Hello everyone. I am finally making my own website... it is about traveling. From luggages, flights to places to go to. I just want to know, what are the basics of money making using a website. I am definitely a newbie on this field... thanks

Ensure that you have interesting content that you can create more of and site design that is easy on the eyes. Start light with ads, I personally hate sites that seem to have more ads than content. Really think about your ad placement.

In the end I think most difficult part is getting traffic. After all is said and done making money is about how much quality traffic you can get.

Will your site be an e-commerce platform or informative?

My first website, back in 2001, took close to a year to code from scratch - every HTML statement entered by hand... (it's been number one for my chosen key phrase on dozens of search engines for several years now)

Not long ago, I put up an entire site over the weekend. (granted, it was a quicky website just to advertise a business) Used Wordpress, and with smart linking stratagies, had a number of first page results in Google within a month. Ended up taking the site down when the company wasn't interested in purchasing it.

My newest site took less than a month - and utilized the Drupal CMS. I think nowadays if you don't use a good CMS, such as Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, Mambo, etc... you're just doing things the hard way. Decide what type of website you want to put up, then select what CMS (and there are hundreds of free ones!) you want to work with. Be careful, if you aren't proficient in HTML & PHP - select a popular CMS with lots of opensource support - or you'll be stuck not being able to do something that you can't program yourself!

Next, presuming that the topic of the site is dear to your heart, filling it with content should be relatively easy. Aim for at least one new article every single day for the next few months.

Now, the hard part - traffic. I'm a non-believer in PPC - since I'm not selling a product. So organic search traffic is all I want. That means links. Forum links such as this, blog comment links, articles posted to article directory links, link exchanges with other websites, links from directory submissions, links, links, and more links... links until you're dreaming of nothing but getting an additional link when you go to sleep at night.

Did I make the point that links are important?

Best is to simply draw up a daily plan of attack... one new article for your site, 5 new blog comments, 2 new forum posts, 5 new directory submissions. Something like that.

Don't make fun of even one new link a day... over a year's time that's 365 new links in a year... and depending on your niche, that may well be enough to put you on the first page of Google. (Anchor text is another important consideration)

This is a topic that can go on for quite a bit more...