Before building your website/blog, ask yourself this first question
#1.) What idea does your site revolve around? Is it about gardening? Sports?
Electronics?--Whatever it is, make sure to write down specifically what your website/blog is going to be about. Get a specific as possible.
#2.)The next thing that you should do is build your website/blog. Come up with every bit of resource to make the site interesting with all the content that you can come up with. There are plenty of freebies out there, and I can tell you about those later on when you are building your website. When you build your site, make sure to put meta tags in it. If you don't know what that is, there is a site that shows you on the internet that I found
http://www.dalleh.com/HTML/Meta_Tags/meta_tags.shtml
This will help your site be indexed into the search engines when submitted. If you don't have meta tags in your site, your sit cannot be spidered by the search engines. I am trying to brief as possible so that I don't confuse you if you know nothing about the matter.
#3.)Submit your site to the search engines. Don't...and I repeat...don't pay for
this service to be done. Many of the search engine submitting companies want a bunch of money for things that you can do for yourself in a matter of a couple of hours at the most. It sometimes takes a few weeks before you show up in a couple of the big name search engines like
http://www.yahoo.com and
http://www.google.com, but I'll show you how to get around that later on in the article. There are also a lot of submission service companies out
there that will submit your site for free in the major search engines if you just
place their banner/button upon your website/or blog..
#4) Gettin' down to the nitty gritty. This is my favorite part, because I love research. Now, you may not be one that likes to dig things up; but this a crucial part of the process and is definitly needed for success. You need to do research on your competitors. Remember when I was talking about write down specifically what your website is going to be about? Well, here is where it will come handy. Referring back to (#1), type in your key word on
a big search engine such as
http://www.yahoo.com or
http://www.google.com and locate your competitors. BOOM! There they are! Your competitors that you either have to team up with, or absolutely
crush to get to the top. I know it sounds ruthless when I say crush; but hey, we're talking about the internet here and not a playground. Copy each url of the sites. Copy and paste, or whatever works best for you. Go to each and every one of the websites. Write down their strengths, weaknesses (or what they are lacking). Write down everything you can find out about their site. Keep this for your records on your computer, or print it out and keep it in a folder.
#5) More Research-- Copy each url that you collected information on and go to
http://www.alexa.com and do a rank search. This site has so much infomation there. It's incredible! This shows how many hits they are getting, and how long they've been around. Your asking why this is important, but I'm about to get to that. You can even look up information about your site. Don't think much information at all will come up about your site at first, especially if it's brand new.
#6) Find the best competitors rank and find out who's linking to them I found out all about my competition there; who was linking to them, and everything about the sites on alexa.com. This is the key right here. This is where the big boys play, and where you find out who's linking to them. Find out what their rank is. Always try to find the biggest ones linking to the site. Always try to find the ones that are in the top 100,000 in the world. See what the sites are about. Your gonna find out that some of them are just forums-(message boards), or just online document saving communities in which you will save your filed documents, images, etc.
#7) Go to the site that are linking to them and find out how or if this site is doing link trade. If it's just a forum-(message board), then join it anyway. Please make sure to get a free email address when you are doing all of this, because it could clutter up your personal email. Trust me, I've been through it and its not fun. Trying to delete or save all of this stuff can be a little bit confusing at times. Also, another thing that is pretty tough to do is remember all the passwords. So,.. write yourself emails to forward to your free account to try to keep them
in order. This stuff will definitly come in handy later.
#8 Before doing a link trade with the site; make sure to already have a link back to them before asking a link. The website you've already built needs to have a link section in it. Make sure to have them placed in there. Also, you don't want to be very generic when asking for a link trade with a site. Don't write "Dear webmaster, I would like to submit my link for a trade." It will get discarded. You have to have a reason for link trade. Give them some insight as to why you
are submitting your trade with them. I'm sure if you've done your research, it is a matter of relevance in material in the site itself. Give them reasons why you like their site. Heck, I don't know any other way of putting it besides kiss their ass.
#9 keep doing it... find the highest ranking websites to link to and the relevance of your content. I know that this part seems redundent, but it is a tried and true process that works over time. Don't spam people or boards, but approach them. Write nice formal emails, or if you have a way to call them to talk to them do that. Remember, you are building a business and not a scam operation, so treat it like your business. This takes time and discipline. Eventually, you
will get some good inlinks coming into your website.
#10 Start writing informative article on a subject and submitting it to several different online ezines! This is where things really start to take off for you. There are many publications out there on the internet that would love you to write your articles and submit them to their sites and ezines. Just to name one that is high on the list would be
http://amazines.com/ amongst a list of so many that I wouldn't be able to fit in this article. You would have to contact me for that information.
#11 Get them published on top ranking which will raise the (PR- page rank) level of your site and search engine exposure and get hits to your website just from writing good quality articles. A good example.. do you have a key interest
in music or plants which is what your website is about? Do you know more about a subject more than others know? There it is. By writing articles on certain subject matters and linking to your site/or blog can improve search engine rankings, not to mention a lot of traffic coming your way to find out what more is
on your site. So, be prepared if you are a good writer because you will be swamped.
#12 Continue to build informative subjects on your website/blog to help make it interesting. Always update your website at least one time a week, if not everyday. find all the free stuff you can to install to your website or blog. Whatever you do, keep it interesting and real. Don't ever try to just sell,
sell, sell because people are a lot smarter than you think. The internet is fun and profitable as long as you take a soft approach to selling quality things to people. I have my own things to sell amongst affiliate programs that I participate in, and if you don't have a product and need help with getting products to sell, I have no problem in helping you out there either. Don't know how to build a website or a blog? No problem.. I can help you do that too. Now, there is no reason for you not to go out there and get your dreams of becoming a webmaster.
I found out all about this research through 16 hours a day of hard work on the internet right after I lost my job when my boss had a heart attack and decided to go out of business. I've learned a lot and wouldn't mind helping a few people out.
I hope that this helps, cause marketing on the internet can cost big bucks if you don't know how to do this stuff. Don't go paying for stuff when you can go get it for free. That goes for anyone else here too. Let me know if this information was helpfull to ya.
Jack