As a person coming from technical background, I’m always tempted to fantasize about exciting technical solutions on the web that make big commercial wins. Most people around me do. Of course, there is a number of web & IT businesses that started in a garage (sounds familiar, huh?) and reached sky heights, but most of the mortals should probably go for something much simpler.
In real life, it’s quite different. One can make a decent living on the web without much fancy bleeding edge acronyms. It isn’t trivial though, but the way is well paved.
Basically, you want your website to attract as many people as possible and hope they consume advertisements there in a way that generates a profit for you.
To do that, obviously, you must be able to display such ads, but it’s a simpler part. The hard part is to let people want to visit your website.
Unless you are fine with creating a website full of links promising to lead to stuff people want, you’ll need some real content. You shouldn’t be disappointed if you don’t have much content. You need to understand that website must live in order to remain attractive. Start small and build on top of it. Build your content on daily basis. Always think about new content that you could display.
Once you have some of the content, you’ll want people to be able to find it (still don’t forget to keep building the content). SEO (search engine optimization) is beyond the scope of this text, but you should definitely understand its concepts. One of those that I easily find myself forgetting about is making sure that sites relevant for your subject contain links to yours. Go out and find people doing similar stuff. Exchange links. It’ll help you both.
For the website to stay alive, besides the fresh content always coming in, it is necessary to slowly get rid of look and feel that becomes obsolete, and adopt popular stuff. Things on the web often become popular for no good reason. Try and pick the stuff that will drive you to your goal.
Keep researching. Give people what they want to read about. Keep an eye on who is visiting your site and why they came at first place. Go with the flow. Do stuff that help. Remember that every small improvement helps getting closer to the goal.
CREDITS
I’m in the web business for over a decade now, and I’ve definitely known all this stuff for a while. However, I got inspiration for this post after talking to a friend that happens to run a website of his own: http://www.personal-math-online-help.com/.
He asked me for some help, and in no time we came up with a simple interactive tool that hopefully helped him increase visits to his site: http://www.personal-math-online-help.com/area-perimeter-calculator.html