For people interested - I've been involved in website building for years (started 2009ish). One of the best places to start learning about how to build a webBUSINESS as opposed to a webSITE is with SBI.
SBI is not the cheapest way to get started - the cost is $299 per year - but if you are serious about making money with your site it is well worth paying. The Action Guide is a 10 step programme that essentially helps you build a workable business plan for your website. It includes a lot of very powerful tool to help you research your business and has a very powerful blockbuilder system so you can literally drag and drop "blocks" (images/text/headings/tables) to where you want them on your page.
The action guide also includes some Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to make sure that your site has a hope of getting traffic.
What I have learned from doing all this is that it is very hard to make money on an "information-only" site. It is possible, but you need huge amounts of traffic to get
enough clicks on adds to be worthwhile. My main site had around 1500 visitors per day for a while, and was bringing in around £200 per month from adsense. I had to work really hard to get those visitors, building hundreds of pages and taking thousands of hours. I haven't worked on the site in around 12 months and still get about £50 per month
residual income. This is from a tightly focused niche site, well researched with well targeted keywords and a very specific and high spending audience. I learned a huge amount doing it, but probably wouldn't build an "information only" site now, at least not as a business venture.
A hobby site/blog/farm diary built on a free platform like wordpress.com simply doesn't have a hope - you can't build in the SEO from the start, you don't have the tools for keyword research without paying for them separately and typically the audience you will attract will be browsers looking for free information. Getting them to spend money is hard.
On the flip side - if you have a high value product with a decent
profit margin then making money is comparatively easy.
I have a website selling a "Bee Rescue Service" - when people want
bees gone, they really want them gone. I don't need 500 clicks on adds to make £100 - I just need one solid lead. With a good margin I can pay for google ads and buy traffic to my site. Currently I'm getting around 1 solid lead per £5 spent on ads - each with a potential profit starting at around £100. I only get around 20 visitors per day and spend around 10 minutes checking emails. The jobs themselves are typically a day of labour and I get paid in
bees and cash for it. This is much better hourly rate than I ever achieved building content pages on my old site.
So my overall advice -
invest in the SBI package and spend time working properly through the action guide. It is the best place to learn web business building I have ever found.learn everything you can about page building, keyword research etc...Try to figure out a physical product or service you can sell - one with a high price tag that people really need. People don't need a lavender wheat bag, no matter how nice it is and your mark up and hourly rate will be low. People with a bee problem really NEED a beekeeper to come and help. Start with the customers need and see what you can do to address it.
I hope that is of some help.
Mike
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