Preparation of a transaction account

Now that you have learnt on how to create a blog to be your platform, and you might have selected your niche, it is time to prepare for the next action - to prepare an online transaction account.

May be by the time you were waiting for my post on this, you would have customise your blog to suite your need and try to make it more beautiful and attractive based on he niche that you had selected. You had already acquired basic skills on how to do that from my previous posts, right?

There are quite a number of different organizations providing the internet transaction services. One of these, which is very famous and I had use it for years is PayPal. In this post, I am going to provide the first step guide in setting up a Paypal Account for free. Even thogh I had tried to capture some screen shot for this writing, but the actual display may be varies as the website was design and updated by Paypal.

You have to first go to http://www.paypal.com and click on Sing Up to create a new account. Of course you can Log In if you have already had an account with Paypal. 

On selecting to Sign Up a new account, the following selection of account types will be available. An individual account will allow you to buy and pay with Paypal and a Business account will allow you to receive payment with PayPal. Of course a business account will also allow for payment. As we are talking abount earning money online, hence a business account is required.

Note: If you have had an individual account with Paypal previously, then you can log into you account and select to click a button to update it to business account at any time as needed. 

Select the correct account type as needed ( in our case, a business account). The screen shot above shows the selection and obviously the right side [Get Started] button is for openning of Business account.

On clicking the [Get Started] Button, Paypal system will prompt you to enter you e-mail address and then follow with a form for you to fill in necessary information.

You will be asked to enter your credit card information in the sign up process, This is required as the account will be linked to your credit card so that you can pay online, in which the same amount will be charged from your credit card. I remeber when I first signed up, I was asked for approval to allow for a charge of RM10 to confirmed that the credit card is linked properly. This RM10 is still stay in my account until later I started to make money and able to withdraw through a linked bank account.

I do believe that you can follow the neccesary guidance provided by Paypal for account setting up. Linkage to your credit card is to enable you to pay online and this is a minimum requirement because Paypal would have to ensure they have a way to charge you when you buy something online. You would have to link one of your bank account to Paypal too so that you can transfer the money from your Paypal account to your bank accordingly.

Select you niche

"Select the niche". A lot of internet marketers like to start with this step. I decide to do it differently because I believe that by explaining the "niche" now you would have a better idea.

If you have been follow my blog from the beginning, you should know it is easy to set up a free blog. No problem if you missed it as you can follow this link to my content page, where you can find a list of my guidance posts sorted in systematic steps so that you can start from the beginning.

Internet marketers call it a "niche". It is a sort of category or segment of the market. If we go through the marketplace, there are millions of different products or services in the market. A lot of them do provide affiliate system that you can help to sell and earn commission. The question now is "what you want to promote?"

Let go to one of the most famous affiliate network Clickbank.com to check out how the products are categorised.

Let click on the following Lazada banner to go to the Lazada website and check on the product category tabs.

There had been a lot of research done by these well known organisations with regards to customer behaviour to finally come out with the category. Hence it can be used as a general guide for us to decide on the niche of market that we want to go into.

There may be some of you who will say, of course I want to promote all products that available. But please remember Rome is not built in a day. Every large plan has to start with little steps. So please spent sometimes to consider carefully and sincerely on what is the niche that you want to start.

Select a niche that you are passion with. I may advise you to select some idea that you will be interested to continue even if it does not give you any monetary benefit. If you really do not know what niche to select, then please click on the banner above and go to the market. Assuming you are going to buy something in the market, what are the items that interested you? Select a few of them and take note on which niche (category) they belongs to. 

By doing this, you are actually checking the items from the customer perspective. Your niche selected must be somethings that your final customers want. With something you selected as a customer, and yet interested you, then you will have a higher chance to fulfil their needs. Fulfilling your audience's need is the final objective of a true internet marketer.

If you still do not manage to decide, then go forward to the following link on Amazon and checkout for more idea.

Alternatively, these books will be a good reference to check out on how to find your niche.

    

  

The outlook of your existing blog

After following my blog over the last few posts, I am sure the following blog outlook looks familiar for you. You should be able to create a basic blog like the picture with the following 5 main features. The may looks different with different setting from you but the basic layout and the 5 features will be as per your setting.

Refer to the red circle number as 1 in the picture, this is the header of your blog. You can use the default image of the theme, with some title you typed in. Or you may have prepare a picture in JPG or PNG format with resolution of 1200 pixels-width X 250 to 380 pixels-high, even with the name of blog writen on the picture.

The red box number 2 is the brief description of your blog which you typed into the description field in the header of your blog layout design page.

Red box numbered 3 is the main body of you blog post. You can set to display 1 or many posts as per your preference by editing the main body section in the layout design page too. Red box numbered 4 is the side column which can be used for various purpose. Please note that the blog outlook of one main column (marked 3) with one right side column(marked 4) depends on the layout format you selected. It can varies depends on your selection.

Finally, the red box marked 5 is the navigation tabs row, which you created and finally select to display on the cross-column below the header in the layout design page. Selecting this "navigation tabs" will display your page accordingly, except the "Recent Post" which I change the name from "Home" to "Recent Posts" in my previous post on Set up pages to be navigation tabs. 

By selecting the related navigation tab and then scroll down to the bottom of you page, there is a pencil icon which you can click on to edit your page (as shown in the picture below). You can then edit your page accordingly.

In case you do not find the pencil to edit a page, most likely you are not logged into your account and is viewing your own page as a guest. Log into your account and you should be able to find the edit icon of pencil.

After editing you page, you can then click on the update button on the top right coner to update your page on your blog.

By now, I am sure you have had the basic skill of creating and configuring your blog on blogger.com. Do go ahead for some trial and practice until you have the blog outlook that you are happy with. I will let you free to play around on your blog for a while before I come back on my next post.☺

On the other hand, below is a place where you can buy a very good book "Google Blogger for Dummies" in which you can have more detail reference on how to create a very well presentable blog on Google Blogger. Click on the book to find out more detail.

Setup pages to be navigation TABs on your blog

In the last post, I write about how to use the "Pages" function of blogger.com and how to create a few pages. I did advise you to try create a few pages regardless of the content at that time.　The main reason of creating a few pages is to make sure that you do have a few pages with title that you are familiar with. These pages will be used in this post to set up a few selection tabs in your blog.

Let go back to the dashboard of your blog. Select the "Layout" function on the side menu. The layout customisation page of your will be displayed. On this page, you would be able to see the now familiar sections of headers, body, sidebar, footers and etc. There is an "Add a Gadget" section that I am going to guide you through today. This "Add a Gadget" section can appear on either the left or right side menu, depending on the layout format you set. You can add a gadget by clicking on this link.

There will be quite a number of different gadget that you can select to add onto your blog. In my post today, we are going to add the "Pages" gadget as shown in the following picture. This is a gadget to customise the display of the pages you created on the last post.

By selecting to add the "Pages" gadget, the following pop up window will allow you to configure the list of pages you had created and published. The Title field (marked #1) is optional. Just provide a name so that it will be display as the name of the a section in the layout view on your blog dashboard.

In the red box marked #2 in the above picture is where you can decide on which page to display on the section of your blog. Take note on the default page with default name "Home". This is a page that you cannot customise but designed to display your blog post in an descending chronological sorting. The newest post will be displayed before the elder post. The default name of "Home" can be edited. I am changing it to name as "Recent Post" in this blog.

As shown in the above example, I selected the "Home"  and renamed it to "Recent Post" together with "Support Blog", "Blog Content" and "About Michael Beh". The "Thank you very much" page is left out because it is to be used for different purpose.

You can drag the selected pages in the red box marked#3 to your preferred sorting order. Please take note on the brief explanation by blogger before the save button that you can move the gadget to header section to display pages title as Tabs of your blog or leave it in the side column so that your pages title will be display as related links on the side column.

Finally, click the "Save" button to save the configuration and you will be brought back to the layout design page on you dashboard.

In the layout design page, you newly created "Top Menu" gadget will be shown on the side column, because I guide you to add the gadget there. You can then drag it to the area below the "Header" section of your layout. Alternatively, if you started of adding gadget with the "Add a Gadget" by the "Cross-Column" Section, the newly created "Top Menu" will be appearing there. And of course you can drag it to the side column if you want.

  

Click on the "View Blog" link below your blog title and your blog will be displayed as per how your visitor will view it.

Create some pages in your blog

Hi, Michael Beh here again to continue on the guide on setting up the Guide on How to Earn Money Online guide.

I am sorry for a delay in this preparation because of busy schedule over last two weeks.

Today, I am going to guide about how to create new pages in your blog hosted on Blogger.com. If you are new to my blog and are not sure on where to start, then go to my Blog Content and start from the beginning in a step-by-step basis.

If you had been following my blog, then you should have setup a blog on Blogger.com. Go to www.blogger.com and sign-in to your account to access the blogger dashboard (or control centre). You should be able to read the name of your newly created blog on the upper left corner of the dashboard, right above the "View blog" function.

On the left column of the dashboard, you should see a column of menu showing various functions of blogger. I am going to guide about the "Pages" function (marked as 1 in the following picture). By clicking on the word "Pages" and selecting this function, All your pages (includes Drafted and Published pages) will be shown on the main display area on the right. You may not have the list of pages on the main area if this is your first selection of the pages function.

Click on the "New page" button (marked 2 in the picture) to create a new page. After you had created a few pages, the title of the pages will be shown as the list below this button. The sample page that shown in the picture below is titled as "Support Blog" and it is marked as 3 in the picture.

You can select the function right below the page title to "Edit", "View", "Share" of "Delete" it accordingly. I notice that the "Share" function here can only share the page on Google+. Nevertheless, this is not a concern to me as I can share it with different method. As for now, just create the pages needed for your blog will do.

After you click on the "New page" button marked 2 in the picture above, the following page editing window will pop up for you to edit you page. Key in your page title (marked 1 in the picture below) for this new page. There is a row of editing tools (marked 2 in the picture below) which is fairly easy to use. The area marked 3 is the body of your page. I am not going to go into too detail on the editing process at this moment because the same editing method will be used when you post your article later. Hence the editing method will be cover in more detail later.

For the time being, simply enter the title and type in some content into the body section. Create a few pages even though you may not have any content to write at this moment. My example that shown to you in the first picture includes "Support Blog", Blog Content", "Thank you very much", "About Michael Beh".

Even though the content is not ready yet, please remember to create at least three pages and "Publish" them by clicking the Publish button. These pages that created here will be used for the next setting process of your blog.

Trying out in auto responder

Life may not be as smooth as planned. A lot of issues creep in this month. Do not manage to have time sitting down and prepare the next step of action.

Meanwhile, I am testing out some function in the auto responding provider that I had just sign up under this account name. Some people may have noticed the profile section on this blog had changed. It is now a form created with auto-responder platform.

If you are not sure on what is auto responder now, don't worry. As mentioned, I am testing it and will show you how to do it in one if the future step.
In order to make your online business grow, this is an essential step. I am trying to get the step clearer before put them down into my guide here.

Sorry for missing out this month and hope that you can understand why the step by step guide is not progress as planned.

Configuring the blog header

Hi! Michael Beh is here again,

After my last post briefing on how to setup the theme of your blog. let me continue on how to configure your blog's header in this post.

On the left column of your blogging page, you will note a function menu named as "Layout". Click on this Layout function and the layout of your blog, depending on your selection of layout method when you setup the theme of your blog will be shown on the work-space. You can scroll up and down to look at how your blog layout is separated into various sections,

In this post, let us look at how to configure the "Header" section. The steps are easy with three simple clicks as shown in the following picture. Select the "Layout" function, Look for the "Header" section and then click on the related "Edit" button to activate the Header configuration page.

The header configuration is very simple as shown in the following picture. There are only three fields to fill up. The Blog Title, Blog Description and one field to upload your image if you decide to do so.

As a beginner, you can fill in the Blog Title and Blog Description and leave without the image. By saving this and then view you blog, you would be able to try out and understand what you can do to configure your blog header. The title and description you enter here will appear on your blog, with the default background as per the theme you had selected.

When you had gain more experience, or if you are familiar with image editing, you can then prepare an image separately and then uploaded the image in this header configuration page. Remember that the image should have the same width setting as you blog. I did suggest to set the with of your blog to 1200 during the blog theme setup step. If you do follow the same setting there, then your prepared image should also has a width setting of 1200 pixels. This is to ensure that your uploaded image will stay with good fit to your blog.

Below is a book on Amazon that you can refer to beside following my blog on how to create effective blog on Google Blogger.

Making your content stand above the rest

Every successful person keep learning every day. While building and developing this blog, I do search around on the internet to update my knowledge too. Below is a book sold on Amazon that I come across and found it packed with tips, advice and inspirational stories from successful writers who blog.  

There is also an article I found, explaining on the importance of ,
Making Your Content Stand Above the Rest
By Carolyn Cohn

You probably understand the importance (and necessity) of writing content. Your content is the way that you prove to your target audience members that you are an expert in your niche or industry. It is also the way that you build credibility and trustworthiness with your audience. However, it is important to bring your content to the next level and to make it stand about that of your competitors.

Considering all of the elements of your blog
First of all, people will be more than happy to offer you advice about what to do to your blog content in order to make it stand about the blog content of your competitors. Of course, that advice will not necessarily be appropriate advice for your particular business. You may be handed advice about your headlines, your teaser paragraph, the body of your blog, your conclusion, and your call-to-action. All of that is not to mention advice on what you should do to promote your blog after you have written it. The question is whether those people who are giving you all of that wonderful advice are actually not seeing the forest for the trees. Are they missing the point that you are actually trying to make with your blog?

It isn't enough to simply write and post your blog content online. You also want a large number of qualified people to notice and support what you have written and have taken the time to share. In short, you want your blog content to go viral. If your blog doesn't get the attention that you are hoping it will get, it will be a mere flash in the pan. Your readers will forget about it the minute they finish reading what you have written.

The fact is that being invisible is the worst possible thing that you can imagine (especially in business). If you (or your content) is not memorable, you won't get anywhere. You must create content that is not only valuable but that is also compelling and that makes the reader hunger for any content from you that he or she can read.

Well, don't despair because there are definitely ways to change that situation.

What you can do to make your content more memorable
There are many goals that you have in business that are important and are solid contributors to bringing your business to the next level. Some of those are increasing your website traffic, ramping up your list of connections, and writing top-shelf content. However, those factors will not necessarily make you memorable for other people. If you want to stand above your competitors, the way to do it is by being truly unique.

The truth is that everyone  has competition. Some people don't actually believe that they do but they really do. We all do. Through your content, you need to express ideas that are so unique and exciting that the reader can't stop talking about them. That probably means that you need to think (and step outside of) the box on a semi-regular or regular basis. In fact, you need to do everything within your power to stand above your competition.

Getting other people to notice your content is not easy but it is not impossible either. Your ideas need to be so compelling that they are imprinted on the other person. The following are ways that you can make that happen:

Create your public persona carefully: Most people have public personas that are different from who they really are as people. If you want to create a perception in the minds of other people about you, you can. It is all up to you. You have the power. Of course, that generally means that you will have a persona that is extremely positive and larger than life. Part of your persona is an air of professionalism that goes beyond doubt. A large contributing factor will be the emotions that you introduce to that persona. Before you can create your persona, you need to figure out exactly how you wish to come across and that will always involve a photograph. Photographs are not only critical because of the large number of people who respond emotionally to images but they are also critical because, without your photo, you don't have any human qualities in the eyes of the other person. Without your photo, the other person has no way to relate to you. You will not resonate with them. It is the first step to building a meaningful relationship. It is important to remember to be consistent in all of your photos. Whatever emotion you are trying to convey with your photo, the same emotion should come through every time. Above all else, your persona should say that you are a human being, just like the other person.

Express your values: If you want to get people to buy into who you are and what you represent, tell them about what is important to you and what drives you. It is extremely important that you stand for important principles. Undoubtedly, there will be some people who will not agree with your views but that is the basis for lively, stimulating discussions, which you should invite whenever possible. However, there will certainly be a large number of people who support you and who agree with your point of view. It should never be a situation of unpleasant fighting, only reasonable, varied points of view. The other thing to remember is that you should always welcome other opinions than yours, as long as they are expressed in a polite, constructive manner.

Show how human you are: The fact that you write content expressly with the goal of helping other people in mind means that you are a good person. That concept already puts you one step ahead. However, showing your human side is critical to your success in business. Human beings only relate to other human beings. If you show your human/emotional side to the other person, you will be adding to your credibility and to your trustworthiness. The other person will never be able to relate to the person who seems too perfect. The fact is that you are human, which means that you will make mistakes sometimes. Other people will call you out on those mistakes and you will have to own them and move on from there. That will surely fortify your relationship with the other person.

Always be transparent: Your transparency and your genuineness are critical to your success. It is another way to demonstrate to the other person how human you are. You are saying that you are just like him or her. You will never subscribe to the "do as I say, not as I do" philosophy. You need to prove to the other person that you are willing to roll up your sleeves and get in there regularly. Nothing is above you.

Always be sensitive but not too sensitive: It is important to keep other people's feelings in mind and to be sensitive about what you share online. However, that doesn't mean that you always avoid conflict at all costs. If done appropriately, conflict can lead to really amazing discussions. If you don't think that way, you may be shutting yourself and your business off from opportunities that may be amazing for everyone involved. It really is all in the approach. If you express yourself in the right way, the consequence should be fine (and even productive).

Conclusion
Your public persona is critical to your business' success. Once you have established that persona, you will be able to write effective content, which is driven by your persona. Your content will allow you to stand above your competitors and to be noticed by the right people. Your content should help people to find you, position you as an influencer, and make people aware (or more aware) of your brand and of your business.

You can also demonstrate the gaps that you see in your competitors as a basis for comparison. At that point, you can highlight all that you offer. It will really wow your target audience. If you do it right, everyone will want to interact with you and everyone will want to read what you write.

Carolyn T. Cohn is the Chief Editor of CompuKol Communications. Mrs. Cohn has a wealth of experience in managing people and projects. She has run several editorial departments for various companies. Mrs. Cohn has 25 years of editorial experience and her expertise covers a wide range of media, such as online editing, editing books, journal articles, abstracts, and promotional and educational materials. Throughout her career, Mrs. Cohn has established and maintained strong relationships with professionals from a wide range of companies. The principle that governs her work is that all words need to be edited.

Mrs. Cohn earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo.

Mrs. Cohn is a member of the American Medical Writers Association (AMWA).

Article Source: Making Your Content Stand Above the Rest

Setting Theme and customize your blog

The picture below shows the working page or control panel of your blog after you created one. If you are not sure on how to create one, please check up this link.

If Google does not amend the outlook, you working page will be as shown in the picture with a list of fucntions on the left column. This is where you can carry out various customization of your blog. In this post, I am going to brief on the "Theme" setting function. You can clink on the Theme and the page will be as shown.

Blog Working page

The preview shows the view of your blog on both live page on desktop and mobile. You can customize them seperately. You will also note that there are two buttons under the live page, one indicated "Customize" and the other as "Edit HTML". Some experience people may want to edit the page with HTML code. As a beginner, I am sure you want thing to be easy and clicking the "Customize" button to get into the blog design page is simple.

On top of the blogger theme design page is your design panel whereas the bottom section is preview of your page as you work on.

I would like to suggest you to select the Theme function on the left side of the design panel. This will bring up a series of selection that you can select. Do select a few of them one by one so as to give you an idea on how the different theme looks like.

Adjust width is the function that you can adjust the width of the main panel or side column (also refers as Side bar). I would recommend to set the total width to 1200 and Side bar width to 300 for a two column blog. This make me feel easier to insert necessary link and banners in future.

RELATED BOOKS

Click the book to buy from Amazon

Next, select the layout functions and you would be able to select different type of layout as you like. I normally like to stick to two columns selection to make my blog looks "clean". Of course, this is personal choice, and it depends on the subject (always refer to the niche) of the market that your are selecting.

All the above steps should provide you with a good enough view of you blog outlook. After you become more familiar with blogging, then I am sure you would like to explore the advance function, where you can amend the design in more detail, including the font sizes, background and font colour of various components in your blog.

Action is the only path to success: Create your first blog

Hi, Michael Beh here again,

As mentioned in my previous post, action is the only path to success. So it is time to start building your platform for money making.

Among various method that can be used as a money making platform, I am going to select blogging as the core of operating platform. And Google Blogger is what I select for my example. You must have a Google account to use this service provided by them. So if you have no Google account yet, please start with going to Google Signup page to create one. After having your account, then you can go to the blogger signup page to start creating a blog. The system will ask you to sign in if you have not done it yet.

Google Blogger Sign Up page

The blogger system will pop up a new blog creation page for you to key in necessary information. Please select an easy to understand and representative title so that your target audient will be able to find you easily.

The address is very particular and you can try the best to make it representative to your content, again for you audients to find you easily. However this is more difficult to achieve as it has to be unique as per Google Blogger's record. It means that it must be an address that no other people using. There is a little message under the field to alert you if the address is not available. So you have to try until you name an address that is available and the Tick on blue backgound is there to show you that this address is available.

Google Blogger New Blog Setup page

After deciding the Title and address, you can then select a Theme that you want and click on "Create" to starting the blog. Selection of theme is required but not particular here as you can edit it later. After you click the "Create blog" button, the system will take a shor while to set up and then your blog will be ready and you will be sent to the following page to work on your blog.

So you have your blog ready now and you can work on it. Please note that the title of your blog will appear on the top left column and below it is the "View Blog" link that you can click to check how your audient view your blog.

Your working platform to work on you blog.

Blogging All-in-One For Dummies

Example on Blog front page upgrade

Hi this is Michael Beh again here!

Today, I am sharing the front page view of my Personal Health Care again after trying to update. You will note two major changes. The background color (to be more correct ... texture) had be changed and a row had been added below the header for TABs.

This is done with free platform on Google Blogger. It may not be fully customize-able, but it should be good enough to customize enough to provide an attractive page.

Updated Version of my "Personal Health Care" Blog

Even though I am sharing in a step by step basis slowly, but it should not stop you from exploring on your own. The most important thing is to put your though into action. Blogging is one of the method to set up a platform for Making Money on Internet. There may be other methods such as joining social media, setting up fan pages and etc. Over this blog, I am guiding to carry out platform setting by means of blogging.

The starting of this blog

This starts Today on 24th Jul, 2017. It is the day after I attended a 3-day training on "Internet Marketing" to learn on how to earn money online.

To be frank, I know about all the topics explained in the training for years. I even had used some of the web service providers many years back. It is after this training that only I realize there are some very important concept and strategy that I missed. Hence I decided to set up this blog and log in the progress I do step-by-step. It will serve as a record to my serve, but in longer terms, it could be a online guidance to all my friends who are interested in Making Money online to achieve their own aim in life.

This blog is set up on Blogger. As you can see from the picture below, it is a simple page with nothing on it at the moment, except the single button on it which sell an e-book, for those who are impatient to know more detail prior to by completion of setting up this guidance.

Do come back to visit my blog. You can also start to set up yours on the blogger so that you can practice my steps here as I progress.

If you are interested, here it is .....Another new blog I created on Personal Health Care. I am going to use this two blog as an example on how I progress in earning money from the internet market.

My Personal Health Care blog

By referring to the two new blogs that I prepared, I am sure you would be able to see. There are simple blog, and I will guide you through step by step to get into more detail.