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Part of the Perfect Foundation Series

Create a blueprint for your website by incorporating elements of other sites that you like.

Make It a Hybrid

Many great websites nowadays are hybrids, meaning they are not exclusively a blog or exclusively a review site; they take elements from blogs, review sites, affiliate sites, content sites, corporate sites, and other types of sites.

Take elements from these various types of sites to form your own unique combination for your site. Select a handful of the components below that best serve the purpose of your site:

• Marketplace (affiliate, meaning they are not products that you company owns)
• Selling your products: Electronic
• Selling your products: Physical
• Blog
• Content: linear text information
• Content: coursework
• Downloads: software, PDFs, audio, etc.
• Audio interviews
• Videos, such as YouTube videos
• Community sites
• Discussion boards
• Wiki
• Search engine (when people can use your site to search for sites on the Internet)
• Reviews
• News
• Image portfolios
• User login areas
• Maps
• Data storage
• Tools
• Games
• Humor
• Affiliate
• Corporate site aspects (very professional, attention to brand and detail and presenting your company best)
• Web portal (parts of your site that are dedicated to telling people where else on the internet they can go to learn about a topic)

Make your site a hybrid of other types of sites. Use whatever elements best create the user experience you want to provide.

Sketch It Out

Once you have written down which of these elements you want on your site, you can start to conceptualize and sketch out the structure you want for your site.

For example, let’s say you plan to build a site that gives information on the history of lawn flamingos. You want to monetize it through affiliate banner ads and textual ads, as well as by selling flamingos in a marketplace area of the site. That means you want a content area and a marketplace area.

However, you might choose not to include an email opt-in in this particular site because you do not have enough relevant information to fill a newsletter.

Other Resources

Next week we will discuss silo structure, a type of site architecture that is great for search engine optimization when you have a content site.

If you sell goods ON your site — meaning that you handle payment processing — then you will need a merchant account. That is an important topic that will be written about in more depth in a later blog post.

We at Affiliate Classroom teach you a lot about affiliate marketing because that is the quickest way to start making money online. Getting a taste of success quickly is essential for many people to commit to building a long-term Internet business.

Get instant access to Affiliate Classroom v2 by signing up for our $1 offer at http://my.affiliateclassroom.com/.

Add a comment below if you have advice that will help others who are starting websites.

Select the Best Content Management System for Your New Website

Part 2 of the Perfect Foundation Series

Once you’ve bought a domain and hosting, you want to put some content on that domain instantly. Getting content onto your domain will get your foot in the door so you can build the site out into the distant future.

What Are Content Management Systems?

Put your site up online within minutes and be able to scale it out by using content management systems.

A content management system (CMS) is a program that you install on your domain to provide you with an online admin area where you can write and publish content to your websites.

Top Three CMSs: Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress

Three CMSs stand out among the multitude available to you are Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.

These three CMSs are open source, which means they’re free. And they’re popular, which means you will have strong communities to support you and provide you with tons of cool features. They all will give you the ability to publish to your domain instantly and build it out into a great-looking site that you can profit from.

The main strengths of each are the following: To make and publish a blog site as quickly as possible, go with WordPress. To make and publish a professional site as quickly as possible, go with Joomla. For long-term professional or community sites, go with Drupal.

Here’s a chart comparing their relative popularity based on the number of searches for them on Google:

Because these are open source platforms, you can download tons of add-ons created by programmers around the world for free. These add-ons make these platforms able to do almost anything you want, instantly and with minimal technical knowledge from you.

After you’ve installed one CMS, start inputting plug-ins for it. For Drupal go to http://drupalmodules.com/. For Joomla, go to http://extensions.joomla.org/. For WordPress go to the “Plugins” tab within your site’s WordPress admin area.

Plug-ins and Open Source

Even though plug-ins give you great control over making your site great, plug-ins are the most vulnerable part of your website. Read about the plug-ins you plan to use to make sure your site will be safe.

Overall, however, open source systems are in certain regards much more safe than commercial systems because everyone who uses the software can make it safer by sending corrections or “patches” to the CMS organization. The Obama administration website “whitehouse.gov” recently switched to Drupal citing safety as a key reason they made the switch to the open source CMS.

Installing Your CMS

You will have a GoDaddy domain and hosting account if you followed the recommendations of the first article in this series “Perfect Foundation.” You can install all of these programs within your GoDaddy account with no complicated decisions.

Download the free WordPress blog platform by signing into GoDaddy, clicking “Hosting,” then “Manage Account,” then “Your Applications,” then “Blogs,” then “WordPress,” and finally “Install Now.” Follow the same general steps to install Drupal and Joomla from within your GoDaddy account.

If you cannot use your hosting account to auto-install these CMS platforms, then follow these steps:

1. Go to joomla.org, wordpress.org, or drupal.org
2. Download the version you want of the CMS software
3. Unzip the file, read the instructions
4. Upload to your site via FTP — which was described in the first article in this series — and start the installation.

In Affiliate Classroom v2 you can read how to use CMS programs to quickly build revenue-generating websites. Get instant access by signing up for our $1 offer at http://my.affiliateclassroom.com/.

Part 1 of Our “Perfect Foundation” Series

Master these quick tips for picking the perfect domain name for your site:

1. Make it relevant.

• Make sure you have industry-related words.
• Make sure your words explain clearly what your site is about. Before you can choose the words, you need to consider what value your site will provide to visitors and exactly who your target visitors are. Then think of the experience your site will give your visitors, and use words related to that.

2. Add SEO.

• You would gain SEO by having hyphens in your domain name since search engines will see the words more clearly. However, people find it much harder to remember the site name when you use hyphens. Whether or not to use hyphens is a decision you’ll need to make on a case-by-case basis. (Note from editor: Even though the idea that search engines see keywords clearer when the domain has hyphens comes straight from speaking with an SEO web designer last month, many commenters to this article convincingly argue against the use of hyphens in domains.)

3. Pick words pregnant with emotion.

• An easy way to find psychologically powerful words is to write nonstop for three entire minutes about your customers from their perspective. Step into the shoes of ONE SINGLE fictional customer — the person who is your target — and really get into what their life is like, what keeps them up at night, and what they hope to do with their life.
• That step will get you into the mind of your customer so you can stream out words that powerfully affect you (now in the customer mindset): If you’re in the mindset of your customer and your customer is a guy in his early twenties buying your get-out-of-debt ebook, you can easily think of powerful experiences like, “When I go out with friends to dinner, I always order the cheapest thing on the menu and even that is out of my price range,” which you can use to communicate to your market that you understand their situation.
• Keep a notebook with you at all times — write down any powerful words or phrases that speak directly to your customer and their lives.

4. Make it memorable.

• Make it short (obviously). One way to keep your site name short is to find a phonetic spelling of a word or words related to your product. “Compaq” for example communicates “compact” and is phonetically spelled. It probably reduced the price of the domain name since it created a new word.
• Consider alliteration, as in the names Google and Bed Bath & Beyond.

Now go to Godaddy.com to look up and buy domains and hosting. If this is your first domain, just buy the domain and the basic hosting. Don’t worry about anything else such as concealing your identity as the site owner.

Next week, we’ll get into choosing the best content management system for your website. See you then!

Promotional: We also have a course on domain name selection within Affiliate Classroom 2 (ACV2), which you can try for 10 days for only a dollar — and then you will start getting the regular price of $97/mo. — at http://v2.affiliateclassroom.com.