I think most of this is motivated by the fact that I am giving a lot of time to Facebook. I am posting links there and generally doing work to help their bottom line. It’s time I make sure that I am doing something for my own bottom line.

The big positive is that I have more income in my pocket and it’s allowing me to come up with a few killer plans. I know that I finally have the chance to finally invest the money I need to make my own personal business a success.

I guess all I need to do now is to get the time I need to make some serious business plans.

How can you avoid that happening? Maybe you can start by not making those squeeze type pages. They just ooze sleaze. I couldn’t believe when I read a local paper where an ebook author was suggesting the use of these squeeze pages for “normal” products. Come on get real.

Use a blog to promote the products instead and give people a reason to take advantage of it. There are always ways in which you can really relate to your potential customers and convey the information they need.

I’d love to hear other ideas out there on ways to improve your success that doesn’t involve snake oil tactics.

What is needed? A single domain with focused content about the the product. The content needs to be well written and the site itself should be designed in such a way as to make it easy for search engine spiders to crawl it. If it can do that, then the only thing left is getting out the word. In other words, marketing.

Too many domains with the same message just muddle things up and cause Google to discard all of them. This is why the single domain is better. Another thing is that the single domain is easier to market since there is just one site with a focused message.

Now, for small businesses, my advice for marketing is to find local bloggers and have them put up links to the site or blog about it. Traffic is the ultimate goal of any website marketing, search engine results may be great, but all that gives is traffic. As a small businessman, it’s best to focus on traffic because that is what generates income for your site.

These are just a few things to keep in mind for now….more later.

Basically, they handle the downloads for the product and they provide a simple shopping cart. This means that you can stick some simple code on your site and people can easily buy the ebook and download it, without any work on your part. They even have affiliate programs built in so that it’s easy to get people selling for you. A big bonus is that their basic fee is just $5 /month. That’s a good deal that is difficult to pass up.

I will certainly be using them when I start selling my ebooks. They make it easy to get started selling digital content.

URL Shortening Services To The Rescue
An easy way to get a more customized Facebook URL is by using URL shortening services like tinyurl.com. Normally, they work by creating a link like http://tinyurl.com/cur6q6 but they can just as easily create a link like http://tinyurl.com/jackwoodsfacebook.

Nitty Gritty Details
How do you do it? Just visit tinyurl.com. On their page, put in the link to your Facebook profile address. If you have any problem finding it, check out the part 1 post and the directions are there. Mine is http://www.facebook.com/people/Jack-Woods/1022785814. There is a little box below that says “Custom alias (optional):.” That’s where you will put in your custom name. In my case, I tried first jackfacebook and that was already taken so I tried jackwoodsfacebook and it gave me the link http://tinyurl.com/jackwoodsfacebook. Easy, right?

Other URL Shortening Services
You are also not limited to just tinyurl.com. Many of the URL shortening services let you shorten the URL to a custom name or alias. Bit.ly allowed me to shorten my long Facebook url to http://bit.ly/jackwoods.

Pretty cool, huh? Granted it’s better to use a redirect from your own domain, but these URL shortening services do really help you get a better, more customized Facebook address and are an acceptable substitute.

Q1) Who maintains ownership of the domain?
Q2) Do you have any expertise in web marketing?
Q3) Are your designs standards compliant?
Q4) Do you ensure that all content is free from errors and search engine optimized?
Q5) What is your web development philosophy?
Q6) What websites have you designed?

I know these questions seem pretty corny, but believe it or not, many non tech savvy people do need to get web design and development work done and haven’t got a clue as to the answers. Answering these questions can easy become a sales pitch if written correctly.

I’d love to add to this list so if you have some great questions to add to this list, please leave them in the comments.

Basically, as long as you are willing to use the chi.mp blogging software, you can have your very own domain name. You can even set up an email forward with it. You should really check it out to see just how it can work with your online strategies.

What happens if you start using the domain and don’t like the interface or want to go your own direction? No problem, you can register the domain for $20 a year. While it is pricey, it’s actually affordable if you get just the domain name you want.

I’m also using it in my paid writing. I find it makes me extremely productive when I need to write up content quickly and easily. I can easily hammer out a few thousand words in just a few minutes, well not quite a couple of minutes, but it’s very quick.

This article was written using Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

How so? You need two tools. You need the StumbleUpon bar in your browser and you need the Addthis widget on your website. You should submit your best pages to StumbleUpon and encourage others to give it a thumbs up. This can result in a large amount of traffic. The Addthis widget helps those visitors easily share your posts. You can see the Addthis widget at the bottom of every post I make on this blog. By clicking on it, user can share your post on any number of social media outlets.

If you need traffic, then you need to be doing this now. You can be successful online, but you have to make it happen.