Last year was not a bad one for me, but it had its ups and downs.  Like any business, webtrepreneurs have to be able to adapt to curve balls thrown their way.

2009 started off with a bang.  My eBay affiliate business was netting around $300 a month in January, $400 in February, and was set to earn $500 in March.  eBay, however, decided to cut off my account in March for no good reason.  After months of dispute, they never paid me in March and my affiliate account has been deactivated.  I have no idea why my account was flagged as all my sites stuck to their terms of service and all sites were original and clean.  Such is life, right?  I think they’re shooting themselves in the foot and this is just another blow to their reputation, in my opinion.

So, with that stream of income cut off, what’s one to do?  Well, it’s a good thing I had other moneys coming in from other sources.  I netted about $1000 last year from referrals and the few bucks I made from eBay.  Though I didn’t set any goals for 2009 and 2010 is already shaping up to be a very busy year, I’ll do my best to keep blogging and I hope to make 50% more this year than last.  Let’s see how things go and I’ll keep you posted!

It should come as no surprise that getting listed and indexed by Google is very important to your blog or business website. I run a few different affiliate websites and the fact that the sites are indexed by Google is the only reason why they are currently making money. Given that the sites are not performing extremely well for any particular keyword, visitors continue to find my sites when they type their searches on Google. Without Google, there would be no traffic to these websites and by now you should know that I think traffic is the new gold.

I have been building websites for a long time now, but within the last year I have been building sites with the hopes of making money online. I have tried several ventures in the past; coupon sites, tech reviews, eBay sites, affiliate sites, and blogs. Out of those sites, the most important aspect has been making them visible to other users through search engines (read: Google).

Why do Search Engines Matter?

The goal of any website is to have visitors, and to that end, there are basically 2 ways to get traffic. The first way would be to pay for traffic. This includes advertising on search engines, other websites, or through offline campaigns such as newspaper ads, television ads, or other means such as fliers or handouts. Alternatively, you could try to get free traffic. Free traffic happens when people either know your website’s address, are recommended by someone and follow the link, or find your site through search engines.

The cons of paid advertising are straightforward. Firstly and most obviously, it costs money. Many new sites and blogs don’t have a budget to advertise nor do they feel the need to advertise their site. Secondly, advertising is not always sticky. What I mean is that once your advertising budget runs out, people will not necessarily remember your site nor will they remember how to get there. You’ll get a spike in traffic while your campaign is running but as soon as it stops, your traffic will drop down to zero.

The pros of free traffic are more interesting. Firstly, it’s free. Nothing is required from you and people find you based on their needs and searches. Secondly, the hits you get are contextual and your visitors are more likely to take action (subscribe to an RSS feed, click through an affiliate link, etc…) because they found you based on results from a search they willingly performed. So here’s the question: how do you get free traffic?

The holy grail of free traffic lies with placing well in search results. Your search engine ranking position (SERP) is crucial to gaining free traffic and if you place in the first page of a search engine for a given search, you will be seeing a significant amount of traffic. Within these results, the higher you rank the more hits you will receive. In order to place well in search engines, you must first get indexed. This step is crucial and trivial, but you can do a lot to help your chances.

Use Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools is a set of utilities provided free of charge from Google. Within GWT, you are able to submit your site to Google along with a sitemap for your site.

After finding Google Webmaster Tools, your next step should be to add your site. This is simple, just type your URL in the dashboard and click on “Add Site”.

After you have added your site, you will need to verify it. For this step, you’ll need to figure out how you want to verify the site. You can do that either by uploading a file to your server or by adding a meta tag to your index page. Either way you choose, you need to verify your page.

As the last step, you need to add a sitemap to your site profile. The first thing you need to do is create the sitemap. If you don’t know how to do this, you can either install the Wordpress plugin or you can go to the free XML sitemap generator and create a sitemap you can upload to your site.

After you have added your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and your site has been verified, chances are that your site will be added to Google’s index. For me, this normally takes only a few days but some people claim to be able to do it in hours. I call “BS” on those people and think they’re full of it.

This is how your dashboard should look like once things are all done:

By this time you should be indexed in Google and ready to receive hits to your site. Your placement will vary depending on keywords on your site and competition for those keywords but this is the basic framework for getting added to Google and placing on search engines. After this you need to work on your site in order to place well. But that’s another post.

I think that it is good practice to sometimes look back at your work and see where you can improve. Be reviewing and revising, you can often find various opportunities to significantly improve your work, which will in turn make you better at whatever it is that you do.

It is in the spirit of reviewing and revising that I came up with the idea for this post. I hope that you can find some insight to help you make your blog better. The better your blog is, the higher the likelyhood that you’ll be successful.  The focus of this post is on domain names.
Domain Names

Back in October of last year, I did a series on this blog called “Internet Marketing 101″. The second part of the series was all about domain names. Domain names are very important for your business and if you don’t yet have one, I recommend that you go to GoDaddy.com right now and purchase one. Domain mames, in short, are important for 3 reasons:

1. Professional. If you plan on making money from your website or blog, you should definitely plan on buying a domain name. When you buy a domain name, it lets your visitors know that you’re serious about blogging. It shows other bloggers that you mean business and it also adds credibility to your site. Often times when I surf the web for content and ideas, I’ll find something meaningful on other people’s blogs. However, I hardly ever pay too much attention to those blogs hosted on sites like Blogspot or other freebies. These sites are nice for communicating with your friends, but in all honestly, they’re not good for business.
2. Personal. When you buy a domain name, you have a lot of room to be creative. You can express your interests and even brand your blog by its domain. Take this blog, for example. This site is about learning to make money online, so my domain name is “LearnHow2Earn.com”. I think that this address is professional and personal. In addition to adding credibility and creativity to my site, it makes it easier for others to remember (which is my point #3).
3. Memorable. Probably one of the most important reasons to buy a domain name is so that others can remember where and how to find you. With a site name that resides on another domain, there are too many dots and slashes to remember, and most people won’t. When you have your own professional, personal domain name, people will remember you more easily.

So, sit down with some paper and a pencil for about 20 minutes and think about as many domain names as you can.  Write them all down, and go do something else for 10 minutes.  Come back to your list and start eliminating those you don’t think are very good anymore.  Take another quick breather and repeat until you have 10 domain names left.  At this point, rank your choices 1-10 and head on over to GoDaddy.com to see which ones are available.  Start with your #1 choice and work your way down the list.  If you’re unfortunate enough to have none of your top 10 choices still available, rinse and repeat.  Try some variations, like using dashes or periods in the domain name.  Good luck and get down to business!

It is now 5 days since my last update on the search engine marketing campaign that I’m running with my friend Davey Z, and I have another brief update. We’ve doubled our sales since then and have made over $220 after an initial investment of only $30. We found out yesterday that we made 4 more sales during last week, and we are anxiously anticipating the results of our weekend campaign.

Since Davey Z is a numbers guy, we decided to ramp up the campaign by raising our bids on our 4 main keywords. This moved us up quite a bit in the search results and therefore increased our click through rate significantly. Since we don’t yet have the results from the weekend, we have lowered our bids once again and are craving data to analyze and inspect. If things worked well this weekend, we will double our efforts and try to make even more money next weekend.

While running this SEM campaign has been a successful experiment, we are not yet done learning and still have quite a ways to go in understanding more about how the whole process works. In the meanwhile, I have learned a few things that I would like to share.

• SEM is Not Easy. Whlie Davey Z and I have been able to succeed with this campaign and we have learned a lot in these last 2 weeks, we still have a lot more to learn. Secondly, SEM is not something that you can “set and forget”. Sure, you can do that for 3 or 4 days at a time but in the long run you will not make any money if you think that this is the kind of thing you can do once and forget about. Although the “set it and forget it” attitude is working (little by little) with my eBay websites, the approach just won’t work for too long in SEM. SEM is very dynamic; competition changes, prices change, trends change, and consumers change from one minute to the next. You need to be on your toes if you want to be successful.
• SEM Requires Patience. In case you haven’t read about my frustrations with affiliate programs and their reporting delay, SEM requires patience. Although you’ll generate a lot of traffic rather quickly, it takes a few days (3-5) for you to see the results of your efforts. This can be a costly period or a period that wasn’t as profitable as could have been if you had real time data available. Also, you need to stick with SEM for it to work in the long run. If you fail, try again! Don’t give up. If you’re determined and have your facts straight, you’ll succeed.
• SEM is Not Rocket Science. As I mentioned above, SEM is not easy. However, it’s also not “rocket science”. I now believe that anyone can make some money from SEM. Even though I have not yet achieved my goals, I feel as though I am now armed with some valuable information that will go a long way to helping me reach them. No offense to the super affiliates. Although they are making much more money than me, they are not all that brilliant. Sure, they can run campaigns that have been working very well and they have fine tuned their SEM machine, but I think that anyone with the time and knowledge can make it happen.

In the following few weeks, I will be posting more about what I’ve learned about search engine marketing. I believe that it’s an area ripe for the picking and am doing my best to reach out there and grab some of the money hanging from the search engine trees. Although it’s not necessarily an easy thing to do, I believe that anyone can do it. Want to learn more? Sign up for my RSS feed and stay tuned!

For the last two weeks, I have been working with my friend Davey Z on learning how to make money online with Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  After reading the blogs of successful SEM’ers, we decided that we’re smart enough to give this thing a shot.  We started out with $130 in Yahoo! search marketing 2 weeks ago and so far have racked up 3 sales of what we think is a low-conversion item.  Our 3 conversions have earned us $54, but so far we have spent $75.  One of our rookie mistake was not checking out all of the available affiliate programs.  The first 2 conversions we made paid out only $8 through Linkshare but it pays out roughly $24 through Azoogle.  Had we started out promoting Azoogle’s offer from the get go, we would have broken even, or there abouts.

Quality versus Quantity

We have done several things since starting out on our original campaign.  At first, we had some really big, over arching keywords that were cosing us substantially more than other targeted keywords.  We decided to stop “bleeding” from those keywords and as a result saw our clicks go down dramatically.  Our hope was to exchange quantity for quality of clicks.  So far, we have not seen any conversions but with Azoogle’s 4 day delay, I’m not sure if we have a complete picture yet.

Our hope is that, although we are sending only very few hits to our program every day, most of those hits would convert.  It makes sense in theory, but it may not work like that in real life.  To better illustrate our goal, look at this simple graph:

Our aim is to increase quality if we are able to increase quantity.  We don’t necessarily want 10,000 clicks per day if those clicks aren’t contextual or relevant or lead to any conversions.  What we want to do is hit people when they’re ready to buy, and because of this strategy, the quantity of our clicks is very low.

So Now What?

Our attitude of quality clicks hasn’t really paid off at all yet.  I agree with the strategy but also agree with the law of large numbers.  I would rather see a more action than less, so we’ve decided to try out another campaign.  This new campaign is supposed to convert better, but it is also a campaign whose payout is significantly lower.  Paying less than $1.50 per action, we hope to be able to find cheap keywords that give us a lot of traffic in return.

We started this campaign today with the bare bones bidding price of 10 cents per keyword.  We estimate that at the end of the day, between 30-50 people will have clicked on our ads and seen the intended page for them to take action.  If 20% of those 50 people take action (that’s  10 people), we would have made roughly $15 while spending only $5.  That’s a 3:1 ratio of income to expense.  Even if only 10% of clickers convert, we still see a profit, albeit a much smaller one.  However, profit is profit, right?

So, with a new campaign active as of this morning, we will monitor clicks and trends for the next 4 days as  Azoogle receivs the data back from the programs.  Our expectations, I feel, are quite humble and I hope to report good news in the next few days!