Table of Contents
Your Website:
You will need to get a website in order to start selling your information products. I would highly recommend NOT using a free webpage service. If you do this, you will have no control over the ads placed on your page and it just looks unprofessional and unreliable. I never trust content from a site built on a free service.
Luckily, getting a webpage up and running isn’t as difficult as you might think!
1. Register your domain name. You can do this very easily at www.register.com. I use this service for all of my websites.
2. Decide if you'd like to use a pre-made template or would rather design the site yourself. If you do not have any website building software (I use Dreamweaver), then you should probably go with a pre-designed template. Register.com can either build your site for you (for an additional fee), or you can use one of their easy templates.
3. Tips when choosing a domain name (www.yourbusiness.com):
- try to make the domain name something to do with what you are selling
(example: www.scrapbookdesign.com would be good if you are selling info on how to make scrapbooks. This is just an example and I'm sure this domain name is already taken). - try NOT to use any hyphens in your domain name (example: www.info-mom.com). It is highly likely that people will not remember to use the hyphen when typing in your website address, and your traffic will then go to www.infomom.com - which would probably be a competing website. Don't give your traffic away! Again, these domain names are used for examples only. I'm sure they are already taken.
- use something easy to spell and not too long
4. Tips for optimizing your website (so that it will show up in the search engines):
- Make sure to include a title tag (that uses keywords). For example, look at the title of this page (look at the very top of your browser). Notice how I used the keywords website and information product.
- Make sure to use a H1 tag (also called a header tag). The text here could be the name of your site or a brief (one sentence) description of what your site is about. For an example, go to www.infomarketingmom.com and look at the top of the page for my H1 tag: "turn your knowledge into cash!" The H1 tag should be in big, bold text.
- Make sure to use keywords in your text. Use them early on (towards the top of the page) and use them often (throughout the page). It also helps to put keywords in bold or italics.
- Use original content on your site. This means that you write it yourself (or hire someone to write it). It should not exist anywhere else on the web. This could be in the form of a blog or original articles that you write. I personally do a mixture of my own articles and articles from other authors. Just make sure you have some original content. Search engines love this.
- Your navigation links should be plain text (NOT buttons - which are images - and search engines cannot read images) and should use keywords. For example, don't have a link just called "home." Instead it should say the name of your site (on this site it says "infomarkeingmom home." Notice that my free articles link doesn't simply say "free articles" but instead says "free info marketing articles." Use keywords in all of your links. Never use a link that says simply "click here." Instead the entire link should read something like "click here for information on ebook marketing" (for example).
- Get other sites of a similar nature to trade links with you. This means you place a link to them on your site, and they place a link to you on their site. Link popularity is HUGE when it comes to ranking well with the search engines.
- My site www.shuttermom.com is highly optimized (and I continue to work on it every day). Check it out for examples of what I'm talking about.
5. More ideas to get traffic to your website:
- submit original articles to websites such as www.ezinearticles.com
- have a link to your website under your signature in all outgoing emails, and under your name in all message board and blog comments you make
- create a blog
- create a discussion forum on your website (check out www.websitetoolbox.com and others)
Next Page: Writing copy for your website