I am one of those people who want to really make money online, and don’t really care what it takes – many people see that it is not enough to make money from home, but at the same time you should be able to make it easier then in a real work. I’ll have to break it to you right from the start: you are going to have to work more than you would at a regular job, but in the end the income is limitless – limited to the amount of work you are willing to put in.
I see people ever day who are asking questions like “how much work is it going to take” and “what do you need to do to achieve this” and also “I don’t want to work for nothing – I want you to tell me what keywords I should target, and what is the amount of competition I should go for with my sites.”
The only way to make money from home, is to work for it
See the thing is that not many people will do the work for you – only your mother and maybe your wife to some extent, but to be honest they are both going to quit trying to make money online before they see income. There are great tutorials that are going to tell you how to estimate the competition but in the end it is going to come to the point where you will have to do the work – can you stand the challenge?
I answer quite a lot of e-mails on a daily basis – well definitely not anything near to the amount that the real famous MMOers do but more than I would expect – and usually the questions are related to issues that I see as an obvious issue.
Making money from home with micro websites is something that is quite common, but in the end people are not going to work enough to make an income from it. One of the obvious issues that I get asked quite commonly is the way that I build my support sites, and to be really really honest with you, most of the people who are building websites at all are doing it initially wrong – not very wrong, but too wrong for them to be able to match the competition if they only build a few support sites with short posts and zero backlinks – these don’t count because the sites are quite unlike to ever get indexed.
First of all the keyword research is wrong – they are spending their time looking only at the PR of the competition when they should be paying attention to the amount of competiiton, the PR of the competition, the quality of the competition and the backlinks of the competition. PR simply does not mean anything when it comes to ranking on the search engines, and I might soon give your real life examples of this with one or two of my niche sites – this is not going to disturb me in making money from home because these keywords are going to be worthless, or you are simply not going to have the effort in you to target them.
A very common way to estimate competition when building websites that you want to search engine optimize to the top of the SERPS is to use the Google Keyword tools to find keywords that you are going to target. Usually people are using the exact search value that they are going to multiply with the CPC and then expect that they rank #1 for it. When you are #1 you can estimate that you are going to make an amount of money that is comparable to 40% of the searchers to click to your website, and then 5% of them to click the ads. So that is going to make us believe that the amount of money that can be made each month, from home with a #1 ranking micro website is 0.02*monthly search*CPC.
There is a keyword that is supposed to give you roughly 26 000 searches a month for the exact search and the competition is shitty websites which have a handful of backlinks with the correct anchors, and the CPC is almost $6,5. I found this keyword last spring when I built a website around it. When I ranked on page 1 I still waited for the traffic. To be honest all the three visitors that find my site each week, must be other internet marketers that are evaluating the competition, because at no point this site made me ANY money.
How do I evaluate the competition when building micro websites
When I am building those smalle micro websites I am really trying to find low competition keywords – preferrably no competition. How do I do it?
First of all the External Keyword Tool is not going to help you at all. It is going to give you estimates that are too high, too low, and the CPC is going to be way off. Do you want an example? Try doing a google search for this keyword. and take a look at the External Keyword Tool to estimate the money that you can make with it. With this example I should be making roughly $3400 a month with this single website – heck that is the same amount of money that Griz at some point stated to be making with MMOFB. Sounds too good to be true? Well it is.
The problem is that the External Keyword Tool is not going to only give you too high estimates, but at the same time it is going to give you too low estimates. What good does it really do for you? Not much. The day I realized this, I started using the Search Based tool to do my research when trying to make money from home.
What I soon noticed was that neither one of these tools gave me accurate estimates to any extent. I have websites that are pulling 1000 visitors per month from keywords that have 600 searches a month in the Search Based tool and 1000 searches a month in the External Tool. If you take a look at the example here, you won’t even find it in the search tool, even if it has 26 000 searches a month based on the plural and singular of the keyword in external tool.. This confused me and at this point I realized that I should not really trust on anything else but my gut.
The very first thing that you should do is to think about the keyword – is anyone going to use it in a search? REALLY? The money making example that is supposedly going to make you rich working from home, is a keyword that no-one is going to use. Our very primary instincts are the ones that you should trust – most of us start an MMO website in the beginning because “Make money from home” is a keyword that we think people use in the search engines. You are right about this one because you used it to find the websites that made y0u start your online venture in the first place. The problem with this is the competition – even if they don’t necessarily have the PR they have the backlinks, the authority, the domain age and the content to outrank you for a long time.
When I say long time, I mean forever. As you are building your website, so are they and you are never going to catch them. If you want to make money from home you are going to have to do it with micro websites at first. These sites don’t have competition, they also don’t have a lot of searches, but if you make a lot of them you can make a nice income from home.
How to make money from home with micro websites
I am currently at the point where I am building websites that are not going to make me rich on their own, but if I make a thousand of them I can quit my day job. A thousand? That sounds like a lot of work – maybe I should outsource it? The fact is that 99.9% of the articles – the content – that I build on my sites comes from my keyboard. That 0.1% I outsource because it is going to be based on keywords that are simply too difficult for me to produce high quality content from, and it would take me too long time to do the research. At some point I will have to write about it, but for now I am focusing on building a lot of websites, and this is not going to hold me from making money from home.
When I evaluate the competition I go through a list of things, but based on my current experiences these don’t always apply. Sometimes I rank #2 off the bat, and sometimes #12, but even so here goes.
- Check out the amount of competition for the keyword. If you want to make money from home you will need to know how many other people are trying to achieve the same goals with the same keywords that you are using. I use 50 000 of competing sites as a limit, but sometimes I do go for keywords that have more competition, or sometimes I won’t go for them even if they have 50 000 competitors, and that is based on the other princples.
- Look at the search amount of that micro niche. When I try to make money from home with a website, I want the keyword to have a decent amount of searches to avoid building sites that rank #1 but have no visitors. You must remember though that the tools give you inaccurate estimates, and you are going to build a lot of websites with next to none searches even if they look like they will make you rich.
- Take a look at the CPC of the keyword. This again is an estimate, and it is not going to give you a good idea about the CPC but heck you will have to have some basis to target a keyword for a website. I have websites based on keyword that show $1,00 CPC and they give me roughly $1.00 per click, and I have websites that have $5.00 CPC and give me $7.00, but also I have sites that give me $0.10 when the CPC is supposedly over $5.00. If you look at a long tail version of a keyword that shows to have a $0.05 CPC and the base keyword – the short tail – has $10.00, you are likely to score money everywhere in between these numbers.
- Look at the backlinks of your competition. If your competition has your keyword in the majority of their backlink anchors then you should not even bother – they are targeting it and if you want to make quick money from home with micro websites, you should not really target keywords with competition. If they have non-targeted backlinks then it is time to go for it. The best tool to make this investigation is Linkdiagnosis.
- Find an exact URL domain. I know people are using free blogs to make money online, but these guys have a lot of great websites behind them, and if you are starting at this game, then you are going to have to wait a few years to really do this. This is the harsh truth – today you will have to spend a little money to be able to make money from home. This is thanks to the spammers that created a lot of websites on the free hosts and raked in a lot of money a few years back. Today it is quality that ranks. If you can’t find the exact .com url, go for the .net and if that is not available, then the .org and if not then .biz. You can also use the local domains (.co.uk and so on). .info does not rank well without backlinks. If you can’t find the exact url then you should really think twice whether you should target the keyword at all this way. ** UPDATE ** Based on my recent experiments .biz is not that much different from .info when it comes to instant rankings – With backlinks this should all be taken care of though.
You are going to have to be able to build sites in bulk to actually learn this game – you won’t learn anything before you start producing these sites on a daily basis. Reading this post is going to give you a nice idea on what you should do, but in the end it is about learning to target keywords that produce money with your style of writing – some of use can write people to click ads on certain keywords, and some of us can’t. If you really want to make money from home with micro websites you will have to understand that they priority is in building the sites, not in finding out how to build them. If you have not built the one hundred, two hundred or thousand sites, you won’t make the money.The learning curve is something that each one of us need to go through!
Static HTML vs. WordPress
It is not too long ago when I read a comment on an MMO blog that was basically claiming that WordPress is superior to any other way of building a website and that it was something that G appreciated and ranked high in the result pages. I don’t think that this comment was thought through but anyways it made me think a little bit about the way the search engines look at websites and also at my goals and little bit my future also.
See my goal : build a sufficent amount of websites that is going to produce an low maintenance income working from home. This is going to involve a lot of micro websies and also a lot of bigger websites that at some point will make me enough money so that I can live where I want to live, travel as much as I want to and work when I want to work – or not if I don’t want to.
This goal is quite general but until a few weeks back I did not really understand how many websites it would require. People are saying that you will have to build a lot o websites but based on my experinces most people need to see numbers to understand the proprtions.
When I select a keyword I select it on a basis that I expect it to make the value of the domain registration for each year, every month. This means that I would make 11 times the amount of money invested on the site – I don’t count hosting. If the value of the domain is $10 I want the site to make at least that amount of money each month – sometimes I make more, sometimes less. For me a nice full time income would be $3000, and for $10/month that would mean 300 sites. The biggest problem with making money from home with micro websites is that a big number of those sites are not going to make you that money. So I would rather estimate that I need 500 sites to make $3000 each month.
When I build these sites I aim to post 3-4 high quality informative posts on the subject – these micro websites are not supposed to look like they are made for making money, but instead they are meant to provide the information, and at the same time I have chosen to display some ads there – “to cover the hosting” or some shit. That is going to be 1500-2000 good informative posts that have each at least 400 words (usually 400-600, sometimes even more). If you are thinking about outsourcing, you are most likely going to use all your savings – the only real way to make money with this is to write all this yourself. When you make that $3000/month then use that money to outsource for articles and you should be soon looking at even a greater income – as long as you keep working yourself at the same time.
I can build a website in a little more than an hour, an hour and a half, and I do make them static HTML websites. This is because when I am thinking about my future in internet marketing I think about WordPress and my past. I have updated my blogs quite a lot, because WordPress constantly finds some security breaches and needs to be updated to patch these holes. If I want to make decent money working from home, I am possibly looking at 1000 micro websites at some point, and a few hundred bigger sites – if these are all WordPress blogs that need an update every three months, and all in one SEO pack needs an update about three times a year, I am looking at about 1200 websites to update every three months. I don’t need to do the math to realize that this is something I don’t want to do. For this reason I am currently basing all my micro niche websites on static HTML to avoid this. I won’t need to update the sites, the plugins and I don’t have to worry about someone cracking my wordpress password and hacking my site when I am not looking – it happens quite frequently even if you don’t believe it.
“But Phil!!! Building HTML sites needs a few years of education on website design and you need to master CSS and PHP and other shit!” To be honest, I don’t know shit about HTML and I don’t know shit about CSS. What I do know is to use a HTML color code palettes, and I know how to use the Google to find out what I need to know. Basically what I know about HTML is the <a> tags , <H1> and <H2> tags, and the <p> tag…. To be honest, that is pretty much what you need to make money from home with micro websites.
You can easily find HTML templates that are simple and ugly, using the search engines. What you need to do is to simply delete all the code that you don’t need – you don’t need anything else than a place where you can add your navigation and your posts. Strip the code, add H1 tags to the title of your page, H2 tags to the title of your post and use <a href> to link each page on your micro website, to each one of the pages on your micro website. Also you might want to link the titles of the posts to the main page and also use a link in each post with the keyword you are targeting as anchor, to point to the main page of your site. To start with, your micro niche website is going to have four or five pages – this includes the privacy policy that you are going to need – and that is merely a copy+paste work to get these pages done after the first one. If you chose a CSS template, you can easily use the CSS file to change the colors of the site for the following site, but in most cases this is not going to be needed. You won’t need a database to make a HTML site work, all you need is to upload the files to public_html – backuping this is simple as hell. Just build the site offline in its own directory, then .zip the files and save it as backup and you are done. No need to install a database backup plugin that needs to be updated every now and then a few weeks after WordPress needs an update.
The benefits of WordPress are the obvious. Doing a fantastico install is simple – it is not any faster than uploading your HTML to your hosting account using FileZilla, but it is simple. Adding more content is simple like it is with any CMS – it will build all the links on the old pages also – but when you are only building 4 posts who gives a shit? You can easily build nice looking websites with wordpress, but to be honest, nice looking websites never made anyone any money. Ugly websites, and a lot of them, have made a lot of internet marketers rich working from home.
WordPress works great on websites like this where I plan to add a lot of content during a long period of time. This is not one of the sites that I plan to make money out from, but instead this is website that I plan to write my methods down, and clear my plans to myself, and at the same time to people reading this blog – most of the people reading this are not going to have the motivation to try this out anyways so I am no feeling threatened by them as competition.
On page SEO is simple these days as the keyword density means less and less, and all you need to do is the get the H1 and H2 tags in the correct place – H1 on your webpage title that has to contain your keyword and H2 on the post title that has to contain your keyword. A major thing is to get the exact domain – this is going to make things a lot easier. After this it is going to be about your backlinks and nothing else. But if you are making money from home with micro niche websites that have no competition, the H tags and the domain name should be enough at first and you are not going to have to build a lot of backlinks in the future either.
To shorten things out for people who read this far the most important thing is to learn how to evaluate the competiton – this can only be learnt by building the sites and seeing how they rank, and analyzing the competition and the sites that you built. You need to get the exact domain name – if you can’t get it because it is parked by someone like SEDO, then you need to think if the keyword is worth to give a try with a different keyword, this is something that you will learn by doing. Only target buying keywords if you are a beginner. You can make money from home targeting informational keywords but you are going to need a lot of traffic and you are going to need a lot of marketing skills to be able to sell stuff to these people – don’t bother. You need to target products, services, and stuff that people use on a regular places. Find desperate people and build websites around solutions to their problems – sell them products as solutions. Choose the correct form of monetization – I don’t like to focus on a single form of monetization, because I constantly find potential keywords that simply don’t have ads for Adsense, or products at Amazon or eBay, so I only need to find a way to monetize and I can build the site. If I can’t find any way to monetize it, I will forget that keyword for a while.
Making money from home with micro websites is going to include a lot of work, but at the same time it can be one of the fastest ways to make money online. You can really see an income after the first two weeks you start to build the sites, and you can make a full time income in a few months. This though is going to require a lot of work, and if you want to build a hundred sites a month, then you will have to prepare to be writing and researching five to six hours a day, every day. I never said it was going to be an easy way to make money online, but to be honest, there are no such ways.
