I think I mentioned it before, but back in May/June I decided to have a go at making some small websites and trying to monetise them. I’m not going to be a millionaire any time soon but they’re bringing in some pocket money, and I have been quite lucky because the first site started bringing in money within a couple of weeks.

Only pennies, but it spurred me on. Site #2 is not doing so well, and has probably made less than £5 since the beginning of September when it went live. I have a sneaking suspicion it’s jumping around the search engine rankings because of the number of affiliate links on it. I’ve removed almost all the links as of this evening, so we’ll see if it settles down or not. Site #3 only went live today, so we’ll see what happens with that. Unfortunately I’m not going to be sharing the URLs or niches for copycat reasons :P

This post is intended to be an overview of things I’ve learned, and I may go into more detail (about how I chose my niches, things to consider when monetising a site and so on), across several follow up posts if there’s enough interest.

Reading vs. Action

I read a lot of websites, forum posts and blogs before I jumped in at the deep end and decided to create a site. I think it’s best to find that balance – you do need to read stuff about affiliate marketing and Google Adsense before you start, but you could carry on reading forever and at some point you have to actually do something active. There are a few stages – the first stage, where you’re enthusiastic but need advice, the second stage where you’re not sure where to start or how to choose a niche because you’re so overwhelmed, and the third stage where you get on and do it.

Earnings

I think a bit of luck and skill is required at the third stage, because it’s easy to get impatient. The first month I started, Site #1 earned me around £4. Four months on, it’s on track to earn me almost £50 for the second month in a row. That may not seem like much, but multiply that by ten sites or fifty sites and it starts to look appealing, especially since I have spent absolutely zero on these sites beyond the domain registration. Practically everything is profit; in fact it’s pretty much 100% profit since I’ve used affiliate credit from Dreamhost to register the names! Of course I’m paying for hosting too, but it’s less than $7 per month and I’d be paying it for Blossom and Single Shot anyway.

Passion

One of the things I read a lot was that you should choose a niche you have experience in or a passion for. This was the one bit of advice that really stood out as being irrelevant for me. I couldn’t have chosen niches I’m interested in less on a personal level. The things I’m interested in aren’t really monetisable, and the ones that are are way too competitive. I’ve learned to be interested; I can be interested in anything if it makes me money ;) The whole point about niche sites is that in an ideal world they’re ‘set and forget’. On a practical level, it’s never going to be quite like that unless you spend money on an amazing domain name or you pay for articles to be written – but there are shortcuts. Choosing a good niche helps. Setting targets for content and link building and scheduling posts in advance also helps. I have a rule that I never spend more than fifteen minutes writing an article (anywhere between 300-500 words), because beyond that I’m wasting time. They aren’t the most amazing articles, but they aren’t spam either.

Ad Styling

Another bit of advice I read a lot was to tinker with the site until you figure out the optimal way to present ads and links on the page for your particular site. I mainly use Google Adsense at the moment because although I get clicks from affiliate links, I don’t seem to get sales, for whatever reason. A click from Google Adsense guarantees some pennies at least! I’ve found that ads towards the top of the page tend to get clicked more than any other, and positioning ads either at the top left or right of the page plus an ad block at the top of the sidebar seem to work best for me. For links I use a colour that stands out compared to the rest of the page, but I use the same colour background as the page itself. This seems to work quite well; I’ve read posts that say to use a completely different colour scheme to prevent your ads being ignored. I’ve also read the exact opposite, that Adsense ads should be identical to your site’s styling. After experimentation I found that the middle ground seems to work best, although I do alter the link colours on occasion in an attempt to avoid ad blindness.

Opening Up

My final bit of advice for this post is related to markets. I hang out on UK forums quite a bit and there are lots of affiliates and Adsense gurus on them who operate in the UK market. I try to make all my sites appeal internationally – Adsense will automatically show ads related to the visitor’s country – and it opens up a much bigger global market. For that reason, I’ve stuck with .com, .net and .org extensions which are all global players and rank well everywhere.

Finally…

At the moment I’m waiting for Google to send me an Adsense cheque – my first since 2008! :)