When you build a website, you really need to focus your attention on simple goals:

- Attract traffic (it’s traffic war out there you know).
- Decrease bounce rate (your headline and design matters).
- Get your message across.

Adding pictures or logos to your webpages is a key element to success with regards to the three above mentioned goals.

+ Attract Traffic +
Images are very quickly picked up by search engines. Pics do bring traffic because a lot of web users use Google Image search.

+ Decrease Bounce Rate +
A page which features only text might turn off visitors. Having pictures on the page, above the fold, will bring balance to the page and make it more attractive thus reducing the percentage of readers who hit the Back button.

+ Get your message across +
A picture is worth a thousand words. A good picture or logo will help put your message across in a clear way.

How to design your logo, pictures etc.. without using photoshop?
Photoshop is not free, you can only use a demo version for up to thirty days. 30 days may be enough time for you to get familiar with this design software but most likely after that time you will still feel the need to make some changes to your webpages.

Luckily there are tons of free design softwares available on internet. Just type Free design software in Google and you will have plenty to choose from.
In comparison, if you are looking for a more specific program such as a T-shirt design software the number of alternatives will be much smaller.

Tags: Free design software. Alternatives to photoshop. How to reduce bounce rate. T-shirt design software review. Decrease webpages bounce rate. SEO. Images on webpages. design logo. attract traffic

Proof:
Check Google search results for free design softwares for Mac. More than one hundred million results!!!

Many readers have contacted us to talk about their website’s design and its (future) ranking in search engines results.

Very few have asked us the following question: How to set up my website to grow my business?

Answering this question will ultimately make a difference between success and failure. Therefore, we have asked the team members of Autoweb Creator (and their friends and relatives) to run a series of questions to the successful business people they know. Here are their answers:

How do you limit the cost of attracting traffic to your webpages?

We only use Adword campaigns (Pay Per Clic) to launch a new website (for a period of 1 to 3 months) and for special events. We alos take advantage of Autoweb Creator hosting service with our website featuring on their high popularity webpage. 

When using Adwords, we review the cost of keywords and expressions every three days to ensure maximum impact.

The rest of the visitors to our webpages (70%) are sent by search engines, that because we use search engine optimized webpages templates such as the ones provided by Autoweb Creator.

We also follow the tips (available on this blog) to avoid confusion in search engines: Keywords are in headings, text and bold text at a rate of 4 to 8% depending on the competitors for each keyword.

How do you get in contact with your webpages readers?

They get in contact with us, we are only making sure that we are only one clic away at any time.

When they sign up for the newsletter (around 15% of them do), they receive more information from us, all for free.

This happens on a weekly or monthly basis and ensures that we are part of the landscape at the time when the lead will need our services.

We keep in mind that a new reader today might need our products next week or maybe next month if not next year! So we know that the timing is unpredictable and we must be there when they decide it is time to take action.

______________________________________

Related search:

How to set up your webpages to make money online? Making money online is easier than you think, follow Bruce Bucks simple tips to set up your website to make money using Google Adsense advertising program.

They have helped us to prepare this post:

Betty U. consultant at www.vietnam-recruitment.com Vietnam Jobs - Successful recruitment strategies for successful employers.

Bruce Bucks at www.fresh-cash.com  Follow his blog at blogger.com and get more traffic to your website

Kim and Loan at Ellen Clothing Manufacturer – wholesale clothing manufacturers - your clothing brand, your clothing manufacturer.

 Arthur at www.website-creation.info - Expert website creation in minutes – great tips for great webpages

Keywords / Tags:

Basics. Blog. How many visitors to my webpages? Grow business with internet? Mailing list. Make money online. How to make great webpages? Marketing online.

Money. Increase online reach. SEO. How to start a business? Traffic. Website creation free tools. How to recruit affiliates? Website popularity. Contact visitors. How to grow business online?

What is really great about working online is that all you need to get back to work is an internet connection.

Forget about the time spent commuting (about one or two hours a day for most American professionals). What’s great is you also save money staying at home.

All this results in more time and more money for you to take care of yourself and your loved ones. Thanks to what new technologies bring to us getting online doesn’t necessarily mean staying at home. Laptops, smartphones and tablet PCs are light and user friendly so updating your webpages with fresh content is getting easier and easier.

On top of that these new phones and new laptops look really sexy, do you remember of the first mobile phones used to look? Technology is now part of the dream job for millions of American men and women. The latest tech toys are used by all of us, young and old, male and female, it’s not anymore only a feature of the typical nerd.

It’s in this spirit that we have built Autoweb Creator, with light, free, user friendly tools to make webpages that we hope will help you work from home and promote your business.   

Related search: Why working online (from home) is the new American dream? American dream. USA free online tools to create webpages. Make a website. Make money online working from home. Smartphones and tablets. Create webpages free. America!!!

It’s traffic war. As you know, the whole web is fighting to get the traffic directed to their website. Why? Because traffic is money.

Did you know? You can build a website from scratch without any IT knowledge and then sell the website at the auctions for thousands of dollars!!

More: There are many ways to make money online! The most popular is to get paid for clicks on advertising integrated to your website.

Other popular ways to work online is to direct traffic to other websites (Amazon, Ebooks) through affiliate programs.  Learn how to make money online.

Related search: Google adsense, online advertising revenue. Advertising online. How to sell a website? How to make money on internet?

Sign up for www.fresh-cash.com newsletter (free) to make 2010 a happy new year for you and your loved ones.

It’s Traffic War!!

Being popular is the name of the game in business and on the net. If you are not constantly focusing your internet business on popularity then you are probably building a beautiful shop in the middle of the desert.

Don’t just assume that people will like your website because the design of your homepage is slick. For this to happen, they will first have to stumble upon it.

To make your website popular, you will have to work hard at it. Always have something new to talk about and send out on the social media / marketing platforms: Delicious, Twitter etc..

Internet applications make you popular on the net and offline too. Applications help define the uniqueness of your website.

A personalized application makes the difference between your site and others. That’s if it was thought and built to help. Ideally, your custom online application is:

- Useful

- Easy

- Quick

- Unique

- Free

If the application you offer on your website has all of the above specifications then it will soon be used by a large number of people. This is what I call a popular tool.

Popularity is the reward that you get for helping people. Time or money saved by the online users is the reward for trying the application, giving it a go.

Developing an application, may it be a loan calculator, a quotation system, a forum or anything else that works in a user-friendly way can be difficult.

Bringing something new to the world wide web may not require much imagination, but it certainly requires a good set of solid program / IT skills.

For any project of this type, feel free to contact Autoweb-Creator.com

Popular applications developed by Autoweb:

http://www.autoweb-creator.com Build your website in minutes

http://www.autoweb-creator.fr Create webpages for free (French website)

http://www.apparel-free-tools.com Online calculators for apparel manufacturers.

Related search: Launch a website that works!! Marketing your products and services. Smart tips you need to know before you start your website.

It’s traffic war!!

And if you are smart you want to fight with the right weapons.

There are millions of webmasters out there interested in getting their websites just in front of yours. Would you like the bad or the good news first?

The bad news is that most of those webmasters are very experienced and have lined up hundreds, if not thousands of links to their websites. They’ve been all over the web,,, twice.

The good news is that one webmaster or even a small team of them can only work very efficiently on a small selection of keywords. The combination of words is (almost) infinite, that’s the good news.

That means that there are unused great keywords or expressions relating to your business that will attract the targeted traffic to your website.

Get on with the job, read http://www.riches.com.au/choosing-keywords.htm this website seems to be a good starting point:

A part of successful search engine optimization of web-pages is working out what keywords your targeted visitors might type in to a search engine to find your site.

You need to find the right balance. It is somewhere between:
- the very popular keywords that you can not compete on (yet)
- the keywords nobody uses that will bring no traffic.

Feel free to ask any questions related to the choice of keywords here in the comments section.

Note: Anything can be changed on a website, except its address. So, make sure to study the market and study your competitors before you choose a keyword rich URL.

Related: Introduction to keywords. Why choose keywords at all? Key phrases versus keywords. How to research keywords? Keyword brainstorming. Keyword density of my web-pages.

Ever been to a market? A fish market or a street market selling such things as vegetables and fruit? It’s a very special world, lively and busy where all market players are pushing each others in order to get the best spot.

Internet is very similar to a street market in many ways. There are a couple of keywords that really would work very well for your business.
Type your favorite keywords in Google and heck the number of results sitting there: MILLIONS!

You are only the new guy. You had no idea you’d have to queue behind millions of already-existing websites standing there, in front of your customers and proud to be in the first pages of Google results.

Are you going to queue? No, it’s Traffic War!!!

This is the best topic ever discussed on internet: Moving your shop from a back alley to the main street.
These are exciting times, things happening now could never have happened before, at least not that fast.

Why be in the yellow pages when 10 competitors are on the coverpage?

It all starts with words, so we will definitely talk again about words in the next post: Choose the right keywords for your business.

Thanks to the followers of this blog. It is new on the block and we really appreciate your comments.

Feel free to ask questions, they will only help us to identify your concerns.

Related search: Business, basics of traffic. Launch a website, start a website. Create a website, marketing online. SEO, search engine optimization. Make a webpage.

Hi! This is part II of E-commerce: How to Start? (go to E-commerce: How to Start? part I)

Asking for quotations to get a company to make your website will take a huge amount of your precious time. It is time-consuming because you will need to explain exactly what features you will need in your website.

Creating your webpages all by yourself is quick and easy with Autoweb Creator free online tools. No need to learn any html language, it’s just user friendly and fun.

So let’s do it by ourselves! Let’s take this opportunity to make more out of life,  just like our grand grand fathers built their house, their shop, their farm in their own time and with their own hands.

What is the risk? What do we have to loose? Not much, really: A domain name costs less than usd 20. It only takes a few minutes to build your website from scratch with free templates at autoweb-creator.com

The difficult part, the one that you cannot buy (because nobody can guarantee such a thing) is the positioning of your website in the search engines results.

However they are ways to put Good Luck on your side:

- Choose a domain name that is keyword rich,

- Key in a quick description of your business.

- Make sure that your homepage is full of text with little code.

- Put a link from your website to an other (quality outbound link)

- Offer internet users to sign up for an alert, so that you can contact them as soon as your shopping website is fully functional.

- Submit your website to the 10 major search engines for indexation.

- Set up a Google Cost Per Click campaign with a very small daily budget.

Each single task above is simple. Just take it step by step. The good news is that you get online assistance from Autoweb Creator if you are stuck.

Smart Tip: Do the above early to gain a bit of profile history.
After that, just let your website’s homepage alone for a few months.

Now, you have time to:
- Become an expert in analyzing other websites titles, body text, bold text, Meta descriptions, H1 headings, links texts.

- Study your competitors’ websites and their link popularity in directories and search engines (Alexa, Google, and Yahoo) as well as in the social marketing websites (facebook, digg, delicious, YouTube).

If you want your shopping website to be amongst the most popular, then you need you website to be of the same caliber than these websites.

Do what they do and you will have what they have. Remember this: “It is possible if you work hard at it.”

Build your mailing list. Time is on your side: While your website is automatically collecting email addresses from your prospects as they sign up for an alert, you are setting up your shopping website in a secret sub page of your website.

Make it easy for yourself, choose a freeware such as OScommerce online shopping platform which is user friendly, easy to install and offers the right options for payments, products pictures etc…

When your website is completely ready, send an email to your email list to let them know the shopping season is opened.
That’s what I call a good launch for your line of products.

About the Author: L Lemaire is a internet business writer and partner of Ellen Clothing Manufacturer. ECM is a French clothing company with a factory in Vietnam. Related article: Start a clothing line from scratch.

Online business basics by L Lemaire

What is the best way to do business online? Surely an other one million dollar question! And the one who can answer this question will ultimately get any money problems out of sight.

It’s easy to do business online if you know what you are doing and if you’ve got the right partners. It’s also very easy to get distracted when doing business on internet because there is so much at hand.

Since the end of the industrial age, we are in the era of information. The unfortunate downside to this is that we are sometimes overflowed with information.

My personal way to stay on track is to apply old school thinking to new technologies. For example, I like to think of a website in the same way than a brick and mortar shop.

To me, the best way to do business online means first mastering the two main aspects of running a shop:
- Getting the crowd in the shop.
- Getting them to purchase your products.

Getting people in the shop should immediately remind of Hilton famous saying: There are three important things when opening a new site: Location, Location and Location.

That means of course that a beautiful shop in the middle of the desert will not generate any revenue. What is called Location in the real world is simply callled Position in the world wide web.

The position of your website is important, it determines the traffic in your shop. What your landing page is made of plays a huge part in the position of your website.

Play it safe: Use Autoweb Creator as a starting point when creating your webpages. Write naturally about your business and your customer needs and use the tools at hand (often free) to check that your text doesn’t over-use one keyword or expression.

In the next article, we will examine how important it is that your shop is easily accessible by a simple click from as many quality websites as possible.

To make sure that you don’t miss out, subscribe to Autoweb Creator RSS feed. We will make sure to keep you posted!

About the Author: L Lemaire is a internet business writer and partner of Ellen Clothing Manufacturer. ECM is a French clothing company with a factory in Vietnam. Read recent articles by this author on ECM blog

How to successfully launch online a new line of products? Yet another one million dollar question!

In this article, the author shares his personal experience in launching Ellen Clothing Manufacturer (ECM) online catalog: www.wholesale-clothing-supplier.com

This article is not targeted solely to business people in the clothing industry, it may be of interest to anybody getting started in the online shopping business.

Various references to the clothing business are made here, if you are not in this industry, simply ignore the references and pay attention to the method used by ECM and approved by Autoweb Creator.

How to start a shopping website successfully?

L Lemaire about the launch of ECM shopping platform.

Here we go again with all these logo drawings you’ve made and those shattered dreams of being your own boss. And apart from these drawings? What do we have?
The thing is these services, products and the way they are designed might be very popular with a certain population and not so popular with another.

So the designs, logos, colors and all aspects of the products (or services) are not in my mind the most important part of the business.

Here we are talking of launching a business. From the day you start your business, it may take a couple of years to become a solid, fully operational, self standing money making machine.

Focusing on the product may result in neglecting the other important parts of the business, the cash flow, the composition of your dream team, the way you lead the company.

Let’s start with the cash flow, without it the business won’t start.
The day you run out of cash, you are out of business.

Therefore, pay special attention to the following and make sure:
- To keep your customers happy and returning to you for more products or services.
- To find new customers who will enjoy a pleasant buying experience at a competitive price.

You are a customer too. Just take inspiration from the successful business and businesspeople of this world.
If you are running a manufacturing business, why not read about Henri Ford, the most successful manufacturer ever.

When it comes to advertising your products and selling them, reading Zig Ziglar or listening to Nightinggale Conant will make a difference.

At the time of writing this article we are in May 2009, and internet has definitely taken its place in our everyday life. If you are selling your products in Ebay, you are probably surrounded by competitors, same goes if you are one of a million showing products on a large shopping website.

My feeling, and also the fact that I have tried such platforms as a way of advertising my products, is that it is difficult to stand out of the crowd on someone else’s website. The reason for this is that you are not in control of the design and the general structure in which your product is presented.

Since running a business from a concrete and mortar shop would mean higher entry and fix costs, and because doing so might result in focusing on a limited location, why not avoid these pitfalls by owning your own shopping website?

Sounds brilliant, no? Right but, how will making my website stand out of millions of websites will be easier than making my products stand out in the middle of EBay?  Well, here, we are talking about taking control of your website and its ranking. This can easily be achieved by getting education.

By getting education I mean obtaining the power of using useful organized information which you actually apply to make your website come up in the best results of the search engines’ research. Start with Autoweb Creator webpages templates to make sure the fondation are sound.
Because of the huge benefit of a good ranking / good qualified traffic (with the credit card at hand), you can imagine that outsourcing this website optimization will be equally big a budget. With Autoweb Creator you can easily get started in seconds and get your webpages online within days.

A good website structure such as the one provided by Autoweb-Creator.com and interesting content (which may be a presentation of your business) is the best way to get started. Read part II of this article very soon and check the To Do List to see how you can successfully launch your online catalog with our step by step guide to online success.