Build A Web Site

Create a web site to make money online 

Including Software I Use and Recommend

Here are some tools you can use to launch your own websites and make money online. Some are free and some are not.
But they all can go a long way to creating a nice online presence for you to make some money.

1. XSite Pro. This piece of software is one we use to create our own web sites [including this one]. It is not free but it is great if you are willing to spend some money.  I first started out setting up web sites just to do it -to be "on the net". One of the first things I did was put my family history online. It was neat how I started being contacted by "long lost cousins"! But that is the power of the Internet.

But later on I realized that there were possibilities to making money with what I was learning. I saw web sites where people were actually selling things! I even started buying items on the net. And I continued to wonder how I could do it. And I struggled...I used different pieces software to set up my "money making" web sites...I went through some great programs like Frontpage and a few others I don't even remember now...I tried ones like Yahoo Site Builder and some Freeware ones...and I ended up using Dreamweaver because it was so powerful....

But I still made very little money. Why?

Because I was spending all my time on code, trying to get things to work, trying to get it to look just right, learning more about HTML and then PHP and....what I wasn't doing was learning how to make money online! Then I came across some folks who were talking about XSite Pro. I lurked in the chat rooms and followed threads that discussed how quickly and easily people were starting web sites with this software. I took the plunge and now I don't spend my time on all that other stuff...XSite Pro does all the work of setting up a website and I concentrate on finding things to sell.. and actually selling them!  Check out XSite Pro further for yourself.

All my years in management in the "bricks and mortar" world taught one valuable lesson...you need to concentrate on getting the customers to sell to and selling them rather than spending all your time doing the million and one things required in every business. I hired people for the warehouse, for the order desk, for accounting...and I "hired" XSite Pro to build my web sites and I concentrate on finding new ways to make money. And when I find a new way...XSite Pro builds a web site quickly for me!

Don't get me wrong...you still need to know important things like how to drive traffic to your website and how to find the right keywords and links that will put you high in the search engines. BUT...I can now spend my time on those important areas and not have to worry about getting up and running in the first place.

Now...I am online fast and competing for the billions of dollars spent on the net. XSite Pro helped me to do that.

2. SEO Elite. As a manager in the "real world" I learned how important it was to know two things.

1- You needed to know your competitor[s] and understand what they were doing in the marketplace. Sometimes they had a briliant idea or concept that we could modify for our own use. We also need to understand their weakness and where we could market successfully against them.

2-You plan your work and you work your plan. You've probably heard that expression before but it is so imperative to know where you are going and then to be able to monitor where my company was going and how successful we have been [or not]. This allows you to actually change your plan as you progress to achieve your goal of success. A plan is important but you also need to be flexible to achieve the best results.

And SEO Elite helps you to do all of those things in the "online world". SEO Elite does the "research" for you to determine your compeitor's keywords, how they are using them, what kind of linking structure they are using and how successful they have been.

You can enter the keywords you are planning to target into Google [or any other search engine] and see who pops up on the first page. Those are your competitors. Then feed their url's into SEO Elite and let it do its' work to help you to determine how they go to the top of the search engines. You can then copy how they did it and look for areas they have neglected to zoom past them in the search results. And THAT is the key to the whole thing. The higher you are in the search engines, the more TRAFFIC you get to your website. Traffic is the key. No matter how good your webs site design and structure might be, you still need VISITORS that you can sell to. Without that, everything else is wasted.

Feed your own url into SEO Elite as well and it can help you to determine how well you are doing in your plan to pass your compeitors. You can then modify your plan or strategy to continue to have online success. Again, this is not a free program, but I highly recommend you check out SEO Elite to add to your online tool kit.

3-The Market Research Wizard The Marketing Research Wizard will help you handle days worth of tedious online research in just a few minutes. This is a tool that you can use to determine how easily you can sell physical goods on the 'net. Want to sell little red wagons? Put that into The Market Research Wizard and it will return a list of competitors who are selling from web sites or avenues like eBay and determine your odds of success for your business. The software gathers data from multiple sources in just seconds. Computers excel at tedious and repetitious tasks. Let the Wizard do the boring work while you use your time and brain for the creative work that computers cannot do.  A great piece of software.

4-Free Office Suite

OpenOffice.org is one of the finest free office suites on the internet. Very powerful and able to do nearly as much as the big boys like Microsoft Office....and it's free! Will work on Mac and PC platforms and is compatible with most other office document formats.

5-Dragonfly CMS  A free open source content management platform. This program written in PHP and powered by either MySQL or PostgreSQL.
This is a great piece of software but you will need to be willing got learn the languages used to be most effective.

6- Drupal can easily support a large variety of web sites from your personal web logs to large community based web sites.

7 -Mambo is another great open source tool for content management to help you to build a web site.

8-RSS News Feeder

Carp is a great way to get fresh content on your web site every day. There is a FEE version as well as one you pay for but the free one will get you started. How does this work? Well RSS feeds usually contain a headline, an intro and link to a web page. A lot of internet users use RSS feed readers to read the feeds generated by various web sites. These readers are similar to a web browser but are designed specifically to read RSS feeds instead of regular web pages. When the individual sees a headline that appears of interest, they simply click the headline to go to the web page where they can then read the full story. Other web sites will convert the RSS feed to HTML and display it on a web page for their visitors to browse the headlines. When the visitor find an interesting headline, they can click through to read the full story as well. Which ever way is used, the RSS feed will drive traffic to the web site. When you publishing an RSS feed from one website on another web site, this is called "syndication" and that's what RSS was originally designed for on the internet. The RSS feed reader was added after the fact.

9- FTP software- software to upload and update your web site while you work at home..

10-Graphics software - software that allows you to manipulate images [jpeg, gif, bmp] on your computer.