Tips
1. Make your site easy and soothing on the eyes, who's gonna wanna look at bright yellow pages with big red text on it, or text that is hard to see against the background right?
2. Make your site easy to navigate, you want your visitors to find what they're looking for!
3. When building your site, don't use too many fancy graphics that take forever to load, that'll drive away your visitors, I know I'm always driven away from slow-loading sites.
4. If you sign up with affiliate programs, don't use traditional flashy banners, everybody hates those, you should know, you probably do too right?
5. Be honest on your website, people like honesty, not hype.
6. FFA (free for all) link sites are not a very effective form of advertising. They usually won't do any good although I've heard people say they have gotten responses from them, so you never know, just don't use your primary e-mail address when submitting to many of them, because you will have an inbox jam packed with ads if you submit to many at once!
7. If you're thinking of using opt-in lists from some company (rather than simply starting your own mailing list) be very careful about which company you choose, some, or even most lie and using them could get you accused of spam.
8. Services that provide you with a certain number of visitors are generally not the best way to promote your site. If they want your money, you should ask them how they send visitors to your site, this is very important. If they give you a vague answer or no answer at all, don't give them your money. Some places send visitors to your site using methods that are very ineffective such as annoying popups or popunders or some other way to send people to your site accidentally. Spend your advertising dollars wisely!
9. Some search engines, like Google, use link popularity as a factor in ranking sites. Link popularity is determined by how many sites are linked to you. There are at least 2 ways of improving link populaity that I know of. The first, most traditional way is to simply find sites with similar content to yours and ask the webmaster or site owner to link to your site. Another way is to make multiple mini sites and link them together. For example, you could have a site about health and a site about exersise, a site about diet, etc. and link them together.
10. One key to a successful online business is targeted traffic. The best way to get targetted traffic is with a site focused on a very specific topic. For example, instead of a site about making money on the internet, you could have a site about affiliate programs. This way, visitors to your site will be interested in the topic of your site and odds are you're going to get much better results.
11. There are a lot of good tips and useful info. in the Impact Lessons by Neil Shearing. His lessons contain valuable information for beginners, so if you're thinking of starting your own online business, I recommend reading Neil's Impact Lessons.
12. Make a real commitment to your business goals, don't give up if it gets hard!
13. When building a site for your business, have your text with keyword content as high up on your page as possible. This will help your site get ranked better.
14. When building a site for your business, keep graphics to a minimum, there's nothing more annoying than slow-loading pages. Also, the more text you have on your site, the better you will do with search engines.
15. To get the maximum number of sales, it helps to accept as many forms of payment as possible, there are the traditional forms of payment such as credit cards, money orders, etc. and then there are newer methods like PayPal, E-gold and other online payment methods. Some people do not have credit cards, some people do and just don't use them online. So make sure you accept more payment options so everyone can buy from you.
16. Know what your visitors want. This is crucial to your success. If people comming to your site don't find what they are looking for, you are not likely going to get any results. You must deliver to your visitors what they are comming to your site to get. It helps to focus your site on one thing rather than many different things. You may want to ask your visitors to take a survey or poll, that will help you get to know who's comming to your site and if your site is meeting their needs.
17. Check your site often, even if you think it's perfect. I learned this important little lesson today when I finally got around to checking my site and noticed a lot of overlapping text. I had left it like that for at least a week! You should also make sure all your links work, it's so annoying clicking on a link and then getting "this page cannot be displayed".
18. It helps to have informational content on your site. Informational content makes your site helpful and it's a great way to add keyword content to your site.
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