Selling Websites for a Living

I was out having a drink with a mate at the weekend and after a few too many he set me a challenge.

“I want to build an authority website that makes £100 a week (about $1000 a month) as quickly as possible BUT I only have a few hours a week to spare, is it possible and if so can you show me how?”

It dawned on me that this would make a good post as many people reading this blog would not be in a position to follow the $3 a day websites system until they had some sort of regular income to spend on domains, hosting and link building services.

Building lots of sites is also time consuming where as working on 1 authority site can be easily managed with a few spare hours.

So here it is folks, the exact steps to building an authoritive, profitable website with just a few hours a week.

First off, you are about to become an internet publisher but to do that you need something to publish. There is just no getting away from the fact that there is going to be writing involved. If you hate writing why become a publisher? Find a part time job on your high street and do that instead.

Secondly, its all about repetition and that can get boring. So much so that hopefully you will be happy when its time to do some writing

Thirdly, you must stick with it. This is no secret magic formula. Sure there are guys out there calling themselves guru’s and charging $37 or more for this exact info but its very simple really, you just have to follow the plan and stick with it and the site will be a success.

Lastly, you are going to build an authority website. Forget what you might have heard about posting crap so the readers click on your ads, that’s all long gone – Google’s just way too clever for that stuff. You want good quality articles, stuff people would actually bookmark.

When Google sees that the people they send you stay for more than 10 seconds they will send you more people. When Google sees the people who do click on your ads go on to purchase the products advertised they will reward you with higher payouts.

A quality site means quality traffic and quality traffic means bigger payouts for you.

Making Money With Adsense

There are several ways to making money from websites but the 2 most popular are Adsense and affiliate marketing. This blueprint will stick with Adsense because even if your site sucks you will still make some money with it where as promoting an affiliate program has too many landmines waiting for the beginner.

Adsense is by far the easiest because you aren’t pre-selling. You can write honest reviews (ie this product is shit) and still make money when visitors click on those ads. Also, you aren’t relying on someone else to make the sale because you aren’t sending your visitors to a products landing page with your fingers crossed.

For those that don’t know, Adsense ads are shown on websites and blogs and are blocks of ads strongly related to the subject matter of the site. When a site visitor clicks on one of those ads the site owner gets a percentage of the money paid to Google by the advertiser.

Choosing Your Market

Notice I didn’t say niche? That’s because we aren’t looking for a tight niche with 1000 searchers a month and no competiton. We want huge markets that have plenty of competition because that means there is money to be made.

What you want is a huge market and then take one or two steps deeper instead of the 3 or 4 which you would do for niche marketing.

‘Finance’ is the market
‘Loans’ is one step in
‘Student loans’ is two steps in
‘Student loans in Texas’ is three steps in and regarded as a deep niche

So in the above example we might build our site around ‘student loans’ although I might be worried there is not enough scope to flesh out the site but we could easily build a 100 page site on this topic and make good money. However, if you were looking for the long term I would want a topic that is not so focused so the site can expand.

A site on ‘loans’ would be better for the long term because there is so much room for growth. You would have plenty of categories to work on such as student loans, business loans, mortgages etc.

Do not worry about competiton, just choose a topic that has plenty of money in it, ie. are there ads on tv, in the papers and magazines etc? and if you want to concentrate on building just one super site then make sure there is scope for fleshing the site out if you want to concentrate your rfforts on one site.

If you can find something you are interested in then it makes the writing easier but it must have companies spending big bucks on advertising. Knitting or paragliding isn’t going to cut it.

Another example for you:

Yes – Health -> Cancer
Maybe – Health – Cancer -> Cancer Treatments
No – Health – Cancer – Cancer Treatments -> chemotherapy

Hopefully you get the idea, leave yourself plenty of room for growth.

Keyword Research

So much crap is written about this and its made out to be far harder than it really is. Lets run with the ‘loans’ idea and go check it out.

Go to Google.com and search for ‘loans’ then in the left column click on more search options and then the wonder wheel option. Of the 8 results I would drop the loans calculator but keep the rest as my category themes.

Next we need some keywords for the 7 categories we have to get the site started.

Open up Google’s free keyword tool by clicking here. Type in student loans and then click on advanced options and select ‘United States.’

Then go down to where the results will be shown and click on ‘columns’ at the far right and uncheck everything apart from global monthy searches and average cpc. Once done hit the search button.

Results will vary depending where you are in the world but mine is showing advertisers are bidding around £8 ($12) for this keyword.

That figure is rarely accurate but its a very good indication that we will make good money whenever we get a click and 1.5 million searches a month means there is plenty of traffic about. Finally, there are plenty of keywords for us to go after.

Everything looks good so we want to grab these keywords. Click on the ‘global monthly searches’ to sort them into order and then click on download and select all keywords, download as csv.

Repeat the process for your other category themes ie. car loans, personal loans etc.

There endeth the keyword research.

Choosing Your Domain Name

You want your main topic in there and you don’t want dashes and you do want .com. You will need to be imaginative but really, don’t sweat it.

Just try for something catchy and memorable, loansadvice.com etc.

Building Your Money Making Website

I don’t use WordPress any more because it becomes a pain updating all the time to keep it secure and I don’t believe Google loves them like they used to. Also, I always sell my sites and find blogs are a pain to transfer compared to an html site but that’s just me.

If you have X Site Pro or some other html site builder and you know how to use it I recommend building your website with it. If you don’t and you are a beginner then use WordPress as its dead easy to install and use.

Install the SEO plugin and the Google site map plugin if you go with WordPress, that’s all you need to get started.

Hostgator offer a 1 click install for wordpress with their hosting packages or if you want to try building a website instead of a blog they include an easy to use website builder.

Whichever type of site you decide to build before you get started making money you need to include certain pages to keep Google happy so add the following pages:

Contact
Privacy Policy
About Us
Terms and disclaimer

You can find free templates for all of the above with a quick search. Your privacy page will need a paragraph about the Google DART cookie so you are legal once you add the Adsense. Click here for details.

Setting Up Your WordPress Blog

Once installed go to permalinks in settings and select custom and then enter /%postname%/

Go to pages and add new. Using our loans as the example you want to add a title such as ‘Loans – What you need to know’ to this new page and then at the bottom deselect both the ‘allow comments’ and allow trackbacks’ options and then publish.

Go to ‘reading’ under settings and select ‘a static page’ at the top and then select the page you just created. Remember to save your changes.

That’s the structure set up, you can now search for ‘wordpress themes’ and find yourself one that matches the theme of your market.

Tasks for Tonight

Find yourself a market with plenty of scope for growth

Get a domain registered at Namecheap.com ($10 for the year)

Get your hosting from Hostgator.com – Go with the hatchling plan at $4.95 a month and enter adriancalow when asked if you have a coupon to get 2 months free.

Install and set up your blog.

Write at least 700 words on your main topic. This will be going on the page you created and set up as your home page. A brief introduction to the site plus 100 words or more about each of the catagories.

Part 2 will be in a day or two.

Do NOT do any promotion work, link building etc. yet and do NOT put Adsense on your site.

Any questions use the comments or contact page.