The best ways to use a website to make money
I am continually being asked about all the different possible ways to make money online. I do extensive training on the setting up of websites for small home businesses. This advice and training very often is also in demand with other bigger businesses to get their websites set up properly online.
There are so many website designers that are extremely skilled in the art of making a website look brilliant and even function very well, and then they fall down on the most basic of Search engine optimization, or on the simplest of keyword research terms that are so necessary to getting a website noticed online. It horrifies me to see a small business owner sitting with a website that he has paid massive amounts of money to have set up and the business is simply not happening as it should.
Really brilliant HTML coding and other details that are put onto big websites are often not the fault of the website designer. The client is king is so often heard and is generally true. As a service supplier it is not our place to tell the client that he is a fool and is not going to get the best result out of his website for whatever reason. Most of the time we just end up agreeing with the client and find it easier to just do what they say they want, and that is not always the best option, hence this report.
What this is about is to explain about some of the bigger website types, like a membership website, and allow that to help you get a clear overview of website styles from the beginning.
If I could give all prospective website owners a brief overview as to what all the basic options are in relation to the different ways that they could optimize their websites, then I would have done everyone a big favor.
Just knowing what the most common types of websites are and how they operate will help you get a better understanding as to which direction your website or e commerce business should be directed to.
The bigger the corporation – the more opportunities that that sized business has to portray their website and hence their image in a multitude of different ways. Big business has the chance to do brand building, run competition websites or just do pure information websites.
This freedom is not always the choice or even an option for a small business, and the smaller the business is the tighter the targeting has to become. This exact focusing is one of the first items that are thrown out of the discussion meetings when designing a website.
The most important factor in setting out the initial design parameters of your business website is to be very sure as to what you really need the website to do, and then to stick to that plan from every aspect. Be totally clinical with all the different facets of the websites layout allowing that all you need it to do is keep to that main structure.
You would still have a lot of flexibility in the style and look of the site with all the different pages, posts and things like color and style being very fluid.
Best of luck with the designing
All the Different website options
Do you want to run an article directory – Or a social website – What about a sport blog – Or a membership website?
Go through the list below and get better acquainted with the basics
What I offer you here is another important part of your website planning – that is the knowledge and understanding that you are structuring your website correctly from day one. Here below is a list of some of the more popular ways to set out the structure of your website to encourage your profits and visitors to be clear, targeted and all happy.
Pure Blogging – Website type One
Blogging has become a bit of a generalization recently as so many webmasters are using the standard website platform – wordpress as the basic structure for their normal website layouts. I am a big fan of using this system to build a variety of different website designs.
This report is not going to go into too much detail about that side of the website / blogging aspect
What I want to help you grasp here is the original idea of blogging and how you can turn a daily web log into a website business and earn a living from it. The original idea of hosting a personal diary of stories and daily posts or log entries is where the true form of blogging originated. I admit that I do love the idea of having the entire world seeing my point of view on a specific subject and then allowing open and frank debate on that topic of the day.
It would not matter much as to what the topic of discussion is as I am the sort of person that enjoys sitting around a fire or a table with coffee dissecting a subject and analyzing it with good friends.
Now the concept of this form of pure blogging is just that, and if you choose your style correctly from the beginning you could find yourself in a position where your personal style and daily input has turned into an international business.
What I definitely need to point out to you here is a very important fact about blogging, and that is that there are millions upon millions of blogs out there on the internet. You will find yourself in competition with literally a flood of similar styled bloggers as competitors that you might feel that the idea is not worth the effort.
In my personal opinion I feel that you not only stand a good chance of getting your head above the crowed and noticed, but could get your blog into a position of high visibility if you plan correctly and stick to that plan like a possessed person.
Here is a list of some of the things that you will need to do to be a super blogger.
- Choose your style of blogging carefully as you will need to stick to that format for a very long time. If you start to change your style on a regular basis you could lose a lot of your regular readers. What I mean here about style is the mood or “flavor’ of your blog. You need to set a tone like being funny, sarcastic, frivolous, serious, and friendly chatty or any other of a long list of styles that you have to choose from. All I ask is that you give it a lot of thought especially if you are going to target a specific niche like pregnancy. Funny stories about pregnancy are ok, but in a niche like health it might not be too advisable to be constantly cracking jokes about people’s health.
- Plan the look of your blog carefully as it needs to be open and easily legible. Nothing stops people from ever coming back as quickly as a confusing or cluttered blog. I suggest that you keep the look as simple as possible and do not even have a header. You could have pictures in your posts, as this is a good thing, but too many adverts and other things are confusing, and you will lose readers.
- Your blogs title has to be planned from a keyword point of view so carefully that I do in fact suggest that you take a lot of time thinking about the name of your blog (and the domain name naturally as they are almost the same thing)
- Equally you need to give a lot of thought as to which specific niche you want your blog to be involved in. The most common types of blogs normally are about topics like celebrities or sports and this is not really a bad thing but you need to consider this carefully. It might pay you to consider a more stable niche or platform to set up your soap box in and you could be more successful there. Your choice. I do suggest that you go and look at the hot trends aspect for ideas, and perhaps start there.
- Make the RSS aspect of your blog very prominent on your blog, and equally the social bookmarking aspect is absolutely vital to the viral aspect of your blogging success. Be nice to all the bookmarking websites as they will be you make or break department.
- Post often and never put up a post without making sure that it is properly thought out. You could chase away 50% of your regular readers simply by posting a stupid post or one in bad taste. I suggest that you post twice a day as this will not only keep your content fresh, but will have the search engine spiders expecting your blog to be busy and always fresh.
- Do not give up as this form of internet business is built one word at a time, and eventually you will have a solid base of visitors and advertisers and a great business.
- You have to continually post your articles onto the great article directories, and then keep bookmarking those posts and articles. Your regular readers will do further bookmarking for you if your content is fresh and popular.
Go and start right now if you think that you are writing orientated.
Niche blogging – Website type two
Pure blogging was the subject of my previous website type and this time I am going to cover niche blogging. Niche blogging differs from an ordinary niche website as a normal niche website is really a mini site aimed at a particular niche, while niche blogging is constantly updated and kept fresh.
The biggest difference between pure blogging and niche blogging is the frequency of the posts and the addition of new pages. When you are working to keep a niche blog fresh it is more the fact that you always want the most current affiliate product or CPA offers to be the most prominent on your blog at any given time.
Generally any post or page written will be very heavily keyword orientated as to bring you targeted visitors for that exact product. Whenever you are promoting a new affiliate product you would know which way to market to that exact segment of your niche and do all your posts and promotions accordingly. You would have things like press releases working with carefully timed article releases to gain the maximum amount of exposure for a launch or new product.
Equally if you are producing your own reports for sale or writing e books for your niche you would still use the same tactics to get your visitors pouring onto your blog or website.
This form of blogging still needs a blog format like wordpress as you would be doing changes to your website or blog on a regular basis. These changes would differ slightly depending on your promoted product be it CPA, affiliate products or your own products. Either way you would have a structured plan in the exposure of the information to your visitors and be using a variety of different marketing tactics to drive your business.
Naturally this form of blogging is very orientated to a constant and active form of internet marketing and you would need to stay current in all the different tactics available to you in the internet world. You would be using all the resources of the system with things like forum marketing, social web 2.0 tactics and naturally using an email auto responder list system. This auto responder system is vital to a lot of the internet marketing methods out there but in some cases it becomes the lifeblood of your blogging system.
What I want to remind you about here is that this is not a mini site where you set up a carefully planned website to keep a flow of organically driven traffic to, this site is added to and worked on almost daily and generally becomes a large website and popular over time. The niche that you choose to operate in here makes a difference and I suggest that you choose one of the bigger or more popular niches to market to and if you are going to be an active player you would soon build up a large e mail list and find that you are earning very big numbers if you keep the blog pumping with new and exciting stock or content.
Local OFFLINE brick and mortar business – Website type Three
If you have an existing business – a brick and mortar one – offline and want to get the maximum amount of exposure that you can with a website then this article is aimed directly at you. Many existing businesses could have doubled their turnover long ago had they approached this internet business the right way.
Most businesses initially treat their websites as an online business card or some sort of place holder and because they have used this approach they are marketing online incorrectly from the beginning and it can be difficult to repair those initial mistakes.
If you have got a website already I suggest that you do this simple test
- Write down a list of the ten keyword phrases that you think people would put into the search engines and then test them one by one. Does your business show up in the results? Secondly do the same search test but set the search results to “local search” and see if your website shows up on those results.
- Then go to the Google keyword tool and enter those keywords into the search box and see which keywords are really being used to find your products. If you set the search results in the Google keyword tool to “exact” then you will see how many people put those exact terms into the Google search box every month.
- The results of this test should be glaringly obvious to everyone, and if your searches and results do not show your website up in a good result then you need to start from scratch.
If you do not have a website yet then do the test this way
- As above – you must write down the 10 possible keywords that you would expect people to be entering to find your products. Do the test both ways as shown above.
- Now where you need to do more research here is on how big your market really is. If you were in the lawn mower repair business you will find that you only have one or two choices of keywords to use. People would be using the most obvious keywords.
- However if you are in a field that is more broad for example you own a local hardware store you will need to do a lot more research. You will need to divide your keywords up into categories like power tools, building supplies, hand tools and diy as examples. Now each of those could be getting a lot of searches that if you are not active in those keywords will miss that business.
Local domination
If you really want to you could completely tie up the local search results in a market like the hardware shop shown above. Let us say that you have a store called “Andersons hardware and tools”. If you were serious about totally dominating the local internet business then this is what I suggest.
You get the keyword term that get the best searches for those categories in your country. So here locally in South Africa they would be these following terms or terms similar.
Diystore.co.za – powertoolsstore.co.za – building-supplies.co.za – and a few more…
Then you would get the domain name that matches your local store Andersonshardwareandtools.co.za and then take those 5 or 6 domain names and go and register them. You could keep adding a few domains with terms like johannesburghardwaresupplies.co.za and kensingtonhardwareshop.co.za as these would also be put in as a local search by people looking for your services or products.
Now I realize that many of you are saying here that you surely do not need to have 8 or 10 websites to be competitive online and normally I would agree with you, but in some markets like property sales, some stores, hosting, and a few other examples – the more of an online footprint that you have the bigger you catchment area will be especially if like the hardware example has a wide variety of keyword terms. A plastic surgeon would not need to have a lot of domains’ to dominate, two or three at the most would do it, and then naturally the way you maintain the sites will make a huge difference in the placing in the search results.
The way that you now design and market your websites is almost as critical as to having done the initial keyword research properly. I would suggest that you use a popular format like joomla or wordpress to structure you website so that it is easy to maintain by a normal person and won’t need a highly qualified webmaster. You will need to put up a lot of informative content onto your website and keep the content fresh. Keeping the look simple and easy to read and navigate will be another vital aspect and if you keep your facts and pricing honest you will do very well online.
YOUR OWN PRODUCTS – Website type four
It is said that the strongest position to have online is to be the author of your own products. It does not really matter if the products are eBooks and reports or software and other similar digital products; if they are of a high standard then you will have the customers queuing up to buy from you.
If you are planning to have a website based online business that is primarily run to promote your own products then the method of marketing your website is normally very easy. What you cannot do with this sort of website is have too big a variety of products for sale on one website. There is nothing wrong with having hundreds of different eBooks or reports for sale if they are all on the same general topic, in fact that would be the perfect website model to have in this field.
However if you have ten eBooks on dog training and then have ten more eBooks on exercising in water you will need to have two different websites. Even if the topics of your products start to get closer than my example you should still have two separate websites. The nature of the search engines are such that your keyword targeting needs to be so accurate and targeted that you should not be trying to cover a niche with a shotgun approach. Please believe me when I say that laser targeting is the only way to go, especially in the beginning.
If you are a large corporate business and you feel that your products or eBooks cannot be confined to a smaller keyword area then please realize that you are going to need to do a very large amount of articles, press releases, viral competitions and other forms of marketing to get the exposure and traffic that you need.
If you plan to market your own eBooks or reports here are some tips to keep you focused on how to keep your website busy.
- Keep your focus tight. I strongly suggest that you pick a very tightly focused topic to write about and only start to expand and deviate from that topic once you have started to get constant visitors and sales of your product.
- Try not to mix eBooks and software, and if you do give one of the two away for free as a bonus to keep the other selling well.
- Please – and I am begging you here – keep your website clean clear and uncluttered. The easier it is to see exactly what is happening on your website the bigger your success will be. I am personally still learning this fact daily as my natural tendency to behave like a designer tries to override logic daily on my personal websites. I will eventually fix my own entire website collection in this regard, but the point is clear – your website will fail or succeed on that split second image that you imprint upon your visitors as they hit your website.
- You must plan and run your email marketing campaign very carefully. The profits that your business will achieve will hinge very highly upon the size of your email list. Whenever you have a new product that you are about to launch and could send an email to a massive list of existing buyers you will have a huge spike in your income from one email launch.
- Use very high quality free products to grow your client base and your email list. People are not fools, and if you treat them as such you will never get any respect and subsequently have no sales. If you are offering new visitors to your site a valuable product for free to join your ezine or email list you will gain instant recognition as an expert in your field.
- Never ever put lousy or badly written products onto your website. Too many website owners start to outsource the production of their future products to the wrong people as soon as they become a success and then wonder why their customer base is shrinking. Set your standards very high from the very first day and then plan extensively on how you can improve all the time.
- Use all the social marketing tools that are available. Article directories, social media platforms, press releases, forums, clubs and peer groups are all going to be the sort of places that will be a large help to your website.
- Run an affiliate program as fast as you can. Run the same affiliate program with the very best affiliate tools and bonuses that you can think up. The power that you can gain from having a few hundred other websites doing the active marketing for your product is beyond the understanding of a new website owner. You should even offer your primary product as a 100% commission product to your strongest affiliates as they could bring in hundreds of new clients to your website daily.
No doubt I could keep giving you important pointers forever but what you need to keep your focus on here is the very basic parts of your plan. All the focus must be on the getting of visitors and then on the offering of a very high quality product.
Quite easily done right?
Training or Teaching Websites – Website Type five
If you have the skills to be a good teacher, trainer or lecturer you are already a very large step in front of almost everyone else. The need for high quality training online is insatiable. While this model of website that I am about to cover for you in this section is not really one that should stand on its own as a website type, I feel that it still needs to have a specific focus and be planned carefully from the beginning.
As I myself am still relatively new online I am part of a few websites and membership sites that are teaching me things every day. These website owners that I have learnt to trust have such a wealth of experience that they really do fit into that joking category where we comment that they have long forgotten stuff that we do not even know yet.
I digress; the training niche online is a very complex and at the same time is simply the very basics of all online development. The internet training websites can be divided into two very distinct types of training facilities, those that teach traditional things that have been around for years and now simply do it online, and those that teach internet based items.
Either way these types of websites are extremely popular as they can be followed in your own time and at your own speed. They are driven very largely by video which is a great medium for teaching and allows a student to rewind and repeat difficult sections that they were struggling with.
Equally the proportion of training products that are followed online and the ones that are downloaded and followed on your own computer offline are probably about the same proportions. If you are a teacher or a trainer then you need to realize that the need for quality products and training online is so great and necessary that you almost have a head start on all the other online products that are out there.
There are a few main ways that training is promoted online and your method of delivery would be best suited to your style of training or you product. The first way would be to divide your product up into 6 to 25 modules and sell or promote it as a continuity course or as a membership website.
The second way is to write up your product as a complete report or product and promote it or sell it as a downloadable product and then to gear your website to promoting and selling that product.
Another way to do training online is to offer the bulk of your training online for free and this will get you a large following and then promote products to those free trainees. Perhaps also by allowing the free trainees to download products but then would have to join an email list where you would then promote up sell products to them from that platform.
So just to recap here this type of online business or website could be delivered in a blog form a membership site form a static PPC website platform and perhaps even a few more methods, but ultimately still does training or teaching.
Err, just too really muddy the waters here but you could also use an online presence to do hard and heavy promotion of an offline school or seminar system, so the training side of online websites can be very varied.
Just Adsense – Website type six
Setting up a website business that is primarily aimed at earning its keep by putting Adsense income streams onto your site are in fact a fairly popular way to earn money online. What you need to know here is that the term Adsense is a term that describes Google’s advertising program. Other search engines do also have a system that allows webmasters to put targeted advertising onto their websites and is also aimed at a constant income stream from those placed articles.
Equally what I need to point out to you here is that the primary aim of a search engine is to deliver the very best quality facts and websites that they can in response to someone’s query. So having said that – you need to note this – if you planned to run a website that is going to rely heavily upon getting paid for running Adsense programs on your website, you need to have very good quality information.
There are a number of factors that are used by the search engines to judge the quality of your website and all of these factors combined are what will place your website highly in the search engine results. To earn a fair amount of money from these types of websites you will need to have a very large volume of visitors appearing at your website all the time.
Your position in the search results is based upon factors like keyword placement, visitor comments, backlinks, topical content, regular and fresh postings, a mix of pictures video and text and a few more very important factors. The bigger your website becomes and the constant additions of fresh content are vital factors in keeping your website visible to the big search engine spiders that crawl your website on a regular basis checking what you are up to all the time.
Sticky is a term that describes how long someone stays on your website when visiting and the longer they stay the better your score becomes in the eyes of the search engines, and then all of that combined will get you well placed in the search results and get your traffic.
Traffic or visitors that are fairly well targeted are a combination that will create the correct environment to get your advertising account fattened and earning you a living.
Finally before I leave I would like to point out a factor that is extremely important and sadly very confusing. The big search engines are constantly on the lookout for websites that are using automated tools that create websites repeatedly as they are aware that these websites are not of a reputable standard. They have very highly qualified people designing programs that look at your website very closely. What they are looking for is simply a breaking of their rules, and what is commonly referred to as black hat really means working around someone else’s rules.
It has been repeatedly implied that black hat has a criminal connotation to it, but it is a constant battle between one or two very large companies rules and thousands upon thousands of webmasters that have to constantly change the way they set up their websites to comply with those ever-changing rules.
Please do yourself a very big favor and go and read all the terms and conditions carefully before you attempt a website along these lines, and remember that you could be removed from their system at anytime and without warning.
C.P.A. or cost per action based website – Website Type Seven
The cost per action method of making money online is perhaps the most popular at the moment and for a very good reason. More and more webmasters and online businesses are using all the different ways to make an income online using CPA.
The big reason that this type of income system has become popular is that it is not covered with confusion as to the rules and regulations. A single advertiser has the ability to set very clear and exact rules per each campaign that they set up for promotion.
A big corporation – or even a few smaller companies have found that the very nature of the exact marketing that is attached to this form of internet marketing is perhaps the very best ever method of marketing their products. Their ad spend now becomes very targeted and is not like the old days where a large and very expensive advert placed in a newspaper or magazine is more of a shotgun approach.
What you do when using this form of marketing using your website is to go about it in three more common methods.
Paying for your traffic
If you design a page layout that is extremely targeted to a very tight prospect and then you do an advertising campaign using any of the big search engines Pay per Click systems you will possibly be very successful. Naturally this method has extremely high capital layouts and requires a very knowledgeable person to do the planning of this website, but the rewards can be the biggest online and perhaps the fastest way to earn your income.
Setting up very Targeted SEO websites
What is done here is the exact targeting of one tiny aspect of a subject or niche. By being so laser targeted you can send very directed visitors to your website that are looking for that exact item that you are promoting. Your sales are normally high per visitor in a situation like this one.
Adding a few per webpage
The idea with this option is that you find a few complimentary CPA offers and then design a website that is compatible with those offers. Sending traffic to a website that has a few more choices to choose from gives you a better chance of converting your visitors to one of those options shown on your webpage.
Affiliate Marketing – Website Type eight
Setting up a website to target just a single or a select niche within an area for affiliate products is in fact a very good idea. By finding a good affiliate product that you know sells very well, and then setting up an extremely targeted website is one of the best ways to make money with a website.
Firstly you need to know that very often only one website might not be enough to earn you a lot of money and creating a few that are either related to each other or are targeting a new topic will possibly be necessary. Having said that, this would depend upon the strength of the initial niche that you have decided to do with this affiliate website, and how you go about doing the marketing.
If the niche that your affiliate product is in is a strong niche then you might never need to have a second website – ever. An example here is the health niche or the dating niches are all strong, but if you choose to get involved in the toy train niche then you might need to be a little more patient about getting very rich from that website. However if you have done your homework correctly from the beginning you will be fully aware of the potential of the specific product that you have chosen to be an affiliate of.
The beauty of setting up a website that targets a single or compact affiliate product is that you can pick one that you have an interest in and possibly even a lot of knowledge about. Naturally the more facts you know about that topic the better off your articles and posts will be in relation to the promoting of that product.
I am a full time affiliate marketer and do different websites with a lot of different products but I admit to loving the just affiliate model that I am describing here, as I get to be immersed in a niche or product for awhile and before I get totally bored with that item I move on to a new website. I do admit to using blogs and other marketing tactics to promote my main affiliate website but that system is exactly what grows your traffic and eventually earns your living.
Before I run away, I thought that I needed to point out to you that you need to remember that being an affiliate or having a website to a specific affiliate product need not mean an e book item. While promoting a great eBook is one of the best ways to do this affiliate website thing, you could just as easily do a website promoting some software or a membership website. Naturally you need not restrict yourself in that way, but this website model is really about promoting a single affiliate product and remaining loyal to that individual product.
Advertising/Yellow Pages – Website Type Nine
Creating a website that attracts advertisers is one of the nicest types of website to own, as once the website has reached maturity you should be getting a constant income that keeps on filling your personal bank account. There are a number of different ways to do this type of website and I will list them below.
What you need to realize that these styles of websites are mostly template driven and therefore you might need to layout some funds getting the initial website set up. Very often you could pay the website developer some money to do the complete setup on your behalf, and this way you would be in business sooner.
Remember too that this website type takes time to grow to its maximum capacity and that you need to do careful research before you get started as to the exact nature of your directory or listing site. If you are only ever going to attract 12 advertisers in the niche that you have chosen to build your website around then you are not very likely to succeed, but if you listed all the plumbers in your city that would be a different situation.
Another thing that I should mention now before you get any further is that you are likely to be doing a lot of offline marketing as the bulk of your new business will be coming from the brick and mortar side of the world. So here again there could be some capital needed to be laid out in the building up of your website. Personally I am busy at this very moment starting up one of the models listed below and I foresee great potential in that market for myself.
Smalls
Small classified advertising websites are very popular and can be very lucrative. What I do suggest to you is to be very careful here in your research as in my personal opinion I feel that you could end up competing with some sites that are so powerful that you might never succeed.
I would suggest that you pick a niche section to run your classified site as this is more likely to generate the required traffic that your website does need. A topic like baby classifieds, health classifieds, new car classifieds, classic cars classifieds or even a sport classified might be the way to go.
Please remember that your URL address becomes very important and that you need to buy the domain in the country that you plan to promote (example .co.za for South Africa) as this is important as to where the search engines send your enquiries.
Bookmark
Bookmark listing websites are really a form of social website and will be covered again in a different section of this report. However it still falls under the umbrella of a listing or yellow pages type of website.
What the point of this style of website is all about is to get you tags or listings up onto the search pages of the biggest search engines thereby getting massive amounts of traffic to your website daily. Generally the income gained from these sorts of sites come from the banner adverts and affiliate products, and then naturally from the Adsense programs. Remember that you are attracting someone to your site that is still in search mode and when they are confronted with targeted lists of Adsense adverts they are very likely to click out and therefore earn you money.
Page per advertiser
This is the style that I am going to do with my new website. While it is still only listing the details of a service or company you allow a lot more detail.
Banners only
Whichever way you choose to feature a banner only website you could attract listings, but would need to keep your layout clear as you could lose focus and end up confusing a visitor. Too many colors and banners can be a bad thing and you would need to have a very basic design to pull this one off.
In all the cases listed above I do also recommend that you add more than just the basics to your website as things like free eBooks offered to get an e mail list, or big competitions would be an added attraction to the visitors to your website.
I have a number of great ways to promote this sort of website offline as this will be vital to the success of your business. Please contact me directly if you are planning to do one of these websites and we can talk.
I do though still encourage you to visit my website that I use to promote the building up of new websites…
Article Directory – Website Type Ten
Debate rages about the need for another article directory, and if you are not familiar with this model of website I suggest that you go and search for same and look at what they offer.
The basic concept behind having an article directory is to have a base where quality articles are kept online at a single website allowing access to this content by all. Both those writers that want their work read and publishers want to find good quality articles to publish will benefit from a good article directory.
The history of article directories has unfortunately had a bit of a muddy patch where thousands of article directories were launched to earn money easily from the advertising programs. The good news is that the great article websites survived this period and still are very popular today.
I am still a firm believer that there is still a massive hole currently in the internet where specialized article directories should be publishing for a specific niche. Naturally you would have to have a moderation policy and would therefore be very busy full time running your niche article website all day. If you chose a particular niche like the pet industry and only published articles that related to the pet industry I am convinced that you will become very popular very fast. The very nature of your targeted business will make you attractive to those niches marketers, publishers and all the guys in between.
There are already directories that cover the how-to industry but I am betting that if you gave it a bit of thought you could come up with a variation of a DIY theme or any similar sideways slide on the original concept of an article directory.
Let us look at an example.
If you did a DIY article directory as an example you could add features that other directories do not have at present that would create interest and give everybody value. Without giving too much thought to the categories that you could add to your article directory I thought to list some ideas below that just pop into my head and see if you think that any of them could be viable if added to your website.
Top hundred pages
If you ran a constant top 100 of dozens of different categories like top articles read, top article submitters, top subject and a whole lot more. The more you think up the more your less prolific writers will have a chance to feature on your top lists and this will encourage them to do more and to keep going.
Full personal page feature
Anyone who joins your directory would have a full page added to your website which would allow them to add products and all sorts of descriptive features to gain them more exposure. If I was able to tell the world that I have 93 websites and that I do x and y and z I would be very pleased with that article directory and would probably support them. Naturally ezine publishers would get a section on their own and you would allow them to add things like a subscribe button that would allow them to capture subscribers from your directory.
It goes almost without saying that you had better have an eagle eye to look out for any funny business, but if you were careful you could survive that side of your business.
A classified section
You could add a classified section to your directory which would give your members a second level of links and allow different ways to market their products.
I could keep going by telling you to add forums, sister niche directories and a bunch of other ways to give your members reasons to use your website and that would gain you massive numbers of members in a very short space of time which should make your site a success.
I believe that if you kept your branding clean and pure, did not allow widening away from your selected niche and used some viral marketing tactics you could be very successful with this website model. Good luck with it.
Social web 2.0 /bookmarking/ but niche driven – Website Type Eleven
The advent of these so called social web 2.0 websites is really a descriptive term for a more modern website where the involvement of the public is on a daily basis.
With this website model I propose that there is a great big hole in the niche side of it all. There are so many bookmarking sites but they all cover the whole internet and are not generally tied to a single niche. The are some in the internet marketing side of things, but I am talking about a smaller more focused website like one that only bookmarks articles or reports written by doctors, or one that does the same but is restricted to resort owners.
This site would NOT be a forum for resort owners but the members would have to own a website that promotes resorts or hotels and then they would be able to bookmark reports or events or even just a new price special on your website. Eventually your website would be very well placed on the SERPS (search engine results pages) and more and more hotel owners would use you to “announce” their new tariffs.
Can you see the benefit of starting up a socially active website that only caters to a specific portion or niche? You could add other features that would be a bonus to your members that would allow them to have a second feature whereby they can do one of those short 140 character type message blasts that would get their new bookmarking noticed even quicker. The big search engine spiders would be regular visitors to this type of website because it would be very active and your detail would be noticed quickly.
If you look through the different types of website models that I have written about you will notice that a lot of them could be intermingled, for example this type that I am writing about here could be changed into a membership type of website. What you would do is have different levels of participation that would be allowed firstly for free and then later for increasing levels of payment. So for example a free member could bookmark as often as they like, but a level one member would gain a personal page with linking allowed. This would keep stepping up to where a level three member would be allowed to have 10 profiles and all the other benefits that go with it, the message broadcasting and pages, forums and the whole package.
I do suggest though that you get the basics of the website planned out correctly from the very beginning as you will find it very difficult to change complete layouts later down the line. People are never happy with change and you could lose members fast if you keep changing the structure of your website. Pay a good website designer to do all the planned aspects into your site before you even think of launching.
I do believe that you could have a winning website here with this model. Have fun.
Webhosting – Website Type Twelve
A webhosting website is one that has proven to be extremely successful over time. The biggest advantage to have a webhosting business is the fact that the payments are residual. You keep you customers for years into the future.
With the bigger hosting companies offering what is referred to as reseller hosting package it has become popular for many thousands of people to startup their own hosting websites. I need to warn you all right now at this point that this is one of the most hotly contested sections of the internet, while everybody that wants to have a website does need hosting, it does not mean that they will ever find your website and sign up with you.
The competition is so fierce and as it becomes more and more contested the bigger established players are simply offering lower prices and even more bonuses to get their client base bigger and to cut you off at the roots. If you do not believe me please go and do a search for the top ten terms and look at the amount of competing pages, there are millions of them and your work load would be massive for years to come.
Now that I have warned you properly, I am going to say that you still could compete in this market if you put together a very complicated system or simply pay for traffic and build up your hosting company that way. I feel that to even make the slightest dent in this market you would need to have a network of websites all driving in new customers with huge freebies and bonuses and finally still have competitive pricing and good service. The entire package will need to be offered before a new website owner could be encouraged to join up with your service. There are many ways to skin a cat – I have heard and if you can think up an innovative way to draw in new customers then you might succeed.
If you have downloaded this report from me then you have become part of my efforts to suggest good hosting services to you that I have used and you can trust. Please do not forget to sign up for my recommended hosting at the bottom of this report.
Remember that very often you will need to do massive forms of offline marketing to make people aware that your products exist, and offline marketing can be very vague and more than a little expensive.
What I would suggest that you do from the very beginning is to adopt a business model and pare it down to one very tightly targeted aspect and then market the hell out of that single feature. Do not stop marketing that bonus or single item, and over time your name could become known as the guy that gives away a cell phone with every new hosting – or whatever. Call yourself cell hosting or something and offer free airtime, or a cell phone or do something that will make people think that they cannot live without your offer. The capital outlay could be very high with this sort of marketing idea, so I suggest that you sit down and plan carefully from the start.
Membership/Club – Website Type Thirteen
Membership websites are a very nice website model but would appear to be getting a little bit of bad publicity lately. What has happened is that the internet marketing world has been promotion the idea of owning a membership website as the best thing since sliced bread, and have caused such a huge influx of membership websites to appear and some are very badly done. These bad ones have caused a bit of a backlash from the general public.
Now I firmly believe that if you offer a great product that people would be very happy to become members and be even happier to remain members for years to come.
Before you even consider the idea of owning a membership website I ask you to consider the following aspects.
Popularity
You will need to know that there is a demand for your particular type of club or membership before you blunder forward and build a website. If you are fully aware of the potential of this niches membership potential then by all means go ahead.
Content
Members of a club or membership website are not going to be happy to pay a monthly fee to belong to a website that never adds new content to the website. Some membership websites are only meant to be a six week membership, and that is fine if your website is set up that way, but the long term websites need to have a lot of content, news and stuff like features and freebies added all the time or you will lose your members.
Originality
If your membership website is competing in a specific niche where there are already a lot of other membership websites then you had better have something that makes you stand a full head and shoulders above the crowd or your site will die.
Website size
Here again this would depend upon the original topic, and if your membership website is aimed at antique steam train enthusiasts then you are not likely to be getting a lot of fresh news daily in such a niche, and would therefore need to be certain that you still have new and fresh content to add weekly.
It would be easier with a more popular topic. What I am saying here is that you would be encouraged to be adding hundreds of quality items a month to make even the most jaded member happy and keep increasing your membership site. I am a member of one of the best membership websites online and the guy who runs it keeps us all astounded with the quality that he adds daily. Very few people bail out of that membership website. (Thank you Chris Farrell)
Focus
Do not lose focus as to what your original intentions where, and you need to remember that that reason is why most of your members joined up in the first place. The idea of adding a fun element like a daily competition might seem like a good idea, but sooner or later you diehard members are going to be asking questions. If the original intention of your membership website was to keep old car enthusiasts up to date with all the gathering dates and happenings, and you stop telling them those details they will run away.
Name
If you feel that the word membership has started to get a bit of a negative feel to it then I suggest that from the word go you call your membership website by a different name. You can play around with the options like club, team, group and a whole lot more and some will work and others not. Be careful that you still keep the integrity of the original idea intact.
Information (Consultation) – Website Type Fourteen
Setting up an information or content based website has the potential to be one of the most solid forms of website models out there. If you owned a website that had thousands of very high content pages you will be getting so much traffic to that website that it really would be like owning an ATM machine.
But before you rush out and start to develop such a website I suggest that you consider a few factors.
Ulterior motive
This is possibly the most important question that you should ask yourself. A website like this will be all consuming and will require daily work for years before it becomes solidly established as an authority website on your chosen topic. You need to check if you really are passionate about the subject and the idea, as you will be living and breathing that specific topic for a very long time.
Personally I am passionate about decorating – so in my case I could start to write up a website that covers all the thousands of different aspects of décor and home improvements, but could I do it every day forever? I wonder.
If your urge to teach and continually keep the world updated on a subject that you are passionate about is the reason you want to own an information website then by all means do it, but remember that it might not be as financially rewarding as starting up a dating website.
One thing that you must remember is that if you are a nuclear physics addict and wanted to have a business about this subject, you would probably never be able to do it offline, but there are possible enough similar addicts like you online to make such a website viable as your catchment area will obviously be international. So do not be afraid on that side of the idea.
How will you monetize it?
This side of the idea of owning such a website is vital as if you are in it for the money I suggest that you reconsider. If you are really passionate about the idea then you possibly will survive and thrive as long as you keep to your original game plan that you set out to achieve.
There are obviously a lot of ways to monetize a website and earn your living and I suggest that before you set off on a huge mission like this will probably become that you are very certain as to which ways that you will find and apply to the financial aspect of your website.
Generally speaking I would suggest that you write and sell your own products, but naturally there are many more and obviously you do not need to use only one form of monetization.
Do you have enough knowledge?
This question has already presumed that you are actually passionate enough about the topic of your website, and questions you ability to properly construct and control such a website. It goes without saying that you could outsource all the writing that you will be putting up onto this website of yours, but what if you do not have a clue as to how accurate the information is that is being written by your ghostwriters?
Is your theme or topic popular?
If your subject of choice is on such an obscure niche and nobody cares at all about your website you might want to reconsider your choice before you spend any more time on the idea. Thousands of pages on the mating habits of fish are not likely to get you a very big following online at all.
Do you have the staying power?
Personally this is where I suspect that I would not be able to go the distance, as to constantly be writing and talking about a single niche or topic for years would probably be the death of me. Even the subjects that I love like food, sex, books or music might become boring after awhile – and that would be very bad. You need to be very certain that you really do have the amount of motivation to tackle such a big project and go the full distance.
Properly planned to be popular?
If you are passionate enough to do this then why not put a system in place that makes your product or website popular enough to make you a lot of money? If you structure the layout of your website correctly from the very beginning then even when it has reached 25 000 pages it will still be easily navigated by the visitors and they will not become bogged down and lose interest.
May all sorts of forces be with you on this one!
Forum – Website Type Fifteen
Running a forum could possibly be a really brilliant idea, and to be honest I have absolutely no idea as to how much work this sort of website entails. Whenever I visit these websites I get the impression that they are run by the moderators. Now how brilliant is a concept where you start up a website wait until you have a lot of members and those that are the most regular you simply appoint them as moderators, or as I picture them – babysitters and then you can go fishing.
Ok – joking aside I suspect that this form of website has just as many hidden things that cause a lot of work every day and as always you will need to consider all the aspects of this sort of website before you spend a lot of time trying to develop it.
Forums that are well visited fast become very highly ranked websites and if your niche is popular your website could receive a lot of traffic daily. Where you need to be careful about this sort of website business idea is on these following aspects.
Layout or template
I have joined a lot of forums in my time online and I have to be honest I find most of them boring. From the very minute that I see the forums layout I have very seldom been impressed. Now I fully understand that the sizes of these forums are normally big and therefore the template needs to load fast, but still…
If I was to start up a forum website I would have a front page that has some handpicked threads that are featured on the front page with a cartoon or picture attached or similar attractive visual aspect to make the first impression have big impact. Remember you are competing with thousands of other forums and the one that leaves an impression will be the winner.
Level of competition
You are welcome to compete in any market online as nobody will tell you that you are not welcome, but I highly suggest that you do a lot of research into the different niches that you could start up your forum in before you just step off the edge.
Check all the different levels, do keyword research, use all the available tools to ascertain the exact level of competition that you are up against and then plan your attack accordingly.
Maintaining interest
In my opinion just owning a forum is definitely not enough to keep your members from returning to post and comment and become happy and active members. I suggest that you plan a lot of different facets into the initial design of your forum that will give it a unique feel and make it somewhere people will want to spend all their free time with their new online friends.
Initial grind
Initially you will be confronted with a massive amount of marketing to get you website growing fast, if the initial growth is too slow your first members will disappear as they will find no new posts and threads and lose interest very quickly. The best option would be to plan a very big marketing campaign and offer prizes and pay to get thousands of visitors to your website in the first few weeks. You could tone down your marketing after that slightly but never lose momentum as your regulars will feel the drop in comments and interest and your site could die.
I would highly recommend that you start up another 5 or 10 websites all in different sub niches of your niche and use those websites to drive organic traffic to your forum all the time. If you are careful on the domain name choice of those websites and are equally careful as to how well the sites are optimized you could be receiving a constant flow of new members all the time from those websites.
A lot of visitors will mean more visitors and this exponential growth will fill your pockets with money, or fame and adulation if that is your preferred method of payment.
Mini Sites – Website Type Sixteen
Setting up mini sites as your website model of choice has become extremely popular and is possible being pushed as an easy way to make money online. Do not be fooled as with any business setting up and running fifty or one hundred mini sites is perhaps one of the more difficult ways of getting an income from the internet. There are a lot of products that you can buy online that will teach you a bunch of similar ways to set up “cash-grabbing” micro or mini sites.
The concept is very simple – what you do is a bunch of keyword research and niche research to find that tightly targeted spot online that is not that competitive and you build and leave a small website for those specific keyword searchers. Now the guys that have in fact actually made a success from this very type of marketing will readily admit that only about 40% of their websites ever actually make them money, and very often these sites are chugging along at a very small income. The entire point to this form of web based business is to create hundreds of tightly targeted websites that all stand or fall independently and eventually you will have a consistent income.
I have a suspicion that my cynicism is creeping through and is visible in my tone here in this report. I should explain. I have built a few of these websites myself, and if you do them correctly they can make you consistent money. My real complaint goes to these guys that promote their products to us, and tend to make it all sound so much easier than it really is.
They will run promotion that tells you that you will be able to set up a mini site in two hours, and using this system would get to 100 new websites a month, and if they are to be believed you will be making an average of R2000 ($240) per website per month. Well perhaps they are capable of doing that but I have to tell you that I am experienced at setting up these types of websites and I personally have found that they need at least two days of work to give them enough “meat” to stand all alone out there online.
So finally if you read between all the lines that I have gone over here, I do agree that if you put in at least two days of solid work per mini site and you have done your keyword research properly then you might stand a chance of achieving a network of income generating mini sites. If you do not start to use underhand tools or tactics to punt your websites online you should be in a position to gain a decent footprint online.
One word of warning, the future of the internet is fast becoming one where real and high quality content will be the most highly ranked item and if you keep putting copy and paste stuff up you will eventually fail. Be careful, rather go slower and put original and good quality content onto your websites.
Shopping site – Website Type Seventeen
I love the idea of owning a website that is dedicated to shopping. If you have the products and the ability to set up a competent shopping website you will almost certainly always have a winner. To correctly put this type of website in its own category here I say that it must be a website that has a shopping cart system in place and where you actually pay for the product on that website.
While the hard parts of owning a shopping type website are tedious you gain one massive advantage and this is the fact that if your marketing is done correctly you are in a position to drive very targeted traffic to your website.
Here are a few pointers that you need to consider with the ownership of a shopping website
Choosing your niche
The different types of products that you could put onto a website that are sellable as a real deliverable product are many, but naturally your decisions on what that product is and how big the actual stockholding should be is your decision. You could arrange to have drop shipping done and this method is becoming more and more popular with the owners of shopping websites.
Setting up a good template
If the products that you sell are not many your flexibility in the choice of your website becomes much wider. But if you plan to have a range of thousands of products then you need to buy or design a custom template that is capable of handling all those products.
That all important initial impact is critical as most people judge your entire business within those first few seconds and your business will live or die on that judgment. However you need to pre decide on factors like are you selling specials or on price or do you want to create an image of luxury to get a higher price out of the buyer.
Checking on daily prices, links etc
Two factors are going to be vitally important to the daily running and therefore the profitability of your website and they both need to be carefully controlled.
The first is to be continually aware of factors like price changes, and inventory. Never let yourself be in a position where you end up having to deliver hundreds of an item at the “old” price. Constant vigilance on these daily fluctuations is so important to the health of your business. I suspect that you are fully aware of this.
Money flows
You are going to need to set up a very sophisticated shopping cart or payment system as you need the buyers to not have any obstacles in their path as you obviously want it to be very easy to make a purchase. You will also need to make it clear to your buyers as to what all the charges are and things like delivery charges so as to have to whole system run smoothly.
Marketing and traffic
Finally the most important factor is that you need to drive huge amounts of traffic to this sort of website as your profits will depend upon all this traffic. I would suggest that you build a few other websites that are very product keyword strong and use those websites to direct your traffic.
Naturally one of the best ways to get your traffic is to run a carefully controlled pay per click campaign and control the flow of your visitors in that way.
Final notes
While I have written a lot of information here for you, it would be possible to keep splitting up the types of websites and show you dozens of different permutations of the basic website types.
I do say that other websites that I haven’t covered in detail here – like your own software that is really specialized, or things like targeting certain types of offline businesses could be discussed but the point of these listings was to give your website aspirations a jolt and perhaps put your ideas into a more accurate focus.
This report is simply to give a new internet person an overview as to what types of websites could be set up and run online.
You are welcome to contact me if you feel that you need to go into more detail on some aspects in this report.
Below I have listed a variety of products and websites that will be able to help you to take some of these ideas further.
I need to add that some of these websites or products will pay me a commission if you purchase the courses or products from them.
Finally while there are a lot of very competent products that you could buy to further your online education I very highly suggest that you email me long before you get the urge to go out and buy a product as you could be buying something that would be totally unrelated to your website or experience.
There are mentoring courses and free products that could be far more beneficial to your education.
I have more than 85 websites and blogs, and own upwards of 50 domains. I host with three different hosting companies, and am very happy at the moment – BUT have some horror stories to tell if you are interested. Take care please.
If you need to see some examples of what I am doing online contact me and we can get you sent into the correct direction.
Let us start with my email address.
Rob Anderson
email one
e mail two
Domain registration
Stallion Hosting http://tinyurl.com/stallionhosting
Crazy Hosting http://tinyurl.com/Crazyhosting-superhost
Website hosting sites
Local South African Hosting
Stallion Hosting http://tinyurl.com/stallionhosting
Crazy Hosting http://tinyurl.com/Crazyhosting-superhost
International Hosting
Hostgator http://tinyurl.com/Hostgator-International
Westhost http://tinyurl.com/west-host-hosting
Internet marketing related websites / forums
Warrior Forum http://www.warriorforum.com/index.php?referrerid=119166
Chris Farrell membership http://tinyurl.com/Free-HTML-Videos
Email Marketing/ auto responders
International
Aweber http://perfectmailsolutions.aweber.com/
Free I have a way to get you a free auto responder – get hosting from Crazy hosting above and wait the required 4 months and you get it for free.
Remember this – it is not just a clever idea that will make your internet business a success but a complete and complicated plan to attack the market where you will be competing. Unless you keep to a pre-thought-out-step-by-step-plan you might never get to the far end of your idea.
Good luck with it all
Rob.
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