What is the biggest mistake any ‘newbie’ can make when starting a Make Money Online business? They plan to make money in the “make money online” niche!
But that is what you are doing Kevin I hear you say! Yes, but I am not doing this to make money, I am doing this to tell everybody how much I am making from all my other niches 
So why is it a mistake for newbies to start in the Make Money Online niche?
Making money in this niche is not an easy task and here are some of the reasons why it may not be a very good idea to start your online business in “make money online” niche:
- It is already a saturated niche with some big players like problogger.net, shoemoney.com, johnchow.com, and thousands of others making some serious cash.
- The people that visit such sites are webmasters and most of them are ad blind. So it is very difficult to make money from webmasters.
- Most of the people in this niche already know, and tell the tricks in this field. So it would be difficult to find and write something new which is not known to them.
- CPC costs in this niche is much less than others niches like finance, auto, health etc.
- If you find something new/great in this niche, it gets copied/duplicated quite fast on blogs bigger than yours as well in some other form. And they get the credit instead of you.
- Huge search engine competition in this niche.
So, in what niche should you try to make money?
Try something which you are interested in. It can be anything. My suggestion is think outside “make money online” niche. Spend some time, do some research and find a niche which interest you and does not have massive competition.
One of my friends had some money he wanted to invest in building an online business. We discussed it in some detail and my suggestion to him was to just go out to the marketplace and buy some good websites. I even gave him some tips on what to look for when buying websites.
About 2 months ago, he went out and bought 6 websites for a total sum of $28,000. We did some some search engine optimization and link building work for the websites. Now these sites are making around $3,000 in monthly revenues with a monthly expense of around $200. That is a very good ROI I would say. He should get his money back in less than 10 months. Amazing! Which other business would provide that sort of ROI.
So what are the tips I gave to my friend for buying websites?
Here are those tips. just remember them while going into the marketplace and buying a website:
- The first thing you need to remember is that you should try to buy website with minimum amount of work required. That is the key to building your “online real-estate empire”.
- Always use escrow service. Even if it is at the cost of your own money. This will give you time to verify ALL the claims by the seller about the monthly traffic and revenue. If those claims are not met, feel free to reject the deal.
- When viewing the traffic stats, make sure you view the referrals stats as well. These days many people create quick traffic with sites like digg and stumbleupon and then sell the website. Such websites may not have a good business model to work on in the long run. So make sure that you view the referral stats to see how much traffic is coming from search engines. If around 70%+ traffic is coming from various search engines, you are good to go.
- If the seller is not using adsense on his website, make sure he is not banned from using it.
- When person is showing the revenue stats (lets say from adsense), make sure that CTR is not very high. If it is too high, make sure that the person is not in any sort of violation of policy on the page, for example, images above the ads, extra attention to the ads, etc.
- When you see the page rank of the website, don’t just believe it. Check the back-links of the website and verify that these back-links actually make sense with respect to the page rank of the site.
- When verifying the back-links, check if there are many site-wide back-links. If yes, ask the person whether these are his own sites. If yes, ask him how long the the links will stay. If not, ask him what sort of understanding with the other site is, so that those links can stay there.
- Make sure that internal pages of the site also have some page rank.
- Ask the seller if he has ever sold any site before (on the same forum/marketplace or other). If yes, check his history and transaction with previous buyers.
- Make sure that the site is listed in Google and pages are cached.
- Make sure you ask the seller whether the content on the site is unique. If yes, ask him who has written the content. Use the copyscape to verify what the person says. Also inquire about the images used on the website. Make sure they are not in any copyright violation with some other site. If they are, you should know about it.
- Check the age of the site. The older the better. Check the archive of the website at archive.org to see what has been the past of the site. Make sure it is not a site which was created on a old domain grabbed which had some other site in past.
- Ask the person whether he bought the site from somebody else. If yes, when.
- Find out what softwares/scripts he is using on the site. Make sure you are comfortable with those. Else it can create problem later on.
- Don’t ever belive the “webalizer” stats. They are much inflated. Ask the person to provide stats from any third party like google analytics or scripts like awstats.
- Last and finally, ask the person if he/she would help you moving the site to your server. Most people will agree to it, but its always good to ask first.
So now you know what are the things you need to know while going for the business of buying website and creating your own online real estate empire.
Are there any tips you would like to add here?
This post is about one of my friends who is studying to be an electrical engineer. He contacted me about 6 months ago asking whether he can earn money on the net without spending a single penny. I thought a lot about it and this was my reply to him:
Hi *******,
Yes you can, but it will take you awhile before you start making any money. Maybe as much as year, or two. Here are some steps you can take if you don’t want to spend much money:
Create a blog on http://www.worpress.org on the subject of your choice (make sure you choose a subject which you are interested in).
Use a simple and clean template and put your Google Adsense code on it to earn the money.
Devote one hour every day to your blog and try to write two good posts (current events, news, reviews etc) on the topic you have chosen.
Submit each of your posts to all the famous bookmarking sites like digg, stumble upon etc. (this will take an extra 10 mins).
Go everyday to http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=65 and see the NEW DIRECTORY ANNOUNCEMENTS in the section. Submit your site to two new directories every day free of cost.
Register with some forums in your niche and put your website URL in your signature. Use the forum everyday for half an hour and interact with people in the forum
When you start getting some traffic from bookmarking sites or forum threads or search engines, you will be making some money out of it in Google Adsense.
When you get your first $10, start hunting for cheap links for your blog. Remember to get ONLY related links. Please remember to put all your money back into the site (promoting it) for quite some long time. Then will only it will rise.
Get more and more links when you get more and more money. That will give you more and more traffic. Which means more and more money.
So these are the steps I think I can tell you. Do let me know if you actually plan to follow them.
So the main points here were to get some free traffic first, which will make you some money, use that money to get some paid links, which will increase your traffic further.
Yesterday I was discussing with him like how is his project going. So he showed me his Google Adsense for the last month (5th month). In his 5th month he made around $602. But he has put in all the money he has earned back into his blogs promotion.
Today his 300+ post strong blog (niche: renewable energy news) gets around 1200 uniques per day and make him around $600/month. He says, he still does not need any money right now, so he will be using all his money back into his blog for next 6 months
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