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I added a few articles to the site this week that may be of interest to anyone just starting out and looking for some advice on how to build a website.  The first article is a primer on setting up a plan before you actually get started building your site.  I think most people either skip this step altogether of just have a plan in their mind without actually putting it on paper.  I hope that article will help in pointing people in the right direction.

The second article is help with the first article and is about how to develop a linking strategy.  If you will follow the mind map outlined on that article you will reap rewards for years to come.  The article shows you how to build long term valuable links to your website and get paid for doing it.  That may sound funny to you, but there are 3 great site mentioned that will all pay you for placing your content on their site and build great links to your site.

The last article is for people looking for the best ASP shopping cart.  I have used VP-ASP extensively in the past and know it to be the finest shopping cart solution made.  In the article I have outlined some of the benefits of VP-ASP and hope you will consider using them if you are in the market for a great shopping cart solution.

That’s it so far but I hope to be putting up lot’s more articles for you in the very near future and always welcome anyone that has questions about marketing their site or building their site to drop in on the forum and leave your questions there.  I will get back to you as soon as possible and hopefully find a great solution for you.

There are 2 certainties about being a web developer that you can always count on.  The first is that you will have days of complete frustration.  The second is that when you actually accomplish something you will have to celebrate alone, because everyone else has gone to bed.  I have been having one of those days of frustration, trying to get a site put together.  It is one of those things that there just isn’t a simple solution for and getting everything to work just takes time.  I get a lot of satisfaction when it actually works, but when it is that hard to implement I am always weary of when it is going to break.  But like everything else we will just cross that road when we come to it.  I spent the better part of 2 complete days setting up a site that should have taken 4 hours or less and now that it is so far behind schedule it is going to have to wait some more.

Following will be the best advice I can possibly give to a new developer about how to make a website, and that is:  Don’t take on too much at one time.  If you are looking to build your own site and not someone else’s then build 1 site and that’s all.  Don’t ever think that you can build site after site and give them all the attention that they deserve because it is just flat out impossible.  Don’t take on site number 2 until site number 1 is not only up and running but is virtually self sustaining.  Not that there isn’t always maintenance and tweaking to do, but wait until you are happy with everything right down to the amount of traffic that site 1 is generating.

This is my personal site and I have a ton of fun with it, but it gets neglected way more than it should.  I had plans to have this site completed during the month of January and maybe I should clarify that is 2008, since at the rate it is going it may not be complete until 2009 or later.  But I digress, I am in the process of changing priorities so that this site and a couple of others can get the attention they deserve.  The funny thing is that once they hit that magical point you really don’t need to do much to them to maintain the traffic they get.  One of my blogs was getting right at 1400 visitors a day at the beginning or February.  The last post I made to it was February 2^nd and since then traffic has actually gone up to right under 1800 per day.  2 and a half months without posting to it and I have probably only seen the site 4 times since then and the traffic is increasing.  So keep heart if you are working diligently your time will come it is just a matter of time.

It is time to stop playing around and get serious about making money with your website. The answers to how to make money online are as varied as the number of websites there are online. If you are ready to get serious and start testing the market then you have to know a few things about your website first. How many visitors do you get per day? Where do your visitors come from? Why are they visiting your site? As a webmaster you need to take great care in tracking your visitors so that you understand why they visit your website. It is important to know what draws any person to a certain site.

I use Awstats to track my visitors. Awstats is an easy to install, easy to read, and comprehensive stat program. I like the fact that you can install Awstats directly from your c-panel and it gives great data. Awestats will give you visitor history by the month, day, day of the week, and time of day. The most important stats to me are the stats that tell me where my visitors come from and what search phase they used to find my site in the SERPS. With that information you can also search for the same terms and find out where your site ranks. You can also use that information to either continue to use that same terminology or change your keywords to garner the audience that you are trying to attract. Don’t be afraid to change things up a little to find the right keywords and audience. Making money with your website is much easier to accomplish once you understand your site and your visitors.

Take care to understand your visitor’s wants and needs, and then you will be able to give them exactly what they are looking for. It doesn’t matter if you are selling batteries at the lowest price in the word if your visitors are looking for candles. If you can’t do the copywriting yourself then hire someone who knows how to build great content. Hiring out your content work may be expensive but so is having a site that doesn’t sell. A good copywriter will only cost you money once, but the work lasts forever. You can potentially have an everlasting stream of income from one very well written piece of copy.

I often use test sites to test new software, scripts and ideas. To me it is essential to test things before you actually implement them on a working site. I know that it can be difficult for some to have this luxury, so I would like to extend the offer to anyone who is a member of netrat.com that I will set up a test site for any script or software you would like to try out before you implement it on your site. Or it may just be you want to try a new script to see if you would like to use it on an upcoming site.

The idea came to me today when one of our members Jinesh asked a specific question about a shopping cart function with Joomla. I set up the test site for him to work with and hopefully that will answer a lot of his questions about using that particular component of Joomla. Of course I am always here to answer questions but if you want to get some hands on with a new piece of software then just let me know what it is and I will do my best to get it set up for you.

Please make your request on the forum instead of emailing me directly. Forum post don’t get lost or put into the junk pile.

I took a look at the stats of this site for the first time in a long time today and found that someone is using keywordspy.com to figure out the keywords I am targeting for this site.  Well first I would like to say that the results that showed up in keywordspy.com were way off.  And second if you really want to know just ask I will tell you.  This site is a hobby and I am not concerned with competition or the number of visitors that I get to this site.  So whatever you thought you found out from keywordspy.com is probably wrong, and there is only one phrase that I have targeted at all and the number of searches is so low that if I were you and looking to get into whatever business you think this website is in, I would try to find better keyphrases than the single one that I am targeting.  Which by the way if you can’t figure out what that phrase is by looking at the site then you are probably in the wrong business.  I seriously wonder how you would ever be able to LEARN HOW TO MAKE A WEBSITE.  Get it?

Well anyway I just thought it was a little funny since this website has such low traffic and no business focus at all.  The only way this site makes money is off of the Adsense that is on the directory and I believe it makes about a dollar a month, possibly less.  So if you are getting into the giving away information for free business like this website then go for the how to make a website phrase like I am and I am sure that you also will be able to make no money what so ever.

However if you are interested in learning how to do keyword research then go to the main site and click on videos and watch the gtrends video that I made for you.  I have never been one to be overly concerned with what the competition does, because I can’t control them.  I find my own keywords and focus on what I can control, if you do the same you will be a lot better served in your efforts.  Go check out the video and see for yourself how easy it is.

I started a new website today at footballrecords.org, so I thought I would walk everyone through the entire setup process and what I will be doing to market the site.  This will be a project for the fun of having it not for profit so I don’t mind sharing everything that I will be doing to get it up and going.  It started a couple of days ago actually when I decided after having problems with PHP-Nuke before that it had some features that I really wanted to use so I would give it another shot.  Well it was an entire day setting it up before I realized that users couldn’t register at the site, so I scrapped an entire day’s work.  But that is another story.  So I spent the entire day today setting up the site with Joomla, and it still has some bugs to work out but that will come over the next couple of weeks.

It is really funny how this one started, so I will start from the very beginning.   I am a member of the domain name aftermarket and received the regular newsletter about domain name and one of them for sale caught my attention because it seemed so overpriced.  It was footballrecords.com, and the starting bid was 5000.00 so I went and did a little research about the niche to see if it was worth the price.  What I found was 60,000 competition and about 1000 searches a day during the season.  And some other related searches that were okay.  Which peaked my interest just a little in the niche, but not anywhere near $5000.00 worth.  So I went and looked and found that footballrecords.org was available and unclaimed.  I figured for the 10.00 reg fee I would give it a go.  And since I am a football fanatic and also love hanging with sports fans I thought it would be one I could spend free time with and make it a super fun site.

I went with Joomla because I knew it had to have a huge forum for every team including the college teams and the members could contribute to making the site a success.  I started by setting up the standard site and then added the key components to it that make a community site a lot of fun.  First the fireboard forum because of what I said earlier.  Fireboard forums aren’t the easiest to set up when you are doing a ton of categories but the look great and work great.  Then I added community builder from Joomlapolis so that members could interact with each other in other ways besides the forum, and it has other great features that I will tell you about in another article.  Yes it really is that great that it deserves an article all its own.  I then added a video sharing component called Seyret.  There are other ways to implement video with Joomla but Seyret is a self contained video component from Joomlaholic that is super cool in my opinion.  Besides some other little tweaks that was all I really added to the site.  Of course setting up categories and adding videos took the rest of the day along with testing.

I put up a short welcome message and added a couple of posts to the forum and that was it for the site on day one.  The only other thing I did was write a hub for hubpages titled Dallas Cowboys forum and pointed the link to the specific Dallas Cowboys forum. That should give you a really good idea of how I will be marketing the site.  I will be using article marketing at hubpages and a couple of other sites and will be linking directly to the relevant pages on the site.  And then of course other general articles will point to the front page of the site.  I will also let you know what I will be doing to build other links into the site, and we can watch it grow together.  As of today 04/02/08 the seoquake toolbar shows no indexed pages and no backlinks which is correct.  And since this site is for fun and not profit I will walk you through all of the things I will be doing to promote the site, so that you get ideas how to promote your own.  Remember it doesn’t take money; it takes effort to make a site successful.  If I can pull of building a large community site right before your eyes then you will know for sure that you also can build a great site.

I have done a lot of work with various content management systems of the last few years and have decided that there really is only one that does everything I want it to do, and that is Joomla.  Joomla is the most versatile and complete system that is on the market today.  I have tried Drupal, PHP-Nuke, Post Nuke, Xoops, and Mambo, and they all fall just a little bit short of Joomla.  In fact there is really only one thing I don’t like about Joomla and that is the SEF URLS that can be at times hard to implement correctly.  There is only one good component that I have found for SEF URLS and it can be very finicky at times.  In fact it is giving me fits with a new site right now, but I know with a little patience I will get it working fine.

I guess the big question would be why would a new site or a simple site choose to use a CMS over Wordpress, and my answer would be that the CMS can do everything Wordpress can do with some options that may just come in handy down the road when you want to expand your site.  You may not think you want to go beyond a blog when you first start, and if you choose not to then you still have a functional blog platform and don’t need to expand.  But let’s say you do want to expand into selling products or having a forum on your site, if you had started with Joomla then it would only be a matter of turning on that functionality and putting it to use.

CMS do have a higher learning curve at first but once you understand how they work, they will open your mind to the infinite possibilities that you and your website have to offer to the world.  Yes I actually believe that you and your website will grow just based on using a CMS from the start.  I believe that you will start to see more avenues to take your website down and will work to accomplish even more things just because you are not limited by the backbone of your sites structure.  I don’t want anyone to think for a moment that I don’t love Wordpress because I do, I just think as a beginner that you should open your mind to the possibility that there may be more you can do on a CMS.