I have always said to hell with SEO and went the paid advertising route which I recently realized was a mistake. At the time of this writing, websites that are bringing in daily search engine visitors are worth money regardless of how much money the site is making. The big investors investing in established websites are paying 5-6 times the yearly revenue for sites that are generating passive income through Adsense and affiliate offers. Even sites that aren’t monetized, but are getting natural search engine traffic are selling for a decent price.

Let it be understood that this is an ideal long term strategy and if you take consistent action to create these sites regularly, you will always have assets on the auction block ready to be cashed out. Now I know you probably like the fast instant money and you don’t want to wait six months for a site to reach it’s potential but unfortunately that’s just the way it is. You have to have the long term in mind here or you wont be successful with this model. Believe me when I say that it’s well worth the wait and if you keep the sites for over a year, you can sell them and only pay the long-term capital gains tax of 15% should you decide to sell. Of course you can always sit on the sites and let them earn money for you without lifting a finger but you better make sure you are constantly promoting your sites and adding new content if you want to keep the traffic steady.

Now let’s get down to the nuts and bolts of what you will need to start rolling out highly optimized websites that search engines will love. The first step is to find a fairly simple theme that you can get ranked for quickly. We don’t want to be targeting terms like “work at home” because it will take you years to rank that site and a lot of work. Think long tail terms like “how to get rid of ants” or “how to build a treehouse”. You’re going to have to do your keyword research and the tool I use exclusively to research projects like this is called Keyword Country. What you’re looking for is some long tail search phrases that get traffic but the competition isn’t real stiff. Believe me when I say there are thousands of keywords like this which means you could easily have thousands of sites. This is simply a numbers game and the more sites you have the better. Imagine having 500 sites that each get 20 visitors a day. That’s 10,ooo visitors a day and lets just say that you are selling affiliate products and the average sale pays you $20, and your converting traffic into sales at 1%. That’s $2,000 a day in PROFIT for you while doing nothing and spending nothing on advertising. Of course it’s going to take you some time to create that many sites but just think where you could be in a year if you had someone doing all the work for you. Would it be worth it to make $60,000 a month if you had to work hard for a year or if you had to invest a little money up front?

Once you have decided on some good niches and keywords for your websites it’s time to decide how you are going to design your site. Even though I know how to create my own websites from scratch I use simple XHTML compliant templates to build my SEO sites. Google loves them and they are very clean and fast for the end user. Just do a search on Google for free XHTML compliant website templates and you will have plenty to choose from.

Now let’s say that your theme is “how to get rid of ants”. Luckily, I have already built a site on this very subject just to give you an example of how the site should be built. Go to how to get rid of ants and take note of the very simple design. This site literally took me two hours to create! The cool thing is, it’s now ranked in Google for a few terms and an article I wrote and submitted to Ezine articles is bringing in 15+ visitors a day.

Some key elements to take notice of with this site is it’s internal linking structure, it’s super clean XHTML compliant code, the adsense placement and don’t forget the sitemap. Also, notice how I use no follow tags going to my privacy policy and contact page. Privacy policies and contact pages usually contain very little content or duplicate content so linking to them with no follows is a good idea.

Once you have your site complete be sure to generate your sitemap at xml-sitemaps.com and submit it to Google’s webmaster tools, digg it at digg.com and then submit one unique article to ezinearticles.com.  Watch what happens over the next week or so and I think you will be quite pleased with the results .

At last you’ve got a website filled with products or affiliate offers and your ready to make some money. As time passes you hope and pray that the traffic gods will dump a windfall of traffic on your website and the sales will come flowing in like the salmon of Capistrano. You better keep praying and you better be prepared to do it for a long time because without some type of marketing plan, you’ll be long gone before anything like that happens.

I remember when I got my first website online. It was a crappy one page clickbank review website I got when I signed up for a money making program. I was super pumped about having my own website and was even more excited thinking about making that first sale. Well, like most newbies I just sat there and waited for that magical influx of traffic to my website but sadly it didn’t come. Hell, I didn’t know any better and I just figured that my site would start bringing in visitors from all over the internet. Boy was I wrong!

Like most newbies I got duped into paying for traffic from those “Get 100,000 visitors overnight” programs and then I joined those paid to surf programs and that didn’t work and finally I almost gave up!

The funny thing about that little story is that 90% of the newbies coming online to make money with their websites fall into this same trap. They get a website, they buy the junk robot generated traffic and join the paid to surf programs and still they make no sales and then they ask “why isn’t it working?”. First of all, if you are newbie and you are using these types of programs stop wasting your time because they WILL NOT bring you any money. I don’t know what someone told you but it’s garbage. Think about it for a minute…

If you have 10,000 people just like you, meaning they are a newbie that doesn’t know what they are doing and they are all a member at the same paid to surf program and they all want to make a sale on their website, why would any one of you buy someone elses product there? It’s like advertising to your competitor! I don’t mean to be harsh but someone needs to tell you the truth. If you are paying a paid to surf website for traffic then you are getting screwed because you will never make a sale there.

Now what about the “Get 100,000 hits overnight” programs?

These programs are even worse! These are those sites that advertise different traffic packages ranging from 25,000 visitors to 1,000,000 visitors for a set price. Did you know that these visitors are generated from a software program and not real people? Yep that’s right, you are getting screwed and again you will never make a sale with this traffic.

Ok, now that you know that you will never make a sale from these services it’s time to wise up and devise a marketing plan that really works. The first thing you need to figure out is who your audience is. If you don’t who you’re marketing to then how will you know where your market is and how to reach them? Different products and affiliate offers are marketed in different ways. Some offers are better marketed on Yahoo as opposed to Google and vice versa. Sometimes you want to use pay per click advertising and other times banner advertising. Maybe you will need a landing page or pre-sale page and maybe you are better off sending your visitors straight to the sales page of an offer.

The key to making sales online is targeting the buying and researching audience of your market. You don’t want to waste your time with people who are just out to kick a few tires. For example, if you are promoting a money making program and its called Nick’s Money Making Program you want to find the people typing keywords into the search engine like the following:

• nicks money making program review
• nicks money making program scam
• buy nicks money making program

These are called ‘buyer’ keywords as in these people are ready to buy but need a little push from you. There are thousands of products being sold online and there are millions of people ready to buy something at any given time. You just need to get yourself in front of them and reassure them it’s ok to make the purchase. So how do you get these people to your website?

Here is where you need to decide if you are going to pay for laser targeted visitors or if you are going to take the free approach. If you want to pay for high quality visitors targeted to what you are selling you need to use Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing or Microsft Adcenter. If you want to use free methods of promoting your website you will need to write articles, create blogs and join forums.

The lesson to be learned here is there is no effortless way to get good quality visitors to your site without spending money on PPC advertising or putting in the elbow grease with free advertising strategies. Paid to surf farms DO NOT work and neither do the “buy 100,000 visitors” programs.  Stay tuned for my next post on free website promotion techniques.

Obviously I am reaching out to the newbies here because most seasoned marketers know that almost all online paid survey sites are a scam. It sounds like a simple way to make money from home doesn’t it? Sitting around taking simple surveys all day and getting paid $25-$65 per survey is a dream job folks and it will remain a dream at least for the foreseeable future.

Now don’t get me wrong. Back in the day I remember a local college sending me a survey and I got paid $100 to take it and send it back. However, it’s not like I could find 100 of these surveys to take a week and they actually found me somehow. So, what is the online paid survey crap all about? Basically they are databases filled with affiliate offers to companies that give away prizes and even sometimes a little bit of cash. Hardly worth paying any money to join such a program because you will work at least 100 hours a week to make any money at all and if you get lucky you might get entered into a drawing to win money.

The only one getting paid off these survey programs is the people who operate them. They make money on your signup fees, they make money on the survey database because they are just affiliate offers and then they have you on their mailing list to send you even more crap later on. If you’re still hard pressed to give it a go, signup for the free survey sites out there like Survey Club or Nielson Net Panel. They are free to join and you stand a better chance at making money with surveys with these companies without paying a dime.