nick usborne's blog

Make sure you write your website on a topic that really interests you.

I was sitting with my son yesterday chatting about all things web and, as always, I was encouraging him to write a theme-based site of his own.

My advice to him is no different than to anyone else: Start your site right now, add great content, engage a growing audience, start making some money, but...above all...create an asset that will continue to pay you revenues for years to come.

He agreed, but said that he started lots of web projects only to lose interest a few weeks after getting started.

Then I said something a little mean, but true:

“People like me make money from our websites, because people like you give up too quickly.”

As we continued talking, it became clear why he gave up on his projects.

He chose topics that he figured might make him money. But he didn’t choose them based on whether the topic actually interested him.

So my next fatherly gem went something like this:

“Choose a website topic that you would like to write about anyway, whether or not you ever make a penny from it in income.”

Almost every topic you choose to write about will have some potential for income. But the most important part of writing your own website is to CONTINUE writing about it every week for years to come.

That will be very hard to do if you have no personal interest, connection or passion for your subject. But writing daily or weekly is easy when you feel passionately about something.

The end of the story is that we found a topic for him. It is something personal to him and I think he’ll feel motivated to write about it. And we identified several ways for him to monetize his audience in the future.

I go into this in a lot more detail in my program, How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites...

What if I put my website online and it doesn`t work?

Good question.

But here is the great thing about websites. You can always make changes. You can always correct mistakes. You can always make improvements.

Best of all, you can always experiment.

If you write a book or anything else that is going to be printed, then you had better make sure it’s exactly right before it goes to the printer. Once it is printed, there is no going back.

But the web isn’t like that.

When you create your money-making website you’ll probably publish it when you have only about ten pages completed. And that’s fine. A few months later you’ll probably have over a hundred pages.

Over that same period you may change the text on the home page. You might improve or replace the text on another page. You might even change the design of the header or the layout of the pages.

You can’t really make a “mistake” when you are publishing your own website. And if you do make an error, it is easily fixed.

The other day I uploaded an article to one of my sites, promoted it through Twitter and then realized there was a huge typo in the headline.

No problem. I made the correction and had the new version live on my site within five minutes of noticing the mistake.

The same goes for experimenting with different ways to monetize your website.

I have tried all kinds of different affiliate programs. Some work well and others don’t. When a program doesn’t work, I just remove the links.

Over time I also make changes to the design of my sites.

Sometimes I’ll add a new tool or function.

My point is that with the web you have nothing to fear. You start with a few pages. It’s like dipping your toe in the water.

Then you track what’s happening. You watch the stats and figure out which pages are most popular. The site slowly evolves, getting better with every change you make.

And as this is your site and yours alone, you’re not answerable to anyone. Nobody has to approve what you do. You just move forward at your own pace and find out what works best.

So don’t worry about making “mistakes”. Mistakes can be corrected.

The only tough part about this is to make the decision to create a site in the first place.

Learn more about How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites...

Isn’t your How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites program simply about affiliate marketing?

Someone emailed me with this question late yesterday. I’m glad he did. It’s a great question.

The answer is, yes and no.

One of the simplest ways to make money from your own theme-based website is to sign up as an affiliate for companies which sell products or services closely related to your topic.

For example, some of the revenues from my coffee sites come to me via affiliate commissions from companies selling coffee and coffee makers.

But affiliate income is just one of several potential sources of revenue for your site.

You can also make money by placing contextual ads on your page, like Google’s AdSense.

You may choose to write an e-book on your topic and sell it as a download from pages on your site.

Your expertise in your topic may grow to the point where companies look to you for consulting or coaching services.

But is there really a fundamental difference between my program and a program teaching affiliate marketing?

I think so. There is a significant overlap, but I think there is a fundamental difference too.

Many programs and courses that teach affiliate marketing focus on creating sites for the sole purpose of driving traffic forward to vendor product pages, as quickly as possible. Many of these affiliate marketing sites have very little value or depth of content as stand-alone websites. Their purpose is to move people forward to another site.

My program focuses more on creating a high-value site packed with great information. I want people to click on the affiliate links I include on some of my pages. But my primary purpose is to create a site that is an authority site in its niche.

I want people to talk about my site. I want people to come back to my site and tell their friends about it.

I want my site to become a real asset, with the flexibility to make money for me in a variety of different ways, some related to affiliate marketing and some not.

All that said, you could say that my program is a great program for affiliate marketers. I say that because I think that what I recommend is the route that most affiliate marketers would do well to choose.

Whatever your plans for monetization, a deep, content-rich information site will always grow in value and will always provide you with a variety of ways to make money.

More about How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites here...

What is the difference between my two writing courses?

Good question. This was asked and answered, albeit briefly, within the comments thread of a previous post. But I though it worth bringing this topic to the “front page” and expanding on my answer.

Over the last two years I have written two difference courses, both of which focus on writing for the web.

The first one off the presses was Nick Usborne’s Million Dollar Secrets to Online Copywriting.

I wrote this course for anyone who wants to make a career of online copywriting. It covers just about every aspect of the online copywriter’s job, from writing home pages, content pages, sales pages, email, e-newsletters and more.

This is the course you want if you are thinking, “I want to make money selling my services as a professional online copywriter.” If you are a freelancer, you’ll be writing online copy for your clients. If you get a job, you’ll be writing online copy for your employer.

Either way, this course gives you the knowledge and tools to sell your services as an online copywriter.

My most recent program is How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites.

This program is not designed for use “in the workplace”. This is a course for anyone who likes the idea of creating a new stream of income by writing a website on a topic that interests them. You’ll be doing this at home, for yourself, probably part time.

You won’t have clients. You won’t be invoicing for the hours your work or charging anyone a project fee.

The time you spend writing your website is sweat equity. You’ll get your rewards when you start attracting traffic to your site and those visitors start clicking on money-making links on your pages.

I hope I have cleared up any confusion.

Get Nick Usborne’s Million Dollar Secrets to Online Copywriting if you want to charge clients for online copywriting services.

Get How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites if you want to sit at home and create a website of your own as a source of long-term residual income.

“I tried finding a topic for my money-making website, but all the good ideas are taken.”

We’re at the two week point now after the launch of my program, “How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites.”

Some people bought early and are already working their way through the program. (Which is now being reprinted as the first run was sold in a little over a week.)

And a few people are emailing me with comments like, “I tried finding a topic for my money-making website, but all the good ideas are taken.”

This is the first barrier to creating a website that makes money. You take a look at various possibilities and then find that other people have already written about them.

At this point, perhaps the majority of people give up. (Good news for those of us remaining.)

Let’s address this issue.

What happens when you have a great concept idea and you find that there is already a lot being written on the subject?

The first thing is not to give up too soon.

As an example, let’s look at one of my own websites, CoffeeDetective.com.

Yes, when I started doing my research I discovered that there were hundreds of other sites out the about coffee. (Starbucks anyone?)

I could have given up at that point and moved on to another topic.

Instead, I dug a little deeper. For sure, I couldn’t compete on the word “coffee”.

But I soon found that there were a few phrases people used in searches which were not being well addressed by existing coffee sites.

Here are a four of them:

- how to make coffee
- best coffee makers
- coffee benefits
- how to measure coffee

I identified maybe ten different phrases that were being typed into Google quite frequently, but for which there weren’t a lot of quality site pages.

I couldn’t compete on “coffee” with the big players, but I could attract traffic with other, related phrases.

Here’s the next thing...

I thought about those phrases and asked myself, “What kind of coffee lover asks these kinds of questions?”  The answer was, and is, beginners.

Ah ha, I thought. I went back over the quality coffee sites and found that pretty much all of them were addressed to people who already knew what a single origin coffee was and knew that the Swiss Water decaffeination system was.

But there wasn’t much out there for people who were just starting out on their gourmet coffee journey.

There weren’t any beginner sites for coffee lovers.

That is the gap I found. That’s why I stuck with that topic.

Do something similar. Whatever the topic you are exploring, you can be pretty sure that a lot of sites already address it. Most of the one and two word search phases will already have stiff competition.

Dig deeper. Dig sideways.

Keep digging until you find search phrases for which there isn’t too much competition.

Make a list and figure out what that list is trying to tell you.

There won’t always be a gap to fill. You may have to try another topic. But don’t give up too soon.

More about How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites...

Someone else asked me whether the affiliate income from my websites is higher than my Pay Per Click advertising costs.

Another good question, because I know that a lot of people have tried creating websites, paying for traffic through PPC advertising and then hoping to make enough in affiliate commissions to make a profit.

That’s not what I do, and not what I teach in my program, How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites.

I don’t do any PPC advertising. In fact, I don’t pay for my site traffic at all.

The whole point of this model is that you write a website that will attract organic search traffic.

You don’t pay money to get traffic. You invest sweat equity instead. That is to say, you spend the time necessary to build up a body of excellent, useful and relevant content.

That’s it. That’s what I do and that’s what my program is all about.

Spend time, not money. And then keep all the money you do make through affiliate relationships and/or contextual advertising.

Someone asked me to suggest some profitable topics for a website.

Good question and a tricky one.

If you are going to try writing your own money-making website, the choice of your theme or topic is going to have a big impact on your level of success.

There are a number of factors to consider:

-  Is this a topic you feel you can write a hundred pages about, with genuine enthusiasm? (If not, then you’re going to struggle, and make yourself miserable.)

-  Is this a topic that is going to fill a gap in the marketplace, where there is sufficient demand for your subject, but not too much in the way of existing, quality information? (If there is no gap, you’ll be struggling to get on page one of the major search engines, and that’s where you want to be.)

-  If you do get plenty of free search engine traffic, can you translate the attention of your visitors into dollars or pounds or euros or yen?

Let’s look at that third factor.

Some topics, if you can get the traffic, have the potential to earn you more money than others.

For instance, if your website is related to insurance, then you might earn a dollar a click on the Google Adsense ads you place on your content pages. (Insurance companies will pay generously for leads.)

Pretty nice.

The problem is, tens of thousands of other marketers already know this, which means it is all but impossible to get on page one on Google for two or three word phrases that include the word insurance.

OK, so if the competition is too tough for insurance as a topic, how about a website about headphones?

There is a lot less competition there, but your Adsense ads will probably earn you only a few cents a click. You’ll need a lot of traffic to turn that into a big monthly check.

These are just two examples. Also, using contextual ads isn’t the only way to make money from a website.

But choosing a topic or topic niche that will work well for you, and earn you money, takes some research.

Naturally, I cover this in a lot more depth in my program, How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites...

Don’t sell your prized possessions to make a few extra dollars. Use them as a theme for a website and make a LOT of extra dollars.

I was just reading an article about how some people are selling their most prized possessions just to make ends meet.

One person sold his vintage muscle car, someone else sold a collection of violins and another person sold his autograph collection.

A comment under the article made the point that these are all just “things”. But our most prized “things” have deep meaning for us.

I couldn’t help imagining these people taking an alternative course, writing a website about muscle cars, a website about musical instruments and a website about collecting autographs.

It would be ridiculous for me to try to reach these people, and absurd for me to think that everyone would jump at the idea of building their own money-making website.

But when people talk about their prized possessions, passions and hobbies I immediately think in terms of how great those would be as topics for websites.

Don’t sell the things you love...use that passion and knowledge to create a site that makes you enough money to keep those things, and buy more of them.

More about my How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites program...

Being on Twitter while launching a new product is a wonderful thing.

I have a confession to make. When I first started using Twitter I did so in the knowledge that it might come in handy to have the ears and eyes of a few extra people when I launched my program, How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites.

In other words, my original purpose on Twitter was simply to build a list of followers, catch their attention and let them know when I launched my program.

I have done exactly that, although I don’t know how many extra sales might have resulted from my involvement on Twitter.

However, I have discovered a few things along the way:

- Being active on Twitter has been a wonderful way for me to get back on touch with a lot of colleagues from way back, and meet a lot of new people too.

- I learn something new every day from the people I follow on Twitter.

- Being on Twitter transformed the “product launch” experience.

Let me expand on that last point.

From the day my program was launched, I started receiving Tweets from people who decided to buy it. Then I would hear from people who had just received their package in the mail. Then I began hearing from people who had dug in and got started.

For me, that is a wonderful feeling.

Usually when I write and publish something, I might receive the occasional email about it. But with this program I feel myself a whole lot closer to the people who buy it, simply because of the immediacy of Twitter.

Because I am accessible, right now, people can send me a Tweet about the decision to buy the program or even ask me questions when they get started on it.

Of course, this kind of immediacy and transparency wouldn’t work quite so well if I were fooling people into buying a third-rate product. But I am happy with what I wrote and am loving the fact that I hear from people who purchased it.

So while my original intention with Twitter was completely self-serving, my actual experience has been a whole lot richer and more rewarding than I ever anticipated.

Wow...the first week’s sales of “How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites” are way over what we predicted.

Well, that’s good. It’s nice, because I spent a huge amount of time researching and writing this program. All 65,000 words of it. It would have been disappointing if nobody wanted a copy.

Why is it selling so well at a time of deep recession?

In a way, I think the recession is helping with the sales.

People are fed up with entrusting their future to their employers and Wall Street.

People no longer trust their employers to keep them in work. And they certainly don’t trust Wall Street to take good care of their retirement investments.

Another way of looking at it is to recognize that people like the idea of taking control of their own income and future. Being able to create a micro-business of their own, which will reliably make money, is becoming increasingly attractive.

And yes, writing a money-making website is a micro-business. It is something you can do part-time, using your home computer, but it can also become a significant source of income outside of your regular work.

Ideally, one or money websites of your own will eventually replace the need to actually “go to work”. Or, if you get the timing right, your website income can hit the exact level you need for when you retire.

One way or another, I think the program is selling well simply because so many people are fed up with entrusting their future to companies and organizations which simply can’t be trusted.

Learn more and buy your own copy of How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites here...