One thing that a lot of webmasters encounter is frustration.  It’s easy to lose focus on your website when you get no traffic.  The Internet is an extremely competitive place and unless you have a lot of money for advertising or a very clever idea for a website chances are you’ll be last in line for traffic on the web.  One way to stave off this frustration is to set up realistic goals for your website.

It’s important to set small easy to obtain goals so that you don’t lose focus.  If you choose a goal of getting one thousand visitors a day it could be many months or years before that happens, during that time you won’t feel like you’re making any kind of progress.  The goals should be small and easily obtained at first.

It’s also important to set different kinds of goals.  Maybe your first goal is to average 50 unique visitors per day.  Then the next goal could be impressions per day (impressions are different than visitors, one visitor can generate many page impressions).  If you’re running ads on your site that pay per click you could set a goal of one click per day after that.  Then go back to unique visitors.  Then maybe instead of clicks per day it’s amount of money per day earned from the ads.

Keep going with the goals and make sure you vary them.  By varying your goals you’ll learn different things about your visitors.  You’ll also learn valuable lessons about traffic and how to convert it to money, returning visitors, and how you site will grow in the future.

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Many people just starting out in the web world have some experience with a programming language whether it be C# or C++ or Java or a scripting language like PHP or Python or Perl.  There are a lot of options out there when choosing a language to write your website in.  But to choose you should ask yourself a couple questions.

1.  How much time do you want to spend setting up the site?

If you want to spend very little time setting up the configuration for the site you should avoid languages like Java or C#.  Big object oriented languages will require at least a few days of configuring servers and files depending on what type of web framework you choose.

2.  Does the code for the site need to be easily extensible?

If you plan to use the site as a platform to make a large company from you’ll need to make the site much larger over time as you add new clients and new features.  Making a hulking site is easier to do with an object oriented language, maintaining it is easier as well.  The time you spend configuring the site up front will be saved on the back end.

3.  Do you have a dedicated server?

If you don’t have a dedicated server (those are costly) you won’t have the ability to just add whatever functionality you want to the server.  Most shared servers come with PHP and Perl installed for you to use and some will have some form of Java or C# available, but chances are that you’ll want some feature that they don’t have installed and won’t install for you to use.  If you don’t have a dedicated server you probably would be better off choosing a scripting language that is already installed.

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The number one mistake everyone makes when starting a website is that they do it to make lots of money.  Very few websites ever make more than a few thousand dollars a month let alone the millions that google or facebook make.  The best kind of site to make is one that you like writing about.  That said, there are different ways of making a website to get your ideas out on the web.  Different methods produce different results.

Forums: if you liked a particular topic, say batteries, you could easily make a forum on the topic and write all kinds of posts on different kinds of batteries that you liked.  If your forum picks up members you get the added bonus of the members writing most of the content for you.  The downside is that you have horrible click rates from members so most of your page views won’t result in any clicks.  Another downside is that if you don’t pick up members you’ll be talking to yourself and you won’t get any of the free content and then
your website looks like a graveyard to any potential members.  And no one wants to be a part of a dead or dieing community.

Another format that’s popular is blogging.  With a blog it’s much easier to convert your traffic into clicks, you can put the ads right in the middle of your blog posts and anywhere else you want to put it where it’ll get a higher conversion percentage.  You also have the bonus of not needing members to contribute content or posts to make your blog look like it’s lively.  The main detractor is that you need to keep adding content to the blog every few days.

Social networking/news sites seem to be a big hit these days.  Though those formats are so overly used and created these days that you’ll have a hard time breaking into those niche’s, and you require a huge userbase to make it successful.  Though if it works the upside is much bigger than anything else these days.

If you’re good with flash you could make a few clever games online, though like social networking the web is flooded with these sites.  You’ll need to be really clever with your game.

Overall, the best kind of site to get into for beginners is blogs.  They’re easy to use and pretty flexible.  Once you have a good amount of traffic you’ll be bringing in money through advertising.  Once you get a feel for how websites work a forum would be a good addition to your blog.

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There are two kinds of websites.  Those that look good and those that look bad.  If you care about how your site looks chances are that you spent a lot of time designing it and thenr refining the design.  The ease of use and flow is important to the people that view it so it’s understandable to want to make your site as good looking and user friendly as possible.  This way users will have a good experience while on your site and are likely to come back in the future.

The problem with having a great design is that it encourages users to stay on your site, and then return to it in the future.  This kind of traffic is important if you want the users to generate the content (like on a forum), returning users on a user content generated site are the most important users.  But these users become ad blind quickly and will not click on them.  The first time user that finds your site and likes is it more likely to stay on the site longer, thus reducing the chance of them leaving the site through an ad.

If your site is repulsive to users they’ll want to leave it quickly by any means possible.  These users need to find your site through search engines since you won’t be getting many returning visitors.  The advantage to having a bad looking site is that the user is more likely to click on an ad to leave it since they’ll not be familiar with the layout.  These sites can succeed too since search engines are blind to website designs.  Put a lot of content on the page and you’ll get traffic.

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Traffic traffic traffic!  You need traffic.  If you want your site to be profitable you need traffic.  But did you know that all traffic is not created equal.  There are returning visitor, there are visitors finding your site through a link, and there are visitors finding your site through search engines.

All three are important.  You want returning visitors since they’re more likely to post a comment on your site thus adding to the content.  These visitors however, are going to be the least profitable for you.  Returning visitors become blind to ads very quickly and will not click on them.  In fact I suggest you disable ads for users that are logged in.  You know they’re a frequent visitor if they’re logged in, and they’re ad blindness will cause your click through percentages to go down.

Users that click onto your site through a link are the most likely to convert to regular users.  Presumably they found your site because they found a link to it on another site with a similar topic to yours.  Since they’re already interested in what your site has to offer they’ll be less likely to click on ads, but more likely than if they had visited before.

People that find your site through search engines are the most likely to click on ads.  They typed in a search and often the search wasn’t specific enough or it was too specific.  Your site came up and it is pretty close but not quite what they’re looking for.  People scan web pages in a matter of a few seconds and if they don’t think they’ll find what they want on your site they’ll leave.  Either through the back button or a link on your
site.

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People in the webmastering business will tell you that content is king.  Well if content is king then traffic is queen.  You can have all the great unique content in the world but if you only get a dozen visitors a day then your site isn’t worth much.  There are a number of ways to get traffic to your site.  First you need to make sure that your site is in all the search engines index, you can do this by submitting your site to the search engine or by linking it to an already existing site (when the search engines index that page they’ll follow the link).

Now that your site is known to the search engines you need to start building up links to it from other sites.  Doing so will help to increase your traffic to the site as well as increase your pagerank for search results pages.  There are a number of ways to build up links.  You can link to it through blogs.  Linking to your site through a blog post is easy and if you can find a blog that pertains to your sites topic then not only do you build a link for the search engines but people visiting the blog will click the link and probably visit a few pages on your blog.

Another common way to build up relevant links is through forum posts.  Find some forums that relate to your site and put a link to it in some of your posts, make sure your posts are on topic though.  If the forum allows it you can also link to the site in your signature, that link is less likely to be followed by visitors but search engines like it all the same.

Directories seem to be a common thing sprouting up all over.  Directories are like phone books.  You can submit your site to the directory in the relevant categories and if they approve your site you’ll be listed.  Most of the top ranked directories have stringent requirements for being listed and some require that you pay a yearly fee.  Others will ask you to provide a link back to their directory in exchange for their link to your site.

Link exchanges are like directories in that they link to you, but they require that you link back to them (hence the name).  If you can get on a link exchange with a high pagerank site you’ll see your pagerank go up that much more.  It’s important to note that the major search engines seem to frown on link exchanges, they will randomly go through sites listed on link exchanges and knock the rankings of each site listed down a few notches.  So proceed at your own risk with those.

Ads are another way to drive traffic.  A clever ad on the right site can bring in a lot of good traffic to your site.  This method is pretty difficult since most of us are not ad marketing guru’s as well as webmasters.  This method can also be very costly as you try to find the right ad to drive traffic.

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There are differing opinions as to when a person should add Google adsense to their website.  Many people will tell you that you should wait until you have a strong userbase and are getting over 1000 unique visitors per day.  Their logic follows that if you clutter up your site with adsense ads then you’ll turn potential repeat customers off to your site and it’ll take that much longer to gain a userbase.

Others will tell you to not wait and put the ads on right away.  It can take years to get to over 1000 unique visitors a day.  During that time your website isn’t making you any money, little as it may be.

They’re right, you shouldn’t wait until you get 1000 unique visitors per day, unless you’re the first into a popular new niche that’ll take a long time.  But you should also not clutter up your site with adsense.  You should add your ads in a way that makes them part of the overall template so that they don’t look out of place.  To do this you need to incorporate them much sooner than 1000 visitors per day.  But when doing so don’t make your site look like it’s just made to serve ads.  You definately should wait until you have most of your pages indexed by google as your adsense ads will be wildly off target until google has most of your site indexed.  You can determine this by using google’s webmaster tools.

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