Website Business Tips

A couple weeks ago I told you how to start from zero and have $100,000 in the bank 15 months later.

As proven in my example, all you really need to do is start a website that makes $86 per day to achieve this goal.

So, in this article, I’m going to show you how easy it is to make $86 per day with a website.

There are lots of ways to monetize a website (have it make money).

- You can put Google Adsense ads on your site and earn money when those ads are clicked.

- You can sell advertising directly to companies who want to reach your audience.

- You can sell your own physical products, services, ebooks, training guides, etc.

- You can promote other people’s products and services as an affiliate (and earn a commission on any sales you refer).

- You can generate leads for companies and earn money for each lead generated.

As you can see, there are literally hundreds of ways to make money from a website. The one’s I listed above are the most common.

There are really ony two things involved with making money online.  One is you must have traffic to your site. If nobody visits your site, you can’t make money. The other is getting those visitors to do something that earns you money (such as the things I listed above).

To make it easier, all you need are visitors and visitor value.

A visitor value is basically just an average amount of money each visitor to your website generates for you. To calculate a visitor value, you simply take the total income your website makes per day and divide it by how many visitors you received.

If you site makes $10 per day and you get 200 visitors per day, you have a visitor value of $0.05.  Each person that views your website is worth $0.05 to you in this example.

Your exact visitor value will vary based on which topic your website is about. Websites in competitive markets can have visitor values in the $1.00 range or more.  Smaller, hobby type websites can typically see visitor values of about $0.20.

When you are trying to make money from your website, it’s important to test various revenue generating ideas and then look at your average visitor value while these tests where running.

For example, if you have google adsense ads on your website and you generate $8 from 200 visitors, your visitor value that day is $0.04.

The next week, maybe you text promoting a product as an affiliate instead of using adsense. During this test you get 200 visitors to your site again, but this time you make an affiliate commission of $19 because you sold one product.

Your visitor value that week is $0.09. Using common sense, making nine cents per visitor is more than four cents per visitor, so you decide to keep the affiliate promotion on your website and you dump the adsense ads. The next week you test something else and see if you can beat your previous visitor value test.

If you sell your own products and you sell one product at $40 for every 100 visitors to your site, your visitor value would be $0.40. (one sale per 100 visitors is pretty typical for a website by the way)

Anyway, getting back to the $86 per day…

If you have been testing various revenue generating methods, you should be able to get your visitor value up to around $0.40 per visitor.  When you get to that point, it then just comes down to a numbers game.  If each visitor is worth $0.40, then you just need 215 visitors per day and you will make $86. This doesn’t take into consideration the cost of getting these visitors to your site however.  Unless the visitors are coming from free sources such as organic search engine rankings, articles you’ve submitted to directories, etc, then you are going to have to pay for this traffic.

That’s another good reason to always know your visitor value.

If you know that your visitor value is $0.40 per visitor, then technically you can spend up to $0.39 per visitor and still make a profit (although not much of one).

I typically use a budget of about 25-35% of my visitor value to buy traffic.  If my website’s visitor value is $0.40, I like to spend no more than $0.10 to $0.15 per visitor.

Going back to the example, let’s buy traffic from google adwords and spend $0.15 per click.

To reach our $86 per day goal, we would need to buy 344 clicks from google at $0.15 per click.

The Math:
344 clicks x $0.15 = $51.60 (cost for advertising in google)
344 clicks x $0.40 visitor value =  $137.60 (gross income made by the website)
$137.60 - $51.60 = $86.00 (profit per day we need to meet our goal)

As you can see, making money online is just a numbers game.

Don’t get overwhelmed and you’ll see just how easy it is to make a good living online.

How much money do you have in the bank right now? I read a sad statistic the other day that said the average US family has less than $3,500 in savings.

It just blew my mind!

How can a family work every single day at a job for 15 years and only have $3500 in the bank to show for it?

There are a few problems with our society. One is overspending and the other is people working for low wages.

My solution to this problem is, start an internet business.

I think everyone should start a web based business. They really aren’t that difficult to do. And, by starting a real company (an LLC can be formed for about $200), you can get some GREAT tax advantages and write offs for your new business.

When I was thinking about writing this article, I thought a magic number people would like to see in their bank account would be $100,000. Wouldn’t it be nice to see six figures sitting in your savings account?

Then I was thinking about the fastest way to get there. Here’s what I came up with…

- Start a website
- Run the website for 15 months
- Sell the website

The reason I chose this path is because it’s proven to be successful. I’ve followed this exact process myself several times and it works great.

Now, let me show you exactly how easy this is.

What I typically do is think of the end result that I want to achieve and work backwards.

So, if you want to have $100,000 in the bank 15 months from now, here’s what you need to do.

Multiply your desired amount of money by 2.60%. In our example, that’s $100,000 x 0.026 = $2,600

To have $100k in the bank 15 months from now, you need to make an average of $2,600 per month from your website (or $31,200 per year). That might sound like a difficult task, so let’s break that down again.

Divide the $31,200 per year by 365 days and you will find that you need to make just $85.48 per day with your website.

So, if you can make just $85.48 per day, you will have $100,000 in the bank after 15 months! That’s really not that hard to do.

Based on $85.48 in profit per day from your website, here’s how you will get to the $100,000.

$85.48 per day x 15 months comes out to $38,978 over the next 15 months. That’s how much money you will have made while running your website.

Then you sell your website for 2 times its annual profits (Annual profit of $31,200 as explained above x two = $62,400 - website sales price).

That’s all there is to it. After 15 months, the website will have generated $38,978 and you will have sold the website for $62,400 giving you a total of $101,378 in the bank.

See how easy it is?

The key is to break down the numbers so it’s not so overwhelming. Making $86 per day doesn’t sound nearly as hard as making $100,000 from your website.

If you write a blog or articles for your website, you’ve likely had some writer’s block at some point.

Coming up with new ideas or topics to write about can be hard sometimes. I however, have a little trick that I’ll share with you. I do this almost everyday and I’m never stuck on ideas (I typically have 30 things I want to write about each day, which is the opposite problem!)

The first thing I do, is I figure out what my reader wants. It doesn’t matter what I want to write. I write for people like you, so the only thing that matters is what the reader wants to learn.

To find out what your readers want, these are my top secret tips…

1. Go to forums in your niche market and look for common questions that get asked by the users. If you see people asking questions like “where can I find a 10 speed huffy bike with purple stripes?”, all you have to do is search google for whatever the readers are looking for. Then, you can write an article or blog post called “Top 3 places to find a 10 speed huffy with purple stripes”. Your readers will be amazed that you can read their minds, and you’ll have a follower for life!
2. Go to other blogs in your market and read the comments left by their readers. Often times readers will leave specific questions in comments to blog posts, and you can use these questions to come up with new topics for your website (as explained above).
3. Tie major events into an article or blog post. If the Super Bowl is on tv next week, then you can always weave that into something to write about. Maybe you saw the quarterback of one of the teams riding a 10 speed huffy bike with purple stripes? Maybe not that extreme, but you get the point…
4. Contact experts in your market and ask them to chat for a few minutes. This is something you should try to do anyway, but having these conversations with people in your market will bring up topics you never thought about. Maybe there is some new technology coming out or a new product that will help your market, etc.

When you find a couple of good topics to write about, just start writing. Don’t stop until you get all of your thoughts out of your head and on paper (or computer screen). You will notice while you are writing about a certain topic, other topics will pop into your head like magic. Jot those ideas down on a notepad so you can use them the next time you need ideas.

If you are still stumped, you’re probably making it harder than it is. Take a short break and come back to it later…

A very common question, especially from people new to internet marketing is “what business should I start” or “what niche market should I get into” or my favorite “what is the most profitable business topic”.

My answer…

There are NO bad markets! I know, that’s different from what most people will say, but hear me out…

It doesn’t matter if you want to start a business selling shoes online, become a freelance writer, or even give tattoo advice (yes, I made money online doing just that!).

Whatever you want to do, you CAN do it online and you CAN make money doing it. There are however, a few “guidelines” I follow when picking a business topic or niche market.

1. The bigger the market, the more money can be made. This is pretty obvious, but many people overlook the concept. Obviously there are more people who want to lose weight than there are people who want to teach their cat to do back flips. Don’t be scared of getting into big markets though. Just because that’s where the “big boys” (or girls) play doesn’t mean there isn’t room for you to come in and get a piece of the pie. In fact, I prefer large markets over small niche markets any day (for reasons you’ll learn about below)…
2. The group of people you are targeting have to be willing to spend money (or at least do something for you that earns you money - ie click your ads). Again, the more money people have to spend, the more you can make. BUT, just because you want to get into a market that doesn’t have much money, it doesn’t mean you can’t make money from that business idea. Look at all those celebrity gossip blogs and websites. Those site owners have readers who rarely buy products from them, but they are earning millions of dollars by displaying ads to the hundreds of thousands of visitors they who are reading their websites each day.
3. Pick a topic that is interesting to you. If you are not interested in the business, you will not be motivated to work on the business. I fell in that trap a couple times, and the most money I’ve ever made online was with businesses that I was passionate about. It doesn’t feel like work when you do something you love doing.
4. Pick a topic that other companies would be interested in. Like I always say, your business exit strategy should ALWAYS be to sell your website at some point. When I start a business online, one of my first steps is to find a company that I would like to get acquired by one day. I build the business to compliment nicely with this other business right from the start. I try to target their same customer demographic, offer similar but non-competing products, maybe join their affiliate program to begin building a business relationship with that company, etc. Then when I want to sell the business, it’s practically sold before I even list it for sale because it’s such a perfect match for them. Big businesses grow by acquiring smaller businesses like yours, get used to the idea and you might get rich in the process…
   (even if you don’t end up selling your website to this company, there will likely be others like them that will want to buy your business, such as their competitors!)
5. Try to stay away from trends or fads. Things like “specialized diets” (ie Atkins) that fade away a few months after they are released are not good business models. Yes, you can make money from trends and fads, but it’s not a very good long term plan.

It really depends on your goals and how much money you want to make. If you are happy with earning an extra $300 per month from your web business, then you can start almost any kind of website to make that much money. If you want to make at least $75,000 per month, then you need to focus on the bigger markets and be prepared to work a little harder.

I know most of these tips you’ve never heard before, but I guarantee it’s the most valuable advice you’re going to find online.

Until next time…