Every one of us wants to create a successful website. No one wants to fail. As a consequence of this many of us are out there looking for the silver bullet. Now to me the silver bullet lies within you. You are the key to your success. Of course this sounds nice but how can it be applied in practical terms?

Firstly you like anyone else go online to seek solutions. Your idea right now is that you want to make money. So you are going to search out opportunities that enable you to achieve this.

As a result of this you are going to come across a lot of information and the information that seems the most believable to you is the one you will choose to obtain. However there is also another element at play and that is emotion. The site that outlines the benefits that speak best to your emotional desires will be the one that you approve.

To build a successful website you can use yourself as the model. In other words when people visit your site are you going to outline the benefits that speak to their emotional desires and furthermore will you provide proof by helping them to connect the dots which will make it believable for them that they can reach the goal that they desire to reach.

If your website is built in this way where you genuinely help others achieve their objective then your site will be naturally successful. It really is as simple as that but that does not mean that the work will not be challenging because it will - but if you are determined and build you site with the visitor in mind then the rest is history.

As you know we are all fond of the easy things in life. We all like the path of least resistance. The easier we can find our way the better for us. The more complicated something appears the less we understand it and as consequence the less we like it.

With this in mind we need to approach the building of a website in a way that will avoid all of the above. Your website will need to be laid out in a way that understands the visitor's needs and addresses them clearly and concisely.

The question then becomes how to do this? When considering what subject to build your site around you will need to start your research on the forums relative to the topics of choice. For example if your passion relates to golf then you will need to visit forums where this subject is discussed.

Here you will need to look at what questions are being asked and where the people posting to this forum are having difficulty. Then you will need to get engaged and try and help. Here is how you could do this. Create a signature that links back to a free blog that asks the question "what is the biggest problem you face when it comes to golf"

On your free blog you could ask other questions. Your blog then can have a form where people can submit their questions. Of course you would need to offer them something to do this that will help their game and of course you will need to offer it for free.

Based on this you will be gathering actionable intelligence relative to your target market. With this information you can then build a website that addresses these concerns and provides a product that you are either affiliated with or that you have created yourself.

Now that you have this information you can build a real website that can generate a real income in multiple ways. You will want to build a site that is structured properly for the search engines and one which is easy to navigate for your visitors.

To conclude if you lay the groundwork properly then the rest will fall into place.

Some people say that using a splash page as your home page is a bad idea. And that's true. You shouldn't use a splash page as your home page for search engine optimization purposes. Search engines love content, and having a splash page as your home page defeats your purpose of ranking well in the search engines, if that is one of your goals.

A splash page actually is a good idea - if you don't use it as your home page.

For example, a splash page on a traffic exchange is an excellent strategy and it's actually one of the best ways to eke out results from traffic exchanges.

You can set your splash page as an extension. For example, yourdomain.com/splash.html. Then use that for appropriate marketing channels. A splash page works well to get a visitor interested in a site because it's consistent two-step marketing. Get someone to do something, and he is likely to follow-up on whatever you tell him to do next!

So go and create a simple splash page now and use it for marketing channels like traffic exchanges, classified ads, pay per click ads etc. Splash pages are uncannily effective when the situation calls for something less cluttered and more attention grabbing. For the traffic sources mentioned above, splash pages definitely fit the mold.

Hire a graphic designer to create a snazzy graphic for you to use on your splash page. After all, the goal of your page is to capture immediate attention! You can even create a simple Flash movie or even include a video there.