Someone who has a great idea or is starting a business, but doesn’t know how to build a website is in for a whopper of a dilemma. Do I spend time on learning website stuff and Google stuff or do i spend time on my idea / business?

At some point in time you have to ask yourself where is the value. Most businesses want to use the Internet as a way to market (or directly sell) their goods or services. Their business is usually not about the Internet. It’s about something else and the Internet is just another tool for success.

People sometimes stop working on their million dollar idea in order to save a few pennies. I’ve seen several businesses save their way into bankruptcy, when spending a few hundred dollars could have tripled their sales. It always seems to track back to a value proposition. How much time will I spend doing this and what’s the value of spending the time in that way?

If you knew that an expert could get your business up and running on the web in less than a week, would you want to spend 2-3 months figuring out how to get your message into a webpage, or would you rather spend those months focusing on the actual message?

The tools and systems on the web are getting bigger, better, and faster. The small percentage cost difference between “dipping your toe in the water” and truly diving in, is more a matter of your commitment than the money.

To give you  an example, someone recently asked me about building them a website and helping to get ranking on Google. Here was my reply:

I host and build a Content Management System that allows anyone to login from any computer and update/add information with no coding needed on their part. I looked at your competition and I think we can do much better (photogallery, contact form, blog, RSS feed, podcasts, video, and analytics).

Google, on the other hand, is something that takes time and effort on your part to build your website up. At least that’s true if you don’t intend to pay Google $400-$1000 per month to be in the top listing. Your content is the main factor that Google looks at when ranking your site. Your content has to be relevant, highly valuable, and full of the keywords that you want people to be looking for. Then, you get to shift into marketing mode with online articles, podcasts, videocasts, webinars, etc.

The more valuable the your content is, the higher Google will rank you. By creating these articles, podcasts, and videos, and placing them in different places online, you can have them point back to your website. The more content you have pointing back to your site, the higher Google will rank you. The more people who like your content and link to it, the higher Google will rank you.

So, you can either pay Google to get ranking, or you can self-market your site and obtain the same results without the horrible cost. It takes time, effort and a willingness to build up an audience of interested people (this means starting a blog on your site to get your thoughts down and allowing other people to interact with your posts).

Yes, all of these features and more are there with any site I build. Since I build with a system, the number of pages and how they are organized is up to you and how much you want to write.

I am currently building a site for someone with a PR company who is wanting to get into the website side of things. I see her site as being similar to your needs. Here’s what I did for her PR website:

• Static Pages – Informational pages are always needed on a website. Home, About Us, Contact (the form that people can use to send you their contact information) are part of the basics, but a page could be created to present any part of your business.
• Home page video – This can be a video you make, or just a collage of photos that express what your business does.
• Photo gallery – usually linked from home page to show off your work. People love photos, especially good ones that tell a story about your business and how it relates to your customer’s needs.
• Blog topics – This is a listing of topics on the right side of the site that lets you give good information about topics related to your business. This is also where you will create and place blog posts. The idea is to give out good information that people will want to keep coming back to read (i.e. new posts every few days). People should also be able to comment on those particular posts in order to make the site interactive (you can create the blog separately, but Google REALLY likes blogs, so its a good idea to have the blog as a part of your site).
• Analytics – This is a way to monitor the traffic on your site and see where people are going and where they are not. It can help you figure out how well your content is doing.

The time frame for getting this done is usually around two weeks. That’s highly dependent upon the design and content, but once the design is finalized and the content is written, then the website can be built much faster. I can also point you in the right direction for building your own podcast and videocast (its not nearly as hard you might think and it is a content type that your competition doesn’t have, so it will make you a cut above them). There are a lot of good articles on Open Source Marketer that can help with your site, so take a look and see if you find some more ideas.

Let me know if I can help in any way,

Christopher

While that was simply an email reply, I always try to stress to people that CONTENT is where they need to focus their efforts. CUSTOMERS want more content. GOOGLE loves content. ANYONE interested in your topic wants to read more about it (or listen to podcasts, or watch video, etc.). When web technology is continually getting cheaper and faster to implement, why, oh why, would you want to focus on a business tool when you REALLY need to focus on what you do best……CONTENT.

What do you think?

Christopher “Toff” Ward
OpenSourceMarketer.com