Where to Start

First Things First

So you are starting your own business and you want to set up your own web site. Where do you start?  How are you expecting people to find you on the internet? Do you need a shopping cart? Are you going to collect email addresses and how?

These are but a handful of questions you may be asking yourself, and these pages are here to guide you through the minefield where the unwary get fleeced and the ignorant perish!

Whether you are going to write your own site or go to a web designer these pages will point you in the right direction and show you how to avoid the pitfalls that await the unwary.

Most people think that the first thing to do is to buy a domain name, but actually there is something you should do before this.

You need to work out how people are going to find you on the internet.

Now that sounds very simple.... so let's look at the options:

You could use 'off-line' advertising such as adverts in magazines related to your business - the effectiveness of which is debatable, and it's usually expensive.

You can use Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns in Google, Yahoo and bing - more on this later - but essentially you pay the search engine to rank you at the top for various words and phrases you think people will use when searching for you - they collect their money every time someone clicks through to your site - hence the term Pay Per Click.

Well managed, a good PPC campaign can be very effective, but it can also run away with your money! However, it does highlight the whole issue about how people find you on the internet, and that's finding the words and phrases people type into the search engines... these are called KEYWORDS and doing your keyword research before anything else is often the key to your success (or lack of it!).

Get that right and you have every chance of people finding you in the search engines for free as they conduct a 'natural search' - i.e. they type your well-researched keyword into the search box.

Keyword Research

How do you go about doing keyword research?

Well, there are some very good tools out there you can use - some free and some for which you pay. It's often quite salutary to type a keyword you think people might use into Google and just see how many sites come up!

Suppose you are planning on selling a product that will help people lose weight - be that an exercise machine or a new diet - try typing "weight loss" into google and see what sort of competition you are facing.



I tried it just now and Google found 70,700,000 web sites! So you would be competing to be found with over 70 million web sites!

Getting found amongst that lot would for that keyword be a miracle, so that's why you need to find your niche.

Rather than deciding what to sell first, you would do far better to do your kewyord research within an area that interests you. When you find some fantastic keywords that have lots of searches and little competition, that's when you know you've hit the jackpot. This is your niche market - the holy grail of internet marketers.

A good place to start is with the very useful free package you can download at www.goodkeywords.com

but I would thouroughly recommend that you look at Wordtracker - this is a brilliant tool that lets you find out what's happening in all the major search engines and you can try it out FREE! Not only that but it comes with lots of help, and tutorials that will turn you into an expert on Keyword research in no time! You can find the wordtracker site by clicking here

Once you have found some good keywords for you product or service, then you can think about looking for a good domain name!