Your Business Website

Did you know that your business cannot afford to not have a website? It’s true, in the 21st century, even the smallest businesses have websites, and the reasons are clear. Over 90% of all households in America now have some form of internet connection, whether it be high speed broadband, or dialup. Out of these 90%, about 65% start their search for new products or services online. Numbers like that tell you that you cannot afford to NOT have a website.

So you have decided that you need a website, now what? Depending on your computer skills, there are two options: Make your own website or get it made by a professional. We will dive into both.

Making Your Own Website

Making a website may sound easy, but it takes a lot of hard work and dedication, much like running your business. You will not only need to research about your industry, you will have to dive into a whole new industry, the website industry, as well.

First and foremost, you will need a name and a place to keep your website.

Your name, known as a domain name in the internet world, will be the way that people access your website. You will need to pick something that is easy to spell and to remember. There are literally billions of domain names currently, so you may have to get a little creative. Domain names are a yearly fee, typically around $10.00.

A host company hosts your website on their servers. Hosting is a monthly fee, ranging from $3.00 all the way up to $15.00+ depending on the type and size of the hosting. There are 3 main things to look at when you are deciding on hosting.

1) Space size- How much room with you have to host your website? Hosting size is measured in megabytes (mb). Take into account that a typical, status page is about one tenth of a megabyte, and go from there.

2) Bandwidth size- each time a visitor visits your right it takes bandwidth to display the website for him. Bandwidth is typically measured in Megabyte (mb) or Gigabyte (gb). The higher amount of bandwidth available, the more visitors you will be able to show your website too.

3) Special features- Since you are new at making websites, you will want to look for a hosting company that offers specials features for new designers. These features may include a website builder, forums, guest books, counters, Invite pages, and so on. This is especially useful as installing these types of features yourself can get somewhat complicated.
After you find a hosting company and a domain name, you will then need to build your website. Websites are coded in a language known as HTML. Unless you are extremely experienced in HTML, you will not be able to code a website by hand. Instead, you will need to use a website builder to complete the job.

There are several free website builders available online. Just use your chosen search engine and see what you come up with.

If you want to get a little more fancy and have more options available to you, then you may want to consider paid software programs such as Frontpage or Dreamweaver, both of which are available for about $100.

While making your own website seems better from a financial aspect, you also have to consider the quality and effort a professional teams of website designers can offer you.

Hiring A Professional

Hiring a professional may be your best option if you do not the time to build a website for yourself or if you want special features within your website.

Remember, the professional does this for a living and will provide you with the highest quality. They will also typically handle everything from buying and setting up the domain name to updating the website on a weekly basis.

A professional will sit down with you and discuss your ideas and aspirations. Once they believe that they have a good idea of what you are looking for, then they will create your website.

Hiring a design professional can vary, depending on your region, and what you want on your website. Typical prices are anywhere from a couple of hundred, well in the thousands.

Some people say that the only way to make good money is to work hard. No doubt that in the past, hard work was one way to get ahead. But even hard work wasn’t a guarantee of success. These days, in the age of technology, the internet has made making money easy. For some, all it takes is a computer and an internet connection to get a successful small business off the ground.

If you’ve spent any time online lately, you probably already know that blogs (short for “web logs”) and blogging are big. There are literally thousands and thousands of blogs online, and some of those bloggers are turning their daily posts into cash. These days bloggers aren’t working hard, instead they’re working smart and making money easy as they do. But how can a simple blog turn readers and clicks into cash? The answer is simple: affiliate marketing and Google Adsense.

The Google Adsense program allows you to put relevant advertising on your own blog or Web site. That means you can get a share of Google’s pay-per-click (also known as “PPC”) revenue by displaying the Google PPC ads. When a visitor to your site sees the Google ad and clicks on it, you get a share of the advertiser’s bid for those keyword ads. Google Adsense can make making money easy on your blog or Web site. Simply sign up for a Google Adsense account, generate your ad units, and Google provides you the special code for your site or blog. Just copy the code and paste it into your own site or blog and within moments you’ll have Google’s contextual advertising PPC ads on your own web property. Now that’s making money easy.

In addition, you can earn revenue on your blog or Web site through affiliate marketing. Here’s how it works: you provide links from your site to the sales pages of other online businesses. As an affiliate, you get a unique code that you embed in the links on your site. If someone reading your site or blog clicks through to the merchant’s site, you’re making money easy because you get a portion of their purchase amount. One of the most popular affiliate marketing programs is available through Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer. Amazon sells a huge variety of products, so it is very likely that you’ll find many items to link to at Amazon. Simply sign up for their affiliate program, receive your unique affiliate ID, and place the links on your site or blog.

It may seem like making money can be difficult, but if you spend a little time online, you should be able to find a number of ways to make making money easy. From Web sites to blogs, you can turn your information into cash. Consider Google’s Adsense contextual advertising program or affiliate marketing programs like those offered by Amazon and you could be adding to your income very quickly.

There are many, many, many ways by which you could earn money online. There are ways that could earn for you a lot of profit at a relatively short period of time. There are ways that would require a gestation period that would take a little more time to pay off. There are ways that would require a lot of work. There are ways that would afford you a lot of time to relax, but would be just as profitable, if not even more.

Naturally, the popular option would be those opportunities that would demand less from you but would promise more rewards. Yes, these opportunities exist, but are they the right ones for you? That remains to be seen, though by the end of these lessons, you’ll be armed with everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, you need to know to succeed in whatever online field you will decide to pursue.

The fact is, the opportunity you will choose must be complemented by your own skills, your own passion and your own interests. Loving your work would make the latter less onerous, after all, and this would result in a more fulfilling experience for you. More importantly, loving your work would make you more committed to your field, and this would result in better products and better production for you.

But before we could study your skills, we should first study the online opportunities that you could choose from. Here are some very profitable moneymaking options on the internet:

1. Telecommuting. Telecommuting is like working for your employer. The difference is that you could work from the comforts of your own home. You won’t have to spend for transportation. You won’t have to deal with nosy and irritating officemates. You won’t have to settle for claustrophobia-inducing cubicles. Whatever the employer will ask you to do, and whatever is included in your job description, you could carry out from your own home, thanks to the wonders of modern technology. All you need, really, are a computer, a phone line, a reliable internet connection, and in certain instances, a fax machine.

2. Selling your services. Whether you’re proficient with writing, graphic design, web design, programming, and the likes, you will always find some clients for what you could offer. Remember, the internet opens the way to a global market. Yes, the entire world is a well of potential clients! If you can do what they need to be done, then rest assured that you’ll be in business for a long, long time.

3. Selling your own tangible products. You could sell some physical goods online. Whether they’re something that you create yourself, or something that you have bought from suppliers and you wish to trade for a higher price, the internet will forever be a channel where you could peddle your goods to a worldwide market. You could sell them through your own website, or through some established auctions sites like www.ebay.com , where millions of dollars exchange hands every single day without fail.

4. Selling information products. I could discuss this forever, and I will never be able to convey the amazing potentials of this option. The internet is called the information superhighway for a reason. It’s because information fuels the various processes online. If you have information that other people would need, then you’ll be doing good – nay – great business. And the fact that information is cost-effective to create into distributable form, and the fact that information can easily be distributed through online channels, makes this very commodity the most lucrative product for an online undertaking.

5. Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing. With the advent of Google AdSense, the online world changed. Many even attribute the web’s fantastic recovery from the dot com bubble burst early into the millennium to the introduction of PPC programs, led by Google’s moneymaking offer. Today, a lot of webmasters create hundreds upon hundreds of websites, EACH, with all of them imbued with the PPC code that earn as much as $25,000 in earnings per month. But don’t be misled by such a high end statistic, as such is quite rare and is reserved for the best and most experienced PPC veterans. $400 to $4,000 would be a more realistic goal when it comes to this opportunity.

6. Affiliate programs. Many claim that affiliate programs are the quickest and most efficient way of making a living online, and it’s true. There are no enrollment expenses, and you won’t have to take care of processing payments, providing technical support, and delivering the products that must be sold. All you have to do is to pre-sell an affiliate merchant’s products and you’d stand to earn the most generous commissions possible, in the range of 20% to 95% per sale.

The last three options are perhaps the most profitable opportunities available for you. They, together with the other options discussed in the previous lesson, will be discussed in full details in the coming days. But most of our focus would revolve around these three opportunities, as I believe beyond the shadow of a doubt that they are the best choices towards online prominence and prosperity.

There are other options, of course, like product creation, resale rights marketing, joint ventures and the likes, but they are merely incidental to the above.

But let’s leave those for subsequent articles, shall we?