My Websites Aren’t Making Money – What Do I Do?

I get this question quite often:

“I have lots of websites and they’re not making me money. What do I do?”

I recorded this answer while I was in Paris.

Here are bullet points of what I suggest to do:

1. Pick one of them and focus on it.
2. Pick the one where you can see the end from the beginning, where
   you understand everything that it needs.
3. Don’t try to convert random people to buying random things. Be Specific. Know who you’re trying to sell to.
4. Self Replicated MLM or Mortgage or Real Estate sites don’t work. (or…I’ve never seen it work)
5. Re-evaluate the effectiveness of the site you have. Study some
   copywriting techniques and do things to increase conversions on your
   site. Whatever you’re selling, give people a reason to buy it
   (give incentives, tell them why it’s the best, it has a problem and I’ll solve it, …)
6. Make sure your site only has one purpose. It has one goal when someone
   comes to the homepage. Get rid of widgets unless they serve a purpose.
7. Get traffic. Buy a little and see what happens. Don’t overspend. Don’t pretend to be macho with google adwords. Learn a little about it.
8. A quick plan for getting free traffic:
   1. write an article and submit it to ezinearticles.com
   2. create a squidoo lens. put 2 pieces of content, link it to your site
   3. create a short video, submit it to tubemogul (and verify it worked)
9. If you built the sites following a blueprint or something, stick
   with it for a bit before moving onto something else. Sometimes these
   things just take time.
10. Don’t give up! You’re going to fail some. This is a business.