After spending approximately four years building up a successful website and selling it off for $200,000 dollars, I thought it might be a good idea to outline some of the major lessons that I learned throughout that process.
All of these things listed below played a major factor in my success, and so I continue to focus on them while building up my next profitable business.
1) It takes more on-site content than you think to be successful.
2) It takes more time and patience than what you think to be successful.
3) Networking with other site owners in your niche is your most powerful marketing strategy.
4) Incoming links take forever to boost your site in the rankings.
5) You will drive yourself crazy trying to evaluate your rankings and positions in the search results.
6) The quality level of your first article published is probably way too low to build a successful site. You must iterate and drive up the quality considerably over time.
7) You cannot do a website justice if you have multiple projects going on. Putting all of your energy into one website will yield the fastest rate of growth and most stable income.
8) If you make money from advertising or affiliate sales, there is almost always a way to move up the value chain and monetize more efficiently.
9) Social media is probably a waste of your time unless it creates organic link building through sharing your premium content.
10) Publishing multiple articles daily is your greatest opportunity for growth. Publishing one article or less per day is going to result in a very slow growth curve.
It takes more on-site content than you think to be successful
I usually tell people to start their online journey by publishing 100 articles on their website. Many people completely freak out at this number and act like it would take them 5 years to publish that much content.
If this is your attitude then you might rethink your business idea. I suggest starting with 100 articles, but ultimately your goal should really be to work your way up to 1,000 articles. If you are serious about building this into a full time income stream then those are the kind of numbers that you need to be thinking about.
If you are really serious about building this business then I would suggest that you shoot for 3 on-site articles per day. If you keep that pace up and never miss a day then you will have over 1,000 articles published on your site each year. This is may sound like a difficult pace, and it probably is for most people. If you can compose quickly though and you have a lot of ideas in your niche then this is the sort of pace that you need to establish for yourself.
One article per day is nice but that will not get you the sort of income growth that you want to see.
Depending on your niche, most websites will only be making around $100 per month or so in income after having a year or two of age and 100 articles published. Think bigger than this. Envision a huge website with over 1,000 articles on it in 2 or 3 years. That will be much more likely to be earning $1,000 to $2,5000 per month. Volume matters.
It takes more time and patience than what you think to be successful
Unfortunately, the age of your website plays a huge factor in how much earning potential it has. Generally speaking, Google is not going to send you enough search traffic in the first year for you to make any sort of real money.
If I was starting over today from scratch I would probably buy an existing website that is getting a small amount of Google traffic, does not make much money, but is at least 3 years old. I would expect to pay about one to two thousand dollars for such a site if it is making around $50 dollars per month or so in income.
If you were to do this and purchase such a website, then you would have a huge jump start on the whole “age problem” when it comes to ranking a website. You could start adding lots of quality content, build a few links, and really be able to see the income jump.
If you do this on a brand new domain, you will NOT see the income jump right away. It will take months, possibly years for the search engines to start trusting your website.
That is why purchasing an under-performing site is such a big jump start to your business. The biggest thing that I would look for when buying such a website is existing Google traffic. If the site claims to make income but does not have any regular search engine traffic, I would definitely NOT buy it. What you are essentially trying to purchase is trust from Google in the form of an established website that you can then build upon.
Age is important. Younger sites will struggle to create income growth. Older sites have existing trust that can quickly boost new content that you add to the site.
Networking with other site owners in your niche is your most powerful marketing strategy
In the course of building up my flagship website, I emailed a few other webmasters in my niche and had conversations with them. A couple of these emails resulted in guest post opportunities and incoming links.
There are 2 types of links that you can get:
1) Premium links – from sites that rank well in Google for your chosen topic.
2) Manufactured links – that you build yourself and do not have strong relevance (are not from sites about your specific topic).
In order to get premium links, you probably have to start conversations with people in your niche. Guest posting is one of the best ways to try to get a link from a good website.
Eventually you will probably create many manufactured links in order to try and boost your rankings for specific keywords. But these cheap links will not be as effective unless you ALSO have a premium link or two pointing at your website.
Building a real relationship with other people in your niche is probably one of the most important things that you can do. Without these critical relationships (and resulting link juice) your website will probably not get the traction that it needs to take off and be successful.
Networking is important. No website is an island.
Incoming links take forever to boost your site in the rankings
So you go through all of this effort to contact others and network with people and then you finally create an awesome guest post and now you have this super premium link to your website.
What now?
Well if things worked the way we wanted them to, tons of traffic would show up the next day from the search engines, and you would suddenly be making a lot more money.
The reality is, this is not going to happen. It’s going to take time for that link juice to kick in before you really see the effect that it has on your rankings.
In fact, I would urge you to ignore your search engine rankings altogether and simply focus instead on creating outstanding new content and then building links to it.
Which brings us to our next point……
You will drive yourself crazy trying to evaluate your rankings and positions in the search results
Some of the people that I have taught internet marketing to drive themselves absolutely crazy by monitoring the serps (search engine result position).
“Yesterday I was ranked number 3 in Google for this keyword and today they got me down at number 8. Now why would they move me around like that, especially since my page is so much better than all of these other results?”
I don’t know and I don’t care. Seriously. That really is the best possible answer to that very common complaint.
First of all, nobody knows why your site gets bounced around in the serps. Seriously, no single person really knows. We could drive over to Google headquarters and interview each and every employee over the next few months and not one single person would be able to tell you why your ranking is fluctuating. Not one person. The fact is, the Google search algorithm is so complex and has so many different programmers contributing to it that no one individual can possibly explain a single occurrence such as what you are witnessing. For you to sit there and try to analyze the search results is just beyond crazy. Even Google employees cannot explain why your site moved up or down. For you try to figure it out is beyond insane. Do not bother.
Second of all, nobody cares. Your niche is absolutely tiny compared to the rest of the vast Internet. Not only that, but nobody actually cares if one site in the serps gets moved up or down a few notches, or even if it disappears completely. And this leads us to our practical conclusion:
You should not care either.
Instead of studying the serps and wasting precious time, you should be creating more amazing content for your website and building links to it. Time spent pouring over the serps is time that could have been spent creating future income for yourself.
We have already established that you are NOT going to learn anything useful by studying the serps. Therefore, you have a simple choice:
Are you going to spend time today creating future income (by publishing articles), or not?
The quality level of your first article published is probably way too low to build a successful site. You must iterate and drive up the quality considerably over time
When I look back at the first few articles that I ever published online, my efforts were laughable. They were short, not very original, and did not help the searcher very much.
Today when I publish articles, they are much more helpful and detailed. People who read them tend to comment, bookmark my website, subscribe to get future posts, and so on. This happens much more happen these days than it did when I was first starting out.
This is because the quality and usefulness of my content has improved dramatically. It is no longer enough to just crank out a 400 word article that summarizes ideas that you found on the internet already.
I would argue that you need to keep pushing the quality line, and create remarkable, useful, and original content.
I would also argue that you should expand your content model and offer things such as video, pictures, eBooks, and so on.
Go to Google and do a search for your topic or main keyword. Carefully examine each result on the first page. What is the quality of their content? What formats do they use? What do the give away for free, and what content do they charge for? Do the websites have discussion forums on them?
Your goal is to create a website that beats all 10 of them that you just saw in your research. You want to have:
* More in depth articles with lots of detail.
* More content types for your users (video, pics, infographics, eBooks, etc.)
* More given away for free (whatever your competitors are charging for behind a pay wall, give that away for free).
* High volume with lots and lots of articles on your website.
* A better way for your site visitors to connect and interact with each other (add a forum perhaps).
Quality matters. Most people are probably aiming too low at first. Force yourself to keep improving what you create.
You cannot do a website justice if you have multiple projects going on. Putting all of your energy into one website will yield the fastest rate of growth and most stable income
If you want to create a long term and stable stream of income from your online business, then I would urge you to NOT diversify your efforts, and instead, concentrate them into a single website.
Many people think this is risky to do. I would argue that if you diversify, you may miss out on building a $200,000 dollar website, and instead you may end up with a bunch of little niche sites that do not have enough link juice to even pay for their own hosting costs.
If you want to see a depressing rate of growth, go start 10 brand new websites and attempt to work on all 10 of them equally. By the end of one year you will be lucky if you are making a dollar per day with these things.
No, the landscape has become much more competitive. Put all of your energy into a single website and you will see a much more exciting rate of growth.
How do you like building links? Not so much? Nobody likes to build links because it is very difficult and tedious to do. Getting the really good links is especially difficult. So if you have 10 websites, then guess what? You get to build links 10 times over again. If you have one website, then every single link that you build is going to build up your entire business.
Don’t get distracted. Make one website, and put all of your energy into it. Diversification sounds real smart in theory but when it comes to creating multiple websites that each earn significant income, you are going to find that it is a very difficult to create more than one income stream at the same time.
Rather, you will push and push and push on one website for at least a year, and finally see a very small trickle of income coming in. Keep pushing and pushing for another year, and eventually you will have a full time income from your efforts. This is only possible when you concentrate all of your effort on a single website. Spread this out among 10 websites or even just 3 sites and it will take you years and years to see any decent return on your effort.
If you make money from advertising or affiliate sales, there is almost always a way to move up the value chain and monetize more efficiently
So let’s say that you build a website about widgets and you set up Google AdSense to display ads about your widgets and you find that you are making a certain amount of income. You might go to Amazon and sign up for their affiliate program and then try to sell the widgets directly from your website. Depending on the product and how targeted your traffic is, you may make a lot more income by selling the widgets directly this way.
Furthermore, you might decide to start drop shipping widgets to your site visitors, or even to start carrying inventory of these widgets yourself and ship them directly to your customers.
Finally, you might decide that you can build or create these widgets all by yourself, and thus cut out any middlemen from the process altogether.
So most online businesses start with advertising and end up with something close to “product creation.” If you can create and sell your own product or service, then you are going to do much better than if you are just running ads for other people’s products or services.
Think about it: If it is profitable for others to pay for ads on your site in order to sell something, then shouldn’t you just attempt to sell whatever that something is? Doing so almost always results in more income.
I experienced this with my flagship website when one of my advertisers offered to buy me out completely so that he could monetize directly using my traffic. Because he owned the products directly, he could make more efficient use of my traffic than I could. All I could do was to sell my traffic to others, whereas he could turn my traffic directly into customers.
Social media is probably a waste of your time unless it creates organic link building through sharing your premium content
If you read up about internet marketing online you will probably hear over and over again that you need to “engage with social media services” and that you need a facebook and twitter account in order to build your traffic levels.
My experience has always been that this is a waste of time. If you get a boost of social media traffic to your website, looking at your stats will indeed cause you to get excited. But this will not translate into new income, because social media traffic does not have the same “buying intent” that search engine traffic can carry with it.
The only reason I would experiment with social media traffic (and in fact I do at times) is to supplement your organic link building efforts. Understand that you are not using social media to try to get links from Facebook profiles or on tweets and such, but rather to spread your viral content and hopefully pull in some real links as a result.
I only do this when I have created what I consider to be a truly exemplary piece of content, and then I generally throw paid traffic at the content and try to measure if people like it or not. For example, you can easily do this with a very limited budget (5 dollars per day) and then you can see how many people voted that they liked your content. Thus you can keep refining your offer in order to find out what content does best with the social media crowd.
Once you find something that seems to get a good response, take 50 bucks or so and throw a ton of Stumble traffic at it. If this results in even one organic link back to your site then it ts probably well worth it.
Publishing multiple articles daily is your greatest opportunity for growth. Publishing one article or less per day is going to result in a very slow growth curve
If you are serious about building an online business then everything comes down to this one idea:
“Are you willing to write and publish multiple articles daily?”
If the answer is “yes” then I believe that you can easily build up a powerful income stream from this business.
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