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The goal of this website is to give support to people who are facing problems in their relationship related to cheating, abuse and narcissism. I am living in Europe and English is not my native language, I wish you will excuse me if I make some grammatical errors. I have a background in neuroscience and behavioral sciences and I am currently doing brain research related to these topics in university in my home country. I decided to write in English because I wish to reach as many people as I can around the world.

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OBS! If you are not interested in starting your own internet business, you can skip this article. This article is meant for people who have been asking me for advise regarding how to build a website and what options there are if one would like to start a home based internet business. In this article I am sharing some of my knowledge regarding this matter.

- Maria

Starting a home based internet business

I have received many emails from people who are asking tips regarding how to create a website and how to start a home based internet business. Many of these people are separating or in process of getting divorce and wish to either have new challenges in their life or to find a way to generate additional income in order to better support themselves after separation. I have written an article about this matter earlier, but I decided to elaborate a bit more on this topic since it seems to be of interest to so many.

First of all I wish to say a very important thing: Starting an internet business is not going to make anyone rich overnight. There are many websites out there who are claiming that one starts to make huge profits immediately. That is very misleading and simply not true. It takes time and effort before an internet business starts to generate a significant income. How long it will take depends on how much time and effort one is willing to dedicate to a given project.

Having said that, let us now discuss what are realistic expectations and opportunities regarding a home based internet business. Most people find the following points to be positive aspects regarding an internet business:

Possibility to work at home

Many people would not mind working at home. All you need to start an internet business is computer and internet connection. If you are patient and work hard to build your online business, in time it will generate enough income to support you. At that point you can decide if you wish to work at home full time or for example maintain a part time job outside home. Many people find it refreshing to work outside home part of the time, others like to work home full time.

Once the groundwork is done, your website will generate passive income

This is without a doubt one of the biggest pluses regarding an internet business. Once the groundwork is done, your website is generating passive income without much (or in some cases any) effort from you. Even if your website does not show up on the first page in google searches, there will still be people who will find your website. Let us see next how these visitors can generate income for you.

Different ways to generate income with home based internet business

Adsense

Adsense is perhaps the easiest way to generate income if you own a website. Adsense is an advertisement program created by google. You can sign in to Adsense program as easily as you can open a gmail account. Once you are signed in, if you wish, google can show various ads on your website (do you see blue links to other websites on the sidebars of my website? They are my google Adsense ads). You can choose if you wish the ads to be related to the content of your website. When your website receives visitors and when visitors click on ads, you will receive payment from google.

Once you have created your website and set up Adsense system, you do not have to do anything more. From now on your website will generate passive income for you. The amount of income depends on how well you promote your website. If you receive lots of visitors, your ads will be clicked more often and hence your income will increase. You can also play around with the placement of ads on your website to find the places that are most favorable (locations on your website where your ads receive most clicks). You can follow the amount of clicks and the accumulation of your earnings by logging in to your personal google Adsense account.

Adsense is a very good system for generating passive income because there is no way one can lose with it. It does not cost anything to open Adsense account. In a worst case scenario nobody will click your ads. Even if this happens, you will not lose anything. But most likely this will not happen, most likely some of the visitors on your website will click on your ads. Even if the income is not enormous in the beginning, most people do not mind having extra pocket money. Even if you would not promote your website very actively, google ads will continue to produce a small passive income to you. If your website does not have interactive nature (discussion forums or other interaction with visitors) you can even forget about the site and log in to google Adsense account every now and then to see how much income your ads have generated for you. When the earnings reach certain limit, google will automatically transfer the money to your account. If you start to promote your website more actively, your income will naturally be more.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing refers to a marketing strategy in which a seller of a certain product rewards a person who is promoting the product. Consider the following example. Let us imagine you have written an article on certain topic, let us say about a book you have recently read and liked. You publish that article on your website. At the end of the article you have a link to the website (Amazon etc) who is selling the book. Your website receives visitors who read your article and follow the link from your website to the website that sells the product (book). If the visitor has become interested enough after reading your article of the book and ends up buying the book, you will get a commission (this is usually a certain percentage or the total price of the product).

Now you may wonder how Amazon will know the visitor came from your website. In order to become an affiliate of amazon, you must sing in to their affiliate program. After doing this you will have access to your personal account page, where you can get a personal "tag", a string of text, that you must attach to the link that leads from your website to Amazon website. This tag tells amazon the visitor came from your site. If this visitor buys something, the commission will be payed to you.

Nice thing about these "tags" is that most affiliate programs allow the the so-called lifetime of the "tag" to be several months, years or in many cases forever. This means that even if the visitor you have sent to the website of the Seller does not buy anything during that particular visit, that visitor will "belong" to you and if he or she ever returns to the Seller website later and buys the product, you will still receive a commission. This happens even if the visitor happens to go to the website of another affiliate. Whoever sends the visitor to the Seller website via his or her affiliate link at first, will get commission if visitor ends up buying something.

Depending on product and on a given affiliate contract, it is possible to make up to several tens of dollars per single sale. If a given product costs for example 100 USD and affiliate gets around 30% commission, you will get 30 USD per sale. If a given product costs 50 USD and affiliate fee is 30%, you will get 15 USD per sale, etc. The amount of commission depends on a given affiliate contract.

Examples of products one can promote as an affiliate marketer

- Books

If you like reading, you can write reviews of books you have read, publish your reviews on your website and include an affiliate link to your review. If a visitor comes to your website, reads the review, gets interested in reading the book, clicks the link and orders the book from Amazon (if you happen to be an affiliate of Amazon), you will receive a commission from each sale.

- Health, fashion, sport etc. related products

If you are familiar or interested for example in fashion, health or various beauty products, you can write reviews about the products you have tested or find interesting and attach your affiliate codes to links that take your visitors to the websites of the sellers of these products. If your visitors become interested in trying the products themselves and click on the links on your website to enter the Seller website, in case they end up making a purchase you will receive a commission.

- Other products

There are countless of companies out there who have their own affiliate programs. Having affiliates benefits both the company (they get more customers) and an affiliate (affiliate gets commission). You can use google to search the products to promote that are of interest to you.

Selling your own products on your website

If you are an expert in some area or feel you have something you can share with others, you may wish to create your own products to sell on your website. These can be for example ebooks covering various topics, various hand-made items such as clothing, furniture, paintings etc. Your website is in a way your "store", where people come in to have a look around. If your visitors like what they see, they will buy your products. The sky is the limit, you can sell practically anything on your website to people all around the world. Of course nothing prevents you from promoting the products of others (to be an affiliate) and sell your own products in the same time. You can come up with a certain theme that interests you, or couple different themes and sell products related to those themes on your website.

How to start your own website - Finding a Web Hosting Service

In order to start an internet business one must have a website. The first thing to do is to find a service provider, a hosting company that provides you with server space for your website. There are many good service providers available. There are several things to consider when one is choosing a hosting service. One very important aspect is of course price. Some hosting services are quite expensive and yet the quality is not necessarily any better than if one chooses a hosting company with more reasonable price. There are several hosting services that are very cheap, but they may have flaws such as poor customer service, slow servers (meaning it takes lots of time to load pages of the website) etc.

I have used Hostgator as my hosting service provider for several work-related websites and I have had good experience with them. Their customer service is friendly and fast, cost is reasonable (cheapest hosting plan was 4.95 USD/month last time I checked) and they have many additional features that are helpful for someone who does not have much experience in starting/managing a website. They offer practical tools for beginners to use to create a basic website. Tools are easy to use and freely available for people who have hosting service contract with Hostgator.

There are several different hosting "packages" available at Hostgator. You can compare different packages on their website by going to Hostgator Home Page and clicking on a link "view web hosting plans". Cheapest and perhaps best for a beginner is "Hatchling Plan". This plan includes one domain name (the address you choose for your website: www.yourdomain.com, replace "yourdomain" with the name of your choice) and one "web hotel", space where your website will be located. You are asked to choose your domain name as you are making your order. After making the order, you receive email with your passwords and clear directions how to enter your new website and how to get started. You find more information and help (should you need it) from "Support" section of Hostgator website.

Do you need help with building your website?

If you are unsure regarding how to build a website and would like to have a site that resembles my website in terms of layout, after signing in to Hostgator and obtaining your domain name and space, you can download a guidebook that instructs you how to build a website that looks similar to this website. Alternatively, if you do not wish to go through the trouble of building a website yourself from the scratch, you can hire a website designer who will create a site for you. Using the services of a Web Designer will usually cost several hundreds of dollars or more, depending on the design and content of your website. There are several good web design companies, you can find and compare them by using google. It is possible to create a very simple static website with a minimum or zero expense, however if one wants to create a bigger website that contains several pages and sections and will grow with time, it is worthwhile to get a good and flexible system to begin with.

If you would like me to help you by building a website for you, I will do the work for minimum expense, only charging for the time it takes to create your website. I must charge for the time I spend building your site because if I would build websites for free, too many people would ask me to do this and I would end up using all my free time for building websites. I am offering this possibility because many people have been asking me for advise regarding starting a website. I wish to help those who wish to start their own internet business, however I cannot build sites for people completely for free. If I did not charge for the work time, my email would be loaded with requests of building sites for people who are not necessarily planning to use the sites and it would simply be impossible to fulfill everyone's requests.

If you would like me to build a website for you, I will be happy to work together with you to design your website according to your wishes. In that case send email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and let me know what kind of a website you would be interested in creating. After you have obtained your domain name and space (see previous chapter) I will install all required components to your website and we will then design together the appearance of your site. Once your website is ready, I will teach you how to get started in managing and producing content to your site. If you wish, I will also teach you how to place google Adsense ads to your website and how to insert your affiliate codes to the links on your website.

- Maria

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