Creating a useful, informative and potentially profitable web
site can be very exciting. The business plan and ideas are
set, now it's time to create that award winning site. The
internet is full of useful tools for content, scripts, site
creation and submission. Although these are very important
functions of a successful website some very important dynamics
are often overlooked. When a site is created, the essential
ingredient for success is traffic and/or sales, without these
a website may as well be a document sitting on your desktop.
In order to get traffic and sales, money and time must be
spent on advertising and site submission. A customer of ours
created a nice, user friendly website. This customer proceeded
to pay a submission service and buy $500.00 worth of pay per
click advertisement space. One week went by, the $500.00 was
gone and they received only ten orders. The pay per click
advertising worked, it generated a thousand visits to their
site but only ten orders. This indicated a problem, it turned
out the general public thought the offer was too good to be
true. The price was increased by ten percent and several
customer statements regarding their service was added to the
homepage and presto! They increased the percentage instantly.
It is imperative to test a completed site in increments
before spending a significant amount of funds to advertising.
On top of this several sources should also be tested. For
example, let's use $1,000 as an advertising budget for October.
In the first week $250 is spent on a pay per click search
engine such as Goto.com - The second week $250 is spent on
banner space - The third week $250 is spent on newsletter
advertising and the fourth week spend the balance on targeted
e-mail. The end of the month should give you a good idea on
where to focus your advertising dollars. Of course, the use
of a submission service for good search engine placement should
be done early considering the amount of time it takes to get
indexed to major search engines.

Tony Sandora - Owner and operator of www.freepersonalwebsites.com and
www.freebusinesswebpages.com - FREE Hosting for business
and personal websites with unlimited traffic, megabytes
and pop3 e-mail hosted at www.yourdomain.com for free,
for life, guaranteed. Contact support@freepersonalwebsites.com