Last updated on November 18th, 2011 at 03:34 pm

How many of you have heard the quotation “If you build it they will come” from the film Field of Dreams?

Recently I have come across lots of people that seem to think that if they build a website visitors will come, and if they pepper the website with low value articles and add adverts or affiliate links that they will be able to earn a living doing this.  While it may be possible in some countries I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s not possible in most of the western world where the cost of living is higher.

If you, as a website owner, think that it’s possible ask yourself some very simple questions :-

• Why would the search engines decide that your page is more important in the search results than the billions of other pages out there?
• If the search engines do decide your page is important why would human visitors decide that it is?  If you are like me you have a mental black-list of sites that when they appear in the search engine results you ignore, possibly because the articles are poor quality / they are copies of other pages (scraped information) or maybe because all they are are listings on other sites where you can find the information.
• Once you have a human visitor why would they click on an advert on your page?
• Assuming all of the above, would you be able to generate enough visitors to your site?  Taking a very good click-through rate of say 2% and a very good earnings of £1 per click ) that means that you would need 50 visitors to earn £1, so if you need £100 to live per day (don’t forget tax and things like hosting bills) you need 5,000 visitors per day.  You should bear in mind that a 2% click through is ambitious and that many clicks may pay you much less than £1 meaning that the number of visitors needed would increase dramatically.

So, far from “if you build it they will come” you need to be thinking – “if I build it can I add value to the visitor?”, “Can I get pages of my website to the top of the search results”, “Can I build up a following?”,  “Can I generate enough visitors to the site?” and possibly even “is this a valuable use of my time?”.  If the answer to all of these questions is “yes” then you have what is possibly a business proposition, but personally I would start by building a website about your business or interests and then, if you run adverts on some of the pages any extra income will be a nice surprise for you rather than at the end of the year thinking “I spent a year working on my site and it’s not brought any money in – how am I going to pay the bills?”.

And finally…

Good luck with your website and what ever you do, please do not be taken in by adverts saying “earn £1000’s a day from your website for 1 hours work a day” – I can promise you that if you want to earn £1000’s a day it is going to take a great deal of skill and time (and ask yourself – if you could earn that kind of money would you let others know how to do it or would you spend another hour and double your money?).