If you want to build an effective online business, a good approach is to create quality content sites designed to rank highly in the search engines. When done right, the work you put in one time can provide you with a steady stream of free traffic and profits for years to come.
But how do you do this in the fastest and easiest way? Here's a quick five step overview that shows you exactly how it's done:
Step 1 - Choose Your Topic
The first thing you need to do is to pick a topic for your new site. All the pages should be related to one clearly defined theme to appeal to visitors and search engines. You can start with a topic that interests you and then verify that it has profit potential.
The best strategy if you want to build a profitable site is to choose an area where there are lots of products being sold online. Simply pick a topic where there are existing affiliate programs or one where a lot of people are paying for pay per click advertising. This ensures that money is being spent in your market.
Step 2 - Do Competitive Keyword Research
Once you have your overall topic defined, use automated research tools to find out exactly what your target market wants. You will quickly be able to discover all the specific keyword phrases they are searching for, how much traffic each one can generate, and how much competition there is for each keyword.
This information is invaluable. If you design the important landing pages on your website for keyword phrases with high demand and low competition, it will be much easier to rank well in the search engines. Do this research now and create an overall outline for the structure of your site.
Step 3 - Build Your Authority Site
When you have done your keyword research, it's time to start building your website. The easiest way to do this is to use content management software like WordPress to handle the technical aspects. There are a lot of plugins and customization options available to make sure your site is optimized for the search engines. It's also very important that you use a good clean layout that gets the response you want.
Publish your content in a themed silo structure using main pages and sub pages based on your keyword research. This will give more relevance to each group of pages and better long-term rankings. Simply take your keyword outline and create one page specifically designed to rank well for each keyword phrase. Add new sub pages continually to target more and more specific keyword terms as you start building traffic.
Step 4 - Monetize Your Traffic
When the basic framework is in place, your site is ready to receive traffic. You job now is to convert that traffic to profits. A good strategy is to offer a free newsletter where visitors sign up to receive updates from you. This can be automated so an email is sent out whenever you add new content to your site and it's a great way to build a following of repeat visitors.
You should also include ads for related affiliate programs in key positions on your pages. This means you share the profits whenever someone visits your site and buys one of the products being offered. You can rotate ads randomly to see which ones are more profitable. Another simple monetization option is to include pay per click ads like Google AdSense where you get paid whenever a visitor clicks on one of your ads.
Step 5 - Get Links To Your Site
When your site is ready, it's simply a matter of getting traffic. A good basic framework ensures that you will be able to get good rankings in the search engines for all your important keyword phrases. What determines your rankings after that is the quality and quantity of links to your pages from other established sites out there. This is what you should focus on now.
Besides providing unique, quality content, you should use smart social media sharing tools to make it easy for people to link back to you. This can be automated so you only have to set it up once to have it included in all your pages. You can also distribute articles to other sites, participate in discussion forums and blogs to get backlinks to your website. Whenever you get someone to link back to you using your keywords in the link it will positively impact the long-term rankings of all your pages.
That's it. This simple five step strategy can be used to set up new authority sites in different niche markets with minimum work. You should be able to complete the basics in a couple of days. After that, it's just a matter of driving more traffic to your site and collecting the profits it generates for you.