For a lot of people this economy has been devastating financially. Large companies who we use to think to be invincible have now gone bankrupt. From large auto companies like Saturn to electronics giant Circuit City, all the way down to mom and pop stores in our local towns.

When times are tough decisions have to be made to cut back on expenses or go out of business. One way I suggest to cut on costs is to build your own websites. I have seen companies spend tens of thousands of dollars to have their websites built for them.

One of the problems that comes with having a company build your websites is that you also have to pay for updates and changes. For small companies and especially mom and pop stores this just is not a feasible option right now. It is time to build your own websites and learn how to update and maintain them yourself.

It has never been easier to build your own websites. It use to be that you use to have to learn html code or other programming languages to build your own websites. Now times have changed and the technology we have has improved. Now if you can point and click a mouse copy and paste and type some words like you would on a word doc, you can build your own websites.

My suggestion for people who are new who want to build their own websites is to stick with a simple online builder. There are a lot of option out there whatever you choose make sure they have good customer support and that there is a staff of people to help you if you get stuck. Customer service should be available seven days a week because the Internet never closes.

I recommend not spending more than twenty five dollars a month on your hosting cost if it includes support seven days a week. There is definitely cheaper hosting plans out there, but from my experience you definitely get what you pay for in terms of customer service. I tried out one of the big companies out there promising hosting for ten dollars a month. My experience was less than satisfactory I was spending all of my time on hold waiting to talk to customer service.

So if you are going to build your own websites remember my simple tips. Find an online builder that charges twenty five dollars or less for hosting and includes reliable customer service seven days a week. Most of these companies will offer a free trial period so you can try their web builder out. I suggest taking full advantage of their trial to make sure you are happy with it before you pay for anything.

The first Thing is to set up a dynamic Presentable website. You need to ensure that your website is targeting your professional needs and looking better with your competitors. Your website is must be look that it invites your End Users to come inside, Keep in mind that your website look a consumer friendly website, your website rather than stopping at your Main page visitors are not good for business. You need to encourage conversion from a visitor to a paying End User.

Main page or home page must be following the landing page standard. There is some standard about landing pages. If you follow the landing page Guidelines your website conversion rate would be excellent. This is the page your prospect goes to when they click your Website or open your website.

The basics to a successful landing page Quality Guidelines.

First, you need to give the prospect exactly what People are looking for. You see, when it comes to landing page need to be a smooth 2-step process. For example, if your End User is searching for Sports Shoes then make sure your landing page with information and products about Sports Shoes. The worst thing you can do is send them to your home page and make them search around for the information. A high percentage will leave quickly and you get much lower conversions. Next, give them a reason to stick around. The World Wide Web makes it too easy for End Users to simply click away. Most prospects are looking for more information to make an information service decision. If you want more sales or leads you need to have a Good informative landing page. When you do this you’ll get the conversions.

The first Thing is to set up a dynamic Presentable website. You need to ensure that your website is targeting your professional needs and looking better with your competitors. Your website is must be look that it invites your End Users to come inside, Keep in mind that your website look a consumer friendly website, your website rather than stopping at your Main page visitors are not good for business. You need to encourage conversion from a visitor to a paying End User.

Main page or home page must be following the landing page standard. There is some standard about landing pages. If you follow the landing page Guidelines your website conversion rate would be excellent. This is the page your prospect goes to when they click your Website or open your website.

Small business blog marketing is something that anyone can do. Having a blog and keeping it up to date with the latest information is not hard. All you need to have is a plan and you will be set to market any type of business from your blog. Whether you are selling a product or a service, it does not matter. A blog that is marketed the right way will be beneficial to any business whatever it might be.

So you are probably wondering how you are going to accomplish this small business blog marketing. When you are marketing a blog, you pretty much do it the same way that you would market a website. It is going to need keywords, and content. You can write the content yourself, or pay someone else to write it for you. That part is totally up to you. However you will want to be sure that the content is decent and something that your readers will want to read. This will keep them coming back. Make sure that the content is written from special keywords that you choose. You will also want to become familiar with SEO which is Search Engine Optimization. SEO will help you to optimize your blog to get a better ranking with the search engines.

Once you have chosen the keywords, and gotten some content published on your blog, you will be ready to get it out there some more. Link exchanges are wonderful for marketing your small business blog. You want to try and exchange links with sites that are relevant to yours, but not in direct competition. If you try to exchange links with sites in competition with yours, you are going to find that many of them will turn you down in fear of losing business to you.

Paid directories are a big part of small business blog marketing as well. You can pay some directories to list your blog URL in their directory under the specific category that it falls under. However, some of these even have specific qualifications that you must have to get in. Follow all of the application steps, and you should be ok. Just do not try to submit your blog to a directory that it does not qualify for, or fit in.

Another important thing to remember when you are into small business blog marketing is that if anyone leaves you a comment on your blog, you should acknowledge it and respond. You can also comment on other blogs that are relevant to yours, and leave a link to your blog as well. This will help bring in visitors to your blog, and you will begin to see more and more traffic.

1. Make sure that your website is very informative. Make sure that the articles you write are what they are looking for. Do not just tell them things that they already know about or something that they can find in other websites. Do not ever copy and paste things you read in other sites.

2. Proofread, proofread and proofread. You will lose readers if they see a lot of errors in grammar or typographical errors. Make sure also that your contents are accurate. Giving wrong information will lessen your credibility.

3. Make your site easy to read. Do not write long articles. If you have a lot to say, write them in several short paragraphs. You can also use bulleted forms. They are easier to read. Remember, people who search on the internet do not have much time to spend.

4. Write articles using tips or ‘how to’ formats. These are usually what people look for. These give readers directly what they need. You can write tips for gaining this or achieving that. Or you can write how to choose this or how to build that.

5. Regularly add new things to your site. Add polls or surveys. People like answering short surveys or polls. Just make sure you give the results after a specific period of time so they would know they did not waste time answering them.

6. Choose keywords carefully. Instead of using single keywords, use keyword phrases. Keyword phrases will give better rankings in search engines than single ones.

7. Do not overstuff your articles with keywords. Search engines will likely classify them as spam so you lose your chances of being found by searchers. Instead of overstuffing, use variations of your keywords.

8. Use meta tags. These are the codes that only search engines see. They give your page an accurate description so it won’t be considered as spam.

9. Create links with other websites related to yours. This will allow you to attract their readers to visit your site as well. Make sure though that you only link with credible sites. Linking with sites that are not reliable will also make your site less credible.

10. Offer promotional gimmicks like giving freebies. Freebies can help increase traffic to your website. Everybody loves freebies, right? Freebies could be downloadable software or free tickets for contests or raffles.

Creating RSS Feeds; RSS Feeds are made in XML which is a language like HTML but a lot more structured, you don’t need to know how to write XML to use RSS Feeds, as most software you may use will create them automatically. Such as WordPress, TypePad. And many web 2.0 sites like Squidoo and HubPages will automatically include an RSS Feed.

RSS Readers; An “RSS Reader”, “Feed Reader”, or “Aggregator” is a web based or desktop based program that allows you to subscribe to RSS Feeds and get updates whenever they change.

RSS Directory; These are directory’s that read and aggregate RSS Feeds that have been submitted to them, just like a web directory collects links to website and article directory’s collect articles these sites collect and store published RSS Feeds.

Using RSS For Subscriber Content Delivery; If you setup or run a Blog it is common place now that a percentage of people will subscribe via RSS to get updates from your Blog. People that subscribe via RSS will be good readers and unlike email marketing there is a lot less information competing for their attention and can generate you some good repeat traffic.

Using RSS For Link Building; By submitting you feeds to RSS Directory’s every time you submit new content to your site, it will be syndicated across all the directory’s and give you a link back to your website which will help you in the search engines.

Using RSS For Cross Site Syndication; If you run multiple websites and you want to post the same article to all of them, then you could setup your WordPress Blog in way to do this with RSS, you would want to get 2 free plug-ins for this one is called “wp-o-matic” which will collect the feeds, and another one called “Dual Feeds” which will allow you publish full feeds instead of just snippets. That way you can set it up to copy all articles from one of your Blogs to all the others.