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Hi my name is Maleah and I own the Coffee Fair site. I love
adding new coffee recipes to my site and I'm happy to share
them with everyone. |
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Coffee
Fair - Delicious hot,
cold and iced coffee recipes (secret family recipes) plus all
kinds of fun coffee related stuff. |
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Coffee Fair also
has a listing of websites that give away free coffee samples,
it has a section about coffee myths, some coffee humor I
collected over time, and some of my favorite coffee related
video's too. Almost forgot I have a coffee e-book (free) there
for you too! |
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Something I've
been told by family is that my "find the man in the coffee
beans" photo on my home page is somewhat distracting, but
I like it too much so as the webmaster I've decided it'll
stay! I saw it while surfing for coffee graphics one day.
Well, I could NOT find the guy in the beans so I decided
to put it on my home page to see if anyone else had better
luck them me and it's been there ever since. |
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How did you get
involved in your particular "niche" for your chosen online
business. |
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It started with
some coffee recipes I collected over a few years. My
family has been coffee fans for as long as I remember and
I'm sure they put coffee in my bottle though it hasn't
been confirmed yet or nobody in my family will admit it.
Anyways, so I went to Godaddy and located a domain name I
liked - Coffee Fair. You know a fair is fun place and it
had to do with coffee! I collected all the family recipes
and put them on a single page to start and then added
pages as time went on. Eventually I began learning about
SEO, Google ads, affiliate programs and the like.
When I received my first Google deposit I thought it
was great, then when I started to receive my affiliate
commission checks I knew it was no longer just for the
family and that I had a real online business! |
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What is your
favorite part or what do you like best about running your
own online business? |
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My favorite
part is that I control when and where I want to work on my
site. If I've had a tough day at my job I can come home,
relax and not even think about turning on my computer. If
I do decide to check links, update pages or spruce up my
site a bit I grab my laptop, sit out on the lanai and then
get to being creative. So I like the flexibility the best,
it's not the type of business where I have do certain
things at certain times, besides most of the time I don't
even think about it as a business, more like my hobby that
pays me which is nice. |
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What is your
biggest challenge as a webmaster & site owner and how do
you overcome it? |
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At the
beginning it was just learning how to make the actual
pages and setting up the navigation so my visitors
wouldn't get turned off. Later after I added Google and
received my first payment I scrambled to learn about how
to generate more visitors and get listed higher in the
search engines. I spent many an hour in the early days
learning about search engines, content, key words and all
that stuff but it paid off in the end with better search
listings and more traffic. Though just getting beyond my
one page of recipes was a challenge, the biggest has been
in generating good traffic, so I expanded into link
trades, traffic programs and other things but haven't
gotten around to article writing or getting more involved
in the social network type of marketing, yet anyways. |
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If you had to
do it all over again, what is the one thing you would
change if you could? |
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I would have
done more research into how to build a website correctly
the first time around. The version I have now is actually
my third version. I started with my single page of
recipes, then bought a template package that looked great
but was way to advanced for the software I had at the time
(it required flash software) so I did what I could with it
for months before finally tossing it all away and starting
over again from scratch. The site I have now is actually
just a basic kind of site where I placed graphics, colors and other things in it to
make it look the same throughout the site. So it was free
and I just learned as I went along, experimented, and
tried new things. |
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What would you
tell a person reading this about starting their own online business? |
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Find something
you're passionate about is the most important thing
because without that you'll lose interest fast. I say don't
just go into it thinking you're going to start a business
online and then make a bunch of money and then be able to
walk away from your real job. If you think of it as a
hobby or as something you're interested in like how coffee
is to me, then what you're doing is "fun" and the money
follows naturally. Like I said earlier, I can do what I
want to with my website when I want to, and the extra
money is nice but it was never the reason for my site. So
I'd close by saying do your site or blog about what you're
interested in first, then worry about affiliate links,
Google or anything else sometime later. |
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 We
hope you gained some insight into what it's like to run
your own online business. We appreciate the time Maleah took
for our Success Story interview and have asked her to
provide some great links for you - be sure to check them
out today! David &
Margie |
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Interviews with
people earning from their websites
