BN DreamMakers

Developing Web Site Content - 1.4

The development of your web site content will be the largest undertaking in regards to building your web site. No matter how great your navigation is or how flashy your site looks the search engines can really care less.

These things are important as far as web site conversions once you get a visitor to the site BUT they must get there first. It seems that most developers overlook this. The saying “Build it and they will come” DOES NOT APPLY.

It is a fine art to write for both the search engines and humans. They both want different things. You must consider the following basics when writing your content:

• Each page of your site needs to be treated as a separate niche.
• Each page of your site needs to be 1,000 words.
• Each page of your site should contain the pertinent keywords/phrases and placed in the proper locations.
• Each page needs to provide valuable information for the reader.
• Each page should have a call to action of some sort to get the reader to take the next step.

So how do you start? You should have already decided or at least have a rough idea of your navigation for your site. This will provide the start to the pages that you need to start with. You should have also generated a keyword list when you initially started to setup your web site. If you did not do that step then you will need to go and generate a list of keywords for your site before you start to write your content.

Use this Free Keyword Tool

Once you have your keyword list you can start to develop your content. Just pick one page and work with it until it is just right. Use the following tips to help write your content:

Tip # 1

Is your page helping your customer to imagine already owning the product or using the service that you are providing?

*Show pictures or movies of the product being used.

Tip # 2

Do you pictures of the product? Can they get an enlarged view? Do you show more than one view?

*Show pictures or movies of the product being used.

Tip # 3

If your product will save the customer money, have you told them exactly how it will accomplish that? …. As if they already own the product.

Offer testimonials of savings - audio and written

Tip # 4

If the product or service will save the customer time have you explained how that will be accomplished?? …. Again, As if they already own the product.

Tip # 5

Are there any special incentives to purchase RIGHT NOW!

Tip # 6

Does your site instill confidence in the purchase or would a prospective client be nervous in placing an order with you?

An unprofessional site will not instill confidence. I am not talking about flashy, just professional looking. Not something generated in MS Word.

Tip # 7

Does the page convey your main point right away or do I have to search for what the product or service actually is? (If I have to work at it I will go somewhere else)

You must capture the customer attention right away and then offer supporting text for your main point. If you make them search or work to hard they will go on to the next site that did it right.

Tip # 8

Is the order process easy?

Can I buy easily?

Make sure there is an easily visible button to purchase. This can be in several places on the page.

Can I find shipping easily?

This is a pet peeve of mine. I will personally not waste my time on a web site if I cannot find the shipping costs BEFORE I make the purchase. I have come across many sites that only have the shipping costs available after I have gone most of the way through the purchase process only to find in some cases that the shipping was more expensive than the product.

Can I easily see the payment options?

Make sure you list your payment options on the page.

Tip #9

If I have questions about the product or service can I easily find out how to contact you for more information?

Make your contact options readily apparent. I recommend a phone number and an online form. If you list your email address directly on your site you will increase your chances of spam. If you really want to list it make it into a graphic.

I highly recommend this form program:

csMailto

An automated script that allows the user to build and manage multiple mailto forms within a web site. Now you can use preexisting forms. Forms created in FrontPage, Dreamweaver, and any other HTML Editor. You can import them into csMailto!

Tip #10

Are there related products that I might want to purchase? Did you make it easy for the customer to find them?

Many shopping carts have this feature built right in so you can easily display related products with the appropriate products.

I recommend QuikStore for a very advanced shopping cart with many plugin. This software is very good with a database or HTML option and all of the plugins that you will ever need.

osCommerce is a very nice Free shopping cart with a lot of features.

If you have a small amount of products then PayPal is by far the easiest way to get started and it is absolutely free to setup. The only charges are for each sale that is processed.

If you are stuck with your content you may want to consider hiring a Ghost Writer. A Ghost Writer will write your content for you and you can place it of your site. They contract for the work and do not receive any credit or byline for the content. You can find Ghost Writers for any type of writing here - Elance.com

So far in this series you have learned to :

Register a domain name
Setup a Web Host for your new site

Now it is time to start working with your actual web site design. The design of your web site is extremely important and there are a number of items that you must consider before you start. Obviously you can modify your site when ever you want to but some changes are quick and others can take a large amount of time.

Consider this scenario. You setup your site and it grows as all successful web sites do. Your site reaches 100 pages. Sounds like a lot but depending on the site that can happen very quickly. If you failed to consider some of the possibilities for growth you may be in for a huge amount of work to make the changes required for that many pages.

BUT do not let that keep you from getting started.

The best way to get started is to use a template for your web site. There are millions of sites on the Internet so your site will virtually be unique even though it is a template site that others may have purchased. For sure your product or service will be unique.

Guaranteed that your content will be your own and that is what the search engines depend on.

Some great places to buy templates are listed here:

• Template Monster
• BNDreamMakers

Review the templates that are available and select one that you like. remember that this is your own piece of Internet Real Estate and you will ultimately be promoting you so it should reflect at least in part what you like.
When you are selecting your web site you must consider all of the following:

• Web Site Colors
• Web Site Layout
• Navigation
• Expandability

Web Site Colors

Most colors invoke certain associations and feelings in people and should be considered when building your web site.

Red
This color is viewed as exciting,dramatic and passionate. The darker reds have a rich stately feeling.This color is the most emotionally intense and stimulates faster heartbeat and breathing.

The following feelings are invoked by this color:
Excitement
Energy
Warm
Powerful
Activating
Dramatic
Passion

Blue
This is one of the most popular colors, invoking the opposite feelings from red. Peaceful,tranquil blue causes the body to produce calming chemicals.

The following feelings are invoked by this color:
Trustworthy
Dependable
Committed
Calming
Cooling
Tranquil
Peaceful

Green
This color symbolizes nature. It is the easiest color on the eyes. People waiting to appear on TV sit in “green rooms” to relax.

The following feelings are invoked by this color:

Peace
Ecology
Soothing
Relaxing
Renewal
Self-control
Harmony
Tranquil
Restful
Secure
Flexible

Yellow
This color is one of the most attention getting and is also considered optomistic. People have been known to loose there tempers more often in yellow rooms and babies will cry more.This color is best used in small quantities due to the eyes difficulty to take it in.

The following feelings are invoked by this color:

Optimisim
Enlightenment
Happiness
Cheerful
Stimulating
Intelligent
Expressive
Warm

Purple
This color depicts royalty and sophistication.Since it rarely appears in nature it can appear as artificial.

The following feelings are invoked by this color:

Uplifting
Calming
Spirituality
Stately
Regal
Respected
Humble
Richness

Black
Black is the color of authority and power.Black also implies submission.

The following feelings are invoked by this color:

Authoritative
Powerful
Mysterious
Dignified
Refinement
Sophistication

White
This color symbolizes innocence and purity.White reflects light and is considered a summer color.

The following feelings are invoked by this color:

Purity
Cleanliness
Neutrality
Fresh

Web Site Layout

Your web site layout should be easy to use and not contain too much information per page. You have seen the sites where they overstimulate you and you cannot find anything. I have a tendancy to use 2 column site to keep myself from adding too much information. If you have a lot of information then add a new page or button in your naviagation.

You can use the 3 column layout as long as you keep the pages from being too busy. After you want you visitor to find what they are looking for and when they do find it you do not want them to be distracted off in another direction.

Navigation

Your navigation must in all cases stay consistent throughout your web site. You do not want your visitor to become lost on your site. If they become lost they will leave to find another site. If you have a product or service that has relatively few pages then you can use buttons for your navigation. If you have a wide variety of content then you will need to use drop down menu’s to have smooth navigation.

Expandability

When you are selecting a template you have to use your crystal ball and try to look into the future. What direction will your web site grow in? Will your template accomadate that direction. Your web site layout may only have room for 5 buttons depending on the layout and in the future you may need 6 buttons. Depending on the template you select there may be no room.

I have seen many site become a jumbled mess due to the growth of the site. They became unruly and hard to navigate which will stifle the growth that you worked to achieve. If you select the correct categories then you should be able to expand your buttons to include more in your drop down menus. If you choose buttons down the left or right sides of your site then you may be able to add a few more.

You may decide to create your web site from scratch which will require you to either learn a graphics program and learn html or work with someone who does this type of work. But keep this in mind. There are hundreds of thousands of web sites. Creating your web site is the easiest part of the process. It is true that you need a functional professional looking web site but it is not where you wil spend most of your time.

Many fail on the Internet trying to build the “Perfect” web site. You will find that once you build the web site your customers will in some degree define how you modify your web site. So get it built and functional as quickly as possible so that you can move onto the next step.

Building your web site content which is the next in our Internet Beginner Series.

Web Site Hosting - Part Two of Our Internet Business Series - 1.2

If you do a search on Google for this topic you will see the following:

3,800,000 for “Web Site Hosting”

That would require an extreme amount of research to find the “best” hosting for your site. We will get to more on that later. In our last article we showed you how to select and register your domain name. You must have a place to host your new domain name. The web site hosting that you select will depend on a variety of factors. Some of these factors will require a little vision as to what you ultimately see your web site becoming and this depends on what product or service that you are promoting.

You will need to consider the following factors when you are looking for hosting:

• Bandwidth
  • This is based on the amount of traffic through your site. This includes the amount of emails sent and the amount of traffic from visitors.
• Hosting Space
  • This is the amount of space required to host all of the programs and pages that your site contains. This includes the size of email boxes (accounts) that you have for your site.
• Number of Databases provided
  • You will ultimately using a MySQL database on your site. At a minimum you will definitely want a database for a Blog. Many shopping carts and tracking programs also use a database to store your records.
• Allocation of IP addresses
  • In order to have a secure shopping cart you will want a unique IP assigned to your domain.
• Number of Email Addresses provided
  • You will want the ability to have multiple email addresses. It is more convenient to be able to have a different email address for various programs that you will be setting up on your domain.

It can be difficult to decide how much space you will actually use. You want to have enough space and bandwidth to accommodate your site without paying exorbitant prices if you need more of either but you do not want to pay too much while you are still building your site. So not only do you want to start with an amount you can work with you also want to check on what the charges will be if you need to increase the size of either.

Example- Bandwidth and Disk Space Used

To give you an example of a typical site I have taken 4 of my sites that are of various sizes and shown you exactly what they are currently using.

Band Width Used       Physical Disk Space

Site #1                                                 6.46 Meg                     10 M

Lead Capture Site

Site #2                                                 1.65 Gig                       188 M

High Traffic Site

Site #3                                                 1.14 Meg                      21 M

Low Traffic Site

Site #4                                                 3.39 Meg                     108M

Image Hosting Main Site

You should be able to easily find hosting for less than $20.00 per month to accommodate your site.

Linux or Windows

Ok now you can go and do a little research and find yourself a hosting service. One more thing. I recommend finding a Linux host as opposed to a windows server. I have used both and I have had fewer issues with Linux servers.

Name Servers

In the last issue I showed you how to choose the correct domain and register that domain. The default settings when you register a domain point the domain to the name servers of the registrar. You will need to repoint the domains to your new hosting service.

So what is a Name Server?

That is how everyone finds the sites that they are looking for on the internet. This is not as technical an explanation as it could be but for this article it is all you need to know.

When you type in your domain name into your browser there is basically a search of the Domain Name System (DNS) to find where your domain resides. The system finds your domain name server and then finds your domain name and displays the pages of your web site. You need to login to your account where you registered your domain name and find the section that allows you to change your Name Server. You enter the information for your new host’s name server and update. It can take anywhere from 1-3 days for the new information to propagate across the Internet. I have seen it takes a few hours to a few days. I have also seen changes take place at a friend’s computer across the country days before I could see the changes at my physical location.

Basic Setup of New Hosting Server

The majority of hosting that you will find is using Cpanel as the control panel on Linux servers so I will be using this as reference if all of my articles. It is very user friendly for beginner and advanced users. There are a few basics that you will need to setup as soon as your server is setup.

Email Accounts

You will need to setup your default email address. This is the address that is a catch al address. So if someone sends an email to bill-yoursite.com and you do not have that email address setup, the email will has to be directed to the correct location. You can accept the email or bounce it or dump it.

• Accepting All Email (Not Recommended)
  • If you accept all email you will be inundated with a lot of junk. Spammers will find domains and then use lists of names + your domain name and randomly send out email in hopes of hitting an active email box.
• Bouncing Email
  • Instruct the email to send a return response such as Fail: No such person at this address this will instruct the server to return all mail that is sent to a nonexistent email addresses to be returned and also let the sender know that the email address does not exist. Hopefully there will be no future email sent to that address.
• Dump Email
  • You can also dump the email that is sent to what is referred to as a black hole. You will not have to receive the email and the sender will never be notified that the address does not exist.

I recommend bouncing the email.

Now the basics of your server are setup. There will be a further explanation of some other email setting to come. The default email address is important to setup right away so that you do not use up bandwidth on junk mail.

Your domain name is going to be the place that you refer everyone to and when you start to build your site you are not going to want to change it mid stream.

So pick one that you want. With all of the domains that are being used you would think that all of the “good ones” are gone. I have been very fortunate to find pretty much just what I was looking for.

DO NOT PICK A NAME BECAUSE IT IS CUTE!

You will find that as time goes on that building a successful web site is not due to one big thing. It is because you did a lot of little things right. With that said the very first place to start is selecting the right domain name. Keywords will play a large part in everything that you do on the Internet and your new domain name is no exception.

You can use a free keyword tool located here:

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

With this keyword tool you can search for the most popular keywords associated with whatever product or service that you are going to be promoting with your new web site.

For an example we will look at this article that you are reading now. yes, I use keywords in everything that I do. Before I wrote the article I did a few keyword searches and I saw these results:

2173    domain name registration

This means that there were 2,173 searches for the keyword phrase “domain name registration”. My first choice was “best domain name” which had the following results.

3    best place to register domain name

I did this quick check just to name the article you are reading right now. So do a little brainstorming and make a list of keywords and keyword phrases that fit your new web site. Once you come up with the best combination make sure to chack the name for a few other things before you go out and buy it.

Can you repeat the name easily over the phone?

You probably will have the occasion to have to give someone your domain name over the phone or in person so it is best if it can be easily understood. Keep an eye out for words that can easily be misspelled.

Make sure if the domain name has a word that could be a number such as:

www.buyleadsforless.com OR www.buyleads4less.com  I guarantee that you will be answering the question over and over again about which way to spell it or worse yet people will assume the wrong spelling and never end up at your site.

You can compensate for this by purchasing both names and then redirecting the 2nd site to your main site. Many people register the misspelled names just for the possibility of capturing the extra traffic.

So you have done your home work and you have a keyword rich domain name selected. Now it is time to go and make your purchase. But where?

There are hundreds of places to go for domain name registration. The typical pricing is in the range of $7.00 - $15.00 per year. Just about any domain registry will do. Most people have heard of Go daddy for domain registration because they have the best pricing. Unfortunately they also have the most confusing user panel that I have ever seen. Even though I do have domains registered there and I cringe when it is time to go into the panel and make any changes.

Fortunately most domain name registration panels rarely need to be accessed after they are initially setup. You will only need to do the following steps when you make your purchase:

• Purchase the Domain Name with a credit or debit card.
  • Checks are rarely used on the Internet

There is one more step that is required after you make your purchase. That is pointing your domain to your new host. At this point we have not covered hosting or name servers but we do not need to just yet.

Get your new domain registered. An aged domain has certain advantages so I don’t care if you are not going to be ready for a month. Get your domain name picked our and make your purchase. The cost is very cheap for a piece of Internet Real Estate so do it now.

Just a Note:

I have in the past had the perfect domain name picked out. It was everything that I wanted. I even did a search to see it was available. I put the purchase off and when I got back to it someone else grabbed it.

Don’t let this happen to you.

This series of articles is designed to help the Internet Beginner get setup on the Internet.

The series will encompass everything you need top know to start from scratch and gradually build your Internet Presence.

A little about myself. If you search the Internet there is no shortage of “Internet Guru’s” and “Internet Experts”. I do not claim to be either. I have been on the Internet from the year 2000. Everything that I have learned is from the trenches and I taught myself. From Web Site Design to Internet Marketing. I have supported myself and family for over 8 years using the techniques required to become successful.

If you are new to the Internet I can definitely identify with how foreign it can seem. New terms and definitions abound. The Internet is definitely the world of new terms. Many of which are made up to make the same old thing look new. It is one of the fastest changing places that you will ever encounter.

In this series we will reach you how to do all of the following:

• Pick the right domain name
• Register the domain name
• Setup a server for hosting
• Setup your email

I will be posting new articles as they are written. If you have questions feel free to register and ask your questions. I will answer as quickly as possible. This will be the first in a group of articles designed to let anyone with no knowledge start there own Internet Business. I cover everything from initial setup to building your web site and the all important Internet Marketing of your web site.

Other items that you will eventually see published will include all of the following:

• General Business
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Data Management
  • Ebook Marketing
  • Give Away Events
  • Product Creation
  • Business Tips
  • Conversion Tips
  • Emotional Hot Buttons
  • Self Improvement
• Web Site Design
  • Web Site Content
  • Web Site Navigation
  • Site Maps
  • Landing Pages
  • Niche Web Sites
  • Shopping Carts
  • Newsletters
  • Search Engine Optimization (Long Term Gold)
  • Audio Creation
  • Video Creation
• Internet Marketing
  • Article Writing
  • Article Marketing
  • Article Submissions
  • Ghost Writers
  • Search Engine Submissions
  • Directory Submissions
  • Autoresponders
  • Email Broadcasting
  • List Building
  • Link Building
• Software Reviews
  • Software that I use Free and other wise

These are many of the subjects that I will cover but it is not all inclusive. I will share actual case examples of marketing that has worked and some that have not worked. I study the trends and information available on the Internet and I can honestly say that there is always some pearls of wisdom in everything that I have studied. Sometimes a little and sometimes a lot but always something. I hope that I can help you have a smoother ride in developing your new Internet Business.