Build a strong foundation before creating your first Online Identity – Notes for beginners.

Thomas Kempis once said “The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid.” Similarly, a successful website is one which is laid on a firm foundation.

One of the secrets of a successful website is to lay a strong foundation and build the empire brick by brick. If you are looking a strong online presence, you must follow some of the basic rules those are required and can help you to lay strong foundations of your new website.

All you need to answer few questions mentioned below and you are a step ahead with many others.

• What I am going to do with a website? Decide your primary goals as it helps you to setup your future website design and website marketing process.
• What I am going to achieve? Setup your realistic target; you must expect that your website can help you to achieve what you want.
• How I can do this? Take your decisions and setup your strategy for website design, contents and marketing.

That’s all! The success with your website is never hit or miss, it all depends upon your business plan and putting regular efforts that helps you to materialize your goals. You must know the real art of placing the right thing at right corner, which is not at all a difficult thing to do.

Internet can do wonders for your. Today internet is a fastest growing medium that provide maximum exposures that at a cost which no other media can do for you. If you think right and take right actions step by step, it is almost certain that your site will have an ever growing online presence and a reach to the maximum of you potential clients.

You must have patience and invest your time towards managing your website. It needs regular attention and up-gradations. Just remember the phrase “empires never built in day”, but it takes years of dedicated hard work, devotion, patience and to work constantly towards improving the core areas. It’s a rule that applies with your website too. Even if you are a slow mover but consistently work towards improvements, there is no reason your efforts will fail.

Another most important factor is consistency, putting few regular efforts towards improving your website, which you repeat day in and day out can help you to achieve results and a certain success.

However it is always advisable to gain some basic knowledge yourself before you begin your journey to a grand online success. Below are few points where I like to touch the base. It can help you to organize your stuffs and take the right decisions.

• Secure your Domain Name: Choose a descriptive and short domain name. It is essential to choose a good domain name that is easy to remember. Don’t go for any sub domain or free domains, but always have your own, people will be remembering you with your name only. It should be a TLD i.e. yourbusinessname.com, .org, .biz and so on.

• Choose Quality Web Hosting: Select a quality web host that provides you consistent uptime and have enough flexibility required to upgrade or extend required features for running your site effectively. In general if you like to have a greater visibility of your website you should hire services from an experienced hosting company even if the cost is higher than small hosting companies.

• Plan it well: Set up your website goals, Design principles, marketing strategies and make your site plan that help you to take decisions. Simply open your notepad and write down what is your site all about, what it sells, how it sells, to whom it will sell, and other things. Think about possible sections of your website and note it point by point. It is advisable that in beginning; launch the website with the basic functionalities and upgrade it on regular intervals. This will give you an instant kick to launch your site and you can always enhance its functionality with fewer efforts.

• Create unique contents. Write for humans, not solely for search engines. If you provide specific information, you can improve conversions and have returning visitors. In order make a strong presence in World Wide Web and well ahead with your competitors, you must provide specific information relevant to your business. If needed you can hire a writing agency that is specialized in writing quality contents, of-course you need to do careful analysis about the credibility of writer.

• Accessible website design: Hire a developer who understands the basics of website accessibility, usability and visibility. In simple terms, your website should load faster, easy to navigate and easy to read too. This will improve your conversions, if visitors easily find what they are looking for; they can take decisions too. Designer should analyze the buyer’s decision making psychology to create a better website for you. You can also have high quality graphics but those should be scaled down, so that it won’t affect your website loading time.

• Creation of Landing Page/ Sales pages: Create an effective landing page that attracts buyers who are heading towards purchasing stage. Your landing page should have specific information that helps them to take a decision. It should not have too much irrelevant information, but it is created to reduce the buyer’s decision making process. In other words it is an art of converting visitors into a prospective buyer.

• Managing you information pages: You can have lot of information pages, but they should be well organized and point towards the relevant landing pages. Visitor who is approaching to your site is likely to buy. He will gather all the information and evaluate your product or services before taking a decision to choose. If you put information which are not relevant may confuse your visitors and that reduce your conversions.

• Search engine optimization: Do it yourself or hire an experienced SEO to optimize your site. Search engines are major source of traffic and to be found you need to apply basic SEO rules that help crawlers to index your site. You can find lot of stuffs in my site which are proven and tested SEO methods. However you need lot of patience to rank well in SE’s, but you or your SEO must follow ethical techniques, that helps you to stay longer on SERP.

• Market your site. A Business is all about what it sells and how well it is marketed. A well marketed site reach as many of prospects and provide greater conversions. Apart from SE’s there are lots of ways you can develop a market for your site. The basics of marketing are to identify your prospects and prepare your offers. Simply find the answers of questions like, what you sell, how you sell, where you sell, who are your targeted potential clients, how much domain knowledge you have, what is the actual strength of your product and so on. A well drawn regular marketing plan combined with selective advertisement campaign, can provide greater results on World Wide Web which enable you to reach your goal successfully.

• Promote your site. Promoting your site is a vital technique which can not be done in one day or overnight. To get desired results you need to work hard constantly so that you will be able to capitalize the maximum exposures on world wide and establish your solid online presence. There are many ways. You can start an affiliate program, create reseller channels and sales points, develop business networking, publish a press release, write articles, manually add your site to different directories on section which is most relevant for your site theme, or use advertising channels i.e. Pay Per Click advertising, Ezines, banner advertisements, and many more possible ways to promote it regularly on internet.

These are the basic and fundamental need to build a strong foundation for your online presence. Remember a tallest building on earth has the strongest foundation too that support its structure to stay longer on earth. Follow the ethical ways and simple rules and take a step forward towards building a foundation of your online empire.