Book Description
About the author
He has also worked as a Web Master for Walt Disney World. And is currently President of BestWebsite® LLC which helps people start profitable websites. Nelson graduated from Kansas State University and lives in sunny Orlando, Florida.
Excerpted from Best Website: Simple Steps to Successful Websites by Nelson Bates, Amber Massey. Copyright © 2008. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1. The most important aspect of making money online is also the hardest thing to do. This is creating significant and consistent traffic to your website. To illustrate why traffic is the most important aspect, consider this: when I was running my website appraisal business, we received submissions from some of the most poorly designed websites that were earning $10,000 to $20,000+ per month in profit. The key was that they had a tremendous flow of traffic.
I never saw a single example of a great looking website, with no or low traffic, making lots of money. I did, however, see plenty of bad and mediocre websites making incredible money, simply because they had excellent traffic.
2. The second main point to making money online is designing a great website. This is split into two parts:
a. Part one is the modifications you make to your website to optimize it for the Search Engines.
b. Part two is everything else that makes up your website, like graphics, layout, navigation structure, and the sales process.
In the design of your website, you want to create immediate credibility in the eyes of the potential customers and effectively lead them through your website to make a purchase (i.e., the sales process), thus, maximizing the number of buyers you get in relation to the number of visitors you receive.
Also, the people who make the most money online, at the very least, know how either to manage their own website (e.g., being able to update content, add links and graphics), or to build the entire website themselves from scratch using one of the professional design tools like Adobe DreamWeaver or Microsoft Expression Web. There are certainly exceptions to this rule but, in general, this is true.
Knowing how to manage and/or build your own website allows all your ideas to come to life without having to pay a web designer (who usually can't ever quite deliver what you intended anyway!).
By learning the methods I show in this book, you will be able to dramatically enhance your ability to manage or build your own website in a fraction of the time and with far better results than trying to pay a designer to build your site.
Don't worry if you've never done this before or have tried in the past and felt overwhelmed; I'll show you a number of ways to get things done effectively either entirely by yourself or by hiring out the details that you don't feel comfortable doing yourself. Some of the tasks you may wish to outsource are: database design, Flash creation and graphic design, to name a few.
So why do most people lose money online?
I believe people lose money online for two reasons. The first reason is because they get bogged down in the details of building their business. Things like server platforms, coding choices, graphic design, layout options, entity formation, and search engine optimization, among others. It's very easy to get confused and lose track of where you need to go. The second reason is that they don't allow enough time for their business to succeed. Most people will not continue past three months if their business does not start to make money. They become frustrated with the process and give up.
In my opinion, you'll need at least 3 to 6 months to establish a solid website and start generating enough traffic to become profitable. It just takes that long to refine your website and gain search engine traffic. But, as long as you know what the right path is, you'll know to keep going.
