Learning how to make a website that makes money is not that difficult to achieve as this information is widely available online for people to follow but yet, 80 – 90% of new websites/blogs fail to generate any revenue. So why do beginners fail? In my opinion, the number one factor is vague and misleading information. I started my journey of making money online in January 2016 and the amount of fake gurus or so called “experts” that I found online is uncountable. Even the ones that I have trusted for a while turned out to be a bunch of deceivers as well. I’m not saying that everything they mention is a lie and in fact 70% of the information they provide is valuable. This brings us to the next question….why do these gurus lie? The short answer is these gurus provide misleading information in order to convince you to buy their courses and other products/services that they are affiliated to. But I don’t want you to worry because today is your LUCKY DAY…you have finally reached a place where you are going to actually learn something valuable without the need to subscribe to an email list or sign up to a free webinar that will end up selling you a $1,999.97 course.
I have prepared a simple 6 step guide that will teach you how to make a website that makes money passively using your passions and skills. Furthermore, this type of online business doesn’t require any major initial investment to get started with and 60 to 70% of the money generated from this website will be done without having to SELL ANYTHING! But one thing that I would like to clear up right from the start…this is NOT a get rich quick online business and in fact, it may take 6 months to 1 year or even longer (based on your performance) until you see some results. So if you have the patience to start a REAL online business that will grow over the years and something that you will be passionate about then follow my step by step guide below…
Step 1: Niche Selection
You should keep in mind right from the start that the main goal of this online business is to attract interested readers from the search engines. People who do a search on Google are usually looking for answers to their questions or detailed solutions to their problems. A trust relationship will be established between the reader and the editor if the website specializes in that specific niche and it provides the right content that the reader needs. Therefore, you need to select (category) from a list of things you actually do on a regular basis that you’re skilled at or something that you enjoy doing like a hobby which you have good knowledge about. For example, if you have been buying and using laptops all your life then this maybe a good niche to get into since you can share tops on the best hardware and software specifications to watch out for when purchasing a laptop. Also, keep in mind that the narrower your niche is the better results you’ll get in the long run. For example, instead of talking about laptops in general, you can select a specific laptop brand like “Lenovo” or a specific type like “gaming laptops”. And one last MAJOR advice I can give you about the niche selection is choose something that you’re really experienced with or passionate about. If you’re not passionate about a certain topic then you won’t have the drive and self-motivation to write informative articles and continue to grow as an entrepreneur. And don’t forget that the readers are attracted to unique and descriptive information which ONLY YOU can provide from your own personal experience.
Step 2: Website Creation
I know that this step may scare someone who doesn’t have experience in web designing but I don’t want you to worry because the process of creating a website has become easy. We will be using a user friendly system called “WordPress” which is easy to learn and you’ll find thousands of free YouTube videos on every aspect of WordPress if you ever get stuck. I learned how to use it myself 7 years ago even though I’m legally blind so imagine what you can do? Anyways, the first thing you need to do is get yourself a domain from any domain registrar which will be the address of your website. You can get a domain that includes your main business keywords like “laptopexpert.com” or you can create a brand name like “laptology.com”. The second thing you need to do is get a Web Hosting Service. A web host will store your website content on a public server so it can be viewed by people on the internet and to give you access to the backend area to configure your website. Please follow my 9 Step Guide to create your
first website from SCRATCH
Step 3: Keywords & Content Writing
Step 3 is the most important step in this guide so make sure that you follow everything I say because I’m about to show you exactly how to make a website that makes money. After designing the main layout of the website, it’s now the time to start writing the content for your pages/posts. The first thing you need to do is think about 10 to 15 article ideas which you have enough knowledge/experience to write about. The second thing you need to do is keyword research to find an appropriate keyword for each article.
Keyword Research
The purpose of keyword research is to discover keywords that will increase the chances of ranking the articles higher in the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc). These keywords will also generate higher revenue per click for the banner/display ads when placed on a website so doing proper keyword research is essential for a successful niche website. So how do you select the right keywords? Try to find keywords that fall under the following 3 criteria’s:
1. High Search Volume (Number of searches done per month in whatever region/country you’re targeting).
2. High CPC (Cost per Click). keywords that advertisers are bidding high on in their PPC search campaigns.
3. Long tail Keywords (4 to 6 words). Short keywords that contain 2 or 3 words are very competitive as thousands of people are already using them.
So now let me use an example to simplify the entire process for you. Let’s assume that your niche is about laptops and you decided to write an article about cheap gaming laptops. The next step you will take is going to a keyword tool and type the words “cheap gaming laptops” in the search box. The keyword tool will generate hundreds of new keyword ideas for you and it will list beside each keyword the volume of searches (based on a specific location) and the average CPC. Using this example, I will select the keyword “best affordable gaming laptops” (long tail keyword), 5000 search volume, and $4.50 avg. CPC. I will include this same keyword in the article title, Meta description, a couple of times within the article, and in the article’s URL (laptopexperts.com/best-affordable-gaming-laptops/ ). You repeat the same process for each article that you write.
There are many keyword tools available online but the best two free ones that I know of are Ubersuggest (by Neil Patel) and the Google Keyword Planner (which is available inside a Google Ads account).
Content Writing
Another important factor for search engines to take your content seriously and rank you high is QUALITY CONTENT. Why would Google place you on the first page of search results (which is the goal of all website owners) if you don’t provide any value to the reader. So when you start writing a new article, think about what the readers are looking for and try to answer all of these questions in one article. 10 years ago, people used to write short articles (300 – 500 words) and actually get traffic from Google but that doesn’t work anymore. Therefore, you need to write high quality content that is unique (No copy pasting) and make it a minimum of 1000 – 2000 words per article in order for search engines to recognize your content and rank you high in their search results.
Step 4: Indexing & Tracking
Once you have started working on step 3 and have published a couple of pages/posts (articles) then it’s time to register your website with two free Google accounts: 1) Google Search Console and 2) Google Analytics.
Google Search Console
This is a tool that’s used to index (list) all of the published website’s pages and posts on to the Google search engine and to track the performance of a website. To be more specific, it provides Google search metrics like the number of clicks from Google, position of pages/posts in the search results, Queries (search terms used by searchers to be found), pages/posts viewed, locations, devices, etc. Furthermore, Google Search Console notifies website owners by email if there are any technical issues related to indexing or site appearance/user experience that needs fixing. To verify and connect your WordPress website with Google Search Console, please read the indexing section in this SEO Basics Guide for Beginners
How can you benefit from the data provided by Google Search Console
In general, you can use this data to find out how is your website pages/posts are performing in the Google search results and discover ways to improve your website’s SEO. For example, you used the keyword “best affordable gaming laptops” for one of your articles. After a couple of months, you log in to Search Console and you check the pages report under the performance tab and you find that this page received 4 clicks in the last 3 months. This and is positioned on the fourth page. In this case, you can check other reports to discover why this page is not performing well. After checking the Queries report, you noticed that the keyword “best affordable gaming laptops” is not getting any clicks or impressions but you have lots of impressions from other keywords related the topic. This is a sign that this keyword is too competitive or maybe this keyword is not a good match for the content of this article. So what you should do is optimize this article using other keywords that have high impressions and good positions (1st or 2nd page) which are found in the Queries report. In conclusion, Google Search Console will give you useful insights on how you can improve your content, on-page and off-page SEO.
Google Analytics
This is one of the best tools that any website owner can use to track an entire website’s traffic data. It provides real-time statistics of the website visitors like number of sessions, pages viewed, time duration (average time they stay on a website), bounce rate (percentage of people that leave right away), load time (how fast does a website take to load up), referrers (traffic sources), locations, devices, etc. You can just go to analytics.google.com and easily sign up using your Gmail account. I would also recommend that you install and activate a Google Analytics WordPress plugin so you can access all of the data right from your website’s dashboard area. There are many Google Analytics plugins to choose from but I’ve had a good experience with a free plugin called “Analytic Insights for Google Analytics 4 (AIWP)” that displays all the stats you need to understand your traffic.
How can you benefit from the data provided by Google Analytics
Checking your traffic data on a daily/weekly basis is ESSENTIAL because it will give you insights on how the visitors are reacting to your content and if the traffic coming in is good or bad. For example, if you notice that the bounce rate is 98% which is a bad thing then you need to figure out why most of your traffic is leaving so fast. Using the other Google Analytics metrics will help you further investigate and find out what seems to be the issue. So in this specific case, if the load up time is 15 seconds, this means the page is taking too long to open for the users and so they decided to leave. And let’s say you checked the referrals report and you notice that the traffic is coming from an unknown source or looks like a spammy website then it’s a non-human bot traffic and it’s expected to bounce at a high rate. In other words, you need to analyze the Google Analytics data and connect the dots.
Step 5: Website Monetization
By the time you reach to step 5, you should have at least 15 article posts) live on the internet and some organic traffic coming in from search engines (Google/Bing/Yahoo) and other sources. For whatever reason, if this wasn’t achieved yet then you can’t proceed with step 5 until you’ve accomplished that. This is because the website monetization methods that I’m about to share with you requires traffic in order to make money plus many programs (but not all) that you’re going to apply for in this step approve only websites with steady monthly traffic. I don’t want you to stress if your website isn’t ready yet because it will eventually generate some organic traffic but you just need to be patient. In the mean time, I recommend you to work on building your backlink profile to get more recognition from Google and other search engines. Please read the backlinks section in this SEO basics guide to learn how backlinks can boost websites’ rankings. Sharing your links and doing a light promotion on social media would also definitely help in the growth of your traffic so it’s something to consider. So now let me share with you the TOP WAYS TO MAKE MONEY FROM A WEBSITE
Step 6: Growing Your Website Traffic
I would like to congratulate you on reaching step 6 because this means you now own an online business that you LOVE where you can share your passions, knowledge and skills with the entire world. Doing a good job in maintaining your niche website will only make your audience grow and in return, will make you more money. The key to success in this type of online business is TRAFFIC and so that’s what we are going to concentrate on in this final step. Therefore, I want to share 3 important tips that will get you traffic if you still don’t have any and will boost your traffic to the next level if you are getting a limited amount of traffic.
Tip #1: Create More Content
The process of writing content should never stop and in fact, you should publish one article every 1 – 2 weeks. Let’s assume that you currently have 30 pages/posts indexed in Google. In most cases, not all of these pages will rank on the 1st or 2nd pages of Google and will not get any traffic. So maybe 15 out of 30 pages will actually generate you revenue. Therefore, you need to target new keywords and write more articles in order to increase the volume of traffic that comes in from the search engines. It is possible that you’ll run out of ideas or you’ll be exhausted from writing but I don’t want you to stress about that because there is a solution for everything. Find the keywords that you want to use and hire a freelancer to write an article. Another way for you to easily create articles is to use AI tools like ChatGPT. You can request ChatGPT to generate a 1000 word article using any keyword and it will be done in seconds. The only issue with that is that ChatGPT results are usually generic and so I recommend that you modify the ChatGPT articles and give it your own personal touch. I have personally never used AI tools to write articles because my articles are always sharing my own personal experiences which is is difficult for robots to generate. I am also legally blind and so editing/personalizing a long article is actually harder for me than writing it from scratch. If you’re interested to hire writers or get a helping hand from experts in anything related to your website for a low price then go to the BIGGEST and most affordable freelancing platform online!
Tip #2: Build Backlinks
As you dive deeper into SEO, you will realize that backlinks are a MAJOR FACTOR to the success of a website. Please take the time to read and watch the video I’ve provided in the backlinks section of the SEO Basics Guide so you can understand the concept of backlinks. To briefly explain the idea using simple terms, backlinks will push Google (and other search engines) to notice your website much faster and will make Google recognize your website as a reliable source of information for your specific niche. This will give your website more authority and will boost your website’s rankings in all popular search engines. You should consider writing guest posts which is a well-known and safe way to build backlinks. Keep in mind that eventually backlinks will be generated organically for your pages/posts if you’re providing high quality content but it’s usually a slow process and may take years for that to happen. If you’re interested to get help in building your backlinks profile then hire SEO and Backlink Experts to do the hard work for you!
Tip #3: Free & Paid Advertising
The main goal that we are trying to achieve with a niche website is to generate FREE organic traffic from Google but there is one obstacle that will always come in the way: Google Algorithms. No one can guarantee the outcome of your SEO keyword efforts but we can only predict because at the end of the day, it’s all in Google’s hands. Therefore, you need to do some promotional work in the early stage in order to help the Google search engine algorithms to notice you and to speed up the process. I’m not going to waste your time on discussing free promotional methods as you can find hundreds of videos on that in YouTube. My ideal way of paid advertising is PPC (pay per click) search. The best two platforms for PPC search advertising are Google Ads and Microsoft Ads (Formerly known as Bing Ads). As a beginner with low budget, you can easily find promotional coupon codes that will give you $75 – $100 of free credit to use in these platforms. Just do a basic search on Google and type “Google ads promo code” or “Microsoft ads promo code” and you’ll find plenty of resources. The reason why I like PPC search advertising is because I get to place ads in front of an audience that is searching for my specific niche. It’s EXACTLY like what you’re trying to achieve from a niche website but the only difference is that PPC search advertising will give you instant results. I also noticed that PPC search advertising will speed up the process of generating organic backlinks of your website and therefore, this will improve your website’s ranking on Google much faster as well. There are many other great marketing strategies that professionals use to promote their websites so if you’re interested to learn more about these strategies then please check out the following list of Digital Marketing Courses!
Summary
By following the 6 steps above, you’ll know how to make a website that makes money using your passions and skills. To simplify the process, here’s an easy formula that summarizes the guide for your convenience:
Quality Content + SEO Implementation + Monetization = Free Search Engine Traffic (Revenue)
So there you have it, you can now start a simple online business that will generate you a monthly income without having to buy a $2000 course or signing up to a guru’s email list who will blast your inbox with hundreds of emails every month.. If you found my free guide beneficial then please support me by just sharing it with others…BEST OF LUCK!