This is an enormous subject and you could write a book on each different step. I'm just going to provide a general outline here of the 6 crucial steps to creating a website that's successful over the long term.
1 - Pick Your Niche
Choose something you enjoy researching and writing about because you're going to spend a lot of time doing both. It shouldn't have a lot of competition. For example, don't choose "electronics." I guarantee you'll never get a better ranking in the search engines than Sony or Amazon.com. Narrow it down to something like "high end audiophile speakers".
Do some research. Check out how much your keywords are going to cost for advertising. If they're really expensive you might want to choose another niche. Check out some sites with similar subject matter so you can see who you're going to be competing with for rankings in the search engines.
2 - Choose Your Service Providers And Register Your Domain
Your service providers must be reliable. If your internet connection is always going down or your server is constantly crashing it's going to be difficult to maintain a successful business. Don't skimp on quality just to save a few pennies here.
Your domain name should contain your most important keyword that you're hoping to rank well for in the search engines. It should be something unique that's related to your niche and easily brandable. By brandable I mean easy for people to remember and associate with your site. Some call it "mindshare".
3 - Create Your Content
Your content must be unique. If you're content is plagiarized, Google will tend to ignore you. They now recognize duplicate content and refuse to list it. They want to provide their users with useful results. People have been slapping together crappy "made for adsense" websites by just copying and pasting content and Google's decided to put an end to it.
My advice is not to mess with Google. They're the 900 lb gorilla of the internet that you really don't want to piss off. If you can't get listed in the search engines, you're pretty much doomed from the start. So give them what they want. You'll need 30-100 pages of good content before you even put up a website. You could just start with a few pages and add a page day - like you would with a blog - but it will take you longer to get indexed. Are you noticing a theme about the search engines here?
4 - Create Your Website
You're either going to have to use a program like Dreamweaver or a Content Management System. I'd suggest considering a CMS. You'll need to update your website frequently, and even for experienced web designers this can be difficult. A CMS removes all the hassles of publishing new content daily. However, you have to make sure your CMS is search engine friendly. Probably the easiest thing to do for a beginner is use a blogging program like Wordpress. Search engines LOVE blogs, they're very easy to update, and best of all Wordpress is FREE.
You should create the website with search engine optimization in mind right from the start. SEO is a very in-depth subject that I can't get into here. Basically, you'll want to make sure your website can be easily crawled by the search engine robots or "spiders". This requires all kinds of things like proper meta-tags and making sure you have good keyword density on your pages.
Also, you MUST make sure all your pages load quickly. Much of the world still doesn't have broadband. The average surfer will only wait about 4 seconds before they click off elsewhere. If your pages load too slowly you will be losing massive amounts of traffic. Navigation is very important as well. If people have a hard time finding their way around they'll quickly get frustrated and leave.
5 - Drive Traffic To Your Website
Setting up a business on the net is different than at a physical location. In the "real" world it's all about location, location, location. If your store's in a high traffic area it's easy to get customers. But on the net no one just passes by, they SEARCH for specific things. Until your site is listed in the search engines there's no way for anyone to find it - It's up to you to drive traffic to it.
There a several ways to do this:
You can buy it by creating ads and then bidding on certain keywords so the ads will show up whenever anyone searches for them.
You can get it for free by:
- Writing articles on your niche topic with a link to your site in the author's resource box, and submitting them to article directories so publishers can use them and distribute them to thousands of readers.
- Submitting your site to free SEO friendly web directories.
- Social bookmarking some of the more interesting pages on your site at places like del.icio.us and Blink.
- Submitting some of your articles to sites like Digg or Reddit, where people vote on whether they should be displayed on the front page. If you're item is popular and gets displayed on the front page of Digg, the amount of traffic you get could crash your server. I'm not kidding, I've seen it happen.
- Participate in forums and provide a link to your site in you signature. Don't spam or you'll get banned - make intelligent comments.
- Comment in blogs with a link in your sig. Again - don't spam. And make sure the blog isn't using no-follow or you'll be wasting your time.
- Post free classified ads. These provide a high value link back from a popular site, plus you get free targeted traffic to your website from the ads.
- There's many ways to get free traffic - just be creative - but don't be too creative. There's a lot of illegal ways to get free traffic as well but they'll backfire on you in the long run.
6 - Monetize Your Website
This is the fun part. Now that you've got all this traffic how do you make money?
- You can sell advertising - probably the easiest way is with Google Adsense. You can also sell banner space, text links, almost anything really.
- You can sell merchandise - I'd suggest drop-shipping. Why do all that packing and shipping if you don't have to? That's too much like work.
- You can do affiliate marketing - one of the easiest ways to do this is to feature recommended products that link through to your affiliate's site for purchase. Just make sure you choose quality products to be affiliated with.
- The sky's the limit when it comes to monetizing your website. Be creative here too - but again, not too creative. You don't want to do anything stupid and get banned from Adsense or your best affiliate program.
And there you have it. How to make your computer print money in six not so easy steps. Now get going and have some fun!
About the Author
Matthew Carney is an internet entrepreneur and disgruntled former chef. If you found this article informative and would like to learn more about making money online you can visit his website: http://carmat.thebizreview.net You can also check out his blog: http://myonlinebusinessreview.blogspot.com
