6 Steps to a Profitable Website

1. Find a money maker
You may be surprised by this, but: you need to know what you are going to be selling before you do anything else. The only exception to this rule may be if you are planning to monetize your website using Adsense, in which case you can choose from many niches. But, in the case of an affiliate product, you don’t choose the niche and the product afterward. You choose the product first and the niche implicitly.

2. Decide the type of website you are going to build
Here, you have 2 basic options: you can build a small niche site centered around the particular product, or build a large website that is going to attract a lot of search engine traffic. In order to find about the advantages or disadvantages of each method, read the article “Small Niche Site vs Large Authority Site”

3. Keyword Research
This is where 90% of the people get it all wrong. They don’t realize the importance of keyword research. Keyword research is the foundation of all your future work. If you don’t get this right, you are doomed from the get go. You are not going to get targeted visitors and you are probably not going to get search engine traffic at all. And although there are a lot of people who quickly dismiss search engine traffic under the pretense that they don’t want to depend on Google, it is the best kind of traffic you could ever get. People who dismiss it do so simply because they have no idea how to get it. How to do keyword research can be the subject of a small book, I could write on and on about it. I consider the best tools for this task to be Google’s tool and Keyword Discovery.

4. Content creation
You should now start creating your content around the keywords that you have chosen. If you want to build a small niche site, content creation will not be very difficult. However, if you plan on building a large site, it may take a while. You can outsource it if you like, but make sure that you always have unique content on your website. For a website that’s going to make you money, unique content is always the best bet.

5. On page Search Engine Optimization
Of course, I will not include tasks like uploading the website to your server in this small guide, these are self implied. Proper on page search engine optimization includes the following tasks:
- proper use of title tags;
- proper use of meta description tags;
- use of H1 and H2 headers;
- bold the main keywords on a page, but not more than a few times;
- using alt tags for images;
- designing a proper internal website structure.

6. Link building
Without targeted links, your business will never be productive. Read that again and remember it. Getting the right links to your website and in the right way is almost an art. Some people have more complex classifications, but I only split the links in two categories: crappy links and quality links. I define crappy links as being the links you get from article directories or social bookmarking sites, while quality links for me are in context links, from medium quality sites and up, anchored with my keyword, and with the keyword in the title tag of the page that’s linking to me. Again, I could write a whole book on the subject of link building.

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