Internet Marketing For Newbies

A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1) Site optimization purposes

We all want top rankings on Google, MSN, etc. It’s pretty hard to do when you’re an internet marketing newbie. There are a lot of internet marketers that have been around for awhile that are already there. This is of major importance to breaking through. When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website. On a blog this is usually done by your recent posts or archives. A great tool for this is in Google Analytics and it’s free to use. Just sign up for a free account.

2) Navigation purposes

You need it to be easy for your visitors to get where they want to be, or they’ll leave. A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browse your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

3) Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors time.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone.

As a web designer you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all, a welcoming experience. It doesn’t matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world — if your website is poorly done you won’t be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.

When I’m talking about a “good design”, I’m not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good website design — accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.

Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I’ve come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it’s high time to take serious action!

1) Background music

Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and everytime a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I’d just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site — users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed.

2) Extra large/small text size

As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics — user accessibility is a really big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it’s illegible you won’t be selling anything!

3) Popup windows

Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention. I just close them on instinct everytime each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed every time it appears on a visitor’s screen. Your website loses its function immediately!

Let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it’s meant to do effectively. Don’t let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!

Whether it’s a "free report", software, or an article, almost everything has a license attached. You will see PLR, MRR, Creative Commons, etc. It’s good to know about each of these so you don’t get yourself in some kind of trouble.

1) Creative Commons License

If you see that something is covered by a Creative Commons License it usually means that while it’s useable by the public, the author of the works, be it writing or images, etc. has a list of what you are or are not allowed to do with the stuff they’ve created. To quote Wikipedia,

The Creative Commons licenses enable copyright holders to grant some or all of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.

2) PLR- Private Label Rights

Private Label License tells you specifically what you can or cannot do with a product, article, etc. Some let you republish with your name on it as if you are the creator. Some let you republish but only if you leave everything in tact as you received it. You need to go through the list to verify how whatever you have may be used.

3) Master Resell Rights

Master Resell Rights are pretty much just like it sounds. They are usually more expensive and while there is still a list of dos and don’ts, the product is pretty much yours to do with what you want. In most cases you can rebrand it as your own, you can sell it and keep 100% of the money, etc. A lot of times there are restrictions on how you give it away, as the author doesn’t want the value of the product to disapate.

4) Public Domain

Many times it’s hard to tell what is Public Domain and what is not. You need to do your research here. A standard rule is that anything written prior to 1923 is public. Also, usually on the bottom of an article etc. it will tell you about any copywrites.

One thing you don’t want to do whether you’re just getting started or been online for awhile, is wind up in court over stealing material. Also if you write something or put something really good together, you may want to copywrite your own stuff to determine how people are allowed to use it.

Remember, Save your work often! One of the reasons this blog has been neglected for a few days is I didn’t follow my own advice. I lost an almost completely written post with links, etc.

They used to say in sales "you need a gimick". In Internet Marketing, you need a "niche". A niche is something you specialize in, something like your own little corner of the world.

While you may be interested in "dogs" for example, that term is much to big, so you would want to narrow it down a little. Maybe you are interested in selling "dog collars" or "dog training". You need to do a little research to find an area where people are searching, but there isn’t a whole lot of information to serve those people. One of the places to do this is google’s own "keywood tool". It is a free tool that you really need to get familiar with anyhow, for when you put "keywords" into your website so people can find you. For now we are going to use it to research our "niche".

If you go to Google’s Keyword Tool, you put in the term for what you are planning on specializing in. Google will return a bunch of terms and a small graph for each one showing how full that particular niche is. It also gives you the number of searches for the last couple of months. Ideally what you are looking for is a bar graph that is about half full with a lot of people searching the term. An example may be the term for "dogs" is full, but the term "rhinestone dog collars" has a lot of searches, but the bar graph shows very little competition. So you may want to dedicate a site completely to "rhinestone dog collars from around the world" something like that. You need to narrow down your area of expertise when deciding what product to bring to market.

Other places to check out when wanting to see what people are searching for is Alexa.com, which will give you the top 100 searches and your own search engine. They all have a catagory for checking out what the top searches are from the people that use that particular search engine. I will let you know right up front that after the usuals, YouTube etc., a good portion of searches are either about celebrities or porn. You just need to wade through it.

Once you’ve found your "niche" and are deciding on what to name your website or blog, you may want to take the following into consideration.

Update: Read the post after this about finding your "niche" before reading this post. Sorry, kind of took them out of order. 

Once you’ve got a plan and decided whether to build a website or a blog, you will need a domain name and webhost so people can find you. Many webhosts include the domain name for free with their hosting packages. I myself use Omnis.com because when I first started building websites, that is what the instructor used and recommended. Their webhosting is pretty cheap ($5.95) and they offer a free domain name. The things I like about Omnis are:

1. It’s extremely reliable. They are up they say 99.9% of the time. In all of the time I have used them, they have never been down that I know of. That is very important.
2. They give you Unlimited Storage
3. Unlimited data transfer, etc.
4. They offer the first 30 days free to try it out.
   

The things I don’t like about Omnis are

1. It uses a File Manager to manage the "behind the scenes" stuff. Most tutorials and programs that you will come across are set up to use a "C-Panel". For me, being a non-techy this has made some things harder than neccessary.
   
2. It has "site builder" as it’s website builder if you don’t want to build from scratch. It’s a really great and easy tool, but they only let you build 3 pages for free. You have to pay extra for more pages.
3. I don’t like their help program. It’s like an "open source" from around the web vs. being specific help program for Omnis.
4. They’re customer service isn’t very helpful and seem rather condescending if you don’t know what they know as far as how things work.

The original webhost that I was with when I took over my first website was Lunarpages. I was so inexperienced that I didn’t understand how to use a lot of the great stuff there and thought the C-Panel was very scary. I probably should have spent more time learning my way around. The thing I don’t like about Lunarpages is:

1. It sets limits on storage, etc. It’s quite a bit and they say you’ll never use it all, but I don’t like the idea if something goes extremely right and I get a ton of traffic, my site could quit or break down. I know the average website uses very little bandwidth etc.
2. They offer a 30 day moneyback guarantee vs. just letting you try it free for 30 days.

The things I like about Lunarpages are:

1. It has so very many useful and easy features.
2. It’s cheap, especially right now because they have a special going.
3. You also get a free domain name
4. It has the regular C-Panel vs. File manager which is usually easier to use with a lot of software programs and tutorials

Another Webhost that is making big onto the scene is Go Daddy. If you watch Nascar at all you’ve probably seen a lot of their ads as they sponsor a car. I really don’t know much about this service as I have never used it. I know their prices have gone up a bit since they’ve grown so much. Just be sure and compare services side by side to see what you’re getting for your money.

If you google "webhosting" or "domain names" I’m sure you will find a ton more. One tip I read recently is to not get your domain name and your webhost in the same place. I don’t know why this is, as I have never had a problem and you can move your domain to another webhost at any time you wish. (Verify that with whatever service you use).

Also, when choosing a domain name, stick with the .com. Most people are used to using it and it will keep your visitors from landing at another site by mistake.

Once you have your domain name and webhost, you are ready to upload your website files to your server and go live!