“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

It is true for anything in life that in order to succeed well-laid plans must be prepared prior to execution. Likewise, when planning your website, a well thought out design will allow you to create a site that will be able to generate multiple streams of revenue. The single, most common reason why many websites end up as online wasteland is because they have not been planned properly and therefore do not receive any visitors. Webmasters of such sites who often begin their online businesses with a passion eventually lose heart and eventually stop updating their websites.

If you plan to create a website to produce an income, the crucial point in planning your site is to optimise it for revenue generation. Start by dividing your site into major blocks, ordered by themes. Build new pages and subsections under their relevant blocks. For example, if you have a tourism site, you might have a “food” section, an “accommodation” section and a “transport” section. You can then write and publish relevant articles in their respective sections to attract visitors looking for further information.

Once you have a broad, well-defined range of themes for your website, you can sell advertising spaces on your webpages to people or other companies who may be interested to advertise on your website. You can also generate alternative income sources from programs like Google’s Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing if your webpages receive visitors who view your themed pages and click on the ads. Since Adsense ads are generated contextually, the better your webpages are defined, the more relevant the ads displayed on your site will be. This can also improve click-thru as your visitors will be more likely to see an ad that interests them. Basically what you want is for the advertisement blocks on your pages to be relevant to the content. By keeping themed pages, this helps ensure your ads are relevant.

As more and more people flock to the Internet for a myriad of reasons, advertising on the Internet will become a critical medium. It is even possible that it will overtake the results currently seen for magazines and other various offline media. To catch this wave in its infancy, it is important to start building your themed website early.