• Are
you considering a website for your small business?
Learn
what you need to know before you build a website including how
to research and plan your site, how to create content and how to
get it built and maintained without spending thousands of dollars.
• Do
you have a website that is not working?
Identify
what is wrong with your existing web site, and understand why it
is not drawing enough traffic to bring you the amount of customers
you need.
• Do
you want to increase the traffic to your website?
Any
website can be improved and expanded. Learn the most cost-effective
ways to expand and enhance it to bring in even more business.
Do
You Have a Website Master Plan?
Understand what is needed to build a successful website
Most
small businesses today have a website that just lists the basic information
about their business such as products and services, an
About Us page, directions and a Contact Us page. This is called
a brochure style website.
Local
businesses such as electricians, builders, dentist, doctors and any
business that serves a local market will have to develop a solid
web presence or they will find themselves slowly and steadily losing
ground to their competition.
While
a brochure website may bring in some business now, (because there
may not be any real competition in the local market yet), over
the long
term these brochure websites will be beaten in the search engine
ranking by more developed websites.
Nearly
all small businesses have no idea what they need to do to create
a solid web presence. Most will spend a few hundred to a few thousand
dollars on their website,
call it done, and unless something changes with their business
they will never change or update their website.
Below
is an outline for a website master plan that includes
researching, preparing, building, growing, monitoring, promoting
and monetizing
a small business website.
Step
1. Website Research - Before You Do Anything!
Keywords -
find the web search terms related to your business that have
the highest search demand on Google and the lowest number of competing
websites using tools such as SBI's Brainstormer or Market
Samurai.
These are the most profitable keywords to use to build your website.
Website Research Tools
Theme -
focus your website around a theme using the most profitable keywords.
Website Theme Focus
Domain
name - choose a website name that contains your best description/location
of your business using a
profitable keyword.
Evaluate
Competition - Look at the other websites in your local market.
Evaluate the strength using
on-site
criteria
and off-site criteria. Copy
their good
ideas and avoid their mistakes. How
To Evaluate Your Website Competition
Step
2. Prepare
The Website Content & Features
Create
Relevant Information about your business using profitable
keywords wherever possible.
Provide
Useful Information for your visitors such as common questions and
answers.
Leverage
Video by providing useful information, answer questions, build trust,
and establish yourself as an expert.
Enable
relationships with your visitors:
Contact
Forms protect you from having to put your email address on your
site and also provides a more structured
format for
your visitors
to
contact you
or ask questions.
Q & A - A powerful way to establish trust and provide information
to your visitors, and also it helps
to bring visitors to your site.
Blogs are another great way to communicate with prospective customers and
can be used to announce new products
or services as well
as new features of the website.
Since a blog is so easy to update with news, pictures,
links and videos the business owner can usually
do this.
Build
Your Mailing List - Offer a free newsletter or free report
of useful information in exchange for the visitors' email address
so you can promote to them in the future
Step
3. Build
Website
Hosting - website hosting is basically renting space
on a computer to be a home for your website. There
are two main
types of hosting:
basic hosting, where any additional tools
or services are À la carte, and
all-in-one hosting that includes everything you need. About
Website Hosting
Select
a Content Management System - websites can be created
one page at a time -- the "old school" way, but there
are programs that
automate
a
lot of the
work
such as
Wordpress and SBI. The Most Important
Website Choice
Add
Website Content using Search Engine Optimization(SEO). It
is crucial that the information on your website be presented
in a way that is easy for the search engines to understand.
SEO is
a set of guidelines for building a search engine friendly website.
You can check that you are using correct SEO with tools like
SBI's Analyzer and Traffic Travis. Search
Engine Optimization Methods
Step
4. Promote Your Website
Build
Back Links - Links to your website from other sites help
to show the search engines that your site is relevant and important,
and will help get better results in the search engines and bring
in more traffic. Website
Link Building Techniques
Step
5. Monitor Traffic, Rankings & Links
Analyze
Website Traffic - Find out how many visitors your website
has, how they found you,
where they come from, and how they use your site with a traffic
monitor such
as StatCounter
or Google Analytics. Analyze
Website Traffic
Track
Search Engine Rankings - Track where your website appears
in the search engine results for your keywords using tools such as
SBI or Market
Samurai.
Collect
Visitor Feedback - Use contact forms or surveys to find out if your
visitors had any questions or problems and what they would like to
see on your website.
Track
Back Links - Use Yahoo Site Explorer to view the back
links to your website, as well as the websites of your competition.
Click here to see the back links for this website
Indexed
pages - Make sure your entire site is getting seen by
the search engines. You can see the pages of a specific website
that are in Google's index. Click
to see the indexed pages for this website
Step
6. Monetize
Monetizing
is really the last step in a website building plan. You monetize
by selling ad space, promoting your products and services, or those
of others.
Ads -
If you are promoting your own products and services you probably
do not want any ads on your site, but an information website
can make money with ads, either from an automatic service
like Google
Adsense
or from selling
ad space
directly. Buying and Selling Website
Advertising
Affiliate
Links allow you to promote products and
services from other
websites in exchange
for a
commission. Website Affiliate Introduction
Understand
Your Website Options
& Goals Before You Build
Website
Choices
Will you build a brochure website or content
website?
A website of valuable information
will bring a lot more business than just a list of
products and services.
Website
Marketing
Some of the many ways to make money on the internet.
Most people have no idea of the many different
ways to make money on the internet. Here are just a few examples of
the ways you could use a website to promote your products & services
and those of others.
Website
Evolution
Don't
stop with a handful of pages. Make a plan to grow your website.
Understand that the first version of your
website is just a seed that will grow and change. As you add pages
it creates more ways for customers to find you. This chart shows how
as your site grows it can be monetized in a variety of ways.
Free
Website Resources:
Blogs & Web 2.0
Make
a Free Website
How
to use free websites to promote your products or services.
You can use these popular services even if
you don't have a business. By creating valuable & interesting content
on free website services like Squidoo & Wordpress you can create
an income without any investment at all.
Make
Money Without a Website
Creating
Short Articles, E-Books and Infoproducts.
You don't even need to create a web site or
a single web page to market your expertise on the internet. You can
create information in digital book form, videos, web seminars, interviews
and more that can be marketed by others.
How
to Research Before You Build
Evaluate
Your Website
Find
the problems with your existing website
Learn how the search engines "see" your
website and how you can avoid common problems that can affect the flow
of traffic to your site.
Website
Competition
Study
your competition to learn their strengths and weaknesses
How
to find out the hidden factors that will show you how effective a website
is - how much traffic your competitors are getting and their strength
in the market.
Search
Engine Optimization
How to give the search engines useful information
Learn the essential basics of Search Engine
Optimization. Understand
how the website name, website theme & structure, page layout and
image labeling all work together to give the search engines a clear
picture of your website content.
Website
SEO Focus Mindmaps
Get the overall picture of search engine optimization
with these diagrams
How to make all the elements of your site work
together. The essential concepts of SEO from internet level to site
level to page level.
Website
Research Tools
Learn from Google & Yahoo
what people are seeking
Find out what your potential customers are
searching for and design a website to answer those questions and provide
those services.
Choose
the correct tools & hosting to build your website
Website
Hosting Options
An overview of the many choices for hosting your
website
Conventional website hosting companies offer
a-la-carte choices for website services like mailing lists and traffic
monitoring.
SBI
Website Hosting
Our recommendation for full-service small business
hosting
More
than just website hosting, SBI provides all of the
tools and information you need to build, grow and monetize
a small business website.
