You put up a website to attract clients for your professional service business. Maybe you even put up a sales letter - a solo web page designed to promote an information product, tangible product, or seminar.

And so far...nothing! No takers. No sign-ups for your ezine. What's going on?

(1) Get solid evidence that people want your product -- and will buy it online.

Even on eBay and craigslist, some products go unsold. Some markets don't buy online, download ebooks or listen to mp3 files: they shop in brick and mortar stores, buy books at Borders and listen to CDs.

(2) Make sure you have targeted traffic coming to your site.

If you have no traffic...well, there's your answer. But not all traffic is equally valuable. Your keywords, positioning or referral site may be attracting visitors who are outside your target market.

(3) Encourage each visitor to begin building a relationship with you.

Often visitors won't buy on a first visit. So you need to invite them to sign up for an ezine, an ecourse, or even a downloadable manual. Some people read my ezine for over a year before they buy from me.

(4) Showcase unique, meaningful benefits for your target market.

Many professionals focus on how they deliver the service instead of how clients feel about their new lives. And you need to tell readers why you're unique - why nobody else can make the same offer.

(5) Make it easy for your visitors to say yes.

Believe it or not, when visiting other people's sites, I often have to hunt around for an order form when I'm eager, even desperate, to get my hands on a product. Ask visitors to buy...and consider adding some bright red arrows to point them in the right direction.

(6) Create a sense of urgency.

Ideally, your product or service reaches readers by connecting to their pain and their toughest challenges. But you also need to suggest reasons for buying today - not next week, not later.

(7) Test...and test some more. For example:

Test 2 or 3 versions of your headline. Sometimes a news-oriented headline actually works better than a sales-oriented headline or vice versa.

Test backgrounds. I once tripled sign-ups to my ezine by changing the background color.

Test the small stuff. Once I compared two google adwords ads. I changed the spelling of one word in the headline - from midlife to mid-life. The hyphenated version attracted 40% more clickthroughs. Go figure.

Bottom Line: Even when experts create your marketing message, you need to keep evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing materials, especially your website. The Internet gurus share one passion: testing and revising. They're constantly enhancing their sites and their messages. And the rest of us need to do the same.

I think the biggest mistake many of us make when we set out to build a website to make money is not to think out clearly how we are going to achieve this under our given set of circumstances.

We immediately jump on whatever bad wagon promises the best opportunity and hope to be able to achieve the same results. While hope is always nice it is action that will bring results. This is why it is imperative at the outset for you to figure out what you are prepared to do and how you are going to go about doing it.

For example list your strengths and what you are comfortable doing. Then you are going to look for ways and opportunities that will compliment your strengths.

If I had done this years ago I would have been a lot more successful. What I did instead was jump on the latest greatest opportunity, then when I would get the material I would be disappointed because many of the techniques listed where not in my field of expertise.

For example it would involve me having to cold call people to make sales and this is something I hate to do. So your first objective when setting out to build a website is to build it around a subject that you have some relationship with. Basically something that interests you.

Start out broad and be prepared to be taken down different paths that may yield more positive results in other words do not be too ridged.

Research is critical the more time spent researching the better your chances of success. Visit forums relative to your topics of choice and see what people are looking for - then with this information start to structure your site.

There are many site builders out there that can help. The one I used took care of the hosting and also helped me to market the site. This was very helpful especially starting out.

To conclude figure out what you want to do then be prepared to be adaptable based upon what the market demands. Then build a site that addresses their needs and provides solutions and you will make money.

Just what is a 301 Redirect?

There seems to be a lot of confusion as to what to do when you move, delete, or want to redirect incoming web traffic from an 'old' web page to a 'new' web page. A 301 redirect is the most efficient method for web page redirection from an old web page to a new web page location. There is also some confusion as to how to handle the complete move or redirection from one web domain to another web domain. According to Google, "If you need to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results, we recommended that you use a server-side 301 redirect instead."

How to Set Up a 301 Redirect

Depending on your web environment, there are several methods to set up a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect is not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page or web domain.

.htaccess 301 Redirection

The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website. In this example, we are redirecting incoming web traffic from an old domain to a new domain.

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The .htaccess file is the most common method used for 301 web site redirection.

PHP 301 Redirection

You would place this code in a file at the old location.

Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );

Header( "Location: http://www.new_location.com" );?>

IIS 301 Redirection

• In Internet Services Manager, you need to right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
• Select the radio button titled "a redirection to a URL".
• Enter the redirection web page
• Check "The exact URL entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource"
• Click on 'Apply'

That is all there is to it.

There are other methods in addition to set up a 301 redirection which include coding for ASP, ASP.NET, Java, CGI, Cold Fusion and Ruby on Rails. The above are the most common that I've encountered. When set up correctly, a 301 redirect will preserve your search engine rankings when it is necessary to move files around or switch, or consolidate, domain names.