You work online, start earning your first money, want to progress - sooner or later you realize that you need contacts in the online world in your particular niche otherwise you exist in some kind of vacuum.

As a sample I will talk about search marketing industry in this post. If we talk about Internet search marketing there are names that everybody knows: Jim Boykin, Aaron Wall, Rand Fishkin, Bill Slawski, etc. And there are names that are unfamiliar to the industry players. In fact, there are two great lists of the top industry experts that were recently posted on Rand Fishkin and Barry Schwartz’s blogs.

It would be great to see your name and blog on that list. Of course, there is an alternative way – the lists are not exhaustive and there are hundreds of other talented Internet search marketers. You can build ‘your own circle’. But before you know their names and they know yours it is a good idea to target best.

To begin with, read what reputation and image are to know what the target is.

The question is what it takes to get to that list?

- to start with, display your name and contact details at the website

- become an expert. You should be an expert in your industry and prove your status all the time (in your blog, online communities, conferences, projects you run, etc)

- generate unique ideas and some buzz. When you are a newbie you copy best experts in your niche. If you would like to join the expert list with time you need generate your own ideas. Good ones.

- time. It obviously takes time to become an expert and to let others know that you are one

- testimonials. Show customers happy with your services and products.

Probably, you will not get to the top list even if you follow the above guidelines. But you are likely to get contacts with other persons in your niche who are less known – by this you will achieve your target to find great people to communicate and build relations with in your niche.

Once you gain some reputation online (preferably, positive) you need to monitor and influence it. How to do that? The best way I know – make use of this Online reputation monitoring beginners guide where it is explained what and how to track. It is hard to gain a good online reputation, but it is easy to ruin it – a few forum posts and blog entries more than enough – take care of monitoring your hard earned reputation.

Summary: This post is about online reputation in search marketing – it is a sample. In general it applies to any industry online.

It is not easy to combine all aspects of your online work: you need to run your own website, regularly update it; you need to market and promote it; in addition you need find time to develop your online reputation. But it is a fact of life that these three components are a must if you would like to succeed online.

[tags]how to gain online reputation, user generated content, forums, free, link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, archive.org, adsense, adwords, ppc, text-link-ads, links buying, links selling, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, ebay, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, wikipedia, del.icio.us, technorati, bloglines, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]

Dropshipping is a woking model for your e-commerce business. I have posted about possibilities you have to buy an established dropship websites. Samples of droship website sale are here and here There was another sale of an established dropship website - this time outside furniture dropship website:

• URL: thecedarstation.com
• Established: 9 Mar 2002
• Uniques/Month: 12,000
• Page views/month: 45,000
• Monthly Revenue: Profit $17,000+ Year - Taxes are available from 04′ and 05′
• PageRank: 4
• Listed: 14 Aug 2006

Description:

Im selling a dropship furniture website I have, if anyone is interested. You dont have to stock anything, or ship anything. Its a yahoo legacy store. I dont have time for it anymore, and its being neglected. It has rankings for outdoor furniture, teak outdoor furniture, deck furniture type phrases, and a bunch more. “Patio furniture” has fallen into the 60’s, though I had number 2 for that phrase for sometime. That phrase alone gets like 200,000 searches in the summer, and it shouldn’t be hard at all to get back into the top 10 on google. Im sure you could have all rankings back by the next summer rush. The site has about 9,000 total backlinks also. Its a very strong site.

I got into real estate investing sometime ago, and its basically become my life. I don’t have time for article writing, link exchanging etc. I hate sitting here, and watching this website go down the tubes, because its made me great money over the last few years.

Email/pm and Ill fax/email you tax information and whatever else you need. I’ve never sold a website, so Im not sure how this process is supposed to work.

PR4
4 years old
Individual visitors per month - 12,000+ (low end. This number was MUCH higher when all rankings were in place.)
Page views - 45,000+ (low end)
Dmoz listed - 3 years

Compared to other phrases I’ve ranked for, outdoor furniture type phrases are generally easy. I cruised for over 2 years doing absolutely no seo, and kept top rankings. Last summer/fall this site was getting well over 1000 individual customers a day. Im also going to give you a guide I wrote that tells exactly how to achieve rankings in search engines, so you can keep the rankings I have obtained, and get the ones you want. The seo I’ve done to this website alone is worth $10,000 alone.

Revenue Details:

Summer/Spring months are 90% of income

Traffic Details:

Traffic is from multiple organic rankings for highly trafficked keyphrases in major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Summary: Drop ship business model is a good way to diversify your online business. I do not think you should focus all your efforts on drop shipping – it is not a lasting business model – at least from my point of view. But if you have a good supplier and after your online marketing research you see potential to grow business in that direction – you should give it a try.

[tags]dropship, drop ship, archive.org, adsense, adwords, ppc, text-link-ads, links buying, links selling, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, ebay, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, wikipedia, del.icio.us, technorati, bloglines, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]

In case you are unwilling to build your community website from zero (short of time, no experience, cash available to invest, etc) - the basics of the process and general guidelines how to start your forum I discussed in forum launch post - you have one more viable option: buy an established forum. Yes, a simple, efficient, but expensive way to become an owner of a web community.

The places to visit if you would like to check forums for sale are the same as I listed in the post on where to sell / buy websites So, you can combine your search of websites and forums and buy the property you like most.

You as a potential forum buyer should pay attention to most points mentioned in how to sell / buy websites but forums has some specifics that you should check additionally.

Here is a few extra points to go through while evaluating a forum (potential forum sellers should find these points also of some value – it will assist you to know what questions to expect from your prospects):

- is it a standalone forum or it comes with a blog or website or something else?

- check members list: date joined, last visit date (does membership grows smoothly, no unusual jumps in new members joining the community)

- posting frequency: check how many active posters the forum has (roughly in %), are there many lurkers?

- staff: who helps to run the forum? If there is staff how they are paid? Or are they volunteers? Who are moderators? Will they stay to go on with their work?

- check what mods the forum uses.

- does the forum come with some custom designed skin?

- read it for some time – can you get a feeling of community?

- check the forum reputation online: feedback, is it a well known community in its industry?

If the forum uses vBulletin software ask for VB admin Stats and Logs – you will see how many threads were started on a particular day, how many registered per day, how many registered members logged in per day. Does the seller include VB license into the sale?

You should be careful not to buy a forum that will go dead as soon as you buy it – the former owner could artificially boost much activity in recent days or weeks prior to sale – so, it is a good idea to browse the forum checking the dates of the posts.

If the forum owner is reluctant to reply to any of your questions or provide information you ask for - stop any negotiations.

Summary: Forums are great as they generate much content automatically. Yes, they are more difficult to monetize, but they take less time to run. Your business gets diversified – it is my belief that every forum owner runs websites, but not every website owner runs a forum.

Another great advantage of the online communities – you are less dependent on search engines. You will become more relaed when the next Google update comes and youwill not a frequent poster on www.webmasterworld.com (Google news section) where every second poster tries to find an answer to: why my pages go supplemental, why Google dropped so many pages of my dear website, why Google ignores my robots.txt file, why It does this and why It does that.

[tags]how to buy forums, how to sell forums, user generated content, forums, free, phpbb, vbulletin, link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, archive.org, adsense, adwords, ppc, text-link-ads, links buying, links selling, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, ebay, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, wikipedia, del.icio.us, technorati, bloglines, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]