Website Design

There are a lot of misconceptions going on about how to start making money with a new or even an old site. I’ll pretend like we’re talking about a new site but the idea would be the same if it was an old site. Let’s pretend that we have a quality design, a good product and everything online is 100% ready to go. Now we need the traffic.

Let’s pretend that we are selling car parts and I have all my car parts in stock and ready to go. I have a 68 ford mustang left hand door skin, if I rank this part for the keyword car, then I’ll get people looking for new cars, car pictures, car dealers, used cars and the list goes on and on. That would be a waste of bandwidth, time and energy for me; I will not sell this part to someone looking for a new car or someone that does not even own a Mustang.

A little common sense tells me that I need to sell this to someone who is looking for a 68 Ford Mustang left hand door skin. I notice that I have a red one, blue one and a black one. I’m going to take my blue one and create a page named blue-mustang-door-skin.

On this page I’m going to write up some text about my 68 Ford Mustang Blue Door Skin. I’ll use the words 68 Blue Ford Mustang Door Skin at the start of my article, in the text, at the end of my article, in bold, in header tags, in plural and singular words and I’ll use those words together and separate from each other and in links coming and going from this page and most importantly, I’ll use them in my page title.

I’ll also have pictures of my Blue 68 Ford Mustang Door Skins that are optimized and set up for the search engines. They will rank if someone does a search in images for a 68 Blue Mustang Door Skin and they will rank if someone does a search in the organic engine for 68 Blue Mustang Door Skin because this is a non-competitive search term. I’ll have a call to action that will take my visitor to my shopping cart when he is ready to make the purchase.
On this page I’ll have links on the left hand side that will link to a page called Door Skins, 68 Red Mustang Door Skins, 68 Black Mustang Door Skins and the list will go on and on pointing people to different model and ages of cars that I have door skins for.

I’ll do this for every part and product that I’m selling. Once I finish, I will send out press releases about my new site, about my products and then I’ll write articles about my products and link those back to my products with the proper anchor text. I’ll submit these to article websites; I’ll then find car forums and start posting in those and use my signatures to link back to my product pages. I’ll create a blog and forum on my site to talk about my business and products and link to my products from that blog every chance I get. I’ll write post in my blog that we get others to link back to my blog.

I’ll create small sites like a 68 Ford Mustang website where I’ll give information and have a little forum for people that are interested in 68 Ford Mustangs to post. I’ll use this website to link to my products and help promote my main site. Once it’s going good I’ll create a new forum for 69 Ford Mustang lovers.

I could go on and on, I’ve not even started writing yet, there are so many ways to make money online.

It will take me some time and a lot of work but I will dominate the market that I’m in.

Content is an important part of any search engine optimization campaign because each article we write is another way for the search engines to find us. The more articles we write, the more words that are used and the more search results we will show up in.

With the current blogging software we are able to easily write articles and post them on our sites, once the articles have been posted the software can be set up to ping other sites to let them know something fresh has just been added to our site. This means instant traffic every time we add something new to our website along with the added benefit of traffic down the road as the search engines pick up the pages and rank them.

It’s not necessary that the content be well written when it comes to ranking on the search engines but well written content can have the added benefit of people linking to it and being picked up by bookmarking sites like Digg and many others.

There is always a downside to everything and here is the downside to this.

As more and more people begin writing fresh new content there will be more pages for the search engines to index. This will cause more competition as well as causing the search engines to start moving old text out of the way for the new. This means that good fresh well written content will be more important then ever as time roles on.

If you don’t have a blog it might be a good time to start one.

I’ve been playing around a little with some blogs and trying to figure out how to go about making a blog work for me and one of the things that really makes a blog stand out is pictures. I was playing with a blog about lawn mowers and placed a picture in the text and I think it makes it look really nice.

The picture is in black and white and I’m not sure if it’s because of the blog having the black background or if black and white cartoon pictures just look good but it made a big difference when I added the picture. I’m going to play around with the pictures some more but if it helps as much as this one seems to have helped I’m going to hire me an artist to come in and draw pictures for each of my blog post. But before I do that I’m going to play around a little with this blog and see how the pictures look here.

If the black and white cartoon pictures don’t look as good here then I’ll have to figure out something else for the pictures on this blog. At this time I do feel that pictures along with the text is a good thing but I would like to have the pictures uniformed with all the same look and feel to them. Another words if I’m going to use black and white cartoon pictures then I want all the pictures to be black and white cartoon pictures.

I know there is a lot more to a successful blog then a cartoon picture but I’m trying to make my blog work for me and it’s like a giant puzzle and I’m having to put it together one piece at a time.

I’ve decided that I’m not going to get into any more heated discussions on forums, as a matter of fact I think I’ll just stick to making comments about the topics on my blog. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of traffic and sales to be made from these discussions but that was never the reason for my participation.

I see bad information getting spread and it bothers me, because people that are new to the Internet believe these things and end up wasting time and money trying to make something work that has never worked for anyone. It’s not the forums fault, they are there for open discussions and the forum administrators and moderators should allow the topic to be discussed.

Take this topic from WPW the thread starter bhartzer claims;

1. To have started a new website that is only a couple days old.

2. That it is getting 1,000’s of visitors a day and the website is less than a week old.

3. That he is swamped with emails from people that are wanting to advertise on his new site.

4. That 100’s of people are searching for the website under a made up name that no one knew before the launch of his site 5 days ago.

5. That he has spent no money on the site.

6. That it’s all been done by bookmarking the site which only took him 30 seconds to do.

If the above is not crazy enough there is more;

1. Some forum members asked to see the website and he refused saying that he did not want any off topic links going to the site.

2. Members pointed out that he could give the url without making it a link and he refused because, I really don’t know why he refused but he did.

3. He refused to show stats or any proof at all of his claims, including the website.

4. Some members found the site and claimed it was nothing more then a scrapper site pulling press releases from other sites and using that for his content, they posted the link to the site but the website was immediately pulled off line.

Now this is a site getting 1,000’s of visitors a day, it has been branded the best of the best, people are searching for the name on Goolge (which is a made up name), advertisers are going crazy trying to buy ad space to get onto this site but this guy pulls it off line. Seems a bit strange to me but then we have the word of a moderator that goes by the name of Greeneagle (aka Ken) here is a post about him on another forum. Now Ken (aka Greeneagle) knows bhartzer and feels that since he has given his word the information is accurate that’s all we need. I also know bhartzer but I have a problem with some of the information and it does not make sense.

I offer to do some testing and I’m attacked by Greeneagle as someone that is trying to steal the thread. If the claims are true he should be more then happy with my test because this will prove his point but instead the Greeneagle attacks me and I leave the thread to do my testing in another thread. I go far beyond what bhartzer did;

1. I use an old domain name

2. I don’t bookmark the site but bookmark the articles inside the site. Instead of one bookmark I do 3 and 4 per site.

3. I don’t bookmark for one day and stop but continue to bookmark the articles for two days.

4. I don’t take press releases and use for content but write original content to be bookmarked.

The conclusion is that bookmarking sites can be a way to get traffic but the numbers are closer to 100 to 200 per day, unless your able to hit the front page of Digg or one of the other big bookmarking sites and if you stop, the traffic also stops. But this traffic is not going to be easy to convert to sales because the people using these sites are people that are tech savvy and spend a lot of time on the Internet.

They are searching for information and while they may sometimes buy products online, interrupting their search to try and sell them something is not the best way to make a sale. I posted my findings on the forum and I’ll just quote the post below that was posted back to me.

The point is that to get your pages index quickly and to rank you need visitors to your site (new sites need this to get past the “sandbox”). Your pages need links–and you can get fresh eyes and fresh links using social bookmarking. The point here is to get visitors which will help get better search engine rankings. Search engine rankings lead to conversions.

Now it looks like he is saying that he’s doing this for the search engine ranking but he started out telling us not to worry about the search engines and on top of that he’s now trying to say that traffic increases your ranking and I’ve already tested this and feel this is not the truth either. So I question this.

He goes on to say

It’s not traffic alone–there are other factors. But you have to realize that the big GOOG (as greeneagle calls it) uses Google Toolbar data as a part of their algorithm. Your site’s visitors have the Google Toolbar installed. Catch my drift?

It goes on and on like this and we end up talking about the fact that Google uses the Google toolbar to find pages they don’t already know about and it can help you get indexed. For some reason people think that indexed means ranking and it doesn’t but they get all excited about this and then Greeneagle jumps in and says yes and it also keeps up with the time someone spends on the site. If it only helps the page get indexed, another words, all it does is let Google know about a page that they didn’t already know about, then why in the hell does it need to keep up with the time you spend on the site?

And to make it worst you have the jackass that only has 1 post and wants to know why everyone is attacking this guy who is only trying to help. Let me try and help you out.

1. No one is attacking the guy, asking for proof is not an attack

2. The reason we ask for proof is to protect people like yourself that are easily fooled

Now I have a question.

Why is it that you only have 1 post and your very first post on the forum is to take up for this guy

1. Your his friend?

2. Your him?

3. Your just to stupid to understand why spreading bad information is bad?

Your the type of person that I was trying to protect from the bad information but it is apparent that you enjoy the bad information. So why I’m I wasting my valuable time trying to help out someone that does not want my help.

I’ll continue posting in the forums but you can find me in site reviews where people want honest oppinons on there website and posting in my blog about all the stupid stuff that stupid people post.

I’m a bit disappointed in the traffic, I’ll continue doing the bookmarks but I need to look into some other stuff along with it. At this time I have some links from the forums as well as the bookmarks but the traffic is no where near where I would like it to be. This is day two and we are getting a little over 100 visitors per day.

I’m about to try out some other stuff but just not sure which things I’m going to try. I’m thinking that you can safely get between 100 and 200 visitors a day from the bookmarking sites and of course if you take the time to build up a good network of friends you might be able to push that number up between 500 to 1,000 (I’m going to work on that slowly) and then you have the post that makes it to page one on Digg where you can get 10,000 visitors in a day.

The think to remember about a network of friends is that trying to sell to the same people everyday is not going to cut it. You can never stop building your network it needs to get bigger and bigger everyday brining in new people otherwise you might as well sit in front of the coffee house and play checkers.