Even when the overall real world economy is falling there’s always money to be earned online by anyone willing to work for it, and the process is amazingly simplistic. It just requires that you put in the effort, which is where most people I’ve seen give up failed.
I don’t care what you do or sell, or whether you monitize your site with sales or advertising, there is a basic formula to making money online with a web site that is basically universal:
Your web page plus some way to earn money on it (sales or advertising), plus quality content and backlinks from other sites to yours will equal indexing and ranking in the search results and traffic–which will bring you revenue.
It doesn’t get easier than that, and it really isn’t more complicated than that either. Yes, there’s a zillion little things that you can learn and do to improve your site’s performance on-page and off-site, but those are all just “in addition to’s” and not the core formula.
It all starts by having the above basic things in place. Once you have those you should be earning money with your site. And once you’re earning money with your site you can amplify each thing and start playing with those “in addition to’s” to make more money.
Web page
I’ve written plenty about building web sites and pages already, feel free to browse and search around here for those postings. Here I’ll just gloss over this by saying you just need to pick something you’re interested in and start building a site about it.
It can be a static HTML web site or a blog, whatever you want to do. Grab a domain and hosting and get the ball rolling.
Pick a way to make money on your site
Depending on what topic or niche you decide to build a web site about there may be affiliate products or programs you can join and promote on your site for commissions.
There is also always contextual advertising through Google’s AdSense program and the publisher’s network on Yahoo!. And there’s a bunch of other contextual ad networks too that you can look into and decide from.
Finally, there’s always direct advertising sales too. You can offer other webmasters and site owners graphic or text based advertising on your site pages by contacting them directly or having an “Advertise Here” page on your site for them to find you.
Direct advertising is great if you have a lot of traffic already on your site, but can be nearly impossible for a new site so I’d suggest keeping this method on the back burner when starting your site but be sure to revisit the idea down the road once you have steady traffic coming in.
Content
Some people find this to be an obstacle, but you need quality content on your site pages; and if you want the best reach for search engine traffic then you’re going to need lots of quality and fresh content.
Recently I’ve made a free tool available here for help with creating lots of quality article or blog posting content that may help you. It’s called Article Factory and you can access it from the forum of this site.
Article Factory is good for static content, but people and search engines love dynamic and constantly updated content even more so there’s another tool you can use that builds large pages of fresh content instantly based on your topic and keywords called NIMS (Niche Instant Mashup Sites).
Exactly what kind of content you’ll want to use and which of the tools will be better for you to use is going to depend on what you are building your site about and what visitors to your site might expect to find there, but the tools above should give you plenty of help to get your web site up and running fast.
Backlinks
Links drive the web. Everything is based on links and that’s why the search engines place such high value on the links pointing to a page when determining where to rank it in their indexes.
And links don’t connect web sites, they connect web pages. It’s important to think of it that way because a lot of people spend all of their time building links to their home page and then get frustrated when that doesn’t seem to help them very much with their search engine rankings.
The search engines don’t see links as connections between sites, they see them as connections between pages, so you have to look at it that way too in order to develop a strong link building strategy that will work out.
What you need to do is build links to your individual pages. All of them! If you really want to climb the search engine rankings (assuming your pages have quality content on them).
So, by looking at links as connections between pages rather than sites it helps you to view the link building process from the right perspective. It’s also good to think of link building as a multi-purpose process.
Every link you get has 2 purposes for you, first to hopefully bring you some human traffic and second to help support your on-page keyword targeting for search rankings.
I like to see link building as a sort of hour glass with my site at the center point and with each link existing both above and below my site. The top half represents my “reach funnel” from which human traffic can be obtained and guided to my page–and the bottom half represents a rising foundation of support for lifting my page up in the search rankings. Hopefully that isn’t too confusing, and here’s an illustration of what I mean:
The yellow block is my page, and each link I get for it is represented by a gray block above and below my page showing the dual purpose I see each link as having.
There’s plenty of places to gain legitimate links from such as: social bookmarking, web directories, article marketing, web 2.0 publishing platforms, blogs you comment on, forums you participate in… the list is endless for the creative.
There’s also several posts on my forum under “Link Building” with over 100 different resources for high quality link opportunities on low and high ranking sites, many of which you can use to get deep links to your individual pages rather than just home page links so that should give you a good start in developing a link building plan.
SERPs and Traffic
It’s easy to miss this, but your search engine rankings and traffic don’t “just happen” because you’ve put the things above into place.
By creating pages with content and getting links to those pages you have built your rankings and traffic.
In other words, at the end of the day it is you and not the search engines who is in control.
So it’s vital to spend some time learning the basics of keyword research in order to have the best chance of ranking high for the right terms.
You don’t need to become an expert, just get a handle on how to pick decent keywords to focus on from your pages and then use what you learn as you build more new pages for your site.
$$$
If you’ve done everything above, created a web site with some form of revenue earning, filled it with good content and developed lots of backlinks for your pages then you should be getting some targeted traffic very quickly…and some of that traffic should be converting into revenue for you.
I don’t care if you earn $0.01 or $10,000.00 — the point is once you’ve earned some revenue then you know that you have the foundation pieces in place. Now you can move on to expanding on them, tweaking what you’ve been doing, playing with all of the “in addition to’s” I spoke of early… testing and improving your site performance.
And all of that will be easier once you’ve realized that the biggest hurdle, learning how to make money online, wasn’t really that big of a hurdle at all. It only takes a willingness to do the tedious grunt-work required for getting those key factors like content and backlinks in place.
Email this post
