How To Make Money Online

Recently I introduced a friend of mine to SEO, and the methods I use to make money online. As part of this process we exchanged a whole heap of emails with useful information for beginners. This article includes all the best parts of these emails.

Keyword Research

If you are serious about looking into search engine optimization (SEO), which is what I do, and wanted to research what keywords would bring you traffic this tool is free and probably the best as it’s by Google.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The idea is to find keywords that closely relate to what you are selling, but that also get a good search volume. To find good stats that we can use you need to search for a term, then change the match type setting to exact. This stat will tell you how many people are searching for the exact term. It is an estimate.

The next thing I do is search that term in google. And see the sites I am competing against. I know I can outrank most sites for a specific keyword, if I target it, but some are a lot more work than others.

Analysis of competition gets a bit harder, I have a tool that does it for me…it looks at how many links the site has, how long it has been around, if it is optimised for your keyword, the google page rank of the site…all of which are important.

To illustrate my example…it would be easy to outrank Harvey Norman for the term “3 seater couch”. They are a big brand, there is no way they are going to target such a specific term. They will naturally rank for a term like that, as they probably have a category page on their site called “3 seater couches”. So if you then go and optimise for that term, and build links to your site that target that term, you will eventually outrank them. However, it would be impossible to outrank them for the term “Harvey Norman”.

What sort of site should I make?

The big things are:

1) How will you get traffic to your site?

2) How will you convert that to money?

My friend had an interest in property investment. I explore this niche as an idea.

I have had a bit of a look and property investment is a huge Adsense niche….massive money to be made and very competitive. To give you an idea of how much money is involved, if you were to buy traffic from Google, a click from a search result page for someone searching for the phrase “property investments” would cost you $8.30nz….for one click. What this means is huge competition for the main keywords, and that you will be competing against people who know what they are doing. This is also very evident when searching for the term in google.com…look at all the sponsored listings surrounding the search results…this means there is big money to be spent and made in this niche. So it’s not going to be easy to make money, but when you do start ranking, you should make very good dosh!

A few thoughts:

Just because you would be writing about NZ property investment, doesn’t mean you should only target NZ search traffic. This seriously limits how successful you can be. The key to making money with adsense(google ads) is to get lots of search visitors for high paying keywords, but not to satisfy what they are looking for….i.e. if they find the information they are looking for on your site, they won’t click your ads. A great strategy would to be write property investment articles that are generic, but in places using NZ as an example. You then have a huge market. When they get down to the guts of it, they may find much of the information is relevant to NZ only, but all that means is that they haven’t found what they are looking for so they keep searching….and in many cases that search would involve clicking on what will be a very well targeted Goolge ad that you will have on your page.

The highest volume keyword for this niche is “investment property” - which even from google.co.nz you are looking at nearly 500 searches a month for. However, because of this all of the direct match NZ domains are gone… investmentproperty.co.nz .net.nz .org.nz and .gen.nz are all gone.

Google.com gives nearly 50,000 exact searches a month for this term, so you can dream about the money you would make ranking well for that term…possible, but a lot of work, and time for your domain to develop.

So if this were me, I would buy a .com or .net and target international traffic. But a less competitive keyword from the same niche…something with 3000 exact searches a month…You could easily turn that traffic into 100’s a month, but you won’t be up against such hardcore competition.

I had a look for some keyword domains with exact matches:

When buying domains you are always either looking for brandibility .i.e easy to remember names: twitter???  or exact matches to keywords that are searched often.

The idea once you have a domain is to get 5 keywords that closely relate that you will target – For this niche terms that are getting around 300 searches a month look good. In niches with lower competition, you can target higher volume searches more easily.

Creating Content for the site

As you get the site up it is worth putting a good substantial amount of original content up on it. Write at least 7 articles for your site… 2 with the main keyword in the title of the article + 5 articles that have with each of your other keywords in the title. These 7 articles need to be 500 - 1000 words, good grammar, spelling etc and have appealing human readable titles. Lists are always good, Top 20 mistake you should avoid, Ten things you didn’t know about Property investment, The biggest mistake I made as a Property investor  etc , just make sure you have your keywords in the article title. Also as much as possible you need to include you main keyword in the text…it needs to look natural, but including your keywords 3-4 times in each article will help a little.

For this site I suggested a good beginner link building strategy would be to belt out some Ezine articles.

After you have these 7 articles you need to write 5-7 articles which we will use to promote your site on ezinearticles website. This site will get you authority links and direct traffic.  These articles need to be greater than 250 words, but greater than 500 where possible. From each of these articles you get two links back to your site, one we will link back with your main keyword, the other we will link back to each of your secondary keywords. With ezine you can’t have keyword terms with greater than 3 words.

Adding one article to ezine jumped a page on one of my sites from ranking 41st in Google to ranking 2nd in Google for a very nice 1000 searches a month keyword related to making money online. Link building is very important and ezine is a very good place to get very good links…you just have to work for them…there is a particular way you have to include your links in articles, but I can help you with that when you get to it.

Wordpress Permalinks

For SEO reasons it is important that we have our article titles in the URL. The default setting displays an id number as the URL for a post or page. This is no good. Go to settings and select Permalink, and change it to custom structure and use: /%postname%/ . I almost always just use the above template, although it is fine to use things like dates and categories in your URL as well, as long as you have the post title.

How do I show excerpts on my homepage with a read more link?

Firstly go to appearance/editor, you will see all the theme files on the right, select the page either named home or Main Index …it probably has the file named home.php or  index.php.

You need to find the content php tag <?php the_content( ));?> and replace it with <?php the_excerpt(__(’Read more’)); ?>

Save the modification. That will make you site show an excerpt instead on a full post on the homepage. Problem is excerpts by default are rubbish and they kill all your images and formatting. So you then need to install this plug-in:

Advanced Excerpt

Once installed, it will allow all your formatting to show, and give you a excerpt option page in your setting where you can define the length you want the excerpt to be.

How do I add a read more link to the bottom of my excerpt?

To get the read more part add this line to your home.php under the excerpt tag:

<p align=”right”><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”>&raquo; Keep reading &raquo;</a><br /></p>

You can change the &raquo; Keep reading &raquo; part to whatever you want .. read more etc

What are hex numbers and how do I change colours of my text and links etc?

In your Wordpress theme editor, select the style sheet file down the bottom of your theme files.

A style sheet defines properties of various page elements in your theme. Colours in style sheets are represented by a 6 digit hex number i.e. #ffffff is white. You can alter any colours in your theme using this file. Use this site to find colours: HTML Codes

Ezine article tips

• You need to write 250 + word articles.
• It helps to use low to medium volume keywords that related to your main keyword in your title, stuff that gets searched 50-300 times a month. Ezine articles will rank easily in google for low competition keywords.
• You add your links to the resource box, not the article text
• You get two links per article, use the following format and always target your main keyword, and another targeting an article keyword.

Format:

<a href=”http://google.com”>Google</a>

• You can’t have more than 3 keywords between you anchor.
• Just place the keywords into some sort of generic self promoting sentence. i.e. On my site, I give Property Investment Tips and advice on how to Buy Investment Property…and place the links around your keywords…try and use attractive language that encourages clicks. You can’t be self promotional in the article body, but you can in the resource box…so sell your links to try and get extra traffic. Ezine traffic is targeted, and often comes from google as your articles will rank for keywords. Because of this, if you get them to click to your link, they will often click your ads which will use similar self promotional language. I don’t often bother targeting any direct traffic other than google traffic but ezine direct traffic is worth the effort…so use language that encourages people to click your link.

How do I find out how many backlinks a site has?

I can look at the backlinks a site has by using:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Setting Up and Using PHP Pro

Once you have paid for the plugin and You put the auction file and image folder into your root directory.

Copy the phpbay folder into your plugins folder, login to wordpress, go to the plugins tab and then activate it.

You need an Ebay Partner Network account. Enter details into the main screen…phpbaypro will show up in your settings panel.

Once the plugin is set up you use the following tag in posts to display listings.

[phpbay]Keyword, X, “Y”, “Z”[/phpbay]

Where The first option is the keyword search term in Ebay you want to show. X is how many listings you want to show. Just using those two will work…but if auctions displayed are not a good match you can use the Y and Z options… Y is the cat number for the products you want to show…you can find a good cat match for your stuff here:

http://listings.ebay.com/_W0QQloctZShowCatIdsQQsocmdZListingCategoryList

And the Z you use if you want to exclude listings…i.e. a keyword for something you don’t want to show.

{ 3 comments }