Hey there! If you're new here, it'd be great to have you sign up for my RSS feed. If you need a feed reader, you can download one for free here. Thanks for visiting and your comments are welcome anytime.

It’s been a little quiet here this week and I completely neglected to come back with some ideas on what tool to use to build certain websites as I promised last Friday. I guess that’s what happens when you’re forced to your back (or actually your side, if you can’t lie on your back for fear of crushing your organs…LOL!). Anyway, sorry for the delay and here are some thoughts for you.

Disclaimer: These are simply opinions and obviously based on my preferences. It all comes down to your own preferences, skillset and goal with your own website. If you have questions or preferences of your own, please feel to leave your thoughts in the comments area.

Beginners

As a beginner, you need to make some decisions on your budget and quality of site you can live with. For example, when I got started, I didn’t hire anyone (not really because I was cheap, but because I didn’t know who to hire) and I got right in there with FrontPage and made my own sites - they were pretty ugly, but they did the job.

Of course, you don’t have to live with ugly - you can try a site builder or hire someone to help you (for just design help see FreshNets or for more full-service online business help, consider our Platinum Membership).

Content Sites

If you’re looking to do a content site, you have many options that again come down to your preferences.

A site builder: like Internet Based Family (web-based) works well as a content site and I have a couple that I run myself. It’s a low monthly fee for a site that isn’t ugly, is easy to put together and has some decent features. And from my experience, if you use basic SEO techniques, these sites do quite well in the search engines. No programmer or designer required - except to possibly customize the graphic header.

A CMS (Content Management System): like WordPress, or their are many other choices (I’ve tried a few and WordPress is my favorite amongst them), works well for content sites. Unless you have some basic to advanced programming skill, you’ll likely need to hire help to get it set up and customized (CMSs are web-based).

An HTML/WYSWG Editor: like FrontPage (no longer being made by Microsoft and has been replaced by “Expression Web”) or Dreamweaver can serve you well for creating a site you can have complete control over, without any programming skills. You may or may not want to hire help with these (both are desktop software).

Shopping Cart Sites

As with any type of sites, are tons of options for shopping cart style sites. If you have a very large line of products, you probably want to use a site builder like Internet Based Family (cart included) or a full shopping cart / website management system like OSCommerce or Zen Cart as it makes it easy to dynamically create all your product pages.

For Internet Based Family, there is no developer needed, but for the others where a script is installed, you probably will need a hand. Before choosing any script, make sure you have a developer on your side that is very proficient and has plenty of experience with the cart you choose. Not all developers/programmers have experience or work well with all scripts.

If you have a smaller line of products, you can create your site from scratch using an HTML editor, so you have complete control. Then simply use an add-on cart like Quicksales (1SC) or WAHMCart to manage the product sales. All you do is copy-and-paste code into your website pages.

(All the shopping cart options are web-based - to add products, you need to be logged into your server or a web-based account)

Sales Letter Sites

Use an HTML editor (desktop software)…plain and simple. You will get the most control and no unneeded bells and whistles or distractions that come with site builders and content management systems.

If you’re not good with HTML, get a template. In fact, I’ll be giving out a free sales letter template tomorrow (look for my Sweetie Saturday post). Or you can also use the sales letter builder that comes with my Copywriting Sweetie course (desktop software). That way, you only have the elements you need for your page.

Blogs

There are plenty of blog platforms out there. My personal experience is limited to Blogger and Wordpress (both web-based). Whichever you use, always host the blog on your site, so you have full control and ownership of your site Plus, you have the option of changing at a later date, if you want.

Wordpress is more powerful, has many useful plug-ins available and offers more built-in features. But it requires script installation and at minimum, you’ll need a ready-made theme installed (don’t use the default - it’s HORRID!) and some minor customization (again, check FreshNets for help). If you are in a hurry to get started and want to get your feet wet with very little expense, you can try Blogger. I used it happily for a number of years and was able to customize the look all by myself…but I eventually outgrew it. My programmer was able to move me over to WordPress quite painlessly, thank goodness.

Desktop or Web-Based?

You’ll notice, that I made some notations on whether a program was web-based or desktop. I did this for a couple of reasons as it’s an important consideration:

1. Will you be working offline frequently? If so, you might want desktop.
2. Will you be hiring people to work on the site or have contributors adding content? If so, web-based is often the best choice.

Those are just a few things to consider and I hope my thoughts have been helpful. The ultimate decision is yours and it can be perplexing. But please - don’t let the decision on a web-building tool hold you back from getting started. You won’t know your preferences and true skills until you get your feet wet. Besides anything done in cyberspace can be undone, redone and fixed…so go for it!

Alejandro Reyes is still at it and he has posted some more Twinterviews on his Internet Business Blog. I hope you’ve been enjoying the series.

Here’s a link to the previous interviews (including mine, if you’re so inclined).

Warren Whitelock

Tony Blake (watch out, this dude is certainly “colorful” on Twitter)

Michael Martine

Listen enjoy. Then see you on Twitter.

If you’re following me on Twitter, it’s no secret that I LOVE it. I see tremendous business and personal benefit to it and outside the random visits to a few forums, it’s really the only social networking site I participate in.

Well, Alejandro Reyes of Success Fool has been conducting short interviews with Twitter users and asking how they use Twitter.

If you’re interested in learning more about how others use Twitter successfully, here’s a list of interviews he has posted to date:

with me (Alice Seba)

Kevin Riley

Sherman Hu

Justin Brooke

Feel free to share your thoughts on the interviews and how you use Twitter.

If you are moving pages around your site (i.e. changing file names or moving a whole entire website) and you want to increase your chances of retaining your search engine rankings, Google recommends using a 301 redirect and so does Yahoo.

Here’s a detailed video by Lynette Chandler that shows you how to do a 301 redirect using cpanel hosting (and shows you how to deal with those pesky links that get messed up in cpanel):

I came across this one when someone posted it at The Warrior Forum. It’s an interesting tool that helps you analyze the Emotional Marketing Value of your headlines.

To tool here is: Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer

You simply type in your headline and the tool gives you a score, expressed in a percentage. You can put in up to 20 words, but realize that the shorter your headline, the easier it is to get a higher percentage. BUT that doesn’t mean a shorter headline will outperform a longer one.

Out of curiosity, I swiped a headline from Michel Fortin to see what would happen:

and his 18-word headline produced a pretty nice score:

As I mentioned, I found the tool from a post on the Warrior Forum and you can read about the members little experiments with the tool here.

But what was most helpful on that thread is when Hakim Chishti, the man behind the tool took some time to explain the science behind the whole thing. His explanation really helped show how this can be a very helpful tool in increasing the emotional value in your headlines…but of course, there are other factors that go into a good headline. After all, you can use the headline to make a totally nonsensical headline and get a score of 100%.

Go ahead and read the post, where you can read Hakim’s full comments, but here are a few helpful snippets that I picked out:

“This analyzer is not meant to tell you specifically which headline is “best”. Nor does a ’score’ of 100% or more necessarily mean the headline is good.”

“When the headlines are six or more words, revising the words to produce results in the 40-60% score range, produces measurable improvement in conversions. Scores of less than 20% do not often perform well in advertising messages.”

“We have analyzed tens of millions of words of advertising copy, from past and present copywriting “greats”, online and off-line. The ad copy for most all of the best known copywriters seem to perform at the 30-35% of EMV words. ”

After reading, I went back and submitted my own headline from Affiliate Marketing Sweetie (which exceeds 20 words) and came up with:

You’ll notice that in addition to giving a score, it marked my copy as more “empathatic”…where as Michel’s headline was labeled as “intellectual”…and likely quite appropriate for our respective audiences.

Now if you’ll excuse me…it’s time for me to grab some tissues and get a little bit more emotional with my headlines.

For those keyword serious, they may already be familiar with and use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. If you use it, you’ll know that it’s not only perfect for Adwords campaign research, but for organic keyword research and helping you find topics for articles and other content.

On the first (and default) tab, you’ll see “Keyword Variations”. Simply enter a keyword phrase or phrases in the box and click “Get Keyword Results” as you can see below:

You can uncheck the “Use synonyms box” to remove synonyms. That way, you’ll only see results with the precise keyword phrase you chose.

In addition, you can click the “Filter My Results” link and remove any words or phrases you don’t want included in your results.

The second tab, called “Site-Related Keywords” is pretty cool, but often overlooked. By entering a URL, you’ll get site specific suggested keywords. Just enter the web address and the tool suggests keywords based on the URL and the pages the URL links to.

Once you’ve chosen your keywords you can use them in your Adwords campaigns with the click of a few buttons.

…or export the results to a .csv file for your own use.

Check out the Google Adwords Keyword Tool by clicking here.

By Mel

In response to user requests (THANK YOU!) some new definitions have been added to Internet Marketing Definitions. Expand your Internet Marketing vocabulary by clicking the links below:

Bread Crumb Trail
DealDotCom.com
DupeFree Pro
Forum Program
Google Answers
Google Groups
Invision Power Board
Mailing List
MSN Groups
phpBB
Title Tag
vBulletin
WordPress plugin
Yahoo Answers
Yahoo Groups