Making Money From Your Web Site
You’ve created a great site with lots of great content and you have chosen your web host. So big question what’s next? Unless you are especially altruistic (and if you search the web, you’ll be surprised to see just how many people are), you’ll probably want to make some money out of your efforts. But how do you turn this stream of dots on a screen into a revenue stream? Here are a few pragmatic tips that might help basic steps that will get you started and (hopefully) start you thinking.
How will people find my site?
Before you can make money from your site, people have to visit it – it’s as simple as that. Your first job then is to get people to visit your site. It doesn’t matter whether you have the best site in the world, if people can’t find it you are never going to get any visitors. Getting your site known means using search engines, and to get you started, that means submitting to a few of the key engines, particularly Google.
Luckily, there are a number of free web sites that help people to submit sites to search engines. The one I use is Addme.com. This has a very simple interface which guides you through submitting to a number of engines including Subjex, Alexa, Scrub The Web, FAST Search AllTheWeb, LookSeek, Jayde, InfoTiger, NerdWorld, Aeiwi, Walhello, LifeTips, ExactSeek, and EntireWeb. Most importantly, Addme.com gets you into Google. You might want to supplement this with a registration to MSN and Yahoo! (outside Google two of the biggest players) although I have never found registration to the latter particularly easy. Take a look around on the Internet – you might see others submission sites that I don’t know about that will help you out with Yahoo! In fact there are thousands of search engines you need to submit to, but for now, until the ball starts rolling, this will do. Don’t make the mistake many people do – don’t hit as many registration sites as possible in order to increase your chances of a good placing. It doesn’t work like that – submitting to the same engine many times actually does the opposite. In fact, it could get you completely banned from a search engine. And don’t submit specific pages of your web site as an alternative – it won’t help. The search engines are smart enough to recognize the similarities between www.yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com/page1.html!
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How will people even know my site exists?
OK – so search engines are going to direct people to your site, but that’s not the whole story. If you had a regular business, a ‘bricks and mortar’ business, you’d want to let as many people as possible know as quickly as possible that you have started operations, right? Why would an Internet business be any different? As soon as you are up and running, make sure you send out Press Releases. Fortunately, there are now countless Press Release sites on the Internet, most are free; some provide a much more expansive coverage for only a few dollars. Here are a few good ones: http://www.prweb.com http://businesswire.com http://www.prnewswire.com http://www.free-press-release.com http://www.free-press-release.com http://www.theopenpress.com http://www.prleap.com http://www.openpress.com http://www.pr.com http://openpr.com
Have a good look through these sites; many have articles on how to write a successful Press Release. A well written Press Release will significantly increase your chances of getting visitors to your site.
What about directories? Should I use them?
One of the other ways of getting people to your site is registering to directories. There is every possible type of directory on the Internet. They are comprised of lists of items related to a specific topic – travel directories, used car directories, etc. You will almost certainly find a directory to meet your needs. One good one is Craig’s List. This site gets hundreds of thousands of visitors a day and people who list their sites here can get up to 800 visitors a day immediately! Don’t stop there though. If you look around the Internet you can actually find services which, for a small fee, will find directories for you and place your details in them. Generally they are not too expensive.
Should I advertise?
Aside from press releases and directories, you can also pay for advertisements that link to your site. Of course that can be very expensive, but there are a number of cheap alternatives currently available. Particularly popular at the moment are ‘Pixel Ad’ sites. These sites allow you to buy small amounts of adverting that is stuck on a single page. The ‘father’ of these web sites was Alex Tew’s ‘MillionDollarHomepage’ but there are now scores A search for ‘pixel ad’ in Google reveals the following: www.pixeladmall.com www.milliondollarspixel.com www.freepixeladvertising.com
The list goes on and on and on and on and on and is likely to continue growing! How do I make my site make money? By now you should have a few people visiting your site, which is a good start. Without them you won’t have a chance of generating revenue! But how do you start making money now the visitors are coming? One of the problems with the Internet is that everyone wants, and (because of the history of the Internet – DOT COM Boom, etc.) to some extent expects to become at least a millionaire overnight. Very few people do this (the ‘MillionDollarHomePage’ mentioned above took 5 months to make Alex Tew his million – I doubt the other sites listed are even close) and you should start small. Think of making a dollar a day as a good start on the way to something better, rather that an outright disaster that makes you think about quitting! In my experience, if your objective is to make a living from a web site, there are ways and means of achieving this, no matter what the subject area of your site or your current circumstances.
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