Schewanick Computer Services

How to Create a Website:
My Own Experience

By Garry Gamber

Have you been thinking about putting a website on the internet? Perhaps you're like me; you know the value of a good income-producing website and you know that sooner or later you want to create one. But where do you start? Perhaps I can help you discover the process.

There are many millions of people worldwide connected to the internet these days, and millions more will be coming online in the years to come. That means that there is a huge hungry market available for you to try to attract.

The decision seems obvious; you really must create a website. All that remains is to find a good idea and to find a way to put it on the internet. Sounds easy? Sounds like a lot of work?

Getting Started: Education

I know how you feel. But just take your time. I spent most of six months reading about website development and taking tele-courses in website building and internet marketing. During that learning period I looked critically at many websites and website ideas and slowly developed an appreciation for how to grow a good idea into a good website.

For example, I decided that for a website to be successful over a long period it should be heavily content-oriented. That means to create interesting, entertaining, problem-solving pages that will make the reader happy to have visited my site and happy to return to it later. I also learned that frequent communication with a client is extremely important and that means it is necessary to offer an e-course or an e-zine newsletter.

Further, I learned numerous ideas and techniques for optimizing a website to take advantage of free search engine traffic. I also learned that purchasing targeted traffic from pay-per-click search engines is a great way to get a website started. It's even a great way to keep an established website going. Additionally, I learned to write articles for newsletters and to trade website links and establish joint ventures in order to attract customer traffic.

Lastly, I decided that I did not want to create or sell my own products at this time. I knew that a good affiliate site could earn significant income and avoid the e-commerce problems of shopping carts, merchant accounts, and order fulfillment. An affiliate site earns a commission whenever it refers a paying customer to a website that has an affiliate program. There are many established and lucrative websites that have affiliate programs.

Numerous good ideas for a website subject came to me. Several ideas centered on activities that I personally enjoy passionately. Several other ideas were ideas that I knew I could research easily and become interested in. I rejected several ideas that I knew I could never really care about on any level.

Content Development: Tools

My next step was to do some research to see if my good ideas really were good ideas. One of the tools that I used was from Overture. They have a popular and effective search term suggestion tool at http://inventory.overture.com. When one enters a search term of one or more words, the tool will return the number of searches performed through Overture on that term during the past month. That information will help you to determine whether a website based on that search term would be a good idea. Further, the search term tool can help you to determine which terms would be appropriate to build pages of your website around.

Overture is free to use but there are more powerful tools available that require a weekly, monthly, or yearly fee. One such tool is Wordtracker, found at www.wordtracker.com. They offer a free trial so that you can see how it works.

As a result of my research I decided that for my first large content-driven website I would devote a site to the online dating business. Online dating is a huge and legitimate business worldwide and it is growing rapidly. Through my research I arrived at the name, The Dating Advisor, and I registered the URL, www.thedatingadvisor.com.

I decided to use a highly rated package website building service called Site Build It, located at http://buildit.sitesell.com/leaddog.html. The service has great research tools, a thorough tutorial, excellent marketing advice, web hosting, and a powerful page building tool. The philosophy behind the service is that good content is the key to a good website. Their service provides huge resources to help a person develop a content-rich site.

Meanwhile, I studied material about websites that use affiliate programs to produce income. The books and articles were authored by acknowledged experts Jim Edwards, Jeannette Cates, and Rosalind Gardner. These authors have numerous websites filled with good information and you can easily find them through search engine searches. The material made sense to me and was easy to follow. It gave me confidence to get started sooner rather than later.

Building the Website

My last step was to purchase the Site Build It program and to begin building web pages. Using my keyword research I wrote numerous targeted articles and dating service reviews for my various pages. A brief outline gave me an appropriate structure for the site and in just a couple of weeks I had about 50 pages posted to the site. More research, more writing, and a few more weeks brought the page total to over 100.

The past few weeks have been devoted to refining the website and marketing the site. The construction of the site alone was able to push its ranking quickly into the top 2% of internet websites as measured by Alexa. If you aren't familiar with it, Alexa, located at www.alexa.com, is a good tool for obtaining data on the traffic and popularity of a website.

The marketing work that remains to be accomplished includes advertising with pay-per-click search engines and gaining links with relevant directories and websites. Both types of marketing require additional research and attention and they will require several months to produce good results.

As you can see, the process of creating a large content-rich website requires considerable time and attention. Such content sites are likely to remain relevant for a long period of time, and that indeed is the goal.

If you can do me the favor, please visit www.thedatingadvisor.com and let me know if you enjoy the content of the site. And if you have suggestions for additional items please contact me through the website or email me directly at leaddog50@alaska.com.

Good luck with creating your own content-rich website.




About the author:

Garry writes articles for his two favorite health products companies, www.usana.com and www.seasilver.com
Garry also owns www.thedatingadvisor.com