Design a Lucrative Blog or Site

This post is going to share with you the key points when trying to design a lucrative website or blog. First of all if you dont know what a website or blog is, start by looking up those two things on wikipedia. The first thing you must know when thinking about building a blog or site, is that there is no get rich quick secrets to blogging or designing a website. Both take a lot of time and effort to get going. Here are the steps to designing your Site:

• Choose a topic you know a lot about or are very interested in, this is the most important step, if you are not interested in the topic you will not last very long and give up the site/blog very quickly, remember you dont have to know too much about the topic to write a lot about it, just make sure you are interested in the subject.
• examples of this are, if you are interested in staying fit, you might design a site about healthy nutrition, or if you are interested in computers you might create something that has to do with computer maintenence etc.
• Decide how your going to make the website. There are many programs that can assist you in building a website, and there are also web templates that you can find online (tip: your appearance of your page plays little importance, focus on the content, i cant stress this part enough if you decide to make an income with your website.) Another approach is to create the website from scratch by writing the html/php yourself, i will include basic tutorials on how to do so in later posts, for now focus on the content and topic. (note with blogs, there are several good looking templates, pre loaded into the site.)
• My favorite web building software is by macromedia called Dreamweaver, i currently use Dreamweaver 8 to design websites, however i am not an expert at html or php quite yet.
• Another user friendly software is called microsoft frontpage. Many of you probably already have this program installed without realizing it.
• Note: Another way to design a website is to hire a freelancer, there are many sites where you can post a project and a freelancer will bid on projects you post, check these sites out : www.getacoder.com, www.coders4rent.com
• Try to create as much content as possible, the more content you have the easier it is for people to find your site, Later in this tutorial i will go over SEO's (Search Enguine Optimizations) and how to submit to search engines like google, this is essential to create traffic to your website. If you need a little boost on how to get good content there are many free articles that you can use, some of these sites only require you use the authors name and or link to their website.
• remember more content=more traffic
• Run out of content to provide? check out these sites for free articles: www.articlecity.com, www.isnare.com
  
• you may also submit your own articles to these websites and earn a little cash that way.
• Once you have completed your website you need to find a good host, if your using a free blogging service, skip this step. There are specific things you want to look for when looking for a good host:
• Bandwidth, how much bandwidth does the host offer per month? this is important, if you want to provide a website that has a lot of traffic per month, you need to have a higher bandwidth, also if your website is hosting large files for download or if your website has logins you will also need more bandwidth per month, typically sites offer 200gb-2000gb per month. Thus the more bandwidth the more the monthly cost with the host.
• Disk Space: how much space the server allows you to take up. This is the second most important item about the host, the more gigabytes the host offers, the more content, videos, etc. you can host with the server. The better sites offer between 200-300gb however, there are many servers that provide terabytes of space or 1000gb, again the amount you pay is the amount your going to receive.
• Learn what the host supports, if your site is going to be based on php, and your host doesnt include MySQL in the server, your going to be in trouble, make sure your site is compatible with the server. If your site is basic HTML its going to be compatible with almost every current host.
• Compare the benefits the hosts offer, some hosts allow unlimited domains, some only allow up to 10, some hosts allow infinite email addresses with the server, some in the thousands, however use caution, when there may be a large advantage to one feature, it may take away how generous the other features of that host are.
• Some of the best hosts out there: i currently use Bluehost, the reason being, it is only 6.95$ a month, the customer service i have recieved is unbeatable, they answer my questions within minutes: www.bluehost.com
  
• Other hosts i recommend: www.hostmonster.com
• Now comes the key part of this tutorial, traffic to your new site. The Best tool to create web traffic is to submit your sites to directories, the number one directory being google, you MUST get your website into googles directory, even if you have poor keywords, google is an important tool to your websites success. Google is the number one search engine in the world right now. To submit your website to google, just click this link here and follow the directions provided. Other forms of traffic would be posting on forums and keeping your link in your signature, this is a very easy and free way to get traffic, this is how i get a lot of unique hits to this blog, by posting in forums. To find out how to write keywords that get clicks, go here and view my post on how to write keywords that sell. Other alternatives to getting traffic include link exchange sites, and one of my favorites PPC services or pay per click services. These services are also a very useful tool to getting traffic in high volumes, when you use a pay per click service, your paying a company to display a link to your website on other webmasters websites depending on what keywords you choose to describe your site, examples of this are google adsense, Miva and clicksor. On the other end of this you may also host these services on your site to make a percentage every time someone clicks the content targeted links on your website.
• Remember the key to high traffic is to get a good placement into googles website directory.
• Use forums and other posting sites as areas to place your links for free, try to post in forums that are relative to your site in order to attract the right crowd.
• PPC services are a valuable way to produce high amounts of traffic.
• After you complete these steps your probably wondering how you make money with the website. One of the easiest ways to make money with your new website is by using googles adsense tool. By placing content related links on your website, youll recieve some extra cash everytime your viewers click the links. Another way to make money is by joining affiliate programs and making a percentage of sales you provide specific companies. There are also directories that have many affiliate programs grouped together, check out cj.com or clickbank.com for these directories. There are many other ways to make money with your website, i will be posting more specific articles that focus directly on certain money making strategies.
• google adsense is a key to making passive income from your websites
• Affiliate programs are great for making extra cash.
• Lets review here, the three most important aspects of your website are
• Topic
• Content
• Traffic
• Use google's directory for free website traffic, i cannot stress this enough.
  
• Pick a host that most suits you.
• Thanks for reading this tutorial, dont forget to subscribe to this blogs feed for updates on new tips! I will be writing more tutorials and articles that go further into specifics about web creation for a passive income.