WRITING BUSINESS PLAN
Writing business plan comes high on your list of 'things to do' for a website business. In fact, it's the first thing to do, well before you plunge into the mechanics of website build and hosting.
You'll remember in your 'writing business plan' to balance the advantages of a website:
whereas you'll be lucky to sell more than a few hundred copies of a chapbook, work on your website can be read by thousands every month.
costs are a few dollars only.
lavish colour and design, much too expensive for poetry books, come as standard.
pages can be updated as often as you wish.
you can add a subscription service in the form of pay-to-view pages.
with minor changes, your site can be compiled into an e-book for sale or easier distribution.
website costs can be recouped by subtle advertising and affiliate sales.
Against the marketing needed to get your site noticed among the thousands, or indeed millions, that offer literary material today. Many strategies exist, but all boil down to two things: having good content and making your site friendly to the search engines. Large companies devote much time and effort to these matters, and so — without spending a dime — must you.
Content
By content is meant more than a few articles, or even your life's work. Your pages have to be genuinely useful to thousands of viewers, giving them what they can't readily find elsewhere. That need is yours to find, unfortunately — to research by thinking what you yourself are looking for, what fellow writers talk about, what other sites don't currently offer. Many niches have now been filled, and the obvious gaps that still exist — reviews of popular literature, a searchable index of specialist ezines — require a lot of work. You may want to team up with fellow writers or enthusiasts.
Search-Engine-Friendly Site
Search engine promotion is dealt with later, but all savvy companies (though unfortunately few literary sites) start by doing the following:
decide what market their site is going to serve, and arrange for relevant content to be spread over 30+ pages, each page being written about a particular theme or keyword.
use Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery to find keywords which receive good traffic but don't face impossible odds (no more than ten to twenty thousand competing sites in Google).
keep searching for keywords and adjusting plans until their site can be represented by 30+ optimal keywords.
write pages about those keywords, i.e. each page has proper content but also weaves in the optimal keyword in the required place and the correct number of times.
That may sound complicated, but it's only what thousands of webmasters are doing every day. And without that effort, frankly, your site is not going to be ranked well by the natural search engines and receive decent traffic.
Design
Search engines don't care about the visual aspects of a site — indeed can't detect them — but your visitors will. Make your site pleasing to look at, and easy to navigate, but don't go overboard on graphics — especially, please, on angels, roses, Flash animations, fancy fonts and the like. Your library will have books on graphic and possibly web design, but you can learn by simply looking at good coffee-table books. Small graphics, tables and cascading style sheets will serve you well.
If you do need royalty-free photos, consider these sources.
Getty Images. Over 100,000 high quality photos supplied on CD. Also fonts.
iStockPhotos. High-quality royalty-free photos: from $10 for 20 credits.
PictureQuest. Supplies nearly 500,000 images from 14 royalty-free providers and 35 rights-protected agencies.
Photos.com. 80,000 non-royalty photos and photo objects. One month's subscription is $129.95.
Design is a personal matter, but these sites seem to us worth emulating if you want something striking: