David Fiske Affiliate Marketing & Web Development

I want to share one of my theories with you. It is a theory that states that all websites are like our own children.

We conceive an idea about our website. It may start with “wouldn’t it just be easier if…” or “I’ve thought of a niche idea…”. However it starts, it is an idea that is conceived.

You set around creating your site. You bolt bits on, you may integrate API’s or embed external content. After careful manipulation, you end up your baby – a fully functional website.

Here is where people fail.
 
They expect the baby to fend for itself, to look after itself. As with humans, you cannot leave a baby to look after itself.

Many businesses suffer from this problem and expect their baby to sing and dance, whilst earning them millions from day one. IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THIS.

If it did, we would all be seriously rich.

So what do we have to do to help our baby grow?

Firstly, it needs nutrition. Every website needs a regular feed of content to stay alive. A lapse in content feeding can hinder your overall objective of producing a fully functional child.

Content has to be varied too. If you feed a baby one kind of food day in day out, it will suffer from malnutrition. Your content should be fresh, organic and original. Resist temptation to use other people’s content as the search engines don’t like it.

You like to dress up your child – make it look smart. Some people still do not grasp this for their site. Would you dress your baby in black clothes with lots of lime green writing on it? Why then do people make sites with black backgrounds and lime green text to write about cars or planes or trains or buses?

As your child gets older, it becomes more knowledgeable. As your site gets older, it develops a reputation with search engines. Search engines tend to give ranking preference to long established sites. It is not always the case but it is in the majority of cases.

Eventually, your child makes new friends. Through nursery, then school, the university, their friendship pool should increase. Your website needs your help here. You need to develop a wide base of relevant link exchanges. If your site is about cars, exchanging links with nursery schools is not going to benefit you a lot.

Remember to keep in contact with your link exchange partners. They can help you spread the word.

Also, remember that the majority of visitors will land on your site because they are either searching for a phrase or they are looking for your brand. Once they have finished on your site, they may never return. Try to keep the relationship alive by encouraging (not with pop-ups please!) then to share their email address with you. Set up an opt-in mailing list or opt-in autoresponder to maximise the chance of having that visitor return to your site.

Eventually your child graduates and pursues a career. Naturally, you would like your child to earn so much money they can help support you (isn’t that the point of having children?!). Yes you would love your child to work for a mortgage broker, or an insurance provider. Similarly, you would like to advertise credit card providers, insurance providers and loan providers on your website. But sometimes, it just won’t work.

If you run a site about cars, car insurance may be relevant. If you run a website about funeral homes, car insurance may not be the first thing on the mind of your visitors.

Remember that your baby cannot generate you a million pounds as soon as it is born (unless it is very special and talented!). Don’t expect your site to do the same. There should be a correlation between time the site has been online and the revenue earned from it – providing you have successfully optimised the revenue streams from it.

To summarise:

• Make sure you have fresh, organic content on a regular basis
• Design your site using sensible colour schemes
• Make sure you develop relevant link partners
• Resist temptation to advertise irrelevant yet high paying advertisements. Go for targeted ads
• Build a list of interested visitors
• Don’t expect to make millions on day one