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How Do Websites Make Money

If you have ever wondered exactly how people make money online just by setting up a website, let me help you find out.  The great thing about an income generating website is that you don’t even need to sell anything directly yourself, which makes things so much easier; no stock, no shipping, no after sales issues, no online payments or any of that stuff.  The other great thing is that your income continues even if you are asleep or on holiday!  However, that does not mean it does not take a lot of work – beware of anything you come across that suggests you can get rich quickly with no effort.  The only people getting rich are the ones selling you this fraudulent idea.

How Do Websites Make Money – The Basic Principle

OK – here is the basic principle behind how websites make money: 

you create a website about any subject you want, you attract loads of free visitors to it from search engines, who click on adverts and links to other sites.  You get paid either for every advert click or whenever someone buys something from one of the other sites you provide a link to.  You have to understand that this is a drastic simplification, but it sums up the mechanism for how you get your income from a site that sells nothing at all directly.

Your website really can be about absolutely anything, though you should be aware that some subject areas can be more lucrative than others, depending how much competition there is for advertisers and what products or services are available to be sold in that particular niche.  By the way, niche is a word you will come across a lot in the field of online business.  In order to succeed, it is quite important to find a niche market that is not being targeted by millions of other websites.  It is easier to get to the top in a small field of competitors than one full of businesses with lots of money and expertise to throw at the problem of getting visitors.

How Do Websites Make Money – There Are No Magic Short Cuts

The subject of your site should be something you know a lot about or feel passionate about.  The subject of your site is less important than the fact that you can find plenty to say about things relating to it.  You need to set up a relatively simple, well structured website with lots of pages of information, advice, or guides – genuinely useful stuff that will be of interest to your target niche market.

There are no short cuts here.  The only way you will get any income is if you get lots of visitors, and the only way you will get lots of visitors is to create a site that people find genuinely interesting and useful.  Make no mistake, no matter what your website looks like, or what adverts and links you have on it, your income will only ever be in direct proportion to the number of people who actually visit your site.  Ranking highly enough in search engine results to get visitors to your website is a big subject in itself (search engine optimization), but making sure your website is full of useful content is the first step in this process.

How Do I Start An Online Business – Get It Right At The Start

If you want to avoid wasting lots of time (and we all do), it is important to carefully research the subject of your online business before you start work on your website.  You need to brainstorm ideas for your business and make sure you are identifying all the possible avenues around your subject areas.  Finding the right keywords makes the difference between life and death for your website.  This also feeds into the choice of domain name for your site.

You also want to check out the competition from other websites as well as the level of advertising competition.  You need to think about all the possible related angles and subjects you could write about, and ensure that you can get your hands on enough information to produce a website of at least fifty pages just for starters.

How Do I Start An Online Business – Creating Your Website

If you decide you want to go ahead and try to start your online business, everything is going to depend on your new website.  Even if you already have a site, unless you are getting at least a hundred unique visitors a day from search engines, you should seriously consider whether it would be better to start again.  If you feel you should stick with an existing site, you should at least carry out the research that will allow you to know for sure if your old site is worth pursuing or if you are better of starting a new one.

If you don’t yet have a website, then in some ways you are at an advantage, as you have a clean slate and all your options are open.  The nuts and bolts of getting a website are relatively straightforward and I discuss this in more detail on my how to create a website page.  The fundamentals involve getting a domain name, web host and a website design package, but this assumes you know exactly what you want to do with your site, what subject will be profitable, how to structure it, what keywords to use, how to optimize for search engines, etc.  In addition to the cost of web hosting, website design tools and domain name, you will have other individual costs to help your search engine optimizaton efforts.  These could include SEO tools, directory submission, keyword research tools, link exchange packages, etc. 

How Do I Start An Online Business – Use A Specialist Package

The raw tools mentioned above will enable you to build a decent website, but are not necessarily enough in themselves to give you a really good online business.  An alternative to buying all the separate ingredients of a website is to use a package that is specially designed to take you through the entire process of building a website that is an online business.  One such system is SiteBuildIt, in fact it is the only one I am aware of at the moment. 

Check out all the different tools that are included in SiteBuildIt here.  This option is ideal for anyone who is starting from scratch, as it is essentially a step by step guide to building an online business, and you need no technical knowledge at all.  It is uniquely all inclusive, as it covers web design, hosting, domain name, search engine optimization, round the clock support and all sorts of other useful tools, so you have no additional costs at all.  To compare the cost of using this package with the alternative of doing everything separately, have a quick look at this comparison.

One of the main reasons I like SiteBuildIt, though, is that it is founded on a principle that I firmly believe in - that the route to success is to create a good quality website full of great content. Unike any other option, SBI takes you through the whole process of researching and planning your online business first. This is done using brainstorming tools and keyword research tools to arrive at the most profitable subjects and topics for you personally.

If you have an existing site, but have not created it in the right way to drive search engine traffic to it, you don't necessarily have to scrap it with SiteBuildIt. If you are happy with the appearance and general function of your old website, you could use SBI to build another site that attract lots of traffic, and you can then funnel those customers into your old site to close sales, etc.

I won't go on about it here because you can find out all the ins and outs on the SBI website, but I had to mention it here as the only system specifically designed to take a beginner through the entire process of building an online business.  They do a video tour which is a reasonable introduction to SBI if you want to find out more.

How Do Websites Make Money - Conclusions

In general, your basic approach should be to concetrate on building a site with good quality content and focus on SEO techniques to get it up the search result rankings.  The reason for this is that the first thing you need to get is traffic to your site, so don't worry about adverts or any other money making techniques until you have first cracked the problem of getting lots of visitors.