I WANT TO WORK FROM HOME!!!
(A deviation from my blog on true crime!)
I've been telling myself this for 20 years! So, what has been stopping me? Well, 20 years ago I become a web designer when the internet first became available and every website was made with simple html, which was incredibly ugly!
As the years went by I tested all the new web portal providers that came along such as Geocities, MSN, Lycos, Excite, Wix, FrontPage, Wordpress, Joomla and of course Blogger!
My day job, by the way, was Instructor for CompUSA. I taught everything from Microsoft's HTML Certification Prep to Microsoft Office.
Outside of work I bounced back and forth working on my two websites, one built in FrontPage and the other in Blogger. FrontPage was eventually discontinued and that left me with Blogger.
I love Blogger but alas, it attracts very little traffic on its own since there is absolutely no where to customize meta tags and descriptions. I am dismayed every time I display my small list of articles to see that I have barely more than 50 page views in the YEARS that I have had the blog going. That led me to experiment with content management systems, aka CMS.
The first time I put up a Joomla site on Host Gator (don't do it! Siteground offers a much better suite of services) I started getting traffic from day one. I determined this using my web host's built in free traffic analytics. I also used Wordpress but it was very restrictive, prevented me from having any other CMS on my web host and required too much coding. Backing up was also inconvenient.
So, long story short, what took me so long to start a nich site is that I couldn't make my mind up between WordPress and Joomla. After all the fiddling around, I have decided to start my niche site building career as an Amazon Associate with Joomla and NOT Wordpress (Gasp!) because of one simple matter - it allows me to have one website that acts like many. For instance, I can blog on 10 different topics (arranged into categories) with each category having it's own style or template. This allows me to login in one time and have access to all of my niche sites. Each category has its own look and its own menu system so that visitors have no clue that I have other topics on the same site.
I can have multiple domain names pointed at each category because Joomla uses Search Engine Friendly URLS, which means I can customize the page names. I can point MyJetSkis.com at MyWebsite/jetskis.html.
To successfully set up a Joomla site like this, the templates should all have the same positions and should be from the same company. In other words, one template with 10 different customizations.
The best tutorial I have found to date is from OSTraining at https://www.ostraining.com/blog/joomla/different-templates-different-pages/
So what if I have 200 categories? I'd be stretching myself thin with that and besides, I'd run out of nodes on my web host. Nodes are an indicator of how many files one has on an account. This can be viewed from the web host's control panel.
If this happens, it's time to call your web host for an upgrade.
Well, I'm off begin installing my new Joomla site on SiteGround so that I can apply for an Amazon Associate Account. That's right, you heard it, Amazon won't even consider you until you have a fully developed site with traffic coming to it, so get moving!
If I'm successful, you won't see me back here on Blogger. Sorry Blogger! I will be off sailing around the world as I blog from my laptop and upload links from random port cities.
Adios Amigos!
