I was first enthralled with the idea of earning passive income online when I discovered Clickbank products about five years ago. So I created my first information product and started buying pay-per-click traffic which was directed to an awful landing page that I had created.
I lost money.
However, I had glimpsed the power of the internet, and knew that I could create a system to produce income. I want to show you how I created a profitable website, and how you can do the same thing.
Get-rich-quick schemes hardly work, if at all. It takes time and effort to build a successful income online.
Can you really make money with this stuff?
At first I had doubts about my online business’s lucrativity. Then some income trickled in from a website that I was working on. I was running advertising on the website and I got a click that paid me over a dollar.
It was then that I had my “Aha moment” and realized two things: that if I built a website of sufficient volume, I actually could make a living out of it, and if I could get a single click for a dollar, then I can get one hundred clicks and make one hundred dollars.
The only thing holding me back was volume. I needed to expand my website so that it would earn more income in shorter periods of time. Eventually my flagship site grew and thrived, perhaps due to the following factors:
* Varied article length – I mixed long with short articles.
* Varied content type – Aside from text, I also posted videos, pictures, free eBooks, etc.
* Community – My site had an active user forum with lots of returning visitors generating thousands of words of new content.
* Premium quality – I made sure that my articles were genuinely helpful to the site visitors. No fluff.
* Link diversity – Not a ton of links, but quite a diverse backlink profile. A couple from “real” websites in the same niche.
* Age – My site has been growing for over 5 years, building more trust with the search engines.
If you want to build a similarly lucrative site, review this list carefully. The idea is to build a “real” website that actually helps people, rather than just a bunch of text that is spam for the search engines.
There is plenty of time and room online for a one-website approach
Some topics online are probably out of reach for most people due to their competitive nature, such as “insurance” or “credit cards”. Those topics are off-limits, and other hyper-competitive topics should also be avoided. As for “real world” topics, it’s all about search volume and casting a net wide enough to bring in plenty of searchers.
One of my most important suggestions is to concentrate on one website then work on it every day for at least a year or two. If you try to run five or ten websites in the hopes of “diversifying” then guess what? None of them will go anywhere. Instead you will be stuck with ten worthless websites.
Profitable topic, sufficient volume, expert knowledge
You need an intersection of three things in order to chose a topic for a website:
1) Profit potential – The topic has to be able to generate decent income (avoid “free sewing patterns”, etc).
2) Sufficient volume – How many people are conducting searches about your topic in Google each month? Can that amount support a business?
3) Expert knowledge - Can you talk for two hours about your topic with some authority, without running out of key points?
You have to find a topic that fulfills all three requirements. Just having one of those things is not enough.
Don’t go after a topic that has profit potential, but of which you know very little. On the other hand, if write about what you just love, there may be no money in it. Instead, brainstorm a list of topics of which you have some working knowledge, then investigate to see if any are potential money makers. Qualify each topic, and see which ones have the potential to be lucrative.
One quick way to check for profitability is to search for you topic in Google, and see how many ads are displayed on the first and second result pages. Generally speaking, the more ads shown, the better. If the ads are “thinner” on those first result pages then you might consider a different topic.
Premium content sets you up for success
The web is full of spam. New articles are churned out by the hundreds of thousands each week in order to try to game the search engines and make a few cents off random clicks.
Building a real business online relies on standing out from the sea of web spam. In order to do that, you have to create amazingly useful and high-quality articles and not just a bunch of 400-word articles that are all perfectly optimized for different keywords.
However, volume is still important, being a key factor in netting plenty of long-tail traffic that will result in passive income. So one of your goals should be to have at least one thousand interesting, outstanding, and useful articles published on your website.
That is the real challenge in producing content: you want quantity and quality.
How to do it?
Start slowly, publishing one quality article each day. Push yourself to create better articles, while testing for responses to measure what your most useful and helpful articles are. Useful metrics for this include comment counts and bounce rate.
As you progress, your publishing speed will increase. Your goal is to publish three quality articles each day. Any more than that and you risk burnout.
Publishing three articles per day will result in more than one thousand each year. If you can maintain a high quality then this is more than enough volume to build an amazing business.
Two more tips about quality content:
1) Check out competing websites and see what content is behind their pay wall. That is the level of quality that you want to give away for free on your website. Don’t copy them, but use their paid content as a benchmark for your own free content.
2) Marketing and promotion are so tough that the shortcut these days is to create such amazingly good content that it sells itself. Take the energy that you would have spent on promotion and refocus it on creating high-quality on-site content instead.
Focus on building income and passive traffic rather than readers or social followers
It is so easy to get a quick burst of traffic from social media sources — such as Facebook or Twitter — that many people end up focusing all of their efforts on chasing more and more of that type of traffic. This is a notorious trap and if you fall victim to it you will likely never make much money at all.
In contrast, growing your daily search engine traffic creates a powerful foundation for your website. Social media promotion pretty much takes care of itself when you have amazing content and several hundred search engine visitors per day.
Let your audience handle your tweeting and Facebook sharing. It’s better to focus on building precious search engine visitors.
Why is search engine traffic so important? Because it shows up every single day. Once you build it, once your site has established authority with quality content, the search engines tend to send you a steady stream of traffic with no further effort on your part. Your work ends after you build an amazing website and gain authority through incoming links.
Live on monthly earnings or cash out for a huge windfall
When my flagship website went over $1,000/month in earnings, I seriously entertained the idea of quitting my day job. A few months later the earnings had risen to $2,000/month, and so I turned in my two-weeks’ notice.
Then something completely unexpected happened: Someone offered me $200,000 dollars for the website. Since I can always build another website, I decided that this was a good deal for me, and I sold the site.
Now I am busy building my next business online so that the monthly earnings can cover my living expenses.
I’m not saying that every website created will generate huge amounts of wealth. But if you are serious about building an online income, the opportunity is certainly there for anyone gutsy enough to pursue it.
To recap, the most important points of this article are:
1) One website approach - Concentrate your effort into a single website. Avoid diversification.
2) Topic selection – Brainstorm workable topics and then screen them for profit potential.
3) Quality + volume – Build a highly useful website. Make it big by publishing multiple articles daily.
This is a plan for building a large authority website. Anyone can do it, but very few will have the drive and discipline to actually make it happen. So if you want an amazing six-figure payout then you have to build something amazing!
Photo credits: www.techfilipino.com, www.fivequidexpert.com, http://3.bp.blogspot.com
PATRICK MENINGA of Make Money With No Work has recently built and sold a flagship website for $200,000 dollars, and is eager to share his insights with you.
The Discussion
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When it comes to making money online from your blog and other social media means. its a little hard to believe, But I’ve tried and used systems that help me make a good deal of money. For example one of my tech blogs makes about $ 400 monthly.
I have been running my site for over 2 years now and still not yet been successful to make around 100$ / monthly …. First of all I believe , a good fund for promoting your site in earlier stage is a must to get promoted easily and have good backlinks…..
As Eddie said he made around 400$ a month from ad’s its quite clear that either he is working from a long time in his site or might have promoted it in its earlier stage….. Otherwise he would also be in my stage……
@ Eddie – The tech niche is a strong money maker, so good for you! The only system I have ever used is to focus on building search engine traffic, one new article at a time. My experiments with social media always seem to lead me back to the basics of SEO as the foundation of a stable online income. Thanks for your comment!
Well, I have no doubt in accepting that blogging does get you cash and money but as they say, ROME WAS NOT BUILD IN A DAY. In the same vein, blogging requires huge amount of perseverance and patience. You lose it, you lose your money
@ Tushar – Agreed, Rome was not built in a day. If you get fast income growth overnight then you can lose it just as quickly. A slow build up of income is preferred, especially if you want sustainable income. Most people do not have the patience to make an authority website pay off for them. It is too much work and too long of a timeline. I say, hang in there and don’t leave before the miracle happens! If you are putting up quality stuff then your ship will come in some day. It all takes time. Thanks for your comment….
I certainly agree with you here. If you only focus on one site, there is a much greater chance that you can make it successful, no matter how crowded your niche. The older your site gets, the better it performs as well, it’s very difficult to make any money from a new site
@ Robert – Nailed it right on the head. Most people are not patient enough to make it past “search engine probation.” The onslaught of web spam that clutters up the web forces even legit content to wait a year or so before it receives free search engine traffic. Thanks for your comment!
Yes, absolutely. I’ve read that domains are great source of income. Yes, it also depends on the authority of the site. Flipping domains is also a way to get money out of your site.
@ Levi – I never thought I would sell my site because it was making me such good money. When someone offers you 100X monthly income, though, it makes you re-evaluate your position. Hello dividend income! I can always build another website. Thanks for your comment!
“One of my most important suggestions is to concentrate on one website then work on it every day for at least a year or two. If you try to run five or ten websites in the hopes of “diversifying” then guess what? None of them will go anywhere. Instead you will be stuck with ten worthless websites.”
This is main main problem for he last year or so, I keep getting more websites and then trying to do them all at once, which never works. I wouldn’t say they are worthless, as I make money from them all, but I do feel that if I created one website at a time, I would certainly make more money from each one, and when I finished one I could have moved onto the next one.
We learn though, and at the moment I am only working on two of the websites, which is easy to do and after I have these two done, onto the next project I go.
Thanks for the good read,
Regards,
Simon Duck.
@ Simon – Yes that is another good strategy that I definitely endorse: start two or more websites, but be quick to zero in on the winner and focus all of your efforts on it at some point. The “testing” phase can prove beneficial. Most people are hesitant to kill their losers though, and so their efforts remains splintered and spread thin.
But by all means, if you can test multiple sites and then run with the winner, do it! Great strategy. Thanks for your comment.
There is a need to start working on the blog from the day one. We have write good length of article with meaning full words and including keywords up to the great extent. Not sure everyone will get succeed immediately after starting a site or blog about their interested topic. They have to write good articles. Someone feel that their work is over after they have written the article and will look for traffic for their posted article. But they also have to work on getting backlinks, using keyword research, posting into the forums, social bookmarking sites. Then after sometime, their website or blog will be in good ranking with getting enough amount of traffic.
So lets start work on getting backlinks to your website.
@ Facts in – Absolutely. Getting backlinks is a huge key to making it all work. Without them you it will take far to long to build real authority, and you will not get the free traffic that you need. Good luck to you!
This point of view has really encouraged. I was arguing about it with my friends, but now I’m definitely sure, I was right. Thanks a lot. You’ve helped me a lot!
5 years old domain, of course you can make money with it. the point is there is no easy way to get money online.
I can share here to get the info useful. thank you
I’ve been looking for a detailed post on the very same title – can your site work for you. I found the answer here, as Yes.
@ wahyuhono – Well grab a domain then and let it start aging! Five years is not so long to reach real success in the business world. Shoot, many businesses go broke by then!
@ Amal – Rock on! Hope you get your site working for you too!
off course, i can make my website work for me, i have earned money from my website
Completely agreed with you guys. Blogging takes long patience. But before you start blogging or writing a for blog, you should have in-depth knowledge about that particular topic. I have encountered lots of bloggers who just face-lift the original content and didn’t mention the real source. If someone really wants to hit the niche, read, read, read, get knowledge and go on.
Paying attention to your astounding post, I locate it is of the extraordinary experience and appropriate suggestions.
nice blog bro .. and nice info .. thank u ..
Thanks for sharing such a great info…well said and greatly presented…loved to read…
Nice article and i like the website designed
It is really nice posting.I like it very much.As a website designer i appreciate your proposal.It maybe helpful for us.
hope my blog will be like your site,with many traffic
Hey Patrick.. you just got my pain.. I also wasted my lots of money in buying traffic but i did not notice much importance towards my landing page and results were always composed of huge loss, but eventually I realized the ways to make it improved and converted my figures into positive ration and today I earn sufficient amount by selling clickbank products. Honestly If I Say , i am more greedy for it and would love to follow your tips. Thanks !
In my opinion the basis of having that does the work for your is through seo. Once you have a site ranking in the top3/5 positions in google then you only need just to maintain the site to keep the ranking which is usually means much less than trying to rank the site in the first page of google.
Keep up the good work
Janice
@ Janice – Agreed. Building authority is tough. Keeping authority is relatively easy. So the big push from the beginner is in building link juice and site authority. It takes time and hard work. No easy shortcuts (other than maybe buying an established website!).
Well this is very important for the promotion of a website
i think quality content is the key to success in this aspect…
thanks
you’re right, search won’t have the interest to crawl on your website if it does not have a good content.
Hi, I found your post really helpful. It helped me all the way in completing my assignment, I am also giving a reference link of your blog in my case study.
Patrick, I am loving your articles. Thank you so much for taking the time to share. I wish I had more time in a day to read more. It is a very interesting point you make about “Focus on building income and passive traffic rather than readers or social followers”. Search engines make such an emphasis more and more about social networking and that tends to make me focus more on my individual efforts for that, you are right though. Thanks !
@ Tulsa – Thanks for you comment and focus on increasing search traffic and income! Good luck to you.
Hi
Thanks for the information
No i can’t
Very informative article. A lot of it confirms a few things that I am expereinicing and doing. For instance, most of my traffic comes from Search Engines, and I find that my Twitter or Facebook traffic does not provide the same quality of visitors. I really like what you said about build your site on a foundation of keyword researched data.
I have the same focus of building great and valuable content for my readers, but have seen others focusing on attracting a great audience. I do agree with you that you need your SEOed traffic as your foundational blocks.
Blogging takes long patience. But before you start blogging or writing a for blog, you should have in-depth knowledge about that particular topic. I have encountered lots of bloggers who just face-lift the original content and didn’t mention the real source.
nice info kunjungan balik ya bro di master-1st.blogspot.com
It’s though to earn some extra money through the online resources, until and unless you don’t have in-depth knowledge on particular subject. Plus, next thing goes, how you present your views and thinking.
Although, I am also agree with LEXI on whatever she said about bloggers. I would say such content lifting is majorly done by the newbie blogger who want to attracts some visitors. Although, if you mention the original source, the visitors would definitely come next time expecting that they would find some other resources.
The simple funda of blogging is to share information and providing useful resources to other.
With website age increasing the number of links and content also increases on your website if everything goes good you tend to earn more money…
Well I have also earned a lot of income from my site.Although these days 1000s of blogs take birth everyday in these universe .Well in order to tackle quality matters the most
Your post contains very useful information. In the world of internet blogging as well as having a website is a great way to earn money. This article can help those who want to become online money maker. Best of luck……..
Thank you webdesign
Nice Posting Bro….
Visit Back My Site
Good and interesting article. Site with quality content will make good money.
Interesting article, thank you.
I not a long ago only began zanimat’sya conduct of bloga, the article met your not as by the way.
I wanted to do three bloga, but now understand it is better zanimat’sya one, but in earnest.
I had a bad experience even after by doing the correct things in blogging. May be their was some mistake of mine but Google slapped my site to half and now i am just fighting from 6 months to recover….
Nice article, and nice blog..thanks!
Really an informative post for blogger and especially for newbies. All you tips and suggest and points are very useful and applicable.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us.
A good post. I am doing blogging since past 2 years and yes my site is working well. The reason for success in this field is the quality of your content. Nothing else matters. Forget SEO, content is the king!
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