I just wanted to wish everyone a great holiday season.
I am working on several posts regarding Blogger, Niches, Adsense Optimization and a few other topics I have been asked about but won't be posting them for a few days. I am in the midst of bundling up the family for a short vacation but will update the blog as soon as we are settled.
This blog turns 1 year old tomorrow and I just want to thank all my readers and friends for your support this past year.
Have a great 2008.
Back soon,
Griz
Since introducing Blogger Unleashed to my readers I have been inundated with several emails regarding Vic's methods and what my view is about them and why I do things differently. The email below best sums up most of the questions asked;
Hey Grizz,
I have been reading your blog for a while now and read Vic's blog like you suggested and I have a few questions. His little trick to get indexed instantly is really cool but it only works for terms that no one will ever search for. How does this help make money online? I notice your system involves getting a link from a PR site to get indexed right away - why do you do it that way? And finally how do we use this info to our advantage meaning making money? Also sorry so many questions Vic's Adsense site is a lot different than the way you do it - which is better? Thanks so much for your help and sorry to keep bugging you.
Adam
In regards to doing things differently keep in mind that there is no one way to do anything - we use different methods depending on our targeted audience and what our niche is and what we are monetizing.
Adam is right - Vic's trick to get indexed instantly works for terms that no one searches for - so how does this help? The point he was making wasn't for getting traffic it was to show you how to just get indexed. Once you are indexed then you can start adding keyword targeted content that will then be crawled and indexed as well. This simply allows you to start building indexed content right away and having the chance to start getting traffic without fear of being sandboxed by Google.
Now I said this gives you a chance at getting traffic sooner. If you add competitive keywords to your site you will get indexed for those terms but most likely you'll be listed deep in the serp bowels. This is why I have said to go and submit your link on a high ranking PR site like Squidoo, Yahoo Answers, Propeller etc. If you add this extra step then you can skip the never searched for keyword that Vic uses and insert your main keyword in your anchor text thereby getting a high PR link to your site which in effect states that you are an authority for your main keyword. This will get you listed higher up in the serp's and for a term that is actually searched for. It will also get a brand new site indexed in short order - maybe not in minutes like Vic's example but usually within a few hours. High PR sites are crawled several times a day by the Google bot and your link will be found on the next crawl. Sometimes you will get lucky and get indexed in a few minutes.
If you are targeting niche traffic and you do not have a lot of competition using a high PR third party will often land you on page 1 of the serp's for your keyword and you are in business - targeted traffic will start showing up on the same day that you started a brand new blog. If you don't hit page 1 then competition is rated by how far back in the serp's your PR5 link landed you. If you are on page 2 you will only need a couple of more high PR links to get to page 1. If you are on page 10 then you are going to need a lot more links and more importantly a lot more keyword rich content.
I use this method for starting new white hat blogs that I intend to nurture into long term money makers.
Adam mentioned Vic's Adsense Blog was different than mine. I assume he means Vic's Bu.bulicio.us site compared to this blog.
There are several methods for making money with Adsense and this is 1 of them. Vic's site is what I call a full out assault - produce tons of keyword rich content and get tons of traffic. This method is probably the surest way to make a lot of money with Adsense and I'll explain why.
Vic is trading off CPC for CTR, in other words he knows that every 1000 visitors he gets he will make a steady income. If he makes $10 per 1000 visitors then increase your visitors to 20,000 a day and you will earn a good income. And - I can hear you thinking - how the heck do you get 20,000 people a day to your site?
You do what Vic does - he writes tons of new, unique, and keyword specific content and here is the secret, he writes about current events - new stuff that has little to no competition and is being actively searched for by thousands of people.
Go make some money now.
Maybe the best way to learn this is to just do it.
Vic uses one site to generate a lot of content on a lot of different topics. I use lots of blogs centered on one topic each. Both systems work but I do things my way as I am a lot lazier than Vic. I really admire Vic - he posts a lot - huge amounts actually and I wish I had the drive he does. I don't though so I look for ways of making money with the least amount of work. I am going to show you a blog of mine that exemplifies crap - it is ugly, devoid of any meaningful content, amateurish and looks like I spent a good 2 minutes designing it which I did. It also makes me a daily income and nobody anywhere could have done less work or designed a poorer looking site than this.
Do any of you remember Antonella Barba? She was the bombshell who had all sorts of racy photos leaked last year as she was competing for American Idol. Do you know how popular American idol is? Do you realize how many teenage boys spend their days looking for n*de pictures of female celebrities?
Lie and lie some more.
I hate showing you a seedier side of making money online but it's out there and it works.
Here is a blog I put together last March called celebrityn*dephotos.blogspot.com. Don't worry there are no n*de photos - Google will ban your Adsense account if you post n*dity so never do it - just lie and say you have the photos. I built the blog along with others to post stories about whoever was hot in Technorati Tags at the time.
Check the stats on the bottom of the blog. Over 31,000 hits since March. The blog only has 14 posts - all crap and scraped with a little editing. Must have spent a good minute on each post.
Here are some of yesterdays stats for the keywords used on Google to find this site.
(Click images to enlarge)
If you search for "Kelly Pickler N*de" this is what Google will return;
On any given day 100-200 people search for "Kelly Pickler N*de".
You'll notice I don't have Adsense on the site. This is because the ads generated by this niche are all low paying $.01 - $.03 per click ads. Using Adsense I only earned $2-$3 a day but I was smart priced which meant that all my Adsense sites became smart priced.
Important: If any of your Adsense pages becomes smart priced it effects all your Adsense pages - even those on different sites. This means that your best Adsense sites will suffer lower CPC as a result of 1 poorly optimized site. Only use Adsense when you can provide highly optimized content which initiates highly optimized Adsense ads. If you ever get public service ads or the "blogging" ads then you are being smart priced and my advice is to pull Adsense off the blog immediately or all your other sites will suffer lower earnings.
I have used ROI rocket ads for the site as well as fake ads which lead to affiliate pages and outright affiliate links. The types of visitors to the blog don't give a damn about affiliate links and will never substitute their own - they don't know what an affiliate link is. They just want nude pictures and when they can't find any on my site they start clicking ads. I have found that teenage boys are easily hooked on the idea of making money online.
Are you ready for the best part?
This crappy stupid blog that took maybe an entire hour of my life to create and then totally ignore (only 1 post since May) makes about $30 a day in affiliate sales and /or lead generation fees. Everyday one or two visitors buy something... everyday... day in day out... I do nothing. This is how I like making money online.
I have over 100 of these types of blogs. All Blogger blogs that cost nothing and were set up in minutes. All the content is scraped but re-edited to be original. The only other work I do is muster up a few links to get top spot in the indexes and with most topics that get hot there isn't a lot of competition.
If you want to try this just pay attention to what is happening around you - here is a small list of some of my best producing blog subjects this year.
Virginia Tech Massacre, Antonella Barba, Kelly Pickler, Mel Gibson, Britney, Paris, OJ, iPhone, Eva Mendez, Joost, Sanjiya Malakar, Stephen Colbert and the list goes on...
Now here is the reason Blogger kicks ass - if you are fast you can usually create a brand new blog with your subject or keyword in your url. On any given day someone gets the media spotlight and people will search for info about the person or event. There is little competition on a new story so if you are quick and manage to get a blog setup fast then you will see traffic. Once you have the traffc you have to figure out how best to monetize it. Sometimes Adsense works best, sometimes affiliate links and sometimes you use the blog to redirect people to a different site (bait and switch).
When Antonella Barba hit the scene I was getting about 20,000 hits a day to each blog I had created about her. (I had 6 blogs - you don't need to just create 1). For the first week each blog made between $50-$90 a day in Adsense - not bad but I was dissapointed because I was getting over 100,000 visitors daily and only making $300 bucks. That really isn't very good for 100,000 people. The second week I dropped the Adsense and created a bunch of fake ads - "Click here for a free Antonella nude Calender". One link took the visitor to a sales page for Free Music Downloads. Another link directed people to an affiliate page for Acne remedies. Remember who my visitors were - teenage boys.
I made over $15,000 in commissions over the next two weeks until Antonella was booted off American Idol and people forgot about her. Kelly Pickler hasn't been forgotten it seems and unlike most of these blog blitzes she still makes me money.
Note: Antonella was a goldmine and I don't want you thinking you will get the same results - that was the best two weeks of my entire online career - her popularity was an oddity that hasn't been matched since. If I can get 1000 visitors a day I'm happy. These blogs are usually only short term and die when interest drops off. Some prove to be more long term like the Pickler blog - 100-200 people a day. You make small amounts multiplied by the number of blogs you set up. Over time it all starts to add up but don't expect unrealistic numbers from any one blog. The more you experiment though, the more chance you have of finding the next "hot" subject.
Yes this is deceptive, scummy, deceitful and exploitative but it is what marketing is all about. I have said this before - if you want to make money online you will have to examine your own ethics at some point. I'm not proud of these tactics but I am online to make money and I will do what it takes short of hurting someone. You will have to make your own decision on how far you want to go.
Oh... I just checked the stats on Kelly for the past hour as I wrote this post.
Sex, Celebs and misery always has an audience folks.
One last thing and I have said this countless times before - quit creating "make money online" or "how to blog" blogs. I have this site for only one reason - to see if my SEO is good enough to take top position for the term "make money online" and not because I thought there was lots of money to be made in this niche - there really isn't. Think about this - I made $47 yesterday with this blog which takes up a lot of my time and the throw away Kelly Pickler blog made 2 affiliate sales for $40 and I don't do a damn thing with it.
Spend your time wisely and stop and think like a marketer. What are people interested in right this second, how do I attract them and what are they likely to buy. I have discussed how to target and rank well for keywords at length previously and now use that knowledge to start targeting the "Right" keywords. When you combine these two lessons you will start seeing the money.
Till next time,
Griz
I have been having a little fun the last few days with Vic Franqui of Blogger Unleashed. Vic is a former black hat gone straight - well that's not quite true, once a black hat always a black hat - and he has decided to open up his chest of black arts and show bloggers the tricks that people like Vic use to make money online.
This isn't for people looking for fame, it's 100% about making money and he cuts to the chase - do this, do that and this is the result. The best part is you can test out his methods in real time and see for yourself if it works. Yesterday he described how to get a page indexed in minutes and then did it. His readers then jumped on board and tried to get instantly indexed themselves. They all succeeded and before the day was done Vic's name was popping up on Blogs far and wide.
Check out Monika's post Blogger Unleashed - An Introduction or Costa's post Can A Low Traffic Blog Make Money. Terry gives a nice summary of his results using the method on his post Can I Work at Home for Mony. If that's not enough I found several more great posts about Vic and Blogger Unleashed; Blogger Unleashed Review, Ouch! It Hurts! by Markk and Frank Carr's More Entrecard Sucks Madness. If you've got a few minutes I would read the articles and get to know a little bit about Vic Franqui. He is a unique character that you haven't seen the likes of before and I suspect he is about to become quite well known.
Vic has started a contest and will give away a fully optimized PR4 blog to the winner - if you are interested and you should be you can get all the info here: So you Want a Free Blog? Or What?
If you are trying to make money online then do yourself a big favor and give Blogger Unleashed a visit. You won't be sorry.
Griz
Does any one know if Ants scratch there ass?
Vic Franqui from Blogging Zoom is an old Black Hatter that is busy revealing secrets that few people are aware of and to prove his point he just posted a lesson asking his readers on Blogger Unleashed how he managed to get indexed and ranked number 1 on Google for the term "Do Ants Scatch There Ass".
If you have any interest in SEO then check out Vic's Blog and find out how he managed to get "Do ants scratch there ass" indexed before he even finished his article.
He did it the same way I did it but he did it in 6 minutes whereas I took 7 minutes to do the same thing.
Since Vic was faster I think I'll let him tell you how to do this - only fair.
Seriously though - Vic is one of the few people I have met that really knows his sh*t and I highly recommend all my readers take a few minutes and check out Vic's new blog "Blogger Unleashed". When black hat experts start talking about how to make money online the rest of us should really pay attention.
Griz
If you are a first time visitor you probably won't even read this - what on Earth would a cheesy looking blog like this know about making money online. Most first timers take a quick look and then hit the back button and are gone. A percentage leave by clicking a link somewhere on the page. If you are still reading this then chances are you are one of my readers that has got past the cheese and knows that I actually have real content on these pages - the vast majority of it really does explain how I make money with this free no frills Blogspot blog.
In a nutshell I make money with this blog by explaining the SEO techniques I use to target terms like "make money online". I make money by simply ranking high in the serps for terms related to making money. That's it. I don't even need a single person to read a single word of a single post on this blog and I still make money. Good money too.
This blog will be a year old on December 23.
I have spent the past year writing posts that optimize various keywords that I have chosen based on the amount of traffic those keywords generate on the search engines. I built this blog without ever expecting or caring if I ever had a real audience of readers. My goal was simple - generate large amounts of search engine traffic and convert that traffic into Adsense clicks and affiliate sales.
I have had to modify my tactics somewhat from my initial plan due to the fact that I seem to have built up a small but growing readership and in deference to them I have had to shelve my affiliate sales pitches - you won't appreciate me hawking products designed to entice the unwary blogging newcomer. I haven't totally given up on this revenue stream yet it's just I haven't figured out a "Reader Alert" system to warn my regular readers when they should simply ignore a post logged for the purpose of affiliate sales. I will work it back into the mix at some point as there is just too much money sitting on the table with affiliate sales for me to ignore. I know because the first six months I made a decent buck from affiliate sales by optimizing this blog for those types of keywords.
The loss of affiliate sales has been mediated by the sharp increase in Adsense revenue as my main keywords have slowly climbed Google's search engine rankings.
For all of you that think Adsense is crap and doesn't pay much I have news for you... it is still the single easiest and best source of long term income online. If you haven't made money from Adsense it's because you don't know how - not because it doesn't work.
I now rank in the top 1-2 pages on Google for all the main "Make Money" keywords. This past week I finally hit page 1 for several highly searched terms and before I show you what this has meant I want to show you a few of those rankings.
I have yet to reach page 1 for my Prime keyword - "make money online" - but I am on page 2 of Google.com (The US region)
Note: I reached page 1 in February, 2008.
(click images to enlarge)
I have however hit page 1 for "make money online" in most of the smaller Google regions like this serp from a query originating in the Netherlands. 
There are a couple of things I want to point out as you look at these and the following screenshots. A week ago there were about 170 million competing sites in Google's index. Today there are only about a 10th of this amount.
Google has just quietly cleaned house once again and eliminated millions of sites that are deemed irrelevant. Not just in this niche either - I have noticed this across all my niches. While this will have little effect on most of you, I point it out for interest sake as it is just one more step Google has taken recently to clean up its rankings. For those of us making money online this just means less competition and that's always welcome.
The other thing you should notice is the frequency of Blogspot.com blogs listed on the top search pages. People love bashing Blogger for all sorts of reasons but primarily because it doesn't look as professional or as nice as a self hosted wordpress blog or it is limited in many ways that wordpress blogs aren't. This is all true but when it comes to making money online all those nice looking Web 2.0 blogs aren't in the same ballpark.
Making money online and producing a reader friendly A-list style blog are not the same thing. Every time I hear a Web 2.0 blogger put down Blogger I cringe. People who haven't made a dime online are busy telling other people who haven't made a dime how to make money online by creating fancy looking social network friendly blogs. That is not how you make money online - that is how you try and make a name for yourself. Making a name doesn't mean you make any money. Ranking on top of the search pages does.
Keyword: "how to earn money online"
3 Blogspot blogs in top 10
Keyword: "how to make money"
3 Blogspot blogs in top 10
Keyword: "how to make money online"
4 Blogspot blogs in top 10
Keyword: "making money online"
2 Blogspot blogs in top 10
(BTW - how many A-List blogs did you see in the top ten?)
And...
What has making the first page meant in terms of earnings? Until last Saturday I was receiving 10-20 visitors a day each from Google for most of these terms. I was on page 2. Since Sunday I have seen up to 10 times the traffic for some of these keywords.
See my Feedburner search engine keyword stats up until mid afternoon today.
A week ago I was averaging $10-$15 per day in Adsense revenue.
Check out my earnings since Sunday.
Not a bad increase at all. Guess what? All my niches have gained traffic in the wake of Google's housecleaning. I mentioned a few weeks back that I had finally broke the $200 a day barrier for Adsense earnings.
Look at yesterday's total earnings for my entire network.
Kinda blew by the $300 a day barrier - almost anti-climactic.
A word to the wise for all of you Web 2.0 bloggers - keep your nice blogs and play with them to your hearts content but don't expect to make money with them. If you want to make money online do yourself a favor and learn two things; stop complaining about Google and learn why Google is important and then learn how to SEO.
Think about the fact that once you do the work it just keeps paying you day after day and you don't have to worry about readers and posting schedules or spending all day stumbling and digging. I haven't done a damn thing in three days and the money just rolls in.
There really is an easy way to make real money online and I have just shown you what it is.
Adsense.
In my next post I will tell you why there are so many high ranking Blogspot blogs and then go over some little known tricks and tweaks for optimizing both search rankings and Adsense.
Griz
How to Make Money Using Targeted Traffic - Payday Loans
I have been targeting the term Payday Loans for the past few weeks. If you are just joining me you can catch up by reading the "Adsense lessons" posted in my sidebar. The purpose of this experiment is to make page one on Google's index results for the keyword "Payday Loans". This is a high paying keyword for Adwords users and as an Adsense publisher I want to attract people who will click the Adsense ads.
I started out with a single optimized post and then sat back and waited for visitors to show up. I collected the keywords used by each visitor and then added these terms to updated posts. Since the last post I have collected several more terms listed below with search engine rank after the term;
payday loans work from home 10
payday loan business opportunity 38
how payday companies loans work? 4
payday loan no need to work 4
roi payday loans 15
payday loans seo 6
how does pay day loans work 6
payday loan content 10
payday loans (AOL) 84
make money payday loan 2 and 3
tips for marketing loan companies 13
payday loans canada 41
no faxing payday loan 22
does google loan money 10
make money online selling insurance 1
~no faxing payday loan 20
links+payday loans 10
I have now added more related keywords to the ever growing list of "Long Tails" that searchers have used to find my blog on Google. I have gone from 1-2 visitors a day in the beginning to 10-15 a day presently. Not large numbers but enough to confirm whether this campaign is worth pursuing. I have been able to confirm a few clicks from the "Payday Loan" crowd and was pleased with the results.
I won't go into all the gymnastics of figuring out what page my ads were clicked on (I don't use Google Analytics - another story) but I will say that you can never be sure exactly which ad has been clicked so the best you can do is ad up the circumstantial evidence and make an educated guess. I happened to be up on two occasions when Google rolled past the witching hour and I was able to isolate the stats on my first clicks of the new day.
The screenshots below told me that someone had clicked a $0.95 ad. I was able to track down both clicks shown to my Payday Loan page which displayed Loan ads in the sidebar Adsense block and regular "Make Money" ads in the Lead or Top block. The "Make Money Online" ads typically pay $0.30 - $0.40 per click but have fetched over a dollar at times. Using my statcounter stats I was able to determine that I had a visitor to my payday loan page at the time the click occurred and coupled with smart pricing guidelines I am pretty sure that the click came from the targeted traffic.
(Click images to enlarge)
This is the query used to find my payday loan page.
This is the $0.95 click recorded on my Adsense account.
These are the ads I was displaying on my page at the time.
On a second occasion I matched this query...
... with this result. A $1.80 click. Bingo! - this is definitely worth pursuing.
Now it is possible that the targeted traffic didn't click the ads and someone else did but not likely. To get better paying clicks you have to meet a few Google guidlines which are best understood by explaining how Adwords works.
An advertiser using Adwords allows Google to manage what sites it displays the advertisers ads on. An advertiser wants conversions and doesn't want an ad appearing and getting clicked on a bunch of sites that aren't likely to convert. To increase the advertisers ROI Google instituted smart pricing which basically states that they will charge less for clicks that are less likely to convert and more for highly targeted clicks.
A crude and simplified example of how this works.
If someone queries Google and finds my site using the term "make money online" and then clicks a Payday Loan ad, is this targeted? From Googles point of view this click would be considered less likely to convert as there is no connection between what the visitor was searching for and what they chose. In short if one of my "make money" searchers had clicked the payday loan ad I wouldn't have received the high payouts. Conversely you can see direct relevancy and how a searcher looking for "payday loans" would be more likely to convert for the advertiser. In this case Google charges the advertiser full price and I get top CPC by providing a highly targeted visitor to the advertisers site.
If this is confusing just think in terms of a relevancy trail. If everything is relevant then you get paid more and if you have people dropping in from stumbleupon and clicking the odd ad you will get paid pennies because that type of traffic is not targeted and is not relevant to the ads clicked. Large amounts of social traffic also bugger up your CTR and invariably if you draw social traffic you will be "smart priced" by Google and only paid pennies for all the Adsense ads. This is the reason most web 2.0 or A-List style blogs don't make any money with Adsense - they don't draw the right type of traffic and draw lots of the wrong type of traffic (from a money making standpoint only).
To make money with Adsense you only want large amounts of "targeted" traffic and basically nothing else.
The shot below lists the latest keywords or queries used to find my blog on the search engines. 90% of my total traffic comes from Google and these are the typical terms used to find me. 
In essence I know exactly who my visitors are and what they are looking for - and so does Google.
Because I have optimized all my posts for specific keywords Google sends me highly targeted traffic and then puts highly targeted (the best converting) ads on my blog for the visitors to click on. I am not smart priced and get the better paying clicks. This is the reason that page optimization is so important - your content and how you optimize it determines how targeted your traffic is. If you can't provide targeted traffic then you can't make money either with Adsense or with Affiliate sales. Selling ads is also hard if your traffic while large, is diffuse. To make money online you have to provide the people paying you what they want - converting traffic.
To summarize the "Payday Loan" campaign I have been tracking my index rankings for all the keywords I have collected and have made good progress in climbing the serp's but my main keyword has stalled out at a rank of 36. This appears to be as high as content and my PR5 can take me. From here on in I will be adding backlinks with highly targeted anchor text to boost my rankings.
It is at this point that many of you can't do what I do. I have access to a lot of sites that I can use to link to my pages. If you are just starting out then you will find getting backlinks more of a challenge and you won't have enough PR to target the competitive niches. This is why I have recommended starting out by targeting niches that you can overcome with content and a few backlinks that you can get using articles and services like Yahoo Answers and Squidoo. As your PR and content increases you will be able to target better keywords and build a successful Adsense site over time.
At some point you will be faced with the "ethical" dilemma of whether you should or would cheat. By cheating I am referring to the practice of buying links. I am not advocating anything but I will tell you that every successful niche marketer buys links - they have to. If you want to make any serious money online then you will be faced with this decision at some point. Just thought I would mention it now.
Before I leave you I want to address an comment I received recently. The writer mentioned that she had read that it wasn't a good idea to rely on Adsense for all your income online as Google can take it all away in an instant. This is true and I should mention that this is not the only way I earn an income online - it is just one of the ways. I have found that some niches are ideal for Adsense and others are better suited to affiliate sales. Lead generation has become my main focus lately and I have found learning how to make money with Adsense is a great way to hone the skills needed in generating leads. At the moment lead generation is dominated by the Black Hatters and you may find the article below illuminating if you are wondering just how far you can take a niche like "Payday Loans" and make money from it.
This article will give you a good idea of the kinds of people you are competing with online and the tactics experienced marketers use to make money. I have not used hypertext as I don't want to link to this site - black hats don't make good link partners.
http://oooff.com/php-affiliate-seo-blog/affiliate-marketing/
making-big-easy-money-with-google-local-search/
(I have broken the URL to fit the page - cut and paste both lines as one long URL)
Thanks to Paul for bringing this article to my attention unfortunately he didn't leave a link. The only thing missing in the article is how the lead generation sites managed to rank high for the Payday Loan terms they targeted. The answer is using the same optimization techniques that are used for Adsense.
Now that I know there are profitable clicks in this niche I will continue to add links over time - slowly - and work my way up the "Payday Loan" serp pages. I am already adding income to my bottom line and I'm not even ranking that well yet. I will update you when I get enough payday loan traffic to have a significant effect on my daily bottom line. At the moment my daily earnings on this blog fluctuate between $10 and $15 - when I start seeing higher earnings I will know that the payday loan clicks have started to accumulate.
Cheers,
Grizzly
Update Below
Follow along with me step by step as I show you how I pick a target and then optimize my blog in order to make money with Adsense.
I outline my "Payday Loans" experiment in sequential order below.
Payday Loans
Payday Loans Review
Payday Loans and Adsense
Payday Loans - Adsense Update
Payday Loans Update
- Griz
Over the past few days Blogger has changed it's comment form to exclude links pointing back to the commenter's site. There was no announcement made and once again Google has caused people to scream and flail. Google owns Blogger if you are wondering what the connection is.
The gist of it is only links to other Blogger blogs will be displayed in the comments. If you have a blog elsewhere you can still leave a comment but there won't be an outgoing link to your site. 
People using Blogger are understandably irate as this just adds one more reason why others won't bother commenting on Blogger blogs. Conspiracy talk has already begun and cites this as an attempt by Google to undermine all the other Blogging Platforms by removing all outgoing Blogspot links and the PR associated with them.
It should be mentioned that you can still get an indirect link by setting up a Blogger account and listing your other blogs in your profile. When you leave a comment on a Blogger blog the reader would have to follow your link on the comment back to your profile and then access your blog from there.
I want to discuss the ramifications of this but for those interested in a good summation of what has been done see Blogger.com No Longer Allows Links to Non-Blogger Sites in Comments by Windyridge. Read this post and then come back and listen to my take on this - it concerns everyone that is currently using do-follow.
What is Google up to now?
Each time Google acts there is swift condemnation from the blogging world. The general theory is that Google is a monopoly and everything they do is centered around eliminating competition - competing advertisers in relation to the crack down on paid links and now we will hear how they are trying to take down other blogging platforms like wordpress.
If you are one of the people who subscribe to this view then please hear me out.
If Google's prime objective was to control all advertising on the net they could do it overnight. If they wanted to end all the other blog platforms online they could wipe them out in the blink of an eye. How?
Think on this for a bit. Google controls most of the traffic on the net. They are just one search engine among many and yet most people choose to use them when searching for something. Google can list whoever they want for whatever reason they want and if you don't like the results they give you then you are free to use another search engine. You can not call in the District Attorney or the Attorney General and ask that Google be sued for violating anti trust because they didn't index your blog or because they took away your PR. The legal minds would quickly inform you that you can use a competing service if you aren't happy with Google.
The point is that they are NOT a monopoly - there are lots of competing search engines. What they are is successful and all because people CHOOSE to use them and not because people HAVE to use them.
Now for the real shocker - Google could simply decide that only Blogspot blogs will be listed in their index. They could also decide that any site displaying any advertising that they don't own or control will be dropped from their index as well. They haven't done this but they could and there would be nothing wrong with this.
Google's index is no different than you or I publishing a list. Take a popular site like 45n5.com which lists the top 100 "make money online" blogs according to Mark the owner. Now for some reason, in spite of several requests to include me in the listings I have never heard back from the site and haven't been added. Do I have the right to sue because I haven't been added to the Top 100 index? No. It's Mark's index and he can do what he wants with it. (But if he were to add me and hopefully he has a sense of humor, I would be overjoyed to remove the no-follow on my link - hehe maybe blackmail will get me in.)
The point is Google can do everything people are accusing them of if they wanted to do what they are accused of and they could do it instantly without all this playing around. They haven't though and that's because they aren't trying to eliminate advertising competition or other blogging platforms. The only competition they would like to eliminate is other search engines and they are doing this by being the "BEST" search engine.
It is ironic that people have been claiming that Google is no longer "valid" since the latest slap reduced so many high PR sites to ashes. Do they really think this invalidates Google? Google eliminated one of the top avenues that people were using to artificially inflate their PR - people were buying PR from sites openly selling it. Does stopping this practice make them less valid? Would you rather see a site listed on top of the serp's because it was able to buy the most reviews on the net or would you prefer to see the site that has the most authentic PR?
The end result is that Google only takes action in order to make their search results more valid. Getting rid of a portion of the paid links problem increased their validity, it did not diminish it.
Google and the The Do Follow Movement
When I first heard about the Do Follow movement my immediate reaction was that this won't end well for the people using it. Like paid links nobody stopped to think about Google's reaction to it. If you depend on Google for your traffic then you really should think about Google before proceeding down one path or another.
So, how do you think Google feels about Do-Follow?
Let's ask what is the point of Do-Follow?
If you are a blogger then you have convinced yourself that this is a legitimate way of inducing comments from your readers. More people will comment if you offer them a link that passes PR back to the commenter's page.
Do I really need to tell you how Google sees this?
This is simply another way to game the search engine. Before you protest just think of how many sites publish lists of Do-Follow blogs with high PR. What are people being told to do? If you want to increase your page rank then leave comments on all these high PR blogs. Does this allow a blog with poor quality content to inflate it's PR? You bet it does. If you are using Do-Follow then you are still selling PR but instead of money you are doing it in return for readership and comment content.
It doesn't matter if you don't think there is anything wrong with what you're doing. In fact Google doesn't care what your reasons are because you are ultimately allowing others to game the serp's even if your reasons are pure and unselfish.
Like paid links the people who will be penalized will be the ones allowing the links - not the ones receiving the links.
I mentioned a penalty but I am only guessing. It seems to me that Google is sending a clear message in regards to removing links from the Blogger comments. If anything it probably means that comment links will or are now being ignored by Google although I have no proof. It makes sense for them to follow this path though. What possible reason could allowing comment links help Google in ranking sites? Almost none that I can see. They know that all these links were not created by the PR owner and that the owner is passing on PR indiscriminately. Why should they accept the link as valid?
Just a hunch but I think comment links play an important role in Google's algorithm.
Google's latest move is puzzling because they could simply decide to ignore these types of links without anybody even knowing so why the change to Blogger. It seems obvious that the changes were made to stop people from removing the no-follow tag on Blogger comments. All Blogger blogs are automatically no-followed and wouldn't pass PR normally and Google would have no reason to change the linking structure. That they are eliminating links to the outside altogether has to mean it's the only way to stop do-follow links. This sends the message that they don't like do-follow or at least that is how I am reading it.
The thing is that if do-follow is causing them concern why not just ignore the links on comments all together? Why bother sending a message trying to get everyone to eliminate the do-follow links?
I am totally guessing but is it possible that Google uses the amount of comments a blog gets (by counting links) to help rank sites on it's index? It certainly would be a somewhat relevant factor in deciding which sites are seen as an authority. This certainly isn't conclusive but in general the more authoritative sites do tend to get the most comments.
As I said, just a guess but it would explain why Google can't ignore the links and why they want no-follow used. If they have been using this metric in the algorithm then you can see how do-follow would dramatically skewer the rankings.
So why not tell everybody they use comments to aid their rankings? Because then we will all be spamming our own sites with comments.
I might be completely off here but it pays to wonder when Google starts making changes. My hypothesis may be wrong and there could be other reasons for these Blogger changes but I know that Google does not like the Do-Follow movement and you can be sure that they will have a plan to eliminate it. This alone should make you think about being involved in it.
Cheers,
Grizzly
If you are just joining me I have been demonstrating how to optimize blogs for certain keywords in order to drive search engine traffic. I use this type of traffic primarily for adsense revenue but my techniques will also work if you are selling affiliate products or advertising on your pages. The goal is to target the type of traffic that will respond to what you offer on your page.
I have chosen the term Payday Loans for a number of reasons.
It is a heavily searched term in the search engines which means that it could be profitable using Adsense or by selling ad space to payday loan companies who want to take advantage of the targeted traffic.
It is also a term that is not particularly relevant to my blog and while this is a no no in as far as Adsense is concerned I am experimenting to see if I can successfully pull off introducing an off topic niche into this blog. It may not work but if it does then the field is wide open for future keyword cherry picking.
Lastly it allows me to show my readers the step by step process I use to make money with my blogs. If you want to catch up you can read my previous posts on this topic;
Payday Loans
Payday Loans Review
Make Money with Payday Loans
Several readers have asked me about other marketer's techniques and I want to set something straight at the outset. My way of doing things is not the only way - there are other SEO methods out there and lot's of ebooks regarding Adsense. I am a trial and error type of person and while I have read other methods I find that most aren't kept up to date and in large part concentrate on short cuts. Short cuts are fine for short term projects and I will discuss this type of marketing in the future but for now I am interested in showing you how to create a steady long term income that works in the current search engine climate. Because I am always experimenting I find that my methods are always being tweaked and updated which keeps my blogs moving in the right direction without fear of running afoul of Google. Having said that, this current experiment could get me into trouble but I am a firm believer in taking things slow and being cautious - which is what todays post is about.
Knowing how to plan ahead and gauge your progress.
I'm just guessing but I bet 90% of all the blogs on the net are unplanned "off the top of the head" creations.
Most are not focused on any defined goal. The URL has nothing to do with the content, the blog title is usually a name or a general phrase ie. "My Lonely Life" and it has nothing to do with the content either. The content changes day to day and covers topics from one end of the spectrum to the other. The post titles don't reflect the post content and the content itself is not optimized for any particular keyword or topic. Did I miss anything?
I am aware that a lot of bloggers - certainly the majority are busy creating content that they think will interest people and they use lot's of snappy titles and tricks to lure traffic to the site - the Web 2.0 crowd. This has become the new dominant blogging scene and it is all geared to drawing traffic from the social networks in order to eventually become an A - Lister. Every day I read blogs that talk about which is better; Stumble Upon or Digg. Every day someone has a new way to gather hordes of traffic using these sites. When I read these blogs I always wait for someone to ask one important question. "What did you do with all that traffic?"
Appealing to the stumblers and diggers it seems most bloggers don't realize that they are only after traffic for traffic's sake. They don't have a plan on what to do with the visitors they do get. Visitors who usually just click in, click out and are never seen again. The general theory seems to be that this will lead to becoming recognized which in turn will lead to becoming an A-Lister. Why do they want to be an A-lister? I presume they think this will make them a lot of money or maybe they just want to be an A-lister for the sake of being an A-lister. If I had to guess I would say that most bloggers have at least considered the possibility of making money with their blog and true bloggers blogging only for the fun of it are a minority.
Here is the million dollar question - has anyone become an A-lister just from social traffic? All the ones I know of draw most of their traffic from search engines or at least they did until achieving enough notoriety to attract social traffic. What's more, they still need search engine traffic to make money from their sites. Someone has to click the ads they sell or no one will buy ads. Social network users don't click the ads - when was the last time you bought something on one of the A-listers sites? Did you even click an ad?
The point I am making is simple and all the Google haters out there will have to realize this sooner or later - you will not be successful online either as a marketer or as an A-lister without Google's traffic. Period.
If you know of anybody that makes money online who doesn't rely on search engine traffic to do it - please let me know.
I am not trying to dash your A-List dreams, just trying to outline the basic concepts of SEO that you can and should incorporate into your blog. To this end I have been explaining how to target the term "Payday Loan" using, so far, the most basic techniques that all optimized pages must have to rank well in the serp's.
These are;
Select a prime keyword or phrase as your ultimate target. Use that phrase or keyword in every post title that you can. Use it 2 to 3 times per hundred words of content. Always highlight it in the first paragraph a few times. Use it in the last paragraph as well.
Select a list of long tail keywords (related terms and phrases of the prime keyword) and use these terms liberally in your content.
Target each new post to a long tail and work at raising these related keywords towards the top of the serp's first. The more related keywords you target the higher your prime keyword will rank.
Use keywords and only keywords in your tags - prime and long tails.
This is basic SEO and has the effect of telling Google exactly what your pages are about.
Once you have posted your articles pay attention to your stats - specifically tracking the keywords people use to find your site. Keep a list of these keywords and use them in future posts or even go back and include them in prior ones. This will increase your index ranking for each of the terms.
This has confused a few people so I will show you what I am talking about using my Payday Loan posts.
The first Payday Loan post was a fishing expedition. I wrote a long rambling post that used all the main keywords for my target. I then sat back and waited for the first visitor to find my site using a payday loan related keyword. It wasn't long before Google sent me someone who had typed in the term "cashadvancelinkdirectory.com" and I quickly checked Google to find where I ranked for this term. It was 3 and still is. As each day passed a few more visitors showed up and I noted the keywords used and the ranking of each. I then wrote a new post and included all of the terms Google had sent me traffic for. The point of doing this is to reinforce those terms as relevant to my site and as this relevancy increases Google sends me even more long tail relevant keywords. Slowly and steadily I will incorporate all of the newest terms into my posts as well which will lead to getting more terms and so on...
This is the initial list of related keywords for Payday Loan that visitors had entered into Google's search box and where my blog ranked for each term in the result's pages.
payday loan industry competition - rank was 20
cashadvancelinkdirectory.com - rank was 3
make money online with payday loans - rank was 4 and 5
make money with payday loans - rank was 3
emergency cash - loan - rank was 110
pay day loan reviews - rank was 16
loan money online - rank was 26
how much does payday loans make - rank was 4
Since then I have added the following;
payday loan traffic ranked 8
payday loans + marketing ranked 17
marketing for payday loans ranked 5
make money payday loans ranked 5
i need a loan to make money ranked 10
how to make money with payday loans ranked 4 (first Yahoo visitor)
how to create your own online payday loan business ranked 2
keyword ideas payday loan ranked 1
reviews on payday day loans ranked 26
I have since entered all these terms into SEO Elite in order to track the rankings. In the chart below you can see each term and how the rankings move - up or down according to Google. (Click image to enlarge)
Most of these terms will never bring me much traffic but that's not what I am after. I simply want to make my site relevant for Payday loans in general and I do this by adding as much relevant content as possible. Normally I would be doing this on a blog set up for the target and would be posting lengthy articles covering every aspect of loans that I could think of. Because I am trying to incorporate payday loan relevancy into an existing non-related blog I will have to move slower and I do this by simply building up long tail phrases over a longer period of time.
The chart above is important not so much for showing me my rankings but for showing me how Google is ranking me. I will explain the difference in a minute but first the initial chart readings.
The first thing to notice is that I am not ranked at all for "Loans" and "Cash Loans Online". I added these to the list as one is the parent keyword of my prime keyword - "Loans" and the other is a highly searched related term - "Cash Loans Online". If I succeed with payday loans then I should begin to rank for these two terms as well and they will be future targets if I do. Just planning ahead.
The next thing of interest is that I am being ranked for my prime keyword - "Payday Loans". This is good news so soon in my quest. It tells me that Google has accepted my blog as being at least somewhat relevant to the term. Keep in mind that the keyword I have chosen is commonly referred to as one of the red flag keywords - terms that set off spam filters far and wide. It is a high paying adsense keyword and as such it attracts spammers trying to cash in on it. Usually Google will flag you instantly and never index your posts if it suspects that you are a spam site. Google has decided that I am not and I now have a huge lead on the spammers.
You will also notice that I went from a rank of over 200 for Payday Loans and I have climbed 49 spots in a few days without doing anything more than using the term in my post titles and content - a practice I am repeating in this post. I have not chased down any backlinks yet.
This increase in ranking tells me that I should have a legitimate shot at success.
You will also notice that I am slowly getting more traffic for more terms. This is directly related to the fact that as Google accepts your relevancy for one term it in effect boosts your relevancy for all the nearest related terms which in turn means ranking for more terms. It becomes a snowball rolling down hill. The more terms you rank for - the more terms you will get to rank for.
I said the chart was helpful for tracking my rankings and it is but the real story is that it shows me exactly how Google has me pigeon holed at the minute. If you look at the terms I have been ranked for you will notice 3 distinct levels of relevancy.
The terms that Google has ranked me high for are all quite relevant to my blog. I am telling people how to market and make money off of payday loans or at least the term.
The terms Google has ranked me 2 - 4 pages deep are terms that Google hasn't quite decided if I am totally relevant for yet. And they are right. I have used the term "Payday Loan Review" in my posts but I haven't really done a review of any payday loan companies or systems. I shouldn't rank on the front page for this and Google is able to figure this out. The algorithm is really quite amazing in a lot of ways.
Google is also accurate about the terms in which I rank out in the netherworld - "emergency cash loan", "I need a loan to make money" and "payday loans". I don't give out loans and Google knows it. My task will be to convince Google to put me on the front page for my term in spite of this. I will have to convince Google that a review or informational post deserves top billing along with the actual payday loan companies.
A note about Red Flag Keywords
I mentioned earlier that I would normally start a new blog if I wanted to target a new niche or keyword not related to any of my existing sites. If you are following along then I suggest you start a new blog and target a niche of your choice. The main reason I am experimenting with this niche on this blog is because it is increasingly difficult to target Red Flag keywords on sites devoted to the terms. If you want to target legal/law related keywords you had better be a law office. If you go after mortgage and loan traffic then you had better be a financial institution. If it's insurance related then you had better be selling insurance. If you can't show instant relevancy to Google then you won't get out of the water.
If you are picking a niche please stay away from all the spam keywords. Not because I don't want the competition but because you need to learn how to do this with a niche you can dominate before tackling one that I know will lead most of you to failure. I have no assurance that I will succeed so don't waste your time on keywords that will be almost impossible to succeed with. This doesn't mean you shouldn't go after highly competitive keywords - I always do as that is where the money is. Competition doesn't scare me and if you take my advice to heart and do what I do it won't scare you either. The more competitive the keyword the better just stay away from the spam keywords - you don't want to lose your Adsense account.
To reinforce this point I want to show you something which will also explain why I am going slow in my campaign for Payday Loans.
The moment you get involved with spam keywords you attract all the spammers. I mentioned in a recent post that one of the current methods that spammers are using to game Google is to scrape content off of legitimate sites and post links back to the source - they do this in order to get a trackback link returned to them. They are taking advantage of the fact that most bogs have yet to add the no-follow to trackbacks. In effect they are stealing PR from high ranking blogs.
No sooner did I post my first article on Payday Loans than I started receiving links from spammers. To date I have had 28 links to my first post. See the screenshot below.
Normally I wouldn't mind 28 new links all perfectly optimized for my post (notice the anchor text in BOLD) but not when they come from bad neighborhoods. If you try and go to most of these sites you will be re-directed to a different site. Spammers cloak their money sites and present Google one URL while actual clicks are sent elsewhere. I was worried about all these links showing up so fast and still am. I have no-follow on my comments and on Bloggers version of trackbacks - the "sites linking" widget. Hopefully this is enough to convince Google that I am not linking to them and that I shouldn't be punished for others linking to me. Remember that Google doesn't usually blame you for incoming links - you really can't control who links to you. You only get penalized for links leaving your site. This is why the people hurt most by the recent Google slap were the one's posting the paid reviews and not the one's buying the reviews.
Each post I have written has recieved a number of these spam links and for that reason I am going slow and have been reluctant to start adding my own links. Linking has to look natural - a few at first and then increasing over time with a variety of keywords used in the anchor text. Too many links too fast and all using the same anchor text will get you on the Google Bomb radar and as John Chow found out - this ain't a good thing.
Alright this has been long enough but as you can see I am making progress as far as targeting Payday Loans and I am seeing a little more traffic each day for related terms. Some of that traffic will start clicking the ads I have on the pages if they haven't already and I should slowly see an increase in my Adsense earnings. You will notice that I haven't done anything that you can't duplicate easily on your own blog. I will keep you posted on my results as this progresses.
Till next time,
Grizzly
Update Below
Follow along with me step by step as I show you how I pick a target and then optimize my blog in order to make money with Adsense.
I outline my "Payday Loans" experiment in sequential order below.
Payday Loans
Payday Loans Review
Payday Loans and Adsense
Payday Loans - Adsense Update
Payday Loans Update
- Griz
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. For a good synopsis of the differences between these platforms see Blogs: Self Hosting vs Free Hosting by Terry Didcott.
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 other's 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 definately 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
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