About 5 months ago I set out to work on building a website. I started this because I believe that there was money in the internet and I could get some of it. So in my steps to success I have tried affiliate programs such as Clickbank, Shareasale, and others. I have used Traffic Exchange Programs, and Banner Exchanges. I have even tried Pay Per Click (PPC) programs such as Google Adwords.

When I decided that there was money on the internet, I decided to read a bunch of articles that were kind of like this one, except Not. The articles I read, and there were many of them, told me to start a website and promote it. First off I looked around the internet a few places and I found a web address I liked. It wasn’t something fancy just something that allowed me be very vague with my affiliate work. So I then picked up a program called, Coffee Cup HTML Editor. As this program helped me learn HTML, I decided to start Shareasale and Clickbank affiliate programs.

Shareasale was pretty cool because every company involved has banners. Very Decorative banners I thought would make my site look nice. So I used my HTML editor to create some web pages. Soon after creating these pages I found that sometimes the same web page would look different in a different screen Setting (800x600 – 1000x700 – Mac, Netscape, etc). The banners would move around the page independently and I never felt comfortable with the settings involved. So I started over and over and over. I’m sure you get the point. Needless to say every time I built a web page I got more and more Tem plated, with more and more Tables.

Then I moved on to Clickbank Market Place where I text links that I could create any way that I liked. So I started building web pages to focus on this Content specifically. Then I used Google Adwords to create my pages. First thing I have to say wrong was the creating the web page thing. Visitors are generally not going to continue to click through a site unless they feel that the sales letter is taking them in. Since, I’m not that great at writing a sales letter I figured that the site should sell itself because the visitor will ultimately end up there anyway. This eliminated the need for a web site, besides that fact that I was loosing almost all of my visitors on a Read this and click here to see more idea. So I used Adwords to directly link to my Clickbank Products.

Now I had a website that I paid for because someone told me that it was the only way to make it on the internet. I wasn’t out of luck, because the over all yearly cost was so low, but I still wanted to make some money on the internet. So I found that I could increase my visitors to my site by adding more pages, getting ranked by the search engines and just getting people to visit my site. I then started Traffic Exchange programs to help boost the rankings of my site. It worked I increased the rankings of my site. I didn’t increase my Page Rank and I didn’t sell anything but I had Hundreds of visitors a day coming to my site. I even once paid for Visitors from the Traffic Exchanges just to build a better Alexia ranking.

So, In essence of wasting money on everything I had done I needed to make some money back or I would really be in the hole. I really stared using the PPC programs that Google Adwords had to offer. First I started Setting up ads for the Clickbank Products. I started the bids low and then increased them little by little until I started getting visitors to the sites of my choice. I went through a few sites that never made me any money but I wasn’t going to give up because I just knew that It could be done. I finally found a couple of Clickbank products that would sell, one was even selling at every tenth visitor or so. After I made a few hundred Dollars, it just stopped. I kept paying for visitors and still was at a loss, no more sales. I was way over the Amount of money that I had spent but if this kept up I was going to be back to breaking even.

Turns out that Clickbank doesn’t tell you when the websites you’re promoting stop paying them for the Stuff you’re selling. Actually the Site changed; I was sending visitors to a page that said “I’m sorry we are no longer selling this item." I spent about $30.00 or more before I actually figured that out. I was a little discouraged by the way things were handled, and also the fact that I paid for all my advertising long in advance of when I received my affiliate check from Clickbank. This made things hard, but if budgeted correctly it can work great, and bring in mucho money for anyone.

Now, my website is getting traffic but no sales. I paused the selling on Adwords because I hit my monthly budget of money I wanted to spend, and the program that actually was selling wasn’t selling anymore. I decided to work on the website. First thing I did was buy some Content from Ebay. 16,000 web pages of content to be exact. I uploaded all of this to my server in hopes of attracting more visitors. I found that the search engines only index for content, not for what you are selling, so I was wasting my time creating pages with out content just things to sell.

In the next step I found that as a better webmaster it is better to promote one specific item then it is to promote many items. The reason for this is so that you can get your Meta Tags in place and have good specific content for what people are looking for. Now I didn’t even know what Meta tags were at this point and I just put them in my Index pages just because I read somewhere that it would help get ranked in Search Engines. Turns out that you MUST have them or your site will not get indexed. In fact, submitting a site without Meta Tags is almost like throwing your money down the toilet. Stupid! So I built a website to sell Art Work.

Now I had all this content and didn’t know what to do with it, so I started an Article Site. Both Sites were created with MYSQL and in PHP format. I did this for the ease of editing and moderating. It sure made adding pages a breeze. To edit the Script involved with PHP I began using Macromedia. I taught myself Flash, and some programming language. Learning Flash was almost useless since I probably will never need it.

So in most of my Studies I found that you probably can make more money with Google Adsense when you have a ton of content. So I set up with Adsense and added this to my site. This worked out great for a while and then one day Google just cut me off. They said that I was getting invalid clicks. I was totally shocked, because I wasn’t clicking on the ads. I read a few articles on getting banned from Adsense and as it turns out some of the viewers through the Traffic Exchanges that I was using were Clicking on the Ads. To me this doesn’t make sense that it’s invalid. Seems that there are real visitors clicking on the ads, but that is the policy.

So now I’m back to promoting Affiliate Banners and Clickbank Products. It’s fine with me because I actually made more money promoting this items, I will just have to be more careful to keep checking the Ads and updating as necessary. I now write articles for other sites. In the bottom of each article is my Byline and it has my Web Address so people can come and read more articles I write, a much better way of getting traffic.

So to finish this Article up I would like to point out the keys to being successful. Step 1; only buy a website if your plan on the Long Haul. Step 2; do not use traffic exchanges to promote it. Step 3; Write Articles to promote your own site. Step 4; Set a Budget and Stick to it. Step 5; more content mean more visitors. Step 6; Meta Tags.