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One of the most basic ways to make money online is by selling your own products. I’ve spoken to a few successful internet entrepreneurs who run successful online stores (trust me, they make a VERY comfortable living) and have compiled this list of tasks they go through to build their network of online money makers.

1. Identify a need and market. Do some research and find out what items are related to that market. It’s preferable to sell items that can give you a high profit margin but are still affordable and competitive in the market. Products that are related to celebrities or fashion usually fit into this category
2. Find dropshippers for your chosen items. E-sources is a good choice for both UK based and international dropshippers and wholesalers, whilst DOBA is more suitable for US based dropshippers. You can also do a Google search for dropshippers of specific items.
3. Sign up to Paypal and download one of the following free e-commerce shopping carts:
   • osCommerce
   • Cubecart
   • Zen-cart
   • Mal’s e-commerce
   • Shop-script
4. Sign-up with a good hosting provider. There’s a good list of free hosting providers you can start off with.
5. Website installation and configuration. You can either install and configure the website yourself or outsource this to someone on elance, getafreelancer or some other freelancing website for a . Don’t forget to include a web analytics application like Google Analytics and Statcounter into the site.
6. Setup your records. Track your finances using a site like moneytrackin or a spreadsheet (ex: outgoing payments, revenues, expense, etc). For customer relationship management, download the free Sugar Open Source.
7. Market your online store. Sell a few items on eBay, advertise through PPC, email your friends, market on myspace and other online communities, start a blog, partner with other online stores. Check out the rest of this blog for more ideas on getting traffic to your site.
8. Start an affiliate program and recruit affiliates. Use an inhouse, custom-built affiliate management software that you can get designed and integrated by a freelancer from the freelancing site used in step 5 above or install a bespoke affiliate marketing software from about $50.
9. Continue your growth. Increase your product lines, improve your conversions, expand your marketing, automate your processes and keep your customers happy….or if you want to move on to other things you can sell your website to another budding entrepreneur on eBay or Sitepoint.

Myspace Resources Website Script. Contains layouts, generators, codes, friend train, upload tools, graphics and more.

Comes with Google AdSense built in. Just add your Adsense publisher ID and you’re off!

Add this script to an existing website to keep people coming back! Or sign up with a free hosting site instead and start a standalone site.

Download it now for free.

Don’t forget to subscribe to Make Wicked Money.

Most affiliate programs give you a bunch of text links and banners. But there are also affiliate programs that are similar to white label programs. They give you fully fledged sites without needing to promise waves of traffic or even pay for hosting or domain names. Usually, you are provided with a sub-domain name (like yourstore.mainsite.com). I’ve made a list of sites where you can start online stores for free.

Bravisa

• Products: clothing, food, pet products, puzzles & games, sports & recreation, electronics and more.
• Commission: depends on your mark-up.
• URL: http://www.bravisa.com

Zlio

• Products: books, DVDs, mobile phones, computers, video games, food and more.
• Commission: up to 20% (depending on merchants chosen).
• URL: http://www.zlio.com

Amazon astore

• Products: books, music, DVDs, toys, electronics, clothes, jewellery and more.
• Commission: 4% to 10%.
• URL: http://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join (USA), http://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/gp/associates/join/main.html (UK).

Spreadshirt

• Products: personalised t-shirts and other clothes.
• Commission: depends on your mark-up.
• URL: http://www.spreadshirt.com (USA), http://www.spreadshirt.net (outside USA).

Cafepress

• Products: personalised t-shirts, CDs, books and gifts.
• Commission: depends on your mark-up.
• URL: http://www.cafepress.com/

One of the hardest things to do when starting a new site is choosing a domain name. It takes forever to check if a name is available, it’s difficult thinking up word combinations and you run the risk of someone stealing a good name when you manage to come up with one!

If you’ve ever been frustrated with these issues, then you’ll love Bustaname!

This cool site includes a word combiner that tries every combination of your entered words and lets you know what domains are available. It also produces alternative suggestions to your entered words.

You can also try more possibilities by adding prefixes (i, e, my and busta) and suffixes (ly, ster, let) as well as pluralizing nouns (car to cars) and dropping the last vowel (flicker to flickr).

This is a very useful site and I definitely see myself visiting every time I start a new site! Check it out at www.bustaname.com

One of the necessities of building sites is obviously web hosting. To help you out when starting out, I’ve made a list of hosting sites that give you free hosting, a sub-domain as well as support for PHP and MySQL.

Wicked Zone

File space: 150 MB.
Bandwidth: 4 GB.

http://www.wickedzone.net/signup.html

110MB

File space: 2 GB.

Bandwidth: 100 GB.

http://www.110mb.com

Awardspace

File space: 200 MB.

Bandwidth: 5 GB.

http://www.awardspace.com/signup.html

KwikPHP

File space: 350 MB.

Bandwidth: 6 GB.

http://www.kwikphp.net

XLPHP

File space: 250 MB.

Bandwidth: 6 GB.

http://www.xlphp.org

Pro-PHP

File space: 250 MB.

Bandwidth: 6 GB.

http://www.pro-php.org

Net-fast

File space: 200 MB.

Bandwidth: 6 GB.

http://www.net-fast.org

Sprinterweb

File space: 300 MB.

Bandwidth: 6 GB.

http://www.sprinterweb.org

Freehostia

File space: 250 MB.

Bandwidth: 5 GB.

http://www.freehostia.com/free_hosting.html

Pro-hosts

File space: 300 MB.

Bandwidth: 6 GB.

http://www.pro-hosts.org

Myplacehost

File space: 350 MB.

Bandwidth: 6 GB.

http://www.myplacehost.net

Myspace is one of the most visited social networking sites in the world. In fact it’s pretty much consistently in the top 10 of Alexa’s charts. And with over 100 million accounts and about 230,000 new sign-ups everyday, there are definitely opportunities for some easy traffic to your site.

This is a simplified blueprint to marketing on Myspace…

Pimping out your myspace profile
The first step is to customize and pimp your MySpace profile to differentiate it from the other crappy default profiles. You need to present your profile in a way that best represents you. It’s a pretty good guess that a majority of the users aren’t HTML and CSS experts and never thought they would ever need to be.
Do a Google search for “myspace layouts” and you’ll find a whole list of myspace resource sites. Have a browse around for the layout that’ll suit your site. Grab the code and paste it into your “about me” section of your profile. Play around with it some more to personalize it to your target market.

Also its a good idea to store your images and graphics on either your own site or on a free image hosting site like Photobucket. You can then reference them through the HTML code.

You need friends…the more, the merrier!
If it is friends you want to add in a relatively short time, there are various software packages available out like Friend Blaster Pro and Friend Adder that simplify this task. What they generally do is send requests just as you would per doing each one by hand. The main advantage with this software is that you can target profiles according to demographics and keywords. Also, this obviously will save you a lot of time! You’re still limited to Myspace’s rules and restrictions though but now you don’t need to invest hundreds of hours adding profiles.

Groups
This is purely optional but can be VERY effective. If you want to make sure that you’ve got a good presence on myspace, the best way is to create a group. This can be a general one dedicated to your chosen market or, if you’re bold enough, you can create a group specifically dedicated to your site.

Everyone knows how easy it is to start a blog using Wordpress. What isn’t very known is that it is also not very SEO friendly by default. Yeah sure you can create better permalinks but that’s pretty much it. The following Wordpress plugins are the absolute minimum you’ll need to sort out the major SEO aspects of your blog.

All in One SEO Pack
This plugin allows you to produce unique meta description and keywords for each post and page as well as your homepage.

Google Sitemap Generator
This plugin generates an XML compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.

Optimal Title
This plugin moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before. This optimizes your post titles over your blog name and helps make it easier for your visitors to distinguish between your posts in the .

Permalink Redirect
This plugin returns a 301 permanent redirect if the requested URL is different from the entry or archive permalink. This makes sure that only one URL is associated with each blog entry.

Really Simple Sitemap
This plugin produces a sitemap page for both human and search engine visitors by creating a list of all your posts and pages. Have a look at my “All Posts” page for an example.

SEO Wordpress
This plugin produces a robots.txt file that helps in eliminating the problem of duplicate content inherent in any default installation of Wordpress.

WWW Redirect
This plugin has the ability to redirect all your site’s non-www URLs (ex: http://makewickedmoney.com) to the www prefixed version (ex: http://www.makewickedmoney.com) or vice versa. Also, it redirects index.php requests to / (ex: http://www.makewickedmoney.com/index.php to http://www.makewickedmoney.com/).

If you have suggestions for any more plugins to improve Wordpress SEO, then please leave a comment below.

One of the quickest ways to make your blog known by the blogosphere is by pinging blog search engines and aggregators such as Technorati, IceRocket and Syndic8. What you could do is go to visit each individual site and ping them directly whenever you update your blog. But here’s a faster way to do that…

Go to Autopinger and Pingomatic and ping ALL of them at once. These sites send a ping to loads of major and minor blog authority sites including Technorati, Syndic8, Feedburner, NewsGator and many other sites including podcasting and niche blogospheres.

Have a spare parking space? Youcanpark.com is a site that lets you list your parking space to rent out for cash.

Go to http://www.youcanpark.com/search_for_space.aspx to find what others are charging for spaces near your area.

Turnkey Flash Game Website Script. Filled with over 150 Flash Games ready to upload to your host.

Website template and script.
Includes an admin area to upload new games.
You can easily edit the website template to suit your needs.
Add this script to an existing website to keep people coming back! Or sign up with a free hosting site instead and start a standalone site.

Download it now for free.Don’t forget to subscribe to Make Wicked Money.