Guide book how to run a Internet business from a Internet cafe

By Herman Dreyer
Posted Sunday, December 26, 2004

First register a free e-mail address with Yahoo Go to (http://mail.yahoo.com)

The reason is to get access to Geocities free hosting services. Geocities are part of Yahoo and has all the tools on-line to set up the software you'll need to run your on-line business. They have a Page Generator tool, a Upload tool to load HTML files, a Site Statistics tool to see how many hits was generated, a File Manager tool to move, copy and delete files.

Most of the other free services provide the same tools. You can get free hosting with (http://www.freeyellow.com) as well as many other places on the web. Just do a search for "free hosting" without quotes in (http://www.yahoo.com) and you'll find a heap of places you can have your stuff hosted.

Web site creation

First of all I must say it help to have basic HTML knowledge. Its just easier to edit a HTML file afterwards having a bit of basic HTML know how. To learn more about HTML go to (http://www.davesite.com) However here is a on-line site you'll just have to fill in the blanks in order to create a web site. (http://www.station4.com/scripts/skola/hpm_form.pl) For people who are not HTML literate, HTML are the code language used to create HTML documents also called web sites.

There are also web site generator programs available to create off-line web sites. In other words you don't have to be on-line in order to make a page using these editors. Some programs are easier than others to use. However the more one practice the easier it became working with these editors. The benefit of these editors is that they have copy and paste functions as well as automatic hyper link generator capacities making it possible for non technical people to create just about as good a set of sites as what even a seasoned webmaster can do. A well known editor is FrontPage from MicroSoft. These days you can get free editors on- line from lots of free sites. Try (http://www.thefreesite.com) And if you're hard pressed here is a site with hundreds of free web site templates (http://www.freesitetemplates.com) or you can download this free template of mine from (http://www.geocities.com/dreyerherman/enjoy.zip)

Home and link pages

The first page one usually create is the home page or main page which have links to the domains other pages. Talking about the domain. The domain is the Internet address (http://www......) one use to call up a web site from a host server where ever it might be in the world. My home page is (http://www.herman-dreyer.com) Then to keep in mind is to cross link and or back link the link pages to the home page in order to work up some link popularity which the search engines fancy to determine a page ranking. Lot said. Basically is to have links pointing back to the home page and visa versa.

Now what shall I put into my pages?

Good question ????. You can make pages of about just any thing under the sun you can dream up. Most people setting up web pages eventually turn it into some sort of a income. While many only use the web to distribute information or store information. My idea is to generate income from my Internet exercise. Thus to put you onto a money making scheme is to start off with affiliate programs. Affiliate programs is when basically you work for a merchant selling its products via your pages at a set commission. They handle the orders and shipping and pay commissions on sales volume generated by their affiliates web sites. Usually they supply you with free web sites, free banners, on-line training etc. Here is two companies I joined for free and are generating a income on-line for me. You're welcome to do the same and I'll show you how to promote your web sites with the main search engines. It all boil down to generating targeted traffic to your web sites which in turn lead to making money from sub affiliates. As with this site the theme is free info for people to be able to set up sites on the web with the emphasis to draw site visitors / sub affiliates which in turn will pay me a percentage income on their efforts, creating a viral effect and could do the same for you. In the mean time keep "Clickbank" and "QuickCommerce" in mind. These two programs work easy and are also in demand for people doing business on the web.

Some tips on Uploading and promoting a Domain?

Assume your home page and link pages are ready. Now come the tricky part is to add meta tags to your HTML documents. Meta tags are the coding going into the header tags of a page used by the search engines spider bots to determine the page rank. Without meta tags the search engines are pretty much hampered in indexing a site. Cause this is the first bit of coding it encounter when visiting a domain. Here a title tag is required to identify what a site is about and also highly valued by the bots. Then you need a description and keywords tag to give further weight in order to get a nice rank. Then the first line of coding in the body of the page is regarded as critical or important for the bots to make a calculated decision where to index your site. This line should be anchored to make the bots aware of its importance. To learn more about meta tags go to (http://www.searchenginewatch.com) which is incidentally the site of Mr. Sullivan a leading expert about search engines.

Ok I assume you've got your free e-mail account set up with Yahoo. Just remember to write down your login particulars. You'll need it to enter your Geocities account. When you register your e-mail address it will be something like take mine as a example dreyerherman@yahoo.com Now the first part become your directory on Geocities looking like this (http://www.geocities.com/dreyerherman) which is the domain for your home page. The home page extension is known as index.html. So remember to save your home page as index.html

And any link pages will be (http://www.geocities.com/dreyerherman/meta_tags_builder.html) obviously saved as meta_tags_builder.html

You have a choice to make sub directories under the main domain which will lead into for instance ......... dreyerherman/affiliates/johny.html. Now for this exercise don't worry about sub directories cause you get heaps of server space where you could easily load up 100 pages or more.

To upload is to basically go to the Geocities site (http://www.geocities.com) Log into your account with the first part of your Yahoo e-mail address as the user name and the password you have chosen to register your Yahoo e-mail address. This will open your account where you'll see the various service options they offer i.e. File Manager, Upload, Site statistics etc. Click on Upload, search for your index.html file and any other files you have created including graphics files giving you five files at a time to upload.

Once done to check your site on-line is to open your browser and type the URL or site address into the address block i.e. (http://www.geocities.com/mysite/) hit enter and the browser will open your home page. Optional to add index.html. However to call up a links page you need to add the full URL (http://www.geocities.com/mysite/linkspage.html)

A good thing is to put your HTML file through a validator. Just to make sure the coding is up to a acceptable standard. (http://watson.addy.com) is a free on-line validator.

Now for the promotion part:

Go to (http://www.google.com/addurl.html) Fill in the full URL die. (http://www.geocities.com/mysite/index.html) Forget the comments block. Google's bots will visit and index your site plus any links pages it regard valuable with its next crawl usually within a month. For the rest of the free search engines go to (http://www.add-url-free.com/) These search engines index automatically but can took some months to be visible in their databases. Another sure way to generate traffic is to write articles. One of the main marketing tools used by the gurus. Submitting articles to ezines for publication your stuff could get read by thousands of ezine subscribers. Here is a weekly on-line issue of Article Submission E-Gazette where you'll find hundreds of places where to submit articles and ebooks. (http://mjvn.co.za/hd/current.htm) A quick way to learn about formatting articles is to download a few articles from (http://www.ezinearticles.com) My (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/articlesubmission) is a free on-line community of writers you'll find interesting to visit and its free to join.

However the mother of results is to do paid e-zine classified ads and pay per click search engines are also a good proposition. Here you can get your ad e-mailed to 215000 yes two hundred and fifteen thousand targeted e-zine subscribers for $36. Go to (http://www.demc.com) and Overtures PPC option is apparently the best PPC engine to spend your hard earned bucks. (http://www.overture.com)

Now to turn your arm to look at the two affiliate options: Clickbank and QuickCommerce

Best is to visit the sites but here is short descriptions:

ClickBank is the online distribution center for over 10,000 digital products and services that are delivered entirely over the Internet itself (via web pages, files, or e-mail)..... (http://zzz.clickbank.net/r/?rerhd)

QuickCommerce: Make more money with your existing Internet business by becoming a QuickCommerce affiliate today! When you sign up as our affiliate, you'll instantly receive your own free QuickCommerce web site with free hosting, all automatically created. Simply refer potential e-commerce clients to your affiliate site, and you can earn over $300 per sale. (http://www.qc123.com/qc/hdreyer/)

To save you the agony of remembering all this. I have put it all into a free ebook you can download and study at your leisure. (Including web masters tips and the meta tag builder) (http://www.herman-dreyer.com/cafe.zip)

Just a piece of advice is to register your own domain name and go for paid hosting. It just work better with the engines and lend credibility to your business. However for starters saving you initial outlay the free services are a nice learning school. By the way they do include help files if you should get stuck.

Here is a few links to help making things a bit more clear:

A discussion board where you can find answers to web masters questions. (http://www.webmasterworld.com)

A discussion board where you can find answers to Internet marketing questions. (http://www.bizweb2000.com/wwwboard)

Here is a nice freebie you can download "Internet Email! Beyond The Basics". Tell you all about e-mail marketing. (http://www.herman-dreyer.com/email.zip)

Oh you can do all this using a Internet cafe. Almost forgot :-)

About the Author
My name is Herman Dreyer I live in South Africa and is a webmaster doing all my own programming