If you are going to be building a website for your small business, then there are certain things that you definitely need to know. The purpose of a business website is to help people who are interested in your business find out more about it and then contact you to purchase a product or service if you have something that interests them. To create your business website, you have a few choices. Either you can build the site yourself, or hire a web developer to do it for you. Many small business owners will prefer to create a website by themselves, primarily due to the availability of good tools that allow a website to be built without coding, and also due to the fact that professional web developers and designers might sometimes charge more than what some people would want to pay.

When you build your site, there are certain things that you need to keep in mind. Here is some information on the whole web building process that will be useful to anyone that is creating a website for their business.

• First, Make a Plan

Before you begin building anything, it is important that you plan the overall look and feel of your website, as well as determine the kind of content that you will be placing on it. Also, you will need to determine what your website will do for your business. Will it be just a website that will present information about your business and encourage your site visitors to contact you, or will it be something a bit more advanced. If you are selling products, you could, for example, build an e-commerce site that would let people buy your stuff online, without needing to call you to place an order or to visit your location. If you offer services, then you can include an ordering system on your website as well. Planning your site is the first step in putting all the pieces together. Of course, you will be able to make changes as you go along, as well as after when your site has been put up.

• Determine What Platform Your Site Will be Based On

A “platform” in web building usually refers to a content management system that will power your site and allow you to make easy changes to it. Of course, you do not have to use one if you don’t want to. If you want to build the simplest kind of website possible, then you can simply create a static HTML website that will need to be updated manually.

But to make things easier, there are several systems that you can use. Some are general, such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, which work well with any kind of website, due to the thousands of free themes, plugins and additions to these systems that can be used. If you are going to run an e-commerce website, then there are special e-commerce platforms like Zen Cart, Magento and OS Commerce that you can use to base your site on instead. It is a good idea to learn more about these systems and what they can do for you.

A recent survey taken in the United States by a technology consulting firm gives some very interesting figures about the use of internet marketing among small business owners. Based on the results, the majority (close to 80%) of small business owners had a website for their business. Of those that didn’t the majority were planning to create one in the coming year. This result is really not something that is surprising. It has been said time and time again that creating a website is beneficial for any business owner, even those that run a very small local enterprise. It makes them easier to find by their prospective clients, many of who exclusively use the internet in order to locate a business that they want to use.

While this first statistic was not especially surprising to anyone, what followed next may raise a few eyebrows. Of all business owners that had an online presence, nearly 40% were not entirely satisfied with the results that it was bringing them. Some were not happy with the way their website looked and wanted one that was more professional and more attractive to customers. Some others had a website and were quite happy with the way it looked and worked, but they were not convinced that it was doing them any good, as they did not see their website bringing them the amount of customers that they needed. It has also been said that small business owners (outside of the technology or marketing sectors) did not have much knowledge of how internet marketing worked and only a minority of them (14%) wanted to spend some time studying techniques to make their site better and to figure out how to deploy betting marketing efforts such as SEO and other internet advertising, in order to get more visitors to their website.

Ok, this maybe news and it is always nice to know some stats… but what does this mean to internet marketers? The bottom line is that there is a wide open market of local business owners who would want to use your services. Some of them want better websites. Some want to do some SEO on their site to get a better ranking on search engines. Others would want to use internet advertising in order to bring in more customers but are not sure which kind to use and are hesitant to buy ads on their own.

For those of you who are just learning internet marketing, or who are doing something else (CPA, Clickbank, eBay sales, affiliate stuff, etc.) and don’t get the results you want, this is a great opportunity. What you need to do is simple: learn how to create simple, yet functional websites. Learn how to optimize pages for SEO and build backlinks. Learn about the different kinds of online ads (business directories, classified ads sites, PPC, etc) and how they work. Compile a list of tutorials and learning materials (there are hundreds of videos, articles and blog posts on these topics, all free) and study them for about 2 weeks. Then you can start targeting local business owners and providing them your services as an internet marketer.

One of the main goals  of your business is to get your website to rank as high as possible. The reason being, if you have a higher ranking website, the more eyeballs that view it, the more revenue and business (or philantropy) you can provide for your visitors. The point of creating a website isn’t to have it sit idle and without viewers, but to get as large as the owner wants it to be. That is where ranking high in search engines is really going to help. Statistics show something like 40% of the users on search engines like Google click on the first link available, your goal is to be that site.

Ranking systems within the popular search engines used more often by browsing individuals can either give you an advantage or a disadvantage. If you are not ranked higher in these listings, then you get less exposure and that is bad when your website depends on exposure from people who want to see what you provide on your website. It is not impossible to get a top ten ranking on search engines and it does not take too much to get there if you know the simple tricks to use.

There is a wide variety of things you could do to help improve your search engine ranking. The most important thing that needs to be done is having the website optimized for search engine indexing. This optimization could be simple things like providing the necessary tags, having content that is tailored to the target audience and more. This can be done by yourself or you could hire professionals to do it for a fee. Either way, it helps to improve ranking and promotes more traffic to the websites which are being optimized.

The next option is to look into blogs and social media for link purposes. The way that some of the goliath search engines work best is by having back links to the original source. This means that the more times that a link is traceable back to the website that originates to some content or provides a simple link to the main page of the website, the more times it will show up in the search engine when searched. Many search engines combine the weight of all of the links towards the original and provide higher rankings when searched. This does take time, but is fairly worth the effort to increase ranking on search engine sites.

Google Adsense Websites

Google adsense are google adverts that are put on your website and everytime a visitor on your website clicks on those adverts you instantly earn commission. Anything from $0.01 – $5 depending on the type of link.

If you already have a website established with a good amount traffic coming in and are looking for some extra income from your website then it could be a good idea to experiment adding google adsense to your website. Its very easy to add, simply create an account with Google and when your application is approved you will be given the html code to add to your website. Its very simple.

If you don’t have a website and are looking for a website idea then you could try create a Google adsense website. This simply is creating a website on a particular topic and having a alot of content about this subject and on each page having your Google adverts nicely spread out on the page enticing users to click on the links and earning you commission.

Some webmasters have create a search engine website that uses the Google adsense search bar. This means when ever a user hits your website and does a search for anything, a full list of results is displayed and whenever someone clicks on those links you instantly earn a commission

Another good way to generate adsense sales is by having a blog, as you can update your content everyday and for each blog have one google adsense advert in each blog tempting the reader to click on the advert and earning you commission

Once you have your google adsense website established and making money you can then start to experiment with adding affiliate links which earn you commission everytime someone buys something. Affiliate links are product links to other websites that sell products or services. If a user clicks on an affiliate link on your website and goes to buy that product you instantly earn a nice commission