Why most websites never make money
Id love to know the stats but I’m betting that the vast majority of new websites started by amateurs online never make any money. There’s many reasons why but the end result seems to be the same for so many people, they spend lots of time/money getting the site up and running and then nothing happens for months and they cant work out why. Before giving up they usually try offline marketing methods in an attempt to get things going, like leaflet drops, business cards in supermarkets and even launch parties (my favourite).
The thing is no matter the size or function of your site unless you embrace SEO, PPC or both then your doomed to failure. The problem is though both these skills are time consuming to learn and implement, but isn’t everything? Even when you know seo it still takes plenty of time to get results so that combined with running the site could make it hard to achieve part-time, but anythings possible.
Ok so after all that negativity what do you actually have to do to make it with your site?
- You have to get out there and connect with other bloggers and websites, this is at the core of Internet marketing. A good way to get started is guest posting, this is were you write a post or article for someone else’s site and in exchange they give you a link back, sounds simple but trust me its still a lot of work. As we know incoming links help both with search engines and your overall popularity so no-matter how long it takes you’ve got to do it. If your not sure where to get started myblogguest is a free forum where you can write guest posts for other webmasters.
- You have to stand out at least a little bit because there’s a million sites out there all doing the same thing. Honestly if you want to build up return visitors you’ve got to give them a reason to come back. Ultimately you’ve got to give your audience what they want and in a clear structure they can understand. So if your an online store offer discounts the competition cant because even though you take a hit in the short term on price the exposure you gain long term is always worth it.
- Consistency is another big part of the equation, are you going to stick with this gig? Are you going to be getting new links for your site on a weekly basis. Will you be creating content for your site for the next 12 months every week to keep it fresh? Obviously the amount of work required is going to depend on the niche your in but even so the work is going to be there until you reach your goal, are you prepared for that?
So that’s my problem, I’m just a realist I suppose but better that I think than one of the get rich quick gurus. I’m always looking for legitimate ways to earn money online that actually deliver a return for the time spent. I cant imagine anything worse than spending lots of time and money on some system that I didn’t fundamentally understand, are you prepared to trust in luck? Or do you want to spend time learning a process like Internet marketing which is already proven?
An online business for an offline world
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about just how clueless so many offline businesses are about the web. Its bit of a generalisation I have to admit but when you look a little closer at the way so many companies are trying to adapt their business to net the net it’s a bit scary. Granted most businesses have a website but often they are so bad I want to cry, and it’s not just design mistakes I’m talking about, its factors that directly affect how well the business is going to do online i.e. marketing.
So this has got me thinking about a way to in-directly earn money online by providing services to these “lost” businesses. It’s true there’s a million and one people doing web-design these days but how many companies actually have the promotion and marketing thing working well? I’ve always thought there was money in marketing smaller businesses for two main reasons:
- They are usually competing in a smaller market so it shouldn’t be difficult from a technical point of view to deliver results. Think making them No1 for “Mechanic in Birmingham”, how hard is that gonna be?
- Everyone else is overlooking these smaller businesses in the race to land the big fish. Imagine if you had a load of these small companies paying a monthly fee (£50) for promoting their site online, that can really add up.
I suppose the point I’m making is that while I love affiliate marketing, seo and all that stuff often you can make more leveraging your skills to real world businesses, the key has always been to interpret and adapt to what’s happening, it’s what all great entrepreneurs do.
What it all comes back to though is acquiring as skill that the market demands, whether that’s graphic design, seo or programming its only possible to leverage what people need and what your good at. It’s a common factor they don’t talk about in the get rich quick ebooks, if you wanna make money on the web you need to be bringing value to the table in one way or another.
One very important point that I can’t miss out is how much time your average “business to business” provider spends dealing with people. I can tell you first hand from the web design industry that sometimes you can spend more time dealing with a client and all their “issues” than building the site. The problem is you often don’t know that you have a difficult client until it’s too late. At the other end of the scale though it is possible to get clients that are great to work with and it’s even better when they have regular work, its kinda like hitting the lottery when this happens (for them and you).
Still with all that being said I’m sure the mixture between offline/online business is going to appeal to some people for the reasons listed above. I do like listing all these different ideas I have to admit, when it comes to earning money online there’s a million methods and a million variations on each one. Everyone always puts their own spin on any money making idea (they have to). Until next time…
What the “gurus” aren’t telling you about making money
So I feel a rant coming on. I only have myself to blame though as for some reason I can’t stop reading 100s of different SEO blogs, it comes with the territory of being interested in something I suppose. Don’t get me wrong there’s lots of “interesting” content out there when it comes to internet marketing but there’s so much fluff too that you gotta wade through html for days before you find that nugget of useful info.
So anyway I was reading this post today at seo-theory.com where Michael essentially says people are way too hyped up about link-building. I don’t necessarily disagree with this to a point especially when it comes to some of the useless link-building techniques I see around the net today. However he then drops the bomb that he only spends around 10% – 15% of his time link building at also that uber googlar Matt Cuts says links are only 1% of the algorithm. I mean seriously, go spend 10-15% of your time building links for “car insurance” with the rest on your “site architecture” and get back to me. I probably won’t see you in the top 1000.
This is by no means the first time I’ve seen a post like this on a SEO blog but it’s still weird every time I read this stuff. The only explanation I can come up with is people are trying to setup pre-made excuses for clients about the more difficult aspects of SEO.
“Link building is very 2005”
Still as I’ve said before there can only be one guy at No1 making money on every search and for the rest there’s a million excuses. When it comes down to it there’s really only one thing that matters and that’s if you’re making money from your site or not, everything else is just technical nonsense. Part of the problem of course is the inherent nature of internet marketing when it comes to making a living as few people really get the concept of earning money online and how much work it actually takes to get off the ground. Indeed the delay search engines impose on new sites is probably one of the most off putting things for new people that most don’t make it past the first month.
People often ask me what the keys to a successful website are and it’s really one of those impossible questions to answer just because every site and more importantly every market is different. For instance if you are an online store selling physical goods your margins are very different than someone setting up a blog and selling advertising to make money. The problem is that even though people are developing wildly different sites “Gurus” are handing out this universal advice as a one size fits all solution. I’m hoping not to get into any of that rubbish here on the blog and will try to be as specific as possible (even when I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about sometimes!).
This brings me on to another point with the Internet marketing Gurus, all the terrible products and books they sell. Don’t get me wrong not all the money making ideas they “sell” are scams but I’d say about 95% are. They are quite easy to spot though, if they promise the world within 24hours of purchase then you know what to expect and only have yourself to blame. With that being said though I have bought 2 very good IM products this year which have saved/made me quite a bit of money, however I did have to waste a lot of cash on other useless stuff before I found them. Now I’m not actually going to say what they are here, first because I don’t promote other peoples products here (yet) and second because unless you understand the basic principles website promotion they really aren’t going to work for you anyway. It’s probably one of the biggest problems with the make money on the web industry, they are selling these advanced programs to newbie’s because all the advanced people have already bought it (there’s not that many advanced people). I will say though its v exciting when you finally find a program/system that allows you to save days or even weeks of work. Notice how I define the value as saved time and not direct money because at the heart of this thing is work and the time to do it. The work will always be required but the processes can be streamlined, improved and sometimes even outsourced.
So the question remains, how do you know if the latest money making scheme you are reading about actually works? Well you don’t but for a start it should never be a scheme and it should always be founded on principles that you do understand. For instance if you do understand how article marketing works in relation to your website promotion then a tool that helps you speed that up a few hundred percent is obviously going to in-directly increase your income. However if the “system” is another mysterious promise and only talks about the money you can make how likely is it to be legit?
So anyway this post started out as a rant about one guys “seo theory” and ended up in the more general area of internet gurus, are they the same people? The thing is being able to sort the good information from the bad is the fundamental principle of learning in general and not just this internet business stuff. If I had to give advice to someone just starting out in the online world I would say start small with different techniques and see what works. Also you need to understand the general principles of what’s happening in any marketing situation in order to suss out whether a new opportunity is the real deal or not. Blind faith is only going to get you so far my friends.
So that rant lasted a bit longer than I expected but still it’s nice to let of some steam in html form. Until next time…
Do you have to cheat the system to earn money from the net?
So first off I have to make an apology because so far there have been over 1,500 comments on this blog but until today none of them have been approved because I just haven’t had time to check. While it’s true that over 1,495 of these comments were advertising the latest form of medication for “blood flow regulation” it still makes me look me look bad! I mean how are these people going to promote their latest pharmaceutical products if I don’t approve their latest msg (which is usually in Russian for some reason)? So anyway I have some program called Akismet now so hopefully it will allow me to have some genuine comments on here at last.
My Russian pill pusher friends do lead me on to an interesting point though and that’s if you have to cheat the system in order to earn real money online? I can say for more certain that in this case these people are completely wasting their time commenting on random unrelated blogs. For a start Google ignores these links automatically and there’s really no chance of someone clicking on the link within the blog comments section. So what’s the point of it, its lazy marketing at best and very annoying at worst. It actually reminds me of that old Microsoft slogan which I’ve always liked:
“Work smarter not just harder”
The thing is when people see these and other black hat techniques pasted all over the interweb all the time they assume they must be working all the time, however that isn’t necessarily the case. On the other hand though you have a very large group of people going in the opposite direction and trying to follow every solid “rule” they have been told about either how to market at website or start a business online. That old saying “think outside the box” has become an overused cliché but you do have to think about things differently to get noticed. You’ve got to remember that all the best markets (i.e. worth money) are going to have competition and there can only be one big dog at No1 (for Google anyway) so how are you going to persuade them to pick you?
As you may or may not know my main method for making money on the internet is to build websites that attract traffic from Google using SEO. Sometimes when I mention to people what I do (i.e. when at the bar) their eyes tend to go a glassy as if I just asked them 7 times 8. Usually I just say that I build websites as trying to explain the complexity of the Google algo in any intoxicated state in is just about impossible. But there is also a safely in that complexity I have to admit, partly because my ego likes the fact that not a lot of people can do this but also the less serious competition the more money for me! Not that there will ever be too much competition imho with so many different markets and keywords out there.
So what exactly am I trying to say here? Well first off all these black hat techniques don’t really work unless you’re doing them in ridiculous volume and even then the tolerances are so low. At the other end of the scale you have all these people who don’t do anything at all! I mean they might do the occasional post on a forum about their website but fundamentally they just want to sit there and wait for the magic to happen. So what’s the answer? Well for a start you have to be active in marketing your site but more importantly you can just wait for the SEO secrets to arrive at your door. At the same time I’m not saying there are “secrets” as such but there are definitely some more efficient ways to do the basics (which I’ve talked about before). Time is also a big factor here, you’re not going to learn everything you need to know overnight. It could take quite some time, however since the search engines are in no hurry to rank new sites anyway does it really matter.
So back to my original point. I think it’s possible to have all the fun of evil tactics but without the sleepless nights and with more success than your average spammer can dream of. Until next time.
Starting an online shop to make money? Do your homework first
So I was thinking the other day just how many people I see on a daily basis starting out ecommerce sites with just the hope that they will make money (just because they are there). I suppose this attitude stems from the offline world where if you open a shop you will get a certain amount of foot traffic (and thus sales) from people who are just walking by. Thing is people just don’t stumble across your website (well not usually) as we don’t just go around typing random we addresses in with the hope that one will eventually work.
Back to the point, it’s amazing how much people will spend on the creation of a new website when it comes to design and programming compared to how little is set aside for promotion. In my opinion your promotional budget should always be a couple of times what your building costs are.
This also brings me to another very important point. If you’re hoping to be making money with this ecommerce thing for a while to come then surely you’re going to want to have this skill in house? After all SEO is a full time job do you really want to be paying money to an outside agency for the rest of your internet career? The way I see it if you are starting an online shop you have a few options when it comes to increasing your earnings with SEO.
- Go with a marketing agency. They should have a number of employees in different specialities from social media to link building, this avoids being stuck with a “jack of all trades” character. There will usually be different plans available but most people go for monthly “pay as you go” type option as its ideal for a small start-up business. The main downside that I can see is there’s no real investment going on from your own knowledge or training point of view.
- You can hire a wiz-kid SEO to work for you. Sounds simple as you could have someone working for you on a full time basis who will probably be cheaper than a marketing agency. However finding them might not be easy and they might not have as much reputation as you would like so the safety net might not be there. Also since they have to be good at everything they do need to be bit special as it takes a lot of skill (and organisation) to pull off all the aspects of net marketing.
- Learn it yourself? Sounds daunting as internet marketing is a constantly shifting landscape, do you have the time to stay up to date? If you have some IT experience then it may not be too hard to learn but others from a completely different field could struggle. Of course even if you do pay someone else to do the work it always helps to know the basics.
As you can see there’s 3 main options when it comes to increasing your sales (and hopefully money) via internet marketing but they do all have their downsides and plus points. Still internet marketing is never an overnight thing so you will probably have time to (and have to) go with all 3 methods at some point. Until next time.
