Do’s and Don’ts for Newbies
If you are new to building website there are a few things you should know (and avoid) before getting started online.
Don’t be suckered into get rich quick schemes.
There are thousands of sites and so called gurus out there trying to get you to spend your money, by convincing you they their program will allow you to immediately make extra cash. Don’t be fooled by 10,000 word sales pages, often with copies of unverifiable bank statements or checks from Google. Typically there will be testimonials sprinkled in with an attempt to close the sale by offering only a limited number of products or subscriptions remaining for sale, with a pending price increase. Check out a few of these sites. Make a note of the current price and the the date they will be increasing. Does the increase happen? Read through some of the testimonials and visit the referring sites. Do the websites have any substance, in which you can really believe their recommendations? Is the referring site even still online?
Don’t pay for “How To” information.
There are so many sites online offerings free tips and tutorials (like this one) for free, so why spend money to get the same information? Don’t pay for someone to teach you how to effectively optimize your website for search engines, teach you how to rank highly with search engines to bring traffic , how to become an affiliate guru or make a website.
Keep your money in your pocket and find the same advice for free. Do you want to get started with search engine optimization? You can get started with optimizing right on this site or you prefer to read offline download Brad Callen’s “Search Engine Optimization Made Easy” for free.
Don’t pay more than average for domain registration.
Starting your first website or business will cost you a bit of money getting started, so don’t pay extra for services you don’t need. The average domain name registration shouldn’t cost more than $10 annually. Different registrars will try you to “up-sell” you on additional services, but outside of domain registration privacy option, you don’t need anything else included. In addition, most of these extra options you can add at a later time if you need them.
Do find a reputable hosting provider.
Your website will be the life blood of your new online adventure, so why trust it in the hands of unreliable hosting provider? To ensure the minimum amount of downtime choose a hosting provider that has a reliable history and a site that allows you to create an unlimited amount of websites and register unlimited amount of domains.
Don’t buy links or email addresses.
Don’t buy backlinks to increase your sites position in search engine results and more importantly do not purchase email address from websites offering you tens of thousands of email addresses in order to bring traffic to your website. While it may be a pain, you must build up your own links and your own opt-in list of verifiable email addresses.
Do carry out search engine optimization.
Your site will go nowhere and receive no traffic if you don’t effectively optimize your webpages. This means searching for and using keywords, developing a link strategy, writing quality content, and promoting your website in other ways.
Don’t waste time on things that don’t matter.
Getting started with your first website can be an exciting process. There are lots of new skills to learn on your journey, so don’t waste time sweating the small stuff. Your website is an evolution, so spending hours finding just the right theme, writing all of your content, tweaking your colors, playing with plugins or components or staring at your statistics doesn’t add to your bottom line. Your site will improve over time, so just get started!
