Business Class Websites

Desire Is Not Enough

Before you go off and build your website, my advice to you would be, to create a plan, it’s like the old saying goes, if you fail to plan you plan to fail.

This article is about getting the desire and the idea out of your head and in front of you, so you can see it for it’s full potential.

These simple brainstorming Techniques that I am about to show you will work, if you want to get some clarity and direction for your new website, or any project you may be working on.

From my experience if you really want to build a profitable business online for the long term you will need to build a solid foundation to start with.

I found that having a desire to build a money making website is not enough, even If my desire is mixed with passion, but I have no vision or direction, no amount of work I do will give me the drive and motivation to continue with the site.

I would continuously end up feeling overwhelmed and frustrated. I would always seem to be continuously chasing my tail, not knowing what Id already done or what task I had to do next.

It’s like always being lost, you can try as hard as you like to find out where you are and where you need to go, but if you don’t get your hands on a map or find some direction, you will always feel frustrated and confused.

Don’t start out by rushing headlong into building your first website without a plan, Because before you know it, you’ll realize your heading in the wrong direction and all of the work you’ve done would of been wasted.

Avoid The Mistakes

Hopefully by following these suggestions you will avoid some of the mistakes I made when I was getting started.

For example when I first started building websites, I just went out and bought the first domain that was available, quickly installed a new version of Wordpress onto my hosting account and started adding content.

The Problem.

The problem I found was, I had no structure to my site or no plan to work with, I was just randomly adding content, and as a consequence I ended up with articles all over the place.

If you ever visited the site you would of had to scroll through a list a mile long just to find the information that best suited your needs.

I had no specific category order, my sales pages where hard to find and mixed up with all of my other content, it was in all honesty a very bad example of how to build a website.

These Days are Different.

Today I would like to think I’ve matured in my Online education and I now realize that there is a better way to build your sites than just dumping content on the web.

The First Step.

Once you have decided on the topic or market you want to build your site on, and you have done all of the necessary market research.

The first step in building a site in my opinion, and this is only MY opinion, is to brainstorm the idea and think about a long term strategy.

Simply start by grabbing a pen and paper and make a list of what you want to actually put on your site.

Some Simple Brainstorming Suggestions

The questions that usually come to my mind when I’m brainstorming a new idea are something like…

• How do I want my site to be perceived, Do I want my site to have a corporate feel or do I want to create a personal touch and reveal a part of my personality.
• What type of content do I want to publish, am I going to have video published on my site, and is the video going to be viewable for every one to see or is it going to be for private viewing only.
• Do I want to set up a members area and if so what type of membership site do I want to create?
• How am I going to collect payments from my site, do I need an e commerce shopping cart or will a simple pay-pal account be enough.
• Do I want to build a blog and give away free information and sell advertising space from my site.
• What other ways can I make money from my site?
• What products am I going to sell, will I be selling my products and services from the site or just collecting leads so I can take my prospect offline, and sell to them via conventional offline business methods.
• Am I going to sell other peoples products from my site, either through affiliate commissions and product reviews
• Am I going to sell offline products or purely electronic down loadable products
• How am I going to build an email list that I can market to.
• What is my initial auto responder sequence gong to be about?.
• How am I going to choose my domain name?
• Am I going to choose a name that will promote my offline business?
• Do I want to market myself as part of my sites branding.
• Do I want to have a keyword specific URL?
• Do I want a long or short domain name?
• Do I want to have a squeeze page that I send my visitors too instead of sending them straight to my main content site.
• What will my USP be? and what will make me stand out from all of the other marketers in my field.

The list could go on and on.

The Suggestion.

I suggest you make a list of everything you want to put on your website, anything you can think of, articles you want to write, products you want to sell topics you want to cover… whatever comes into your head just write it down.

Think about what are the major topics you will want to cover, these can be your major categories.

Get as many ideas and thoughts as you can out of your head and put them down on paper

Once you have done that, start trying to make sense of all of the pieces and put them into some kind of order.

Create a mind map and and start thinking about how all of these ideas will fit into your long-term vision for your site.

If you get this right you will save your self a lot of confusion and frustration, well at least this exercise helps me any way.

You may find that a lot of the ideas you may never use, but at least you have created some clarity in your mind, your thinking will not be all cluttered with random ideas that you can’t piece together.

You will have created for yourself a starting point, because you will know exactly what you need to do in a logical practical order, and if you can’t pin down all of the exact details or you don’t know how you are going to do a specific task don’t worry at least you know what you will need to work on in the future.

Even as I build this site, I still have ideas that I need to work on and finalize, my USP for example, is something that I still need to work on, but at least I’m aware of it and my mind is free and open to ideas that come into my head rather than being cluttered and confused about what I have done and what I need to do.

Try it. it works for me.