I need help in setting up a professional website .  I intend to market
a marketing system to life insurance agents and individuals looking
for a career change.  I develop;ed this system over some 25 years and
know exactly what I want in my site but don't have a clue how to do
it.  I will pay fee or a %, whatever they want but this is a great
opportunity for someone.  I live in Georgia, some 80 miles north of
Atlanta.

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Request for Question Clarification by tutuzdad-ga on 21 Sep 2003 10:56 PDT

Are you looking for someone to set up a site for you to help you
market your idea or are you hoping we can help you find an investor
who will take your idea and run with it?

Regards;
tutuzdad-ga

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Clarification of Question by 211563-ga on 21 Sep 2003 12:47 PDT

I don't need investor...I have whatever funds are necessary....I need
help in setting up site and marketing it...i KNOW HOW TO place ads in
various publictions to direc t people to my website but I don't know
how to use email to market my site and need help there....

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Clarification of Question by 211563-ga on 21 Sep 2003 12:49 PDT

In the Life Insurance industry, I am well known.  My name is a
household word in tens of thousands of homes of Life insurance career
people.  Now its time to capitlize on tht name...I've never written a
book or even a mag arti le...I could have but it might have hurt my
agents and my ego wasn't that big...now I'm retired....

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Request for Question Clarification by taxmama-ga on 30 Sep 2003 05:54 PDT

Dear 211563,

Do you have the time to do some reading? 

If you do, i have the perfect site/system for you to use.
It comes with a detailed 200 page (or so) workbook to teach
you everything you need to know to make your site successful.
(Oh, if you're too impatient to read that much, there's a 
quick start version of the book, too...for people like me - 
that don't like to read instructions.)

The site comes with templates already designed. You simply have
to drop in your text. 

It comes with detailed information about how to market the site
and get it well placed into the search engines. 

It comes with a built-in system to store your mailing list and to
communicate with your audience.

It lets you send out newsletters. 

It lets you accept payment for products or services. 

And, shortly, they will be building in an affiliate program
that will let your customers or fans sell your product on their
websites, and receive a commission from you. 

It teaches you how to buy advertising online.

Incidently, within the system, if you decide you'd rather have a 
designer take over and create your site, they have a list of 
webdesigners who have proven themselves reliable and competent.

Oh, and the price? About what it costs for basic hosting.

If you're interested, please let me know.

Your TaxMama-ga

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Clarification of Question by 211563-ga on 06 Oct 2003 12:54 PDT

I sure am interested...please let me know...Randy

Dear 211563,

Take a look at Ken Evoy's Site Build It   
http://buildit.sitesell.com/main/index.html 

It comes with everything I've just described. 
He's adding more features every day. 
The cost is around $400 for the year, including
the hosting, domain name, member database and more.

You can see more details in a question I answered here,
and the Google User's reaction to it:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=246598

Using Site Build It, you can do it yourself. And
the manual is an amazing learning tool - for the web
basics and marketing information. 

I am using it for one of my sites.  

Incidentally, I also found something else recently that
is very interesting. With this software, you'd probably 
need someone to set it up for you, and you would need 
your own hosting and domain services, But if you want
to easily maintain an archive of your regular newsletters
and levels of paid membership - PMachine looks like a winner. 

http://pmachine.com/features.php

In fact, it seems to have features I've been wanting on my
site for several years - and expected to pay several 
thousand dollars to develop. The commercial version of PMachine
only costs $125.00. 

If you go the PMachine route, you'll need your own hosting. 
You can get that from Ventures Online for about $8.00 per month.
http://venturesonline.com/

You can get the URL - your domain name, from 
http://www.godaddy.com
for about $8.00 per year.

And you'll need to have your merchant account - but you can 
use these services without monthly fees.

PayPayl  http://www.Paypal.com 

PaySystems http://www.paysystems.com/IBA.htm

And if you have no familiarity with setting up your own site, 
may I recommend someone to help you? Take a look at Seresign
http://seresign.com/
She does beautiful work - very reasonable prices. 

Oh, if you want to read a good book on Web Site Design Made Easy,
get your hands on Boogie Jack's book of that title
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0895825732/
It's spiral bound so it lays flat while you're trying to follow
the instructions. 


Or if you want the newer version of it (I just got my copy), ask
Boogie Jack himself. Amazon won't have it for quite a while. 
(And it's not even up on the Boogie Jack site yet because Dennis
practically sold out the first print run.)
http://boogiejack.com/book/index.html

Going either of these directions will save you a ton of time and
money. I wish these options were available when I was starting out.
Now, I have so many pages and databases to convert.

Best wishes,

Your TaxMama-ga

As always, outstanding work...for the results, this is the cheapest
service on the net....I  can easily say that the people that answer
these questions have made my life bearable and lord knows how much
money...thank you all

Try the website www.creativemoonlighter.com. I have posted several
projects there and always got great results at a reasonable price.

Hello 211563-ga,

You've got me intrigued. It sounds like you want to try out the
"online waters" with a system that worked for you offline. If your
marketing concept is based on quality information, the internet is
probably a good candidate for you to make some extra $$.  That you
"developed this system over some 25 years and know exactly what I want
in my site" also helps quite a bit as well but with a few
clarifications.

On the internet, search engines are the marketing mediums. People go
to search engines, like google, and type in queries when they are
looking for something.  Since the person is already predisposed to
*need/want* these things, traffic from search engines (and directories
such as yahoo or dmoz) results in very high sales %. In this way you
can think of a search engine as an online sort of equivalent to a
searchable yellow pages.

You mentioned email marketing in your clarification, which can be
highly successful as well, but is different from search engines.  When
you market via email you generally hire a company that has a database
of user tastes. This database is developed usually by purchasing email
addresses in bulk from companies that also provide demographics. For
instance, if an email marketer purchased a database of emails from an
electronics company, they then know they can send "spam" (unsolicited
email) to those email addresses related to electronics products.  The
hope is that one of the emails sent (advertising whatever product for
sale) will result in a purchase.

If I were to give an analogy, search engine marketing would be
somewhat equivalent to having your business listed in the yellow pages
versus email marketing which is closer to telemarketing.

Ok, with that said there are a couple of types of professional
websites:
(1) Free informational site - This makes its money through advertising
revenue
(2) Subscription Based Site - Same as a free informational site except
you have to pay a fee to view the content
(3) Ecommmerce site that sells a product or service.

In any one of these three cases I can't stress strongly enough that
you need to optimize the site for a search engine. That is, develop a
site that will deliver content to the search engine in such a way that
it is easy to read and also conveys the appropriate message.  Using
colors and sizes of fonts and also images can create an immediate
impact for email campaigns should you choose to go that route as well.

Regards,
Chris