Since I last created a post to this site, I’ve been busy developing strategies on how to make more money from the ‘net.  I’ve tried a few different approaches with varying degrees of success and have come to the realization that only 2 things really matter when it comes to making money.  One of the variables is easier to manipulate (and should be!) and the other has more to do with how much money you want to spend to see things through.  Sure, it is possible for the 2nd variable to occur naturally but it will take time.  If you’re like me, you like to see results quickly.  So, here are the two variables:

1- A captive audience – This is your target audience.  You design your website and fill it with content so that these people find your site and make a decision to spend money through it.  I say “through” it because you’re most likely building an affiliate site so you’re not selling anything.  Your website visitors see your content, and decide you are trustworthy enough to click on a link and go spend money at the target site.

The ‘captive’ part of having an audience is the bit that’s really interesting.  You are able to almost completely manipulate your audience so that they are captive.  If you are anything like me, this part stinks.  I have no artistic ability and really struggle to make a website design look good.  I spent a lot of time going through design iterations and end up settling for something that I know is less than optimal…but then I spend a lot of other time creating good content on my website so I think that things balance out.

2- Traffic.  This has been my mantra: “Traffic is the new gold”.  I believe that if you have enough visitors to ANY site, you’ll end up making money.  If you’re selling something desirable (like a Nintendo Wii) and get average traffic, you’ll make money.  If you’re selling crap and get a bazillion visitors, you’ll make money.  It all comes down to traffic.  If you have a budget of $100-$500, you can create a lot of traffic rather quickly (Google adwords, paid ads on relative websites, etc…) and hopefully build from there.  However, if you are a cheapskate and don’t want to spend any money, you have to earn your stripes and do hard-core work that will take months to give you any results.

Right now I’m still working on factor #1.  I am getting organic traffic to my websites and need to create a more captivating environment for these folks to decide to spend money.  In the future, I plan to grow the number of websites that I have and will also have a budget for marketing.  This is all still trial and error for me but I believe that I’m on the right track.

The question for the ages. How does one place well for certain keywords on Google? I get asked that more often than I would have thought. I’m not Matt Cutts nor am I an SEO expert, but I have done OK for a few of my sites in the recent past. There is no one magic trick to placing well in the engines and Google surely won’t give away any tips or tricks. However, they do give you a set of very vague guidelines to help you get an understanding of how to build your websites.

Firstly, keyword search results, or your search engine ranking position (SERP) determine how well you place when a user searches for a given keyword that is relevant to your site/page. Google advises you to make your page for the humans that are reading it, and if it’s relevant to humans then Google’s Googlebot will read it and index it. In addition to content, Google recommends that you have other links going to your site and that you also create a sitemap. You should also make it accessible and avoid keyword pollution, page cloaking, and other malicious things.

From the paragraph above, you can see that there are at least 4 recommendations. From these recommendations, honest developers and spammers alike will be indexed by Google. Google then aims to remove the spam and keep the ham. The honest content creator and the Evil Marketing Spammers (the Ems, as I like to call them) both have the same set of guidelines, but somehow, it seems like the Ems are getting ahead of the game. While the honest content creators strive to provide good content, the Ems will work their evil magic to beat Google’s rules and algorithms in order to rise above other more qualified and relevant websites.

Learn From the Ems

Then question then becomes simple. As content developers and non-spammers, what can we do in order to make our websites better than that of the Ems? How can Google find favor in our sites, given that we don’t have all the time, money, or other resources that the Ems have?

Lucky for us, Google has given us some starting points and the Ems have given us plenty of knowledge and insight into doing well for ourselves.

1. Human Readable Pages: Google recommends that your page should be human readable. Well, aren’t all pages readable to humans? I would say “sort of, yes”. However, what Google really means is this: “Make your content so that our bot can read it”. In other words, don’t create one huge .jpg with text on it. Googlebot will think it’s only an image. Don’t make your site in Flash if you’re not using any text that can be parsed. If possible, use only valid HTML code. That’s kind of what they’re saying. Googblebot is impressive, but it is not able to interpret things other than text so it goes through your source code and looks at what’s inside. It then makes sense of your content and indexes and ranks it accordingly.
   It also seems like Google cares about how much content you have. If there are two sites of similar quality, content, and ranking, I think that the one with more content will be ranked above the one with a lesser rank.
2. Incoming Links: In the Google Webmaster tools, there’s a way for you to check incoming links to your site. I’m not sure how the big G finds and categorizes the incoming links, nor do I know what they count as a valid incoming link, but that does seem to play a big role into placing well in the search results. We can learn from the Ems here and use some strategies if we really want our content to be found. We (as individuals) can create accounts on sites like Squidoo, Blogger, and Wordpress. We can then create content on each of these sites that link to our site. This is kind of an odd strategy because you are then creating SPAM to promote your quality site. I’m not too fond of this approach but I have used it in the past with a small degree of success. Likewise, you can create accounts to social bookmarking sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon and hope that your users will like your content. These two strategies combined can help your site to place higher in search engines.
3. Accessibility: Lastly, Google says your site should be accessible. This does not mean making it only so users can GET to your sites, but it means making the content “accessible” to people with disabilities. You do this simply by adding “alt” tags to your images and by adding titles to links. Make sure to validate your site using the W3 HTML validator.

Getting indexed by Google is the easy part. People will find you and people will get to your site eventually. If you employ the above strategies and work on building solid content, people will find your sites more frequently and you’ll start getting more and more hits organically. Keep your eyes peeled and examine the sites made by Ems. They’re good and you can learn a lot from them!

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.

This month (this year, actually) has been off to a great start. Since returning from vacation less than 2 weeks ago, I’ve written 3 guest posts (2 are coming soon!) and started 2 new made for eBay websites. This is all in addition to being a full time grad student and full time IT guy!

Needless to say, I’ve been up late doing all kinds of research for class and working on websites that could help me make some money in the long run. I decided to go ahead and work on these 2 new sites because my first 2 websites have been working well for me so far. Nothing stellar considering that I haven’t spent more than $15 on advertising, but enough to make me want to make more websites. If things work out for these 2 new websites and my extrapolations and calculations go as planned, I could stand to make between $300 or more per month without spending a dime on advertising. I know that’s not retirement money, but it certainly is enough money that I could splurge on some geek things like a new monitor or some fancy website reviews or maybe even go to a blogger conference one of these days.

If things proceed as planned, I will of course spend money on advertising in the hopes of getting more visitors to my sites. As we all know, “traffic is the new gold” so the more people visit my sites the more chances I have that they’ll like what they see and will buy something.

I’m sure you’re wondering how I am making my money on eBay, and I’m going to say that I’ve already told you how I do it. In case you missed class that day (shame on you! Sign up for the RSS feed!), here’s a link to my previous post about making money with eBay. I’m sticking to my plan and the plan is panning out so far. I will continue to work on the SEO of my websites and hope that they get more and more organic traffic each day.

Sign up to my RSS feed and stay tuned!

How are you currently making money online? Are you doing well what you do “just because” or do you have a plan of action? Do you keep an active watch on your stats as well as trends in your niche? If you’re like I was, you probably had all of your eggs in one basked at one point or another, and you may still have only one plan to make money online. After the performance of my main website started to decline, I had to go into panic mode for a little while and try to figure out what I could do in order to start making some cash online. The plan is still coming together but instead of just 1 site up and going, I have a total of 6. These sites are a combination of affiliate sites and eBay stores. Their performance has not yet reached close to their potential and I am working on figuring out what it would take to make these sites shine.

If you’ve ever had an income stream online, you’ve probably thought to yourself at one point or another that you really should have more than one way to make money, just in case something would happen to your site. These are 5 reasons to do it now:

1. Trends Change

It should be no surprise to learn that we live in a fickle, materialistic society. People want the latest and greatest things at a moment’s notice, especially when it comes to technology. If you have a website that revolves around technology, you’d better be prepared to act quickly and serve those people who may no longer be interested in your product line.

The same goes with many other niches; health, fashion, automotive, etc. If you are sitting still in an ever changing business environment, a new trend will come up and your site will be left in the dust.

2. Competition Changes

Remember the old way we used to obtain music? Going to the store, shopping the aisles, finding the right genre, looking at shrink wrapped packages (On a side note, why do they have to make CD’s so hard to open? I wonder if a music exec has ever had to open one. I doubt it, else they’d realize how dumb that packaging is.), opening up the CD and popping it in to our CD players or portable Discman’s.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, comes iTunes and revolutionizes how we listen to music. Now we can buy individual songs or entire albums with the click of a button. Music executives didn’t believe in iTunes or digital delivery, now they’re crying foul and wondering why they’re not selling any more CD’s.

The same can be applied to your website. Things could be going along just fine, then all of a sudden a new competitor arises. You can do one of two things: Prepare your business to tackle the opponent or sit there like a lame duck and blame others when thinss start to go wrong. I suggest the first option.

3. Google Changes

Google is a business baromter of sorts. They claim that the good stuff shows up first and the bad stuff is not displayed at all. Many web business live and die by the rankings given to them by Google.

If you currently just have one site for one product, then you’d better be prepared for a rocky road ahead. Google’s algorithm changes occasionally and if you are not prepared to take the hit, then you’ll be in trouble when changes head your way.

Google search rankings mean everything to some businesses, and unless you’re really good at obtaining one of the top spots, you’ll have to rely on luck and little else to make money online. Prepare yourself, make good websiteS and have a solid business plan to make you money for the long run

4. Stuff Happens

Another reason to have more than one income plan is that, in all honesty, things happen out there that are beyond your control. For example, if you had a site that was somehow making money selling Enron gear, the day they went out of business you too would have been out of business. If you sell health products and the FDA changes stance on them, you’d better be prepared to take a hit.

5. More is Better

If you’ve manage to stay out of trouble, either through luck or preparation, you should diversify your net portfolio because in all honesty, we’re in this for the money. More income streams = more earning potential. More earning potential = more money in the long run.

Prepare yourself, make GOOD QUALITY websites about your niche products, and stick to your guns. Always grow and learn in order to position yourself ahead of your competitors.