Welcome to the DotStartUp Mega Mall Blog!

 We are going to be walking through the process of setting up your online publishing business from scratch here. Stay informed and inspired as we go step-by-step and invistigate many scenarios and possibilities that you are free to use in making your online business.

 This tutorial is centered around the Mega Mall product platform, but you may find the bits of information and ideas useful for other platforms. Just keep in mind that the names, controls and features we’ll be describing will be the same as in your Mega Mall system.

This tutorial will hopefully act as inspiration as well as a step-by-step guide to take you from an idea to a working, profitable Mega Mall.

Best wishes,

DotStartUp

Creating a Business Idea

Henry Ford once said,

“Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right!“

He was a man that knew about creating and using ideas.

What we want to get started today is a stream if ideas. The stream starts to flow and with a little pratice the stream grows into a river of ideas.  Specifically, we are looking for ideas that excite and inspire you. Most of us have a passion for something, a hobby we love, a sport or leisure activity we are especially knowledgeble of.

We want you to think of a topic; the thing that you enjoy the most.

If you are stuck for ideas, we are thinking of things like this:

• reading
• stamp collecting
• travel
• cycling
• cooking
• scrapbooking
• photography
• videogames
• bird breeding
• sci-fi
• guitar
• hiking
• religion
• fitness
• investing
• child raising
• fishing
• bingo
• supernatural
• vinyl recordings
• sailing
• programming
• dollmaking

This list could go on and on, but we want you to find a single that that you really like to do and have some knowledge of.  At this stage, desire outweighs knowledge. So, if you have a great desire to learn about something new, that can easily be your topic.

The objective for the this step is to generate a topic that is easy for you to talk or write about and make a list of 20 things about that topic.  Email that list to yourself and make a special “business” folder in your mailbox.

Recap: Determine your passion and make it your topic.  Come up with a list of 20 sub-topics about your main topic. Email this list to yourself.

Best wishes,

DotStartUp

Sounds Too Good To Be True?

We’ve all heard this expression before…

“If it sounds too good to be true. It probably is!”

Before we continue, let’s bust some myths about affiliate marketing.  Here is a tagline from a hugely hyped program:

Amazing Profit Generator earns 17 year old over 15 million a year! Now he’s selling
his secret!

becomes…

Profit Generator Web Site Secrets - The System that Sells Itself

which in reality is…

17 Year Old makes Thousands Selling Profit Generator Scam

And unfortunately, there is a big sucking sound that made thousands of honest people’s
bank accounts cringe in agony.

So we have gotten over the idea of buying those matching red Ferraris before Christmas. Sorry to burst your bubble, but we’re going to save you money and frustration by being up front. If you want to build a business online you should set your sites on the word “build.” Analyze your talents and goals and do this in a real and plausible way.

Making money online is about building stuff. Look at the phenomenal success in the late
1990’s of sites like Yahoo and eBay. We’re these sites “flash in the pan” overnight successes? NO! They were the result passion for a good idea and LOTS OF HARD WORK.

Passionate, hard-working people with good ideas deserve results. We are sure that most everyone agrees with that simple concept.

Fact 1: Making piles of money online is NOT as easy as many web sites make it out to be.

Fact 2: Getting enormous amounts of free traffic to your marketing web site is a myth.
Sorry, but even in cyberspace, everything has a price.

Fact 3: Free traffic comes largely from search engines and search engines want to see
unique content.

Fact 4: Cookie cutter “mall” sites that offer pages full of ads simply don’t
get any traffic from search engines. This is due to their lack of unique content.

Fact 5: Many so called “marketing experts” are actually more interested in selling their
own products or services than helping you.

 Now that we have some myths out in the open, we can focus on building a solid plan to turn our passion into ideas and ideas into money.

Best wishes,

DotStartUp

Setup Requirements

There aren’t a lot of requirements for getting your Mega Mall setup. You need an email address, a ClickBank nickname and a credit card. Although these requirements may seem obvious, we should go over a few things first.

Your email is an important connection to DoStartUp for critical ordering information, billing information and customer support. It is somtimes required that you check your ‘junk’ or ’spam’ folder for the first message and indentify ’support @ dotstartup.com’ as a legitimate sender. You don’t want support or billing info getting junked then deleted by your mail program. We send you a welcome email with all the important stuff in it to the email address you specify, so make sure that it is correct.

The ClickBank nickname is your connection to thousands of ClickBank vendors and will appear in each link and ad that points to these vendors. Without a ClickBank nickname you will not be able to setup a Mega Mall. The nice thing is a ClickBank nickname is free and easy to apply for. If you have a ClickBank nickname already, there is only one last requirement; a valid credit card to purchase the Mega Mall system.

When you go through the order process you will be taken to ClickBank for a single-page payment then returned to us to complete the setup. 

We do not store payment or credit card info on our servers.

After payment, there is one last setup page. You are asked to create a Name for your Mega Mall and choose a username and domain that will become the address of your site. Let’s look at these setup options in detail and learn how we can make the most of them.

Name

The Name of your Mega Mall can be anything you like and you can change this later in your Dashboard by clicking the Account button. A good Name is the thing that becomes your Mega Mall brand if you will.

Your Name should reflect your primary topic as we looked at in the Ideas page. For a niche mall you should always try to include your topic in your name. This improves visibility in search engines. It also tells people what your pages offer. So if your topic is ‘brick and tile making’ then use those words in the Name.

Username

Next in the process is choosing a Username.  Your username has two important functions. Firstly is becomes the sub-domain or part of your Mega Mall address. Here is an example…

If choose the Username hobby-stop’ then your Mega Mall address will have that username in it. So your address may be http://hobby-stop.kewlhut.com. The username you choose has value in a marketing way too. The word ’hobby’ is included and this adds that strength to your address when someone is searching for ‘hobby’ on a search engine. 

Tip: Always think of your topic when choosing your Username.

Password

The last thing you need to enter in the setup process is a password. Passwords must be more than 4 characters and ideally they should contain numbers and letters. Passwords are not allowed to contain any punctuation marks or spaces.

Now you’re done and the next page will send your welcome email and let you access your new Mega Mall.

Best Wishes,

 DotStartUp

Day 1 at Your New Business

Congratulations! You are taking steps towards success.

The first day at anything new can be a bit disorienting, so we’ve brought all the important ‘Day 1′ stuff into this one post.  Most of your day-to-day work is done in your Dashboard. The Dashboard is a kind of mission control center for your publishing business. First lets look at logging in to your Dashboard.

Login

When you signed up you created a Username and a Password. You should have also received a welcome email. Click the My Dashboard link from the email, or go to the bottom of any of your Mega Mall pages and click the Admin link. You will be taken to the Login page that looks something like this…

Enter your Username and Password and click the Login button.

After a successful login you will be taken to your Dashboard.  In every Dashboard there is a menu bar along the top that assists you in navigating around and getting your work done.

Your Home Page 

When you first start up, you have only one main page linked in your Mega Mall (and hundreds of sub pages). This is your HOME page. When someone visits your new web site, they see this HOME page first.  (More advanced users may want to change which page appears as their home page and you can do this later on if you like.)

Probably the most important thing about your home page is this:

Your home page is used to make copies for your new pages you create.

This means that you want to have something unique appearing on your home page right off the bat. So follow these steps to get some unique content on your home page:

1.) Click on the Pages button. This is where you work on pages.

2.) In the Mega Mall Page List click the Edit link for the Home page.

3. Edit the content in the Body Content editor.

You can type in as much as you want into this body area. The things you put here will appear in your home page as soon as you hit Save, so make sure to check over your work before saving. The nice thing is that it can easily be changed later.

Header Setup

The Header is the top part of your page. Some things in the header are visible to us humans while other things are hidden and seen by search engines. We have a special section called Header Section that lets us change this info to better match our topic.

Select the Header Section from the drop down selector at the top right of the page.

You will see the home page’s header items ready for editing. We have changed these to match our topic of the hobby store.

Once you have this basic information in your boxes, be sure to update the by clicking the Update Header Section button.

So now you have unique home page and have had a little experience with the Content Editor you are ready to create more pages and add more Affiliate Programs to your system. We’ll look closely at making a new page in the next step.

 Best wishes,

 DotStartUp

Let the Pages Roll

The great thing about your DotStartUp Mega Mall system is that it lets you make as many pages as you want! More pages means more content and content gives you search engine exposure.

Creating a new page is pretty straight forward, but may be confusing for the first time so we’ll walk you through it.

Pages is where you work on Pages

1.) Click the Pages button from the menu bar.

2.) Click the Create a New Page button.

3.) Now enter your New Page Options.

In our example, we are going to add a page to our Hobby shop about classic car models from the 1960’s.

The Page Name is something unique that we will remember this page by.

The Page Title is used to link this page within your Mega Mall.

Clicking the Create New Page button checks your entries and creates a new page for you to begin working on.

4.) Go to work on your Body Content.

Here we are simply typing some content into the body section of our new page ‘Classic Model Cars - 1960’s.’ The text will be plain and have the font, color and size of whatever the theme has defined. You can change the formatting with the buttons in the editor.

Here we have selected the first sentence and will click the H1 (Heading 1) style button to apply formatting to the sentence. See the next two images.

Now apply the formatting…

The H1 button also improves how a lot of search engines see your page.

To a search engine, H1 is an important indicator as to what your page is about.

It’s a good idea to make the first sentence a summary of what your page is about and make it H1. Do not apply H1 to the whole Body Content as that will confuse the search engines. You want your lead sentence to be accurate and reflect your page content.

Continue typing in your page content. Remember you are building content for the long term. The more you type the better chances you are going to show up well on search engines. As a rule you should be typing at least two paragraphs.

This will be enough content to allow Google’s AdWords to find something on the page to lock on to.  Remember, you can always come back and edit this later. Add more content later if you wish.

For some of you this will be the most challenging part of building your business. Writing is a skill that takes time a practice. Don’t be shy. Consult your dictionary, Wikipedia, writing sites and give yourself the edge. If you have the passion you will want to explore ways of getting your energy into a page.

Hint: If spelling is your weakness, then we recommend using the Firefox web browser when create and edit your pages. Later versions of Firefox have a spell checker built in. Very handy.

Create then Convert

As your goal is to make money with your web pages, you want to be on the lookout for ways of connecting your content, your readers to a product or service where you can earn money.  How you do this depends on your topic and what affiliate programs you have joined. We can safely assume that you are have a ClickBank nickname already, but sometimes ClickBank doesn’t have the right product or range of products that you can link well to your topic.

Targeting 

If you are already signed up with AdSense or Kontera your page content will automatically dictate what ads appear in your page.

If you have affiliate accounts with eBay or Amazon you can be very specific about what advertisements you want to appear in your page. This is done with use of a ‘keyword’ that is sent to eBay or Amazon asking them for some items that match the keyword. For our example and show you how to use the Ad Insert, we’ll be looking for ads to do with ‘1960’s Classic Cars’ on both eBay and Amazon.com.

Save your work and see the next post.

Best wishes,

DotStartUp

Getting Everything Ready to Publish

Right now your latest page is in Draft mode. Which means it is not linked to in your Mega Mall and it is not available to search engines to index.  The last step is to publish your page. This will do three things:

1.) Enable search engines to see your new page.

2.) Send a ping to syndication services notifying them of your new page.

3.) Add a link to your page in all of your Mega Mall pages.

So you can see that clicking that Publish link is pretty important.  But wait!

 There is one last thing you need to do before Publishing. This step is to improve the search engine’s view of your page. For this step we need to select the section editor control and go to the Header Section…

Now you will see the Header Section details and most of this was copied from your home page. (Remember we set that up earlier?) What we want to do now is tailor some values to match the content of the your new page. In our example we are talking about classic American muscle cars from the 1960’s so we will make some adjustments to reflect this topic.

The most important header element is the Page Title. This is what most search engines will show as a link to your page and your visitors will be clicking on those words.

The Meta Description and Meta Keywords are used by some (not all) search engines to get an overview of what your page contains. In some search engines your Meta Description is used in their search results listing while others like Google grab your whole page and display parts of the copy as the listing description.

Be generous and use a few accurate sentences for the Meta Description.  The Meta Keywords can be any words related to your page content and can contain misspelled words too. Don’t go overboard on Meta Keywords as most search engine bots (crawlers) will simply cut off your entry.

Do not repeat any keywords more than a few times. Search engines consider this to be “keyword spamming” and frown on this tactic.

Update your Header Section and you are ready to publish your first page!

Click the Publish link in the Page Status area. Congratulations! You are in the publishing business!

Best wishes,

DotStartUp

Different Sidebars for Different Pages?

A lot of publshing platforms have set sidebars that are the same for every page. This is not the case with your Mega Mall system. Although your sidebars are copied from your home page when you create a new page, you can change them and tailor them to each page. This helps to better target the page content and improves your search engine optimization.

Your master sidebars are the sidebars from your home page. Whatever is there gets copied as the sidebars for your new pages.

This means that changing your home page sidebars will effect all new page sidebars, but NOT existing page’s sidebars.

Changing an existing page’s sidebar

When you are editing an exiting page you can also edit the sidebar(s). Select one of the sidebar sections from the section editor. If your theme has both Left and Right sidebars, then your section editor controls will show this. (Some themes only have a Left Sidebar.)

Now you can go ahead and edit the Sidebar Content in the same way you edit the Body Content.

You can view and save the sidebar in the same way as you do with the body. All of the controls are virtually the same.

Next we are step you through adding an image from another server to your Mega Mall pages.

Best wishes,

DotStartUp

Adding Images from Image Hosts

There are dozens of free image hosting services available on the Web these days.  In this demonstration we’ll use Google’s Picasaweb service and link an image from there to a page in our hobby Mega Mall.

We first locate the image in our online gallery we want to use in our Mega Mall. What we really want is the URL or Location of the image.

The next steps are similar in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Here’s both in screen shots to demonstrate.

An something like this in Internet Explorer…

Make sure to swipe (highlight) the whole location or address. For images, this will always start with http:// and end with .gif, .png or .jpg. Our homemade stout image from Picasaweb has a location that looks like this:

Once you press the CTRL key and C keys together you make a copy of the location to your computer’s clipboard. Now go to your Dashboard and to your WYSIWYG editor for adding the image to your Mega Mall page.

Start by clicking at the location where you want your image to appear.

Click the Insert Image button from the editor toolbar.

Swipe the initial http:// in the Image URL box (so it’s highlighted)

Paste the location URL from your clipboard by pressing CTRL and V together.

Now type some Alternate Text which briefly describes the image. (This  Alt Text is good for search engines too!) Choose how you want the image to be displayed (Left, Right etc.) and click the Submit button.

No matter where you keep your images online, you can use this method to have them appear in your pages, providing they are made public. Picasaweb, PhotoBucket, ImageShack are a few of these services.

Next we will look at adding a clickable link to an image.

Best wishes,

DotStartUp

Adding Hyperlinks to your Mega Mall pages

One of the fundamental things that glues the Internet together is the hyperlink or sometimes just called link. Every one of your Mega Mall pages can have many custom links that you create yourself or copy and paste from somewhere else. In the next few posts are going to look at three different ways to get links into your pages.

Linking Text

When adding a link to some text use your WYSIWYG editor and highlight the word(s) you want to link and click the Insert Link button.

Now we’ve found a vendor on ClickBank that is paying 60% for referring sales for their scrapbook products. This is a product that is perfectly targeted to the page content and our audience. We located the vendor and made a hoplink at ClickBank. The page looks like this.

This is not critical for the linking operation but we thought that now is a good time to analyze a hop link from ClickBank. The hoplink contains three variables. They are shown in the image above.

Affiliate Nickname - this is your nickname you created when signed up at ClickBank.

Vendor’s Nickname - this is the vendor’s identifier at ClickBank.

TID or Tracking ID - this is some short identifier to let you know where your sales come from.

We simply copy the URL from ClickBank into our clipboard by highlighting it and pressing CTRL and C together.

Now we need to paste the URL  and click the Submit button.

Now the page is updated and shows our selected text as a hyperlink.

Congratulations! You now have an affiliate link in your page. Whenever someone clicks on this link, ClickBank records the fact that they came from your web site and will credit you for sales you refer. Next we will add a link to an image.

Best wishes,

DotStartUp