There is so much to know when it comes to trying to make money online. Many may find the idea of making money from home using the internet as a very appealing, however the learning curve involved can certainly discourage many fledgling internet marketers.
Think about it, even the most basic of things such as finding a hosting company, getting a domain registered and then knowing how to put up a proper site is a daunting task for anyone who has never done such a thing before. And this is the easy stuff. Then you have to learn how to do proper keyword research, create tons of content, learn about back linking and all the other types of search engine optimization techniques that exist.
For anyone starting out, this can take months of experimenting with site design, research, asking questions on forums, and generally observing how your site or sites perform.
When I started out, I went through all of this. Before I took the plunge with my first site, I had spent a few months buying as many internet marketing courses that I could afford and spent hundreds of hours pouring through every detail that I could absorb. I had certainly learned a lot about putting up sites, keyword research, learning about special services and software that I would have never known about if I had not taken the initiative to buy all these e-books and videos. However in the end, it all came down to practice.
I was so exited about my first site. I had discovered a keyword that had high search volume and low competition, and then proceeded to create a domain name around it and put up my site. This was a WordPress site which is reliably easy to get up and running. Anywhere I had created around 30 pages of content, and did most of my back linking with bookmarking sites.
Within the first month I started to get some traffic, wow was that ever exciting! I even made my first $ 2.00 with AdSense within this time only 1 click! I was on to something. My site was starting to get more hits by the 8th week, I was averaging around 40-50 hits a day, and my AdSense earnings were starting to increase. I was going to make a lot of money with this site before the year was out, or so I thought.
All of a sudden, my traffic just died out, I went from 40-50 hits a day to about 5-10 hits daily practically overnight. I just could not understand it. What had gone wrong? Why did this happen? I was so bummed out about it, after 3 months of hard work, this is what I got for it.
For the next 3 weeks or so I spend every minute online trying to figure out why this happened. I started posting on forums explaining my situation, I had many people take a look at my site and got all kinds of opinions and advice as to why and what I could do about it.
In the end I was more confused than ever, I started doing everything that people suggested. I removed all my out going links from my home page, I added images with alt tags, I set up a robots.txt file with all sorts of code that I did not understand the significance of, yet I just did what people suggested.
In the end after a couple of weeks of this, I just cave up on the site. I went to Google and asked for a reconsideration, because I thought that I had done something wrong resulting in my site being penalized for something. To make a long story short, it turns out that this sort of thing is normal. What I am about to say is very important to anyone who is just starting out and why it is important not get discouraged if this happens with your new site.
The Google dance. This is a phenomena with many new sites that have low rank and very little back linking at first. Quite often Google will give good placement in the SERPs (search engine result pages) for a new site for a while, resulting in some decent traffic if the keywords are well chosen, however all of a sudden your site gets kicked down to some darker recess In the search engine placements.
What you have to do to get it back up is to create some authority for your site. There are many ways to do this, but in general it is about good back linking strategy. This means that you need to get as many back links as possible from high ranking sites.
The best way to do this in my opinion is to create articles and submit to article directories, such as this article. There are other methods, however the message here is to expect your new site to go through the ups and downs of search engine placement and not get discouraged if / when it happens.
This is just a small aspect to the whole picture in regards to internet marketing, yet this is in my opinion a very important piece of advice that I can give to anyone who is new to internet marketing. Of course I am just touching on a few things in general without getting too much into detail. There is so much to learn. Yet what a rewarding experience it is to be able to receive a check in the mail for merely sitting at home working on a computer.
The message here is do not give up if this is what you really want to do, if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it. Having said that, it is not that hard once you learn the ropes, remember its all a numbers game in the end. Keep putting up new sites, rinse and repeat the process and you will see over time how well you can really succeed in this business called internet marketing.
