How can I get my e-business really off the ground? Am I allowed to advertise places? Good Luck! I spent a lot of money and time I wish I could get back doing that. Jennifer Hi,
If you don't have much money for a web site it will be difficult to attact targeted traffic. Most people will fall prey to the many so-called "free" web sites and waste a lot of time on them and achieve little in the way of targeted traffic.
You see, there are thousands of web sites that purport to create a free Web site. What they don't tell you is how to attract targeted traffic via the search engines (Yahoo,Google,Msn, Ask). Web site creation is all you get. And you might be able to create 5 or 10 pages at most before they begin to nickel and dime you to death with add-ons that cost money and before you know it the "free" web site costs over $300 and more, assuming you don't drop out by this time because the Web site just doesn't work and you may have wasted a year on this fruitless effort.
Many people new to Web site creation believe that you just create a Web site and they will come. Like the baseball movie where the guy creates a baseball field in the middle of nowhere and soon thousands are flocking to the field.
This only happens in the movies, not in real life.
You must attract the search engines(SEs). The most cost effective way to do that is by creating lots of Web pages with quality, relevant content (information).
Potential visitors do not look for a web site per se. They are looking for inforrmation. They do not enter your Web site URL into a SE. They enter keywords or phrases into the SE and the SE reponds with millions of Web sites in many cases and then the surfer may make his keyword more relevant and try again. Most surfers only look at the first few pages even though there may be millions of hits on a particular keyword.
So the first thing you must do is to brainstorm you keywords - which keywords are relevant to the theme of your Web site.
But this is not enough. Remember the concept of supply and demand? What you should look for is keywords that have a huge demand and very little supply. One of the ways to do this without spending any money is to use Google's AdWord tool: (https://adwords.google.com/select/Keywor...
This tool is actually intended to help advertisers decide which keywords to buy. It provides Demand (they call it "Search Volume") and "Advertiser Competition" (another kind of Demand for your keywords!). This tool even provides the "monetary value" (optional) of your keywords (i.e., what advertisers can expect to pay).
So what do you (a publisher, not an advertiser) look for? Remember this for now...
* the more relevant keywords that are generated by this tool,
* the greater the Demand ("Search Volume") for the keywords,
* the greater the "Advertiser Competition", and
* the more the keywords cost advertisers...
... the better for you!
Just go through the tutorials that Google has to offer.
The other tool for keywords is Worktracker - it is not free, but is the best on the Web for analyzing keyword demand and supply: (http://www.wordtracker.com/index.html). Try their free trial. I entered "free keyword analysis" into Google and got 11 million hits so you know it's a hot topic.
Once you know what your keywords are, they form the basis of creating Web pages for your Web site. You sprinkle relevant keywords throughout your Web page. These will attract the SEs and if you have enough pages, you will rise up through the ranks and hopefully achieve a listing on the first page of the SEs.
The SEs use software called "spiders". The spiders job is to crawl the entire universe of Web sites and index them by keyword. The index is why they can return an answer so fast because there are now a billion Web sites or so and still growing fast.
You keep adding pages to your Web site - the more pages the better. That's why the phrase, "Content is King!" came about. The SEs love lots of high quality content.
That's also why most 5 - 10 page Web sites attract no targeted traffic. The SEs just ignore them.
However, all is not lost because once you get to about 30 pages, the SEs begin to take notice. When you reach 50 pages, you may see a page ranked number one in an SE, but don't stop there. Keep adding pages - just one a day would mount up to 365 in one year.
Now, where do you find software that can build your Web site. Here is one that is free and it's a lot like Microsoft's Front Page. These are sometimes called WYSIWYG editors, pronounced "wiseewhig" and means "What You See Is What You Get". The Web site for the free WYSIWYG is: (http://www.nvu.com/index.php). There are tutorial there. More tutorials can be found by entering "free nvu tutorials" in Google.
You may want to try GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program). This is a free graphics editor that rivals best of breed Adobe Photoshop. There are free tutorials for GIMP, too here: (http://www.designyourownweb.com/gimp-tut...
Once you have your Web site constructed on your PC or Mac, then you need to get a domain name. This will cost money, $10 to $300 per year depending on options. About the cheapest with the most options is GoDaddy. There are free hosting sites, but you have to put up with their advertising all over your pages. There is really no "free lunch"; there's always a catch.
Once you have your domain name and host, you upload your Web site to your hosting supplier and you are published on the web. As you create more pages, you continue to upload those pages to your host server.
That's what it takes to get published, but we are not done yet. We now have to get recognized by the SEs. If you have enough high quality content and are patient, eventually the SEs will discover you. Impatent people use something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Internet Marketing. Here is a new book that does just that: "Search Engine Optimization - An Hour A Day" by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin.
Then, there is Brad Tabke's "26 steps to 15K a day". It boils down to solid content thoughtfully put together can make more impact than a decade's worth of tweaks that may or may not work such as fiddling with META tags. Find his 26 steps here: (http://www.frihost.com/forums/vt-2797.ht... Brad also created and runs one of the best forums for Web site information at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/).
I would really be remiss if I did not mention how I created my Web sites. They were created with Site Build It! a Web site builder developed by Sitesell, Inc., a Canadian company that has been around since 1967 and has helped people world-wide to create theri own Web sites (over 20,000). It does all of the above utilizing 50 programs. No geeky knowledge required.
You may want to check it out, before going it alone.
Kindest Personal Regards,
Walt Brown
Site Build It Certified Webmaster
capecod1@capecod-beaches.com
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