1 Set Your Goal
The first step in building a successful website is to decide why you want it. Do you have a specific product or service to sell? This new website can be focused on getting new customers. Do you want to make money without having your own product? That’s OK. Millions of websites were built to generate revenue through affiliate programs such as Google AdSense ads or by referring customers to buy products elsewhere, such as on Amazon.com, eBay, or through affiliate managers like ClickBank, Commission Junction and ShareaSale. The specifics of these programs will be dealt with in later chapters. For now, the important thing is to understand why you want a website.
Let’s assume you are a travel writer, and you want to have a professional image and provide a way for people you’d like to impress, such as editors you want to sell stories to or people you want to invite you on press trips. A website is an excellent medium to display articles you’ve had published, other examples of your writing, and possbily some of your photographs, awards you’ve won, etc.
If you do freelance work, such as technical writing or editing, for example, you can also attract new business. Your site can even have a form that prospective customers can fill out and email to you for a quote.
There are other ways to make money with a website. If you get enough visitors on a regular basis, you can sell advertising space. Or you can put up Google Adsense ads, and whenever a visitor clicks on one, you get anything from a few pennies to ten or twenty dollars. If you’ve written a book, you can sell it from your site. Or, you can sign up as an affiliate with Amazon.com and earn 3% or 4% commission whenever people buy the books you’ve advertised.
The Most Important Thing
Here’s the most important thing — you need to decide ahead of time why you want the website and what you want it to do for you. If you start with that clear vision, then you can make sure it works as well as possible to fulfill that vision. What the primary action you want your visitors to take?
- Buy your book?
- Click on your Google Ads?
- Publish your articles?
- Send you on a press trip?
- Request a quote for you to do a writing job?
- Buy the rights to reprint your pictures?
If you only want your website to be visited by people you have told about it, then, of course, you don’t need to worry about search engines. But if you want people to be able to use Google, Yahoo, MSN, or one of the other search engines to be able to type in some keywords and then find you, then your next step is to do some keyword research.