Do you dream about an alternative stream of income to pay monthly bills, warm up those dry spells of unemployment or too little employment, pay for a great vacation, provide gifts for loved ones or underwrite your child’s education? Creating a website business is definitely an option. But don’t let slick website marketers take precious dollars you can’t afford to lose.
Are you suffering from website blues? Can’t afford a designer. Don’t know where to start or what to fix? Does you head ache from all the guru garbage speak coming your way. Website marketing experts may have great information and experience to share, but their tactics can easily drive a wedge of self-doubt into the heart of the website newbie.
If you’re seeking website guidance, phone 786.693.4223. We will design the site of your future and/or walk you through the website design process – saving you thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours in the process. If you like RightsRadio.com, RightsUniversity.com and P12Media.com, you’ll love what we do for you.
No monthly fees, no expensive CD or video sets. Listen to my Rights Radio Self Help Hour show on this topic here.
Ten Questions to Ask Yourself (and Answer) Before Trying to Create a Website Business:
1) What are you going to sell or offer? Do you want to start a business or do you hope that a business will somehow evolve from your website creation? Do you intend to sell affiliate products – in other words, something someone else created – promote Google, MSN or Yahoo ads, your own products or a combination thereof? In your heart of hearts, what do WISH you could offer on your website?
2) What do you intend to call your website?. It’s easy to purchase a domain name. The problem is that you can easily fall into the domain name trap – buying dozens of name for the same site just to stop someone else from doing so. What’s in a name? Almost everything. Note the name Rights Radio – clearly something to do with rights – or Blog Talk Radio – definitely talk radio associated with blogs. In ancient days, circa 2006, SEO gurus told us to hyphenate names so that the words would be easier for search engines to understand. Today, if your url is hyphenated, readers suspect that it’s not a primary or even real business.
3) What software will you use to establish your site? Static site software? Blog software? If the latter, which blog software? WordPress is free – and in my view the best – but dealing with WordPress (and everything that can go wrong with the inevitable WordPress upgrades) will sap your spirits and steal your weekends. As one experienced but annoyed blogger wrote:
Why is it that EVERY time that there is an upgraded version of WordPress they SCREW THINGS UP? On one of the previous upgrades they took away my Post Preview and now it takes extra clicks to look at a post while in draft mode…Now I’m missing the list of my drafts in the Manage/Posts tab. Now, I have to go into WRITE a POST just to see what drafts I have in the wings. I have no idea why WordPress keeps doing “ugrades” and keeps breaking the things I like about them in the process. I’m almost afraid to do the newest update for fear of losing another feature I use and depend on.
Joomla and Drupal are also free content management systems, but to my mind, harder to learn with less support in the blog community at large. Typepad has excellent customer support, while WordPress users depend on a cadre of volunteer developers, experts-for-pay, experienced bloggers – and even fellow newbies – for answers to pressing questions (if/when you can find those answers online). If you purchase a WordPress theme, the seller typically provides forum support, but make it difficult if not impossible for you to write or phone directly.
4) What type of design should you use: simple versus elegant; tons of video and photos and/or text; a landing page site or a few dozen pages versus hundreds of pages? What works best is what works relative to what you’re trying to achieve. Some visitors might even like the cluttered, blinking, ad-driven home page look (or hate it).
5) How about a fancy banner? Should you pay to have one created? Maybe and maybe not. But definitely not until you know what you’re trying to sell. There are many free graphic programs available today. With a bit of extra work, you might learn how to do it yourself.
6) How much should you pay to learn and earn? A good portion of website newbies thrown thousands of dollars down the drain on eBooks they never read and videos they never watch, or monthly training they forget to attend. Don’t spend a quarter (the dime isn’t worth much these days) until you have a better idea of want to achieve. And then pay only for what will help you achieve it.
7) Do you want to create an ecommerce site, meaning a shopping cart site? You can easily sell a three or four products without a shopping cart by using PayPal and Google buy now buttons. But once you pass the four product marker, the right cart could prove essential to your success. There are so many carts at wide-ranging monthly fees. It’s not easy to select the best cart, as each has advantages and disadvantages. Rule of thumb for newbies (not yet earning a cent): Try not to spend more than $30 a month at the outset. Money aside, the right cart can have long range consequences. Do you really want to keep changing all of your product links? You may have to live with that cart for years to come.
8) How do you plan to market your site? Adwords? By purchasing traffic? Free traffic? How much money can you afford to spend on advertising? Don’t break your own heart by spending more than you can possibly earn.
9) How do you know if you’re doing things the right way? Create a reasonable target. I have a friend who earns only a few hundred dollars a month from his website, but he’s thrilled with that number! Many high profile website marketing gurus might describe him as a loser – those who brag about their millions, even show you their canceled checks. I call that “mean” marketing, designed to make you swallow their bait. After all, don’t you want villas is multiple countries and more cars than you can ever possibly drive? Give me a break. Don’t be a victim.
10) It’s not JUST a business. This is how you could be spending almost all of your working/waking hours. Are you in it just for the money? If so, perhaps it’s best that you find a paying job.
Phone 786-693.4223 for a quote.
To your website empowerment,