1. Choose a domain name.

Your domain name may feel like one of the easiest steps in creating a website, and it’s true. Choosing a domain name is as simple as seeing if your choice is available and purchasing it. That being said, you may want to put a bit of thought into your domain name before you purchase it. It is after all how people are going to find you, refer to you, think of you, and brand you. In short, your domain name can help build your company and brand or it can inhibit your company’s growth.

So a logical question might be, how do you choose a domain name that will help your company? The answer is to make your name easy to spell, easy to remember, unique if possible, and to do your absolute best to try to get your keywords in it. Once you have a domain name choice, your next step is to register it. If it isn’t available you can offer to purchase the domain name from the person who owns it or come up with a viable alternative.

2. Choose a web host.

This is important because you want to choose a host that will have very little downtime, that will have competitive rates, that is easy for you to use and that will be available to answer questions when you have them. Another thing to look at are the features the web host offers. Some hosts offer all sorts of ecommerce features including shopping carts, forms, Ezine management and design, autoresponders, digital product delivery and more.

Consider the needs of your website before you sign up with a host. For example, if you plan on having a forum on your website and your host doesn’t offer forum building and management features, you will have to find a way to integrate forum software into your existing program. It can be done but it is an extra step. Additionally, if you want to blog, it might be useful to find a host that already integrates blogging features into your website.

Price is obviously a concern for many starting businesses, however hosting isn’t generally very expensive and there are free hosting options now with Google and other open source hosting services. They may not have the features you’re looking for, however they are cost effective.

3. Navigation structure.

Before you begin creating your website, it is a good idea to grab a pencil and paper and flowchart your website. What is your navigational structure going to be? What pages will you have? How will your internal linking structure look? A general rule of thumb is to never have any page more than three clicks away – it is cleverly called the three click rule. Once you have a navigation structure worked out on paper, then it is time to begin looking at the design of your website.

4. Design.

There are a number of factors that go into a successful website. They include:

• Logo. Logos are an excellent tool to brand your image. It may be worth the time and money to hire a professional to create a logo that you can take with you on every piece of marketing material you have.

• Colors. The colors of your website will want to reflect the tone of your business. For example if you have a website related to nature, food, gardening, or health then the colors you might choose will be greens and colors that represent freshness. Conversely if you sell products that are of a more adult nature, then maybe you want to use saucy reds and blacks. Consultants and professionals tend to stick with cool colors.

• USP. aka Unique Selling Proposition. What is unique about your business? A unique selling proposition will tell others what is unique about your company while at the same time promising a benefit. For example, the famous M&Ms USP, “melts in your mouth not in your hands.” Spend some time brainstorming USP ideas. Test a few if you’re uncertain.

• Type of website home page. There are three basic types of home pages. Splash style pages, ad pages, and tabloid style pages. The differences are as follows. Splash type web pages generally have a large graphic and an invitation to enter. A ad page will generally have a sales type headline, a lead in section of copy, and a navigation bar with the major buttons. A tabloid style page has multiple headings and multiple text blocks. To determine what type of style would work best for your site consider your audience, examine your competition, and consider the purpose of your site.

• There are a few important factors to keep in mind when designing your website. Your website must be appealing and easy to use. A website must be easy to read, which means no flashing graphics or pictured backgrounds. Make it easy for people to read your website by using standard Ariel or Verdana font in black. Consider placing a form on your website to make it easy for customers to contact you. keywords

5. Optimization.

Keyword research is important to your search engine ranking. The higher your ranking, the more visibility. Search engine optimization for your web pages is a three point process. Incoming links help your ranking, keyword optimized content improves your rankings, and optimized pages. To optimize your web-pages take the time to find keywords that will generate the most demand and have the least competition. Include your keywords in your title tag, your domain name if possible, your headings, subheadings, and in your first paragraph. Also consider optimizing each page for a different, but similar keyword.

Your next steps, once your website is up and running is to market and promote your site. There are a variety of tools to use to get started including content, advertising, email marketing, networking, and promotions.

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Article Source: http://www.thecontentcorner.com

You’re spending a lot of money, time and efforts, struggling like mad to market your business, website, blogs using the most powerful Internet marketing strategies, hoping to make your business a success to earn you a comfortable living. Most probably, you have been one of the hard starters, extremely busy writing ad copies, articles, press releases, sending them to media outlets and popular publications, striving night and day to promote your business using the most powerful Internet marketing strategies. Basically because affiliate marketing is the laziest and possibly the best way to earn profits online, unless otherwise you are a businessman and would rather sell your own products online than advertise other entrepreneur’s products on your site. Although affiliate marketing is promoted as one of the easiest and most successful ways to earn money online, it’s not as easy as it sounds. For more details go to www.reprintarticlesite.com .The most important affiliate marketing secret to bear in mind is the reason why affiliate marketing remains the most effective way of marketing any online business.
Writing your own articles and publishing them can be free as opposed to paying for Pay Per Click Advertising and the more articles you write the more well known you will be and the more targeted website traffic you will get. Each article you have published is great advertising for your website as at the end of your article you will have printed an ‘about the author’ section (also called bylines), this advertises you and your website and builds free traffic to your site and trustworthiness for you if your articles are of good quality.
You’ve probably heard by now that article marketing can assist you build links back to your site. Many people do not know it but a free marketing article can be much more commanding than a mini site and can also do a lot more to drive targeted traffic to a targeted site. There’s no question, the three most popular ways to drive targeted traffic to your website are pay per click advertising, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and article marketing.
But by themselves they don’t put money in your pocket – there are a myriad of factors that can turn your article marketing efforts into an opportunity to increase your income, not just the number of visitors to your site. Keep in mind that Article Marketing is not an ad, so you can not just start writing about how great your product or service is but rather supply helpful informative content for people. You don’t even really need to know much about the subject you are writing the article about since there are resources available that you can use to provide a baseline that would have enough information in it to get your article started. For more details go to www.myarticle-submitter.com .It is impossible to guess which sites will pick your article up, but it can be very exhilarating to find that an article that you created has been printed by a site with Page Rank of 4, 5 or maybe better. Investigate and build a list of all the free article directories you can find so that you can simply submit your articles to the sites on your list when you’ve finished writing. Based on my experience both as an author and a creator of niche focused content sites, think very carefully before jumping on the wagon of the fanciest style in article publishing.

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Article Source: http://www.thecontentcorner.com

These days it seems everyone has a spot on the web. By that, I don?t mean just using an online computer but putting your content on the net either with your own personal website or a business website or maybe you just contribute to social networking. Read the rest of this entry

Marketing a website is pretty important for its success. A successful marketing campaign guarantees valuable increase in the amount of traffic to the site. Read the rest of this entry