New approach

Making Money on the web Tip #1: When trying to think of some new site ideas, think about what people are talking about at that time, or what they will be talking about in the near future. For example, Christmas is almost here. There are probably some hot toys or gift ideas that will get searched for. In February, there is Valentines Day. There are thousands of examples. Build it and help them find you.

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I had this great idea in my mind that I would make a site that would hand hold all the steps involved with making money on the web. I have had second thoughts. Not because I want to charge you for it later. In the field of online marketing especially, you need to realize early on that you have to learn to do a couple of things:

1. Just build it.
2. Trust your gut

I cannot tell you how many times I have heard "I thought of that" or "I wonder how a site about X would do". Do it!. And when you think about an idea, just build it. And when I say build it, I pretty much am just talking about writing content.

So, if you start at the beginning of this blog and followed through the things that I say to do, they still apply. Up to this point we were at actually building the site. I will not go through how to actually make the site, banners, what have you. This will be more about making money from the site after it is made and less about making websites.

More about Home Pages

You can skip this section for now if you just want to create your homepage content and go on the the next step. This will all be covered later in the course as well.

Before we go any further with the content on the homepage, I would like to introduce a concept we have not talked about yet that I think is important to understand right now. Also we will talk a little more about the homepage in general to help you think about your own homepage.

The system that I am having you go through is a 3 part process - Create / Promote / Optimize. These steps are then repeated over and over again, either with your current website or a brand new one.

Simply put, CREATE is the process of writing the content of the pages, PROMOTE is the process of getting your site found on the internet, and OPTIMIZE is the process of making changes to your site so it performs better. We will go into details on all three steps, but for now this is all you need to know.

We have talked about how end users use a home page and what we want to put as our content, but how do we as webmasters use are home page to the maximum extent. Lets look at what we already know:

1. Most of your traffic will come to your homepage - What can we do with this?

a. If I have something I really want people to see, I should showcase it on my homepage
b. If I am selling advertisment space on my site, I will charge the most for my homepage

I also mentioned that most people do not read what is on the homepage. What I am refering to is your content, your words, your sales pitch, your paragraphs. If you want to show them a hot promotion, they will see that. If you want to showcase a particular link or page on your site, they will see that too. But, as we get more and more used to looking at webpages, we pretty much tune out the fluff. Interesting enough though, we still need to optimize this section.

2. Why should we if no one reads it?

Well, when I say no one reads it, I mean humans don't read it. But, humans are not the only thing that visit our sites. All the search engines have these programs called spiders (we will go over this more) that come and read your pages and store them in the search engine. From this stored page, the search engine trys to figure out what your site and or page is about. What we really want is the search page to select our page in the results when someone searches for a term that we want.

3. Why should we optimize the homepage?

We have an entire page to tell the search engines about our site! If no one reads it or cares about our home page content, we can make it tell the search engines what we want.

So right now you should have your 3 ideas, 3 titles, 3 pages of content. You might have looked at some other websites, and you may have thought of some new ideas when you have been doing all your content writing. What search terms are important to you? What word(s) or phrase(s) do you want to be found for?

If there is something you want the search engine to know about your site, MAKE SURE IT IS IN THE CONTENT ON YOUR HOME PAGE. If this word or phrase is very important to you, make sure it is in the content on your home page MULTIPLE TIMES.

To conclude - As webmasters, we can:

use the home page to showcase a particular product, link, whatever
use the home page to sell our most expensive ads
use the home page to let the search engines know what are site is about

We will get more into this later. I wanted you to understand this now while you are writing your homepage content so you can make sure you get the terms that are important to you into your paragraphs. If you don't do it now, we will obviously do it later in the optimize section.

Step 6 - Home Page content

What should you have now:

Theme
3 page ideas
3 page titles
3 pages of content
domain name

Next in the list is your home page content. For this step we are concentrating on the words and paragraphs, not layouts, logos, pictures, templates, navigation, or anything else.

For your homepage content, I want you to go look at other sites in your topic or theme and see what kind of home pages they have for some ideas. Copying and pasting someone's homepage and changing the domain name is not what I mean. Read their home page. Look at what they are doing.

What do you do when you normally land on someones home page?

I can tell you that most of the time I am looking for some type of navigation to find what I am looking for. I personally do not spend much time reading home pages, and I would think that this is the norm.

So what kind of content should you put on your home page?

First, lets think about what a home page is in the grand scheme of things. This is the place where most of your traffic will enter your site. They get a first impression about your site, if it looks like there is information that they can use, they may click on some things. This is what you want. You want them to stay on your site and click somewhere else in your site.

The kind of content you want on your home page can be a little sales pitch. You can tell people who you are, what you are offering, how much experience, why you are doing it, how you are different, whatever you want to say about you and the website. Upsell yourself. Make it sound as professional as possible.

Hosting your website

In order for anyone to see your website from the internet, you are going to need someone to host your website. There are many website hosting companies out there offering all kinds of different options. From how much space to how much bandwidth and a whole lot in between.

For your first site, I would suggest using a Budget Plan from ResellerZoom. It will only cost you 4.95 a month, and will offer you plenty of space, monthly bandwith, and a lot of extras that many hosting companies will offer. Check out their site for more information.

If at some point you need more space or more bandwith, it is not difficult to add these items when you need them, or even switch to a different plan or provider. This should suffice for now while you are learning.

If you have any questions about this please let me know.

What should I use to create my webpages?

If you have gotten to this step, you should have:

Theme
3 pages of content
3 titles for your pages
domain name
homepage content

This is about the time I would purchase hosting and start creating your website. Many of you may not have any products to build websites. So before we buy hosting, we better figure out what we are going to use to build it.

Personally, I use Microsoft FrontPage 2003. If you are familiar with Microsoft Word, FrontPage is not that big of a step. It has the same look as Word, and many of the same functions as Word as well. I have found it the easiest to use out of all the alternatives.

I could write a whole new site on how to use Microsoft Frontpage, or Dreamweaver, or other website building programs. I am trying to focus on the making money and the marketing side of websites, so I will not spend a lot of time on actual creation of sites. Anything that I do mention will be made from using FrontPage.

I can point you in the right direction on how to learn to use FrontPage. I would suggest that you get a copy of FrontPage and start trying it out. There is a nice help feature that has all you need to know and information on how to do anything you want built into the software. There is also plenty of free information on the internet on how to do everything. If you are looking for some personal help on getting started using it, I can help you with that as well.

Step 5 - Domain names

We have come to the first step that involves purchasing something. There are many places that you can buy a domain name from. You may want to purchase your domain name from the same place that you host your site from, as they usually have some bundled deals. This may make things easier for you, but may cost a little bit more money. Since this is your first site, one of my goals is to limit your costs for hosting to around $5 a month. If we can get a domain name for under $10, that should limit your domain and hosting costs to $70 a month.

When you register for a domain name, you normally are paying for one year. Domain names can cost anywhere from 60 cents to 15 dollars depending on where you purchase them.

These are places that I have registered domain names at that I would recommend:

Namecheap.com
Aplus.net
GoDaddy.com

If you search for cheap domain names you will probably find registerfly.com. They are cheap, but I did not like their interface, have slow customer service, and found that there were more problems then any of the other places I have used. The learning curve seemed steeper there then at any other place. I still use them from time to time when buying a large amount of domains at one time. For your first site, I would not advise using them.

Before we start looking, take a look at all of your content that you have created already. Look at your titles, your topic, and see if anything jumps at you in terms of naming your site. Write down at least a few keywords that you can search for.

To show you an example of registering a domain name, I am going to choose Namecheap.com. I will create a domain name for my example site and show you the process. Most domain registration sites will have a very similar process, but it would be impossible to show all the different sites.

Step 1 - Go to namecheap.com

Step 2 - Around the top of the screen there is a field to type in a domain name and some check boxes that allow you to choose your extension. I am only concerned with the .com check box at this time. Type in a possible name for your domain, leave the check mark alone, and click "search"


I have chosen to see if "spywareinfo.com" is taken.

2. The next screen will give you the results of your search and hopefully you are done searching. Do not get discouraged if yours is taken, as this is quite common.



As you can see above, the domain I wanted was taken. You can continue the same process by entering in domain names and clicking on "search" from this screen, or you can use namecheap's "search by keywords" options.

3. If you choose to "search by keywords", you will see a screen that has some fields to type in multiple keywords. Try a few different words and see what you can find. Notice that there is a check box that says "include hyphens in the results". If you have been reading you know my thoughts about hyphens, so I suggest you leave this unchecked. I searched for spyware and info as my keywords.



4. spywareinfoworld.com shows as being available. This is not too bad, especially being my first search. Three words, easily spelled, has some direct correlation with my site.

Notice that all the other selections are NOT .com names. Before you purchase, double make sure you have a .com. Look for misspellings. Make sure you have the name you want.

At some point, I may come back to this domain, but I am going to keep looking. Use the domain name search or the keyword search until you find something that you want.

5. I have found a domain name that I like, spywaredave.com, that is available. Mark the checkbox next to the domain name that you want and click "add to cart".



6. You will have to fill in a form to create your account before you can purchase your domain. Fill in the information, and then click on "Create Account"

7. You will see your account screen. Namecheap has a few different ways to pay for your domains. If you are a PayPal or Google Checkouts user, you can pre-fund your account from this account screen. If you want to pay by credit card, click on the "click here to checkout".



8. You will be asked to fill in some various contact information for 4 different contact positions. This information is put into the WHOIS database. What is the WHOIS database and why is it around? This question is for another day. Just know that it is OK to put your contact information in all locations.

You may have also noticed at namecheap.com and other registers that there is an option (sometimes free) to mask your WHOIS information or make it private. This is so no solicitors can access this information and add you to mailing lists, send you junk mail, etc. If you want some more info on this, let me know.

9. After you enter this information, you will come to the payment screen. If you have pre-funded your account, choose that option, if not, choose the credit card option.

10. You will recieve a summary of the transaction, and see that it says wait 24 hours before it becomes active. This is ok because we have more things to do before then.

You are done registering your domain. It is yours. There are a few more settings we have to change at a later date, but we are not there yet.

I did infact purchase spywaredave.com. This is where I am going to build my site following along with this guide.

My thoughts on choosing a domain name

Here is a list of things to look for and think about when choosing your domain name

1. Shorter is better then longer
2. Fewer words is better then more words
3. Avoid commonly misspelled words
4. Avoid dashes in your domain name
5. Try to get the .com domain name

Personally, I feel that the most important aspect of your domain name should be ease of verbally telling it to another human being. That is my final test if I like a domain name. I want to be able to say "go to casino dave dot com" and have casinodave.com entered and visited by who I am telling.

Why do I care if a lot of my potential is from the search engines and links? You want your name to be easily remembered so that you can get repeat customers. You want people to be able to tell their friends your site name. You want to be able to tell people too, and you want all these people to go to your site, and not someone elses.

Keywords in the domain name are nice, and so are descriptive words about your site. They are nice, and you should see if some names that fit your site are available. But not if it means that your site name is www.keywords-about-my-site.com or www.keywordsstuffedinmydomainname.com.

A direct link to your site will always get there. A search engine result page link to your site will always get there. Computers, browsers, and links will never care what your domain name is. Click the link no matter what the name is and it goes to the right place.

All my reasons above are to avoid human errors, not computer errors. You do not want someone finding someone elses site and not yours. All the reasons try to limit the possibilites of errors.

- The longer the domain name, or the more words, the more oppurtunities they have to forget it, say it wrong, or make spelling errors.

- If you have a non .com domain name (like .net), you can easily send traffic to a .com name because people generally assume .com is the default site.

- If you have dashes, someone may not put the dashes in, or not all of them, or not in the right place, or might not remember the dashes.

Some of my thoughts of picking a name like casinodave.com:

- My site is about online casinos, so I wanted to get a word like "casino" in there.
- 2 words, easilly spelled, short and sweet.
- Notice "dave" has nothing to do with online casinos, bonuses, blackjack, or anything about my site. Yes it is my name and I like personallizing, but using "dan" or "steve" or "dog" or any easily spelled word would work just the same.
- I have the .com
- No dashes, no places for anyone to make a spelling mistake.

Think about telling someone who has never used a computer before your domain name. How confident are you that they will enter it in correctly? If there is any doubt, there may be a better name out there for you.

Keep these things in mind when you are searcing for your domain name in the next step.

Enough with the writing, lets make a site!

If you have completed all the steps you should have all of these things -

Main Theme
3 page ideas
3 page titles
3 pages of content

My intentions behind all this writing prior to making your site are the following:

#1 To see if you like creating content -

If you are going to be making webpages and websites, you are going to have to do what you have just done with your initial idea many times. This is not for everyone, not everyone enjoys it or can stand it. So before you go learning a lot about the technical aspects of making your site, you should probably know now if you are interested in writing, typing, researching, and brainstorming ideas and content. If you do not, then this type of website may not be for you. This will save you a lot of time from learning something you will not use. Are you still interested?

#2 To open your mind to different thoughts and ideas about your topic-

It looks pretty simple, right? Just a simple little outline and simple little tasks on a subject you know about. During this process, you thought about your topic and wrote about your topic in some detail. Perhaps you already have some ideas for your next set of pages, or maybe you now have a better idea of what you want your website to offer. Maybe you found that you liked talking about one aspect, and not so much another.

#3 Getting started is oftentimes the hardest -

I cannot tell you how many times that I used to open up Frontpage or some other website creating tool and would just stare at the screen. Without a plan, it is very difficult to get started. It can be very frustrating, and again if you do not get started you may never give it a shot. This plan will make things very easy to create your site.

#4 To help you with your homepage -

This can be very difficult if you have never made a site before, and is often a place where people start, get annoyed or frustrated and quit. If you have some general feelings from writing about your theme, you should already have some ideas about what you want your homepage to say.

#5 To help come up with a title and/or domain name of your site -

Sometimes this step scares people too, and often times people spend a lot of time thinking about domain names first. From writing about your content and creating titles for your pages, you more then likely have some domain name ideas.

Step 4 - writing content for your 3 pages

Now is about the time where I take my webpage ideas and just start writing about them. They do not have to be masterpieces or a complete finished product. Here is what I am looking for in my initial pages:

1. 250-500 words
2. Spelling and grammer mistakes fixed
3. Content has a general flow to it
4. Content is readable
5. A mix of keywords that I would want someone to type in to a search engine to find my site. I will show you this in more detail later.

All of these can be added upon and tweaked at a later date. What we are looking for is content to get on our site, something to start with, something to work with.

I usually just open up Word or some other document writing program and start typing. I am also a big fan of brainstorming and thinking about possibilities. Usually when I do this I find other ideas similar to what I am writing about that can also be used at a later date.

It also does not hurt to get some ideas from your competition. Search Google for the title you have decided for your pages, and see what your competitors are doing. You will see some ideas for the page you are working on as well as some future ideas. Write these things down that you like.

While you are doing this, DO NOT CUT AND PASTE from someone's site to yours. This will have no benefit in what we are doing for your site. You want unique content, your own words. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others love unique content and penalize duplicate content. Do not do it, it is counter productive to what we are trying to accomplish.

I am going to write my pages now.

Step 3 - Titles for our 3 pages

Ok, you know what you are going to write about in your 3 pages. We need to think up some title names for our pages.

Here are my page ideas -

Review of a specific software solution for removing spyware
General How-to get rid of spyware
Frequently Asked Question page about Spyware

Don't worry if they are not this closely related. They should be a common theme, but it can be different sub-topics. For example, my three pages could be one about spyware, one about firewalls, and one about anti-virus. One could be on laptops, one could be on desktops, and one could be on software. As long as they are related you are going to be fine right now.

Now, lets start thinking about what words you would search for to find your page. I prefer two or three word phrases, but sometimes more. Write down your ideas somewhere.

Using my example:

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Review of a specific software solution for removing spyware -

Example Titles
Anti Spyware Software
Spyware Software Review
Recommended Spyware Program
interchange these words to come up with more

Keep all your ideas, and choose one to be the title of this page.

I will choose Recommended Spyware Software.

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General How-to get rid of spyware

Example titles:
Removing Spyware
How Do I Remove Spyware?
Spyware Removal

I will choose Spyware Removal

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Frequently Asked Questions page about Spyware

Example Titles
Spyware FAQ
Common Spyware Questions
Spyware Frequently Asked Questions

I will choose Spyware Frequently Asked Questions
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Do this for each of your page ideas, and write them down.

You should now have:

Theme of site

3 webpage ideas

3 titles for these webpage ideas

Step 2 - Three Webpage Ideas

You know the subject that you want your site about. Now lets think about what we want on your pages. I have decided to go with something computer related.

To start, I want to make 3 content pages.

Here are some ideas of what I would do.

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Write reviews of..............

I have built over 100 computers and set up about 50 different networks. I can think of a lot of things that I can review.

Example: main site about laptops, and review 3 specific models.

Example: main site about computer upgrades, and pick 3 parts to write about, like hard drives, mice and video cards.

Example: Main site about software, and make one page a software review and the other two non-review pages.
This is what I am going to choose. I will write a review on a particular spyware remover. Which one I have not chosen yet, and this does not really matter right now.
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How-to-do................

How-to-do pages are great, especially if you write them yourself. You are giving an answer to something that someone is looking for. This can really be just how-to-do whatever. Like how to sharpen a knife, or how to program your VCR. It can be step by step or just an explanation. Whatever, doesn't matter right now. For now, think of something you know how to do about that has to do with your website idea.

I know how to do a lot of things with computers, so I have a lot of how to pages that I can write. (I hope you see that choosing something you know about makes this process a lot easier).

Example: I could write about how to make your computer shut down faster, or how to make a word document a PDF, or how to prolong the life of your computer. It can be general, it can be very specific, it doesn't matter.

Keeping with my Spyware theme, I think I will write about in general how to remove spyware.

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General Information / Opinion / Question - Answer

I tend to like the other two more then this one, and I would more then likely make two reviews and one how-to or vice versa, but I just want you to know that this is available. General information works too, and you can make it on just about anything you want that relates to your site. Specific or general, it does not matter at this time.

Example: General Information - I could write about how long the computer has been around for.

Example: Opinion - Similar to review, but not as specific. I could write about how I think wireless networks could be better, or why I hate spam.

Example: Question - Answer - Just like it sounds. Write a question about something within your topic, and answer the question.

Keeping with my spyware theme, I will make a frequently asked question (FAQ) page about spyware in general.

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Now you should have an idea what you are going to make your three pages about. Choose three and write them down. Will they all be easy to write about for you? If not, choose something that will be.

I have chosen:

Page 1 - review of specific spyware software

Page 2 - How-to page on how to remove spyware

Page 3 - Frequently Asked Question page of spyware

Once you have selected yours you have completed step 2

Site Creation: STEP 1 - What is the site going to be about

So you are ready to get started with your first site. We need to think about what the site is going to be about.

I find that if you want to give yourself a chance at making a successful website, you need to make this topic something that you either know a lot about, enjoy talking about, have an opinion on, or have some basic interest in. This I believe is especially important with the first site.

Why do I suggest this?

1. It will be a lot easier to add content to your site. You will enjoy it more if it is on a topic you like and/or know a lot about.

2. I find that when I have a topic I do not know much about, it is much harder to come up with unique content or expand the site at a later date.

3. You will be learning a lot about various ways and methods to make money with your site. If you can focus on this instead of researching some topic or gathering information, you will be better off. I have had many ideas where I just don't follow through because I don't feel like doing any research on the topic.

4. You will soon see that Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN are extremely important to making any real kind of money with your site. What Search Engines like more then anything at all is UNIQUE CONTENT. Copying and pasting and generated content will never be as good as unique content. Your thoughts make your site different then the rest. We will talk about this in more detail later, but just know now that unique content is very important.

5. This is going to take some time, and if you enjoy what you are writing about you will enjoy making your site more. You may not enjoy it at all, but at least this gives you a chance at it.

Ok, so let me give you some example ideas. I am going to think about what I like.

I am a computer guy and I like computers
I know a lot about online casinos and I like gambling
I am in a pool league and am pretty decent

Think about what you like, what you know about, or what you have opinions on and write them down. Think about things that people would want to buy or want information about or what they would search about for each of your topics. Think about which one has the most possibilities or what you would think would be easiest to expand on. Once you have decided, you are done with step one.

Understanding how money is made from websites

Before we start actually making a website, there are a few things that need to be thought about.

#1 Understanding how money is made from your websites

A lot of people do not understand how money is made on a website. That is OK. For most of you reading this, this is very new to you. That is OK. I think it is important to understand before choosing what the site is going to be about or building the sites. We will get into specifics, but for now the basics money makers are:

Affiliate programs - another website gives you a link that you put on your website. If someone clicks on that link AND buys something at that website, you get a commission. This commission varies from program to program. For now, just know that pretty much anything that you want to promote has an affiliate program somewhere.

Advertisers - another way to make money from your site is to sell space and links to advertisers. If you take a look at casinodave.com, you will see that in the right hand corner I have "premier partners". At the time I am writing this, I average about $50 per link per month on that site. I also have sold ads on several other pages on the site. For now, just know that their is this potential to make money.

Google Adsense and other Pay Per Click programs - another way many people choose to make money is by putting Pay Per Click ads on their website. Just like their name sounds, PPC earns you money for anytime someone clicks one of these ads on your site. I like adsense because it does a very good job of matching ads with what your site is about.

The list is longer then this, but these are the big 3 that I concentrate on when I want to make money from a website.

I find many people have the same misconceptions about making money online with their websites. A few of the more common ones are that they have to sell something and ship something to customers, and that regular links between your site and popular site have some value to your website or that you will make money that way.

Obviously you could sell actual items from your website. I do not use this method, and my guide will not talk about this. I really like the affiliate programs because you will make about the same amount of money (profit) on an item sold and you do not have to ship it. There is no need to worry about inventory, shipping materials and expenses, and so on.

So that is a brief introduction to the possible ways to make money with your site.

Intro

Hello! Thank you for stopping by and checking out the site. I am going to briefly introduce myself and what I plan this blog to be about.

My name is Dave, and I have been a webmaster for 3 years now. I have built dozens of websites, and have had some very good success. One of my first websites, casinodave.com, has done extremely well over the last year. I am also a computer and network consultant with a Bachelors Degree in Information Technology, have 10 years experience, and have multiple IT certifications from Microsoft and other IT vendors.

My intentions of this blog is very simple. I would like to show a lot of people how to make money making websites. I have not been able to find a good guide on how to do this if you were starting from the very beginning. So, I am going to make one.

While I make my posts about the steps involved, I will also be performing the same steps on a new website idea that I have. Every step of the way though I will tell you and show you what I did and why I did it.

I think it is important to start off very slowly and understand a few concepts right off the bat. So often material is laid out in a way where you are already doing so many things, but you really do not know or understand why you are doing them. Everything will be explained as simple as possible, and if there are ever any questions feel free to contact me, write comments, etc.

If you take this journey, I wish you the best of luck. Contact me anytime with any questions. I am here to help.

Lets begin.