website from hackers, spyware, viruses, etc.?

Now, if you are on the point of giving up because (a) you can never acquire the skills to run your own Web Server (b) you cannot purchase Megabits of bandwidth and (c) you do not have the knowledge or budgets to provide your Website security from malicious stuff, don't give up - Hosting Service Providers do all this and more, at very affordable rates! So how do they do this? Simple - by shared infrastructure! Your Website would be one of many hosted on a single Web Server, sharing the Bandwidth and Security measures with all the other websites hosted by your Hosting Service provider! Typically, the cost of hosting a reasonably big Website, complete with all bells and whistles, is in the range US$ 100 to US$ 400 per annum. Simple Websites without Database, e-Mail and other appurtenances may cost as little as US $ 20 per annum! Check the guaranteed Uptime that a Hosting Service provider talks about, before making your choice!

There are one-stop vendors like GoDaddy and Bravenet, where you can purchase a Domain Name as well as a Hosting package. If you choose one of these Hosting Service providers, you just can't go wrong!

Set up Support Systems: This stage needs to be done just before you begin writing your content. This is easily the easiest stage and it involves getting your Computer (the one you are going to use, for all your Website work) in WellOiled condition. Thus you need to ensure that you have;

1. A Computer (Desktop or Laptop) with sufficient RAM, Hard Disk space and other peripherals, for working on your Website

2. Top-notch AntiVirus and AntiSpyware programs to ensure that your Computer does not go down right when you need it most! As always, we recommend Norton 360 for all your Security needs!

3. A Browser to check how your Web pages display in the Browser. If you are getting deep into Web Designing, we recommend that you install at least the following Browsers, since each of them use different Browser Engines:

   • Microsoft Internet Explorer

   • Mozilla Firefox

   • Opera

   • Apple Safari for Windows

   Since the other Browsers use the Engine used by either Microsoft or Firefox, your pages are likely to display perfectly in them, once they display perfectly in each of the above four Browsers. If you are a perfectionist, you ought to check your Web pages in each of the 12 Browsers we have reviewed - click this link to read our Browser Reviews!

4. A fixed, non-flexible schedule for updating your Operating System, AntiVirus, AntiSpyware, Browser and all your Microsoft programs

5. Sufficient Bandwidth for 'Uploading' the pages you create to your Web Server. Although 128 kbps Bandwidth is workable, we suggest you arm yourself with at least 256 kbps - you don't want to spend time playing game after game of Solitaire, while your files upload to your Web Server, do you!

6. A top-notch HTML Editing program. The best ones are Microsoft FrontPage (which is no longer supported by Microsoft, but is extremely easy to use and is being used by a large number of people the world over), Adobe DreamWeaver and Microsoft Visual Web Developer - all of which are commercial software that you will need to buy. You may also use Freeware HTML Editors such as AceHTML. Some of the freeware HTML Editors are quite easy to use and have all basic features. If your needs are spartan, you may even make do with Microsoft Word - nothing is easier than Word now, right?!

7. A Scanner and Printer at the very least - in website work, you are definitely going to need both! We suggest you get yourself an hp All-in-One Multi-function Peripheral!

Ensure that everything works and continues to work 24 x 7, and move on to the next stage!

Create and Edit Contents: Now that you have come up with your winning concept, purchased the Domain Name of your choice and paid up your Hosting Service provider, it is time you began creating your Website! You have a number of high-quality solutions that you can use, to create professional Websites. You may also hire Web Designers whose job will be to design a beautiful, well-structured and easy-to-navigate website for you! However do not forget that the concept is yours - you are the subject matter expert, where your subject is concerned. It is extremely improbable that your Website Designer can contribute meaningfully with respect to your content!

If your website designer is not too good with language, you have freelancers who will clean up your grammar and do other such stuff for you, for a fee: we do such services ourselves. However, to expect such people to CREATE content on your topic of expertise is unrealistic! We would like to explain this with an example, since we have been misunderstood on occasion, in the past: Let us assume that you are a Doctor specializing in Cardiac problems and plan to put up your website on how to ensure that your heart does not wear out prematurely - excellent material for a website, honestly! YOU, the Cardiac specialist, will have to jot down all your points. A freelancer or professional agency can put your points into smooth, flowing, error-free content that is ready to put up on your website - the agency CANNOT do a proper job of explaining why it is necessary to jog for at least 30 minutes every morning, to stave off heart problems! We at WellOiledPC take up both Web Designing as well as language work on any topic meant for the Web (or Print), but we are quite HELPLESS where CONTENT GENERATION is concerned -  that is YOUR area of expertise!

Set up Website: Once you have identified your Hosting Service provider and got your Website space, it is time you understand how your Website (provided by your Hosting Service Provider) works. This is a complex step consisting of a number of Server-side settings to understand and operate. It is common for beginners to be confused and frustrated at this stage, due to its complexity. But then this is also information that you will use daily, both for setting up as well as running your Website! There are Websites running Windows as well as LINUX, Websites that have Front Page Extension/ PhP/ ASP.NET and other technologies, etc. Most Hosting Service Providers have Web Servers running each of these permutations and combinations - what you choose ought to depend on your choice of HTML Editor, what you are comfortable with and how you want to present your content to visitors.

If you are outsourcing your Website design, all you need to do in this stage is to clearly communicate your requirements, so that your Web Designer can adopt the appropriate platform. Usually, Windows-based Web Servers are costlier and this will affect the final pricing of both your Hosting Service provider as well as Web Designer. Make sure you get all User Names and Passwords for accessing your Web Server though - YOU have paid up for these facilities, not your Web Designer! Besides, if you decide to change Web Designers, your new Web Designer will require all this information, to work for you!

If you are going to build your website yourself, you need to understand a few things, once you select your Server OS and Web technology. Here are the things you MUST know, at the bare minimum:

1. The Root Directory of your Web Server, which is the directory that is visible to visitors and to you, behind the scenes as well. To protect their Server, Hosting Service providers NEVER give a client (people like you, who have their websites hosted on the Server) full access to all the folders on their Server!

2. The IP Number of your Server. The IP Number consists of a series of numbers in the following format: abc.def.ghi.jkl. Every Server on the Internet has a unique IP Number. Since Computers work best with numbers and humans with text, we have Domain Names for humans to find a website and IP Numbers for Computers to find other Computers on the Internet! You must know both the Domain Name as well as IP Number of your Web Server!

3. How to upload files to your Web Server, using FTP/ Front Page Server Extensions/ SharePoint Services, etc.

4. If you have opted for e-Mail Hosting as well, you must know the SMTP and PoP3 settings (for PoP3 Mail) or IMAP parameters, if you are planning to set up IMAP for your e-Mail. Usually, Hosting Service providers also give you the facility of checking your Mail over the Web (much like Mail and Hotmail). If so, you will need to know the URL for accessing your mail over the Internet!

5. Information on how to check your Web Statistics. You MUST know how many visitors come in to your Website every day, which pages are viewed and how many times, what are the key words being used by visitors to land up on your web pages and a thousand other things, where your web statistics are concerned! Although there are freeware and paid-for solutions that help track your web statistics, we have found that the Web Statistics provided by our Hosting Service provider is not only more detailed, it is a lot more accurate as well! Web Statistics provided by your Hosting Service provider is free - it is part of the money you pay for the hosting service - as well as easy to access. Your Hosting Service provider will usually give you a URL that you can visit using your Browser, to check your web statistics on a daily basis. Note that usually, such Web Statistics is captured once daily - they are not real-time (i.e., you cannot see statistics as they happen, instantaneously - you have to wait for a specific time every day, to see the happenings on your website during the last 24 hours) statistics. In any case, make sure you have all the information that you would like to track regularly, and the URL to do that as well! If you are serious about your Website and growing it, we seriously recommend that you choose a Hosting Service provider that gives you all the Web Statistics that you will possibly want!

6. Additional information like Secure Socket Layer information, information on setting up Shopping Cart/ Ad Banners, Guest Book, etc., and all other stuff you have paid for

Usually, your Hosting Service provider sends you all this information, in their Welcome e-Mail.

FTP to Website:

As discussed briefly earlier on, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is what you use, to copy your finished web pages from your Computer to your Web Server. In Internet parlance, this is called 'Uploading' - the reverse of 'Downloading', where you copy software/ pictures and other stuff from a Web Server to your Computer at home or office.

All top-notch HTML Editors have FTP facilities built in. FrontPage, DreamWeaver, Visual Web Developer - all have easy-to-use, powerful FTP modules. However, you will need to set up your HTML Editor the first time you use it for FTP. At the Server end, you will need to supply your Web Server's Domain, the FTP Port it uses (usually Port 21), your Used Id and Password for gaining FTP access and the Root Folder on the Server, to which you will be uploading files. At your end, you will nee to set up the Root Folder on your machine, where you have created your Website. All FTP programs save this information, therefore this needs to be filled in the first time alone.

Apart from FrontPage, DreamWeaver, Microsoft Visual Web Developer, etc., you have stand-alone FTP solutions as well. AceFTP is an excellent AdWare (Freeware, where you are shown advertisements, while using the product) FTP solution. CuteFTP is another very popular FTP solution in this genre. Finally, if you use a Mozilla-based Browser such as Firefox, CometBird or Flock, you have the excellent free add-on FireFTP, which is one of the easiest FTP solutions we know of.

We recommend that if you are using an HTML Editor that has built-in FTP facilities, you should stick to that. However if you find it too difficult to use, you may fall back on AceFTP/ FireFTP and its numerous cousins!

In the Flow Chart, we have shown a double-headed Arrow connecting the stages "Create and Edit Contents" and "FTP to Website". This is because you will be making thousands of changes to your web pages - we for example make fully half a dozen changes, on an average, to our pages. Now every time you make a change, you need to upload the changed page to your Web Server - otherwise your visitors will continue to see your older page! Some HTML Editor-cum-FTP solutions let you work directly on your web pages, modifying it right on the server. If that is the case, you will need to download all the pages and images of your website to your Computer at home/ office, as backup! Either way, you need to synchronize the files on your Web Server and your local Computer's folder containing your website files. The double-headed arrow, wherever we have used it in the Flow Chart, depicts a perpetual closed loop between the concerned stages.

Submit to Search Engines: At this point, you have accomplished all the following:

• Identified your million-dollar online niche

• Purchased a Domain Name that suits your online business to a 'T'

• Identified a reliable Hosting Service provider who has all reports and facilities you want for your dream website

• Set up Support Systems at your Home/ Office, as described in the relevant stage on this page

• Created your web pages

• FTP-ed your final web pages to your web server

With the above steps, you are in business! What you need to do now are tasks that will accomplish the following two objectives for you:

• Bring loads of visitors to your website

• Compel your visitors to buy your products and services

Once you accomplish both these, you begin to make money from your website!

Now that your website is up and visible, with anyone able to view it on the Internet, the next logical thing to do is to inform your friends about it. You may be the FRIENDLIEST person in the world, but surely your hundreds of friends isn't enough?! One of the well-documented facts in the online business is the fact that conversion rates are abysmally low - under 1%, actually. Therefore if you have a hundred visitors, you should expect maybe 1 sales inquiry. And for every 10 inquiries, you can effect a sale. Therefore, you need THOUSANDS of visitors arriving daily, before you can begin counting your profits!

Here are some more interesting statistics:

• Over 65% of visits received by websites today is through Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, etc.

• About 90% of the people who use Search Engines never look beyond the first 3 pages of Search Listings

• Amongst the Search Engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN account for over 80% market share

Hence if your website is 'invisible' to Search Engines, you are getting about 35 visitors alone - if your website is visible to Search Engines, you would receive a Hundred visitors, everything else remaining the same!

To emphasize: you CANNOT ignore the power of Search Engines, if you are in the online business!

Quite predictably therefore, your next step is to make your website and all your content visible to Search Engines. At least to Google, Yahoo and MSN! The mere task of submitting your website and all its content to search engines is simple - we have a tool that lets you do that, right on our HomePage - click here (this will open a new window) and scroll to the bottom, you will find the tool next to our Web of Trust (WOT) Certification! It is a simple-to-use tool that submits your Website to about 20 Search Engines, and its totally free!

To ensure that Search Engines visit your site frequently and pick up all your content changes, you need to re-submit your website and all your contents periodically to Search Engines. We recommend that you re-submit your website once every 2 weeks or thereabouts.

Search Engine Optimize: You have tested, proven techniques for ensuring that Search Engines quickly pick up your content. Again, it is not sufficient that your Web page appears on Page 78 of a Search Engine's listing - we repeat the statistics we quoted earlier - About 90% of the people who use Search Engines never look beyond the first 3 pages of Search Listings. Therefore your efforts should be good enough to land your content on the very first - or at least second page of the Search Engine Listings on Google, Yahoo and MSN! Else, you are wasting your time!

The techniques of ensuring your content high 'Search Engine Visibility' is called 'Search Engine Optimization' or SEO. A number of SEO specialists and consultants today offer SEO services, with many of them doing excellent work. However, look out for smooth operators who promise you great stuff, while their own company website looks like something the cat left over, with an Alexa Ranking that is way below the 5,000,000 or some such mark! They are DEFINITELY people who are out to make a fast buck without knowing the ABCs of Search Engine Optimization!

Good SEO specialists know what is amiss with your website, much like your Dentist, who knows exactly what to do to relieve your painful toothache! They ensure that your Meta Tags, Keywords and Content are written in a manner that is easy for Search Engine 'Robots' to 'Crawl' your website. Again like your Dentist, they may recommend that you pull out the offending tooth (completely re-write your pages) or perform surgery on your aching tooth (modify your existing pages) or merely take a few medicines (make minor corrections to your web pages)

Let us first explain these new terms: 'Robots' are small scripts that Search Engines use, to go through your web contents. These contents are then sent to the Search Engine sending out the Robot, so that your current content is displayed, when people search using the Search Engine! Clearly, Robot visits to your website is a good thing!

The process wherein Search Engine Robots go through your web contents is called 'Crawling'. You may want all your web pages to be crawled or leave out a few pages. If you specify the pages you want crawled and those that you do not want crawled (for whatever reason), your SEO Consultant can easily make it happen exactly the way you want

Website owners - even those who have owned and operated websites for years - often think that SEO is something to be done once in a lifetime. This is a BIG misconception, for SEO is a CONTINUOUS PROCESS! Thousands of new websites come up daily and many of them are likely to be in the same niche as you. If your content remains static, Search Robots will soon stop visiting your site and instead, will increase the frequency of visits to other websites in the same niche as you! Result? Your website and contents begin to fall off in Search Listings, you get relegated to pages that are farther and still farther away from the first two pages! Instead, other websites that continue to do SEO and continue to update their contents get into the slot you have vacated and could climb their way right to the Number 1 position! The loss is yours...!

So what are the basics of SEO? We will list down the points, in decreasing order of importance:

• You WILL be at the top of the search Engine Listings for a search on your website - that is natural. BUT THAT IS GROSSLY INSUFFICIENT - if people knew your site's URL, they wouldn't be using a Search Engine! For example, we are right at the top for the keyword welloiledpc. That is natural, for NOBODY else can have the URL welloiledpc - we have purchased it! We are however the Number 1 if you do a search on 'best pc specifications', for example - Number 1 on Google, Yahoo AND MSN! This is due to our constant efforts at SEO on WellOiledPC - if we stop our SEO efforts, we are sure to spiral downwards immediately thereafter!

• Your Content, Site Description, Page Title and Keywords should tally. For example, if you run a website that teaches school children how to perform well in the SAT and if your Keywords are words like 'rock music' and 'football', while your content talks about the SAT, and your Site Description reads 'You cannot go wrong if you choose Mike's lessons', you are not going to be on the top either for searches on 'Rock Music' or 'Football' as well as 'Scholastic Aptitude Test'!

• You need to have a number of one-way and two-way links to and from your website, to other reputed sites. You cannot be isolated in the online world!

We explain more about the various kinds of Links under the heading Put up Reciprocal Links a in the next-to-next section. The importance of such Links and other stuff as well as how to set them up is discussed under the last FAQ, How do I set up and maintain Reciprocal Links?

Update Contents on Website: We have stressed the importance of updating the contents on your Website. Search Robots will quickly stop visiting a static website and thus, its Search Visibility gets hit adversely. You need to constantly change the look-and-feel, navigation, pictures, etc., too, apart from the contents. We believe that NO WEBSITE can present ALL the knowledge there is, on any given topic on Earth! Updating your contents is thus important for the sake of the quality of your website as well!

Put up Reciprocal Links: We will discuss this more completely under the last FAQ, How do I set up and maintain Reciprocal Links? Under this heading, we will merely explain the different kinds of links there are. These are;

• Inward Links. Any Website that has a link to any of the pages on your website is an Inward Link for you. For example, if www.ibm.com has a link to any of the 150-odd pages at WellOiledPC, it is an Inward Link, as far as we are concerned. Inward Links are very important, as far SEO is concerned

• Outward Links. Any reference to any other website's pages from any of your pages is an Outward Link, as far as you are concerned. In the above example, the link to one of the 150-odd pages at WellOiledPC, from www.ibm.com is thus an Outward Link, as far as IBM is concerned. Clearly, the definition of Inward and Outward Links depends on which side of the table you are sitting on, speaking figuratively! Outward Links too are important, where SEO is concerned

• Internal Links. Internal Links are links from one page of your website to another page on your website. For example, a link from this page to the page to the one where we review Windows 7 Release Candidate is an Internal Link. Click on the link shown here - it will open our Windows 7 Review page in a new window! Needless to say, Internal Links aren't too useful, as far as Search Engines are concerned - they are more a technique for directing visitors to similar content you already have, on a different page, without copy-pasting the entire content

• One way Links. One-way Links may be either Inward Links or Outward Links from Website A to Website B. The concept of One-way Links will be clear when you read about Two way Links, discussed right below

• Two way Links. Two way Links are actually two Links - one from any page on Website A to any page on Website B AND the other, from any page on Website B to any page on Website A. These are therefore also called Reciprocal Links. If we had a link to IBM's website and IBM had a link to our website as well, IBM and WellOiledPC would have set up a Two way or Reciprocal Link.

Select Online Ad Vehicles: Earlier, we spoke of Multiple Revenue Streams in online businesses. In a traditional offline, brick-and-mortar business, you sell products/ services and prepare your Balance Sheets. However with online businesses, there are more options. One of the most popular options is to display Advertisements of other websites on your website and this is called Online Advertising. The following are the different models of Online Advertising:

1. Flat rate for displaying advertisements on your website. Typically, you are paid about US$ 20 per month, under this online advertising model

2. Display the Banners/ Advertisements of other Websites on your web pages. This model is also called Pay Per Impression and you are paid a small sum of money for every visitor who comes in to your page displaying the advertiser's advertisement. Typically, you are paid about 5 Cents for 1000 'impressions'. If you have two advertisements of the same publisher on the same page, a visitor viewing this page would see both advertisements, therefore it is counted as Two Impressions

3. Display the Banners/ Advertisements of other websites/ products/ services on your web pages. You are paid money for every click on the advertisement. Sometimes, these advertisements open in the same window, therefore your visitor leaves your website and enters your advertiser's website, when they click on the advertisement. This is the Pay Per Click model of online advertising. Typically, you are paid anything from 5 Cents to 2 Dollars per click.

4. Display the Banners/ Advertisements of other Websites on your web pages. When your visitors click on the advertisement and actually end up buying the advertised product/ service, you earn a nice commission, since the purchase would not have happened, if you had not re-directed the buyer to your advertiser's website! Your commission from such sales is a lot higher - even up to 5% of the cost of the product/ service! Therefore if the advertisement was for a Laptop costing US$ 1000, you earn as much as US$ 50 per sale!

There are a number of Advertisers who have Online Advertising schemes. The most prominent of them all is Google's AdSense program. With AdSense, you need to first register with Google and prove that you are indeed the owner of your website, by means of a simple process. You are then allowed to pick up small Java Scripts from the AdSense program site, which you may copy-paste to the relevant part of the page on relevant pages. Google Ads are highly customizable, so as to merge with your website design. How, where an what Google Ads to place on your pages is an entire subject by itself - we may take it up in the future...

Apart from Google AdSense, there are other excellent Online Ad Services like the ones offered by Bidvertiser, AdBrite, etc. What works for one site may not always work for you, what once worked for you may not continue to always work for you too. Therefore you need to constantly monitor the sales from the Online Advertising vehicle you have subscribed to, you need to constantly experiment, constantly look out for new opportunities. You may subscribe to more than one Ad Vehicle on your website, usually there is no backlash. However with Google, you need to be very careful, for they disqualify websites for the slightest infringement, even where it is committed by your visitor! Again, discussing this is beyond the scope of this topic... maybe in a separate page...

You also have alternatives to this kind of Advertising - one of these is the innovative In-line Advertising, where certain portions of your content gets double-underlined. When your visitors place their mouse on such text, an advertisement pops up. If your visitor clicks on these ads or makes a purchase, you get paid! We are currently running In-line advertisements by Infolinks - check out our Home Page! And do not forget to click the advertisements, for that brings us money! :) Since we are checking our Infolinks' earning potential, we have put it up on one page alone, for the time being

Select Online Advertisers: Just because you have subscribed to half a dozen Online Ad Vehicles does not mean you cannot display Ads of websites that would like to deal with you on a one-to-one basis! You need to constantly scout around and sign up with websites/ advertisers who will pay you money to display their ads on your website. We have a few such sign-ups at WellOiledPC - the BestDealsInsurance advertisement we have at the bottom of our HomePage is one such. Such advertisements are additional revenue generated by your website!

Monitor Ad Revenues: Monitoring your Ad Revenues is absolutely important. Nothing is permanent except change, as we have all learnt at our grandmother's knees. This is, if anything, even more true in the online world! An Ad Vehicle that brought you US$ 5000 last year may suddenly bring you no more than US$ 10 the next year! The website advertisement that fetched you US$ 100 in the last 3 months might suddenly run dry - or the company may close down, drying up that revenue stream. Again, a new opportunity might come up that has a higher chance of success in your niche. For example, if you run a website that promotes travel and tourism, a newly-launched airline may be interested in displaying their ads on your website and pay you handsomely for it! Therefore you need to keep your eyes open!

More important than keeping your eyes and options open, you need to monitor exactly what each ad vehicle, each advertiser is generating for you! You need to do this with the sincerity of a manic Accountant - otherwise you have no way to know the truth and therefore, take the correct decision!

If you thought that running an online business is easier than running an offline business, you're mistaken. For, it all happens in the blink of an eyelid, in the online world. Moreover, there are newer technologies than come up constantly, making it difficult even for the most techno-savvy person to keep pace with technological developments: where would (s)he find time to devote to the business aspects then? Therefore, outsourcing is perhaps even more important in the online businesses.

Having clarified that - and understood the important stages of running an online business from the previous FAQ, let us look the functions that may be outsourced. Our views on this are as follows:

The tasks you need to PERSONALLY do are;

• Come up with a winning online idea/ product/ service

• Choose an appropriate Domain Name

• Select Hosting Services provider carefully, ensuring that all infrastructure and reporting tools that you require are available at their end

• Be in control of the contents: you may outsource the Grammar part and the Web Designing part, but YOUR thoughts and ideas should be present, undiluted, on your website!

• Select and carefully supervise the setup of Infrastructure support at your end

• Carefully select Reciprocal Links that bring traffic to your site/ enhance your website's Google Page Rank and Alexa Ranking

• Select Online Advertisers carefully to maximize your returns, while enhancing your site's contents and looks

• Select Ad Vehicles (online as well as offline) carefully, to maximize your earnings and minimize your Advertising Cost

• Set up robust mechanisms for daily monitoring of your Advertising Revenue

Organizations big and small, running simple and complex websites across the world follow the norm, "Outsource as many non-core tasks as possible. Non-core tasks include simple as well as highly specialized tasks - they are non-core only because they do not contribute to a company's revenues! For example, a school does not print its own text books - they merely scan the best text books in the market and adopt the best. Similarly, a Bakery makes its own cakes - they usually do not make the paper covers that are used for packing their cakes!

Usually, doing non-core tasks within the organization results in poor quality work that takes longer to perform and ends up being costlier. This is because the organization needs to employ full-time personnel for non-core tasks. These personnel do not have avenues for updating their knowledge and thus end up being second-rate at their work, in an industry that is as fast-changing as the IT industry. When outsourced, the organization pays per task completed - there are no overheads, no extra costs associated with permanent employees! For the agency that does such outsourced work, these tasks are core - they earn their bread and butter by specializing in these very tasks! They retain experts and skilled personnel in the field and thus produce far better results. It is easy to see why there is such a rush, globally, for outsourcing!

Following are tasks that are easily outsourced:

• Web and e-Mail Hosting Services

• Infrastructure Services such as;

  • Internet Connection

  • Payment Gateway

• Maintenance of Computers

• Design and development of Website

• Updating and maintaining Website

• Editing of content for the website

• Website Software Development

• Submission to Search Engines

• Search Engine Optimization

As you can see, there are a number of tasks in-house as well as outsourced, that go into the making of a top-notch Website! 

Website development is a much larger area, of which Web Designing is a subset - the part dealing with the creation and maintenance of HTML pages alone. You have a score and more books that deal with the principles of good Web Designing - we cannot go too deep into that. Let us instead list out some of the most important principles of Web Designing: get these right and you have a website that is basically OK!

• Stick to one HTML Editor. If you are most conversant with, say Dreamweaver, use it to complete and maintain all your web pages. If you want to change to, say Microsoft Visual Web Designer for some reason, it is best to re-create all your web pages from scratch, under Microsoft Visual Web Designer! This is because each HTML Editor leaves its signature on the HTML coding. Search Engines look for the signature and where there are multiple signatures, your page may get incompletely spidered or not spidered at all!

• All your web pages should have a continuity about them in terms of;

  • Page color

  • Font size, font face, font color, link colors (unvisited and visited links should also be same across pages)

  • Your Logo

  • Other Page Elements like Tables, Lines, etc.

• It is usual for websites to have a slightly different Home Page. However, the rest of your pages SHOULD have a uniform look and feel!

• To achieve a uniform look and feel, you should create your own Template or use a Template that you have purchased/ downloaded free. Count this Template page as one of your website pages - update it if you need to, upload it to your Website, backup your Template page, etc. Of course, you need not have a link that opens your Template and displays it to your visitors!

• You MUST have an "Alt" Text Tag for all images. Some Search Engines are very particular that the Alt tags are filled in for all images

• It is a good idea to include the complete path, when specifying the locations of links, images, etc., on your web page. Incomplete paths like /images/ProductLogo.jpg will still display the image, but Search Engines prefer http://mywebsite.com/images/ProductLogo.jpg

• A page that has too much text is likely to be skipped by your visitors, though Search Engines will spider any length of text. (We are guilty of committing this crime...) It is a better idea to have text and graphics/ images/ other content cleverly mixed with the text, so as to retain visitors' attention

• All your Links should work. This is extremely important! Most HTML Editors have built-in Link Checkers that do this task for you automatically, returning a list of broken links. It is a good idea to run the Link Checker after every middling-big or major change to site content. For smaller changes, it might be easier to check the page by viewing it in your Browser and checking each changed link manually

• A simple Menu Bar is preferred to one that is jazzy - you have something to SAY and it is not "Hey! Look at my cute Menu Bar!", right?

• It is important that every page have a link to every other page on your website: different visitors move about differently! This is easily achieved by putting the Menu Bar on each of your pages. It does NOT help if the Menu Bar looks different from page to page or is placed at different places on each page!

• You need to optimize each of your web pages. Whether you use a visual editor such as FrontPage/ Dreamweaver, etc., or whether you like to code your own HTML from scratch, you will be surprised at the number of mistakes generated - even where the page displays perfectly! Luckily, most top-notch HTML Editors have a built-in HTML Optimizer that checks and removes extra spaces, double and empty tags etc., automatically. Such Optimizers are NOT Link Checkers - you need to run link checkers separately

W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is the organization entrusted with the development and maintenance of Web Technologies like HTML.

Here is the link to the Experts of HTML, the people who lay down HTML standards!

Like any business - online or offline, building customers, servicing their needs and retaining their loyalty, while adding new customers daily is central to success. The difference is that a brick-and-mortar store would have a sale for every 2 or 3 customers that walk in, while a website would have a sale for every 500 or 1000 visitors alone! Therefore increasing traffic is of paramount importance, if you are planning to raise revenues from your website.

We present below a brief of the usual sources of traffic to any website, as well as a brief comment about each source. Depending on the niche you are operating in, you may have other sources of visitors too. For example, if you are a Lawyer running a website dealing with legal issues, the e-Mail addresses of all Lawyers in your region may be used to invite them to your website.

• The easiest source of visitors to your website are your friends, relatives, students, colleagues and other people you know. However, talking to each person you know and requesting them to visit your website is the most cumbersome thing you can imagine. It is also unlikely to bring in large number of visitors, for your anyone's of friends is finite.

• Another source of visitors to your website are focused Newsletters and Mailers to people who are likely to be interested in your content. This has excellent potential, but returns have usually proved to be much lesser than the efforts put into promotional Newsletters and Mailers. This is because there is so much Spam on the Internet - a study conducted by MessageLabs in 2006 estimates that over 70% of all mail received is Spam! The percentage is likely to have gone up in 2009! As a result, your Mailers would probably land up in the Spam folder of your recipient! Even where it does not, it has to compete with a hundred other mail that e-Mail users receive everyday!

• The other drawback of sending unsolicited mail to large numbers of people is that YOUR e-Mail Server could get blocked by authorities such as DNSBL, SpamHaus, SpamCop, etc. If that happens, you get embroiled in the exercise of getting your e-Mail Server certified OK by the authority - until you free your Mail Server, your mail will NOT get sent out! ISPs and Mail Hosting Service Providers are likely to ban your e-Mail accounts even before the matter reaches authorities such as SpamHaus and SpamCop! Remember, your e-Mail Server SHOULD NOT be blacklisted by ANY of the Black Listing authorities or by your own ISP, for your e-Mail to work!

• The other source of traffic is offline methods such as pamphlets, advertisements in local newspapers, etc. These are generally very expensive, in comparison with online methods

• Yet another source of traffic is through One-way and Two-way link exchanges. We have already discussed the basics of One and Two-way Reciprocal Links under the heading, Put up Reciprocal Links. More information, including how to find out sites who are likely to agree to your request for a Link, will be discussed under the heading, How do I set up and maintain Reciprocal Links?

• Reciprocal Links do work. However they do not work too efficiently. Moreover, they take years to set up and you can never be absolutely sure whether the site you have put up your link on gets good traffic, thereby redirecting good traffic to your website!

• The best method of getting really large numbers of visitors to your website with relatively less effort and at near-zero cost is to submit your website to search engines. If your website is search engine-friendly, your site's contents will get picked up by Search Engines. When a visitor performs a search on any of your listed keywords, your website's link will appear in his/ her search results, with a brief description of your page! You are thus able to reach out to millions of potential visitors, at the cost of Search Engine Optimizing your website! Try a search on the key words "best pc specifications" - you will find WellOiledPC right at the top of the results, whether on Google, Yahoo, MSN or other Search Engines! We have worked hard to bring it to the first page of search results, on these search engines, but it has proved to be worth the efforts!

(Click here to go back to Website Ranking Systems)

Search Engines are a product of the Dot Com economy. When the whole world is your customer, you need to be 'seen' by people who want your product/ service. Traditional methods like advertisements or direct selling are hopelessly inadequate for larger geographical areas. Even where such methods are possible, the costs are prohibitive!

Websites get to be 'seen' thanks to 'Search Engines' like Google, Yahoo, MSN (a.k.a. Live.Com and now known as Bing.Com) and others. Search Engines ceaselessly collect information from the millions of websites, classify them and display them to whoever searches for specific information. In most cases, search engines search your website for contents without you having to 'register' or pay a fee for being searched for your contents. Here re some terms you should know about Search Engines:

1. Robots - these are tiny bits of computer code, Scripts, that are sent out by Search Engines, to 'study' your website and collect the information you have presented on each page of your website

2. Spidering/ Crawling - this is what Robots do, once they visit your website

3. Indexing - this is the action of classifying the information collected from your website, when a Robot crawls your website. Indexing makes it easier for humans to understand the collected information

4. Key Words - are the words that search engine users type into their search engine boxes, to look up information on. For example, a person wanting to travel to Acapulco would type in Acapulco into his search engine box. Acapulco is thus the Key Word of this person's search

5. Key Phrase - these are a super set of Key Words. For example, a person looking for cheap accommodation at Acapulco would type in "Cheap hotels in Acapulco" or "Cheap Lodgings in Acapulco" or "Cheap accommodation in Acapulco" or something similar. Each of these possibilities are Key Phrases for a search on cheap accommodation in Acapulco

6. Search Listing - this is what the person doing a search on his/ her chosen Key Word/ Key Phrase gets to see in his/ her Browser. A Search Listing contains an ordered list of web pages - complete with the URLs and a brief summary of the page - of all pages crawled by the Search Engine, containing information on the Key Word/ Key Phrase that was searched for. Typically, Search Engines list out tens of thousands of pages containing information on any given Key Word/ Key Phrase and display 10 or 20 links per page

Search Engine Robots lead a busy life. They flit from web site to web site, looking for new/ changed content. When it finds either, the content is sent to the parent Search Engine for indexing and listing by the Search Engine, when any person anywhere in the world searches for the information. Search Engine Listings have a brief of your contents in your own words and include a link to your page that has the information as well. All that the person seeking information has to do is click on the link provided by the search engine, to land up at your web page! Nothing could be easier, isn't it?

It is not only important that your website is listed whenever your pages have information related to a Key Word/ Key Phrase, it is also important that you are featured in the first or second - at worst, the third page of Search Engine Listings. If it on, say Page 82 of a Search Engine's Listing, it is as good as not being listed at all, as people rarely look beyond the first 2 pages of a search engine listing! If your web pages are frequently Spidered by Search Engine Robots - and your web pages are designed to be search engine-friendly, your web page will be listed in the early pages, for any Key Word that your site has information on. More about that in the next FAQ.

Optimizing Web Pages to make them search engine-friendly is a muti-billion dollar industry. Small wonder, for the benefits of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are tremendous. You can multiply your visitors many fold, thus increasing your sales and SEO costs a fraction of the potential increase in revenue!

Search Engine Robots come in to your website whenever they visit a website that has a reference to any of your web pages. Once at your website, they quickly, silently scan for changes in content (if it has visited your website in the past, otherwise it scans all your content) and sends the changes to the parent Search Engine, for indexing. Once it completes indexing, the Robot goes to the web pages (to other websites) that are presented in your web pages. Building up Links is therefore absolutely essential for your  website to be crawled frequently and the quickest, best way to build links is to go about setting up reciprocal links with websites you like, websites that are popular! The importance of Link Building cannot be overemphasized!

If building up Links is the first step to SEO, the second step is to write search engine-friendly content. It is a good idea to choose your preferred Key Words and Key Phrases for each page, separately. When writing content, make sure you use your key words and key phrases as many times as possible, without compromising on the quality of your language, grammar or readability of your content. Search Engines give prominence, if the key word has a higher 'Density' on your web pages. Remember, if your language is artificial and an obvious attempt to gain a higher Search Engine Listing, your readers are going to be put off by inferior language and poor readability, therefore it is important to strike the right balance!

As the third step, you need to mention your Key Words and Key Phrases in the Meta Text portion of your web page's HTML Code. Your Key Words are to be mentioned in within the <head> and </head> tag of your web pages. All HTML Editors let you specify your exact key words and key phrases

Finally you need to submit your Website to Search Engines, on a regular basis. We have a simple tool for submitting your website to about 20 search engines for free, right on our Home Page. There are many sites that do this service for free, there are many who charge you a small sum of money for this service as well.

The Big 3 Search Engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN (a.k.a. Live.Com - and from May 2009 onwards, known as Bing.Com). These three Search Engines handle about 70% of all searches made over the Internet, daily! Therefore if you are listed in these three, you have excellent chances of being discovered by anyone anywhere in the world! It is a good idea to get listed in the second-tier search engines such as AskJeeves.com, AOL Search, etc., too.

Web/ Blog site Ranking Systems

There are quite a few Web and Blog site Ranking methods - Google Page Rank, Alexa Ranking, Compete Ranking etc. Of these the Google Page Rank (abbreviated Google PR) is the most popular, followed by the Alexa Ranking system. However, there is no 'perfect' Web/ Blog site ranking system - all of them make major assumptions, all of them need to scale down the complexity of assessing a web/ blog site's popularity, so as to arrive at a reasonably accurate answer!

Google PR System

The Google PR system is a modification of Larry Page's (co-founder of Google) Ph. D thesis. The Google Website has this to say about Google PR: "PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance."

It ranges from PR 0 (this is the lowest Ranking) to PR 10 (which is the best PR). Its actual workings are a closely guarded secret at Google. Potential advertisers, potential website buyers and other interested parties are virtually certain to check out a web/ blog site's Google PR, before they take a decision.

While the Google PR system may be a mathematical marvel, it ends up being a measure of 'just how compatible the website is, with Google's policies'. For example, if you subscribe to Google AdWords (where you pay Google money for putting up your website's advertisement, every time someone searches on one of your keywords), your website's PR increases, even if you do not do anything to actually improve your web/ blog site, even if the number of visitors to your web/ blog site actually goes down!

Google run yet another Advertising program, called AdSense. AdSense is a typical PPC (Pay-per-Click) Advertising model, where your web/ blog pages carry advertisements of other web/ blog sites. Anytime your visitor clicks on these advertisements, you are paid a small amount of money. However, Google might suddenly decide to award your web/ blog site a Page Rank 0 if someone (maybe your competitor) systematically made invalid clicks in your Google AdSense account! Never mind that your website is visited by a hundred times as many people, even as your Google PR slips to 0! The other drawback with the Google PR system is that the PR is for a SINGLE PAGE. Therefore, a website with multiple pages ends up having multiple PRs - one for each page!

Alexa Ranking System

Alexa is an Amazon.com group company and its Alexa Ranking System is based on the number of visitors visiting your web/ blog site, with the Alexa ToolBar installed into their Web Browser. As we said before, there is NO perfect system for measuring the rank of web sites: if Google is heavily biased to its advertisers, Alexa is biased to its ToolBar users! In the real world though, the Alexa Ranking system is very well understood and therefore, it makes sense to ensure that your web/ blog site has a high Alexa Ranking too!

Here is how Alexa describe their Ranking System, on their web page: "The (Alexa) traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users)".

The Alexa Ranking system thus excludes visitors who DO NOT have the Alexa Toolbar installed in their Browsers. Again, the Alexa ToolBar is available for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (and the other Mozilla-based Browsers CometBird, Flock, etc.) alone.

Click Here to download the Microsoft Internet Explorer version of the Alexa ToolBar - and Click Here for the Mozilla version of the Alexa ToolBar, called Sparky

All said and done, the Alexa Ranking System DOES give a composite Ranking to the entire website, rather than different Ranks to different pages of a website! Increasing your Alexa Ranking is also a lot easier, as any increase in traffic to your website will include a good/ fair/ poor sprinkling of Alexa ToolBar users as well, thus enhancing your Alexa Ranking accordingly! (Read FAQ #8 for increasing traffic to your website)

Trees give you multiple benefits - they provide you with shade, shelter, fruits, wood, etc., apart from helping to keep the ecological balance. Of course, you need to take care of your tree. Similarly, if you take care of your website, it will give you many returns - something that might not be true of offline ventures! Again, online businesses are characterized by very high volumes of visitors to your 'online showroom' and a very low 'conversion rate', in comparison with offline businesses. With an offline business, you could have a conversion ration of, say, 1 sale for every 25 people who make an inquiry on telephone or personally: in the online world, the norm is more like 1 sale per 2500 inquiries! This is also the reason why you MUST target a large geographical area, rather than just a few blocks of your city!

Let us once again list out the multiple revenue options that a website offers:

1. Sale of your own Products and Services to the world

2. Sale of products/ services of trusted Third-party vendors (Affiliation)  - more about this in a separate FAQ, below

3. Online Advertising - more about this in a separate FAQ, below

4. Content Syndication - you sell your content to other website(s) for a suitable fee

5. Sell your Website to the highest bidder - like the Hotmail sale to Microsoft, 2 years after startup, for US$ 400 Million!

While you certainly need luck to succeed in business - offline or online - the fact is, you help yourself tremendously by being proactive, intelligent and ready to grab every big opportunity that comes along! Until your sales increases, you will need to handle all operations yourself, unless you have the dough to hire people even as you set up your online business!

Let us look at the core competencies required for success in each of the potential revenue streams: these are general core competencies cutting across functional areas and are common to all online businesses

As you can see, the required Core Competencies have nothing whatsoever to do with Great Website Design (unless you are in the business of building websites, that is!). However, you MUST have a unique product or service, you MUST have a large number of visitors coming in daily, you MUST OBVIOUSLY perform to the satisfaction of your Principals and yourself, to succeed in an online business!

The other fact that emerges is that you MUST have a large number of visitors. With the low conversion rates that online businesses are used to, a large number of visitors is VITAL! As we discussed in the earlier FAQ on how to bring in visitors to your website, SEO is the cheapest and best way to bring large number of visitors to your website!

A final word: the above Table displays general competencies required for each revenue stream. There are bound to be changes - minor or major - depending on your area of operations. For example, if you run a Wedding Portal for a certain community, your visitors will be limited to members of the community.

Affiliation is a tried and trusted method for making money online. There are a large number of sites that sell products and services that are produced/ serviced by others. Websites earn a commission on every sale they make, when they sell their principal's product or service. For example, we are affiliated to Symantec Corporation through their affiliates DigitalRiver OneNetwork and sell their Computer Security Software on WellOiledPC. We are therefore a second-tier affiliate of Symantec. Every time our visitors click on the links we have on our pages, they are taken to DigitalRiver One Network's secure site, from where they may securely pay for the Symantec product of their choice. e-Bay has a large number of affiliates, usually men and women who work from home and have their own website, who sell e-Bay products through their websites!

The process of Accounting is handled in real-time by software. Thus your principals (DigitalRiver, in our case) knows exactly which WellOiledPC visitor has purchased what software through WellOiledPC and their website. We are given monthly statement of the sales we have effected on their behalf and are paid our commission!

It is easier to make money by means of affiliation, compared to selling your own products/ services. As an affiliate, you are selling a product/ service that already has a standing in the marketplace. You are therefore not concerned with brand-building, overheads on publicity, staff expenses, etc., whereas you need to personally monitor everything from quality of your product/ service to sales, if you are selling your own product or service. A large number of websites make a great deal of money from affiliate sales - enough to meet all expenses and save a handsome amount each month - many earn larger amounts that that earned by employees working full time for organizations!

Your customers too do not lose, since the commission you receive does not add to their cost of purchase: what you earn is merely what a dealer/ distributor of the product would earn as their commission!

Content Syndication is yet another method by means of which a website owner can make more money than if (s)he were a full-time employee at an organization. However, to be successful (and earn consistent money), you need to be a master in your domain of knowledge, someone who is well known in your circle. For example, an eminent Cardiologist can earn a lot of money by writing articles for websites dealing with Health and Medicine. Someone who belongs to say, Thailand and has in-depth knowledge of the tourist spots of Thailand (and of course, excellent writing skills) can make a great deal of money writing for tourism and travel-related websites. There is no barrier in Content Syndication: ANY field of knowledge has buyers in today's global economy, provided you have an excellent grasp of the subject and can write very well! The larger the number of people who seek information in your domain knowledge, the better your chances of making big-time money from Content Syndication!

A number of websites (for example www.articlecity.com, http://www.amazines.com, etc., accept articles for free. While you do not get money for your content, you do get exposure and it might make sense to begin by publishing your articles to such free article directories. You are usually allowed to put your name and Website URL to your articles, so that readers who like your article can get in touch with you.

On the other hand, websites like ezinearticles (http://www.ezinearticles.com), Go Articles (http://www.goarticles.com) and Article Dashboard (http://www.articledashboard.com) pay you money, if they publish your articles. There are many others that pay you money for your expertise! However, you need to establish your credentials as a writer, before you can expect payments.

Different publishers have different norms: article language, topic, length, whether you are allowed to put in URLs (including your website's URL), allowable HTML codes, whether you can submit your article that was published elsewhere, etc. However, all of them check for plagiarism, i.e., whether the article is original. These websites are VERY SERIOUS about Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) violations!

While online article directories generally do not pay, you could write for media such as Print and Television, depending on your domain knowledge. These usually pay for good articles on topical subjects

Of the various revenue streams, online advertising is arguably the one that requires least skills. As the owner of a website, you have a huge amount of advertising space - almost limitless, since your web page's length is not limited! Organizations are more than willing to pay for that space!

You have different online advertising models, as discussed briefly under the FAQ detailing the important stages in going online/ Select Online Advertisers. These are;

1. Flat rate for displaying advertisements on your website. This is the Direct Online Advertising model. Typically, you are paid about US$ 20 per month, under this online advertising model

2. Display the Banners/ Advertisements of other Websites on your web pages. This model is also called Pay Per Impression (PPI) and you are paid a small sum of money for every visitor who comes in to your page displaying the advertiser's advertisement. Typically, you are paid about 5 Cents for 1000 'impressions'. If you have two advertisements of the same publisher on the same page, a visitor viewing this page would see both advertisements, therefore it is counted as Two Impressions

3. Display the Banners/ Advertisements of other websites/ products/ services on your web pages. You are paid money for every click on the advertisement. Sometimes, these advertisements open in the same window, therefore your visitor leaves your website and enters your advertiser's website, when they click on the advertisement. This is the Pay Per Click (PPC) model of online advertising. Typically, you are paid anything from 5 Cents to 2 Dollars per click.

4. Display the Banners/ Advertisements of other Websites on your web pages. When your visitors click on the advertisement and actually end up buying the advertised product/ service, you earn a nice commission, since the purchase would not have happened, if you had not re-directed the buyer to your advertiser's website! This is the Pay Per Sale (PPS) model of online advertising. Your commission from such sales is a lot higher - even up to 5% of the cost of the product/ service! Therefore if the advertisement was for a Laptop costing US$ 1000, you earn as much as US$ 50 per sale!

Most advertisers like Google/ AdBrite/ Bidvertiser, etc., will pay for PPI, PPC and PPS simultaneously!

Here are the tasks you need to do, to earn money from online advertisements:

• Sign up with Google AdSense/ Bidvertiser/ AdBrite or any of the numerous Online Advertisers. Most of them allow you to carry others' advertisements on your web pages as well.

• Be constantly on the lookout for organizations who could benefit from direct advertising on your website. Needless to say, a high Page Rank, high Alexa Ranking, high number of visitors, well-written content and neat website design help you clinch deals with all categories of advertisers!

• Keep up-to-date records of the performance of each of your media vehicles. Situations change in the blink of an eyelid in the online world, therefore the advertiser who was earning you, say, 50 Dollars a month may now be earning you a mere 5 Dollars a month. If that happens, you need to maybe change your advertiser, so that you continue to earn money!

• Follow all rules and regulations laid down by the advertiser: in the online world, THEY create rules since they are much bigger entities and you, the publisher, must merely follow them!

There are a number of websites that offer free reciprocal links, a number of websites that charge a small amount of money for putting up your links on their site as well. LinkMarket (www.linkmarket.com), Reciprocal Link Exchange (www.reciprocallinkexchange.com), Link Partners (www.linkpartners.com), etc., are well-known sites where you can find websites ready to exchange links with you!

Here are some guidelines while selecting a Link Exchange Partner:

• Reciprocal links should be part of your links strategy, not your total marketing strategy. Although Search Engines do consider the number and quality of links on your Website, you can end up overdoing it too!

• Link up with quality, relevant websites alone, that complement your website but are not a direct competitor to you!

• It is a good idea to link up with sites that enjoy a higher Google Page Rank and/ or Alexa Ranking, in comparison with your website. These two parameters can be found easily for any website, while it is difficult to estimate the amount of visitors a website is capable of attracting!

• Linking up with quality, relevant sites can be tedious, time-consuming, even frustrating

At WellOiledPC, we are open to free reciprocal links with good, quality sites. You are welcome to get in touch with us by clicking here, if you are interested in a reciprocal link with us!