January 15, 201412 yr I have been apart of the WDF since 2007, if I remember correctly. I have been through everything from being self employed, having a full time development job (which I still have) and also making websites for myself. The one that I really love, is creating a site myself and trying to make a living from it, something I have been doing for a while now. There are a lot of people that post on blogs and forums saying they want to make a website so they can make money, thats wrong in my opinion. If your main objective is to make money then you will find it difficult. Your main objective should be to communicate with people with the same interest as yourself. This can be anything from a football team, genre of movies or even photography. It can be literally anything. What you should do is provide content to readers that will really interest them, spark an emotion or an action. This content should be in the form of hands on reviews, videos, tutorials, personal accounts of what you have experienced. None of this generic 500 word articles that can be bought for $5 with SEO'd content, barely readable and probably spun for the 50th time. I have been asked to look over why websites doesn't make money for friends and acquaintances on a few occasions, in every case the reason has been the emphasis of the website was always on getting people into the site and throwing ads at them from every direction possible with terrible content or content that just doesn't inspire someone to read past the 1st paragraph. Your website MUST be geared around great content that people want to read, share and discuss - off of the back of this you will start making money and can introduce affiliate links into your great content. I am currently doing a tutorial series from deciding the niche you should make a website about right up to making that first £1. It will likely be across the next 2 weeks and split into 5 parts. I would really love a little feedback with regards to what you guys look for when trying to make money online, what questions do you ask yourself, do you really know how SEO works for 2014?
January 15, 201412 yr That's a big question - it really depends on how you want to create an income... 1. Sell stuff - probably the easiest way, though having unique and desirable products helps. If you are simply wholesaling common products there is a lot of competition. 2. Sell services - again relatively easy if you have something that's unique and desirable, classifieds could be a service but obviously bog cometition from the likes of Ebay 3. Affiliate marketing - very hard to make any decent money - affiliate programs have been over subscribed for years and payouts are generally relatively low - requires serious traffic to make conversions 4. Ads - probably the easiest way - pay per impression os easiest if you can drive big traffic to the site - pay per click is harder - ad blockers and cookie blockers get in the way 5. Niche - some niches are more popular than others, some like adult, web design are saturated, so finding a smaller uncatered for niche can be more productive in the long run (less competition)
January 15, 201412 yr Author That's a big question - it really depends on how you want to create an income... 1. Sell stuff - probably the easiest way, though having unique and desirable products helps. If you are simply wholesaling common products there is a lot of competition. 2. Sell services - again relatively easy if you have something that's unique and desirable, classifieds could be a service but obviously bog cometition from the likes of Ebay 3. Affiliate marketing - very hard to make any decent money - affiliate programs have been over subscribed for years and payouts are generally relatively low - requires serious traffic to make conversions 4. Ads - probably the easiest way - pay per impression os easiest if you can drive big traffic to the site - pay per click is harder - ad blockers and cookie blockers get in the way 5. Niche - some niches are more popular than others, some like adult, web design are saturated, so finding a smaller uncatered for niche can be more productive in the long run (less competition) I wasn't asking for advice. I am giving it Selling products and services I won't be covering because I don't have experience other than selling SEO and Web Dev services. Affiliate marketing though is the easiest way of making serious money and it can be mixed with ads which can provide a small boost. Its easy if you follow a few simple rules, which I will go through in on of my next posts. Payouts for physical goods are generally lower than digital products or services. Also, most people turn to the biggies such as Amazon and big brand website for affiliate. There are loads of different affiliate programmes which offer double the standard amazon payout. You don't need serious traffic if your content is good enough to entice someone to buy. I have a website that gets at most 100 people a day and usually 3 people will buy everyday. Thats $30 a day. With regards to picking a niche most people make the mistake of targeting something like adult, web design or something else very broad and trying to cover all the topics at once. What you need to do is pick a domain which is broad and then start by targeting smaller parts of the niche for example you can have a general photography blog but start by targeting only specific cameras to have reviews, then supply tutorials for those cameras with examples etc. Start small and work your way up.
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