DIY Business Website Explained.

Designed for small local business owners,  DIY Business Website is a video course designed to show exactly how to develop a successful online presence for a small business.

The course comprises of 17 core videos and a PDF guide showing how to research, plan, build and run a successful small business website.

There are small businesses all around and many have no website, of those who do many have a poor web presence.

Most small business owners believe that it is almost impossible to gain a significant web presence. This is far from the truth and in fact, because most small businesses are localised,  this actually makes getting your website seen by the right people very easy in most cases.

Every business owner wants new customers and extra sales and a good website is a very low cost form of advertising.

Of course, having an advert that seldom gets seen is of little benefit but it is actually quite easy to build a website. More importantly by applying a simple set of processes to planning and building your small business website, you can almost guarantee a top 10 search placement for a term that is highly relevant to your product or service.

This makes a website a low cost and devastatingly powerful form of advertising if done correctly.

Modern software has made building a website a task so simple that even a novice computer user can do it with ease.

DIY Business Website shows simple but effective researching method, that pretty much guarantees that you will be able to get a high position on the front page of the search results.

The course then goes on to show how to choose the right domain name, set up hosting and build the site.

The methods are demonstrated by Steve actually planning and building a simple website for a friend of his who owns a small plumbing company. The website goes to number 3 on Google for two of the search terms that he targets in a matter of a few weeks.

DIY Website also goes into some detail on developing the website and maximising it’s potential.

The course rounds off by showing how to develop more traffic and how to make additional income from the less relevant visitors.

Of course it will not be for everyone but it is an excellent resource for small businesses that have limited budgets but want good results. As I said it’s not for everyone and if you have a large and ever changing range of products and requires constant updating it probably wont fit your needs. Having said that it is very low cost and a good and valuable insight for anyone thinking of building a website.

If you want to find more information about this course visit the official website at http://www.build-sb-website.com/Home.html

The Tradesman’s Guide to Small Business Websites is a 21 page guide for small localized businesses that are thinking of building a website or want to improve their web presence.

TGSBW was developed to be used with DIY Business Website.

You can read The Tradesman’s Guide to Small Business Websites online here.

New Small Business Website Guide

Get your Re-Brand-able copy, re-brander and instructions now !

Unzip it, re-brand it, put it on your website for download, send it to your list and start making commission.

Click the image to the right to get your copy !

New Small Business Website Guide

A Little Planning Goes A Long Way.

A common miss-conception among small business owners is that a website is some kind of company mascot. Often you will see small business websites that over concern themselves with the comany and not its products and services.

A small business website should be thought of firstly as a collection of adverts for the company’s products and service and then as a place where people can find information about the company itself.

Although the website is a collection of adverts, the way that people find those adverts is very different from that of traditional forms of advertising.

When you consider a newspaper advert, it is possible to estimate roughly how many people will see it. A newspaper would have a fairly specific circulation and will have sections that reflect various products and services. Given these facts it is possible to work out roughly how many people will visit each section. Each page will have a number of adverts on display and there is a good chance that yours will get seen.

The way people find a website is very different. It is necessary to construct your website to capture visitors who search for a term or terms that are specific to the company’s product or service. If you consider a kitchen company trying to get noticed online the most obvious search term or keyword would be kitchen. However if you consider just how many kitchen company’s there are on our planet it soon becomes apparent that you are going to be competing against millions of pages.

The vast majority of people searching on the internet will not move beyond the first page of the results. For this reason a website must be set up in such away that will allow you a very good chance of a front page position in the major search engine results. This sounds difficult, but is often a lot easier than you might imagine.

Using our kitchen company as an example, we need to think carefuly about what people would search for if they were looking for us. While many people might type kitchen, doing so will most likely return results that do not fit their needs at all. If a person is looking for a local kitchen supplier or fitter they are more likely to search for a less broad term. Many people would type a term and not a word. Let us assume our searcher lives in or near a town. They would most likely search for (kitchen MyTown or MyTown Kitchen). This would not only be a term that has less competition, but is highly specific to our company and customers needs.

Not all people will search for the same term and a search for (kitchen MyTown) will return a different set of results than for (Kitchen Fitter MyTown). By analysing the business it is possible to identify a number of search terms that people might search for if they were looking for a company like yours. By narrowing these terms down to a locality you are identifying a number of niche terms within your field. These niche terms carry far less competition and because of a lack of understanding among small business owners the competition is often very poor.

Once you have identified a number of possible search terms/keywords it is time to research the competition. Researching the chosen keywords enables you to work out how easy or difficult it will be to gain a front page position in the search results. Having this information enables you to put in place a foundation on which you can build a framework over time.

If the main keyword phrase for our company was (kitchen MyTown) we would start with the foundation which would be the domain name. A common mistake among companies large and small is choice of domain name. Choosing a domain name with the phrase (kitchen MyTown) in it should be your first choice. Using the company name as a domain name is most likely going to attract visitors who are already aware of your existence. These people would have been likely to buy from you anyway. Because a company name is usually quite unique in itself, it should be possible to build a page that is optimised to that keyword anyway.

Using a locality as a niche can work very well if your company is localised. but if you want to sell your product or service to a larger audience the job becomes a bit harder. For a national company using (UK or USA……..) can be possible, but you are likely to be competing with large companies. An alternitive approach is to build a number of smaller websites to cover different regions. The possibility of finding niches within your products and services is also an option, but your final decision should be made as a result of your research.

Researching potential keywords is made simple thank’s to a number of tools and services that are avilable,  many of which are free. You should be prepared to invest several hours to keyword research even if you find several quite quickly. Finding a broad range of keywords will give you flexibility and you need to pull traffic from as many different avenues as you can.

Some examples for our kitchen company.

If we assume our kitchen website has the domain name MyTownKitchens.co.uk/, then each page would be an extension of that with the page name preceding the forward slash.

So we may add and optimise pages that reflect other things that people search for.

Search = MyTown Kitchen fitter.   example   www.MyTownKitchens.co.uk/kitchenfitter.

Search = MyTown Kitchen Worktops.  example   www.MyTownKitchens.co.uk/worktops.

Once this basic foundation is in place the page titles, descriptions, keywords and content can be built around each page. Good content on your website will influence how it is seen by the search engine spider software. When a search engine receives an instruction it has to work out the order of importance the pages and It does this surprisingly well.

Understanding how the search engines tick makes it possible to construct your pages to ensure that they are seen as highly relevant to a given term. This can be built on further by making your pages popular with other relevant websites, but this another subject and will be the subject of my next post.

Planning a small business website prior to even buying a domain is a crucial process if you want your small business website to be successful. The vast majority of small business websites fail to come close to realising their full potential. This is almost always due to lack of understanding and poor planning.

Having a website built by a professional is always a good idea, but for most smaller businesses it might not be cost effective. It is possible to get a website built cheaply, but as with everything else, you get what you pay for. Buying a cheap website will usually turn out to be a waste of money. Cheap websites tend to be made quickly from a template. Usually little if any research and SEO would be carried out and text content is often minimal.

The fact that modern software make it so easy to build a website presents another problem. There are a vast number of web site designers that know less about SEO than you will by the time you finish reading.

If you are going to have a site built make sure that you know the difference between a designer and a developer. A developer is the one who you will think is trying to rip you off when in actual fact he is giving you good advice. A good web presence involves  ongoing development and therefore ongoing costs. Ownership of the website and domain name is another issue that must be considered. If you get your website built make sure you own the website and domain name.

Another thing that is nearly always overlooked is that a website can bring additional revenue to a business on its own. Affiliate and pay per click advertising can be added to your website to make passive income.

There are many programs online that offer extensive training on affiliate marketing, but care should be taken when considering a program. Fortunately your needs are going to be simple because the main focus of your website will be your business. Having said that many people make substancial incomes from Affiliate marketing and it can be a profitable addition to your business.

When advertising other product care should be taken to ensure that anything advertised is complimentary and not competitive to your business. Care should also be taken where place adverts on your sales pages if at all. This may take the customers focus away from a sale that you were about to close.

A good way to get rich content into a business website is to have a section offering tips or advice. This is a good place for your affiliate advertising and also shows the image of your companyas helpful and knowledgable.

For more on building a small business website check out the other posts in the small business website category at the top right of this page or for my video course click here.

New Small Business Website Guide

When and Why You Should Consider Building Your Own Small business Website.

As we move into a new age, a business website is fast becoming more of a necessity than a luxury. Many people buy online and almost everyone uses the Internet to find information.
Even when people are going out to make a purchase they often have a look online to source the product first.

Most people naturally assume that they should hire a professional to build a website for their company. Of course in an ideal world we would all do just that. Unfortunately if you are not prepared to make a realistic investment and an ongoing financial commitment you will probably be wasting your time.
It is possible to buy a website and get it hosted cheaply and this is why many small business websites fail to deliver. Simply putting a website online is not enough. Unless you want to end up paying to advertise your website you will need a strategy.

When you set up your small business website you need to consider a number of things. You need to understand how people use the internet and how you will make the right people find you. Building a website that captures the right visitors is the key to success for a small business. A large volume of irrelevant  traffic is going to yield little income so the emphasis should be on traffic that is highly relevant to the company.

The good news is that for the average small localised business a good web presence is inexpensive and not too difficult  to achieve.

With a little understanding of search engines and a few free tools and services building your own website can be a very productive indeed.  If your website needs are simple this should be the first avenue that you explore. If you need complex databases or sell a wide range of products that frequently change price you should consider a designer.

When planning an online strategy you need to consider weather to build and run your own website or to outsource the work. Whatever you decide to do it is crucial that you first arm yourself with at least a basic understanding of the processes involved. No one knows your business better than you do and a basic understanding on your part will help your designer and ultimately your business. You will also be able to weigh up your designers understanding of search engine optimisation.

A growing number of software packages have evolved in recent years making it easy for even the novice computer user to build a website. This  is an advantage for those that choose to build their own website, but it poses another problem. There are a now many so called web designers who have limited if any knowledge of search engine optimisation. Obviously if you do have the luxury of a reasonable budget to plan, build and maintain your site correctly, then you should use a designer. If you choose your designer with care you should be OK.  However you should still make it your business to arm yourself with a basic understanding. Doing some online research will pay dividends when you come to form the structure of your website.

A small business website should be a low cost, yet powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal. Not only can it be financially rewarding, but building and running your own website can be great fun too. So before you rush out and hire a website designer just take a bit of time to explore doing it yourself.

One good place to start is DIY Business Website.
DIY Business Website is a video course designed specifically with small business owners in mind. The course has a set of core videos that take you step by step through each process involved in getting a successful online presence.  The video course is kept simple enough to overcome the common problem of information overload yet delivers a good understanding of the basics . The website author Steve Hippel demonstrates planning, building and growing a website by building a site for a local plumber, so you get to see the whole process. You can then adapt the principles to your own business and literally copy what he does.

Large company’s spend vast sums of money on their web presence because they know that the first in the queue is the most likely to get the business. This presents a problem for small businesses who simply do not have the financial resources to compete. or does it?

In actual fact the very nature of the internet and the way that search engines sort the pages into a list of results makes it easy to compete in a small business niche. A small localised business can set out its pages to capture traffic from a rather different set of search terms than those the major companies will need to use. Done correctly, this will also deliver traffic that is highly relevant to your company and it‘s products and services.

If your business is small, reasonably localised and you require a fairly simple website, building your own website should be investigated first. Many of your competitors will have got a cheap website built and put online. This will give you a major advantage if you build your own website.

If you want to explore building your own website there are numerous websites articles and resources available online. It is a good idea to find a resource that takes you through the whole process. searching out the information you need will most likely lead to conflicting information and holes in your strategy.

With a little simple research it is often quite easy to identify a set of search term that are highly specific to your company’s niche. By constructing your pages around these search terms or niches you can capitalise on a lot of natural  search traffic. Natural search traffic is free and should form the basis of your strategy. If you can score high on a broad range of search terms for free, you can often eliminate the need for paying to drive traffic to your website.

Another big benefit is that the website can be set up to earn additional income from related, but not competitive products or services. Many people make substantial full time incomes by setting up websites purely to sell other peoples products and services. You can even get paid for clicks. Put simply when someone clicks on an advertisement on your page you get a small commission. These methods are often described as earning money on auto pilot among the internet marketing community.

If you build your own small business website you should start with some research. There are a number of tools & resources available online including video tutorials, ebooks and membership websites. A good way to approach this is to find one that you are happy with and stick with it. The one thing about the internet is that it can quickly give you a bad case of information overload.

If you hire a designer, make sure he known his stuff. Merely building a website is not enough. Your average 13 year old can build a site, but he/she probably wouldn’t know too much about optimisation or back links.

New Small Business Website Guide

Get your Re-Brand-able copy, re-brander and instructions now !

Unzip it, re-brand it, put it on your website, send it to your list and start making commission.

Click the image to the right to get your copy !

New Small Business Website Guide

When you learn or start learning how to make money online it is often a slow process at first. Many people are lured in hoping to make money quickly and often this is because they need money quickly. What is often overlooked is the fact that the skills that you are learning can be applied in other ways to earn income.

There is a lot of competition out there all chasing the same niches and clambering over each other for traffic. Sometimes we just can’t see the wood for the trees. There are untouched niches like virgin snow all around us, the traffic levels are lower, but the commissions much higher.

Building small business websites for small local companies is a quick and easy way to earn a decent additional income while you practice your skills. Most of us know a few small business owners like tradesmen, shopkeepers, local accountants etc and these people are constantly looking for new customers.

Now the problem is, it’s often difficult to get them to pay you a couple of hundred dollars to build a website for them. So you need to just think outside the box for a moment because you can actually get them to pay you a lot more buy giving them a website.

There are virtually untouched niches right under our noses everywhere. They are smaller, but the commissions are potentially much larger. They need only a little well targeted traffic and they are much easier to exploit.
Let’s assume you have a friend who is a carpenter. He has no website, or maybe he has a website that he had built for him and he doesn’t get much business from it. This is a common problem, most small businesses like your carpenter will have a website that fails to deliver. It fails to deliver because they had a site built on the cheap and no optimisation was done.

So you have a word with your carpenter friend and offer to build a website that promotes his company for free and he pays you a commission on any business that you pass him. You agree a percentage and set about building the website using simple search emgine optimisation techniques that fit your friend‘s trade and location. This is the niche using the trade and location along with some simple research techniques you can find niches that are virtually untouched.

Now let’s say that you agreed 5% commission and you build a kitchen website. Your carpenter friend gets a job to supply and fit a kitchen and the job comes in at a cost of $10 000. You just earned $500. Now let’s add in some Adsense clicks and affiliate sales and maybe you have $550+. What if you done this for 10 or 20 others and you were scoring a number of big commissions each month. You are doing it all on one hosting plan costing $7.95 a month.

So it sounds good so far, but here is the best bit. The big problem with conventional methods is getting new customers and building a list. All of your potential small business customers already advertise so they are offering you there contact details on a plate. Everyone that is not on the front page of Google has a problem that you can address and all you have to do is offer to solve it. You offer to solve it in a way that has no risk and benefits both parties.

This method is a lot easier to apply to these virtualy untouched niches and demands less traffic than conventional methods. You don’t need to do much you just take the phone calls and tell them that you will get the person they need to speak to call back. You then phone the carpenter, pass the lead and he calls them back and takes over from there. There is nothing sinister about this because you are advertising his company and he will be calling them. All that you have done is created small website management service that pays a commission.

Small business websites of this kind are easy to build and done correctly can be put on the front page of Google with ease. If you want to learn more about building small business websites DIYBusiness Webite is a great place to start.  DIY Business Website is a set of video tutorials where I take you step by step through the processes of planning building and growing a small business website. Find out more.