You built a site and now you want to make money off of it.  There are several ways to add multiple income streams to your site.  You can mix and match these and make money from all angles.

1. Sell your product.  You might have a product you’re interested in selling or the whole purpose of your site is to sell your product.

2. Use contextual advertising on your site.  Services like Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network spider the content on your site and automatically create ads that match your content.  Be careful here you might be advertising your biggest competitors if you don’t filter them out.

3. Become an affiliate.  There are so many affiliate companies and products out there chances are you’ll be able to find something that will complement your business.  Don’t look at everyone as a competitor.  If you can find a few good products that complement what you’re doing you can make a lot more money from just about any product.

4. When all else fails.  Put up zip and email submits.  You only get a $1 or so for each one, but that’s $1 more than you were getting before.  These dollars can add up if you have good traffic and you picked a decent offer/offers.

5. Sell banners and ads on your site.  You can get premium pricing if you sell the ads on your site directly.  Give it a shot.

There are even companies out there where you tell them about your site and they will sell the ad space for you.

You can get that site making money quickly, the only thing you need is traffic.

You try to provide the best service and products to your clients but sometimes there is nothing you can do to please everyone.  You could be selling a proven, working item that is of the highest quality and still there will be someone that finds something wrong with it.  They start complaining and complaining every where.

They say every unhappy customer tells 10 friends and every happy customer tells 3 friends.  It’s in your best interest and in your pockets’ best interest to have happy customers.

The first thing when you have an unhappy customer is see how you can fix the problem before it escalates into an unmanageable situation.  Just showing you care is the first step.  If you can actually fix the problem you will might even be able to turn that customer into a happy customer.  Think about the testimonials they can give you, “There was a problem with my sprinkler installation but Frank from Brick Sprinklers, fixed the problem and even threw in a couple of installed free sprinklers for my troubles.  I have to admit these are the best sprinklers I’ve ever used and they even save me money on my water bill.  Frank and his team handled everything very professionally and even helped when they could have just sent me straight to the manufacturer.”  You can convert an unhappy customer to a raving fan.

Don’t let the problem escalate.  Offer a solution when possible and give them a bonus for their trouble or immediately refund them.

A refund will shut most mouths, but if you give them a bonus and fix the problem you will still be able to keep the client for the future.  Remember not all buyers are one time customers.  The lifetime value of a client can be very high so we should try to keep all clients satisfied and happy to do business with us.

Some people no matter what you try to do to fix the problem will never be happy.  You can offer them bonuses and a fix to the problem and they’ll still be mad.  There are people that are just unpleasant to deal with.  If you know in advance a person is difficult to deal with you can politely let them know your product might not be appropriate for them and send them somewhere else.  I know, no one wants to give away or turn away clients but sometimes it will save you money and aggravation to just cut them from the beginning.

People aren’t always happy with a refund.  If someone bought your product then they bought it for a reason (they might actually need it).  A refund isn’t always going to help the situation but it is appropriate at times and should be given at your discretion.

Not all clients are going to complain directly to you.  Some people will go on the internet and complain to the world in public forums and blogs.  This is actually great.  Remember how the saying goes, “All publicity is good publicity.”  You can leverage those comments and complaints and publicly settle them quickly and easily.  You just got free advertising.  Be polite and cordial.  Do not say the customer was wrong (unless they really were completely wrong and were ripping you off), just give a solution, or a way to get a quick solution.  Thousands of people can see complaints about your company online, if you settle it publicly your company will be respected as someone who is looking out for the best interest of their clients and you can earn more business from people that admire the way you handled the situation.

Some people still won’t forgive you, but if you did everything within your power to settle it (offered a refund, fixed the problem, offered to fix the problem and give a bonus or partial refund, etc..) and posted it publicly the internet audience will even start to defend you and you’ll still look like the knight in shining armor.

Remember some people like to criticize no matter how good a product or service is.  Do not take the criticism as an insult.  Always stay level headed.  A nice even temperment will get you more clients and more respect for the way you do business.  So many times I’ve seen business owners get mad over comments and the only thing that does is lose business for that business owner.  You can defend your product or service in an intelligent way, where everyone including yourself feels satisfied with your answers.

A good way to find comments about your company online is just doing a quick google search with your company name.

Custom Request is a very generic term so it doesn’t help to look that up.  It has 23,200,000 results and although I’m number one for that result, I don’t want to go sifting through all those results to see if I’m mentioned somewhere.  I could try in quotes “custom request”.  I’m still number one but there are still 87,500 results.  For me the easiest way would be to use my domain name or even look at my website stats and find the referrers to my site.  customrequest.com gets me 74,300 results and my site is a large portion of those results.  I can start my search here.  An even better way is “customrequest.com” only 962 results but they are all mine or related to my site.  I can go through these results and find if anyone is commenting about me.

Anytime I find comments about myself I go and respond.  Whether the comments are good or bad (they’re always good) I like to personally respond.  It shows you care.

An easy way of keeping track of who’s saying what about you is google alerts.  You just put in your search term in the box and google emails you anytime there is a mention of you or your company.  It’s a set it and forget it way of keeping track of what’s going on.

Everything can’t be free but it sure is nice when it is.  When you want to get new clients/customers you have to hit them from every angle and look for new business in as many places as possible.  Have you ever bought something or visited a business because you saw there ads and things that reminded you of them plastered all over the place?  I know I have.

Here are some low cost techniques that can get you more exposure:

Fliers – You can print these out yourself by the hundreds and pay someone $10 per hour to hand them out for you.  If you go to Manhattan or any major city a lot of times you see people handing out fliers.  There’s a reason why they do this…it works.

You aren’t limited to just handing out fliers in front of your business.  You can have the person walk around handing out fliers.  As annoying as it is they can place them under windshield wipers (check your local laws first).  You can drop stacks off at businesses, post them on bulletin boards, and the list goes on and on.

They are cheap to make and the main thing is giving them out to as many people as you can.

Business cards – Just about everyone has these made already so now you have to give them out.  Give them out to everyone you meet, drop them off at stores, post them on bulletin boards.  You can do almost the same thing with a business card as you can with a flier but a business card is much smaller and doesn’t fit the same amount of information.  A business card is appropriate in a lot of scenarios where you can’t use a flier.

Yard signs – You can get small plastic yard signs very cheap if you buy them in bulk.  Just pay someone to stick them all over the place and you’ll have an advertisement for as long as the sign is up.  In a lot of places as long as it’s public land or you ask permission you can stick your sign up.  These have an advantage over fliers and business cards because each sign can be potentially seen by thousands of people.

T-Shirts – Create a stylish t-shirt with your company information.  Everyone that you give these to will be walking billboards.

Here’s a little tip:  If you don’t know anyone that travels a lot in public, try going to a local bus or train station and handing out your t-shirts.  These are people that are using public transportation and a lot of times they travel all over the place.

If your business targets young people hand out your t-shirts to young people, if your business targets older people hand them out to older people.  Also if you see someone that wears a suit all day, they might not be your best target to give out free t-shirts.  Look for people that normally wear t-shirts.  If your t-shirt is visually appealing people will wear it.

Tell everyone – Simple and free.  Tell everyone about your business.

Tell everyone to tell everyone – Also free.  Ask people to tell their friends and family about your business.  Something as simple as, “I really appreciate your business, if you have any friends or know anyone that would be interested in my services or products, please let them know.  I would appreciate it.”  When you tell someone to do something for you, they realize they are helping and a lot of times will oblige.

Give something away – Give out something that costs you close to nothing to buy.  Word of mouth spreads when there is something free on the table.  A lot of companies have loss leaders; where they give something away or sell something at an incredible discount because they know most customers will buy something else.

Work with other businesses – A lot of businesses compliment each other.  You can create an exclusive discount for customers of another business and have that other business hand them a flier or card with your discount.  Your best bet here is using businesses that compliment yours, not competing businesses.  If the other business wants you to reciprocate, then you do the same for them.  That way you both leverage your clientele and help each other.  It’s like having double the traffic for almost free.

Mailers – You can mail your ads/fliers to potential clients.  If your client is a certain type or age group you can find lists of your target demographic and send them a mailing.  Most successful mailings are multi-part, so one mailing won’t always get you the best results.  Make sure to give a discount or offer a compelling reason to buy from you.

The list can go on and on.  Be creative and spend a couple of bucks to build your business.  Not everyone uses the internet and the one’s that do it’s not guaranteed they’re going to find or look for you.  Sometimes a surprise ad will remind someone they need a service and it can help you find the impulse buyers.

A favicon is a small 16 by 16 pixel image that shows up in the address bar for a website.  For this site you’ll notice the favicon is a scientist with glasses.  A favicon is good for your website because it can help people remember your site and if they have your site bookmarked they can find your link quicker since they now associate your site with the little icon.

Because of the small size of a favicon you can’t really use complex images or long logos.  A simple image is fine.  You might even have to cut your logo down or redo it to be favicon friendly.

Favicon’s aren’t your standard image.  They are .ico files.  A quick google search should find you an online favicon generator to make one easily from any image.  You don’t have to bother paying for a program or for a site access there are tons of free online favicon generators.

A favicon is normally installed at the root of your website (meaning right in the public_html section, not in a separate folder).  Then you add the following code to the <head> section of your templates:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico"/>

A favicon will help your site stand out from the crowd and gives your site a subtle memorable aspect.

If you want to get into or are already into pay per click, Yahoo Search Marketing is giving away up to $199 to get you started.  You do have to add $30 into your account before you are credited but that’s to prevent abuse.  Usually they credit your account in a few days.

Here are some codes and links to get the free advertising money:

$199

$50

$115

$199

$50

$25

$50

I’ve added several codes just in case you were too late to grab the $199 offer.  If the offer is still valid you will see on the top right hand corner the dollar amount they will credit you.

Hurry this is for new accounts only.  Take advantage before these coupon links expire.

There are tons of things that can make your email go into a spam box especially with the large email providers like Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, etc… Certain titles and text raise red flags and get your emails sent straight to the bulk mail folder.  I’m not going to tell you how to write correct emails (at least not at this point) to avoid the spam box, but I will let you know about a few things you can do on your server to make it less likely you will appear in the spam box.  You need a dedicated server, VPS or a host that will help you with this to do this.  If done properly most of your email will make it into the main inbox without a hitch for the big email providers and get through spam filters.

Note:  I’m using CPanel so this is a CPanel tutorial.  The steps may be similar with other control panels but might not be exactly the same.

First thing you need to do is setup reverse DNS or rdns.  A lot of hosting providers will take care of this for you.  If they won’t, here is a very good tutorial on how to do this (you need to login or create an account there to view the tutorial).

This is a very important first step and you should get this done before worrying about anything else.  Even if you can’t do the other steps for whatever reason just this will improve your deliverability.

Second step setup SPF and DomainKeys.  An easy way is just to log into each CPanel account and in the Mail section go to Email Authentication.  Click Enable for SPF and DomainKeys.

I was stuck on the second step for a while because I was using the old CPanel X theme.  I ended up having to go into WHM and using the X Skin Migration Wizard to switch to the X3 theme for this option to show up.  It took 2 seconds to do this.

Another way of doing it is by running these commands in SSH:

For SPF:

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/spf_installer username

For DomainKeys

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/domain_keys_installer username

Where it says username put in your CPanel username.

That’s it.  These quick steps can drastically increase your email deliverability rate.  Yahoo is still a pain, but after your domain has been around a while (if you’re using a new domain) they’ll start letting your emails in.

A common problem people have is not reading between the lines and taking things as they literally appear.  If you are creative in your thinking you can actually expand off of every idea you read and the potential for each tiny idea can be extravagant.

On this site I give you ideas on how to improve your business, website, life, and anything else I can brainstorm.  I give you a seed but it’s your creativity that can turn that into a full harvest.  Some of the stuff I write about can be used for good or evil purposes, it’s up to you how you use it, but you have to take advantage either way.

If you see something interesting that you might be able to use try to expand on it, see how you can make it better, even if you think you can’t use it try to expand on it and see if somehow you can make it work.  I’ll give you some examples from past posts I’ve made.  I’ll expand a little more just to give you an idea of how expanding can be used for good or for nefarious purposes .

Here I mentioned the Chilton Library and how it’s great for mechanics.  Now what if you targeted mechanics, auto shops or mechanics could use your services or product?  What if they never knew about this resource or didn’t have access to this or a similar resource?  That’s right you point them in the right direction and maybe the law of reciprocity will kick in and they’ll give you business.

Here I mentioned local directories and yellow page type sites.  If you were into doing evil things you could grab someone else’s listing, change it up and take all of their traffic.

Here I mentioned a loophole for WikiAnswers what if you created a program that automates this and literally post on thousands of questions?  Or instead of just using WikiAnswers now you have an idea that there are tons of other sites that have a similar setup where you can just slap your link in there.

Here I mentioned Yahoo Anwers and how you can use it to get indexed.  Really you can use it to market yourself and your products or services.  I’ve made a lot of money with affiliate products and for my services through Yahoo Answers.  You could also search for an answer and copy and paste the answer right in there so you don’t even have to waste time writing anything out.

Here I mentioned Youtube and video sites.  It’s actually a primer to video marketing.  You can make a lot of money with good videos.  You can even make a lot of money stealing other peoples copyright videos.  It’s up to you how you use the information.

These are just a few examples and you can expand on everything much more.  Let your imagination run wild when you see something new or think you might be able to use something.

Don’t tell anyone this, but your local library is a gold mine for information.  Their prices are great to0 (free).

For example do you sell mainly to businesses with 5-10 employees that make over $1,000,000 per year?  That’s an easy one.  I don’t need any expensive subscription services, I just go to my local library’s website, Ocean County Library, pull out my library card and start searching the ReferenceUSA (InfoUSA) database.  I can find out the owner’s name, phone number, address, employees, and tons of other pertinent information.

This works for people searches also.  I can find out who just bought a house, who just moved, I can find people by how much they paid for their house and where, the options are limitless.  This is like a free lead factory.

The other day I had a small problem with one of my cars.  I didn’t want to buy the manual for the car because I’m not a mechanic and really I knew I didn’t have to buy it.  I went to my trusty library’s website and lo and behold they have the Chilton Library available for free.  If you guys don’t know about Chilton’s books, go to any auto parts store and you’ll find these are the guys that make repair manuals for just about every car.  This of course is even better than buying the books because they even have helpful videos on this site.  This site is literally gold for a mechanic.  Now they don’t have to buy every manual out there, this site has had every car I’ve searched for.  I showed this site to a friend of mine that fixes cars and now every time I see his computer he always has this page open.

Do you need a generic legal form?  The library has you covered.  Through their site you can access Thomson Gale LegalForms.  I always suggest contacting an attorney before doing anything but….for the do it yourselfer this is a great resource to have.  You can get forms from leases to contracts to everything else in between.  These forms are a big time and money saver.

Have a lot of employees that speak a language you don’t?  No problem the library let’s you access Mango Languages, to learn a ton of different languages.  Now if you don’t habla español you can start to learn it anywhere you want for free with no pressure.

These are just the tip of the iceberg.  I’ve used the website for more than just this, but these are a few examples of how powerful that free library card is.

I also go into the library every once in a while and take out books.  You’ll be surprised at what books they have in stock.  I use to go to Barnes & Noble all the time to buy books, then one day I visited my library and thought, “Holy Shit!!!  These guys have half of the books I’ve bought, read once and never looked at again.”  I am an avid reader, so although I don’t visit as often as I should and still buy plenty of books they probably have in stock, it has saved me money on several occasions.

Support your local library.

Local directories and map listings are a great place to have your business listed.  A lot of these sites feed other sites data so you can get traffic from literally hundreds of large sites for submitting to just a few.

I’ve compiled a list of sites that will let you add your business listing for free.  Most of these are major sites with big pull and tons of traffic.

citysquares.com
ibegin.com
infousa.com
insiderpages.com
judysbook.com
littleengine.com
local.com
local.google.com
local.yahoo.com
magicyellow.com
maps.live.com
mojopages.com
superpages.com
truelocal.com
tupalo.com
yellowbot.com
yellowpages.com
yelp.com

This list is good and active as of the time of this posting.

A lot of businesses don’t realize if they don’t grab their business someone else can and might.  Local listing hijacking is real.  You’ll notice if your business is listed in any of these directories you can claim your business if you didn’t previously.  What happens if someone else claims your listing?  That’s right they can change your business address, website address, phone number, etc…  Than they get all of your hard earned traffic.

Don’t hesitate grab your local listing at least from the top 3 search engines and if you have time gradually grab your listing from the other major companies (infousa, superpages, etc…).  Your business will be glad you did.

MySQL (pronounced my sequel) databases are the foundation of many PHP based scripts.  If you are into using commercial scripts or even custom built scripts knowing how to create MySQL databases is a very important step.  The databases do exactly what the name implies, it stores your information within the database.  If you have customer lists, an online store, a mailing list, etc… these are all usually stored within some type of database.  MySQL is one of the most popular due to the fact it’s a free and open source database.  It comes standard with most Linux hosting accounts.

To create a database is very simple.  Since I usually host with CPanel (one of the most popular hosting scripts), I will show you how to create a database with CPanel.  It’s very similar with other hosting control panels so don’t worry if you don’t have CPanel.

Also keep in mind I use the old CPanel X skin although my CPanel is up to date.  The images might look different from your version but it’s basically all the same thing.

Click on MySQL Databases to start creating.

Your admin panel for MySQL should look something like this.

The first thing we'll do is create a database name. I chose test for this demonstration.

Click Create Database.

This is what it looks like once you create the database name.

Now Go Back.

This is where you'd input your username and password for the database. I used test for both of these fields.

Click Create User.

Success. Our database username and password have been created.

Now click Go Back.

Our database, username and password have been created.

Now we have to add the user (username) to the database.  So that we can use it.

99% of the time you will pick All. If you have to pick something else, the programmer or script install file will let you know.

You will almost always pick All.  There are very few times (if ever) where you’ll have to select something else.

Click Add User to Database.

Success. You have created a database with your chosen username and that username now has permissions to manipulate the database.

Now Go Back.

This is what you should see if you successfully followed the steps.

Since we have successfully installed the database I might as well add some generic tips that will help you install a large bulk of scripts quickly and easily.

A lot of scripts have a configuration file (sometimes called config.php but it can vary) or an online installer.  Some of the information it will ask is host, database name, username, password (for the database).

The host is usually localhost.  That’s it.  You just type “localhost”.  It will work a good portion of the time.

For database name it depends on what hosting control panel you are using.  Since we already have my screenshots up and you can see my username, we’ll use that as the example.  If you look closely at the final screenshot you’ll see all my info that I put in earlier.  So my database name is my CPanel username; deduct underscore test for the script it would be deduct_test.  If you’re not using CPanel it might just be test.

For username it will be deduct_test also.  Remember if it’s not CPanel it might just be test.

For password it will be test.  There is no underscore or control panel username in this.

That’s about it.  All the other information should be pretty easy to figure out.  It will probably include username, password and things like that.

With just this information you should be able to install a good chunk of scripts you find online.