A portal site is a website designed to advertise local businesses on the internet. Basically, the owner of the site will get advertisers to pay them x amount a month or a year to list the advertisers business on the site.
Portal sites are a great way of making money and given a bit of work, and talking to the right people (local business owners) you can have a very popular local portal site making you money and providing referrals to local businesses. And best of all, you can generate a recurring income from portal sites.
There are systems available where you pay someone else to provide the portal for you. You then get business owners to advertise on your portal and charge them more so that you make a profit from the system.
The problem with this business model is that you have to pay someone else from your earnings, from your hard work in getting the advertisers.
You’re effectively paying someone else for doing not a lot, on their part. You can easily setup your own Portal site and keep 100% of profits for yourself.
In this book, I am going to show you that you do not need to pay someone else to have your own portal site built.
I will show you that you need no technical know how to set up your own portal and that you can set up a portal site using Free software, so the only upfront cost to you is a domain name and a hosting account.
And all this is so that you will keep 100% of all money you generate, rather than having to pay someone else for your efforts.
This is a step-by-step guide, I will show you every step you need to take to set up a portal site and, believe or not, you’re not going write a single line of code, not even a humble HTML tag!
Follow these instructions carefully, and you can have your own portal site up and running in just a few hours.
Side note: Please do not skip any of the steps I outline, I know you are eager to get your site up and running, but missing out a step in the setup will give you problems later on.
Side note: This manual was originally written for Joomla 1.0.13. Since then, Joomla 1.5 was released. I did not update this manual for Joomla 1.5 immediately because, as with all new software, I decided to let them iron out any bugs before updating this manual.
More than a year has now passed and most of the initial bugs in Joomla 1.5 have been rectified, so I have now updated this manual so that you can use the latest version of Joomla.
What this manual isn't
This manual is not a marketing manual. I have deliberately kept Marketing out of it, because Marketing a website like this is a huge subject by itself.
But to help you with Marketing, please check out the resource section at the end of this manual.
Also, this is not an administrators guide to Joomla. Again, that is a huge subject in itself, and there are some great resources available, and for this Google is your friend. But we’re jumping ahead of ourselves here.
Let’s get started building your website.
