your GUIDE2success

http://rapidshare.com/files/142862310/hbr_092008.rar

The keywords that are used by Google in their Adsense programme have different values, which means that people clicking on some ads will generate more cash for you than on others. So if you can find out which keywords have a greater value, then you can use those that are relevant to your content to help get better returns.

Googlest.com have produced a 13 page document with the Top Paying Google Adsense Keywords which is available to download for only $5.

This is a great aid for those using Adsense, but obviously only keywords that are related to what your blog is about and can be naturally integrated should be used.

You may notice that I have added a new widget on the left sidebar, which is regularly updated with AdSense Tips to help optimise your use of AdSense on your site.

I have just created my own widget for one of my blogs Authentic Greek Recipes - you can see it near the bottom of the left sidebar. This contains the recent posts, along with photos from the blog, and I created it really easily at Widgetbox.

I have placed it on each of my blogs to help bring more traffic toAuthentic Greek Recipes. The good thing at Widgetbox is that you can also make your widget a Facebook application, and then invite friends on Facebook. Once you have at least 5 who accept, you can register it in the Facebook Application Directory.

Widgetbox also has its own network, with various Channels, or categories. I have joined the Food group, and this can increase your traffic in 2 ways. Through visitors to the Network Channel itself and also, each member has a Channel widget on their blog with yours on it, so visitors to all these blogs can visit yours from there.

Having Adsense setup in your blog doesn't guarantee great success generating money with it. It needs to be optimized and tweaked accordingly to ensure that you get the best outcomes from it. There are many factors determining Adsense success, or its failure. In this post, you'll learn what all these factors are and what to focus on when optimizing Adsense. All the materials are presented in a very compact form to help you learn the most important points fast, quickly, and easily found if you want to come have a look at it again.

Before reading through them, it's best if you have already understood what Adsense is and what its policies are. Also, be sure that your blog is acceptable by Adsense.

Photo by alexdecarvalho.

Factors for Success
There are 4 major factors to make Adsense more successful to bring money in:

• Traffic Levels - As the number of visitors increases, so does the total number of clicks.
• High Paying Ads - Ads that cost the advertisers $3 per click will add more to your revenue than ads that cost $0.01 per click. Finding the right keywords to be the niche of your blog that targets these high (or at least moderate) paying ads are very crucial before you start a blog. Targeting niche keywords that pay very little is not worth your effort.
• Relevant Ads - Ads that are more closely related to your blog are more likely to interest your visitors to click upon. 'Public Service Announcement' or ads that are not related to your content are less likely to be clicked upon because generally, they don't spark any interest in your visitors.
• Optimal Ads Position and Design - Ads position, colors, sizes, number of units, and borders do affect visitors' behavior in looking or clicking at them. Finding the optimal design and position is crucial to maximize your Adsense income.

Each one of these factors are as important as the other. Do not only focus on one or two of them and leaving the other parts weak. Your Adsense success is as good as the weakest part. This is a fact adviced by many probloggers. For example, having high paying ads served on your blog but with only a small number of visitors won't result in good amount of conversion. More details on these factors are explained below.

How to Increase Traffic
These are some practical tips to increase traffic levels that have worked well for many experienced bloggers.

• Build useful, quality, interesting and original content - Reflect on the blogs that you read often and think again why you read them.
• Good blog design - Do you tend to think that a blog has quality content if the design is terrible?
• Link to others - You'll only have others linking to you if you have shown your generosity in linking to others first. Linking helps in two ways: (1) Bring more visitors. (2) Increase your ranking.
• Comment on other blogs - Interact with others genuinely (not spamming) by giving thoughtful comments in other blogs. People will grow their interest in your blog as you interact more with them.
• Update frequently - a significant part of large traffic comes from frequent readers, who wants to see fresh contents all the time.
• Interact with readers - Interact with your readers actively. Answer comments, questions, create memes, games, etc.
• Optimize for search engines - Visitors that tend to click on the ads the most come from search engines. Doing SEO will increase your revenues and your rank as well.
• Add your blog add in your email signature - This can help increase visitor numbers to your blog too.
• Create RSS feed - Let your readers have the option to subscribe easily to your blog's content. Visit Feedburner.com for more details. This method eases their connectivity to your blog.
• List your URL in directories - This increases the chance for people of relevant interest finding your blog easier through many mediums and portals.
• Submit to search engines - Send your blog URL to search engines too and similar sites such as Technorati. Use the right and relevant keywords to describe your blog as this is the most crucial information that connects your blog to your visitors.
• Create a newsletter - This is another option to update your readers of new postings.
• Get involve in other blog projects - Make yourself visible in the blogosphere by actively participating in other projects or memes. The more visibility you have the better.
• Participate in forums - This are the places to find other with similar interest. You can draw visitors to your blog by making yourself visible through helping others in the forums.
• Promote your posts - Send your great posts to others or submit them in social media if you think they have a chance to get votted up. Be selective of which posts to promote to avoid being too annoying.
• Add an 'Email a Friend' button - Add this button below each of your posts to let your readers have the option to email their friends.

Sharon Housley gave out top Adsense tips to help webmasters or bloggers profit from Google Adsense to generate money online using websites. The main ideas of these tips are summarized here.

• Sites rank better on search engines if they have specific niche and clear themeand therefore will get the best revenue out of Adsense if the topics targeted have sufficient number of ads available.
• Target decent or moderate paying keywords as your specific niche. Sites targeting highest paying keywords will find it difficult to rank well because of the high competition from established sites.
• Older websites generate better ads revenue simply because it will rank better in search engines and the ads will become more relevant (relevant ads have better click-throughs).
• Use Tracking Channels in Google Adsense program to study the ads that make the most money, best performing sites (if you have more than one), and ads placement. Make sure to let those ads run for a week and compare results on a weekly basis to see what ads work best.
• Blend ads with site content (e.g. create ads without borders close to content). It's best that ads links should be different from the content colors to increase click-throughs. Randomizing ads link colors frequently is also a good practice so that frequent readers don't filter the ads.
• To serve the most expensive ads on your site, compromise with the number of ads displayed. This is because the value per ads decreases as you increase the number of ads displayed (up to a max of three ads units).
• Ads placed on hot spots and without scrolling will generate higher click-throughs (according to Google). Based on this hot spots map, the best place is near the beginning of the content. Experiment with the type of ads (text or image) to see which works best.
• According to Google, the best ads sizes with highest click-throughs are the 336 x 280, the 300 x 250, and the 160 x 600, but these may be different for different web layout. Again experiment with these yourself to see which works best.

if you have a blog with higher Pagerank and would like to sell text links in your blog but don't have enough time to do it by yourself then here comes backlinks.com.They will find the buyers of text links on your blog , Manage the Link inventory and Payments.

Google loves pages that have a good title stuffed with keywords. And some believe that Googleeven looks at the words contained in the filename of the webpage to measure it's relevance or importance.

Despite this fact, Google's Blogger users have absolutely no control on the filename of their blog posts. Blogger automatically derives the name from the title of the post - it just concatenates the first six words of the title separating each word with a hypen and also removes the common words like A or The.

For instance, if I create a new post titled "Yahoo! Desktop Search getting closer to X1", Blogger will store the file as yahoo-desktop-search-getting-closer-to.html. Notice that it even removed the exclaimation mark in the permalink.

Basic SEO understanding suggest that in the above case, the file name should contain keywords like "Yahoo", "Desktop Search", "X1" since the post is all about "Desktop Search" provided by Yahoo! and X1.

Since Blogger doesn't allow custom file names, here is a simple blogger hack:

1. Compose your Blogger article with a title containing all the keywords (6 is the limit) and in the right order (e.g. X1 Yahoo Desktop Search)

2. Publish your post on Blogger.

3. Now open the post in w.bloggar, an offline blog editing tool and change the page title to something more meaningful (e.g. Yahoo! Desktop Search getting closer to X1)

4. Click "Post & Publish". Congratulations! Your permalink filename is what you want it to be and no longer defined by Blogger.

There's another scenario - Say if you wrote a post on Monkeys an year ago and that article became very popular with lot of people linking to it. One day, you decide to add about Bananas in that same article so a page title "Monkeys and Bananas" makes more sense. But if you change the page title, Blogger will change your page URL or permalink - That would not be a good thing as people who have previously linked to that Monkeys page would no longer find it and there's little guarantee that search engines will index the new page. The above hack may save you here as well.

Adsense Script Tools

These are the tiny little programs you install on your server (blech!) or locally on your machine that help you analyze your adsense clicks, CTR and earnings. Some of them are easy, some of them are difficult, and some of them help you make pretty graphs. To be honest none of them are worth recommending. You could do just as good a job by setting up your channels properly and dumping a CSV file into excel. If someone has a specific one or wants to send me a review copy of thier software, I will look at it. DO NOT send me anything that has to be installed on a server. I run multiple websites on multiple hosting companies, so I don’t need something that requires more maintenance thank you very much.

Adsense Preview Tools

The Adsense Sandbox comes via Digital Point. You put in a URL and it lets you preview what ads are most likely to appear on a URL. Pretty handy IMHO.

Adsense Tracking

While not set up to be an Adsense tracking tool per se, the free log analyzer from AddFreeStats is actually pretty good. You put a small graphic tracking bug on the bottom of each of your pages and it gives you standard logging reports. You can also activate adsense tracking to find out what ads are being clicked on what pages. Combine this with an excel spreadsheet and channels and you are good to go. You can upgrade to a paid version and get an invisible tracking bug. TIP: Lock down your stats under a password, I’m fascinated how many people leave that open.

Adsense in Action

Probably one of the best things you can do to increase your adsense earnings is to go and look how other people are doing things. The adsense case studies are one place. While these are Google approved you really don’t have an idea how successful they are. So you’d be much better off finding someone you know is in the UPS Club. Jason Calacanis who runs Weblogs Inc is on a quest to make 1 Million dollars a year from Adsense. While I do give Jason a hard time sometimes, I do actually admire what he’s built, and think there are some very valuable lessons to be learned from looking at the websites owns. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger also has two sites I really like the Digital Camera Review and Camera Phone Review. Don’t be a wanker and copy exactly what they’ve done, it’s bad form. Instead look at them, learn from them, and use it as inspiration.

I’ve been reading a few forums and blogs about Google Adsense tips lately, and thought it would be helpful to consolidate as many as possible in one place without the comments. I’ve also thrown in a few tips of my own. We start out with some of the basic general stuff and move to the more specific topics later on.

Build an Empire?

When you’re deciding to become a website publisher you will fall into one of two broad categories:

• Publish 100 websites that each earn $1 a day profit
• Publish 1 website that earns $100 a day profit

The reality of it is, most people end up somewhere in between. Having 100 websites leaves you with maintenance, management and content issues. Having one website leaves you open to all sort of fluctuations (search engines algorithm’s, market trends, etc). You can adapt your plan on the way, but you’ll have an easier time if you start out going in the direction of where you want to end up.

General or Niche

You can build your website around general topics or niche ones. Generally speaking niche websites work better with adsense. First off the ad targeting is much better. Secondly as you have a narrow focus your writing naturally becomes more expert in nature. Hopefully this makes you more authority in your field.

If this is your first try at building an adsense website, make it about something you enjoy. It will make the process much easier and less painful to accomplish. You should however make sure that your topic has enough of an ad inventory and the payout is at a level you are comfortable with. You may love medieval folk dancing, but the pool of advertisers for that subject is very small (in fact it’s currently zero).

Once you’ve gotten the hang of how Adsense works on a website, you are going to want to dabble in some high paying keywords, you may even be tempted to buy a high paying keyword list. This does come with some dangers. First off the level of fraud is much higher on the big money terms. Secondly there is a distortion of the supply and demand relationship for these terms. Everyone wants ads on their website that make $35 or more a click, however the number of advertisers who are willing to pay that much is pretty limited. Additionally the competition for that traffic is going to be stiff. So, don’t try to run with the big dogs if you can’t keep up. If you have to ask if you’re a big dog, then chances are, you’re not. I have used a high dollar keywords report from cashkeywords.comand was pleased with my results (see cash keywords free offer recap).

New Sites, Files and Maintenance

When you’re building a new site don’t put adsense on it until it’s finished. In fact I’d go even farther and say don’t put adsense on it until you have built inbound links and started getting traffic. If you put up a website with “lorem ipsum” dummy or placeholder text, your adsense ads will almost certainly be off topic. This is often true for new files on existing websites, especially if the topic is new or different. It may take days or weeks for google’s media bot to come back to your page and get the ads properly targeted. TIP: If you start getting lots of traffic from a variety of IP’s you will speed this process up dramatically.

I like to build my sites using include files. I put the header, footer and navigation in common files. It makes it much easier to maintain and manage. I also like to put my adsense code in include files. If I want/need to change my adsense code, it’s only one file I have to work with. TIP: I also use programming to turn the adsense on or off. I can change one global variable to true or false and my adsense ads will appear or disappear.

Managing URL’s and channels

Adsense channels is one area where it’s really easy to go overboard with stats. You can set up URL channels to compare how one website is doing to another. You can also set up sub channels for each URL. If you wanted to you do something channels like this:

• domain1.com - 728 banner
• domain1.com - 336 block
• domain1.com - text link
• domain2.com - 728 banner
• domain2.com - image banner
• domain2.com - 336 block
• domain3.com - 300 block

While this is great for testing and knowing who clicks where and why, it makes your reporting a little wonky. Your total number will always be correct but when you look at your reports with a channel break down things will get displayed multiple times and not add up to correct total. Makes things pretty confusing, so decide if you really need/want that level of reporting detail. TIP: At the very least you want to know what URL is generating the income so be sure to enter distinct URL channels.

Site Design and Integration

Once you know you are going to put adsense on your website you’re going to have to consider where to put it. If this is new site it’s easier, if it’s an existing site it’s more difficult. While there are some people who will be able to do it, in most cases I’d say if you just slap the adsense code in, you’ll end up with a frankensite monster (props to Tedster of WMW for the buzzword). While every website is different, Google has published some heat maps showing the optimal locations. No surprise that the best spots are middle of the page and left hand side. Now I’ve done really well by placing it on the right, but you should know why you’re doing it that way before hand, and be prepared to change it if it doesn’t work out.

Google has also has published a list of the highest performing ad sizes:

• 336×280 large rectangle
• 300×250 inline rectangle
• 160×600 wide skyscraper

From the sites that I run, I do really well with the 336 rectangle and 160 skyscraper. My next best performing ad size is the 728 leaderboard, I don’t really use the 300 inline rectangle too often. So really it depends on how well you integrate these into your site. Placement can have a dramatic effect on performance. TIP: When working on a new site or new layout you may want to give each location it’s own channel for a little while until you understand the users behavior.

Another ‘trick’ that can increase your CTR is by blending your adsense into your body copy. For example if your body copy is black, remove the adsense border and make the title, text, and URL black.TIP: Try changing all of your page hyperlinks to a high contrast color (like dark red or a bold blue) then change the adsense title to the same color.

The one area where I’ve found blended ads don’t perform as well is forums, especially ones with a high volume of repeat members. Regular visitors develop banner blindness pretty quickly. One ‘trick’ to keep the ads from being ignored is to randomize the color and even the placement. As with any of the decisions about location, placement and color it’s a trade off. How much do you emphasize the ads without annoying your visitors. Remember it’s better to have a 1% CTR with 500 regular visitors as opposed to a 5% CTR with 50 visitors. TIP: For forums try placing the adsense ads directly above or below the the first forum thread.

Using Images

One of the latest ’secrets’ to make the rounds is using images placed directly above or below an adsense leaderboard. This has been used for a while but came out in a digital point forum thread where a member talked about quadrupling their CTR. Basically you set up the adsense code in a table with four images that line up directly with the ads. Whether or not this is deceptive is fuzzy and very subjective. Obviously four blinking arrows would be ‘enticing people to click’ and be against the adsense TOS. However placing pictures of 4 laptops over laptops ads isn’t, so use your best judgment here and look at it from the advertiser or Google’s perspective. If you have a question as to your implementation being ‘over the line’ write to adsense and ask them to take a look.

As far as using the images, I’ve done it and can tell you it definitely works. You get the best results when the images ‘complete the story the ads are telling’. For example if you have ads about apple pies, use pictures of freshly baked apple pies, instead of granny smith, Macintosh, pink lady, and braeburn apples. TIP: Don’t limit yourself to using images only on that size ad unit, it works just as well with the other sizes, like the 336 rectangle.

Added:
I got a little criticizm for this and rightly so, as I wasn’t specific as I could have been. Do not use very identifiable brand name or products for your images. Use generic non-specific stock images whenever possible and appropriate.

Multiple Ad Units

Another way to increase ad revenue is to use multiple ad units. According to Google’s TOS you are allowed to post up to three ad units per page. Similar to standard search results the highest paying ad units will be served first and the lowest being served last. If there is enough of an ad inventory, place all three ad units. However you should pay attention to the payouts. Current assumption is you get 60% of the revenue (on a $0.05 click you get $0.03). So if a click from the third ad unit is only paying between 3 to 5 cents you may want to omit it from your page. This is one are where giving your ad units channels does have value. If one ad unit is getting a higher percentage of click throughs you’ll want to make sure the highest paying ads are being served there. TIP:Use CSS positioning to get your highest paying ads serving in the location with the highest CTR.

Adsense in RSS

With the growth of blogs and RSS feeds you’re starting to see adsense included in the feeds now. IMHO this doesn’t work, and here’s why:

• You only get to place one ad unit.
• You have no control over finding the ’sweet spot’ for the ad unit.
• The ads are usually poorly targeted (this is getting better).
• People develop ‘banner blindness’.

I know people like being able to read full postings in their feed reader, and there are at least a dozen other reasons for full posts from pleasing your users to mobile offline computing, all of which are completely valid. However if your website depends on generating adsense revenue to survive, then bring them to the site and show them the ads there.

Affiliate Sites

Placing Adsense on affiliate sites is tricky. Are you giving up a $10, $20, or $30 sale for a $1 click? This is something you have to test on your own to figure out. If you aren’t converting now it’s definitely worth a try. I like to use adsense on my article pages. For example let’s say you had an affiliate website where you sold shoes. You’re going to need some related articles to ‘flesh out’ the site. Things like ‘getting a shoe shine’ or ‘finding a shoe repair shop’ these are excellent spots for adsense. While you won’t get rich, they will usually provide a small steady income and cover things like hosting costs.TIP: If you find you have pages getting more than 50 clicks per month add more pages about this topic, and link the pages together. Mine you logs for the search terms used.

PPC Arbitrage

This is a dicey subject so I’m going to steer clear of precise examples. Basically you bid on low volume uber niche terms at a very low cost. You set up landing page that contains high payout ads for the related general topic. You are looking for terms with a large gap between the price you are bidding on adwords and the price you are getting on Adsense. If you pay $0.10 a click and get $1.00 a click you make $0.90 each click. To get your adsense ad approved you will need to ‘add some value’ along the way. You can make a killing or get taken to the cleaners with this one, so make sure you know what you are doing before you try it.

Have any other adsense tips, tricks or secrets? Drop me an email and let me know, I’ll give you credit.

Added
728 leaderboard works very well if it is just above the end of the
“above the fold” area on what would be considered your viewers average
resolution/browser window size if there are few other enticing links
above the fold. Makes for an interesting layout but if you’re building
a site for AdSense it may be worth it. We consistently receive very
high CTRs from doing this.

Try to build sites that allow you to quickly try any and all of
those locations outlined in the heatmap guide or at least allow you a
wide degree of freedom to easily change ad/content locations.
via:nuevojefe

Did you know that FORTY percent - 40% - of young people want to be their own boss someday? That’s a LOT of aspiring entrepreneurs. Millions, in fact.

Truth is, only a fraction of those people ever really start a business. Some get comfortable in a lifestyle that they can’t afford to give up. Others realize just how hard it is to be an entrepreneur and never try. Sometimes life just happens and makes entrepreneurship unattainable.

Of the few that actually try to start a business, many fail. The ones that succeed, though, have a few things in common. You may not need to have all 15 of these abilities to succeed in business. But be willing to learn them or hire someone who can cover your butt if you want to get out of the rat race and be your own boss someday.

Be a Salesperson

Never underestimate how important it is to be able to sell. It’s at the top of the list on purpose. Even if you never have to sell to clients (unlikely), you will have to sell your ideas to investors, sell your company vision to prospective employees, and sell consumers or customers on your brand. Selling is absolutely critical to your success, so if you have an aversion to it, you’d better get over that fast.

Delay Gratification

No business is successful on day one. Almost no businesses are successful after year one. If you think entrepreneurship is the ticket to instant riches, you need a reality check. Not only will you have to work hard for a long-term goal, you will probably have to work hard in the face of what seems like certain failure at times.

Discipline

Discipline isn’t just about working hard, but you do have to do that. Discipline is also about managing your entrepreneurial tendencies. Many natural born entrepreneurs are blessed with a mind that is an idea-generating machine. The good news is that some of those ideas are gold mines. The bad news is that if you continually pursue new ideas, old ideas never get developed to fruition. And I’ve watched one multimillionaire in particular run his business into bankruptcy because every week he was working on something new.

Take Risks

Just leaving the rat race is a huge risk in an of itself. No wonder so few people do it. And if you have a spouse or significant other, realize that they are risking with you - whether they like it or not. Everyone has a need for some level of certainty, so if you can’t find it in your business, plan on finding it elsewhere - maybe for several years at a time.

Build Rapport

Note that this is not called ‘Making Friends’ - important, yes, but not the same thing. Building rapport means building respect, a reputation, and hopefully key alliances along the way. Donald Trump doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy you’d call your BFF. But he does have the ability to get people to listen and trust him. You will need to build relationships as an entrepreneur, no business is an island.

Be a Leader

While you may be a natural born follower, as a business owner, you will have to be able to lead. That means trusting an inner compass to guide you when there are no outside indications as to what step to take next. It means having people rely on you. And it even means forgoing the ‘road less traveled’ forbushwhacking your own path.

Be Uncomfortable

Nobody thinks that running a business is easy. But generally people underestimate just how hard it can be. There can be times as a business owner that for months on end you will be in a state of stress, worry, anxiety, and discomfort. Being an entrepreneur means being able to live and function in this state for extended periods of time, and being able to find a way to shut it off so that it doesn’t consume your personal life as well as your career.

Inspire

To be an entrepreneur you need to be inspired. You will likely have to inspire others such as employees and your first customers - who will have to believe in you with no track record. But most of all you will continue to have to inspire yourself, because sometimes your vision is the only thing that can lead you out of one phase of your business and into the next.

Focus

Related to discipline is focus - the ability to tune out ‘noise’ that can distract you from your goal. That noise could be people who doubt you, busywork, doing too much “social” networking, or perhaps worst of all, the noise inside of your own head of self-doubt, fear, or unrealistic expectations of yourself. Personally, I’ve only heard about these things, I can’t say I know this from experience. 

Understand Numbers

I am extremely number-challenged. I’m the biggest of big-picture thinkers. So there are times when I am working on a project that I think is going terribly - only to finally force myself to build a spreadsheet or break out the analytics and find that I’m actually doing better than I had thought. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true, when I think that I’m kicking ass only to find that the actual return on investment of time, dollars, etc. isn’t where I thought it would be. Truth be told, this is one of the number one reasons people go out of business - they don’t pay enough attention to the cold, hard numbers.

Analysis

Related to being able to understand the numbers is the ability to look at the numbers in a variety of ways. Sometimes what looks like a dip in traffic/sales/whatever might also be a roadmap to a previously undiscovered opportunity. There are benefits to being a stats-a-holic, which can often times be a key source of consumer insights that larger companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for.

Ask for Help

Quite honestly, I don’t know one entrepreneur that embraces asking for help. We seem to have a natural aversion to it, in fact. It doesn’t make it any less important - in fact, it makes it more important, because it usually means that when an entrepreneur finally does ask for help, they probably needed the help something like 2 months ago. If you have a natural knack for asking for help, good grief, I hope you aren’t reading this, because you should already be working for yourself!

Know Thyself

Every entrepreneur has strengths and weaknesses. A good entrepreneur plays to his or her strengths. A great entrepreneur plays to their strengths AND builds a business that can compensate for their weaknesses. That means knowing what you aren’t good at, admitting it, and structuring your workflow so that you don’t get in your own way.

Balance Ego with Humility

You have to have high self-confidence to make it in business. I’d go so far to say that a little bit of a big ego can actually be an asset - it helps to get people talking about you and can help to increase your visibility. But there is a very fine line between a healthy ego and being an egotistical maniac. But bring too much humility to the game, and it comes off as self-doubt. Walking the line between the two will never please everyone, either - sorry, it just comes with the territory.

Persistence

Most of all, to get out of the rat race, you need persistence. You need to fall on your face and get back up. You need to make big mistakes and learn from them. Sometimes you even need to fail - it may be the only way to succeed. To quote some of my wonderful peers, “Your recovery strategy is what’s important; avoiding mistakes is not.”

I use Paypal for all my online invoicing and payments. Paypal is secure, reliable and most important of all - easy to use.

Here's how to set up a Paypal account for your business.

1. print out these instructions

2. click here to Set Up Paypal Business Account

3. scroll down and click where it says: "sign up today"

4. choose whether you want a personal, premier or business account

If this account is for your business, you should choose Premier Account or Business Account

Here's the only difference: a Paypal Business Account allows you to set up the account under your business name. But you need to have a business bank account and wait for your Paypal Business Account to be approved.

If you don't have a business bank account but you want your Paypal account under your business name, here's how to get around it: sign up for a Premier Account, but instead of putting your name in the name field, put your business name. For example, if your business name is Acme Consulting, put "Acme" in the "first name" box and "Consulting" in the surname box.

5. choose your country

6. click Continue

7. fill in all your info (see note above about business name)

8. click Continue

After your account is set up you can pay someone by Paypal, or request payment (send an invoice) just by going to www.paypal.com and logging in to your account. It's very obvious how to do it.

The above article is intended as general information only and should not be construed as financial or legal advice.

Just last week my brother asked me how he could make money on the Internet. My answer was this: There's lots of ways to make money on the Internet, and there's even more ways to LOSE money on the Internet.

Scam artists are just waiting for you

That's because there are so many scam artists just waiting for inexperienced people to respond to their "make money fast" schemes. These scam artists are very, very good at persuading unsuspecting folks to sign up for their program. And because it's so cheap to set up a website, the scam artists can have very convincing looking websites that make them look more legitimate than they are.

Internet business requires high attention to detail

The other thing that I told my brother is that all Internet businesses require a lot of work before they start making money, and a lot of attention to detail to maintain that success.

ATTENTION TO DETAIL - something that my brother and I both know is not his strength.

My brother's an idea person, a big picture thinker. Details bore him. At the very least, my brother would need to learn how to outsource (hire other people) the detail work. And for him, even doing that would require too much attention to detail.

Are you suited to an Internet business?

If you are the type of person who lets mail pile up, or can't be bothered to check bank statements to make sure all the charges are accurate, and if the idea of analyzing statistics makes your eyes glaze over...then an Internet business probably isn't for you.

Because by definition an Internet business requires paying attention to details.

Think about it - what is the Internet? It's all about information. So if you're going to have an Internet business you're going to be dealing with information - lots of it.

And you'll need to turn into a bit of a computer nerd

You're going to need to learn at least the basics of html (that's the gobbleygook code that makes up webpages), search engine optimization (that's how to get your websites ranking high in Google), and social media (that's stuff like Facebook and Twitter).

But the good news is that if you do have good attention to detail, and if you're willing to put in long hours over a period of a year or more to learn the ropes, you can start an Internet business with relatively little money (compared to a bricks and mortar business).

It doesn't take a lot of money to start up, but it's not a get rich quick thing

Wendy Peirsall from Sparkplug.com says that although anyone CAN make money online, not everyone WILL make money online, because making money on the internet takes a long time to learn, and most people give up because it can be extremely frustrating.

So, where do you start? Wendy gives these pointers:

1. Pre-packaged programs only work as much as you can customize it and make it unique and your own. Even then, techniques that work for one niche won't work in all niches.
2. Be wary of any "system" that promises instant results (especially anything that sounds like a get-rich-quick scheme!)
3. Knowing the basics of html, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), social media, and traditional marketing and sales are a must.
4. Every business is made stronger by specializing in a tight niche. Know your audience and stick to it.