Do You Make Money Online

DIY Website – Part 4.

Once the website is online it is more a question of little and often than pedal to the metal. By adding new pages and working on getting incoming links, the search engines will see a website that is growing steadily in size and popularity, with rich and unique content. These are all good scoring points that will help to improve page rank.

Incoming links can be from a number of sources and some are better than others. When you first put a website online none of the search engines even know it exists. You can submit the website to the search engines, but this guarantees nothing. The website may take months or even years to get found if it has no incoming links. Until the search engines have indexed the website no one will find it in the search results. The fastest way to get indexed by the major search engines is to get some good incoming links and quickly.

One quick and easy way to get some incoming links is to join a link exchange. There are many link exchanges online like U.K Link Exchange and Link Market. These are websites where you can contact and exchange links with like minded users. When exchanging links in this way it is far better to go for quality rather than quantity.

Incoming links should also be at least broadly relevant to the subject of the website. In  our case, Cosy Kitchens will want links from pages that are kitchen and home  improvement related. Initially getting some links is important, but as the strength of our  own website grows it pays to be a little bit fussy about who you exchange links with.

Links from strong websites with a higher page rank are very good and more so if the page that links back to us is a relevant one. We can capitalise on this by actually creating our own relevant content, placing it on someone Else’s website and linking from it back to our own.

There are many websites that will allow you to submit articles and most will allow you to link back from them. By writing a short article (e.g. in our case it could be about tips when fitting kitchen units) and pointing links back we get the value of a strong link or two. There are other benefits to be gained from writing articles and commenting on blogs in that it also generates some extra free traffic. This traffic is going to be less relevant in that the article readers will be dotted about the planet. There are however, ways to make additional income from a small business website from these and other visitors who come across our website.

The fact that these visitors were reading a kitchen article and have followed a link to a kitchen website means that they have some sort of interest in kitchens. If our article was about fitting kitchen units the chances are they are thinking of fitting their own kitchen.

There are many thousands of electronic information products available online and people are willing to pay you a healthy commission to promote them. This is also the case for a growing number of physical products. The ability to make additional income from a website is another good reason for creating your own. We will come back to this shortly when we have taken a deeper look at developing the website.

Some article directories have very strong page rank and I will list the top 6 or so in the
resources section at the end of this guide. For the vast majority of small businesses, writing and submitting articles will only need to be done from time to time. If the competition within the company’s niche is poor, getting a high position will be quite easy. The great thing about articles is that they can be directed at specific pages that you  choose.

If our would be kitchen fitter has come to a page on our website devoted to kitchen fitting tips, we might be able to guide them towards a useful related product. Let us say we are promoting a downloadable video course on kitchen fitting (and there is one I checked). Our would be kitchen fitter is struggling and frustrated the shops are closed and he is looking for some answers. We can guide him towards a quick solution to his problem. We don’t have to handle the sale we simply supply the potential customer and get paid if he makes a purchase. With companies like and ClickBank & Commission junction the process of tracking the transaction are automated. All that the website owner has to do is place a special type of link on their website and the rest is handled for them.

Posting comments on blogs and forums used to be a popular way to get links back to a website. Most blogs now have no follow links and posting on many of them is a waste of time. The same can be said for forums. They may still produce a little free traffic, but the link will carry no weight. Links from some of the big social networking websites like twitter and YouTube carry good weight because once again these are popular, high ranking websites.

As you can join an affiliate program to promote other peoples products for a commission, you can have other people promote yours. This not only gives you a chance to boost your online sales, but can bring huge numbers of links to your website from affiliates websites.

Another way to bring in revenue and visitors is pay per click advertising. Pay per click advertising is as the name suggests advertising whereby you have an advert and pay only if someone clicks on it and visits your site. Pay per click advertising can be fruitless if you do not know what you are doing and requires a little research and understanding. There are numerous e-books covering the subject and a little education on the subject will probably save time and money in the long run. As well as paying for an advert you can display one, in this case when someone clicks on it you get paid. This like affiliate advertising is another way of earning additional income from a website and will be covered later.

As a small business operating in a tiny niche against poor competition it is unlikely that a huge number of links are going to be needed. A spread of links using the methods described so far will be sufficient in most cases. For good effect around 50% of the incoming links should point at the home page and the other 50% at pages throughout the website.

An important part of the processes of developing the website is traffic analysis. This is made easy with free services like StatCounter.  StatCounter is easily incorporated into a
websites pages and is a powerful tool that can help us fine tune our efforts. StatCounter not only counts the number of visitors to the website, but returns a great deal of very important data. It is possible to see how many unique and returning visitors, what they  searched for or how they arrived at your site. As well as this it shows what pages they looked at, how long for, where they exited the website, even their screen resolution and location. Most of all it tells us our most popular search terms and most visited pages. Using this data in the development of the website is of massive benefit when it comes to fine tuning it.

The objective is to build and develop the website over time and it is important that we aim to have over thirty pages. The more content rich pages the better, but at least thirty will give a good chance of achieving a page rank of 3. A page rank of 3 will often be sufficient to dominate your niche if you have done your research and chosen your keywords well. Of course if you continue to just give a little of your time on an ongoing basis it is possible to improve page rank still further. This would give you a chance of scoring some results on the broader terms like kitchen and can bring a lot of traffic.

That in turn increases the websites capacity to earn additional passive income from affiliate and pay per click advertising.

NEXT – Additional Income From a the Website.