Make Your Web Site Successful
Take Your Web Site from "Online Business Card" to "Cash Generator"!
(remember that my way is not the only way)

Quick background: This site (F7 Sound and Vision) has been online for over 10 years. I've spent nothing on advertising it (other than a few print ads - years ago - which promoted some of my audio services - those ads did include my web address). This site consistently receives 500,000 hits (or more) every month.


But you're not here to read about my website's statistics. You want to know what I did to get so much traffic so that you can do the same or better for your web sites - right? That's what I thought so here's what I do.


1) I learned HTML and I'm good enough with it to make effective use of the META and ALT tags. This is very basic stuff here, but it works. META and ALT tags are essential to getting high rankings on search engines.

This homework might set you back a day or two at the most. I also learned some basic graphic design. Enough to know how to make web-efficient graphics that download quickly.

There are plenty of books on HTML and creating web graphics. Take a web design course. Consider your time learning this to be an investment. BTW, you don't have to create your site(s) by hand-coding HTML. That would take forever.


2) Create useful content. High ranking and high traffic web sites have useful content. What's content? Stories, humor, free stuff, video, audio, blogs, software, product reviews, things to download, how to's, information that serves others (original content is best!).

The web thrives on content! Search engines thrive on content. So, create something. Tell your story. Help others. Put it out there for the WORLD to use. Do that and search engines will find you. Then people will find you.


3) Updates. A successful website is almost like a living being. It must change and grow. Give people a reason to visit, then give them more reasons to come back. Then give them reasons to LINK to you and talk about you. And, while you're at it, make sure to set up outbound links from your site to other useful sites! Update often.


4) Time is essential. What I mean here is that it's going to take time to get this going. How much time? Several months probably. Good content takes time to create. Realize that creating, maintaining and growing a successful website is an ongoing process (and business!).


5) Use my model. My web business focus is essentially this: Entertain, Inform, Inspire. With that, everything falls into place (and it has done so for years).

Entertain - My goal is that my visitors to enjoy their time while on my sites - to discover things, maybe even laugh a bit - and come back again.

Inform - I focus on passing on my experiences and things that I've learned (and even failed at) to my visitors so that they learn and benefit from their time on my sites.

Inspire - I want people to use their experiences on my sites in a positive way that sparks their creativity.


6) Improve my model (and other web sites' models) - Keep in mind that the subject material of my web site may not be what you're interested in. That's fine, just replace my "subject" with what you're focus is. Explore my site. Look for places that you can do better.

Then implement those improvements into your work. And, if you feel like letting me know what you've done, that's great. Look around the web for other high-traffic and high-ranking sites.

View their source code (this is where knowing basic HTML comes in handy) and see what makes them tick. Read their copy. Learn from them. And improve on their models.