journey

I’ve been doing a lot of different things relating to web mastering, design, monetizing, link building, link selling, etc. So for this article, I thought that I’d tell you some of the things that I have learnt recently.

Link Building is process, not a goal

Link building is something that should be done all the time. If you grow your links gradually, you’ll slowly increase your rankings in the search engines. Generally speaking, building up links too quickly puts you in a greater risk of being flagged by the search engines.

Another thing to note, make sure there’s variety in anchor texts that link to your site. Links that feature identical anchor texts are much more likely to get noticed and penalised.

Don’t rely on just one source of income

Nearly all of us have heard the popular saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. There is so much truth in that statement, and it applies to pretty much everything. Therefore don’t just rely on one form of advertising. What if you experience a massive drop in earnings, or your advertising account gets terminated? That’ll hurt a whole lot more if you only use one channel for revenue.

Up until recently, I’ve used Google Adsense as my only source of income. At the end of last year I started experimenting with Chitika, and I am already getting great results. I’m earning another 40% extra on EnviroGadget per month with Chitika compared to Google Adsense. Oh, and I’m using both of them at the same time!

Offer a product to a market, don’t try to find a market for a product

I found this advice in a book, and it’s actually great advice. So when coming up with your ideas, try to solve a problem that will benefit others. Those people you benefit are potential customers. Coming up with an idea, and trying to make your customers want it is really difficult, so don’t waste your time.

In my case, I’ve been focusing on sites that people actually get value from, as opposed to sites that have keywords that happen to pay well with Google Adsense.

Expect the unexpected

When I set my goals for 2009, one of my goals was to “Reach 150 daily RSS readers (currently around 70) for DailyEcoTips.com“. After just 2 months into 2009, and I already have 193 RSS readers on Daily Eco Tips!

I found that the significant jump was due to using the “What Would Seth Godin Do?” Plugin, along with my own ideas on how it should be implemented.

Incidently, all of my goals are on track for the end of 2009, except perhaps the £10000 pre-tax profits goal. We’ll see though.

Offer to give more than you’re asking for yourself

I was writing guest posts in order to get backlinks to my sites. It has been working really well. It seems to be because some blog owners struggle to write content frequently (I do too actually). By offering to write an article for just a couple of links, a surprising number of blog owners (around 25% of whom I approached) were interested. I got these links for free, links that would have otherwise been expensive to buy.

Conclusion

So there are some of my experiences and lessons learned. Please share your lessons that you’ve learnt from this year so far.