1. Do something you are passionate about
2. Add a new page of content to your site every day
3. Get a new external link to your site every day

Do something you are passionate about

This may sound a bit funny but it is the single most important thing you can do when building a website. You should never consider making a website because of the earning potential of it. You should do something you will really enjoy doing. Every subject imaginable will be a viable source of revenue in a website. You are passionate about the subject right? Other people are too. And they will come to your site.

There is another very fundamental aspect to having passion for the subject. You will be able to use and leverage what you already know about it. This means that all the learning you have done is instantly available for use on the website. That’s a lot of information. But also, if you are passionate about the subject you are very much more likely to continue working on the website. Thus avoiding the biggest thing that causes websites to fail: The webmaster gives up.

Add a new page of content every day

This serves three very important purposes. The first purpose is that when you get a new web visitor he or she may come back another day to see if there is anything new. If there is nothing new he or she may never come back. But if there is new content you have a frequent visitor hooked, and the search engines love new content. If a website is growing at a regular pace they consider it to be very important and they will rank you accordingly. This means that more people will find you, and finding new content when they come back means more visits, which means better search engine ranking. Can you see how this can spiral into something unexpectedly pleasant? It takes time but it will happen.

Get an external link every day

Try to get one new link to your website on another website every day. There are many different ways you can do this. Send emails to other webmaster in your general subject area and ask for a link exchange. Write articles for article directories and put a link to your site at the bottom of the article. Post informative stuff to forums and use your signature block as a link to your site. Join an online group or organization and post links to your site on their site or in their message threads. There are a thousand ways you can get links to your site.
As you try to improve your website and get more people to visit you are going to learn about a tremendous amount of things, tricks, techniques, processes, and methods for doing it. Just stick to these three simple rules and your website will, over time, become a substantial success. It won’t happen overnight but it will happen.