Plan Your Website

Content

The content of your website will depend upon whether you are selling your own product (or service) or selling someone else's through an affiliate program.

If you are selling your own product or service, your site will basically take the form of a sales letter. The book Make Your Site Sell by Ken Evoy (yes him again) is the acknowledged bible of online selling. It goes into great detail, leading you step by step through the process of creating a site that will make the sale. The download version provides over 500 pages of easy to understand information for only around US$20.00. Another bargain from Ken.

(Ken Evoy's name pops up through-out this site for good reason. He was one of the pioneers of online marketing back in the early days of the internet. His books are always readable, useful and reasonably priced. I would go so far as to say, "If it has Ken's name on it, buy it!")

If you are selling someone else's products through an affiliate program you do not - I repeat, not - want to give your visitors a sales letter. Why? Your merchant partner already has a site set up to sell his product. How would you feel if you read a sales letter for a product, then went to the product's site and found ... another sales letter! At this point would you be in the mood to buy?

You want to give your visitor useful information that is in some way related to the product (or service) that you are promoting. Then send them to your merchant partner and let him do the selling. The Affiliate Master Course mentioned earlier goes into this in great detail with examples. Again, I highly recommend this free course.

Site Design

You need to keep the following things in mind when designing your site:

• Your site needs to load quickly.
• Your site needs to look professional.
• Your site needs to be easy to navigate.
• Your site must be designed to optimize your search engine ranking.

Quick Loading - How many times have you left a site before it finished loading because it was just too slow? No one will buy anything from you if they never see your page. And they won't see your page if it takes 5 minutes to load. The way to make your site load fast is to keep it simple. Avoid large graphics. Use smaller graphics and use no more than 10 to 20 depending on their size. Avoid fancy Javascripts, Java applets, or plug-ins.

Professional - Keep your layout neat and simple. Keep your color scheme simple. Using ever color in the rainbow will make your pages look tacky. For more information on how to design a pleasing webpage see Web Pages That Suck .

Easy Navigation - Make it as easy as possible for someone to move around your site. Keep your navigation consistent on each page to avoid confusion.

Search Engine Optimization - You must design your site with the search engines in mind. The search engines will bring in most of your traffic. And more traffic means more sales. This subject is too big to tackle here. I recommend you get Sumantra Roy's Search Engine Masters Course. This FREE 5 day email course covers how to pick key words and how to optimize your website's search engine ranking. Click here to order this excellent free course.

(We will discuss more about the importance of search engines in step 6: Market Your Website)

OK, now it is finally time to start building your website...