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If all goes well, you now have chosen your market, have one or more cool domain names, have found the best hosting company and have written 5 to 10 pages of interesting content for your web site. You now need to post the content on your web site (that is hosted at your hosting company). Two simple options are now available for you: 1) You learn how to do it yourself. 2) You hire a qualified person to do it for you. Both options are very valuable and you are the best person to decide what will work for you. Even if you decide that you do not want to learn all the web design programming that you need to get your business on track, I honestly think you will need to learn how things work a little and what can be done on the internet. There is one great program called Webstarts - The #1 Way To Create A Free Website Create A Free Website You may decide that you will learn later how to create and modify web sites and that is just fine but if you want to try it yourself then Webstarts may well be for you; I know that I am better off by hiring a webmaster (I actually have two or three at any given time working with me). I am glad though that I checked out Webstarts as it helps me understand all the possibilities available in web design and maintenance. Hence, I often tell my webmaster: ”Please do this and that. I don’t know how it can be done. I just know it can be done!” A faster option is to spend some time “playing” with the possibilities of a WYSIWYG program. WYSIWYG (pronounced “weeseewig”) is short for “what you see is what you get”. I use the program called My Free Web Site Builder by Ewan Chia. You can download it for free and create some web pages. You will soon realize that creating a web page can be as simple as writing a word document. The cool feature is that at the end, you can click on the view function in the upper bar and then view the HTML version of what the codes of a web page coding looks like. In fact, for any given web site, you can click on the “view” function on the upper bar and then click “source” to see the coding on that page. You can learn a lot from doing this and looking at what your competition is doing on the net. I highly encourage you to download and play with My Free Web Site Builder just to get more familiar with what can be done in web design. I have long decided that I did not want to do web designing nor web maintenance as my time is very limited and I am better at getting ideas (lots and lots of them!). It then came pretty clear I needed to hire a good webmaster. There are many ways to hire a person who will do your web design and web maintenance: 1) You can post a project on www.elance.com 2) You can post a project on www.guru.com 3) You can post a project on www.rent-a-coder.com 4) You can go to your local College or your computer-savvy teenage neighbor and ask if he (or she) is interested in getting paid to work for you. 5) You can ask around. 6) You can do a Google search for “web design” or “web maintenance”. Allow me to share my own experience about all the above suggestions and you can decide for yourself. I often use www.elance.com as I find their interface easy to use. They also have an escrow function which basically helps you if the person you hired does not complete the work (which happens more time than you can imagine). I have fellow internet marketers who prefer using guru.com or rent-a-coder. My experience has been that finding a good
reliable webmaster can be as hard as…finding your soulmate! Although I might be exaggerating a little, I am often surprised to hear very successful internet marketers (multi-millionaires) asking around for a webmaster. Luckily, I have now found two very good
webmasters and I am hanging on to them. Let’s hope they hang on to me! Getting back to posting your project, here
are some simple advices: Be as specific as possible in describing what you
need. A posting like “I need a website” is not sufficient. Again, you need to
know what kind of site you need and what you want to do with it (sell, post
pictures, videos, etc). You will then decide how long the bidding will go on.
Usually 7 days gives you a good sampling of what is available. Beware that many
replies or bids are just text that people send you by doing a copy-paste. A good
way to see if the person bidding is responsible is by asking them a simple
question. By doing this you will see two things: if they are fast at answering
your needs and if their comprehension of English is acceptable. Resist the temptation to choose the lowest bid as often the person offering it may not be the best to complete your work. I have honestly posted some works and
cancelled the project by lack of getting any interesting offer. Follow your gut
feeling on this. Another very good habit is to browse the reviews these people
have been given on the site. These are valuables and will save you time, money
and disappointment. Frequently, you will realize that people
are very enthusiastic and literally beg you to get the project awarded to
them…but then do not follow through and provide you with excuses after excuses
for not delivering the goods on time. Timothy, an experienced internet marketer,
told me he often awards the project to 3 or 4 bidders and pays all the ones who
finish the project and keep the best one. You would be surprised that by his
method he often has only one or two person complete the task. It is the sad
reality of human nature! Howie Schwartz, a very good internet marketer often tells me: “I fire people everyday!” and you should be comfortable doing so too. Another warning I want to give you is to stay away from people who themselves artists and want to design your site with lots of artistic functions and charge you big bucks for it. Most of these sites are long to open, cost a fortune and cannot even be seen by the search engines robot so you are basically annoying your customer and invisible on the web. Although I have done many Google searches for web designs and maintenance, I find that the most valuable options are found at Elance, guru.com and rent-a-coder. Why waste any more time elsewhere? Ouf! That is a big page but this step is
one of the most important so take your time to get it right. Good help is hard
to find. After all, most probably you will need to hire more people later on for fulfillment, copywriting, link submission and all S.E.O. functions, customer service, etc, etc.
1) Download My Free Web Site Builder 2) Browse the web and click on the function “view” and then “source” and see what a web page is made of. 3) Visit Webstarts and see if this is something you want to go through and if this would help you. Do not lose time though and come back to www.thebiginternetmarketinggame.com to continue your journey and get your web business going. 4) Figure out exactly what you want your web site to be: pages, pictures, do you want to sell products? Do you want to grow with time? etc 5) Start building your website or hire a qualified person to do it for you. My suggestion is that after trying for yourself for a day you do not have a web page uploaded and visible on the net, you need to hire someone. Time is running! See you on the next square!
Nathalie |
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HERE IS YOUR BIG CALL TO ACTION: