How To Create Your Website

Chapter 4:
How to create a website

The 6 STEPS to creating a website

Since we promised to take you through each step of being able to make money from the Net, we shall teach you how to make a website in seven steps ! This is NOT an advanced course on website development. However, we suggest you skim through the sections in this chapter, even if you don't need to learn about website development. There are a few Hot Tips, and THOSE should never be missed !!

This chapter will enumerate some How To's for creation of a website. We suggest that you read through the six steps of creating a website and come back later to revisit each step while actually developing your website.

STEP 1 - Plan the Site

Before diving headlong into HTML and tools, first sit down and lets think it through. The first question you need to address is :

Do you want to have a mini site dedicated to a single product ?
OR, Do you want to have a larger site with many products belonging to a similar category ?

THE FACT: Both types can and will be successful given proper product selection and marketing. Don't let anyone tell you that either of the above IS THE ONLY way to go.

There are many examples of profitable sites of both categories. However, what one would need to remember is that in the short run, mini-sites will probably be more productive.

At the time when you might be just starting off, it might be advisable to start with a mini site. That will let you be focused about product selection, content creation and marketing. It will also enable you to go through the entire gamut of affiliate marketing activities instead of spending a whole lot of time that will be required to create a bigger website.

Once you HAVE decided, lets move on to planning the site's navigation. How many pages ? What content ? What will be the flow ? Where is the content going to come from ?

Put the number of pages, the basic flow, the content for the pages, etc. all on a separate file or even on paper. Spend some time thinking on what you would like to see ( from the visitor's perspective) to be convinced that the product is worth buying, or even trying. Neat navigation and easy flow are always going to help.

Here is where we get to state the Internet's Most Oft repeated Clich� - "Good looks for the site is important, but Content is King !" One thing that we can never emphasize enough is the importance of content in any e-marketing. You might have a class product but unless you put its strengths through in words in an appealing manner, you are leaving closure of sales to chance.

Now here is where you might be wondering: "Why do I to worry about the content?" the Merchant will take care of that, right ?

Well, in most cases, YES ! But here, allow us to digress from the topic and share with you one of the secrets that are known only to experienced Affiliates !

Amazing as it sounds, as you start spending more time on the net searching for products for affiliate marketing, you will come across a few products that look good, but have not been marketed well by their own publisher. Now this is a FLIP, because most sites do a good job of marketing products which are not so useful or reliable or really worthwhile.

For these specific products, you will see hardly any content and will notice that not enough pain has been taken to describe the product, its features, etc. You will notice that the merchant's site itself has a lot of Don'ts of e-selling websites .

In such a case if you take the pain to use the product and create good marketing content for it, YOU could create a KILLER site.

The reason this works so well is that most affiliate marketers assume that the Product owner will have taken the pain to create good content, and hence most marketers simply do a cut and paste from the merchant's site.

So while the market will be driven to all the sites doing affiliate marketing for this product, sales will get closed more often only from yours.

It is a well known and researched fact on the Internet that the customer needs approximate seven exposures to a product before he/she actually buys. Most other affiliates for such a product will end up helping in sales for you, as they will only give the clients the exposures but NOT be able to convert Your site will be the one actually converting focused visitors to sales. And, as you get better and better closures for that product, you will start getting better deals from that merchant for doing so well for them.

So next time you see a decent looking product with a bad job of marketing, don't run. Use this knowledge to leverage as much as you can out of the situation. And be careful to copyright content and design of the site (with permission from the product merchant), else you will only end up having other affiliates steal the content from you.

However, keep in mind that the basic rules of picking the product remain the same, stick to those basics. Just because of this TIP, dont pick only products with poor content, and all products with poor content.

Let us now get back to 'Planning the Site'.

Assuming that the merchant's site has done a good job of marketing the product, you could pick up a lot from there, including images, and tweak it a little. You could use this content and images to plan your site now.

STEP 2 - Design the Website

Once you have the basic content and the images ready, you need to arrange them so that the web pages look neat, attractive and easy to read.

This aspect of website design requires some level of visualization creativity, so you might get someone to help you in the beginning. And remember, no matter how creative one is, it always takes people some time to get the hang of website creation.

Once you have the desing ready on paper or in your mind, it needs to be converted to HTML, which is the 3rd Step.

However, once again if you find yourself stuck at this particular stage and want to bypass it as fast as possible, you could use some sites that give you HTML templates that you could use for your website. These are reasonably priced, and might save you a whole lot of time if you DO NOT want to spend time on website design. One more resource that can help in website design is the following website which is a website for images that you could use for your site:

www.templatemonster.com

STEP 3 - Write the Code

HTML, the basic language that you need to learn to be able to create your webpages is NOT tough. But it still takes some time to go through the basic rules of HTML creation. If you want to learn HTML from the basics, you could use this FREE site:

www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu

However, you need not necessarily spend all the time and effort of learning HTML Tags. There are HTML editors in the market that can largely simplify the job of creating webpages.

One neat tool that lets you edit HTML easily and fast can be found on :

www.coffeecup.com/html-editor/

STEP 4 - Find a Web Host

OK. Now you have the site content, design and code ready. Unless you have your own web server and are capable of hosting the site yourself (in which case you would have skipped this chapter by now), you need to host this with companies that do hosting on a monthly paid basis.

In layman's terms hosting is nothing but keeping your files on a server that is connected to the Internet all the time. This machine will be running the HTTP or web server that will be able to understand requests to the various pages of your site and be able to respond with the correct files. Technically this might not be the best way to explain hosting, but we hope this conveys the spirit !

There are thousands of hosters out there, and quite a few of them do a reasonable job of hosting at a reasonable price. We currently host a lot of our websites with :

www.net4india.com

To find out more just click on the link and follow the instructions on the website.

STEP 5 - Upload the Site

There are multiple tools and ways of uploading the website you have created to the server. We will however, restrict our discussion to FTP.

FTP is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol. There are quite a few neat FTP tools out there. The one we use and with great ease is found here at:

http://www.cuteftp.com/cuteftp/

This is a very intuitive tool and should make the process of uploading sites regularly pretty painless. And it has a Free 30 day trial.

At this stage your site is ready and uploaded, and there is only one thing left to do....

STEP 6 - Test your Site

One would have thought that this would be a normal thing for all webmasters to do after uploading their site. Hardly worth making it a Step for website development.

Well, all we can say is - Please Do Test all the links in all the pages of your website. It sounds like a lot of pain, but take our word on this one. Do it.

A website with a few links leading to 404 errors or missing images within the pages create an impact of an amateur at work, and when one are trying to sell, one has to come across as an expert.

Testing is EXTRA important for an affiliate marketing website because you will get your credit for a sale only through the link that your affiliate merchant will provide you with, when you sign up.

Mess up with that and you end up only sending traffic to the merchant's site and not get any credit for any resultant sale. Also, only because of a few incorrect links, in the long run you might give up on a perfectly good idea/product. You are also going to carry the incorrect impression that there was something wrong in product selection or your marketing effort. This would hence effect your future decisions as well. How much worse can it get ?

Make sure that you budget enough time for testing each link, specially your affiliate links. If possible, get friends to help in some spare time. A fresh mind always tests better !

At this stage you have your Site Uploaded and Tested. Now what you need to learn (though you will learn a lot through experimenting yourself) are the various ways you would be able to market and promote your website. Your personal contacts and your address book can only get you so much traffic - and most of this will not get you sales, so you need to focus and learn other ways of getting meaningful traffic to your website. The next few chapters will tell you exactly how to do that.