Making Money Online Is Possible
Making a website that earns $100 or more per month is something that anyone can do. All you need is the desire, a little grit and determination, and a willingness to learn from mistakes and the past experiences of others. If you have that, then you are ready to take the next steps to making your website.
But the thing about making money online is that it is not easy and it takes work. You can't just throw up any ol' website about shoe laces and expect to begin raking the cash like it is going out of style. What you are going to need to do now is find a topic, or niche, that you can build a website about that will be able to earn you $100 a month or more.
Selecting Your Niche: A Lesson In Keyword Selection
Finding a good niche for your website is the first step to creating that money making site. If you don't pick a niche that has traffic and has a way to monetize that traffic then you won't make any money from all the hard work that I will outline below. Your niche needs to be solid.
One of the best ways that I have found to tell if a site has both traffic and the potential to make money is to head over to check the niche in the Google Adwords Keyword tool found here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
It will look something like this:
Now you need to enter something inside the text box. What you will enter here will be your niche/keyword(s).
Let's say that I really like birkenstock women's shoes - its my passion and it picks me up in the morning just thinking about this type of shoe. I want to see if I can make a website that will earn a minimum of $100 a month. So I am going to type "birkenstock women's shoes" into the text book in the keyword tool. Once that is entered, I will hit the Get Keyword Ideas button.
Now the next part is going to be very important: you are going to want to change the Match Type from broad to exact.
This will give you an idea of the number of Internet users who perform a search in Google using the phrase "birkenstock women's shoes." It is important to note that not all keyword tools are exact, but Google does provide some very good data to their AdWords clients through this tool - so you can expect this number to be fairly accurate.
As you can see from the photo, this term is searched ~40,500 times a month, or ~1350 times a day. Getting the first spot in Google will get you about 40% of all the search traffic for a term, so if your site is able to make it to that spot you can expect around 500-550 visitors a day from this term.
This is a pretty good amount of traffic and is definitely a possible niche for you target if you want to make $100 a month from your website. Now you have to decide if you can make any money off this type of traffic.
Will People Buy or Click ?
If you can't give an affirmative answer to the question of whether or not someone will buy something from your website or click on a CPC advertising method (like Google Adsense) then you probably shouldn't pursue the niche. It simply isn't worth your time.
In this case, I think we can make a strong argument that someone doing a search for "birkenstock women's shoes" is going to be looking to either buy some shoes or click on a link that offers to sell them shoes if it looks enticing enough.
But can you definitively say that someone searching for that keyword phrase will want do something that will earn you money? No, but all you have to go on right now is your gut. If you can't trust your gut, what can you trust?
How Much Can You Earn?
After determining if your site is going to be able to convert traffic into money you need to find out if your traffic numbers, your projected conversion rate, and your goal of $100 a month are going to fall into place with your particular niche.
The way you do that is by taking the the number of people you expect to get to your site, multiply that by your conversion rate (the number of people that will do something that earns you money), and multiply that by the average amount you will earn for each conversion. The equation will look something like this:
Monthly Traffic x Conversion Rate x $ per Conversion = Money Earned Per Month
Let's just say that in our "birkenstock women's shoes" example we end up ranking first for that keyword, bringing us 15,000 searches a month. Then let's say that we throw up some Amazon adds and have a conversion rate of 3% on our site. Since Amazon pays on a commission basis, we will be earning some portion of the price of the item we sold. For the sake of argument let's say that we are only average $1 per conversion (at payouts ranging from 4%-8% of purchase price I think this is relatively reasonable). We would calculate how much we would make by doing the following:
15,000 x .03 x $1 = $450
It looks like this site will be able to earn you your $100 a month if you work hard at it!
Pick A Website Platform and a Domain Name
After you find out your keyword you are going to want to set up your website. You are going to have to decide if want to go with a free hosting service like Blogger (since they let you display Adsense as well as other affiliate programs) or do some self hosting.
I personally recommend going with a self hosted blog or website, but I understand that this can seem a little daunting to a person just starting out with trying to make money online. I personally use Dream Host for my hosting and have generally been very happy with how they have treated me and my websites. I started out as a complete novice and found their interface easy to understand and work with.
But for most people it is going to be simpler if they start off trying to make money with a free blog. For that, I definitely recommend blogger. It has a pretty intuitive interface and lets you control pretty much everything about your blog if you are willing to get your hands dirty and learn coding.
One problem with free hosting platforms like Blogger is that a lot of the good domains names are already taken. For our example, the ideal domain for targeting birkenstock women's shoes would be:
http://birkenstockwomensshoes.blogspot.com/
... but that is already taken. So instead I had to settle for:
http://womensshoesbirkenstock.blogspot.com/
When selecting a domain name you want to try and get your keywords into the URL of your site. While this isn't the most important thing ever for your site, it is considered to be a tie breaker between two sites with exactly the same content and backlink strength. The site with the keyword in the URL wins.
Building Content For Your Site
The next step is to actually get out there and start building content for your site. If your site is focusing on a certain type of product you can do a couple different things when generating your content:
- write reviews of the products in your niche
- write descriptive posts about the products, describing them to potential buyers
- write sales pages for each product
- write posts that generally describe the niche that you are in
Each of these is definitely a viable strategy for making a $100 a month website, but you may want to get inside the head of a user before you make your final decision. You want to sell the most products that you can so that you can make the most money that you can so be sure that your content targets the right people with the right message so that you earn the money that you are trying to.
If you are making money using an advertising method like Adsense then your content creation becomes a lot easier. All you have to do is write whatever it is you want to write about as long as it is on topic with the niche that you are targeting. If I targeted the birkenstock women's shoes niche I could write about how they are the most hideous shoe outside of crocs, writing post after post about how they are similar and why they both suck.
This type of site could be very fun to create (if you like making fun of things) and can still end up making you money if you can get your site to rank well for your targeted terms. (It might not work out so well for that niche, but you never know).
One quick content creation rule to keep in mind:
Always, ALWAYS, make sure that all your content is thematically related on your niche site. If your site is about oil filters you probably shouldn't write a post about Babe Ruth and modern baseball's love affair with performance enhancement. Write that post for a place like hubpages or for your baseball blog - just leave it out of your $100 a month oil filter site.
What Next?
Niche selection? Check
Domain and hosting? Check.
Content created? Check
What's next? Backlinks, baby. Backlinks. Now it is time to make all your hard work pay off by doing some more hard work. It is time to go out there and get some links to your site.
Links are the currency of the online world. The richer you are in links, the better you will rank for your term. But you aren't seeking just any type of link - you are seeking properly anchored links.
To get those, you generally need to have some level of control over who will link to you. There are several ways to do just that. They are to:
- Submit your site to link directories
- Write articles and submit them to article directories
- Contact other site owners and ask for links or suggest a link exchange
- Get links from social media sites
Not all of these methods are created equal, but all are ways to get you links to your site and increase your popularity with the search engines.
Get Links: Submit Your Site To Directories
I have to be honest, directories are a little antiquated in this day and age. They are relics from the Internet's long gone past and the link juice they provide your sites is anything but spectacular. For sure there are some really good directories that you do really want to get links from, DMOZ, BOTW, Yahoo! Directory, etc, but many of these 'good' link directories charge you some money to get your link on their site.
To help you understand which directories you should be submitting to you should check out this post from SEO Zombie: the best link directories and the how to use his best directory list
I wouldn't go super crazy submitting your site to web directories since they do sometimes cost you money and not all directories are created equal. My suggestion is that if the page where your site would be listed has Page Rank then consider the directory, even if you have to pay some money to get listed. But be smart about it and don't spend $100s on directory links unless you feel like it will really benefit your site a lot.
But, beleive it or not - you can rank for some highly competitive terms still using directories as this Sphinn thread indicates.
Get Links: Submit Articles
Submitting articles to article directories is a really good way to get anchor backlinks to your site from pages relevant to your site's niche. The reason that these are good for this is that you write them yourself so you control the keywords used in the article and the anchor text of the link pointing to your site. You probably don't need to write a defining work every time you submit an article, but they should be clearly written and leave your reading wanting to visit your website.
There a three main ways to go about about article marketing:
- Submit unique articles to only the best article directories
- Submit your one article to lots and lots and lots of article directories
- Submit "unique" (i.e. spun) articles to lots and lots of article directories
Option 1 is usually what people low on cash do and is perfectly fine for a brand new site. You probably don't want hundreds of links pointing to your site in the first month or so from article directories anyway, since search engines like Google tend to think that this is a little spammy.
Now there is some debate about the differences between option 2 and option 3. Some say that option 2, though effective, is not as effective as option 3 since "spinning" an article will increase the likelihood that the article submited to article directory A will be different from the article submitted to article directory B. I'm not sure that I by this argument since the level of spinning required to make something unique is fairly high.
I will definitely need to do some more research in this area, so you can feel free to give either option a try. Right now I use Article Marketer (an option 2 service) - you can read my Article Marketer Review if you want more information.
Get Links: Other Site Owners Are Your Friend
This is by far the most important step on your road to making $100 a month with a website. If you can get enough site owners to link to you then you can forgo submitting your site to link directories or doing any article marketing. Do you think CNN or Amazon submits their sites to directories or writes articles in article directories? You'd have to be kidding me.
They power of these sites: they have content or provide a service that inspires other website owners to link to them. Chances are that you won't have a website that is as awesome or useful as CNN or Amazon, but if you can make some relationships with people who have sites in your niche or in a related niche then you would have a really good chance of them linking to your site. They may ask for a link in return, but that seems like a fair arrangement to me.
You should be spending the bulk of your link building efforts trying to track down site owners to link to your site with the proper anchor text. If you can do that then you will rank very quickly for the keyword terms that you are trying to rank for and will be that much closer to creating your first $100 a month site.
Get Links: Use Social Media
I honestly don't know why I am including the use of social media as a way to get links to your site. The truth is, links from social media sites are crappy and have to be received in massive quantities to do much for your ranking power. When you have to get massive amounts of something it usually means that it isn't going to worth your time to do it by hand. There are plenty of tools out there that will help you get these links, but I don't use any of them.
A lot of social media sites are dofollow, so the links are worth something. Just don't go too crazy in getting them.
Making Money Takes Work
If you haven't figured it out by now, making money online takes a lot of work. It is very possible and you can definitely do it - you just need to make that commitment to do what it takes. There are no free lunches and there are no easy ways out. But if you work hard and create a website that is useful and meets the needs of Internet users you will be well on your way to making a nice, reoccurring, and mostly passive income.
If you are going to take the advice of this hub seriously, then you need to spend about 10% of your time doing your research, finding a host and domain name, and building good content for your site. The other 90% of your time you should spend getting links. If you can do that you will make money online.
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