There are a billion websites about making money on the internet, and I think almost all are gimmicky. The formula will always be to build real traffic, and to do that you need a good website that provides good content or resources that will attract and keep people coming to your website. Making your website easy to use is just as important.
There is no easy way to do that, using the spammy "get more traffic" gimmicks won't do that for you. It will take actual work.
Picking a niche subject to base your website about can help, but it is hard to start a website from scratch. If you are lucky and pick a niche that doesn't already have a popular website, things might be a bit easier for you. You still have to provide good content and resources.
If your website already has top tier competition, try to find things those websites lack and focus your work towards that.
For instance, steelsoldiers.com is the defacto when it comes to former military vehicles. Huge following, lots of traffic and lots of repeat visitors. Though this site rules the fmv land, there is quite a lot of lacking qualities.
The biggest is the almost non existent updates from the admins. There are broken things on that site that have been broken for years. Another turnoff, silly rules and "cliques" that hammer newbies.
Post a question and you will be bombarded by annoyed long time members, telling you search for it and do your own work. That would be fine in dandy if the search was actually good and all the "old" posts links to the site itself weren't dead. The holier-than-thou attitude is a big turnoff.
I created FMVowners.com and am basing the strong points of the site to the weak points of steelsoldiers.com. It will be regularly updated, problems will be fixed promptly, new resources will be added when called for, etc.
I also own RamchargerCentral.Com and pride myself on how that site is run, no silly rules, no bashing, no giving new people a hard time. That is how all of my websites will be run.
There will be no silly rules, all in all it will be an easy to use no hassle website. I have also added a technical manual download area (steelsoldiers was broken for years) as well as a NSN part number database, where users can look up parts and get the NSN and part numbers.
Now comes the hard part, get traffic. It has started to pick up, and hopefully it will keep up. Right now there is no advertising, no way to make money off of the site, so this may have been a bad example for this article :)
Now on to making money. Google Adsense is the best way I have found. Get it and use it. Affiliate programs are good to, but it is a pain to register with the thousands of affiliate programs and stay up to date with them. I have found a better solution, VigLink.
VigLink is a Google invested company that finds links to companies they are affiliated with and dynamically changes those links to affiliated links.
This works great with forums, if a user posts a link to Amazon.com, it gets changed to an affiliate link so when someone clicks that link and buys something in the next 30 days (or whatever the time frame is for their affiliate program is) you get credit for it and receive a percentage.
These are both great and easy ways to make money from your website. I would love to hear of ways or success stories you may have about your own website. I am always open for ideas :)
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