I know, I know . . . you’ve heard these claims of fortune online before. Chances are you’re like me and have purchased countless “how-to make money” ebooks online. I tell most people almost every ebook I’ve bought on line was not worth the bandwidth it took to download it. Notice I said “almost” all of them. One huge exception to this is Steven’s excellent and fascinating ebook, Google Money Pro.  This ebook is quickly becoming the bible for making money online with the double-punch combination of Adwords and Clickbank. 

Now others have written about this subject before.  And most represent guys making $2,000 to $7,000 per month.  But Steven is a true master at the top of his game and a Certified Google Adwords Expert.  Google doesn’t heap these certificatitons on just anyone.  Google Money Pro is a great read for every Internet marketer, whether you’re an Internet newbie or a skilled veteran with 10 years of Internet marketing experience.  What every reader will like is the fact that this great book descibes step-by-step what he does to make a fortune driving web users to buy Clickbank products using Google Adwords ads.

This book is an honest to goodness masterpiece that provides a proven blueprint to making serious money online.  I’ve followed its principals and can testify that it works.  This is not some 20 page report written over a cup of Java.  It’s 148 page long and paints the picture of how to duplicate Steven’s success in clear and simple to understand language. 

If you’ve found it hard to make money online, here’s a technique that does not even require you have a website.  All you need is a PC, internet access, a Google Adwords account and a Clickbank affiliate account.  I encourage you to check out Steven’s website now, which provides an online video that documents his earnings and provides proof that this guy and his system are for real.

In a nutshell, the answer is “Yes, ebooks still work, they still make money.”  But where does one start?  Although it may seem a bit high in terms of costs, Clickbank.com offers an unbeatable opportunity for most ebook authors. 

Having a Clickbank account will allow you to (1) take credit card orders online, (2) immediately direct your buyers to a download link after they’ve paid for their order and (3) provide you with access to thousands of Clickbank affiliates that might be interested in promoting your ebook on their websites for a commission.

The cost of using Clickbank is $1 per transaction, plus 7.5% of your ebook sales price.  If the sale is made through a Clickbank affiliate rather than your own website, the affiliates commission will be deducted from the net amount paid to you.   You set the desired commission level you wish to pay your affiliates.  And the beautiful thing about having Clickbank affiliates also promoting and selling your ebook is that Clickbank handles all of the affiliate accounting and pays your affiliates for you. 

In summary, once you go the Clickbank route to market ebooks and find out how simple and easy it is, how all the accounting and paperwork is provided for you, you then come to realize that its worth $1 + 7.5% of your sale.   Give Clickbank a try on your first ebook.

But HostGator.com no longer ranks near the top in terms of true bang for the buck.  In this category I’ve ranked Bluehost.com near the top for the past year.  But lo and behold Bluehost has been kicked out of the saddle by Web Hosting Pad – who without a doubt offers the best bang for your buck in the web hosting world.  With 1,700 gigabytes of disk space and 17,000 gigabytes (yes, I said 17,000 gigs!) of bandwidth for as little as $4.95 per month and the ability to host unlimited domains, you simply cannot beat the regular everyday price deal offered by Web Hosting Pad.  Click here to learn more.

Options - General

First, login to your Wordpress site using the username and password you chose for Wordpress during the install.  You will arrive at the Wordpress control panel, what many people call the Wordpress Dashboard.  Near the top of the page is an upper menu area with a light blue background.  The last menu label to the right is called “Options.”  Click on the “Options” menu tab.  This will open a page under the submenu Options/General that lists various configuration options for you to review, modify or experiment with to see how they change your site.  At the very top of the page is your Blog Title and Tagline, sort of like the name of your website and your slogan.  Anytime you wish to change this from what you chose during the install, this is the place to do it.

Below the Title and Tagline are two slots to edit your website address and your blog address.  The default that Wordpress used for both of these does not contain “www” in the addresses.  It is not neccessary, but I normally always edit these by adding www to the url addresses of both.  If you installed Wordpress in your root (or main) directory, the url address will be the same for both of these.

Below the url address area is a place to change the name of your admin email address.  Chances are you will want to leave this the same, but if you ever need to change it this is where to do it.  Below the admin email address is an area with two options under the heading “Membership.”  There are two options:

These two options are very important because they will help you control the amount of spam submissions you might get to your blog.  If you don’t want people commenting at all, deselect the “Anyone can Register” option.

Leave the “New User Default Role” as “Subscriber” to prevent anyone from posting articles to your site.

Under Date and Time you only need to change one area.  The time is set at UTC, or Universal Controlled Time.  You will need to add the correct time zone offset so that your articles reflect time of day postings that are the same as in your time zone.  I’m in the CST, or Central Standard Time Zone, so my offset is minus 6 during the winter, and minus 5 during daylight savings time, or entered into Wordpress as -5 or -6.  To know what to put for your time zone go to: http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/xtra/tzdatepick.html

After you’ve completed the options changes, click on the button that says “Update Options,” located at the upper right and lower right areas of the Options page.

Options - Permalinks

You will want your blog to be search engine friendly and have every page indexed by search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.  The quickest way to accomplish this task and ensure you’re SEO-friendly is to click on the sub-menu item called “Permalinks” under the Options top menu label.  Note that under “Common Options” the “Default” radio button is selected.  If you leave this unchanged, all pages in your blog will be named after numbers and will include the question mark symbol ? in them.  We want to remove that ? because it prevents the pages from being search engine friendly.  Do this by checking the second option, to make all page names date and named based.  Now click the “Update Permalink Structure” button at the top right or bottom right side of page.  If you get an error message that says your permissions were not set correctly, you will need to temporarily change the permissions on your .htacess file to allow Wordpress to rewrite to this file to finalize the update of Permalinks.  This is not always required, but may be required on your server.  If it is, temporarily change the .htaccess file in your main Wordpress directory to permissions 777, perform the update and then change the permissions back to 644.

Congratulations!  You are now ready to start blogging to your heart’s content.   However, I highly suggest you continue looking at the various menu options under Wordpress to learn as much as you can about the power of this blogging and content managment system.  It is truly an awesome program and one you will enjoy working with for years to come.

To really get a fast start with Wordpress, I highly recommend the purchase of either one or both of the two following books from Amazon:

Users can sign up for a free acccount with Mals-e.com to get the hang of the program, build a working shopping cart and start taking orders.  If you wish to upgrade to the “Pro” version the cost is only $24 per quarter.  Thus, for only $92 per year one can have a shopping cart that is fully compatible with all Paypal payment methods, Authorize.net, 2Checkout and most every one of the remaining major credit card or online payment processors that operate online.

The beauty of Mals-e.com is that is entirely web-based and each individual setup option is listed separately.  Thus, when setting it up, one can walk step-by-step through each bullet item in the setup area to set the program up and customize it to your satisfaction. 

You can first sign up for the free version and then convert to the Pro version later.  The free version is a fully-functionable version and will handle most all of the needs for work-at-home business owners.  It even includes an affiliate management system so you can run your own affiliate program! 

The Pro version is designed for much busier merchants and includes the following additional features:

• Remove the “Hosted by…” footer from the cart and replace with one of your own.
• Batch download of orders and payments either as one big page or in CSV format for import into a database or spreadsheet.
• Customize your secure cart pages
• Directly integrate the cart into the credit card payment gateways of Verisign, Authorizenet, Worldpay, Trustcommerce, Secpay and other supported Payment Solution Providors.
• Custom Admin area for your clients
• Advanced shipping calculations
• Simple transfer from free service
• For goods delivered on the internet you can setup an extra 500 products.

Mals must be one of the most gratified and successful work-at-home entrepreneurs that operate an online business.  He has over 137,000 online businesses using the Mals-e.com shopping cart. 

I will close this post by asking you the simple question, how many truly great web applications do you know that operates for a profit, but is willing to give away a full version of their software for anyone to use.  And on top of this, Mal is always good about responding to support emails.  He’s answered my personal emails (maybe 4 or 5 over the years) within 24 hours.  Great product, great price and value, great service — what more could you ask for?

Logging Into Your Wordpress Dashboard

Frankly, if you wanted to you could being writing articles immediately.  To do that, you simply click on "Write" then "Post" from the dashboard of Wordpress’ control panel.  You access your Wordpress menu dashboard or control panel by clicking on the "Login" menu item on your home page.  This will take you immediately to your login page.  Some theme designers omit the "Login" menu item to help prevent spam or hacking of your blog.  If the theme you chose is one without a login menu item you can login to your Wordpress by going to http://www.yourdomainname.com/wp-login.php (replacing yourdomainname.com with your actual domain name address).

Editing Your Blogroll

You may have noticed a category in your menu column called "Blogroll" with links to several Wordpress-related websites.  These are default menu option or website links under your Blogroll.  Go back to your home page.  If you’re inside the dashboard or control panel area of Wordpress, simply click on "View Site."  You should now be on your home page.  Look at the Blogroll area closely  Now click on your browser’s "Refresh" button.  See how each of the links in the Blogroll area rotated up or down on position.  Now click refresh again and watch the links roll yet to the next position.  This is why they call it a "Blogroll" and it is essentially a roll or list of blogs you consider personal favorites.

The next thing I want you to do is edit this list.  Go back to your Wordpress Dashboard.  You can either hit the back button on your browser or login to Wordpress again.  Once inside Wordpress, click on the "Blogroll" menu item and check and delete each line item under "Blogroll."  Now, "add" several favorite links of your own.  You’ll want these either links to other sites you own or to other favorite sites that deal with the niche your website is trying to serve.  For now, limit your list to five or six links.

If you wish, you can even change the category label from "Blogroll" to another name, like "Favorite Sites" for example.  You can edit the label "Blogroll" by clicking on the dashboard menu item "Blogroll" and then the sub-menu item "Categories."  Edit the category called "Blogroll" and change it to something you deem more appropriate or that you like better.

In our next post we will discuss how to change the "Options" area of Wordpress.

You can find literally hundreds of Wordpress themes available for download on the Internet.  Two sites I use often are Themes at Wordpress and Wordpress Themes.  Visit these two sites and browse their extensive listing of Wordpress themes until you find a template you like.  Both sites provide free demo views of what each theme would look like if installed on a website.  Once you find a Wordpress theme that you like, click on its download link and download the theme to your PC’s desktop.  I actually created a sub-folder on my desktop called Wordpress Themes and I download all themes to that directory.  You might decide to do the same later once you see how easy it is to install a Wordpress theme and change the look of your website on the fly in seconds.

Once you download the theme you’ll see that it is in zipped format.  Double-click on the file and it should open in WinZip if you have the program installed on your PC.  If you don’t you’ll need to get a copy of Winzip and install it on your PC.  Assuming you have Winzip, double-click on the theme’s zip file.  A popup window will appear revealing the contents of the zip file.  You’ll need to highlight all the files in the popup windown and click on WinZip’s "Extract" command.  Point your mouse to the folder where you wish to unzip the files to on your PC.  This will usually create a sub-folder named automatically named after the title of the theme.  The contents of this new folder will be all the files you saw in the popup window that were in the zip file.

Now that you have the theme’s contents saved on your PC in a new folder it created named after the theme’s title, you’ll  need to FTP (i.e., upload) the folder and its contents to your new Internet website address or URL.  If you don’t have an FTP program you can login to the control panel of your linux web host and access a program called "File Manager" that will do the same thing an FTP program will do when it uploads files to the Internet.  Whether you use your own FTP client software (which I highly recommend) or you use cPanel’s File Manager, you will need to FTP the entire theme folder and its contents to your website address.  The exact place you will need to upload it to will be the "themes" directory of Wordpress.

The themes directory is located under the wp-content directory of Wordpress.  Let’s assume you FTP to your new website address.  Once you connect you’ll see two folders, labled "public_html" and "www" if you are hosting your website on a  linux server.  Click on either one of these folders.  Next you’ll see a folder called "wp-content" - this is the content folder for Wordpress.  When you click on it you’ll see 3 sub-folders:  uploads, themes and plugins.  Click on the "themes" folder.  You’ll now see 2 more subfolders, "default’ and "classic."  You will now upload your new themes directory and when completed you’ll see 3 subfolders appearing under the themes folder:  classic, default and your new theme’s name.

Okay, now go to your home page and click on the "Login" menu command.  Type in the username and password you established for Wordpress when you installed the program.  Once you login to your Wordpress click on the menu item labeled "Presentation."  Then click on "Themes" in the sub-menu area.  You will see 3 icons on the page, each representing a small thumbnail picture of what each Wordpress theme looks like — i.e., the default theme, the classic theme and your new theme.  Click on the thumbnail icon that represents your new theme.  Next click on the "View Site" command at the top of the page.  Bingo!  As you can now see, your new theme has successfully been installed and your site has a whole new look and feel.  Now, wasn’t that easy? 

As you see, one of the beauty’s of Wordpress is you no longer need a web designer.  If you want to change the look and feel of your website, just download a new free theme, unzip it and upload it to your "Themes" directory.   Then, click on the theme’s thumbnail under "presentation - theme" to activate it.  As my mom would say, its "as simple as pie."

When you first created your web hosting account you picked or were assigned a username and password.  This username and password allows you access to your domain’s control panel.  The control panel will give you many options, such as the ability to check your websites, add new email accounts, upload files from your PC to your website, and much more.  One of those “much more’s” is the Fantastico tool. 

To login to your cPanel control panel using HostGator.com, for example, you simply go to http://www.yoursite.com/cpanel — where “yoursite.com” is the actual name of your domain name.  When you try to visit this url address you’ll be asked for your username and password.  Once you enter your login info you’ll see a large website with many icons and labels underneath each icon noting what function you control or access by clicking on the icon.  The Fantastico icon is like a large light baby blue happy face with the label Fantastico De Luxe.

Click on the Fantastico icon and you’ll see many different programs and scripts on the left-side menu of the next page.  Underneath the “Blogs” programs you’ll see several different blog managers you can install with Fantastico.  One of these option is Wordpress.  Click on the Wordpress menu option.  Then, in the right-side column click on “New Installation” option.  This will bring up a blog configuration page.  On the configuration page leave the “Install in Directory” field leave it blank.  This will install Wordpress in your root directory.

Next choose a username and password for your blog.  Then, type in the nickname you want to appear as the “author” for all blog posts you write.  You might want to type in your first name or a ghost name if you want your name to remain a secret. 

The “Admin Email Address” field will have your default email address listed.  You may wish to change this to a custom email address, like sales@yourdomain.com or yourname@yourdomain.com, for example. If you haven’t already added a new email address that matches what you want to put in this field you can do so later, through the “Mail” menu option on your control panel.  At any rate, type in the email address you want to use for anyone responding to your blog.  Don’t forget to add this new email address via your control panel later.

Next pick a site name for your site (Fantastico will prefill this option with your domain name, but you can edit this and write any site title you choose.  Next type in a short 25 to 30 letter (or less) description for your website.  This is like a subtitle or by-line. 

If you opted to use a custom email address for the admin, you’ll need to change the e-mail account username to the email address you’ve chosen.  For example, if your username for your website is “makemoney” then you’ll see  the phrase “makemoney” in the E-Mail account username slot.  Feel free to change this to your new email address if you wish.  Thus, if your new email address you want to use for all correspondence is andy@yourname.com then your email account name username slot should be modified to read “andy.”

Lastly, add your email account password and click on the menu button below that says “Install Wordpress.”  Next, click on the option that says “Finish Installation.” 

You’re almost finish.  When a new page appears you’ll see a slot that says “Email the details for an installation.”  Add your email address here.  Lastly, click the “Send e-Mail” button and the username/password instructions and notes about the installation will be sent to you.

Now go and visit your site.  Just type your domain name into your web browser window using the following format -  http://www.yoursitename.com (substituting with your domain name, of course) and you should see a website appear for your domain with a generic blue and white website template.  You are now ready to start posting to your blog, but chances are you will want to change the template, what Wordpress calls the “theme,” so that your website won’t look so bland as the generic template you’ll see immediately after Wordpress is installed.  In my next post, I’ll provide instructions on how you can change the look and feel, or theme, for your new blog’s web design.

So what is your next step?  Well, as you’ve already figured out, owning a domain name and hosting it is only a small part of building a work-at-home Internet business and making money online.  For you now need a website to host, and at this juncture 99.5% of the Internet guru’s I compete against online would tell you to either (1) pay someone to design a website for you, (2) learn HTML and design your own website or (3) purchase a pre-designed web template and fill in the pages with your own content.  And this is where they are wrong, at the very get-go on telling you how to make money online.

Don’t fall victim for anyone of those methods for producing your website.  Instead, if you followed my advice and purchased hosting from one of the parties I suggested you already have your secret weapon for launching your website quickly.  I’m using that weapon as I write this very article.  For you see, I build information and sales content websites using blogging software.  Not just any blogging software, but a free open source blogging software product called “Wordpress.”  And if your purchased web hosting from a vendor that offers cPanel hosting on a Linux server, you’re already on the fast track to launching your website quickly.  Over the next couple of posts I’ll teach you how to install Wordpress on your serve, create your first website, then change the look and feel of your website with ease. 

In the meantime, to learn more about Wordpress you can visit their site at http://www.wordpress.org .  Be patient, I realize I’m spoon feeding you, but there is a lot to learn and its very important I don’t overload your brain and cause your frustration.  Otherwise, your experience of trying to start and run a work from home Internet business will be considered a short-lived failure.  I ask that you trust my instincts and just follow along.  In a few days you’ll be posting content to your new site daily.

Most likely you haven’t purchased hosting services yet or may not even know why they are needed.  Owning a domain name is not the same thing as having a website.  You will need to host your domain name with a web hosting company and create a website for it in order for the rest of the world to see your domain.  Cost Cutter Domains is not the only service on the world wide web that offers web hosting services.  Two I can highly recommend and use include HostGator.com and Bluehost.com  I’ve been pleased with both companies, but overall Host Gator tends to response much quicker to support questions or problems.  For a mere $7.95 per month with Host Gator or $6.95 per month with Blue Host, you’ll be able to contract all the web hosting you’ll need to promote your Watkins business for a long time.

I’ll cover more about how to set up your domain name once you purchase a web hosting package from one of these three services.  For now, you need to simply look at the web hosting plans and prices for these 3 services and purchase a hosting plan from one of them.  Tomorrow I will begin writing about what to do once you have both your domain name and your hosting service.  Once again, the three hosting services are:

• Cost Cutter Domains ($3.99 per month)
• Host Gator ($7.95 per month)
• Blue Host ($6.95 per month)