Category — Content

With the current bear market and an economy that is not doing too hot, we must find ways to maintain our high percentage returns on investments.  If you look to the stock market, you won’t find anything right now that can yield appealing percentages.  However, if you look online, you see a few options.  Even worse, those of us with money in the market, are seeing little or no returns.

No, please don’t go and get an online savings account with a .01% better rate than your local bank, because that is NOT what I am talking about.  I am talking about making money FROM the internet.  Here I will talk about one way you can yield high percentages online while doing very little work, and watching it pay off more and more over time.

We have all heard that blogging is a great tool to make some extra cash - right?  Well, that’s true, but you must stick with it and post often, and create “juicy” headlines and titles to attract readers, etc.  Some people just aren’t into that.  My suggestions are similar, but not exactly to that extent.  Here is what you do..

Figure Out What Topics You Have a Genuine Interest In

Seriously, it might be your career, or a hobby you spend time on when you get home.  It also might be a category that you frequently find yourself answering all the questions on Jeopardy!  Who knows.  We all have interests that we either supress or never find time for.  So dig deep and think about something that would really interest you.

Set Up a Wordpress Account

Once you have decided on a topic that intrigues or interests you  -  You can set up an online Wordpress account in a matter of a few seconds.  If you are an advanced web user, you can download Wordpress and install their standalone version on your web hosting account.  Either way, you will eventually be starting a BLOG.  Don’t worry, we aren’t trying to turn you into a journalist here.  We just need to use the advanced software that blogs are made from to get your site up.  They are also very easy to set up as well.  Some websites are run on Wordpress and you cannot even tell because they look like normal sites.  Wordpress has evolved into something much more than just blogging software.

If you are a Wordpress.com user (Beginner) then I recommend you change your theme to something that fits your blog’s overall theme.  You will find the option in your settings area on Wordpress.com.

If you are using the standalone hosted version of Wordpress, then check out some wordpress themes sites for some advanced looking themes that can easily and inexpensively be applied to your site.

Start Posting Information About Your Chosen Topic That Will Benefit Others

After you get your Wordpress account all set up and you have a chance to tinker and figure things out, then start posting!  Don’t just post a bunch of random crap, but think of things that you feel will benefit other people about your chosen topic.  Separate each point, tid-bit, or chunk of information into separate posts.  Be clear, but don’t worry about your writing skills.  People researching topics don’t want to see some corporate professionally written stuff, they want information from people that know what they’re talking about - like you!  Post as much as you can, whenever you think of something.

Don’t get upset if your site isn’t performing as well as you had originally hoped.  Sometimes it can take days, weeks, and even a month or two before search engines like Google and Yahoo come around and put all of your data into their search rankings.  Eventually, search will become your number one source of traffic.  When that happens, you will know it.

Implement Ads Into Your Site

Now you are ready to monetize this website into something that should make you a little extra money.  You can use Google Adsense or other advertising networks that are easily integrated into Wordpress.  The Wordpress.com (beginner) version offers easy to use tools that help implement ad placement.  The great thing about Wordpress is that almost any advertising model works very well with it.

When using the standalone version of Wordpress, you will find that most ad models offer some type of plugin that you can install and activate which will easily start working with little knowledge needed.  There are also tons of great resources on how to properly optimize your ad placements for the most clicks (PPC Model).

In the end, the more content you publish to your site, the more likely someone searching or researching your chosen topic is to come across your website.  With every post you submit and publish to your site, you are becoming more visible among the sites with your topic on search engines.  While there are some tricky ways to manipulate search rankings, you don’t need to worry about that now.  Just stay on track and post as often as you can with valuable information.  If you place your ads in the right spots, near and next to the content, then you will probably get a few clicks eventually.  The goal here is to accumulate a few dollars a week, month, or every so often.  But, when you add up the little money trickling in, and do the math… it turns out to be a nice little bit of change that can help offset your losses in the stock market and economy.  It can also help pay for gas, now that it’s averaging over $4.00 per gallon here in the United States.  The money your site generates can quickly grow as your site becomes more indexed into search results.  As I mentioned before:  Every bit of content you add, you are increasing your visibility among your chosen niche.

Extra Benefits

There are some extra benefits that can potentially come from running a successful website about something you are passionate about and knowledgeable on.  Often, when large media publications become interested in your niche or industry, they turn to the established pros, like yourself, to quote and cite.  This can lead to a career change for some people as they become the “go to” person in their niche.  If you are smart, then you will quickly figure out how to capitalize on your new found popularity.

Hopefully this post benefits some of you, because I sure find this very helpful to my income.  Most of my personal sites have gotten large enough I either have staff writers posting daily on them now or I turn them into destinations on the internet, rather than just trying to gather search traffic.  Eventually, you may choose to do the same.  I now make several hundred dollars each day from my network of websites and domains.

Yes folks, you read the title correctly.  I said that you cannot beat good old fashioned HTML.  What am I referring to?  Try to remember the times before Google when everyone was using WebCrawler, Alta Vista, and Yahoo while almost all sites were static and hand-updated with quality, innocent information.  This was a time before affiliate programs and internet advertising was very young.  Yes, those were the good ol’ days.  Now, web content has a higher value than newspaper articles and affiliate links run rampant.

What is the point of this post?

I am going to admit, there are new alternatives in website design utilizing CSS and PHP that can outrank and out perform any static HTML site in a heartbeat, but people with old content-rich static HTML websites are still reaping some profits from the early days of the internet.  There is a reason these sites have done so darn well over such a long time!

Old school HTML is basic, static, and time consuming to make changes.  However, it’s so simple that all search engines can easily crawl and index any content.  Making the crawling easier gives you the first shot at rankings and improves your chances of getting ranked for existing topics and terms.

I’m not really sure how to word this post without pissing a bunch of people off, but basically what I am trying to say is - Based on my personal experience, and historical data, some of my static HTML sites are still outperforming my much larger and more popular CSS, PHP, and dynamically driven sites (Wordpress, Drupal, etc.) that have several more hours of SEO work done to them.

I’d like to get the opinion of what others think about this?  Obviously I am not saying let’s all ditch what we have learned over the years and start creating static HTML sites again, I am just pointing out how successful my older sites have been and still are.  I think the old K.I.S.S. (”Keep It Simple Stupid”) strategy is at work on the internet too!

Many search marketing professionals will echo that quality of content is a very important, if not the MOST important, factor in search ranking.  I strongly believe that you must develop sites and online assets with consumers in mind.  I don’t mean consumers as in people who will buy something, I mean consumers as in INFORMATION consumers.  People use the internet every day to consume information of sorts.  Even when someone is searching to buy something online, they are still trying to consume information on the best deal and the best product for their needs.  We need to start developing our websites with the information consumers in mind and not advertising or money.  The money and compensation for work will come no matter what, as long as you provide a great source of quality content.

This brings me to another topic:  How to monetize the traffic that our high quality sites and content have brought in.  I will be posting on this later.