You can see my answers here:

http://www.webanswers.com/technology-computers/which-is-the-best-way-to-earn-money-in-online-cc88ee

http://www.webanswers.com/technology-computers/internet/web-sites/please-tell-me-any-that-how-to-make-money-online-i-am-just-new-internet-user-9b174c

Pats self on the back!!! My answer was chosen as best answer – and no, I don’t know the asker.

Here’s an example.  If I enter “home treatment for mosquito bites” (I didn’t use those quotation marks when I entered the term in Google) – this is what Google tells me at the top of page 1 “About 170,000 results”.  That’s a scary number if you are thinking of entering that niche and selling a product.

But wait.  Click through those results to the end – and the end isn’t where you think it will be.  After just a few clicks, I see this message “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 850 already displayed.”

There are just 850 competing sites.  This is quite normal.  If you really want to know how many sites are found in Google using your search term, then click through to the end.  Even keywords with, allegedly, millions of competing sites usually only have a few hundred in reality.

Everyone dreams of that “holy grail” – a website that makes money on autopilot.  Many people, mistakenly, believe that all you need to do is put up a website, add a “buy now” button and magically you will get rich.  It doesn’t work like that.

Firstly, your site needs to get visitors.  Secondly it needs to be selling something that those visitors want.  If you can get that combination right then you will make sales.

One excellent way of making money on autopilot is to set up and run a local business directory.  What do I mean by a directory website for local businesses? I mean a site that lists several businesses in the same niche.

Why just one niche?

• Because it’s much easier to seo a site that focuses on one niche – real estate agents, chiropractors, taxis, car dealers, for example.
• Having an exact match, keyword targeted domain name is a great help with seo.
• It makes it much easier for site visitors to find the information they want.  The success of your site will depend on your visitors actually finding the business they want and either clicking through to their website or contacting them.  A large, muddly, site with lots of options and lots of different business types will just confuse your visitors – they will leave without clicking through and your advertisers won’t be happy.

How do you build a Directory Web site so that it will get those all important visitors and make you those sales?

First, do your research.  Think of a specific niche.  For example, suppose you want to set up a directory site for dentists in Chicago.  Go to the Google keyword tool and type in “dentist chicago” – make sure you set the tool to look for “phrase” under match types.  This will tell how many times a search term that includes the phrase “dentist chicago” is used each month.  Look at the results – you might find, for example, that more people are searching for “cosmetic dentist Chicago” or some other closely related phrase.

Don’t be put off if you live in a small town and there are only a few dentists, plumbers, riding instructors – or whatever profession you are targeting.  Directory sites in small towns can work very well.  The key point to look for here is this – are there more businesses in that niche than will fit onto page 1 of Google?  If there are, then these are exactly the type of businesses who will be interested in paying to list on your site.  Your aim is to get your site onto page 1 of Google – the businesses who haven’t made it to page 1 will be keen to get on your site to promote themselves.

Having found a search term that you think might work, head to google and type it in as a search.  Take a look at the results.

There are two main things to look for.

• Is there already a directory website site in the top three of the search results?  I’m using “dentist chicago” as my search term (try it for yourself) – there are no sites that look as if they are directory sites for dentists, specifically aimed at Chicago.  That’s good news, because it means you have a good chance of getting your new site to rank at the top of page 1 – which is where it needs to be if people are going to pay you to join your site.
• Also on the search results page you should see a google maps extract – look at how many circles there are on there.  They are all dentists, they are all in Chicago and I’ll bet that most of them would like to be immediately accessible on the first page of google.  That’s where your site will come in.

Now head to your domain registrar and see if there are any domains available that are an exact match for your search phrase. When searching for exact match domains it never ceases to amaze me how many have been purchased but aren’t being used.  What a waste.  My search for Chicago dentists is typical.  At the time of writing this – chicagodentist.info is a generic registrars advertising page, chicagodentist.com is a blog, chicagodentist.net is “under construction”, dentistchicago.com redirects to a real site, chicagodentist.info is a generic advertising page.

This is good news for you.  None of these feature on page 1 of Google for a search term that gets 3600 monthly searches in phrase match.  A golden opportunity for a well seo’d site to rank well.  There are still some variations of the words “Chicago” “dentist” “dentists” and a strategically placed “in” available if you want to have a go with the exact theme of this article.

Once you’ve registered the site you need to install a classified ads directory theme or plug-in.  Now comes the work.  You need to add some keyword rich content to start getting your site listed.  Add a blog to your site and start writing about the benefits of using a Chicago homoeopath, or staying in a Chicago hotel – or whatever theme if your site is.

Then you need to start promoting your site – all the usual seo techniques work well here.   Social bookmarking, online directories, article directories, well chosen forum/blog commenting (please don’t spam your links on unrelated forums with pointless posts).  If you have a VA – then this is work that they could easily do for you.

Once your site has reached page 1 on Google, you can start contacting local businesses – and start asking them to pay to list on your site.  This has several benefits – with real listings your site has more content, so will rise even further in the search results.  Once your paying customers start getting business via your site they will recommend your site to their colleagues – so you get even more paying customers.

If your directory theme or plug-in allows for automatic rebilling, then the site will, literally, run on auto-pilot once you have the first few clients on board.  They will be automatically emailed and rebilled each year.  No need for you to lift a finger.

The perfect auto-pilot business.

For a more in-depth, fully illustrated guide, go to this page How To Build A Directory Website

I had already written 4 articles and submitted them to Ezine and a couple of other high profile directories.  While I was laid up, too bleary eyed to come up with anything original, I decided to submit the same articles to other sites.  The result was almost instant increase in paid sign-ups and seems to be continuing.

Last month, I had my best ever month, earning just over £200 in commission from this program.  At the time of writing this I have already made just over £50 this month.  My previous best month was around £170.

Article marketing definitely works!

One of the most common ways of monetising a site is to use an affiliate program.  There are lots of different programs – here are a few that I use:  Affiliatefuture.com, tradedoubler.com and clickbank.com.

Affiliatefuture and tradedoubler have a wide range of well known clients whose affiliate programs you can join – selling things ranging from finance to broadband, chocolates to clothes.  They are free to join, so it’s worth signing up and taking a look around their site to see if there are any programs that fit with the subject of your site.

For the next few posts I’m going to be looking at Clickbank.  Why?  Because an online contact of mine has issued a challenge to me and another contact.  I like a challenge, so I couldn’t resist.

The challenge: To build a site in the reverse phone look-up niche.  This is a niche that mainly operates in the USA where, for a small fee, if you know a person’s cell phone number you can do a reverse search to find out who owns the number.  This has obvious uses if you are concerned about who your child is calling, or to see if you can trace a scammer if they are using a US cell phone number -a subject close to my heart because I run an anti-scam blog.

The idea is that we each build a site, sign up for a Clickbank program (or programs) and then promote the site.  The aim is to see if we can achieve an income of $1000 a month from our site.  Sounds like a tall order – but like I said, I like a challenge.

I decided that if I post my progress on here, step by step, that should give you an idea of how to monetise a site using affiliate programs.

I’ll start in the next post by telling you how to register a domain name – so far we have used a free site from blogger, but sooner or later you will want to own and run your own site with your own domain name – and this is a good time to start.   So read the next post to find out how to register a domain name and how to find hosting for it.

There are many sites on the internet you might want to look at:

The Warrior Forum.  Members can offer their services in the “Warriors for Hire” section.  New members/writers often start by offering to write free articles for a few warriors.  This allows Warriors to see the quality of your work, and allows you to get some all important feedback.

Daily Article. A site where you submit articles that you’ve written for sale.  You can write about any subject you like and choose your price.  Some articles sell quickly, some don’t.

Constant Content.  I haven’t used this one, but I think it works in much the same way as Daily Article.

Helium.  This works differently.  You don’t sell articles, but you can get paid according to your rating . It’s a bit complicated – you have two ratings – number of articles written, and number of “rates” you”ve submitted.  All the articles on the site are peer rated – ie members rate each others articles.  Take a look to see what I mean.

I hope these sites give you a few ideas to get you started.  Being a content writer can be lucrative once you have built a reputation and you only need to accept the amount of work you feel you can cope with.

When you’re new to IM, the forum can be a bit overwhelming.  Don’t worry – it’s like learning any new skill.  It will slowly start to make sense and the place is a goldmine of information.  It’s where I learnt most of what I know about IM – and I’m still learning.

You don’t need to join the forum to read most of the posts – you only need to join if you want to take part in discussions.

There is a search facility so you can search back posts to find information.

Adsense works by autodetecting the content of your page.  Usually it is fairly accurate.  However, if ads are displayed that you don’t want for any reason you can block them by adding them to the “competitive ad” filter.

How to Use the Adsense Competitive Ad Filter

Log into your Adsense account and click on the “Adsense Setup” tab.  Then click on “Competitive Ad Filter”.

Enter one web address per line in the box and scroll down and click on Save Changes.

How can you tell the web address of an Adsense ad? NEVER click on your own ads to find out where they take you.  Google will BAN you for click fraud.

Fortunately – they provide an answer in the form of the “Adsense Preview Tool”.

What is the Adsense Preview Tool?

This is an add-on for Internet Explorer.  Download it from here – Adsense Preview Tool.  One this is installed it adds an extra item to the RIGHT click menu in IE.

When you click on “Google Adsense Preview tool” from this menu you will see a list of ads that could be displayed on your site.

You can click to put a tick beside the ads whose URLs you want to know.

Then click on “Show Selected URLs”.  The URLs will be displayed in a box.  You can copy them from here and paste them into your competitive ad filter.

NOTE:  If the URL you copy is too long for the ad filter, you will see a message in red displayed after you click on “Save changes”.  Just delete as much of the URL as is necessary to reduce it to 64 characters or less.  If you look at the URL, you will probably find that most of it an be deleted so that you are just left with something like www.myunwantedsite.com

Start by going to Statcounter and signing up for a free account.  Once you have your account, sign in.  You will see a list of your projects (if you are setting up your first project, your project list will be empty).

Click on “add new project”.Fill in the details of your blog:

I usually leave the rest of the options on this page unchanged.

Scroll down and click on “next”.  Then click on “Configure and Install Code”

I always use an invisible counter – it’s a personal preference, but do you really want the first few visitors to your site to see that you have only had, say, 6 visitors?

Click on “next” and then select your site type – there is an option for Blogger, so we will use that – although I usually just use the default guide.  (The code you are going to get in the next step is the same – it’s just that the instructions for its use change.)

Now follow the instructions that Statcounter give for using the code to install your Statcounter.  I could give instructions here, but they would be exactly the same.

Using your Statcounter

From time to time, log into your Statcounter account.  Click on the name of your project (there will be a list of names if you have more than one site with a counter on) to see your stats.

I’m going to click on “keep safe” – a blog I run to help prevent people falling victim to scammers.

Choose which stats you want to see from the left hand menu.  I usually use “Recent Keyword Activity” – which tells me which search terms people used to find the site and “recent came from” which tells me if people came to my site from an external link – for example from one of the social bookmarks you made if you followed the previous post on this blog.