A Beginner's Guide to Creating Your Own Website. Tips & Coupons for Webmasters & Affiliate Marketers

Ever thought about having your own web site? Do you have your own website but looking for some affordable solutions for improvement? The freedom of working from home and being your own boss that being a webmaster or affiliate marketer offers is very attractive to many. More and more people are turning to the internet as not only of source of information, but as a source of income as well. I thought I would share with everybody some tips and coupons for webmasters and affiliate marketers, as I am learning how to become one myself.

Webmasters know that developing a good site is much more than just programming. You need a wealth of knowledge that deals with more than just codes and html. I feel it's important to focus on what you do best, in my case sales and affiliate marketing, however understanding the big picture of creating an effective website should not be overlooked.

Finding a niche that you can be successful at can be difficult, but it is very important. Try using a keyword tool to find the popularity of your potential topic and use that information to judge if it's something worth pursuing. The smaller the niche, the better chance you have at making an impact and engaging regular visitors or members of your site. One of your goals should be to become an authority on a topic so that people will trust you enough to buy things based on your recommendations. Once you figure out what your site will be about, you'll need to pick a domain name and set up your hosting. We've got some great deals from godaddy to take care of all your domain and web hosting needs.

Creating good copy and content is probably the single most important aspect in web development. It's often said that "content is king". Writing about things you are passionate for is widely recommended. In other words, don't just write about making money because it's something that you think people will want to know about. If you know a lot about grocery shopping, then the information you create about grocery shopping will be much more useful to your audience and thus much more effective for you. Adding high quality photos, images, widgets, videos and other useful media to help convey your points can be very effective as well.

Search engine optimization is another important aspect for webmasters. Optimizing your sites for search engines like google and yahoo will allow people to find you on the internet much easier. This involves creating title, meta and description tags that mention the keywords you are trying to target, along with on page optimization and link building. For example, if your site will be about Chicago restaurants, you would want to mention those words in all of the tags and about three to five times on your actually website page depending on the amount of content. This helps google determine what your site is about. You can find more information about search engine optimization at xebradesign.com.

Link building is also very important in determining your site's rank in search engines. The more high quality related sites that you have linking to you the better. For example, if you have a small plumbing business, you would want links from other sites related to plumbing. Good places to start would be any associations or organizations that you are a part of. General directories, article directories, facebook, myspace, craigslist, google maps and yahoo local are also great links to have. The age of a site is very important in the eyes of google too, so the sooner you get started the better!

If you are not a designer or not familiar with website design at all, it might be easiest for you to get started with a free blog from google. They supply many free templates and everything you need to get started with having a web presence for free. Otherwise you can find a plethora of high quality template choices from joomla or templatemonster. As time goes on if you want to be taken more seriously, you should consider upgrading your blog to a wordpress and using a custom coded site.

Now it's up to you on how you would like to monetize your website (not as easy as it sounds). Most people don't make or sell anything themselves, so affiliate relationships have been growing rapidly in the past couple years. The way this works is pretty simple; you send traffic to a merchant that sells products or services via a text link or banner placed on your site. They pay you a percentage of each sale that comes through your site in return. One site that I came across has a very affordable comprehensive solution to getting started with affiliate sites for only $49.95. I would also highly recommend the AbestWeb forum. You can learn from some of the best affiliate marketers in the industry and stay abreast on current webmaster and affiliate trends.

Websites are widely regarded as the best marketing tool available nowadays. Whether you have a small business or just looking to make some extra income, gaining a web presence is very important and will only continue to increase in effectiveness as the popularity of the internet grows. Getting a website or making your existing one better is much more affordable than most people think, especially with the help of some coupons and deals from wantedcoupons.com. Check out the webmaster page and get started with one of the best investments you can ever make.