On our website you can find plenty of theory about Building a Profitable Website. All theory you need. However, we need hands-on experience, don't we? Let's walk together through a little, but fully sufficient Do It Yourself Ecommerce example. At the end of day 9 we will have a working Small Ebusiness Solution, that is generating a profit stream and can be left unattended for long periods of time.
Anyone can follow the steps we are going to outline, but only few will. Most people do not want to do something new. I hope you are not one of them. After all, it is so much fun to go online and to see another $20 on your account, that appeared since yesterday evening...
First of all, we assume that you have an Ebusiness Idea: something - anything - that you want to share with the world in exchange for money. If you are a software developer, it is going to be the software. If you are a cook, it will be a cookbook (ever thought about publishing a "Klingon cousine"? Don't. The trademark does not belong to you). If you are a nurse, write a broshure "taking care of old patients". If you are a fisherman...
There are a lot of little things people study. Little - for them. But you may be sure there are some other people who are looking desperately for this information. The Internet is huge. HUGE. Anything you know can be turned into profit - when done properly.
OK, you have the Ebusiness Idea, the information to share. As for me, for this example I am going to share with the world the tutorial called "Build a Profitable Website in nine days". This site. The pages you are about to read.
We are going to create a sceleton of the first page. All other pages will use the same template, so you can say it is going to be a sceleton for all pages.
By the way, if you do not know HTML, you need to learn it. The language is very simple, unless you want to do very advanced things (you don't), and I have a belief, that says that without knowing HTML you will not Maximize Website Traffic.
But aren't there HTML editors, that can hide all the low-level details from you? Yes, and you don't want to use them. Why not? because they have their own opinion on what to put in the page that you are creating. Example?
The following is an EMPTY (!!!) HTML file, that was created by Microsoft Word. Try to view the HTML source of this page, and you will see a lot of text, that is invisible for the visitor and only making your file larger. Now, recently Google mentioned, that the faster loading pages will have higher rating - it means you do not want unnecessary extras on your site.
When you do Search Engine Positioning, you need to control every character in your web site. So - use some simple text editor, like Windows Notepad (Click the Start button, select Run, type Notepad), Notepad++, or any other editor like that. If they have color highliting for HTML syntax, it is a plus. If they hide HTML from you - beware.
We are going to add the content to the site. The text, that is your unique knowlege. We are also going to have a little discussion on the topic for a site.
Adding the affiliate links. One of two ways to make money that we are going to use in this example (the second is to sell your own books or software) is to sell someone's merchandize for the comission. We will use Amazon, as I had only good experience with this company for few years. They pay, and they don't cheat.
Adding keywords to our Ebusiness Site. Now THIS is going to be "fun". It will be time consuming and will require some learning, too. I am going to walk you in very little steps, so everything is going to work fine.
Creating the eBook. If you are a software developer, you will add your program to the site, but for most people, it is going to be a broshure.
We are going to create the "free e.mail class", so that your visitor can subscribe and receive emails during five days, one letter per day. I will also explain why it is a good idea to create opt-in e.mail list, rather than simply to publish the same information on the web site.
We will register the domain name and find hosting provider for our site.
We will upload the site to the Internet and do minor remaining things with the Search Engines.
We are going to add the "order" link to our site, so that the visitor can buy a book or a computer program. I will explain how to use services of
the online credit cards processing company.
Important (C) note
The class that you are about to enjoy is supposed to be an example, so that you
can copy the HTML code from the samples and use it in
your own projects.
You can NOT copy the text, like list of keywords, that is specific for this
site, and the text of the tutorial. You will have to add your own keywords
(I will explain how) and your own text (for example, about your software).