So you have a good business idea, have found your specific niche, did your keyword research and have registered a domain name. How do you go about getting a new website? This is actually getting increasingly easier now that the internet is really developing. There are lots of designers, good content management systems, many webhosting packages now include website builders and some sites even have tools that let you create your website for free. But before looking at you options for building your website let’s first discuss what is important in a good website.

Why do you need a good website?

Your website is the first impression of your business. On the web this is critically important as it is so easy to leave. If for some reason a visitor feels your website looks tacky, unprofessional or too cluttered they may leave in an instant.

If you want to create a website that generates profit you will need to have a professional look that will give the visitor the confidence that you know what you are doing. That they will need to know that they can trust you if they provide you with any personal information.

What is a good website?

In my opinion a good website:

• Features professional graphics
• Has a modern, current look
• Has a lot of good quality content
• Provides a form of interaction with the customer
• Is pleasing to look at and has the right balance in colours and graphics
• Has a clear navigation structure for easy browsing around the site
• Is not too cluttered
• Does not have any obvious mistakes
• Has clearly written copy with lots of lists like this one for easy browsing
• Needs to be fully up-datable by the owner to ensure frequent fresh content and interactivity

How to get a good quality website?

If you want to have a professional looking website you will either need the help of a designer and / or programmer or create your website from a pre-designed good quality template. You could also use a combination of the 2: work with a good template but enlist the help of a designer / programmer.

Good budget $1500+: contact a web designer and let him / her create the design and website. If you select the right person you will get a great looking website that is completely unique. It will also save you a lot of time and work.

Medium budget $100 – $1500: Get a good quality template and theme and depending on your skill level customize it yourself or have it customized for you. This can produce a high quality website that is still unique for your business, but using an existing template can save you lots of time in design and development.

No budget: Go to Weebly.com and create a website there. If you know what you are doing you can create good websites there but often they do look home made.

What kind of website should you get?

Unless you just want to create a 1 page product website, interactivity is the key to success. You will want to build a community and build a subscriber list. You will want a website that is easy to update so you can keep adding valuable content that will be picked up by the search engines. I currently advise customers to choose either a ProntaCMS or WordPress.org website.

Pronta CMS

This is Escala’s own CMS and the solution we advice for people who want to code as little as possible.

What are the benefits?

• Very affordable; if you only have a low budget you can can choose one of the free templates
• Fully customisable: if you have a bit of a budget you can add your own design or fully customize one of the free templates
• Lots of feature: image galleries, search, forms, calendars, wisiwig editor, movies, blog etc.
• Hosting is included so no need to set that up
• Can be fully optimised for search engines

Have a look at the Promta CMS website to find out more and determine if this is the right solution for you.

WordPress

WordPress is free software that you can download from the Internet. It was set up as blogging software but has grown to an application that allows you to create about any kind of website. The learning curve is a bit higher than Pronta but if you are willing to learn then you can create a very nice website.

What are the benefits?

• WordPress can be downloaded for free
• Lots of templates available but be sure to know what you need. You may want to read my article on the Business Web Strategy website: 20 things to check before buying a WordPress theme.
• Lots of free plugins available for extra functionality
• Search engine friendly
• Lots of support

Good luck with the creation of your website! If you need any help then ask your questions below or contact me.

Here is our next installment on how to get started on the Internet with Internet Marketing. If you have gotten a clear idea on what niche you want to be in, you can go searching for a good domain name.

What is a good domain name?

There are basically 2 kinds of domain names you could go for.

1. A brandable domain

This is usually a very short and catchy domain. In many cases it does not mean anything but it is easy to remember and it builds up a brand.  Most bigger companies will have a brandable domain name. Famous examples are of course Yahoo and Google.

Of course it would be great to register a one word domain name that is catchy and DOES mean something, but then be be prepared to spend a lot! These domain names were picked up a long time ago and may be very expensive. These kind of domains are good if you can promote your brand well, but be sure to pick the right name. It needs to be easy to pronouce and not sound too weird.

A brandable domain name should be

• Short
• Memorable
• Easy to pronounce
• Easy to spell
• Not too similar to competing domain names
• Not a violation of someone else’s trademark

2. A descriptive domain

This domain has some kind of meaning. It could include some of your keywords and it may give a person a direct understanding of what your business is all about. These domains are good for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes and may help to promote your business. An example of this is one of my own domains escalawebstrategy.com (although this is a combination of brand and meaning as escala is my brand) or SEOmoz.com, a resource site for SEO.

If you don’t want to spend a lot of money for a one word descriptive domain you will need to go for a short phrase. A good place to start looking for a domain name is Namecheap or GoDaddy. Domains are very cheap here and you can search a domain by keyword and get lots of domain suggestions.

Buying a domain

Buying a domain is easy! My suggestion would be to go to Namecheap as the registration process is easy and they are very cheap. All you need to do is provide your contact details, pay and that’s it for the moment. Make sure you keep your registration information though! Many people forget to keep these records and it can sometimes be very tedious to get access to your domain if you have forgotten all details. You will need access to your domain when you are going to setup your site and email.

Don’t postpone buying your domain for too long. If you have a good idea for a domain, check if it’s available  and if it is buy it. US9.69 will not break the bank balance! Even though you may change your mind later you would still not want to risk someone else registering your domain before you. You can always point your unused domains to your new website or sell them on later on. I was able to sell one of my domains for well over $1250 (and if I had been a bit more clever in negotiating, probably for a lot more), so you may even turn discovering profitable domain names into your new online business!

Applying a domain

When you want to start using your domain for you email and website you will need to point the domain to the correct nameservers. This is very easy to do in Namecheap but let’s not worry about that for now. Once registered your domain is safe at the register and you can now start thinking about how to create your website. We will talk about that in our next post.

Once you have found your niche and perhaps also the products you want to promote, you will need to continue with your keyword research.

Keyword research is important because you will want to rank high for keywords that people are searching for. There really is no point in ranking high for keywords that nobody types into search engines.

So how do you find the right keywords?

The first place I usually go is the Google keywords search tool at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Select the country you want to target and then type in the keywords phrase you were thinking of targeting or the topic of your website. Fill in the captcha code and press “get keyword ideas”.

Google will now let you know how many searches there have been for those words in that month. If you want to be even more specific then you can select “exact” in the match type drop down box. Some results that have come up for the phrase “content management system singapore” are: content management system has 246,000 globally and 165,000 in the united States but that is probably a too wide a keyword or too difficult to rank for.

Finding the right keyword combination that you can rank for

Try to look for other combinations that may be less competitive but still get a good amount of traffic.

Web content management system gets 27,000 us visits and web content management system gets 2,700. Cms website get 14,000 and web cms and cms system 22,000. Content manager software 40,500. Simple CMS 22,000.”content manager software” is much better with only 17,000 search results.

Find out which keywords your competitor is targeting

You can also find out which keywords your competitors are targeting. I’ve got PPC web spy installed in Firefox which lets me find out which keywords competitors are bidding for. Another tool is Keywordspy. Find out who is ranking high and which keywords they are using.

Find out how difficult it is to rank for those keywords

The next thing you want to do is to find out how difficult it is to rank for these keywords. Go into Google and do a search for each of the phrases that you just found. At the top of the screen you can read that CMS has about 142,000,000 results. Far too high and it will be extremely difficult to rank for the very general term in a short amount of time. Let’s narrow it down and put our phrase in quotations . This will make it an exact phrase and will give you better results.

Another tool to test the keyword difficulty is SEOLogs.com . They check all websites for these keywords in their title tag, anchors etc. If I type in “Content Manager software” it comes out as 66/100 which is still quite difficult. simple cms does better with 45/100. Anything below 40 will be relatively easy to rank for with anything between 40 – 60 achievable.

Target several phrases

Finding the right keywords will greatly improve your chances of being found in search engines. Of course you can target several combinations, especially when your website has multiple pages.

In upcoming posts we will go into more details on how to optimize your pages and all other aspects of SEO. There are also lots of good tips in our free course so don’t forget to sign up for that. (top right of the page).

Now you may have read my previous posts What is Internet Marketing and How to make money from my website and would really like to try this Internet Marketing thing. But how to get started? This is the next post in a series of How to get started with Internet Marketing which is now called the Newby Course. I will try and ‘walk’ you through the whole process.

First steps

There are a few different ways to approach this. You can just register the first domain that comes into your head, get a quick free website and off you go. Sometimes I have this tendency to jump right in when I have a great idea. Although this can be good sometimes, it is usually better to do research and plan for your new online marketing business.

Start your research

Find a topic you are passionate about

Start by thinking about what your passions are. What do you know a lot about? Start with just a piece of paper. You can also create a mind map and visualize all your ideas. If you like to get more inspiration for possible subject areas then there are several online research tools that you can use.

Googles Zeitgeist lets you check which topics are HOT at the moment.

Lycos Top 50 also lets you review the latest trends and you may also like to try Yahoo Buzz and Ebay Pulse which is a good place to start looking at sub niches. Just look at what sub categories are very popular here.

One relative newcomer as a research tool is Google Trends.

You can also investigate how many magazines there are on your niche by going to http://www.magazines.com . After that visit a magazine shop and look at the advertisements. Who is advertising and how many advertisers are there in your niche.

There are quite a few other sites that you use and a lot of them are explained in a Free report on finding a niche that I’m giving away.  All you need to is fill in the below form and I will send you the link to this free report.

Which products and services could you sell in that niche?

This is an important step because in some niche people don’t buy products. So find out if people spend money in your niche.

When you have zeroed in on about 5 topics, think about which products or services you could sell in that area or niche as it is called in internet marketing terms. Also think about which companies could possibly advertise on your site. This is an important step because in some niche people don’t buy products. So find out if people spend money in your niche.

As mentioned check the magazines and check how many digital products are being sold in your niche at Clickbank.

What is the competition doing?

Continue your research with a look at the competition. How many people are already operating in that area? One easy way to test that is to type the words into Google that someone would type in if they wanted to find your site. How many results come up? If you use Firefox, another great tool to use is the SEO book toolbar. It gives you lots of information about how many visitors your competition gets and many research tools. It is free to download at SEO Book.

Choose your niche

After your research, weigh up all the pros and cons of each particular niche and start thinking about a business name. Next time we will talk about how to get a domain name and website. Don’t miss a post and subcribe.

As this blog is about internet marketing and how to create websites for profit I thought I should start with the basics. It is a question I am often asked.

What exactly is Internet Marketing?

Essentially it is the marketing (promoting, selling) of goods and services online. This can be anything from books, ebooks, courses, radios, software, yoga mats etc. To market online you will use various skills like technical skills (website creation and development), creative (design, ideas generation), advertising and sales. As an internet marketer you will try to provide your customers with a product they need at a particular time.

Why use the Internet?

The internet is an excellent place to market your products and services. More and more people are using the internet to buy what they need. The Internet is always open and you can work on your marketing activities any time you want. On top of that you can choose to sell products on just about any topic. So you can choose something you love to talk about and market and connect with people with the same interest.

Advanatages and disadvantages

Advanatages

Like anything Internet Marketing has its pros and cons. Here is a quick summary:

• A huge advantage of doing business on the internet is that there are no entry barriers. If you have some time on your hands you can start right away. This is of course also a disadvantage as there will be a lot of competition.
• Low start up costs.
• Marketing online is very affordable and it allows you to track what works and what doesn’t. This gives you a lot more control than traditional marketing.
• Internet marketing allows you to communicate very directly with your target customers. You can connect with them through social networking sites, your blog, twitter etc.
• You can choose whenever you want to work and what you wear!
• You can target any market in the world
• You can create systems that once setup and promote kind of take care of themselves.

Disadvantages

• Internet marketing is not necessarily easy. It still requires a lot of work, creativity in finding the right product or niche and determination in promoting this product. But if you can find a way to create good online assets you can literally make money while you sleep.
• You will need to get a website and therefore learn some technical skills. You may want to outsource a lot of the technical stuff later but it’s still better to have a basic understanding.
• Because of the low entry barriers there will be quite a lot of competition so it will be your task to be either smarter or more focussed on your niche

So what does it involve?

In Internet marketing you can expect to get busy with the following tasks:

• Creating a website and writing a Blog: a great way to attract traffic and an audience
• Article Marketing
: writing lots of articles for both your own site and other sites
• E‐mail Marketing
: building a subscriber opt-in list is a great way to keep reminding potential customers about you
• Search Engine Optimation: get listed at page one for your targeted keywords and receive lots of (free) visitors
• Advertising: pay per click ads, banners, pop up ads
• Social Media marketing: Using sites like Twitter, You Tube, Squiddo to attract visitors
• Forum Marketing: helping out in online forums can help you sell your products and services

On this site we will explore all of these topics in greater detail. I will share my endouvours in Internet Marketing and will tell you what works and what doesn’t. I hope you will take this journey with me. You can do so easily by subscribing to this blog.