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Make Your Website Profitable

How do you make money from your website? One of the biggest mistakes business owners and potential entrepreneurs make is to assume if they have a great idea or a successful business, is that they can start making money from it online just by getting a nice website done - Wrong, it doesn't work like this.

Getting a website is just the start of your online business. Treat setting up a website like setting up a completely new business, and set your timescales and budgets likewise. Having a new website is like opening a shop in a shopping centre, but nobody is going to the shopping center.

The key of course is to get your website listed on Goggle's first page when people are searching for what you've got to sell.

There are basically 2 ways of doing this:

Paid Advertising

1. Advertise using Google's AdWords. This allows you to have your ads showing· at the top of the listings, and you pay on a 'cost per click'· (CPC) basis. This means that when someone clicks on your ad, you then pay for this click. The cost of the click can be from a few pence to £30 plus depending on the competition and where you want the ad to display. A lot of money can be spent setting up one of these campaigns before you see any return, and can be quite a big challenge for a novice to do. It can also be very tempting when you see how many visitors your site is getting. But the conversion rate is the most important thing. There's no point having thousands of paid visitors unless they are buying.

Search Engine Optimisation

If you want to appear on Google's page 1 without having to advertise you will have to embark on a Search Engine Optimisation campaign to make your website appear well liked and trusted by the search engines.

There are 2 aspects to this in brief they are:

On site optimisation - This is where you have to ensure the content on your site conforms to accepted Internet standards

Off site optimisation - This is the bigger of the two jobs really. Basically it's all about getting other sites to provide quality links to your site.

This is an industry in itself now, and depending on your website and its competition it is likely that a good SEO campaign would cost you more than the price of setting up your website. The advantage however is that once done the effects will be lasting, your site will continue to stay high in Google without you having to keep paying for it to be at the top. It's likely that in time your competitors will have their own SEO campaigns that will push above you, but you can then respond to this, and the cost wouldn't be too much, as a lot of the hard work will have already been done.

Doing an SEO campaign can be a big job, and it would be wise to get a web Design Company or an SEO specialist to do it for you.