You can do everything that we have discussed so far without your own web site by using separate services. But as I have indicated, your Newsletters, eCourses, and Special Reports can be posted to a web site to give you more credibility in your field and give you a better chance of showing up in search engines.
More and more people are turning to Internet search engines to do research and determine who they are going to do business with. When people find your web site through a search engine, they are exposed to your newsletter subscription and special report offers. All of these on-line marketing programs work in conjunction to further the number of contacts with your prospective customers and build a better relationship. The better the relationship, the more they trust you, the more business they do with you.
Designing Your Site
It would take you years to learn everything there is to know about how websites can be built, especially with the constant barrage of new technologies each year. Even those in the industry have a hard time keeping up. The good news is that you don't have to know how to build a web site from scratch or learn a lot of complicated software to get started.
That is because most good hosting companies have template based programs that will write all of the code for you. You pick your color scheme, upload your graphics, and paste in your copy. It creates the web site for you. That's all you need to start. Remember that the reason for you web site is not to impress people with how cool a site you have. The reason for your web site is to provide the means to teach and create trust relationships.
This doesn't mean you should not take the time to do it properly. As with anything else in business, you need to create a plan. You plan should start with your navigation system and have everything flow from there. Even if you have the best information in the world on your site, people will not stick around to read it if they can't easily find it.
I usually create my navigation plan in a spreadsheet using the same type of format used in school for writing the structure of a book report. It becomes a fluid document that I can change until it makes logical sense and/or change as I add things to the site. It also gives me a map of how to link the pages together.