Search Engine Marketers Manual 3 - Successful Business Website Building for Dummies

If you want to market your products or services online then you need your own website, there’s no way around it.

When you follow a few basic website building rules, choose the right color scheme and keep your visitors’ attention, your website will pull in more sales than you ever thought possible.

By following the guidelines in this article your visitors will know exactly what you want them to do and they’ll do it!

Your Domain Name

When building a business website, your domain name is one of the most important things you’ll have to decide on. You’re going to want to buy a domain so that you don’t have ads all over your site. You can get a really cheap domain and hosting package from StartLogic (I use them myself).

When choosing your domain name you want it to relate to your business or product. You can choose to include the name of your business or product in the URL or use keywords that relate to your business or product. But you don’t want a really long domain name; the shorter the better.

You want people to be able to remember your domain name because it’s your address on the internet. If they can’t remember your URL then they may not find your site. So make it something that’s easy to remember and easy to spell. And you should always opt for a .com domain because most people are going to assume it’s a .com site, not a .org or .biz site.

It’s also a good idea to not include any hyphens in the URL because most people will type out a domain name with no spaces between the words; it’s just what they’re use to. Once you get your domain name you’ll have to start thinking about how you can make your website visually appealing to your visitors.

An ugly site with poorly chosen colors might cause your visitors to leave your site without really even looking around. It’s been said that color accounts for almost 60% of an advertisement’s acceptance or rejection, so it’s a pretty big deal!

You don’t need to slap the full rainbow on your site; 3 to 5 different colors is about all you really need. When selecting your colors you need to keep in mind the type of mood you want to set and who your audience is going to be.

It might seem odd, but colors do actually evoke different moods…

Warm Colors

• Red will evoke aggressiveness, passion and strength
• Orange is a fun color that evokes cheeriness and warm exuberance
• Yellow is the color for positive thinking, sunshine and cowardice
• Pink is a feminine color that evokes innocence and softness

Cool Colors

• Green will evoke tranquility, health and freshness
• Blue is a color of authority and evokes dignity and security
• Purple is a color of sophistication and evokes costliness and royalty

Neutral Colors

• White is a refined color and evokes purity and truthfulness
• Black is a classic color and evokes seriousness and boldness
• Gray will evoke authority, practicality and a corporate mentality
• Brown will evoke earthiness, woodiness and subtle richness

But don’t forget to choose colors that are going to appeal to your target audience…

Men love colors like blue, green and black but they hate brown, orange and purple. So if you want to create a site that appeals mostly to men then stick with 2 cool colors and one neutral color.

Women love colors like blue, purple and green but they hate orange, brown and gray. So if you want to create a site that appeals mostly to women then stick with cool colors.

If your site is aimed at both men and women then you want to make sure that you include some blue and green in your site while avoiding orange and brown. As people age they seem to dislike green and orange even more. But purple and brown seem to appeal a little more to the older crowd.

So keep the mood and your target audience in mind when choosing your site’s color scheme and you’ll keep your visitors around longer. Now we need to get into the construction of your website.

When building a business website you really need to prioritize what’s on your page. Remember that your main page is going to be the squeeze page that we talked about in the last manual. So the most important thing on this page is going to be your sign up form. It’s a good idea to have some video or audio automatically start to catch your visitor’s attention but you need to have your form in plain sight so they realize what to do on this page.

This isn’t going to be a long page and you don’t want them to have to scroll to get to your form. Have the form up top on the right so that, 9 times out of 10, your visitor’s cursor will be hovering right over it. You can draw attention to your form with arrows but that is really the only part of this page that should be flashy and stand out. You want the rest of your page to be subtle and easy on the eyes.

Get straight to the point and make your visitor realize that this is the kind of site they want to be on. Tell them what you have to offer and how they can get it; all they have to do is give you their name and email. But don’t cram too much information on this page; keep things spaced out. If someone comes to a page that’s filled with text from top to bottom, they’re going to close their browser. They don’t want to read all of that!

All you need on this page is a video (or audio), a summary of what you have to offer and some bullet points. When you tell them how to get what you’re offering this is your call to action. Tell them to sign up to your newsletter and let them know how valuable the information in your newsletter is. That’s it; it’s a simple process but it works!

This is a proven method for creating a successful business website and getting people to opt-in to your newsletter. With the right domain name, colors and website layout you’ll have a full customer list in no time! You now know how some of the richest internet marketing “gurus” set up their websites.

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