Ideas To Make Money Online

Happy Winter to Everyone!

As I sit here, I'm staying home from work due to yet another snow storm. At lest that gives me time to write about how to make money from home. This is a topic that I am endlessly interested in since I am hoping not just to make extra money, but to completely earn a living from it.

If you've read any of my other posts, you may know that I'm a Griz follower. In my opinion, he's the master of MMO. Very basically, his strategy is to write long rambling posts that would naturally accumulate all manner of long tail keywords by the search engines (SEs), most notably Google. He advocates posts that reach into the thousands of words. Loooong.

The second part of his method is to get the best backlinks using proper anchor text that you can get. If you can't get good backlinks (meaning high Page Rank and from your niche), then focus on getting as many other backlinks as possible. Always with good anchor text.

This is also the method taught at The Keyword Academy. I'm a member and I encourage anyone that wants to make money blogging or any other online venture to join as well. They're good people.

In fact, there is a competing theory over there that indicates you should strictly focus on writing content for your own site. But the trick is to write about extremely long tail keywords with almost no competition. You will thus rank very quickly for these obscure keywords.

I'm thinking of experimenting with this second theory as I'm not a prolific writer and writing such long posts does not appeal to me AT ALL.

Cheers!

MJ

Niche Sites or Super Sites?

As my education continues, I find that my journey to earn a passive income from home is like walking on quick sand. The 'make money from home' terrain is constantly shifting under my feet and I'm changing strategies as the landscape dictates. What do I mean by all this?

For months (maybe years?) I've been reading that the way to excel in the search engines (SEs) was to create an obscure niche that would not have much competition. Utilizing this SEO technique would allow the SEs to find my website easier when someone typed in a long-tail keyword. The next step is to create more and more and more of these niche sites, making a few dollars on each one per month.

This may be a strategy that some people follow. It makes sense and has been working for plenty of people for years. The latest in SEO theory, though, is to create Supersites. You may ask "What the heck is that?" I would say "That's a good question". There is no hard and fast definition that I can tell, but it seems to be a focus on using the 'niche website' strategy and applying it more broadly.

Meaning that you should still go for the niche topic, but develop it more rather than slapping up 5 or 10 pages and moving on to the next niche. The reason this makes more sense (at least it makes more sense to me), is that you need to do an awful lot of article marketing to build up a given webpage. Once one of your webpages has been built up to have some Authority (Google calls this Page Rank - known as PR) with the SEs, why abandon it to start a whole new site?

Why not use that page to build up another page on the same site? Why not continue to broaden your niche topic and build up the Authority of every page of the site? High PR pages carry a lot of weight with the SEs and if you can use one high PR page to link to, and build up, another page on your site...good for you!

This path to so-called easy online money takes a lot of education and work. While there are plenty of internet business opportunities, none are without effort. Whether you go with the niche site or the supersite, the main thing you should do is - take action!

Until next time!

MJ

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.