In my previous Post Challenges of Starting a new website Part 1.  I talked about my new website My Weekend Trip Planner and how difficult it is to get your website discovered.  It is very difficult to get that initial traffic to the sight especially because SEO is really hurt by the fact that the site is so new. It is important to build the traffic to your site at least initially through other sources then just search engine.  These ways can be things like word or mouth or paid advertisements.  One of the ways I have found that works the best is social media.  Social media is extremely important especially for discovering a website.  You need to use social media to create a buzz for example on My Weekend Trip Planner when I launched the site I changed my status on Facebook to announce the launch of my new site.  I also tweeted it.  I received 30 visits from that in 4 hours.  This is perfect example of you can use social media to tell people about your site hopefully they will then tell their friends and the result can be viral.  This will then increase the likely hood people liking to you and before you know have a powerful website.

I just recently built a site for this class called My Weekend Trip Planner.  It is a great website and I think you should check it out on a side note. Upon completing the site I realized that there are definitely a lot of challenges that need to be overcome in order for your website to be successful. Take my website My Weekend Trip Planner, it is a website tells people about great weekend trips that are located right next to them.  These trips are meant to be affordable and for people that can’t use vacation days. I think this is viral idea and it has a lot of potential.

The Problems

The Problem is having people find your website.  The internet is a big place and there are literally millions of website out there.  How is Google going to find you how are you going to be found.  SEO is essential, but when a website is created it has a lot of disadvantage that really hurt it SEO.  First, Google like sites that have existed for awhile.  This makes sense because Google wants to make sure that the website is some fake that was just created to rick people.  Another huge problem s since you were just created you obviously don’t have any links.  Links are the currency of the web.  It is essential to have a lot of links to your website this will really boost Google’s image of your site, but that takes time, but if no one knows you exist how are they going to link to you.  Finally a news site doesn’t have a lot of content because it was just created.  These are all issues that really devastate a website.  In my next blog I will talk about possible solutions to help get your site discovered.

PS You should visit My Weekend Trip Planner and submit a vacation.

There are tons of methods to start diagramming your business plan or ideas in general. Visually representing your ideas is something we’ve all been taught through this class. Here’s an absolutelyway to do so online:

http://www.diagram.ly/

It’s free, it’s easy, it’s intuitive, and definitely helps get a business model out on paper. There are plenty of other webapps or programs that do this, but few are so lag-free as well. It even lets you print straight from the page. Give it a try.

I had a fantastic internship interview this past break. While there were several takeaways from this encounter, one of which were my interviewer’s words:  “you need to look up and follow Seth Godin”. In case you’ve never heard of him, Seth Godin is a famous entrepreneur, author, and public speaker. And more applicably to us, his blog is ranked in the AdAge Power 150 as the #1 marketing blog out of 976 tracked. I’ve subscribed to his RSS feed and can tell you firsthand that even just over a week man’s posts are pretty incredible, short, and applicable. Definitely worth a look for all entrepreneurs at any level. Check it out for yourself.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

Many of us are starting websites in this class. Just yesterday I bought two domain names, and this process is definitely exciting stuff (for now).

A quick tip I picked up:

Don’t use godaddy.com to buy domain names. While a quick google search will provide you with dozens of more techy reasons, I can sum it up for you real easy: there are other sites that do the same thing, but for less money. I got one domain name for…four bucks using this one:

http://domaincityhosting.com/

Definitely worth checking out.