Welcome

What Is So Great About This Blog?

The only chance this blog has of succeeding is to be different then the 100's of other 'How To Make Money Online' blogs.

What makes this blog different:

• This blog is about a website. It discusses and analyzes the creation, maintenance, and performance of howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com.
• All claims are backed up by actual data. You will not see claims like: 'post comments because it increases traffic'. This blog will show, by using actual data, how much traffic posting comments has brought to howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com.
• There are no false claims of how I made 1000's of dollars a day using a secret system. With this blog, lies and exaggerated claims are impossible because howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com reveals all of its stats.
• Being a webmaster is not always a sunny day. This blog discusses the real trials and tribulations of being a webmaster. If this blog/website are doing poorly then you will see traces of tears in the posts.
• This blog has no advertising or selling of any kind. It is simply information and entertainment. The website howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com does all the money making, not this blog.
• Most blogs expect you to follow their advice on the assumption that they are an authority on the subject. This blog expects you to look at the data and decide for yourself.

All Posts Are Written With The Following in Mind:

• Honesty.
• Mix information with entertainment.
• The visitors time is valuable. Provide clear and original content.
• No claims without data to support it.
• One day this blog and the website it discusses will be successful.

Enjoy!

Last month this website did not make a lot of money.  No surprise.  I have become comfortable not making money with this website.  My world would be in chaos if this website made money.  What would I do?  How would I act? Who would I be?

Obviously making money does not motivate me to keep this website.  For motivation I need to look elsewhere.  Like the man who is suddenly happy because he finds an unscathed sock amongst the ashes of his burned down house, I too have something to smile about.

The Search Traffic Graph

There are many graphs on this website.  But none of them please me as much as the organic search traffic graph.  If I was a father and graphs were my children then the search traffic graph would be my favorite son.  The one that makes me most proud, the one that is going to grow up just like dad, the one I always take fishing.

When everything looks bleak and I start to feel like Sisyphus, all I need to do is to look at my beloved search traffic graph and everything becomes alright.

Every month organic traffic increases to this website.  Last month was a huge increase.  Almost 500 visitors from Google – twice the amount compared to the previous month.  For the entire year the graph is almost a perfect 45 degree upward slope.  For the last few months organic traffic has been doubling every month.  If this keeps up I will have 8,388,608,000 monthly visitors in 2 years.

It is a well known fact that to increase search engine traffic you need two things: time and backlinks.  As more time goes by the amount of search engine traffic should increase naturally – the older your website the better.  Google checks the date your domain name was registered to determine the age of your website.

(It is also claimed that Google checks the expiration date of your domain name.  If your domain name registration is about to expire, or registered for only a year at a time, Google thinks you are a fly by night operation – maybe even a spammer.  It looks better if your domain name is not close to the registration expiry date and is registered for the next three years.  It is claimed – I am not sure if it is true but it makes sense to me.)

Besides time you also need backlinks.  The last few months were a guest post frenzy.  Continuously spinning the lever on the guest posting machine gun:  Problogger, Dailyblogtips, JohnChow, Blogsessive.  Not because I want to entertain and inform people, I do it for the backlinks.  And it works; the graph keeps stepping up and up – 8,388,608,000 monthly visitors in two years.

The Real Value of Search Engine Traffic

500 visitors a month is not a lot.  There are websites a lot younger then this one that receive more search engine visitors in a single day.  But that does not make me envious because not all search engine traffic has the same value.  Some visitors are worth more then others and mine are worth more.

Google sends me visitors who are searching for “how much money can be made from a website’ and variations on this theme.  These are valuable keywords – I know because I tried to buy them.

Last month I created an account on Google AdWords.  I wanted to buy traffic.  I was going to pay money to have my website appear on search engine results in the sponsored links section.

I opened the account and then 30 minutes later I abandoned the account.  Visitors for this niche are expensive.  Imagine someone does a search on Google for ‘make money with website’.   My website appears on the side of the search results, if the person clicks on my link then I pay Google around 5 dollars.  5 dollars to have somebody land on my website, look around, and leave.  My earnings which took a year to accumulate would be gone in 4 hours.

Of course if I thought that the visitors would buy the ‘website starter kit’ then 5 dollars is a small price to pay.  I would be paying 5 dollars  and receiving 65 dollars when a paid visitor buys the starter kit.  To break even I would need 1 in 13 paid visitors to purchase the starter kit.  Being a realist, I know that is not going to happen.

My keywords are expensive so I cannot afford to pay for visitors.  But the flip side is that this website receives valuable visitors from search engines.  People looking for ‘make money with website’ are worth a lot more then people looking for ‘how to comb down a cowlick’ which  cost only 5 cents per visitor.

Last month I received 500 visitors from Google.  Visitors that if I had to pay for them would cost me around 2500.  In other words, last month I saved 2500 dollars.

This website receives only 500 search engine visitors a month while other websites receive 500 visitors a day because the ‘make money with website’ niche has a lot of competition.  Visitors who want to make money with a website are worth more because they spend money.  Visitors looking for hair combing tips do not spend money and that’s why they are worth only 5 cents – nobody wants them.  Other websites get 500 visitors a day, but these are messy haired visitors without a dime to their name.

Other websites get 500 search engine visitors a day worth (500*.05) 25 dollars a day or 750 dollars a month.  My visitors are worth 2500 a month.

Now all I need to do is figure out what to do with these valuable visitors.  I have them but how do I use them – how do I convert their value into cash.  People come to my store with cash stuffed pockets – how do I get them to give me that cash.  So far they just walk in, look around and leave.  Some of them accidentally dropped a few pennies on the floor but the bulk of the 2500 dollars that came through my door left.  I need to convince visitors to give me their money before they leave.

How to make visitors give me their money?  My days are spent thinking about this question as I lovingly gaze at my beautiful search engine traffic graph.

Like a green oasis in the desert, a life giving miracle has appeared.  This website is making a profit.  Finally after 320 days this website has incurred $538.23 in costs and made $544.71 in revenue – revenue is a bigger number then the costs number.  That is a cool $6.48 that goes straight into my pocket.  A crisp five dollar bill and some jingling change.

Of course $6.48 is a lot less then the $10,000 I was hoping to have.  But I take is a learning experience.  I have no other choice, the only other thing I can take it as is a total failure; so in this case I am choosing optimism over the truth.  I learned that my expectation was way to high.  I year ago I thought that in 320 days I would be drinking hundred dollar wine and deciding between a red or black corvette.  Instead, I have made just enough money to buy a coffee and ride the bus.

Bitter?  Yep.  Basically I got ripped off.  I have put in 494 hours of work and received a meager $6.48.  This is criminal – a scam.  A rational human being would never accept these terms.  The only way a person could end up in this situation is by force or trickery.   In my case it was not force – nobody made me make a website.  I chose to make a website.  I chose to build a website because I believed that I would get paid fairly for my efforts.   

Who knows how I fell for it.  Or who did it to me.  Or how they benefit.  It is like the Kennedy assassination – the deeper you look the more mysterious it gets.  I have tried to analyze what happened, how I get duped, where did it all start.  My investigations have led nowhere.  Somehow I believed that the internet would be a great source of income.  I have no idea who did this to me.  But to keep my sanity I have stopped asking who and why.  Kennedy is dead and the circumstances around it strange – period.  I spent 494 hours to get $6.48 – period. 

What To Do With The Bitterness?

Being bitter raises an interesting problem for a webmaster.  There is no way to vent or redirect negative feelings.  At the work place it is easy to redirect bitterness. 

Let’s say you do not get the bonus you expected.  No problem.  Do not buy toilet paper, pens, calculators, or coffee – the office will supply you with these.  Take one or two items a day.  It’s not stealing, it is your bonus.  You can come to work a little later, have a longer lunch, leave a little earlier.  Its is not abuse, it is your bonus.  One way or another you will get your bonus.

Boss does not appreciate your work?  You work over the weekend to get the report on the boss’s desk first thing Monday morning and all you get is a ‘great – thanks’.  No problem.   Monday and Tuesday you play solitaire and browse your favorite websites with a clear conscience because you are simply recouping your weekend.

Having a bad day at work:  Co-worker talking in your ear about her stupid domestic issues?  Crappy computer crashes?  Client upsetting you with unrealistic demands?  Phone keeps ringing?  No problem.  Hit the keyboard a few times, open and close the laptop monitor many times and really fast, hang up the phone extra hard, start a dirty rumor about your co-worker and give her real domestic issues.

That’s what so great about the work environment.  You get bitter and upset, but at least there is something you can do to vent.  The workplace offers many ways to redirect that bitterness onto other people and office equipment.

Sadly a webmaster has no such luxury.  A webmaster works alone and with their own equipment.  Nothing to steal, nothing to hit, nobody to bad mouth.  Something goes wrong and all you can do is sit there and stew.  You could hit the keyboard but then you need to buy a new one.  You could have a longer lunch but then you will have to make it up later.  You could yell at the dog but he will just wag his tail and want to play catch.

Like a egg, a webmaster can only boil in their pot and harden.

Raking The Sand

The other day I was browsing Amazon for something to spend my $6.48 on.  I quickly discovered that I have enough money to pay for shipping but not enough for the product.  So I went to the only place where I can spend my website profits – the dollar store.

The pin wheel hat was too tight and the plastic gun did not look real.  But then I saw it.  As soon I as I tried it I knew it was exactly what I needed.  It is a simple thing.  Sand, rock and a rake – a mini zen garden.

Now it sits beside my computer.  Before I check my stats I pick up the rake with my left hand and begin to slide it across the sand.  It has a calming effect.  Little rocks are placed randomly in the sand so I rake around them.  The four little lines in the sand twist and turn around the rocks and relax me as I check my revenue stats.  Monks have zen gardens to bring them closer to nirvana.  I have my little zen garden to avoid destroying my own keyboard.

My zen garden has taught me something else.  Just because I spend lots of time on my website and receive almost nothing in monetary return, does not mean my time is wasted.  Now I know that there are even bigger wastes of time possible – like raking sand around little rocks.  This calms me and the bitterness floats away.

I strongly recommend that you purchase a zen garden.  It will really help you as webmaster and make you gentler and kinder blogger.

If 26 of you buy the zen garden via the Amazon link above then I will earn $6.50 from Amazon – almost doubling my annual profits.  I am raking with my left hand and pecking the keyboard with my right.

Your visitors are strangers. You know almost nothing about them. All you are told is where – where in the world they are located, and where on the internet they came from.

There are occasions when knowing the location of your visitor matters, if you are selling snow tires and your visitor is from Egypt then you will not make a sale. But for the majority of cases geographical location is irrelevant. At most it reveals the local time for your visitor. If it is morning for him then he is grumpy, if it is evening then he is either full of wine or tired – how you can use this information is unknown.

The other where is the important one. From where did the visitor come from? There are three possibilities:

1. Some other site
2. Search Engine
3. Address bar or Bookmark/Favorite

Knowing from where your visitor arrived is vital information. Because when you know from where they came, you know their intent.

Know Their Intent, Predict Their Behavior

Like the father of a beautiful daughter, your main concern is: what is the intent? A boy walks up to the door, rings the doorbell, father opens, “hello…what are your intentions with my daughter?” The coy boy replies, “Nothing much, we are going to play baseball. I like to pitch and your daughter enjoys being catcher. After the game we are going to a BBQ for some hotdogs, which reminds me, your daughter needs to bring some buns – I bring the wieners.” The father smiles and shakes the young boys hand, ‘you kids have fun’.

Unfortunately you cannot ask your visitors about their intentions, the best you can do is infer. And the most useful piece of information about their intent is to know from where they came. Unlike the word of a horny school boy about to take your daughter on a date, knowing how your visitors came to your site is a true description of intent.

Why is intent important? Knowing intent allows you to predict visitor’s behavior on your site.

Obviously you want your visitors to behave a certain way. For this site I want my visitors to do at least one of these four actions:

1. Click an Ad
2. Purchase an affiliate product
3. Purchase my product
4. Backlink to this site

Visitors who do none of the above can be ignored – they do nothing for this site. If you are reading this blog then you probably belong to the ignorable category. You are familiar with this site so you will not click on the ads or buy the products. The only way to turn yourself into a valuable visitor is to backlink to this website. Some of you have done it, but most of you have not and will not.

If I want visitors to behave in one of the four ways above then I need to look at their intentions. Once I know their intentions then I know how they will behave.   So once I know which traffic sources brings me the properly behaving visitors then I can focus all my energy into getting more traffic from those source.

The Intent of the Social Website Visitor

Social website visitors have no intent. They just drift around aimlessly from one website to another. They like funny, shocking, sexy, and strange. If you do not provide one of these then they are gone – looking for the next zap of instant satisfaction.

They are pigeons moving the mouse and pressing the button hoping to land somewhere that dazzles the eye. Click, look, click, look, click, look. If the there are lots of colors, pictures, videos and sounds they will clap their hands ecstatically and stay – otherwise they are gone.

These visitors have no intent. They are aimlessly wondering around the internet killing time. With no intent they are useless for this website. They are not interested in anything I have to offer. They arrive at the website; see all the words, yawn, and leave. That is why I completely ignore social traffic. No need to promote via facebook, digg, twitter. I give visitors the option to do it for me, but I will not do it.

The Intent of the Search Engine Visitor

These are visitors with direction and purpose. These people are not wasting their time walking around randomly hoping that something interesting happens. They arrive at your site with their intent written on their foreheads. Hello, I am here looking to ‘make money online’, can you help me? Yes I can. Click on one of these conveniently placed ads which will show you how to make $5000 a month online. Thank you, thank you too.

Hello, I am here because I want to know ‘how to build a website’, can you help me? Yes I can, buy my starter kit and you will have a money making website in no time. Thank you, thank you too.

See how pleasant it is when you know what the visitor wants. No guess work involved, no trying to find something that the visitor finds interesting. When you know exactly what the visitor wants you can easily direct their behavior into an action that benefits you.

Image you have a website selling a Philips screw driver. What would you rather receive – 10,000 visitors from a social website looking to be entertained, or 100 visitors from a search engine that typed in ‘buy philips screw driver’?

Intent is everything.

A little birdie told me that I have a guest post on Problogger.  This is great news.  With over 15,000 visitors a day Problogger is the biggest blog for bloggers.  And with a Page Rank of 6 this website will receive a great backlink along with the exposure.

Exposure and a great backlink should give this website a much needed boost.  Unfortunately ’should’ is not good enough.  What if I get a traffic boost for a couple days and then things settle back to normal – back to 60 visitors a day.  I want proof that a guest post on Problogger provides a long term benefit for this website.

Without a bubbling cauldron and a dash of bat wings it is difficult to determine with certainty whether the guest post will help in the long run.  The best I can do is figure out statistically whether sites with a guest post on Problogger are doing better then sites without a guest post on Problogger.

Question: Do people who have done a guest post on Problogger have more success with their sites then those who have not done a guest post?

Most Sites Fail

In a previous post (What Are The Odds Your Site Will Fail) I tried to determine the success rate of sites by taking the URL’s of Problogger commentors 3 years ago and seeing how their sites are doing today.  The current state of the sites where put into three categories:

• Dead (0-500 visitors/day)
• Serious Injury (500-2000 visitors/day)
• Alive and Well (2000+ visitors/day)

The results where humbling but promising.  Popular lore is that 99% of sites fail.  But according to the results things are not that terrible.  Here is the current state of site owners that commented on Problogger 3 years ago:

Instead of 99% failing only 72% are dead three years later.  Grim, but better then expected.   Commenting on Problogger does seem to give you a statistical advantage.

Most Guest Posters Succeed

A commentor on Problogger has a 72% chance their site will be dead in three years.  But now I am guest poster.  I have advanced from commentor to guest poster, what are the odds that my website will fail?

Determining the answer is simple.  Thanks to the great archive on Problogger I can go back in time and gather the URL’s of all the guest posters.  Then run them through a traffic estimator and see how the guest poster’s sites are doing today.

So with Vivaldi blasting out of the speakers I spent the day going through the Problogger archives gathering guest posters URLs.  From January 2007 to June 2009 I collected all the guest posters and put their URLs in a table.  If the post started off with something like “this is a guest post from…” I grabbed the URL.

After a few hours I accumulated 63 distinct guest posters.  Then I ran each one through a traffic estimator (webtraffic24.com) and noted how much daily traffic they currently receive.
With all the data collected I broke the results up into the same three groups – dead, serious injury, alive and well.  Here are the results (download table):

54% of Problogger guest posters have a successful site.  And only 24% ended up dead.  This is a big difference compared with people that only comment on Problogger.  I have drastically increased my odds of success with my guest post.  Now it is a coin toss – heads I win, tails I lose.

Why Does Guest Posting Increase Your Chances Of Success?

Answering this question bumps against the classic problem of causality.  There is no way to tell what causes what.  Do people with guest posts on Problogger end up with successful sites, or do people with sites that become successful guest post on Problogger?  Do people who smoke end up with cancer, or do people with a cancer gene end up smoking?  There is no way to tell.

All that can be argued is that if you belong to the group that smokes then you have a greater chance of having cancer, and if you belong to the group with a guest post on Problogger then you have a greater chance of having a successful site.

How much of the success can be credited to the guest post and how much can be credited to your site?    Again, no way to tell.  Most likely it is a tangled combination of the two.  Here is how it works:

1. You create a site. You think it is good but are uncertain because with little exposure not enough people have seen it to judge it.
2. You write a guest post for Problogger. It gets accepted – this confirms your suspicion that your writing and content is good (at least Problogger thinks it is good enough for his blog).
3. Your guest post goes live and exposes your site to a lot of people. Because your site is good, the visitors stay and tell their friends.
4. Your site becomes a success.

Your site becomes a success for two reasons: it is a good site and exposure.  To get the exposure you need a good site.  You cannot have one without the other.

It is not the guest post by itself that increases your chance of success, it is the fact that you have a good site and you get exposure.  It has been said a million times, in a million different ways – before anything else, before thinking about SEO, social networking, promotion, backlinks etc. make sure you have a good site.  Without a good site you are simply digging a hole to China – you will drown in a pool of hot lava.

Will This Website Become A Success Because Of A Guest Post?

I do not know.  But I have dramatically increased my odds by being a guest poster for Problogger.  Now I am hanging with the right crowd.  Mingling with winners.  Chess club is great for playing chess, but if you want the cheerleaders you need to join the football team.  Of course, there is still a 50% chance of failure – high, but a lot less then 84%.

The First Time You Were Surprised By Reality

Around puberty you begin to think about love.  Not the love for your mother or bone fetching friend Rusty.  You think about being in love.  Meeting that special someone to share your life with.  Walks in the park, smiles across a crowed room, tingles in the stomach, kissing as you suck a single strand of spaghetti.  You lay in your bed, stare at the ceiling and daydream about being in love.

Also around puberty you become inundated by the mass media machine.  Movies, music, books, and paintings.  You read books about eternal love, listen to songs about true love, watch movies that end with  ‘and they lived happily every after’,  your favorite picture is of a couple feeding each other grapes under a large oak tree.  The concept of love, how beautiful it is, how perfect it is, how eternal it is, forms in your young mind.

You cannot wait to be in love.  Everything will be perfect.

And then it happens.  You find somebody.  It is exciting – just like your favorite song said it would be.  Always smiling and skipping – everything just like in the movies.

Unfortunately you do not live in Disneyland – things do not end happily ever after.  Reality suddenly  arrives with a kick in the crotch.  Just knocks down the door and storms in, no knock, no ‘can I come in?’.  Love turns out nothing like you though it would be; like they told you it would be.  Instead of butterflies and rainbows there are slaps and flying dishes.  There is jealousy, pain, doubt and sometimes lawyers.  Cupid’s arrow hits the pulmonary artery and causes internal bleeding. 

Fortunately you are older now.  Now you know that mass media simply doles out what people want to hear.  Songs about love eternal sell.  Movies that end with happily ever after sell.  Paintings of couples embracing in the sunset sell.  Perfect love is not real but it sells.

Now you know better.  Your expectations about love are more realistic.  Hearing a song about love eternal causes the eyes to roll instead of the heart to swell.  Teens walk out of the movie theater with tears in their eyes, you are holding your mouth trying not to laugh.

Surprised By Reality Again

One day browsing the internet you come across a website that catches your attention.  A big flashy header, ‘Start your own blog today!’, it is easy, make lots of money, be famous.  You start getting excited.  This is exactly what you have been looking for.  To write and be famous.  To work from home and make lots of money.  To sit on the beach with your laptop and a martini.  You lay in your bed, stare at the ceiling and daydream about being a blogger.

The more you look into it the better it gets.  There are so many successful blogs out there – everybody is doing it.  And the best part is that it is so easy.  All you need to do is write a couple paragraphs everyday.  Visitors will adore your writing, they will tell their friends, your blog will have thousands of visitors in a matter of months.  No more nine to five at the office, goodbye idiot boss, time to get off your knees begging for a bonus.  Everything will be great – you will be a rich blogger.

Like a giddy little school girl on the first day of class, you start blogging.

Six month later you are a bitter old man feeding pigions in the park, cursing the cruel world with an occasional shake of the fist.  Without asking to come in, reality barged through the door again.  Writing everyday is not as easy as you expected.  You only have 50 visitors a day.  Instead of thousands of dollars you have hundreds of pennies.  Most of your time is spent deleting spam.  You dread the boring promotional tasks that need to be done everyday: commenting on blogs, writing articles, adding links to directories.  Being a blogger is nothing like you thought it would be.  It is hard work with little reward.

You were fooled by mass media again.  Stories of people making thousands of dollars a month.  Websites claiming that you can have a successful blog by working only a few hours a week.  Blogs claiming that all you need to do is buy their ebook and in no time you will be making a living from home.  They make these claims because they sell.

Now you know better.  Again.

Real Love, Real Blogger

Real love requires patience, persistence and hard work – so does being a successful blogger.