A tried and true tactic to making money has been to build something from scratch and then sell it to the highest bidder once the going gets good. Just look at all of the mergers and acquisitions that go on in the business world; this should give you an idea of just how much money is potentially at stake for you. You could sell a small business to Google, for example, and net yourself $1.6 billion.

Taking the ‘real-world’ example and modifying them to something you can do in your spare time is pretty easy, conceptually. With all things, however, you are going to need to dedicate time and effort to making things work, grown, and prosper. It won’t be easy, but you can do it.

If you’ve never heard of it before, there’s a huge marketplace for websites on the internet. More than one, actually, but this post was inspired by an auction currently going on at the sitepoint marketplace.

This auction is for a premium, well established, monetized, popular website. Minimum bid: $500,000.00. Small fries need not apply. This auction caught my attention because I’ve used that site in the past. It also caught my attention because it’s being sold for at least half a million dollars.

So how can you build, market, and sell a website for a profit? The principle is easy: Build a site, build a following, then sell the site. Now, as webtrepreneurs, we all know that quite a bit of effort is required to make things work out. Starting this week, we will explore these 3 topics: how to build a website, a community, and finally, how to sell the website for a profit. Be warned: you will need to spend a few bucks to try this, but it takes money to make money.

The methods that I will teach you are tried and true; I’ve built a few sites using this plugin and the sites have already paid me back nicely. Bring a good attitude and a business spirit and get ready to jump on the online money train!

Are you interested in making money online? Then stay tuned and sign up for my RSS feed. We’ll do this step by step so that by the end of the series, you will have a website that you can build on and get it ready for sale.

The question for the ages. How does one place well for certain keywords on Google? I get asked that more often than I would have thought. I’m not Matt Cutts nor am I an SEO expert, but I have done OK for a few of my sites in the recent past. There is no one magic trick to placing well in the engines and Google surely won’t give away any tips or tricks. However, they do give you a set of very vague guidelines to help you get an understanding of how to build your websites.

Firstly, keyword search results, or your search engine ranking position (SERP) determine how well you place when a user searches for a given keyword that is relevant to your site/page. Google advises you to make your page for the humans that are reading it, and if it’s relevant to humans then Google’s Googlebot will read it and index it. In addition to content, Google recommends that you have other links going to your site and that you also create a sitemap. You should also make it accessible and avoid keyword pollution, page cloaking, and other malicious things.

From the paragraph above, you can see that there are at least 4 recommendations. From these recommendations, honest developers and spammers alike will be indexed by Google. Google then aims to remove the spam and keep the ham. The honest content creator and the Evil Marketing Spammers (the Ems, as I like to call them) both have the same set of guidelines, but somehow, it seems like the Ems are getting ahead of the game. While the honest content creators strive to provide good content, the Ems will work their evil magic to beat Google’s rules and algorithms in order to rise above other more qualified and relevant websites.

Learn From the Ems

Then question then becomes simple. As content developers and non-spammers, what can we do in order to make our websites better than that of the Ems? How can Google find favor in our sites, given that we don’t have all the time, money, or other resources that the Ems have?

Lucky for us, Google has given us some starting points and the Ems have given us plenty of knowledge and insight into doing well for ourselves.

1. Human Readable Pages: Google recommends that your page should be human readable. Well, aren’t all pages readable to humans? I would say “sort of, yes”. However, what Google really means is this: “Make your content so that our bot can read it”. In other words, don’t create one huge .jpg with text on it. Googlebot will think it’s only an image. Don’t make your site in Flash if you’re not using any text that can be parsed. If possible, use only valid HTML code. That’s kind of what they’re saying. Googblebot is impressive, but it is not able to interpret things other than text so it goes through your source code and looks at what’s inside. It then makes sense of your content and indexes and ranks it accordingly.
   It also seems like Google cares about how much content you have. If there are two sites of similar quality, content, and ranking, I think that the one with more content will be ranked above the one with a lesser rank.
2. Incoming Links: In the Google Webmaster tools, there’s a way for you to check incoming links to your site. I’m not sure how the big G finds and categorizes the incoming links, nor do I know what they count as a valid incoming link, but that does seem to play a big role into placing well in the search results. We can learn from the Ems here and use some strategies if we really want our content to be found. We (as individuals) can create accounts on sites like Squidoo, Blogger, and Wordpress. We can then create content on each of these sites that link to our site. This is kind of an odd strategy because you are then creating SPAM to promote your quality site. I’m not too fond of this approach but I have used it in the past with a small degree of success. Likewise, you can create accounts to social bookmarking sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon and hope that your users will like your content. These two strategies combined can help your site to place higher in search engines.
3. Accessibility: Lastly, Google says your site should be accessible. This does not mean making it only so users can GET to your sites, but it means making the content “accessible” to people with disabilities. You do this simply by adding “alt” tags to your images and by adding titles to links. Make sure to validate your site using the W3 HTML validator.

Getting indexed by Google is the easy part. People will find you and people will get to your site eventually. If you employ the above strategies and work on building solid content, people will find your sites more frequently and you’ll start getting more and more hits organically. Keep your eyes peeled and examine the sites made by Ems. They’re good and you can learn a lot from them!

Way back in 1963, J. S. Adams established the “equity theory of management”. I find his theory a bit obvious and extremely applicable to entrepreneurs and all sorts of business minded individuals, but I want to discuss this theory with you today.

In short, the theory “attempts to explain relational satisfaction in terms of perceptions of fair/unfair distributions of resources within interpersonal relationships” (1). Very simply put, this theory says that there is a tie between what you feel you are worth in a certain setting and how you feel about your worth or compensation.  In a business setting, this means that an employee may feel like they’re being treated unfairly if they’re paid too little (or too much? Yeah, right.) for their work.  The relationship between the pay for the job and the fairness of the pay based on the amount of work (”equity”) that you put in can lead to either an increase or a decrease in work satisfaction.  Click on the image below to get a bigger version - it’ll help you visualize this theory better.

So what does this have to do with blogging?  Well, it’s pretty straightforward, I think.  How hard to you work on your blog?  What kind of time and commitment are you giving your blog?  How thorough are you when you make posts?  Do you research your topic?  Do you spell check?  Do you make posts that make sense?  Are you active in your blog’s community?  Do you answer the emails that you get?   If you’ve answered “yes” to these questions, then you are definitely working hard and deserve to receive recognition or payment for your work.  If you’ve answered “no” to some or all of these questions and yet you believe that you should be getting paid to blog, then you need to wake up and smell the roses.  There’s a definite tie between the amount of work that you put in and the amount of money that you get paid for your work.

I recently received an email question from a newbie blogger asking for my honest feedback on his blog.  I know it probably was a shot in the dark to send me an email, but I appreciated the note and felt as though this person cared about my opinions.  So I took the time to research his blog, figure out what I thought about it, and compose a nice email detailing my views.  It took about 35 minutes out of my already busy day but I did it as a favor for this guy.  I never received acknowledgment of receipt nor did I receive a simple “thanks” or anything else.  I don’t mean that I felt like I was owed anything, but I what I got out of this transaction was that the blogger didn’t really care to hear about anyone else’s opinions, even though he asked for it.  I don’t think his blog will be around very much longer if he keeps up this attitude.

If you’re involved in your blog’s community and are actively putting in sweat equity into your blog, Adams suggests that somewhere down the road you will feel like you need to be compensated for your work.  And I agree.  How you can be compensated varies, but if you have any kind of audience it is your duty as a blogger to work hard to monetize your site.  Private ad sales, paid reviews, or otherwise,  you need to figure out what kind of payment you want to receive from your blog.  Don’t give up and keep writing!  The money will follow…eventually.

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_theory

So Davey Z and I found out today that we were unintentionally violating the terms of service to one of our big search engine marketing campaign programs. This campaign apparently didn’t like us using our domain name to promote them. That’s why our link stopped working roughly a week ago. During this time, I had been working with my affiliate manager to figure out what the problem was but we didn’t figure it out until today.

Up until today I was really happy with my affiliate manager at Azoogle, but the fact that it took him 3 days to tell me why the link stopped working is really unacceptable. I know, I know, I’m still a small fish. I brought in less than $1000 last month so why should he care about my problems, right? Regardless of size, I think he should have been more responsive.

So, lesson learned. Read and understand the terms of service fully before spending money on a campaign. I don’t think we’ll lose any money other than the money we paid for clicks for a few days, but other than that we’ll be in good shape.

What did we get out of this lesson?

1. Pay attention to the fine print. The campaign’s terms and conditions clearly told us not to use a domain name that contained their name. We ignored that and did it anyway. Our mistake. I don’t think it was worthy of an immediate ban but I guess that’s just how they work. No sweat. We won’t lose any sleep over this. There are plenty of other campaigns out there….it’s their loss, ultimately.
2. Check your campaign links every day. We could have saved a few click dollars if we had checked up on our links every day. It tooks us 4 days to realize that our link wasn’t working, and therefore we lost out on PPC dollars. This money, ironically, was our first attempt at scaling this campaign so we were bummed when we found out our link was dead. We didn’t lose all of it, so we’ll find another campaign for sure.
3. Stay on your feet. What happens when you get tossed a curveball? Do you let them throw you a strike or do you swing for the fences? Stay on your feet, keep your eyes open for new campaigns, and have a backup plan in case of emergency. Davey Z and I have talked things over and we’ll meet tonight to hammer out our new plan just in time for the weekend.
4. Learn to move on. Don’t let little setbacks like this keep you down. Sure, we were only running 2 campaigns. This one was our “big” one…it generated most of our income last month. Oh well. Big whoop. We’ll find something else and kick our strategies up a notch.

I learned a few lessons this past week about affiliate marketing. I hope you can learn from my mistakes so that you don’t face the same problems that I did. Remember to stay on your feet, pay attention to your campaigns, and most importantly, don’t ever give up!

March is here and February is already over. Even with leap day and February being a “long” month this time around, I just feel as though time flew by. These few weeks have been exciting and fast-paced. They’ve included seeing the start of new ventures as well as seeing other ventures continue to work.

Online business is never boring and one of the key benefits to making money online is that you can see results and gather data very quickly. In less than 1 month, Davey Z and I have learned a lot about search engine marketing and gathered enough data to be able to anticipate and predict certain patters in our trial campaign. We hope to be able to take what we’ve learned in the last few weeks and scale our projects to make us more money this month, so that we can reinvest it and keep growing.

This is what this month looked like:

In January, my eBay sites had started off nicely, earning me roughly $3.50 per day. February showed a little bit of a slowdown for these sites, although I believe this has to do with my lack of effort in updating those sites. For the month of February, those eBay sites made roughly $2.87 per day, or about $83. Although this is a low number and I’d like to see much better results from those sites, it’s important to remember that I did absolutely no work on those sites this month nor did I invest 1 penny into buying new products/plugins or any advertising. This is $83 that go right into my technology savings fund.

In addition to the made for Ebay sites that are making me some money online, I also kept up this blog and started on a search engine marketing campaign with Davey Z. The blog’s performance was similar to last month’s, although advertising sales are still sluggish. Do you want to see your ad on my site? Contact me by 5pm on Wednesday, March 5th and I’ll give you a special rate! Thanks to Claire from Sharp Wit Designs and a few paid reviews, this site earned $40.50.

The part about this income report that I’m most excited about is the SEM report. Starting in the last few days of January, Davey Z and I launched and managed 4 different campaigns. Two of them turned out to do well and two of them turned out to be dogs. We ditched the dogs and kept the ones that worked. That being said, our total income from our SEM campaign topped out at $721.25. Not bad for our first month, eh? Our total cost for running these campaigs was $367.79, but given that we used some promo coupons to get us started, our adjusted costs came to be only $84.87, for a grant profit of $636.38. This is a great first month! We are going to reinvest these earnings and go all out in March. Hopefully to see these numbers keep growing!

2008 is off to a great start. Breaking records and learning new things, I’ve been able to add to my arsenal of webtrepreneurship. I hope that March is a better month than February; given that Davey Z and I already have a bit of experience with SEM and have data to helps us know what to expect, we hope to keep trucking along and pushing the envelope of our SEM skills.