Writing your own content for a Part Time Income isn't difficult
This 'method' is no secret, there are no systems, quick routes or easy money involved; it is merely based upon gradually publishing and building a body of work for yourself that has the capacity to earn you an increasing income from the advertising you show alongside it. It does require knowledge and interest in something, it will require work, much of it for little or no reward in the first few months, you do need to write original and informed articles and, in most probability, you won't make a fortune from your endeavours BUT the internet has still totally revolutionised the writing and publishing world. This means that if you are careful and realistic you can profit from your online writing, while keeping hold of your intellectual property rights, through self publishing on the web.
Anyone can do it? Okay, almost anyone can generate an income from web publishing. This article only presumes that you can create basic HTML pages and upload them via FTP. If you can't then get a domain name and some hosting, get Filezilla, get nVu, create a new document called index.html - write out 'Hello World' in it, save it. Open Filezilla, make a new connection and upload it to your webspace. Congratulations - you've just made your first page. Yep - web publishing is a cinch. That's why it's excellent and what some 'web designers' hate other businesses to know. Remember, though, people have to be interested in what you publish. Great pictures, compelling content, in depth analysis and up to date informed comment will always be in demand, whereas spammed rubbish or hard sell spiel is pretty transparent to most people, no matter how much you've tried to jazz it up.
Thinking about your site
First of all - if you take the first idea for your site and remove all the advertising that you have planned for it will there be something left over for your visitors to read or view and gain from? If the answer's no - don't do it. Forget that Shopping Mall idea. It will be outdated before you can say "Merchant X Programme has been suspended" and you'll be banging your head against a wall if you hope to have any success with SEO for terms as competitive, common and varied as HDTV and Bathroom Accessories. Another pixel site? Why not make them $10 a pop and make $10m instead? The first (MillionDollarHomepage) was fun and succeeded because of its brazen single purpose, but even Alex Tew's own follow up (Pixelotto) just seems to be a doomed imitator. As an advertising channel pixel sites are a waste of time. No one in their right mind thinks 'I need a new lawnmower...better head off to click in hope on some miniscule and indistinguishable ads at JustAnotherPixelSite' - just bin that pixel site script right now and work on something that will be more rewarding.
Don't try to reinvent the wheel. If you think you've got a great idea, check to see if it's been done before. That great digital product could be old news, and you still couldn't produce it as well as the others. Avoid grand ideas of providing Paid Services. Promise less and deliver more so people have a reason to come back. Let trust develop in your site and you as a publisher.
Think carefully about any customer service, financial or technical issues you will be letting yourself in for and whether you will be able to do this for a long time before you generate a positive cashflow. Cashback and off the shelf affiliate network sites seem to be launched all the time and the failure rate is high, because they are so demanding and there are already many successful, well resourced ones out there.
One thing is for sure. Whether you are trying to monetise a site through Adsense, YPN, AM ads or whatever, the one thing you will always need is good quality traffic in volume. Simple as. There are plenty of ways of getting this, and some are certainly more relevant than others, depending on your sector. Some may be closed to you if you're site is gambling, booze related etc. but the first time publisher with no previous revenue to reinvest will always be looking to gain at least some of their traffic from organic search results whether or not they are allowed to market the site in the search englines. SEO is for everyone and crucial for 'niche' sites; be realistic though, do it carefully, do read up on what not to do and don't expect miracles overnight.
The topic of your site and choosing your domain name
Being realistic : Target your theme, topic or niche. You are ideally looking for a generic (not including tradenames / marks etc) search keyword or keyphrase that you know about, that you want to write about (or won't get bored writing about, at least), that people are actually searching for, and that has few enough results in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for you to have a realistic chance of getting and maintaining a decent position. My basic rule of thumb is greater than a 1000 at Overture and less than a million at Google is prime niche material if it is related to something where affiliate ads can be relevant to visitors, and finally where the likelihood of conversion into sales and average commission makes it all worthwhile. I use these figures as a guide because generally less than a sustainable 1000 seaches per month means even the maximum potential traffic will be fairly low and more than a million results ahead of you at Google means your task begins to get more difficult still. Don't choose a 'hot topic' that had a thousand searches last month, but won't have any six months down the line. This is simplifying the reasoning and ignoring factors like the types of sites already in the dominant positions and the geographic source of potential traffic and ads you could show, but you want to start with at least a chance, hence my > 1:1000 benchmark.
Draw your site topic or niche from something like
> Travel - focus on a particular region or place - make the most of your holiday pics
> Hobby - you may well already know many of the active online community involved with it
> Unusual Niche Topic - whatever floats your boat
> Specific Niche Product(s) - whatever floats other people's boats
> Professional / Specific Skills Information - sharing and capitalising on your work related knowledge
Get your related domain name. I don't mean your brand, like Supertastic Webdev or Bob Smith Publishing, but a name related to the topic you intend to write about. Everyone has different opinions on this, but here are a few of mine. Three words maximum. You'll have to balance your target keyphrase with a reasonable length for the name and those names still available. Try your keyphrase in its non-hyphenated form to see if the .co.uk and .com are taken. If not, great - you can register one or both, combined the cost can still be less than a tenner per year and is to be recommended for UK publishers. Hyphenated is less attractive and potentially more confusing and, considering that the theme of your site isn't going to be your branding as a publisher, another generic may be viable. I'd always prefer something like travelguide.info over find-travel-guides.com if you can find these short, heavily searched for terms still available in the non .com generics, like .net and .info - easier said than done, but worth trying especially if your are targeting a relatively small and defined niche. Don't use text speak or play on words in the domain name. You are just looking for a word or two/three word phrase that is broad enough to write about, small enough for you to do well with, but with the scope for introducing ads for related products or services.
Creating your site
Tailor your site to your skills. You want to minimise the need for manual updating or modifications to pages that you've already created. A page about Chinchilla Healthcare won't become obsolete if you don't edit it every two minutes. A London Gig Listing page will. Be realistic about how much updating your site will require and whether you will have a chance of doing a more comprehensive job than those sites already enjoying success in the search engines.
Do some research and write the content for some themed pages, a few thousand words in total will be plenty to get started with. If it's a long time since you had to do anything like this, it's easy to get back into glorified essay writing, and it will be more productive in the long run than any Adsense scraper site, or regurgitated articles that are already known to the search engines from a hundred other sites. Take your knowledge, get out the books, use and link to exisitng online resources, sketch out some paragraph ideas on paper, write and edit, and keep practising. My background is in literary essays and I know getting the right 'narrative voice' for a commercial site does require work, especially for those of us without a journalistic, business or marketing background.
Write and edit your text in Notepad so you remove the distractions of design, but can easily transfer the information into HTML documents later with a quick Cut and Paste - don't forget to remove Wordwrap though!. 3000 words will give you enough for four or five pages of content, each one targeted at a keyphrase very closely related to that of your site as a whole. With your homepage and an 'About' page containing your Publisher details, company info etc you have enough to launch a small, but functioning and self contained, site.
> Keep the site simple if your design skills can't make it superb (about 99% of us)
> Forget the 1001 animated clipart freesites and pay some serious attention to accurate titles, despcriptions and keywords for your pages, but don't turn your metas into essays!
> Do give each of your pictures, diagrams or other images a brief, but descriptive, ALT text
> Make proper use of h1, h2, h3 headings
> Do make your site and its pages as accessible as possible to both visitors and the search engines - don't use Flash or images as navigation elements, unless you have standard text links to the appropriate page aswell.
Make sure eye candy is relevant. Photos are great and can be essential to an explanation of some things. Get them taken and get them in your pages.
Get a few decent links to your site. This is not about spamming out thousands of link exchange requests and creating a reciprocal link directory at your site. This is just about using the resources you have to hand - beg, borrow or barter with your friends for a little link love to get started. You will most probably have a forum profile and signature or social networking page. Get a link up on these too if it's permitted. Don't be obsessed with Page Rank though. As long as Google regularly visits the page on which your link appears, then it won't be long before they know your site exists too.
The 'Waiting Game'
So, what happens next?
Well, if your domain name is newly registered, you will have to expect some months of being 'sandboxed' by Google. Only your homepage will be returned if you do a site:whateverdomainname search even when the search giant has been round. You will see your other pages as supplementals, you will do great in search results, then terribly - all part of the usual rollercoaster process for any new domain. It will pass though, as long as you don't start doing anything silly and you will begin to show in the results when searching for your keyphrase. Just where you will begin to show depends on a host of factors, not least the level of competition actively targeting the same keyword(s)/phrase(s). Frequent the forums, rather than paying for outdated or just plain rubbish ebooks, for today's latest news and buzz. Even recently I saw great swathes of hidden text on a merchant's e-commerce site, proving that some people do still read the 'How to spam Alta Vista 1999' book, but haven't got round to the volume entitled 'How to get banned by Google in the 21st Century' yet. Many old-school (before yesterday) SEO black hat tricks won't get you booted instantly, because you'll be effectively under their radar and insignificant, but that doesn't mean you should attempt to use them. You won't get away with it on any scale before suffering the search engines' wrath and your task will have become ten times harder.
Continue to add content to your site. Look at your site stats to see where your traffic comes from, which pages they are reading and what they have been looking for. This may well throw up some great ideas for new pages or sections that you can expand upon.
Use this kind of data to begin to gauge the kind of ads that are relevant to your traffic and choose a couple of established and appropriate merchants to test out, but don't overkill the ads on your site. Try a text link and a 468 banner from each maybe. It's probably best to start off with merchants from one of the established and respected UK networks. There can be nothing worse than seeing your first earnings disappear because the merchant or network has done so too, so choose your merchants and network(s) carefully.
Don't expect miracles. At this stage you probably still have very little traffic, as you're still a small fish in a small pond. Don't give up. It may take up to six months for you to see any positioning in the SERPs.
Don't expect amazing click through rates or conversions into sales. It may take hundreds, thousands of visitors before you see a commission. This is why the topic you choose must interest you, because you will still need to keep adding to it, without seeing a return.
As the benefit of the work you put in now isn't going to be seen instantly, don't get disheartened and don't wait until you are earning before thinking about getting another site going, either in a related or unrelated niche.
Doing it again and a few tips on what not to do
Add original content and grow both your sites, promote them in profiles or sigs you have at other sites if you can but don't spam, tell your friends, let links grow organically. You are not looking for a large scale or time consuming SEO strategy. You're looking to do simple things that will be an effective use of your time without you inadvertently risking all your hard work through reading the wrong 'latest quick fix' solution. Don't keyword stuff your pages, don't get into the habit of interlinking your domains, don't obsess over the design (use free templates if you want) and DON'T use software to spam other webmasters asking for link exchanges. Get to know other site owners online and give them some easy formatted links to pick up at your site. Make effective use of the anchor text (the hyperlinked text) - and have different versions for your main and secondary target keyphrases. Don't participate in link farms or jump at the opportunity to exchange links with everyone who contacts you; just why do you want to be buried in, and link to, a host of nondescript directories that will give you nothing? Do link out from your site without an ulterior motive; if linking to another authority site helps your readers then include it in context.
Don't register tons of domain names without doing your homework and having a plan that will ensure you can afford the renewals. In most cases just parking them won't achieve this.
If you only register your names at the same rate as you create websites then you'll be able to scale things effectively and profit from your internet publishing. Creating ten or so basic sites that you can continue to add to over time is certainly no unreasonable expectation for a part time publisher to achieve within six months. There are lots of cheap hosting accounts available for multiple domains from £5 per month or so and names average around £5 per year. Far more than ten pounds worth of advertising revenue each month from ten sites should be perfectly achievable though, if you've actually developed them with some original content. As your work should be varied and on topics of enduring interest you can try out other forms of ad revenue too (eg:Adsense) at a few of your sites. A lot of your knowledge of what works and what doesn't comes through trial and error as you grow your publishing network and you'll never know until you start.
So, stop reading the latest ebook, turn to your own knowledge, get writing , get publishing and enjoy some part time self employed work that can be both enjoyable and profitable.