Years ago is the preferred answer but if you are yet to get started, the time is now.
Why?
In the past, the easiest way for a beginner to get traffic was to join one of the many revenue sharing websites such as Squidoo and Hubpages. These sites give you the chance to earn online without spending any money at all. They publish your content and take care of many of the technical aspects in return for a percentage of the advertising revenue earned from your writing. They were seen as high authority sites by the search engines and features such as their internal linking structure made it easier to get your writing onto the first page of the search results.
The advantage was so significant that paying 40 -50% of your potential earnings was a very good deal for you.
50% of a lot was much better than 100% of nothing.
Over time, google noticed that a high percentage of the top results for many search queries came from this type of website and they were not entirely happy with the quality of the content, much of which was only written to rank highly and produce advertising revenue. They publicly declared war on "Content Farms" in early 2011 with the Panda Update.
So, what now?
Firstly, absolute beginners should still use these "content farms" to gain an introduction to writing online and to learn basic SEO techniques. They can also be use by more experienced people as a free way of testing a niche before investing in your own site. I still recommend Hubpages for this purpose.
Secondly, as soon as you have identified a niche with potential, start your own site.
Why?
Domains and hosting are both cheap and getting cheaper. Using a bit of common sense, it is not hard to break even with a single site. Making a little money is easy. Making a lot becomes much harder.
EXAMPLES:
Looking back over my last year of domain name registrations I find I bought 7 domains:
2 x .com
3 x .net
2 x .org
Assuming these domains were bought for one years registration only they would average out at $10 / year.
Hosting for an unlimited number of sites cost me just under $8 / month. The same plan can now be had for less than $6.50 - (see the Baby Plan here.)
The total expendture to run 7 different sites for one year is $166 ($13.83 / month)
That actually sounds like a fair bit of money, but as even the weak sites contribute to the total it is easy to recoup.
Ignoring affiliate sales and only looking at Adsense revenue:
In the last 3 months:
The best performing site made $41.84 ($13.94 / month)
The worst performing site made $0.00 (only 3 posts - forgot about that one!)
The average monthly adsense return from all sites combined is $22.16
This is a profit of $8.33 / month.
As my goal from Adsense is to cover costs this is a good result - especially considering that 4 of the seven have less than 5 posts. I have been lazy but chose keyword rich domain names in a niche I understood in terms of both content and competition.
There is a lot of room for development of these sites to increase their current affiliate sales of around $110 / month.
Every since the google Panda Algorithm change, these self hosted domains have been doing particularly well. As an added bonus, these sites build value over time and can be sold in the future.
My Summary:
- I use Market Samurai to identify niches, domains and assess competition (see this post)
- I use Wordpress.org to run my sites.
- I monetize with Adsense to cover costs and affiliate sales to earn the bulk of my profits.
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