If you’re reading this site, you’re probably at least familiar with the terms SEO and SEM, but do you know the difference between the two? Let’s take a look at the two, and what circumstances you should be using each under.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the process of organizing the content on your site, and tweaking the site itself so that it will appear higher up in search results. There are two basic steps to making a site SEO friendly. The first is to optimize the site itself by using the right keywords in the site’s code, and the site’s copy. Make sure the title of each page is relevant to the topic discussed on that page, and that the copy contains keywords relevant to the topic at hand. You should also be sure to give your images descriptive names, and take the time to fill out the alt tag for each image. Once your site is optimized, be sure to update it on a regular basis with relevant content. Search engines look at how often a site is updated, and how long it’s been since the last update when determining where that site shows up in search. Try to update your site with interesting, or entertaining content. The more incoming links you have, the better your search rank. The more entertaining the content on your site is, the more incoming links you’ll get.

SEM, or Search Engine Marketing is the “buy your way to the top” strategy. By buying pay per click ads on a search engine, you’re ensuring that a link to your site will show up in the “sponsored links” section of the search results, which usually appears at the top of the page. It’s important to do some keyword research before diving into SEM. Broad terms, like science tend to be very crowded, and as such, you will have to pay a higher CPC (cost per click) to get your ad to appear more often. By picking a more specific term to place your ad on, you can lower the amount of competition, and consequently, the CPC you’ll need to pay.

Now that you know how they work separately, it’s time to put the two strategies together. When you first launch a site, it’s a good idea to invest some money in SEM. A brand new site, even an SEO friendly one, probably isn’t going to show up on the first page of search results for your keyword of choice right away. By spending some money on SEM, you can ensure your site will receive traffic until the benefits of SEO kick in. By using the two together like this, you can get steady traffic to your site from day one.

Website flipping was very popular a year ago but recently it is not as popular mainly because the market got saturated with simple sites being sold for $50 when a year ago you could sell them for $200.  I still believe you can make money from flipping websites and ive created this plan to help you make a living flipping websites

Step 1 – Find A Niche

I’ve personally found selling clickbank products to be very successful as alot of people like to buy digital products online.  Have a search on clickbank for a product you would like to sell that is popular within the market place.  Look to see their gravity rating, the percentage in refunds they have had, this is a good indicator to see if the product has been successful.  Also check to see how good their sales page is also.

Step 2 Keyword Research

I like to use the free tool from Google – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to look for keywords related to my niche that i want to promote.  Say for example you want to target the keyword ”loose weight fast” put that into the Google keyword tool and see what the competition is like.  You may wish to use another keyword similar that has less competition.

Once you have found the keyword you would like to use, pick 10 -15 long tail keywords and start writing some articles with these keywords you have chosen.

Step 3 – Choosing a domain

When picking your domain its a good idea to have your main keyword within your domain as this will greatly improve your chances of being on page 1 of Google (e.g looseweightfast.com)  if .com is taken the next best choices are either .net or .org anything else is no good.

Step 4 – Create your website

I would highly recommend setting your website using wordpress as these websites rank very very well in Google.  Google seems to love wordpress because of its structure and how well they are optimised for search engines.

Add some keyword rich articles to your website with some reviews on the clickbank product you are promoting.  If you can also make a video and upload it to youtube and embed this into your website.  Google likes websites with videos on and also readers also like videos about the product they are buying so this will also help your conversions.

Also add a contact page, about me page, privacy page as these also improve your rankings, this is something that Google looks for.

Step 5 – Promote your website

Once you have finished your website you now need to start promoting your website.  Submit around 10 articles to article directories like Ezinearticles with rich keyword content articles with anchor text links pointing back to your website.  Submit your website to all the major social networking websites.  You can use socialmarker.com for this.

You can also join forums related to your niche and write a number of posts with your anchor text link in your signature, this is a great way to drive traffic to your website and increases your serps.  Also blog commenting on blogs similar to your niche is another good method.

Create a squido lens, hubpage and wiki page to provide more backlinks for your website.

Step 6 – Site maintenance

For the next few days monitor the site everyday, checking traffic, sales, average time a user stays on your site, which pages they are exiting from.  Then you can make any adjustments changes or additions to improve.  If its still slow after a couple of weeks i would start submitting more articles to ezine, more blog commenting on other blogs and forum posting to build up your backlinks.

Step 7 – Sell your website

After 3 – 6 months you are now ready to sell your website if it has steady traffic going to it, steady flow of sales every month.  Great websites to sell your website are Digital Point or Flippa.  Generally you can sell your website for 6-10 times your monthly income. So for example if your website is making on average $200 a month from clickbank and adsense you could sell for $2,000.  Not bad for a weeks work.  You can create a new site every week and leave it on autopilot just monitoring its stats and making adjustments here and there.

If you keep your website for longer say for over a year and kept working on building up the backlinks and adding content which increased your monthly sales then you will be able to sell it for even more money.  It all depends how quickly you want to flip your website.