ah the glory and the promise of making money on the web
For so many years people balked at the concept of making money with web sites. I recall as a young laddy, how I approached so many businesses to do web site design. No one beleived in the web. Ahhh, but that is old news.
The new news is that now we have the quest for making money on the web, even where no money exists. the old adage “build it and they will come” no longer applies with the myriad of thousands of websites going up each week… or are they. What we have now is a new breed of webbie, the domainers, who simply purchase domains for the sake of adwords revenue and put them online to compete with real mom and pops and mid sized buys trying to make a buck out here in the wild blue yonder. I’m not knocking the domainers who buy cheap bulk domain names to impart their wares upon the world, but moreover seller beware, the market has been skewed. As long as Google continues to reward the “fake” site with ad revenue, they will continue to exist and they will compete with you.
Now we get back to the original reason for this post. The glory of making money on the web is still alive but it takes oh so much more work these days. Once you get a domain, your next step is to design it, position it, link it and advertise it. Then and only then can you really make money. Each of these steps takes an additional step or two as you’ve probably discovered.
1. Design it: You must design it not only aestetically, but also in terms of consumer perception. Clarity of purpose, ease of use.
2. Position it: Your website standing out looking beautiful at a particular address is like a house in the burbs. If you don’t give your guests directions and there is no map out there with a way to find them, pretty much no one will be coming to dinner. You must position your site somewhere that will actually get noticed. You need an angle, and again clarity of purpose, a singular direction from which visitors may arrive knowing clearly where you are on the map.
3.Link it: the best way to get a position is to link your site from other sites. You can start with directories, free directories and cheap directories, but until your site is located somewhere on the web, it is landlocked within it’s own domain.
4. advertise it: Many small owners make the mistake of avoiding advertising, google adwords, and the like due to cost. But if you have a few dollars a week to make a buck, you can easily afford to advertise some niche keywords to get started.
Remember, you are starting a business, not just a landlocked web site in the suburbs with no hope of anyone finding out. Google and other search engines are mere robots, not here to punish you, or make it difficult, but certainly don’t realize your frustration. Take a step back, look at your dilema and make things happen that are logical from a robotic point of view. Spend a few hours a week on your website and in a few months you should be able to position yourself on a shoe string.
Good luck~!
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