So soon everyone wanted a shopping cart, got one ready to go, and… nothing. They didn’t get any traffic. Then came the website submission hounds with programs like Site pro. It worked for a time, though some submitters turned into spammers and thus began the game of cat and mouse between spammers and search engines.
As the number of websites grew, and around 2000 when Google, who had partnered with RedHat and Yahoo, began to become a real force, it was no longer enough to have a website and submit it… at least not for small businesses online. Sure, about $66 billion dollars in in goods was sold online in1999, but mostly by big players who already had bricks and mortar momentum. If the new guy on the block wanted a piece of the action, he had to get smart and stay smart.
Cue the SEO experts, a growing herd of geeks with a profusion of theories about the directories and search engines. Some search engine optimizers were ethical and followed the rules set by search engines. Others practiced “black hat” SEO. The search engines guarded closely how they rank pages but some SEO devotees put all their energy into trying to reverse engineer those algorithms, to discover the magic formula, and find holes, however temporary, to exploit.
By the beginning of the present world century, yes we are talking about 21 st century, some basic “white hat” SEO principles had solidified, and the fad had shifted from shopping carts to informational websites. You can’t optimize something that doesn’t have information, and the more you have the better.
But digital expert minds need money too, so various revenue sources have been explored from running advertisements in the form of clunky old banners and the dynamic AdSense variety, to helping others sell their goods through affiliate programs, to developing their own digital goods, like ebooks, special reports, even programs and web utilities. These paths have already been trailblazed, but you still must to choose the best one for you. If you have a product, you’ll want to use the internet to sell it. If you don’t have one, you could develop one. If you don’t want to, sell other people’s. If you don’t want to do that, just run ads.
Let’s forget, for the moment, that these all depend on incoming web traffic, and go through mentioned below on the pros and cons of each revenue source: