Money Hints

Welcome back to another riveting post on the whys and wherefores that you can learn how to make money online. In this post, I’m going to mention one way in particular that you can make money by avoiding something. That something is the scourge of newbie Internet marketers known as the paid monthly subscription sites.

There are plenty of them around and they all promise to make you rich if you follow their teachings month by month, while they relieve your credit card of their fee. This subscription fee varies from scam to scam, er, I mean from scheme to scheme but you’ll be out of pocket to a greater or lesser degree either way. Some charge as little as $30 a month while others like to go for the ubiquitous $97 a month and some charge way more than that.

So what do you get for your money?

Very little that you can actually use in 99% of them. A quick backpedal here – there is the 1% that actually will teach you something useful (I’m thinking Court’s Keyword Academy and Vic’s mentoring program here) but you still have to take that knowledge and apply it. Most don’t, then moan that the scheme doesn’t work.

The rest of them are 95% hype and 5% recycled same old same old and you might make a little cash from them but for most of them you will not cover your subscription fee.

Of course, there is one person that these paid subscription sites make a ton of money for. The owner. Looking at them from the opposite direction anyone with two eyes in their head cab see the obvious staring back at them. The person who sets one of these things up and markets it to all the newbie wannabes out there who are looking to buy into the make money online dream, that’s the person who will make money online in spades from their paid subscription site. So, in all honesty, paid subscription sites do make huge amounts of money for at least one person!

For the rest of the people sucked in by the hype and promises of easy money, the reality is far different. They will spend a lot of time reading up on the method, then when they go and try to put it into practice they find that the promised riches do not drop out of the sky into their laps. The opposite, in fact in that they make absolutely zilch.

So what goes wrong when all the mentoring, teaching, information and guidance should result in an Aladdin’s cave of treasure? And why am I not even bothering to single out any particular scheme to compare and contrast will the multitude of others?

Second question first – they are pretty much all of a muchness. The basic model is the same:

1. Buy domain, build website
2. FIll it with all the free PLR articles they give away
3. Fill it with PLR products to sell as your own
4. Get traffic, build your list to pimp your stuff to
5. Sit back and watch the gravy train roll in

That’s pretty much how it works for most of them and that model fails 95% of all new Internet marketers. Why? Because it rarely works unless you are so determined and pig headed that you’ll stick at it for years and build up a huge list of thousands of people. Do that and you will sell stuff by the law of averages. It’s a numbers game, and if this is your first time to hear this, you need to understand that to sell anything you have to fail to sell stuff to a number of people before you get a sale. Basic salesman stuff, but it’s oh, so true whether your flogging stuff online or knocking on peoples’ doors.

Most people don’t have the patience to wait that long and so give up and become one of the statistics aka one of the 95% of failures. Along the way, they may have spent many hundreds of dollars to find out. They feel ripped off, scammed, let down. Understandably so, because they got a crap shot and crapped out. If you are even thinking about buying into a paid membership site, think twice. Read Lis’ article on Teaching Sells to get a real hard hitting review on one of the new scams, er, I mean schemes that are hyping their way to a computer near you as we speak. Or read.

Are there alternatives?

Hell yes! But you have to shut out all that hype and all the promises of easy money, because the reality is that there is no easy money. Its a lie. What is not a lie is that there is a huge amount of money to be made from the Internet. You just have to be in possession of the right knowledge. This is information you can get for free in several places online from real people who are making real money for themselves without taking a penny from anyone else. You have already been introduced to several of them in previous posts in this very blog, so I won’t go over it all again here.

I am one one them too.

Although I’m not so foolish as to go publicizing how much I personally make online. Suffice it to say, I make my living from the Internet and it doesn’t cost anyone else a penny. I don’t run subscription sites and I don’t sell crap to people.

I do post a few ads here and there on my many websites and make money from commissions but if people buy from the advertisers, they are spending their money elsewhere. But those people come from the search engines looking for answers and I give them some and the ads may give them more. That’s how it works. I’m not going to hark on about how to get the right kind of traffic to your site. I’ve already done that in previous posts right here and at my sister make money online sites.

Lastly, if you are going to heed this advice and avoid paid subscription sites like the plague, you need to know how you can make money online legitimately without ripping anyone else off and by putting in a lot of hard work yourself, because that how you’re going to do it. Read this blog, go read Griz or Vic, or Court. Check google – the top site for the term “make money online” is Griz’s site and its a wealth of legit information. Its the top site because he knows what he’s doing and he shows you how to do it.

I’ve echoed his teachings in this very blog. Its a model that works and you can do it for free. Then at least if you don’t have the balls to work hard at this, you have lost nothing except some time. And if you do have the balls to work hard, you can make a good living from the Internet too.

Never give up!

How To Make Money Online SEO Hints

Ok, I’m back again with another of my money hints when it comes to the wide, wide world of the web. This time I want to look at using mini sites to help you make money online using their revenue share for Adsense amongst other things. In particular, I’m looking at Infobarrel and one of the quirks of that setup that is annoying on the one hand and downright dangerous on the other.

Its probably not a regular occurrence, at least I hope not, but on occasion, certain articles published in good faith by writers at Infobarrel have had their article title altered by an editor before it was accepted. Now this is fine of there is an error in the title, or if it is clearly not relevant to the topic of the article. But if the author chose the title for a very good reason, such as it being the exact keyword that the article is targeting, then by altering it, you are detracting from the article’s ability to rank in Google’s search engine for that keyword which was carefully selected by the author.

By altering the article’s title this instance, the editor has effectively robbed the article of a potentially good source of  targeted traffic from the main search engine and therefore effectively robbed both me and Infobarrel of a potentially lucrative source of income from Adsense from that article.

An example of one of my own personal articles that has suffered from this foolishness is now entitled “History of the long tail keyword” where its original title and highly lucrative keyword was simply “long tail keyword.” For obvious reasons, I’m not revealing what that keyword is exactly, because it has a very high CPC and is in my sights to take in the SERPs. This is a keyword that a lot of time was spent researching for viability as a source of revenue and one that could relatively easily be taken advantage of. Not any longer, it seems. It wouldn’t be so bad, but the article only touches on the history of the long tail keyword as a precursor to the rest of the article, the bulk of which explains what this long tail keyword actually is and what its used for.

The worst part is that by altering the title, they also altered the part of the url that contains the main keyword. Sure, the keyword is still in there, but its lost a little of its SEO power by diluting it with the extra words that are both unnecessary and irrelevant.

So this is my timely warning to anyone who is using infobarrel as their mini site to create articles and make money from Adsense. Watch your titles and if you haven’t yet reached the point where you are past having to wait for each article to be approved, make them relevant as well as containing your keywords. Your keywords should come first, so here’s an example of what I mean. If your wrote an article about weight loss and it was about the benefits of a certain type of exercise, your natural inclination would be to make the title something like:

The Benefits of Exercise for Weight Loss

whereas a much better, more SEO oriented title would read:

Weight Loss the Benefits of Exercise

Notice, I didn’t put any punctuation in the second, more relevant title. Its another quirk I just discovered about Infobarrel article titles in that if you place punctuation in there, it ends up on the url. I just wrote one using:

Keyword: The Benefits of Subject

(replace “Keyword” with the keyword phrase and “Subject” with the article’s subject) and got a shock when I saw the url:

www.infobarrel.com/keyword:_the_benefits_of_subject/

Luckily, I don’t think Google take much notice of the colon in a url, but it looks ugly. Just a few pointers there.

Of course, once you gain full “writer” status with 10 articles, you can write the titles any way you want and they won’t be changed by the editors. That’s what you need to aim for anyway, as when all is said and done, Infobarrel is a good authority domain for strong links to your main sites.

How To Make Money Online SEO 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

While I’m on the theme of how to make money online here at How To Make Money Online SEO Hints, its all well and good getting your site onto page one of Google’s index for your main keywords using some sleek SEO techniques, but what will you do with the site once its there? Well, there are several methods of monetisation that all work extremely well depending upon the niche you are working. But in this post, I’m going to look at how to make money online with Adsense.

Adsense, for those of you who do not know, is Google’s published ads that are paid for by their advertisers and placed in search results as well as on individual websites and blogs and work by earning the publisher a set amount for each time one of the ads is clicked. That is paid for by the advertiser depending upon their niche and keywords and several other factors too, which I won’t go into here as this is a post about Adsense, not the advertisers side of it, Adwords.

So, its simple enough to apply for an Adsense account with Google as long as you have a decent looking website or blog that has been around for a few months at least and has plenty of relevant content on it. There are tutorials on the Adsense site which show you how to put the ads on your website or blog, so I won’t go into those details here.

I’ll assume you now have a working website or blog and you have the ads displaying on the front page.

The general idea is to attract visitors to your site and hope that they’ll click one of the Adsense ads and you can sit back and watch the good time roll… except its ain’t gonna happen like that man! You’ll probably sit around a few days, then a few weeks and wonder why your stats show a big fat zero.

Well, you need something for the clicks to happen and that something is traffic. But not just any old traffic, it really needs to be that good old organic search traffic I’ve been talking about in previous posts. It has to be targeted for your keywords too, so that means that not only must you rank highly (read first page) in Google’s index for your keywords, your on site content must also be perfectly optimised for those keywords so that Google serves the right ads – those being the ones relevant to your keywords, of course.

Now for the basic explanation:

The way Adsense works best is when targeted search traffic turns up at your site looking for something specific, either the answer to a question or to buy something. A good Adsense site is one that they land on and see that it looks crap, and it’s immediately viewable text doesn’t answer their question. They see a block of text links in a prominent place (usually just above the title of the article) that promise to answer their question, so they click one of them. Voila, you get paid what the click was worth (anything from 3c to a dollar or so) and the surfer goes on their merry way. Incidentally, Google decides which ads to display on your site and what they’ll be worth.

Now one of two things will happen.

1. The surfer lands on the sales page of the advertiser and buys the product or service.

2. The surfer doesn’t like the look of the site they just landed on and head off somewhere else.

In the first case, that’s good for you because it means your click converted and Google will send more high paying ads to your site – which is when you start seeing $1, $2 or higher clicks. My best so far has been a $3.59 click I got the other day (yes, you can track them)

In the second case, that’s bad for you because your click did not convert. If you get too many of them, Google will only send you low paying ads in the 3c region.

From this you can see that it is of major importance that you not only attract targeted traffic, but that you show them ads specific to what they’re targeted to. You also need them to show up in reasonable numbers, because your own conversion rate will probably be around the 3%-5% mark depending upon several factors such as site layout, ad placement etc. So that mans for every 100 unique visitors, you should get between 3-5 clicks on average. So that tells you that you need at least 30 unique visitors a day to get even one click. Of course, the more the better!

Another factor in ad conversion is site layout and this can make a huge difference in converting those visitors into clicks.

Imagine yourself as a surfer looking for some information on where to find the best local plumber, because your kitchen is filling up with water and you need it fixed. You go to Google and type in Plumbers in Mytown, Mystate and you get a list of several hundred thousand pages. You look at the sites listed on the first page and select the first one (like 90% of all other surfers will do). You land of the site and it has some brilliant graphics, flash animation, a video of the site owner squawking about how his company is so great that, incidentally you can’t find the “stop” or “mute” button for, a page so long it takes you ages to scroll down past hundreds of 125×125 flashing ads and banners and a site navigation bar with drop downs on its drop downs and you spend an hour just searching around for damn telephone number… Meanwhile your kitchen flood is now encroaching on the dining room…

Well, does your website remotely resemble that nightmare scenario? If it does, guess how well you’ll do with Adsense. Mmm, no chance!

On the other hand, you click on the next site in Google and what opens is a fairly plain white page, basic header telling you the name of the site with some article on plumbing below it and a block of 3 or 4 links above it that say something like “24 hour emergency plumber in Mytown, Mystate”… Oh boy, you click it like your life depended upon it!

Hope that graphical representation of what a surfer is likely to do when faced with two very different styles of website. The rule of thumb is that if you make it too fancy with too many distractions, your visitors will be unlikely to click your Adsense ads. On the other hand, if your site layout is clean, clear and the ads are prominent with no other distracting ads (such as affiliate banners, or navigation links to articles that might answer the visitor’s question) then you will likely get a much higher click through rate (CTC). Meaning more money for you.

So the concise lesson here for Adsense to work for you is:

1. Make sure that your site is sitting high in the SERPs for not just its main keywords, but for many closely related keywords and it is attracting sufficient traffic

2. Make sure your on site content is very highly optimised for those keywords

3. Choose a simple, clear and clean site layout with as few distracting links as possible

4. Only place one keyword optimised article on your front page to prevent dilution of keywords and risk confusing the Google Adsense bots

5. Experiment with ad placement by all means but make sure your main ad block is high on the page, preferably above the title of the article or post.

End of short adsense lesson!

There’s lots more to it, but the idea that you just put the code on your site and Google will serve up a block of ads that will convert into $$$ is only true when you know exactly what you’re doing. As for the keyword side of things, you could always check out Court’s Keyword Academy which will also help you to learn how to make money using keywords in creative ways. But learn you must, because if you don’t know what you’re doing, you will end up getting rock bottom priced clicks and not very many of them either. Then you will say, “Adsense doesn’t work!” and you’ll go off looking for something else to monetise your site with. Guess what? There isn’t much else that is as easy to work and converts as well as Adsense when you do know what you’re doing.

So like any methods to make money online, you need to put a good deal of thought, research and hard work into it in the first place before you’ll start seeing the results that you want.

Terry Didcott
How To Make Money Online SEO Hints

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a big buzzword that has been echoing around the make money online fraternity for several years now. But it seems that only recently has several of SEO’s biggest kept secrets been blown wide open to anyone who wants to hear about them. This is a change of scenery from my last post here at How To Make Money Online SEO Hints where I looked at How to Make Money Flipping Websites and building up new websites and then selling them for big profits was the order of the day.

However, SEO is also a part of that business, as the better optimized a website is, the better it will rank in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, the more traffic it will attract and therefore the more money it will make. Which will make it sell for more money, of course.

By SEO, I mean the process of obtaining high calibre back links to your site and not really much else. Sure, there are books that will teach you all about so-called on-site SEO, but in the real world, 90% of SEO is about accruing strong, authority one-way links to your site. I’ve probably already explained that part in earlier posts in this How to Make Money Online blog, so I won’t go back over them again here. Suffice it to say, links are SEO and SEO is all about links.

But if you weren’t in the market to sell your website after careful search engine optimization has boosted it to the lofty perches atop page one in Google’s index for some heavily searched terms, then of course it make sense to keep hold of them. Why? Because you can monetise them and probably, assuming you’d chosen a nice hot niche, have found out how to make money online hand over fist.

So what is a hot niche?

Well now, a hot niche is a piece of pure solid gold that many Internet marketers are searching high and low for. A hot niche is one where the following criteria exist:

• Its main keyword is heavily searched for in Google’s index
• There is scant competition from other SEO savvy Internet marketers
• There are plenty of advertisers who pay top dollar per click for their adsense campaigns
• People searching on the keyword terms are looking for something in the guise of information or merchandise

This all ads up to a veritable goldmine if you can find it.

Ok, these goldmines are like real ones in many ways. There are out there all right but they’re damn hard to find. So when you do stumble upon one of these goldmines, what do you do to make money from them?

Well, this is where a lot of luck comes into play. If you have the luck with you, then you’ll already have a website that occupies a very similar niche where some of the keywords overlap. Your site already has authority for similar keywords and you have access to other sites that can link to your main site using the new goldmine keywords as the anchor. Then you need to write a long, keyword rich article, publish on your main site and then link to it from as many different sources as possible using the main keywords in the anchor. If you can get links from other authority sites in similar niches, all the better.

If you do it right and there is not other serious competition, you can quickly dominate the niche and take the spoils in the form of PPC (adsense) or affiliate merchandise, or both, whichever the niche will support the best.

If the luck is not with you, then you’ll have to sit down and have a re-think about how to make money online from that niche. SEO is the key to the equation for sure, but if you don’t already have a suitable website with authority, you are going to have to start at the bottom and work your way up. Now in a highly competitive niche, such as Make Money Online, you would have a real fight on your hands and it would be one that you wouldn’t expect to win for a long time without a mountain of high grade link sources to draw upon.

But if the niche were not so competitive, then you could still expect to do well relatively quickly even with a new website. Of course, you’ll need to be able to avoid the dreaded Google sandbox, which is not always possible even with the best will in the world. If Google see a new site appearing high in its index and it suddenly starts attracting a lot of traffic, chances are that site is destined for the box. Its merely Google’s way of protecting their index from the scourge of spammers, which is perfectly understandable. As long as your site is completely legitimate, has plenty of relevant original content and complies with Google’s quality guidelines, you’ll be out of the box again pretty soon and back in a hot spot in the index.

A lot of marketers have a keen interest in trying to game that system in some way or another, but to be honest, there is no need and often no point. If you get caught, your site risks getting de-indexed for a long time which will render your attempts to dominate any niche stone cold dead.

The sticking point for most people is that part where they need the links to rank high in the SERPs and fulfill the SEO that is necessary to dominate a niche. Many resort to buying links, or getting tangled up paying for the services of a link farm. These actions are in contravention of Google’s guidelines and will get you penalised if caught. And they are very good at catching people who disregard their guidelines.

Better to do it naturally. Let your site grow naturally over time and let people link to you because you have something worth linking to. Or you can go a little more quickly and procure links from authority sites by using guile. I don’t mean cheat, exactly, but there’s no reason you can’t contact the owner of a high ranking website and draw their attention to a relevant article you just published on your site and ask them if they would be kind enough to link to it. In all honesty, ot won’t work in most cases, but in some it will as long as the site you are approaching is in the same niche as yours and they don’t view you as competition. Y

ou could even offer to write an article for publishing on their site free of charge, and put your own anchored link in there. There are several authority blogs around that also accept articles from third parties. You may have to write one and submit it for free to begin with as a show of goodwill, but if you could get to write a relevant post with your anchored link in it once a month, you’ll be doing your site no end of good. And that is one form of SEO that is perfectly legit and win-win for all concerned. The blog owner gets free content, you get am authority link!

Ok, that’s enough on the subject of SEO for this post, which seems to have run on for longer than I had initially anticipated. Oh well, at least it means I have had the chance to add plenty of my own keywords to it as part of this site’s own on page SEO is concerned. While its only a small part of search engine optimization, every little helps in the advancement up the SERPs ladder as I help people to learn how to make money online!

Terry Didcott
How To Make Money Online SEO Hints