Freakin’ awesome.

If you want repeat customers for your business… look at the way TigerTech treats their customers … the level of support is just mind blowing.

Here are ten questions that will help you spot the signs if your website is failing:

Have you introduced yourself? Putting your information isn’t merely a matter of posting your name, your contact numbers or your email addresses. It’s also about drawing your customer in and allowing him or her to know you. Tell them something about yourself –if you’re in college and doing this as a sideline, say so. People in general appreciate honesty and this personal touch will increase trust and will allow clients to be comfortable with you.

Do you have the correct product information?
Does it provide real content?
Always have a FAQ ready, and tell them what your product is: what it’s made of, what it’s for, where it came from, etc.

Can people purchase through your site?
This is essential for selling; make it easy for your customer to buy from you. If they have to go through a long, hard process –and it doesn’t even have to be that hard –they will drop like flies.

Have you chosen your target niche or a general theme?
Talking to your audience means knowing who they are. You will cater to them better, and know more of their needs. If you spread yourself too thin, people will have the impression that you lack direction and even expertise.

Do you regularly communicate with your public?
Keep in touch and keep the avenues of communication open. Without your clients, you have nothing.

Are you using a dot.com name?
Does your website have a professional appearance?
A dot come name makes your site easier to remember and using professional-looking designs will give you a measure of authority.

Never least, have you checked on the competition?
You can find what you do and do not like from websites in the same market and use that to improve yours.

Answer these ten questions and re-evaluate your site. This’ll give you a powerful edge over the competition.

First, understand that your first year on the web isn’t the year when you make money. So don’t try to make money in the first year. Instead, build out the infrastructure to make money in year 2 and forward.

Second, understand what a resource page is. I’ve created a primitive example of how to create a resource page using the example of scottish tartans. Check it out.

Third, put 4 days of time into building one killer resource page per week on your topic. Spend the 5th day networking, emailing, building links and doing social media on the article.

Fourth, take 4 weeks off.

Fifth, remember the basic rule that the best linkbait is a well regarded, authoritative website.

If you stick with this plan over 12 months, and really put a lot of effort into building your site, you’ll find that you have something special on your hands that is poised to make 5 figures per month rather than 5 pennies.

The 4 Dimensions of a Link Portfolio + Improving Your Link Portfolio

All of these opportunities have the real potential of turning into full time jobs after college … working out of your home … as your own boss. Or, if you prefer working as part of a team, you can develop these skills in college, make some extra money, while simultaneously making yourself attractive to the millions of online companies out there.

Some of these Net Professional (aka web worker) careers are higher-paying then others, but there are pros and cons for all of them. Here’s a quick overview for those of you considering online careers. The benefits are that these can all be freelance or consulting type gigs, so you control how much work you want to take on – which is ideal if you’re still in college. Don’t be deterred by being in college – you can still win clients. This may or may not mean offering services for barter instead of cash.

1. Blogger for hire.
If you’ve got reasonable writing skills (most college students do!), regardless of what you’re studying, blogging for hire is a nice way to earn a bit of extra cash.

• Pros: Writing for someone else for pay means that you probably don’t have to worry about a lot of the non-writing tasks. Start small, build a name for yourself and you just might earn a nice income.
• Cons: Your earnings are limited by how many articles you can write per day. Quality creative output can’t be turned on like a machine. (You could, however, start earning a bit of money by selling links from your college blog – just be sure you’re allowed.)
• Links: For a few great places to learn from and hone your skills, start at Daily Blog Tips, Chris Garrett, Xfep and Bloggers for Hire. For gigs, check out Freelance Writing Jobs, Performancing Job Board, Problogger Jobs, Blogger Jobs.

2. Designer.
If you’re studying print design or something related, or otherwise have the necessary skills, what better way to start than online.

• Pros: If you’re a capable designer than can offer not only logo design and general graphic design but also website templates, there is potential for a healthy online career. There’s also the standard print-based work such as business cards, flyers, posters, etc., much of which can be sourced online if you can prove your skills with an online portfolio.
• Cons: Much of the template market relates to the WordPress blogging platform. This not only means you’d have to learn to code templates in WP but also compete with all the literally thousands of free templates.
• Links: Daily Blog Tips lists their choice of top 25 web design blogs, though a shortlist is A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, Pearsonified, Dev Lounge, CSS Zen Garden, Randa Clay, Brian Gardner, Daivd Airey.

3. Blog overlord.
If you don’t want to blog for hire, you could always try launching and monetizing your own blogs, one at a time, then hire writers to carry on the work while you later promote. (Either that or partner up with SEOs or SMMs)

• Pros: You can launch multiple sites and hire writers for each – either on a flat-fee or revenue share basis. Try different payment models and see what works – replace unmotivated writers.
• Cons: Blogging for hire is still a relatively new profession and while bloggers abound, many are still learning the necessary skills. There’s a shortage of skilled bloggers for hire, so you might be writing your own content for a while.
• Links: Start with Problogger, Performancing, and Dosh Dosh to get a sense of what it takes to build more than one blog.

4. Copywriter.
Good copywriters earn more than most other types of professional writers, and the blogosphere is an ideal place for promoting these services.

• Pros: You don’t have to be a literary genius to be a successful copywriter, but you do need to learn the proper techniques. Also, one good gig per year that pays royalties could be enough to build enough supplementary income to pull of a 4-hour work week.
• Cons: Dry, unsexy niches might get boring after a while (but if you’re good, you can pick and choose).
• Links: Start building your repertoire of techniques by reading Copywriting, Copyblogger, Copywriter Underground, American Copywriter, Copywriting Maven, Writing White Papers.

5. Domainer.
Domaining efforts can be a good starting pointing into moving towards being a blog overlord (above).

• Pros: Of all of the above online professions, this one has the highest potential. Complete portfolios of thousands of domain names have sold for as much as US$300M. The top domainers are said to work an hour or two each day, and some literally sit on the beach sipping drinks.
• Cons: You need to keep up with trend studies and pop culture, to have a sense of what domain names might be worth purchasing and when to let them go. Also, the best domains are all gone and can be costly to buy. Cracking into the market at the bottom is not going to make you millions. You have to buy and flip lesser names and bootstrap your way to buying the expensive domains. Or partner up. Furthermore, domainers are often despised especially because they squat on domains.
• Links: There are a lot of domain blogs all of a sudden, but several seem inactive. Start at Domain News and Domain Name Wire, and read Aviva Directory’s How to Get Started as a Domainer.

6. SEO/ SEM
The Search Engine Optimization/ Search Engine Marketing niche is huge and is really perfect for college students because it can be done in short bursts of time between classes, etc.

• Pros: There is a large market for SEO/ SEM services, and some the top firms are commanding $100K/mth in billable work. There’s enough spillover work for those newer to to the niche.
• Cons: To get to the top levels, you really need to network and either know what you’re talking about or hire the appropriate parties. Outsourcing is one option, though marking up their services limits your margin, unless you can provide some value-added service not available elsewhere. The biggest drawback is being reviled by others who think SEO/SEMs are spam marketers.
• Links: Get part of your education reading SEOmoz, Search Engine Journal, Graywolf, SEObook, Tropical SEO, Scoreboard Media, Single Grain, Stuntdubl, Pronet Advertising, Cornwall SEO, Search Engine Land and loads of other great sites.

7. SMM.
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is becoming a crucial aspect of online promotions.

• Pros: People with “power accounts” are always in high demand with SEO firms, and these services can be offered as a supplement to other work as listed above.
• Cons: Because social sites are, well, social, paid SMM work is always frowned on. You have to not only build your credibility but maintain it without being overly commercial. You really need to leverage your networking skills. If you’re shy by nature, forget about this niche.
• Links: Build your profile on facebook, myspace, digg, sphinn, delicious, stumbleupon, shoutwire and any other social media sites you can manage.

Choosing one of these paths is not something to do lightly, if you’re just starting out. But if you already have skills in a certain area and feel you can promote yourself online or otherwise find the clients you’ll need, then all of these Net Professional careers have potential for providing you a nice income. There are other services you can offer such as writing business plans, resumes, copyediting, etc. However, I think that the ones listed above have the highest potential for college and beyond.   And even if you’re clueless about how to get started in any of these fields, there are plenty of people (me included) who are willing to train you for free.

The plain fact is that the most successful businesses are the ones that use their money to make more money. So how do you use your money to make more money? Here are some tips for that I’ve found effective. Just remember that I’m coming from the bootstrapping method for starting a business, and these may only apply to that method. What’s bootstrapping? Well, it’s all about building equity with lots of sweat and hard work, motivated by nothing but the promise of future rewards.

But to move beyond bootstrapping, you need to have a plan to put profits to work, and to expand operations beyond your own limited efforts. Here are five ways to effectively re-invest your profits into your online business.

1. Purchase Assets for Leverage

Let’s say that you’ve started a blog that focuses on “Green Homes” and that you’re making $3/day after 6 months of hard work. A next step might be to go out looking to buy an established website in a related niche. Maybe your initial blog is all about planning to build a brand new “green home” – you might try to find a couple additional sites to compliment and reinforce your current site. For example, “Green Home House Plans” or “Building a Home from Scratch” or “The Economics of an Energy Independent Home” or “Green Retrofitting” or even “Finding Cheap Land in the United States” – Assuming that the new site has been around more than 12 months, it’s definitely worth looking at for acquisition.

Buying established sites to help reinforce your new blog can pay huge dividends and start you on your way towards niche domination.

2. Pay Writers/Bloggers

Around January of this year I learned that my business receives a lot more value from my effort when I limit the time I spend writing. Successful entrepreneurs should spend most of their time strategizing and executing plans behind the scenes. Full time blogging is exhausting and often frustrating. Contract out your writing needs to experts in the field in which you need writing done. The best place to look, in my opinion, is not to full time bloggers, but rather to people who have never blogged before! Sounds weird, but probloggers take shortcuts that diminish the value and passion factor of the content. A search on Craigslist can net you someone who loves the topic so much they’re not really in it for the money.

3. Find a good SEO

The fact is that in today’s search engine world, you need your site to be perceived as an authority on its topic. You can make a lot of progress simply by buying older, more established sites and then linking into your newer sites, but, for better or worse, that is no longer sufficient. You need dozens, if not hundreds, of content level links from other reputable and relevant websites.

But beware: Not just any link will do. Some SEO can have negative affects. Especially if your SEO just tosses up run of the site links. Your SEO should know what it takes to turn an average site into an authoritative site. So the most important thing you can do is have your SEO discuss his or her philosophy, and determine whether it is thoughtful and strategical.

4. Diversify Your Investments

When you start making 4-5 figures per month, it’s time to diversify your revenue sources. Even if you don’t have what it takes to start an online store, consider looking for website owners or bloggers who are looking for investments. I put a post up over at Performancing announcing my interest and receive at least one inquiry every month, several of which panned out.

What many people don’t understand is that when you invest, you are letting your money do most of the work, instead of you. So put your money to work in as many profitable places as you can for ultimate diversification. Lately, I’ve been investing most of my money to help bring offline businesses online. But I’m not the one bringing them online. I’m letting others do that for me. My investment is simply an attempt to expedite business growth and to move it beyond the bootstrapping phase.

5. Become part of an investment group

Now more than ever, success on the web directly reflects a site’s perceived authority. Most young entrepreneurs don’t have the financing available to gain the leverage and exposure they need to dominate a niche. That’s where the idea of an investment group comes in. Pool your money together with other likeminded entrepreneurs, setup a corporate structure that allows for share-based ownership, and then execute the first four steps that I’ve listed above, only this time as a group of shareholders with equivalent interests in seeing success.

Creating strong, authority websites can be accomplished more easily and effectively from within the context of an investment group then by a single individual trying to bootstrap her way to success. But becoming part of an investment group is only possible once you’ve bootstrapped yourself into a position of having significant cash on hand to invest.

Conclusion

So those are five ways to reinvest money for your online business. To end, I’d like to ask question of the College Startup readership: how much profit do you re-invest in your company and how much do you pull out as salary?

Let’s head over to one of the review pages on the site. It’s called The Log Siding Guide, the section I want to point out is a specific competitor’s review. You might wonder how in the world I could get a competitor to link to one of my sites. And this is exactly how. I set up a review site with my top 10 competitors. I put up basic information and solicit reviews. Some of these will be real, and some will be gleaned from their own website.

I then turn around and email them the url. And bang many of them —- WILL link to this site. Now just a quick note. All outbound links on my site are NoFollow. I know. I know exactly what you are thinking. This is evil. And it is. But it works.

And folks this is what is called The Ultimate WordPress Link Silo. Basically you will have relevant inbound links coming in. if you only get a few that’s ok. All of them passing pagerank, and all the outbound pagerank passing will be headed into my actual ecommerce website and the link quality will be hugely golden passing that third party pagerank from El Competitoro.

Ladies. Gentleman. Stand aside. This is what is called Smart (almost Unethical) SEO. It’s a fine fence we must not cross. And the site will rank well and be a genuine adsense money maker if done right for years and years to come. On top of getting links from the competion we are also getting their marvelous ad dollars. This is the part I’m not sure is ethical. It’s like the competition is basically handing us Our Living without us doing any work.

This is what I get for spending to much time over at Blue Hat SEO.

The fact is that the web creates virtually unlimited possibilities and rewards those who have good ideas and work hard to implement them. So if you’re struggling to find a summer job, or just don’t like the idea of an 8-5 job all summer, why not work for yourself? Why not put the infrastructure in place for a job that allows you to go down to the beach any day of the week?

Here’s what you need to do. First take a gut check. Are you self-motivated? Or do you need people watching over your shoulder to get things done? If you’re self-motivated, then you’re off to a good start.

The next step is to ask what you want out of your summer job. What’s your time horizon for seeing profit? If you’d like some quick cash, then follow Ben’s strategies for buying, building and flipping websites. If you think you’d like to see your summer job turn into a full time job after college, in other words, if you’re really determined to be self-employed, then map out a three year plan. Determine what you’re going to do to get to a certain place three years later.

The next step is to ask yourself what you do well. Not everyone is a blog designer like Ben. You might have fabulous ideas, but not have the skill set to implement them. This is where you have to start networking with people. Some skills you can easily learn (like how to setup a new blog, how to backup a blog database, etc.). But some skills are hard to come buy (a great eye for blog design). If you meet the right people you might be able to barter for services. Or, you may need to be ready to shell out some cash. Running auctions at SitePoint for logo and design services can be some of the best money spent.

But site design isn’t the only profitable skill on the web. Let’s say you’re an expert at classical guitar and have this brilliant idea for teaching people how to learn classical guitar. Start a blog on classical guitar, but only give teaser information. Don’t give your best stuff away. Instead, work behind the scenes developing an e-book or even an e-video series. As you build a readership with your blog, start charging for the e-book or videos, and maybe even offer webcam lessons!

Or, let’s say you’ve grown up with dogs your whole life and plan to become a veterinarian. If you have access to lots of dogs, it would be an awesome idea to develop a site with video of dog training and various breeds of dogs. Everyone and their grandmother has a dog in the US. If you execute properly you could have a hugely popular site.

The bottom line is this: when choosing a summer job you’re making a critical career decision. There are virtues and benefits to both types of summer job. But if you have a true passion and a true entrepreneurial spirit, then why slave through your summer working for someone else on poorly defined tasks, when you can have total creative control and set a precise path to become your own boss down the road.

I’ve got to be honest. I’ve never been satisfied with the various stats programs for my blogs. Whether it’s raw server side logs analyzers or javascript stats like Analytics or a WordPress plugin like shortstat, I’ve never been able to get the clear picture of visitor behavior that I’d like to have.

That is until now. I’ve been trying out pMetrics from Performancing now for close to a month and I absolutely love it. Simple (unlike Google Analytics) yet feature rich, pMetrics gives me all the information I want, no more, no less.

The coolest thing about pMetrics is that you get detailed information about each user without having to drill down 5 levels in the navigation. One of the things I hate about Google Analytics is that although it is powerful, finding the information you want has never been intuitive or easy. pMetrics solves this issue.

But pMetrics offers you more. Have you ever wanted to get a good sense of real-time user behavior? pMetrics has a Spy function; a real-time stats-ticker that shows each and every user behavior at your site, as it happens in real time. This information is priceless and can provide the details you need to increase site usability. You can also monitor, in real time, the results of any marketing and promotion that you are involved in.

pMetrics also offers a great picture of visitor demographics and geography, breaking visitors down into countries and even cities, and then plotting this information on Google Maps.

The basic version of pMetrics is available for free, but I highly, highly recommend upgrading to the advanced version for only $15/year (just a little more than $1/month). The advanced version includes Spy (real time visitor stats) and RSS feeds so that you can syndicate your stats and view them in an RSS reader saving you time and energy.

I can’t say enough good things about pMetrics. If you’re a stat junkie like me, but have always found stat programs lacking for one reason or another, give it a shot. You’ll love it.

Get started with pMetrics from Performancing

The basic idea is that you need to focus on building a few valuable properties and then squeezing money out of the properties you’ve worked hard to build.

Most bloggers are tempted to just keep slapping up new sites. My new theory is that you should build a few good sites and then partition the domains into monetizable sections. In other words, you should no longer think of a blog in isolation but in a wider context of *the domain* on which it is located. Focus on the blog, but build around it too!

If you take the advice in the Performancing article combined with my “Model Portfolio” article below, you’ll be on your way to a great online career.