Each and every day I am amazed by the great number of people who want to learn Internet Marketing and want to make money online but simply can’t. They can’t for various reasons, either it’s their lack of discipline and will or, in most of the cases, the misinformation that is being spread around by the Internet Marketing gurus. You need to believe me when I tell you this, because I can’t stress it enough: 99% of all the products that come from the gurus are plain rubbish. If you continue to listen to them and buy their products, you are not going to make any money.

What you need to do instead is start working, testing, working and then testing some more. I’ve learned what I need to do in order to make a website profitable through trial and error. However, most of the people who try their luck online, never make more than a buck or two. This is because they do it all wrong and are influenced by the gurus, when they should be testing and working. Internet Marketing is not easy. If you got that impression, you are wrong. Now here are the things you should do in order to create a profitable website. Bear in mind, you need to do them in this order and follow these guidelines.

1. Find a money maker
You may be surprised by this, but: you need to know what you are going to be selling before you do anything else. The only exception to this rule may be if you are planning to monetize your website using Adsense, in which case you can choose from many niches. But, in the case of an affiliate product, you don’t choose the niche and the product afterwards. You choose the product first and the niche implicitly.

2. Decide the type of website you are going to build
Here, you have 2 basic options: you can build a small niche site centered around the particular product, or build a large website that is going to attract a lot of search engine traffic. In order to find about the advantages or disadvantages of each method, read the article “Small Niche Site vs Large Authority Site”

3. Keyword Research
This is where 90% of the people get it all wrong. They don’t realize the importance of keyword research. Keyword research is the foundation of all your future work. If you don’t get this right, you are doomed from the get go. You are not going to get targeted visitors and you are probably not going to get search engine traffic at all. And although there are a lot of people who quickly dismiss search engine traffic under the pretense that they don’t want to depend on Google, it is the best kind of traffic you could ever get. People who dismiss it do so simply because they have no idea how to get it. How to do keyword research can be the subject of a small book, I could write on and on about it. I consider the best tools for this task to be Google’s tool and Keyword Discovery.

4. Content creation
You should now start creating your content around the keywords that you have chosen. If you want to build a small niche site, content creation will not be very difficult. However, if you plan on building a large site, it may take a while. You can outsource it if you like, but make sure that you always have unique content on your website. For a website that’s going to make you money, unique content is always the best bet.

5. Onpage Search Engine Optimization
Of course, I will not include tasks like uploading the website to your server in this small guide, these are self implied. Proper onpage search engine optimization includes the following tasks:
- proper use of title tags;
- proper use of meta description tags;
- use of H1 and H2 headers;
- bolding the main keywords on a page, but not more than a few times;
- using alt tags for images;
- designing a proper internal website structure.

6. Link building
Without targeted links, your business will never be productive. Read that again and remember it. Getting the right links to your website and in the right way is almost an art. Some people have more complex classifications, but I only split the links in two categories: crappy links and quality links. I define crappy links as being the links you get from article directories or social bookmarking sites, while quality links for me are in context links, from medium quality sites and up, anchored with my keyword, and with the keyword in the title tag of the page that’s linking to me. Again, I could write a whole book on the subject of link building.

And these are the 6 steps you need to take in order to build a profitable website. There are lots of details to the whole guide, but it’s up to you to research and know how to do them properly. Notice I didn’t put a magic number in the title in order to draw more pairs of eyes. I just wrote the process as I do it. Now get to work, what are you waiting for?