Here on Blog Consulting we are writing a series of articles about setting up ten websites/blogs for ten dollars a year.  We are putting together a group of Alternative Energy Information sites.  Currently we are setting up the sites so that they can have some potential income sources while they are developing relationships with the search engines.  What kind of things should you have on your website/blog in the beginning phases?  Let’s use Alternative Energy Stocks as an example.

On this site we have added a premium WordPress theme, then we added some affiliate links, we added five public domain articles about alternative energy stocks, and we added Google Adsense.  If you look at the site you can see that we take time to keep the sites attractive.  The Adsesne is carefully color coordinated to match the text and links on the rest of the site and the ads are placed carefully.  We added a stock market ticker to give a more professional feel to the site as well.  We want our content to be valuable, but the reality is that the best outcome for the site is that someone clicks on one of the Google ads or on one of the affiliate ads.  If the site doesn’t look professional, the chances are that people will just move away from the site without clicking anything.  This site presents well, and as we begin to see some traffic people should start to click on the ads.

A fairly normal click rate on Google is about 2 or 3 percent.  That means that if hundred people visit the site, two of them will click on an ad.  If the click is worth fifty cents or more than you can make a dollar for every hundred visitors.  If the site is only costing you one dollar a year, it doesn’t take long to break even.  It could take a while to get the first hundred visitors.  We will discuss how to start getting traffic in future articles on Blog Consulting.