Tips On How To Make Money With Your Own Website

Hello, my name is Johnny W Morlan, owner and webmaster from the very start of J W Morlan's Unique Wood Gifts business website. I have had my business website on the web for over 10 years, J W Morlan's Unique Wood Gifts. I am a woodworking artist {designer}. Believe me, selling any type of art or kind of wood objects is extremely difficult because there are so much of them out there.



I am also selling special {niche} products and they are high priced. If you sell more sought after {in demand} products priced under, say $30 each and utilize the tips in this article on your website, it should produce more sales and money than my website does.



My website did not make money the first year. It has for the last 9 years, especially the last 6. It took me 4 years to learn the information in this article and implement all of it. If I had known all the information that this article features, my website would of made more money the first 4 years!



My websites traffic rank is about 600,000. Now there are at least 18 million websites which puts my website in the top 4% for traffic. 95% of my sales come from my business website. I receive an average of 200 visitors per day and that is excluding the visitors I get entering my Merchandise Gift Certificates Drawings. The average length of time spent on my homepage is approximately 1 minute 30 seconds.



Averaging my sales for the last 6 years, my sale to visitor ratio excluding custom made orders and excluding the visitors I receive entering my Merchandise Gift Certificates Drawings is approximately 1 per 67 visitors. My sales excluding the custom made orders are averaging approximately $53.00 each. I usually average 5 or 6 custom made orders per month. The custom made order sales are averaging approximately $325.00 each.



My sales stay pretty steady year around. In June, July and August they usually drop around 25% and in November and December they usually increase 30%. For the last several years, I have had to stop taking custom made orders about the second week of November to ensure getting them all done by December 20. It is not uncommon for me to work 12 - 16 hours a day, 7 days a week during the month of November and up to a couple days before Christmas.



The Internet is the best way to sell goods. You are promoting to many people in a vast area. In the last year alone, I have had visitors from approximately 215 different countries and 8,650 different cities. Below is a text link, going to a page that displays a World and United States map indicating the approximate location of my websites last 1000 trackable visitors. It takes 30 to 40 seconds to fully load the maps are large.World & USA Map Morlan Wood Gifts, Last Trackable 1000 Visitors.



A few keyword or phrase search results for my website on the top 3 search engines. The majority of them I will also come up in the top 10 results on the top 15 search engines and have for at least 6 years.



wood gifts

Google.com #2 out of 17.5 million.

Yahoo.com #6 out of 26 million.

Msn.com #2 out of 14.6 million.

Aol.com #2 out of 833,000.

Ask.com {Ask Jeeves} #1 out of 3.9 million.

Dogpile .com #10 out of 115.

Gigablast.com #2 out of 59.6 million.

Wisenut .com #2 out of 236,000.

Lycos.com #1 out of 3.9 million.

Teoma.com #1 out of 3.9 million.

MyWebSearch.com #2 out of 1.2 million.

Netscape.com #2.

MyWay.com #1 out of 3.9 million.

AllTheWeb.com #6 out of 25.8 million.

AltaVista.com #6 out of 27.6 million.

Excite.com #6 out of 107.

IWon.com #1 out of 3.9 million.

MyTotalSearch.com #4 out of 51.8 million.

Clusty.com #1 out of 59.6 million.

ScrubTheWeb.com #3 out of 3,490.

Accoona.com #6 out of 1.8 million.

Mamma.com #1 out of 92.

Search.com #1 out of 1.1 million.



unique wood gifts

Google.com #1 out of 5.3 million.

Yahoo.com #2 out of 8 million.

Msn.com #1 out of 3 million.



wood art gifts

Google.com #2 out of 7 million.

Msn.com #2 out of 1.9 million.



wood desk accessories

Google.com #7 out of 6.1 million.

Msn.com #1 out of 688,000.



wood jewelry boxes

Google.com #34 out of 2.3 million.

Yahoo.com #2 out of 4.4 million.

Msn.com #15 out of 2.3 million.



wood showcase boxes

Google.com #3 out of 1.8 million.

Yahoo.com #1 out of 596,000.

Msn.com #5 out of 166,000.



wood handgun boxes

Google.com #1 out of 2.1 million.

Yahoo.com #1 out of 90,000.

Msn.com #1 out of 25,000.



wood cigar humidors

Google.com #3 out of 247,000.

Yahoo.com #1 out of 308,000.

Msn.com #3 out of 169,000.



wood business card holders

Google.com #8 out of 8.3 million.

Yahoo.com #6 out of 1.3 million.

Msn.com #1 out of 129,000.



wood desktop business card holders

Google.com #4 out of 2.3 million.

Yahoo.com #1 out of 327,000.

Msn.com #1 out of 62,000.



wood multiple desktop business card holders

Google.com #1 out of 2 million.

Yahoo.com #1 out of 259,000.

Msn.com #1 out of 79,000.



wood letter openers

Google.com #3 out of 301,000.

Yahoo.com #4 out of 734,000.

Msn.com #2 out of 44,000.



wood desk sets

Google.com #16 out of 2.1 million.

Yahoo.com #4 out of 3.4 million.

Msn.com #1 out of 758,000.



You can add the word {handcrafted}, {unique} or words {custom made} to a lot of the phrases above and my website most of the time will be in the top 10 results on the top 15 search engines.



There are at least 200 more, less used keyword phrases that my website comes up in the top 10 results of. I have had days that there were over 100 different phrases used to get to my website.



wood box construction

Google.com #1 out of 8.4 million.

Yahoo.com #2 out of 9.6 million.

Msn.com #1 out of 1.1 million.



wood movement

Google.com #2 out of 16.1 million.

Yahoo.com #9 out of 14.6 million.

Msn.com #1 out of 1.6 million.



hardest wood in the world

Google.com #1 out of 1.8 million.

Yahoo.com #5 out of 1.9 million.

Msn.com #6 out of 344,000.



wood facts

Google.com #1 out of 12.8 million.

Yahoo.com #9 out of 12.3 million.

Msn.com #2 out of 3.8 million.



artist woodworking biography

Google.com #3 out of 1.3 million.

Msn.com #5 out of 27,000.



If you type the keywords, wood gifts on IXQuick, I will have at least 7 stars.



The formula for producing sales and making your website prosper consists of 3 parts. Of coarse the first one is getting people {visitors} to your website {traffic}. The second is getting your visitors to go deeper into your website from the page they entered it on by making a good first impression, arousing their curiously and hopefully good enough to make them want to revisit your website. The third and the hardest part is, to get your visitors to actually click on the buy or purchase button becoming a customer.



Getting People {Visitors} To Your Website {Traffic}



It does not necessarily take a multitude of visitors for a website to make money! You only need to know your {target market} the type or kind of people that would be most interested in buying your product and in some cases are affluent enough to!



The average website receives less than 5 visitors per day. 90% of websites do not make a profit or if so very little. Of the 10 out of a 100 that do, most either have something to do with pornography or have well known names such as Wal-Mart, Target, Zales, Best Buy, J C Penny, Dillard's, Bloomingdale's, Old Navy, Circuit City, Macy's etceteras.



More traffic does not necessarily mean more sales! For instance, I have had 400 - 500 visitors in one day {24 hours} and not one sale. Then I have had days that I only had 50 or 60 visitors and had 3 or 4 sales. My record is 8 sales in one day, actually in 10 hours and I only had a total of 83 visitors that whole day.



The results we are trying to obtain, are to come up in the top 50 results of a keyword or phrase search that are typed in on the search engines and that are relevant to your website and to advertise, market and promote your website without spending a wheelbarrow full of money. In my experience from looking at my website statistics, the majority of web surfers don't look past the top 50 results.



1 Choose a domain name with your first two or three keys words in it, which should be what type of products you are selling. Try to keep less than 30 characters long.



2 One cold hard cruel fact is some keywords are just typed in by web surfers more than others and they look for certain products or services more. For instance, weight loss is typed in 1000's of times more per day than wood gifts. This will affect how many visitors your website receives.



Make sure each and everyone of the keywords you use are absolutely relevant to your website! The search engines will penalize your website by placing it further down in the rankings.



Choose 50 - 100 key words or phrases for the key word meta tag. The first 6 are the most crucial, the ones you what people to find your site the most with. Do not put commas between the key words or phrases. Do not use a keyword more than 3 times {spamming}. You can use different variations of a word, such as art, artist, artistry, just not in a row, spread them out with 10 - 12 words in between them otherwise it is spamming.



3 Use your first 6 - 10 keywords in the title meta tag of your homepage. Make it 75 - 90 characters long including commas, periods and spaces. Google and some other search engines will cut it off at 75 characters so make sure the first 6 keywords will fit in 75 characters. Google is the most important search engine.



4 Use your first two keywords in the body of the text of your homepage, for 5% - 10% of the total wording {keyword density}. If your homepage has 500 words use them 25 - 50 times each. Here is a website that will count the most frequently used words in any body of text, Word Counter. Here is website that will count the total number of words in a body of text, Cut & Paste Word Count.



5 Make sure the name {title} of your company {business} is at the top of the homepage and all other pages. Then name each page with what is on it and put it right under your title or business name. Do not use a keyword meta tag or a description meta tag on any page except the homepage. Only use a title meta tag. The search engines will pick up the title meta tag and any relevant words in the body text and index them as such. Not all visitors are going to enter your website through the homepage. Only about 30% enter my site from the homepage.



6 Include your first 6 keywords in your description in the description meta tag of your homepage, preferably in the first 10 words. Make it 150 - 225 characters long including commas, periods and spaces. Again, google and some other search engines will cut it of at 150 characters so make sure the most important part of the description and what you want people to read will fit in 150 characters. Again, Google is the most important search engine. The last sentence in your description should make people curious enough to what to click on the link and check your website out.



7 Make sure if you are using HTML that it is correct with no mistakes on all your pages, especially the homepage. I know someone that inadvertently made just one mistake and his website went from #6 to #572 on google.com. Here is a website that will check your HTML and tell you the mistakes, CSE HTML Validator.



8 Put a navigation area using text links at the bottom of the homepage and all other pages thus linking all the websites pages together so when search engines crawl your website they will index each and every page.



9 Create a separate page on your website as a website map and name it Website Map. Using text links, list all the pages to your website on it. This gives your visitors, yet another way to navigate your site, a general summary of your site and like the navigation area text links at the bottom of each of your website pages, connects all the pages of your website together.



10 Actually, you only need to submit to the top 15 English Language search engines. Always manually submit to them one at a time. They are listed in alphabetically order, All The Web

Alta Vista

AOL

Ask Jeeves {Ask}

Dogpile

Gigablast

Google

Lycos

MSN

My Way

My Web Search

Netscape

Teoma

Wise Nut

Yahoo



99% of all searches are done on the top 5 search engines. They are listed in order of the number of searches done on them. Google

Yahoo

MSN

AOL

Ask Jeeves {Ask}



Make sure you submit to {ODP}, Open Directory Project, it is a search directory.



Here is a website that lists the top 150 search engines and directories, that allow you to submit to them for free,Free Submissions To Search Engines And Directories.



Do not submit too much, it clutters up the search engines with your redundant website. They will penalize you by placing it further down in the rankings. I only submit once every 6 months. If your site is new, it will take a minimum of 3 months for most search engines to index and place your website in the results. Google.com is taking 8 months. You must have patience!



11 Keep your website fresh by changing the content frequently. It only has to be a small change, add a few words here and there, rephrase sentences or add a page or product. If the search engines go to a site a few times and nothing has changed they will start crawling your site with less and less frequency. It also gives visitors a reason to keep coming back to your website {repeat visitors}.



12 They are 3 types of links, reciprocal, one way {outbound} from your web site to another website that does not have a link coming back yours, one way {inbound} from another website that has a link going to your website but you do not have a link going back to there website. The best is the latter, but it is impossible to control. There are a lot of small websites that use the category contents on, {ODP}, Open Directory Project.





I have approximately 100 total outgoing links on all my link pages combined, the majority are reciprocal but Worldwide I have at least 12,000 websites that have a link going to my website and probably 50% of those are websites using the ODP, Shopping: Home and Garden Accessories Wooden category contents.



Google Page Rank {PR}, in a nutshell is one of the deciding factors that google determines how high up a websites particular webpage will appear in the results of a keyword or phrase search. Webpages are ranked from 0 - 10, the higher the number the more inbound links {webpages} the page has connected to it and thus the more important it is.



My website has approximately 165 pages, the homepage has a PR of 4, the other 164 pages have a PR of 2. That is not a bad rank for internal webpages of a website taking in consideration that a high number of websites link to the homepage of a website. That would mean that websites are also linking to my article pages or to my particular product pages. Here is a Google Page Rank Checker , that you can type the URL of any webpage and it will give you its PR.



Inbound links to your website webpages cannot hurt {penalize} their PR because they cannot be controlled. Outbound links from your website webpages can hurt {penalize} their PR because they can be controlled 100%. As a rule, the higher a websites traffic ranking {homepage} the higher their PR will be. You should not link to a websites homepage if its PR is 0.



Reciprocal links are good. Just be very careful and make sure the other website is not in direct competition with your website but compliments your website and is relevant in some way. Try to exchange links with websites that have a traffic ranking of 1 million or below and 6 or so with a traffic rank of 100,000 or below. One website ranked 100,000 or below is worth 100 ranked 100,000 - 1,000,000 and one ranked below 10,000 is worth 1000. The lower the number the more traffic they receive. Here is a website that will tell you a websites traffic ranking if it is below 900,000, Traffic Ranking.Do not join link farms! Most major search engines do not count the links a website has from known link farms.



Have different categories for your links and only put 1 category per page. Do not list anymore than 25 links per page. It is wise to not only use a text link with a description, but an image link also. Name the image the business, company individual it represents. Place the text link with the description above the image link. My statistics show that I get more referrals from the sites that have an image link going to my site than the ones having a text link to it. You know what they say; an image is worth a thousand words.



13 Another way to get visitors to your website and your business name out there, is to do contest drawings or give aways. From experience the best prize to give away are merchandise gift certificates. More people enter because they can pick from all the products on your website and get what they want.



Make a separate page for the drawing contest and entry form. Make it an advertising page by placing 10 or 12 products at the top of the page, telling a little something about you and your business and if you have testimonials display some of them on the page also.



Submit it to the top 3 sweepstakes and contest websites. They are, EZSweeps

Oline-Sweepstakes

CashNet Sweepstakes



Of coarse you will need to put each of their banner links on your drawing, contest, and entry form page.