Part of the Perfect Foundation Series

Create a blueprint for your website by incorporating elements of other sites that you like.

Make It a Hybrid

Many great websites nowadays are hybrids, meaning they are not exclusively a blog or exclusively a review site; they take elements from blogs, review sites, affiliate sites, content sites, corporate sites, and other types of sites.

Take elements from these various types of sites to form your own unique combination for your site. Select a handful of the components below that best serve the purpose of your site:

• Marketplace (affiliate, meaning they are not products that you company owns)
• Selling your products: Electronic
• Selling your products: Physical
• Blog
• Content: linear text information
• Content: coursework
• Downloads: software, PDFs, audio, etc.
• Audio interviews
• Videos, such as YouTube videos
• Community sites
• Discussion boards
• Wiki
• Search engine (when people can use your site to search for sites on the Internet)
• Reviews
• News
• Image portfolios
• User login areas
• Maps
• Data storage
• Tools
• Games
• Humor
• Affiliate
• Corporate site aspects (very professional, attention to brand and detail and presenting your company best)
• Web portal (parts of your site that are dedicated to telling people where else on the internet they can go to learn about a topic)

Make your site a hybrid of other types of sites. Use whatever elements best create the user experience you want to provide.

Sketch It Out

Once you have written down which of these elements you want on your site, you can start to conceptualize and sketch out the structure you want for your site.

For example, let’s say you plan to build a site that gives information on the history of lawn flamingos. You want to monetize it through affiliate banner ads and textual ads, as well as by selling flamingos in a marketplace area of the site. That means you want a content area and a marketplace area.

However, you might choose not to include an email opt-in in this particular site because you do not have enough relevant information to fill a newsletter.

Other Resources

Next week we will discuss silo structure, a type of site architecture that is great for search engine optimization when you have a content site.

If you sell goods ON your site — meaning that you handle payment processing — then you will need a merchant account. That is an important topic that will be written about in more depth in a later blog post.

We at Affiliate Classroom teach you a lot about affiliate marketing because that is the quickest way to start making money online. Getting a taste of success quickly is essential for many people to commit to building a long-term Internet business.

Get instant access to Affiliate Classroom v2 by signing up for our $1 offer at http://my.affiliateclassroom.com/.

Add a comment below if you have advice that will help others who are starting websites.