Freshh Media

Don’t subscribe to get rich quick schemes.

There are thousands of sites out there trying to get you to part with your money, and inferring that you will immediately start reaping the rewards. Don’t be fooled by compelling one page sales letters, often with copies of bank statements, and invariably concluding with free gifts worth hundreds of dollars. Often the letters are sprinkled with testimonials and attempt to close the sale by offering only a limited number left remaining for sale, or you are warned of an imminent price increase. Check some of them out. Make a note of the price and the suggested uplift date. Does it really happen. Check out some of the reference sites. Are they really sites of substance, in which you would place the utmost faith in their recommendations. Yes, you can make money, but is usually after the passage of time, and not without a good deal of effort.

Don’t pay for information on How-to.

There are thousands of publications offering, at a cost, to teach you how to bring about search engine optimization, rank highly with search engines or become an affiliate guru.

Keep your money in your pocket and seek similar advice for free. Let me start you off by pointing you at some free publications which will get you on your way, and all of which are available to download from our web site. Brad Callen’s “Search Engine Optimization Made Easy” is a useful read. To emphasise my point about rogue web traders, I did a Google Advanced Search for exact matches to the title. At the top of the first page, ranking No1 out of 26,400 was a site offering to sell you this free book for $29.95.

Ken Evoy’s Affiliate Masters Course is an excellent free read. Whilst one of its aims is to educate the reader about affiliate schemes, much of the content relates to pretty much any web site.

You might also want to download another good free read, “The Netwriting Masters Course.”

Don’t pay over the odds for domain registration.

There are thousands of sites offering to register domain names. Do find a site that not only provides search facilities to see if your chosen domain name is already registered, but also provides alternative suggestions if it is. Don’t pay more than $10.00 as an annual registration fee. Let me stress that we are not affiliates of the company we use. We last paid $8.95 for a dot com at Godaddy.com. We liked the access to nameservers so that we could activate the transfer of the domain name to a host of our choice. Do not subscribe to hosting at this site.

Do get yourself a suitable domain host.

There are some very important points here. To ensure minimum of downtime from your host do not join any of the free hosting sites. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Choose a site that offers to host an unlimited number of web sites for you. The fist host we selected still has a maximum of two sites before they start to increase the annual fee. You should possibly consider one that offers an unlimited number of autoresponders, if you feel that you may need this facility in the future. Although not the site we have recommended on our web site, you might find that Hostgator.com compares favourably with anything else. Make sure that you are comparing like with like when it comes to number of domains, web space, band width etc.

Don’t buy links or email addresses.

Don’t buy links and more importantly do not purchase from web sites offering you tens of thousands of email addresses. Whilst it can be a pain, you must build up your own links, and your own opt-in list of email addresses. To assist with link building, particularly with keeping track of where you are in a link relationship we use a truly excellent piece of software, outlined on our web site. Not only does it generate the link pages but it handles the sending of emails from templates.

Do carry out search engine optimization.

Your site will go nowhere unless you have carried out the basics. By this I mean searching for and using keywords, developing a link strategy, writing and submitting articles, and promoting your site in other ways. For keywords use the “Tour” at wordtracker .com and then try it for free. For SEO read Brad Cullen’s free e-book available on our web site. For tuition on how to write articles, go to Joe Robson’s site at adcopywriting.com. Joe has had many years of copywriting experience, and his advice is free.

Do get good article submission software.

For our experiences do a Google Advanced Search for the exact phrase “Articles to Directories in the Newbie World” and select a site to read about our experiences. We found disappointing submission companies, mediocre software and again came across the heavy sell, one pagers with free gifts. This prompted us to design our own. We have now made the decision to share it with others, and we are currently preparing it for commercial use.

Get easy-to-use web design software.

Nearly all web design software writes the HTML code for you. Some packages are very cheap with, reflecting functionality. Others are very expensive, but with considerably longer learning curves. Nearly all require the purchase of some extra software for search engine optimization. We have recently carried out an in-depth review of a web design package which led us gently by the hand through SEO, and optimized each page for us. Feel free to visit the review at the web site shown below.

I guess this is my chance to start something similar to a blog to keep some kind of a personal record of my professional journey. During my school days in the National University of Singapore, I never thought I would be making a living creating websites for others.

I started picking up HTML about 5 years ago. Surprisingly, despite coming from a non-programming background, I picked up the language almost effortlessly. I started putting up small websites on those free hosting sites. There were a lot of those companies back then.

Before long, I was working on several projects for a few companies. It didn’t take long for me to stumble upon Macromedia Flash. Once again, I was curious about how it worked and kept working on it. Those first few Flash files were real cheesy but in after just one year of hands-on experience with HTML and Flash, I managed to win a local web design competition. I got first out of slightly over thirty entries and won lots of software and several pieces of hardware.

My friends kept telling me to start something on my own. Well, I did but it didn’t quite work out as I lacked the marketing and business skills to run a proper Company. Before long, flocks of freelancers entered the market and the prices hit rock bottom.

Anyway, I was running a personal website. It was doing well until I got a full-time job and due to neglect, it disappeared with the many websites at about the same time when the dotcom bubble burst.

And when I said doing well, I meant getting just 5 visitors a day. Hence, the title of this article. I put up some simple articles on my website and also offered a free email service but without the marketing know-how, the traffic was trickling.

It wasn’t until 5 years later that I started getting between 20-50 unique visitors per day on each of my website. I’m now running close to 10 websites on my own and several others for my customers.

I’d be the first to admit that I’m far from being successful but the results are encouraging. At least the websites are now paying for themselves and on some weeks, there is even some profit

At this point, I bet you want to know how I did that? Well, there really isn’t any secret and if you look a bit harder, I’m sure you can find the information you need on one of those Internet Marketing websites.

But I’ll save you the trouble and give it to you here. There are two things you need to know to run a website that will eventually pay you back.

The first is that your website MUST be search engine optimized. That means tweaking your website to make sure the website is friendly for the search engines. If you have a bit of time for experiment, here are some tips.

Make sure that your keywords appear in your page title, and in your URL if possible. Get as many inbound links as possible but with anchor texts in your links. That means enclosing your keywords within your inbound links.

Beware of websites that sell you a half-baked story about how they can guarantee you top rankings. I tried and tested all those information I found on the Internet and it took me MONTHS to see any kind of results.

If you are in a hurry to get started, take a look at Instant Website. Instant Website is an in-house product developed by myself and I use it to host my corporate website. It took me months to build and I’m now hosting my customers’ site on it.

The second thing you need to know is that you MUST know how to build lists. This is critical to the success of your website. Search engine traffic brings in the visitors and you must have the tools to retain them!

I’m talking about having some tools to reach out to those same visitors. One example is an email box. Instant Website has a simple one incorporated in it but if you need something more powerful, here are a couple of good ones. http://www.aweber.com and http://www.constantcontact.com

That’s it. Make sure your website is search engine optimized and keep building that list and you’ll never have to worry about your website averaging just 5 visitors a day. What you want to do with all that traffic is completely up to you.

On sites like this one, I place Google ads on them. Maybe I’ll write more about that in another article but if you click on it, I earn some money. But only do so if you’re really interested in what you see in the ad.

So there you go, the story about the website that had 5 visitors a day but I’m sure after reading this article, you’re on your way to running successful websites! So start one today!

Incoming search terms for the article:

• i\m only getting 5 hits a day

ou have made a few resolutions. You need your website to perform so that you reap the rewards. This article will be more useful to companies who have a web based business or a portal.

Does this sound familiar:
1. We have a website and have spent a lot of money but it’s too clunky.
2. It served us well when we had a tight budget and needed to have a website but its not performing.
3. The development company that built the website for us told us they could do all these wonderful things but left the site incomplete.
4. Our competitors have mastered the web business even though we can out beat them with our marketing and reputation.
5. When ever we ask the developers to add new features or functionality they turn around and claim it cannot be achieved or that was not the scope of the project.

The list can go on and on but if the above are statements that you have said or heard and you need to break free then read this article and let me know if it was useful.

When a business on the web is built. It is built to serve a target audience. It is built to serve a need in the marketplace. If the website was formed out of an idea and you were not sure if the idea would be worthwhile then the reason you are reading this is because your website and idea were worth the effort. You built the website for your visitors and not for yourself.

The decision to do something with your website or web portal needs to be after a full in depth analysis from someone other than yourself. The reason for this is because it allows you to get an unbiased opinion. The first steps before approaching someone to analyze your website is to list the objectives of this exercise. To help you with this process I have tried to list the questions I would ask myself

1. What’s the purpose of this website?
2. Is this website an information site or a transactional site?
3. The visitors who would like visiting this website would be IT savvy or not?
4. Has the website in its current state received a lot of visitors?
5. Have I received feedback from my clients or visitors about the site?
6. Have I analyzed the behavior pattern of my web visitors?
7. Am I IT savvy?
8. What websites do I find usefull and user-friendly?
9. Are any of these websites close to being my competitors?
10. What features and aspects of my competitor’s site do I like?
11. What I want the website to achieve?
12. How much am I willing to spend?
13. Do I have time deadlines and if not make it a point to have a time deadline.

Deciding if the site needs to be redeveloped or tweaked

After having listed the answers to the above questions you should either request or appoint an expert to give you an unbiased opinion of your website or decide that you do not need to do much about your website. If you do go ahead to get an in-depth report check to see if their report points out any of the following:

1. The site has usability problems
2. Information or content on your site is hard to find
3. Actions that need to be performed on your site are not performed by visitors as they do not understand these actions or find it too difficult.
4. The design is too cluttered
5. Users are not following a certain navigation path that you wish them to take
6. Pages take too long to load
7. Search engine optimization has not been catered for
8. Navigation flow on the site is not planned out well. This is crucial not only for a human to navigate through your site but also from a search engine point of view.

It is important to realize that your present website may not need a complete rework if the business goals are to simply make the site design to look good. If however you want all aspects of your website to function and in it’s current state they do not function then you probably have answered your own question. Yes its time to have a budget and plan in place to move forward.

Once you have got your report you need to take time out to analyze the situation before making the final decision

Goals from a Visitor point of View:

You goal should be to have your visitors
1. Find what they want easily
2. Get what they want easily
3. Easily perform the appropriate actions that you want the visitors to perform.

To accomplish this, the website needs to have:
1. An excellent navigation system.
2. The website should be user friendly. For example, does the website have a natural flow while placing an order or does it make it difficult for a visitor to handle this process.
3. The most important actions should be accessible within one or two clicks.

Goals from a Search engine point of View: Please note the below points are a rough guidelines as this topic is vast.

Flash : If your website presently uses a lot of flash consider the following before making a decision to redesign or redevelop. Most search engines cannot read text inside a flash animation. If core elements of your site such as your navigation menus are in flash you need to rethink about this. Consider a site whose navigation menus are all in flash. A search engine would not effectively index the pages on the site as it cannot read the flash links to each page. That is unless you also provide a duplicate navigation system without flash.

Incorrect or poorly structured HTML: If you are not very IT savvy and do not understand HTML. It is wise to have the HTML code reviewed roughly to check if there is any incorrect HTML code or overlaps as this has a negative affect on your search engine ranking. This can also confuse search engines.

Java Script: Again while most search engine can read java script, they cannot cause the javascript functions to activate. This can have a negative impact if your site navigation system is javascript based with no alternative. It is safer to have text links then have buttons which depend on Java script as otherwise your navigation links may be hidden to a search engine.

There are many other important factors such as: The use of frames or IFrames; Cross browser compatibility, Huge blocks of encrypted viewstate text at the beginning of each page; etc…

Making a decision to have the complete website redone is a tough decision as you need to have the right developers who understand your needs and not theirs. I have noticed many companies after realizing that the first development cycle was not the best they go about redeveloping the website by what I consider patch work.

Patch work can be affordable if the site does not have major errors or shortcomings, but if it does it is advisable to have the application redone or implemented using other off the shelf packages. The rationale to this is that you have a website already which needs to be improved so a development company or a developer can have a better understanding of what you require and the dos and don’t for your business. It is important to remember that especially in the case of website re-development it is the quality of the work that matters and not the size of the development team. A development company with a good project manager and true geeks in the development team is one that will get you places.

I hope the information here was useful is some way. If you make up your mind to do something about your website spend your budget wisely by first listing the objectives the site needs to perform for the next 2 years and what functionality is the bare necessity and what functionality is a nice to have. Speak to your existing clients and do not waste too much time in planning that the cost of planning exceeds the actual cost of implementation.

Good luck and all the best for your mission.

http://www.zapstrategy.com