Quickly making money with a website is the dream of all new online marketers but can it be done and if so how is it done. This article tells what I did in order to start making money in less than 3 weeks with a brand new website in the competitive insurance industry.

The first step I took was to decide on a particular industry. Unlike many of the experts that advocate selecting a niche in order to exploit it, I choose the subjects for my websites based on the popularity of the subject matter in terms of consumer interest and of course profitability. For this particular website I chose to concentrate on insurance. This subject is very competitive and can be difficult to score well on in the search engines but to be honest that wasn’t my goal. Instead for every website I make I focus on having it make between $500 and $1000 within 6 months. The methods I use have made it possible to achieve this standard on 3 previous websites so I felt like I could do the same with insurance.

I want to set the story straight so it is only fair that I disclose the software platform that I use to make my websites. I currently make my websites using Site Build It. The features for this program are to numerous to mention in this article and I don’t want to focus on them here. I believe that you can still achieve a profitable website within a short timeframe using other software just not as fast as when using SBI.

As I stated earlier I set my sites on the insurance industry because the keyword bids are fairly high for advertisers of insurance products. You can find this type of information on Overture or if you have a Google Adwords account. Again I won’t go into specifics on how to do that research as it has been covered by other webmasters in better detail then I could describe.

I decided to set my website up to include all areas of insurance. With that in mind I created web pages for car insurance, home insurance, life insurance, health insurance and several other insurance categories. After setting up my main categories I concentrated on making web pages that point to the main category. For instance if my main category is car insurance and I have a web page built for it then I would make other pages such as California car insurance which point back to my main page on car insurance.

Here’s the tricky part normally I spend around 2 hours a night working on my website. That may sound like a lot of time to some people but I assure you, if you want to succeed you will find the time. Trust me ? I work 13-14 hours a day at my main job, have 2 children under the age of 4 and am finishing up work on my Master’s degree. If I can find 2 extra hours a day anybody can. Use the desire to someday be your own boss and have enough money to be comfortable as your motivation to make it happen.

Typically what I do during that two hours includes the following: Make at least 1 or 2 new insurance web pages for my website, write 2 new articles and submit them to other websites that accept articles and try to find 2-3 new link exchange partners. The key piece that has allowed me to quickly make money on my websites in less then 3 weeks involves the articles. Every article I write links back to my website with a link in my signature box. The impact that 20 or more articles linking back to a website become evident when the website starts making money due to the articles.

The best technique I have found to quickly make money online is to use Google Adsense on your web pages. The ads generated by the Google code along with any insurance merchants you affiliate with will be the cornerstone of your money making website. The initial amount of money a website will make may not be much in the first few months but the ability to make money in less then 3 weeks is a fantastic motivator which allows a webmaster to stay focused in order to continue to work on a website until the larger dollar amounts start rolling in. From my experiences this usually starts happening around the 6 month mark.

The above article is rather sketchy on specifics but it truly is the format I follow for all of my websites and I continue to make money very quickly which soon grows to a sizeable amount within 6 months.

Timothy Gorman is a successful webmaster and publisher of Best-Free-Insurance-Quotes.com. He provides more insurance information and offers discount home, life and auto insurance that you can research in your pajamas on his website.

Other websites operated by Tim: Cellular-Phone-Solutions.com – Free information and resources regarding cell phones and cell phone plans.

Military-Loans-Online.com ? Which provides free money saving loan quotes on your entire loan needs to include home equity loan information.

Directories are important to your ranking and success with Search Engines. In a nutshell, search engines are completely automated and usually there is no need to submit. Directories all have human editors who review your site and you do have to submit to them to be listed. But you must submit the right way or you are wasting your time.

If you think getting listed in search engines is slow, try directories. Getting listed in directories takes time but it is well worth it.

One of the good things about getting listed in directories is that Google puts a LOT of weight on sites that are listed in directories. DMOZ is the most important one to Google (and therefore should be the most important one to you).

Junk sites can get listed in the search engines, but try getting a junk site past one of the human directory editors. You can’t even get useful sites that are poorly designed past the “eagle eyed” directory editors. Maybe that’s why Google puts so much weight on sites that have achieved the status of being listed in directories.

There are a LOT of directories, but there are only a few that you should bother with now.

Here are the major directories

www.DMOZ.org — Free. Submit to DMOZ first. (DMOZ is also called “Open Directory Project” on their website). They take a LONG time to get your site listed, but do NOT resubmit or your site will go back to the bottom of the stack. To find out about the status of your site getting listed go to www.Resource-Zone.com and ask questions in the discussion forum directly to the DMOZ editors.

www.Gimpsy.com — Free or pay $20 for 72 hr. inclusion and higher ranking for 90 days.

www.JoeAnt.com — Pay $39.99 or become an editor and it’s free. All editor applications are automatically approved. I suggest you become an editor. You’ll learn a lot.

www.GoGuides.org — Pay $39.99 or become a “guide” (same as editor for other Directories) and it’s free.

www.Business.com — $99 a year, but well worth it if you sell your products to businesses. You’ll get a lot of interested and qualified traffic.

www.Yahoo.com — Yahoo is no longer worth the $299 a year fee in my opinion. Skip this one.

Here’s how to get listed in these major directories. Of course, you have to submit your URL to the directory to get listed, but before you do that consider the following steps: Don’t jump the gun and submit a site that is under construction.

Make sure your site is well designed, easy to use, has useful content, no spam, no tricks, no broken links, etc. A human editor is in charge of “widgets” and she wants all of the sites in her widgets section of the directory to be useful to the directory visitors.

By all means spend a LOT of time reading the instruction of each directory before you submit. Don’t rush to submit your site until you understand what the directory is looking for and how they want you to do it.

Your directory title and description are very important to getting your site listed in the directory. They are also important after you’re listed. Your title and description are what potential visitors to your site will see in the directory listings.

Here are some tips for writing your title and description for directories.

Do NOT use any marketing hype (Never use words like “best”). Stick to the facts. Be descriptive. Choose your most importnant keyword phrase, but don’t try to stuff a lot of keywords in your title and description. Tricks will kill your chances of getting listed. The human editor has to like you and your site before your site will get listed. So follow the rules!

The most important thing to do is to submit your site in the right category. Drill down to the most specific category you can. Look at your competitors. What category are they in? Look at the sites that are in the category you choose. Look at their titles and descriptions.

You want to follow these examples, but you don’t want to be exactly like these sites. Directories don’t want sites that contain basically identical information to what’s already in the directory.

As soon as your site is completed submit it to DMOZ and get the clock to start ticking. A listing in DMOZ will automatically get you listed in the Google search engine and in the Google directory.

Of course, you can get listed in the Google search engine much quicker by having incoming links from other sites, so don’t wait on DMOZ to get you listed in the Google Search Engine. Do depend on it to get you listed in the Google Directory.

A lot of people say they don’t want to spend the effort trying to get listed in the directories because it could take three months. (I’ve seen it get done in one month, but sometimes it has taken six months.) I know people who said this over a year ago. They could have had a much higher PageRank and a LOT more free traffic by now if they had spent a few hours back then submitting their sites to the directories.

Some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen and some people wonder what happened. You have to make things happen if you want to get high rankings in the search engines.

Craige Stacey has been studying search engines optimization as a hobby and has achieved some very good search engine positions in the past for membership software