{"id":338,"date":"2011-01-31T20:27:27","date_gmt":"2011-01-31T20:27:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/?p=338"},"modified":"2011-11-18T15:34:53","modified_gmt":"2011-11-18T15:34:53","slug":"if-you-build-it-they-will-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/2011\/01\/if-you-build-it-they-will-come\/","title":{"rendered":"If You Build It They Will Come"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading Time: <\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> 2<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minutes : <\/span><\/span><p>How many of you have heard the quotation &#8220;If you build it they will come&#8221; from the film Field of Dreams?<\/p>\n<p>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 <a title=\"Making money with affiliate marketing\" href=\"http:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/affiliate-marketing.php\" target=\"_self\">affiliate links<\/a> that they will be able to earn a living doing this. \u00a0While it may be possible in some countries I have a sneaking suspicion that it&#8217;s not possible in most of the western world where the cost of living is higher.<\/p>\n<p>If you, as a website owner, think that it&#8217;s possible ask yourself some very simple questions :-<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Why would the search engines decide that your page is more important in the search results than the billions of other pages out there?<\/li>\n<li>If the search engines do decide your page is important why would human visitors decide that it is? \u00a0If 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.<\/li>\n<li>Once you have a human visitor why would they click on an advert on your page?<\/li>\n<li>Assuming all of the above, would you be able to generate enough visitors to your site? \u00a0Taking a very <a title=\"Improving your click through rate\" href=\"http:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/increase-click-through-rate.htm\" target=\"_self\">good click-through rate<\/a> of say 2% and a very good earnings of \u00a31 per click ) that means that you would need 50 visitors to earn \u00a31, so if you need \u00a3100 to live per day (don&#8217;t forget tax and things like hosting bills) you need 5,000 visitors per day. \u00a0You should bear in mind that a 2% click through is ambitious and that many clicks may pay you much less than \u00a31 meaning that the number of visitors needed would increase dramatically.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, far from &#8220;if you build it they will come&#8221; you need to be thinking &#8211; &#8220;if I build it can I add value to the visitor?&#8221;, &#8220;Can I get pages of my website to the top of the search results&#8221;, &#8220;Can I build up a following?&#8221;, \u00a0&#8220;Can I generate enough visitors to the site?&#8221; and possibly even &#8220;is this a valuable use of my time?&#8221;. \u00a0If the answer to all of these questions is &#8220;yes&#8221; 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 &#8220;I spent a year working on my site and it&#8217;s not brought any money in &#8211; how am I going to pay the bills?&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>And finally&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Good luck with your website and what ever you do, please do not be taken in by adverts saying &#8220;earn \u00a31000&#8217;s a day from your website for 1 hours work a day&#8221; &#8211; I can promise you that if you want to earn \u00a31000&#8217;s a day it is going to take a great deal of skill and time (and ask yourself &#8211; 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?).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading Time: <\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> 2<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minutes : <\/span><\/span>How many of you have heard the quotation &#8220;If you build it they will come&#8221; 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,10,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-advice","category-marketing-2","category-seo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}