carlosonweb

Non-techies, this is for you. I’m starting a series of articles geared towards non-technical folks who want to find their way around the intricacies of running an Internet-based business. This one is the first in the series.

Call this Web Development 101 or whatever. This article is for non-techies who want to have a website but somehow doesn’t know how to begin.

No, I won’t turn you into Web Development Rock Star overnight. That would take a million lines of programming code and a lot of sleepless nights to go with it. Better leave it up to your techie brother.

However, unlike other technical folks in my circle, I don’t believe that you need to go back to technical school to be able to run a successful online business or even simply own a website.

Knowing the basics, especially the technical jargons, will get you on the right footing. After all, in any business, there are aspects that you need to be aware of so that you will not be at the mercy of someone else.

Of course, it helps to recognize where your knowledge ends where the services of a qualified expert begins. As a non-technie website owner, it is better to concentrate on improving your business (that’s already a full-time job, mind you) and learning how to delegate or outsource the technical details.

Okay… I know that was so mouthful for an introduction.

Get yourself ready…Here are the Seven Important Jargons that I believe should sink into your Web Vocabulary.

1. Domain Name

Simply stated, it is the address of your website on the Internet in human-readable, text format. The domain name of Google Incorporated is google.com; The domain name of Facebook is facebook.com. It’s no-brainer, really.

Don’t underestimate it. A domain name is the single most important resource you can have! It is your online identify. Before you even think of how your website should look like, you should spend a lot of time brainstorming about what domain name to use.

2. Web Hosting

Your website will take up some space where you will put your files: text, audio, video, images, etc. These files should be stocked somewhere or nothing will appear on your website. This is where web hosting comes in. You upload those files to your web host.

A Web Hosting Service usually comes with the following bundle of services:

1. Web Server – makes it possible to run your server-side script.
2. FTP Server – allows you to upload and download files to and from your server
3. Email Server – allows you to send and receive email messages based on your domain.

There are a couple of other services, but these are the basic ones you need at this point.

3. FTP

FTP stands for File Transmission Protocol. Basically, it is needed to move files from your local computer to the Server and vice-versa. As a user, you would normally be using an FTP Client to transfer files to and from the server.

4. Scripting Language

Have you heard about PHP, Perl, C# and Java? Well, these are Programming Languages used by web developers to code things up so that your website can have a seemingly intelligent personality behind it.

Among other things, Scripting Language executes codes

• in response to user requests
• when processing database operations
• to render the final web page

…And others. I hope you get it.

5. Database Server

If you need a way to organize information in an intelligent fashion, store and retrieve it, or manipulate it programmatically, then you will need a database server.

6. Content Management System

A Content Management System (CMS) is a software bundle that allows you to maintain the contents (articles, pages, etc) of your website without having to bother much about the technical details like HTML and CSS. Gone are the days when every webpage is saved on a separate file. Thanks to the emergence of FREE and open-source CMS. Maintaining a website is easier than ever.

7. Search Engine Optimization

As soon as you have your website up and running, the next best thing to do is to let the world know that it exists. Since the most users use search engines to find something on the Internet, you stand a good chance of having someone stumble on your website if you optimize the pages for search results. That’s how Search Engine Optimization comes into play.

Essentially, it involves a process of gathering back links, placing keywords in the right places and having enough content that visitors and search engines would love to consume.

Notes on Web Hosting, Scripting Language and Database Server: When looking for a Web Hosting service, always check for their support of a particular Scripting Language and Database Server that you will be needing on your website. As a small business or professional, you would probably be at home with a web host that supports PHP and MySQL — two of the most popular, open-source technologies. When it comes to price, functionality and user-support, the combination of PHP and MySQL is simply outstanding.

Your Website, Your Baby

Treat your new website as you would a new baby. If at first it doesn’t look very impressive, as does anything in the early phase, don’t get discouraged. Having a business website requires a series of improvements along the way.

And remember, there is no such thing as a perfect website.

First: Raising A Red Flag

For Employees and Self-employed individuals, this article may come as a big surprise. This group of people is used to earning money by trading time for it.

When introduced to the concepts of leverage, residual income, and the like, many of them are so closed-minded that they automatically equate such concepts as a scam. And when they meet an ordinary guy (especially young and under-schooled) earning income that can only be describe as extra-ordinary, the guy is downright branded as a scammer.

What a wrong headed thinking!

Raising The White Flag Of Financial Education

I’m not sure if Robert Kiyosaki was the first to expose it, but his book entitled CashFlow Quadrant is instrumental to my understanding that there are basically four quadrants or ways of earning money each of which is represented by groups of people this way:

• E – Employee: earns from his job
• S – Self-Employed : earns by practicing a profession; may also work on his own business
• B – Business : earns by owning and running a business system
• I – Investors : earns by using money to make money

If you have not read the book yet, I recommend that you grab yourself a copy. Your local bookstores usually have it on the shelf, but of course you can always get one from Amazon.

Three Types Of Income

Linear Income – This is the type of income that is directly proportional to the amount of time you put into your work. Here are some examples:

• You work 8 hours, you are paid 8 hours
• More clients and projects, more money
• A 5-minute late for work means a deduction on your hourly salary… Blame it on the traffic… Grrr
• All sub-ordinates always earn lesser than the boss … ouch!
• Absent or in vacation means ZERO income

Leveraged Income – A business makes ample use of leverage by hiring people to work for the company or business and paying them for the time and talent spent to get things done.

Franchising (widely considered as scam a long time ago) is also a form of leverage. By inviting franchisees to run a business using a tried-and-tested set of methodologies, the franchisor is able to expand its brand and therefore makes it more valuable.

Leverage is making use of resources, talents, efforts of a team of people. Paul Getty, sums it best when he said, “I will rather earn from 1% of 100 people’s effort than from 100% of my own effort.”

Passive and Residual Income – This is the type of income that is worked out once and reaped several times over a long period of time. To generate this type of income requires creativity, talent and smarts. Here are some examples

• Royalties – artists, musicians and authors still earn even when they are long retired
• Rental Income – From commercial buildings and others
• Sales Override – Possible through affiliate marketing and network marketing (another one that’s deemed as a scam.)
• Investments – Essentially, the use of money to make money. Stocks, mutual fund, real estate, etc.

Which Type Of Income Is Best?

Notice that of the three types of income, it is only in the first type (Linear Income) that you are directly exchanging time for it.

Going back to Robert’s CashFlow Quadrant, Linear Income is generated by those in the E and S Quadrants. Leveraged Income and Passive Income are generated by people in the B and I Quadrants.

Take note also that anyone can be in any quadrant. It is even possible to belong to all of the Four Quadrants.

So, in other words, the answer to the question, “Which type of income is best?” depends entirely on you – your level of comfort, the talents you bring into the table, your own desires and your willingness to pay for those things.

I Love Money

But… Isn’t the love of money the root of all evil?

Sorry folks, I beg to disagree. I just disproved it.

I love money. There is no denying it. Contrary to what has been embedded in most people’s subconscious, money (or the love of it) is not the root of all evil. It’s the lack of money that is the culprit.

Imagine Haiti without money pouring into the island after the disastrous earthquake. It would be a terrible world indeed.

I Love Time

I love time — lots and lots of it. I’m talking about free time.

Free time allows me to stroll around any place I want while the rest of the my friends are sitting on their office chair waiting for 5:00 PM to tick so they could punch the time card and so that they could stroll around like I do after a long day’s work.

Free time allows me to watch my kid growing right before my eyes. Unlike a remote control dad, this activity is so important to me that I am willing to give up all the business deals in the world just to have time playing with my little monkey.

Time and Money Dilemma

But time and money are not always best of friends like man and dog.

Let me explain it this way.

How do you make money?

For most of us, we make money by exchanging our time and skills for it. In other words, trading time for money.

A programmer makes money by coding, analyzing business processes, and following instructions from the development manager. An accountant makes money by scrutinizing financial information and making intelligible conclusions about it for business decision making. One of the ways a lawyer makes money is by playing the devil’s advocate, finding faults, and dissecting the Law to protect the client from potential punishment.

In all of the examples above, a person is trading time for money. For most people, this is the default business model, so to speak, they follow to earn money. In many cases this is fine – you get paid for what you work for.

And, ideally, this leads to…

• More work means more money
• More projects mean more money
• More clients mean more money

More money means more happiness, right?

Wrong!

Here’s why…

• More work means more money, but less time spent on other activities like:
  • a cup of good coffee with a friend
  • a good physical exercise
  • relaxation and meditation to remove the stress out
  • creative thinking
  • just plain do nothing
• More projects mean more money, but there is a limit on the number of projects you can handle.
• More clients mean more money, but clients are people — and people can mean problems. You can only entertain a few of them before your sanity explodes.

Of course, the less time you spend working means less money in the bank account.

This is the consequence of trading time for money. Since time is limited (a mere 24 hours in a day), it is not always a good idea to exchange your time for money. Exchanging time for money is bad for you. And it limits your happiness up to a certain point.

Time-Money Solution

Is there a way around this problem?

Of course there is.

First, you need to understand that time is more important than money. As a matter of fact, time is more valuable than money.

Money can be made from ZERO, but lost time can never be recovered.

In the next article, I’ll show you some of ways money can be made without trading time for it.

Stay in touch and I encourage you to subscribe to the blog so you can get updates delivered to your email box. Thanks for Google FeedBurner! Click here to subscribe and join the other subscribers who enjoyed the few articles on this website.

When starting a new online venture, a beginning entrepreneur would probably do three things first:

1. Buy A Domain Name
2. Get a Web Designer and craft the collest web design on earth
3. Create five pages or so containing an overview of his products and services, his business, mission and vision, some photos here and there, etc.

After a few days, he could be laughing already confident in his ability in getting a cheap web designer after dumping the high-profile professional aside.

A week or two later, he begins to invite his friends to take a look at his latest business innovation. He would even tell his friends to tell their friends about the website — an experiment on word-of-mouth marketing. But will they do it? Heck, no!

Months past, he is wondering already why his website has only three constant visitors daily: he, his wife and his web designer (who would probably be still doing a few tweaks here and there).

Sounds familiar?

Small businesses still don’t get it. Like other professionals in any field, not all web designers or web developers are equal. If they are, they would all be probably long-haired by now.

When it comes to having a website, small businesses still don’t get it. A website is not just an online business card or electronic company brochure that you only update once in a decade.

A website is (or should be):

• A money-making machine minus the friction of the moving parts real machines have.
• A salesman who never sleeps and best of all never complains about it.
• A PR Officer that invites the visitors and sells them the benefits of doing business with you.
• An electronic catalog that visitors can use to find the products that interest them – not you.

The list could go on, but you get the picture. If you want to get the best of what your website can do for your business, there are basic things that you need to grasp so you can be on the right track.

You can do it right the time if you carefully follow the 5 Steps to Website Success below.

Five Steps To Success For Any New Website

1. Get A Domain Name That Sells

At the minimum, your domain should reflect what you are offering to your clients. It must be easy to remember and even easier to type on the keyboard. If you are a professional and your name is quite popular, get domain name that is based on your first and last names. If you are a company, your domain name should be based on the brand that your company is known for or a brand that you want to promote on the market.

2. Perform A Keyword Research and Analysis

Many small businesses have no idea about this.

When a web user wants to get information on something, he relies, almost always, on the search results generated by the search engines after typing some words and phrases on the search box.

There are millions of searches performed every single minute. It’s mind-boggling to know each one of them. But you don’t have to. You are only after the keywords that are related to your services or the products you are offering.

Think about those phrases. Do you have them on your pages? How about your competitors, are they doing a good job on placing the right keywords on their pages?

In essence, that is what keyword research and analysis is all about. It’s getting a snapshot of what the visitors are searching for when they needed information; hopefully, your information.

There are tools on how to perform this very important task. Don’t ever launch another website without having an idea of the keywords relevant to your business.

3. Prepare Your Killer Content

Content is the king. A good content is educational and information-rich. They should be related to your business or products and services. The content must be in an easy-to-read text format. Use graphics sparingly and only when they help convey the point of you text. Video and Audio may be good, but remember search engines can’t index the information contained in your video and audio streams.

One more thing on content: Never promote your website if it lacks the basic content that the visitors would expect. Putting the sign that says, “This website is under construction,” is a fastest way of telling your visitors, “Don’t come back here anymore.”

4. Get A Top-notch Web Design

One of the biggest mistakes small businesses make when deciding to get a Web developer is to award the contract to the lowest-bidding web designer who knocks on their door. Don’t do it. Cheap, even free, can be even more expensive than you originally imagined. You should understand that anything worth having always comes with a price and if you are dead serious about getting it, you should be ready to pay the price. Are you ready to pay the price in exchange for the things that you wanted the most?

Another mistake is to get the one with the cutest web design. Cute maybe nice, but it doesn’t always translate into positive cash flow or business savings. Worst, the graphic design could turn out to be just an expression of the designer’s artistic talent, which is totally unrelated (even hurtful) to your marketing campaign.

Tip: A lot of Web Designers out there are frustrated artists and painters experimenting their way into the digital media. Sure, they can come up with really creative and out-of-this-world designs. But would you rather run an online digital art gallery or a business website? It’s your call.

5. Promote the Website

I can’t emphasize this highly enough. Promote your website or it will die a natural death. Web Promotion is everything.

There are many ways of doing it: forums, email campaigns, newsletters, RSS, etc. The advent of social networking sites makes web promotion a snap.

If all you wanted to have is just a website, it’s ok not to promote it. But if you want the benefits of owning a popular website, positive user feedback, money from traffic, then web promotion should be a consistent activity of your business.

If you are an owner of a small business, this article is for you.

It’s driving me nuts. A lot of small businesses are still clueless about the benefits of doing it online. And for the few that jumped into the techie bandwagon, many are doing it wrong. As a result, they end up spending money on it instead of having the technology bring them the money. Technology then becomes a liability for them instead of an asset; sucking money out instead of pouring it into their business.

Take owning a website for instance.

The following as very common symptoms of small business website failures:

1. The website is owner-centered instead of user-centered. If this is you, don’t be surprised why your website has only three frequent visitors: you, yourself and you alone.

2. A fancy graphics design that demonstrates the graphical talent of the web designer more than his ability to promote it. Ever wondered why your website doesn’t appear on Google? Tip: Don’t ask your web designer.

3. Poor content including: ineffective copy, grammatical errors (of which I admit I am guilty of), articles made only to boasts the company’s already inflated ego and disorganized navigation. You may not be guilty of it all, but at least you get the point.

Remembering Mario

Mario was the visitor who came to ask how much I would charge for making a simple website. For the life of him, he can’t believe I actually charged a whopping $650 that consists of the following: Web Design, Setting up Ecommerce Account, and Search engine optimization.

Was I overcharging?

Based on Mario’s emails, yes I did. But that’s his opinion. Despite the fact that I pointed him to the websites I made where I charge even three times that amount, he’s still unconvinced. You can read the whole email exchanges here.

My fault, I guess, is that I didn’t elaborate to him further enough on what he would get from those things I offered. I was not able to convince him that by using me (my skills and experience), he would recover his investment in no time and if his products are good enough that there large enough market ready to bite it to nourish their respective businesses. He could have been laughing all the way to the bank now and surf as much as he wants, all because I made him a cute, cash-generating and simply crazy website.

His fault, I guess, is he thought every web developer is like everybody else. He therefore had the website developed by his son. And oh, he asked his son’s friend to do it for him FREE of charge, because his son was busy with his master’s.

Of course it made me smile in silence. I actually wished him luck in his new business website.

Break… Some Words Of Wisdom

Enough for this blame game now. An old man once told me a long time ago that “the only person to be blamed for in any failed business deal is the guy who stares back at you when you face the mirror.” Right, that’s me.

I have so much to thank Mario. Because of that email, I was able to write a two-part article on pricing: Price 101, Part 1 followed by Pricing 101, Part 2.

The Disappointed Entrepreneur

I can hardly believe it. Mario came knocking at my door once again (read: my website) after six long months to ask if I can help him with the website his son started but for some reasons could not continue any longer. And note he did not get his son’s friend to do it. It seems like nothing is FREE anymore nowadays. He thought he has no other choice, but to have his son develop him the website. Go, go, go, kid!

But what a crap! I could almost laugh when I saw the damage done by the kid. It was not a website that you can be proud of — from a business standpoint, that is. The domain looked like some cute-little fingers just typed in the keys in random and then another one decided it would be nice to have it registered as domain name. And viola, a domain name!

Not only that, the very reason why he shot me an email was that the shopping cart software failed during checkout. The email sort of say, “Carlos, can you help me with this emergency blah, blah, blah.” Unfortunately, I’m not the type of programmer who enjoys fixing the mess that others have created in the first place. And if I did, I would ask for a premium in doing so.

Enter: Carlos, The Consultant

Of course, the Web Consultant that I am suggested some solutions that he could take. My free suggestions included the following:

1. Getting a new Domain Name
2. Doing a Keyword Research and Analysis
3. Preparing the contents
4. Do the Web Design or Get Someone who can do it (should be some other guy and not me, I’m not available no more.)
5. Promote the website

These are the areas where a many online entrepreneurs failed miserably. Like Mario, they started taking the wrong path and wonder why they are not going anywhere.

In Part 2 of this article we will explore each one of these. So hang on please.