What do you need to create a profitable website?

As I was creating this website, it occurs to my mind what does a person want to learn when they come to this website? There are many reasons why one would want to build a website and for this post, I would like to address to people who want to build a profitable website or business who want to expand their businesses online.

So what is needed to create a profitable website?

There are many different kinds of online business models that can help you make money online. And different business models would require different kinds of skills right?

It’s like there are numerous ways to become a millionaire – build business, doing sales job, stock and forex trading, and many more.. And all of these require different skills set and being good at one of them doesn’t mean that you will be good at the others.

That goes the same as online business as well.

To help you with a main idea of some of the profitable business online, here’s one of the more popular business models out there.

Sell a product online (can be digital or a real physical product).

Let’s say you are a toy manufacturer and you are selling this doll. So what kind of website do you need in order to successfully build a reasonable big online business by selling this doll (assuming there is a huge market for your doll).

1. Blog
2. Your Sales Letter
3. Squeeze page

For this business model, you would only need these 3 elements in order to sell your products online. Yes, it’s as simple as that. When you have this in mind, there are just not too many things you would need to learn to succeed online.

Let’s find out the purposes of these 3 important key elements:

1) A blog is to provide valuable and free information for your readers. Another purpose of putting up a blog is that a blog will rank better in the search engine rather than a 1 page sales letter. The blog can become a very powerful tool for marketing your company or your own brand – you can even create a community of your customers in your own website.

You can simply learn how to put up a WordPress blog and you have mastered the first step to building a profitable business online. When comes to designing your WordPress blog, you can either hire a graphic designer to design it for you or use a free/paid WordPress theme. Most of my sites are using Woothemes as they provide great-looking designs.

Click here to get some of the best free WordPress themes by Woothemes

2) Salesletter – Unlike traditional business, in online marketing, we need to do direct response marketing in order to sell our products. You can definitely use a blog to sell your product but blogs are full of distractions that may just cause you to lose quite a number of sales. You need a one page template for your salesletter.

For the design of your salesletter, you may want to think about paying for a good design. This is important as this will affect your brand image as well as your customers’ trust. A low end simple design could cost anywhere from $50 – $100.

After you gotten the design, you can either put your text copy of your salesletter into the HTML design itself, or get someone to do it for you. Hence you would need a little HTML knowledge so that you can do it yourself.

3) A squeeze page is used for capturing the emails of your visitors. You offer a bribe to your visitors for their emails. Most internet marketers give away free report, templates, videos, in exchange for their emails. Here’s an example -

I’m giving you this squeeze page creator to help you create your squeeze page. Just go to this page and enter your email address - Squeeze Page Generator. Remember to bookmark the page after you have entered your email address.

Studies have shown that visitors require 6-7 times of contact points in order for them to buy from you. Most people don’t buy from you the first time they reached your website. And in order to convert more prospects into customers, you would need to follow up them in their emails.

Why a squeeze page?

Besides that, we usually use a squeeze page when we buy traffic to our website through advertising like Pay Per Click advertising or solo ads. Using a squeeze page would help our conversion rates to reach sky high conversion rates of 50-60%.

If you use a normal blog, you may not have such a high conversion rates. And if you are paying large amount of money for advertising, you want to capture as many prospects and customers as you can.

Besides getting the design of the squeeze page up, you would also need an autoresponder. Autoresponder allows you to send emails to your subscribers automatically when they subscribe into your email. The current one I’m using is aweber.com. It is highly recommended that you use aweber because they have grown to such as an extent that most services or products are built upon them.

It’s like why people choose to buy an iphone instead of other 3G phone. There are many too many new applications on the iphone than other phones available that iphone becomes such a powerful phone. Iphone has also integrated with so many applications that it becomes a integral part of our lives.

This applies to aweber too. Aweber has integrated with many applications like Twitter, Facebook, software applications and tools.

Now you should have a more detailed idea on what are some of the knowledge and skills you need in order to build a profitable website or online business. In fact, in most of the cases, knowing how to create these 3 things (blog, salesletter, and squeeze page) could be very useful in many many business models.

Here’s a summary of some of the skills and knowledge you need to learn or acquire.

1. Setting up a wordpress blog
2. Reading some basic HTML, editing your squeeze page and your salesletter
3. Knowing how to set up your autoresponder

Related posts:

1. 9 Tips to Build a Powerful Army of Affiliates