What Is Your Online Portfolio Worth?

I hear many people moaning that they are not earning enough money from their website/s online. They had hoped that they would be obtaining more online sales or a lot more money from programs such as Google adsense after all of the online promotion that they had been doing over the previous months. In this article, I write about the bigger picture, the long term value of each site.
I have a lot of friends who are attempting to make money via the internet. Most of these people have invested in a number of websites which they are hoping will earn them a decent monthly income via adsense. They have spent a lot of time in attempting to drive traffic to these sites by way of writing articles and by other forms of website promotion. What I am finding however is that they are hoping for instant results and have a lack of patience. This time of the year (the summer), there are a lot less people who are willing to spend long periods on their computers due to the heat and the fact that a lot of them are going away on their summer vacation. Earnings from adsense are always likely to be reduced during these periods for these obvious reasons.

My friends do not seem to accept or understand this however and see all of the hours spent in promoting their sites as a waste of their precious time. Another aspect which has greatly annoyed and frustrated a lot of my friends is the fact that they are seeing no movement in the page rank of their sites. In the last two page rank updates Google has seemingly only updated the page rank of new sites, and my friends were hoping that all of their hard work would be rewarded with an increase in the visible page rank of some of their sites. This again is a lack of patience and is very short sighted. The backward links that they have obtained should have already resulted in an increase in traffic to their sites and they should not be so obsessed with this page rank issue. No doubt in time Google will update the rank of all of the sites and to stop promoting each site now would be foolish.

I also see each of my own websites as an investment. I would of course love to be able to earn quite a lot of money from them today but I am seeing it as a long term project. If I continue to work hard the traffic will steadily increase and within a few years the search engine position of each of my sites should be a lot higher than they are today.


The portfolio of sites that I own, also have a market value. If I wanted to, I could sell them and surely the more work I put in to promote each site, the higher this market value should be.

In conclusion, if you are not earning as much money from your websites as you had hoped, do not despair. Hard work generally pays off in life, see the whole thing as a long term venture, have patience and your rewards should soon arrive.

How to Use Your Web Site to Make Money

If you consider your web site a money pit, you are not alone. Quite a few business owners have told me that they have web sites because "everyone else has a web site", but they haven't gotten any business from their web site. None. Zero. Nada. Zip. Many of them have paid thousands of dollars to web designers to create the web sites for them, and than the web sites just sit there, gathering the proverbial Internet dust, and getting enormous traffic consisting of three to five unique visitors a month.

Your web site should not be languishing in one of the rarely visited corners of the Net. Instead, it should be working 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year getting leads and clients for your business. It should serve as marketing brochure and as your best salesperson (who incidentally never sleeps, and doesn't require either salary or commissions).

So how do you turn your dust collector into a lean, mean sales machine? First, you need to lay down the infrastructure for your online business. Here are three guidelines your web site should adhere to before its initial debut:

- Your web site must be easy to navigate, understand and use. When a web surfer comes to a web site and doesn't understand what the web site is about in the first few minutes, the surfer moves on to the next web site (trust me, there lots of them out there. Approximately 2.7 billion at last count, give or take a few billion).

If the purpose and intent of your web site is not blatantly obvious, a surfer will move on. If your web site is difficult to navigate, a surfer will move on. If your web site is hard to use (for example, it is not obvious how to contact you or hire you) a surfer will move on.


 Your web site must discuss what you do AND how what you do will benefit your customers. Let's say Sue and Jane are both weight loss coaches. Sue's web site says that Sue is a weight loss coach. Jane's web site says that Jane is a weight loss coach who helps women look and feel better by losing 30 pounds in 3 months.

Which coach sounds more appealing? The one who not only states what she does, but also shows what is in it for the customer. The site must answer a fundamental question: Why should I hire you?

- Have a newsletter sign up box on your web site. The majority of your web site visitors will not contact you about your services after visiting your web site, but they will subscribe for a free newsletter. By subscribing, they give you permission to send them your information-packed newsletter, which will also serve as a reminder about your business.

Without a newsletter, many people will visit your web site once and promptly forget about it 10 minutes after leaving it. By having a newsletter, you are able to capture these visitors, and tell them about your business again and again.

Take action today! Take a critical look at your web site and make sure that it conforms to the guidelines outlined above. A website that follows these forms a solid foundation for having a marketable web site for your business.