Due Diligence and First Things First
--Setting Yourself Up For Internet Success--

A majority of the people who decide to create websites to
make money seem to be under the impression that all they
need to do is throw a website up on the web and they will
make money. Many appear to take less thought and
preparation in the creation of their site than they would
to choosing a new outfit or preparing for a campout.

How can I say that? you may ask. When you look at the
statistics on the web, the experts will tell you between 90-95% of the websites on the internet are not making money.

Understand, with 4 billion plus webpages (according to Google) that 5-10% still represents an awful lot of successful netrepreneurs out there.

Personally I have interviewed many clients who somehow thought a website was some kind of financial magic-bullet. We have all seen the tv commercial where the web guru gathers all of the people in a small company around the computer and says, "Launch completed!" There is a moment of silence as they gather around watching the hit counter show one hit, 10 hits, 25 hits and all of a sudden the hit counter starts to move faster than you can see the numbers.

This commercial does not show the team of people that worked on putting the site together, designed the marketing strategies, put together the keywords, descriptions, head-lines, and great body copy. It doesn't show the hours spent researching the market, determining what companies to provide the e-commerce tools, checking demographics, going into newsgroups, establishing branding...etc.

And it certainly doesn't show the amount of money laid out in advance marketing costs that let people know the website was going to be there.

Let's face it, successful websites are not instant pudding. They represent hours of hard work, study and experience. Much sweat, thought, marketing saavy and money goes into making them work.

Anyone who tells you different is either trying to sell you something or doesn't like you very much and would love to see you fail.

So what's the good news? You don't have to take the school of hard knocks as far as how to create a income-producing website is concerned. You can leverage other people's experience to avoid the obstacles and pitfalls of commercial ventures on the internet.

Remember our first statistic? If 90-95% are not making money.
how many are? There are over 4 billion websites on the internet. That means around 400 million are making money
and have figured out how to make the internet into their own
personal cash cow.

So how do you get started? What do you need to do in order
to make your site profitable? This article is intended to
help you lay the foundation for a profitable site. We are going
to start with a little homework. The following steps dig the
necessary deep foundation for creating a site designed from
the beginning to be a money-making site.

We recommend you do these excercises now, even if

Your homework: Start a website notebook and answer the
following questions (write the answers down or type them
in your word processor.

1. What are you selling?

What do you want your visitor to do when they get to your site? Is the front page of your site designed to lead them to your order page? Is the text of your site full of keywords that will cause the search engines to rate you high in relevancy for the search that brings them there? What, specifically is your product?

2. Define 5 Markets.

Look at what you are selling and think about who your customer is. The goal here is to choose 5 pockets of people who have a problem that your product or service will solve for them. (No, "everyone" is not a category.) Questions you should ask yourself: How much do they earn? What is their level of education? What is their level of computer literacy? This will help you know how to approach them, and will tell you what kinds of words they may be typing into the search engines to find you.

3. After you have determined which markets you are going for, ask yourself, "What is their problem and how does your product or service resolve it for them?" A lot of search engine queries are just restating what the problem is, eg.: "repair my car myself", "train my dog", "relieve lower back pain", etc. If you know what problems your product resolves for them, you have some pretty good clues as to how to come up with some great keyword phrases.

4. Now that you have done some thinking about your
customer, begin to create a list of keywords specific to each market. The goal here is at least25 keywords or keyword phrases for each market. As you are creating your list, break out your thesaurus to come up with appropriate synonyms for the words you have chosen. A thesaurus (either electronic or the good old fashioned book kind) will be an important marketing tool, not only for creating lists of keywords, but for creating great headlines and sales letters.

5. Now go into the search engines and begin to put your
keywords in and do searches on them. What companies come up in the first 2-4 pages? Print out copies of these pages.
You will be visiting these sites and seeing what keywords
they are using, and checking to see if they are compatible
businesses for future strategic linking opportunities and/or
joint ventures. This is important, ongoing research that you
must do on a regular basis to get and keep yourself in the
top listings on the search engines.

So, what is the next step? Watch for part two in this series:

The Bones of a Profitable Site

Don't be left clueless. Turn your website from a cash cow to a money machine. The Web Woman is here to help. For intformation about free TeleWebinars on internet marketing and much more, visit: http://www.thewebwoman.com.