If you’re like me, you have a million ideas bouncing around in your head and on Post-It notes everywhere you go. For people like us, it takes a lot of motivation to stick with anything for an extended period of time. I’m going to show you how I’ve taken websites making no money and with no traffic to something sustainable in 30 days.

First of all I should let you know that I’ve never sold anything online, not a get-rick-quick eBook nor a training course. Since I don’t have anything to sell, you have no reason to see if these steps might be able to help you make some money online. Without further ado, make money online using these 7 steps in 30 days.

I’ll be skipping the basics like buying a domain and finding a niche. You should be able to register a domain, get, or have, hosting and write at least as good as a high school student.

1. Content. Content is the bread and butter on my strategy. Good content always beats any form of scam and/or spam. Good content is lasting and creates defensible traffic. Great content on the other hand does everything for you. Marketing, sales, everything. If you can write a great piece of content that other people like and want to link to, the job is 80% done. This great content is commonly referred to as linkbait.

Before you write that great linkbait article, you want to make sure that the foundation of your website is created. To do that, you need to have articles on your website. I would suggest 10-20 general articles about your niche. My current project is related to the call center industry. My first articles that were just filler pieces included, “Why Outsource to a Call Center, “Call Center Supervisor, and “Call Center Basics. As you can see, those aren’t exaclty interesting articles, but they provide filler and content for the website and give Google and the other bots something to look at while you working on your linkbait.

When talking about content, it’s important to consider your method of delivery. Working the way I suggest includes a lot of writing. If you plan to do a lot of writing, nobody wants to copy and paste code into a text editor and upload HTML pages. Not to mention if you want to change something on your website, it means spending a day making manual changes. WordPress can change that. Download and install WordPress, that’s the end of the boring basics.

Throughout the entire month you’ll continue adding content. If you can get 30-50 posts up in 30 days, you’re doing good. For the current project I’m working on, my partner and I are going for 150 posts total. It’s not an unreasonable goal at all, it just depends on who you are and how quickly you can write.

2. Design. Depending on the niche you’ve chosen, a free WordPress template will probably work fine for the first year, depending on your growth and income. As income rises, you should invest in a quality CSS/XHTML valid custom theme. You can find designers that will design and code a unique WordPress theme for less than $150. In the first 30 days, just get something up that will allow you to have 2 or 3 columns. A layout with 3 columns is my preference because the options for advertising and linking is greater.

3. Marketing. Once you have your great linkbait article written you’ll want to post it and begin marketing it. Depending on your connections you might need to ask for favors. If you don’t have a lot of friends on Digg and Stumbleupon, you’ll definitely need to ask people to check out your article. It is always best if you can find someone other than yourself to submit your article to Digg. If you can’t, go ahead and submit it yourself. If it is a quality article, it should start getting votes on it’s own, but you don’t want to rely on that. Ask other people to read your article and if they like it, ask them to vote for it. Writing a successful linkbait article can take as much time as you give it. I’ve taken anywhere from 3 hours to 3 days writing a good linkbait piece.

4. Social networking. Now that you have some content and hopefully some links from your linkbait article, you’ll want to start networking with other websites in your niche. If this includes blogs, my favorite way to begin networking is to link to one of their posts and send a trackback. The following day send an email to the blog owner or writer telling them how much you like and appreciate their blog. In that email you want to ask the a question. The question doesn’t matter, but you want to start a dialog with that owner. Hopefully this will spur future conversation and possibly allow you to get that website owner to write a guest post on your blog. Bringing in people makes your blog more visible because that new writer probably has an audience that likes his or her writing and will read that content, even though it’s on your blog.

5. Outsourcing. Once your blog gets rolling and you’ve started making a little money from Adsense or an affiliate program, reinvest that back into your site. You could buy links, but that is short term. A better option for your new site is to outsource some of the writing. You can hire a writer for $5-10 per page and get good quality content. This frees up some of your time to work on step 6.

6. Link building. While link building is one of the most important tasks in creating a successful niche website, it should never be done first. Unless you have a stable base of content, you have nothing to link to. When you are first building your links, I focus on building links to the homepage with varied anchor text. Find a long tail keyword and try to begin ranking for that. After you built 10-20 quality links begin sending some of your new links to deep pages. These are the pages that you first wrote that are now indexed by Google. You hopefully have a long tail keyword somewhere that you can focus on. By ranking for a few small keywords you begin to drive a small, but steady, amount of traffic to your website. Even if it is only 5 visitors per day for each keyword, you can continue adding keywords while your website matures and you increase content.

7. Move on. A lot of people would argue that this is a bad move. For me, I don’t like to be tied down to one project for a long time. That is why I give myself 30 days to make it work. Whether the site is making $3 or $300 per month, I move on. The reason I like to keep moving is because I duplicate my efforts across 10-12 niches per year. Each one of these niches can generate a little or a lot of income, but the main thing is that it is passive. Usually I will go back to a website after about 6 months, evaluate what it needs and spend about a week on it. Using this strategy is great because you now see what keywords you’re ranking for and can work on those a little by building links, writing related posts and adding some content.

While this has worked for me, it may not work for you. I can easily write 100 pages about a topic I know nothing about. If you have a hard time writing content focused articles, you might want to move step 5, Outsourcing, to the top of the list. While this is expensive in the beginning, it allows you to focus on your strengths.

I hope this look into my work life motivates you to get out there and do something. Thanks to Randy Brown for allowing me to write this article for you!

Brandon Hopkins currently owns over 100 niche websites. This month he is working on a website about the Call Centers, and you can view his Call Center Blog for more examples and marketing ideas.