I'm sure you've got your attention, haven't you? I am working on my headlines. Sorry to disappoint you, but this article is not about cheating or getting rich quickly. It is about how to build a successful website that will attract a lot of traffic and make you a lot of money.
This is a huge topic and you can write a book on every step. I am going to provide here a general outline of 6 important steps to build a successful website in the long term.
1 - Choose your niche
Pick something you enjoy researching and writing about because you're going to spend a lot of time doing both. There should not be much competition. For example, don't choose "Electronics". I guarantee that you will never find a better ranking search engine than Sony or Amazon.com. Limit it to something like "high-end audiophile speakers".
do some research. See how much it will cost to advertise your keywords. If they are really expensive you might want to choose another place. Check out a few sites with similar topics so you can see who you're going to compete with for ranking in search engines.
2 - Choose your service provider and register your domain
Your service providers should be reliable. It will be difficult to sustain a successful business if your internet connection is always down or your server is constantly crashing. Don't skimp on quality here just to save some money.
Your domain name should be the most important keyword that you are hoping to rank well in search engines. It should be something unique that relates to your niche and is easily brandable. By brandable, I mean that it is easy for people to remember and engage with your site. Some call this a "mindshare".
3 - Create your content
Your content should be unique. If your content is stolen, Google will ignore you. They now recognize duplicate content and refuse to list it. They want to provide useful results to their users. People are slapping crappy "Made for Adsense" websites by simply copying and pasting content, and Google has decided to put an end to it.
My advice is not to mess with Google. They're the Internet's 900-pound gorillas you really don't want to pee. If you can't get listed in search engines, you're pretty much doomed from the start. So give them what they want. You will need 30-100 pages of good content before putting up a website. You can start with just a few pages and add a page day – just like you would with a blog – but it will take you longer to get indexed. Are you seeing a topic about search engines here?
4 – Build your website
You'll either have to use a program like Dreamweaver or a content management system. I would suggest considering a CMS. You have to update your website frequently, and this can be difficult even for experienced web designers. A CMS removes all the hurdles of publishing new content every day. However, you have to make sure that your CMS is search engine friendly. Perhaps the easiest thing to do for a beginner is to use a blogging program like WordPress. Search engines love blogs, they are very easy to update, and the best WordPress is free.
From the very beginning, you should build a website keeping in mind search engine optimization. SEO is a very deep topic that I cannot go into here. Basically, you will want to make sure that your website can be easily crawled by search engine robots or "spiders". This requires all kinds of things like proper meta-tags and making sure you have good keyword density on your pages.
Also, you have to make sure that all your pages load quickly. Broadband is still not available in most parts of the world. The average surfer will only wait 4 seconds before clicking anywhere else. If your pages load very slowly you will lose a huge amount of traffic. Navigation is also very important. If people have a hard time finding their way around they will quickly become frustrated and walk away.
5 - Drive traffic to your website
Setting up a business on the net is different from a physical location. In the "real" world it's about location, location, location. It's easier to get customers if your store is in an area with high traffic. But one doesn't just go through the net, they search for specific things. Unless your site is listed in search engines, there's no way for anyone to find it - it's up to you to drive traffic to it.
There are several ways to do this:
You can buy it by creating ads and then bidding on certain keywords so that ads will appear whenever someone searches for them.
You can get it for free:
- Writing articles on your niche topic with a link to your site in the author's resource box and submitting them to article directories so publishers can use them and distribute them to thousands of readers.
- Submitting your site to a free SEO-friendly web directory.
- Social bookmarking of some of the more interesting pages on your site in places like del.icio.us and Blink.
- Submitting some of your articles to sites like Digg or Reddit, where people vote on whether they should be displayed on the front page. If your item is popular and featured on the front page of Digg, the amount of traffic you can get could crash your server. I'm not kidding, I've seen this happen.
- Participate in forums and provide a link to your site in your signature. Do not spam or you will get banned - comment wisely.
- Comment in the blog with a link in your signature. Again - don't spam. And make sure that the blog is not using no-follow or you will be wasting your time.
- Post free classified ads. These provide a high-value link back from a popular site, plus you get free targeted traffic to your website from ads.
- There are many ways to get free traffic - just be creative - but don't get too creative. There are also many illegal ways to get free traffic, but they will have the opposite effect on you in the long run.
6 – Monetize your website
This is the fun part. Now that you've got all this traffic how do you make money?
– You can sell ads – Probably the easiest way is with Google Adsense. You can sell banner space, text links, almost anything really.
- You can sell merchandise - I would suggest drop-shipping. Why do all that packing and shipping if you don't have it? It's like too much work.
- You can do affiliate marketing - The easiest way to do this is by offering recommended products that link to your affiliate's site for purchase. Just make sure you choose quality products to be affiliated with.
The sky is the limit when it comes to monetizing your website. Be creative here too - but again, not too creative. You don't want to do anything stupid and get banned from Adsense or your best affiliate program.
And there you have it. How to print money from your computer in six easy steps. Now go and have some fun!
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