I am sure you have gone to sites and see that they are giving away an ebook if you sign-up for their newsletter or purchase some service. I am sure a few of you have wondered how you would go about doing that. So here it is…

1. Understand your niche. If your not sure who you customer is or what they want then find out by doing polls and research of your current site visitors.

2. Start a mailing list. If you do not have one already then start building it today. You can use a free service like Feedburner’s or a paid service like AWeber.

3. Develop or buy an eBook. If you have the time to develop your own book you can do that with a word processor tool and then publish using Acrobat or some other PDFing software. If you do not have the time you can browse bookswealth.com for ebooks with Master Reseller Rights. With these rights you can give the book away for free and the cost of the ebooks on the site are between $2 to $3.

4. Setup your welcome email to your newsletter to include a link to where they can download your ebook.

5. Add a link, banner or button to join your newsletter.

Once you do this you will see an increase in the number of sign-ups presuming you picked an ebook that fits your visitors needs.

If you get stuck leave a note in the comments or catch me on twitter.

At one time business was only done through a shop and customers had to go into your shop to do business with you. Face to face contact was the only method of doing business. Today there are many business who never meet there customers face to face at all. Technology has changed the way people do business and the way customers interact with a business. Everyone today has there own personal preference for how they like to interact with a company. Some like to phone, others like to email and then are a few who like to use online chat.

For those customers that like to use online chat you can make it easier for them to add you on MSN or Yahoo by doing the adding the following code…

[code='html']Add me to your MSN

Add me to your yahoo[/code]

Like us you can use an image or any text you want. Be sure to add this code to your page and upload it.

If you get stuck leave a note in the comments or catch me on twitter.

Last week we talked about installing a forum using phpBB which is included in our shared hosting using Fantastico. One of the common questions I get from people is how to integrate phpBB into a blog. Here is what I could find.

Sidebar Integration
One way to integrate your phpBB into your blog is to show the most recent forum posts in your sidebar. To do that you can install phpbb_recent_topics plugin. This plugin is easy to install and is a good solution for integration.

Individual Integration
You can integrate your users from your phpBB, give those users their own blog who want to comment and keep one theme between your blog and forum with the WP-United plugin. This plugin is a phpBB mod which connects to your WordPress and requires no plugin to install.

Forum Integration
If you want each of your blog posts to be added to your phpBB then the WP2BB plugin is the quick way to install it.

Blog Post Integration
This one is a bit more complicated but if you wanted a new blog post for each new Forum topic and reply this would involve installing phpBB RSS Content Syndicator 2.1.0 then using FeedWordPress plugin pull that RSS feed in to your blog.

If you get stuck leave a note in the comments or catch me on twitter.

Have you ever thought about adding a forum to your site? It’s not as hard as you think. A forum is a good way to build a community where people can interact and learn from one another. Our own forum is still relatively new but if you have not had a chance to view it you should do so.

If your using our shared hosting just login to your cPanel and do the following…

• Click on Fantastico.
• Scroll down and click on phpBB.
• Click on New Installation.
• Enter in an admin username and password and click install.

Your done. You now have a forum installed and ready to go.

Next week we will discuss how to integrate phpBB with WordPress.

If you get stuck leave a note in the comments or catch me on twitter.

We have posted a lot on how to use twitter, why you should use twitter but never really explained how you can right now go out and make money with twitter.

This weekend you can follow these instructions to earn money using twitter…

If you do not have twitter already then step one will be to sign-up. In the past I have suggested you use twhirl but for making money hands down TweetDeck is going to work better.

So in the past I have suggested you start following people you found interesting. I still suggest you do that but to make money skip that step for now. Open up TweetDeck and click on the Search button. Type in what you want to search and click ok. This will open a new column with the results. Start scanning the results an reply to people. Let the sales game begin.

Wait so how do you make money?
Well this depends where your skills are. If your a programmer I suggest you search for the words “help script”  or if you are a writer you should try “help writing”. There are people out there on twitter right now that need your help. So get on board and start earning money.

If you get stuck leave a note in the comments or catch me on twitter.

If you haven’t noticed people like John Chow, Shoemoney and now us are starting to post questions on Twitter and then sharing the answers on our blog. This is a good way to bridge your community between twitter and your blog.

This week I will share with you how you can make your own twitter question post.

If you do not have twitter already then step one will be to sign-up. Then download a twitter tool and start following those you find interesting. Soon people will be following you.

Once you have a few people following you try posting a question. They will reply back with an @youruser name.

So now to get those replies in to your WordPress post. I have modified a script so it will look how I want. You can download this script and use it yourself on your own site. You just need to update your username, password and domain. The limitation of this script is 20 replies but I am working on another version which will allow for 100.

Open the page in your browser and highlight the replies. Copy (CTRL + C) and then go to your WordPress post and paste (CTRL + V) them in the Visual editor.

That’s it your done.

If you get stuck leave a note in the comments or catch me on twitter.