How to Make Money The Honest Way

Well, my last post here How to Make Money Online With Action, went into how to get off your backside and do the work in order to figure out how to make money online. This one takes it one stage further and explains exactly how to make easy money with SEO!

If you want to know how to make easy money with SEO, or Search Engine Optimization as its full name is, here’s are some very useful pointers that will help you if you are willing to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty by doing some hard work. If the very thought of that is too much for you to bear, then you probably won’t get anything out of this and you might as well save yourself some time and not bother reading any more. This post is primarily for website owners whop want to know how to make money online from blogs, website etc but are struggling to attract the right kind of traffic.

I’m also going to add a disclaimer here: If you’re target niche is Make Money Online (MMO) then the methods I’m going to talk about will work, but you will have to amplify your workload a hundredfold to compete with the people who are holding onto the front page in the only search engine that really matters, Google. It may seem a little contrived to be writing about how to make money online with SEO on a site that doesn’t, but what this site does is immaterial to the information as it works best in other niches. This site unfortunately occupies the very same MMO niche and is nowhere for most of the keywords that matter. That’s because I learned early on that if I were to put the amount of work necessary into floating this site up to the top of MMO into a less competitive niche, I will not only dominate it much more quickly, I can rinse and repeat with several other niches and still have time to go out and spend the money I’m making from them.

Meaning that I don’t make money from the Make Money Online niche, but I certainly do from other niches that I have learned how to dominate using the SEO methods I’m going to talk about here. Why is that? Because other niches are much easier to dominate due to the sites that populate Google’s front page are generally not owned and run by Internet Marketers who are SEO savvy. Most of them are battling it out in MMO, which is good for me and the people who have figured it out, because while they’re all fighting and spending all their time in that niche, they’re not working other, more profitable niches, like the ones I’m working!

What niches am I working?

Are you kidding? If I revealed them, every person who read this post would suddenly become my competitors and I don’t want to have to fight to keep my top spots which make me money!

So you’ll just have to go find your own niches to work. Don’t worry, there are literally thousands of profitable niches out there that are easy to work and easy to dominate once you have done the groundwork. Which is where I’ll start in my explanation on how to make easy money with SEO.

First thing you’ll need is a website that you can use to put up Adsense, or a comparable PPC advertising medium. Failing that, you’ll need some affiliate products that you know will sell with enough traffic. But I’m going to concentrate on Adsense, because it is one of the easiest ways to make money I know of, once you know how to use it. Incidentally, this information is probably sitting in a dozen or so eBooks which you’d probably pay a pretty penny for, except here its for nothing, nada, zilch, zip, en gratis! I’m happy to give it away for the trade off with traffic.

Another thing you may notice is that I don’t use Adsense on this blog. That’s because it doesn’t get the organic search traffic needed to make it work. Most of the traffic to this site is social, which while is very nice to have people read my blog, its no good for converting into money simply because as I’ve said before, social traffic does not click ads and therefore don’t make money for me! No problem and I’m not going to sweat it. You’ll see why in a minute.

Your main site that you have set up for Adsense should be a site that is at least 3-6 months old already and been indexed for most of that. Better if its over a year old and already features in Google’s index maybe even in the high pages of the SERPs, but if not, you’ll just have a little longer to wait. You’ll need to SEO your site for your main keywords for several reasons. The main one is that’s the keywords you want to rank in the SERPs for and they should be keywords that have reasonably high monthly search figures for, preferably more than about 3000, but more is obviously better. Don’t try for really high search numbers as you’ll probably find they’re very competitive and you’ll struggle to break into them. Anything up to around 30k a month is good.

Remember a thing about your position in the SERPs is that if you are in number one spot, you will take the lion’s share of the traffic. In fact you’ll attract anything from 60% up to 90% of the monthly search figures in that place, although it varies from niche to niche. The lower down on the front page you are, the fewer visitors you will attract, so you need to aim for top spot. When you are researching the keywords, this is a factor you need to be aware of. If the current top site is a PR6 with hundreds of relevant keyword anchored backlinks (more of that in a minute), then you will struggle to usurp it. Obviously the weaker the competition, the easier it will be to overcome it.

So how to beat your competition using SEO and a little guile.

If you haven’t already got them you’ll need to build some more sites. Free ones are best and easiest, meaning they’re going to be blogs. They should be built on a mixture of platforms, such as Blogger, Wordpress, Blinkweb, Geocities etc. The more the merrier. The subjects of the blogs will be relevant to your main site in more general terms, so try to get your main keywords in the URL even if it means creating blogs with long URLs.

The next part is the hard work part. You’ll need to get these blogs populated with several relevant posts each and indexed in Google. You can do this a number of ways, but the safest way is to write them yourself and make them original. Do not use PLR articles and do not scrape content from other sites. This will cause Google to either not index the blogs at all, or to not give them any authority, which is almost as bad. What you want is for these blogs to be legitimate and relevant so that they will also feature in the SERPs in their own right. They don’t need to sit high, just to be in the SERPs for your given keyword or long tail keywords is enough. Why?

Because these blogs are going to link to your main site and give it a lot of authority for its main and long tail keywords. This is what will make it rise to the top of the SERPs – not page rank, which is another thing that confuses people.

A PR0 site with lots of authority from relevant links will beat a PR5 with fewer links.

To do that, you need to use SEO. And this kind of search engine optimization is easy enough to do. Here’s how.

For each new post in each blog, you need to write about a subject that is highly relevant to one of your main keywords. The title of the post must contain the keyword. Then include a link to your main site from within the post using the keyword in the anchor text. Then go on to the next blog and do the same thing, only use a slightly different one for your main keywords.

You need to target several closely related keywords. Not only will it increase the SERPs authority for your main site for its main keyword, it also gives additional SERPs authority for the closely related keywords, meaning your site will feature in several different search pages, which all attract traffic. So you could end up sitting on top of the SERPs for several related keywords that all attract varying levels of traffic. The more traffic you attract from the search engines, in particular Google, the more money you will make from the Adsense ads that they will be more disposed to to click on.

Lastly, the layout of the main site itself needs to be optimized for Adsense. That means that while you’ll need plenty of relevant content for your keywords, you don’t really want anyone to read it. That may sound pretty crappy especially if you like the idea of attracting lots of readers top your site or blog, but if you want to make money from Adsense, you’re going to have to make your site less attractive to people so they’ll be more likely to want to click out and go someplace else. I know that hurts to hear, but its the truth. If your site is too good and the content too helpful and interesting to people, the less chance they’re going to want to go anywhere else and the less chance they’ll click your ads.

You also want to make sure the right ads trigger for your keywords. Here is where relevance comes into play. Your main keywords must feature in the title of your posts or the H1 headers on your page. The keywords also need to be in the post for good measure, but they don’t need to be there in any great quantity as long as your main headers tell Google what your page and your site is all about. If you are getting different sets of ads, then that is telling you your page is not optimized properly and the Google bots is seeing several different main keywords. Here it is best to only publish one article on your main page and make it as relevant as you can. That way the bots won’t be fooled with multiple titles and you’ll get the ads you want.

As for ad placement, this can vary from niche to niche, but a 250×250 ad block just above the title of your post is more often the best spot. Go for a plain white background and blue links, because this is what people are used to seeing. Your sit should match this – plain white background and dark grey or black text is best.

This will improve your CPC, but that is probably a topic all in itself and one for a future post as this one is already getting far too long!

On that note, I’m going to sign off, wishing all my readers a happy and prosperous 2009!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Ok, I’ve left this blog alone for quite long enough, so its time to post something useful. The last post Hacked!, said it all about what can happen when you let your guard drop. The consequences were bad enough for me in that it cost me a lot of valuable time cleaning out all the malware and dodgy links that whoever got into my sites inserted all over the place. They could have been a lot worse had they infiltrated some of my sites that actually make me some money by costing me a lot of traffic.

Which brings me onto a point I just posted about in one of my other blogs about how the unaware marketer can be fooled into thinking they are sitting high in Google’s SERPs and still not be getting any traffic. The post can be found at: Make Money Fast.

What it highlights is that most Internet Marketers, when doing their keyword research to find good, well searched long tail keywords with low competition, then put their site together and work hard with their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and after a while they see it appear on page one of the SERPs.

That’s great and they then check their stats to see all the traffic flooding in – and… wait a minute… a mere trickle

How can this be?

Its a phenomenon I recently noticed on a couple of my own fairly new niche sites as well as the make money site I mentioned above. When I search on the keyword term “Fast Make Money”, which the site ranks well for, it actually sits in the top spot on Google. The keyword search program, Keyword Elite, shows that search term gets over 11k monthly searches, so I should be seeing a ton of traffic to that site.

But I’m only seeing a trickle. Why?

Because I, like most Internet Marketers use quotes around my keyword search terms in the search engines search box. Then it dawned on me that most people (who are not Internet Marketers) do NOT use quotes. The keyword search tools do not discriminate between searches done with or without quotes, they just report traffic stats for the keywords searched.

They can be in any order, by the way!

So when I do the search on the same keywords without the quotes, a very different picture appears. The first thing you’ll notice is where your keyword search tool has told you there are X amount of monthly searches and Y number of competing sites on Google, its telling it the way it sees it for the keywords in the order it displays them.

So for Make Money Fast, I see 11.5k monthly searches for only 106k competing sites. That, one would naturally believe, is an extremely good keyword competitor to get into the ring with.

Except its not the whole picture. In reality, take away the quotes and you get 11.8 million competing pages – not such a great bet after all. My own site actually manages to scrape in at the bottom of page two without the quotes, so that’s why it only sees a trickle of that search traffic.

But even that’s not the end of the story.

The keywords themselves are not necessarily in the order that the ordinary organic search traffic surfer keys in, so you then have to look again at different word orders for your keyword. Of course most people won’t search on Fast Make Money, because it doesn’t make sense. They’ll naturally search on Make Money Fast, or even Make Fast Money, as these terms are simply better English!

So you do another Google search on Make Money Fast, and whoa! The number of competing pages changes (9.8 million) and the sites displayed also change with different sites occupying the top places.

This phenomenon occurs with all keyword searches. Change the order of the words, use quotes or don’t use quotes, you get a different result every time.

So what does that mean for all the hard work you just put into trying to dominate your chosen keyword?

It means that you have more work to do. You not only have to rank for that great, high traffic, low competition long tail keyword you thought you’d found, but you also have to rank for different configurations of those keywords and without the quotes too. Makes it all a little more difficult, doesn’t it?

Another point here, which I’m sure will be obvious to you and you probably already thought about it and that is:

The fewer individual “words” that make up your long tail keyword, the better, because it means fewer combinations of the keyword phrase, so more chances for you to rank for the assorted word order alternative for your keyword term.

Of course, single word keywords are best, as in that case, all of the above does not apply – quotes or no quotes it won’t matter, as you’re only dealing with one word to be searched, like Money. Except you’d be going up against 933 million competing pages for that term.

Do you fancy your chances?

Most people, unless they have a very highly rated site simply cannot compete with that much competition, which is why we all work more with long tail keywords instead. It at least gives us a fighting chance. Of course, in niches other than money, politics, health and finance, there is less competition and fewer highly SEO’d sites making up that competition, so you have a much better chance of getting your site onto the front page of the SERPs and attracting that valuable organic search traffic, which will convert into dollars if you’re site is properly SEO’d and monetized. Take something simple, like Asia’h Epperson, for example. Much easier to compete when there are not so many pages to go up against!

Lastly, you might be thinking, “Who cares about the search engines when I get 1000 visits a day to my blog from social networking sites, like Stumbleupon, Digg, Del.icio.us etc.”

Well, if you like having a lot of readers, that’s fine.

But if you want to make money, you need targeted, organic search engine traffic, because they are the people who will click your PPC ads and affiliate banners.

Social traffic visitors to your site tend not to click ads or buy affiliate products. That’s simply because they are Internet Marketers themselves and for one, don’t click people’s PPC ads and two won’t buy your affiliate products. That’s because they most likely already have a Clickbank account themselves and will use their own affiliate id to buy any ebooks or software and have the discount themselves.

If you don’t believe me, and you’re relying solely on social traffic to fill your daily site stats, just have a look at your bank statement and see all the zeros where the Clickbank and Adsense cheques should be…

Ouch! Reality can be painful, can’t it?

Terry Didcott – Freedom Writer
The Honest Way