Studies prove simple web sites can sale just as effectively as, or even better than, elaborately designed, phenomenal looking websites. Maybe you used your friend to make a web site for you and now you're sitting back waiting on the dollars. Perhaps you purchased FrontPage, Dreamweaver, GoLive, or another web site software product and have been making your own sites. Most people who try to make money on the Internet fail miserably, have you?

Let me share a another secret with you. It's not hard to learn HTML and CSS. It's not hard to make simple web page that can be very effective at selling. One of the problems with full blown software packages like FrontPage or Dreamweaver is that it makes it very easy to keep adding to and tweaking your web site until its way too busy to be an effective sales tool. I create the majority of my web sites by directly editing the HTML, ASP, or PHP code in a text editor. There are times that I will do an initial layout in a package such as FrontPage and do the remainder of the work using a text editor tool. This is especially true for pages that are interactive, like a page that contains a form to collect user data and populate a database such as mySQL, or a page that pull data from a database to create dynamic output.

Let me share one last secret with you. The pages you create to sell something are probably not very effective at selling, unless you're already successful, and experienced, at marketing and copywriting. When I first saw a sales page that had been optimized based on statistical analysis of successful and unsuccessful sales pages I was dismayed. I just knew that it was too simple and too plain to sell anything... I was not only wrong, I was dead wrong. I base my sales pages on this same statistically proven design, it's clean and simple and there's nothing complex or hard to about creating it. The main things are that you constrain the text in an area that's around 800 pixels wide and that you have a white background in this area. You can have a boarder around this body area and the page itself can be black or white. You can see an example at my web site.

I've given you three secrets that can make your web site more successful and more profitable. Don't just sit there, make it happen.