And why Google Sites is an often overlooked source of excellent organic traffic
Your decision to click into this article “7 Steps to Make Money from Free Google Sites”, more than likely confirms that you have a quantifiable interest in earning money online. And for those of us who have already begun that journey, we know only too well that making a decent income online, is much harder than it looks at first glance. If you’ve been struggling with motivation, here’s a little audio inspiration for you 😀
You can spot an internet marketer by the scar on their forehead. 🤕
We’ve pretty much all been there. Banging our heads against the wall, trying to find a way to finally crack the online income nut! Most of us have tried blogging, ghost writing, affiliate marketing, selling digital products through online marketplaces. And the list goes on and on. If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve probably even tried network marketing or shudder to think, MLM (multi-level-marketing). And yes my skin is literally crawling from just the sheer thought of those hideous memories.
A product or a service?
In most cases, making money online means either selling a product or providing a service. Whilst providing a service has a much more potent potential to make serious money down the track. It also requires heavy upfront investment, and a lot of upfront work to get the service out the gate. So most of us turn to selling products.
To be able to effectively sell a product… We need to either create the product ourselves or sell someone else’s product for a commission. As affiliate marketing can provide decent percentages (often up to 75% of the sale price). Many of us turn to using this form of marketing to generate much of our online income.
Many people just starting out will attempt to throw up an article and just include an affiliate link or two. For the most part, if they are able to lead a reader to click on that link, 9 times out of 10 the reader will visit the sales page of the offer. And the disconnect is large enough that the reader will simply bounce from the site and not buy a thing. The click is wasted and no one (sadly including the reader themselves) benefits. You must by now be thinking, “there must be a better way.” And thankfully there is.
A better way: Pre-framing your sale with the power of a decent landing page.
For a reader to actually want to buy the product you send them to, you first need to help pre-frame their thinking. This is where the necessity of your own landing page comes in. Here you utilize the landing page as an intermediary step between your article and the affiliate products sales page.
You use that landing page to pre-frame their thinking. Outling the benefits of the product or service you’re selling. Building their desire for the product so that they actually want to buy it. You take the time here to deal with their objections, even before they actually have them. So that when they click on your “Buy Now” button. Arriving at the affiliate products sales page, they are already eager and ready to buy.
If the items you’re selling are generic in nature. And come with built in mass market appeal: Think discounted household items like Temu products. This is easily achieved by simply offering your reader a variety on your landing page. Perhaps an item from the Kitchen Items category, another from the Electronics category, another item from the Hobbies category etc. However if your product is more specialized. You’ll need to work on building up a narrative as to why they will want your product. Highlighting its benefits and how its use solves a real world problem.
The other reason we need the landing page is to collect their contact details. So that should they decide not to buy, their precious click is not entirely wasted. You can easily collect their name and email address by offering a free downloadable report. Ensure its in line with the content of your article.
Until now, good landing pages haven’t come cheap.
For this to work well. Traditionally we would need to spend the money on a domain name and some decent web hosting. Ensuring that our landing page is fast enough to retain our reader. It’s a well known fact that if your site takes more than 4 seconds to load — your precious reader will be gone! So we need some fairly fast web hosting which doesn’t come cheap.
Most people, once they have invested in the domain and hosting. They install something like WordPress to give them the flexibility to build the landing page they need. However, for many. The first obstacles of hosting fees, domain names, and the time investment necessary. For the learning curve required to successfully operate WordPress. Can seem almost insurmountable for many.
For help with this check out our article on Building Your Online Presence.
Due to this many people turn to the likes of Shopify to try and simplify things somewhat. Yet Shopify still has a fairly extensive learning curve. And can be downright difficult to edit, if you need to customize the theme. On top of that, by the time you add in all the required plugins, it’s actually quite an expensive option.
Sorry I digress, I didn’t mean for this article to become a quick course on how to sell online products. So let’s come back to why we’re here. Can we make a decent income from a Free Google Site?
Why Google Sites? Because it’s a literal goldmine of eager buyers!
Established e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Etsy have large user bases, competition can be fierce to say the least. Google Sites however fills a distinct niche: an untapped market of ready-to-purchase customers. Here’s why:
- Good SEO: Google Sites effortlessly integrates with search engines. None more so than the king of search engines itself: Google search. It’s no surprise that Google Search seems to look favorably upon a site made on Google Sites. It’s just another way for them to keep their traffic in-house so to speak. It seems that they have weighted their algorithm to somewhat favor a well written Google Site. One that employs effective use of well placed SEO (search engine optimized) keyworded content. This ensures that your material appears at the top of search results for relevant terms. This organic traffic results in a highly focused audience with serious buy intent.
- Micro-Communities: Unlike huge online marketplaces, Google Sites promotes a sense of community, as most visitors know you’re a small fish in a big pond and not some cold corporate shark or just another rinse and repeat Shopify or Etsy shop. Your audience feels a sense of connection with you, the person behind the brand, which helps increase their trust and the likelihood of them buying something from you if your Google site is well set up for that.
- Niche Focused: Google Sites allows you to narrow your attention to a certain specialty. This targets a passionate and engaged audience that is more likely to respond to your call to action to buy your products or the service that you’re promoting.
- Integrated Services: By utilizing Google’s eco-system you can incorporate other Google services for example Blogger.com to leverage the added traffic, further building your organic traffic growth.
The Untapped Potential of Google Sites
E-commerce juggernauts such as Shopify and Etsy currently reign supreme. But Google Sites has its own growing user base. According to BuiltWith Trends, there are presently over 798,000 live websites that use Google Sites. Take a look at the screen shot below and cop an eye full of the traffic stats and income generated from those on the top of the Google Sites list.
Similarweb validates this traffic claim, reporting that sites.google.com received over 209,800,000 visits in February alone. This turns into a vast pool of potential clients looking for specialty products and services.
Adding to this untapped potential, (the potential that most people walking down the digital high street have completely walked past and ignored) is the realization that perhaps the best part of utilizing a free Google Sites website, is the fact that it’s still completely free to use!
This is amazing really, considering that the Google Sites servers are blisteringly fast. And the latest version of their WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor is easy, a total snap to use. Some people are of the opinion that it’s too restrictive and not flexible enough. But that’s usually because they are using one of the pre-made, included templates. If you opt for the custom template, you can pretty much edit and adapt anything.
Gosh! I’m getting sidetracked again into writing a how-to article on how to use Google sites. That’s not why you’re here now is it? Let’s get back to why you clicked on the article title.
7 Steps to Make Money from Free Google Sites
- Discover Your Niche: What are you enthusiastic about? Identify a problem or a market gap that you can fill. This could range from homemade products to niche consulting services. Once you know what you want to sell, it’s time to drill down into that general niche, through some decent keyword research to find a niche that 1. Has low competition and 2. Has a respectable amount of search traffic. A good free option here is the Google Keywords Planner.
- Create a compelling website: Whilst Google Sites does have a user-friendly drag and click interface, don’t underestimate the importance of a well-designed reader-centric website. Ensure that you provide your readers with clear navigation, high-quality images, and niche-specific content that gives them value. Write your site like it’s a fish trap. A broad open end at the top, with a juicy piece of bait for the headline. Then taper your site down, with your content becoming more and more focused like entering a funnel until the reader arrives at the only option left at the bottom. Your “Buy Now” or “Learn More” button.
- Monetize Your Experience: There are many ways to turn your experience and knowledge into money. Learn about effective affiliate marketing, How to structure your main article to promote your landing page, tailoring your content to pique your readers curiosity, pointing the way for them to click your landing page link. Offer digital products such as ebooks, courses, printables, NFT’s and basically anything your readers can instantly download. Or you could even head down the physical products route by utilizing drop-shipping products that are relevant to your niche.
- Content is King: Try to be as consistent as possible, creating insightful and entertaining articles or blog posts that establish you as an authority in your field. This fosters trust and keeps your readers returning for more. Remember to give them value, in exchange for the time that they are investing to read your article. If you’re going to use a click bait title, ensure you give them a good feed with your article. Make sure you answer the question or statement in your title and subtitle somewhere within the body of your article. Make sure you over deliver.
- Embrace SEO: Search Engine Optimization assists search engines to properly categorize your content so that your website appears in search rankings. Use relevant keywords throughout your content, and take advantage of Google’s own SEO features. Use Google Keyword Planner to find the best keywords to target for your niche. Don’t just focus on short-tail keywords like “online income” which have enormous competition. Utilize long-tail keywords like “how to make online income from my Medium.com articles” to reduce the competition and zero in on your niche audience.
- Spread the word: Remember that this isn’t the movie “Field of Dreams” where the mantra was “Build it and they will come”. Give yourself a pinch or maybe even a slap. You’re not in a movie! And although you’ll pick up a fair bit of organic traffic on Google Sites. Don’t just build it and hope people arrive. This is where you’ll need to put in some work or spend some dollars. Promote your website through writing articles that help people, posting on social media platforms, internet communities, and related forums. If the ROI (return on investment) is positive, utilize PPC (pay per click) advertising like Google Ads or Facebook Ads to bring in some more targeted traffic.
- Analyze and adapt: Use Google Analytics to track the success of your Google Site. By studying your reader’s pathway through your site, try to determine what resonates with your audience and tailor your content approach to fit in closer with their needs. Try using A-B tests on as many elements of your content that you can. For example, try different button colors to see which color button gets clicked the most.
Sometimes it’s easier to just see an example
Take a look at the simple landing page I threw together in about 20 minutes. It’s a simple landing page to redirect the reader to a pretty incredible 90% off sale of everyday Temu items, that most people either already want or most likely already need.
https://sites.google.com/view/temu-flash-sale
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