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There are 2 certainties about being a web developer that you can always count on.  The first is that you will have days of complete frustration.  The second is that when you actually accomplish something you will have to celebrate alone, because everyone else has gone to bed.  I have been having one of those days of frustration, trying to get a site put together.  It is one of those things that there just isn’t a simple solution for and getting everything to work just takes time.  I get a lot of satisfaction when it actually works, but when it is that hard to implement I am always weary of when it is going to break.  But like everything else we will just cross that road when we come to it.  I spent the better part of 2 complete days setting up a site that should have taken 4 hours or less and now that it is so far behind schedule it is going to have to wait some more.

Following will be the best advice I can possibly give to a new developer about how to make a website, and that is:  Don’t take on too much at one time.  If you are looking to build your own site and not someone else’s then build 1 site and that’s all.  Don’t ever think that you can build site after site and give them all the attention that they deserve because it is just flat out impossible.  Don’t take on site number 2 until site number 1 is not only up and running but is virtually self sustaining.  Not that there isn’t always maintenance and tweaking to do, but wait until you are happy with everything right down to the amount of traffic that site 1 is generating.

This is my personal site and I have a ton of fun with it, but it gets neglected way more than it should.  I had plans to have this site completed during the month of January and maybe I should clarify that is 2008, since at the rate it is going it may not be complete until 2009 or later.  But I digress, I am in the process of changing priorities so that this site and a couple of others can get the attention they deserve.  The funny thing is that once they hit that magical point you really don’t need to do much to them to maintain the traffic they get.  One of my blogs was getting right at 1400 visitors a day at the beginning or February.  The last post I made to it was February 2^nd and since then traffic has actually gone up to right under 1800 per day.  2 and a half months without posting to it and I have probably only seen the site 4 times since then and the traffic is increasing.  So keep heart if you are working diligently your time will come it is just a matter of time.

It is time to stop playing around and get serious about making money with your website. The answers to how to make money online are as varied as the number of websites there are online. If you are ready to get serious and start testing the market then you have to know a few things about your website first. How many visitors do you get per day? Where do your visitors come from? Why are they visiting your site? As a webmaster you need to take great care in tracking your visitors so that you understand why they visit your website. It is important to know what draws any person to a certain site.

I use Awstats to track my visitors. Awstats is an easy to install, easy to read, and comprehensive stat program. I like the fact that you can install Awstats directly from your c-panel and it gives great data. Awestats will give you visitor history by the month, day, day of the week, and time of day. The most important stats to me are the stats that tell me where my visitors come from and what search phase they used to find my site in the SERPS. With that information you can also search for the same terms and find out where your site ranks. You can also use that information to either continue to use that same terminology or change your keywords to garner the audience that you are trying to attract. Don’t be afraid to change things up a little to find the right keywords and audience. Making money with your website is much easier to accomplish once you understand your site and your visitors.

Take care to understand your visitor’s wants and needs, and then you will be able to give them exactly what they are looking for. It doesn’t matter if you are selling batteries at the lowest price in the word if your visitors are looking for candles. If you can’t do the copywriting yourself then hire someone who knows how to build great content. Hiring out your content work may be expensive but so is having a site that doesn’t sell. A good copywriter will only cost you money once, but the work lasts forever. You can potentially have an everlasting stream of income from one very well written piece of copy.

I often use test sites to test new software, scripts and ideas. To me it is essential to test things before you actually implement them on a working site. I know that it can be difficult for some to have this luxury, so I would like to extend the offer to anyone who is a member of netrat.com that I will set up a test site for any script or software you would like to try out before you implement it on your site. Or it may just be you want to try a new script to see if you would like to use it on an upcoming site.

The idea came to me today when one of our members Jinesh asked a specific question about a shopping cart function with Joomla. I set up the test site for him to work with and hopefully that will answer a lot of his questions about using that particular component of Joomla. Of course I am always here to answer questions but if you want to get some hands on with a new piece of software then just let me know what it is and I will do my best to get it set up for you.

Please make your request on the forum instead of emailing me directly. Forum post don’t get lost or put into the junk pile.

I took a look at the stats of this site for the first time in a long time today and found that someone is using keywordspy.com to figure out the keywords I am targeting for this site.  Well first I would like to say that the results that showed up in keywordspy.com were way off.  And second if you really want to know just ask I will tell you.  This site is a hobby and I am not concerned with competition or the number of visitors that I get to this site.  So whatever you thought you found out from keywordspy.com is probably wrong, and there is only one phrase that I have targeted at all and the number of searches is so low that if I were you and looking to get into whatever business you think this website is in, I would try to find better keyphrases than the single one that I am targeting.  Which by the way if you can’t figure out what that phrase is by looking at the site then you are probably in the wrong business.  I seriously wonder how you would ever be able to LEARN HOW TO MAKE A WEBSITE.  Get it?

Well anyway I just thought it was a little funny since this website has such low traffic and no business focus at all.  The only way this site makes money is off of the Adsense that is on the directory and I believe it makes about a dollar a month, possibly less.  So if you are getting into the giving away information for free business like this website then go for the how to make a website phrase like I am and I am sure that you also will be able to make no money what so ever.

However if you are interested in learning how to do keyword research then go to the main site and click on videos and watch the gtrends video that I made for you.  I have never been one to be overly concerned with what the competition does, because I can’t control them.  I find my own keywords and focus on what I can control, if you do the same you will be a lot better served in your efforts.  Go check out the video and see for yourself how easy it is.

I started a new website today at footballrecords.org, so I thought I would walk everyone through the entire setup process and what I will be doing to market the site.  This will be a project for the fun of having it not for profit so I don’t mind sharing everything that I will be doing to get it up and going.  It started a couple of days ago actually when I decided after having problems with PHP-Nuke before that it had some features that I really wanted to use so I would give it another shot.  Well it was an entire day setting it up before I realized that users couldn’t register at the site, so I scrapped an entire day’s work.  But that is another story.  So I spent the entire day today setting up the site with Joomla, and it still has some bugs to work out but that will come over the next couple of weeks.

It is really funny how this one started, so I will start from the very beginning.   I am a member of the domain name aftermarket and received the regular newsletter about domain name and one of them for sale caught my attention because it seemed so overpriced.  It was footballrecords.com, and the starting bid was 5000.00 so I went and did a little research about the niche to see if it was worth the price.  What I found was 60,000 competition and about 1000 searches a day during the season.  And some other related searches that were okay.  Which peaked my interest just a little in the niche, but not anywhere near $5000.00 worth.  So I went and looked and found that footballrecords.org was available and unclaimed.  I figured for the 10.00 reg fee I would give it a go.  And since I am a football fanatic and also love hanging with sports fans I thought it would be one I could spend free time with and make it a super fun site.

I went with Joomla because I knew it had to have a huge forum for every team including the college teams and the members could contribute to making the site a success.  I started by setting up the standard site and then added the key components to it that make a community site a lot of fun.  First the fireboard forum because of what I said earlier.  Fireboard forums aren’t the easiest to set up when you are doing a ton of categories but the look great and work great.  Then I added community builder from Joomlapolis so that members could interact with each other in other ways besides the forum, and it has other great features that I will tell you about in another article.  Yes it really is that great that it deserves an article all its own.  I then added a video sharing component called Seyret.  There are other ways to implement video with Joomla but Seyret is a self contained video component from Joomlaholic that is super cool in my opinion.  Besides some other little tweaks that was all I really added to the site.  Of course setting up categories and adding videos took the rest of the day along with testing.

I put up a short welcome message and added a couple of posts to the forum and that was it for the site on day one.  The only other thing I did was write a hub for hubpages titled Dallas Cowboys forum and pointed the link to the specific Dallas Cowboys forum. That should give you a really good idea of how I will be marketing the site.  I will be using article marketing at hubpages and a couple of other sites and will be linking directly to the relevant pages on the site.  And then of course other general articles will point to the front page of the site.  I will also let you know what I will be doing to build other links into the site, and we can watch it grow together.  As of today 04/02/08 the seoquake toolbar shows no indexed pages and no backlinks which is correct.  And since this site is for fun and not profit I will walk you through all of the things I will be doing to promote the site, so that you get ideas how to promote your own.  Remember it doesn’t take money; it takes effort to make a site successful.  If I can pull of building a large community site right before your eyes then you will know for sure that you also can build a great site.

I have done a lot of work with various content management systems of the last few years and have decided that there really is only one that does everything I want it to do, and that is Joomla.  Joomla is the most versatile and complete system that is on the market today.  I have tried Drupal, PHP-Nuke, Post Nuke, Xoops, and Mambo, and they all fall just a little bit short of Joomla.  In fact there is really only one thing I don’t like about Joomla and that is the SEF URLS that can be at times hard to implement correctly.  There is only one good component that I have found for SEF URLS and it can be very finicky at times.  In fact it is giving me fits with a new site right now, but I know with a little patience I will get it working fine.

I guess the big question would be why would a new site or a simple site choose to use a CMS over Wordpress, and my answer would be that the CMS can do everything Wordpress can do with some options that may just come in handy down the road when you want to expand your site.  You may not think you want to go beyond a blog when you first start, and if you choose not to then you still have a functional blog platform and don’t need to expand.  But let’s say you do want to expand into selling products or having a forum on your site, if you had started with Joomla then it would only be a matter of turning on that functionality and putting it to use.

CMS do have a higher learning curve at first but once you understand how they work, they will open your mind to the infinite possibilities that you and your website have to offer to the world.  Yes I actually believe that you and your website will grow just based on using a CMS from the start.  I believe that you will start to see more avenues to take your website down and will work to accomplish even more things just because you are not limited by the backbone of your sites structure.  I don’t want anyone to think for a moment that I don’t love Wordpress because I do, I just think as a beginner that you should open your mind to the possibility that there may be more you can do on a CMS.

I am writing this more for my benefit than anybody else’s, so bear with me.  I recently needed a new hosting account and decided to try another host just for the sake of it.  Well really there was a purpose but I can’t go into that here.  So I signed up for an account at hostgator.com and started moving some of my domains over to them.  The first couple of days I notice that the server is really slow and some of my empty Wordpress and Joomla sites fail to load properly.  So I called their support and they check the sites and also notice that they are at times, timing out and running very slow.  The support person couldn’t figure out what the problem was so he filed a trouble ticket and promised 24 hour turn around.  Well maybe that is acceptable but 24 hours to me, when I am trying to set up domains is like an eternity.  Yes I can be very impatient at times, I acknowledge that fact and try to work on it, but none the less it was bothering me.  So I took a deep breath and went to work on other sites.  The next day everything seemed to be working fine, and I went back to work on a site that I really wanted to get up and running.  I spent the next 2 days setting it up and got everything just the way I wanted it.

2 days on a Joomla site is not unrealistic for me because there was a ton of content and video to add to the site.  Well anyway it was up and running fine for about 3 days and then I started getting 500 server errors on all of the domains, but only periodically.  Keep in mind I only have simple Joomla and Wordpress sites running on this server with nothing special, no extra scripts or plugins and nothing I have ever had trouble with before.  I called support again after seeing these errors on all of the sites for about 5 hours.  Again the support person also sees the errors but can’t figure out what the problem is.  This time he puts me on hold to find a technician and when he comes back he says they found the error and it is all fixed.  I thank him and hang up.  Next day rolls around and I start seeing the same errors again.  Again I call support and another trouble ticket is filed with the standard 24 hour turn around.  But by now I have started promoting the site and have started getting a few visitors, who cant access the site because of the errors and of course the search engines are seeing the errors also so this brand new site is obviously going into the sandbox.  Yeah for me!

24 hours later I still have the same errors and since I haven’t heard anything regarding the trouble ticket I call support again.  This time the support person informs me that it takes 24 hours to resolve a trouble ticket.  I politely assure them that it has now been 24 hours and 18 minutes, they put me on hold to speak with a tech.  20 minutes later they come back on the phone and ask me if I received the email from support, I assure them I did not receive the email and even if I had the problem still persists.  At that point the email is sent to me explaining how the error is my fault because one of my sites is not disconnecting from the database.  If I had written or changed the script I can definitely see how that might be the case, but remember all I was running on the site in question was a Wordpress blog with 0.00 content.  There was nothing on the site at all, I had only set up the blog and done nothing else with it.  I cancelled the account and moved everything to a new bluehost.com account.  As a topper I receive an email from support after they were informed that I have decided to cancel the account with a helpful link that should fix the problem I was having.  I didn’t bother clicking on the link and instead replied to the email with a question.  “Why would you wait until a person has decided to cancel their account to try to help them fix the problem?”  It really bothered me that they may have had a fix for the problem but were unwilling to share the fix until after the account had been cancelled.  I guess they know that once a person has set up 1 or a bunch of domains it is a real pain to move them so the person feels stuck.  Don’t make the same mistake I made because it really is a pain to move sites, especially if they are old and established sites with lots of content.

It cost me another 2 days to move everything over and I still don’t have the important site back up and running because I know it is going to be crap holed in the SERPS for a while yet, plus I am very frustrated.  Just so it is perfectly clear the same sites on the new bluehost.com account run fast and no errors.  This is all my fault I have run into hosting problems before, and I know how good bluehost.com is, but decided to try something different.  Yes I am kicking myself, and one day I will make the same mistake again, but hopefully not anytime soon.

A few days later I made the same mistake with PHP-Nuke.  I will tell you about that also.

HTML Linking

It occurred to me that as a beginner one of the things that you need to learn is how to correctly use html linking on your site.  I will assume for the purposes of this article that you have already chosen the keyphrases that you are targeting and are starting to build links to your site.  A link to your site is great and every one of them counts, but specific targeted links are what we are really after.  So a link to your site that looks like this “I found this really great site about pest control and you can get there by clicking here” is a worthwhile link to have if someone puts it up for you and you haven’t spent any effort to get the link.  What you need is a link that says “I found this really great site about pest control“.

When you are working with Wordpress it is very important to title your posts with the exact keyphrase you are trying to rank for.  For instance the title of this post is “html linking” so if you wanted to do a trackback to this article the link on your site would read html linking.  It is important to consider the title of each and every post that you write.  When you are trying to build a volume of visitors you have to learn to go after keyword phrases that people are actually searching for and also have a low rate of competition.  I wanted to title this article the art of linking because linking really is an art.  It is my art, well it is the art that I know how to paint.  I can’t draw a picture to save my life and it would be a crime for me to pick up a paint brush, but I can build an audience through the art that I paint in the search engines.  I can splatter words in every direction and make them come up looking like roses because it is the art I understand.

Here is what I know about the term html linking.  Approximately 140 people search for that term in any given day, and just by the words I know that they are inexperienced people who would benefit from this site.  I also know that there are 39,200 other pages with that keyword phrase on them.  39,200 is actually a very low number so immediately it catches my attention, I can compete with 40 thousand a lot easier than I can compete with 40 million.  I also did a search for html linking to see what my competition looked like and while they are nice highly ranked pages they are not really optimized for that phrase.  And as a small experiment I will place some links to this page with the phrase html linking to see how long it takes to make the first page, and how long it takes to actually get some visitors as a direct result of the phrase html linking.

The actual words that are the hyperlink are what we call the anchor text.  In the examples above the anchor text of the first link is “click here” and in the second link the anchor text is “pest control”.  I would never care to rank in first place for the term click here because no one ever searches for the term click here, but ranking for the term pest control is a whole different story, there are a lot of people who search for pest control every day.  So the really important lessons in this article are to build your links the right way, and to choose your keyword phrases carefully.  It will make the difference in not raking for your pages and zero traffic and ranking for something that people actually search for and getting lots of traffic.  That is the end of the lesson on html linking.

There seems to be a little confusion about placing ads on your weebly.com site. Weebly does not use Adsense they use a company called Adbrite.com to place their ads. Unfortunately at this time it doesn’t look like weebly has a revenue sharing program. I believe this is a major drawback to using weebly and will hurt them long term in the number of users they will attract. I will go over a few things about both programs just as an FYI. Adsense makes it nice and easy, choose the placement of your ads and put up the code and you are pretty much done. Adbite on the other hand takes a little more care to get right. You have to choose which ads you want to show, so that your audience is getting what they want.

Just a quick note about Adsense. If you aren’t getting the result that you think you should try moving your ads around and or placing them in the text of your article and you may find that you get better results. You may find that with the right placement your results can double or even triple. For further help with Adsense you can always check out the official Adsense blog. And you can sign up for Adsense here.

An issue that I have with some of the Adsense ads is the amount you can be paid per click. I have had way too many .01 clicks. You lose your visitor and you make a penny. It’s just not worth it for the long term health of your site. If you have a site that demands a high payout per click then Adsense is one of the best alternatives there is, but is your site has lower payouts per click there are better alternatives.

When you are setting up your site for Adbrite choosing the correct location for ads is just as essential as it is with Adsense. But now you have the added element of accepting advertisers and approving or denying ads. It does take a little more work on your part to run the program but there are some real benefits that make the Adbrite program worth the effort. After you have signed up and placed the code on you site you can set the Adbrite program to either automatically approve ads or manually approve ads. I recommend that you set it to manual and after they send you a list of advertisers go through the list and only approve ads that you feel will suit the audience of your site. Also take a look at the amount that each advertiser pays per click and weed out the lower paying ads. It just isn’t worth the effort in the long run if you can’t make a decent profit per click.

Adbrte also allows advertisers to pay for direct placement on your site within your ad placement. Let’s say that you have the code at the top of every page and you show 3 ads at a time. Advertisers can bid for one or all of those spots and you get paid regardless of how many people click through. You can set the pricing for the spots and be guaranteed advertising revenue from your ads every single month. That is a real benefit that Adsense does not offer, and I have done very well with selling ad spots through Adbrite on specific niche sites. If you have a blog that is niche specific I would highly recommend that you try Adbrite for your ads.

Of course that depends on a number of factors, like what kind of website you own. If you are selling tangible products and you control your markup then you can make as much as is feasible from your set of constraints. If you drop ship items directly from the manufacturer or distributor then you are not constrained by inventory and employees. Your only constraint may be your ability to attract new customers. If your website is an affiliate website attracting customers to your site and sending them to another site for purchase or signup then you are dealing with a whole different set of problems. If your website is an informative website that attracts large numbers of people because of your content and you make your money from advertising, then you are dealing with other issues. Look for articles dealing with specific issues those types of websites face on this site. This article will deal with just how much money it is possible to make from advertising on a small niche site.

Small niche websites usually depend on advertising for revenue. Google.com has a terrific program called Adsense that targets the ads specifically to the content of your`website. This program works well because if the person came to your website to gather information then they are most likely interested in the ads that will be displayed by Google.com. This type of advertising works because you will only get paid when someone clicks on one of the ads on your site. A word of caution is in order here, never click on one of the ads displayed by google.com on your website this would violate the terms of your agreement and possibly cause your advertising contract to be terminated. When advertising is your source of revenue then you can understand why you wouldn’t want the contract terminated.

Alright finally to the answer to how much you can expect to make from your website. Let’s say that you have a website about Aruba and you attract 20,000 unique visitors per month and you have a good conversion rate of people who click on your ads. 2% is a pretty good conversion rate, so that would mean 400 people per month clicked on your ads. Take that 400 and multiply it by the amount you get paid per click. Some keywords like travel pay fairly decent per click but there is a lot of competition in that arena. So let’s say you get paid an average of .50 per click, 400 x .50 = 200.00 per month, not bad but it sure doesn’t pay enough to quit your job. What if you had 20 websites doing about the same amount of money as the first? 20 websites would do a number of things for you, first they would balance the load if one did poorly one month or was cut off by your advertiser for some reason you would have 19 more to fall back on. Having multiple sites is also a lot of work. You have to build content for 20 different sites every month tweak them and do redesigns every so often. Yes it’s just like having a full time job, and the truth is that any single website making 200.00 or more per month from Adsense has been around for a while and has great content that search engines that consumers are looking for. Having that type of great content takes time to build for just one website, let alone 20 or more websites.

My advice is don’t quit your day job just yet, maybe later but don’t get into this business thinking that you are going to make a living right away. Niche marketing takes specialized talents and tools. Successful marketers know how to attract visitors by using the correct keywords, and catering to the information surfers are looking for. You can become a very successful marketer yourself by following the step by step guide on this website.

Advertising works well but most niche sites make money by selling some sort of informational product to the people who are interested in that specific niche. Once you are selling a product to your niche that is when you will truly understand the power of Internet marketing. Learning how to build and market those products is the reason that netrat exists. Take a look at the front page and find out how to join how to make a website.