Website and general business help please?

lucky_me_2

I am in the process of researching a business idea of mine - it's not so much a money making scheme, more of a money saving scheme to help people in saving money whilst asking businesses to promote their services etc, using social networking.

I don't expect to make any money to start with as I would be offering for businesses to advertise their services for free but I was hoping that eventually if it is something that is successful I could build a website and sell advertising space to the bigger businesses whilst still offering free advertising to the smaller ones.

I can't say too much what I would be advertising at the moment but was wondering if I could build my own website and then offer advertising space? Is this easy? I know how to build a website but I know nothing on offering advertising space, can anyone help?

Horace

You could set up a site on wordpress - it is quite easy to do. You could have banner ads on the site, I know that I have added such ads on my site using affiliate links, however, that is not to say that I won't sell that space to someone who wants to pay me for it.

I use affiliate window and buy.at for my affiliate links and have various ones that I use from time to time. When folks click on the link they get taken through to the suppliers website and when they buy something I get commission.

InsideInsurance

You can build your own website but for the majority of people it is a very expensive route. I am sure I can show you a dozen sites and you'd get in the region of 90% accuracy of guessing which are self built and which are professionally built.

At the end of the day, when you want a professional service, lets say having a tooth filled, do you go to a dentist and pay them to do it or do you get some books out from the library and teach yourself how to do it? Why would a professional web designer be any different?

If you have a very basic, very standard idea and happy to have an off the shelf template that 5,000 other sites are already running then you can get something up and running that may look OK and be useable. If you want anything that stands out, has anything but bog standard functionality then self build tends to end up being the most expensive route when you consider lost business etc.

Suarez

You can have the most spectacular website in the world - but that would be useless unless you can drive traffic towards it (Which is the hardest part)

texranger

InsideInsurance wrote: »

You can build your own website but for the majority of people it is a very expensive route. I am sure I can show you a dozen sites and you'd get in the region of 90% accuracy of guessing which are self built and which are professionally built.

At the end of the day, when you want a professional service, lets say having a tooth filled, do you go to a dentist and pay them to do it or do you get some books out from the library and teach yourself how to do it? Why would a professional web designer be any different?

If you have a very basic, very standard idea and happy to have an off the shelf template that 5,000 other sites are already running then you can get something up and running that may look OK and be useable. If you want anything that stands out, has anything but bog standard functionality then self build tends to end up being the most expensive route when you consider lost business etc.

you can use

1) a pre-made template
2) build your own site
3) get a professional designed site
4) use a site builder service

but none of these can guarantee traffic to the site as Suarez says "its the hardest part"