It doesn't matter if you own a simple blog or a complex web app, to survive you need to be mentioned on other news blogs and editorial news sources as often as possible. While you might look at being mentioned on news sources as publicity, in reality what you getting is far more important; you're gaining respect and acknowledgment. So next time you're thinking about how you can be mentioned on popular sites like TechCrunch, Mashable, GigOm, CNET, Wired, or any other on constant basis think about how you can build up on your reputation first and everything else would fall into their place much easier.

important: A full featured website that has done all the needed development up front and doesn't need to do much else is unfortunately newsworthy only once. If you don't need to innovate or improve on your perfection then there isn't much else news sites can talk about other than what they have said at the beginning. Take the examples of Truemors, Pownce, and Answers.com for example, they have not done any major updates or upgrades since the last time of their world wide web coverage. They haven't even redesigned their site and as a result you don't see them being mentioned on news blogs. Why is that? well, they don't have anything news worthy.

The trick of publicity savvy and business minded innovators is to draw a very complete and solid plan but release in phases. revealing all your cards at once doesn't do you any good but having something new to show for every few weeks keeps blogs on their tails as to what you have in store for them. Though most of the things you want to do are pre-planned but a multi phase release shows that you are constantly innovating under the hood, it also shows that you are pretty serious when it comes to taking care of business not to mention that you are trustworthy when it comes to taking care of people and that makes you newsworthy on a constant basis. Take the examples of FaceBook, Apple and Google, none of the news sites can't get enough of them, not because their are brand names but because they have something new that news sites can talk about. How do you think great brands are built anyways???

Today Internet is extremely crowded and polluted, and day by day it doesn't get any better. Many applications and blogs start and die everyday. A project you think is brilliant is already being thought and developed by several other groups and any day now they are going to beat you to the launch platform. But don't worry too much about being the second or third site arriving to the starting lineup, the road ahead is extremely bumpy and difficult. The faith of your online project is not defined by who launches first but by who gets it right!

By getting it "right" i don't mean the perfectly designed and developed site, nothing will ever be perfect, but "Right" as in what people wanted all along; "Right" as in efficient, beneficial, reliant and easy. Getting right is a guessing game because it's hard to predict who want what and if you can fit it within that need category, but is it?

Getting it "Right" requires lots of research, asking the right group of people the right type of questions, considering their well being ahead of your greedy demands. It is about understanding that if you give people what they want they will probably give you want you've been daydreaming about during all those long hardworking hours. But there are a few other ways as well...

So How can you get it "Right"?

1- Dummy proof everything!

The purpose of your site and topic of discussion MUST be visible. If you have a blog and you're constantly writing on your blog but no one can figure what you're site is about then that's a huge problem. There are millions of blogs that seem to be talking about everything, they announce news, business mergers, parenting, child care, beauty, cars and videos and podcasts, all in one little blog with a naive notion that the larger the broadness of the topic the larger audience they are going to attract to their site. CNN and BBC can do that but then again they have billions of dollars to make sure that they can, you don't!!!
Design of the layout of a site is one those areas that MUST be dummy proof. Making it clear where navigations are located, where each menu is suppose to take you, and how people can get around your site with ease. You must make registration forms something people would want to fill out rather than something you're doing because everybody else seems to be doing it as well.

Make content easy to read, whether it's the headlines, body of the content, static pages, and etc... everything must be identifiable and understandable. The easier you can read content the more engaged people will become in your site. Content is all about typography, from line spacing, size of fonts, choice of fonts to colors and what have you. Here are a few sites that talk a great deal about design and typography:  Link1  link2   link3

2- There are so many other things you probably have not considered yet!

I've read in many blogs that they didn't make the right choice when choosing a hosting company. they started with a cheap host or an unreliable one and as soon as they saw some nice traffic their  site went offline. This has happened to many blogs and it keeps happening to many more so before you jump on web business make sure to chose the right host, there are several cheap and reliable hostings out there, 1and1 or dreamhost are the two that come into my mind. if you're seeing a healthy dose of traffic you can upgrade to more performance known hosting companies like MediaTemple, Peer1, Voxel, and etc.

Load time is just as important as anything else. New visitors to your site have 5 seconds or less patience time. Meaning, your site should load under 5 seconds. Several things attribute to this cause. I don't want to become too technical, but the major factors are heavy use of graphics, a large number of database calls or queries, slow web hosts, heavy use of Java-scripts,  large home page size, large number of DNS calls, and the list goes on. You would need a technical help from a professional or freelance developer to solve many of these issues, so if you have somebody that is designing your site you can ask them to take care of the above issues as well.

If you're starting your own blog then there are a few choices you're probably considering, you can go with free blog apps like Typad, Blogger and BlogSpot or Open source CMS like Wordpress or MovableType or Drupal which sit on your own domain and server, or a CMS that costs money like another version of MovableType, and several others. Let me make it clear right here that unless you're trying to do extra stuff with your site, all of the above option basically do the same thing and if you can generate traffic then you are probably able to make money as well. Typad and BlogSpot live on some server off some where you'll never know, you don't own your domain and migration is hard not to mention that you can't customize all that much. Wordpress, MovableType and Drupal can be download, customized, and installed on your own domain and server, they are also expandable by adding plugins and other features. Though Wordpress, MT and drupal are free and open source but customizing costs money, you may need to hire a developer and design familiar with the program to be able to do everything you want the site to be. The costs are not that high but be prepared and do extra research.

You shouldn't start your online project with advertising and ad focused content and services. If you have a new blog or a web app and already you're site is bombarded with ads, it is a big turn off to the new users. Since you're site is very new and your traffic is very low your ad dollars don't kick in anyways, so save some face and remove those ads so the content and the substance of your site can breath and build you some reputation. Ads make sites really ugly, specially the google ones, not having ads at the beginning tells your users that you value and appreciate their willingness to visit your site and you're not just working on the site to make a quick buck but to help them in one way or the other. As your sites starts to grow and traffic is coming to your site in bunches (more than 1000 hits per day) then start adding ads, but still very slowly.

==

Above is a brief overview of what you need to do to be prepared to launch your website. It's basically what this site is all about. I've done many project and have built many websites and the above issues keep repeating themselves over and over when working with new clients. In early meetings i spend many hours explaining why it costs them so much to build or consult them on their web project and when i explain the factors involved then they slowly start to come around. i hope this helps you guys with your own projects.

I've been talking a lot about "everything is a process" and how you should incorporate this mentality into your every project, if you want to become successful! This article is to prepare you for the challenges a project might have, sort of like "what you should know before jumping into building you business"

Goals are a great thing have, they give you a target to achieve and motivation to achieve them but most often we disregard the challenges that we might have to face in favor of the sweetness of the outcome. The truth of the matter is if your goal is to make a $1,000,000 (1 million dollars) you won't wake up one day and have that in your bank account, the fact is you have to first make a $100, then $1,000 and over come more challenges, innovate more solutions to get to $10,000 then $100,000 and if everything works out then you achieve your first goal. It takes time and a lot of work, consistency and efficency are the absolute requirements.

But before you set a Million Dollar goal for your self, there are a few things you should know:

1- How well do you know your self?

• if you want to get into business you should NOT wake up later than 7am. I'm practicing to move my current wake up time from 6:30am to 5am. The Earlier you wake, the longer day time you would have to work. Contribute the early hours to answering emails, reading the news, making comments, discovering new sites and working on your blog if you have one.
   
• We all need to have routines, we need to be disciplined that way. Try to make plans for your entire day, hour by hour and stick to it. If everyday you tend to do different things that do not relate to each other then you are very confused. Organize you time and manage it within your abilities. After a while your routine will become natural to you and as a result your productivity will increase.
   
• Measure how long it takes to do the basic humans needs, like how long it takes you to eat lunch, commute to work, shower, shopping, and etc. When you are aware of the minutes you spend  doing everything you have to do everyday then you you can find better more efficient ways to increase your working times. Don't over kill your self, what i mean is taking a shower should take about 10 to 15 minutes at max but if you're spending an hour in shower then here is an opportunity to save 45 minutes and put it towards working on your blog, making phone calls, making new connections and finding more ways of making your business better.

2- Do you REALLY know what you're doing?

• if you're going to start a blog, are you familiar with the blogging world. Regardless what the topic of your blog is about there are several key blogs working in that category already, familiarize your self with them and everything they do, the last thing you want to do is to have a blog that has the exact same topic and discussion, what you want to do is to find out where these key blogs are lacking and start your blog knowing that you're filling a gap and contributing to the well being of the category. Having a complimentary blog grows much faster than a copy blog, over time when you have a lot of traffic then you can move into other blogs' category.
   
• if you starting your own web app (web 2.0 or semantic) project, then how well do you know the industry, you need to know how it works and how you're going to make it big. Promoting a web app has its own set of challenges and before you jumping into programming you need to consider all the roadblocks. Getting traffic is a big issue and before you assume that you're going to get a lot of traffic consider why people would want to use it and why it should become a part of their routine. The worst thing you can do when building a web app is to assume everything will workout on its own, trust me it doesn't. Always prepare with the worst case scenario in mind!
   
• Know everything about your competition (small or large). for example, If you're going to make something that compliments DIGG but you don't know about MIXX then that's a huge problem because if you don't know what everybody in the category is doing and how they are doing it then you probably won't be able to come up with a solution that solves big problems. You also don't want to be compared to other websites, avoid "YET ANOTHER WEB APP" attribute at all cost!

3- How well do you know BUSINESS?

• Business is a game, a dog eat dog world. Just because you can make a great site doesn't mean you can make a big business out of it. In business you have to know how to manage people, employees, PR people, your network and etc. If you can't manage people then you cannot attract talented people to do the tricky parts of your business, they just won't stick around. If you don't know how to make deals or negotiate to get maximum benefits then you're business won't have a chance to grow. Managing innovation, money, growth, revenues streams are a few of the other things you need to be very familiar with.

I'm not trying to scare you, but i'm trying to prepare you. remember if it way easy everybody would have done it, it's difficult and that's what makes it interesting and appealing. Now i only mentioned a few things you should know before jumping into muddy waters, there are many other things you need to consider such as choosing the right business partners, knowing your audience, optimum design, naming and branding, strategy, and last but not least knowing when you want to launch, how you're going to do it, and what you need to do to promote it. The list goes on and on, the more you know the better you will do.