I received a nice email yesterday from a reader of O`Bannon’s Leap, Susan, who gave me some wonderful compliments (which I always appreciate) and asked a question that made me review how I was presenting information on the site. In her own words: “…and I always find a real gem in almost every post, but the one thing I haven’t seen on your site or others is a full ‘from A to Z’ walk-thru of starting a web site. From concept to paycheck. For a new and complete web-dummy like myself that sort of a guide would be like striking gold! I’m not asking to be handed an idea or guarantee of success, just something that shows how someone might find their idea and then take it all the way to a developed site.”

Well, Susan, you asked for it and I’m happy to oblige. To avoid any problems–such as tons of people all building the same exact web site expecting the same exact results as in the example I give, but in reality only creating a bunch of noise for each other–I’m going to go from A to Z for you with a fictional product. However, the steps and information will be 100% valid and exactly how the majority of my sites have come to exist.

Something to note here, is that what I’ll be describing is commonly referred to as a mini-site. This is not a SPAM web site, or a MFA (made for AdSense) piece of crap (from post #1 on this blog I’ve warned readers to avoid producing garbage sites and I certainly apply that to my own web sites as well), but rather a small site that can be 1 or a handful of pages max in size, and that offers unique and valuable content or tools for visitors. It should also be highly targeted to a narrow topic.

The reason I like building lots of small sites rather than large sites is that I simply have a wide range of interests and this allows me to keep myself from growing bored; which I would if I were writing about–or marketing–the same topic day after day. By building these types of sites I can work on whatever sparks my interest on any given day.

Step 1 : Inspiration

Inspiration can come in a variety of ways. Typically for me it is born from something new I learn about, often while watching the news or a documentary. I’m kind of a CNN and Discovery Channel junkie. I’ll see or hear about something and where most people might think “that’s interesting”, I think “that’s an opportunity”.

Another common method for me is when I solve a problem. No matter if it is something technical or even just learning how to re-screen the window screens in my old house. Whenever I solve a problem or learn something new for myself I see it as a potential web site; provided there aren’t already a ton of similar sites existing and I can offer unique content or tools of value to others with it, which will lead me into the next step.

For the sake of this example, lets assume that while watching a documentary on widgets somebody mentioned that there are numerous uncommon and widely unknown uses for widgets beyond what they’re intended to be used for. “Uncommon Uses for Widgets”, seems like an interesting topic that could make for a neat site to me.

Step 2 : The R&D (research and development) Phase

So I have my idea, “uncommon uses for widgets”, and now I need to research it. This is a 2 part research project. The first part is to see if there are already a bunch of sites out there that address these uncommon uses. Since the person in the documentary said they were both uncommon and widely unknown, we’ll assume that there isn’t a lot of competition online for this topic. There might be a few sites, and that’s a good sign actually that there’s interest in the topic, but there isn’t a saturation of sites so this is good.

The second part of my research will now be on the actual topic. What are the uncommon uses for widgets? Are they safe? That’s important to me, I’d hate to learn somebody got hurt or damaged their property because of something they read on one of my web sites. Do they actually work well for these uncommon purposes, or are they cheap and bad alternatives to the proper products that should be used? Again, all important to me before I’ll create a web site.

In doing my fictional research on uncommon uses for widgets, I found that they aren’t cheap or bad alternatives, just creative. Everything is looking good so far.

I’ll complete my research now by actually testing widgets in these uncommon ways. This is an optional part of the research, and can be skipped if you plan to pay others to do your research and content writing for you (many web masters do that), but since I do all of my own content writing I make it a habit to test everything for myself.

So, now I’ve done my research, found all of the uncommon uses for widgets and have tested each of them for myself. Now I’m ready for the development part of this step. I’ve documented my testing research, so here I simply begin to write the content for my site that will give detailed descriptions of what uncommon uses for widgets exist, along with my own experiences in using them. Once completed, I’ll have some very unique and informative (valuable) content for my site and be ready for the next step.

Step 3 : Securing a Domain Name

In my opinion, a good domain is easy to remember and related to the subject matter. I prefer .com extensions only, you can sometimes get .info extensions cheaper but a .com is still going to be less than $10 a year and will resonate better with humans (the traffic you want) to get any kind of future word-of-mouth referrals.

I also try to get the domain as directly related to the topic as possible, and avoid numbers and hyphens at all costs. Obviously, widgets.com is probably taken already, but since this site is going to be about uncommon uses for widgets, something like BeyondWidgets.com will work great and is more likely to be available for registration. Combo domains, where you combine two or sometimes even three topical keywords for a domain that describes your site focus are great–so long as you can keep them reasonably short–since they’re both descriptive and more readily available to register.

Once I find the domain I want to use and make sure it is available, I register it. There are plenty of registrars out there you can use, two that I use often are GoDaddy.com and NameCheap.com but you can use any registrar you prefer, just check the pricing as some are still bilking customers with high registration fees. Your domain will be just as registered and safe with an established registrar who charges you less than $10 per year as it is with one that charges $15, $25 or more per year so don’t be fooled into paying higher costs.

Step 4 : Need a Web Host

Like registrars, there are plenty of hosts out there to choose from. I like HostGator.com because most of their regular accounts allow you to host unlimited domains (web sites) under one account, and since I build lots of these sites that’s a real plus in both convenience and price. Small sites require very little disk space and bandwidth, so a small and less expensive hosting account that allows for unlimited domains can hold a dozen or more sites on it, all for the price of a single account with some other hosts.

If you’re planning to eventually build multiple sites then I’d suggest finding a host like HostGator.com who you trust and has this option available.

Quick Recap So Far

1) Was inspired to build a site about uncommon uses for widgets
2) Researched the topic, tested the claims and created my content text
3) I’ve decided upon and registered a domain for the site
4) I’ve secured web hosting for the site

While this may all seem like a lot right now, I can honestly say that once you get a routine for building sites setup it becomes a very fast process. In-fact, most sites I create now take less than a day to get from inspiration to up and running. The research and testing is the only real time consumer in the whole process, and if you’re planning to farm-out that work you could literally build several sites a day. I just prefer to do it all myself, not so much for quality because there are great writers online waiting to work for you, but a major reason I’m in this business is my love of the whole process.

Step 5 : Build the Site

Having a domain name and hosting account, it is time to build the site. In the interest of keeping this from getting too long I’m not going to cover the in-depth details of web site design here. If you know how to build a web page that’s great. If not, you should spend a little time learning about HTML and CSS.

There are also several resources online where you can find Free or Open Source web site templates to use. I love these because they’re often very graphically pleasing, well organized and easy to use. You simply copy-n-paste your content into them, edit the title, META tags and navigation links (if your “mini-site” is more than a single page) and upload them to your hosting account.

That did it, the site is now up and running! But wait, how is the site going to get traffic or make money? Isn’t that the point?

No!!! I can’t stress enough that if you’re focused on making money while you build your web site it is going to end up being a junk site that’s just wasting space (and reader’s time). You have to be focused on building an honest informational resource or useful tool for your visitors first.

However, once your site is up and running (as my example site is at this point), now is the time to look at how you will monetize it if that’s what you’re planning to do.

Step 6 : Monetize Your Site

There are numerous ways to monetize a site, the 2 most popular are Contextual Ads (such as Google AdSense) and Affiliate Products. Sometimes you’ll use one or the other, and sometimes you can use both. It depends on what’s available (affiliate products that blend well with your site topic may or may not exist) to use and your site layout. You don’t want the advertisements to overwhelm your visitors and detract from the value you’re trying to provide in your content, so how much advertising to include is going to depend on what you have available and how much content you have to mix it in with.

In my uncommon uses for widgets example, there’s plenty of content (since I did all that testing myself) and lets assume several vendors who sell widgets have affiliate programs I can join.

I’ve already decided that I want to include Google AdSense on the site, because that offers “targeted and topical” text ads that my visitors may find of value. I always prefer it when I can earn my money providing something that’s of real use to others at the same time, which is the main reason I prefer Google’s Contextual ads to most others at this point, because Google has gone the furthest in making sure the ads that get displayed are directly related to the topic of your web pages.

So, I’ve added some AdSense advertising blocks to my page, trying to make sure they are visible and unobtrusive at the same time. I’ve also joined 2 affiliate programs for widget sales. Because the AdSense ads are already prevalent, I’m not going to go very far in promoting the affiliate products since I don’t want the advertising to be “in your face” for visitors when the page loads, so I’m only going to use text links within the content of my pages to promote them. Basically, I’ll review my text content for good keywords or key phrases, like “widgets”, “plastic or wood widgets” and etc., and then create hyper-links around those keywords that point to the vendor’s sites using the special affiliate links they provided to me when I joined their programs.

Now the site is up and running, provides sincere value to visitors and is ready to earn me a little revenue. All I need now are visitors…

Step 7 : Traffic Building

This can be the hardest and most time consuming thing you’ll do, trying to build your traffic. But don’t fret because it doesn’t have to be so hard (sorry, I can’t make it any less time consuming for you).

The best traffic, especially for an informational resource like this widget example site is from search engines and word-of-mouth. Since word-of-mouth depends on the quality of your content I’m hoping I’ve done a good job with that already, now the initial traffic building methods I’ll employ are intended to make the search engines notice my site. I say search engines in the plural because Google isn’t the only player out there and Yahoo! & MSN can deliver lots of targeted traffic to a good resource site so don’t overlook them.

There are two ways I go about this. The first is getting some other sites to link to mine. There are lots of ways to get those links, but the quickest and easiest is to find directories online that are search-engine friendly and submit your site to them. With a dozen or so directories linking to your site it is a safe bet that the spider-bots of Google, Yahoo and MSN will find your site fairly soon. An added bonus is that if you find directories that get good human traffic themselves you’ll also get some human visits to your site from those links too.

The second way is the big one, I go back through all of my notes from the research phase and I now write 4 to 6 short new articles about my topic, in this case uncommon uses for widgets. I don’t get as detailed or specific in these articles as I did in my content writing earlier, and I try to make them lite-hearted and entertaining. The idea here is to spark interest in my topic in an entertaining way, hoping that readers will be interested enough to click the link to my site that I’ll include in the Author’s Bio at the end of the article.

Then, for the next 4 to 6 days I’ll submit my articles (one per day) to several online article libraries for inclusion. There are a bunch of them online, and really which ones are better often depends on your topic. Some have more of a technical based reader demographic while others have an arts and crafts following. Your best bet is to do a search for article sites, check out their front pages where they usually list what’s popular on their site, and get an idea for yourself if your topic will do well there or not. Just try to find 6 or more that you think are good fits for your topic and you should be in good shape.

These article libraries are dual-purpose, by adding a link to your site in the Author’s Bio you have another link available for search engine bots to find, and since article libraries are often popular (good traffic) you can get an instant flow of human traffic coming to your site from your articles. How much traffic will depend on the strength of your writing, the traffic of the article library and the interest in your topic, so don’t be too discouraged if you don’t see instant results. I’ve found that sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t get instant human traffic doing this, but I always see long term gains from it and that’s the key.

Once I complete all of this, I may do a little more link building for the site, but typically I stop at this point and move on to the next project.

If I’ve done my job well and provided an honestly valuable resource for readers it will get indexed by the search engines in short time, it may even pick up some free links on other sites from people who agree that it is a valuable resource–and the traffic will steadily grow without any more input from me needed. And if I’ve monetized the site efficiently without the ads putting people off, I’ll begin to see a steady revenue stream from it that corresponds with the traffic rates.

In Conclusion

How fast will I see income and how much do these sites earn me? I have a bunch, and they all begin earning some revenue within the first 2 weeks if I got everything right. As for how much, that depends on everything from the traffic growth to what kind of advertising and products were available to promote on the site. The best (and most honest) answer I can give to this question is that all of my “mini-sites” consistently earn at least $25 per month for me (once they’re past the 3 month old point) and some of them earn a couple hundred dollars every month for me.

One thing I can tell you is that once your site is past the 3 month age you should have a feel for what the earning potential is. In my experience these sites tend to reach a maturity (for lack of a better term) level around the 3 month point and seem to remain fairly consistent from then on. Sometimes you’ll see some minor rises in traffic and revenue, I almost never see any declines, and occasionally you’ll even get a major spike here and there if some very popular site suddenly links to yours, but for the most part by the 3rd or 4th month the site will level off and be a steady income (whatever it is at this point) for you.

You may even be able to pour some time (and money if you want) into promoting the site again at that 3 month point to boost the traffic and revenue levels. I never do, because I like the challenges of creating the next project more for myself, but I wouldn’t say someone else shouldn’t revisit the marketing of a site if they wanted to, it just doesn’t fit into my business model or schedule.

Once you form your own routine for site building, you’ll get pretty fast at it. When I’m not involved in other projects I can easily build 5 of these in a week. You might ask why I would spend a whole week working on them if each one only produces the minimal $25 per month in revenue? That’s a great question, and the answer is simple, because that’s at-least $25 every month from each…recurring.

Think of it like this, if I had the time and resources to do nothing else but build these sites for the next 3 months, and none of them returned any better than the $25 in monthly revenue that my current weakest sites do, at the end of the 3 months time I would have built up an additional recurring monthly income of $1,500 for myself with 60 web sites (5 per week over 3 months) of 1 or 2 pages each.

That’s $18,000 per year added to my income. My investment, 60 days worth of time and about $720 in domain registration and hosting fees. Of-course I’ll have to renew the domain registrations and hosting each year, but I don’t put any more time into the sites once they’re made, and with the recurring income it is a good investment in my opinion.

Obviously, most people (including myself) can’t spend every day for 3 months building up web sites like my example. That’s okay, this isn’t a “get rich quick” scheme, it is a viable way to steadily (at your own pace) build a solid secondary income or even an eventual full-time business for yourself that provides value to your visitors and has relative stability for you. I say relative stability only because there’s no way to know what the future will hold for anyone. Even Google could get rocked by a scandal and go under some day, so I can’t say with 100% certainty that Contextual Advertising or Affiliate Marketing will be a part of online business down the road, though there’s no indications at this point that they won’t. All I can say is that what I’ve just laid out for you is the “A to Z” of how I build the majority of my personal web sites and how they’ve panned out for me to date.

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