Through the plethora of online “money making programs” out there, how do you know which one to chose, or if any of them are truly legit?
It seems as though every day there is a new program popping out of the woodwork with some internet guru claiming they know the secret formula that will finally make you millions. It can be quite frustrating when starting out to know what exactly is the “secret formula” that will work for you.
Well I can tell you quite honestly, there is no secret.
Not really, anyway. There’s no magical program or button you can push that will make you millions. There’s no “loop hole” in the system, either. It’s going to take time, hard work and persistence, but if you start small and work your way up, you can achieve success over time.
Many starter programs and products teach something called affiliate marketing, it is the most common way to teach beginners how to make money online because it is a proven method that works (if you do it right) and it’s fairly straightforward.
There are good ways and bad ways of doing it, though.
A strategy many training programs and gurus teach is to build several little one pager micro-niche websites. They say you’ll only have to spend a couple of hours at most making the site, then it’ll rank in Google and sit there and earn you money on auto-pilot.
There’s a definite flaw in this system, however, and that is that most of the time, it will no.t work with today’s search engines
Even with proper keyword research, it is quite difficult, especially after all the latest updates of Google (Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird) to get a site with very little content to rank well in the organic search results.
That is, unless you go the way of PPC, (pay per click) and start paying for traffic. However, that usually takes experience to really get it right–lots of beginners lose BIG money trying to start out with PPC. I personally wouldn’t recommend starting out with that method if you don’t want to risk losing out on a lot of money!
Let me show you some examples from my personal websites…
Website #1
This is the Google Analytics report from a website I created sometime back in July. It was an EMD (Exact Match Domain) I made for purely experimental purposes. It was what I would call an extremely “good” keyword – over 5,000 monthly searches and QSR of 73 (that means there was virtually no competition within the search engines). Theoretically, I should have no issues ranking for that keyword.
I probably spent around 2-3 hours putting it together – did some research, wrote a few pages of content, set up authorship, and sat back to watch what happened.
Well, guess what? With no further invested effort, basically NOTHING happened. As you can see, I received a mere 15 visits over the course of the several months it has been up and running–that’s basically nothing.
Remember, a lot of programs will try to tell you it’s possible to spend a couple of hours on a website and have it magically rank and consistently earn you money – well it is clearly not always the case!
Website #2
Now, here’s another exact match domain style website I created back at the end of August. Again, I used a very “good” keyword in the domain- even better than the previous one. This website, however, I have invested much more time in than the previous example.
I worked consistently for weeks and kept putting up new content, but as you can see it still isn’t really getting much traffic at all – only 87 visits over the course of a few months!
Despite the lack of traffic, I do plan to keep cranking out new content for the website. Why? Because (as you’ll see down below) when you have patience and persistence, your efforts will pay off in the long run.
A website will take more than a few hours of work to produce the results you want!
You can’t expect to just spend a couple of hours slapping together a website and expect it to earn you money! Even in my second example above, I’ve spent weeks putting together the site and after a few months it still isn’t getting traffic.
Let’s take a look at some traffic statistics from my sites I actually have invested A LOT of time and energy into
Website #3
From February 2013, (the time I created the site) to May 2013 (the time the traffic starts picking up) I was consistently creating new content on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. As you can see, it took a good three entire months of consistent work before it started to pick up!
(The rises and dips in traffic are due to the seasonal demands of the particular niche).
But this site has gotten quite a bit of traffic over time, much of which turned into customers (meaning sales) and continues to do well to this day.
Website #4
Here’s a website I created 5 months ago, in June 2013. I spent a lot of time on it, consistently adding content on a daily or at least weekly basis. The result? After four long months of such efforts, the traffic and sales finally started to pour in.
It takes an average of 3-4 MONTHS when starting out before you can expect traffic to start pouring in
…and that’s with consistent effort.
Now, I realize not every case will be the same. It’s dependent upon many, many factors as to how well you will rank. Some websites might take a lot LESS time to rank, others may take more, but I can tell you something I’ve learned….
When you go the route of organic search – you will win some, and you will lose some
The thing I’ve experienced with keywords is they are always a gamble. The majority of the time, if you know how to do proper keyword research and write decent content, you WILL rank for that keyword – but sometimes you just don’t, or you will have to wait a very long time for your website to gain some authority to rank better.
That’s why it’s really important you don’t build an entire website or campaign around ONE keyword. It’s the cumulative effort of all your content and keywords that will help rank your site and gain traffic, and that is what will lead towards your success.
So don’t fall for an easy solution – you’re going to need to put a lot of work into building a website. Remember, your website is your BUSINESS – it takes time to build up success.
Want to start your own website, for free?
Any questions or comments? Drop them down below. 🙂
Wendy
Leave a Reply