How to Build Websites that Make Long Term MoneyOur Personal Experience -> How to Build Websites that Make Long Term Money by Jim Griffin There are countless ways to build a profitable website, and honestly, I don’t claim to know even a fraction of those ways. If you want to talk to me about Drupal and Joomla as CMS to power a website, or pay-per-clicks and banner buys for marketing, sure we can discuss, but ultimately I don’t know a heck of a lot about those things. What I do know, and consider myself and expert on, is how to build websites that make money long term. That’s what I’ll discuss in this how to guide. Section 1 - Getting Prepared
Step 1: Decide on a Profitable NicheThe first step is to identify a profitable and massively popular niche you have a sincere interest in. You don’t need to know a lot about the niche, so long as you’re willing to learn, that should suffice. So how to know if a niche is profitable? Well a good way to gauge it is to use Google’s Keyword Suggestions tool. However before identifying a niche read all 4,000+ words of this article. I’m not joking and believe you’ll be glad you did. If after reading this full article you’re drawing a blank at what some highly profitable niches might be… off the top of my head, ideas include stock trading, gambling, fantasy sports, taxes and that names just a few. Another factor that comes with experience is making sure your niche is not too broad; I’m going to cover more about that later. Step 2: Select a Domain Name You Are Excited AboutIf you have money to invest there are thousands of aftermarket domains available at sedo.com. However, if budget is an issue (as it is for most) I suggested my other guide how to secure a great domain at reg fee. After following the advice in that article you’ll mostly likely end up with a great .com, .net or .org domain name that you’re excited about building. Step 3: Get Your Finance in OrderNo matter how much money you may or may not have, building a website that makes money long term, takes time. If you follow the method I cover in this guide and stick with it, your earning potential is massive. However, you need to recognize upfront we’re not even going to begin to think about monetize your website until after it has has search engine traffic. If you’re building a website because you’re in dire needs of money, find some other source for now. One, two, maybe even three years down the road the investment made into your website near certainly will pay off, so long as your investment into it is consistent. Now that you’ve got a domain name and your finances in order, it’s time get started. Section 2 - Understanding Your Goals and Defining Your WebsitePerhaps the first step to planning a website is researching all the ways there might be to make money in that particular niche. If you own a domain about stock trading, well there are probably tools stock traders value as well as training products such as ebooks, coaching, video training, seminars (live and online), accredited distance learning and the like you could affiliate and/or sell advertising to. If you have vast knowledge about stock trading, perhaps writing and selling your own ebook, or an actual paperback, is an option. Another idea, and perhaps the most profitable is to make the website about online stock trading and then sell advertisements to stock trading sites many of which have high profit margins and large marketing budgets (Think E-Trade who advertises during Super Bowls). Once you have all these ideas to monetize your website, forget about them for now. You see you have nothing at the moment. You have domain that’s not hosted yet, you have no visitors, no search traffic etc. Far too many startups are worried about having everything set up so that when the first visitor arrives there is a chance to make money from them. I won’t even go into all the reasons this is a poor approach as that would take an additional 4,000 words. Let me touch on just a few reasons advertisement and monetization should come after website traffic is secured. 1. You’ll get better advertising rates and affiliate deals when, rather than pitching an idea, you actually have the type of website companies are lining up to advertise on. Trust me; if the companies willing to pay you $100.00 for each conversion now, when you have serious search traffic and can give them exposure on a popular and trusted site they might be willing to give you $350.000 per conversion then. Don’t be in a hurry to make money, deliver value first and cash in some of that later; consider your websites a savings or investment account. 2. All the time you spend trying to find deals is time that could be spent getting your website started. Remember it takes a while for sites to start getting significant search traffic. The sooner you get started the closer you’ll be to your long term goal. 3. A new website with high quality content and limited (or no) advertisements will be taken far more serious by Google.com than some website that appears to have no purpose for existence other than to earn the owner of it profit. This is called Google Trust Factor. Get off on the wrong footing with Google and it will take your website longer to get free traffic from their search engine. Okay, so now you have a solid idea, you’ve identified that if you manage to get search engine traffic there will be plenty of ways in the future for this website to make money. It’s now time to write your first page of website content. Yes that’s right, no hosting account yet, no theme etc. write and work on that first page of content first. This first page of content should be an introduction to your website. It should include your sites reason for existing, purpose and plans. Go ahead and write things as if they do exist, such as… below you’ll find links to our reviews of the top 5 stock trading websites. That’s content you’ve identified you’ll eventually write. This first page defines the basis of your website. Section 3: Getting Your Initial Page OnlineEverything I cover in this section you could probably find someone on an affiliate forum such as http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ to do for $50.00, by this I mean the actual labor. You’ll still need to pay for hosting, and perhaps a theme. For those looking to do it themselves here’s a reasonable how to guide with quick references. 1. Purchase and set up hosting: bluehost.com and hostgator.com are two companies I’ve used. Their cheapest option is fine, and their support departments can help you if you have questions on the actual hosting account set up. 2. Download and Install Wordpress: You can find this software free at wordpress.org. To install it you’ll need an FTP client which you can pick up for free at http://filezilla-project.org/. Tip: be sure to download the client version (not the server version). Next, follow the instructions at http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress and install word press onto your hosting account. Prior to publishing your first page here are three things you need to do: 1. Install and activate HeadSpace2 plugin (important!). The plugin can be downloaded at http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/, a page which also covers simple installation instructions. If you’ve never installed a wordpress plugin before refer to this guide. http://urbangiraffe.com/articles/how-to-install-a-wordpress-plugin/ 2. Log into your wordpress admin area and on the left side menu click settings, and then in the same area click permalinks. Change the checkbox to custom and enter the text /%postname%-%post_id%. This will give your pages SEO friendly titles. 3. You need a solid theme with good clean code that is optimal for holding and presenting high quality content. Personally I suggest purchasing the thesis theme from http://diythemes.com/. Yes, there are a lot of free themes on the web; however I strongly feel the $77.00 spent on this theme is justified and a great theme to use when just getting a website started. Their company also has great support and should be able to help you get the theme installed should you have any questions. Publish your first webpage:When installing Wordpress a sample page was created. To recycle it, from the admin, go to ‘pages’, find that sample page and click ‘edit’. Using copy and paste change that sample text to the first page of content you wrote earlier. Save it, and just like that your website is now online. Section 4: A Crash Course on SEO (Important)In this section I’m going to give you a very brief crash course on search engine optimization (SEO). The first thing to understand is: Google is the largest search engine with well over 50% market share. This means no one is close to taking over, so this is the search engine we want to focus on. So understanding this let’s ask… what is it Google as a company is attempting to accomplish? Lucky for us, see below. Google Mission Statement: Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Read that statement two more times. Okay, maybe I’m a geek, but that’s a statement I have memorized. It’s a fairly straight forward simple statement. It doesn’t say they want to determine which info is the best, nor does it say anything else about ranking it, it only speaks about organizing it, making it accessible and making it useful. Everything else there is to know about Google can be construed using simple logic. It makes sense Google wants to rank the most relevant information first, that’s their edge and clutch on the market. Now let me ask what type of website is most likely to rank well in Google? The most logical answer is an information websites. So no matter however anyone might define SEO (and spammers define it in odd ways) I’d personally define it differently. You see in 2001 I had a theory, If I build website that help Google achieve their mission and model most of my own business practice similar to Google, I’ll be in synergy with them and this gives me the best chance of having a website that gets free traffic from them for a long time to come. While that was a theory in 2001, today in 2011 it’s a belief. So as far as “my” definition: “SEO is the process of optimizing and presenting information contained on a webpage in such a way search engines stand a better chance of classify it correctly, for the purpose of making it universally accessible and useful”. With that said here is the gist of how that is done. Let’s assume my article is titled: Banks Offering Free ATM Checking. In what will appear on the Title and description meta tags (controlled by HeadSpace2 Plugin) I’m going to insert something like this. 1. Title: Free ATM Checking Accounts – Expert’s Advice 2. Description: an article by Mike Smith covering which banks offer AMT checking accounts for free, as well as his expert opinion on the future of online banking. 3. I’ll then set it up so the URL for this page is
mywebsite.com/free-atm-checking/ If in my personal opinion I feel my article is the best anyone can find on the web for the search query…free atm checking, and it’s appropriate I’ll make sure those keywords also appear in the text. Warning: This should be entirely natural. Many people make the mistake of being far too concerned they’ve placed words in bold, italics, headers etc. In my opinion you’re far better off being under search engine optimized than over. At the moment this is all you need to know about SEO. I’ll come back and introduce one more SEO concept (link building) to you later in this article. Section 5 - Publishing Website ContentOne of the biggest keys to building a website that makes money long term is to cover a topic better than anyone else while also making it an interesting read. Consider this, if your website has the same information as five, six or maybe 100 or 1,000 other sites ranking in Google then why does is it deserve to rank well in their search results? So with that let’s get back to the how to. So at this point your hosting account is set up, wordpress is installed and your first page is online. This first page introduced your website, stated its reason for existing/purpose and plans. For now, as you change your plans keep updating your home page. Your goal now is to start chipping away at covering topics related to your theme better than any other website ever has. Do not be intimidated by this… I’ve made a lot of money online and most every other webmaster I compete with runs circles around me with better command of the English language. If you struggle as a writer, write anyways, do your best, take a course and get better in time, but for now the important thing is you write and keep on writing. What topics should I cover?Go back and review step section two. To start you should have tons of topics to write about, all in an attempt to cover your main subject better than anyone. Again if your site is about online stock trading, perhaps start writing reviews of each company. Write article about who has the lowest fees. Perhaps publish a researched opinion on why a certain company with high fees has as large of market share as they do. When you run out of ideas Google search and spend time reading what other websites are writing. Perhaps the best content ideas come from reading another publisher’s opinion which you disagree with. As a general rule of thumb I try to make every article I write include at least one piece of information that was difficult to find and no one else ranking on the first two pages of Google includes. For example if my article was about domain names, I might casually mention “a lot has changed since March 15, 1985; the date the first ever domain name (Symbolics.com) was registered”; which by the way is a true story. Of course, a quick Google search tells me all about that, so we’re not exactly talking hard to find, but that’s okay; interesting facts are interesting facts, and not always hard to find. Where the great facts come from is those times you’re researching something and no matter how deep you dig through Google you can’t find the answer. Well on those rare occasions let it become your obsession to find the answer. When you find it, use it in content, and if it’s something you expect others might like to know then for sure this is a topic to do a full article on. Again I can’t emphasize enough ideas for great topics come just by learning your market. There are times I am about to fall asleep and just like that a content idea pops into my head, the more involved you are, the easier it becomes. There’s not much more for me to say about content, keep working at it and your content will continue to get better. Section 6 - Building LinksGoogle has thousands of quality review editors that do read content and help rank it. However, for the most part Google uses computerized robot technology to rank sites. The onsite SEO I discussed in section 4 is your method to help the robot determine what your content is about. The other factor important to search rankings is how popular and trusted your website is. This is determined by offsite factors. The theory is… if your website has great content, others will link to it. The Google robot finds these links and considers them a vote for your site. Also the more popular a site linking to you is, the more value their vote is worth. So for example if ESPN.com links to you this might be 7 votes where if your 9 year old nephew’s blog links to you this might be one-quarter a vote. It doesn’t work exactly like this, but that’s the general gist. Google attempts to devalue websites that buy and sell links in order to increase their rankings. While this isn’t a popular opinion me personally I’m a strong advocate of not purchasing links for the sole purpose of boosting Google’s rankings. So how do you get links? Increase Your Website TrafficThe best way to get links is to get traffic to your website hope others like it and will link to it. A great way to do this is to explore and experiment with social media. If you publish something interesting, ground breaking, perhaps something that goes so far against the grain yet it’s backed up with facts, perhaps some gossip you found, or perhaps some hidden piece of information about something upcoming… social media can help get your information sites a lot of traffic. Digg.com for breaking news, stumble upon for sharing entertainment value, Wikipedia.org for linking to a major update. If your site is about sports and news breaks a major athlete just passed away, instantly publish a page and write only the words: Mr X just passed way our condolence to his family… article to follow shortly. Go to Wikipedia and add the fact he passed away with your site as the source reference. (Note: only do this if the topic is highly related to your website) Now quickly get to work on that article so when another wiki editor shows up moments later your reference is not removed for a more complete reference. All these here are solid ways to get free traffic which increases the chances someone enjoys your content and links to it. Regarding Wikipedia.org, it’s against the rules to link to your own websites. If you do this, be sure you’re giving them value back in exchange for what you just took. For example, edit and contribute 10 other wiki pages for every one time you link to your own article. For thing such as major news, they are unlikely to have a problem with it if you’re a trusted editor constantly adding value. Link to OthersIf you’re linking to and commenting about articles other websites produce, the chance others in the same industry/niche start to notice and value your website increases. Again considering your website coverts the topic better than anyone, you might find them soon quoting or linking to you in articles just the same. Build Your NetworkMake friends with as many people as you can in the same niche you’re doing business in. A great way to build a network is to help you competitors while expecting nothing in return. This called reciprocity which the Wikipedia entry explains as “Reciprocity in social psychology refers to responding to a positive action with another positive action, and responding to a negative action with another negative one”. Network and get to know your competitors, after all at the moment your website is making no money and you’re not a threat to them nor are they to you. You might send them a follow up to one of their articles (no link included) and say man that topic was great, but I’m not sure the average reader would understand this one section. In case you’re interested here’s a follow up I wrote which you’re free to post as having come from an anonymous reader, or also feel free to post it as your own content however you see fit. They might never use that content, but the time you spend making friends will pay off (however don’t let it distract you from publishing fresh unique content regularly). The trick here: “DON’T ASK FOR (OR EXPECT) ANYTHING IN RETURN”. Yes when you know someone so well that with a smile and humorous tone asking for a link works, okay once in a while maybe go for it. How to ask a competitor for a link? I did this the other day, true story. I’ve had the owner of gambling666.com on my Skype for 3 years now, a few times per month we small talk, share information, ideas, etc. Well today I said to him.., had an interesting day. When he asked me what’s up, I told him: I woke this morning and pledged allegiance to the devil while looking at his website (his sites not about the devil, just has a cartoon one for theme). He responds confused until I said… yeah man I prayed to him and begged and begged please give me a backlink. Odd how religion works, no response and all day I’ve been searching your site and can’t find a link. He found it funny asked me for something in exchange and I said “do me this favor without asking for anything in return and I guarantee whatever you might ask for now, you’ll get bigger in return later”. He said good enough and I had an awesome link on a page he suggested a few minutes later. Artificial Link BuildingIn real-life (as opposed to online) some major companies go to great lengths to get press in a manner we refer to as “publicity stunts”. They might have their owner test drive at NASCAR and intentionally crash, report a fake robbery, or whatever. These are preplanned occurrences designed to create press, all the while appearing to be actual news. These stunts are kept tight lipped because in some cases they are not entirely lawful. Thankfully on the internet we can do similar without breaking any laws. Let’s say I was able to write a compelling argument that the Lakers need to trade Kobe Bryant, and I took it serious, and actually believed it, but knew it wouldn’t be popular. I publish this article, and then hire a lesser known competitor to publish a follow up response on his own website telling his viewers how wrong I was while linking to me twice in the article. All this preplanned a third website (much large one) comments and writes about this battle going on between our two websites. Someone else goes and starts a thread on a major sport forum linking to the article that summarized our battle. Conversation starts and via this forum me and the original hired poster can move our debate to this forum. Eventually you’ll have others linking as well and this might quickly become a hot topic, others will write about, but not before you started it first. To recap link building
Section 7 - Everything ElseYou’ve now spent a great deal of time building your website. You’re a recognized leader in your field, you know your competitors, you have constant website visitors, probably much of it from search engine rankings. Now comes the time for all this hard work and investment to pay off. Some might wish I’d conclude this article with tips for building new templates to contain your content, or how to negotiate deals, split test, work on calls to actions and the like. The reality is, you’ve just built a website that will make money for a long time to come. You’ve turned down potential advertisers; you’ve seen what your competitors are doing to make money and perhaps even chatted with them about this. You’ve viewed and had ideas based off countless numbers of monetized sites you’ve visited thinking “maybe I’ll do that when I start monetizing my site”. So honestly, when you get to this point, you’re now well equipped to figure out how to do the rest of the stuff. Follow these methods and you have a website that all the money in the world could never buy because you’ve went from someone struggling writing content to the super star of his niche. Your website is now a major brand but when it all boils down to it you look and realize the true brand was yourself. That my friend is how to build a website that will make money long term. |
There are three thing you’ll need to do first prior to starting a
website; I’ll cover those things in this section.