Step 1: Follow Your Passion

If you want a website to be successful, it’s VERY helpful if you’re interested in the niche your website will occupy. I know this sounds like common sense, but a lot of marketers – especially affiliate marketers – start websites that they clearly have no interest in simply to make a couple bucks on an affiliate offer. I’m not saying that this can’t be profitable, but in the long run this is not the best way to make real money online.

Visitors are getting more savvy every day. Most potential customers have a finely tuned BS detector, and if your site is poorly written, poorly researched, and unattractive, you’re not going to make nearly as much money as a site with quality content, good graphics, and good layout.

Besides, there’s no need to start a site on a topic that isn’t interesting to you. Simply write down a list of your hobbies, your interests, and your likes. Off the top of my head I like: food (cooking, recipes), electronics (computers, tvs), jogging (running clothes/gear, ipods), web design (software, webtools, etc…) and many more things. I can easily find dozens of niches that are interesting to me, and I’m sure with a little thought you can too.

This is important for many reasons, but the most notable are:

• You’ll create better content – because you care!
• You’ll spend more time working on your site – because you care!
• Better content + more time = better chance of success
• You’ll be coming from a place of integrity.
• Most importantly, you’ll be able to provide real value to your customers.

Step 2: Identify Your Customer

Who are you writing your website for? Be as specific as possible. If you’re creating a ‘Cooking for Singles’ site, you may be writing for 20 – 30 year old women who like to cook. A high-end model train website may be targeted toward 45 – 70 year old men that grew up with train sets and can afford nicer model trains today.

Identifying your customer will help you design a better website. The design/colors, the content, and even the monitization become easier when you can envision your typical customer.

A tool that is really useful for finding your demographic is Quantcast. Quantcast is free to sign up, and free to use. If you have a website you can use Quantcast to learn more about your current visitors, however if you don’t have a site yet, you can use Quantcast to learn more about the visitors to your competitors websites.

For example, if you’re starting a weight loss website, you may want to look at the traffic that’s going to Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers. Looking to sell electronics? Take a look at newegg or even gizmodo.

Quantcast is easy to use – simply type the name of the site you want more information about in the top search bar, and it will give you a full graph with monthly traffic, traffic location, and demographics.

Step 3: Decide on a Monetization Model

You may have already taken care of this in step 1 if your passion is to sell a product or service. If, on the other hand, your site is information or entertainment based, Step 3 is for you.

Many sites monetize with Google Adsense (text ads), and while there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that, it’s my experience that you can do much better – as in make more money – with affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is where you refer your visitors to products or offers, and in return you receive a commission when someone makes a purchase. I have several affiliate banners on this site – both in the header and in the sidebar. Most of the products I show on my site are there more because they’re useful than because they pay particularly well, but even still, the returns are much better than Adsense.

The vast majority of e-tailers have affiliate programs, and most are easy to sign up for. Amazon has one of the best known programs, but pretty much everyone has an affiliate program these days.

You can also go straight to affiliate networks to find affiliate offers. ClickBank is one of the more popular affiliate networks, but there are many more. You can offer everything from software, to diet programs, to dog training manuals on your site and get paid very decent commission every time someone clicks on a link (called a hoplink) from your site and places an order. Take a look at Clickbank’s Marketplace for inspiration.

Step 4: Keyword Research

This is a HUGE topic that I’m only going to go over briefly here. Keywords are the words or phrases that people type into search engines. Assuming that you’d like to get free traffic from the search engines (I’m sure you do), then finding target keywords are one of the most important things you can do. In an ideal world you’ll have keywords in mind before you register your domain and launch your website.

In this example, ‘rich kent’ is the keyword. Fortunately my site shows up first for my ‘target’ keyword. Of course my name isn’t a very powerful keyword. Only people who are already looking for me will find me. That may be fine for me, but what are the best keywords for you and how do you find them?

There are many keyword research tools, but the best place to start is with Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool also known as the external keyword tool. Simply type several keywords that are related to your business into the tool, and Google will do the rest.

In this example I’ve typed ‘dog training’ and ‘dog guides’ into the tool. As you can see, dog training has 2.24 million monthly searches. Obviously ranking for that keyword could be very profitable. Unfortunately, it will also take a lot of time and a lot of work.

You can figure out how much time and how much work by typing your preferred keyword term into Google. In the case of ‘Dog Training’ there are 56.7 Million results pages. With that many pages, you’ll have a hard time ranking. Shoot for terms that have less than a million results as they’re easier to rank for.

That being said, this is a HUGE simplification. I’ll go into greater detail in the future, but that should get you started. What you should look for when starting out is a keyword or keywords that you can integrate into your domain name. If you’ve already registered a domain, don’t worry, you can still rank for good keyword terms.

Step 5: Optimize Your Website

Google likes well-optimized websites that are full of helpful and unique content. In step 4 we identified keywords that we want to rank for. In Step 5 we integrate those keywords into our site.

In general, it’s best to target 1 keyword per page of your site. Sure it’s possible to get traffic from several different keywords to the same page, but it’s best to start out simple. Your home page is good for targeting your main keyword – Dog Training – But let’s say you also want to get traffic for people looking for “German Shepherd Dog Training”. It’s best to create a subpage that uses German Shepherd Dog Training as the keyword, in the url, and in the page content. Then you can create another subpage for “Jack Russell Terrier Training” and so on.

If you create enough pages targeting enough keywords and properly optimize those pages, you’ll be way ahead of the game when it comes time to start off-site SEO. This can be the difference between getting tons of free traffic, and having a website that gets NO traffic. I recommend using WordPress for your website as most of the onsite SEO is built right in. In another post I’ll show you how to optimize WordPress for SEO.

I hope you found this helpful and good luck with your online business!

Here it is: take consistent action.

I know, I know, not much of a secret, right? Even so, I can’t stress this enough. The #1 thing that kills a website or a web business is inactivity. If you don’t consistently work on your web business, it will wither and die.

So what can you do to make sure your business is alive and well? Here are 2 strategies for building traffic I recently discussed with a client:

Advertise on Craigslist

Craigslist – craigslist.org – is a giant community with tens of thousands of potential customers for your business. For some businesses craigslist isn’t an option, but for most of you it can be a great source of free traffic.

If you have a local business it’s best to post in just your local craigslist directory, but if your business is primarily online you can run ads on several different craigslist sites at once. You may need to create more than one email address to post on different sites, but you can easily setup gmail, yahoo, and other free webmail accounts for this purpose.

I would recommend running ads in 3-5 different cities a week. Anything more than that and you run the risk of getting flagged.

Other classified sites:

US Free Ads – www.usfreeads.com

Oodle Classifieds – www.oodle.com

Epage Classifieds – epage.com

Join a Web Forum

Web forums are a great place to build links to your site, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. Here’s the right way:

Find a forum that’s related to your business. The easiest way to do this is to google search for “Your Niche Forum”. So if you have a dog training business, search for “dog training forums”. If you sell model trains, search for model train forums, etc… I’ve yet to find a niche that didn’t have an active web forum associated with it.

Once you’ve signed up, resist the urge to post links to your site!!! It’s important to become a real member of the forum first. As the forum is related to your niche, you should have plenty of helpful information to contribute. Read posts and contribute information as you can. Post pictures, make friends, etc… See, sometimes marketing can be fun!

This shouldn’t be time consuming. Spend 10 – 15 minutes a couple of times a week and make a post or two.

After doing this for a couple of weeks, the forum should be comfortable enough with you that you can put a link in your signature without any problems. Your goal is to integrate your keywords into your signature in a non-obnoxious way. For example, if you have a dog training site and your keyword is ‘German Shepherd training’, then you’d want to put something like this in your signature – ‘Hi, my name is Amy and I run a german shepherd training website’ with your keyword linked.

I wouldn’t make it any more sales oriented than that. You may get clicks from the forum, but your goal is to show up for your keyword in Google, and linking your keyword in your signature will build a new link every time you post.

The other benefit to joining web forums is it gives you ideas for your site. You get to interact with your customers and hear questions and concerns in a non-commercial light.

Keys for Success

The key to making either of these strategies work is consistent action. Post 3-5 links in Craigslist every week. Make 5-10 posts in a forum ever week. Pick a day or pick a time and do it consistently! Remember – websites are like plants. They require water, fertilizer, sun, and attention to grow. If you take consistent action your site will grow into a big beautiful tree complete with massive roots deeply entrenched in the search engines, but until then take action!

I’ve worked in advertising long enough now that I pay attention to (and judge) ads by default. I was looking through a portfolio today and while many of the ads I saw were good, I came across many that could use work including this one:

The ad asks us a question -- Intel or AMD, then gives us some specs, a price and a website -- ZipServers. Here’s what they don’t do -- they don’t tell us clearly what they’re advertising and they don’t tell us what we should do now that we’ve noticed their ad. There’s really no reason to click on this banner.

A lot of designers get so caught up in the form of the banner -- how does it look, Is it attractive, Do the colors match, etc… That they forget about the function. Banner ads are designed to do one thing and one thing only -- generate a click. Keeping that in mind, the banner should be designed to get the attention of a prospective customers and get them interested enough in our product or service that they CLICK on the banner. Use a soft presell, tell them what you’re offering, and then tell them what action you want them to take.

Here’s another banner from the same portfolio that is much better:

Not only does it look good, but it tells us who they are -- Globat, it gives us their mission statement/unique selling proposition -- web hosting made easy, It tells us their pricing, and it uses a button design telling us to ‘sign up now’. It even throws in some freebies -- free domain and free setup. If I were in the market for web hosting I would definitely give them a look.

TV commercials are the most negligent form of advertising when it comes to calls to action. TV advertisers say that their ads aren’t working because of Tivo. I say their ads aren’t working because they’re trying to be so clever, unique, and funny that they leave out the call to action. This commercials is a great example:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyMSSe7cOvA

I dig the commercial. I can relate to the protagonist. But how about if he opened up and said “dude, try a bud light” to the guy at the end. Otherwise it’s just funny. Now I know what you’re thinking -- anyone who watches that commercial knows that it’s a commercial for Bud Light. Of course, but don’t discount the power of suggestion. The commercial is funny, but it doesn’t make me want to buy the product. The last time I bought beer I didn’t think -- hey, I should try Bud Light, it’s been a while. Nope, nothing.

In closing, if you want to make sales, don’t be afraid to ask for the sale. Potential customers have so many distractions (both online and off) that if you’re lucky enough to catch their attention for 10 seconds you can’t afford not to ask them to take action. Integrate a call to action in all of your marketing material and you will see an improvement in your sales results!