As you know [ probably don't, but anyway... ], I'm here to make money to do whatever the heck I want without having to worry about budget or stuff like that. So what exactly do I need to do around here to get paid?
Having been reading the make money sites and others related like affiliate marketing, etc. There's a common understanding of what it takes to get paid online: you need visitors that click on ads or buy products. And where do those visitors come from? Google, of course!
Which is probably not you, if it were, you'd probably be already at checkout typing your card's numbers to get that need-to-have new product. Sure there will be some posts that will be specifically crafted to cater to that audience [ you'll probably spot them from a mile away ], because, guess what, I need to make some money off this thing to go around doing stunts and buying plush junk.
So that's what we'll do first, focus on getting to google to get those visitors coming here.
And what exactly do I need to be doing around here to get listed on google? well, links pointing here, of course!
This is where it has, so far, gotten hard to be earning some semi-decent money around here. I have a site on electronics [ which you can find on google if you really must see it ] that gets, on its best days, a little over a buck a day, that close to 4 cent an hour on a 24 hour day, or 12.5c on a regular 8 hour workday. That's not going to cover my party costs anytime soon, and its boring as hell to update, because even though I love electronics, it's a pain in the butt to find an interesting topic, get a circuit drawn and then write a semi coherent description so those not well versed in the arcane art of electronics can understand it.
I do have some ranking for that site, and some googlers find their way to my nifty little electronics pages, but they aren't enough to make a decent income from. Back on topic of links, that other site has gotten a few links pointing to it, some from articles I wrote myself, some from links I asked other webmasters from, and one or two unrequested but welcome links from people who wrote an article, and considered my site a good reference for what they were writing about.
Getting links to site is a whole industry in itself, spam as taken over and webmasters are increasingly wary of linking out to other sites, thinking that it may hurt their own rankings or be penalized if the linked site gets bad publicity. Also, there's a tendency to ask for a link in return for a link, the so called reciprocal linking, which search engines don't particularly like because it has been abused beyond insanity by spammers and webmasters alike.
Now, besides asking for links, there's another technique called link baiting, where you supposedly write an article or blog post that generates enough attention that other bloggers and webmaster will link to it just to be part of the "I'm in the loop of current events in my part of the web" crowd. But there's one particular problem with this tactic: you need to have the right contacts or a "critical mass" of people who know about your site already for this to catch on, being second usually won't cut it.
So now you get the picture of what's involved in getting links, you have to pretty much hammer your way in for every link you want for your site, which will help you get listed and ranked in google, which will help you get visitors, visitors that click or buy, action which will give you money to do the things that you want to do... Is this getting complicated already?, well, it gets worse...
After you have many links pointing to your site and visitors are flocking, clicking and commenting and who knows what else, the money just isn't rolling like you expected, what happened?
There just happens to be a thing called relevancy and intent to buy. You see, when you are in a site about tropical fish, you might be interesting in buying a fish tank, or tank water heater, or maybe even some pretty looking water plants for you aquatic garden, that's relevancy. But if you are in a site about the breeding habits of tropical fish in their own habitat, you might not be that interested in a fish tank, because, well, tropical fish belong in the tropics where they can breed, right?, there goes the intent to buy.
Selling products or displaying advertisements is the same game, if visits don't convert into buyers, advertisers go away, and for you to make money to do the things that you want to do, that's just not right...
I wrote earlier about how visitors from google are more likely to click an ad or buy something you are promoting, but why exactly is that? That happens because people looking for something on google are most likely looking to solve a problem or looking for info on something that will help them satisfy a need. People just following links from the sites they visit most often are not as likely to buy, as they are in some kind of "tv mode", just like when they watch tv, people read those sites when they're not looking for anything in particular, and most likely expect some kind of entertainment or news, not something to solve.
And to make matters worse, not every google visitor is the right kind of visitor. Depending on what they input in the search box, they are either looking for info or looking for how to get some benefit, and to make money from them, you need to establish what keywords [ words typed in the search box that are key to what the visitor is looking for ] people type when intending to buy.
And how does google know what sites are relevant to the keywords typed? from the links, of course!. When you get [ or make ] a link, the highlighted text that becomes the link, more than likely will be the name of your site or the title of an article, or in the worst case, a generic "click here" or "read more", that text is called anchor text, and that is what google uses as to determine which keywords are related to the page linked.
Remember earlier how I told you about how hard it is to get links?, well, this makes it just one bit harder, as webmasters don't like to be told what you'd like the link text to be, so they either just include the name of the site or just the url, which doesn't help all that much.
Wait a second, I'm reading all this on how to make money, rank in google, get links and establishing relevancy and intent to buy, but didn't you said your goal is to do what you want to do and not waste your time doing boring things? all this seems pretty darn boring to me... We'll, it just so happens that I love the business world, promotion and marketing, as an application to human psychology, which is one of my hobbies, so this isn't boring at all; frustrating and challenging perhaps, but not boring by any chance.
I love getting people to do what I want them to do, but not in a manipulative way like you see in politics or teenage high school drama, I like to persuade subtly, in a way that people don't really know they are being persuaded. It is very interesting to me to get to know how the human mind works, what makes us do and what makes us stop, what drives us to excel and what slumps us into failure, and what better way that to get people to act by buying, clicking or linking, which will give me money to party and travel and buy plush things to give to a lovely girl?
Back on main topic, what do I need to do to get paid around here? in short: visitors with buy intent, that come from google, for which to get listed there you need links that include all the relevant keywords that people type in google when they are looking to solve something, to the point of buying to get that done. Easy as that.
Now I'm going commercial on this thing, because, hey, I need to make some money right?, and you'd want to make some too.
But Zak, I don't have a website where I can send some visitors that buy or get links pointing to, what do I do? Well, get a website up, of course!
There are some ways to go about this, one is to get a free hosted, ready to rumble blog. My personal favorite [ you'll know why in a sec ] is to get a free blogger blog. Why? because its free, google owns it so it won't go down on you in the near future, and because its just oh so cool to make money with a crappy free blog :]
The other way around is to get a hosting account, install wordpress [ or having it installed ] and post away. Wordpress is the go-to platform for many of the "hot shot" internet marketers out there, because you can put a million plug-ins in it to automate and optimize the heck out of it, and its also free, but you need to do some installing, with the added benefit of controlling every thing the blog does [ unlike blogger, where you can add functionality, but not modify the underlying works of it ].
Get your hosting at Dreamhost. Why? because it will pay me every month you stay signed with them, and it should pay for your expenses if you refer a few people yourself. They do good hosting, you shouldn't have a problem with them.
Now that you have your hosting and giving me money at the same time, and considering you'll want to be on the move for as long as possible while still being able to build your site, you should really get a laptop [ notebook, netbook, or one of the similar products with the basic same functionailty ] with good battery life so you don't have to be plugged in all the time. Here are some from Amazon, and yes, you make me money in the process as well, but wouldn't you prefer to give me a tip on your purchase or give it all to the big corporation eh?, well then, go buy yourself a laptop by clicking the amazon ad.
So now you are on the move, with your site set up, ready to start getting links.
Now you have to start thinking what keywords to target, remember I wrote about them earlier? Well, there just oh so happens to be a coaching program that will help you know what kind of keywords to target for your links, and also on how and where to get the links from. The program is The keyword academy, and you sign for $1 for the first month [ about $30 for the next months ].
Now you have your web business on the go with professional coaching available, anything else?
Well, maybe, but this can also potentially make you some money as well. The thing is Linkworth, where you buy and sell text links [ the kind that help you get better rankings in google ]. You sign up as both advertiser and partner, so you can sell and buy the links, every time you renew I get a cut of that, and so will you on people you refer that buy the links. This thing doesn't work very well on blogger [works, but with limited options ], so you should consider getting the hosting account and wordpress, one or two links alone should cover your hosting expenses fairly quickly.
Following the promotion topic, you might want to look into email marketing with aweber. They allow you to build a list of prospects from your own visitors, so you can market to them [ which have already shown interest in what you have to offer, by signing up to your mailing list ]. They also have a referral program, that pays you [ or me ] some 30% of what your referral pays as long as they remain clients of aweber.
Now another moneymaker for those overspent souls that bought just about everything I'm promoting [ which you really should get ], there's Hubpages [ HubPages New User Signup ]. With hubpages you write an article and make money from product sales and advertising revenue [ need to sign up for adsense, amazon and ebay to use all of their revenue modules ], you can also make money by getting others to sign up [ like I am ] and by referring visitors to hubs [ the name they give to articles ], where you make money by getting a share of the impressions generated. Others that work very similar to hubpages are Bukisa [ they have revenue share depending on visits as well as clicks ] and Xomba [ they also have a social bookmark service ].
So now get to IT! now you have all the tools the pro's use to get paid, get them so I can get paid too!
All those programs where I get paid when you sign up/buy are called affiliate programs, they give you a tracking code and when someone buys after clicking your link you get a cut of that. But for easier starting, there's Adsense.
Adsense analyzes the content of your site to serve text ads that are relevant to what you wrote. It's easy to implement because the adsense system pretty much does all the work on selecting the ads. The trick here, is that you need to tweak the position, color and general layout of your ads, in order for visitors to be clicking on them.
There's not much science to it, its just a matter of writing about topics that get ads that when people come from google, they'll find them interesting enough to click on. You need to make your posts in a way that you leave the visitor wanting more info on whatever it is that you are writing about, and just when they are about to leave, an adsense block conveniently placed gives them the perfect way out. But like I said before, the most important thing here is to start ranking for the keywords that people with intent to buy will use to find info that you provide, and adsense takes care of relevance [ as long as you write relevant info, auto generated content just doesn't cut it ].
Also, don't expect to make a million bucks from just one topic, more than likely it won't happen. You either need many sites on different topics, or a site covering many topics. There's advantages and disadvantages for both site building strategies.
When building many sites, you need to start with the right hosting package. For this to be effective, you need to host them on different hosts, different accounts and even different countries. Why is that? because it will allow you to leverage your own links in the future. If you host all your sites with the same host, in the same server, all the links pointing to it will be next to useless for a new site in the same IP block. If you do things right from the beginning, the more links your sites get, the more power your network [ or farm as its sometimes called ] gets, because you can reuse the linking power for other sites you start, without having to start from scratch asking for links or distributing articles.
Another advantage of micro sites is that you can literally build hundreds of them, and although individually they may get a few bucks a month, having many allows you to have a consistent and enjoyable amount of money.
The other strategy, building a single, multiple topic site has the main advantage that it can rank easily for long tail keywords [ that is, keyword phrases with 3 or more words in them ], because of the overall link authority the site will already have. Sometimes called authority sites, the bad thing is that gaining focus can be a little difficult, and "regular reader" will be annoyed at the sudden changes in topics, or lack of consistency in the areas you cover.
When building a multiple topic site, adsense can have a harder time selecting the ads to display on your site, since it not only uses the content on that page, but also the content across your whole site, and also uses user preferences from visits to other sites [ although that can help you get better ads ], so you can't be 100% certain of what comes up in the ad blocks.
Authority sites, a one topic site, need time and energy to rank, because instead of using multiple micro sites [ also called niche sites ] that target the less competitive long tail keywords, you build an authority site to rank for the most competitive keywords, those that can get you visitors in the thousands. You need many links, and also links from sites that have many links from authority sites themselves.
I personally like a hybrid approach: build a website with many topics, but pour all the info for a site in just one page [ kinda like this one page ]. This allows the adsense bot to have a lot of content to digest, which gives me better targeted ads, also I have affiliates to choose from that are related to the program.
Now for more on affiliate programs, if you want your make money endeavors to be just like the regular 9 to 5, then by all means hand pick a product and promote it. If you are like me, then you'll need a few programs that will keep updating the best selling products and track your referrals for a long time, and pay you for repeat or multiple purchases. Amazon works great for this, you make a post, make a widget with the types of products you'd like displayed, and amazon takes care of the rest, serving the bestsellers for the categories chosen so you don't have to worry about it.
Also make sure that you select programs that will keep on paying you for as long as the referred visitor is a client, like my deal with dreamhost. It will be better because the income from one month is on top of what you had from last, so it could keep on building until you have a great income that keeps pouring in even if you stop promoting it.
Adsense works kinda the same way, because if you did your link building correctly, even if you stop promoting your site, visitors can still find their way using google and you keep on making money from people who click your ads.
There you go on affiliate programs, keep building your site and find your style, posting exactly like others are doing is just like imitator singers, if you want to listen to a famous singer you buy tickets for their concert, not for the imitator around the corner.
- Zakmata
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Notes on Link building
Hello again, Zakmata here, reporting now on the well known and controversial field of link building.
First off, a little info for the newcomers. What's link building? It's all the work a webmaster/blogger/Internet marketer does to get links from other websites. It not only includes getting a link, but also all the necessary research that comes before, and also the follow ups to ensure links stay in place, and that they are not being cloaked, hidden, or otherwise not count.
What goes into link building? First let's start with motivation. We who build backlinks do it to get better rankings in search engines for terms related to what we have written, a product we sell or anything else we want to push to online consumers [ see my make money guide for beginners for how to do this ].
The first thing to determine is what keywords do we want to rank for, because those keywords and their variations are what we are going to use as anchor text for the links we build. Before we do this, you need to choose a link building strategy: Heads or Tails.
Heads is going after the big keywords, those that get thousands of visitors per day. Note that this strategy could potentially be a long term thing, but the potential money to be gained could be an order of magnitude higher than what you get from other methods.
Tails is going after the so called long tail keywords, those that get anywhere from 1 to 100 visitors each. For this to work, you need to go volume on how many different keywords you are going to target, because not one keyword will get you enough visitors to sustain you economically for your efforts. One advantage over going for the big keywords is that the long tail is not very competitive, if at all. Rankings should be easy to get, and can be monetized faster.
Now on to selecting the keywords, for this you can use a number of keyword suggestion tools. There are many keyword suggestion or analysis tools around, but the estimates of traffic are mostly off, so they are only useful for determining if there are other keywords that get at least enough traffic to get an estimate on them. Also note that the keywords suggested on those tools are most likely just a combination of the keywords entered, and may not be a real reflection of what visitors type in the search boxes.
Now that you have a list of keywords you'd like to rank for, its time to start the linking process.
Once again, there are two main ways to go about it: Networking/Social media, Article marketing, Reciprocal linking, and finally, link farming.
With networking and social media, you basically use services such as twitter, facebook, digg and others related, where webmasters and bloggers go to hang out and start building connections/friends, so at one point in the near future you can request links from them, either directly or indirectly, by pointing them to "linkbait" articles you wrote.
There are benefits and downsides for this. Good things are that links you get from posts or articles written by your "friends", will probably be the best optimized links you could hope to get, that is, they will use your desired keywords in a relevant link in the middle of a keyword rich and related post in one of their blogs or sites that have quite a few links themselves. Also, most webmasters/bloggers have multiple sites, which is always a good thing to have links from different sites.
The not so good, is that to get links from most webmasters/bloggers, you need to have spend quite a while to develop the trust for them to even consider linking to you without requiring a link back, or you'll need to be quite a personality [ read famous ] webmaster/blogger to get some kind of attention. Also, linkbaiting articles are mostly time dependent, that is, you may get links/traffic to those pages, but only as long as the event that generated it still hold valid or has some appeal to the audience of webmasters/bloggers.
Then there's article marketing. The way this works is that you submit an article, how-to, new piece or other text based "product" to article directories, news sites and press release sites, with a link to you website as credit for being the author of the piece.
The links you get as credit from the articles are the second best yo can get [ second only to those from the social media crowd discussed above ], in terms of anchor text and authority, since the best article directories have many links pointing to them, so any link you get has some inherent link power, albeit small, flowing from them.
One of the things people like about using article marketing and press releases is that they get heavily syndicated, meaning that many other sites and scrapers [ sites that get their content directly from others, without their permission ] will pick the article up and provide a link back, because most times they don't even bother [ or are not allowed ] to remove the author credit links.
The downside to this is that there are not enough article directories to get a diverse link profile, and search engines could easily spot your site as getting SEO only links [ that is, links from articles, directories and exchanges ], in case you get any sort of complaint, they can be quick to take you down for "questionable linking practices".
Next in line is reciprocal link building. This could be good, only if done in moderation. Reciprocal linking is asking other webmasters/bloggers to link to you, providing a link from your own website to theirs.
As I said before, this can be beneficial only if done correctly and in moderation. For this to work, only a fraction of your backlinks should be reciprocal or search engines [ read google ] will start discounting or not even counting the link value they could provide, because at some point in time, reciprocal links have been abused by spammers trying to get to the top of results pages.
To ensure benefit from reciprocals, you need to make sure that the site you'll link to doesn't have links to spam or unrelated sites, because it could end up hurting you. Also, make sure to only get reciprocal links from related sites, if you get [ and give ] links from unrelated sites, search engines can mark them as link spam and hurt your rankings.
One last route, and one that deserves quite a bit more attention than it currently gets is link farming. Historically, link farming has had a negative connotation, because it referred to pages and websites created for the sole purpose of sending links out, most often to unrelated and spammy sites.
The kind of link farming I'm going to be writing about here is quite a different game. The thing that separates old fashioned link farms from modern ones is spam, or more accurately, lack thereof. Modern link farms operate on content people will benefit from reading [ that is, relevant ], as opposed from links to any and all sites with spam to fill the content that old fashioned farms used and use today. search engines have come a long way, and they are able to detect those kinds of link schemes, and of those that pass or avoid the algorithmic filters, all it takes is a few spam complaints and whole networks of upwards of thousands of sites will get removed from the indexes.
The game is a combination of all of the above discussed link building strategies, put together in a way that will allow you to control a large network of sites, and their links and content, for use in ranking new pages, or sites that are making you money with ads or product sales.
The basic premise is to build a site, get it indexed in search engines, get some link power to them, point a link to one of your money sites [ or maybe even a gateway "link launder" site ], rinse and repeat. There's far more to it than this simplified explanation, but it serves to show you the basic structure of a modern link farm.
What we do is to layer up the links we get, first layer point their links to one or more of your money sites, second points to the first, so on and so forth. This is to avoid getting a bunch of links from the same sites [ or more specifically, from the same IP block ], by re routing links to a third, different and often trusted site that already points to your site.
This technique [ called link laundering ] is also used a lot by spammers, to get millions of low quality links, and layer by layer, get them to become two or three good quality links. Not to be confused with link spamming like this, what a good quality link farm [ that is far more effective for its use of quality links in the first place ] is doing is to allow you control of the pages that link to you, because you have created [ or bought ] the original content used in those, instead of relying on other webmasters/bloggers for your link equity, as its called.
The sites that are used for publishing content are most of the time free hosts or article directories [ examples are blogspot blogs and hubpages hubs, click link to sign up ], that have the benefit of not being as penalized in case you get too greedy and start spamming links and search engines detect it, putting your money sites one vital step away from such questionable practices.
Other, less useful ways to build links that have been spammed to death are web directories, blog comments and trackbacks.
As you can see, link building is no free ride; you need to get your research and work right from the beginning. Getting links and spamming are the difference between high rankings and a permanent ban from search engines.
- Zakmata
First off, a little info for the newcomers. What's link building? It's all the work a webmaster/blogger/Internet marketer does to get links from other websites. It not only includes getting a link, but also all the necessary research that comes before, and also the follow ups to ensure links stay in place, and that they are not being cloaked, hidden, or otherwise not count.
What goes into link building? First let's start with motivation. We who build backlinks do it to get better rankings in search engines for terms related to what we have written, a product we sell or anything else we want to push to online consumers [ see my make money guide for beginners for how to do this ].
The first thing to determine is what keywords do we want to rank for, because those keywords and their variations are what we are going to use as anchor text for the links we build. Before we do this, you need to choose a link building strategy: Heads or Tails.
Heads is going after the big keywords, those that get thousands of visitors per day. Note that this strategy could potentially be a long term thing, but the potential money to be gained could be an order of magnitude higher than what you get from other methods.
Tails is going after the so called long tail keywords, those that get anywhere from 1 to 100 visitors each. For this to work, you need to go volume on how many different keywords you are going to target, because not one keyword will get you enough visitors to sustain you economically for your efforts. One advantage over going for the big keywords is that the long tail is not very competitive, if at all. Rankings should be easy to get, and can be monetized faster.
Now on to selecting the keywords, for this you can use a number of keyword suggestion tools. There are many keyword suggestion or analysis tools around, but the estimates of traffic are mostly off, so they are only useful for determining if there are other keywords that get at least enough traffic to get an estimate on them. Also note that the keywords suggested on those tools are most likely just a combination of the keywords entered, and may not be a real reflection of what visitors type in the search boxes.
Now that you have a list of keywords you'd like to rank for, its time to start the linking process.
Once again, there are two main ways to go about it: Networking/Social media, Article marketing, Reciprocal linking, and finally, link farming.
With networking and social media, you basically use services such as twitter, facebook, digg and others related, where webmasters and bloggers go to hang out and start building connections/friends, so at one point in the near future you can request links from them, either directly or indirectly, by pointing them to "linkbait" articles you wrote.
There are benefits and downsides for this. Good things are that links you get from posts or articles written by your "friends", will probably be the best optimized links you could hope to get, that is, they will use your desired keywords in a relevant link in the middle of a keyword rich and related post in one of their blogs or sites that have quite a few links themselves. Also, most webmasters/bloggers have multiple sites, which is always a good thing to have links from different sites.
The not so good, is that to get links from most webmasters/bloggers, you need to have spend quite a while to develop the trust for them to even consider linking to you without requiring a link back, or you'll need to be quite a personality [ read famous ] webmaster/blogger to get some kind of attention. Also, linkbaiting articles are mostly time dependent, that is, you may get links/traffic to those pages, but only as long as the event that generated it still hold valid or has some appeal to the audience of webmasters/bloggers.
Then there's article marketing. The way this works is that you submit an article, how-to, new piece or other text based "product" to article directories, news sites and press release sites, with a link to you website as credit for being the author of the piece.
The links you get as credit from the articles are the second best yo can get [ second only to those from the social media crowd discussed above ], in terms of anchor text and authority, since the best article directories have many links pointing to them, so any link you get has some inherent link power, albeit small, flowing from them.
One of the things people like about using article marketing and press releases is that they get heavily syndicated, meaning that many other sites and scrapers [ sites that get their content directly from others, without their permission ] will pick the article up and provide a link back, because most times they don't even bother [ or are not allowed ] to remove the author credit links.
The downside to this is that there are not enough article directories to get a diverse link profile, and search engines could easily spot your site as getting SEO only links [ that is, links from articles, directories and exchanges ], in case you get any sort of complaint, they can be quick to take you down for "questionable linking practices".
Next in line is reciprocal link building. This could be good, only if done in moderation. Reciprocal linking is asking other webmasters/bloggers to link to you, providing a link from your own website to theirs.
As I said before, this can be beneficial only if done correctly and in moderation. For this to work, only a fraction of your backlinks should be reciprocal or search engines [ read google ] will start discounting or not even counting the link value they could provide, because at some point in time, reciprocal links have been abused by spammers trying to get to the top of results pages.
To ensure benefit from reciprocals, you need to make sure that the site you'll link to doesn't have links to spam or unrelated sites, because it could end up hurting you. Also, make sure to only get reciprocal links from related sites, if you get [ and give ] links from unrelated sites, search engines can mark them as link spam and hurt your rankings.
One last route, and one that deserves quite a bit more attention than it currently gets is link farming. Historically, link farming has had a negative connotation, because it referred to pages and websites created for the sole purpose of sending links out, most often to unrelated and spammy sites.
The kind of link farming I'm going to be writing about here is quite a different game. The thing that separates old fashioned link farms from modern ones is spam, or more accurately, lack thereof. Modern link farms operate on content people will benefit from reading [ that is, relevant ], as opposed from links to any and all sites with spam to fill the content that old fashioned farms used and use today. search engines have come a long way, and they are able to detect those kinds of link schemes, and of those that pass or avoid the algorithmic filters, all it takes is a few spam complaints and whole networks of upwards of thousands of sites will get removed from the indexes.
The game is a combination of all of the above discussed link building strategies, put together in a way that will allow you to control a large network of sites, and their links and content, for use in ranking new pages, or sites that are making you money with ads or product sales.
The basic premise is to build a site, get it indexed in search engines, get some link power to them, point a link to one of your money sites [ or maybe even a gateway "link launder" site ], rinse and repeat. There's far more to it than this simplified explanation, but it serves to show you the basic structure of a modern link farm.
What we do is to layer up the links we get, first layer point their links to one or more of your money sites, second points to the first, so on and so forth. This is to avoid getting a bunch of links from the same sites [ or more specifically, from the same IP block ], by re routing links to a third, different and often trusted site that already points to your site.
This technique [ called link laundering ] is also used a lot by spammers, to get millions of low quality links, and layer by layer, get them to become two or three good quality links. Not to be confused with link spamming like this, what a good quality link farm [ that is far more effective for its use of quality links in the first place ] is doing is to allow you control of the pages that link to you, because you have created [ or bought ] the original content used in those, instead of relying on other webmasters/bloggers for your link equity, as its called.
The sites that are used for publishing content are most of the time free hosts or article directories [ examples are blogspot blogs and hubpages hubs, click link to sign up ], that have the benefit of not being as penalized in case you get too greedy and start spamming links and search engines detect it, putting your money sites one vital step away from such questionable practices.
Other, less useful ways to build links that have been spammed to death are web directories, blog comments and trackbacks.
As you can see, link building is no free ride; you need to get your research and work right from the beginning. Getting links and spamming are the difference between high rankings and a permanent ban from search engines.
- Zakmata
Monday, December 14, 2009
How much traffic for real adsense income?
This question gets asked a lot, and the answer is: in general, quite a lot.
But why is this? because adsense is kinda designed for that. Advertisers need to get the most prospects to their site at the lowest cost possible, so as to make the most profit. Most topics people write about are either low paying, which happens because there's not much buying going on around that, or are topics with good profit potential but because of that, are heavily competed terms.
Let's take a look at both those scenarios:
First, the worst case scenario: low paying.
Quick numbers that are generally accepted to be achievable and a little on the conservative side. You know that income = clicks * cost per click. Also clicks = pageviews * click thru rate. By setting a target income goal we can find just how many pageviews are needed to get to our target income.
pageviews = income / [ click thru rate * cost per click ]
click thru rate = 1%, cost per click = $0.15, target income = $100
we have: pageviews = 100 / [ 0.01 * 0.15 ] = 66,667 pageviews
You see, 60k pageviews is quite a lot of them. That is because we considered a low CTR (click thru rate) and low CPC (cost per click), the $100 income goal was set because that's the minimum amount to get paid with adsense. Now what if you wanted that amount everyday? multiply by 30 and you see where i'm going...
In order to succeed with this kind of sites, is to have a lot of them, because since they are low competition, they are easy to rank for, and since there aren't many people searching for these low competition terms, you need to have a lot of them. Many of the successful Internet Marketers go down this road.
Now for high paying terms:
We set the same target income, but now with a generally accepted, achievable high paying click of $1, and also a very achievable and real 2% CTR.
pageviews = 100 / [ 0.02 * 1 ] = 5000, which is just over 7% of the required pageviews for low paying terms.
Now why isn't everyone making real income from these terms? because there are way too many people going after them, even unscrupulous marketers that use spam techniques to achieve high rankings in search, making it impossible for the average blogger to profit from them.
Most people will tell you that the gold mine everyone is looking for is a high paying, high traffic and low competition term or niche, because that makes it easy to rank, easy to profit and volume means lots of money.
There you have it, both extremes of the game we like to call make money online, now it's up to you to set your income goal and start building that traffic. Also remember, that not all traffic is created equal, some audiences are less likely to click on ads than others, you can find more on this on How to really make money from adsense, where I explain this in more detail.
Good luck, and see you around.
But why is this? because adsense is kinda designed for that. Advertisers need to get the most prospects to their site at the lowest cost possible, so as to make the most profit. Most topics people write about are either low paying, which happens because there's not much buying going on around that, or are topics with good profit potential but because of that, are heavily competed terms.
Let's take a look at both those scenarios:
First, the worst case scenario: low paying.
Quick numbers that are generally accepted to be achievable and a little on the conservative side. You know that income = clicks * cost per click. Also clicks = pageviews * click thru rate. By setting a target income goal we can find just how many pageviews are needed to get to our target income.
pageviews = income / [ click thru rate * cost per click ]
click thru rate = 1%, cost per click = $0.15, target income = $100
we have: pageviews = 100 / [ 0.01 * 0.15 ] = 66,667 pageviews
You see, 60k pageviews is quite a lot of them. That is because we considered a low CTR (click thru rate) and low CPC (cost per click), the $100 income goal was set because that's the minimum amount to get paid with adsense. Now what if you wanted that amount everyday? multiply by 30 and you see where i'm going...
In order to succeed with this kind of sites, is to have a lot of them, because since they are low competition, they are easy to rank for, and since there aren't many people searching for these low competition terms, you need to have a lot of them. Many of the successful Internet Marketers go down this road.
Now for high paying terms:
We set the same target income, but now with a generally accepted, achievable high paying click of $1, and also a very achievable and real 2% CTR.
pageviews = 100 / [ 0.02 * 1 ] = 5000, which is just over 7% of the required pageviews for low paying terms.
Now why isn't everyone making real income from these terms? because there are way too many people going after them, even unscrupulous marketers that use spam techniques to achieve high rankings in search, making it impossible for the average blogger to profit from them.
Most people will tell you that the gold mine everyone is looking for is a high paying, high traffic and low competition term or niche, because that makes it easy to rank, easy to profit and volume means lots of money.
There you have it, both extremes of the game we like to call make money online, now it's up to you to set your income goal and start building that traffic. Also remember, that not all traffic is created equal, some audiences are less likely to click on ads than others, you can find more on this on How to really make money from adsense, where I explain this in more detail.
Good luck, and see you around.
Persuasion techniques to use for link building
When asking for links to millions of webmasters, writing emails and leaving comments hoping to get noticed, and being rejected 999 out of 1000 times, you can get a little frustrated.
In order to be better at this, you need to learn some techniques that make people (and webmasters/bloggers alike) be more open to accepting your requests. A very simple example is to give first without expecting to receive. That means, link regularly, and let them know about it Without asking them to link back.
According to psychology, giving creates many reactions in the other person: they feel compelled to maintain the balance by giving back, they trust you more as you haven't asked for benefit back from them, and also they kinda like you more, and thus are more likely to take your offer on a link exchange in the future.
Also, if you can convince them that your site is link worthy, they will link back. To do this, there's no need to show them reports or anything, just an endorsement in comments or a testimonials page from others can help you a great deal. This plays on the herd mentality of people, that makes us more prone to doing the things others are already doing.
Freebies also help to get action from others, like when you offer a free ebook or just point to a good resource, one that the other blogger will also find useful, can help create trust, trust you can benefit from in the near future.
Learning about these psychological principles is very helpful not only in understanding what makes others want to link to you, but also to help you in many other areas of your life, such as negotiation, convincing your kids to do chores, etc..
Good luck, and see you around.
In order to be better at this, you need to learn some techniques that make people (and webmasters/bloggers alike) be more open to accepting your requests. A very simple example is to give first without expecting to receive. That means, link regularly, and let them know about it Without asking them to link back.
According to psychology, giving creates many reactions in the other person: they feel compelled to maintain the balance by giving back, they trust you more as you haven't asked for benefit back from them, and also they kinda like you more, and thus are more likely to take your offer on a link exchange in the future.
Also, if you can convince them that your site is link worthy, they will link back. To do this, there's no need to show them reports or anything, just an endorsement in comments or a testimonials page from others can help you a great deal. This plays on the herd mentality of people, that makes us more prone to doing the things others are already doing.
Freebies also help to get action from others, like when you offer a free ebook or just point to a good resource, one that the other blogger will also find useful, can help create trust, trust you can benefit from in the near future.
Learning about these psychological principles is very helpful not only in understanding what makes others want to link to you, but also to help you in many other areas of your life, such as negotiation, convincing your kids to do chores, etc..
Good luck, and see you around.
How to write when your mind is blank
Having a case of writer's block is one of the most annoying things to have as a blogger, it stops you from creating new content that can help you build your income, readership and links. So what to do when you can't write? write about exactly that, just like I am now.
Why does that help? because it gets it out of your head, since when you can't write, that is the only thing in your mind. Exploring your thought when writing about your writer's block can help you identify exactly what you want to really write about.
For example, I'm thinking about writing some stuff on persuasion and some interesting psychological principles people use to get you to do stuff, but haven't been able to because I couldn't get started thanks to a block I had about how to start the article. The thing is, I really didn't know what would become of this very post, I just knew I needed to start writing in order to get my ideas flowing, and that's exactly what happened.
There are many causes for a blank mind, which most likely isn't blank at all, just blank about the topic you feel you need to post about. Top reasons include a worry (at home, at work or at blog), wear from writing about the same topic for quite some time, and also because you think too much about what you want your article to become.
A technique that has, and is working for me, is to just get an overall idea of what you want your article to be about. At this point don't worry about what points you are going to include, if you really have interest in the topic, your flow of ideas will take the article in the appropriate direction.
You see, I have just conquered my writer's block, and given you a great advice on how to get to writing. Now I'm off to writing that persuasion article I was talking about, now that my ideas are flowing, it should be well on its way to be a great article.
Good luck, see you around.
Why does that help? because it gets it out of your head, since when you can't write, that is the only thing in your mind. Exploring your thought when writing about your writer's block can help you identify exactly what you want to really write about.
For example, I'm thinking about writing some stuff on persuasion and some interesting psychological principles people use to get you to do stuff, but haven't been able to because I couldn't get started thanks to a block I had about how to start the article. The thing is, I really didn't know what would become of this very post, I just knew I needed to start writing in order to get my ideas flowing, and that's exactly what happened.
There are many causes for a blank mind, which most likely isn't blank at all, just blank about the topic you feel you need to post about. Top reasons include a worry (at home, at work or at blog), wear from writing about the same topic for quite some time, and also because you think too much about what you want your article to become.
A technique that has, and is working for me, is to just get an overall idea of what you want your article to be about. At this point don't worry about what points you are going to include, if you really have interest in the topic, your flow of ideas will take the article in the appropriate direction.
You see, I have just conquered my writer's block, and given you a great advice on how to get to writing. Now I'm off to writing that persuasion article I was talking about, now that my ideas are flowing, it should be well on its way to be a great article.
Good luck, see you around.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
How to really make money from adsense
So you've signed up for adsense, got the ads up and running, got some traffic but money just isn't pouring in as promised all around the web.
Everyone who has set out to make some money online has gone through that, even after learning from the best of the best, we still had trouble on our first blogs. Mostly what happens is that you are targeting the wrong audience.
But my content is relevant, the ads seem just fine, I got a good amount of traffic from related keywords, how is my audience the wrong one?
There are many types of audiences online, just as there are marketing segments or demographics offline. It's some basic marketing thing, to separate the possible buyers from the rest of the world, because advertising to them is a waste of time, since they are not likely to buy; they may occasionally or impulsively buy from time to time, but you can't count on that for serious business.
The same thing happens with blogs and sites in general. If the information you provide is for people that aren't likely to click your ads, then you don't have a chance at moneymaking. Some known examples are webmasters/bloggers, freebie seekers, regular internet users (see ad and banner blindness for more info), and social media users, who are people just browsing for interesting or weird stuff, only to hit back for more weirdness online.
That doesn't mean you can't profit from those audiences, in fact the so called A-list of bloggers does just that for a living: they offer a freebie to webmasters, who are very likely to be regular users that use social media sites. Seems like a tough market eh?, for adsense it is, because there's no way they are clicking ads, since they know that you are making money from it, and they don't want anyone making money from them.
The A-list uses the approach of selling and endorsing, they are basically the online version of Mr. T. selling you the awesome new grilled cheese maker that makes a million different dishes in seconds.
So back on the adsense topic, you are most likely to get some revenue from people coming from search engines, mostly google. They are probably looking for info on how to solve a problem now, and are more likely to click ads that offer just the kind of thing they are looking for, that it just oh so happens to be the best paying adsense block on your site.
That is your target audience, even if it's really not. Confused yet?, here's an example to help you get this concept a little better.
There's this big shot make money guy that goes by the nickname of grizzly brears. He has a make money for beginners blog that has all the affiliate programs and guru ebooks you can possibly imagine, that he himself says are a bunch of overpriced pieces of junk people sell to make money telling others how to make money by selling ebooks.
So did he get his audience wrong? people who want to make money online, his regular readers, are the kind of people that buy from the A-list, and yet he writes that that kind of stuff won't make you money, but here's the catch: He knows that since most of his visitors come from the search engines, looking for a quick fix of make money tips and tricks, he can advertise that kind of products, while advising his regular followers to do some real work and learn from example, his own and others not trying to sell them on stuff, but to actually teach them how to do things right.
He ultimately removed adsense from that blog, because his regular readers clicking the ads and not buying actually caused his account to be smart priced, yet he makes a lot of money from google searches, and he actually does want to help his regular readers, so he set up his blog in order to better serve both purposes.
So you see, you don't have to give up your regular readers to get money from adsense, you just have to diversify your sources of traffic, in order to better convert them to clickers.
There's also another thing to know when making money from adsense: there is only so many links you can get yourself, so you are going to need the link love of other webmasters, and you have to cater to them in some way to get in their good graces so they'll link to you. To do this, what I like to do is to just remove adsense when I know webmasters are coming from that way, which most often than not, referral and direct visits are from people looking for you, not your ads.
There are many easy scripts available to block adsense from certain posts, complete areas of your site, or by entrance path, so as to only serve adsense to google searchers that are likely to click, while giving the webmasters and bloggers an ad free layout: just the kind of clutter free experience they like and have come to expect from possible link partners.
Now there's also keywords and the ads triggered on your pages. As you know, adsense matched the ads served to the keywords it finds on your pages, but there are times when just one word can trigger ads that have no relation whatsoever to the content on your site, thus making people see irrelevant ads that they don't want to click on.
That same mechanism you can use to your advantage, by carefully controlling the keywords you use and on what topics to elaborate on, using the keywords that give the best ads: best paying and more relevant.
There's no magic formula to determine the kind of keywords that give you better mileage, you have to figure that out for yourself by analyzing the keywords you have used on your best performing pages, so as to use them on other, related posts, elaborating on those keywords while still keeping the overall focus of the page on the topic you want to write about, not the one that pays better. Its all about the balance.
Now that's a lot of adsense advice, but also remember to do your seo or people won't be able to find your site on google, from where the most click happy visitors come from, and also remember to work on economies of scale: the more posts you have, the more likely visitors will find your site, just don't trade quantity for quality, that's just spam.
See you around.
Everyone who has set out to make some money online has gone through that, even after learning from the best of the best, we still had trouble on our first blogs. Mostly what happens is that you are targeting the wrong audience.
But my content is relevant, the ads seem just fine, I got a good amount of traffic from related keywords, how is my audience the wrong one?
There are many types of audiences online, just as there are marketing segments or demographics offline. It's some basic marketing thing, to separate the possible buyers from the rest of the world, because advertising to them is a waste of time, since they are not likely to buy; they may occasionally or impulsively buy from time to time, but you can't count on that for serious business.
The same thing happens with blogs and sites in general. If the information you provide is for people that aren't likely to click your ads, then you don't have a chance at moneymaking. Some known examples are webmasters/bloggers, freebie seekers, regular internet users (see ad and banner blindness for more info), and social media users, who are people just browsing for interesting or weird stuff, only to hit back for more weirdness online.
That doesn't mean you can't profit from those audiences, in fact the so called A-list of bloggers does just that for a living: they offer a freebie to webmasters, who are very likely to be regular users that use social media sites. Seems like a tough market eh?, for adsense it is, because there's no way they are clicking ads, since they know that you are making money from it, and they don't want anyone making money from them.
The A-list uses the approach of selling and endorsing, they are basically the online version of Mr. T. selling you the awesome new grilled cheese maker that makes a million different dishes in seconds.
So back on the adsense topic, you are most likely to get some revenue from people coming from search engines, mostly google. They are probably looking for info on how to solve a problem now, and are more likely to click ads that offer just the kind of thing they are looking for, that it just oh so happens to be the best paying adsense block on your site.
That is your target audience, even if it's really not. Confused yet?, here's an example to help you get this concept a little better.
There's this big shot make money guy that goes by the nickname of grizzly brears. He has a make money for beginners blog that has all the affiliate programs and guru ebooks you can possibly imagine, that he himself says are a bunch of overpriced pieces of junk people sell to make money telling others how to make money by selling ebooks.
So did he get his audience wrong? people who want to make money online, his regular readers, are the kind of people that buy from the A-list, and yet he writes that that kind of stuff won't make you money, but here's the catch: He knows that since most of his visitors come from the search engines, looking for a quick fix of make money tips and tricks, he can advertise that kind of products, while advising his regular followers to do some real work and learn from example, his own and others not trying to sell them on stuff, but to actually teach them how to do things right.
He ultimately removed adsense from that blog, because his regular readers clicking the ads and not buying actually caused his account to be smart priced, yet he makes a lot of money from google searches, and he actually does want to help his regular readers, so he set up his blog in order to better serve both purposes.
So you see, you don't have to give up your regular readers to get money from adsense, you just have to diversify your sources of traffic, in order to better convert them to clickers.
There's also another thing to know when making money from adsense: there is only so many links you can get yourself, so you are going to need the link love of other webmasters, and you have to cater to them in some way to get in their good graces so they'll link to you. To do this, what I like to do is to just remove adsense when I know webmasters are coming from that way, which most often than not, referral and direct visits are from people looking for you, not your ads.
There are many easy scripts available to block adsense from certain posts, complete areas of your site, or by entrance path, so as to only serve adsense to google searchers that are likely to click, while giving the webmasters and bloggers an ad free layout: just the kind of clutter free experience they like and have come to expect from possible link partners.
Now there's also keywords and the ads triggered on your pages. As you know, adsense matched the ads served to the keywords it finds on your pages, but there are times when just one word can trigger ads that have no relation whatsoever to the content on your site, thus making people see irrelevant ads that they don't want to click on.
That same mechanism you can use to your advantage, by carefully controlling the keywords you use and on what topics to elaborate on, using the keywords that give the best ads: best paying and more relevant.
There's no magic formula to determine the kind of keywords that give you better mileage, you have to figure that out for yourself by analyzing the keywords you have used on your best performing pages, so as to use them on other, related posts, elaborating on those keywords while still keeping the overall focus of the page on the topic you want to write about, not the one that pays better. Its all about the balance.
Now that's a lot of adsense advice, but also remember to do your seo or people won't be able to find your site on google, from where the most click happy visitors come from, and also remember to work on economies of scale: the more posts you have, the more likely visitors will find your site, just don't trade quantity for quality, that's just spam.
See you around.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)