Hi Friend! Welcome to my post that talks about basic components of any website that earns money for its owner. There are literally hundreds and thousands of websites out there that promise you lot of money but no one really tells you what it really takes to make money from a website. After so many years of hard work and many hundreds of dollars of loss, I can say that I have understood how this whole thing “really“ works.
I can tell you from my experience that making money online needs a solid website with strong flow of constant visitors – especially if you are going to start with little or zero investment out of pocket. The problem is that creating such a website is a big challenge for a new person. Building a steady flow of useful visitors to this website is even bigger challenge. It is not enough to know ‘How to create a website’, you must also know ‘How to make money from your website.’ Also one very important lesson I learnt from my experience – “You will never make money if you build your site only with money in mind.” In other words, think first of some practical purpose or use of a website. Define what your website’s core message is going to be and build it as a service or product offering instead of creating a website that just simply talks about money.
So … coming back to the components of a money-making website, let me get straight to the point now. Any website basically has following components that earn money for its owner:
- Products or services that can be sold on your website - This is the main bread and butter for the site owner. Believe me, you need a core set of products or services that you must have that you can promote on your website. If you are an individual you cannot really manage a huge online store selling hundreds of thousands of products. You need to focus on few niche products and it always helps if you have some expert knowledge about the products and services you are trying to sell on your site. The beauty of today’s online world is that this does not have to be your own products or services! You can very well have a website that is helping someone else sell their products and you are just working for the commissions. In fact, I would recommend that you go for this approach. It will save you lot of overheads.
- Content – Text and information given on the website is called as ‘content’. This includes videos, images and everything the website holds. More valuable the information is, more weightage the website has. Content is very important. Content is what makes the website live or die. You must have quality, unique and legal content on your website. This is not really a big deal. Anyone with some good knowledge about the products and services they are trying to promote or sell can always create a good content. The blog software like the one used by this site can be a good tool to create a good quality content. Without the content your website will look empty and will loose its purpose. Your visitors will not be able to find anything and will eventually leave your website. Better the content, better is the holding capacity or repeat visitors.
- Banner or text ads -This is the key component of any website that makes almost instant/quick and easy money for its owners. No matter how great a product or service you are selling or promoting on your site, making a sale is not so easy. You may get one paying customer out of thousands of visitors. For a new website owner this may take many days or heavy investment in advertising to generate the first sale. You can’t really let your visitors go without making you any money. This is where the banner ads play an important role. Google Adsense is the biggest player in this market and the biggest pay-master as well. What you do here is you show a set of relevant banners or text ads on your website and you are paid by the ad network or advertiser every time the banner or text ad is shown or clicked on. Most common is PPC – Pay Per Click banner where you are paid by the advertiser every time someone clicks on the ad. You will hardly find any website today without these money-making ads shown almost every possible spot on every page. Note that showing only ads will not get you anywhere. You will either get rejected at the application stage or at some point of time when the ad network finds out that your website has no content but only ads. So don’t make that mistake. Also don’t make the mistake of clicking your own ads. That is the biggest reason for disqualification from ad networks. In short – your website must have a quality content and banner ads from these big ad networks if you want to make easy and quick money.
- Website visitors – Well … what can I say. All the efforts and investment is waste if there is no one coming to visit your website. But be careful here. You don’t want any low quality traffic or untargetted traffic like auto-surf or PTC or exchange traffic. That kind of traffic is cheap (most of the time free) but most of the ad networks like Google will ban you if you use those methods. It does not mean that you cannot use that traffic. It is free and easily available so you should use it but use it wisely. Always use some entry pages for such traffic. I might write a separate post at some time to talk about the tricks and tips on how to use the autosurf or low quality traffic but this post is not for that.
So here you have it – the main components of a money-making website – product, content, banners and visitors. Got it?