There are many individuals across the nation that dream about creating a profitable website in order to add an additional income stream to their household or so that they can use the website to work from home on their own terms for their own business. The funny thing is that creating a profitable web business is already a reality for thousands of individuals across the nation and millions of individuals around the world.

So what is it that they know that you do not know? Creating a profitable website takes a great deal of time, effort, and innovation for the website to succeed and create an income for the individual that created it. A great deal of time if you intend to pay all your bills with it that is!

There are 5 steps that you must follow in order to create a profitable website that has the ability to provide a decent income for the creator. The first thing that you must do, like any entrepreneur, is come up with an idea for what type of website you would like to create. With the fluidity of the internet, the possibilities are virtually endless when it comes to what type of website to create and how to design the website to be appealing to the individuals you are trying to attract.

The next thing that you will need to determine is how you would like to make this website profitable. There are a number of different ways that you can use to make a website into a profitable enterprise, including selling a product, selling a service, becoming an affiliate marketer, or create some type of membership community. Websites that are unique and innovative are generally the ones that are mostly the best received and tend to generate their creators the largest incomes.

After the type of website has been determined, it is time to design the website and create the content of the website. The content of the website should be concise and well thought out as well as free of any grammatical or spelling errors. The intent of the content of a profitable web business is to keep the visitor's attention long enough for you to sell them your product, your service, or persuade them to travel on to another company's website as a referral.

The next step to take in creating a profitable website is to determine how you are going to market your website. Individuals that create websites that are intended to be used for affiliate marketing will still need to market their website in order to attract individuals that they can use as referrals to the other company's website. There are nearly a dozen different marketing techniques that can be used on the internet and, in some cases - multiple marketing methods can be used in order to expand the number of individuals who see the website, helping it to become a profitable website much more quickly.

The last step in creating a profitable web business is continuing to review, revamp, and revise your website so that the information remains current and relevant to the needs of the visitors to your website. By following these 5 steps for creating a profitable website, you should be able create a profitable web business that you can eventually make your full time job if that is what you are going after.

The key element to your success is you. It is what you do today that will determine whether you succeed or fail. Beyond that it comes down to consistency. It's what you do every day that will bring results. Sporadic efforts here and there will not yield success long term.

So your first objective is to figure out what you are going to build a site around. Write down your interests and various topics that may be relative to those interests. Once you have a list then its time to start researching.

The key to effective research is focus. Focus can be achieved by understanding what your objectives are and what can help you achieve those objectives. As you know you need traffic to your site to have any hope of making money. No traffic means no money.

So you will need to research markets that have a high level of activity online. The ideal scenario is to find keywords that get searched a lot and have little competition. With that said you have to be careful.

Competition in actual fact is good because it means that there is money to be made in that market. So what you need to do is find ways to enter the market using less competitive keywords yet still be able to generate income relative to the main keyword.

For example with weight loss there are many ways to enter that market without going after the main keyword. Example; lose belly fat, or lose weight by eating healthy foods and so on. I think you get the idea.

Once you have the keywords that you can compete with you will then need to build your site using each keyword to build a page around. You will need to structure your web pages so that you get the right keyword density.

To conclude there are lots of site builders out there to help you with this. The one I had the most success with was site build it. They cover all of the above and also take care of the hosting. This way all you have to do is engage in your passion.

Ten years ago you could include a hit counter on your website and announce proudly that your site was doing "very well" as soon as the number reached 100,000. The current process is not nearly as simple or straightforward. The internet works in complicated ways that have evolved to solve a number of small problems. Consequently, concrete statistics are often difficult to obtain. If you believe the number of online visitors is a reliable indicator to gauge the popularity of your site or the potential sales of your product, you should consider the following:

1. Hit - Every time a user requests a file on your site (a page, not a picture or link to another site) it counts as a hit.

2. File - When a file or page is actually sent to the user, it counts as a file. Files normally outnumber hits, but neither is very useful in measuring traffic. Any IP can request all of the files on your page several times in one hour without any actual involvement from the user.

3. Impressions - This is a concept that has existed in advertising for many decades. For example, a 2-page magazine advertisement counts as one "showing of a creative concept". This equates to one impression every time a reader sees it. If your web page contains five small banners, you could have 10,000 page views, but 50,000 impressions.

4. Page Views - Almost everyone believe this is the most important traffic statistic. This term simply refers to the number of times any particular page has been viewed. This metric can be useful. However, values can often be over-inflated and should always be considered in conjunction with unique visits.

5. Visits & Unique Visits - A visit is simply logged every time a remote IP requests one of your pages for the first time in a timeout period. A unique visit is usually defined as "one visit per IP per day", regardless of timeouts.

The above are all very important metrics, but understanding them properly is key. The best way to decide how your site's traffic is performing is by creating a formula. If you know what you are doing, you can develop your own formula. However, there are plenty of effective formulas currently available. A basic idea of how to evaluate your traffic involves reviewing monthly averages, unique visits and page views. This will give you an idea regarding how many individuals visit your site, how many pages they view, and how long they remain.

A basic formula from MarketingExperiments.com would be:

C = 4M + 3V + 2(I-F) - 2A

This formula shows that conversions are a product of motivation (M), value (V) and then the friction (F) elements minus the incentives (I). This will help you determine how many customers are likely to purchase your product. However, you need all the values first! You can purchase online analytic tools or download them for an upfront or monthly fee. All of them can return useful data to a webmaster.

If you are not an expert webmaster, or you do not understand many of the technical intricacies of web traffic, you should download Google Analytics. This is one of Google's new free products, and all you require is a GMail account and a web site. The program provides easy to read analytic data in a web-based form for your website. This can make it easy to determine which metrics would be most useful for analyzing your online traffic.

Michael Ehlert
RevUpYourWebBusiness.com