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Starting An Online Business With Your Own Website
Thanks to all those late-night infomercials, such as Don Lapre many novices are under the assumption that it is so easy to buy a domain for a website get the host to walk them through putting it up and hope to make a good living or become a millionaire by just having a site. It is not that cut and dry.
I suggest you read these articles on starting a business before you go on:
- Facts and Myths of Internet Riches - Don't let the late night infomercials fool you! Find out the truth without paying big bucks.
- Is Self-Employment Right For You? - Before you invest in an at home business, make sure this is really what you not only want to do, but that you can physically, mentally, and financially support this venture.
Many business mistakes made by novices leave them to wonder why they seem to be unable to make any money or get any traffic. These mistakes include:
- Using free web hosting companies
- Not getting a proper domain name
- Putting up a website that is mostly full of banners
- Non-valuable or stolen content or no content
- Broken codes and scripts
- Bad overall design [code and script errors]
- The look of an amateur site [blasting with music, traffic counters and other pointless scripts...]
- Bad navigation
- Hard on the eyes [this is beyond the bad design, the codes may be right, but it makes it uneasy to look at for more than a few seconds]
There are more issues as to why a first time website is not making money, but the above are the top reasons why a site will never be a money maker.
The number one reason why a website is not a money maker is lack of vision. There are over a billion people with online access and hundreds of millions of websites. What reason do YOU give them to visit YOU? What reason does someone have to go to your site? What are you offering them that millions of others don't have?
If you just thought you would buy website domain names, get a webhosting company to hold your site and then sign up with hundreds of affiliate programs just to throw their banners up on a few pages, this will not make you money. Why?
A "Banner Farm" is a common newbie mistake. They hear about all those great affiliate programs and want to sign up with as many as possible, but don't have the skills or the vision to do anything more than put all the banners on one page without offering much of anything else.
Don't create a banner farm! A banner farm is a page that is nothing but banner ads or may have very little content or a weak sales pitch that is overrun with banners. No one comes back to such a site on purpose. People can see these banners anywhere, so it does not make your site special. It also takes too long to load. There is no trust incentive on why they should click on any of the banners, let alone buy anything from it.
Look at it from the point of view of others. If they manage to stumble upon your website [which won't come from search engines because a banner farm won't have enough content to make a search engine's notice] and see banners, they would:
- Have to be interested in at least one the many banners on your website
- Would have to be encouraged to notice the banner on your website
- Would have to be in the mood to buy at that particular moment or be motivated to bookmark your website and
- Come back just to click on that banner if they remember it
This just is not going to happen.
If you have such a site, you have probably paid to get traffic to your site, or asked your family and friends to visit it, or joined a traffic exchange program in hopes it would drum up business. On a smaller scale, you get the same effect as the larger scale - if you have nothing but banners and nothing special about your site, people have no reason to visit your website or do business with you. Don't throw your money away buying traffic for this kind of website.
If you insist that you want to have an online business, define your purpose. What will you sell? What's in it for your customer to buy from you as opposed to the others? What is so good about your site that will make them trust you and want to come back?
If you plan on selling your own products or services, how will you deliver? Do you have a good sales script? How will you handle customer service issues? How will you process orders? Is it a good product or service that people will buy or something that can be obtained free? Is your product or service geared for a niche market and if so do you know how to cater to that market?
If you plan to sell products or services of someone else such as an affiliate program, commission sales, network marketing or any other established business that will give you a cut to promote their plan, then you have to address other issues. Ask yourself, as a surfer, why should I buy from you as opposed to going directly to that company or one of your competitors? How are you different? What's in it for them to do business with you?
Don't fall into the traps that frustrate newbies.
Pay the extra money and find a real webhosting company. Many reliable services can be found as low as $4/month. You are in business, expect business related expenses if you want to be taken seriously.
A real webhosting service is not like the Geocities which can charge a monthly fee for minimal service or give you the free option in exchange for them keeping banners on your site. A website on these type of servers reek of fly-by-night or unprofessional. People rarely take them seriously as a legitimate business.
Get a proper domain name. Yes, you are not actually buying it, but really renting it for a period of time. Re-direct domains and sub-domains do not give the ease of confidence in the surfer's mind that you are a legitimate business.
Create your own content and scripts. If you have trouble coming up with ideas, you do have options to borrow material, so long as you tailor it to suit your site. You can exchange content for a link to someone else's site. You can find web sites that have all kinds of java scripts to make your site more interesting, but you may have to tweak them to be relevant. Stealing content from other sites will get you in trouble as it breaks copyright laws. It also gives you penalties in search engines such as Google which can get your site quickly blacklisted.
Spend the time constantly tweaking and updating your site while keeping up with technological changes. Feel free to experiment with colors and text and images until you come up with something that is easy to navigate, easy on the eyes, looks good and loads fast.
For the love of all that is good, do not blast music on your site!!! Give people the option to turn it on and off if you must have it. Unless your site is specifically about music or your audience expects a recorded sound, don't include it automatically. A surfer may be listening to something else at the same time only to have your noise drown out something they are enjoying. It makes a very unsatisfied person who will click away from your site and never want to come back again.
As long as you can offer people more in it for them, you can make it a profitable business. If your site cries out, "give me money as I am too lazy to return anything to you in exchange" it is bound to fail. If your site screams amateur, no one will take it seriously enough to want to give you a lot of business.
Take the time to read as much as you can and learn what it takes to make a successful website. Should you hire someone to create a website for you? If you have no vision or purpose to putting up a site and are only in it for the money, feel free to waste your money on a designer. Just keep in mind, a website designer who can put up a site from scratch would make more money in doing it for themselves and would have a better vested interest in spending that time making themselves rich instead of working for you for a pittance.