How the WordPress Affiliate Platform Works

8 Important Features of Professional Website Design

By Angela Wills

Many people who are just getting started online want to create a free professional website so that they can prove to themselves that it will make money before they spend hundreds or thousands on a full blown web design. That’s usually a smart move.

You will, however, at the very least want to pay for hosting so that the content you post online is yours. If you post to free website hosting sites then you are often giving up your authorship rights and your control of the website. If at any time, for any reason, they decide to shut down your website you will have no recourse or ability to get it back.

With that in mind, it is entirely possible to create a free website that is both professional and profitable.

Here are some features you’ll want to include to ensure your website is a success:

1. Includes an ‘About’ Page – To new visitors you are a stranger and they don’t trust you yet. An about page will start to build that trust so that you can make offers they will respond to. All good websites must include an about page.

2. Includes Contact Information- Now imagine your visitor is ready to buy but they just have one quick question they need answered first. They look around but can’t find your contact information anywhere! Don’t let this happen and make sure your website has full contact information including phone number, email and mailing address so your potential customers can choose their preference.

3. A Clear Call to Action – No matter what the purpose of your website is you must let your visitors know and call them to action. Are you looking for them to call you, order a product, sign up for a free consultation or hire you? Tell them in clear, direct words so they don’t miss the entire point of your website or individual pages.

4. High Quality Graphics – I once heard a colleague say that it’s better to have no graphics on your website than have poor quality graphics and I completely agree! Make sure any graphics, logos, backgrounds, etc are of the highest quality.

5. Easy to Read Font – The worst websites are the ones that nobody can read. The best font color for reading is black with a white background. Don’t put a barrier between you and potential customers by making your website hard to read.

6. Free Newsletter/ Ezine or Giveaway -A large majority of first time visitors will never buy from you and never return. What you need to do is catch their attention before they leave by offering something free, a sample that shows them what you offer. Do this in combination with an opt-in form so you can build your list and build the trust that is so important to future sales.

7. Privacy Policies, Website Disclaimers and Copyright – Again, trust is huge. The online world of marketing is very easy to break into and that means there is a massive problem with scammers and thieves. Show your potential customers you are not one of them by having proper disclaimers, privacy policies and protect yourself with copyright notices.

8. Well Thought-out Website Navigation – You want your visitors to find what they are looking for quickly. If they can’t find it in short order, they will leave. Make sure you have a well thought out website navigation that isn’t overpowering with too many links. It’s better to make sub-pages than to give your reader too many options right on the home page.

WordPress has many great free and paid templates available that let you create professional websites quickly.

So there you have some of the most important features of a professional website design.

If you want to learn how to make your own free professional website, join me as I teach you in this online video, webinar and email coaching program everything you need to know about creating professional website designs with WordPress.

— Note to Publisher —

This is a free reprint article. You may publish it on your blog, in your ezine/newsletter, or in your info products as long as it is unchanged and the author remains Angela Wills.

When publishing this article online, you may replace the link to my products with your affiliate link for that program.

Feel free to use this article as a guest post for your blog or reprint article for your newsletteers

Do not underestimate the importance of having a good ebook internet marketing strategy. It will make or break your success in terms of the number of copies your ebook sells, and the revenue and profit you ultimately receive from sales of your ebook.

With that in mind, here are eight vital components for your ebook internet marketing strategy.

1. Set up a Web Site

The first and most important weapon in your ebook marketing arsenal must be a web site containing a sales page for the ebook. This needs to be a page dedicated to information about your ebook only. It is even better if you set up a dedicated domain name and site for the ebook. Now that web hosting packages are available for just a few dollars a month, and you can get a package allowing unlimited sites in one package, I strongly recommend giving your ebook its very own site.

Your sales page should be well-designed and contain plenty of information about your ebook. This information should include features and benefits to the readers, and of course, testimonials from your satisfied customers. And if you expect to have credibility with potential customers, your sales page needs to be free of little errors.

2. Build Your Own Mailing List

If you don’t already have a mailing list and your own newsletter, start one. You may already have heard that, on average, people need to see a marketing message seven times before they will take action and place an order. A newsletter is a great way to keep your message in front of your audience on a regular basis, and at the same time you will be building up their trust in you as they get to know you and the quality of your information.

You might send out a regular newsletter – for example monthly or weekly – or you can set up autoresponders to automatically send messages at specific intervals. An autoresponder can send a given message at a specified number of days after the subscriber signed up to your mailing list.

3. Sell Your Ebook Through ClickBank

Why use ClickBank?  There are several reasons why I recommend that you consider selling your ebook through ClickBank.

First, ClickBank is a very experienced partner to have when selling an ebook. That’s what they specialize in. There are already 10,000 publishers and authors selling information products using their system. But there is something even more important than the number of publishers. It’s the number of affiliates. ClickBank have an army of 100,000 affiliates ready to ‘jump on your bandwagon’ and start promoting your hot new ebook.

Second, ClickBank has a neat payment processing system. If you use ClickBank you will not need to set up an expensive merchant account with your bank in order to accept credit cards online. Setting up a publisher account with ClickBank costs just $50 or so.

Finally, ClickBank works neatly in conjunction with your own web site and newsletter. You simply add the special links given to you by ClickBank into your newsletter and web site, and whenever anyone clicks through your order link, they will be taken to a professional order form where they can pay using their credit card or PayPal.
Whenever one of ClickBank’s affiliates refers a visitor who goes on to make a purchase, ClickBank automatically tracks which affiliate referred the visitor and pays their commission.

4. Article Marketing

Article marketing involves writing articles and making them available for webmasters and editors to publish. The greatest exposure usually comes from listing the articles at article directories such as EzineArticles and IdeaMarketers. This allows anyone to publish the article without any fee to you, the author, provided they include your “Author Resource Box” at the end of the article.

To promote an ebook successfully using article marketing you should write articles on topics closely related your ebook. Your author’s resource box should be a small paragraph or two about you including a direct link to the web page for your ebook.

Besides being a good way to generate traffic, article marketing is a great technique for increasing your brand awareness. As people read your articles at various web sites they will begin to recognize you as an expert in your topic.

5. Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is one of the quickest ways to drive traffic to your ebook’s sales page. It is certainly not the cheapest source of traffic, but it is probably the most effective technique to guarantee a large quantity of traffic, fast.

With Pay Per Click advertising you bid the maximum price that you are willing to pay for each visitor that clicks on your listing and comes through to your site. The more you bid, the more likely your listing will show. Many webmasters obtain traffic for $0.05 to $0.15 per click.
One good thing about PPC advertising is that unlike other forms of advertising, you only pay for visitors who actually click through your link and visit your site. Compare that to traditional advertising where you pay a set price for the ad regardless of whether you receive any response.

6. Regular Advertising

Regular classified advertising is a form of advertising which is particularly common in newspapers and magazines. Many online ezines and email newsletters offer classified advertising spots. Advertising in these can be one of the best sources of targeted traffic, since you have the ability to select those newsletters with an audience that most closely resembles your own target audience.

If you know the email newsletter or mailing list is a very good match, consider sending a solo mailing. A solo mailing is a special mailing sent to all the subscribers containing only your message promoting your ebook. It will cost more than regular advertising within a newsletter, but you’ll get a much higher response rate.
And don’t dismiss offline classified advertising. It is possible to run a classified advertisement in an offline publication such as a newspaper or carefully targeted magazine and get an excellent response of people checking out your ebook.

7. Profit Sharing

Consider approaching other web site owners and offering to allow them to sell your ebook directly from their web site. You should arrange in advance how the profit will be shared. I usually ask the other web site owner to pay me fifty percent of the revenue from my ebook sales. The web site owner usually loves it because they will have a new ebook to promote, and after they pay their own payment processing fees, they should still be able to keep 40 to 50 percent of the revenue.

There you have it. Seven proven ebook marketing techniques for promoting your ebook. You might not choose to use all seven, but you should be using at least five or six of these. Some of these techniques involve using third-party tools or resources. If you are interested in learning which resources are my favorites, I have some additional details on my web site. If you employ these seven techniques carefully they will make an enormous impact on the sales of your ebook.

Stay up-to-date with all the latest information for online businesses, including great business strategies, ground-breaking ideas, and reviews of the best software and online tools. Check out Daniel Moro’s Online Business Review at http://www.DanielMoro.com

1. Most web hosts offer traffic analysis data to their clients, and it is arguably the most important tool at your disposal in measuring the effectiveness of your internet marketing techniques and overall website performance. By taking the time to understand this data, you can begin to understand the motivations and interests of your audience. Are many of them leaving on one particular page? Perhaps you should make some changes to keep their interest. Are most of them looking at one particular part of your site? Perhaps you should make it a more featured area. Since this data updates on a regular basis, you are also able to gauge the effectiveness of any changes that you make. These are the most basic examples, as there are many more useful bits of information available- what search terms your visitors are using to find you, what sites are bringing you the most traffic, how long your visitors are staying, etc. Maintaining a successful website is an ongoing process, and visitor data is crucial to getting optimum results.

There are numerous sites that will allow you to offer original informational articles for others to publish. In fact, our own company routinely publishes articles containing internet marketing advice. Such an exchange benefits you in several ways. First, all of these sites require anyone who is reprinting your article to provide a link back to your site, which can provide highly targeted visitors (visitors that most likely already have a good impression of you from your article). This is also another way to boost your link popularity, which is vitally important to your search engine rankings (as discussed above and in our last issue). Moreover, if you offer a service, a reputation is your most valuable asset. Widely distributed articles can help to establish you as an expert in your field and help you to gain credibility with your future clients. Although internet marketing techniques such as these may require a considerable time investment, the payoff can be well worth the trouble.

As previously mentioned, this might fall better into the category of internet marketing advice, rather than internet marketing techniques. However, it is important that you compare your website to an actual store. Is everything clean and organized, or is everything messy and cluttered? Many websites give bad first impressions with issues that could easily be avoided. Broken links are a sign of sloppiness that are fairly common. To combat this, there are several websites that will automatically scan your site and identify any broken links. Seeing little red “x’s” where a graphic or photo should appear is another common problem that is easily addressed. Does your site maintain its look and functionality with most browsers? People are sometimes dismayed to learn that their site (which looks great in Internet Explorer) doesn’t maintain its look or functionality with other popular browsers such as Firefox. The time and resources required to fix these problems are small when compared with the cost of tarnishing your professional image.