Web Empire

For each site you build to add to your Web Empire, you need to answer two questions before you even register the domain name. First — What is the site about? What is the topic or subject you will cover? Secondly — what do I want the site to do?

Now some people think the answer to the second question is always ‘make money’ — but that is not always true if you are building an empire, rather than a single site. Any site should be able to make a little money, but that may not be a sites main purpose.

What else might be the main purpose for a site? Yesterday we mentioned the benefit of earning good pagerank, which you then pass on to other sites in your Empire through links. Another site might exist to attract pre-qualified traffic — people likely to be interested in a product or service. A blog or information site helps you build a relationship with the group of people interested in that subject, who are then available for making special sales offers, or passing on to your sales site. This is very similar to ‘list building’ for email sales, but uses web content to draw people instead of a subscription based newsletter.

Of course many of your sites will exist primarily to earn money directly. That is OK. You still have to provide good content, in most cases, to attract potential customers. The only exception are sites consisting of a single sales page — and we will discuss those another time.

So, returning to the first question — what should your site be about? There is a lot of discussion about niches on Internet business related sites. For this sense of the word, the dictionary defines niche as:

A special area of demand for a product or service.

Well what does that mean? It just means that your subject needs to be something people are willing to spend money on. Some people interpret niche to mean a small or specialized area of demand, but there is no such restriction in the definition — they are confusing another, totally different definition of niche, where it means a small recess in a wall. An economic niche may be large or small, the important thing for our purpose is that people are willing to spend money on it.

It is much easier to work with a subject you are interested in — you will likely already know something about it, and learning more will be an adventure, rather than an unwelcome task. Don’t worry about finding out if there is much competition for your subject area — the more competition the more interest there is! There is always room for one more.

Nor is there any way to tell for sure how profitable a particular subject is — the profit will probably vary widely from one site to the next depending on various factors. Most people are not going to tell you how profitable their site is — particularly if you are planning on becoming part of their competition!

Studying keyword values is one clue as to how profitable  a subject may be — but it can be very misleading as well. If you can attract tens of thousands of visitors to a site that has a keyword worth only five cents, you can earn more than a site with a five-dollar keyword that attracts only thirty or forty visitors per day.

There are so many people analyzing keywords and popularity for subjects that ‘discovering’ an un-tapped or under-utilized niche is unlikely. Your effort will be better spent building a site with good information on a subject that interests you. The amount of competition you find for that subject is a good-enough clue to the value of the subject.

The important thing, and our subject for future posts, will be to rise to the top of the pack in whatever subject area you choose. That is best done by building a series of related sites that provide better or more easily used information than your competition. Do that by building a Web Empire, and profits will follow.

I know the secret to instant riches, and you probably do too. Rob a bank.

That’s it. There are no instant riches on the Internet. You can’t build a Web Empire working four-hours a week. You can maintain your Web Empire working four hours a week (or less), if it is well designed, but it will take years of hard effort to get to that position.

If you have a website, you have a start. If you don’t have one, then start one today. Go to wordpress.com and start a free blog. First, you might want to try this little experiment. Go to Google and type in:

site:wordpress.com blog

Now, go to those sites and check their pagerank. If you have Firefox, you can use the SeoQuake plug-in and then you won’t even have to visit the sites, it will show you the pagerank for each right on the Google results page. Right now it shows two PR6 and six PR5 on that page, not including the WordPress site itself. Then go to the second page of results. There, I’m seeing one PR7, four PR6 and several PR5 sites. Skip all the way down to page 10 of results, and we still see blogs ranging from PR4 to PR6.

Wouldn’t you like a site with PR4 or above where you can link to any other site in your Web Empire? Links like that are a valuable resource. You won’t find instant riches, but you can add the foundation stone (or another building block) to your Web Empire.

One of the problems with organizing a multitude of websites into a Web Empire is that there are just too many on-going projects to work on. You have ideas and plans, and get started on this project then that — but never finish anything. Everything is a work in progress.

There are two things you can do to avoid this problem. First is focus, the second is pruning.

Focus on one thing at a time. Keep at it until it is finished. Move on to the next thing.

Seems simple enough, but I have to admit this an area where, even though I know the best procedure, I often fall short myself. It is just too easy to come up with promising ideas. It is easy to get excited about a new project, much more difficult to remain interested in a project that is growing old. Once all the problems have been solved, and only routine tasks are required to complete the project, it is easy to set it aside for ‘later’ — even though we know later never comes.

Typically, this routine stage is either entering new information into a website, or promoting that site. You have done the site design and optimization, coded wonderful little bits and pieces into it, and now it is just a matter of finishing up content, or going through the various hoops of promotion.

If you can not bring yourself to keep at it until it is finished, hire someone to do the routine parts. Typically, entrepreneurs building an Internet Business want to hire out work they can’t do — like programming — and do the rest themselves. Fine, so long as you will actually do it. If you won’t it is just the same as if you can’t — hire someone else! Make sure it gets done.

The second part of the solution is pruning. Prune out those projects that will eat up too much of your time. Sure, they may be promising — but you need to prioritize. The best websites for your Web Empire are those you can make and then ignore for years at a time, while they continue to make you money. You should only have ONE high maintenance site — typically your blog — the rest should run on auto-pilot once they have been created.

Again, you can hire someone to do the ongoing work for a high-maintenance site, but that solution is much less satisfactory than one-time hires for finishing projects. You build on-going expenses that way, and it is best to try to keep those to a minimum. Better to prune it out — drop the whole project — unless it is tremendously profitable and worth the extra expense.

I got an email today from someone backing-out of an agreement to purchase a text link on one of my sites. This person said, (and I paraphrase) “I’m sorry I’m going to have to pass on this, I’ve just learned that Google doesn’t allow paid links.”

Google doesn’t allow? Who runs your business — you or Google? Do you find yourself optimizing your site just for one search engine? Do you rely on income from Adsense? Don’t do it! Never put all your eggs in one basket, as mama would say. They are in the business of selling paid links — of course they would prefer if you didn’t compete with them!

They do have over half the search traffic (right now) so I’m not saying to ignore them either. And the adsense program is a great way to earn additional income from your sites — but don’t rely on any single source for the bulk of your income. Diversify your income streams, so that if one dries up, or even fluctuates wildly, it will not create a panic situation.

If you are serious about earning money from an Internet business, you have to keep control of your business — don’t give all the power to an external entity. They are minding their business, not yours. They will always do what is best for them, regardless of how it might affect you.

There are lots of ways to make money online — selling display or text ads, affiliate linking, subscription sites, reselling other people’s products, selling your own products, etc., etc. Build your Web Empire using as many different techniques as you can. Not all on the same site, and not all for any particular vendor or company. Diversify both the sources and the types of income, and you will build a secure Internet business.

Just a few thoughts on CSS today, as I’m still recovering from excess turkey-consumption from yesterday (Thanksgiving). I have found that being thankful every day just makes me feel better, and I’m thankful we have a holiday to reinforce that decision.

Anyhow, on to CSS. I hate seeing websites where CSS has been used to try to control every pixel on the page. If they further suggest I should use a particular browser to ensure their page looks right, I usually just click away. They probably have nothing to say that I’d be interested in listening to.

I rarely browse the web with my browser (Firefox of course) set to full-screen. In fact, I often have two or three programs running at once, and the browser may be confined to a relatively small space. With sites that use CSS to control layout, this often results in overlapping text or overlapping text and images. It can become totally illegible. I wonder how it looks on a cell phone? Using the browser’s font-size settings have no effect if the person designing the site didn’t use relative font sizes in the CSS, further limiting legibility.

Nor is there any consistency from one web browser to the next. I have Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera and Firefox installed on my computer, but I almost always use Firefox. One of my bank accounts forces me to use Internet Explorer for web-access to that account, and the others I use occasionally to make sure my websites look OK on them, but I find Firefox provides the best user-experience.

Do not assume your viewers have large screens, particular browsers or anything else when designing websites for your Internet business. Simple designs are best, not only from a usability standpoint, but for search engine optimization (SEO). I do like to use CSS to control font characteristics — it supports the modular design principles I espouse. But always put your CSS in a separate file, and reference it in the header section of your HTML. Including it in-line is a strong negative for SEO.

For page layout, I try to rely on the browser to render things in whatever manner the user prefers, wherever possible. For gross features, like the number and relative size of columns, I use tables — but try to avoid nesting them — again, a negative factor in SEO. For fonts, table column sizes, and images (when practical), I try to use relative sizes rather than absolute values.

Build your Web Empire with sites as simple and practical as possible, to ensure the widest audience possible. You won’t impress them with appearances, but can still make sites reasonably attractive, and it is the content, after all, that attracts most users.