3 things your website MUST have if its going to make any money

Many things that i hear on a regular basis is someone saying that he or she has a website and they have put work into it but its not making any money.

There are only really 2 things that you need in order to have a profitable website however the 3rd is only important if you plan on getting the bulk of your traffic from the search engines, which in most cases it will be.

There has to be Traffic

You need traffic therefor the keyword or niche that you have chosen or got into has to have some demand within the search engines. If nobody is searching for your product or service then it doesn’t matter how good you think it is then your not going to make a dime. I always use the Google Keyword Tool to check my traffic, the figures are not always 100% how ever its the best indication your going to get and generally the numbers are fairly accurate most of the time i have found.

You Must have Buyers

You need buyers. I will say that again. You need BUYERS. This is where a lot of people make mistakes. When you choose a keyword or a niche to build a site around you should ALWAYS check to see how many advertisers are paying for ads in google because if people are spending money to get people to there stores then they are of course making money.

This means people are buying the product and it is a profitable market.

Just because 1 person is paying for advertisement that still doesn’t mean its profitable. What i do is use spyfu.com insert my chosen keyword and then spyfu brings back and tells me how many advertisers there are spending money in advertisement. You should always make sure there are at least 5 advertisers as a bare minimum.

Also if your building your site with using adsense in mind then you should always pay attention to the CPC price. A great cpc is from at least $1 sometimes you can drop below $1 but remember the lower you go the lower price you will end up getting paid when you get clicks on your site. That’s just something to keep in mind though.

First page of Google Must Not be Too Competitive

You will most likely get most of your traffic from the search engines so that means in order to get traffic you will need to be on at least page 1 of google and at least in the top 5 to get any reasonable traffic. If page 1 of google is very tough with lots of authority sites with PR`s 4, 5, and higher and with lots of home page URL`s then it will be much harder to rank.

Even if the first two steps are correct you may not be making any money from your site because its getting no traffic because your not even on the first page.  A competitive first page of google doesn’t mean you cant rank but why choose a keyword where you have to work much much harder to see any results.

If you refer to my post about checking the first page of google for competition then you will be on the right tracks to building a profitable site.

hope this has helped

paul