The old cliche that nothing is free in this world pretty much holds true when it comes to making money from web sites. As such, you can assume that any web site that is successful got that way because of a lot of hard work. However, some people think that they can skip a lot of the initial work by buying a pre-existing web site. And there are plenty of people will to sell such sites. This tactic is fraught with danger.

Ah yes, here we are at the topic that most people are interested in. The question of how to make money on the web has been on the lips of many, many people for the last few years. Fortunately, Google has made it quite easy for web publishers to tap in to a large network of online advertisers.

Long gone are the days where the phrase if you build it they will come applied to web sites. There are simply too many web site owners competing for the same viewers. This means you now need to actively promote your web site if you hope to attract a profitable amount of traffic.

Technically, your web site is going to be publicly accessible as soon as you activate the WordPress software. However, that doesn't mean that you've actually "launched" it. In fact, even after creating your first web page, you're probably at least several days away from being ready for a true launch.

You may have heard of companies that spend millions of dollars maintaining their web sites. Fortunately, for the goal of monetizing web content, such expensive maintenance is unnecessary.

At this stage in the web publishing game, you should have a topic and a domain name selected for your web site. The next step is to open an account with a web site hosting company. A web server is where your web site will "live" and a web host is a company that sells you space on a web server. Some web site owners act as their own web hosts, but it'll be easier and more cost-effective to simply sign up with a hosting company.

By this point you have selected a topic; picked and registered a domain; and have created an account with a web hosting company. The next step is to set up your web site.

I'm a big fan of WordPress which free software that is used primarily for blogging, but can be modified to meet the needs of other types of web sites. WordPress is written in PHP, a fairly popular programming language for web sites. To store data, WordPress requires a MySQL database. Fortunately, MySQL is also free.

Web sites are constructed in numerous ways. Some are very simple using just a smattering of HTML while others are so elaborately designed that they require the skills of multiple people. You need to find the right balance between the amount of effort you put in to a site and the return on investment you hope to receive.

After selecting a topic for your web site, you'll need to select and then register a domain. A domain is what people will type in to access your web site. For example, the domain of this web site is webpublishingguide.com. People will typically also include the www in front of the domain more out of habit rather than because it is actually necessary.

Finally! A guaranteed way to make $$$ with your computer- no strings attached!

That's right! You can makes lots of $$$$$ using the simple method described below. There is no secret to this method, it has been around for hundreds of years - before computers even existed! Read all about it below.

People have been making $$ this way for a long time - in fact, it is estimated that over $ 100 trillion has been made this way by hundreds of millions of people. Don't worry this is not complicated - everything is completely automated and you won't have to sink any money into it. Follow these simple steps and you are guaranteed to make $$$:

Take a look at the box below. Simply click your mouse cursor inside the box.

Now that your cursor is blinking inside the box, it is time to get to work:

1. Hold down the shift button on your keyboard.
2. While holding this button, locate the "4" key on the upper left-hand side of the keyboard.
3. Click the "4" key 3 times and take a look at the box above.

Congratulations! You have just made $$$! See how simple it was. To make lots of $$$, repeat the same steps. You can even try it on your favorite email program or word processor.

Originally found here.

It might sound obvious, but it does bear repeating. Before you create a web site you need to pick a topic. You should put some thought in to this because you'll need to be able to write at least 50-100 pages on your chosen topic. A smaller number of pages will likely result in the site never gaining traction with the search engines.

When you own and run just one or two web sites, checking in on them regularly is not a problem. But when your portfolio expands to 10 or 20 web sites, it can be a real time waster to constantly check to see if they're all running. Instead, I highly recommend you download a free web site checker that will do all of the grunt work for you.

If you've done any sort of domain name search you've probably realized that all of the good (i.e. short and meaningful) names are taken. Chances are also good that you're not interested in paying the sky-high prices that most domain squatters are asking for. The trick for getting a decent domain in the face of such obstacles is to explore a list of names and combine them with prefixes and suffixes.