Turn a Site or Blog into a Business

A site used to mean just a little journal people post their feelings or post interesting information in. It still serves that same purpose today, but guess what? You can now make your sites into cash generation machines. Before we get started on just how that happens, we need to discuss the various paths that people can take.

The "Powerhouse"

What I call the powerhouse method is just one big, fat information site that provides useful information and is a valuable resource for a wide variety of wanted information. Usually, these sites are already existing, just not monetized for proper income streams. These sites can earn through selling a variety of goods and services, among other revenue streams. If you were to make one of these sites, you must make sure you're in this thing for the long haul, because this site will take a long time to get solid traffic flowing. However, if you are successful in doing creating it, the site will be a reliable source of income for a very, very long time.

The "Shotgun"

Which path to earning $100/day is easier: 1 site that makes $100 a day or 100 sites that make $1 a day each? Of course, it's the 100 site method. Now just how do you do that? These sites usually make money through programs like Google Adsense, which pay their publishers by every click they draw to the ads. Making $1 a day on each site means that each site attracts enough visitors to click on the Adsense (or other program) ads. These sites are usually smaller and focused on more specific topics and particular phrases; that's why they're called "niche sites". Throwing up these sites is easier, but managing to get enough traffic to each site is difficult because the process completely relies on having the site rank high on the search engines. When a visitor searches for a phrase, the site that is the most relevant shows up, and these sites are built to target specific phrases. Getting the sites high on the pages is difficult because some sites, like Wikipedia and About.com, have so much power that they may rank without having to specifically target those phrases. It's definitely not impossible, though, and this method is probably the most popular today.

The Autoblog

The autoblog method does not involve blogs about automotives. An autoblog is a site that pretty much steals content from other websites and posts it on its own pages. It's not uncommon to find plenty of sites that are simply aggregations of bits and pieces of different sites. Surprisingly, these sites are easy to create (most can be put up in 15 minutes!) and do generate traffic/revenue. On the other hand, Google, the most powerful search engine for making money, can spot these sites easier. Recent efforts by the blackhat side of the online community include coding content rewriters into their sites, so that each piece of information scraped from another site is rewritten to make it seem like unique content. If you don't know what you're doing, don't try the autoblog method. You could find your Adsense account banned, which would be devastating.

These are the basic ways you can take. There are other ways you can earn (affiliate programs, link sales, etc), but I'll stick with Adsense for now. All three are extremely powerful methods to make money using Adsense. But what exactly is this "ranked" stuff?

Vocabulary

ranked/indexed - When a site is indexed, it is included in the search engine results of a particular engine. For example, a new site is created and Google hasn't spotted it yet. When someone searches for the site, it won't show up. Two days later, the site is indexed and people can find it via Google. When a site is ranked, the site apepars in a particular position (usually the first page) of the search results. Being ranked is important. If the phrase "big blue birds" is a very, very popular term that is searched millions of times each month, which site will get more traffic: the site that appears in the first page or one of the fifth page? Exactly. Get ranked, get traffic, get money.

Adsense - Adsense allows people to place link or image ads on their site. This often includes a simple code in your site, and ads related to the site's content will appear after a few moments. Advertisers that pay money for those ads have bid a certain amount to pay per click to their site. A portion of that bid, when the ad is clicked, will go to you. The rest will go to Google. All you should care about is your portion. Adsense is also the main program we're going to focus on.

keyword - A keyword is a certain phrase that people search for. How do you know what people are looking for? Google has it's own keyword tool that provides information related to the search volume of a phrase. Choose wisely a keyword you want to target, though. Too much traffic means too much competition because everyone is going for the most traffic. Too little traffic means too little traffic will come, resulting in little money for your time.

The Actual Process

To explain everything, I'm going to run through the process as if I were setting up a niche site. Remember, this is the Shotgun path as explained above.

To start, I would conduct keyword research to find a keyword, let's say "big blue birds", that has enough traffic for my purposes, but less enough competition so that I won't have a hard time to put my site at the top of the search results for that site. I would register a domain like "bigbluebirds.com". If that were taken, I'd try "bigbluebirds.net/.org/info" etc etc. Having the keyword in the domain itself gets major points in relevancy and makes ranking easier.

Next, I'll research auxiliary keywords, let's say "big blue birds toys" and "big blue birds shirts". Why? While I'm taking over my main phrase (big blue birds), I also gain points for attempting to rank for related phrases. Also, look at those keywords. Both of them contain my main phrase anyways, so by targetting those, I'm technically targetting my main phrase as well.

Next, I'll write 3 500-word articles, one for each of my keywords. Then, I'll create a page for each one. The home page is obviously for my main phrase, so I'll put that phrase's article on the home page. The other articles will go on their respective phrases' pages. I'll add links in the sidebar on each page that link to the other pages for navigation. For example, on the home page sidebar, I'll have the words "Big Blue Birds Toys" linked to the big blue birds toys article, and the words "Big Blue Birds Shirts" to the shirts article.

After that, I'll rewrite those 3 articles into 6 250-word articles, two for each phrase. Then I'll rewrite those three times each, so I'll end up with 24 250-word articles, 8 for each phrase. This is where an important process called backlinking starts. Backlinking is what tells Google that your site is relevant. You get points for backlinks. These articles will contain links in the resource box (at the end) that link to their respective page on my site. The links will also use the respective keywords as the text. This is just plain and simple, saying to Google "HEY! This site that I'm pointing to is related to big blue birds!".

After submitting those articles, I'll also keep writing 250-word articles related to big blue birds (not necessarily directly targetting those phrases) to build relevancy. By the end of this all, I should be in the first result, earning at least $1 a day (assuming I picked a phrase advertisers are willing to pay for). Seems hard doesn't it? This process that I've outlined is actually a bit harder because I like to secure my position in first result. Others can do a bit less and still get that result, but I've seen them get taken over pretty quickly.

To turn this into a powerhouse path, I would just add more and more pages to my site, and write more and more articles pointing to those new pages.

Apply these tactics to your site, and you should see quite a difference in how much money you're making (be sure to add Adsense!). You must find the balance between writing for a readership and writing for the search engines, because the extremes either produce horrible sites or valueless sites. Enjoy!