Monday, August 14, 2006

What Is Your Online Portfolio Worth

I hear many people moaning that they are not earning enough money from their websites 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.