Well, here is a great opportunity to start your own online business with absolutely zero investment and no upgrades… EVER.

Green Smoke is the maker and distributor of E-Cigarettes (electronic cigarettes) and they have a wonderful affiliate program which you can join at no cost. They actually put $25 in your account when you sign up!

E-Cigarettes are rapidly becoming the most popular, and effective, way to give up smoking tobacco. Thousands of people are purchasing these products (and supplies) daily.

Green Smoke provides you with your own website, training videos, banners, links, tracking, and promotional materials.

You are paid 15% to 20% of every retail sale for the life of the customer PLUS you earn from any affiliates that sign up under you.

This means that whenever one of your customers orders supplies for their E-Cigarette (which they will) you get paid. These customers are yours for life.

The promotional capabilities are limitless because smokers are not niche restricted, they exist everywhere.

Advertise  through free classified ads, promote through health forums, run an Adwords campaign, add a link to your signature for use in forums, discussion boards, email, etc.

You can also do as I did and create a free blog (smokeless.co.cc) with free hosting and a free domain name. See my post about Totally Free Blogging.

Click here to check out the program, product, and Sign up for your free online business today!

REVISED AND UPDATED FOR 2010

The “Step-by-Step Guide to Selling Online,”
By The Internet Marketing Center…

Start Your Own Successful Internet Business From Square One, With a Proven
A-Z Program for Making Money Online

If you’d like to start making money on the Internet, but don’t have ANY business experience, technical skills, or ideas for what you should sell, I highly recommend you take a look at The Step-by-Step Guide to Selling Online, a comprehensive, step-by-step program for starting a successful Internet business from scratch.

Created by the Internet Marketing Center, The Step-by-Step Guide reveals the exact process they themselves used to generate over $100 Million in sales online.

Using simple, easy-to-understand language, and plenty of helpful video and audio tutorials, The Step-by-Step Guide walks you through the six steps to building a successful Internet business from square one:

1. Find a lucrative niche market and decide what to sell…
2. Easily create your website, complete with winning sales copy
3. Attract your first eager visitors …
4. Take your first credit card payment
5. Ramp up sales & traffic quickly
6. Automate your business to be “hands free”

Then, once your website is live, and you’re getting your first visitors, you can take advantage of The Guide’s hundreds of ADVANCED strategies to improve your business, and drive your sales even higher!

And because The Step-by-Step Guide is 100% online, they’re able to update it whenever there are new test results to add, or new techniques to try out, so it NEVER goes out of date!

When you try the Step-by-Step Guide, you get:

• Over 1,250 pages of detailed, moneymaking strategies and techniques carefully laid out in easy-to-follow steps
• “Real time” updates with the latest and greatest online marketing strategies
• Streaming videos to make your learning even easier
• Content you can print out, or download to your iPod, so you can learn new techniques, even when you’re on the go, and away from your computer
• A “private rolodex” of hundreds of Internet marketing tools and resources
• A one-on-one 15-minute phone consultation with one of their IMC’s marketing specialists
• IMC’s exclusive Ebusiness Road Map System

I give The Step-by-Step Guide to Selling Online an enthusiastic 10 out of 10! It contains every last tip and technique you’ll need to start your money-making website. Thousands of other people have already used it to earn money online — six figures annually, in many cases — so you can be confident it will work for you, too!

If you want to make money online, I urge you to get access to this proven online business building program now.

Click here to try out the new Step-by-Step Guide to Selling Online for 30 days without risk. Get complete access to all of the training, tools, and support you need to start your successful Internet business.

Read the reviews at IM Report Card.

Sign up with sites like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Blinklist, Technorati, and StumbleUpon, then submit your posts as soon as they are published.

The search engines will pick up on this and as long as you have good content, others will as well. This is some of the best free PR there is.

Choose the right sites.

Focus on the social news sites where you will have the most success. There are many and you should select only the ones that will serve you best and provide the biggest payoff.

The sites listed above should be routine, along with Twitter and Facebook. Directoryroll has an extensive list that you can investigate to see what other sites fit your blog style.

Most social sites allow you to categorize and tag your submission which provides viewers a multitude of ways to find your post.
Use your keywords wisely.

Benefits

Submitting your content to popular social newsmarking sites will get your blog indexed much quicker.

Keyword tagging your post will bring about more awareness of your site and result in an increase in traffic.

The majority of social sites will allow you to create a profile, or personal page, where you can list your blog (s), links to posts, and in some instances, publish content.

This not only creates one-way links to your site but enables you to brand yourself as an expert in your field.
The search engine robots will also frequent any new content in your profile/page and follow the links back to your site, thus creating increased page rank.

Social newsmarking may take a little time to set up initially but the rewards will be fantastic.

The first thing you will want to do is download the theme or plugin to your computer and remember where you saved it. DO NOT unzip the file, just leave it the way it is.

Now log in to your WordPress admin panel and click on “Add New Themes” or “Add New” under plugins.

Click “Upload” in the menu at the top of the page then click the “Browse” button on the next page. This will take you to your computer where you can navigate to the file you downloaded. Select the file by clicking on it, then click the “Open” button, then the “Install” button.

WordPress will automatically upload, unzip, and install your theme or plugin. All you need to do at this point is to activate the theme or plugin and configure any settings that may be available.

There may be times when WordPress cannot upload a certain theme.This can happen when there are additional folders or files included by the Author which need to be manually installed.

This is easily accomplished by unzipping the theme package on your computer and using a free FTP program like FileZilla to upload the necessary folders/files to your wp-themes folder in the root directory of your site.

Usually, the additional folders included in your theme package is a Plugin folder which can be uploaded to the wp-plugins folder in the root directory of your site.

NOTE: When uploading themes or plugins via FTP you will want to upload the entire folder with all the contents included. DO NOT open the folder and upload the contents individually.

Planning the future of your blog is an essential element for overall success. A solid plan will allow you to see a more fluid layout, guide you in content writing, and help streamline popularity.

A good way to begin (using paper and pencil) is to write down what your blog is about and what you are looking to accomplish, for example: provide a service, advice, sell product (s), promote a business, etc.

This is simply the overall concept and you should KISS  it (keep it simple stupid). The details will follow. (Be sure to write everything down.)

You want to begin with a list of …

• WHO is your target audience?
• WHY would they want your product/service?
• WHAT benefits does your product/service provide?
• HOW will your product/service improve their lives?

Answers to these questions will give you plenty to write about. Give them a reason to stay on your site with personalized, interesting content.

Put yourself in their place and think about the type of information you would like to see when first visiting a site.

Research

Use Google to find out what your future customers want or need, and what your competition is doing. This will give you more ideas to add to your plan.

Message boards and review sites are very helpful when it comes to peoples opinions of what’s good or bad – use them.

Join a few forums and ask questions about your product/service. The responses you get will be invaluable.

Knowing what others want, and do, is key.

Strategic posting

Make a list of all the information you have gathered so far and do a keyword analysis – Google Adwords keyword tool is most beneficial for this.

Decide on a posting schedule. How often can you consistently post to your blog… daily, weekly, or monthly?

There are no standards but you should try to maintain some consistency, and let your readers know what to expect.

You can now begin creating posts using the above information.

Lead your visitors with posts that relate to one another while using keywords and product/service links in the content. These should be fairly short, but informative.

NOTE: A good idea is to set up a “Page” that describes your product/service, then refer to this page in the content of your articles. By doing this your blog posts are meeting the customers wants, needs, and desires, while giving them a single location to view the product, detailed information, and make their purchase (or whatever).

WordPress allows you to create posts and save them as drafts, or schedule them to publish at a future date. It is highly recommended that you NOT publish many posts at one time as the search engines frown upon this.

Good strategy would be to create your posts, save them as drafts, review for perfection, then schedule them for staggered dates to publish. See “Write a Post” in our WordPress Tutorials section.

Promote your post

Social bookmarking is one of the best ways to let the world know your blog is alive and has something to offer.

There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites where you can “suggest” your articles (posts), such as:  Digg, Technorati, MySpace, Twitter, and maybe a few more. A little investigation will reveal where your target audience hangs out.

Sign up to 5 or 6 of the most popular and submit every post you create to each site. Consistency, along with good content, will make your blog popular.

It is accepted practice to submit your own articles and should be included  as part of your plan with every post made.

Conclusion:

The above steps should get you well on your way to a successful blog.

Please keep in mind that your blog should be fully optimized before initiating the above steps.

Optimization (SEO) tips and strategies can be found on our sister site – asiteable.com.

Though the ease of set up and use is tempting, there are some serious drawbacks you should consider before going this route.

Blogger is owned by Google and you may think  this is an advantage but it is not. First and foremost, the Terms of Service (TOS) gives Google rights to your content. Secondly, your URL address will end in blogspot.com which drives traffic to Google, not you. (An SEO disadvantage) Last but not least – when you realize that self hosting is much better and you choose to move your blog to a new Host, you will find that it is quite difficult, if not impossible.

Blogger is also very restrictive when it comes to customization and plugin availability, compared to the WordPress platform.

WordPress.com is probably worse because your site advertising is limited and many plugins are not supported.

Note: WordPress.com does not use the same platform as the WordPress download for self hosting (free).

You can easily avoid all this and set up free hosting with the full WordPress platform, thus eliminating any restrictions while having complete control over your blog’s appearance, behavior, and SEO.

Computertactics.com was created, and is hosted, using the following information.

Domain Names

The first thing you want to do is get a domain name that is relevant to your business or service. If this is going to be a personal site with no intent on making income don’t worry about it.

It is highly recommended to get a .com domain name. These cost less than $10/year from GoDaddy and are well worth the small investment. This will give your business credibility and show the search engines that you are for real.

If you really don’t want to spend the money www.co.cc will provide you with a domain name free of charge. Let’s say your business is selling books and you chose newnusedbooks for a name, it would then become newnusedbooks.co.cc. For the rest of this article we’ll assume you used co.cc.

Register your name and write down all the particulars like the domain name, date of registration, and login info.

Free Hosting

Computertactics offers the best free hosting available at InstanetFree, which is powered by Byethost. There are no forced ads or any requirements whatsoever.

What’s included:

Once your account is set up log in to your Vista Panel and click on “addon domains.” This is where you will enter your new domain name newnusedbooks.co.cc. At the bottom of this window you will see “name servers.” Copy down the first two, they should look like ns1.byet.org and ns2.byet.org.

Go back to www.co.cc, login, click on “Domain Settings,” then click on your domain name. You will now see a gold button that says “setup” – click this and the next window is where you enter the name server info. When you finish entering the name servers click the “setup” button again and you are good to go. Keep in mind that it could take up to 72 hours for the name servers to transfer.

Now you can go back to Byethost and start building your new site. You will find the free Site Builder in the Vista Panel under the Software section.

Free WordPress Blog installation

Simply go to your Vista Panel and find the “iVista – Easy Script Installation.” Click this open, locate WordPress and click install. You will install this into the root directory of the domain name to be used.

The install window should show a textbox with a forward slash “/” – leave this as is and click “Complete Install.”

That’s all there is to it. Your WordPress login information will be listed here; write it down so you can access your admin panel.

WordPress is designed to be managed outside of your hosting panel, therefore, it has it’s own address which is the url for your domain followed by /wp-admin (http://yourdomainname.com/wp-admin).

Your login ID is admin and your password is the same as what you use for your hosting service. These can be changed in the “Profile” section of the admin panel whenever you want.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

The first thing you should do is go into your Byethost control panel >online file manager >yoursitename.com >.htdocs then click “edit” for the wp-config.php file.

copy and paste this code:

if(is_admin()) {
    add_filter('filesystem_method', create_function('$a', 'return "direct";' ));
    define( 'FS_CHMOD_DIR', 0751 );
}

at the very bottom of page. DO NOT leave any spaces or blank lines after the code.

Once you do this, click the blue square icon at top left to save, then click the blue arrow to return to file manager.

log out of Byethost.

This will allow you to automatically perform upgrades to WP and other components such as plugins and themes. This also enables you to upload themes and plugins from the WP control panel.

Should you decide that you do not have the time, or not want to deal with the technicalities, we can set all this up for you plus add themes and plugins so you are ready to start blogging.

Please visit our “Services” page for details.

Promoting your site is much more than submitting to search engines. As the internet grows so grows the opportunities to advertise your business.

The strategies explored below will help you start a solid promo campaign for your blog.

Make sure your site is optimized before you begin promoting.

Directories

Directories are search engines that are compiled and powered by human beings.
Getting listed in directories is very important because many people will see these listings plus, crawler-based search engines are more likely to find your site and add it to their listings for free.

Prepare your submission information in advance in a word processor like notepad. Write different versions of your site’s title at 50, 75, and 100 characters. Range your description from 100 – 250 characters and set up your keyword list with and without commas.
Now you can quickly copy/paste as needed.

List your site with the top 5 to 10 directories. Some are free… some are paid.

DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) is a volunteer-built guide to the web and provided as an option at many major search engines, including Google. Being listed with the Open Directory is a must for any website promotion campaign.

If you plan to manually DIY check out BestWeb Directories and VileSilencer. They both have extensive lists of free SEO friendly directories.

Search Engines

Submitting your site to the search engines is a waste of time (and money) nowadays. Your blog content, automatic pinging capabilities, directory listings, and backlinks, is what will get you noticed.

Sitemaps are another useful tool to let the search engines know you exist. They are basically a layout of your site, telling the SE’s where to go, and what’s new.
Fortunately, there are plugins for your blog that will automate this process and notify the SE’s whenever new content is added.
Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

The following links are for manually submitting Site-Maps. If you don’t have one, or don’t know what I am talking about, go to “Using Sitemaps” at Google where you can learn what and why, then create one. It’s free.

NOTE: You should first upload your .xml (sitemap) file to your website server’s root directory .

Google Sign in to your google webmaster tools account. If you don’t have an account (shame on you) you can sign up there.
Click the sitemaps link shown on the left side, check the sitemap.xml option, then submit. You’re done.

Yahoo Here is how you submit your sitemap to Yahoo. Go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit and log in with your Yahoo name and password (same as your Yahoo email if you have one). Once you log in you will want to choose Submit a Site Feed. Follow the instructions and you are done.

MSN Live Search (Bing): Login to your Live Search Webmaster Center account. If you need to register for a Live Search Webmaster Center account you can sign up here. Make sure to follow their instructions on how to add your website and verify it. Click on the website URL in the list that you wish to supply a XML sitemap for / Click on the “Sitemap” tab located near the top right / Enter your full web address to your XML sitemap / Click “Submit” and you are done.

ASK.com: Ask.com supports the open-format Sitemaps protocol. Once you have prepared the sitemap, add the sitemap auto-discovery directive to robots.txt as follows:

SITEMAP: http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml (The sitemap location should be the full sitemap URL.)

Alternatively, you can also submit your sitemap through the ping URL:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

Social networking

Social networking (SN) sites are basically online meeting places. Most SN’s are niche focused and encourage you to share your interest by discussing relevant issues, asking questions, offering advice, and socializing in general. SN’s are quite diverse and cover every subject from A to Z. which makes finding a target audience fairly easy.

As a SN site member it is important to follow the rules. SN sites may have restrictions regarding the posting of links and not adhering these restrictions could result in you being banned. Read the user agreement and play by the rules.

Do Not spam the boards with links. Creating a professional signature with your link included is the best way to promote your business. Obviously if you are involved in a discussion, and the subject is relevant to your service or product, a properly placed link would be fine.

Avoid arguments and topics which could spawn them, remember, you are representing your business and you want everybody to like you. Taking sides on any issue will alienate a certain percentage of potential customers. If you feel the need to debate and participate in heated arguments, create a new identity that has no connection to your business.

Mashable.com lists over 300 SN sites with a brief synopsis of each. This is a great place to start.

Article Writing

Articles are a great way to generate links, boost your search engine rankings, find new prospects, and target traffic to your web site. Search engines love content articles and many people will read and link to those that are interesting and informative.

Most article syndication sites allow you to post your content for free. Once published, your content is available for everyone to read, and possibly reuse. Some sites allow you to include HTML links in your articles and some don’t… read the T.O.S.
Almost every site allows links in your “Resource Box” which is your signature, profile, bio, or whatever. You can tell a little about yourself and, more importantly, include a backlink to your website.

Publish well written, informative articles, that attract many viewers and you have a good chance that someone will re-post it (requiring the inclusion of your resource box) on their site, thus creating a backlink.

A great way to find “writing ideas” is to sign up with Google Alerts and receive e-mail once a day, week, or month announcing news articles that relate to any topic you choose. Read through these articles and you may find new inspiration.

Article Writing Resources:

Effective article writing…
A nice step-by-step to article writing.

Writing Tips for Non-Writers Who Don’t Want to Work at Writing…
Interesting things to think about when writing articles.

Forums

Forums and Discussion Groups are a terrific way to promote your online business. They are almost always free to join, and offer more than just social interaction.

Active participation will enable you to discover new business strategies by sharing your ideas with other members.

Look for forums that are related to your business niche. Board Reader, Big Boards, and Board Tracker are great directories to search through.

Be somewhat selective in choosing the forums to join. Aside from being relative to your business you will want forums that are active.
See how many members there are (1000 or more is good) then check out the postings for the past week or two and make sure that there have been multiple contributions on a daily basis.

Read the user agreement and posting guidelines for every forum you join, they are not all the same. Make sure that you are allowed to place links in your signature and promote your business.

Remember, simply joining a Forum or Discussion Group does you no good unless you take part in the discussions. Build a good reputation and you will build your business.

Viral promotion through social bookmarks, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are extremely effective and will be discussed in a future post.

Keyword selection:

Improved search engine positioning starts with proper keyword selection. Study your business and consider the words and phrases that connect best to the products or services you offer.

Consider the following while creating your keyword list:

Who is the target customer that would need your product or service?
Let’s assume you promote a line of makeup. Think of all the terms relating to this product – buffer, bronzer, collagen, moisturizer, etc. and also imagine the uses for these products – to cover up acne or scars.

People will search using all forms of keywords. Improving access to your site includes the use of misspelled and pluralized keywords like moisteriser, pimpels, colagan, etc.

TIP – place misspelled words in your meta-tag keywords as these will not be seen by humans. The search engines will pick them up along with the other keywords placed throughout your site.

Avoid using words like “the,” “and,” “with,” and common terms such as “marketing” and “internet.” The more specific the better.

Use keywords in the:

• Page title
• Meta-tag description
• Meta-tag keywords
• Image ALT tags
• URL names
• Page content

DO NOT Spam. The search engines will eventually discover what you are doing and drop you.

• The keywords you choose must relate to your site and content.
• Keyword stuffing by way of hidden text, css, JavaScript, URL’s, or any other form – No
• URL re-directs – No
• Page cloaking by way of JavaScript re-directs or 100% Frame – No

Once you have a keyword list put together you will want to see what else is available and how competitive these keywords are.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a good start. This free tool will show you many variations of the word(s) entered and the level of competition for each word or phrase along with the hit volume. Essentially you want words and phrases that are relevant, high in volume, and low in competition.

Although useful, Google’s Keyword Tool is not the most up to date or accurate measure available. For the best results you will want to use an advanced program.

The most effective program we have found, and use, is IBP from Axandra. It is one of the strongest, most recommended SEO tools available. There is a constantly updated suite of tools designed to optimize your site… and your rankings are guaranteed.

You can download the free version of IBP here.

Developing a solid keyword strategy is good business management and essential for success.

Credit: Asiteable.com (our sister site)

• Get the customer to your site.
• Present your product, or service.
• Close the sale.

Although fundamentally correct, this is simplicity at it’s best. Each step has a number of requirements to work effectively, and this is what I would like to explore.

Getting the customer to your site is a combination of advertising, networking, and search engine awareness.
A successful site needs to be attractive in two distinct ways; visually and structurally. The visual appearance will catch and hold the customers attention, while proper structure invites the SE’s to rank favorably. You need both.

A few points:

Colors – Others may not like what you like. Try staying as neutral as possible.
Ask yourself, do the colors strain my eyes? Can I easily read the text? Are the colors too violent? Passive?

Consistency – Maintain your theme throughout the entire site. If the header, navigation links, or background, varies from page to page, the visitor can become easily confused and leave.

Layout – Make it easy for the visitor to navigate. They came here for a reason, what was it? To find a Widget?

Don’t make them dig through your life story, or any other unrelated crap. Put up some good quality, useful info, about your product, how it will benefit them, why this widget is the best, etc.
They came for information on something that they hope will better their lives… give it to them.
If they want to know about you they will read your “About” page.

Content – As stated above, your text content is the “sales pitch” to the customer, but it is also an invitation to the Search Engines.
Integration of keywords throughout your site is very important. This can be the tricky part. Your wording needs to obviously make sense to the customer, be grammatically correct, yet rich in keywords.
This is how NOT to do it… “This widget is the best widget there is in the widget world according to widget experts.” It sounds stupid and will be flagged by the Search Engines for keyword stuffing.
WHAT does the widget do? WHY does the widget exist? WHO buys the widget? These are some of the questions you will want to ask yourself to determine any number of good keywords to use.

* Don’t sell price, sell the product.

Bear in mind  that people tend to scan a page, rather than read word for word. Headers, sub-headers, highlighting in bold and italics, bullet/numbered lists, attract attention. You will want to use these to capture immediate interest.
Breaking up your article into blocks using 2 to 4 sentences per block will make it much easier to scan and your visitor is more likely to read the entire article.

Site tips

• Images – pictures are very useful when it pertains to your product, period. Large graphics that are not related to what you are selling take up room, distract from the intent of your site, take valuable time to load, and have no distinct advantage when it comes to SEO.

*Any images you do use, should have an “alt” tag using a keyword related description.

*Advertising images should be held to a minimum. Large banners, flashing graphics, pop-ups, peel pages, and redirects, look cheap, and turn off most visitors.

• Any advertising, affiliate or otherwise, should be related to your business. Subtle, inline, contextual advertising works the best.
• Flash and JavaScript will slow your site down. Have you ever come across a site and have to wait 5 seconds, or more, for it to load? Your potential buyer will most likely leave you for a speedier site. Also, many people have these turned off in their browsers. Unless you are a designer, and Flash is a key to your business, leave it behind.
• Meta Tags – learn about them, and use them. They are still effective.
• Title and Description – Both of these tell the customer and SE what your site is about. Use keywords here, but use them wisely. They should make sense to the reader.
• Structure Code – Make sure your site conforms to current CSS/HTML standards. You want it to look the same in different browsers.

Closing the sale with a customer should be much easier now that your site is “tuned” properly.
Make sure the checkout process is easy and secure, and by all means, tell this to the customer.
Allow them see a total price, including tax, shipping, and any other charges, BEFORE they give any personal info.
Thank them for the sale and offer a print invoice, email invoice, or both.