Part 2 of Complete Guide To Making Money With Your Website

Making money with your future site

So now you have found a topic that you like to write about and you have an idea how to approach it in a unique way to offer some unique benefits to the visitors of your site.

You did your keyword research and found a couple of popular phrases that people look for and you have an idea how you can satisfy this demand for information.

Final Check Ups

Double check your keywords and phrases to see what sites rank well for them. Your site will compete with these sites later on. Are you able to compete?

There are no general rules when or if you can compete with a certain site. It all depends how unique your approach is and the value your site will offer to visitors. You can email me to hear my opinion about your approach.

If you realize you won’t be able to compete either narrow the topic or focus on some other aspects related to the topic. Your keyword research data should give you new inspiration what people are looking for.


Making money with your site

Of course you want to earn money with your site so here comes a quick overview of what you can do to make money without selling physical products.

Advertising:

- PPC: Pay per click advertising like Google Adsense. You get paid as soon as someone clicks on an advertising banner on your site.
- PPL: Pay per lead means you get paid if you send someone from your site to another site and this person completes an online survey for example.
- PPS: Pay per sale means you get paid for every sale that results from a person that you send to another site.

Sell an info product:

This is what I could have done with this guide in which I share my knowledge with people who want to learn about this topic. You can sell information products in whatever niche you are an expert in or think you know something other people might find useful. Here is an article about eBooks / info products.

Affiliate Networks

Sign up with affiliate networks such as Link Share or Commission Junction and do some research on how many companies offer products that you could advertise on your site and would be relevant for visitors of your site.

If you can’t find any products you might consider picking another topic or solely focus on Google Adsense which provides more or less relevant advertising for all sorts of topics. In general the best way is to work in a niche and use both Adsense and affiliates to make money.

Adsense is so popular because it is so easy to use:

1. Go to the AdSense website.
2. Copy a little snippet of code to your website.
3. Get relevant advertising on your website from Google and make money with each click.

Planning the live site

Besides the technical aspect of having a website, which is no big deal we get to that later, you will have to think about where you will get your visitors from. You can have the greatest, most beautiful website that won’t make you any money if nobody knows about it.

The magic word is SEO, search engine optimization which is basically the art of making search engines rank your website well in their search results. In the following chapters we will always come back to SEO because it plays such an important role right now. Search engines are the primary source of traffic for all established websites and because the search engine market is dominated by one search engine it is all about ranking well in Google at the moment.

But don’t worry you are well prepared and this is where your keyword research comes into the game. You will want to create a website around some of the keywords or key phrases that you found and that were popular, but also had the least amount of competition.



Selecting a domain name and webhost



Picking a domain name

Think well about your domain name. If possible it should have the most important keyword you are targeting in it and it should be short and catchy that people can remember it. For most of my sites I spent one or two days checking for available domains before I made a decision.

If you have a name that is made up of two words you can write them together like thailandtrips.com. They are still easy to read for people but if they get longer think about using dashes to enhance the readability. For example thailandislandtrips.com is really a mess to read while thailand-island-trips.com isn’t.

Don’t got for anything longer than three words and I would always recommend that you try to get the .com domain. Everybody thinks about .com when they hear about a website address. I always register the version with separating dashes and without, just to make sure people won’t type it wrong if they have heard the name.

You might also think about common spelling mistakes and get the domains for that.
Top registrars and web hosting companies

There are many, many websites out there that offer you web hosting and domain registration services. I had, like many others, very bad experiences before with several domain registrars and hosting companies.

Many of them oversell the webspace and your site will load slow, the support service won’t reply for two days even though your site is down and you lose money…. I could write a couple of pages about the problems me and some friends had with bad hosting companies out there. Some are too expensive and one actually just took off with my money.

To help you out with that here is a list of services I used and use since 2000 and I can recommend. All of them offer “one click install” services that will make your life so much easier and help you to easily set up your website in a few moments without any technical knowledge. I will walk you through this in the next chapters step by step.

So lets get started and have a look at the first step of running your business online. Getting a domain name.

You should usually separate registrars and web hosting because if you are unhappy with one of them you don’t have the hassle of moving both the domains and your websites to another provider. Registrars are usually also cheaper for registering domains compared to web hosting companies.



Registrars:

GoDaddy is the world’s biggest domain registrar and that has a reason. They are reliable and offer really good prices and a lot of handy extra services. If you are concerned about your privacy for example they offer you the possiblity to get a private registration. Check it out. I have more than 50 domains over there.

Network Solutions is another major player in the domain game. They have a lot of business partners and were one of the first commercial domain registrars on the Internet. Their easy to use interface is great for beginners and like GoDaddy they offer a lot of extra features that you will want to have later on when your site grows bigger.


Webhosting:

This is easy. Hostgator is seriously the most amazing hosting company I have ever been with. 90% of all my sites are hosted with them and their support rocks. This sounds a bit crazy but all my friends and colleagues sing the same song how good they are.

If you had as much problems with other hosting companies you appreciate that Hostgator makes everything run so smooth. Even if you go for one of the cheaper shared hosting plans the support replies to you usually within 1-2 hours. This is just fantastic because most other hosting companies only treat larger customers like this. The basic configuration is very good as well so you can pretty much run everything you want on their webspace and another huge plus in my opinion is that you can host sites for as many domains as you like on their webspace.

Two other good web hosting companies I only left because I didn’t want to pay for so many different hosts are Blue Host and Host Monster

Both worth a look but if you ask me I would always go to Hostgator.



Website promotion and strategies for long term success


Satellite Sites

Satellite sites are smaller sites that are about the same or a closely related topic to the one your main site is about. They are a good way to generate more revenue and in the long run all the sites will benefit from each other while you build your own little network. If you, for example, have already established a small readership for your Thailand bike tour website, you could start a website about cheap accommodations or camping grounds, as this is something that probably targets the same kind of reader as your main site.

On the other hand search engines love highly specialized sites and rank them well. In the long run your cheap accommodation website will get some visitors from search engines who were looking for accommodation and some of them will visit your bike tour website as well if you advertise it on your site. This effect of course goes in all sort of directions. The next thing could be to add a website about hiking, backpacking…

This way you build up a network and have a synergy effect with each site benefiting from each other.
Focus on only one site in the beginning and promote it well. It is much easier to promote other sites if you already have a well visited bigger one.
Promoting your site

Here are some ideas that have been great ways of promoting my sites in the past:

* Invest a bit of money and hold a competition or talk to companies they might sponsor the prizes.
* Become an active member in relevant forums, contribute good ideas and link to your website whenever it is appropriate. Be careful not to spam forums with your links, people will recognize it. Some forums and online communities also allow you to put a link in your signature. Make use of that.
* Comment on other blogs with a link back to yours.
* Write about other blogs if they have something interesting for your readers.
* Ask other blogs if you can write a guest article. For example ask the webmaster of an outdoor sports blog if you can contribute an article about mountain biking. You can place a footnote in the article making people aware that you also have a dedicated mountain biking blog.
* Interview renown people in your niche.
* Create resource lists of all important sites for your topic.
* Submit your site to important directories in your niche and general blog directories.
* Exchange a few links with other sites in your niche. Don’t overdo this because it will harm your search rank if you have too many “reciprocal” links. A few (10-20) will benefit your ranking though.
* Try to find other people who are passionate about your topic to contribute to your site. You can offer them for example their own e-mail addresses to give them some feeling of belonging to your site. Besides that they help you to create content and will probably also tell people about the site.
* Encourage people to comment. This can be done by posting something controversial from time to time or asking indirect questions in your articles. A healthy discussion on your site will contribute to building up your readership.
* Get to know other webmasters. They will help you out promoting some articles while you can help them too. Just make sure that both of your websites don’t compete and rather provide additional information about your topic or certain aspects of your topic.
* Show your personality. It is good if people get to know you over time. Like in real life this can create some sort of relationship that keeps your reader coming back.
* Write truly useful articles. Online and offline people appreciate if you help them and will either become loyal visitors of your site or even better link to you from their sites.