A Plain English Guide to Internet Marketing 

Building a Website


Excellent!  You have decided you need to start marketing with a website. 

If you all ready have a website and aren’t getting the results you want, please read this page anyway.

This is one of the most important decisions you will make.   This is the face of your business.  When you engage in website marketing, you are inviting over 277 million people to visit you, and you want it to look impressive. 

You have two choices.  Build it yourself, or hire someone to do it for you. This too is an important decision.  I have listed below the advantages of each.   

  Hiring a Website Designer

There are definite advantages to hiring someone else to build and maintain your website. Getting someone else to do it for you will save you a lot of time.  There will still be a lot of consulting.  You will need to be very specific with your designer as to what you want your website to look like, what you want on it, etc.  Think of it as designing the building your business is going to live in for the next few years.  

If you decide to hire a pro, it will cost somewhere in the range of $2,000 to $10,000 depending on the website content you want. That’s a lot of money, but you should also get the designer’s professional knowledge on Keyword structure, how to promote the site online, how to structure a Google Adwords account, etc.  You do need to be clear up front with the designer exactly what their fee covers.  

There may be extra charges for making changes and maintaining the site after publishing  

One drawback is the designer may want someone else to write the copy.  This means you will have to do that yourself, or hire a pro. 

My advice is to find someone local to work with.  If you Google “Website Designers in your city, state”, you will be surprised how many local ones there are. 

 Do it Yourself

Doing it yourself also has advantages  The biggest one is you will know in great and gory detail what goes into your site.

I won’t kid you.  This process is time consuming, and can be frustrating.  Choosing the domain and hosting service is critical here.  I am assuming you are not a techno-geek or HTML design expert or you wouldn’t be on this site. 

Be sure the domain and/or hosting service gives you instruction in such things as site structure, positioning of home and tiered pages, internal linking, Keyword research and values, how  Google Adwords work, how to monetize your site, how to promote your site (biggy), etc.  

Many hosting sites want to sell you the domain name as well, so make sure you know in advance if you can switch an existing domain name if you have one.  

A major benefit of doing it yourself is the ability to add or subtract material at will without having to go to an outside expert to do the work for you. This is huge! Outside experts are great, but they want to be paid for their work. 

If you decide to do it yourself, may I suggest using Site Build It (SBI).  I used them to build this site and found them to be the best in terms education, benefits you receive, and bang for your buck.  You can find a link to them on the Internet Marketing Resources page. 

Some DON'TS

DON’T go to Major Domain Name Seller who offers to build your website for free.  Yes, you will get a free website…without any of the instruction elements I discussed above.  I made this mistake with the first two websites I put up.  They both turned out to be duds.  You get what you pay for. 

DON’T fall for the email you will get as soon as you register your domain name saying “For a fee of $XXX.XX we will get your website ranked #1 or #2 on Google searches using keywords.”  Google rates your website on Original Content, not on keywords. This is discussed more completely on the What Are Keywords page 

If You All Ready Have a Website 

Aren’t getting the results you want?  You may be suffering from one or more of the following:

  • Outdated content 
  • Poor navigation between pages
  • Poor site structure
  • Lack of focus 
  • Off-subject Content

There is plenty of material on this website to help you cure these issues.  If you have a specific question, fill out the contact form at the bottom of this page, or check out the resources on my Services page. 

There is one very important thing to keep in mind.  Putting up a website is very much like buying a car.  Once you have it, it has to be maintained, with a constant stream of new and interesting material.  If you don’t do that, people will lose interest pretty quickly. 

Questions? Contact Me

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