Online Earnings - October2010

Just a quick note about my online earnings for October.

I had a quite a spike last month. Between the various online places, I came in just under $19. Pitiful, I know. But I was ridiculously happy about it. These small milestones are what keep us going in the Internet marketing game.

I continue to write pages for my site, and occasionally posting on Hubpages to help with the backlinks. The woman I hired a couple of months back from TKA is also adding links for me (at various social bookmarking sites, I believe).

Anyways, my main site is getting 20-30 visitors per day instead of 5-10 visitors. So I'm going in the right direction. Still small, but my chosen field is quite competitive. I'm not going after 'underwater basket weaving' like the smart folks do.

I recently read that on-site links are just as valuable as off-site links. This gives credibility to the idea of writing strictly for your own site and cross-linking like mad. This will create tons of internal links all pointing at each other.

The problem is that no one really knows the SEs algorithms so its all guesswork. I lean towards writing for my own site because it seems reasonable that if Google could filter out all the link-farms, link-directories (eZine, articlesbase, etc.), they would. But linking internally seems perfectly safe.

Who knows which is right. And tons of people are making tons of money using the article directories. I just don't want to follow that trend right now. If my current strategy fails, I may be forced into trying other means.

I can afford to pay for quite a lot of articles to be written and posted to various directories if need be. Anyways, just wanted to post the most recent online earnings... despite the embarassment of the small amount of money!

SEO Techniques (Part 2)

Yes, Dear Reader, I'm giving you even more SEO techniques to grow your blog or website to new heights. My generosity knows no bounds. Become your very own SEO expert by following a few simple tips.

• Start A Competing Site - If you manage to crack the top 10 with one of your pages (or more than one if you're really good), start another site targeting the same keywords and using the same SEO techniques you used to get your first page ranked. In this way you can dominate the entire top 10 spots for your keyword. Then start up 50 more sites doing the same thing. Own the keyword.
• Add A Sitemap - Having a sitemap can help the SEs find all the pages on your site. Of course they're supposed to craws every link anyways, but giving a little help to the bots can only help you, too.
• Use .Com - It seems to be true that .com domain names get more love from the SEs. The next best is .net. Going after .biz or .tv is much more difficult and often look like scam sites.
• Check Your Links - Broken links on your site piss off people as well as SEs. Make sure they all work.
• Navigation - Some SEs won't even crawl your site without some form of navigation, whether its at the top or on either side of your content. People need to be able to navigate around your site, too, by the way.
• Forget Flash - SEs can't see flash animation. Use it only for your human visitors.
• Label Images - SEs also can't see images. If you insist on using them (and lots of people do like them), use a descriptive label to tell the SE what the picture is of. This can also get you some extra search traffic when people are searching or images.
• Copy The Competition - Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and see what sites are linking to your competition. Then see if you can get those people to link to you, as well. Clearly they don't mind giving out links. Why not give some to you?
• Don't Stop - If you do manage to make to the top of the pile, you can't sit back with a margarita and relax. The SEs are constantly changing their algoritms, new competitors are emerging onto the scene, people are reading up on SEO techniques (like these here) and are moving up the ranks.
• Band Together - Join a group or forum of like-minded webmasters to keep up with the ever-changing search engine landscape. There will be plenty of theories about how the SEs are working. Some will be crazy. But you can see trends when many people share their experiences - both good and bad.

What I’ve Learned About How To Make Money Online

As you know, Dear Reader, my journey to make money online has had only limited success. I’m a year into the process, and have yet to make it big. To be honest though, for much of that time I was working on the wrong things. I didn’t know much about link building or article marketing and I’ve since learned that those are the main things that will make a site profitable.

The mantra "Content is King" was thrown around so much that I spent all my time writing articles that I thought were very useful. But if you don't land on page one of the search engines (SEs), then you may as well not be there. So, while "Content is King" may be true, you must still divide your time between creating new content and building back links.

What are back links?

Back links are when someone links back to your site. To the SEs, they are votes for your site. These votes say that you must have some good stuff, and that people are encouraging their readers to check out your site for more information about a given topic.

I've covered article marketing and blog commenting briefly in a previous post so I won't belabor the point. But how much time should you spend on these tasks? It seems around 80% - 90% of your time should be spent working on getting links. Writing articles and submitting to article directories, or surfing blogs on which to make intelligent, useful comments. Only 10% - 20% of your time is to be spent actually creating content for your own money making website.

Article Marketing Tips

So if you are submitting articles to directories, be sure to use your keyword as the link back to the page that you are targeting. See, the SEs like deep links. Deep links are links to pages of your site that are not your home page. If you only ever link to the homepage, the SEs will think that's a great home page and may rank it very highly, but the rest of your pages will never get ranked. And each page of your site should target a different keyword.

There is usually a place at the end of each article that talks about the author. This is called the bio box. This is where you will be allowed to put your links. So don't put " 'click here' to see my site." Then you'll be ranking for 'click here'. You'll want to write something like, "For more information about 'your keyword', please visit my site 'your site name'. I've made the text blue for where your links will actually be. 

Link Farms

These are sites that charge you a fee to purchase thousands and thousands of back links. I've only heard bad things about link farms. When a web page suddenly gets thousands of links all at once, it is very obvious to the SEs that it is artificial. I've heard the SEs will ban you if you use them. Don't use them.

Link Exchanges

A link exchange is when you and another website owner exchange links. While this is good, its not the most useful of links. The SEs like one-way links much better. One-way links are an indication that one site is voting for another site. Link exchanges look like what it is - two sites trying to promote each other.

Other Links

The best kind of links are also the kind that are woven into the content of an article. These are the most natural-looking to the SEs, and they also carry the most weight. That's why you see various links scattered throughout my posts. These links are pointing to other posts on this blog. It is a way to build links within my own site! Doing too much of this probably isn't a good thing, but sprinkling a few throughout an article is.

I'll continue to share the things I learn about how to make money online as I gain experience...

That's all for now.

Cheers

MJ

Money Making Website

In my quest to earn money from home, I've started more than one money making website. See, my goal is not just to make money online, but to build something that will provide a passive income for years to come. As part of this effort, I'm sharing my experiences with you, Dear Reader, and perhaps you can learn from my failures. Here are some things I've learned.

Blogs and/or websites are the way to go. Writing for HubPages or Squidoo works, but any money your articles produce (by readers clicking on the ads on your pages), you have to split. The tradeoff is that the Search Engines (SEs) know and like the big article sites. They get huge amounts of traffic. And some of that traffic will find your article and possibly click an ad, and thus, provide you with a few cents.

Starting your own website allows you to keep all the money from the ads...provided you can find some readers. Traffic is the name of the game. And trust me, just putting up a site doesn't mean diddly. No one will ever find your site unless you are on page one in the SE pages.

After writing 18 articles for eHow, I decided to go it alone. It is much, much, much harder to do, but I believe the future is brighter doing it this way. Only time will tell, I suppose. Here are a couple of tips I've picked up in my ongoing education.

Link Building

How do the SEs know which sites are the good ones? By the number of websites that link to them, of course! So if I've got amazing, original content and thousands of webmasters put a link on their site telling readers that I've got some really helpful information, then the SEs assume I must really know my stuff. So when someone searches for say, earn money, my site shows up at the top. Almost no one does it this way, though.


Comments

What most people do is to "artificially" inflate the amount of links to their site. One way is to go on other sites/blogs in the same niche as you (we'll cover niches later), and leave a useful and informed comment with a link back to your site. Spam comments just get deleted so don't run all over the internet leaving useless comments. These comments don't carry much weight with the SEs, but they do count.

Article Marketing

A second way is to write articles for various article directories. EzineArticles.com is the biggest, I think. GoArticles.com and ArticleBase are a couple others. I've used all three. The idea is to write an article (around 400 words usually), and submit it to them. They, in turn, allow you to place up to two links in your profile which appears at the bottom of each article.

These are two of the most common ways to promote a website and get backlinks at the same time.