Launching websites is one of the major businesses in the internet industry. One of the things I have learned from my past experience is that sites fail. It’s a learning experience. Every site has it’s own, unique, individual reason for its failure. Whether it’s improper marketing, unfinished website, maufunctioning website, bad content, or anything else of that sort, you should learn from that and not make the same mistake with your next website.

One of the most important things that I have always failed to learn from in the past up until now is to NEVER launch a website prematurely. Make sure everything is in working order, and looks good. Every viewer you get to your site is just as important as the next. Generally speaking, you hope to get that viewer to return to your website at some point. When a user goes onto a website, see’s it is maufunctioning, ugly, or unprofessional, chances are you won’t get that visitor to come back to your website anytime soon. The next time he comes across it, that visitor will figure that they have been to the website before, it’s not a good website, and he/she doesn’t want to waist their time going back.

Another thing that I have learned is to always have a marketing plan. Whether your marketing plan is to not market your website at all, or your marketing plan is to advertise with every search engine on the web, it makes no difference. It’s important to have a FLEXIBLE marketing plan too. If your website is unexpectedly getting thousands of organic hits a day all of the sudden, then maybe you’ll want to do a little less marketing. Or if you planned on getting organic traffic, and don’t get any, you may want to do more marketing. Just leave room for changes based on what you see.

One of the important things about launching a new website is gettting enough visitors to your website to make some good money, and hopefully have some returning visitors, as I talked about before. Promotions, contests, and other things of that sort are great for opening websites. Visitors like it, and will  most likely return to see A) if they won, or B) what the site is all about. You want to make the customer’s experience the absolute best it can be.

Link exchanges are another thing that work great for opening sites. Email a bunch of different industry-related websites, post a few threads on the different forums, and you will have plenty of people waiting to do a link exchange with you. Not only to link exchanges get you a little bit more of potential traffic from other peoples sites, but it also gives you exposure, and more importantly gives you links to get a page rank. Page ranks are very important because the higher your page rank, the higher your website is ranked in Google, relatively speaking. Google likes your website more than it does lower page rank sites. Chances are you’ll get more organic traffic if you can get yourself a high page rank. Backlinks are one of the main things Google considers when considering your website’s page rank.

One of the things a site must do is evaluate their different sources of income, and how they can expand their sources of income. Lets say a websites primary goal is to make money off of Google AdSense. Well, that website should also consider adding ads from Commission Junction, ClickBank, Blogvertiser, etc. The more sources of income a website has, the more a website can potentially make. Make sure not to overload the website with ads and sources of income, but have enough to make some profit easily off of the website. In my opinion, Google AdSense, and any PPC publishers (Bidvertiser is also very popular) are the best way to go for ads on your website. People aren’t paying what they used to for adspace with the economy at rock bottom like it is these days. So Google AdSense is definitely one of my favorite recession-proof tools for income.

Anyways, I would love to hear your opinion about my tips, as well as hear some of your tips for launching a website the right way. I hope you all enjoyed the article. Sorry it was lengthy.