Build Your Website

I’ve been doing business on the Internet for six years. Many things have changed on the World Wide Web since I launched my very first website, but there’s one (negative) thing that apparently will never be gone: this tendency to waste great opportunities that is evident in so many webmasters.

If there’s one huge problem that a smart webmaster should fight as hard as s/he can, this is it. This can never be stressed enough: grab any and all good opportunities that you find on the web as soon as you can. And once you start, do not give up so easily.

I’m going to tell you a real-life story to illustrate my point:

K. started surfing the web because she wanted to have some fun and research her favourite subjects. As time went by, she naturally made friends with other Internet users, joined forums, mailing lists and became a loyal visitor to various sites in a specific niche.

One day she realised that there was a certain type of website missing in that niche. So, she decided to fill this gap with her own web project. It was totally amateurish… yet it soon became pretty successful, because of three major factors:

1. She was a sort of pioneer, because she detected a need in her niche and was the first one to do something about it.

2. She really knew what she was dealing with and even devoted part of her time to expanding her knowledge on the subject, so she could improve her website on an ongoing basis.

3. She had good networking skills, so it wasn’t hard to spread the word about her site.

However, she wasn’t able to make a single cent from that site and eventually took it down. Why did this happen?

* She stopped investing in networking and promotion.

* She believed that the niche was about to collapse, so she lost the motivation needed to keep her site up.

* She thought a site like that couldn’t be effectively monetised.

This is what happened afterwards:

• She eventually realised that the webmasters which persisted and kept their sites alive are now recognised as true authorities in that niche, because they’ve been around for a long time. Consequently, they don’t have to spend much — if any at all — time with promotion.
• The niche never collapsed. Much on the contrary: it’s still growing and there are no visible signs that it’ll be stopping any time soon.
• Several new monetization techniques have been made available to webmasters, even to those who deal with smaller sites and restricted niches.

Talk about missed opportunities!

Had she persevered, now she wouldn’t have to use her own story as an example and alert for other webmasters.

I’ve previously written about the importance of choosing a niche for your site or blog. But I admit that knowing something should be done often isn’t enough. We also need to know how to do that, right? So I asked myself: what’s the best wat to teach people how to identify niches and subniches? Then it struck me: give the readers some actual examples and they will see what you mean.

As a result, I’m going to share with you a short list of broader niches and related subniches that can be found inside each of them. Hopefully, after reading this article you’ll be able to apply and/or adapt its concepts to your own needs as a webmaster. (more…)

How many websites and blogs should you run simultaneously? Some believe that building one huge portal is the way to go. Others prefer investing in site networks. I’m going to write about both cases and hopefully help you identify the case that best suits your needs. (more…)

I’ve said it before and I’m going to repeat it: monitoring competitors is an important part of any webmaster’s strategy. Not that you should invest all your time and resources in this activity; after all, you have to take care of your own business above all. But if you don’t know what your competitors do and how they achieve success, you may miss several learning opportunities.

Why am I writing about this topic once again? Because I feel this is an activity many webmasters neglect. But I know that just saying something is good doesn’t mean much; people want details. And this is what I’m going to give you today. (more…)

Some webmasters and bloggers believe that appearances count a lot when you want to win some credibility on the Internet. They claim that if you aren’t that successful yet, you should pretend you are, until everyone believes you. Eventually, actual success will follow. In other words, this is the old “fake it til you make it” scheme applied to Internet marketing.

Should you apply this principle to your activities as a webmaster or blogger? I’m not totally sure that I can give a positive answer to this question. But I’m going to save my objections for last. Now I’m going to show you a few situations when you might consider doing some make-believing, if you really must. (more…)

As briefly mentioned in my Statbrain review, many webmasters include competition monitoring in their overall strategy. I believe you’ll have a lot to gain if you do it too. Now, how can you identify sites and blogs that are truly worthy of your precious time?

Choosing the type of competitor you want to spy on

First of all, let me make one thing very clear: I’m not proposing that you engage in illegal activities. “Spy on” is just a fancy term in our case. I’m sure you get the idea.

That being said, let’s see the three types of competitor that you could/should be interested in: (more…)

If we go back and remember the early days of blogging, web logs were primarily considered as online journals which we could share with our friends. It has come a long way today, but it has essentially retained the classic layout that still fits the original purpose - sequential posts with the most recent on top in a wide column, and a narrower column or two for navigation. Of course, this simple layout will not work with all types of content, and if your needs are more specialized than what the typical blogging platform can offer, you may want to consider using Expression Engine. (more…)

Optimizing their site is quite a challenge for most small business owners. More often than not, they find it quite an overwhelming task. If you are one of the many such website owners, here is a brief sum up of what you can do to improvise upon your site.

Most search engines nowadays tend to browse through the actual content of the page being searched for, instead of sticking to the tags. Offer quality content on your website, for that is what attracts traffic. More traffic translates to a more popular website. The mantra is that you can never have too much of relevant content. Keep updating the content. Old content did no one any good. The search engines actually look into how old your content is. Fresh rank ensures a higher priority and therefore, higher ranking. (more…)

Sometimes, what’s important is not what you do, but how you do it, and SquareSpace V5 is the perfect example of this philosophy. It’s by far the most polished-looking blogging platform I’ve seen, with a dashboard designed to let you blog in style. Kevin Rose of Digg described it as “like Typepad and Wordpress on crack,” and after seeing what SquareSpace can do, I’d have to agree. (more…)

One important thing to consider if you’d like to blog professionally is the platform you’ll use. There are many free and paid options out there, but for a number of years now, WordPress has been the platform of choice for professional bloggers. Six Apart is trying to change that with the recent release of it’s very own Movable Type Pro, which mixes blogging, content management and social networking. And did I mention that it’s free? (more…)