The 2 Most Valuable Things for Monetizing a Web Site

I notice two consistently recurring themes whenever I do research on ways to improve my online income. When I see them, it reminds me to stop ... clear my mind ... and ask myself, "Is the work I'm doing right now improving one of two things."

"What are those things?", you might ask.

1. adding valuable content that will give visitors to my site what they're searching for
2. building inbound links to pages on my site from highly ranked pages on sites trusted by the search engines

When I distill it down, these fundamentals are at the root of what makes money for me. Yes, I feel the tug of a thousand different to do's I need to get done as I build my online business. At times, all this stuff to do seems overwhelming for me. I find myself getting distracted and spinning my wheels. When that happens, I stop ... clear my mind (and my desk) ... and decide to do two things immediately: write some content and build an inbound link.

Invariably, this does the trick to calm me down, refocus my mind and energy, and gets me producing work that makes me money. I love this business!

Content is King!!!

The two most sought after things on the web.

A thousand times I've heard it said, "Content is King!!!". I agree to a large extent. However, I like to modify this mantra for my personal use, "Unique and valuable content is KING!" So what makes valuable content. To me value lies in giving people what they want. What do they want when they use the search engines? In general, they want one of two things:

1. a quick and clear answer to a particular question they have
2. some form of entertainment

Of course, content comes is an infinite number of forms. But I've found that, when I keep these two basic human desires in mind, I usually write content that has value in the eyes of my readers. And that's what really counts.

Moxie Design Studios

In some recent conversations with my mentor, James Martell, he mentioned "blogmoxie". Driven by the curiosity the springs eternal from my being (was that overkill???:-), I took a look see. Wow! These two women have it together.

Moxie Design Studios offers comprehensive services for anyone needing the infrastructure necessary to get their content online with a beautiful AND efficient web site. I think the beauty of their web site, and the web sites in their portfolio, comes from their inborn talents. Just take a look at the bios for Kathy and Joelle, the owners. They love creativity as evidenced by their scholastic studies.

However, I notice that both of them saw that a career focused solely on the arts won't pay the bills (at least the ones coming from their Italian winery). It takes some serious skill to translate artistic creativity into an online presence. It takes even more skill to monitize that presence. They've gained those skill for sure. Just look at the services they offer. They know CSS, scripting, web site architecture, online marketing, monitizing techniques, and a whole lot more.

I love going to www.blogmoxie.com on a regular basis where I always come away with some nugget of gold.

Hello, world!

I feel thrilled to publish the first post on my latest blog. Having an extensive software programming background, I just had to do the obligatory, "Hello, world." as my first post.

For a long time now, I've wanted, to record my thoughts, discoveries, rants, raves, and whatever else comes to mind about publishing on the web. Now that I completed a large project (finally) some time and energy has freed up for me to pursue this labor of love. So come along for the ride if you like. I hope to learn and give my learning to others.