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By: Jon Stall, Thu Feb 15th, 2007
It is not only the online giants, websites run by huge companies, which make all the money on the internet. Even if you are a small, independent website publisher ranked somewhere far back on search engines, you can make some extra cash every month through your website. Although there are a few methods to make money, we'll be discussing earning through affiliate programs.
Making a profitable website is a 4-step process:
- Build a website: You'll need a website! We'll teach you the proper way to learn it.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The website needs to be optimized so that it ranks higher on search engines such as Google and Yahoo!.
- Join Affiliate Programs: This is how you will be making money. In short, you will become an affiliate of other websites. You will display banner and text ads on your website which will generate for you. We'll talk about the exact workings later.
- Attract Traffic: Finally, you will need to promote your website and bring people in.
The only assumption we've made is that you know how to upload files to a web server (There are thousands of friendly articles on how to do that).
Getting a Host and Domain
You need a hosting service and a domain to allow your website to be viewed by users on the internet. We recommend QuicklyWeb as they have a 60-day money back guarantee, an amazing list of features at a great price and provide both hosting and domains.
Building Your Website
If you would like to build a website yourself, you have the choice of either writing the code yourself or using a graphical editor which allows you to drag elements on to a page. The graphical method is much faster and easier but not as flexible as writing all the code yourself. Most good developers use a hybrid technique involving both manual coding and using graphical editors.
Most graphical editors out there cost quite a bit. Not to worry though, we found a free easy-to-use graphical editor, although relatively unknown at the time this article was written. You can download it for free: http://www.nvu.com/. Creating websites with NVU is not more difficult than using a word processor.
If you're planning to become an internet marketer and willing to spend a bit of money, we recommend XSitePro. It's a website development tool which has been praised by hundreds of successful internet marketers. It comes packaged with powerful tools which make creating profitable websites easy. If you don't have the time to learn XHTML, CSS and SEO techniques, we recommend you buy this XSitePro and scroll down to the Affiliate Marketing section.
The truth is, if you want to develop quality websites you would have to learn XHTML and CSS. Both are extremely easy to learn: you'll be coding in less than a week. We recommend you get hold of: HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition (Visual Quickstart Guide) - Rated 4.5/5 on Amazon.com by over 500 readers. Even if you've decided to (or already are) using graphical editors, I recommend you buy this book. Graphical editors don't even come close to giving the power knowing XHTML and CSS give you. As the title says, it's a visual quick-start guide. Everything is given step-by-step in pictorial form. The book progresses fast enough to allow you to develop websites within days of picking it up.
Once you've built your website, you need to optimize it so it ranks higher on search engines. If you're using XSitePro, you can skip ahead to the next section as XSitePro optimizes your website for you.
Search Engine Optimization
Majority of the traffic on your website will have arrived through search engines. The process of maximizing the chance of your website ranking high on search engines is known as search engine optimization (SEO). Before we discuss the technique, let's see how search engines rank a website.
Essentially, most search engines these days determine the 'importance' of a website by counting how many websites link to it and how 'important' those websites are themselves. It's possible to get higher rankings by buying links, a process we'll discuss in a later section. The other important method to the determine the appropriability of the content is through keywords found on the website. We'll discuss this method here.
You need to come up with a list of words which relate to your website: the keywords. The following are free keyword suggestion tools which tell you what people look for on search engines:
- http://www.submitexpress.com/keytracker.php
- http://www.iwebtool.com/keyword_lookup/
Your website should have appropriate keywords and a description placed in it's meta tags in the head section. You shouldn't have more than 25 keywords per page. Phrases such as 'Make money online' should be broken into keywords 'make,money,online'. General words such as 'the','a' and words not relevant to your content should be avoided. The content on your website should have the keywords appearing in it as many times as possible. Don't over-do it though, search engines are able to detect if keywords have been faked into the content (Such as keeping the font color same as the background color). Try to place the keywords in the title of your page and image alt tags; don't just list them however, fit them into sentences.
Once you've built your page according to the instructions given above. Use the free meta tag analyzer on http://www.nvu.com/3 to see how search engine friendly your website is. Follow the instructions in the previous paragraph and try again until you're satified with the results.
Your website is ready to rank high on search engines. All we need to do now is promote it, but before that we need to build the mechanism which makes us money.
Affiliate Marketing
Basically, affiliate marketing is promoting another web business on your website and getting paid based on one of the following:
Pay-per-lead (PPL): You get paid when a visitor performs a certain action (usually filling out a form) on the website referred to by your website.
Pay-per-sale (PPS): You get paid a percentage of the purchase made on the advertisers website. Depending on the company, you will be paid handsomely for making sales.
Pay-per-click (PPC): Every time a visitor clicks an ad, you get paid a certain amount of money. These pay the least but clicks occur far more frequently than sales.
You might be thinking selling products or services is the only way to make real money online. That's not true. In fact, majority of the web publishers make all their revenue through affiliate marketing. It's quite possible to make enough money to live on.
The next issue is, what does promotion exactly involve? Usually, it's placing text links or banners on your website. When users click on it, a tracking system knows the traffic came from your website. You're rewarded whenever the user does something desired by the web business (They're called the 'merchants' and you're the 'affiliate').
So how does one go about finding merchants? Fortunately, the method is really simple. There are websites which act as 'link banks', you can sign-up to merchants and get links and banners to put on your website. If the definition didn't come quite clear, just follow the links below. The following are completely free and easy to use, to maximize your profits we recommend you sign-up to all of them:
- ClixGalore - One of the most popular affiliate networks on the internet. You must join this one if you want to earn anything. It's free.
- ClickBank - This is probably the most popular one. You've guessed it, it's important you join this one too. It's free aswell.
On the websites above, you'll find tools which allow you to look for merchants. Once you've found merchants and your application to become their affiliate has been approved, you'll recieve the HTML code for banners/links. Simply paste the HTML code in your website and you'll be ready to start earning!
Promoting Your Website
We're almost done. You have your website built. It's been optimized for search engines. Now all we need to do is tell people about it. As we discussed before, most of your traffic will be coming through search engines, to increase your ratings on search engines you can buy links from Text Link Ads; they're one of the most reliable and quite popular.
Don't forget to include your website's URL in your e-mail signature; talk about it on forums, chat rooms and blogs.
And we're done. Depending on how well-designed and well-written the content is, your website can now generate revenue for you!
Stall manages http://www.nvu.com/8 - A website dedicated to proving online money-making guidelines to Australians (Well, you can join in too!). He eats fruit and drinks water in his spare time.