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Making a Good Income From Your Website

The main premise of this website is to help you to to improve your website and to make it the most successful website of its kind. For the vast majority of websites, this means generating a high income. Now for some people, this is the primary goal for the website. For other people, they want a website that satisfies some other purpose as well. Maybe something that can show off their skills or ideas. If you fall into the latter group, then I probably can't help you a great deal with your specific needs. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't also look at trying to earn a little side income from your website, and hopefully this section will help you to do that, without distracting from your primary aim.

For those of you that are trying to create a website that generates income as it's primary goal, then the most important thing that I can do for you, is to try to convince you of the need to really make that your primary goal. Too many people that I meet, want to create a website to their own design, with their own ideas. They want to make their website different and they want to make it stand out and impress their visitors. And then they want their visitors to love it the way they do and hand over their money. This is the reason most people fail. They think the internet is a sure fire way to make money, they try their ideas and they earn very little and they go away thinking it's all a con. This is the same thing that happens offline and is the same reason that 9 out of 10 businesses fail in their first year.

So what makes that 1 out of 10 businesses so special, why does that one work and the others don't? Do they work harder? Do they have better ideas? Are they more intelligent?

No. The difference is business process and business products. The businesses that fail tend to be focussed on the business product rather than the business process.

The difference between the two is vital, but often misunderstood.

The best way to explain the difference is using McDonalds, the fast food chain. A lot of people would like to open their own restaurant and unfortunately, the failure rate with restaurants is even higher than businesses in general. This is because most people who want to open a restaurant want to open a high quality restaurant. They want a restaurant that sells good quality food and has good quality service. They choose a pricing structure to reflect the quality and they assume the customers would come flocking to their restaurant. They are focussing on the product.

At the other end of the scale is McDonalds. They are clearly not focussed on the products, as is demonstrated by the mostly inedible rubbish that they serve. Everybody can make a better burger than McDonalds. So why doesn't everybody do better than McDonalds when they open a better quality restaurant? Because McDonalds has a much better business process. They don't care about the product, they focus on how they are going to sell it, how they are going to attract new customers, retain old customers, sell more to existing customers and generate new sources of income. McDonalds has a fantastic advertising and marketing department that is the envy of almost every other company. That is their business process. McDonalds want to make money, so they focus on the process of making money. The failing restaurant owners want a good quality restaurant, so they focus on the quality and ignore the customers and business processes. Now don't get me wrong, there are many good quality restaurants that are doing just fine. But they have managed to get the balance just right. They can maintain a good quality restaurant while keeping focussed on their business processes.

So how can you apply this to your website? If you come at the project with an attitude of "I want a website that does this, that and the other", you are probably going to find it difficult. You should have the attitude of "I want a website that earns money from people who want XYZ" or "I want a website that earns money from people who are interested in XYZ" or something along those lines. Get over the idea that if you build it, they will buy. It's not going to happen. Think of the subject group of people that your website is going to be focussed towards and think about what they will want and how that can earn you money. Once your website is earning enough for you to live off and gives you plenty of free time, then you can focus on your other ideas for just making it a great website. If you try to do it the other way around, it'll take you much longer and lead to much more frustration.

When I first created Interhike.com, it was just going to be a camping site directory. It would have all the camping sites from around Europe listed in it, then any camping sites that wanted to stand out, could pay a yearly fee for an 'enhanced advert'. This sounded like a great idea to me. This was before the dotcom crash and the internet was just starting becoming widely used by ordinary people. And with 2000 camping sites in the UK alone, I was sure that hundreds of camping sites would want to pay for the enhanced adverts and I'd be minted. It didn't quite go according to plan. It turned out that I'd been too focussed on providing my excellent free service of listing all the camping sites for my visitors and hadn't really considered my real customers. My enhanced listing didn't provide the camping sites with enough to justify the charge so very few of them took up the opportunity. I couldn't understand it, I had provided it, but they wouldn't buy. I was too focussed on the business product and not focussed at all on the business process. So, I deviated into retailing camping equipment via the website and this slowly built up over time, but never really took off to a huge extent. Again, I couldn't understand it, I was providing this fantastic service, I was undercutting all the high street shops, but in the beginning I was making less than one order per week. By the time I'd come up with some more ideas and my sales had picked up to a few orders per day, all the big retailers had already entered the market and I now had to share the online market with them. I had wasted my opportunity and now they were taking over. After a few years, I realised that retail was just too much work for too little money. Now, however, Interhike.com does fantastically. I've stopped focussing on what I want it to be and I now concentrate on how it can earn a better income. What changes can I make to give customers what they want, in a way that will earn me money. I recommend that you do the same. Keep an open mind and don't turn your nose up at money-making ideas that may make your website look different to how you wanted it to look. I didn't want to have add banners on my Interhike.com, I thought they looked unprofessional, cheap and tacky. After a while I tried them and found that they generated most of the income for the website for a short period. Once I stopped focussing on the product of a "website without banners" and started focussing on a "website that made money", the money started rolling in. Once I put the banners on Interhike.com, some of my other friends who were struggling to earn money from small websites commented that the banners made it look cheap. Every single one of them changed their mind when I told them how much the banners were earning. Now I'm not saying put banner adverts on your website. Far from it, banner adverts are now one of the lowest income generators available. Most web surfers just ignore them nowadays. I'm saying, forget about the pompous attitude of "I'm not doing that, it'll make the website look rubbish". McDonalds is rubbish, but would you rather be a multi-billionaire fast food chain owner or declared bankrupt with the embarassment of a failed restaurant?