How to Build a Profitable Online Website

Introduction

Since its inception, the internet has grown from a means of sharing data to virtual world that is almost a self-contained economy of its own. A great many people have made millions on the internet, and countless more earn a comfortable living through their digital ventures.

Making Money on the Internet

As with any business in the world, an internet business is ultimately based around the distributions of goods, services, or both. They may not be your own goods or services, but in the end, all business comes down to one of these two things.

This concept probably seems quite obvious to most people, but it is an important one to remember when you feel as though you may be getting caught up in the rush of the numerous money making systems the sprinkle the internet.

At any point when you are trying to evaluate such a system for its legitimacy, step back and ask yourself:

"Who is ultimately buying the product or service (if there even is one), what exactly are they buying, and why are they buying?".

This simple question can quickly help to put things into a more objective perspective. To make money online, you must either sell your own products or services, or assist in the selling of someone else's products or services.

The Best Vehicle For Doing This

In the long term, a website -- namely a niche website with a regular user base -- is the very best vehicle for achieving financial success online. A website is much like your physical storefront, or business office.

In other words, in order to be successful online, you want to have a website built around specific products or services. You also need to have people who:

- regularly visit your website
- are at least somewhat interested in what your website offers.

The Holy Grail of Internet Websites

The ideal goal to work towards is a website that achieves the following 3 factors. Every person who is highly successful on the internet has achieved the following 3 in some capacity or another:

a.) Is based around a desirable product or service

Just as with any business, the dynamic of supply and demand comes into play. There must be a demand for your product or service if you expect to make any money. Therefore, a highly profitable website must be related to a product or service that has a viable demand.

For example, a website based around colorful animal stickers will be very hard to make profitable compared to most other niches.

b.) Has a large base of visitors or users.

In any online business, traffic represents the main bulk of your potential customers. With a physical business, most people know that even if you have a great product, you won't make much money if you have little or no flow of potential customers moving through your business. The same principle applies to any online business.

c.) Has a large reader, user, or customer loyalty.

Building a website and having people visit it once is one thing. Building a high quality website that people come back to repeatedly is a completely different level.

If your website is largely information based, a reader will be far more likely to purchase a product or service, that you sell or recommend if they are familiar with you, and trust you.

Every person who is highly successful with their internet business has established a certain level of familiarity and trust with a group of people.

How do you build trust and familiarity? Well, there are countless books and articles written entirely on this subject, but to start with, try thinking of the factors that would cause you to trust a certain web-author over all the others. What makes you grow to prefer one website over another? Put yourself in the customer's shoes, so to speak.

4th factor - A website that is well designed for the customer.

In more pragmatic terms, once someone is visiting your website, it must be designed to make the person want to do what you want them to do. This is where internet marketing, website design, and copy writing comes into play.

In broader terms, in order to have long term success, your internet business must have the qualities that people tend to value in any business. Qualities such as integrity and honesty are key. To put it briefly, a solid business is based around delivering great value to the customer. An internet business is no exception.

How To Choose A Profitable Niche

First off you need to choose a specific area to work within. This could be anything from gardening or art to fitness or health. As discussed before, this should be something that has at least a decent amount of popular interest.

It need not be an area that is a popular trend; many of these niches have a huge amount of competition, which makes for a more difficult playing field.

A niche such as learning to play the piano by ear is not overwhelmingly popular, but there are enough people interested in it to make it a potentially profitable business.

I am not personally interested in the piano, but I use this example because there is a man by the name of Jermaine Griggs who had a passion for playing the piano. He spent 6 years in his grandmother's basement building a book & website centered around this theme. He now makes millions per year based around this niche.

My Advice For Choosing A Niche

Make a list of everything that you are interested in, or that you could potentially be interested in. Don't think solely in broad terms like "fitness". As you can see by the example above, some of the most profitable niches are quite specific. Then reflect on that list and try to choose which ones you think have the most potential, based on the previous discussion.

How To Build Such A Website

Once a person has found a particular niche, there are 2 main themes that a successful website can be built upon.

a.) Information based websites

This is by far the simpler of the two concepts, but its simplicity does not detract from its potential. In a nutshell, an information-based websites gives people really, really good information about stuff they want to know, which results in them coming back over and over again.

b.) A unique idea

Many of the multi-million dollar websites today started with an inspirational insight within someone's mind. Major websites like fark.com, myspace, facebook, and even wikipedia started with an idea. I could go on for pages.

These websites started with an idea that nobody had thought of & put into action... at least successfully. All of these websites started with an idea that turned out to be appealing to lots of people.

Now, we take these websites for granted, but You may or may not be prone to thinking on such a large scale, but you just might come up with a unique, never-been-done-successfully-before idea within your niche.

Perhaps your niche is gardening. Maybe you come up with a vision of a community where all people with a passion for gardening come together to share their customizable "mygarden" profiles..... among other things. I'm not really into gardening, so I have no idea if such a website exists. But if it hasn't, it certainly has potential, at least in my opinion.

How Do You Make Money

So how does such a website turn into profits? Well, as before, all business ultimately comes down to the sale of goods or services to someone.

So in order to be profitable, your website must be the medium of exchange for some sort of service or product. Ways in which that can happen include:

a.) You sell your own products.

b.) You sell other people's products for a commission through affiliate marketing. Or if you have a very large and popular website, negotiating deals 1-on-1 becomes a viable option.

c.) You facilitate the sale of goods through advertising. Programs like Google Adsense offer relevant pay-per-click ads as a way to monetize your site.

When you have a lot of traffic centered around a particular niche, your website also becomes a very desirable advertising locale for companies with products related to your website.

d.) You sell your own services or memberships

e.) You sell other people's services or memberships through commission based affiliate programs.

How To Get Started

The first thing that you need to do is to start educating yourself about the 4 factors that were discussed earlier:

- Finding Profitable Niches
- Getting Traffic To Your Website & SEO
- Building Reader or User Loyalty
- Internet Marketing & Copy Writing

Google is a simple, yet fantastic tool for starting the learning process. Start by typing in related search phrases and start reading.

The specific steps to take are far beyond the scope of this article. The best way to start learning is to jump in head first. Make the commitment to spend a portion of time each day or week learning.

Here are a few areas to start researching in. Take these keywords and start searching. Vary the search terms up to get different results.

SEO Basics
Affiliate Marketing Basics
Making Money with Google Adsense
Successful Blogging
Copy writing guides and tips
Getting traffic to your website
Making your website sticky

Technical Skills Required To Build A Website

To build a website, you will need to know how to do it yourself, pay someone else to do it, or work with a partner who has the required skills.

Learning the basics of building a website takes time, as does learning any new skill, but it is not more more, or less difficult than acquiring most new skills.

Note that advanced programming is very rarely a necessary skill to start building your first profitable websites. Many profitable websites are quite simple in design.

Macromedia Dreamweaver is one of the most well known interactive softwares used to build websites. In my opinion, the fastest way to acquire the ability to build basic websites is to learn how to use a software like Dreamweaver, while studying the basics of HTML.

There are hundreds of quality HTML tutorials that can be easily found by using google.

In Summary

Building profitable websites has its pros and cons. The pros include low startup cost compared to just about every other business, and the ability to work in just about any niche. Additionally, the internet has a much more fluid nature, compared to the succeed or fail nature of many physical businesses.

Your first few website ventures are unlikely to be million dollar businesses, but its realistic to be building websites that earn several hundred, or even a few thousand dollars per month in residual income.

In other words, if you are able to stick with it and keep learning, your earning ability on the internet will often continue to increase steadily.

The biggest challenge with online businesses is a large learning curve compared to business vehicles such as network marketing. For people who are not as technically & internet oriented, this can be like adapting to an entirely new world.

Hopefully, this article helped to give you a few insights. Good luck with any online ventures you may decide to undertake