Many entrepreneurs, such as myself, have created a number of websites designed to make money, but with more and more people coming online everyday, and the competition in the various different niches increasing all the time, how can you ensure that your websites will still be around, and more importantly making money, in 5 years time?

Well I've come up with 7 ways you can secure long term profits for your various websites:

1. Keep Building Links To Your Site For SEO Purposes.

There are a number of ways you can get traffic to your websites, but nothing beats the free targeted traffic that you can get from ranking highly in the search engines for various keywords. Therefore, to ensure you get to and stay at the top of the search engines, you have to keep building links to your websites on an ongoing basis, as this is the main factor that will help you rank higher. Effective ways of doing this include writing press releases and articles, posting on forums, and exchanging links with other websites.

2. Keep Adding Fresh Content To Your Site.

This ties in with the previous point, in that not only do the search engines favour sites with lots of incoming links from related sites, but they will also reward sites that regularly add fresh content to their pages with higher rankings. Adding RSS feeds is a good way of doing this, but even better ways are those that involve visitor participation, such as forums and comments sections, because this increases the chances of your visitors returning to your site in the future.

3. Keep Building Your List Of Subscribers.

This should be your main priority because this is where the vast majority of your income is likely to be coming from. By having a list of receptive subscribers who you have built up a relationship with, you can generate a lot of income by sending occasional product recommendations to them via email, which can be either your own products, or those that you are promoting as an affiliate. This also provides security in case your inevitable increasing competition starts to outrank you in the search engines, because you will still have your own list that you can market to if your traffic starts to fall.

4. Reinvest Your Profits.

This applies to all types of businesses, and is extremely important. It's all too easy to fritter away any initial profits you may make from your websites, but you have to think about your long term profits. Your amount of competition is only going to increase in future years, so you have to constantly invest money into your online ventures to ensure you stay one step ahead of your competition.

5. Brand Yourself And Your Business As Much As Possible.

Whatever niche you are in, one of your main aims should be to brand yourself and your business to ensure that not only do people in your niche begin to recognise and remember your name, but they also start to see you as a leading authority in your particular niche. One of the best ways of doing this is by regularly writing articles and submitting them to as many places as possible, including article directories, and related websites and ezine publishers in your niche.

6. Embrace New Technology And Ideas.

The internet is constantly evolving, so it's important to keep up with new technology and embrace new ideas. For example, many webmasters are using the power of social networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube to send hordes of traffic to their websites. My advice is to embrace new innovations and not ignore them, because you can be sure that some of your competitors will be taking full advantage of them.

7. Never Stop Learning.

This is the final point I want to get across. It doesn't matter how successful you or your business are, it's still vitally important you keep on learning new things about how you can grow your business. Ask any successful internet marketer or business owner, and I'm pretty sure they will all tell you they are constantly reading and learning from other successful people. The ones who don't are simply being left behind, and will never be as successful as they could be. It's very often the little things you learn about that can have a major impact on your overall profits.

So to conclude, if you take all of the above factors into consideration now and in future years, you should have profitable websites for years to come in whatever niches you are in, and will not be adversely affected by increased competition.

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James Woolley is a full-time marketer who runs a website and newsletter dedicated to helping people make money online through internet marketing.