Over the last 4 years of developing web sites for individuals and companies, I came to a realization, based on these experiences, that there are certain components which a successful Internet Business or web site should have.

If an online business or web site owner is seriously about what he is doing on the Internet, he should carefully take the following into consideration.

1. Own your domain name
Technically, a domain name is where people locate you on the Internet when they are looking for you. Marketing-wise, a domain name is your branding.

As you market and promote your Internet business or web site, you are branding yourself on the Internet. Think of the hugely successful web sites in the world such as Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, Ebay, MySpace, Youtube. They are all very well known, established brands on the Internet. If you are tempted to create your online presence using free resources such as free hosting, free email or free 3rd party services like blogger.com, I would suggest to you that you should not.

Domain name is cheap these days, you can register one for yourself for less than USD$10 per year all over the Internet. You can get a domain from godaddy.com, hostway.com, namesecure.com etc.

Branding is very important if you want to succeed online.

2. Paid Hosting
A lot of people took up the offer of free hosting from service providers like Yahoo Geocities, GoDaddy etc. In exchange, these service providers insert their own advertisements into your web site and often than not, they also impose very limited bandwidth on your web site. If you have slightly more visitors to your web site, you will realize that the traffic restrictions on your web site will start to kick in, and your visitors will have problems accessing your web sites. This is something that you do not want to see.

Web hosting is an extremely competitive industry globally. For consumers, these are good news for us because prices have been driven so low to less than USD$10 per month for a generously, huge amount of bandwidth, email accounts and bandwidth etc. Instead of paying thousands to buy, install, maintain a web server, you pay only few dollars a month for the professionals to take care of everything for you, including supporting and ensuring that your Internet business or web site stays up 24 hours a day!

In fact, these days, some web hosts even give you free advertising credits with search engines, free web site templates and other freebies when you sign up for an account with them. You can find one of the reliable and value for money web hosting company that I am using at:
http://www.donaldlim.com/go/webhosting

3. Web Site Design
In the past, you have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to get a web site designer to create a web site for you. Today, anyone can create a very professional Internet business or web site in under one hour using free software that you can download on the Internet. And the best part is you do not have to be a technical person to design your own web site.

Take for example, an extremely popular, powerful and free open source software known as WordPress. WordPress is a powerful personal publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible. You can download a copy of the software at http://wordpress.org.

Follow the instructions to downstall the software and you will be up within 5-15 minutes.

WordPress is famous for its 5-minutes installation, hence it should not be too difficult for you to set it up, even if you are a newbie.

The default installation of WordPress comes with some default themes for you to choose from inside your Administration panel under Presentation menu. If you wish to look for more free WordPress themes to be used on your new WordPress installation, you can go to http://themes.wordpress.net

Just download the free WordPress theme that you want to use and upload them onto your FTP server under the WordPress theme directory. For details, please refer to the documentation that comes with your theme.

If you are fast, you can get your new site up within 30 minutes or less. If you want to get started even faster, easier, then you can use the web host which I am recommending at: http://www.donaldlim.com/go/webhosting

This web hosting company supports Fantastico on cPanel (the control panel for your hosting account) which allows you to install WordPress within a few clicks of your mouse.

However, if you prefer learning and designing a web page from scratch but do not have the budget of a few hundreds dollars to buy Dreamweaver or Frontpage, you can download this free open source web site builder software at freenvu.com

4. Paid Autoresponder
If you want to keep in constant contact with your mailing list or your web site visitors, you will need a way to keep in touch with them.

There are many ways to do so but one of the most effective and popular way is via email. You can collect email addresses from your visitors, and send your messages to them on a periodical basis, to keep them informed of new updates for your Internet business, or web sites.

You can make use of an autoresponder service to help you automate the process of handling subscription and un-subscription of email addresses from your mailing list, to schedule email messages to your list, to send email broadcast to your list via a mass emailing. The best part is you can also personalise your email messages to your recipients and track the deliverability and open-rate of your email messages through a centralized online system.

One of the most popular autoresponder services on the Internet can be found here:
http://www.donaldlim.com/go/autoresponder

5. Internet Traffic
There are countless ways of driving traffic to your web site. There are free ways or paid ways. There are time-tested and proven ways as well as new ways that are constantly popping up on the Internet, especially with the evolution of the Internet. There are also online or offline methods in which you can drive traffic to a web site.

Some popular ways to generate traffic will be via blogs, forum, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, article marketing, video marketing, Pay-Per-Click advertising, TV ads, direct mailers and emails etc. (See my other blog posts on how to generate free traffic to a web site)

6. Traffic Monetization Systems
Now you have everything you need to be in an Internet business. However, the most critical component that you must have is the systems/mechanisms to convert your traffic, mailing list, site contents, expertise etc into money, into cash.

Without this, all the costs involved in getting your domain name, hosting, autoresponder, traffic etc are all losing you money. You need cash and you need enough of those cash to make yourself profits in order to sustain your Internet business and make yourself some good money online! The primary aim of being in business is to earn money, earn profits!

There are also many ways for you to monetize your Internet business depending on what you are doing for your Internet business. You may be selling something of your own, selling someone’s else product via affiliate marketing, building enough traffic and convert those traffic into cash using traffic monetization systems like Google AdSense, Bidvertiser, Kontera and Chitika etc. (See my other blog posts on more information about these traffic monetization systems)

Hey guys,
I am sure you guys have heard of NVU, the open source web site editor software!
It’s a website editor used and recommended by THOUSANDS of people everyday.
You may even have recommended others to use it as well or perhaps you are also using it yourself…However there’s just one problem when you do that…You DON’T benefit and earn cash from doing so.

Today, here’s the better alternative because Ewen Chia has taken the popular open source software and modified it for redistribution:

You can get a free copy today by clicking here!

Whether you need a website builder, or have friends who need one…you can make tons of cash daily just by *GIVING AWAY* this free software every day!

Go download this software now and see for yourself! This may be available for a limited time only…BTW, you’ll also receive a free, brand new unreleased ebook worth $19.97 with your web site builder!

Get it now before it is gone! And also remember to tell all your friends about it, they will kiss you for it! So, go to FreeNVU.com

I hope you like it!

PS: I had this idea before, but I never took action on it! Now Ewen Chia has capitalised on it, cool stuff! Great minds think alike!

Now, here is a lesson for you from my own experience:

Always be commited and take action on things that you want to do! If not, someone will beat you to it! This is especially true if you want to do Internet Marketing, you can learn from all the Internet Millionaires but if you are not going to take action on what you have learned, everything comes to nothing! Period!

Hi friends/visitors,

I have just created a MySpace.com profile at www.myspace.com/singaporeinternetmarketer for any Internet Marketers located in Singapore.

If you are keen to be part of this network, please add me as a MySpace friend. If you do not have a MySpace profile, do sign up. It is free and is great for generating traffic!

I am currently only accepting Internet Marketers physically residing in Singapore. You can be a Singaporean or Permanent Resident, newbie or guru.

See you around on the Internet!

In this series of “How To Generate Traffic to Your Web Site”, I will talk about one social traffic generation strategy known as social bookmarking.

To put it simply: Social bookmarking is a way for internet users to store, classify, share and search Internet bookmarks online.

In the past, everyone used to store their bookmarks on their own computers, for example, when you visit a web site that you like, you bookmark it via your browser on your desktop computer at home. Now, if you are away from home, there is no easy way you can retrieve your bookmark from your home desktop.

However, the availability of Internet and social bookmarking sites had changed this.

Now, you can easily go to any social bookmarking sites and put your bookmarks online on the servers of the social bookmarking sites which you are on. You do not have to rely or go to your home desktop to retrieve your stored bookmarks. With social bookmarking sites, you can retrieve your bookmarks anywhere in the world as long as you have access to the Internet. Not only that, you can even share your stored bookmarks with the world if you like.

A typical social bookmarking site not only allows you to put up your bookmarks online, it also let you decide if you want to keep your bookmarks private for own use, for public access, or for restricted access to your contacts only.

Some social bookmarking sites provide even more functionalities than merely storing and displaying your bookmarks online. However, this is not the scope of this article.

There are a few ways of how you can generate traffic to your web site via social bookmarking:

a) Create your bookmarks online and share with everyone else.
Particularly, bookmark the sites that you want others to know, then share them online for maximum exposure for your sites so that anyone who viewed your social bookmarking profiles on social bookmarking sites can see them and hopefully, to click on the links to your sites.

b) For some social bookmarking sites, whenever you bookmark a web site, your latest bookmark will appear on the home page of the social bookmarking site.
Or for other social bookmarking sites, your profile will be featured on the home page of the site whenever you just bookmarked a site.
All these bookmarking tasks actually expose your bookmarks to more Internet users online, which in a way will increase your site visibility online, and possibly additional traffic as well because they provide a link back to your web site.

c) If you have a web site or blog, you can also put some social bookmarking scripts or plugins onto them so that you can allow any of your visitors to easily social bookmark a page or blog post on your web site/blog to share with everyone else. This simple method of allowing others to share your contents online will also bring you more free traffic.

Here are some more time-saving tips for you:
-    If you are looking for a great social bookmarking script or plugin, you must try www.addthis.com. I spent a lot of my time looking and trying out many of such scripts and AddThis is the one of the best out there, with the easiest implementation among many others.
-    Another great resource will be www.onlywire.com. If you are using multiple social bookmarking services and you are tired of having multiple shortcuts to add a social bookmark, then OnlyWire will save your time by allowing you to send once to OnlyWire.com and it will auto-submit your social bookmark to many social bookmarking sites that it supports. (Note: Although OnlyWire saves you time, it does not work perfectly as some auto-submissions to some of the supported social bookmarking sites do not work properly)

Squidoo.com is one of the world’s most popular web site for people who want to build a web page about their passions. Based on current Alexa’s ranking, Squidoo.com is the top 500 web sites in the world.

On Squidoo, you can write about the books you like, how to set up a blog, how to be a better lover, or just to share your knowledge or interest online, or even to spread the word about the stuff you love by creating a lens.

Signing up with Squidoo is fast, free, and super easy. You can do it within 5 minutes.

Basically, you can write about anything that you are passionate about on Squidoo even if you are not a technical person or web designer. At the same time you can also choose to raise money for you or even charity at the same time!

You can do all these by creating a lens on Squidoo. A lens is what Squidoo calls it and it is nothing but just another web page that you can create on Squidoo without knowing HTML, just like how you can create a free blog on Google’s blogger.com

Many web site owners experienced great results using Squidoo because Google indexes Squidoo pages very fast. Many of these site owners had problems getting their keywords ranked on first page of Google for many years but within a relatively short period of using Squidoo, they get ranked on first page of Google for the keywords that they wanted!

I experienced this myself too when Squidoo was relatively new on the Internet. I was promoting an affiliate program and in my test campaign in trying out Squidoo, I realized that my Squidoo page had beaten the product owner on their own product keywords and my Squidoo page was on the first page of Google search results!

I repeated the same Google first page search results when I was doing another test campaign for another affiliate program which I was on. From then on, I realized that Squidoo is one great service to use if you are promoting something online.

However, recently, Squidoo made the news when they became the targets of spammers. Google then gave them the Google Slap.

This slap from Google was said to have affected how Squidoo pages will rank on Google search engines as well as drop in traffic to Squidoo site.

However, if you ask me, I will still think that Squidoo will make a good place for us to tap some traffic from as long as the lenses that you are creating on Squidoo is providing real value to your readers and Internet users.

Also, Squidoo will be very helpful for those who want to share their expertise or knowledge online but do not have the technical skills to do up a proper web page and marketing skills to drive traffic to their web pages.

If you are interested to see how a typical Squidoo page will look like, you can visit one of the Squidoo page that I have set up at www.squidoo.com/freesoftwareguy

This Squidoo page will save you hundreds or thousands of dollars every year because it shows you where to download free and legal anti-virus software, free anti-spyware, free personal firewall, free office productivity software, free html editors etc.

One of the newer methods to generate free traffic to your web site is via stumbleupon.com. From my own experiences of using StumbleUpon, and those from my various Internet Marketing groups and associates, the feedback for traffic coming from Stumbleupon.com has been quite good!

So, what is Stumbleupon.com? StumbleUpon is a new web site that helps you to discover new web sites! If you do not know what web site to surf when you are bored, you must go to Stumbleupon!

How does it work?

• You can sign up for a free account with Stumbleupon.com and you will tell StumbleUpon during your sign-up process about what types of web sites or topics you will be interested in.
• Upon successfully sign-up with Stumbleupon.com, you will install a Stumbleupon toolbar on your browser (FireFox or Internet Explorer etc)
• When you are bored and you want to look for web sites to surf, just click on the “Stumble” button on your StumbleUpon toolbar, your browser will then load a web site in the category which you have indicated your interest in during your sign-up process. For example, if you have indicated that you like Self-Improvement web sites, whenever you click on the “Stumble” button, your browser will load a Self-Improvement related web site for you! So, no more thinking about what web sites to visit! Let StumbleUpon finds you a new web site!
• With StumbleUpon.com, you can channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great web sites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon has millions of sites in its database, all submitted and recommended by other Stumblers.

Also, when you see a web site that you like, you can tell StumbleUpon that you like it via the StumbleUpon toolbar that you have already installed by clicking on the “I like it” button. If you dislike a web site that you saw, just tell StumbleUpon that you do not wish to see similar web sites again via the same toolbar! So essentially, StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better site recommendations for you.

Not only that, you can connect with friends and share your discoveries of great web sites and resources, meet online people that have similar interests, and check out what other people are discovering.

If you are still wondering how traffic comes to you when you use StumbleUpon, let me enlighten you:

1.       When any of the other Stumblers clicks on the “Stumble” button on their toolbar, StumbleUpon may send them to you and you get free traffic!

2.       When you create your StumbleUpon profile, people can view your profile. Any web sites that you have ‘stumbled upon with a thumb-up’ will also appear in your profile and anyone, including your friends or strangers, who view your profile will be able to view those sites that you have indicated that you like. StumbleUpon works on the basis of the power of recommendation. If everyone is recommending a web site on StumbleUpon, do you think you will go and have a look too?

Now, I have some tips for you to bring you more traffic via StumbleUpon:
a)      Visit your own web site and gave it a thumb-up

b)      Tell your friends about StumbleUpon.com and get them to sign up and give your web site a thumb-up as well. The more the better, remember the power of recommendation?

c)      Add your StumbleUpon friends into your StumbleUpon network of friends!

Another popular and time-tested way of generating free traffic to your web site will be using online free classified ads available on the Internet and do your free ads posting online for others to locate you.

Most likely you have heard of using free classified ads web sites to sell your products or services but you may be thinking whether this traditional, time-tested method still work. From my own experiences as a business owner and Internet marketer, I can tell you that they still work because I am still getting sales leads and even sales from those classified ads that I put online.

You may not realize this but there are still many people who will go to online classified ads web sites to buy or sell something. Many buyers will go to such classified ads sites to look for good bargains and sometimes they do find one!

And if you are someone who has no experience selling anything online, online classified ads web site will be a great way to start because such sites tend to have more traffic as compared to a standalone site that you have just built up to sell something where you have no traffic! No traffic equals no buyers!

Some classified ads web sites are free, while some are paid. You may want to use some free classified ads sites before you invest in a paid one!

These are some of the popular online classified ads web sites:
www.craigslist.org
www.ablewise.com
www.usfreeads.com

If you have been on the Internet for a while, and especially if you have been doing Internet Marketing, I am very sure you have come across the terms “syndication” or “web syndication” before, even though you may really not understand what they are all about.

Web syndication is a form of syndication in which a section of a web site is made available for other web sites to use. This could mean simply by licensing the content so that other people can use it; Generally though, web syndication refers to making web feeds available from a site, in order to provide other people with a summary of the web site’s recently added content (for example, the latest forum posts or news and announcements).

A large scale web syndication of content started only in 2001. Today, many different types of content are being syndicated on the Internet. Millions of online web publishers such as newspapers, commercial web sites and blogs now publish their latest news headlines, product offers or blog postings in a standard format news feed.

Syndication benefits both the web sites which are providing the information and the web sites which are displaying it. For the receiving site, content syndication is an effective way of adding greater depth and immediacy of information to its pages, making it more attractive to users. For the transmitting site, syndication drives exposure across numerous online platforms. This exchange generates new traffic for the transmitting site — making syndication a free and easy form of advertisement.

The prevalence of web syndication is also of interest to Internet marketers, since web surfers are becoming increasingly wary of providing personal information for marketing materials (for example signing up for a newsletter) and expect the ability for them to subscribe to a feed instead.

Although the syndication format could be any thing transported over HTTP (such as HTML or JavaScript), it is more commonly done through XML.

The two main families of web syndication formats are RSS and Atom, which are also the most well-known formats available.

A lot of online publishers are taking advantage of web syndication to market and promote themselves online.

MySpace.com is another extremely popular, social networking web site that you can use to ‘steal’ traffic from. According to Alexa.com ranking, it is consistently ranked as the top 10 most visited web site in the world! How about having a small amount of traffic sent to your web site from MySpace.com?

To put it into simpler terms, myspace.com is a web site where people can get to know new friends, or to make new friends, interact and connect with each other’s network of friends/associates/family members/business partners etc easily. You can set up a free profile on MySpace.com, view other MySpace.com members’ profiles online and connect to any of them if you like what you see on their profiles.

You can connect your personal profile to someone that you like, and with the person’s approval to add you as a friend or contact, you are able to see his/her network of friends. And likewise, your new friend who has added you will be able to see your own personal network of friends and associates as well.

MySpace.com also allows you to set up your blog, share your videos, music and photos etc online with everyone else.

Here are some ways that you can generate free traffic to your web site:

• Set up a blog for yourself and attract others to read your blog
• Post your comments on someone else’s blog and link back to your own web site
• Upload videos to share with everyone online. Insert your link into your video post to drive back traffic to your own site
• Find interesting videos, comment on them and provide a link back to your web site or give away something. Be as creative as you can be!
• Find people that you like and add them as a friend. If they approve you as a friend, both of you can connect to each other’s network and this increases the exposure of your profile to more people online. This is a great way to build your network as well!
• In the profile that you have created for yourself, write about yourself. What you do, what you are selling (if you are), what you are looking for, provide a link on your profile back to your web site. Tell the world about yourself. Think creative, you do not have to limit yourself.

Just in case you are thinking that MySpace.com is just for youngsters or people who have nothing to do to put up their personal profile. I am sorry but to tell you in your face again that you are wrong. Reputable and highly successful people and businessmen like Anthony Robbins, Bob Proctor, Jack Canfield, John Assaraf etc all have their own MySpace.com profiles!

So, what are you waiting for? Go and sign up for a free MySpace.com account immediately!

Video marketing is another great way to generate good traffic to your web site.

These are some of the things that you can do with video to drive traffic to your site:

1.    Create a video and upload your video for everyone to share on the Internet.
One way of doing it is to create a video using your digital camera or video recorder and put it on extremely high traffic web site such as YouTube or Google Video to tap into their traffic and ‘steal’ some for yourself!

In your video, remember to put a link back to your own web site. I believe you may have seen some really interesting video in action which can generate hundreds or even millions of hits within days of going online. If you are able to do this properly, you can get great traffic to your own web site or blog.

Nevertheless, this method is only good if you are more technical-savvy to create and edit your own videos.

2.    The alternative way is to find very popular or high traffic videos and give your comments on the videos.
If you have already noticed, on many video web sites, you are allowed to leave your comments on a video, or even to create a new video by yourself in response to an existing video that you see on the video sites.

When you put a comment on a video with high traffic, you can potentially tap on those traffic if your comment has been seen by a video viewer on the web site.

Include your web site address on your comment and this allows people to be exposed to your web site address, and if they click on it, or if they are interested to find out more about your web site, they may launch a web browser and surf to your web site. There you go again, free traffic going to your web site.

2 of the most well known video sites are youtube.com and video.google.com. There are of course many other such video sites. Go to google.com and search for them if you need more video sites. If you are a myspace.com user, you can put your comments on those videos that you can find under the myspace.com video sections as well.

Here is a tip for you:
a)    If you are trying to comment on youtube.com, you are not allowed to insert a generic domain name into your comments such as www.mydomain.com. To work around this restriction imposed by YouTube, you can enter something like mydomain (dot) com, or mydomain-dot-com in order for your comments to appear. Most Internet users will be intelligent enough to get what you are trying to tell them!
b)    Some videos owners may not allow your comments to appear under the comments column of their videos when they do their comments moderation for your comments for whatever reasons that they may have. If that is the case, you may want to look for alternative videos to post your comments to get the traffic you want.