Normally, if you want a professionally designed, custom-built website for your new virtual assistant business, you should be prepared to spend at least a few hundred dollars.

But, all that can change if you know where to find the best deals and the best designs for the lowest price.

First, it costs more to have a brick-and-mortar company design a website for you. Have you seen those newspaper ads that offer a 5-page website for $500? These are probably companies with physical locations. They have to charge more simply to pay for their overhead: office rent, designers' wages, advertising costs and so on.

Therefore, it would be wise to use a virtual assistant (VA) instead! As you already know, VAs often work from home so they do not have high operating costs like a big company does. On the other hand, a VA will be able to design images with quality similar to (or better than!) those of designers from big companies.

However, choose your VA with care. The best way to find the right VA for your project would be to go to visit the website of a VA association. There you can post your RFP (request for proposal) and have hundreds of talented VAs bid on your project, so you will get the best deal. You will also be able to choose your designer based on her experience, past transactions and client testimonials, so your value for money is secured.

Another route you can take is to purchase the Virtual Business Startup System, created by Tawnya Sutherland. It comes with several beautiful, easy to use templates, perfectly suited for a new VA. The templates are easy to edit wth the help of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs such as Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and so on.

Many offline businesses had taken their earnings potential to the next level after introducing their products and services in the Internet. But mind you though, despite the fact that some of them works tremendously, most just failed to attract new customers.

Why they failed and how they succeed? Continue reading to know what it takes to build a profitable website.

Great Content That Have Good Demand

Web surfers are looking for information which then drills down to the solutions. It is your job; as the business owner, to identify their problems and give them the best possible solutions. For example, a couple from US is planning for romantic honeymoon in Italy but not sure which place they should go. If you owned a five star romantic hotel in Italy, they are your potential customers already.

After doing some keyword research, you might want to write about "Romantic Places in Italy" which include all the romantic activities, nice shopping malls as well as pictures surrounding those places. You might also want to offer some romantic packages for them so that they don't have the hassle of managing the honeymoon themselves.

Results? The couple will be more than happy to pay for all the services you provide. Isn't that great?

Building Trust and Deepen Relationship

People buy from someone they trust. This especially true for online purchases since there are so many scams out there. Therefore, you have to bridge the gap with your potential customers as well as your previous consumers so that they will buy the products from you now and thereafter; and not from anybody else. Result? You can keep your loyal consumers and grab the potential customers from your competitors; both at the same time.

It's like killing two birds with one stone. But how?

First of all, provide friendly and personal information about your offer through great web contents. You can write some tips or techniques that will make their job much easier. Secondly, communicate with your customers & potential consumers through monthly ezines or newsletters. You can do this by using auto-responder.

Generate Targeted Traffic For New Customer

You can't expect your website to generate enough income of you don't put effort to market it. Having said that, not all kind of traffic will do, but super-targeted traffic will help. Targeted traffic is visitors that are interested in what your website is all about. This can be a couple looking for romantic places, family looking for great places during summer vacations or maybe some business person who has meetings in Italy. All of them can be your targeted traffic.

But how to entice them to visit your website?

You can advertise your business using Pay-Per-Click methods, such as Google Adwords. Besides that, you can sponsor some banners in other related websites or forum space to introduce your offer. Last but not least, you can use articles to attract them via article marketing. Either ways, you must keep your marketing effort to gain highly targeted traffic to your website.

You might have to spend thousands of dollars to buy tools to build business website but if you are on tight budget, consider buying Site Build It since it offers all the tools required (Keyword Research Tool, Auto-responder, Website Builder, etc.) under one package.

Here are the simple ABC's of web development.

A. Graphics

Graphics is very essential in web development because this is what visitors gauze your site if it is worthy of their time.

So what really makes a graphic to be effective?

First, the graphic should be small. Consider using images that are 10 to 12 KB per image because if you will use larger images, it will slow down your site.

Visitors to your site will likely to leave if your site takes too long to display so it is better that you use images that are attractive and easy to load.

Second, when it comes to graphics, you have to use images that have direct relation to your site. You would not display an image of Hollywood artist to promote the product you are selling, as this will cause confusion to your visitors.

Lastly, blinking graphics are not ideal in web development because blinking objects are really annoying and distract readers. More often readers leave web sites with excessive flash or blinking objects most especially when these objects hinder them from reading the whole web page.

B. Advertising

Advertising is lifeline of web sites and you have to handle them effectively to ensure success of your site.

When in comes to advertising, you have to remember two things, the number of ads and how related it is to your site.

The number of ads should be just enough to give room to other contents of your site. If they are overlapping contents of your site, then maybe that is why your site lags behind in web searches.

Next, you should only post ads that related to products or services offered. If they are related, your readers will likely to open the links to your ads but if they are not related the ads might not be opened.

In the end ads generate income but if they are driving your visitors away, then maybe its time to remove some of your ads and just stick the ones that are related to the content of your site.

C. Web Content

Content is also another essential factor in success of your site. It will be better if you have articles that your visitors can read on a daily or almost weekly basis.

Informative content will likely to increase your visitors as they will bookmark your site and then send your links to other friends and family members to invite them to visit your site as well. But for others to recommend your site, you really have to offer not just ads or graphics but rich and informative content.

For example, you are selling a product, it will be better if the site not just offer the products but also give tips on "how to-" like how to choose, how to use and where to buy.

Meanwhile, if you are maintaining a web blog, make sure that the site is readable and the topics being discussed are really interesting.