One of the advantages of creating your own site is you can add other revenue streams to it, some of the goods I add to this ilovegano blog are from other Affiliate Programs - they shall be slotted into my own 'Static' website - coffeedrinker.org it's on-line but not finished just yet - I made it by buying a domain name from Go Daddy and a purchase of 2 months of Smartspace - which combines 4 unit's of interaction for visitors which reminded me of the chart I did in an earlier lesson.
1. The "static" website: (the version for people looking for coffee to drink)www.coffeedrinker.org - I've set up a feedburner link for e-mails there and may add an e-mail form on that front page too. I picked a "bistro" style template - they had other designs including a coffee one - you get 5 pages of static website for $4.99 a month plus you get 'social space' page, a blog (with RSS/Atom)and a photograph album
With the Blog I ran it through feedburner and put 'buzz boost' (a snippet of javascript you can get in publicize your feed) on the front on the static web page, thus bringing it to life with fresh content.
So 2. is the coffee drinker blog now I can upload products to the blog all relating to coffee, I can then add it's RSS feed to http://www.twitterfeed.com and have it send to my @coffee2u twitter account automatically every 3 or 6 hours (see a still of twitterfeed.com below) That makes my blog and website come alive as it is broadcast anywhere I have my @coffee2u twitter feed broadcasting - i.e on other blogs, on Ning profiles, on Facebook, on Microsoft, on Yahoo - all this is free advertsing - if you make use of widgetbox, you have a flash widget that can be installed on most major networks that don't allow frames or javascript, most places allow twitter, so if you have targeted visitors to you profile, you will get traffic to your fresh content.
But I jump ahead, as usual!
The other two modules are not of much interest to me yet, but in theory the photo album could be filled with coffee related images, cartoons or bigger versions of other products, the social space reminds me a bit of 'pageflakes' but in my initial opinion Smartspace does the job - for the price, I have used lots of free and paid web hosting over the years, so I will have do a comparison of quick website building using "WYSIWYG" (What You See Is What You Get) website builders - and a price comparison.
If you opt for GoDaddy, I recommend you join their Affiliate Program too - it's available on Commission Junction then, just like with GDI, you are potentially able to earn some 'cash back' from the website you are renting!
If paying website hosting fees makes you squeamish, just remember why you are buying it - it's your shop space/ your retail outlet/ open 24/7, if you can get it set up, you then can focus on adding fresh content to the blog, the blog is automatically redistributed via twitter - so your blog is really your center of operations for content, chat and feedback and research can be done on Twitter, Facebook and Ning plus spaces like forums and traffic exchanges etc. which we can look into later.
So in this lesson you have learned what a vertical portal is, you've been introduced to smartspace (low cost web builder app), twitterfeed (freebie reposter)and you've been reminded that once if you have your own website, you kind of have your own virtual retail outlet (which is a lot cheaper than renting off-line!)
*I'll add more details on that at some point I'm sure!
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