How to grow your website income

How to grow your website income                                                            Part 8 - 8

Over the past 7 weeks I've been outlining the plan of attack for making your first $1000 a month online. Completely from scratch.

This series made the following assumptions:

• You will have 5-10 hours a week to work on the business.
• You'll have very few, if any, technical skills.
• $400 to invest.
• A willingness to work hard, stick to a plan and resist distractions.

If you've followed through and taken action on my instruction you should now have:

1) The right mental attitude to pull this off.

2) Selected a niche topic with the "right stuff".

3) A traffic pulling website with at least 10 articles on it (and growing).

4) A strategy and process for converting that content into dollars.

5) An info product you are selling that helps out the folks interested in your niche topic.

If you've got all of that together, you should be very happy with yourself. You've worked hard and you've achieved something that most people lack the discipline to do. Well done.

However, I warn you. This is the most dangerous time for your new business. If it's anything like 99% of other projects of a similar nature, there still isn't much happening on the income side of things. It's often very disheartening.

You may be feeling a mix of emotions including:

• Did I select the right niche?
• This isn't worth the time I'm putting in here.
• The economy must have caused this not to work.
• Maybe my design isn't right?
• I'm not cut out to make money online.
• This sucks.
• Jay sucks.

This is natural. It's the nature of traffic.

We know because we've seen it over and again. As an example, we followed this same methodology for a site of our own. The first month saw just 11 people visit. The second month just 39. Pretty disheartening stuff. In over 8 weeks we'd seen just 50 people hit the site.

However, by just keeping at it we started to see growth. By the third month we'd had around 1300 people hit the site and by the eighth month we cracked 10,000 visitors.

Many people who witnessed the same kind of stats would have given up at the end of the second month. It's hard to make much money off 50 people in 8 weeks. Nonetheless we didn't give up. We just kept plugging away at it until we saw some solid growth.

Once you see your site growing fast, it's a strong motivator. When you see your site making money, it's an even stronger motivator.

Mental toughness

But the hardest part is keeping the pressure on when no one's visiting your site and you're not making a cent. This is why I created this chapter. You need to keep pressing through and have some mental toughness to keep doing it.

It reminds me when I used to race mountain bike cross country. These were normally hellish 2.5 hour races that were comprised of 7 laps. The starts were absolutely furious as you were in the red zone just trying to establish your position. Your heart rate was through the roof and your legs were full of lactic acid.

However, this first lap wasn't the hardest part of the race. The second lap was.

In the first lap your mind was ready to fight and your body fueled with adrenaline. However, in the second lap your body was paying for the first lap's punishment. Your mind was saying, "I can't do this . . . I've still got 6 laps to ride and I'm feeling like I could die . . . maybe I should stop."

It was easy to dig yourself into a mental hole and feel like pulling out.

But then as you complete your second lap you begin to settle into a rhythm. Your body recovers and you get some momentum. As you begin to pass other people you get your confidence back and those mental doubts go away and you refocus on the task at hand.

If you've completed all the steps in parts 1-7, you're probably hitting lap 2 about now. Keep focused. It will only be a matter of time before you see some positive results.

Building momentum

In the meantime, I recommend you keep following the formula of building momentum I outlined in Part 6, "The Traffic".

During this period I recommend setting yourself the following goals. It will help you get through this little rut.

1) Write 1-2 articles a week (following the principles in Part 7).

2) Get 2-4 new links a week (following the principles in Part 6).

Just consistently keep doing this. Do it without expectation for at least 6-8 weeks. If you're still not seeing growth then I would bet that you are doing something on your site that is actually inhibiting traffic.

Check the following:

1) You're not doing anything that violates the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

2) See if your site is being indexed correctly by using some of the webmaster tools provided by Google.

3) Ensure that you have links pointing to your site.

Once you've started seeing some growth, you'll feel more motivated to keep driving forward.

The basic formula for growth is easy. Simply:

1) Develop more content on a more diverse keyword group that people love and want to link to.

2) Develop more content that can be monetized via affiliate links and your own product. For example via reviews and case studies.

3) Improve your sales letter for your product by writing more compelling content, adding testimonials and building trust. Remember, if you can take your conversion rate from 2% to 4% you can double your income.

If you methodically follow my advice there really should be no reason why you can't reach your $1000 a month mark. Of course you can use this to have an amazing family vacation each year, start a college fund, support a new member of the family or really whatever you wish.

Perhaps you don't want to dream big, but it is very possible to earn much more than your $1000 a month. The next major hurdle is to take your site from a part-time income, to a full-time, day job replacing income.

The simplest way is to focus on the 80/20 rule as much as possible and automate this process as much as possible by outsourcing the processes. Simple mathematics say that if you could replicate this 10 times or make 5 sites twice as profitable, you can earn $10,000 a month.

This would be a dream for many folks and could be a good pathway for you.

However, if you want to hit these kinds of figures and higher, there are probably more efficient ways to go.

Now they aren't easier necessarily. You need to be more skilled and possibly take more risks.

How to replace your day job

While this "Part 8" concludes the series on "How to make $1000 a month from scratch", I'm considering producing a "How to replace your day job" type series.

To produce a series like this requires an enormous amount of effort. Hence, I'm keen to find out if this is something that you would find useful. If so, what specifically do you want to know?

We've got experience in particular business models, but not all business models, so we'd need to draw in some experts to cover other methodologies. So the more information on what you want to know you can give us, the better.

Simply post your comments below. or on home page.