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Do I actually need a Website?
Probably. It is possible to make money online without having a website. You can, for example, drive traffic to an affiliate website and earn your commission using various marketing strategies (see Traffic). But most internet businesses will need a site of some sort. These days they can be very cheap and easy to set up.
Websites for small bussinesses vary enormously. For example:
- Small sites with a few pages containing just a sales pitch for one product.
- Large sites with many hundreds of pages of information.
- Store sites with, essentially, a catalogue of products for the custeomer to choose from.
And many more.
Many websites for online businesses will be a mixture of the above, containing pages with:
- Information to draw in visitors
- Advertisements for products
- Internal links to newsletters, information, products
- External links to other sites
Websites don't have to follow any particular format. Indeed, you should aim to be just as individual as you can and suit your site to your purpose. Let us look at how to acquire a website before we go onto what you should do with it.
Setting up a website
Easy websites
The easiest route to a website of your own is to sign up with one of the online sites which charge you a small fee for one of their 'ready to go' instant sites. Often you just fill in a few boxes to personalise the site to you (site name, etc). The products are ready loaded and in minutes you have a site which is ready for you to start attracting customers.
The positive side of these sites is obviously the speed and the fact that you can set them up with no knowledge. The downside is that you have little control over the content and the site will be similar to others out there. The difference comes in your making a better job of attracting customers than others. See 'Instant websites' in the resources list on the right of this page
You can get a website for nothing. Some sites will let you have pages for free in return for keeping their advertising on your pages. This could loose you custom to adverts which pay you nothing. A further downside to these, and the instant sites above, is that you do not have the 'street cred' of your own memorable URL (mydomain.com or whatever). See 'free web pages' in the resources list on the right of this page
A website of your own
For most people, a site of your own is what you should aim for to give your business a professional look and improve your chances with the search engines. They are simple and cheap to set up. The advantages are obvious: your own domain name and a site created for the purposes your business. They down sides are equally obvious: they need time and some skill to set up. However, programs for writing web pages are now very user friendly and the skills are easily learned. Many site hosters include simple writing programs in their packages. If you are skilled, or are prepared to take time to learn those skills you can use the more powerful writing programs available.
Domain Names
These are the names like microsoft. com that identify a site and are its web address. There are untold thousands of sites out there that will sell you a domain name (see Domain Names under Resources in the right hand collumn). You just fill in your chosen name and they tell you if it's available and in what form (.com, .co.uk, .bus, etc), then they'll sell it to you at a cost per year.
Of course, most of the common names are gone, and since every domain name must be unique, finding a name may take some time. However, I did just recently (November 2008) get a single word .com domain for less than £10 (USD 15) so it can be done.
Most likely, you will have to have a combination of words. There is a geat debate over the pros and cons of diferent combinations. I'll simply say that you chosen name should be either memorable (google.com) or describe the site (carribeanhotels.co.uk). You may even achieve both! See
Once you've bought your domain name you need to have it 'hosted'. That is, you have to rent space on the internet where your site can be seen. You can have your site hosted by the site that sells you the name, or choose your own. The fees will depend on what you want. Some providers will host your site for free. For this you will get a cetain amount of space, a limited bandwidth (a rough measure of how much traffic your site can handle) and some services such as email, webwriter, etc. When you want more facilities you can move up to a paid package. Hosting is not expensive.
SEO
What? It's short for Search Engine Optimisation. When somebody types a query into a search engine such as Google, the search engine looks for sites that have certain charcteristics that show they will be useful. The best matches appear at the top of the search list. This is what sites want of course. Exactly what criteria Google and other search engines use is, for the most part, a tightly guarded secret and is updated regularly. The most important features are a) the site is well written so that informatin can be easily found, and b) that the site has text that is rich in the 'key words' of the search, and c) There are many, good quality links to the site.
SEO is a fascinating and vital subject. You can achieve much with a little knowledge. See Google Website Optimiser for Google's own free advice. If you can't make the time to do your own SEO, you can pay someone to do it for you. Try teraffics for reasonably priced deals
If you have no skills and no time to acquire them, get someone to write your whole site, including doing the SEO. It will cost you money, but perhaps not as much as you might think. And you'll have the reassurance of a professionally wtitten site. See Web Design in the Resources column on the right hand side.
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