Build a Good Website and Other Steps
Continuation of Lesson 1 from You Can Make Money
Writing
This page continues the lesson on how to make money with articles,
with the following steps: build a good website; monetize it;
write articles; distribute your articles. Article directories
are covered as part of the last step.
3. Create a Website Based on That Niche
Optimize your website for the keywords that your potential
visitors are typing into the search engines. This makes it possible
for them to find your site. You may want to search the internet
for the wealth of free information on search engine optimization,
but there will be quite a bit about keyword-optimizing your articles
in coming lessons, and this information is directly applicable
to your web pages as well, so be sure to take notes.
My number one rule for any site: Provide something of real
value. Although some people have made money with garbage websites
designed to trick people into visiting through crafty optimization
techniques, this is not something to be proud of, and doesn't
work well in the long-run anyhow.
4. Monetizing the Traffic
Making money from affiliate programs, paid advertising or
your own products are the most common ways. These will be discussed
in upcoming lessons. Again, these are subjects for which you
can find a wealth of free information on all over the internet,
but you'll learn enough here to get you started.
5. Write Articles That Make Readers Want to Visit
Many of the following lessons will show you how to do this.
It is not the same as writing for print magazines, as you will
see in Lesson 2, and anyone can learn how to do this. One exception:
If English is not your first language, you may want to consider
other strategies, or at the very least have all of your articles
reviewed and edited by a friend who is a native English speaker.
6. Distribute Your Articles
This creates streams of free traffic to your website - some
of them virtually permanent. You will be shown how to do this
step-by-step. There will also be a good list of article directories
that I have personally tested, and a lesson on using article
submission services and software if you decide to go that route.
What Are Article Directories?
Article directories are like online libraries full of articles.
Some specialize in a specific area, like internet marketing or
self improvement, while others carry articles on just about any
topic. The biggest directories have more than 100,000 articles
in them. These come from thousands of authors who submit them
to be posted on the site.
Most directories carry "free-distribution" articles.
This means that anyone can take them and use them for their website,
newsletter or blog, as long as they don't change them, and they
leave the links active. These two rules are the most important,
and you should be sure that any directory you submit to has these
in their "terms of service" for users.
The links are primarily in the "author's resource box,"
or "about the author" box. This is typically at the
end of the article, and it's where the writer says a few words
about herself and invites the reader to visit her web site. Hopefully,
the reader clicks on the link found there and comes to the website.
That link is why writers submit to these directories, and
why you should. You post an article once, and not only do visitors
to the directory read it and visit your site, but other site
owners put it on their sites. Their visitors now have a chance
to read it and click-through to your site. In other words, it
can spread and create many streams of permanent traffic.
Why permanent? Why will they keep your article on their website?
Because your article adds value to their site and helps build
their traffic too.
For example, I get traffic for "mexico real estate"
on my site Houses Under Fifty Thousand .com because of an article
written by someone else - one that I took for free from a directory.
The author gets clicks through to her site from mine now, but
I get search traffic and some revenue I wouldn't otherwise have,
so why would I ever remove that article?
Some article directories charge, by the way, but there are
plenty that are free. Many have several options ranging from
free to better placement or active distribution for a small charge.
I have used only the free ones up to this point.
To summarize with an example:
Suppose you love fishing. You build a good website on fishing
tips. You either sell your own fishing-related products, get
a commission for selling other people's products, or just get
paid for clicks on the advertising on your site. If you make
even a little money from a small percentage of the people who
visit your site, you can make a lot of money overall - if enough
visitors come to your website.
How do you get more visitors? You spend an hour or so writing
an article on how to find the best bass-fishing spots. You let
the reader know a bit about you in the "resource box"
at the end of the article, and invite them to come to your site
for more great advice. You submit your article to a dozen directories
(You're about to learn how to do this in twenty minutes manually
and free - no need for expensive software).
Other website owners put the article on their sites. People
read the article, want more, and so click on the link to your
site. While there, they may buy something, or they click on advertisements
that make money for you even while you are sleeping.
Of course you might want to start writing more articles at
this point. I won't lie to you. Most articles will create just
a trickle of traffic, but many trickles add up to a steady stream,
and writing articles can be easier than you think. I'll be breaking
the whole process down into simple steps in upcoming lessons.
Note: Why is using these directories so important?
Because it isn't enough to just build a good website. You need
to get traffic to it. Without any great effort anyone can place
advertisements on their pages, using a program like Google AdSense
(there are many others) and get paid each time a visitor clicks
on one of those ads. This is the simplest way to "monetize"
a website, and any traffic can then make money for you.
One of our dozens of websites makes an average of less than
2 cents per visitor, for reasons I won't get into here (many
websites make twenty times that or more). But the good news is
that even at that it makes hundreds of dollars per month because
of the number of visitors - even if we ignore it for weeks on
end. That shows you the value of many small streams of traffic.
Now imagine if we can get that "per visitor value"
up to the fifteen cents that some of our other sites have...
Continues with Lesson 2 here... Why
Online Writing Is Different
Note: This is part of the book, You Can Make Money
Writing. There are links to all the all the lessons/chapters
on the home page.
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