Making Money from Websites

I could take a lot of time detailing how to find low competition keywords, but honestly it's a skill you have to develop and telling you in one paragraph isn't going to work. You have two choices, buy Janet Smith's book Nomad's Guide to Make Money Online, or buy Micro Niche Finder, both of which will help you learn about choosing low competition keywords for your niche sites.

The trick to making money from niche websites isn't from picking keywords, honestly anybody can learn about that, the real secret is monetizing the sites. And that really does take skill - not! What you need to do is put an AdSense ad in prime position, this needs to be above the fold, and better yet, it needs to be inside your content to get maximum exposure, or more bluntly more eyes looking at it.

I get really annoyed with people on forums who complain about never making any money online and then you look at their sites and all the best ads are in sidebars, below the fold, or there is just so much happening on the page that the average site visitor can't even find the ads.

The reality is if you're going to make money online you really need to make a decision, is your site about making money or is it about being a content publisher who has ads on their site. You can't really have it both ways because traffic that wants your content is going to get annoyed with ads in your articles.

To recap, if you are going to make money from the site, put ONE AdSense block on the page, not two or three, and put the ad in the content above the fold. This means you will probably have to have a really mimimal header, if you even have one at all, because otherwise your ad is going to drop below the fold in some monitors.

On my own sites I try to keep my header to around 80px high so that the ad is completely above the fold even with other images in the design - and that reminds me, I really should talk a bit about your website template.

Niche sites that make good money have really simple designs, the goal is to make sure your site visitor isn't confused with too many links or widgets, and this is also why Wordpress, Serendipity, or Blogspot aren't always the best engines to use for creating niche websites.

If you choose to use a CMS you need to strip it right back to bare basics, a header, a content area, a right sidebar, and a footer, but keep your colors simple. Of course you can't afford to write any old garbage, your content needs to be good enough to provide information, people clicking ads should be because the ad is interesting, not because your content is rubbish.

Once your website is complete, you're ready to start getting backlinks, remember in my last post I said avoid social networking and go for search traffic? The only way to get search traffic is by getting backlinks to your website. You can comment on blogs all you like, that isn't going to help much. What you need is solid links in the post or article on the other site.

Think about, the search engines look for links to your site and if they see a link in an article, for example I could link to Wikipedia right now, I'm not going to, but I could, now the spiders see that as a really good link and rank your site higher in the search engines. In truth you don't rank better for every link you get, just because every other site you compete for is also getting links, but if you get more than your competition you go up a notch.

I've found the best way to get backlinks is to stop worrying about content, to forget about almost everything except getting a link, but I ignore directories and blog comments, and mostly I ignore forums now, instead I write around 5-10 articles per day that I send to other websites to be published with my link. But I also operate a lot of websites so that's a lot of work.

If you're interested, one of the best article submission sites is iSnare Article Submission, and for two dollars you can have your article blasted to 1000 other sites which can give you 20-30 backlinks within a week or two of blasting your article. Good luck.