A Beginners guide to websites and traffic. Part 2

By Mark White
Posted Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Now you have decided what to sell and have the skeleton of a website you must customise it so it looks good and does what you want it to. You either pay some one like me to spruce it up and personalise it, or do it yourself, either way you have ended up with the basic format for your online shop or forum or whatever. Now for the important bits, content and ease of use for the potential customer and getting seen by as many people as possible so you can get some money rolling in.

Tags n’ things

Very important the next bit so please pay attention. Search engines all work in different ways but your pages MUST include meta tags ,titles and a good descriptive section with all your key words in. These keywords are absolutely vital to getting people to you. Two of the best resources around are the meta tag generator here (http://www.freewebsubmission.com/meta-tags.html) and keyword generator here (http://www.wordtracker.com/)
More freebies are available at (http://www.sitepronews.com) .

Traffic

No, not car and trucks and things on wheels but real people who really want to part with their hard earned money for something you are offering. How do you keep a track of all these people? Well those nice people at [(www.bravenet.com) are going to give you a counter so you can get a true picture of how you are doing. The counters and registration are free and you can subscribe to a newsletter that is full of really good stuff for your new creation. For a newbie to the programming world bravenet are an absolute must, these are real experts and the links are a valuable resource so take your time to have a good look at their site.

The look

Don’t go over board with loads of flashing, spinning icons, these just distract the viewer from the main point of your site which is to look at your stuff. That said it never hurts to try an get some revenue from people who offer affiliations, one of the best sites around in my humble opinion is (http://www.tradedoubler.com) . This is a site packed full of major players on the web and the high street who will pay you a small percentage for getting people from your site to theirs to buy from them. Registration is free and easy and as long as you pick carefully and make sure that the items they sell complement yours then you should get a small amount of revenue coming your way to help pay for the maintenance of your site. Just remember ,DON’T overdo it, You are not a fairground full of distractions you are a professional online retailer of either goods or information .

The shop

There are a lot of ways to sort out a way of taking money in your cyber shop but the one I swear by is paypal’s online shop. You must get an account sorted out but it is easy and free and once done you can accept money in any currency and transfer it straight into your bank account. Their customer service is good and both you, the seller, and the buyer get a lot of protection against fraud. You can get set up by visiting this link. (http://www.paypal.com).

Your generous host

With your site all optimised ready for the engines and the shop front looking spick and span you can take the step towards going live. Pick a good name and then pick a good host. I have used 1&1 for my sites and they have never let me down with excellent customer support. They are very competitive with their prices and have hosting plans and bundled software to really get you started in the best possible way. (http://www.oneandone.com)

More traffic

With everything loaded onto your host’s server and the public waiting to storm your paypal account with money you can just sit back and count the readies right?…. Wrong, search engines need to be fed and told you are out there waiting to do business. First job is to get some advice from a genius, no ,not me but my cyber guru / genius, mentor and all over good egg ,Tinu AbayomiPaul. The website of all websites for search engine busting advice from a person who really knows what goes where and why is an absolute must for anyone wishing to succeed in today’s market place and you will get the chance to meet other people in the same situation as you so you don’t feel all alone in the big bad cyber world. The site is (http://freetrafficdirectory.com) as the name implies it wont cost you a penny for all this free advice and the services offered to its members go on and on and on and on……, you get the picture right? So just subscribe to the news letter by sending a blank email to ftdsecrets-mailto:subscribe@topica.com and get that traffic thundering to you down the telephone line. Just remember, she’s my guru so don’t upset her.

Result !!!!!

After a while ( 1 to 6 months ) you should start to see some results and next time I write I will talk about reciprocal linking (joining forces with other sites )and its importance in getting noticed and Ebay , the best place to find a massive audience.

Till next time.
Kind regards
Mark White

My sites if you want a look are (http://www.sunspeks.com) and (http://www.phone-bits.com)

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