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Building Your WebsiteEverybody seems to have a website business these days, from your grandmother selling off the family jewels on eBay to the neighbor kid who is earning a fortune with his video gaming site. It is getting easier every day to create an internet business and make money!
But, before you sink your savings into a online business venture, take time to research and learn the basics first. You can either design and build your own website, or hire someone to do it for your. There are some programs out there that make it pretty simple to build your own site. You don't have to be a computer guru. You will have to spend time to learn. There are some great web design companies out there, too. But carefully check their references and sample their work before you commit to anything. Whether you hire a designer or do-it-yourself, you will need to know some basics about internet marketing.
Usually, these free sites will have their advertisers banners, pop-up ads or other sponsorships or affiliates which pay the server commissions. There is nothing wrong with this and it will work fine for some people, but if you want to establish an online "brand" and create recognition, it is better to have your own domain name. The cost for domain names is very low now, usually under $10 per year. Content: Your site will do better if you have valuable content. The internet is the "Information" Superhighway, and those sites which provide information will do better in search engines than those which just list products for sale. Tell stories about your company, your products, your services. FYI: There are sources which will help you with writing content. The company I use for webhosting provided a great education for me, and content is the backbone of their system. Most of what I know about eCommerce, I learned from them.
Before I purchased their system, I did loads of research and this one worked best for me. I know people who
buy their domain and do their own programming and produce fine websites, but I needed (or wanted) the kind of guidance that SBI provided. It has worked for me. You can check it out (and even try it for free!) Just click on the link below
Search engines and directories (Yahoo, Google, MSN and others) are keyword driven programs. They search the internet and look for specific words, called keywords, to create the list of sites you get when you perform a search. The better your keywords, the better your site will perform in searches. For example, if you search for a very general term, you get dozens of pages listing websites related to that keyword. Most people never go beyond page 3 or 4 of the
search results, so the sites which come up higher on the list will get more hits. You can check for keyword demand on Overture.
Try the Overture keyword selector for yourself!
This will tell you how many times a particular keyword has been searched in the past month. When you build your site, or have it built, you will put keywords in your website's source code, and in your content.
For more info on Building Your Website, click here.
After you have built and optimized your site, there is still no guarantee that customers will bombard you and make you
rich. There are just no guarantees in business, and the internet is no exception. The better planned and executed businesses
have better odds, but there really are no sure bets! But, if you are confident that you have a great product or service, and
you have a great site, there are many ways you can promote it drive more traffic and make more money. Check out some of the other articles on this site about PPC (Pay-Per-Click), Goodle Adwords and Google Adsense, Yahoo ads, eBay stores, Yahoo stores, Affiliate programs, link exchanges, online classifieds, and more.
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