Building a Profitable Website – A Beginner’s Guide
So, how does one make money online through building a website? There’s a lot of things to consider. However, there are some key aspects that if you get these right from the very beginning, your site may be doomed to failure – forever. You can have amazing content, you can have the best .com domain name. But if you don’t follow the right processes of niche research and optimizing for laser targeted keyword phrases three, four or five keywords deep, you’ll likely be competing with huge names that you don’t stand a chance of ever ranking against.
Note that most of what I talk about below is likely related to blogging and using blogging content management systems (CMS) like WordPress. However, these instructions can be applied to almost any website that you build. The concepts and principles remain the same.
You’ll find this general guidance spattered throughout the website.
Step One: Have a Passion, Write About It
The first and most important thing in terms of building any website: make it about something you’re passionate about. If you’re going to be spending time doing anything in life, it needs to be something you enjoy. If you’re writing a website, it needs to be about something you enjoy. I almost want to say, it should be about something you love. When you write about something that you love, the work of that writing no longer feels like work. Words will flow flawlessly from your fingertips onto the web site. I’m writing this website because the thought of helping other people to make money online, through reading my trials and tribulations and what I’ve learned over the last 20 years, is invigorating for me – and that’s why I’m writing this. If you can see your website content helping other people to overcome a problem – no matter what the problem is – or to learn a new skill, like mechanical skills or playing guitar – or whatever! If your website can do that for people, then you’re on the right path
Step Two: Do Good Keyword Research on your Niche
You need to ensure that you do proper research. If you optimize for broad keywords that aren’t deep enough, you’ll have far too much competition. Here’s an example:
- These keywords are too broad: How to play guitar
- More optimized keyword phrase: How to learn Van Morrison songs on guitar
No, I didn’t look up how popular Van Morrison is when it comes to learning how to play guitar, but that’s an example. You need to do research and optimize for deeper, longer keyword phrases. It’s very important, especially when you consider there are millions upon millions of websites on the Internet. You don’t want to go up against a website like Home Depot, as an example.
For more details on doing keyword research on niche markets, check out this article.
Step Three: Consider your Target Market to determine what works
Taking good consideration of your target market is very important. As an example, this website more so caters to people who are somewhat tech savvy – or could potentially be a bit tech savvy. The potential is also there that people looking at this website may be not tech savvy at all, or moreso then the average person. However, given that when foraging into the great big world of building websites, we can safely assume people reading this are likely more tech savvy. With that being said, people who are tech savvy are less likely to click on an advertisement, unless that advertisement is very well targeted at them. Click through rates to advertisements may be lower on a site like this then a website in another niche, right? So one of the things I may take into consideration when building this website is other sources of income then just Google AdSense.
Considering your target market is important in all things. For example, perhaps the niche you are in is about particular movies. You notice through doing some good research using the Google Adwords Keywords Tool, or other tools that there is some mistype traffic showing up. One of the mistypes happens to be not a mistype, but actually part of a fan following. You decide to optimize for part of this traffic and get some additional rankings for a little known search.
This may be a little bit of a far flung example, however knowing your target market is so important, especially if you want to get into e-commerce or selling on marketplaces like Amazon Seller Central.