The number one mistake everyone makes when starting a website is that they do it to make lots of money.  Very few websites ever make more than a few thousand dollars a month let alone the millions that google or facebook make.  The best kind of site to make is one that you like writing about.  That said, there are different ways of making a website to get your ideas out on the web.  Different methods produce different results.

Forums: if you liked a particular topic, say batteries, you could easily make a forum on the topic and write all kinds of posts on different kinds of batteries that you liked.  If your forum picks up members you get the added bonus of the members writing most of the content for you.  The downside is that you have horrible click rates from members so most of your page views won’t result in any clicks.  Another downside is that if you don’t pick up members you’ll be talking to yourself and you won’t get any of the free content and then
your website looks like a graveyard to any potential members.  And no one wants to be a part of a dead or dieing community.

Another format that’s popular is blogging.  With a blog it’s much easier to convert your traffic into clicks, you can put the ads right in the middle of your blog posts and anywhere else you want to put it where it’ll get a higher conversion percentage.  You also have the bonus of not needing members to contribute content or posts to make your blog look like it’s lively.  The main detractor is that you need to keep adding content to the blog every few days.

Social networking/news sites seem to be a big hit these days.  Though those formats are so overly used and created these days that you’ll have a hard time breaking into those niche’s, and you require a huge userbase to make it successful.  Though if it works the upside is much bigger than anything else these days.

If you’re good with flash you could make a few clever games online, though like social networking the web is flooded with these sites.  You’ll need to be really clever with your game.

Overall, the best kind of site to get into for beginners is blogs.  They’re easy to use and pretty flexible.  Once you have a good amount of traffic you’ll be bringing in money through advertising.  Once you get a feel for how websites work a forum would be a good addition to your blog.

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We discussed earlier that you need backlinks to your website to drive traffic to it.  This practice is called backlinking.  When looking for a site to put a link back to your website you need to do a little research first.  Blogs and forums are a common place to provide backlinks to your site.  However, many blog owners add an additional property to the link called ‘nofollow’.  What this means is that the link will work and anyone can click on it, but in will mean nothing for your rank in search engine results.  The nofollow property tells search engines that they should not follow this link.

Different search engines treat the link differently, but Google and Yahoo both do not count the link towards a link to your website when calculating search results (the more links to your site the higher it will appear in search results).  This practice has been adopted to discourage people from spamming sites with links to their own site.

If the blog or forum relates to your sites topic then you’ll at least get traffic from people that are interested in what your site is about.  But you’ll only be getting half of the benefit.  There are many forums and blogs out there (this one included) that do not put the ‘nofollow’ property on their links provided by users.  If you can find one of these then you should go there a few times a week and post something relevant to the topic
at hand.  Doing this will help you slowly build up some backlinks.

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