Here we want to discuss how one should get prepared for Internet marketing in a systematic approach.
- Build a website
- Submit it to the different search engines
- Popularize the website through different search optimization techniques
- Market your ideas/ Products
- Use email for direct communication
The first and foremost thing, which one should plan is to build a website for himself and find a proper domain name that signifies his selling objects like products, concepts or services.
Steps for building an awesome website
- Find an available domain name of your choice and get it registered
- Find a good host and hire the web space (even your PC can also become a host)
- Design and Develop the website
- Host it.
The popularity and ease of availability of Internet have cast its spell directly onto website designing and related activities. The humane desire of publishing personal charismas on the web has gained immense popularity. By the rule of nature, popularity comes hand in glove with frauds. Web design is, therefore, no way an exception. Being lured by the attraction of money people and organizations sometimes come up even with some unrealistic commitments just to take advantages of your ignorance. As the intellectual conspiracies become much more dangerous and adverse you fail to resist yourself from the attractive terminologies which are used by them. So, we do feel that literacy can enlighten people around preventing them from this type of fraudulence. Our continuous efforts to make you more knowledgeable have led to this series of articles, which we believe to be highly beneficial for all people at large.
Deciding on a Domain Name
Let us try to understand the entire web design scenario through a systematic approach. First of all, you must know, that you need a unique identifier in the cyberspace just like your postal address. This is called the Domain Name. You select a name of your choice, check the availability and book the domain. If somebody has already occupied your desired domain you need to modify it a bit in order to keep it unique keeping the vision/ ideology intact. There are several extensions and restrictions, which we shall discuss later.
Let us assume your domain is my domain and anybody can view your pages as http://www.mydomain.com from remote corners of the world. However, once you have selected a domain name, you need to confirm the availability of the same. Looking at http://whois.com one can check this. There are several registrar companies, who facilitate the domain booking services.
Certain extensions are available to all like .net, .org and .com. There are certain extensions that are used for some very specific purpose like .gov or .edu. Generally .gov domain is applicable for public houses and government departments; on the other hand, .edu is applicable to the research & education segment only. The growing demand for Internet and domain names have further created more country specific extensions like .us or .in, where .us stands for.
The United States and .in stands for India.
There are people, who book some common domains and wait for the prospective clients who ask for domains. So, even if you don’t find your most wanted domain, you can rummage around to see who the owner of that particular domain name is and it is also possible that the person may be willing to sell you his domain at very premium prices.
The advantage is that there are various companies, who allow you to create a domain name under their domains and start working. Geocities of Yahoo, free web hosting are some of them, and they literally don’t need to pay anything for them. So, your domain name may look like geocities.mydomain.com. The obvious question remains as to why do they then allow one to create domains free of cost. The answer being very simple they want to display banners and advertisement of themselves or the sponsors to earn. That’s why you can find so many advertisements in the geocities series.
Nevertheless today you can book a domain name (off course if the subject is available) at a price of $10 to $15 per annum.
Getting a Web Server
Once you book the domain, you need some web space where your web pages will reside and at which the domain name will point to. This is something like staying in a particular place on the earth and communicating with another place for attention. This space in the cyber world is called the Server space. The obvious question comes up, whether you can host your website in your own Computer.
Definitely yes, but can you guarantee a 24x7 uptime of your Computer? Remember your website may be visited by people from any corner of the world as per their convenient time zone. In reality, there are many companies, which allow you to share their hard disk space on a rental basis. Even there are sites like Yahoo Geocities, who provide hosting free of cost. The vendors offer you generally two types of hosting services namely dedicated and shared, which will be explored later. Nevertheless, the business ethics ensure the privacy of your files and contents on the hosted server.
Web Design
You have got hundreds of options for designing your Web Pages. It can be simple pages designed by you or you can even take help of various web designing templates available both free and paid over the Internet. You can use simple tools like FrontPage or Dream Weaver to build your website. The selection of the right tool depends upon your own objective and the presentation style you are looking for. You can also hire a professional group, but it all depends on your taste and requirement. Do you know that you can even generate web pages from MS Word or MS Excel?
Once you have completed the formalities for domain name booking, it is your turn to build your website. Now let us understand the basic purpose of building a website. Why do you need a website? You want to propagate your portfolio to the world through the website. A teacher may like to highlight his teaching experience or some useful notes for the common students whereas a company highlights its products & services, Quality and the Client list proclaiming its branding in the market. The challenge is to present your profile to the world in a crisp manner. Remember an average surfer will focus on your page for about 8 to 10 seconds within which one need to convince him.
The advantage is you can express your unique ideas or your experimented knowledge to the world from a space that only your own. So the chances of stealing your ideas to become their owner are nullified as you own the copy write for your website contents. You retain your pioneers. Your unique innovations remain your rights forever. There are sites, like http://copyscape.com, which will detect and let you know, if anybody else tries to copy your thoughts/ ideas and the cyber world is more active than ever before with strict laws for the wrongdoers.
The world goes ahead by copying and it has grounded its root in our mind and soul. How can we ignore the fact that it might be Mc Dowell or Amway who have transformed it? How should we proceed? We can copy if only we know how to sell someone else’s concept or original work with our own innovative expression. Let's take an example. Suppose you are teaching Windows Basics to somebody, which others are also doing. Especially Microsoft website is showing the features insignificant details. We can always try to sell the same Windows Basics through our innovative approach to make it palatable and present it to the readers to build our own brand.
The only point worth a note is that Website is a continuously evolving process. Never treat it as a project that has got a definite starting and endpoint. Building your website once is not the end of the road but you need to continuously change it while keeping it up and running. Obviously, websites will consume substantial time and effort on your part.
But every cloud has a silver lining!
Website building is no more a Himalayan task. Rather the innovation and technology marvels have made it easier than ever. You need not even know HTML or any graphical packages to build your own website. There are hundreds of downloadable templates (both free and charged) available over the Internet, which you can use to build your website. You will find several sites where various
Java scripts are available to set your website alight. Your job is more of assembling everything and presenting it in a decent manner. Nevertheless, there are plenty of freelancers and web design companies existing on the web itself whom you can easily hire to build the website as per your choice and host it for you. The cost is very affordable and economical too!
But don’t delay! Your chosen domain name may become unavailable tomorrow! The web host is the companies that house your domain. On cyberspace, a computer server becomes the host. A server can be of different types based on the operating system, like Unix/Linux server or Windows server. Each of them has got their unique advantages. However, the fact of life remains that a Web host will own a server in which he will allocate some space for you to host the website you create.
It becomes the responsibility of the host to make your website live on the internet/online community as well as to maintain it properly to keep it up for 24x7 hours. It’s the unwritten business ethics of the host to intimate you, if for
any reason server becomes non-functioning for a certain period, but it should
never exceed a couple of hours.
You need to do a quite a lot of research work before choosing the right host and server. A bad host or server can create mayhem for your business. Now let us discuss some options that come to you free. A lot of sites offer you free space for hosting your site. Mostly these sites display their own advertisements or sponsors’ ads to earn.
Once you have built your web pages, you need to upload them to the specific server, so that people can view your vision/ mission/objectives/goals in an elaborate manner. Once you book the domain name, the agent or the service provider gives you a user-friendly, wizard-based Control Panel for managing your domain. As the Control Panel gives one the real control over his domain it deserves a very high level of security and can be only accessed through the right combination of a valid username and password. You cannot only transfer or park your domain from the Control Panel but also manage various services like
Changing of A-Records or MS Records, URL Forwarding etc. If you book the domain name and server space from the same service provider, then managing your entire hosting activities become a cake walk, but if two are from two different vendors, then all these jargons come into the picture, but don’t worry! The technology marvels have made it a much simpler task for you. Let us cite an example, if you change the A-Record of your domain to another valid IP address, your domain will search for the pages in the changed IP Address instead of the default one.
There is hardly any problem if you treat your own PC as the hosting server. You need to ensure that it is up for literally 24 hrs a day and all 7 days a week. The formula of 24x7 has got importance because your website will be visited by different people located in different parts of the world. Just imagine the working hours in the United States are the wee hours for the Indians. You may fall asleep, but your web server CANNOT.
Control Panel allows you to create email-ids of your choice and the number of such email-ids depends upon the package or contract that you have purchased. Most importantly, it provides you the username and password for FTP (File Transfer Protocol). FTP is a must to upload or download files to or from the server. They have got many wizard-based FTP tools readily available whose list starts with WS Ftp, Cute Ftp, ACE Ftp, and Smart Ftp. The options are really varied. You can also accomplish the same job just from the command prompt of your Windows operating system. However, once you complete the entire process, then only people can browse your site, the way you are browsing this article right now.
Web Space
People have got very peculiar ideas about the web space they require. People feel that 10MB or 20 MB are bare minima for hosting. Practically a complete website can be hosted even within 2MB while 10 web pages may require even less than 2 MB of space. One needs to calculate the requirement accordingly and decide upon the space. Perhaps the easiest way is to put all your pages/ images/ scripts in your local folder and calculate the space. Keeping a buffer of 30% on the precalculated size for future enhancements, you may go ahead with the booking of space. This space may be utilized for highlighting some more products/ services at a later stage. Experts have noticed that in due course the people only add on pages to the server instead of removing the earlier redundant ones, thus occupying more and more of the server space. So, we advise you to maintain it properly and remove the redundant/ unused pages/ images on a regular basis to keep clutter from amassing your favorite blog or website.
Search Engine Optimization
Once you build your website and upload it, you want billions of people to visit your website in order to fulfill your business or personal objectives. However proper marketing techniques ought to be applied so that the browsers become aware of the existence and realize the utility of your website. Perhaps the first step towards submitting your site to all major search engines. Remember to look at the 15th or 20th site, displayed by any search engine when you search based on any keyword. So, the most profound method is to get a higher rank in the search engines. Now the obvious question as to how does one get a good ranking in the Search Engines?
A list of search engines are furnished in the Appendix
Constant endeavors towards the goal of a proper search engine ranking have evolved the term SEO - the buzzword of today’s Internet era. There are some key SEO techniques.
It is learned that the site that has got a higher number of inbound and outbound links gets a higher ranking in all the search engines. This is called Link building or Traffic Exchange. Traffic Exchange systems have been identified as one of the primary methods that have found itself at the zenith of its popularity among various SEO techniques. So, in other words, we can say that Traffic Exchange is one of the most popular methodologies that can be adhered to regulate traffic towards your website.
Now let's try to find out what does Traffic Exchange mean? Exchange means exchanging your website link with others. Research and innovation have established the fact that the ranking of your site depends greatly on, “from how many sites, your site can be visited or linked to”, or in other words, how many sites provide a link to your website. The obvious question comes to the fore ‘why should somebody allow you to paste your website link in his coveted area?’ The simple answer is that your counterpart also wants to promote his website using the same approach and in exchange for which he too will demand a reciprocal link to your website.
What are the options open for you? The most commonly used methods are Auto Surf, Paid to Click Surf, Manual Surf and Paid Surf. What is the role of your website? It is to become a valuable resource for your visitors either for free or to earn substantial revenue. Never forget the statutory warning, “you must popularize your website first before looking towards utilizing it as a revenue earning machine!”
A Properly managed traffic exchange system can yield you phenomenal growth in the number of visitors that enables you immensely in propagating your brand name or increasing your regular earning potential through advertisements and sponsorship. Once you are convinced about the traffic exchange system methodology for enhancing your hit count and decide to “give it a go”, you need to further delve into its nitty-gritty. If you just carry out a search with the keyword “Traffic Exchange” in any of the popular search engines like Google / Yahoo / MSN, you will find billions of listings. On the one hand this establishes the profoundness of the Traffic Exchange Methodology, while on the other the overwhelming popularity also should caution you from frauds and scams. Please remember even the commoners may smell the fraudulent practices involved. Most of the search engines have their own auto crawler to provide the requisite protection. After all, one cannot befool a smart crawler behind which a lot of expert robotic and human brains have been constantly at work. Just ask yourself; “can a school for kid website provide a link to a porn site?”
In such a case of paradoxical links, even if by the esteemed and popular providers like Adsense, then the content of your site demands your “Immediate and Urgent” attention. Here you must remember the ever-cherished traditional concept, “Rome was not built in a day”. Traffic Exchange system is never one-time jobs that you can just set up and forget about. You need to continuously monitor and upgrade the links. This job also involves extensive research for finding out relevant links and other obsolete links.
What does a relevant site mean? A site that is cohesive or can become co-efficient in nature to your website is a relevant site. How do you find one such site? Find out sites, which have got similar business goals or objectives. How many similar matching products and services they both offer. Like a website for school kids can link to the relevant links that link to sites on various books/ articles/ magazines/ publishers, higher schools or universities for further studies, various tuition sites, vocational studies, fun and entertainment sites for kids, games and sports’ sites etc.
If you have found out the relevant sites, where you are looking for a Link building or traffic exchange, then you need filtering. What are the parameters? One such parameter may be a PR Checker. You must try to negotiate with sites that have got higher PR rankings. You can instantly search the PR of any website or any particular page of a website from the URL <http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php>. Once you find a host of sites as an outcome of your extensive research get down to short-listing them. Now, start sending emails to their webmasters requesting a link exchange. Once they confirm you can start placing their links on your websites. Even this process can result in some advertising for you. So forge right ahead and give it a try? However, if the traffic exchange is agreed upon then you need to also monitor whether your link has been posted at your counterpart’s site.
Please remember that this is a continuous process, where you need to watch the sites at regular intervals to ensure the existence of your link in the other sites. Webmasters continuously update their sites that may result in an unnoticed or unwilling removal of your link from their site. In this case, you need to immediately draw the attention of the Webmaster for that site. You might also find some deliberate exclusion of your site links from some of your smart counterparts, who do not have any basic business morale. In such cases, we suggest that you remove their links immediately.
With the Internet becoming immensely popular a lot of websites have mushroomed but without proper maintenance and nurture they cease to exist leading to the premature death of the links that these websites provide to others. So, you should ensure the existence and up be running for all sites among who traffic exchange system technique has been applied. “So don’t be lured by the gimmicks like ‘Guaranteed Visitors’ or ‘Million Visitors in 7 days’ or ‘thousand traffic exchanges daily’”. It may be noted that they may or may not be frauds. However, prevention is almost always better than cure and a constant watch must be kept. Remember that the popularity of your site depends largely on how many websites in cyberspace link to your site and this becomes the major criterion for search engines to determine the rank of your site. So, never treat traffic exchange as a child’s play; rather it is serious business. A proper systematic approach may lead to an explosion in the number of visitors to your site while improper utilization may also blacklist it.
Cultivate patience as you deal with Traffic Exchange as the famous adage goes “Slow but steady wins the race.” Please note that a website, which remains unchanged over a period of time loses its ranking with the search engine. The search engine also demands dynamism like today’s lifestyle! There are several other ways of popularizing your website. Like when you submit your site to different sites publish the banner Advertisements or links at other sites. Please note that auto surf sites and pay-on-click sites can significantly add value to your website in terms of popularity.
The two-fold purpose of a website
On one hand, a website provides you the unique opportunity to market and sell your products/ services as well as to establish your credential all the world over while on the other hand, the website itself can become your key earning tool. The first and foremost way is to earn money from your website is through procuring sponsorship and advertisements. As your website grows in popularity, major players will start choosing your site for publishing their advertisements, perhaps in the same way, you had started popularizing your website at the initial stages. Big companies and banks, Insurance Companies, Placement agents want to publish their advertisements to amass their popularity among the visitors.
They prefer the websites, which have got more visitors and page view rates. One such starter’s kit is Google Adsense. Google publishes variously shaped advertisements at your site for sponsorship while Adsense promotes this. Perhaps this has reached the peak today for the beginners as the Internet World and Google have proved to be cohesive. Even you can find the other Internet giants like Yahoo and others have started following up the same technique.
The registration technique is fairly simple. Just go to the Adsense site, get yourself registered. Google will display several options including types and colours to choose from. Once you have selected the style/ color/ size etc, Google will build the code for you, which you need to simply copy and paste in your web pages. It is sometimes forecast that Google Adsense gives your website a higher rank in the Google search engine which is yet to be proved.
Now, this is high time for us to discuss a bit about Google Adsense. The key parameter of Adsense is the content. The content may be of any type starting from the educational content and ending up with a backgammon website. Google searches the keywords from the content of each page and displays advertisements that suit them the most.
Just for an example a donate car site will have Advertisements of car donation related activities and sites like Charity Donation, Car Donation, Charitable Donation, California Donate Car, Top 10 Donate a Car site. Advertisement varies over a period of time because Google displays Ads dynamically until and unless some advertiser expresses his willingness to publish his advertisements on a particular web page. An education page should contain the advertisements Critical thinking, the teaching company, online training system, faculty jobs, eLearning etc.
So, one must appreciate the importance of high-quality, focused content, by which the right advertising punch lines take place in your web page. The problem comes up when one page tries to focus on too many products or parameters. This is again a common scenario in the Home Page; where you want to highlight your all salient products and services. It is the challenge of the content developer to write the quality content for you without distorting your focal content. If Google finds miscellaneous types of content, generally it displays the advertisement of the generic service providers of the locality. The advertisement may be for airfare or big hotels of that locality, which ultimately defeats your purpose. Again we want to reiterate, Google goes by the theme based content of the web page, for advertising sponsors.
Nevertheless, the monthly revenue from Advertisements and sponsors can be a solid income from your website. However one needs to also put up continuous efforts to keep the website higher in ranking and maintain its popularity. There are sites, which pay you if you simply view them Website - explore its earning potential When we set out to discuss the potential additional income that can be generated from a website, the first thing that comes up in our mind is home business. The concept of home business is nothing new to the world as it has spread over for long, but Internet has not only added glitters to it but has also converted it to a prime source of income from the comforts of your home. So, now home business is not treated as an additional income only but true income for individuals.
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