extreme webmaster evernerve

I am going to explain you how I started my own Web business. How I went from earning zero to $1,000 per month (yep, one thousand dollars) with a single website, with Adsense alone. I will split this post into three different parts. You will see:

• How to pull in a shitload of traffic with quality content and good SEO
• How to earn good money from your educational website
• How to create a community around your educational website

Inspired by a book

As a self-improvement junkie, I am a regular visitor at many websites which offer ebooks, videos and other material for download. So I stumbled upon a book that explained how to use AdSense to monetise a website. This book got me all worked up and excited about the prospect of earning money from thing like my own website.

I have been a web designer for many years, but I always earned money by designing and building websites for other people. The idea of earning money from my own website never crossed my mind until I laid my hands on that book that spoke about AdSense. The book spoke about riches that could be earned via the most famous ad program running on the Web. I decided to give it a try.

Starting with a familiar subject

I discovered computers at an early age. Everything that I know about computers, I learned by myself. I am completely self-taught in this field. I thought, why shouldn’t I make a website about a program that I am using? So I decided to create an educational website about a desktop application that I frequently use.

Establishing myself in a well saturated market

When I started building my website, I didn’t even think about doing a little bit of market research to see how much other websites on the subject I picked already existed. I just jumped in enthusiastically. Little did I know that the application I chose to write educational material about, has already been covered by a number of websites made by other individuals, not to mention some very large communities with hundreds of thousands of members. But I managed to succeed. My website became very successful. Here’s why:

1. Going into detailed explanations

The thing that used to piss me off is that the majority of websites that pretended to explain how to do certain things with my application of choice didn’t explain shit. Most websites had how-tos and tutorials that basically said “open this, do this and then you’ll have that”. None of them explained how to open this or how to do this. They just said “do it”, supposing that the visitor is either an intermediate or advanced user of the application. This was bothersome, because I wasn’t able to find proper explanations on doing certain things, even though I was an intermediate to advanced user of this application.

And that’s what secured my place in this niche. Having experience in the classroom (I used to work as an IT instructor), I noticed that people like things explained in detail. At least the less experienced ones. So I started writing tutorials and how-tos by going into extreme detail (I’m an extreme webmaster, remember ). I made lengthy explanations and saturated them with many screenshots. This was (and still is) hard work, but it paid off, as you’ll soon see.

2. Creating a proper website structure and onsite SEO

I also noticed that most of these websites didn’t have a clear structure and were difficult to navigate - it wasn’t easy to find your way around them. So I made my website easy to navigate and user-friendly. I do this for all the websites that I make, it is a must! But here, I paid even more attention to the user.

Most of the other websites also didn’t have any onsite SEO at all! For example, all of their URLs were not friendly (something in the lines of www.myeducawebsite/howto.asp?ID=123). I made all of my onsite SEO by the book. I also made sure that my english is impeccable (search engines don’t like bad grammar and typos much).

3. Having original content

I made sure to differentiate from other websites on the same subject by either:

• writing tutorials on subjects that weren’t explored by other sites in my niche,
• writing tutorials on subjects that were already covered, but making a proper guide/how-to and going in detailed explanations or
• writing tutorials on existing subjects albeit from a different angle.

4. Making enough content for a decent start

To make sure that people would return to my website after visiting it, I made about 10-15 lessons to start with. I made about 4-5 categories and about 3 tutorials in each one of them. That was a good start.

Getting shitloads of traffic in just a few minutes (really!)

I know that this sounds preposterous, and that you have probably heard claims like this one a lot of times. But with an educational/tutorial website, this is in fact possible and doable in just a few minutes.

Due to the existence of many educational/tutorial websites around the Web, hub sites and tutorial directories have appeared. These popular websites allow you to submit a tutorial to their database. They link to your website and latest tutorial if it adheres to their guidelines and in most cases have ranking systems, Digg and de.licio.us links at hand for people to bookmark your tutorial easily.

By submitting your latest tutorial/how-to to just a couple of these websites, you can get up to 1,000 visits in a single day! And it only takes a few minutes to submit your latest piece of work to them.

The two most popular ones are:

• Tutorialized.com
• Pixel2Life.com

These two alone can get you literally thousands of visitors. They accept tutorials on almost any application available: from Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Maya to PHP, SEO, Windows, Word, databases and marketing. I am sure that you will be able to find your niche.

Making an interesting tutorial (sort of linkbaiting)

Also, these websites usually have a “most popular” section where the most read tutorials are featured on a weekly basis. These get an enormous amount of traffic. There is a big difference in creating a standard tutorial which covers some very common thing and an exceptional one. For example:

I’ve seen a tutorial for 3ds Max which managed to pull in more than 40,000 visitors in 5 months, by managing to enter the “most popular” section on a single tutorial hub website. That’s a single tutorial getting that kind of traffic from a single website!

Also, I have seen tons of how-tos and tutorials that look just uninteresting. But, they also get a couple of hundred visitors in 3 or 4 days. That’s not to be neglected, especially if you submit your tutorial to a dozen of these websites. And they make for a few thousand visitors to your website in the long run.

So, you can make some traffic from these websites. You can also make an enormous amount of traffic from them. The key is to write something that will catch people’s attention. Browse through these websites and see what’s popular and why.

Once, I saw a tutorial which explained how to make an Adobe-like icon. Nothing complicated - just a few easy steps. And it pulled in 20,000 visitors! Can you imagine that? You never know what will appeal to people, that’s why you should do a bit of research to see what’s cool and why. And once you discover what’s cool, make sure that you write a quality tutorial that will make people bookmark your website and come looking for more.

Getting shitloads of traffic from Google (yes, really!)

Now this may sound even more preposterous. Google? Loads of traffic? That’s right, dood!

In Google SERPs, I have outranked aged, established websites which receive millions of visits per month! How did I manage to pull that off? Read on:

1. I rank as #1 in Google for lots of long tail search keyphrases

This means that I made a lot of how-tos which aren’t really attractive and fancy, but they are needed and sought after by a certain number of people. This is the long tail: to cover a subject that has been poorly covered by others or that hasn’t been covered at all!

Over a long period of time, these tutorials will bring you a lot of traffic. The kind of search keyphrases that are associated with these tutorials get between 14,000 and 240,000 results in Google.

Also, when you make a lot of these tutorials that cover subjects that are not so hot and popular, their sheer number will pull in a lot of traffic. There are a lot of searches being made over the Web for obscure and hard-to-find subjects. Make a quality tutorial on a number of these subjects, and traffic will start pouring in.

There is one interesting thing that you’ll see: your website visitors will appreciate the fact that you also thought about and made a tutorial on an obscure and rarely discussed subject.

2. I rank among the top three results in Google for some popular search keyphrases

Now how did I do that? Well, thanks to the carelessness of other webmasters. There are websites in my niche that have enormous communities and get insane amounts of traffic. But they didn’t do any SEO at all! And some of their tutorials and how-tos are quickly and poorly written!

By making proper onsite SEO (friendly URLs, precise and meaningful titles and descriptions), I managed to outrank these websites for at least 3 popular searches.

My website is among the first 3 results on the first page in Google for some of these searches. I rank as #1 in Google for some searches that yield millions of results!

All because people still don’t know about SEO and because people make crap educational websites. One of my secrets is not that secret, really: I work my ass off to make a quality tutorial. My how-tos sometimes span dozens of pages, with so much text that they could fill entire chapters in paper books! And Google recognizes that and that’s why I rank. You can’t outrank tons of quality content written by humans for humans.

3. Ranking by proxy websites

Some of my tutorials show up in Google among the top results for certain search keyphrases, but the URL doesn’t lead to my website. Instead, it leads to one of the hub websites that I mentioned (like Pixel2Life.com, for example), where I submitted my tutorial.

I am not exactly sure why is this so, but here’s my guess:

1. Well written anchor text. On these websites, you get to choose how to name your tutorial, and that title will be a live link to it. So by choosing your words carefully, you may get more link juice from Google.
2. The PR of the tutorial hub website. These websites have an insane amount of traffic and inbound links. Which makes them important in the SEO arena. This may be one of the reasons for your rank-by-proxy top placed link.
3. Some search engine peculiarities. I think that there may be some weird algorithms in Google and other search engines, because some SERPs are just plain bizarre. Some websites that have so outdated and crappy content just manage to rank. They have aged domains and lots of other content and many pages indexed, but the specific content relating to the desktop application that I built my educational website around just outranks all the other trusted websites. That’s maybe why rank-by-proxy tends to work sometimes too, not just because of anchor text.

An interesting detail

My educational website doesn’t have a domain name related to my subject matter! And I still rank!

Why? Because I bought a domain a long time ago, when I created a website to promote some of the stuff I made for other people. And I started making how-tos as an enthusiast. Over time, it became a professional website. So, because my domain is aged helps, but also, this shows you that a domain name with related keyphrases isn’t really crucial.

Of course that you should get a proper domain name related to your subject matter if you are starting from scratch, but if you are already far into your work on a non-related domain, your domain name won’t hurt you if you have quality content.

Summary

You can still pull in a lot of traffic for your tutorial/educational website, even when starting from scratch, because:

1. Most educational/how-to/tutorial websites are pure crap (people think that easy money works). So by writing quality, accessible and useful content you can outrank dozens of shitty websites and some of the established ones too.
2. Even the good websites that actually have quality content don’t have any onsite SEO done at all.
3. There are still niches that can be exploited. Some subjects are really poorly written or aren’t covered at all. Really. Do a little bit of research and you’ll see.
4. You can create a website that outranks others in the same niche by:
   • Making detailed how-tos with exhaustive descriptions of existing subjects (this is rare, trust me, I know from years of experience).
   • Making how-tos on existing subjects with new twists, practical examples, real-world applications and such. Think about it: would you rather read a bland article that explains how to use some tool in some application by just describing its characteristics and options or an article that gives you a real-world example that makes heavy use of that tool, something that you may actually use in your daily work?

So, if you think you have a knack for passing knowledge onto others, pick a subject and start working on your first educational website.

In the second part of this article, I will explain you how to monetise your educational website.

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