nick usborne's blog

Are visitors to your money-making website close to making a purchase?

When you write your own money-making website, there are a few elements in play.

You need to write some great content, whatever your topic.

You need to attract as many visitors to your site as you can.

And, to make money, you need your visitors to be close to making a purchase.

Let me explain.

Let’s say I want to buy a new digital camera and you have created a site on that topic.

I might do a search for the phrase “digital camera guide”.

What does that say about me? It says I’m looking for information. It says I probably won’t buy a digital camera today. I’m still looking and learning. For now, I’m just window-shopping.

But if I do a search for “Canon PowerShot SD1100IS 8MP Digital Camera”, you would probably be right in thinking that I am very close to making the purchase. If you have a page on that specific model, you would do well to have an affiliate link on that page.

Think about this is as you structure your site and create your pages.

Ask yourself how close your reader might be to actually making a purchase as they read each of your pages.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t write high-value information pages, such as a broad guide to digital cameras. Pages like that add a lot of perceived value to your site and can attract some strong inbound links.

But if you want to make money through affiliate programs be sure that a good proportion of your pages are there to serve the needs of people who are very close to making a purchase decision.

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

Medicare will run out of money in 2017. That’s why I do what I do...

Here’s a sobering quote from the New York Times, May 13, 2009:

“The Medicare fund that pays hospital bills for older Americans is expected to run out of money in 2017, two years sooner than projected last year. The Social Security trust fund will be exhausted in 2037, four years earlier than predicted, it said.”

Scary enough?

Put simply, within a few years, we’ll be responsible for taking care of our own medical and retirement plans. The government won’t have the money to take care of us.

We have paid our taxes, but the money won’t be there when we need it.

That’s why I have always worked to be independent. That’s why I’m a freelancer.

And that’s why I write my own money-making websites.

I may not be able to depend on the government, but I can depend on my own websites.

My CoffeeDetective.com site already generates an average of $4,000 a month in revenues.

This is my personal retirement and health plan. I have that website and I am writing others. By the time I retire I’ll have enough passive revenue coming in each month to take care of my bills, my medical expenses and more.

Above all, I’ll relish my independence and peace of mind. Whether the government sorts this mess out or not won’t bother me, because I’ll be taking care of my own income needs.

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

The first 30 days of any money-making website are the hardest.

In my last post I talked about how I sometimes get close to running out of steam when working on websites of mine that have been around for a few years.

In this post I look at the problem in reverse - how do you keep the faith during the first 30 days of any new money-making website?

Believe me, this can be harder than you think.

You have invested a ton of time and energy in choosing the topic for your website. You have written and uploaded the first batch of pages. You have done everything you can think of to get the search engines to think highly of your site and start sending traffic.

And then you wait, and you wait and you wait.

Believe me, that period of waiting can be very discouraging.

Here is an example.

I recently identified what I believe to be an information gap and started writing a new website.

Here is the timeline so far:

Went online with first 15 pages- Apr 24th

Indexed by Google - Apr 28th

Indexed by Yahoo! - Apr 28th

First visitor from search engines: Yahoo! - May 2nd

First visitor from Google - May 11th

Total visitors from search engines so far (May 12th) - 13

Three weeks after the site went live, and I have just 13 search engine visitors to show for it.

I have found this to be immensely frustrating. I have done this before, know what I’m doing and expected to get more traffic by now. Remember, with this model the idea is not to pay for traffic, it’s to get free, organic traffic from the search engines.

In spite of my frustrations, if I look at that short timeline objectively, I’m doing just fine. I really am. I just have to keep adding new pages and get more inbound links to the site.

I really shouldn’t have felt frustrated at all. The timeline is fine. But in reality I was getting quite upset! I hate going whole days without a single visit from the search engines, even within the first two or three weeks of a new site.

While my level of impatience was growing over the last few days, I thought of all the people who are doing this for the first time.

Yes, it’s easy to lose heart. It’s very easy to throw up your hands and just give up.

Don’t give up. Keep the faith. Like me you’ll be able to look back at some point and laugh at the frustration you felt over the first few weeks.

Just keep adding those pages, keep developing those inbound links...and the traffic will come.

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

In the face of get-rich-quick, I sometimes lose faith in my get-rich-slowly approach. Almost.

My new program, How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites, has been selling pretty well since its launch a couple of months back. Actually, I have been really pleased. It has been selling better than I had ever expected.

But sometimes I have this small, nagging doubt.

People ask me how quickly they can start making money with their own sites. Not just $50 a month, but $500 or maybe $2,000. More specifically, they ask me how long it took me to make a reasonable amount of money each month with my own hobby site, CoffeeDetective.com.

Well, in the early days of the site I didn’t keep very good records. I wasn’t expecting too much from the site. But I do have a note that I made about $500 during the ninth month.

Now, three years later, that one site makes over $4,000 a month, on average.

But when I am asked that question it troubles me a bit.

I know that people want me to say that they can be making thousands of dollars within 30 days of launching their site.

I don’t much like telling people that it will take them about 9 months before they see an income that’s really going to make a difference to their lives. I know people want the process to work faster.

But what I say to people is the truth. This really is a get-rich-slowly-but-surely approach.

If I had found a get-rich-quick process that actually worked, and worked for anyone and everyone, I would be using it and writing about it.

There are even days when I feel a little bored with my site and wonder if I should keep working on it or not. And then a voice whispers in my ear, “Dude, this one website about coffee is making you about $50,000 a year in passive income. Don’t even THINK about abandoning it.”

Good point. You have to be pretty rich to say no to an extra $50,000 a year.

But yes, it takes time to get there.

When writing your money-making website, don’t forget to watch for seasonal keywords.

When we first start writing our websites, we all pay close attention to the principal keywords we choose for our home page, second-level pages and every other page.

That first group of keywords we select and use becomes the foundation of our website.

So hopefully you have chosen keywords which are used frequently by searchers (high demand), but for which there is a limited supply of quality web pages out there (low supply).

But if you have been working on your site for a few months by now, you’ll probably have recognized that the time of year will impact the number of people searching for your principal keywords.

For instance, with anything to do with consumer electronics you can bet you’ll see a big upswing in traffic in December each year, with a corresponding drop by the middle of January.

If you are writing about coffee you’ll discover that people drink less coffee in the summer than they do in the winter.

If you are writing about gardening, you’ll notice a big surge in traffic when winter gives way to spring.

And so on.

As soon as you become aware of the shifts in seasonal demand for the products or services you are writing about, you can make adjustments by identifying keywords and phrases that might appeal to people at a non-peak time of year.

For instance, on my coffee site I just wrote a page with cold coffee drinks recipes. I want to keep the traffic flowing to my site, even at a time of year when people are drinking less hot coffee.

Or it may be that there are subjects within your main topic that allow you to take advantage of the changes in the seasons.

For instance, if you write about food and cooking, now might be a good time to create some new pages about salads and BBQs.

Just be aware of the shifts that come with the seasons, and search for new keywords and phrases that will best match the time of year.

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