Wake up call: Stop reading ebooks, time for action!

I have a question to ask you at this point in our little journey. Do you consider yourself a serios Website Investor? Have you read all about research, development and marketing? If not go ahead and finish reading those first.

If you did, have you actually put to practice tips given there? Have you researched your keywords? Did you build a site? What was it like promoting it?

Reason I ask you all this is simple. This blog can be read as a one big e-book on Website investing. Like all e-books out there, you will find it useful, you will accept many of ideas and you will learn something new. But it is worthless until you actually do something about it! I want to urge you to stop reading e-books for a while and start doing some live action!

The best way to learn something is by practicing it. If you do not spend equal time in practice as you spend reading theory, you will be simply overwhelmed with information and you won't be able to act creatively. Your creativity will be put to hold, sealed in a corner of your brain. You have all this information at your disposal, yet are unable to find a simple way to start. This can be very frustrating if not prevented on time.

So start today and start small... Research your keywords. If you did, build a site using proper SEO techniques. Apply some of the tips and tricks I told you about. If you did then it is perhaps time to do something about marketing.

Have a great netvesting weekend!

How good keyword research beats website marketing

In the previous article I wrote about beginner tips for website marketing. These are all good and tried steps to get your site noticed and indexed in search engines within a day, sometimes even faster.

Here is the interesting part. I made a small site when I was setting up my last project, called easy wii finder. This site was built merely to test weebly as a development platform and as you can see it contains just one image of Nintendo console and a small review which is then linking to the main page of the project.

The site was never marketed using the standard techniques. For past month it received maximum 15 visitors per day, with an average being about 5. Then two days ago site started moving up significantly in search engines. First it had 62 visits from search and that's when I noticed something is happening. Yesterday this number went to a whopping 95 as the site progressed to the first page of results for term "wii finder". (edit: Site currently has over 200 visits from search engines every day)

No additional effort was made for the site, simply it just got there by itself. This proves that search engines need time to check your website and give it some trust. My opinion is that during that time it is essential that there are no ads on the site. In this case, neither content nor promotion mattered. The site has only one paragraph which has not been updated at all. (edit: This changed as content was added later)

The key element in this case was a good keyword research. Choosing the low competition keywords proved essential as the site was able to move faster up until it gained the position it has today.

Interestingly the squidoo page which has almost same keywords and much more content and promotion still haven't picked up in search engines proving so far my point that squidoo is not trusted by google and should not be used for purposes of website investing.

I will be monitoring developments and keep you updated.

How to find low competition keywords

Evaluating a niche means researching the need for the niche (number of daily searches) and the competition (number of competing websites).

As I described in cool laptop skins project post, you need to balance the search frequency for your niche (the need) with amount of already existing pages covering the topics (the competition). Ultimately you want a niche that has high need and low competition keywords. High need can be described as around at least 50-100 searches per day committed on major search engines. Low competition for niche means that there are less then 20,000-30,000 pages on internet containing that exact term.

Search frequency can easily be checked using brilliant wordtracker tool. Type in your niche, for example "ship building". Wordtracker will list number of searches per day for your niche and also give a list of related keywords. You are looking for at least 50, possibly 100, searches per day.

By searching on google for your term inside quotations, for example "ship building" you will get the number of pages that contain that exact term. You want less then 20,000 to 30,000 pages. In this example there are 1,200,000 pages - too much competition.

Continue to search for combination of keywords that match both parameters, about 100 searches per day and less then 30,000 pages of competition.

You are then ready to move to development phase of the project.

Finding Niche Ideas

Finding a good niche is very hard. This is largely because Internet is so big today that almost all topics you can come up with are already covered somewhere. When you create a site on some topic, you enter a battle with thousands if not millions of other pages on the internet competing for that sweet spot in search engine results.

Your first task when searching for a niche is to write down couple of ideas. You can start with things you like, for example snowboarding or cooking, but chance is they already have too much competition. So you should try some other sources. Also the more keywords there are in your niche chance is that you will have less competition. So cooking is bad, but "how to cook asparagus" is very good.

Here are some sites where you can get niche ideas in no time:

• Ebay Pulse will give you an idea what is hot on ebay at the moment
• Google HotTrends shows what are people searching for today
• Yahoo Buzz! is another similar service

When you have couple of ideas written down, you can move to evaluating niche ideas.

Earning money with zero investments using Website Investing methods

How to make money with zero investment? It is an old question. Thanks to Internet, making money opportunities are in abundance.

I want to share my experience in how to earn money on Internet using only free tools and services through a process called Website investing. I will show you methods and techniques that I learned. And we will learn together in this netvesting adventure.

The whole Website investing process can be split simply into fours separate steps:

1. Research
2. Development
3. Marketing
4. Conversion

Research is a part where you search for a 'niche' for your new Website. Niche is a term, made of one or several keywords, describing your target market. Like for example "shoe making". Your want to find a niche for which you have little or no competition on the Internet, while there exists a general interest for it (people search for it in the google). Finding a good niche is extremely important.

Development is a part where you develop your website around your niche. We need a development platform and content. Good content is very important because you want users to read about something useful which will help you get better rankings with search engines like Google and Yahoo. You will develop content using free website creator services, such for example is blogpsot.com the home of this site. I have not paid a cent to have this site, I do not pay any bills and I do not have to worry about server problems. I only have to write. Everything else is taken care of. There are a lot of other sites like this all about you will learn in website development related posts.

Marketing is a phase where you let the world know about your content. Purpose of this step is to generate traffic (visitors) to your site. The more usable and original content you have the less you will have to worry about marketing. Still you have to make an initial move. Social networking is very popular tool for letting others know about your content. There are other tools like forums, directories, word of mouth etc. The crucial thing is to have content worth talking about or recommending. Key to remember is if you wouldn't recommend your new site to your friends , then don't expect others will.

Conversion is where all the visitors "convert" to earnings. It is all called monetization. It is somewhat a rough word, but it describes process from a monetization perspective. In practice about 200 visitors are needed to make one sale. Interestingly it does not matter what you are selling. If you are selling a sticker for $2 or a diamond ring for $2000, it will still need about 200 visitors to sell it. Chance is people that look for stickers will have around $2 to spare and people looking for diamonds will have $2000. That's an interesting fact that needs to be remembered.