Here's a book I wrote on traffic building. It's called "20 Ways to Build Traffic to Your Site". In this eBook, I discuss various methods (most of which I still use) that will help bring in more visits to your website.

I'll admit some of the tips are pretty elementary if you've been marketing on the web for a while, but it's amazing at how many people still ignore the basics.

You'll also find a handful of innovative ways to promote your site that you should take advantage of (screensavers, contests, etc.)

If you have a website, you're free to offer this book as a free download from your own site.

Download it today.

As I've stated, I am NOT a technical person and really don't care to be. Although, I've always wanted the ability to use some Flash to enhance my site.

I tried using Flash at work and the program intimidated me. I'm sure for some it's easy to learn, but I don't have the patience to sit down and figure it out.

Well the folks over at CoffeeCup keep making it easier and easier for us non technical folks. They have a product called Firestarter and it creates Flash animations in seconds.

I just tried their online demo and it's amazing how simple they make it. You won't believe it. Try Firestarter today.

Someone emailed me yesterday and asked me about "Adsense Ready" websites. Apparently it's a program where people pay $100 or so for access to a database full of pre-written articles.

All they do is choose the ones they want to their site, upload the articles and Voila! their site is complete and ready for Adsense profits. I did a Google search and a there appears to be several sites out there like this.

In other words, these programs are for lazy people who don't want to take the time to develop their own unique content.

People are always looking for shortcuts to success online. What many of them don't realize is that the major search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo) all penalize sites for duplicate content. So over time, as more and more people join Adsense Ready and start to use the same articles, the search engines will begin ignoring these pages.

After all, the key to success with Adsense is drawing in enough traffic to make a profit. That's pretty hard to do if the search engines are ignoring your entire site because of all the duplicate content.

There are no shortcuts to success on the Internet. If you want to make money with a website, you have to work at it and build your own, unique content.

It really angers me when I see companies like this taking advantage of people's ignorance. After finding out about "Adsense Ready" it inspired me to write an article on Internet money making scams.

Colors on a website represent different moods and emotions. Before you settle in on a color scheme, determine which mood you'd like your site to convey.

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RED is associated with love, passion, danger, warning, excitement, hunger, impulse, action, adventure. (Great color for food related websites)

BLUE is associated with trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness, power, professionalism. (Works well for learning or business sites)

GREEN is associated with money, nature, animals, health, healing, life, harmony. (Suitable for health related websites)

ORANGE is associated with comfort, creativity, celebration, fun, youth, affordability. (Great for sites targeted to kids)

PURPLE is associated with royalty, justice, ambiguity, uncertainty, luxury, fantasy, dreams.

WHITE is associated with innocence, purity, cleanliness, simplicity.

YELLOW is associated with curiosity, playfulness, cheerfulness, amusement.

PINK is associated with softness, sweetness, innocence, youthfulness, tenderness. (Works well with sites geared toward women)

BROWN is associated with earth, nature, tribal, primitive, simplicity.

GREY is associated with neutralality, indifference, reserved.

BLACK is associated with seriousness, darkness, mystery, secrecy.

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Most of my family and friends now know the success I've had with the web, but I still don't think they really understand how doable it is to make a decent living with nothing but an information website.

People often think they have to be a techy or computer savvy individual to build a website....much less make any money. Or they believe they have to come up with some product or service to sell.

Sure you could sell something out here, but that's the hard way. Why not make it easier on yourself and just earn money by writing about something you love. A hobby. A sport. Anything you're passionate about.

Even if your plan was to create a fun or personal website, why not get paid for it?

Sure, Nori's website, Anguilla-Beaches.com could have just been a typical teenager's website about her family's vacation to Anguilla. Instead it's a content rich site about a beautiful island and it is making a ton of money.

Is she selling anything? Nope! She just writes about her favorite spots in Anguilla and recommends her favorite places to stay. The resorts pay her a finders fee for every new customer. The site ranks high in Google for "Anguilla related" searches so she receives loads of free traffic.

When you go to her site it's not one big sales pitch for hotels and resorts like you may think. In fact, you may wonder how it even makes any money. That's the point. She's not going after the hard sale. She's simply making resort and restaurant recommendations based on her own experiences, and most people probably don't even realize she's making a profit.

That's the whole point! Choose a topic you are passionate about and make recommendations for products and services related to a particular niche. That's all Nori does. Her site is very helpful because she's offering valuable information that people are searching for (Anguilla beaches), and at the same time she is getting paid for her content in return.

Nori also earns money with Google's free affiliate program called Adsense, where they pay you to help them advertise by simply displaying their ads.

The result of all this....

Her college education is paid for!

So many people are doing it the hard way and I just have to shake my head. Make it easier on yourself. Learn how to create an information website that will pay you for life.

I have been an owner of CoffeeCup's HTML editor for quite some time. I just happened to be browsing their site yesterday and noticed they offer a boat load of software for webmasters.

What's even better is that they are all wizard-based so the setup process is super easy. I don't know about you, but I don't know how to write scripts so I prefer to take the easy way out. :)

Thanks to CoffeeCup, you can have the following on your website in minutes:

- Photo Gallery
- Flash Wizard
- Site Search
- Site Map
- StyleSheet Maker
- Button Factory
- Gif Animator
- Password Wizard
- Chat Room
- Site Music Player
- ...and more!

Go to their software list page and try all of these tools for free!

If you want your search engine traffic to grow, you MUST build an effective link exchange campaign. And I'm not just talking about building a "Links" page where you swap links with other webmasters. Those are not as effective anymore.

Search engines are starting to ignore those kinds of links pages because they realize webmasters are just using them to help inflate their link popularity.

If you want to learn how to get the search engines to love your site, it's imperative that you download this free book called "Make Your Links Work". It's probably the best guide out here on effective traffic building.