When you first get started learning about internet marketing, it is quite easy to spend all your time reading blogs and dreaming about how nice it would be to have passive income rolling in from your vast stable of sites.
However, none of this will ever happen if you don't get started. To help put an end to procrastination, I am going to give you a list of things you can start doing today to jump start your internet marketing career. Nothing fancy, just a few things you need to do to get started. I will explain more how to use these tools later, but just getting these accounts will help eliminate barriers to getting started.
Get a Blogger account and/or a web hosting account
Obviously, you'll need some sort of web host to build web sites. Blogger is a free option that does allow you to monetize your sites, but there are limitations. You will never be able to sell a site, and you won't be able to add as many customizations. Still, if you want to get started making money online, a Blogger account is a must, even if you don't use it for your primary sites.
If you want to host your own sites, get a basic shared hosting account to get yourself going. Host Gator offers a good services at a good price (and yet I do get a commission if you order through that link but that statement is still true). With this account (or one like it), you will be able to make Wordpress powered niche sites quickly and easily.
Get Article Site Accounts
To make money with your sites, you must get links. One of the best ways of doing this is to write articles on other sites that link back to yours. The following sites are good places to go to get started with article marketing.
Apply for an AdSense Account
You're not going to want to put AdSense on any of your brand new sites, but having the account ready to go will help you feel like you're getting somewhere. When you do have the traffic, you will be all ready to go. Apply for an account here. Note that you will need a website. If you have a decent looking site that would be relevant, list that to get accept, otherwise you will need to hold off until you have something to list.
Get A Google Analytics Account
One key aspect of these business is analyzing your traffic to learn which keywords you need to be targeting. Sign up here.
Get the SEO for Firefox Plugin
The SEO for Firefox plugin helps you analyze your competition. It will display a number of ranking factors for sites you visit, the most important of which is number of incoming links. This will become one of your most used tools once you start getting the hang of things.
So, this list should help you get all the basics in place for starting to make money online. I realize I haven't instructed you on the use of any of these items. That will come later, though I would be sure to read around each of the sites listed above so that you know how to use of each of them in a basic sense. Now, stop reading and start applying for some accounts!
Monday, March 30, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Best Make Money Online Blogs: Required Reading
If you've been introduced to this whole making money with niche sites thing through my blog, you might be interested in learning that there some awesome resources out there that have everything you need to know. The blogs I am about to share are where I learned most of what I'll be sharing with you here, so it seems only fair to them all with you.
First up is Grizzly. Grizzly is a master of SEO (search engine optimization) who generously shares his tips with the public on several blogs. His flagship blog is How To Make Money Online For Beginners. This blog proves that you can make great money using only the free Blogger platform. It is an interesting blog because not only does he tell you how to make money on the blog, he actually does make money with the blog. This is actually a surprisingly rare combination. You might be struck with how ugly and ungainly the site looks, but that is all part of the plan. Start reading around and you'll learn, guaranteed.
Just recently, Grizzly started up a second blog about making money with AdSense. This is a great blog to start with as the post are a lot more progressive in nature. Start at the beginning and read forward and you'll get a great picture of how you can start earning with AdSense.
The great thing about Grizzly is he is never trying to sell you anything, which makes his advice much more reliable in my opinion. In fact, I think he makes enough money that he doesn't really care if you read him or not. I would reccomend doing so however. For those of you on Twitter, you can follow Grizzly at http://twitter.com/GrizzlyBrears
The other blog I'd like to share with you comes from Courtney Tuttle. His Keyword Academy site helps you learn to make money online. Court is trying to sell you something, in the form of his own internet marketing courses, but his free info is still amazing. Sign up for his e-mail list, and you will get a great PDF on keyword research that I can't reccomend highly enough. His list e-mails tend to be worth reading too, so being subscribed is worthwhile in my opinion. Sign up for his list, read though his blog, and you'll learn what you need.
There are many other sites that tell you how to make niche sites, but in my mind the two listed above are the places to start for sure. Be sure to check them out and pay attention to what they have to say.
First up is Grizzly. Grizzly is a master of SEO (search engine optimization) who generously shares his tips with the public on several blogs. His flagship blog is How To Make Money Online For Beginners. This blog proves that you can make great money using only the free Blogger platform. It is an interesting blog because not only does he tell you how to make money on the blog, he actually does make money with the blog. This is actually a surprisingly rare combination. You might be struck with how ugly and ungainly the site looks, but that is all part of the plan. Start reading around and you'll learn, guaranteed.
Just recently, Grizzly started up a second blog about making money with AdSense. This is a great blog to start with as the post are a lot more progressive in nature. Start at the beginning and read forward and you'll get a great picture of how you can start earning with AdSense.
The great thing about Grizzly is he is never trying to sell you anything, which makes his advice much more reliable in my opinion. In fact, I think he makes enough money that he doesn't really care if you read him or not. I would reccomend doing so however. For those of you on Twitter, you can follow Grizzly at http://twitter.com/GrizzlyBrears
The other blog I'd like to share with you comes from Courtney Tuttle. His Keyword Academy site helps you learn to make money online. Court is trying to sell you something, in the form of his own internet marketing courses, but his free info is still amazing. Sign up for his e-mail list, and you will get a great PDF on keyword research that I can't reccomend highly enough. His list e-mails tend to be worth reading too, so being subscribed is worthwhile in my opinion. Sign up for his list, read though his blog, and you'll learn what you need.
There are many other sites that tell you how to make niche sites, but in my mind the two listed above are the places to start for sure. Be sure to check them out and pay attention to what they have to say.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Building Niche Sites: My Basic Blueprint
Ok, in this post I will give a rough outline of the basic process of how I earn money with niche sites. This will be a proverbial 30,000 foot flyby that will cover the basics of earning passive income.
My basic formula can be broken down like so:
Finding Keywords
Finding the right keywords is probably the hardest thing about getting started in making money with niche sites. You need a keyword that people are searching for, that advertisers are willing to pay for, and that you can reasonably expect to rank in the search engines for. You might ask how it is possible to know all this ahead of time, and the answer is that you really can't. However, there are some tools out there to help you out.
The biggest of these tools is the Google AdWords keyword tool. I use this all the time for researching potential sites. I plan on covering its use more later one, but basically you enter in keywords and it will tell you how many people are searching for certain terms, and how much advertisers are willing to pay to have their ads appear in the sponsored search results.
Once I've used the Google tool to get some potential niche site ideas, I try to see which ones have reasonable competition, and this is the real key. See, it isn't really that hard to find a popular term that pays a boatload from advertising (i.e., credit cards). However, there is no way you are ever going to rank number #1 in Google for the term "credit cards." There is just too much competition.
So, instead you find terms that hit a sweet spot in terms of monthly search traffic, earning potential, and lack of competition. I like terms that get more than 6000 visits a month, have a listed cost per click in Google of over $1, and has a number #1 ranking site in Google that I think I can beat.
There is a lot more to all of this, but that will come in other posts later on. For now, understand that selecting the right keywords is essential to making a good niche site.
Building A Site
This is the easy part if you're already web savvy. If you aren't, the learning curve isn't that steep. Get yourself some web hosting, learn how to install Wordpress, and you're off. Alternatively, you can can use the free Blogger platform (which this site runs on) to host your sites. Both can work well, and I use both myself.
Then, start writing content. I write about 5-10 posts focused on whatever my main topic is. For post titles, I use sub-keywords of my main topic. For example, if I have a site about hardwood flooring, I would have posts called things like "Installing Hardwood Flooring" or "How to Choose A Wood Floor." This makes your site complete, and the title keywords will help your site to rank well for your chosen term. Once I've got the basic site fleshed out, it's on to getting links!
Building Links for Traffic
In order to get traffic to your site, you have to rank well in the search engines. To rank well in search engines, you need anchored links to your site. The "anchor" is the text in the link itself. For example, for the link earn money with AdSense, the anchor text is simply "earning money with AdSense." Google and other search engines rank your page based on the number of links from relevant sites with relevant anchor texts. The more relevant anchored links you get, the higher you rank.
The trick, of course, is getting these links. One popular link building approach you have likely noticed is spamming, or "black hat" link building. This can be effective if done well, but that's not what I do and that's not what I am going to tell you do to.
Instead, I employ a more "white hat" approach. This involves writing and submitting articles, and connecting with others to trade links between relevant sites, among other methods. This activity takes up by far the bulk of my time, and I will be discussing it much more in future posts. For now, though, understand that building these links is what takes up most of my time and makes me my money.
Making Money
Once you're getting ranked in the search engines and are getting some decent traffic, it's time to start monetizing so you can get paid for all of your hard work. There are many, many ways of earning money from your traffic, but I'm going to talk about the ones I use most for now.
My biggest earner at the moment is the Ebay Partner Network. Basically, the way that this works is that I build a site around a set of certain product based keywords. I make a site with information and articles about the product, then I use a piece of software called phpBay Pro to insert eBay product feeds into my site. These feeds are updated in real time, giving browsers on my site up to the minute pricing information on whatever item they happen to be looking at. If the person clicks on my link, and buys an item through eBay, I receive a commission from eBay from the sellers fees. This ranges anywhere from a few sents to over $100, depending on the item.
My other income generator is the Google AdSense program. These are the little auto-generated contextual ads that you see all over the internet. This is a very misunderstood form of income generation for many reasons. Many of you are probably thinking to yourself that you never click on those ads, so how do you make money from them? Maybe some of you have tried putting these ads on your site, and received only pennies a click.
The secret to making money with adsense, as it turns out, is to make sure you are getting targeted traffic that is looking for some sort of solution. The best way to explain this is with an example. Say I have a site where I offer free wallpaper images. I throw up some AdSense ads, and start getting traffic. However, very few people are clicking, and when they do, I get only a few pennies. This is because people who come to a wallpaper site aren't looking for a solution any sort of problem, and there are no advertisers willing to pay very much per click to gain their attention. This is the problem most people face with AdSense: non-target, non-buying traffic.
Let's say now that I have a site about hardwood flooring installation contractors. If I receive traffic to my site, I have people who have a problem to solve that they are willing to pay for. My site will contain useful articles about hardwood flooring and contractors, which the visitors may or may not read. However, my site will also contains AdSense text link ads advertising hardwood flooring contractors in their local area (Google serves these local ads up automatically). Since these visitors are looking for just such a thing, they will likely click. Conversely, since the local contractors are looking for clients, they are willing to pay a high cost per click to have their ad show on highly relevant sites (such as mine). This way, I got a lot of click worth a lot of money per click. This is the best way to make money with AdSense, but it requires focus and exeperience to learn what works and what does not.
Repeat
I have many sites. Some of them make money, some of them are failures, but the key to success in this field is experimentation. You have to go out there and start trying stuff in order to learn what works for you and what doesn't. Persistance, more than anything else, is key to success in this business. Fortunately, the cost of failure in this busines is super low compared to any other business I can possibly think of, so there is no reason not to experiment as much as possible.
In future posts, I will give you many more specifics on how to accomplish all of these steps, but for now, you can see my basic blueprint. For my next post, I will show you a bunch of resources that you can read to get a jump start on things, from much better bloggers (and online money businessmen) than myself. Stay tuned.
My basic formula can be broken down like so:
- Identify keywords that:
- Get search traffic
- Have advertisers willing to pay for said traffic
- Have a reasonably level of competition (i.e., can I rank #1 in Google for it?)
- Build a site based around this keyword topic
- Build links to this site to get traffic
- Add monetization once I have decent traffic
- Repeat
Finding Keywords
Finding the right keywords is probably the hardest thing about getting started in making money with niche sites. You need a keyword that people are searching for, that advertisers are willing to pay for, and that you can reasonably expect to rank in the search engines for. You might ask how it is possible to know all this ahead of time, and the answer is that you really can't. However, there are some tools out there to help you out.
The biggest of these tools is the Google AdWords keyword tool. I use this all the time for researching potential sites. I plan on covering its use more later one, but basically you enter in keywords and it will tell you how many people are searching for certain terms, and how much advertisers are willing to pay to have their ads appear in the sponsored search results.
Once I've used the Google tool to get some potential niche site ideas, I try to see which ones have reasonable competition, and this is the real key. See, it isn't really that hard to find a popular term that pays a boatload from advertising (i.e., credit cards). However, there is no way you are ever going to rank number #1 in Google for the term "credit cards." There is just too much competition.
So, instead you find terms that hit a sweet spot in terms of monthly search traffic, earning potential, and lack of competition. I like terms that get more than 6000 visits a month, have a listed cost per click in Google of over $1, and has a number #1 ranking site in Google that I think I can beat.
There is a lot more to all of this, but that will come in other posts later on. For now, understand that selecting the right keywords is essential to making a good niche site.
Building A Site
This is the easy part if you're already web savvy. If you aren't, the learning curve isn't that steep. Get yourself some web hosting, learn how to install Wordpress, and you're off. Alternatively, you can can use the free Blogger platform (which this site runs on) to host your sites. Both can work well, and I use both myself.
Then, start writing content. I write about 5-10 posts focused on whatever my main topic is. For post titles, I use sub-keywords of my main topic. For example, if I have a site about hardwood flooring, I would have posts called things like "Installing Hardwood Flooring" or "How to Choose A Wood Floor." This makes your site complete, and the title keywords will help your site to rank well for your chosen term. Once I've got the basic site fleshed out, it's on to getting links!
Building Links for Traffic
In order to get traffic to your site, you have to rank well in the search engines. To rank well in search engines, you need anchored links to your site. The "anchor" is the text in the link itself. For example, for the link earn money with AdSense, the anchor text is simply "earning money with AdSense." Google and other search engines rank your page based on the number of links from relevant sites with relevant anchor texts. The more relevant anchored links you get, the higher you rank.
The trick, of course, is getting these links. One popular link building approach you have likely noticed is spamming, or "black hat" link building. This can be effective if done well, but that's not what I do and that's not what I am going to tell you do to.
Instead, I employ a more "white hat" approach. This involves writing and submitting articles, and connecting with others to trade links between relevant sites, among other methods. This activity takes up by far the bulk of my time, and I will be discussing it much more in future posts. For now, though, understand that building these links is what takes up most of my time and makes me my money.
Making Money
Once you're getting ranked in the search engines and are getting some decent traffic, it's time to start monetizing so you can get paid for all of your hard work. There are many, many ways of earning money from your traffic, but I'm going to talk about the ones I use most for now.
My biggest earner at the moment is the Ebay Partner Network. Basically, the way that this works is that I build a site around a set of certain product based keywords. I make a site with information and articles about the product, then I use a piece of software called phpBay Pro to insert eBay product feeds into my site. These feeds are updated in real time, giving browsers on my site up to the minute pricing information on whatever item they happen to be looking at. If the person clicks on my link, and buys an item through eBay, I receive a commission from eBay from the sellers fees. This ranges anywhere from a few sents to over $100, depending on the item.
My other income generator is the Google AdSense program. These are the little auto-generated contextual ads that you see all over the internet. This is a very misunderstood form of income generation for many reasons. Many of you are probably thinking to yourself that you never click on those ads, so how do you make money from them? Maybe some of you have tried putting these ads on your site, and received only pennies a click.
The secret to making money with adsense, as it turns out, is to make sure you are getting targeted traffic that is looking for some sort of solution. The best way to explain this is with an example. Say I have a site where I offer free wallpaper images. I throw up some AdSense ads, and start getting traffic. However, very few people are clicking, and when they do, I get only a few pennies. This is because people who come to a wallpaper site aren't looking for a solution any sort of problem, and there are no advertisers willing to pay very much per click to gain their attention. This is the problem most people face with AdSense: non-target, non-buying traffic.
Let's say now that I have a site about hardwood flooring installation contractors. If I receive traffic to my site, I have people who have a problem to solve that they are willing to pay for. My site will contain useful articles about hardwood flooring and contractors, which the visitors may or may not read. However, my site will also contains AdSense text link ads advertising hardwood flooring contractors in their local area (Google serves these local ads up automatically). Since these visitors are looking for just such a thing, they will likely click. Conversely, since the local contractors are looking for clients, they are willing to pay a high cost per click to have their ad show on highly relevant sites (such as mine). This way, I got a lot of click worth a lot of money per click. This is the best way to make money with AdSense, but it requires focus and exeperience to learn what works and what does not.
Repeat
I have many sites. Some of them make money, some of them are failures, but the key to success in this field is experimentation. You have to go out there and start trying stuff in order to learn what works for you and what doesn't. Persistance, more than anything else, is key to success in this business. Fortunately, the cost of failure in this busines is super low compared to any other business I can possibly think of, so there is no reason not to experiment as much as possible.
In future posts, I will give you many more specifics on how to accomplish all of these steps, but for now, you can see my basic blueprint. For my next post, I will show you a bunch of resources that you can read to get a jump start on things, from much better bloggers (and online money businessmen) than myself. Stay tuned.
Why I Built This Blog
There are vast portions of the internet dedicated to making money online. The majority of them are absolute trash, but some of the others do a better job explaining what to do and how to do it better than I ever could. So, why in the world am I wasting my limited time starting yet another blog devoted to internet marketing?
Well, the truth of the matter is that since making money on the internet became more than a simple hobby to me and more of a serious pursuit, I've started to tell people about it. Most people tend to react with suspicion. It's really hard to tell somebody that you "earn money with websites" without them suspecting that you are a spammer, a pornographer, or something worse. Even when I explain the basic model (building niche focused websites, promoting them, and then monetizing them through various means), most people are still skeptical.
For those people, I hope I can refer them to this blog so that they can see what I'm really up to. They can see what I spend my time on and how I'm earning my extra money. They can see that it is reasonable and ethical, and actually quite a bit of fun. At the very least they will learn that there is no need to resort to porn and spam to make money online.
There is another reaction I get when I explain what I do, and that is that people want to learn more. They have thought about creating a side income through some means before, and what I say intrigues them. For those people, I hope to be able to point them to this site and have them read about what I do. They will be able to learn what I know, and hopefully start up for themselves. I can interact with people through the comments, and share my ever growing but still limited knowledge of the online marketing field with them.
Finally, there is a great community of people out there doing good work in the make money online field, and this blog will serve as a way of networking within that community. I owe a great debt to other bloggers out there for teaching me what I know, and I see this blog as a way of connecting with them as well as helping to give back.
In the upcoming weeks, I hope to fill this blog with a basic blueprint of how I go about earning money with my network of websites. I'll try to make things as linear as possible, but due to the complex nature of the topic this won't be quite possible. Still, though, I hope you'll read along and find out how I make money online. Thanks for reading.
Well, the truth of the matter is that since making money on the internet became more than a simple hobby to me and more of a serious pursuit, I've started to tell people about it. Most people tend to react with suspicion. It's really hard to tell somebody that you "earn money with websites" without them suspecting that you are a spammer, a pornographer, or something worse. Even when I explain the basic model (building niche focused websites, promoting them, and then monetizing them through various means), most people are still skeptical.
For those people, I hope I can refer them to this blog so that they can see what I'm really up to. They can see what I spend my time on and how I'm earning my extra money. They can see that it is reasonable and ethical, and actually quite a bit of fun. At the very least they will learn that there is no need to resort to porn and spam to make money online.
There is another reaction I get when I explain what I do, and that is that people want to learn more. They have thought about creating a side income through some means before, and what I say intrigues them. For those people, I hope to be able to point them to this site and have them read about what I do. They will be able to learn what I know, and hopefully start up for themselves. I can interact with people through the comments, and share my ever growing but still limited knowledge of the online marketing field with them.
Finally, there is a great community of people out there doing good work in the make money online field, and this blog will serve as a way of networking within that community. I owe a great debt to other bloggers out there for teaching me what I know, and I see this blog as a way of connecting with them as well as helping to give back.
In the upcoming weeks, I hope to fill this blog with a basic blueprint of how I go about earning money with my network of websites. I'll try to make things as linear as possible, but due to the complex nature of the topic this won't be quite possible. Still, though, I hope you'll read along and find out how I make money online. Thanks for reading.
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