When planning your first business website, there are three questions you need to ask yourself:

1. Who is your target audience?
2. How will they search for you?
3. How will you convert them into sales?

1) Who is your target audience?

You’ve got to know who your target audience is, who is it that you’re trying to attract to the website?

If you feel that your market is anyone and everyone then your website will lack focus and you will lose money. You should be looking at creating a niche and marketing to a niche group of people. This will allow the website to be more focused, more targeted, and convert more traffic and make you more money.

2) What keywords would they search for on Google to find you?

And another thing targeting a niche will help you with is the search engines. You’ll be able to rank faster and better for the keywords your target audience will be searching for in a small less competitive niche versus a high competitive niche.

The idea is to try and figure out what keywords your target market would type into the search engines to find you. You pretty much need to actually do the searches yourself. You will need to look at the competition and see who’s on the first page, and what websites are showing up on the first page over and over again.

Look at their websites.

Do they work? How can you improve them? Identify something unique about your businesses set you apart from everyone else.

The keywords that you come up with need to be incorporated into the pages of your website in the titles the headings and the internal links. Keywords need to be specific. What keyword is not very specific will drive more traffic more traffic conversion will be lower because the traffic won’t be the same quality as it would be from a specific search term.

When looking for keywords and adding pages keep in mind the local searches a lot of people search for companies in their area even if it’s a global product.

The key to achieving high search engine rankings is building inbound links to your web pages – that is pages on external websites that link to pages on your site. Crucially this link acquisition should be a natural growth – where inbound link count increases at a gradual pace. The pages that link to yours should be relevant, on-topic and ideally contain the same keywords – especially in the linking text.

Search engines rank pages based upon their reputation – your ranking will be determined by what other (preferably high ranking) pages say about your page.

3) How will you convert your visitors into sales?

You need a website that is powerful, emotional and shows the visitor that his or her life would be more complete – better, easier, more productive, more profitable and happier – if he or she owned what it is you’re selling.

Don’t just tell me about your product or service but convince me that my life would be better, easier, more productive, happier and profitable if I owned what it is you are selling.

You can offer incentives, freebies, discounts, anything to get a dialogue started.

Current research indicates that the human brain makes a judgment about a web page within a twentieth of a second! ?

That doesn’t leave you very long to make an impression. So, make sure that you have your Unique Selling Point (USP) clearly visible and on every page of your website. Keep in mind that a website visitor can enter from any page on your site; it does not have to be the home page. Even more so if they find you through a search engine.

Make sure you list your bullet-point guarantee.

Visitors have to understand what makes you different, better and sexier than everyone else. Why should they deal with you and not your competition. You’ve got less than a second to let them know why.

Your site should have a funnel-shaped structure.

All roads should lead to your purchase and money pages.

Your internal links should describe the target page. If you sell website designs, don’t call your products page “Products”, call it “website designs”, and make sure that the links pointing at this page also say “website designs”. This will not only help the search engines identify and rank the pages on your site, but it will also improve your conversion.

Okay, I’ve got to put some type of strategy together so what I am going to do is offer some type of e-book in exchange for the site visitors email address, phone number and name. This will have to be tweaked and fine-tuned as I go along.

I do want to use the website for selling therefore I’ll do some type of exit pop-up and hit them on their way out after they’ve already taken whatever action they are going to take on the website. I’ll give them some type of free e-book like, “32 Ways to Increase Conversion Rates” or a “How to Get Traffic to Your Website” e-book. The e-book is free in exchange for your contact information.

When someone registers I’m going to collect their name, their phone number, and e-mail address. I’ll then e-mail them the free report followed up with a couple e-mails and a phone call all over a 2 week period.

So the website will be used for information, sales, and for lead generating. The sales will be done when they land on the site with the websites layout, look and feel and most importantly the content. The lead generation will be done when they exit with the exit pop-up and free e-book offer.

Most people think the word “landing page” means to “pre-sell”

… which isn’t exactly correct.

A well-executed landing page should have 3 goals.

1. Disarm The Website Visitor
2. Ignite Curiosity
3. Create a Desire

Here’s what I mean…

There is a silent alarm that goes off in our heads when someone tries to sale us something. It basically tells us to pay attention and don’t believe everything we hear.

The idea of a landing page is to quiet down the alarm and try to build a little trust.

Secondly… the landing page needs to ignite curiosity. It should talk about the benefits of our product and what it can do for the person reading our landing page.

Third… it should create enough desire in the person reading the landing page that they are willing to take the first step. Rather it be contacting us or filling out a form to receive a free e-book.

Our landing page is created as a place for our first meeting with the potential client. And there is a lot more to a successful landing page then red text and unicorns.

I’ve owned my own business for the last 10 years.

What I’ve learned over the years is that when I was struggling and hurting I had a lot of friends, however now that I’ve started getting my head above water they’ve become jealous and many would go out of their way to see me fall. They see me and my family buying new clothes, new cars, a new house but what they don’t see is the sweat, tears, blood and hard work that has been poured into this business year after year.

So…let me tell you about my Easter weekend.

First off…I understand that we don’t take near the number of holidays the government would like us to take. I know it is important to take a couple days off from work now and again, so I have no problem giving as many holidays as we can afford to give, and some we can’t afford to give.

It’s the reason that I gave everyone Thursday and Friday off for Easter. However, Thursday morning I woke up and went to work like normal. That is until the phone rang and I found out that one of my employees had totally deleted one of my customers websites and to make it worse it wasn’t even a website we were working on, or for that fact had ever worked on.

Making a backup copy before deleting a website is like web design 101. Heck they should make that mandatory, before giving you a computer. You always, always, always make a copy of anything before you delete it. Not only did we not make a copy of that website but for reason unknown to the rest of the world we totally deleted and removed it from the server, and replaced it with an under construction website.   If you’re uploading an index page there is absolutely no reason to delete the whole website.

Anyway I spent my weekend calling hosting companies, web design companies, and anyone else I could think of that might have a copy of that website. I luckily found a copy of the website and was able to get it back online. However, at this moment I feel like I can never give anyone FTP access again because I don’t know what they might do with it.

But don’t think that was the only thing I did this weekend, you see knowing everyone else is off means I have to work twice as hard so we don’t fall behind. So I completely redesigned one website relating to dogs, and converted another website into a blog, and worked on the content management system for another lady as well as answered emails and the telephones.

There was a third website I was going to convert into a CMS but the office never sent me the information, so I was unable to do that one. This weekend was the first time in a couple months that I felt like we made some headway but I also see that I need to spend a lot more time in production. The problem with this is that it limits me from the other things I’m supposed to be doing like marking, selling, figuring out new and better ways for us to make money and running the business.

Hopefully it’s just a temporary setback and we can get things organized and set up so I don’t have to do it fulltime. In the last 10 years I’ve gone days without sleep, have eaten breakfast lunch and dinner in front of my computer, I’ve cried, gotten angry, and thrown stuff around the room but in the end I did what it took to get the business where it is today and God willing I will continue to do what it takes to build the business into so much more than it currently is.

Next time you see someone driving a new car or building a new house keep in mind that they have most likely given up TV, movies and time with the family to work their ass of in order to live their dreams and the only difference between you and them is the willingness to work a little harder and give up some of the pleasures in life. So… don’t be jealous of them, be upset at yourself.

Custom Website Templates

Okay, I’d like to take a look at the pros and cons of three different ways you can go when it comes to developing and running a website.

The first way to go is with a custom website design, which is a great way when you want the best of the best. Although you will be spending a lot more money than the other two ways, but it’s going to look and function a lot better. Of course you need make sure you choose the right design company.

The best way to do this is by looking through their portfolio and by visiting the sites they claim to have designed. Call up a couple of those sites and talk to the owner to verify that they did actually design the website. While you’ve got the owner on the phone ask how his or her experience was with the company. If you are going to spend a lot of money, than you should do your research first. There are companies out there that claim that they do custom website designs but really only edit templates.

Pros

• great looking and functioning website design
• one-of-a-kind
• you work with a team of experts
• you can have the website do anything you want

Cons

• can cost you a lot of money
• can take a month or two to finish
• some companies lie about being a custom website design firm

Website templates

Buying a template is a popular way to get started with a website. There are many sites that offer thousands of templates at decent prices, like template monster. The average price of a template runs around about $65.

Buying a template is one of the cheapest ways to get your website up and running, but there are a few things you need to keep in mind. Hundreds of people may have bought the same template so you might have a lot of websites looking the same. If you don’t know how to edit the template or uploaded it to your server then you may end up paying someone to do it for you.

Pros

• cheap way to get a fully functional website
• can have it up and running within a couple hours
• thousands of templates to choose from

Cons

• lots of other people may have bought the same template
• if you don’t know how to edit the template or uploaded it to your server then you may end up paying someone to do it for you

Website Software

Some hosting companies offer software that will build your website for you. They charge you a small monthly fee (usually about $10 a month) and you can build your own website and host it with them.

In theory this is a good idea but from my experience people don’t stick with it for very long. The software is pretty simple to use once you get used to it, most of it is just drag-and-drop. However, if you are looking for a nice flashy, functional, unique website then this is not the place to for you. Websites using these types of software are basic and not much functionality to them. You just can’t get the perfection that you can get with a team of expert web designers and developers.

Pros

• cheap prices
• you can edit the website yourself
• easy drag-and-drop

Cons

• most websites using this type of software look basic and duel
• can get annoying with its limited abilities
• most people that use this software end up hiring a designer to build the website

If you’re looking to build a website and get it online there are a lot of options to choose from. But if you are looking to make money online then the best option is to look at your website as an investment and not an expense.

Small Business Website Designs

Did you know that only 2% of people achieve their greatest life goals?

Two percent!

And did you know that the reason most people never achieve their life goals are because they never try?

Don’t get me wrong, people fail to meet their live goals for all kinds of reasons but the main reason is that they never try.

You see…trying involves risk and most people don’t won’t to take on any risk unless it’s playing the lotto. They are willing to play a game of chance but unwilling to bet on their own skills and desire to work.

So…if you’d like to be part of the 2% that achieve their goals, then the first step is in trying. It’s just that simple.