Make Money From Websites/Blogs

Internet has grown to a level where impossible things are becoming possible.

For example: 20 years back, who would believe that in the future we will be able to book our airline tickets to some country via just few clicks of a mouse?

What about video Chat?

What about Google Earth?

Just like that: the internet has made it possible for us to earn money online via building informative websites/blogs.

Step One: Choosing The Niche/Topic For Your Website/Blog

What kind of website should you build?

Everyone has some hobby/hobbies: in most cases, these simple hobbies lead us to gain experience in certain fields. They help us to gain knowledge about certain things.
For example: I have few friends who love cars. They talk about different cars all the time. If a car is coming towards us, my friends will tell us which car it is and they even tell us the model of the car.

Now: if I ask my friends to write some informative content about different cars, then it will be easy work for them right?

Also, the content that they will write will be useful and informative as they know lot of stuff about different cars. Like: advantages and disadvantages of buying a ABC car.


I suggest that you do not search for things like: High Paying Keywords or High Paying Niches.

You should make a website on a niche about which you can write lot of useful, fresh, unique, meaningful, helpful, correct and informative content.

I personally have worked at freelance sites for few years and I do know lot of information about these sites. So that is why, I has chosen to build websites/blogs that are related to freelance sites.

I also love to play PC Games, so I do write about them in my blog.

So, if you want to make money online via building websites/blogs, then the first step is to choose the Niche/Topic of your website.

And like I said, the Niche needs to be the one about which you can write good content.

Never choose a niche about which you have no knowledge.

One way of choosing a Niche about which you have no knowledge: is to first learn everything about that niche yourself. Do all the research and learn everything about the niche. This may take days/weeks or even months.

Choosing the correct niche is the most important step in building a website.

Step Two: Free Or Paid Site?

Usually I tell people to not invest any money from their pocket for any online money making opportunity. This is to make sure that no one gets scammed.

But there are few opportunities where it is perfectly fine to invest your money.

For example:

If you want to start stock market trading business, then you will need to deposit some money in some well established Company/Bank. Such investment is scam free.

Just like that, you can invest some money to get your own site and your own domain.

You will have to decide if you want to go with a free website or you want your own domain which off course will cost some money.

Free Websites:

You can get a free subdomain at different well established sites. Subdomains are part of a main site.

For example:

If this is the main site:

mainsite.com

Then this can be a subdomain:

minsite.mainsite.com

Or

minisite1.mainsite.com

You can get subdomains for free. So you can build a website without any kind of investment.

You can also get a free site which will be located in a subdirectory. Like:

Mainsite.com/some-directory/yoursite/

Here is a list of sites where you can get a site for free:

Blogger

Google Sites

Yahoo GeoCities [Yahoo Is Closing Geocities]

Remember that in order to make money from your websites, you will have to do some hard work. You will need to learn lot of things.

Making a blog/site at the above mentioned sites is very easy. You just need to explore all the options that are available. In case you need any help, you can ask questions in this forum.

Your Own Site:

You can also buy your own site/blog. Many people prefer to get their own sites instead of making subdomains in some other website.

There are some benefits that people think we have of owing one’s your own website.

You will have full control over your site.

When you will get backlinks, they will be pointing to your own site and not to some subdomain on someone else’s site.

There are many restrictions in free sites that you do not have in your own site: like, you have an .htaccess file that you can use in your own site.

If you are really serious about entering website business and if you are willing to work hard on your site, then I suggest you get your own domain name and hosting.

There are two things that you will need to buy if you want your own website. First one is:

Domain Name:

Every site has a name right? Like the site where you are reading this content, the name is: a1newspapers.com.

So you will also have to get a domain name. I suggest you do not worry about the extension of the domain: you can buy a .com, .info etc domain.

.com domains are preferable as people usually type .com at the end of site URL.

.com domains cost around $10/year.

I think the best registrar of domain names is Godaddy.

Hosting:

Now you have a domain name, but you will need some web-space for your site too right?

Hosting = A place where you can upload files and other stuff for your domain.

Thus you need a hosting. A good hosting plan may costs around $100/year. I suggest you do not buy cheap hosting plans.

Some cheap hosting plans even cost $12 per year.

If you get a cheap hosting plan, then you will experience different types of problems.

I suggest you get a hosting at Hostgator:

What to do after buying a hosting and a domain name?

If you get a free website, then you do not have to learn lot of things. But when it comes to setting up a new site in your own domain, then that needs some hard work and lot of learning.

You have two options:

One is to hire a freelancer who will create a website for you. But you will have to pay when some money for his work. If you want to hire a freelancer, then you can go here to find a list of freelance sites:

List Of Freelance Sites

The second option is to work really hard and do lot of research on the internet to learn the basics. You can do everything yourself but for that, you will have to do the learning for like 8 or so hours every day.

I suggest that you use WordPress to create a nice looking blog.

Step 3: Making A Error Free Website/Blog

You need to make a website that will have no errors of any kind. Remember that the most important source of traffic for your website will be the search engines and SEs do not like to rank sites with errors: high in search results.

Your site needs to have clean code.

There should be no hidden content of any kind in your site.

Verify your site in this validator:

This verification is not a must thing but if you verify your site in this validator, then most probably your site will not have much compatibility issues.

You should check your site for any browser compatibility issues. This point is very important. Your site needs to run perfectly fine in different kinds of browsers.

You can use this tool to check browser compatibility:

Make sure that your site has no spam in it. This tool can help in detection of site spam: Spam Detection

Make sure that your site is not taking too much time to load. This tool can help to see the load time:

Remember to check your site’s browser compatibility for Internet Explorer. You can use this tool to check your site in IE:

Also, make sure your site have some excellent internal link structure: which will benefits the users of the site.

Step Four: Adding Content:

Now it’s time for the most important part in making of a new website.

Content of your site will determine the amount of money that you can make from your website. The better your content is, the more money will you earn.

I suggest that you spend some good time in creating content for your website. Some people hire writers to write content for them: but as you created the site on a niche about which you can write lot of useful content, that is why you do not need to hire any writer.

You have to write information in your site which will help other people. Think about the problems that other people may face and are related to your Niche, and then you can write down the solution for these problems.

Just remember that your site needs to provide some help to the users. If the content is giving no useful information to the users, then search engines will see no good reason to send traffic to your site.

In the step one, I told you that the most important part of making a website is choosing the right Niche/Topic. Choose the Niche about which you know lot compared to what a normal person knows.

Step Five: Make Sure Everything Works OK

After you add all the good information/content in your site, check for any formatting errors. See if there are any mistakes in the content: read the content many times to check for any possible errors.

Check your site in different browsers. You can do that via using the tool which I mentioned before.

Check your site for everything: you should take your time and there is no need to hurry in launching your website.

People make the mistake of launching their incomplete websites. This is the worst thing that one can do. Search engines do not like to see incomplete websites in their search results.

Your site needs to be 100% completed before you launch it.

Step Six: Submission

Now as your site is completed, it’s time to submit your site to major search engines.

You can use Google to find the pages where you will be submitting your site to major search engines.

After that: you will have to use these three tools:

Google Webmaster Tools

Yahoo Site Explorer

MSN Webmaster Tools

These tools are provided by the top search engines. These tools will help you to optimize your site for these SEs.

For example: if Google Bot is unable to crawl your site, then you will be able to see this information along with the reason, in the Google Webmaster Tools.

After launching your site, make sure you submit your site sitemap to all major search engines. You will be able to submit the sitemaps via the tools that I mentioned above.

Sitemaps are simple files that contain all the URLs of the pages in your site. Sitemaps help SEs to know better about the number of pages in your site.

Step Seven: Keep Working And Wait For The Results

In order to see your website to rank good in search engines, you will have to wait for some time. For new sites, one needs to wait for days/weeks or even months to see any positive results.

But during this waiting time, you must continue to work on your website. You need to keep updating your site’s content to make sure it is providing the correct information.

You should also keep adding the useful and informative content in your site. Add all the information that you know about the Niche and try to learn more about your niche so that you can deliver more content in your site.

Make sure you update your site regularly.

Step Eight: Adding Advertisements Or Affiliate Programs

Some people think that we should add advertisements and other things in our site, after we start to get some good traffic. But I personally think that, we should just add these things as soon as the site is ready to launch.

Anyway, I leave this decision to be made by you. You can add advertisement before launching the site or you can do this after you start to get some traffic.

You can make money from your website via different things. You can put advertisements in your site or you can join some affiliate program.

What to choose? Advertisements Or Affiliate Program?

It depends on the nature of your website. If there is an affiliate program that is related to your Niche then I guess you can join it. But Remember: to put affiliate links in your site, you must write some really good/informative/neutral content about the products that are offered in the affiliate program.

There needs to be a good reason for users to visit your site instead of going directly to the site whose affiliate program you are promoting. You must provide useful and helpful information about he promoted products so that the users will learn something that they cannot learn at any other site.

One option is to put both the advertisements plus the affiliate program in your website.

In order to find affiliate program, I suggest you just keep writing about your niche and keep learning about it. You will find relevant affiliate programs automatically.

Here are the top companies offering web based ads to put in quality websites:

Adsense

Yahoo Publisher Network

Microsoft PubCenter

Step Nine: Optimize Ads

Search resources offered by Adsense and other companies to see how you can optimize the ads in your site.

I suggest you try different ad units in your site and also try different ad placements. See which combination gives you the best results.

But do not place ads in an unprofessional way. Your site needs to look very professional and for that, you need to have good ad placement.

Some people just make pages full of ads and these pages have no content or less useless content. This is not the right way to use ads from the above mentioned sites.

These big companies allow the use of their ads program only if they are used in useful sites.

Step Ten: How To Build/Get Backlinks?

Actually, the natural way to get backlinks is to write excellent and useful content for your site. People who will find your content helpful, they will link to it for free.

This is called natural linking and you should try to get such links.

You do not have to go to any other site to get backlinks. Just spend your time and efforts in creating excellent content for you site.

In case you want to get backlinks via other ways, then you can search for that in Google or other search engines, and you will find other ways of building backlinks. For example: Article Submission To Article Directories.

How to improve your site’s ranking in search results?

The best way to improve your ranking in search results is to add excellent content in your site.

Basically, search engines love to see excellent content and quality backlinks. If your site has both these things, then it can rank high in search results.

You can simply get quality backlinks when people will link to the useful content in your site.

So basically, you just need to work on the quality of content that you add in your website.

If you want to know more about this or have any query then comment on this page.