The Web Money Business

So you have a website and you want to make money from it. It may be an ecommerce website that you wish to sell products from or maybe you have a website containing information that is useful and this will bring you traffic that can generate advertising payments.

So what is the first thing you must do?

This will depend on the website itself so I will split this into categories to make it easier to save you reading non relevant information.

Ecommerce

For an ecommerce website to work and be successful you should look at your competitors before planning your strategy. The domain name you purchase is important as this can influence people. For example if you sell Valentine Gifts or Sweets and your website was www.valentinegifts.co.uk or www.valentinesweets.co.uk then people already have a confidence that they are shopping in the right place.

The visual look of your website should match the product you are selling and should be clean and easy to navigate. Complicated websites with lots of flash graphics and pop-up's do not work. The view of a site can be a fundamental factor towards ensuring a low bounce rate for your website. When a customer lands on your website it should be clear what products are for sale and what price and how much delivery cost is. This information should be available in a clear format and easy to read.

One huge tip is to go to your competitors websites and follow the complete process of ordering a product. Think about what you like and dislike about the checkout process. If you completed this task on the top 5 shops in Google you will get some excellent tips as these site obviously work.

If it is possible to show your best selling products and new products on the front page this can grab the quick shoppers that don't like looking at more than one or two pages of a website. There are many customers that will buy products because other people are buying them.

Choose your keywords before start the website and then check if these words are realistic in terms of placement within Google. If you are selling Porsche parts for example there are many company that are fighting to be in a high ranking position within Google. This makes the task a much bigger task to achieve and if you are a new site then you have a lot of work to carry out to get on the first page.

You can use the Google Insight tool which is a free tool that Google provide to check what people are searching and you can visually see the trends of search results within Google.

Choose a web design company that creates website that work. A company can create a huge portfolio of websites that look great but are they all real websites. Look at the portfolio of the websites that the website company has created. If they are ecommerce site go to through the process of buying a product and see if it works. Then look in Google to see it these websites appear in Google when searching for the company name as this is the first important search to carry out.

If the websites that you are looking at in a portfolio don't appear in Google when searching for a product they sell this is not always a sign of a company producing websites that don't work. Web design and Search Engine Optimisation are totally separate skills and if you can find a company that can build a website with SEO in mind from the start then this will assist you and save you money in the long run.

So you have found you website designer and website builder, now it's the fun task of making the website look nice. Remember your own taste will work for people that are similar to you, but what about the millions of other people?. Get feedback from different people but attempt to influence their thoughts. Honest feedback is required at this stage and is a key factor to a solid building block for your successful ecommerce website.

In my experience the colours of a website can be the difference between a successful site a failure. For example if you have a black background and white text it look lovely and many photographers use this colour setup as it enhances their photos in the portfolio. However, some people do not like reading white text on black backgrounds as this can affect their eyes, yet when they view an imagine they have no issue at all. If you notice 90% of ecommerce websites use a white background.

Paying for perfect photos for your website homepage can be expensive, I would recommend a website called istock as this website contains many pictures that are excellent and priced very well. I would recommend building a site with the images that are water marked by saving them from the website and keeping a reference of the individual number of the picture so you can purchase it later if you are happy. This will prevent you from buying lots of images and not using them.