Designing a website may not seem like the easiest of tasks, but with the help of some new web building conveniences that have entered the market in the past few years it is possible to create a professional website for your business with only a small investment of your time and money. In fact, with the advent of greater choice in web design such as ready-made website templates, logos and other corporate necessities, you can build a website So easy these compared to when I started online.

Step One: Plan Ahead

Before you delve into the world of web design and start looking for a suitable template, it’s important to plan ahead. You need to clearly define your company’s objectives beforehand so that the design selection process goes more quickly and you choose the right template.

For instance, who is your target audience? You must know your customer inside and out in order to choose the best site design for bringing in business. For instance, if most of your business comes from corporations and professionals you will need to choose a template that caters to that group of people – one that gives the right first impression and shows you are a serious business that can handle top-notch clients. In this case, a simple, efficient design will be your top preference. If, however, you are building an ecommerce website selling a range of goods, a template that can be customized for online shopping will probably be your design of choice. Perhaps you require a more “flashy” website? Flash templates are also an option and suit many different types of websites that rely on more than just text and a logo to make money.

Ensure that the template you eventually purchase is easy to customize and update. That’s the whole point of buying a template in the first place – to make both the building of the website and its maintenance stress-free, affordable and fast. You will need to add your own content to the template and work with the overall theme once it is downloaded. Also, most businesses will want to add fresh content, site updates, links etc. as time goes by so keep this in mind when searching for that perfect template. If you plan to incorporate interactive features into your site, such as forms and chat areas, the template you choose should be able to handle this as well.

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If there is one bit of advice I can ever give you, whether it be about marketing or business success in general, it is a quote from Russell Crowe in Gladiator: “On my mark, unleash hell.” Yes, you might have heard one or two other marketers quoting this very same line. And with good reason. That one line epitomizes the very core of what all marketing programs teach you. Here’s a break down:

Find your target - Pick a market that is favorable for approach. It doesn’t have to be the perfect idea, just one that works on paper, and most importantly, something that you know you can do while maintaining interest.

Prepare your approach- Mark out the main spots – what sort of advertising mediums can you use? What is your budget? What is your exact strategy for each medium? No need to go into excruciating details, but you should know, for example, your allocated monthly budget for your PPC campaign, your target keywords and the expected cost-per-click for each keyword. This will at the very least help you monitor your advertising and tune it based on the  results.

Intense marketing- There are two different approaches in this regard. Use the first one if you can afford to spend a lot of money on traffic, use the second if most of your advertising budget will be paid for by your business even at the start.

- All-out marketing, pulling out all the stops at once, complete blanketing of your target market – Slow build-up, tackling different advertising mediums one by one, building to crescendo effect where at the end, you replicate the effect in the ‘all-out marketing’ technique.

Taken by itself, the term ‘unleash hell’ is also used to describe another valuable business lesson:

If you have a product, or a business idea, or a service to sell, GET IT OUT THERE! Take your business to the market first, worry about refining and
managing later.

Essentially, don’t wait months to find the perfect idea. Pick an idea that’s good enough, and launch your business. If you are a resume writer and want to sell your services online, throw up a website, put up your basic contact and payment information and BEGIN PROMOTION.

Too often people wait too long until they have the ‘finished’ product before starting their marketing campaigns. A newcomer shouldn’t waste their time like that. The product will be developed along the way through customer interaction anyway. On the other hand, there is no way you’ll make any money without traffic.  So go get that traffic, and ‘perfection’ will come in due time.

Today’s resources – One of my favorite tools is a point and click dashboard that walks you thru each and every step for promotion and it is done Marlon Sanders. The Promo Dashboard is a fun tool to use and you simply follow his point and click formula to drive tons of traffic to your site.

If you are looking for a simple guide to over 70 promotion methods than I don’t hesitate to bring up Ross Goldberg’s ebook The Traffic Manifesto.

If you have yet to start writing your own info product then this is without a doubt one of the easiest ways to get started. Jimmy D Browns Short Reports Fortunes. I wished I had this when I was starting out in the info product business. It’s fast and super easy to understand and you have can have an info product ready to go in just a couple days.

There is one hard and fast rule in generating income for your website: A steady flow of website traffic. If no one goes to your site, it hardly bares a chance of generating an income. Many sites have tried and failed in doing so, and these results to the sites demise. It takes money to maintain an income generating site; it also takes money to make money.

BUT, it doesn’t take a whole caboodle of cash to generate website traffic for your site.

Ever wonder how the big hit sites drive traffic to their sites? Most of them are spending tons of money to drive the traffic to their sites, investing in many advertising campaigns and different forms of marketing schemes and gimmicks. This is all worthwhile because, well, they are what they are now, high earning, big hitting websites.

You don’t have to do this if you don’t really have their resources. There are many ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to spend what you don’t have or can’t afford. Many people have banked on high cost methods and have ended up losing their shirt over it.

Here I present to you the Top five ways to generate low cost website traffic that could help your site a whole lot. Even if you only get a small percentage of successful visitors in to client ratio it still works especially if you get a high number of website traffic.

Exchange Links

This is a sure and proven method. Rarely would you see a site where there is no link to another site. Many webmasters are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more public awareness about their sites. You’ll soon see and feel the sudden upsurge of the traffic coming in to your site from other sites.

A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites is having the same niche or content as the other site. They should share a common subject so that there is continuity in the providing of service and information to what interests your target traffic.

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Hold a Brainstorming Session. Write down everything you can think of that interest you or something from your past that you have knowledge in. It could be a past job you had or my favorite is a hobby of some kind that gets your blood flowing.

To start out, have a brainstorming session with yourself.  Have a brainstorming session with your significant other.  Have a brainstorming session with another marketer.  Do whatever you can to get those creative juices to start flowing.

When doing your brainstorming, you want to focus on your goal.  Remember that the ultimate goal is to produce a product.  The interim goal, though, is to find a hungry market that is willing to part with some money to obtain the information that you are selling.

Don’t limit yourself to any specific topic at this point.  Anything can be a product!  Not everything might justify a nice price tag, but everything can be a product.

What? You don’t know how to brainstorm?  It’s easy really.  Just throw out ideas.  This early in the game, there are no bad ideas or good ideas – there are only ideas.  Break each idea apart – combine a few together – follow one idea to another.  This is what brainstorming is all about!

Now, it can be much harder to do when you are trying to create a product that you don’t know much about.  Then, topics are a bit harder to come by.  Otherwise, look around you.  Try thinking of everything and anything as a potential product.

One piece of software you can use to help you brainstorm is called the Complete Brainstorm Lab.  You’ll find it at:  http://www.InstantEzineContent.com .

If you just glanced across your room and you see a telephone, perhaps you could find a way to turn that into an info product.  Let’s brainstorm it.  You could have an ebook about using the telephone to profit.  You could have a software product that helps you use the telephone to profit.  One way to do this easily is start thinking in terms of “How To”.  When you look at something, think of all of the “How tos” that could go with it.  You’d be amazed at the “gazillions” of products that you can come up with!

One of the ways I use that I have found extremely useful is to go to ezinearticles.com and look thru their directory listings and see what people are writing about. Here’s the thing. If people are writing about a specific subject then they are probably making money in that given niche.

One mantra I have continued to follow through out my online journey is find something you are passionate about or have a high degree of interest in. There are a couple of reasons for this. First and foremost it makes it much easier to sit at your computer every day and write content about it and it makes your processes much much easier and it actually drives the enjoyment factor up.

That’s not to say you won’t do well with niches you have less interest in, it simply means you know something going in and another way I come up with ideas is to to either a local bookstore where they have a huge selection of magazines and it becomes a never ending flow of possibilities.

If they are producing content in a magazine that is your instant hungry market. By reading periodicals, you can also come up with ideas and marjets you simply could have never thought of as well as many sub-niches by looking through the classified ads.

A freebie for you today by one of the greats- Marlon Sanders Online Marketing Ebook .

Two others for creating your own product are Marlons Info Product Dashboard that shows you how to point and click your way to your first ebook. One of my all time favorites is Create Your Own Products In A Flash

To create your own product, you must first start with a topic. This should be the fun part of product creation. How do you choose a topic? That’s easy! First find a hungry group of buyers and then find a topic that either solves a problem they have or benefits them in some way.

Many info product creators will just start creating a product on a given topic, and then, when the product is finished, they will look for buyers. Well, I’m here to tell you that this is the wrong way of approaching info product creation.

Wouldn’t you be better off if you created a product specifically for an information hungry audience? Even better, create a product for an audience hungry for

information who has money! That way, you would know that the buyers existed, even before you put all that time into creating your info product.

If you approach the creation of your info product using this method, you will GREATLY enhance the success of your product! By “success” I mean two things: the profitability of your product as well as the name

recognition of you as the creator.

Let look at two examples:

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