I know many people who visit this website either struggle to build WordPress websites or simply cannot make any money from this venture. There are many models you can follow when building a WordPress website, and for that matter you don’t even have to use WordPress if you don’t want to. (you must be crazy though )

You can build a WordPress website into a authority website, an e-commerce website, or even a niche website. Of course there are many more options. Either way, each website can become its own little business, earning you a decent amount of income.

So lets get down to it

If you know anything about me, I generally build authority websites that can go on for ever and ever. Sometimes this means that I pick a more general niche with probably huge competition, divide that niche by categories, and load the website with tons of content. (only great content though) I go for longtail, short tail, highly competitive keywords.

So this is how I make money online, but this is not all there is to my business. I also have many niche websites, review websites, product only websites, and so on.

Today I am going to openly show you a website that I created (or maybe my VA did) about six months ago. I am going to tell you the exact steps I took in making this website and how it has progressed so far.

I have to confess right now that this website is definitely not up to my standard OCD set up as I simply do not have time to fix it at the moment. However the reason I want to show everyone this website is because it is actually making money and it is nowhere near perfect. I want you to see all the good and all the bad and realize that you can do this too.

Here is the website: http://wordpresswebsitehost.com/ Don’t leave though! Take a quick look, see how ugly it is, and then come back!

Why did I start this website?

I was basically building a website to keep my VA busy and I had an idea about making a website that sold Web hosting. If you have never sold Web hosting before, it is one of the most highly paid affiliate products out there. For example if someone clicks on my Hostgator banner and buys even the smallest product, I get $100 commission for bringing them in the door. Not every website can just simply start selling Web hosting though. Trust me I have tried to sell it on some of my authority websites, but the audience needs to be targeted, so that never worked.

How did I start this WordPress website

1. I searched for a domain name that had something to do with hosting. In my case I wanted to tie it in with my WordPress website group. When I started to research Web hosting, I realized that it was highly competitive niche and therefore I did not research keywords at all. I was not going to rely on search engine optimization to get me traffic in the beginning.
2. I created a WordPress theme using Artisteer as I probably was not a member of Elegant themes at the time.. ( I will be changing the Theme later)
3. I created a page for each hosting company that I wanted to promote. Please note that these are pages, not posts.
4. I created a static front page with a table full of affiliate links and a link to see a full review of the product.
5. I have researched some keywords to narrow down what categories I wanted for the articles.
6. I installed a minimal amount of plug-ins, just enough to get me through. For example I installed Affiliatecamo to cloak affiliate links and get every article pointing back to a review page.
7. I got 10 articles written about Web hosting and scheduled them to post one every four days.
8. I relied on my VA at the time, to fill the product pages with reviews and affiliate links.
9. I put a backlink on one of my PR 6 websites and possibly 2 others. That’s it for linkbuilding.

After all this I spent a few days editing mistakes and content, but never finishing to my standards. When you visit this website I do not expect criticism as I am showing this website in good faith. Of course it can be done better and it will be in time. I am totally open to suggestions though!

Potential Greatness Kept Knocking?

Unfortunately I lost interest after about a week and was often reminded that this website existed by seeing the odd $100 commission coming in. Believe it or not, this is exactly how this website started as well. I often say that I build websites and wait for the website to show me potential. This website you are reading right now, did exactly the same thing. It showed me potential.

The funny thing is that I still ignored the potential in this hosting website as I was just too busy, but then Google had a good old page rank update. I was awarded with a page rank 4 on this hosting website that I had left for dead. So there was another sign slapping me in the face.

Wake up Mitz!

Ok the PR 4 woke me up about the website. This led me to a little bit more promotion, and when I say little, I mean little. I added a link to the website in an article I wrote on my Tips4PC website and also answered a few Yahoo answers, of course leaving a link to the website. That’s it though.

Anyway I got paid $200 into my bank and was curious as to where it came from. I logged into my Commission Junction account for this website and noticed a balance of $700, $600 for August and $100 just outside. The $200 I had already been paid for was July earnings for this website which occurred before I had woken up with my second mini line of promotion. I rarely even go to Commission Junction as I really make all my earnings from Adsense, Clickbank, some individual affiliates, and now Amazon. All this was a surprise to me.

What caused this website to be so successful?

It is not successful yet but has the potential to be extremely successful! Obviously we can see that.

So what caused this website to be potentially successful?

Here are a few reasons I have thought of:

• The static front page is a complete affiliate table and there is not many other options on the page and less you scroll right down to the bottom of the website.
• If a visitor lands on an article on the website, links to the review pages are embedded into the articles. The articles themselves are not interlinked.
• The only outgoing links are to hosting affiliate websites and to this WordPress website.
• The articles that I have published are all original content. These have started to be picked up by the search engines and are getting a very small amount of traffic.

In the screenshot below I show you the settings I used to set my static front page. The first thing I did was create a page with no sidebars. Then I chose this page in the settings below.

What are my plans for this WordPress website?

• I thought about writing some guest posts for this website but have not even got around to it. When that happens that will definitely kick this website onto my earnings radar.
• I also thought about making a banner for it and buying some cheap advertising space on other blogs..Lets face it, $100 a sale can afford it.
• I will hopefully have time to answer a few more questions on Yahoo.
• I could also add a link into my authors bio on the websites that I already guest post on. This means that the link will automatically go want to all the posts that I have already published on other peoples blogs. Can you see the power in this?
• Schedule more articles to run and keep the blog flowing with fresh content.
• I thought this would be a small niche website, well kind of small, but it could turn out to be something bigger. This was not my intention.

Can you copy this?

Sure! Just remember that the domain name I chose really has no one searching for it. Therefore you can buy a domain name like these:

websitehostingcost.net

websitehostingcost.org

americanwebhosting.org

andwebhosting.net

bestwebhosting2011.net

bestwebhosting2011.org

domainnameandwebhosting.net

domainnameandwebhosting.net

bestwebhostingnow.net

bestwebhostingnow.org

topwebsitehostingtoday.com

topwebsitehostingtoday.net

…that are available right now and then reproduce what I have done… Then start driving targeted traffic to the website. If you do use one of these domain names then please do your own checking to see if there are any searches for it….

Just remember that this is my WordPress website case study and I do not guarantee your success doing the same thing or offer personal help to anyone. Believe me, I know everyone needs help and it is impossible for me to do so. The best way I can help you is if you follow this blog.

WordPress Website Case Study Conclusion

Even if the Page Rank disappears on this website, it is extremely easy to drive some targeted traffic to it and still make sales. The page rank has nothing to do with the success of the website. It does not matter that I placed a link on one of my websites because I could have just as easily guest posted on someone else’s site to get a link.

This is what I call handing you a website example on a platter!

I am interested to hear your comments about this WordPress website Case study??

I guess you are wondering if my bold question, “How did I Increase Adsense Earnings By 500%” is true? Well it is!!! And I am still in shock myself! From having a website that made an average of $20 a day, that now makes an average of $100 a day plus, and it is just crazy stuff.

All of those people saying you need to have 100 websites making $1 a day each really made me think that I had pushed my $20 a day website to its limits. Was I kidding myself about making any more money out of one measly website? Should I really be wasting valuable time playing around with  Google Adsense ads when I could be building more websites to make more money?

Please note that I cannot divulge exact figures as it might be against their TOC but Adsense rocks!

How Did I Increase Adsense Earnings By 500%

There are some factors that I believe contributed to my Adsense earnings exploding and I am so glad that I made these decisions and take this path. What if I didn’t have the guts or courage to do what I did? What if I had stopped optimizing my Adsense ads because I thought I had reached the best earnings I could get?

These are all scary questions that I am asking myself, because in reality it was all touch and go.

How Did I Increase Adsense Earnings On My Website?

I moved my website into WordPress to Increase Adsense Earnings

This was a huge job and not an easy task. I took a huge risk as I lost pages along the way and it took about 4 weeks to complete thoroughly. I was worried the whole time, but underneath I knew that WordPress was the right content management system for me. At this stage I wiped out my earnings and just trusted myself that they would come back one day.

I bought SEOpressor to help me with Onpage SEO

I bought this amazing plugin called SEOPressor and I cannot believe I did not buy this sooner! This plugin corrected all my bad on page SEO mistakes and helped me get more search engine traffic.

In the screen shot below you can see how SEOpressor works. It actually scores your posts. To my absolute shock, my posts were scoring on an average of 6% and with the help of this plugin I can now tweak posts until they score at least over 80%.

I suppose your asking “Whats this got to do with increasing Adsense earnings?” Well we all know that extra traffic equals more income and earnings. Onpage SEO is extremely important because if you do right, you get delivered targeted AdSense ads which makes your click through rate and your eCPM go up. After all, you are trying to match the ads to the content, which equals more sales. Here is a FREE PDF report from Brian Clark from Copy Blogger called How to write compelling content for the search engines. This will help you get the right traffic.

I bought Socrates. I was sick of wasting time with free WordPress Themes

I do not want to go too overboard with telling you about the Socrates WordPress Theme as I have done a few posts on the subject before. Socrates has changed my life. Crazy statement, but its the truth. You can now get a free trial of this WordPress theme to check it out for yourself. Get more info from the Socrates Website

Also see Create A Mini Site Sales Page Website With The Socrates WordPress Theme and WordPress theme for SEO and easy customization – Socrates WordPress Theme

I later changed my theme to Thesis and remodeled it to look like Socrates as this is the best conversions theme I have had.

I took advice from the Google Adsense team

Here is a message that that the Google optimization Team sent me:

Our system analyzed 399 pages across your domain, XXXXXX.com, and found only one Google ad unit per page on 397 of your pages. The AdSense program currently allows placing up to three ad units on each page, and we strongly suggest you do so.

Since a large portion of your site is not fully monetized, consider adding any of our top performing units (336×280, 300×250, 728×90 or 160×600) to pages currently showing only one ad in the placements our heatmap suggests:

Below is the exact heatmap that the Google Optimization team sent me.

What steps did I take to actually increase Adsense earnings?

With all the traffic I was getting from my new SEOpressor plugin I needed to optimize my earnings as money was flying out the door.

1. I changed my Socrates theme to a 3 column website instead of a two. So it has the content and one column on each side. Exactly how they showed me in the picture.
2. I inserted an image ad for the 728×90 ad position.
3. I inserted a text ad for the 160×600 ad position.
4. I inserted a text ad for the in content 300×250 ad position.

These actions increased my Adsense earnings from around $20 to $30 and sometimes $40. I thought this was great! But wait….the next day I changed one more thing.One small change and it blew me out of my chair!

Please note that I cannot divulge exact figures as it might be against their TOC but Adsense rocks!

My final step to increase Adsense earnings was to simply change the 300×250 ad to an image ad.

I changed the ad half way through the day and got approximately  $80.00 which was a record for this website and I knew it could do better because the day was nearly over. The next day I  hit a new record of well over $200.00 for one day from one website.

I used to read other bloggers posts about how to Increase Adsense Earnings like Is Google Adsense Making Me Rich by Darren Rowse and think “yeah that would never happen to me”.

Although I cannot show you my whole Adsense account and prove this to you even further, at least you can see the potential. Of course this screen shot might not be real. To succeed and increase Adsense earnings you need to trust yourself and believe that it can happen.

Need more information about increasing your Adsense earnings? Get the How to make more money with Adsense report.

If your not into making websites, imformation products, and making money that way, heres another way you can earn an income online. Selling webhosting. You can make one website or get it made for you and sell webhosting to other people that do want to make a website.

You can drum up traffic or go out onto to street to get local businesses to host with you…This is serious stuff. I actually bought a reseller hosting package for around $200 for a year. Then I sold 2 packages to people that needed web hosting and made my money back and profited $300 the first week! I was shocked at how easy it was. Now I am in the position to sell more hosting packages or host my own website on this hosting for free. Either way I am hitting myself for not getting into this earlier. However if you do not know what you are doing in a particular area you try to avoid it.

How do I set up reseller web hosting? Where do I start?

 Simply go to a wehost that sells reseller packages. I chose Hostgator because I am very pleased with them and have used them for a few years now. Other webhosts had it $5 cheaper but I wasn’t sure about the service and uptime. Image if you hosted loads of website and the server went down? That $5 saving is not going to help your reassure your customers is it?

What reseller hosting package should I buy?

 I started with the smallest package because I know that Hostgator will let me upgrade later.

How hard is it to install a new webhosting account into your reseller account?

If you choose Hostgator reseller hosting there are video tutorials on how to create accounts and do everything you need to know.

There are some simple reasons why you should choose WordPress to build your next website.

1. Its easy to install WordPress if you have fantastico in your cpanel website hosting. (A must have)
2. You can edit your website from any computer, as long as you have access to the internet and a computer.
3. You do not need to know fancy html or php coding to make great websites.
4. You can get thousands of free themes and premium WordPress themes that upload in seconds.
5. You can easily backup your website data to your computer for safety.
6. Google and the other search engines love WordPress.
7. You can get some amazing WordPress plugins that do alot of the work for you.

It really annoys me when people say that want to make websites, but they are not in it for the money. Who are we kidding? Stop lying to us and tell us the truth. Stop looking down on website builders that want to make money out of building websites.

To tell the truth, in the beginning I did not start out wanting to make money out of making websites. It’s when you realise how much work actually goes into them that you start to think…”hey, why not get some money for all this hard work I have done?” If your not thinking this then you are not working hard enough!

I personally love making websites and have approximately 10 in my portfolio. (I treat them like a stock portfolio).. Anyway the more time they take up the more money I need to make from them. That is the simple fact.