Home Business Online Opportunity 7 Skills You Need
These seven new skills are absolutely required for your success in an online store (unless you have lots of money for outsourcing the jobs). If you can’t afford a large negative cash flow at the start of your new business, then you have to take charge of many duties that every successful online business has to perform. That’s what this free report is all about!
Skill #1: HTML & Webpage Development
Don’t be frightened if you have never done this. As a matter of fact, let’s do a little aside right now. Here’s what I want you to do (step-by-step).
Step 1. On your computer open notepad (if you are on a windows machine) or any text editor. (Word puts extra coding into a page and is not suitable for this action)
Step 2. Type the following onto the page exactly as it appears here.
<HR>
<H1> My First Webpage!</H1>
<HR>Step 3. Click on “File”, then from the drop down menu “Save As”. Save the file wherever you want on your hard drive or desktop (just remember where it is) as “first.htm”. Make sure you change the “.txt” extension to “.htm”.
Step 4. Go wherever you stored the file and double click on the file name.
What you should see is your browser come up and show a page with a horizontal line at the top, followed by “My First Webpage!” in large text, then a horizontal line below the text. If you have never created a webpage before, you cannot say that any longer. You have just created your first webpage. Not difficult, is it?
“<HR>” and “<H1>” are called HTML tags. <HR> requests a horizontal rule across the page and <H1> asks that all the text that follows until you see the </H1> tag should be a header. A header is large bold text…as a matter of fact, H1 is the largest header text available.
Now this demonstration does not make you proficient at HTML coding, but hopefully you see how easy it can be to code in HTML and make your own webpages. This demo is important because you need to do so much work in-house. Webpage design is a critical skill for you to learn, unless you have the proverbial deep pockets.
You might be saying: “I know someone; a friend, who knows HTML and works on webpages all the time. Why don’t I just ask my friend to do my webpages for me? I’ll pay him, it’s not like he’s working for free.” You can get a friend who knows HTML to do your webpages for you, but there are several problems with that:
- Even if you pay them, they’re going to give you a special rate and other projects will, of necessity, be a higher priority for them.
- The optimization needed for your webpages to rank highly in the search engines is probably not their specialty. Even if it is, this requires continual tinkering and changing of the webpages, which means you will be calling on them all the time.
- If you push them too hard to keep to your schedule, your friendship will probably suffer.
Look at it from their perspective, they’re doing you a “favor.” Even if you are paying them, chances are they are either using a different rate, doing the job for a flat fee, or under-reporting their time spent on the job. Why? Because they are your friend, and that’s what friends do! And if you push them to meet your deadlines, or have to go to them time and again for changes-then the friendship may suffer.
If you hire a professional to do the design of your webpages, then you need to be prepared to dish out some bucks! If they know how to get your pages to rank highly in the search engines-many more bucks! After all that-what if they only think they know something about the search engine game? If you’re dishing out the big bucks, get a guaranteed minimum ranking before you buy…and oh, by the way, if you can get that guarantee from anyone, they will probably be willing to sell you a nice partial of land in Florida , as well! Buyer Beware!
So, unless you have deep, deep pockets, are willing to ruin a perfectly good friendship, or you’re just lazy, learn HTML coding. It is a skill you will use at your store every single day as you constantly tinker with your pages either to get them ready for ranking highly with the search engines, or as you boost your salesmanship and make your products jump off the page and into your customer’s hands!
Here’s what I recommend, and by that I mean, I use these items to constantly tweak my webpages:
Dreamweaver
– Use to be made by Macromedia. Macromedia has been bought out by Adobe, the Acrobat Reader ™ people. It’s a little pricey, and you can find other WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors cheaper. But this is a product you will use every single day in the online store business. Once I set this product up for my website, it has never failed to properly transfer files back and forth to and from the site. I am sold on the software’s reliability and usefulness. And I don’t know enough about other products of this type to offer a recommendation. I do know a reseller who offers Dreamweaver at an exceptional price, and I invite you to visit their store at:
Here are some HTML book resources that I used when getting started in HTML (Although, with Dreamweaver, you really don’t have to know that much HTML as it does the code for you.) I still use these books as resources when I’m trying to do something out of the ordinary on a page, or if I simply forget the HTML tag for a particular nuance on a page.
So skill #1, which is not real difficult-Learn HTML coding and develop your own webpages so that you can modify them at will, as the need arises. By the way, if you are running low on time and need to rush off-you can download this report at any time as an Acrobat PDF file. To get this free report, click on Home Business Online Opportunity free report.
You’ve got to be asking yourself at this point, “What is it I’m supposed to be selling?” Well, I can’t answer that question. Only you can answer that question. But I can give you some knowledge-and tools to use in finding what to sell on the internet, and how to set up the selling proposition….
Go to Home Business Online Opportunity Skill #2