Shown below here is a list of some of my best tips and advice about internet marketing and online business. This advice is intended for you if you have less than a few years of experience trying to build a website based business or if you’re still trying to find a profitable business model that fits your style.
Let me start by telling you about what I think is the best way to make money online in 2016 if you are looking for a website based business model that you can do completely by yourself.
If you think you can just build any old website and then go get traffic for it, then you have your thinking backwards. Find the traffic first. Then think about building a website for that traffic. Find the demand first. People with lots of experience running an online business can get away with building a website first, but that is because they already know where the demand is and how they are going to get traffic for that site.
Don’t try to build a hundred crappy websites that earn a buck or two per day each. That business model sucks. It is harder to do than it sounds. It will suck the soul out of you.
In my experience, Google Adsense only pays well on websites that attract people who are shopping for something right then and there. If the bulk of the traffic you get to your website is traffic from people who are not in shopping mode, then Adsense isn’t going to pay enough for it to be worthwhile. Come up with some other monetization method or your site won’t earn squat.
Don’t add lower quality content to a website just to bulk the site up. If you want your site to last for years to come and continue to grow in traffic and authority, then only allow superior quality content on the site. Content quality matters a lot.
Don’t bother trying to make money auto-blogging with automated scripts written to scrape content from other places and aggregate it on a money site. I found it to be a complete waste of time and energy. I bet you would too.
The days of being able to monetize crappy content are fading rapidly. Even if you find a way that is still working, chances are that method is going to get shot to hell pretty soon. The trend is working against you.
If you can’t make something on your website high quality enough, then pay someone to make it better than you can make it.
The 80/20 principle applies to online business and to building websites that make money. If you own ten websites designed to make money, then approximately 80% of your income will come from just two of those websites. It might be even more skewed than that. It might be more like 99% of your income comes from just one of those websites.
Good quality writers are far more expensive than you realize. And you can’t build a website that relies on written content (like a blog) unless you have high quality written content. So, if you intend to build a blog to make money with, then you had better work on improving your writing skill. The best way to do that is by writing often. Practice, practice, practice. Read a book on it. Then practice some more.
If you don’t write and speak English as your primary language, don’t bother trying to build a website that targets major countries in the English speaking world such as Americans, Canadians, UK citizens, Australians or people from New Zealand. If you really want to build a site to target those people, then find a partner to work with you who does speak and write English as their primary language. Or better yet, take advantage of an opportunity in the part of the world that speaks, reads and writes in your native language.
If you want to build an affiliate site based around a group of products, that just tries to refer people to Amazon or some other affiliate program, then make sure your website content is really valuable in the eyes of the people you are attracting to your website. If the website content does not honestly provide a reasonably high value benefit to your audience, then you will not be able to get any meaningful amount of free traffic to your site. You will have no audience. You will have to buy traffic for your site which will render the site unprofitable.
In general, don’t waste your time building a website of any kind that does not provide value to the people who land on the site. It is a waste of time. You will struggle to get traffic for the site and the site will fail. Your efforts will go down the drain. If your entire website is just one lead capture page, then you can do that, but if you are trying to attract an audience with free traffic, you need to provide real value.
Don’t waste your time trying to build a site about how to make money online when you haven’t yet learned how to make money online for yourself. Your site will suck and respectable people will realize that you don’t know what you are talking about.
Don’t expect your online business efforts to earn you enough money to replace a full time income in under one year. It isn’t going to happen. It will probably take a lot longer than that. If you have monthly bills to pay, then start doing your online business part time while you keep a regular job. Then you will know if and when you can make the transition successfully. Quitting your job to build an online business before you have learned enough about building an online business is a fast path to failure and misery unless you have all the time in the world and no bills to pay.
Your first website is very likely to earn a lot less money than you hoped it would or thought it would. That is okay. You are not supposed to make a killing on your first try. You are supposed to learn from it and then try again getting better each time. Your next idea for another project will probably work out better. It is a learning process. You have to put in your time and pay your dues to really learn what you are doing. If someone fooled you into thinking your first website was likely to make a lot of money, then shame on them.
You will learn far more by trying to make a change on your website and experimenting with your website than you will learn by trying to read about what someone else is doing. You need to spend more of your time experimenting rather than just reading. You learn deeper and faster through experimentation.
You will find success much faster if you are extroverted rather than introverted. Introverted people are at a disadvantage. You can still succeed as an introvert no doubt, but you will find it more challenging than a typical extrovert would.
You don’t need to build a huge website in order for Google or human visitors to consider your site to be an authority site. Even a small website with just a handful of pages on it can be considered the absolute authority on a topic by both Google and by your visitors if the topic of the site is narrow enough and specific enough.
Traffic gimmicks are mostly a waste of time and energy. If your site isn’t good enough for people to actually want to tell someone else about it, then your site just isn’t good enough. Sometimes that is hard to swallow. If your site is good enough, people are automatically going to tell each other about it. If they are doing that, then you are really onto something. If they aren’t doing that, then keep trying to improve your site so people start sharing it.
SEO traffic is absolutely awesome traffic as long as people are landing on the right page after searching with the right keywords. Anyone who says SEO is a waste of time and anyone who says SEO traffic doesn’t convert well, simply has not ever had the right landing page designed for the right keyword. If they had experienced that, then they would agree that SEO traffic is absolutely awesome and converts extremely well.
I find social media promotion efforts to generally be too time consuming for the reward. If I can’t get other people to share my content because of the quality of the content alone, then I am not going to bother with trying to promote it in social media.
In my experience, most internet marketers who claim they really want to learn how to make money with internet marketing are spending way too much time socializing on forums and other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Those places are a time suck. They suck all your time away that you could have spent actually learning and experimenting with what works. When you go to sites like that you are actually just procrastinating from doing what you know you should be doing. Those sites are rotting your brain and making you incredibly unproductive. And you know it. Limit how much time you are on there.
There is a very tiny percentage of bloggers (way less than 1%) who are so interesting, sexy or charismatic that they can attract a large audience just by writing about their life. The vast majority of bloggers will need to attract an audience based on a specific interest, hobby or niche. Otherwise, you will not be able to attract an audience to your blog at all (at least not enough that you could monetize).
Don’t try to make money by launching a forum unless you have discovered an untapped niche that there is huge demand for or unless you have a lot of experience building forums. Forums take an exceptionally long time and incredible effort to get to a point where they will grow naturally. There are much, much easier ways to make money. And if you ever do try to make money with a forum, make sure you have an entire team of people in place who are going to be high value content contributors and moderators. Otherwise, your attempt at a forum will suck up all of your time while you earn next to nothing.
If SEO is going to be a big part of your strategy for getting traffic, then you really need to put extra effort into selecting the best domain name for your website. I am not talking about using exact matched domains for ranking purposes. I am talking about having a professional sounding or otherwise compelling domain name that makes a person decide they need to click on your listing in the Google SERPs instead of the other sites listed there. If your domain name is properly selected, then it should give the searcher a clue that your site has what they are looking for. The right domain name can actually convince the searcher to click on your listing. Think of your domain name like you would think of an important headline for a written marketing piece.
