CQU flex mode student Tanya Puntii and her partner John have established a thriving Internet-based business from their home office in Mackay.

The Bachelor of Information Technology student recently revealed to Dr Ashley Holmes, developer of a new course in the Bachelor of Digital Innovation program at CQU called Innovations in Interactivity and Social Networks, some insights into how online networking has laid the basis for financial success.

Tanya Puntii and her partner John

Tanya's hypergurl.com site was first created in August 2000.

"At that time, I was trying to learn how to make a website and found there was a need for information that wasn't full of technical jargon," Ms Puntii says.

"Several years ago website designers didn't readily share their trade secrets as they do today. Frustrated with this, I decided to create a website telling others what I was learning, as I was learning it myself.

"One of our first articles was a basic HTML tutorial telling others how to make a website and how to publish it on the Internet. It wasn't long before our email box was full of letters from grateful visitors, relieved to have found design articles that were easy to understand."

Ms Puntii believes that her success has been driven by the ability to utilise web-based tools that are readily available.

Hypergurl.com has since grown to include hundreds of other tutorials and website tools, accommodating over 12,000 unique visitors a day.

"These consist of original articles written by ourselves and those offered by other designers for a link back to their website in return. It is run by a husband and wife team from a home office with 2 networked computers. A handy six-figure yearly income is made without spending a cent on advertising.

"Instead, most of the promotion of hypergurl has been a result of our online networking efforts. For example when we first started out 7 years ago 20 percent of our time was spent on building the website, while the other 80 percent was spent self-promoting on message forums such as yahoo and about.com.

"When I say self-promoting, I'm not referring to going and blatantly saying 'come to my site'. Rather we earnestly participated in the communities we joined, helping to answer questions other members had about building websites, then leaving our URL under our signature.

"Message forums are still a tool we use today. We also find them useful to see what questions people are asking each other and what information is being searched. I believe for a website to be successful it has to fill a need.

"Guestbooks, webrings and website awards were all the rage back then so we did our fair share of leaving comments and awards. This worked quite well at that time.

"However, in this business you need to be flexible enough to change as technology and trends do.

"For example, a few years back we had a successful email/newsletter list that was built up over time. With spamming becoming worse, we found our newsletter members were installing software that wasn't always kind to email lists. This resulted in many newsletters being lost and unopened, which meant our repeating visitor numbers were also dropping. Therefore, we choose to stop the newsletter program and replace it with RSS feeds. RSS feeds are now a built-in addition to all the main browsers and are quickly gaining popularity.

"Other types of technology used include a blog ...  and guest posting, so our visitors will eventually help build the website and feel part of the community.

"We've also utilised popular social networks such as flickr.com, myspace.com and digg.com. For instance, we offer a popular layout generator for MySpace members. Every time someone implements the resulting code to their MySpace profile, it also includes a link back to hypergurl.com.

"Another example is when digg (www.digg.com) first became popular. I saw that it wasn't an easy task for people to add digg buttons to their web pages. So I made a digg button generator coded in javascript and gave it away for free from our site. With not many available it wasn't too hard to get on the search engines in 3rd place. From there 'The Javascript Source' noticed it and added it to their site along with a link back to hypergurl. Bingo! a link back from a popular high traffic website.

"It's been our experience that the higher the quality (and quantity) of links back to your website, the higher search engines list you. By quality, I am referring to relevant websites that have similar content to your own. If you had a website that was about gaming and you had a link back from an automobile site, it would be considered low quality.  

"In addition to hypergurl, we also have a travel website called tourbookings.com.au that we advertise for free through YouTube and Google video. People can view our collection of videos and then click through to the corresponding websites from there.

"We also have a mention of our URL in each video. Those with similar websites can copy and paste our HTML code to their own sites. This displays our video on their website, which in turn promotes our travel site to their visitors. Furthermore videos can be downloaded in IPod or Sony PSP formats. We have plans to do this with hypergurl tutorials as well to further increase our visitor numbers from the ever growing popularity of online videos. We have an American version of the tourbookings site too (usatourbookings.com).

"As you can see, sometimes it's a matter of going to where the people are and building up a social network from there. This is something we've always done in the past and it still works today. Back in 2001 I created an ebook called, 'How to make a website from scratch'.

"It is a very basic ebook aimed at beginners that people can share with their friends and contacts. Our statistics show us that we still receive on average 700 visitors per week from the links found in that ebook alone.

"Visitors who found their way to our website now play a huge part in promoting hypergurl. We often find them mentioning our site on their websites, message forums and blogs."