Your web design starts here

Plan first. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail

Plan First

Choose possible themes for your web site.
Don't try to sell something that has failed off-line.
Brainstorm hundreds of keywords related to your theme.
Use "breakout" techniques for lateral thinking about keywords
Find and record the demand for each keyword
Find and record how many competitors you have for each keyword
Decide if the theme will be profitable, using the above information, and rank the keywords.
Delete keywords that give you off-subject search results
If you want to be an affiliate, find companies that fit your keywords very well.
Use your best keywords to write your main pages, then use the rest for doorway pages.

Does this sound like too much work? You can automate it with "sitebuild" and just use your brain for the sort of insights that a computer can't handle. >Click here.

1. Choose themes

Unless you are an adolescent, your life-experience will have given you information that other people want. People are alway looking for inside information. The only problem is that you have to work out which parts of your knowledge people will want. Write down every subject that you know about, whether it is a hobby or from earnest struggle for living.

You may think that nobody is interested in a book about income tax for instance - but they might be interested in a book about loopholes in the tax system. Nobody would want a book about twenty years of unemployment. But they might be interested in your ideas about frugal living, and getting all the government handouts, and all the freebies available.

2. Do you already have a product?

If you have a hundred thousand widgets that nobody wants to buy from a shop or from salemen, don't try selling online. You can't sell it on-line if nobody wants it off-line.

There is an exception to this. If you can't sell locally because you live a long way from customers, you can sell your products by
online auction - get a free book.

If you have been selling your widgets successfully off-line and are wondering if you can sell them on-line, then you already have ideas about a theme for a web site. Perhaps nobody is interested in widgets, but they are keenly interested in a move to ban them, or a scandal about them, or a monopoly attempt for widgets. Use lateral thinking to come up with possible themes.

If you are a car mechanic you can't sell your services internationally - can you? Well, perhaps not, but you can sell special tools for the home mechanic, and/or a book that you write on how to find out what's wrong with your car, and/or a book that you write about how to prepare your car for a holliday, and what survival equipment to pack.

3. Brainstorm keywords

A free tool to help you with this has come out recently. More searches are being added to it every day. It is ideal to plan marketing for your website. Now is the time that you should get a free course about affiliate marketing. Even if you want to sell your own product, you will find the methods useful for deciding if your idea would be profitable.

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It will teach you the thinking behind what you should do, but you will find it very much easier to automate it.

While you are at it, take this free course about writing for the web.
Click here to receive The Netwriting Masters course... It's an intensive 5-Day course that shows you how to become an effective e-persuader. Advertising is not just a case of over-using the word "FREE".

4. Use "breakout" technique

for lateral thinking then brainstorm more keywords, then use the breakout again. (Use the free searchit tool.)

5. Find keyword popularity

The easiest way is to use the tools included in the SBI package but here again you can use the free searchit tool.

6. See how much competition there is

Use one search engine for all your keywords, such as Google, and write down (or put on database) the numbers of sites found for each keyword. You should also have records of the number of people searching for each keyword, from the last step.

If you aren't using SBI, then use the free searchit tool.

7. Is your theme profitable?

If none of your keywords has been searched very much in the last month, you should look for a different theme!

You can do a crude calculation if you use a spreadsheet instead of a database. Just divide the supply by the demand for each keyword. If sites found divided by people searching is over a thousand for all the keywords, you should find another theme.

I seem to remember that you can also work out profitability using the free searchit tool, but I use the SBI package myself.

8. Rank the keywords

The lower the supply/demand ratio is the better that keyword is for you. And the easier it will be to get found by the search engines. If less than ten competitors list a keyword, you are practically guaranteed a placing in the search engines.

Don't become too reliant on the keyword ranking. It is a very crude tool.

9. Delete misleading keywords

If you sell marvelous tungsten-tipped files and do a search on files, you will probably find that most sites are referring to computer files, or to filing cabinets. Just remove all the disappointing keywords. You will be very discouraged if you have ten thousand visitors looking for files, and nobody buys!

10. Choose your affiliates

You really should study the free Affiliate Masters' course. It gives you all the details and sources of information. But the summary is, that you should find companies who want affiliates related to your best keywords. There are hundreds of thousands of companies to choose from, so if you have a profitable theme, your plan is easy from now on.

Just plan your web design so as to answer all your visitors questions - after all you are an expert - and in the process direct them to facilities that will be useful to them. If you choose companies that will offer valuable services to your visitors, you can't lose.

11. Use your keywords

Whether you write the HTML code for your own site, or get a professional to write it for you, make sure that the main pages of your site are built round your best keywords, and other pages are prepared for the rest of your keywords. Then click the "Promote Your Site" button below to get visitors to your site.

It sounds easy to say "use your best keywords" but it is a very big subject, so Ken has written a free book about it that is at its beta stage just now. It is a tongue-in-the-cheek look at keywords and search engines and is called "The Tao of SBI"

Basically Ken says to work with the search engines, and most programs try to beat the search engines. Ken shows why any victory over search engines must be temporary - they can't afford to let people distort their search results. As soon as the book is available I'll try to remember to put it on my non-technical page.