Make a Free Website that Makes You Money

Ive been asked several times if theres anyplace where someone can make a free website that they can earn money from online, and the answer is yes. However, if youre serious about your venture Id really suggest investing the few dollars it takes to register a domain name and purchase hosting just because it will appear more professional (which may help you to remain focused too), and provide you with more options and freedoms over what you can do, and how.

Still, never wanting to disappoint anyone Ive created a short step-by-step for how you could make a free website in any number of places online, and use that free website to earn some money for yourself.

Thanks to the Web 2.0 revolution there have been dozens, if not hundreds of great properties developed online that rely on user submitted content. Places like Blogger, Hub Pages and many, many more that need your content. For anyone on a really tight budget, or just looking to test the waters before diving into the pursuit of earning an income on the web, these sites are a real treasure.

They want and need your content, but the reason they want it is because it will bring visitors to the pages you create with it, and of course these sites earn their revenue from various advertising they place on your pages, so there are some limitations as to what you can do, and typically there will be content guidelines that you have to follow as well. These sites are using your content to increase their reach and reputation online, so they do have to protect against allowing certain kinds of contentand just plain garbagefrom being published on their pages; otherwise their reputation would sink right down the toilet.

The first step is to pick your publishing platform. If you want your site to be a blog theres Blogger, Wordpress, and a bunch more. If youd rather your site be more like a traditional web page you can use Hub Pages, Squidoo or one of the others like that. Theres even free wiki sites too. Maybe youve got a great idea for multiple how tos or instructional pieces for a niche market. If so, then one of these free wiki sites would be perfect for that. The point is, decide what format you want your site to be and then select the publishing platform to use. Theres a huge list of available platforms at www.web20searchengine.com just look for the link that says Top 1,000 List

Once youve selected your publishing platform and created an account with them, its time to add your content. One point I need to stress is that you make sure to read their terms of service before signing up with any publishing platform. Theyre going to have guidelines that may affect your affiliate marketing links, maybe on the placement of links, or a limit to the number of links you can have, or maybe even both. Youre going to want to know the rules and be sure to stay within them, otherwise you risk spending all your time building the pages, only to have them removed right away or worse, right after being ranked and indexed on the search engines, by some on-the-ball moderator who sees youve broken the rules. Just be sure to know what youre allowed to do, and do just that. Add your content to the pages, with your affiliate links, and now youve made a free website with the potential to earn money from it.

After youre done making the site, you have to promote it. Going into details about online promotions would be beyond the scope of this piece, but just like with any normal website you can use forums, blog comments, classifieds, article directories and so on to spread the word about your new pages, and hopefully get some peopleand search engine spidersto come see them.

Spend a little time every day working to build backlinks to your pages, maybe submit additional articles to the article directories, and basically just continue working to target the good keywords for your niche market.

If youve targeted good keywords for your niche that people use to search and dont have lots of competition online, and youve done a good job of creating quality contentno spammy crap or filler text, but actual content thats of value to the people who visit your pagesthen you should begin to notice a steady growth of traffic to your pages in a relatively short period of time.

I dont mean the flood gates are going to open on day 4, thats not the way it works, but over the first few weeks after initially publishing your pages you should be able to spot an upwards trend in your daily visitor statistics. If not, you may need to revisit your keywords and content to see what went wrong for you. Odds are, youve either selected keywords which arent getting enough searches daily to send you traffic from, or that were too competitive and your pages havent been able to rank well for them.

This is the real wealth in using free platforms like this though, is that you can always make changes, or just start over in the worst cases if you have to, without losing anything but a little time. And whether youre using free platforms or paid, and no matter how experienced you become, theres always going to be some trial-and-error involved with every new niche you enter. Just be sure to learn something from it each time you have to go back a step, so that you avoid making the same mistakes over and over, and youll find it does get easier for you.

Now, assuming you did select good keywords, youve created great content, and did your best to direct visitors from your content to your affiliate links in a smooth manner, you should be seeing plenty of click-thrus on your affiliate links in short time, and if you chose a good affiliate product to market, some of those click-thrus should be converting into sales, and commissions for you.

Theres really no set guide to measure how a site or niche is performing, every market and product is different, but I use a base of 4 as a general rule when judging a new site, and heres what I mean by that. I dont bother critiquing the performance of a new site until Ive had 4,000 visitors to it. I just dont think you can make an accurate observation of a traffic pool on anything less, so I wait until I reach the 4,000th visitor before I start accessing.

Once Ive had 4,000 visitors Ill look to see how many have clicked-thru on my affiliate links. These arent sales, just the number of people who visited my page and then clicked an affiliate link. What Im hoping to see is at-least 160 click-thrus on the affiliate links. Thats 4% of 4,000. If I see at-least 160 click-thrus, then I know that so far, so good. Im getting traffic to my pages, and Im getting at-least 4% of that traffic to click my affiliate links.

Finally, I look at how many actual sales were made. Once again, Im shooting for 4% of what ever my actual click-thru number was. If it was 175 click-thrus, I want to see at-least 7 sales from it. If it was 200, Id want to see 8 sales and so on. If I have 4% of my traffic clicking thru, and 4% of my click-thrus converting, I know this is a performing niche market and you can bet Im going to expand on it from here. If I dont reach 4% on my click-thrus or conversions, then Im going to look at it again from page content to affiliate product sales page and see if I can determine where the problem is. Sometimes theres little things you can do, like tweaking the anchor text of your affiliate link just a bit, or changing placement for your affiliate links that will make a world of difference. Sometimes theres not, and the niche just isnt as good as you had thought or hoped. That happens. But, at-least you now know more than you did before, and you should have an idea if this is a good niche market to keep working at or not, so its all good experience.

I can already hear people screaming that a 4% click-thru rate is outrageously low and unacceptable. Thats fine, you should definitely try for higher. But the key is to make sure your conversion rate of those who do click-thru is still at or above 4%, otherwise youre just wasting time and bandwidth sending untargeted traffic to affiliate pages. But certainly, if you can achieve a higher click-thru rate than 4%, and do it in a way that doesnt pollute the traffic with untargeted visitors, the more the better. I just use the 4% rate as my minimum baseline for testing a new niche market, and once I know that I can get 4% across the board then I work at turning it into 5%, 6%, and so on.

And there you have it, how to make a free website that makes you money. Again, I cant stress enough how important I think it is to have your own domain and hosting, just to be able to do more things with your content and traffic, and especially if youve really found a good niche market and product(s) to promote in it, but for just starting out without any financial investment, or to test-run your niche before investing money into it, this is a perfectly suitable use of free publishing platforms.

Get valuable advice and tips from Scott's free blog for webmasters, O'Bannon's Leap, where he chronicles the ongoing leap of becoming a webpreneur. Scott Bannon earned his first online revenue in 1995 and has made a full time living online since 2000.

Scott also participates at Build The Dot Com, a free resource for webmasters, by webmasters.