How to Build a House – Getting Started
February 14, 2012 § Leave a comment
Building your own home can be a very exciting prospective. If you’ve never built your own home then there are lots of things you need to take into consideration before you start.
Like anything in life, planning and preparation are the key. I’ve built my own home and I have a clear understanding of what it takes and how essential careful planning is. While building your own home can be cheaper than buying one and while you may be able to build a home exactly to your living requirements there are pitfalls.
Ask anyone who has built their own home and you will get a mixture of perspectives. Some will say that’s it’s exciting and rewarding. Others will tell you it’s the most stressful thing they have ever undertaken and would never do it again. Others will say they can’t wait to build another, but generally you will find that the comments are a mixture of all these. Yes, building your home is exciting, it is stressful in some parts, and it is rewarding.
Before you set out on your quest to build your ultimate dream home you will have to be realistic. It is very easy to get carried away in what you want to build. If you have a family then you must sit them down and chat to them about your dream of building a home. They may not show the same enthusiasm and unless everyone is on-board with your plans then you could end up putting an enormous amount of strain on the family life.
Besides all your dreams do you know how much money you have available to build a home? Do you plan to sell you existing home to raise the funds – if so, where are you and your family going to live while the house is being build.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to building a home. There are so many considerations to be made, but if you are like me and really want to build then take a look at the guide below:
When it’s all said and done I can testify that the emotions and financial strain can be difficult to cope with. Generally it’s not all plain sailing and you will find a number of issues to deal with along the build. The key is to be able to step back and look at any problems in a logical way. What may seem like a complete disaster one minute can easily work itself out the next. If this is your first time then I would highly recommend that you employ the services of a site Project Manager. I was advised to do this on my first build and I took that advice – oh so glad I did and for two reasons. The first is that the Project Manager takes so much of the hassle out of the build for you. He or she is the one that will sort out tradesman and materials. The second reason is that I gained a vast amount of knowledge. I made sure I was on-site every day to discuss things and watch how it all came together. I am planning, in the future to build another home and this time, providing I can get sufficient time of work, I’ll either project manage the build completely or co-project manage it… that is employ a part-time project manager or consult heavily with my architect.
I hope the guide provides you with an insight as to what you’ll need to consider when building your new home.
DIY – How to Make a Coat Hook Rack
February 13, 2012 § Leave a comment
A cloakroom is a great place to store your Coats, Hats, Scarves and Shoes, but if it’s not properly organized it can look a real mess.
Take a look around any DIY or Home Improvement store and you’ll see a range of Coat Hook Racks for sale. While there might be a wide choice these don’t always meet you r exact requirements, for example they are too big or too small. The answer to this dilemma is to make one yourself.
All you need is a length of timber and the number of hooks you actually want, which all can be easily purchased from your local DIY store.
You’ll be pleased to know that is this one of those DIY projects that is so easy to do and as usual Hometipster.com has just the project guide you need to complete the job. Not only that we also have a guide on fixing it to the wall.
So, get your toolbox and measuring tape out, it’s time to make your own custom make coat hook rack and fit it.
1. How to Make a Coat Hook Rack
2. How to Put up a Coat Hook Rack
Hope you find these project guides useful!
Getting MORE Visitors to Your Website – Part 3
February 12, 2012 § Leave a comment
In Part 1 and Part 2 we showed you ways in which to boost traffic, by Posting Tips and Answering Questions on Hometipster.com. In this final installment we’ll show you how you can add some real juice to SERP and drive even more Direct Traffic to YOUR web site and or blog.
Sometimes, especially for us small businesses, it seems like a never ending battle to get Google to rank us high enough so that we do get sufficient traffic that produces enough income to put bread on the table. Many people think that Hometipster.com is some well funded, large corporations. That’s not true. In fact we don’t even qualify as a medium size business. We are in fact one of the millions of small business on the web trying to make a name for ourselves. How small is Hometipster.com? Just two people. I take care of all the content, design, blogging, marketing and everything else to get people to visit Hometipster.com, while Andrew, takes care of all the clever CSS /ASP.NET coding that makes the site run.
Just because we are small doesn’t mean we are not successful. We’ve come a long way since Jan 2011 when we launched Hometipster.com and our site traffic continues to rise. I’m not going to say I have a magical solution, far from it. What I do have is a passion for what I do and I work 14 hours a day, every day.
So how does Hometipster.com get traffic? For a start we work hard on SEO, but we believe SEO is not the be-all and end-all to getting visitors. Our primary goal is producing excellent content that our visitors will find useful and therefore return for more. SEO can become quiet natural and as Google further extends and tweaks it’s algorithms it’s getting hard to manipulate, using White Hat techniques, rankings. As Google stated, concentrate on great quality and unique content and Google will recognize it and reward you for it in terms of higher rankings.
If you look closely at Hometipster.com you will see that it is very much a social web site. We allow anyone to Post Tips, Post Comments and become part of our growing Questions & Answers Community. All of these are capable of creating one-way back-links and driving traffic to the posters site directly.
Our third and final offering is ‘Writing Guides‘. We encourage anyone with knowledge of DIY (Home Improvement) and Gardening to write and submit a guide. We do have strict guidelines for submission and this is to protect the integrity of Hometipster.com, our visitors and those who have already submitted guides.
Writing a guide is a great way to let people know what you know. It adds confidence in what you do and produces far greater levels of traffic than any Banner Ad could ever hope to achieve.
With each guide that is submitted we allow a single web link. This provides you with a one-way back-link and an additional tool to drive traffic to your website. The best thing… it’s permanent! Once your guide is accepted and published it stays there, so you are able to continuously get traffic from the effort you put in. Here’s an example of a recent submission – this will give you an idea as to the layout and where the web / blog link is situated. How to Install Window Shutters
We certainly appreciate that writing a guide is hard work but once the guide is online, your work is done and then we take over promoting that guide. We want loads of people to read it and we want loads of people to visit YOUR web site and or blog from it. We promote the guide through the prime social networks, we also promote them within the guide pages on Hometipster.com, through Tags and our More How To Guides.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again… The web is an information platform and it was designed originally to share information between people. By writing a guide you are sharing what you know and this in turn benefits you by increasing the visitor flow to your website and or blog. If you truly want your own website and or blog to be successful then learn to share, learn to dedicate your time and effort that helps others in their pursuit of knowledge. A little love goes a very long way.
So there you have it. At Hometipster.com you really can create one-way back-links and drive traffic directly to YOUR website and or blog by:
1. Posting Helpful Tips
2. Being a community member in our Questions and Answers boards
3. Writing DIY and or Gardening Guide
Each of the above takes effort on your part but unless you win the lottery then to make it in this world, and on the world wide web, then you’ll have to put in the effort to be successful.
Finally, Hometipster.com is always open to suggestions, questions and comments. If you have any then please use our Feedback form. My name is Graham Briar, you can direct your questions or suggestions directly to me.
I hope what we offer at Hometipster.com helps you to get more visitors to your website and I sincerely hope that your efforts are rewarded by success!
Regards
Graham Briar
Founder
Getting MORE Visitors to Your Website – Part 2
February 11, 2012 § Leave a comment
In Part 1 of Getting MORE Visitors to Your Website we showed you how you can get a one-way back-link from Hometipster.com and also drive direct traffic from that link by Posting Tips on our Guide pages.
Today we going to show you another way you can drive more traffic to your website or blog and also create additional one-way back-links…
During the redesign, from all the feedback we received, one of the things many of our visitors wanted to see was a way for them to post questions and get answer answers for their DIY and Gardening issues. This, we felt, would be a great edition to Hometipster.com and so we now have a fully functional DIY & Gardening Answers system.
This Answer system certainly helps our visitors to ask questions and get answers, but how does it help YOU to drive traffic to your website or blog and how does it help YOU to get a one-way back-link?
The answers system has been set up to benefit everyone. Let’s take an example. Mr. A has a question “Is it a good idea to paint walls, in one room, a different colour?” Now let’s say that you can answer this question and in fact you have a guide on your website and or blog showing Mr. A how to do this. This is how you could answer that question…
“Yes, it is a good idea, but you need to make sure it’s done properly so that the colours do not clash. It’s best if you use one base colour and then lighter versions of it. To help you out, here’s a guide that we have – How to Paint Walls Different Colours. I hope this helps.”
Now you can see by the above example that you have:
1. Created a link that can drive traffic to your website. Note that other people using Hometipster Answers can also see this question and answer, so the traffic you get can grow. The question and answer also stays on the system so that you can continuously get traffic from that link.
2. The link also provides you with a one-way back-link
That’s how easy it is to drive more traffic to your website and create a one-way back-link with Hometipster.com
You might be asking yourself WHY does Hometipster.com provide so many ways for other web owners to get traffic and back-link, without asking for anything in return. The answer is twofold…
1. We benefit from it by getting useful content on the site. Both ‘Posting Tips’ and ‘DIY & Gardening Answers’ adds more useful content which helps our Search Engine Rankings.
2. This is what the Web is about isn’t it? Sharing stuff and helping one another to get more recognition and more traffic. It’s just about spreading the word – the web is after all supposed to be a community and if you don’t interact with that community how is your website ever going to be successful?
A final note on Answering Questions… It’s a fact that people are more likely to visit a site where help has been provided. People also like to see that you know what you are talking about and your expertise can create trust and reliability which further increases your chance of making money from your website due to the visitors interaction with your web pages.
OK, off you go now… take a look at Hometipster.com DIY & Gardening Answers and see if you can answer any of the questions – get yourself those one-way back-links and start driving more traffic to your site.
Can you PLEASE SHARE THIS… let others know and hopefully they can benefit from ‘Posting Tips’ and ‘Answering Questions’.
Thanks folks… hope your website is successful as mine!
Getting MORE Visitors to Your Website – Part 1
February 10, 2012 § Leave a comment
There are tons of websites out there showing you a multitude of ways to drive traffic to your website and or blog. We all know that to ramp up site visitors takes work and there is simply no getting around this. There are no magic solutions or fast-track ways to increase your Search Engine Rankings, it takes time and dedication.
Think about why you blog for a moment. That’s right, you want people to read what you write and spread the word, so that other people will read what you write. It’s all about getting more people to view your website and or blog.
If you are a regular visitor to Hometipster.com then you would have noticed that our website has been given a complete overhaul. One area that we did pay attention to was the ‘Comments’. Yes, nearly all websites have a Comments Board and Hometipster.com also provides a way for people to leave their comments. However, we wanted to take the concept one step furthers, so we introduced POST TIPS.
Post Tips
A tip is generally more helpful by it’s very suggestion and that’s exactly what we are achieving. Anyone can post a tip on any of the hundreds of DIY and Gardening guides we have. These tips provide additional information for our readers and they allow those posting tips to get a useful back-link, plus a direct way to drive traffic to their own website via a live link.
—Example— Posted on How to Choose a Bricklaying Trowel
If this is your first trowel then it best if you go for a cheap one first. If you like it then spend the money on a really good quality brick trowel of the same type, weight and shape.
i-brick.com
As you can see, from the example above, the tip is very useful and it probably took less than 2 minutes to write and submit. In return i-brick.com now has a Back-Link and a live URL so that our visitors can visit their website.
A note to all our Subscribers…
We all need a little more traffic to our websites in order to make them a success. The Post Tips helps you to get a useful Back-Link, Direct Traffic and a way for Hometipster.com to provide even more useful information to our visitors.
Please pass this on to other webmasters / site owners you know – it could help them to generate a little more traffic.
Rate this:
Share this:
Like this: