Everyone thinks that choosing a domain name is the first step in setting up a website. The best domain name is really found by brainstorming keywords around your site concept (massage, your city)
Day 2 of the SBI! Action Guide to building websites is about choosing your site concept. Your site concept if you are doing a site for your massage biz is just that – your massage business. Day 3 is creating a list of in demand keywords and planning a foundation for your site and your business based on the keywords that people use to search for things. Day 4 is ways to make money including the obvious – getting massage clients but also how to make money referring people to massage related products or selling your own. It isn’t until Day 5 after you have planned your site that you choose the best domain name for your site. All of this planning and thinking about your site puts you in the best position to be successful. The thing about the action guide is that anyone can read it and you can apply it to any site you are doing. What makes the difference though in having a SBI! website is that you have the software and behind the scenes workings that get your site into the search engines and tracks your results.
If you are doing a site on another topic besides your massage business Day 2 was about brainstorming your site concept and finding something you are passionate about and turning it into a money making website. That is what I basically have done with my 2 websites on massage although I didn’t start out thinking I would be able to make much money let alone the extra few thousand a month I make on adsense alone. I started by site www.thebodyworker.com back in 1999 as a hobby sort of – to help get my mind and body out of burnout. I was gathering information to create an apprenticeship program for a friend of mine who wanted to go to massage school but who already had a significant background in science. Apprenticeship programs are still allowed by the WA State Massage Board and frankly I would love to see other states allow apprenticeship programs in their licensing process. Keith Grant has a great white paper “issues in Massage Governance”(pdf) that talks about the apprenticeship program and how it is actually a better method of learning than the current massage school structure – but that is a whole other topic of discussion.
Basically I just started putting all of the information I was collecting and took my massage school notes and started putting them into a website before websites were even the thing to be doing. I did pick the wrong name and didn’t have any plan but to write. In about 2000 I found SBI! and read their first ebook “Make Your Site Sell” which you can now read for free. It basically started putting the idea into my head that there could be something more done with a website. It took me two years to purchase SBI! and in 2002 I started my site www.massagetherapycareers.com. I actually just sold that site in Sept and started my new site www.massage-career-guides.com. The only reason I sold it was for the money and because I knew I could do it all again and could do it even better with all that I learned. So now I am researching other topics than massage to start a few new sites. With each site making on average $1000 a month I don’t see any reason why to stop making sites! The income continues to grow as traffic does and traffic keeps growing if you just follow the simple plan of creating content and getting backlinks to your site.
I actually am in the process of redoing my site www.thebodyworker.com and I might be just moving it over to SBI but I haven’t decided quite yet. I still have tons of info that I never put online just waiting to be made into webpages. I am also looking into creating membership site or offering the material in ebooks. I can also just keep it as it is offering the information for free the way I have been since it’s creating in 1999. The ads make it all possible. I’ll talk more about ways to make money online tomorrow.
So SBI! isn’t really for everyone. You won’t get rich quick or even in a year or two or maybe even ever but having additional income is always a good thing no matter what profession you are in.
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Yes it can be scary when you first start out if you don’t have a definite topic that you want to write about and develop. I started with something I loved and knew a lot about. In the beginning I didn’t plan anything at all actually but now I am going back and doing so on my 2nd time around.
Setting a time frame could indeed help.
I also have started a few other sites that I didn’t continue with for various reasons. It is all part of learning.
Julie
My story was slightly different to yours, Julie.
I wanted to build a site to promote our business and came across SBI for doing that – and, yes, having a website is a great hobby and it also brings in the money! And now, I am looking (on the web) for information to extend my complementary therapies (which include massage).
Presence on the web is certainly the way to go and spending time on planning the foundation of one’s website is essential.
However, in my early days I spent so much time planning my foundations that, with hindsight, I think I was really just putting off starting!
In my opinion the best thing for anyone planning their websites is to allocate so many days to their planning and then to just go for it using the info they have gathered by that time!
By the way – congrats on selling your site – you put a lot of work into it and you certainly deserved to benefit from that.