Starting your own internet business

"Times of change create opportunities as well as threats."

If you're thinking about supplementing your income by starting an online business, or you’ve lost your job due to the recession and need to find another way to make money, creating a website and starting an online business could be an option. With almost no overheads and the ability to work at any time you like, starting an internet business is a great option for people who wish to work from home.

There are three ways to get your own website:

Commission a website designer to create the website for you
Ask a designer to create just a template so you can build other pages
Create the entire website yourself

Commissioning a designer

Find a cheap, local website designer by searching online for a designer situated in your area, or by thumbing through the Yellow Pages, or by word of mouth recommendation. You can get a whole site designed from about £800 upwards so it doesn’t need to cost the thousands you sometimes hear about.

Getting just a template

Often you just need a designer to create your template, which shouldn’t cost more than around £150, and then you can add new pages in your own time. It’s perfectly fine to start off with a very small site of only five pages and build on it over time, adding pages every so often as you get used to the software. You may also want to get a logo designed.

Doing it yourself

If you're interested in starting your own business and want to do most of the online creation yourself, here is your kit list:

Software you can buy online

Adobe Dreamweaver (or equivalent) for designing your website
CuteFTP Pro (or equivalent) for uploading your new web pages to your server

Copywriting (the written content on your pages)

Keyword research tool, such as Keyword Discovery (or equivalent)
Dictionary
Thesaurus
Plenty of time to think

Optimisation techniques

1. Ask people to link to your new website on their site – if it is relevant it is much more preferable
2. Create good metadata in your code, for example:

Towards the top of the page, between the first occurrence of the word "head" in the code of your website and the word "body" you could place the following code:

<head>
<title>A relevant title for your page goes here</title>
<meta name="description" content="Write a short description of your website here">
<meta name="keywords" content="This is where you write the keywords for your page">
<body>

More detail about the meta data

<title>Descriptive keywords – most important keywords/phrase first, 16-17 words long/95 characters (with Spaces)</title>

NB. If the title extends beyond 95 characters it is truncated by Google and the sentence can end mid-word. It is therefore essential to ensure that none of important keywords extend beyond the 90th character.

Books or articles

Guides to online copywriting, Dreamweaver CS3, and CuteFTP Pro so you know how to use them properly!

Your website will gradually become recognised and indexed by the search engines over time. It won’t happen at once because there’s always a slight delay when new websites are created, especially with Google, but you need to make sure that when the search engines want to index your site you give them enough to go on to give you a strong ranking. It’s important to have good quality, unique copywriting on your site: both human readers and search engines like this. It’s also vital to have some links pointing to your website to boost its popularity.

Types of links you can try and obtain:

1. Authority links
2. Directory links
3. Reciprocal links
4. Run of site links
5. One way links from friends, or related sites
6. .edu and .gov links (but this is very difficult)
7. Radio station, television, magazine, or newspaper links
8. Press release links
9. Article bio links
10. RSS/ Blog aggregated links
11. Comment and Profile Links
12. Presell Page Links

How can you obtain these kinds of links? You have to find a way - buy, borrow, beg, and barter.