I often get asked if it easy to make money online. If I think they could do it. The answer I give them depends on what they planning to do. If they want to resign from their job and start working online full time then I always tell them that it is a bad idea. It can be hard to make a living online and it often takes a long time before you see any success. It is never a good idea to quit your job to start building websites.
If the person, on the other hand, is looking for a way to make extra money in their spare time then I tell them that I think that is an excellent idea. It is not very hard to make money and in a few months, they might have a few hundred extra coming in every month. If they are successful then they can keep building more and more websites on their free time until they earn enough and have the skill needed to turn it into a full-time job. If they do not like building websites or if they fail at it then they have lost nothing but their time.
- DON’T resign to start building websites.
- DO start building websites in your free time.
How to make money
There are a large number of different ways you can earn money with a website. You can get money from donors and supporters, you can use Adsense ads, you can sell links, you can sell things as an advertiser and the list goes on. Only your imagination limits the number of ways you can earn money with your website.
Which type of advertising that is best depends on what topic your website is about. Websites focused on a topic with financial or commercial intent will often be best of using affiliate marketing. This is especially true for websites about financial topics such as loans or forex trading. Affiliate commissions in these industries can be very high and it is therefore usually a lot more profitable to use affiliate advertising on these websites. Forex brokers such as eToro will give affiliates a commission on all revenue based by that client for perpetuity. This can over time often add up to large sums of money. A lot larger then you could ever get if you used Adsense or similar advertising. If your website is about forex trading, forex brokers or any other type of trading you should choose the affiliate model. The same is true if your website is about a certain type of products. You will make more earning a commission off everything sold then you will on click-based advertising.
Adsense and other types of click-based advertising can be a better option if you have a general website that covers a lot of different topics or if it covers topics that lack commercial intent. This includes many celebrity and pet websites.
In this article, we are going to focus on building an affiliate website.
Choosing a topic
For your first website, you should choose a narrow topic with little competition. Look for a topic with a few thousand searches each month and low competition. Use a website such as majestic.com to inspect the link profile of the top competitor. The more links they have the harder it is going to be to rank. I recommend that you build your first website around a topic where the competition has less than 20 links. This makes it an achievable goal for your first website. Your goal with this website is not t get rich but to prove to yourself that you can make money..
Make sure there are affiliate programs you can use for the topic you have chosen.
Chose a domain and hosting
Get cheap shared hosting and a domain name for your website. It is preferable if the domain is relevant to the topic you want to write about. Use a .com domain.
Install WordPress
I recommend that you use WordPress for this first site. WordPress is easy to install and popular among webmasters if you want to sell the site later. Give the site a theme you like and install the plugins Yoast SEO, Custom Permalinks, and Easy affiliate links on your blog.
Add content
You are now ready to add text and pictures to your website. I recommend that you write long in depth articles on each topic you want the website to show up in google for. I do not use texts that are less than 1500 words. Make sure that the articles are well written and is written with the visitor’s purpose in mind. IE it is written to answer the question or desire that the visitor has when he or she visits the website.
Add affiliate links
Add affiliate links of your pages that make it easy for your visitors to buy the products you write about if they want to do that.
Build links toward your site
Try to find a few websites that are willing to link to yours. A few strong links are better than many weak links. Do not build too many links at once.
Repeat
Add more content, affiliate links in the new content and links as often as you can.
Build a second site
If you feel that your site contains everything it needs, everything the user wants and that has enough links to rank then you can start building a new site on a new topic.