Make Money Online in Canada

Make Money Blogging - The Importance of Blog Post Titles

Wait - this really isn't just about making money online in Canada. It's about post titles and they are the lifeblood of getting traffic for your long tail keywords. In the last post I mentioned the importance of using your main keyword in your Blog Title tag and preferably in your URL if you want to attract visitors from the search engines.

Whether you are trying to make money with your blog or just after social readers then the next step is to pay attention to your post titles. Most social bloggers use catchy titles in order to grab their readers interest. This, unfortunately, doesn't work too well with the search engines. If you are writing a post about a subject then you should really try and fit the topic's keyword into your post title - Google will index you for the term and with a few anchored backlinks containing the same term you can quickly find yourself ranking well for it. The thing is - you want a term people will be searching for and most searchers don't search for snappy titles.

For some reason Google doesn't rank this blog very well in several data centers - Google.ca (Canada) is one of them. I am attempting to change that and this post is step one. I could have used a reader friendly title like "Hey G, WTF! Why don't you rank me in Canada?" The problem with this is that it wouldn't get me in the right serp listings and it wouldn't reinforce my main keyword - "make money online". When possible always try and combine your post subject with your blog's overall theme. If you are trying to earn money from your blog this tip is mandatory. (Your post title determines the type of Adsense ads you will get among other things) If you are a social blogger then you can take this under advisement - I know many of you don't want to turn your readers off and prefer to use an eye catching title. I would suggest adopting more of your keywords in the post title if you can.

This isn't going to be a long post today as I'm short on time but for those of you who took my advice about changing your Blog title - well done - and now one more tip just to raise your awareness. Put the keyword first. Both Kathy and Turnip made the changes I suggested in my last post but, in both cases, they added the keyword after their regular Title. ie. Kathy's Humor for the Masses keyword follows her "The Junk Drawer" which shows up in the browser as "The Junk Drawer - Humor for the Masses". Turnip's Social Networking site now reads "Turnip of Power - Social Networking".

Both sites should read as follows; "Humor for the Masses - The Junk Drawer" and "Social Networking - Turnip of Power".

Why? Because the serp's list the most relevant sites first when users type in a keyword. Hence when someone types in Humor blogs then the sites are listed (usually) in order of who shows the keyword first in the Blog's title. Search for that term and you will see what I mean. Once all the sites with the term "Humor" used at the beginning of their blog title are listed then Google lists all the blogs that have "humor" used elsewhere in their title. Always use your main keyword first.

In the two example sites just mentioned both bloggers could increase search traffic by adding their keyword in each or most of their post titles. Kathy's latest post is called "Why did the chicken cross the road?" A better search engine title would be "Humor - Why did the chicken cross the road?" As I said this may not appeal to social bloggers as it may look a little goofy - it will bring in traffic from the search engines though.

In Turnip's case his/her (I don't really know - sorry Turnip) latest post is "Social Networking Contest Update", which is absolutely perfect as is.

Here is another tip that most Canadians know about. In Canada we spell humor as humour and color as colour and center as centre and various other words differently than in the States. I mention this because most spell checkers are based on the American spelling. If you have a site that uses keywords like Humor you can increase traffic by using the Canadian spelling in your post as a lot of Canadians refuse to spell it the American way when using search. The important thing is to only use the misspelling once in your post - G will ignore it as spam if you use a misspelling more than once. I mention this because you will find yourself ranked high in the serp's for the misspelled term and gain traffic from Canada and elsewhere. Btw - this applies to any misspelled keyword - only use a misspelled term once - never twice.

Okay that should get me started on my Canadian serp campaign as I cleverly fit Canada into this post enough to hopefully get G's attention. Hence the post title that 1) Uses my main keyword "make money online" and 2) combines it with my (short) long tail for this post - Canada. Now all that is left is to gather some backlinks that use "make money in Canada" in the anchor text.

That is really all you need to know about SEO folks.

A quick note - Google is busy doing another Google shuffle at the moment and the result is that you may find your blog ranked well one day and totally gone the next. They have been doing this periodically for most of the last year. I don't really know what they are up to other than it appears to be another house cleaning. Several readers have wrote me in a panic and I have told them to just relax as there is little that can be done. Several of my sites have disappeared for a day or two and then reappeared a few days later. Some with better rank than before and some farther back in the serp's. In the past this has gone on for a few weeks before things settled down so wait it out before making any abrupt changes to your site. You will likely find yourself back in the rankings as if nothing occurred provided your site isn't a spam blog or you have not been doing things that G frowns upon.

Cheers,

Griz

Oh Btw - just in case you are wondering how effective targeting keywords in your post titles are - this post didn't take long to start bringing in traffic...

Make Money Online Tutorial - Step 1

I am going to take you through a complete start to finish tutorial on how I make money online. As my regular readers know I took a month long hiatus recently and aside from doing a lot of much needed maintenance on my blog network I spent a fair amount of time surfing the MMO/Blogging niches including most of my friends and readers. One thing struck me time and again - most bloggers can whip up a fancy looking site and in most cases fill their blogs with good, original and even interesting posts. A lot of you have even come to grips with the basics of SEO and have produced Google friendly pages. The only thing that was almost universally missing from the hundreds of sites I visited was the Money Maker - meaning that most of you haven't focused on how you intend to earn money with your efforts. The exception are those who have built Adsense sites.

This tutorial will not focus on Adsense. I have covered this enough for everybody to know the basics by now. I want to look at affiliate marketing and more specifically at lead generation.

Because of the impulse to produce Social friendly blogs I think a good many of you get sidetracked and lose focus. I see countless blogs that have built up PR and alexa ranking and even some search traffic for their MMO blogs but fail miserably at converting visitors into buyers. This is because just about all of you built a social site first and then slapped up a bunch of 125's as an afterthought. How many times have you seen the same "Bidvertiser" ad?, "Text Link Ads" Ad? or "SEO Book" ad? Never mind the countless "Hosting" ads. The point is that your social traffic isn't buying (hell they have the same ads on their own site) and the search traffic that you get is not targeted to your ads and they too, have seen the same stuff on every site they visit.

To make money you really have to reverse the current thinking process. You don't build a site and then figure out what to sell. You figure out what to sell first and then build the site to achieve those sales and only those sales. You must concentrate on the product and resist the urge to slap up more than one type of monetization. If you are selling an affiliate product or generating leads for others then that is what the blog is for. Period.

How do you find a product that isn't saturated? This can be tough to do but I tend to only sell "new" products or programs or stuff that has nobody else selling it (more on this shortly). You find them by subscribing to all the IM gurus who flog crap weekly - once in a while they actually come up with something decent - not often though. This is the obvious answer but not the best. Quit looking for IM products to sell to other IMer's. Join all the hobby forums. Keep abreast of new products, books, calendars, how to's etc in all the other niches online that gather traffic from the mom and pop civilian crowd. Pay special attention to what the teenage crowd is currently raving about. Use the social networks for what they were meant to do - disseminate information. You are looking for anything new that will tweak the public's interest.

Once you find something interesting the next step is to find a method to monetize it. Most of you will see if the product uses affiliates. If it doesn't you pass and move on... that is a mistake. I look for things that don't have affiliates. I don't want anybody else selling what I'm selling. I prefer to make money selling leads rather than affiliate sales - there is less competition and you can set your price if you are good at it.

An example.

I found a company that sells batteries for 2 wheeled golf carts. This is like a pull cart but has a small electric motor attached so that the golfer can control the cart with a remote hand held controller. I first noticed these being used by a lot of the elderly golfers at a golf club I belong too. The batteries only last a few years and then need replacing. I asked a couple of gents where they got the replacements. Turns out a couple of local firms carried them but didn't produce them. I found a manufacturer and several dealers in several major centers and guess what - none of them knew the slightest thing about SEO although they all had websites. I quickly created several perfectly optimized blogs targeting each of the major local niches and not surprisingly ranked on top of the serp's in short order. This brought in a steady if not large stream of traffic.

Now, I had nothing to sell. Just information about the carts and batteries. So how do you make money doing this. Yes you could slap up Adsense but there wasn't much for advertisers. What I did was simple. I picked a dealer in each city and linked to the dealers site. I left the link up for a week. I tracked the traffic that I sent to the dealer - about 20-30 people a day. (You can use feedburner to give you exit stats if you are using a free Blogger blog - no cost, no hassle)

After I removed the link I sent an email to the dealer and basically told them who I was and what I did. I mentioned that I had sent them a couple of hundred visitors and politely asked if they would like me to continue to do so. They all thanked me and said yes. I asked if the increase in sales could justify a weekly fee for the traffic - I suggested $25 per week to the first dealer. They agreed. I suggested $35 to the second and eventually raised it to $50 a week with the final dealer. (They are all paying $50 per week now during peak season (summer) and $15 per week off season. Yes I had to explain PayPal to all of them but they caught on quickly. One dealer did try to lower the fee stating that his sales weren't high enough from my traffic. I responded that I would send the traffic to his competition and see how they converted. He said he thought he might just keep paying me the $50 a week. I said fine...

That is lead generation in a nutshell. No competition and if you find a product or service with a high end ticket price you can ask for a high end fee. One thing I have learned is that very few of us can generate traffic but everyone is trying to sell something. Give them the traffic to sell too and they will kiss your ass... and pay you. If they don't the competition usually does.

I am going to keep these posts short because I want those of you who are interested to work along with me as I go. I have picked a product to promote and will walk you through the whole process in the upcoming posts. I have picked Brad and Matt Callen's soon to be released Blinkweb software that is designed for total non-techies to use in order to build websites and blogs without needing any coding experience at all. Or at least that's what they claim. They have released a short intro video about Blinkweb but that's about it. I have no idea if it's a piece of crap or not but I am hoping that it isn't. Brad Callen has created two excellent programs in the past - SEO Elite and Keyword Elite. Matt Callen's HyperVRE was/is a piece of shit though so it's a toss up as to what we will get. In the event that it turns out to be a winner I want in early and have already set up the blog. You can see it here. Blinkweb.

I have not done anything to get it ranked yet - just a link from this blog in order to get the new site indexed. Google indexed it yesterday about an hour after I added the link on this site. That is why you should all have a flagship blog at your disposal. I will be getting links shortly in order to climb the serp's but thought I would wait for the rest of you and show you that process as well.

When I say "wait for the rest of you" I mean to say - get off your butts and find a product or business that sells something and go to Blogger and set up the site just like I have done. (yes you can spend money and use self hosting but remember I like to set up dozens of these types of sites knowing that most will fail - that's why Blogger is ideal - no cost)

Note: Our friend Frank at OpTempo has built a nice plain SEO friendly theme for wordpress that is similar to this Blogger Minima theme. (Actually it's way uglier) You can learn more here Boring Memo Wordpress Theme or Download the Boring Memo Wordpress Theme or view the Demo of Boring Memo Wordpress Theme

Don't worry if the product or business has an affiliate program. Just find something that can be sold either by you or a business that needs traffic. We aren't trying to make money at this stage. We are trying to find a traffic source so keep that in mind. Find something that you believe will entice a decent amount of traffic. Once we get traffic we will worry about how to convert it - there is almost aways some kind of buyer.

A couple of don'ts

- don't email me asking what I think of your product idea. Just pick one - if it fails big deal. Find another one. I have shown some traffic stats in the past for my affiliate sites - lots of them were duds and a few were winners. This is a numbers game. Just learn how to set up these types of sites properly and then start mass producing them for everything you can think of. There is no cost other than time if you use a free host. Affiliate marketing is a numbers game. Period.

- don't pick a highly competitive niche. It will take forever to get the traffic.

- don't pick a topic that is taboo. No sex, drugs or rock n roll... G frowns on those.

Do pay attention to local niches especially for leads. Who in your town is selling something and would pay you for the traffic?

Ok - if you have been paying attention to my SEO methods then you should be able to see what I'm targeting on the Blinkweb blog and then set up your blog and first post in the same manner.

If you don't have an authority blog to use in order to get indexed send me your URL and Keyword and I'll find a link for you.

Next post we will look at getting the backlinks necessary for top serp ranking.

Cheers,

Griz


On a side note;

One of the problems I have when doing these little example blogs is that I usually end up ranking better with this blog for the keyword than the example blog does. Google indexed this post within a few minutes of publishing it and traffic showed up just shortly after that. They were searching for "Blinkweb" and sure enough this blog is on page two already - with no links and no optimization for the term. See below,



This is a good sign though - it means there isn't much competition for the top spot. This is usually the case for new products so it pays to jump on them early.

And the next day...

I'm sitting at number 2...lol

Search Engine Optimization for Blogs

How to SEO your Blogs

For the past few weeks I have been discussing ways in which you can optimize your blogs for search engine traffic - primarily Google. This is called search engine optimization or SEO for short. I have been targeting the keyword "Payday Loans" to show you the step by step methods I use to make money online.

Ultimately I will discuss how to further tweak your blogs in order to make money using Adsense but till now I have just been focusing on general techniques that everyone should use in order to draw search traffic to your blog. Whether you are interested in Adsense or not you should still focus some attention on acquiring SE traffic - social traffic is great in so many ways but if you monetize your site you will need SE traffic to convert visitors to sales.

Today I am going to jump around a bit as I want to clarify a few things that have popped up in my emails and comments.

Self Hosted Blogs, Blogspot and Wordpress

I still get - or I should say I am seeing more emails all the time wondering why I use a free Blogger blog on Blogspot. Invariably the assumption is that I don't know that "serious" marketers use their own domains. I have also had several readers ask me about what type of blog they should use.

I have answered the first question before but it's worth going over again. The whole point of this blog is to make money and show my readers how I do it. To that end I have focused my attention on beginners and I want to show them that you really can make money online and you don't have to spend money to do it. Hence the free Blogger blog - I prefer to do it by example. I have another reason for using Blogger as well; it has some distinct advantages over other blog platforms when it comes to making money with Adsense. I will get into this further when I turn my focus to Adsense.

In regards to what platform is best I agree that having your own domain is the standard way to go if you are intent on making the A-list. Web 2.0 is the new look and self hosted wordpress blogs are all the rage. In general I find Blogger to be a great way for beginners to cut their teeth. You can learn the ins and outs about blogging without spending money and it is incredibly easy to use. A free Wordpress blog is really not a good idea as it is next to impossible to monetize it.

Some of you that already have an A-list style blog have been asking me if it can be optimized for Adsense. It can but to really go after Adsense properly you will end up losing your aesthetic appeal. The fact is the best performing Adsense sites aren't pretty. You have to set up the site in such a way as to capitalize clicks or you won't make enough to bother with it. In the simplest terms you have to display the ugly and in your face ad block just like I have above the fold on this blog. To make any serious money you will have to do the same - most of you don't want that on your "nice" blogs so I suggest starting a new blog specifically aimed at Adsense and just tweak your A-list blogs in order to capture search engine traffic. If you are monetizing with paid ads then you'll need the SE visitors.

One question I was asked was, "Why is search engine traffic better for making money than social traffic?".

The obvious answer is because social traffic is comprised of internet marketers for the most part and they don't typically click ads or buy stuff. Perhaps the better answer is to skip ahead in my Payday Loan lessons and actually show you a completed campaign where I set out to target a keyword in order to rank high on Google's listings and how I have made money from it.

In January I wrote a review of a program I had tried out called "Project Payday". The program deals with making money by buying and selling referrals on IFW's (incentivized freebie websites). While there are things I don't like about the program (the type of work mostly - boring) the end result is that it is a legitimate way of earning some money online. It actually works which is something you can't say to often online. At the time I suspected this might get popular but in truth I was only guessing. Shortly after I posted the review someone linked to me from the whydowork forum citing my post in regards to a question some one had asked. Before long there was a steady stream of visitors coming to my blog because of that link. They weren't making me any money but it led me to believe that there was interest in the program. I decided to target the keyword for Google to see if there was interest in the non IM world.

To do this I wrote several more articles optimized for the keyword "Project Payday" as well as for all the relevant long tail terms. I then submitted some to article directories to get some optimized links back to my posts. I managed to climb to 5 and 6 on Google's index and haven't bothered going any higher - I don't need to.

Look at the screenshot below;



With the exception of the Project Payday site all the top results point to my blog - the answer on Yahoo Answers has a link to me and of course the whydowork forum has the link I mentioned earlier. Aside from those going directly to the Project Payday site I get most of the search traffic for that term. In fact Google tells me in webmaster tools that I get 61% of all the people searching for the term. I was able to generate a lot of backlinks in the beginning using articles that others published on their sites - each article had a link using the anchor text "project payday" or "project payday review" and it didn't take long to get to 5th on the serp. Remember when you target a term that has little to no competition you can rank well with no backlinks at all if you have enough relevant content. If there is a bit of competition you can overcome it with a few decent backlinks - you usually don't need many. How many others were seriously targeting my term? Probably only a few at most and how hard would they work at it? Not that hard - I had only 2-3 links and was a PR0 at the time I landed 5th spot.

I want to interrupt the flow for a second and deal with some confusion over the issue of backlinks vs content. One of my readers left a comment the other day that addresses this concern...

Jasa said...


ok i just had information overload for two things. Both related to SEO though. Thought you might be able to clarify.


Brad Callen, the creator of SEO elite wrote in his huge Ebook, that the important part in SEO is the off page optimization (though on page is still important but not as important). Which basically refers to backlinking.


On the other hand, your experiments are starting to show that its more the other way round.


Hmm, do you mind clarifying on this? Thx! :)




My personal thoughts are that off page optimization are important to get crawled and ranked well in G's index but on page is the one that gets you on the page(SERPs) that you want. Is that true to any extent?

Notwithstanding the fact that Brad Callen is selling a product designed to get backlinks it is not surprising that he would push for their importance. In truth he is right to a certain extent but not in every circumstance. The easiest way to explain this is to think in terms of competition.

If two blogs write a post on the same topic Google will rank them in order of relevance, backlinks, PR and then by a host of other measures like age, monetization, purpose (is one selling the product and the other not?), Video (does on offer more choices for the reader) and so on.

I have mentioned this before but take a look at the top ten sites on most search queries and you can see a pattern.

Google does not just list the ten sites with the highest PR on any given topic.They strive to give the reader choices. If a reader wants to know what others think about a particular product then Google will present them with a list of the top sites reviewing the product. If all the sites are selling the product then Google will drop some and find the most relevant site that isn't and include it in the list - higher than it would normally have ranked. If there is a video available on another site not listed then it will get bumped up as well. If there is a non monetized site that is relevant it will also get bumped up. Google presents a list of what it thinks is most relevant to your search - if you want a review of something then you don't just want sites selling the product - you probably want to hear other opinions about it or maybe see a video or find out what a site that isn't monetized and has nothing to gain from the review might have to say.

Of course different queries will get different results but Google tries to read your "intent" when compiling it's index. To this end they do not just present PR (read backlinks) dominant sites. They present the most relevant (read content) first even if it has less PR than 20 others. PR does not play a factor until competition increases to a point that all other factors are equal. In general you will need a higher PR to rank better than another site that is equal to you in all other aspects.

To sum this up you need content first and then backlinks. Without the content optimized for the right keywords you can have all the PR you want and not get listed well. In truth you use both in tandem to dominate the serp's but backlinks are not as important until you are up against stiff competition.

The interesting thing is that you can make money without going after highly competitive terms and this brings me back to the Project Payday example. My review didn't include an affiliate link and this had several consequences. Instead of trying to sell Project Payday I explained what the system was about and gave my readers a bunch of links and instructions that they could use to get started without paying the membership to Project Payday. This curried favor with lot's of readers and soon a number of sites were linking to me and telling their readers to check me out regarding Project Payday. Traffic started coming from both the whydowork forum and from other blogs and soon I was getting 100-200 visitors a day. Some of you are probably wondering why I didn't have an affiliate link and the reason was simple; my traffic was comprised of internet marketers and they wouldn't have used my link anyways. I was after Adsense clicks and that's why I wanted to rank well on Google.

The end result is that there is now barely a trickle of traffic coming from whydowork which never converted to Adsense clicks as the thread has grown cold. But, no sooner did I get ranked on the front page on the serp's than traffic started rolling in from the general public and this blog started making Adsense revenue. Ten months later I still get lots of daily traffic and on top of it all Project Payday recently started paying for leads which has meant more earnings for me.

This screenshot shows my earnings from sending leads to Project Payday



This is a prime example of how a small blog can make money in less competitive niches. I have targeted lots of other keywords as well; "Roadmap to Riches", "Two Minute profits", "Yahoo Answers" etc and even well known Guru names - basically anything that I think people will search for in sufficient quantities to click my ads. Remember also that in the process of optimizing my pages for the serps for these terms I have also optimized my pages for the best Adsense ads as well. When someone visits me looking for info on my new keyword "Payday Loans" I will have payday loan ads on my page for them to click as soon as they realize that I am not what they were looking for.

I just took a screenshot of the last half hours worth of traffic to my site according to my statcounter. Check it out,



These are all the recent terms people have used to find my site and the search engine they used. Every term on that list has been optimized for and I didn't just get the traffic by luck. (You'll notice that I am already getting traffic for Payday Loans and I just started that Campaign) Because most of my traffic is search related I know that everyday I will make about $10 with Adsense per 100 SE visitors. This ratio varies from site to site on my network but after 11 months this seems to be the norm for this blog. My goal is simple - increase my search traffic by adding new keywords to this blog and by tweaking my existing keywords so that they reach top billing.

The importance of the top search listing.

I mentioned previously that I have a blog that makes about half of all my Adsense Income by itself. It is in the Fishing niche but only arm's length. It regularly makes $60 - $80 a day in Adsense and I have had some incredible 4 digit affiliate sales days as well. I first came across the main keyword by accident - I had used the term a few times in a post that was loosely related and Google picked it up and sent me traffic. I didn't think much about it but soon noticed that there was a steady if small stream of traffic coming daily. I checked my rank and saw I was listed on page two of the serps.

Here is a big tip - if you start getting steady traffic for any term not listed on the first page of the serp's then you might want to tweak it. This usually tells you the demand is decent. I tweaked my post and wrote a couple of more that highlighted the keyword and within a day I was in 6th spot. Traffic tripled and on top of it Google placed some ideal ads on my page. Overnight I went from a $2 a day Adsense site to $15 a day site. All this took was a couple of new posts and no backlinks. Like an idiot I stopped tweaking and walked around with a smug grin on my face thinking how clever I was. I was an idiot because two months later the traffic hadn't died off but had actually increased and it wasn't until then that I wondered just how much traffic the number 1 position got. I tweaked away and this time had to round up a posse of backlinks but I got to number 1 and now I make $80 a day on a good day. Money I could have been making for the two months I thought I was so clever. I guess I am trying to tell you not to stop until you reach number 1.

This in a nutshell is how you drive search engine traffic to your site. Whether you use Adsense or not - you still need traffic from Google. It doesn't matter what your blog is about - you can and should concentrate on optimizing your posts so that you highlight all the terms that are relevant to you and then tweak those that you receive traffic for. As you build up these keywords your search traffic will steadily increase. As this increases you will notice that your blog will see more clicks and sign ups. More traffic more money - it's not rocket science.

On a parting note I have been asked about optimizing for yahoo and other engines. I used to spend time with my websites trying to go after the Yahoo and MSN market but haven't bothered with my blogs. The main reason is part lazy and part cautious. Yahoo and others still attach relevance to Meta Tags which Google ignores. Blogger doesn't use Meta Tags (go figure - Google owns Blogger) so there would be work involved in modifying the template to include them and aside from being lazy I am worried that this might bugger up Google's love of the Blogger template. I alluded to this earlier but one of the things I like about Blogger is that it is perfectly optimized for Google and Adsense. A blogger blog is easy for a bot to read and categorize. I will discuss this more in future.

Having said that I would encourage wordpress users to definitely go after Yahoo et al, but Google is still the priority. They easily send the most traffic so don't appease Yahoo by sacrificing Google. I should point out that since each has it's own priorities you can lower your ranking on one engine by trying to raise it on another. If you don't know what you are doing best to just target Google.

I will be updating my progress with "Payday Loans" next post for those that have been following along and getting into more details on how to fine tune your on page optimization.

Until then,

Griz