The Rich Blog

If you own a small business, you don’t want to pay a web developer thousands of dollars to build a website for your business. All you need is a basic, professional looking website that is inexpensive and easy to maintain. And WordPress offers you such an option.

WordPress has become an amazingly popular publishing platform that anyone can use to create professional looking websites. There are a lot of people who think that WordPress is just blogging software, but it’s much more than that. It can be a website’s entire content management system.

Here are 5 main reasons why you should consider WordPress when building your small business’ website:

1. It’s FREE

First, you need to choose a domain name and a hosting provider. There are a number of quality hosting companies like GoDaddy where you can host your WordPress site. Most hosting providers offer an option that allows you to install WordPress in just a few clicks. That’s how I created this blog. The only thing you’ll have to pay for is the domain name which costs about $10 and the hosting plan which costs as low as $5 per month. After you install WordPress, you can just log into the admin area and start building your website.

2. Ease of Use

WordPress is very easy to use. You don’t need to have any programming skills or anything like that. When you log into your WordPress account, you will see that you can easily create a great content and establish a fully functional website in less than an hour. There are also plenty of tutorials on the web to help you.

3. Themes

A theme is basically a template that changes the look of your WordPress site. There are hundreds of free themes available for your WordPress account. Some of them are even customizable!

4. Plug-ins

A plug-in is basically a tool you can add to your WordPress site that enhances the functionality of the website. There are plug-ins that help you with accepting payments, designing contact forms, building photo galleries and even optimizing your site’s search engine rankings. If you go to the administration panel, you will see a list of plug-ins available for your website. And the best part is most of these plug-ins are free!

5. Support

WordPress is an extremely popular and commonly used piece of software. There are over 15 million WordPress publishers worldwide. If you have any problems, there are thousands of people available to help you on the WordPress forums. So they have got you covered!

If you are a small business owner who wants to provide your customers with online business services like marketing and e-commerce, I would highly recommend WordPress. It’s free, customizable and an all-in-one solution for all your needs.

Good luck!

If you want to make money out of your website, you need traffic. The good news is that you don’t have to spend a dime to generate high traffic. The bad news, it doesn’t happen overnight. So be patient.

You can use these useful tips to add traffic to your site:

Offer original and quality content
This is the most effective way to increase your traffic. Offer your visitors something unique, something interesting that they can not easily find elsewhere.

Keep your content fresh
It is very important to keep your website updated. Relevant and up-to-date content is what keeps your visitors happy. Keep building and updating your website regularly.

Establish link partnerships
Your backlinks are very important since search engines use this information when ranking your site. Not only the quantity, but also the quality matter. What I mean by quality is how the backlink is relevant to your site’s content. Value Exchange is a good place to start.

Use Online Forums and Blogs
Most forums and blogs allow you to leave a comment and a link to your own website. You gain credibility by giving advice and finding solutions to problems posted on these websites. When you comment, make it useful and build credibility.

Use Social Networking
Social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter can present limitless opportunities to promote your website as they allow millions of people to connect and share.

Submit your website to main search engines
Google, Bing (MSN), Yahoo and AOL are the most popular search engines right now. When you submit your website to these engines, please be patient as it may take some days or maybe weeks for your site to appear on the search results. Do not repeat this process more than once. Your URL may get banned.

Get Listed In Directories
DMOZ is a good place to start. And find other directories that are relevant to your site, and get listed there.

Use keywords in the filenames
Search engines use filenames to help determine your page rank. Instead of naming your page like page1.html, name it useful-tips.html. It is also a good idea to separate words with a hyphen instead of running them together.

Create RSS Feeds
RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. Instead of going to a website, people can subscribe to these feeds and receive the content. If you have a blog that creates automatic feeds, then you can sign up with Feedburner and promote your feeds.

Offer Something Free
Everyone loves free. It is a great way to your visitors’ attention. It can be an e-book or a trial of your product or service.

I am pretty sure that you have heard a lot about real estate flipping. What about flipping websites? As you would guess, it is a simple process of buying a domain name or a complete website and then selling it for more money.

There is a growing number of people who have figured out that flipping websites is a great way to make profits. If you go to eBay and search for “website” or “domain”, you will see thousands of listings. Even there are websites like Flippa.com which are created only for this purpose.

Domain Flipping

The first way is to start from scratch by choosing a domain name, building a website around it and building it up and selling it to people who are interested. This can take some time as you will need to wait until it gets a good amount of traffic. All you need to do is to build a site that generates a good volume of traffic and money making potential with ads, paid links, memberships etc. I strongly recommend you to get a .com domain.

If you are quick enough to snap up a good domain after a new product or service development, you don’t even need to build a website around it. Just put it up for sale as it is and give it some time to catch attention. GoDaddy.com is a good place to start.

Website Flipping

If you are not good at website building but you still want to sell websites for profit then you should try this method. What you need to do is to look for a website that someone has built which is getting a reasonable amount of traffic. Go to eBay or Flippa.com, and look for some potential websites. When you find a good deal, then I recommend you to go to WebsiteOutlook.com to see the estimated worth of the website, its daily page views and ads revenue.

My suggestion is that you should buy a website that has a catchy domain name. Do not buy “thisisaverylongdomain.net”, buy “shortdomain.com” instead!

As there is no limit to the number of websites you can flip and make a profit, just be patient. Don’t forget that you need some experience before you buy a $1,000 website. Also keep in mind that if the owners were really making a good profit, then they wouldn’t want to sell it, right? However, if you can catch a memorable domain name or a nice established website, then you can generate an automated monthly income for very little work.