Enter our web hosting company. I have a reseller account and my son has a hosting account with me. My reseller account is hosted through HostGator. While everything has gone well so far with my reseller account, you really don’t know how well until you have a problem.

With this problem, I found their service to be excellent.  I opened a ticket and they responded within a few hours (on Sunday) with instructions on how to request a restore.  The cost of the restore was $15 which my son was happy to pay. I entered the restore request last night and woke up this morning to find it done.

His website is up and working again like nothing ever happened.  My son has learned a valuable lesson. I have learned that HostGator truly does have good service.

Disclaimer: This blog post contains affiliate links that will provide compensation to our company if a purchase is made.

• Google Adsense integration
• Ready for Twitter
• Nice graphics for RSS and Twitter
• Configurable ads in sidebar and header
• Contact form
• Featured post carousel
• Big text
• My daughter said it looks professional!

One upgrade I wanted to accomplish was to add polish to my email opt-in form.  I always felt that the standard forms from Aweber didn’t look too good.  I really liked Lynn Terry’s form, so I started poking around the SSWT forum looking for clues.  Well, she pointed me to where she got the graphic! (I didn’t intend on picking the same color that she did, but blue is what matched the new theme.)

I want to share with you where I got the custom email opt-in form.  It is part of a great offer containing 120 Squeeze Page Designs.  When you follow this link, you will have the opportunity to get 2 free squeeze page templates.  One is an email opt-in form and the other is an optimized squeeze page.  Here’s where it gets good.  For only $37 you can have the full 120 Squeeze Page Templates.  You could not even get the email opt-in form completed by a web designer for that price!  I think it is a great deal.  (Of course, I bought it!) It is so important to have a good, Web 2.0, look to your web pages in order to increase opt-in rates.  This package will definitely help you with that!

All in all, I am glad that this step toward building on-line income is complete.  It is time to move on to step 2 – launching my first affiliate marketing site.  I’ll keep you updated along the way.

One other thing that has changed is the project I wanted to start.  I am putting that on hold to focus on something that will generate some quicker cash flow.  I still want to do that project, but my online business has bills to pay, now!

As an exercise in accountability, I am posting here my plans for the upcoming weeks and months.

1. This website needs a facelift.  I am going to update the look and better integrate with social media.
2. I am launching my first affiliate marketing site.
3. Create more affiliate marketing sites.
4. More consistent posting on all of my blogs.
5. Profit!!

As this is a blog about my journey to work from home, I will keep updating you on my progress and what I learn along the way.

Truth be told, the “internet marketing guru” portion is not going so well. There is so much advice out there and it is often hard to tell who is a real “internet marketing guru.” Many people are buying and selling content, but I am interested in people who are generating useful content that I can apply to my projects. I could list the folks that I have decided to ignore for now, but perhaps it is more constructive to list who I am going to pay attention to.

In no particular order, those are:

1) Jonathan Leger
2) John Reese
3) Joel Comm

Why did I pick these three? For one, they all give valuable advice for free! Each of their websites offer many things you can do to help your business and it is given in the spirit of giving back. Also, for the most part, there is very little hype for these three. They tend to recommend things they have already tried themselves and they do this with straight talk, including the down-side of product or technique they are recommending. In other words, they are real pros.

Click over to their websites and give them a try. Also, share your recommendations in my comments section.

Today my e-commerce website, www.TenFootTable.com, is most successful in selling Celtic Sea Salt. Some of my plans are to expand the marketing of related items on this site. Salt, while a good seller, is a low-margin product. I want to create cross-sell opportunities for higher-margin sales. This fits well into the niche marketing concept.

It is appealing to add unrelated (to salt) items to sell on the same website. My main reason is that as a small operation it is time consuming to maintain multiple websites and the associated back-ends and/or business entities. Our business is also a family business. As a family, we have varied interests. Is it possible to market to many niches in one website? It will be interesting to find out.

December 2006

January 2007

My website www.mikesmind.com is the only site out of the three that doesn’t have AdSense ads running on it. Based on traffic count, I should get busy adding them to the site!

On a related note, Jonathan Leger has an interesting series called “A case study on the traffic-building power of article writing.” I’m going to give this a try for my websites. Time is the main issue.

Obviously, my lack of posting has hurt my website traffic. This is an important lesson!

I already had a blog, www.mikesmind.com. I had also started another blog, www.freetofarm.org. Finally, I have started this blog, www.daddyworkathome.com. These three blogs are the basis for my AdSense income. My efforts started by reading a great ebook called The Blogging Cash Machine by Danny Warner. Then I purchased AdSense Videos by Michael Cheney. Both of these resources helped me get started.

While I haven’t made any money on AdSense, yet, I believe that I am off to a good start. My basic blogging platform is WordPress. I chose WordPress because I became familiar with it through my blog, www.mikesmind.com. It is also a great platform because of all the themes and plugins that are available for it. The final benefit is that it is free software. This means that you can use it for free, you get the source code for free, and you are free to modify it to suit your needs (within the terms of the license agreement). They will even host your blog for free!

I have been writing content for my blogs. My goal is to become consistent in my posting. The next step is to build traffic to all three sites. I have been reading on the email lists of Jonathan Leger, Dr. Andy Williams, and John Reese, trying to learn as much as I can. Right now, traffic is mostly a trickle. Here are my stats (page views) for last month, September 2006:

www.mikesmind.com 2,583 pages

www.freetofarm.org 595 pages

www.daddyworkathome.com 3,767 pages

I am publishing these stats in order to establish a baseline before starting serious work in building traffic. As a reader of my blog, you will see my progress too and I will share what worked for me.

1. Domain Name – I get and manage my domains through the World’s Largest Registrar – GoDaddy.com. I have found their pricing and management options to be the best. I recommend that you do not buy your domain through a hosting company. This is one thing you don’t want to intermingle. You can read about my trouble with one domain, here.
2. Website Hosting – I host all my domains with AlphaOne Techonology. Once again, I like having my hosting all in one spot. It simplifies management of my websites. I have found their support to be responsive and effective. They also took care of setting up the secure certificate for my store. This is needed to ensure security and privacy for my customers.
3. Shopping Cart – I researched and tried a lot of different shopping carts and settled on X-Cart. It is a lot like OS-Commerce, but is supported by both Qualiteam (the software company), an active user’s forum, and third party vendors. Qualiteam is based in Russia, but I have found their support to be excellent.
4. Products – You will need to decide what products or services to sell online. Once that is done, setup agreements to purchase those products wholesale. You will then need to set your prices and enter product information into your shopping cart solution.
5. Business Formation – I recommend that you setup your online business entity in such a way that your personal assets are protected. I used Biz Filings to setup my corporation. I found their offering to be complete and their prices to be very competetive.
6. Credit Card Processing – No matter what you do online, you will need a way to accept payment. I use two avenues, PayPal and Echo. I used Echo. I use Echo to process Visa and Mastercard. They have an application process that they help you through. It is involved, but not difficult. When you are done, you will be able to accept credit cards on your website, including Yahoo Stores if you decide to go that route. PayPal is easier and quicker to get going. Accept Payments Online with PayPal. Fast, Easy & Secure. Sign Up Now!

That should get you going on the road to e-commerce success with an on-line store. If you are interested in checking out my store, you can go to www.tenfoottable.com.