Making money online
This blog is part of the freeipodsetc.co.uk site which I have explained before. It advertises those free iPod schemes you see dotted around the net. At the moment I am not making much money sadly. My movie trailer network is making me about $1 a day but that is not enough to cover how much it cost to start it. I’m just hoping things will pick up when we get closer to the release dates of the films as only one of the site is of a film which has actually been released. You can check out the main site at movietrailerwatch.com
Make a website and make money online
I’ll try and give you your first few steps to making a website
So you have around £30 in your bank account. This should be OK, for now.
First thing is first. You need a website. You need somewhere where you can publish original content to begin getting traffic. Driving traffic to your site is how you are going to make your money.
When browsing the internet you will have come across ads down the side of the page you are viewing. They may include flashing banners, ingenious catch phrases or some kind of limited time only offer. These adverts are put by the website owners to get them money. There are two situations in which the advert can make the website owner money. The first is that the advertising company has paid the website a fixed fee to have their ad on their site. The second is that the advertiser pays the website for every click they receive on their ad. Instead of every click they may get money for every action, such as only paying the website for every person who registers and fills out a certain deal.
Placing ads on your site is how you will make your money. This is called affiliate marketing. You are marketing someone elses product.
This method depends on one thing though, the amount of traffic your website which has the advert on receives. Not only this, it also depends on the geographical location of the traffic and the needs the traffic has. It is no use aiming to advertise dog food on a website which gets traffic from people wanting a free iPod Touch. The demographics of your traffic is extremely important.
Where does this traffic come from?
This traffic comes from two places. You could either pay people to come to your site. This is called Paid Per Click advertising where you pay a certain amount of money for every person that clicks to visit your site. The main PPC sites are Google Adwords and Overture (yahoo). This method will cost you money and therefore is probably not suitabl for people starting out in the business. I would recommend trying to get natural traffic. This is where you appear high up on the Google search rankings so your link is more likely to be clicked by a person compared to the link below yours.
Optimizing your page for search engines is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short. Companies spend thousands of pounds paying people to get there websites high up the Search Engine Results Page or SERP for short. They know that the higher up they are on these pages the more traffic they will receive and therefore the more money they will make. People make livings by editing peoples’ websites so they appear high up on the results page.
This is cheating the system though is it not?
Google uses secret algorithms which are run on every site it indexes. It compares the backlinks the site has (backlinks are the number of links found to the site on other sites). For example if you linked to my site on yours I would get one backlink. A backlink is like a vote for that website. The more votes the website has, the higher it will be on the search engine results page. Not only the number but also the reputation of the site voting depends on how it will affect your ranking. If I get one link from www.amazon.co.uk and one link from www.shitsite.com then the link from amazon will be worth much much more.
The reputation of a site as it could be called is decided by page rank. Page rank is the rank a website is given by Google. If you have a page rank of 9 then you have a really popular site. If your site ranks at 1 then Google barely cares about it.
Another way Google chooses where you appear on the results page is by looking at the keywords of your site. If you have a site with a lot of keywords for the word ‘dog food’ then you will appear high on the results page when someone types in dog food. A keyword is just an important word in your site. The user searches in the google box by typing in ‘key words’. In the past users would be able to top the search results page by spamming keywords. This is not possible and is likely to get your website banned from Google completely and so would limit your chances of getting any traffic and any money to something close to zero.
Enough of that mindless ramblings though. TIME TO GET A WEBSITE
First thing to do is to get some hosting. I recommend HostGator as you are able to have multiple domains. It’s not failed me yet and seems to be pretty cheap. Here are some codes to save you some money.
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You must get the Baby package so you can get multiple domains. This means you can have more than one site making you money at any one time.
Once you have the hosting you need to get a domain. A domain is the name of your site. My domain is freeipodsetc.co.uk You can register a domain for one or two years. I suggest you get a domain which has something to do with the website. My website has a lot about freeipodsetc which is why I chose the name. When choosing the name remember you are making a website to make money. This website must have original content. Also, you want as little competition with it as possible. This is why you should choose a niche. A niche is a topic or area which has little other interest but has enough interest for you to get the traffic needed to make money off it. To find a niche simply choose a personal interest which you can write a lot of oringinal content on.
Content is king.
Remember, the content your website has will have a huge impact on the amount of traffic it will receive. Facebook has good content. It is a good site which users want to visit again and again. Your site must be like this. People must want to visit your site and tell your friends about it too! If they visit your site and think, oh, this is shit then you have lost one potential customer already.
I am going to show you how to make money off a blog like this. Therefore you will not need to think up a genius idea like Facebook. You will, however, need to be able to have the ability to write pages and pages of unique content. This could be anything from model planes to wine making.
That was a big tangent, sorry.
Right, you need a name for your website. To get one go here. It’s really simple to do, just choose a name which hasn’t been taken and fill in the correct details. I would recommend turning off automatic rebilling as you may not want to have the domain for longer than a year.
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What is twitter and why should you get it?
Twitter is another social networking site. Over the last year or so I have gone from Myspace, to Bebo (very briefly) and finally to Facebook. I have simply discarded my Myspace and Bebo account because the people I wanted to talk to weren’t actually using them. I was the last of my friends to get a Facebook account because I didn’t want to get suckered in.
I am currently using Facebook on a personal level. I have spoken to people who design applications to Facebook but it is sounds extremely hard to break into profits when making Facebook applications.
I have been reading around and I have decided to try and use Social Netorking on a professional level. It sounds like a daunting task trying to organise your accounts on the various sites but hopefuly I will manage.
The days of people becoming faceless and unpersonal as they step onto the online world are over. People are now deciding to show their faces if they are successful on the internet. It seems that the public want to know exactly who the people behind the pages are.
I have decided to begin using Twitter as the first way to market my site. I will try and make friends on twitter and encourage them to check out my blog every now and then. So what is Twitter? Twitter is a social networking site which gives users the options to send their current status to the site as text-based posts, or ‘tweets’. You can set your status to things like “cooking” or “having a BBQ with the lads”.
You can use Twitter to get in touch with other people on the internet which is what I will take advantage of to market my blog.
Check out my twitter at http://twitter.com/freeipodsetc
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