I figured it was about time I wrote something good on my blog that will benefit all of the readers (there are now over 1300 of you!). I’m about 2 weeks away from launching one of my largest projects to date. I’ve got access to well over 2.5 million viral users, and a launch of tons of sites to target them with. Something for everyone. But the best advice I’ve always followed, and had my project managers follow too, was to Keep It Simple Stupid. When you’re dealing with very large projects, it gets very easy to lose focus and stray from your original goal.
I know a lot of you have no intentions of launching massive projects, but there really isn’t any reason why you shouldn’t, or even can’t. Maybe you’re thinking “well, I just don’t have the time to do it” — yeah, that’s a load of crap and you know it. If you have time to run one site, then you have time to run one hundred. Or maybe you’re saying “I don’t make enough off of my first site to make more”. Wrong again sherlock. You don’t have to have a lot of money to make sites, that’s the beauty of the internet. Things can be made in large quantities for so little. Hell, as long as you have access to some type of hosting, whether it’s free, shared or dedicated, you can do this. If cash is not something you have a lot of on hand at the moment, all you really need is the cash to buy a domain name. Many of you have reseller accounts, or access to places where you can get one for $6. If you can’t afford $6-$9 for a domain, then I want you to leave my site and never come back, because that is just horse shit.
Anyhow, back onto topic.. (I always get carried away when dealing with excuses)
Here is a great way for anyone that wants to make a change in their income stream. The first thing you need to do is plan or create a strategy that you can use, over and over without making many changes to. This will be your barebones structure. Finding a niche too, it doesn’t necessarily have to be something that tons of advertisers spend $50 a click on, it can be something very basic. Too lazy to find one on your own? Step outside for 20 minutes and look around. Everything that exists in our society is part of some type of business niche. Make a list of everything you see, and start researching it online. Familiarize yourself with the top 5 niche industries you’ve picked. Now let’s make this super easy for you. We’ll begin with 1 niche.
As an example let’s use lawn care (not that there are any lawns in NYC..) as our focus niche. Alright, so you don’t know much about lawn care, good, because I don’t know anything about it either. But I do know that the industry is huge, because I constantly see commercials for it on TV. We know that stores like Loews and the Home Depot sell a bajillion different types of lawn care products. So if they focus on it, it must be somewhat profitable right? Alright good, so we have our first niche to work with. Now find a domain for it. Don’t get one of those dashed domains either, because they are annoying to look at, and if you really want return visitors, it’ll be tough to remember the name of your site. So pick something preferrably with “lawn care” in the name. Now make some room on your shared host, or even create a free host, it doesn’t matter, but make sure you have something where it’s yourdomain.com and not lawncare.excite.com, ya dig?
Okay, planning stage now. The goal of this excersize is to make money, and somehow or other make it seem like you know about lawn care. So you’ll need an ad network (YPN, AdSense, whatever) and some content. The best content is always unique content. I’m sure you can find tons of pre-written articles around the internet about lawn care, but that’s going the easy way, and it’s a fairly bad habit to get into. So come up with 10 different topics that cover lawn care. Research those topics on sites that have information about it, and write down 5 main ideas for each of those 10 topics all under the lawn care niche. A main idea only has to be 1 or 2 sentences long, so don’t go writing a novel just yet. Now your job is to create some articles. What you can do is you can look at articles you’ve read already, take each of those main ideas, and structure an article around it. Because that’s what every other article on the topic is, it’s just the same idea put into someone else’s words. This should take you about 2 hours at most, probably a lot less, but I’m factoring in really long smoking/bathroom/coffee breaks, and some minesweeper.
So you have your articles laid out. Awesome, the toughest part is now over. See, that wasn’t soooo tough now was it? And look at the bright side, you have 100% unique content, so high five big boy! But don’t get too proud of yourself just yet, you still have to come up with a layout of the site. Now here’s where it may get a tad tricky, but don’t get scared, because you are in total control over the situation and outcome.
Choosing a layout is tough, because what may appeal to you, may not appeal to many other people. Color schemes are also very important. A very good way to keep it super simple is to just follow the layout of other sites that are ranking well for the keywords of the niche you’re going for. But instead of straight out copying them, just make a “lite” version of it. They obviously have way more content and pages than you, so work with what you have in front of you. Don’t go crazy with it by creating links to pages you have no content for. If you think of a good idea for the site.. WRITE IT DOWN and save it for when you can use it. But for now, keep it as simple and straight forward as possible.
Okay, so you’ve come up with some type of nifty layout, congrats. Now here is where we can make some money finally. Ad positioning. This has to be by far the most important part of the project. I’m sure you were thinking that the content or traffic part was the key.. Well, here’s some advice. There is no king of anything. You know when you read on forums about people saying “traffic is king” or “content is king”, sorry to burst your bubble boys and girls, but the only king around, is me. Joking.. but on a serious note, you can’t do well without the other factors. You can’t make as much money as possible with only traffic and no ads or content, and you can’t make money without traffic but amazing content. You need to have a medium of everything combined. And the part that really boosts your revenue potential is really good ad placement.
Gone are the days where banners needed to be flashy in order to get clicks. Who the hell says you HAVE TO put your contextual ads in a border or table near your content? Google and Yahoo WANT you to make more money, because in turn, then they make more money. So what you need to do is use the tools at hand. Make up a checklist of ways that you can put your ads inside of your content. Have the content and ads meld together so that it seems like the ads are part of the layout and content, and that they aren’t there to annoy anyone. It gets me so angry when I see really good laid out sites or sites with awesome content just waste their potential by sticking to the normal size banner ads because they were too damn lazy to put in the time to concentrate on proper ad placement. So ad placement INSIDE your content is something you need to focus on.
I hope you’re keeping a checklist or laying all of this out in your own special way, because all of this information is going to help you build your first of hopefully hundreds of sites that have on goal, to make you some money!
I know I can clean this post up and make it reeeeally easy to follow, but I’m giving you advice, and the best way to really make things work for yourself is not to go step by step with what someone tell you to do, but to learn how to do it on your own. I’m basically teaching you how to fish, so that you can feed yourself, instead of trying to sell you one or two fish for the moment. Next time, when you get hungry for some money, and you’re finally tired of giving yourself excuses on why you CAN’T do it, you’ll pull out the notepad where you wrote this stuff down, you’ll put it into play, and then you’ll come back here and tell me how correct I was.
Oh yeah, before I’m done, I want to add that you should do some light SEO work. PLEASE do not go overboard. Make sure you have good title tags, SOME alt text tags on your images, and some incoming links to all of your pages, that’s right, not just your index page, and the engines will bring in your traffic. You can also buy some clicks on some of the smaller engines for like $0.01-$0.05 a click if you need instant traffic. It doesn’t hurt to try.
Last part of the step is to create VOLUME. Yes, I say it often, but I’m a strong believer that when you do something correct, and it makes you money, then you should keep plugging away and doing it over and over and over. Use the notes from this post to create your own little network of 100 sites in the gardening or lawn care arena. SEO your sites correctly, and you’ll build up longterm streams of traffic. Keep your ads as part of your content and not just flashy banner things, and your CTR will increase, thus increasing your revenue stream by thousands of dollars a month. I’m serious about those numbers. Following this can literally have you going from a measly $5 a day in revenue and low CTR’s to well over $150 a day. It’s not out of reach at all, and I’ve done it so many goddamn times I can probably recite it in my sleep.
Alright, enough writing. Go do it and stop making excuses for yourself. You CAN do this. Time to make more money for the holiday season. Buy your folks something better next year, instead of the same old green and red colored socks, trust me, they’ll appreciate that hot tip.
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