So you are affected by the typical “online marketing bug” and want to make boatloads of money quick and fast from home? Well, it ain’t that easy! Let’s say that you build a website showcasing all the products and services you have got to offer. However, that lifeless webpage would not make you a dime by itself! In this article I will tell you why!
It is a fact that people find products and services online with the aid of search engines. It is also well known that right now Google™ is the leader of all search engines. What this means is that, if you wish your products to be found, you need to get ranked highly in Google. And guess how would you do that? Unless you are ready to invest a truckload of money on pay-per-click advertising, your only other option is to build backlinks for your website!
If you want to make any decent amount of money online, that too with the least amount of investment possible, you need to have two things:
a) Good quality content on your website
b) Backlinks! A solid backlink structure is what would help your website gain good rankings in Google. When that happens, people would easily find your products and services and flock to shop on your website!
Now, let us say that you don’t know anything about backlink building; so, how would you get started? In this article I will take you by the hand and tell you exactly what you need to do – step by step!
Step 1: Find a niche you want to market in. In fact, there is no need to hunt for any particular “niche” market! There are several popular, money-making niches where millions of people are making money day and night. Such niches are weight loss, self help, dating, any hobby niche, etc., to name a few!
Step 2: Use your favorite keyword research tool to analyze your chosen niche market. Remember, this is a very crucial step! A lot of things, such as the domain name you would be buying, as well as the backlinks you would be building depend on this step!
Next, sort your keywords based on the number of times they are searched per month!
Step 3: Buy a keyword-rich domain name. I did tell you to sort keywords based on their monthly search data in the previous step; well, you can buy a domain name containing one of those top keywords/keyphrases! I usually buy domain names from Namecheap,. But you can buy them from your favorite domain registrar if you wish!
Step 4: The next step is to buy web hosting and build your website. There is no need to spend a lot of money on hosting at this point since you are just starting out. Once you start making money, you can easily shift to better quality web hosts. Remember, all you are doing now is “testing the waters”.
Step 5: Assuming that you have populated your website with good quality content, it is now time to do what we have been discussing all along: build backlinks. As a matter of fact, there are two types of backlinks you can build: hard links such as http://domain.com and anchor text links such as:
<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com”>Your Keywords</a> (replace “Your Keywords” with your chosen keyword, and http://www.yourdomain.com with your website’s domain name)!
Anchor text links are what you would focus on since your website rankings largely depend on those links.
Remember not to give undue preference to any particular keyword just because it happens to be the most popular one! You should build backlinks for all the keywords and keyphrases searched for by internet users in your niche market. For me, any traffic is good traffic and any money is good money, and you would also notice that it is easier to get ranked for long tail keywords than the short tail ones!
To give you an idea, let us say that in order to be ranked number 1 for the keyword “make money”, you would need to build 100 backlinks for that particular keyword. But once you change your preference to say, “make money from home” or “make money from blogs”, you would not only need fewer backlinks to get ranked for such phrases but would also be able to get better targeted traffic from these keywords, as opposed to generic, two-word keyphrases!