Sunday 8 November 2009

Make Money with an Authority Site

Ok, there are plenty of ways to make money from the Internet as we've already seen, but easily the most satisfying way is to have that money rolling in without you needing to do much work to keep it rolling in. To do that, a lot of things need to happen first. So if you were thinking that maybe here is the holy grail of making money by doing very little, forget it. This takes a ton of work to set up and then once it is producing cash, you need to maintain it, although only lightly.

If you haven't already got one, or several, then start building an authority site.

If you don't know what an authority site is, then its pretty simple. Its a site that is an authority on its main topic. It will contain a lot of original content in the form of articles that describe the topic and offer help, advice, information and knowledge on that topic. Like I said, it takes a lot of work to build up one of these because you are going to have to do a lot of research to make sure you know exactly what you're writing about and what you write about is going to have to be original. It doesn't have to be totally perfect but it does have to be totally relevant.

Writing takes time so you could outsource if you can afford to do so, but be aware that the quality of what you will get back can vary enormously from barely readable garbage to almost perfect. Price is a reasonable indicator of quality, but not always and some element of luck comes into the equation too. Otherwise, get writing!

You will also have to build links to the authority site so that it will gain authority in the eyes of the search engines, for which Google is going to be your biggest challenge to convince what you have there is a site they will be proud to show off at the top of their index. Oh yes, you are going to work with Google and do what they want you to do in terms of quality and relevance to your targeted keywords. Building links cannot be rushed, so its a fairly long, drawn out process and you should not expect to see any kind of authority status being granted to your site for at least 6 to 9 months or longer, depending upon the competitiveness of the niche you are targeting.

Still with me? Good.

So how do you go about obtaining these links? You may well ask and I'll tell you how to do it in a legitimate fashion that shouldn't get you sandboxed along the way. Slow, steady and natural are the words that you need to become acquainted with here.

Slow, in that to begin with you are only going to get a few links per week and gradually build up the quantity over time so that it looks like you are getting them naturally.

Steady, in that you will not get those links in fits and starts with bursts of a lot of links here and there. This is unnatural and will raise flags.

Natural, in that it must look like you are being given links by other site owners because they like the content on your site and wish to link to it because it may help their readers gather additional information. That's how it works in the real world and that's how it has to look if you want to avoid looking like you are getting those links all by yourself!

Sound impossible?

It's not and its easier than you may think. Links that are contained in blog posts or articles that are correctly keyword anchored are your best links and if you can't get other site owners to link to you, then you can approach them and offer to write an article for them free of charge that they can post on their site. For that you will require a single anchored link back to your site within the body of the article and often they will agree to it as long as your article is well written and adds to their site in some way.

Also, you can write articles and publish them on EzineArticles.com again with a link (or two) to your site in the resource box. Similarly you can publish articles on other article directory sites, but be aware the link you get back will be of poor quality.

You can create Hub Pages and Infobarrel articles which can contain a link to your site. You can create a free blogger blog and a wordpress blog and blogs on other platforms and write in them, providing links to your site.

To keep those links looking natural, you should not use exactly the same keyword anchor in all the links. Do maybe a third of the anchors as your main keyword while the rest should be combinations of long tail keywords related to your main keyword. Also, some of those links should point not to your homepage, but to article pages within your site. The idea is to obtain as many varied keyword anchored links to many pages within your site as possible over time.

This will make the site grow slowly, steadily and naturally into that authority site you wish to own. Once you have gotten that authority, you will rank well in the search engine indexes and attract a lot of traffic for a whole host of related keywords. This traffic you can monetize either with Adsense or affiliate products, whatever works best for your niche.

And that, my friend, is how you make money with an authority site. Get more information from this site: http://makeblogmoney.com which deals with making money from a large site perspective.

Terry,
How To Make Money Online

Friday 13 March 2009

How to Make Money Online with Adsense

Welcome back to this interesting How To Make Money blog. It's still early days for this seat of knowledge, but I think the quality of the posts will far outweigh their scarcity at this point in time. After all, while its main purpose is to bring you factual information on how to make money online, this blog's supplementary purpose is to lend its support to my other money making sites in their endeavours to nibble at the heels of their competitors.

This time around I'm going to look at how to make money with Adsense. It means using what is known as SEO To Make Money Online and I'll make this as brief as possible without all the fluff that other marketers seem to love adding to their blogs.

Here are the basic steps you should take and if you follow them closely, you will make money online with Adsense.

1. Create your blog in a niche where there are advertisers and there is sufficient search traffic to make it viable. Age it naturally, by posting regularly and obtaining backlinks from relevant blogs and static websites, article marketing, forum posts and social bookmarking. Don't make the blog look fussy with tons of widgets and flashy banners. In fact, make it as plain as possible. Make sure your posts are highly relevant to your main keywords and include them in titles, subtitles and within the text of your posts. This is important. Your posts do not have to be grammatically perfect, or even all that interesting, just relevant. You are aiming to attract search traffic, not readers per se as readers are far less likely to click your ads, when you include them in your blog (which is not yet, by the way).

2. Add Statcounter to your blog so that you can track its traffic. This is important because you need to know where your visitors are coming from, when they start turning up.

3. Create more blogs centred around your keywords and similarly grow and age them. Their content only has to be relevant and keyword rich as they will become supporting sites to your main site. They will not carry ads (unless by luck they become ranked themselves) so just concentrate on getting them indexed and populated with sufficient content to pass a visual inspection for legitimacy. From these blogs, you will be able to create perfect keyword anchored links to your main blog which will help it outrank your competition. Begin creating these in-post links to your main site as soon as the blogs are indexed.

4. As your blog ages and its number of incoming links increases, it will be ranked in Google's search index and begin its climb up the index ladder towards the first page. This is where you need to be, as you will need a steady flow of targeted search traffic to your blog before you even consider adding Adsense ads. Forget about attracting social traffic to your blog. They do not convert into money as they do not click ads. Period. Worse, social traffic turning up at an adsense site can skew the Adsense stats and cause smart pricing, where 50c clicks get replaced with 1c clicks. You definitely do not want that to happen!

5. Once your blog has stabilized in a position in the SERPs where it is attracting an average of 20 or so uniques from there (and NOT social traffic), then its time to place Adsense onto your blog.

6. Use a popular ad block, such as the 250x250 placed above the post title. You can also ad a skyscraper in the sidebar further down the page. It is important that pretty much the first thing visitors see is your Adsense block, so your header should not be too prominent and your content should not be too interesting. After all, you want those visitors to see your ads and click them as soon as possible. If they start reading your posts and find them interesting, or worse, they answer the questions those visitors came looking for in the first place, they will exit your blog without clicking an ad. You need them to click those ads!

That's about how it works.

This sounds very harsh and certainly not in the spirit of blogging where you want to attract readers to read your stuff. It is not, in fact it is designed to create a situation in which your visitors do the exact opposite. They will come looking for answers and you must ensure they only find them in your ads, so they will click them to go elsewhere and make you money. This is how to make money with Adsense according to the teachings of Griz.

Terry,
How To Make Money

Saturday 14 February 2009

Make Money Online Basics

Welcome back to this cool blog that is here to help you learn how to make money online using a variety of methods but most of them all boiling down to one, which is essentially search engine optimization, or SEO.

Now, I'll touch upon SEO briefly here along with some other important aspects of knowing how to make money online as I'll expand upon them in future posts in this blog. So what is SEO exactly? Well, it comes in two parts, which is on-site SEO and off-site SEO and can be briefly explained as follows:

On-site SEO is the process of making your website or blog as search engine friendly as possible in o4rder to assist it to rank highly in the search engines index. This is also known as the SERPs, or Search Engine Results Pages and you'll see this acronym used quite frquently by Internet marketers.

Off-site SEO is the process of obtaining relevant links pointing to your website or blog, or its internal pages. This is the greater part of SEO and it is by the number and also by the relevance of inward bound links that the search engines will rank your website or blog.

All this SEO is necessary because you will need to attract traffic to your site in order to convert it into money. There have been countless blog posts on the subject as to why you should be working towards attracting search engine traffic and not social traffic if you want to make money online with your site. I won'¡t expand on that right here, but suffice it to say this is one piece of advice that you sghould heed.

Once you are attracting traffic to your site, you then need ways to convert that traffic into money on your pocket. You do that in a number of ways, and this process is commonly called monetization.

Monetization is made possible by one of several options available for your site. These include Adsense (Pay Per Click or PPC advertising) or similar, affiliate marketing (selling other people's products or services for commission), generating leads for commission, or selling your own products of services.

I'll also look at and expand upon each of these monetization options in a future post. What all this boils down to is the fact that you can actually successfully run your own home business using websites and blogs that you have created and populated yourself by working on them to attract the right kind of traffic and then converting that traffic into a viable income.

See you again soon!

Terry,
How To Make Money

Sunday 11 January 2009

Privacy Policy

What follows is a terribly boring privacy policy that unfortunately has to be present on any blog that intends to either at present or at some time in the future be monetised using adsense or other form of advertising. As Blogger does not provide the ability to create separate pages, this has to be placed inside a post purpose built for it. I'll follow this post with a real one very shortly...

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