What I have done and failed

Firstly, let me give a brief introduction about what I thought and learnt when I built my first website, and what I have done and how I failed to promote my website. That is one reason why I decided to create this blog. From then on, you can watch me how I will think, what I’ll try and how I will fail again and keep trying till I successfully promote my website. I hope you can learn a lot from my failure, as you may not have such kind of opportunity before.

Currently I’m doing medical research in United States. I love my work and have lots of creative ideas. One day I asked myself why not to open my own company. Then I spent some time to learn how to set up a company, how to utilize patents, how to promote my product and so on. I told one of my friends I’d like to open my company in the Internet. But he suggested me to create a website firstly to build up experience of doing business. That is why I create my first website MaPaGuides, which provides some exercises for parents to guide kids to improve their imagination and creativity.

Why did I decide to build the website MaPaGuides? One reason is it is relatively easy for me. When I was a child, I dreamed to be an educator. So I have accumulated lots of information related to education and have taught some teenage students to practice what I learnt. Now I have two lovely kids, I like to use my creative ways guiding them to read and to learn. So I think it is suitable for me to talk about that topic. Another reason is considering business marketing. As everybody has parents, the potential market should be huge. If I fail in such a big market, how could I win in small one? It should be relatively easy to succeed and can teach me more marketing lessons.

Before I build my website MaPaGuides, I had thought and done some things like these.

1) I believe people can earn money online without investing too much money. So for this learning purpose, I will only use free services to build and promote my websites. That is why I chose Google Page Creator and Google Blogger to create my websites and blogs. Currently they are totally free and my own advertisement is permitted.

2) I have searched how people can earn money online. These include:
· Build a website of your company and sell products or provide some services online to earn money.
· Sell products in ebay and other websites.
· Put ads (such as Google Adsense), search boxes, referral (such as amazon, CJ) or sponsor links in your websites to earn revenue.
· Earn membership fee from your websites.
· Find a job working at home online.
· Write some articles or ebook for sale.
· Create a blog and write articles for a special company.
· Ask for donation.
· Use many other illegal or legal ways with high risk or low efficiency to earn money, such as online gambling, participating online polling or ads click.

To do business, you got to have a clear plan of how to earn money. So my plan is firstly to earn revenue from advertisement and referral put in my website. In the future, I may sell my own ebooks or earn from membership fee. But my website is still in construction and Google Adsense refused my application. That is why I put some referral from Amazon firstly.

3) I have been thinking what people may be interested in and what useful and special information I can afford. So I did brainstorm to list all creative ideas I could think. After comparison and evaluation, I chose to provide some information about kids’ education not any products in my websites as said above.

4) Another question I was thinking is how many potential visitors I may get, who they are. That means how many parents are surfing online and where they are. So I used keywords “world traffic population” and found this website World Internet Usage Statistics. It says there are 6.6 billion people and 1.2 billion people can access Internet in 2007. Most people are in Asia (459 million), then in Europe (338 million), North America (235 million) and Latin America (116 million). Most of these people speak English (366 million), then Chinese (184 million), Spanish (102 million) and Japanese (86 millions). If one tenth of them have kids, there are more than 36.6 million parents who will be potential visitors. If I spend some time and money to translate my websites into Chinese, Spanish and Japanese (Google guy said translated pages would not be considered as duplicated contents), I may got more readers. That is why I added a translation tools in my website (Chinese translation may be added later and treated seriously as it is a fast growing market).

5) I know the most important thing here is how to let people know my websites. So I searched Internet and tried to find out how to promote a website. These include:
· Content is the king. So you got to build information rich websites. Your topic should target enough readers and be attractive.
· Make your websites ranking high in major search engines. So search engine optimization (SEO) is very important although google, yahoo and other search engines suggest you not to do SEO and may even punish such kind of behavior. But all of those top ranked websites do search engine optimization. If you are honest enough and don’t do it, your website will never get found whatever if your website is the best in this world. The reality is so ironic and so unfair. You have to yield to the reality, so do I. Then I spent some time to find out how most search engines work, what difference they have, how they rank a website, what kinds of websites they will ban (more details will be discussed later), how to do search engine optimization (SEO). I summarized them as below.
a. Select keywords most people use. You can use some SEO tools to do so such as Google Trends, overture keyword selector tool, wordtracker, Adwords, and so on.
b. Use keywords in your url, title, meta tag (keywords and description tag), head, body, links, alt of images.
c. Keywords should appear in top and key position of your website (more details will be discussed later).
d. You should target more keywords in your website.
e. Increase keywords density in your website but don’t get banned.
f. Get more high quality inbound links. This criteria is the most important for website ranking now.
g. Submit your website to major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and open directories.
h. Submit your website to social bookmarking websites such as Digg, del.icos.us to increase traffic and establish inbound links.
i. Submit your RSS feeder to major search engines, open directories, newsgroup and RSS aggregators.
j. Post comments in blogs, forums and other websites to get inbound links and traffic.
l. Answer question in Yahoo Answers and get inbound links.

· Besides search engine optimization, you can promote your website using many other ways as listed below.
a. Create blogs in major social websites such as Myspace to promote your websites.
b. Submit your videos to youtube to increase traffic of your website.
c. Give out free stuff (Freebies). But don’t forget to add the name and address of your website.
d. Submit articles, news to promote your websites.
e. Do link exchange to get more traffic.
f. Promote your website through email, but avoid spamming.
g. Buy traffic through ads, traffic exchange etc.
h. Promote your website through newspapers, TV advertising, using name cards, in community activities.
i. Promote your website using illegal virus and other means. Continuing…..