27. 07.
If you run any type of website aside from your dayjob, then you may or may not have some sort of goal to make enough extra funds from the site to do something “substantial” with. I put substantial in quotes as it is a relevant term to different people. Buying a house may be substantial to one person while buying lunch is more like it to someone else. For me, the goal was to take my family on a week-long vacation using only the funds made from a few blogs that I run in my spare time. If you would have told me a few months ago that this would be possible, I would have laughed as I knew the amount of time & energy I would have had to pour into making it happen. There probably wouldn’t have even been a family to take on vacation had I tried to “work harder” and “make more money online”. So what did I do? What changed? Simple…I worked smarter.
I focused on good content…content that was popular yet had little competition online. For the travel websites that I run, I would simply check out forums such as TripAdvisor to see which forum topics had the most replies…or which topics kept popping back up. I generated a list somewhat like a FAQ and then started to plan out articles for my sites. For each article, I did just a little bit of keyword research using mainly the following three tools:
- SEObook Keyword Suggestion Tool
- Nichebot
- Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool
These tools are free and helped my find popular keywords/phrases for my articles. I then used those keywords for:
- Page Titles
- Article Titles
- Bold Text
- Anchor Text
- META Descriptions
- Image Alts & Titles
Pretty soon, I had articles ranking quickly in search engines and bringing more traffic. More traffic meant more earnings. The math is simple…the concept even simpler…the execution on the other hand takes time and dedication. I admit it was difficult to spend spare time at home doing these tasks, but now I have somewhat of a routine and have even outsourced some of it. The thing that worked for me was to establish a tangible goal (take my family on a week-long vacation) rather than saying “Make x amount of money by x date.” Sure, I knew about how much I would need to earn, but having a solid goal helped push me…as well as my wife who wanted a vacation even more than me!
So where did we go? We spent an entire week in a beach-front condo in Panama City Beach. We took our 6 month old son to the beach for the first time and it was an amazing experience. He absolutely loved the ocean, sand, people, etc. We ate out every night at some incredible restaurants, played some golf, did some shopping, and most of all…just relaxed knowing the trip and everything we decided to do was already covered financially. That was an awesome feeling.
I’m not saying this to “brag” or boast about my accomplishment. It’s just that I want you to know that you can do something “substantial” with your website if you have the right mindset (that works for you) and if you take care of the fundamentals. Since I run content-based sites (I don’t sell physical products) the fundamentals were to establish good content using strong keywords from popular topics. If you run an e-commerce site, then the fundamentals may be to increase conversions using techniques such as better descriptions, better images, improved “buy” or “add to cart” buttons, an easier checkout process, utilizing a newsletter, etc. The important thing is to provide value to your customers. They say content is king…well…to some extent it is, but to go deeper than that, valuable content is king. Add value to others in everything you do. It’s like Zig Ziglar is famous for saying, “You Can Only Get What You Want, If You Help Enough Other People Get What They Want.” The saying holds true even with internet marketing.
Shane Eubanks
