Like everything else in life the more thought (time, money and effort) you put into your website design, the richer will be your dividends. A well designed website can open up multiple streams of revenue and help you earn vast amounts of moolah through several exciting sources. Through this article I will help you to understand how a well thought out web design can help you maximise your revenue.

Plan your site

There are so many websites that get turned into online wastelands since they were poorly thought out and poorly designed and as a result don’t get even a single hit in a day. As a result the webmaster too over a period of time loses interest and stops updating their site any longer, and it soon turns into wasted cyberspace. A site that doesn’t get hits, doesn’t earn. Period!

In order to avoid this you have to optimise your site to maximise the number of visitors. This will automatically help you attract more advertisers, like any newspaper or magazine that has a large subscription or a TV program that enjoys massive TRP ratings. The idea is have a site that’s an online equivalent of the “K” serials of Balaji Tele-films.

Build different sections for different topics

A very effective way of doing this is to break up your site into major blocks, each governed by a particular theme. Then start adding new pages and various subsections to these blocks. For example if your site is essentially a travel portal, divide your content pages into sections like “food”, “Lodging ”, “entertainment” etc. Then write relevant, interesting and valuable content for these sections. This will help you attract a steady stream of visitors who are looking for the information. When you do this, advertisers - be it hotels and restaurants owners or taxi-cab providers will be keen to advertise with you on your site.

Use Google Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing

In addition to this you can also effectively use search engine programs like Google Adsense and Yahoo! Search marketing to earn additional revenue. Google’s Adsense program will place small text based ads on your site and you will be paid as per the click through rates of that ad. It’s for this reason that the content pages should be carefully themed so that’s its easy for Google to place relevant ads on your page and visitors feel inspired to click on them.

Getting your visitors to revisit your site

Visitors who feel enthused to visit your site again and again do so because they have found something in your site that attracts and interests them. The more times you get people to visit your site the more trust you will be able to generate in them. And it’s obvious that people who trust your expertise and treat you as a source of genuine and useful information will be keener to buy from your site.

So try using these useful methods to encourage repeated visits:

o Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox: By starting a forum or a chatroom, you actually provide your visitors with a place to share their thoughts, opinions and beliefs and interact with their peer group. A sense of community will build up as the number of topics and conversation post increases. This will make people religiously log onto your site everyday to check their post and reply to others, so long as you are able to make your site look interesting and inviting.

o Start a Blog: Start a blog and update it everyday with news and stories about yourself or the industry you serve. Web surfers are usually very inquisitive by nature and will visit your forum on a daily basis, just to find out what you think about the latest occurrence in your field of expertise. A blog will also enable you to enhance your reliability and trustworthiness as you will be proving to your visitors that there is a real live person, who is communicating with them through the website.