Money Hints

Here I am, back again at this How To Make Money Online SEO Hints blog with some more insights into the world of how to make money online, plus some SEO hints thrown into the bargain. In this post, I’m actually going to take a look at a massive mistake I’ve been making with WordPress blogs that have Adsense on them – this blog included. This post is therefore all about how to avoid smart pricing to make money online with Adsense, only more of it!

I’ve only recently noticed this stupid mistake on some of my own self hosted WordPress blogs, through seeing it on one of my own WordPress mu installations. Here is a short story so you’ll understand what is happening and how it dawned on me.

WordPress Multi User (WPmu) blogs are those that you’ve probably seen or even used yourselves by creating your own free blogs on sites like blogetery, blogdrive, freewebs etc. Or even hosted one yourself to enable friends to create their own free blogs on your host. Well, part of the reason you do it is so that you can take a small percentage of the earnings from the blogs hosted on your WPmu using a revenue sharing system. It works for Adsense, eBay, Kontera or any other monetization method that you can program to take a slice of the earnings in return for providing a free blogging host. Hub pages do it too, by the way.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have a WPmu host that I actually switched the Adsense revenue share off, because I didn’t want to get my account smart priced by serving ads on an un-optimized blog owned by someone else. Blog owners, therefore get to keep 100% of their Adsense earnings, which is nice for them and if they’ve optimized their free blogs properly, then they’ll make some decent money from them. I also have several blogs hosted on my own WPmu, some of which I have adsense on.

Over the last week or so, I’d noticed a distinct fall in my Adsense revenue and on closer inspection found that instead of getting my usual 50c-$1 or more clicks, I was now getting 5c clicks. Yep, I’d been smart priced.

But how could this happen? All my blogs were optimized through the roof. Well, I thought so, but it seems I was not entirely right. The first indication I had that I might have missed a real howler of a mistake was an inadvertent search through Google that turned up a privacy policy page on one of my (low competition niche) WPmu blogs. I clicked across to see what it was doing in the SERPs in the first place and got a nasty shock to see the page with its generic Privacy Policy also displaying the Adsense block with some nice PSAs (Public Service Ads)!

Oh Crap!

Further investigation revealed more misery. The mean, one paragraph “About” page was similarly displaying PSAs. Single posts and the homepage, of course were showing normal ads, but the damage was being done by serving ads on “Pages” as well as “Posts”. This is something that is set into the WPmu installation for each theme and means a ton of work to remove it from each installation. Mmm, I have more than one of these babies.

A quick way around this was to create a few themes specifically for Adsense that didn’t make use of the revenue sharing programming that only I (as Admin) could use with my own publisher id hard coded in. That got me round the problem of showing ads on “Pages” and all should have returned to normal. But it didn’t.

There was more stupidity to unearth. Which brings me back to my self hosted WP blogs and this one in particular. Yes, I also found to my amazement that I was serving ads on my Privacy Policy and About pages here too. I’ve just removed the Adsense code from the “page” file. I was about to call it a day and write this important post (because I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one to make this mistake), when a final glance down the page solicited a double take from yours truly as I spotted the Adsense 160×600 skyscraper staring back at me from the sidebar at the foot of the page.

Yep, you guessed it. The sidebar is coded to work with not just “Posts” but “”Pages” too. More scope for smart pricing!

So, here’s how to avoid smart pricing by serving ads on non-relevant pages in self hosted WP blogs. Don’t ad your code to the page.php file and don’t put it in the sidebar either.

That way, you ensure that your ads are only served on optimized post pages, where you’ve written your nice long, keyword rich posts which are carefully SEO’d to ensure not only good placement in the SERPs (with a ton of relevant links) but being served the most relevant Adsense ads for your blog’s keywords and for your post.

Of course, you may have written a highly keyword rich and relevant privacy policy of your own… but if you have, then you are in the minority here! Are there any nasty surprises lurking in the depths of your WordPress blog? Better go have a look just in case!

Terry Didcott
How To Make Money Online SEO Hints

Make money comments? What could he mean? Well, this goes more so for established blogs, unlike this Make Money Hints blog which is still relatively new, who are plagued by spam commenters leaving floods of link filled comments that have nothing to do with make money or whatever niche your blog happens to live in.

In the past, I simply let Askimet deal with the spammers and every couple of days I’d just go in and clear it out with the big, satisfying delete button. But all that time, I was squandering an easy make money online resource without even realizing!

Oh yes, when you open your eyes, an opportunity to make money more can be created out of practically anything. And I suddenly saw the potential after commenting myself in another person’s blog. Just for fun, I made the comment heavily laden with the guy’s main keywords, make money and make money online, just to help his SEO a little, which of course it does. Well, the idea of the century didn’t exactly hit me over the head with a shovel at the time, but a few minutes later I got a spam comment in one of my make money free Blogger blogs. I looked at it and saw that it would have been almost a shame to not approve it, as although it contained a few links to the spammer’s sites, it also contained my main keywords of make money and make money online a few times.

That got me thinking – why not edit the comment and simply delete all the crap links, but keep all the useful main keywords?

Unfortunately, with Blogger blogs, the ability to edit comments does not exist (at least not that I can see), so I had to delete the comment, because there was no way I was letting it through the net while it contained all those unwanted links, despite it containing those easy make money and make money online keywords. But that’s when the shovel finally found the back of my head.

Eureka!

I’d just stumbled upon a glorious way of boosting the popularity of my self hosted WordPress blogs with little work on my behalf. You see, while you cannot edit comments in Blogger blogs, you sure as hell can edit them in self hosted WordPress blogs! That means, for this Money Hints blog in particular (and all my other niche blogs in general, I can actually take each new spam comment I get, clear out all their crap and write my own comment, suitably laced with my main keywords.

Do you see how this could potentially be the holy grail of SEO magic for blogs?

Its so important to rank well for your main keywords if you want to go on to attract organic search traffic to your blog, because that’s the only kind of traffic that are likely to click on your ads and make money for you. Forget social network traffic, as while it might look good on your stats, it won’t make money for you because, let’s face it, the vast majority of people involved in social networks are Internet Marketers and these are precisely the people who will visit your site but never click on any of your ads.

Think about it.

Are you an Internet Marketer? Do you click on anybody else’s ads?

Well of course you don’t!

So do you make money for any blog owner you visit? Nope!

On the other hand, targeted, organic traffic derived from the search engines – and let’s be brutal here, there is only one search engine that really matters when it comes to traffic and that’s Google – will be much more likely to click on your ads and make money for you especially if they don’t find what they want on your blog.

So we as bloggers must work as hard as we can on our SEO to make sure that we rank as highly as possible in Google’s organic search pages in order to attract that traffic to our blogs so we can make money.

Part of that SEO involves building backlinks, we all know that. Also a big part of it involves on-site SEO which means your main keywords (make money, make money hints and make money online in my case) must be obvious and occur often enough for the Google search bots to pick them out because of their high frequency. Just remember that they must not so frequent as to appear as keyword stuffing, which will have a detrimental effect on your search ranking. You should aim for about 5% keyword density in your posts.

But posts are not the only content that lives on your blog. Comments not only count as content, but the volume of them also count as pointers to your blog’s popularity. So if you have several comments for every post and all those comments contain 5% keyword density as well as you posts, then your on-site SEO has just taken a leap forward over your competitor’s blogs! Meaning you will beat them in the SERPs, attract more organic traffic and make money as a result!

Now is that worth the extra effort to edit your spam comments rather than deleting them?

You bet!

Now go edit your comments, put some make money online keywords in them and boost your on-site SEO!

Terry Didcott
Freedom Writer
Make Money Hints

I’d like to follow on from the last post here at Make Money Hints, (if we exclude the Money Hints Christmas message), where I showed you how to get your new site indexed within a few minutes, thereby circumventing the popular method of submitting your site to the search engines. In this post, I’ll show you how I can fake my Alexa rank to further prepare you new site for make money hints by getting Alexa to rank your page fast and then to do what a lot of people don’t believe you can do.

Can I Fake My Alexa Rank?

People are naturally curious and they might ask:

“Can I fake my Alexa rank?”

Well, in actual terms, the answer is no, I cannot fake my Alexa rank any more than anyone else can, but you can do some things to artificially boost it. One of the things you can do is exactly what I’m doing right now – writing a post here at my Make Money Hints blog that claims to be able to fake my Alexa rank!

What this will do is attract the attention of curious Internet Marketers who are in the business to learn how to make money online. They’ll therefor be on the lookout for any good make money hints they can get their teeth into and one of those is naturally how can I fake my Alexa rank.

First, if you don’t already know, you need to understand how Alexa works.

Alexa ranks websites by counting the number of times a site is visited by people online who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser. Its as simple as that.

So the best way to fake my Alexa rank is to get a whole lot of people who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser to come and visit my site here at Make Money Hints. How do I do that? Simple.

Of all the people who surf the Internet, the vast majority are just normal people who are not into it to make money online, so they will therefore not bother to have the Alexa toolbar installed on their browsers – and why should they? What do most people care what Alexa rank a site has? Come to that what do they care what Page Rank a site has either?

They don’t care what your Alexa rank or Google Page Rank is because they’re just not interested. They wanna search for information, or to buy stuff or to find out where their local dry cleaning shop is.

Internet Marketers and advertisers, on the other hand, are extremely interested in what your Alexa rank and your Page Rank is because they like to know what their competition is doing and where the best sites are for them to advertise their stuff on so they can easy make money. So they are most likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed.

So by attracting Internet Marketers and advertisers who have the Alexa toolbar, you will increase your own Alexa rank. So when I make a post like this here at Make Money Hints, which will be of great interest to Internet Marketers and advertisers, they will come to see if I really do know how I can fake my Alexa rank, because if I can fake my Alexa rank for Make Money Hints and tell them how to do it, they will have an edge over their less well informed competition.

In actual fact, the very act of attracting as many Alexa toolbar owners to visit me here at Make Money Hints as I can will artificially enhance my Alexa rank in the short term, which to all intents and purposes is tantamount to being able to fake my Alexa rank!

Neat huh?

If you are reading this easy Make Money Hints blog and have the Alexa toolbar installed, then I thank you for contributing. If you don’t have that toolbar installed and you are a serious Internet Marketer, then shame on you because you have a big piece of the IM jigsaw missing from your toolkit.

Here’s the link to get the Alexa toolbar: Get Sparky!

Terry Didcott
Make Money Hints

Following on from the first post here at Make Money Hints I’ll be using this post to make good use of the first of the extremely useful make money hints online that I want to show you.

Make Money Hints Online

It’s earlier on in the scheme of things than I would have preferred, but in this case is an essential part of the process of getting a new blog, which this one essentially is, indexed by Google very, very fast.

It involves a little known trick that is easy to make use of and quite legitimate. It’s just that not many people at all are aware of this to get their site or blog indexed fast. But first a warning:

DO NOT SUBMIT YOUR BLOG TO GOOGLE TO BE INDEXED

That is the fastest way of getting your site or blog put at the bottom of a very long and slow moving list of sites all waiting to be indexed. Don’t do it, there are many, much faster and more useful ways to do it.

One of the most popular ways of getting a new site or blog indexed within a week or less is to submit an article to ezine articles and let the Google spiders follow the link in your resource box back to your site. As ezine articles is a PR6 site, it gets spidered every day by Google and so any links are also followed back to their originator.

But there is an even better and infinitely faster way to get a new site indexed within a few minutes!

Yes, you heard right, that was no typo. You can get a new site indexed in minutes if you follow these instructions to the letter.

Do a search on Google for a keyword phrase that you know no one will have used before. In the case of this site, I have used my site’s main keywords “make money hints” in the search term which for some strange reason exactly matches the title of this post. “Make Money Hints Online” is what I just searched for and found that there are no pages indexed for that search term.

Perfect.

Then I write my post which is this one you are reading right now.

Then I publish it.

Then I ping this page (not the site) to Google using their own pinging service.

Then I ping the usual services like technorati etc using pingoat.com.

Then I check the Google search term “Make Money Hints Online” a few minutes later and…

Hey presto, there is this page as the only result, so that effectively puts me top of page one on Google!

I’ll go and do that now, then edit this page with some more info on why that happens and to tell you how long it took to get “Make Money Hints Online” indexed…

…ok I’m back. I published this at 11:33 and checked Google at 11:41 and I was there! 8 minutes. Mmm a bit slow but I’ll settle for that!

So why did that work?

Well it’s all common sense stuff from Google’s point of view really. You see, they want to provide the best search results online and to do that they have to be able to have relevant pages indexed for every search term that their clients enter. That’s you and me. So when someone enters a search term and they don’t have any pages indexed that are relevant, a flag is set to be on the lookout for a relevant page coming online. As soon as it finds one, it will index it quickly to satisfy the search term and keep up its good service.

So by me doing the search on Make Money Hints Online and there not being any relevant pages for that keyword phrase, Google set its radar on alert for the first relevant page that appeared, which of course was mine. I helped the process go quicker by pinging Google and actually helping them by telling them that the relevant page they wanted was now published – mine!

If you look at the structure of this post, you may notice that I not only link back to the previous post, but also to the site’s homepage in my sign-off at the end. I do that with every post I make and that is so when the Google bot spiders this post to satisfy its search for Make Money Hints Online, it will also find the other links on the page and follow them too, effectively indexing the whole site as it does so.

As this site is a domain I just bought, it would not normally get indexed for quite some time, so I’ve just sped up the process a little (well, a lot) so that I can work on more SEO to start the long and difficult climb up the Make Money Online ladder to rank high in the SERPs.

If you found this post useful, I’d appreciate it if you submitted it to your favourite social bookmarking site to give it a leg-up and point other information hungry people to some good sound and relevant advice on how to make money online with my Make Money Hints Online post and this Money Hints site!

Thanks!

Terry Didcott
Make Money Hints

Welcome to Make Money Hints, my blog that is all about tips, tricks, techniques and make money hints on how to make money online.

While there are a ton of other blogs out there all trying to tell you how to make money online, very few of them are even close to the mark. That’s because they’re written by rank newbies who don’t even make money online themselves, so how the hell can they be telling you how to make money online with any authority or credibility?

The short answer is that they cannot.

Most successful Internet Marketers tend not to divulge their make money secrets or give away their closely guarded money hints to anyone else for fear that they might steal their ideas and compete for their slice of the make money online pie. Of course they’ll sell you their ebook with most of their money hints and ways to make money online, but they still won’t tell you everything they know. Well that’s fine for them and its not my concern what other Internet Marketers do or don’t do.

What I will tell you straight from the beginning here is that 95% of all Internet Marketers fail online and of the 5% that do make money, only a small percentage of them actually make a lot of money.

So why is this?

Because there is so much hype out there from “get rich quick” mongers and so many newbies fall into the trap of believing that all they have to do is buy this or that great product for godknows how many hundreds of dollars then press a button and sit back while the money falls into their lap.

Well, wake up call – easy money does not exist.

The truth is that the only sure-fire way to make money online without scamming people is to work bloody hard for it!

If you’re still with me after that one of my sound, solid make money hints, then maybe you are interested enough to actually give this a go! I don’t want to frighten anyone off, but to make money online, you need several skills that if you don’t already have them, you need to learn them and soon. Here’s what you’ll need:

• To be able to write
• To be able to read
• To be willing to learn
• To have an open mind
• To be a stayer, not a quitter

That’ll do you for starters. If you don’t possess ALL of those qualities, then start looking in the classified ads for job vacancies at McDonalds, because you don’t stand a chance online without these basic traits. Want to know what else? Even with these essentials, you still need a whole lot more besides, but at least with the basic building blocks you can get started and see if this kind of work suits you.

Because make no mistake – it is work.

So let’s take each of those essential traits and break them down into digestible pieces.

To be able to write means you can write in reasonably good English with reasonably good grammar and spelling. You need to be able to write interesting pieces on whatever subject interests you that other people will be able to read easily and be interested enough to want to read more of what you write. That’s because despite what anyone might tell you about the popularity of video podcasts and audio messages, the written word is still very much king and web content is what will make money for your online enterprise.

To be able to read is a no brainer as you will need to be able to do that to learn the ton of knowledge that you’ll need to succeed online and actually stand any chance to make money. A lesser realized reason is that you will also need to have an interest in reading in order to read other people’s blogs and digest and understand what they’re telling you as well as being able to filter out the bullshit for what it is. That’s because 90% of what you’ll read from aspiring Internet Marketers is regurgitated bullshit they got from some other newbie who hasn’t the first clue how to make money online because they got their information third hand from some other know-nothing penniless newbie.

If you think that’s in your face, then you better get used to it, because there is nothing more heart-breaking than putting a year of your life onto a project only to see it fail because you were working on bad or inaccurate advice from someone who didn’t have the first clue themselves.

Be willing to learn because you will need to spend countless hours learning how to make money online and I’m not talking about a few lousy dollars, I mean sufficient money to be able to live off. Otherwise sweeping the floors in McDonalds is what you’ll be doing to pay the rent!

To have an open mind means you’ll be able to avail yourself of techniques and methods that at first glance might seem unethical or go against your own beliefs. Well, wake up call number two – you have to ask yourself one important question. “Do I want to make money online?” If the answer is YES, then you will have to leave your morals at the door before you walk into your office and switch your computer on. Some of the methods you will need to employ to make money by definition have to be hard-nosed and competitive, because you will have many rivals for every dollar you want to earn and if you don’t grab it first, then someone else will get it before you. So keep an open mind as to some of the methods you will come across – as long as you are not actually hurting anyone, then you can sleep with a clear conscience.

Be a stayer, not a quitter because if you spend several weeks or months in building something and it doesn’t bring the rewards straight away you have to keep at it in order to see your labours bear fruit. While there are some underhand methods available to use to make money pretty fast, your mainstay online income will come from long term investments in time, hard work and patience. If you give up too soon without waiting for results to happen, then you’ll just be joining the 95% of all other Internet Marketers who have failed and will continue to fail because they gave up too soon.

Bottom line is: NEVER GIVE UP!

If you never give up and always believe in yourself, then with the right information, determination and motivation you will succeed and make money online.

Terry Didcott
Make Money Hints

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