As with any pursuit worth doing there will be challenges. Creating a website that makes money is no exception. As you probably already know most people fail. The number that floats around is 99% - which basically means that everybody fails and only a few are the lucky ones. A lottery – most likely you will fail, but there is always the chance that you will be the lucky one.
The most important challenge that you need to over come is understanding that making money online is not easy. If you want to succeed you will have to be patient and you will have to do a lot of work.
It Is Not Easy
Get it out of your head that you will slap together a few pages of content, make a logo, tell your friends, and then just sit back and watch the money roll in. It does not work that way.
At lot of people fail and quit because they get surprised by how much work it is. After all, they want to make money online because it is easy. Yet, they are working more hours and seeing fewer results. After six months of trying they give up - countless hours lost for pennies earned.
The problem is that they got surprised by how much work it was. Then either they quit because they do not want to do all that work, or they quit because they assume that they are doing something wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be a lot of work, they think to themselves, how come I have to work so hard? I must be doing something wrong.
Understand now, before you begin, that it will be a lot of work. That six months from now your website will not be a success. That you will have put in countless hours and have only 50 visitors a day. Realize that now so that you are not surprised by it later - so that you do not do all this work for the next six months only to quit. Realize it now so that after six months you can keep going with your website.
Prepare yourself to do a lot of work. Success will not come easy or fast. But if you keep working and learning then you have a chance at having a successful website.
Creating The Website Is the Easy Part
A common mistake is to think that all you need to do is create a website. Once you learn how to use HTML, CSS and create pretty graphics success will follow - all you need is a website. This kind of thinking is completely wrong.
Of course being able to create a website is necessary, but it is one of the least important aspects. An 8 year old kid can build the website for you. Or for a couple hundred dollars you can have it professionally done. Website creation and design has turned into a commodity. You can purchase completed website templates that require almost no HTML knowledge to maintain and update. Website creation and design should be the least of your concerns.
You should focus on two things:
What your website will be about (the content). Will people want to visit it? How will people find your website? How will you drive traffic to your website?
Before you crack open a single HTML book, or download website building software, make sure that you have the two things above figured out.
What Will Your Website Be About?
Research your topic. Do a search for websites similar to the one you are planning to build. How many websites are there like yours? How good are they? Do they look like they make lots of money? How old are they? What can you do that will make your website different than the current ones available?
Doing your research and answering these questions will help you figure out what your website should be about. Find a hole in the market and build your website to fill it. Do not just build a website that you think will do well without doing research – if you ignore doing the research then there is a 99% chance that your website will fail. Why 99% - because that is the percent of websites that fail and they fail because they are trying to do something that has already been done and does not need to be done again.
How Will You Get Visitors To Your Site?
Besides building a website that fills some market demand (a website that people will want to read) you will need to figure out how you will drive traffic to your website.
You could have the prettiest website in the world and which describes a cure for cancer. But if you do not promote your site nobody will see it. It does not matter how great the content is or how much time you spend building the website, if you do not promote it you will fail.
Websites exist in infinite space. Unlike opening up a store on a street corner, there is absolutely no chance that a passerby will stumble upon your website by accident. There is no chance that somebody will random type in something into the address bar and land on your website. You need to go out, find people and bring them to your website. Go out and leave signs that lead people back to your website - people need to be shown that your website exists.
Promoting your website is by far the ‘hardest part’ of having a website. It is also the most aggravating and the one you will spend the most time on.
The problem is that website promotion is more an art than a science. There is no formula to getting lots of website traffic. There is nothing that you can do to get a certain amount of traffic. It is easy if your goal is 10 visitors a day, but if you want 1000 visitors a day then you will need to work hard.
There are many ways to get traffic. Have a look at How To Get Website Traffic. Here you will find the standard methods of getting the initial traffic to your website. These ideas will enable you to get a base traffic flow – to get your website out there. Every webmaster has their own favorite technique or method that works best for them. You will need to find out what works best for you and your website.
But be careful. Getting traffic is the holy grail for webmasters, so everybody and their dog will try to convince you that they have the holy grail and try to sell it to you. Do not be fooled into parting with your money and wasting your time with these scams. The easiest way to know if it is a scam is if the words ‘free, easy, rich,1000’s visitors’ are together on the same page. Getting traffic is not easy and nobody would reveal how they get traffic for cheap or free. Same rule applies for website traffic as for the holy grail – if the guy on the street is selling the holy grail for $9.99 then it is not the holy grail.
The Amount Of Promotion Required Depends On Your Content
At the beginning you will need to promote your website. How much and for how long you will need to promote depends on how good your website is. And that is the rub; obviously you will think that your website is great, that people would love it - if only they knew about it. So everyday you promote expecting that today is the day the website will finally take off.
The only way to find out if your website is really good, and not just based on your opinion, is to promote it and see what happens. There are 3 possible outcomes:
Your Website Has Great Content
Let's imagine that your new website has the cure for cancer as the content. That is truly great content! After you finish building the site you begin to promote. You leave some comments on other blogs, write an article and post on forums. A few people will visit your site and read your content. They will love your website and email it to their friends.
My guess is that within a few days you can stop doing your own promotion – other people will do the promotion for you. People will email your website and link to it from their website.
This is what happens when you have great content – you only need to promote for a while till the promotion happens for you.
Your Website Has OK Content
Great content means that lots of people are interested in your website. OK content means that it is good content but people who are interested in it are harder to find. For example, a small niche website can have good content but not everybody is interested in the content. Gerbil care is an example of a small niche site. The content is good but you need to spend a lot of time promoting your website because you need to find the people who are interested.
Or OK content can mean that your writing style appeals to a certain type of person only. Out of every 100 people only 1 likes it. It is good writing, but only a small percentage of the people see it as such. You need to promote more to be able to reach that small percentage.
If you have OK content then you will need to spend more time promoting. Your website will succeed as soon as enough people know about it. But because the niche is so small and the potential visitors few and far between it will take time to build up your traffic. Everybody is interested in the cure for cancer so the website will self promote easily, but only a few are interested in Gerbil Care.
With OK content you stand a chance of succeeding – you will simply need to do more promotion.
Your Website Has Poor Content
The worst thing that can happen is that you have poor content and do not realize it. In this situation you will waste a lot of time and cause yourself grief. Months will be spent promoting and for months you will see no results.
You will become bitter. How come that site is a success and mine is not. I promote everyday and nothing happens. Everybody else must be cheating, or Google is not fair, or that webmaster is a jerk for not backlinking to me. All that anger and heartache and wasted time because you do not realize that your website is not good.
If your website is not good then no amount of promoting will make it a success. No amount of link exchanges or tweets from friends will help. You may have a few good days but in the end the site will fail.
You might become so desperate that you start trying to cheat the system by paying for backlinks or joining link farms. This might help your website for a little while, but sooner or later it will fail. These are just life support mechanisms – as soon as you unplug the website it will die – it will never become a success on its own.
