KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays by Mark Victor Hansen, Joel Comm Read Free Book Online

them.
     
    But the interests themselves aren’t unique. If you’re the only person in the world interested in the sewing patterns on the sails of ancient Greek triremes, then you’re going to struggle to make money online. You won’t have any users, and the AdSense code will look at your content, shrug, and serve up something vaguely related.
     
    But because other people are interested in the subject of your web site, you have an audience. Your advertisers have a market. And you have a community.
     
    A community is more than just a collection of people. It’s a group with a shared interest and a shared goal. That interest could be gardening, jewelry making, American ghost towns, or anything else. The goal could be a better garden, jewelry that people want to buy, or the discovery of more ghost towns. The interest and the goal themselves aren’t what’s important. What is important is that the community feels tightly knit and that each member feels that he belongs. That closeness helps to keep your site going in the long term and makes it less likely that users break away to competitors. It’s why businesses offer membership plans and loyalty programs that reward customers and keep them close.
     
    You’ll want to do whatever you can to keep that community together. That group of people with an interest in bonsai trees, photography, home repairs, or whatever your site is about should see you as one of its leaders. It should regard your site as a prime source for information about its topic.
     
    When that happens, you draw lots of easy traffic to your web site. You are talked about constantly. The price of advertising on your site shoots through the roof, and you find it very easy to grow and sell.
     
    In the past, turning your readers into a community used to be fairly difficult. You could look at your site statistics and see all sorts of information about your users. You could see where they were located, what search term they entered into a search engine before they reached you, which site they reached you from, and even which kind of browser they used to view your site.
     
    But you didn’t really get to see them. Users were numbers in a table, faceless figures who determined your month’s online revenues. That’s all changed.
     
    Now, users are people. You can see their names in their comments. You can read about their lives on Twitter, you can become friends on Facebook, and you can form professional relationships on Linkedln.
     
    Those are all important elements in a successful site. Users have such a huge choice of Web pages to read and sites to visit that you have to keep them entertained, interested, and engaged if you’re going to ensure that your site grows. You want your visitors to see you not as another source to check every now and then, but as a friend they have online. Reading your web site should be as much a part of their daily routine as checking e-mail and visiting their Facebook page.
     
    First, encourage people to leave comments on your blog. You should find that readers do that anyway, and it’s a fantastic thing. Seeing the results of a KaChing in your stats table is always encouraging, but when you get unsolicited comments from readers saying, “Great post!” and “Fascinating article,” you really do feel you’re on the right track.
     
    Those sorts of comments are nice ego boosters, but you want more than that. You want users to leave their opinions and continue the discussion you’ve started. If you’ve written a post explaining how to create good compost, you want other gardeners to chime in with their composting tips. If your post is an opinion piece about the noise electric hedge trimmers make, then you want other people to join the argument, whether they agree with you or not.
     
    Most of all, you want comments on your blog submitted by professionals. That shows that your blog has influence, is respected, and has content that can’t be found anywhere else—even if