Yes, you should care how your website looks. Appearance matters, though there are a good number of successful websites on the Internet that can make a convincing argument to the contrary. We live in an image-oriented society where what is on the outside initially counts more than what is on the inside.

Indeed you should always strive to put your best face forward; but should you spend more time concerning yourself with how your website looks than with what your website does, how it does what it does and how your audience values your product?

More often than not I have found that the average surfer is out looking for something specific and has no interest whatsoever in the design aspect of a website. They only care to know if you have what they are looking for, and they are not about to spend an eternity searching through your myriad cupboards to see what goodies you might be storing, regardless if your site is of award-winning quality in design or just a navy background with loud, yellow text. If they don’t immediately find what they are looking for they are off to the next merchant.

People are busy, just like you. They have places to go. They have things to do. They use the Internet for one particular purpose or another, and they do not make it a pastime to checkout websites to see which websites look better than which. It is only a competitor who might care what your website looks like, who might try to have a better looking website than yours. And while the two of you are busy trying to outdo each other, the merchant from an obscure town in Idaho who got a High School student to put up a plain, simple website with text, “2 lbs Idaho Russet Potatoes $1.99. Shipped Same Day. $2.95 Delivery — anywhere in the US. Click here to order” is raking in the $10,000 per day you’re costing yourself by spending your time obsessing over whether one shade of gray might be better than another to use as a cell background color.

Your customer cares about whether or not your product or service meets his/her needs. And they want to know this right away. They want it in their faces. They don’t want to to search through 25 pages of lead-ins before they get to the point. They won’t stick around that long to find out if you have what they need.

And you had better believe it! With their green packages, their bronze packages, their silver packages, their gold packages, their platinum packages, trying to sell you everything under the sun, making you promises they simply cannot keep, and wouldn’t try to keep even if they could, banking on how desperate you are to get rich overnight.

The only time it’s easy to get rich quick is when you’re scamming people, when you are selling them pipe dreams, making them think you have the answer to all their problems outlined in detail in a digital ebook or on an a CD or saved in some format waiting for them to uncover for the bargain price of $59.95.

If you’re okay with ripping people off there are any number of schemes you can try. As the saying goes there’s a new sucker born every day, so chances are you’ll find a few takers.

Otherwise, expect to put in some effort before you start to see results.

Some years ago, when software sales were slow and web development projects weren’t coming in, I went searching for ways to make money online and came across an ad promising that I could make hundreds, even thousands per week taking online surveys.

Well, I thought, I’m online up to 17 hours per day working trying to maintain my various websites, surely I can spend some of those hours taking online surveys if it’s going to help me pay the bills come the end of the month. So I started reading an ad similar to the one below:

Discover an unbelievably quick and easy way to give yourself a
big fat pay raise, without leaving your home or risking one penny of your hard-earned money …

Now, the ad I read was a bit more subtle; and on a reportedly reputable website. Not to try to justify falling for the BS; but when you are desperate you are “almost” willing to try anything, and I was willing to endure the hassle of signing up to join some website where I would be able to spend a few hours per day taking surveys. So I started reading the information to see what would be involved.

Then just as with the above ad which I found through a google adwords sponsored ad on my page today, I came to the end after reading all these claims about how easy it is to make a few hundred bucks per week just taking these surveys, only to find that I was being asked to pay a fee in order to get access to real information I was alfter. And at that point I halted and asked myself, how come these people know where I can find companies that are looking for people to take surveys but I don’t? How come this information is so hard to find that I have to pay them money in order to get access to it? If companies are looking for people to take surveys why aren’t they advertising in a more public arena where people can access their information freely? Surely they realize that the people who would take the surveys are people looking to make some extra money who likely don’t have money to spend to become a member of some website just so they can get access to information about how to make money taking online surveys, only to find once they pay their membership fee that they also have to this, that and the other to get a clue as to how they “might” be able to get a check in the mail for $5 bucks 60 days after they submit a survey.

I won’t pretend to know if these things work or don’t. I never actually joined the website to get the info; and I never tried to find the companies that are looking for people to take surveys on my own; but if I were to guess I’d say the real benefit of ads like these is to the person or persons running the ad. After all, if 1000 people per day fall for their scheme that’s nearly $40,000 per day they are making.

Just because an ad is displayed in the Google sponsored ads list doesn’t mean it is guaranteed to be coming from a reputable company. Anybody can use google adwords. And the more money they make selling their scams, the more they can pay to get pushed to the top of their adwords competitors. So don’t believe it “might” be legit just because it’s in the google sponsored ads. If it looks like a scam and it smells like a scam, click it so they lose some of that money they are making off of those people who still believe it is possible to make $100,000 per month every month just by following some guideline in some book written by some professor of economics, but don’t buy their product.

This isn’t even about healthy skepticism. This isn’t even about being gullible. To believe any of this, to buy this book and make these people rich would be downright irresponsible. If you have so much money you don’t care how you spend it donate it to a reputable charity so some starving child can get fed. These people go on the assumption that you are stupid enough to believe an obvious scam. They bank on their hope that you are desperate enough that you would believe almost anything. And you can believe they marvel at how stupid you are while they sit at their table counting their money.

Everthing below this line comes from a webpage I found when I clicked on a sponsored ad to see what BS I might get from a site promising that I could make $100,000 per month guaranteed.

James Bradley: “Loosers will always be loosers. You can tell them about my book and they won’t take it, thinking that quick money making is impossible. But it was me who made 30 million dollars last year - not them.”

Make money:

• without leaving your house;
• with your PC as the only tool;
• using a method that turns $10 into a MILLION in no-time!

• this is not MLM;
• these are not empty promises;
• you do not have to sell or advertise anything;
• you do not have to buy anything to start making money.

James Bradley: “The best thing about it is that it works automatically. You do not have to do anything and the money keeps flowing.”

Every single minute billions of dollars flow through the Internet. Learn how to grab them.

Often website owners look for ways to make money off their website users. But the average person, including someone who can afford to spend ten bucks per month, is reluctant to spend money on website memberships.

Unless you are already in a position to demand payment for use of your website, in other words you are already an established, respected, membership-fee-based website of the magnitude to afford a few thousand membership cancellations by those who didn’t realize you charge a fee and who refuse to pay to use your site, you should ask yourself a few key questions before deciding to charge a membership fee for use of your website.

Would I myself pay money to use this website if I was a consumer I was targeting?

It can be difficult to be objective in answering this question. Most of us create our websites with our aim being to make money, so we won’t necessarily be ready to admit that we wouldn’t even pay to use our own service; but more often than not it is the case that unless we absolutely need a product or a service provided by a website, we are not going to pay a fee to become a member. So having asked and answered the question of whether or not you would pay money to use your own website, ask yourself the next question:

Why would anybody want to pay money to use my website?

And here again it is necessary to be objective.

Before you rush to answer, exam your website and answer the following:

1. What are you selling?

2. Can people get the same thing you are charging them to obtain through your website free of charge elsewhere on the internet?

3. If people can get this same product or service elsewhere on the Internet for free, for what reason will they buy it from you?

Whether it is a product or a service, if you are not crystal clear on what it is that you’re selling you can be sure no one else will be clear, and when people are confused they aren’t likely to buy what you’re selling. So make sure it is clear to everyone what it is that you are selling.

As for whether or not people can get the same product or service elsewhere on the internet for free, and why they would want to pay you money in that case, it is not meant to suggest you shouldn’t expect people to pay you for something they can get for free. After all, it could be that the places where they can get the product or service free of charge offer poor service or are in some other way paltry by comparison and easy to steal customers away from. But it is important to know your competition, and to know how your product or service compares to that offered by your competition so that you can have a hope of effectively convincing users of why it is worth it to pay you the $25 you are charging them for something they can get for free or for a smaller charge. You should be able to state what makes you stand out from the crowd and how is your product or service better, particularly if your competition already enjoys some popularity.

Take online dating businesses as an example. Every year thousands of new dating sites are started, most of them by ordinary people dreaming of reaching the heights of success as sites like match.com; but the ordinary person with no money to spare for taking on so formidable a competitor will soon find out that a hope and a prayer just won’t be enough for their dating website to grow remotely close to the size of match.com.

If there is already one or more large website offering the same thing you are offering, unless you have the funds that will be needed in order to give youself a fighting chance, or you are a marketing genius who can make anything happen, it might be necessary for you to rethink how you plan to make money off your website, because someone else already had the 5 million people you are hoping will join your site and pay you to use your services, and you can almost guarantee that they are going to trust their money to a household name like match.com over your little startup dating website.