Your content

What do you have to offer

This part is the first step and probably the most important one, What do i have to offer that people would come to see ? What makes my website different and who else has a similar website, who are my competitors, what questions arise and how to solve them depends on the nature of your website.

What is my website about

Check the following list, You must answer yes to at least one of them, if not think of something and then you should be able to answer yes to at least one question.

• Do i want to make a personal website about me, my family, our football team, a non profit organization, or Just for fun ?

• Do i have a product or service to sell and i want to sell it on the internet, if so, can i really deliver that service, for example if i sell washing machines, can i deliver them and still give a competitive price?

• Do i want to promote other peoples products and services for commission, If so do i have content that will drive traffic my way to achieve that?

For a website to succeed you have to make people come to it, In case 1 and 3 you need something people want to read or see, in case 2 you need a product that when sold online will be competent!

Now that you have made up your mind take a few minutes to think of how you can provide a competitive product, service, or website, think in terms of the visitor, do you have something that many people might be interested in reading ? or pictures you think the visitor wants to see, etc...

Who are my customers, will they buy?

Also think of your target market, Do they use the internet? do you think there is a good number of people who would want to visit your website, for example if you sell a product with a target market "men in there mid 80's" you would probably not succeed since very little of those use the internet effectively.

Taking a look at your competition, Where do you stand.

This is a very important step, you should always search for the competitor, see what he has to offer and offer something different or something better, you will probably find more than one competitor (if you only find one that is bad news, it means no one is able to compete since this single provider is too strong)

Lets say you are selling blank CD's of the brand name RedColdCD, First you would probably search for the term RedColdCD, and see who else is selling them and at what price, are you capable of selling at a lower price (or at least the same price), then you should also look for blank CD's and see how much other CD's of some quality are selling, does the customer know that RedColdCD's are better and  worth more of his money, have yourself in the buyers shoos and see if your product will sell online, you should also check your competitive advantage for shipping those CD's, You can not compete in shipping with someone from a customers country, a German website selling in Germany will probably ship allot cheaper than you can from outside Germany, and visitors can find good suppliers easily through strong search engines.