Websites that Make Money

When I first started working from home with websites I read every forum or guru blog I could find, I bought all sorts of make money online presentations, went to seminars, and installed endless website development software, but I didn't make a cent. In time I learned that none of that is important, there are only TWO THINGS you need to know. How to get targeted traffic, and then converting those visitors into customers.

A website that makes money is a website that has oodles and oodles of traffic, plain and simple. The problem is getting traffic to your website, and most importantly, making sure the traffic you get is worth having because your visitors click ads or buy whatever you're selling.

And that brings us to the second problem, the kind of traffic that converts is targeted traffic. If you've ever worked in sales think of it like getting a warm lead, that is what targeted traffic is, they are website visitors who come to your website because you have something they want.

That could be because you own a small hotel or vacation rental, or it could be because you own a website selling baby clothes. Either way, the visitors who come to your website expect to have their needs met, they expect to find what they are looking for, or they'll click that big back button at the top of the browser, and then you lose them.

Getting traffic to your website that converts is all about choosing keywords, and that word is so important I'm going to mention it again, KEYWORDS.

Picking your Keywords to Make Money

Keywords dictate what people immediately think when they arrive on your website. Chances are they don't know your website, so they go to a search engine like Google or Bing and type some kind of keyword into the search box, and what they see on the front page of those results will be a list of relevant websites they visit. You want to be one of those websites!

If your website appears in the top ten results on the first page of the search engine then you are going to make money. What an incredible way of working from home, simply create a website, choose your keywords carefully, rank on page one of the big search engines, then sit back and watch the Euros accumulate.

Oops, It Isn't That Easy Is It? no it isn't, if it was that easy everyone would already be doing it. Part of the secret of why I make money using the Internet is that I teach other people just like you how to choose your keywords and get your website ranked on page one.

If you're serious about joining me, and countless other people who actually manage to pay all our bills working from home whilst we live in Spain, you could pay me to teach you, or you could read on and learn, and while you're at it, buy an e-book I recommend which will give you 80% of what I teach anyway. You will want to read this e-book after I tell you how to find keywords.

How to Find the Best Keywords for Your Website

Google themselves provide a basic keyword tool that can be used to find keywords that have a minimum number of searches per month, and from the list of keywords they suggest, you should find something that is worth targeting.

The process I use starts by defining what my website sells, that sounds silly, but it actually helps me because when I create a website I often fall into the trap of using keywords that mean something to me, and not necessarily what other people would look for. Here's a quick example, one of my websites sells search engine optimization (SEO) services, but my visitors are looking for a "page one Google ranking", do you see the difference?

Your next step is to brainstorm all of the different words other people will use that should find your website, and the trick is to make sure you have content on your website that actually satisfies their need, but let's not get ahead of ourselves, you need a list of 20-30 different words or phrases that you think people will use to find your website.

Now that you have your first list of keywords and phrases, you're going to plug them all into Google's keyword tool, one by one, and look for keywords that have high monthly searches, good CPC, and reasonable advertiser competition. Try to identify at least 10 keywords and that you think describe your business.

The amazing thing about keyword tools is that they also offer keyword suggestions, make use of that, if a keyword you thought of isn't too hot, maybe one of the others is.

After you're satisfied that you have sufficient keywords to get your website started, we really need to know if your competition are also targeting these same keywords, and if they are, how strong they so that we can determine if your website is going to have a chance of reaching the first page of the search results.

Analysing Strength of Competition for Your Website

One of the hardest things you'll have to learn as you start to build an Internet business is how to assess the strength of your competition. It can be done manually, OR you can automate the process - guess which path I follow?

Manually assessing your search engine competition is a useful exercise because it encourages learning, and the more you know about how your business works the better you'll be able to adjust to changing circumstances, but the reality is that I don't want a full time job, I only want full time income, after all, isn't that the reason we moved to Spain (or wherever you are)?

Whilst I teach other people how to manually assess their search engine competition, the reality is that in my own business I prefer spending my time on more useful activities such as getting links to my websites, or networking with people online. After all, my income is directly affected by the number of sales I make, not by the amount of time I spend analysing other websites.

So, how do you assess the strength of competition in the search results? Basically there is a formula, which can be reduced in the most simplistic terms as checking the Google pagerank of the top ten sites, and their total incoming links, and how many times the chosen keyword appears in their title or inbound links.

I realise that is complex and probably sounds like double dutch, unfortunately the learning curve for building a successful online business is steep, but thankfully short. I could teach you keyword research and strength of competition in under 2 hours if you're a fast learner, condensing it to a few paragraphs here is impossible.

My Advice?

Righto, I'm sure you're itching to get started with creating your own online business, and you're probably feeling more lost now than you were before you started, don't give up, you've watched my video above, I'm going to suggest a couple of options for you now.