How long does it take to start making money from a potentially successful website?

[Eli]

Depending on the market I would say you can start turning profits within a matter of weeks, PPC is a real expensive option and you have to have a niche with little competition and low PPC to make it viable, many markets I have worked in for various affiliate schemes unfortunately the PPC option is far too expensive so using SEO and the best way forward.

SEO "search engines optimisation," comes in many forms, on-page and off-page, on-page entails using specific keywords and phrases with uniques interesting content for the reader, if you write for the reader and include a couple of keywords/ phrases within a 500 word article and write a compelling title and description you won't go far wrong with your onpage SEO, but don't over do the usage of keywords as since google penguins recent update it is becoming ever more apparent that google is penalizing websites with excessive use of keywords.

Above all the most important factor is backlinks to your page with using particular anchor text to boost your ranking for that term, for instance if you want to rank for the term "diet pills," then you need links containing that phrase ideally from similar or related websites, obviously this can be a hard task so the only way a small business can achieve this is using some link building software, now the software is often very expensive and hard to operate... especially for those who are un-experienced so I suggest out sourcing such work... but be careful, ensure you get links built in a suitable way... google likes to see relevant links from a variety of websites... but not too much too soon or you can get penalized. For this reason you want to get link pyramid links... this basically means the links interlink with one another and then to your website, in effect making each link more powerful... you wont get too many links this way but the links you do get will really boost your rankings.

You can buy gigs on http://www.fiverr.com for link pyramid packages, buy a couple spread out of a few weeks targeting a variety of keywords you wish to rank for and the rankings will gradually come.

You can also outsource this sort of work on freelancer.com or alternatively buy programs such as senuke x (very expensive) most freelancers who you can outsource this work to will use this program or similar.

Ensure you use the most important keyword phrases in your website/ page title and what is known as a H1 tag within your content.

Following these steps your will achieve great rankings but consistency is king, continually build more pages targeting new phrases as each page is a potential entry page, more pages, more rankings and more traffic = more profits!