But you do need to find a designer that offers you good (aim for great!) design within your budget.

There are of course different levels of designers.

Some are not capable of producing the work where they can command high prices, where others position themselves at the other end of the spectrum out of range for the regular marketer.

What you really want is the high level of design and quality at an affordable price.

But is it possible?

Let’s look at it this way.

If you’re looking to buy a car, you can go out and buy a Ford Fiesta or a Ferrari, both cars will get you to the same destination, but it’s the quality of design that’s going to turn heads.

It boils down to, you get what you pay for within your budget.

Sometimes though, an opportunity comes along where you can have the quality of the Ferrari at the Ford Fiesta prices.

After designing mini sites now for the past few years for clients, I’ve come to realise that there are many Internet Marketers, mostly newbies who don’t have the budget or don’t want to take the risk (as they see it) in giving their money to someone they don’t know or have never worked with before.

Welcome to one the biggest hurdles of running an online business I hear you say.

Yes its true. Trust is a big issue.

But the marketer, website owner, vendor, whatever they call themselves should ALWAYS empathise with their potential client and be willing take on most of the risk in any transaction.

That’s why when I released the Quick Minisite Packages recently, my aim was to absorb the risk for the client and offer an awesome product, at a fraction of the cost.

The client gets a professionally designed mini site, to the same standards of something that would normally cost in excess of $97 at just $37… yes only $37.

So why would I do that?

Well, I want as many people as possible to take me up on my offer and in doing so they’ll get to see the quality of my work and customer service. First hand.

It’s all well and good me telling you about it how great my designs are, but until you actually experience them and try them for yourself, you’ll never really understand or believe what I’m telling you.

That’s just human nature.

We’re naturally suspicious of any offer that seems far too good to be true.

I’m hoping that anybody that tries any of my cheap mini site graphics packages will either buy some more or choose me for a bespoke fully customised minisite design in the future.

So yes you can save on mini site graphics AND still get the quality you thought was out of reach.

You can read more about how to get cheap mini site graphics which are still of professional quality by reading Quick Minisite Packages – From $37.

Technorati Tags: cheap minisite graphics, minisite design

Following on from the last post in the Building A Successful Site series, today I’m going to cover content creation, which may be the easiest of the three factors to master.

If your site has good content which is relevant and tightly targeted to the niche, this will give your site the best chance of success in the search engines.

How do you achieve good content or who decides what good content is?

The quick answer is you won’t know until you get something out there.

What you might think is good, that has taken you hours to create, won’t necessarily be what your audience wants.

Good content can be an article, an image, a video, series of photos or audio.

Whatever it is, its main purpose is to engage with the reader.

At first you should focus on getting as much of your content ranked in the search engines and doing that goes back to your initial keyword research.

With a new site you’ll probably want to focus on writing articles and blog posts as Google will crawl the text and index your site relevant to its content.

Then when you start to get traffic, mix your content creation up by introducing videos and photos, and track what your visitors like the most.

When you write an article its main purpose should be to give the reader something that they want and address the issue of “whats in it for me?”.

If its a good article then it will get shared around the internet which in turn will get you backlinks – but more on that in a second.

One of the main mistakes a beginner internet marketer makes is they tend to write content for the search engines and forget about the “real” people who may read their article.

If you’re article is stuffed with keywords then the probability is Google will spot it and if it doesn’t initially the likelihood of it being shared is minimal.

In the next post we’ll cover the importance of backlinking.

Technorati Tags: building a site, content creation, seo, Web Design

There are three main factors that make a successful site. These are structure, content and backlinking.

All three are interlinked and depend on one another for the whole site to work.

In the next three posts I will look at each factor and try to explain how each one can have an effect on the success of your site.

Now before we start I just want to make a disclaimer that what I’m about to cover doesn’t guarantee your sites success.

There are a multitude of factors that come in to play – you have to put in the hard work and do your prior research before launching a site and entering any niche, all these subjects will be covered in separate posts on the blog.

Site Structure

When you just launch your site unless you already have a flood of visitors lined up (without relying on the search engines) the first thing you’ll need to do is make sure Google and the like index your site and you start ranking for the keywords your targeting.

(As a side note, from now on when I mention Google I do so by also referring to all the search engines, but as Google is the biggest, I’ll concentrate on just that)

To do this you need your site to have the correct structure for Google to crawl and start indexing the content.

Once the pages get indexed you’ll (hopefully) start to rank for your chosen theme and then you can move on to converting those visitors later.

So how do you do that?

This all starts at the beginning with keyword research. I’m not going to go in depth on this as keyword research deserves an article by itself, so I’ll just cover the basics.

When someone does a Google search whatever they enter in the search bar is either a keyword (if there is just one) or a keyword phrase (if there are more than one word used).

For example “widgets” is a keyword, “buy blue widgets” is a keyword phrase. For the purpose of this article I will refer to both as keywords.

Before you launch your site you’ll have decided on a theme that your whole site will be based around after doing some research in a tool like Market Samurai.

Lets say your website is about dog training – that is your theme.

You would then have found some related keywords, which might be crate training, potty training, grooming etc. These would be your category keywords.

Then for each of those categories you could have articles that target long tail keywords that relate to those categories.

For example you could write an article on “a beginners guide to crate training labrador puppies” or “the best way to groom a poodle”.

There should be a natural flow through the site, so when the Google bot crawls your site it will see everything is related and on theme and will look on your site more favourably than a site that covers many diverse subjects.

The tighter the focus of your site the more chance Google will see your site as an authority in that niche.

In the next post we’ll cover content creation.

image credit

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, site structure, website help