Website – Now I know this is stating the obvious, however your website is the life blood of your business so learning how to build a website should be your number one priority. Learn it once and you’ll have the skills forever – as well as saving thousands of dollars in web designer’s costs. If you have never created a website before don’t fret. There is an excellent free resource written specifically for the newcomer that provides a step-by-step blueprint on exactly how to build a website and make money online. The ebook is called “Create Your First Website by 3:45 This Afternoon” and can be downloaded for free.

Domain Name – Your domain name is a technical term for the “address” of a particular website on the internet. A domain name tells your web browser where to look to access the pages you want to see. Most often, your customers will enter your website through the homepage so think of your domain name as the front door to your online business.  Every website has a unique domain name and costs around $10 per year to own. A popular domain name registrar is GoDaddy.com. They offer very affordable domain names and include a heap of other free features.

Website Hosting – Once you’ve completed your website and have purchased a domain name, you will need somewhere to store your content and images for the rest of the world to see. Your web hosting company provides this service to you along with other additional services such as email accounts, site analytics, SSL certificates and much more from under $9.95 per month. I have personally found that Hostgator.com offers one of the best hosting platforms and is also one of the cheapest.

Autoresponder – An autoresponder completes the 4 critical components of how to build a website and make money online. An autoresponder, put simply is a piece of software that enables you to send emails to your subscribers automatically. By writing a sequence of pre-written emails, you can then communicate with your prospects at regular intervals as well as automatically building your email subscriber list at the same time. I’m sure you have heard time and time again that the money is in the list. Put simply, the more people you have on your list the more sales you are able to make so never underestimate the power of your autoresponder.

If you want to know how to build a website and make money online, you must complete the above four components. To get started right away, the free website creation e-book should be your first point of reference. Basically everything you need to build a successful money making website from start to finish is detailed in the e-book. There is even a free series of 43 video lessons that explain how to complete each stage of your website design, right the way up to launching your online business.

The web site, aimed at improving the marketing strategy, should be interesting enough to make sure that the products or services offered by a business or company will be widely known in the World Wide Web. To stay afloat in a highly competitive business avenue online, creativity in marketing strategies is crucial for a small business. Web design techniques can also be of great help in making the site more interesting to generate more traffic. You should bear in mind those higher hits on the site means having more potential customers to get back.

Relevant and sufficient information should be posted on the web site. Leaving your readers clueless after visiting the web site is as good as publishing an empty website. Thus, content and creativity should be consistently merged in this field. Thus it is important to consider the interplay of content and creativity.

For a small business with resource limitations, investing heavily on web site maintenance is not a good idea. Since the internet can function as an effective tool  in boosting up popularity, and eventually profits, the costs of maintaining web sites does not always equate to an extravagant investment. You can take the route of hiring the services of a web design company which offers quality work at affordable rates. There is a wrong notion that seeking the services of a web design company  is costly and impractical. However, some web design companies can offer affordable rates catering to a small business.

In ensuring that you will have a very interesting web site that will serve as one of the marketing tools of the business, using Joomla and the many Joomla components can also help. It is a widely known content management system ensuring a friendly interface even for an amateur web designer. Joomla can ease the task in putting in the necessary content of the web site for your small business.  The good thing is that it does not require a stiff learning curve since expertise in web development is not a prerequisite and you yourself can make the installation. Joomla can ease site management tasks as well as editing tasks. With Joomla you  can post content on yourwebsite without the trouble of getting other people to do it for you. Running a web site online does not always come with a high tag price- the key ingredients are creativity and resourcefulness.