Payday Loans Review and Keyword Taboos

Payday Loan Review - Part 2 In How to Make Money Online

If you are just joining me may I suggest that you read Payday Loans first so that you will have an idea where I am going with this post.

In my last post "Do you Blog for Money or Readers?" I explained that I want to start playing around with this blog. By this I mean that I want to see what kind of money I can scare up now that I have a PR5 blog that gets crawled several times a day by Google. I discussed the whole notion of writing for readers or for money in the last post but suffice to say that I started this blog for several reasons and making money was certainly one of them.

I get quite a few emails from well-intentioned and polite readers who just want to let me know that I would have a lot more readers if;

- I hosted my own domain.

- got professional graphics

- lose the adsense ads

- use wordpress

- change the layout

- show my picture

These are all really good suggestions if you want to produce a top-shelf A-list style blog. This is what you need to do if you are ever going to get to the top. This is correct but what "TOP" are you getting to? If it's to get to the "TOP" of the Internet Marketing community then this is exactly how you do it. If it's to get to the "TOP" of the search engines then it's not the way to do it at all.

There may be a lot of Money to be had getting on the A-list, I don't know but I'll take everyones word for it. Aside from selling pagerank I really don't see where the income comes from myself. I suppose they have the traffic numbers to make money off of no-follow advertising. The selling of pagerank is coming to a close so they will have to sustain themselves on ads. With their traffic this will probably suffice... as long as their traffic holds up.

The image below (click to enlarge it) is a snapshot of the backlinks johnchow.com has. It's only a partial list but I didn't need to run all the links to see a pattern. (Note - SEO Elite is brain dead when listing no-follows so ignore the results posted as they are not correct)

The list below contains some of his top links and you will notice the anchor text used in just about all of them contain the keywords "John Chow". This means he should rank really well for the term "John Chow" (he doesn't as he has been manually Googlized and sent to the back of the classroom) and normally he would be number 1 for this. And so he should be. His fans far and wide have linked to him and told Google in the process that this is the site that is most relevant to the term "John Chow". His fans haven't said that he is relevant for "make money online" or any of the related terms in this niche.



There has been a lot written about the johnchow.com saga, how he doesn't rank for his own name and why did Google drop his PR and send him to the back-benches of the "make money online" listings in the serp's. Why they took his own name away I don't know. Why he doesn't rank for the main "make money" keywords is obvious and it has nothing to do with a penalty. He doesn't have any backlinks showing relevance. Take a look at Darren Rowse's Problogger.net backlinks below;



Are you seeing a pattern here?

Problogger has a lot of anchor text stating that this site is relevant to "Darren", "Problogger" and "Darren Rowse". No relevance to "Making Money Online". These two and other big names in the "make money" world do rank fairly well for "make money" keywords but only because of content and the fact that a lot of the backlinks come from relevant sites re: subject matter, even though the anchor text is irrelevant. The thing is these A-listers don't dominate the serp's as far as profitable keywords go. They just hover at the edges.

Look at my backlinks;



Most of my links have "make money" keywords in the anchor. I am also starting to get the dreaded "Grizzly" anchors. I don't want to be relevant to bears. A tip to all of you reading this - if you want to link to someone then take a minute and think about what that site is most relevant to and then use those keywords in the anchor.

For example, I read a post on Courtney Tuttles blog "Make money online Free" this morning and you might want to read it because it tells you what you should do if you want to become an A-lister. He uses humor and gets his point across by showing you what you shouldn't do. Go Read It (It's really quite good)- I'll wait.

OK. I just gave the best type of backlink for his blog. He just got a relevant (to his niche) PR5 site to tell Google that Court's blog is relevant to the term "make money online". Court is another blogger that suffers from backlinks optimized for "court" and "courtney tuttle" but I noticed he does have a good supply of "make money" keywords too.

I like Court and don't want to upset him by showing his links here - the others, oh well, what are they going to do? Link to me? (not that they will ever see this) Lol.

The point I am making is this - there are different ways to make money with your blog and contrary to current thinking - adsense and affiliate sales (niche sites not IM) can earn you a good income and I am betting a better income than most of the A-listers. I know, I know, Adsense is dead! Affiliate sales requires a lot of traffic! Selling Pagerank/paid reviews is where it's at!

Yes, this is the prevailing wisdom and I couldn't be happier. The competition has been dropping like flies for a while now thanks to Google and their slap happy team of geeks. It's great. I love Google.

Every time I hear Adsense is dead I just smile. I'll let you in on a secret - it ain't dead and there is a lot less competition than there used to be. I find it easier now than ever to make money with it.

Back to Payday Loans.

I led you to believe that I had found a goldmine in the previous post on Payday loans. I showed you how many times it gets searched each month and how few sites existed that compete for this term on the serp's. I also mentioned that clicks for adsense ads ran in the $5 and up range. I didn't lie to you as this is a goldmine but I didn't tell you everything either.

Payday Loans is a taboo keyword. It sits along side of "lemon laws", "mesothelioma" and countless other spam keywords introduced to the world by "The Rich Whatever Guy". The reason there are so few sites competing for "payday loans" is because Google wiped the slate clean of the millions of spam sites that used to target this term. If you try and start a new site with taboo keywords in your url, title or sometimes even mention the keywords in your post you will be flagged immediately and ignored - forever. If you are using blogger you will likely see your site disappear before your eyes. Spamblogs are a lot harder to pull off now and this has made it a lot easier for the rest of us to target productive keywords.

Before I go any farther I need to clarify things. If you want to go after adsense revenue then don't do anything the A-listers do. You make money from search traffic with adsense and only if you can get people to stick around long enough to click your ad. If your site looks too professional or too techie or too cerebral or too cluttered you will not keep them around long enough to click anything but the back button - usually before the page finishes loading. If you want adsense revenue then cheesy is the only way.

I have tested every type of layout on my niche sites and have seen the same results over and over again. People who like to read like professional looking sites. People who are shopping for something want highly relevant subject matter with lots of pictures and they only want to see 1 product. People who like to surf aimlessly like cheese. Cheese is non threatening, inviting enough to say "hmmm what's this about", read a few lines and decide if this is what they were looking for - nope but wait this ad looks like it might be what I need. Click and off they go.

This blog is cheese - name, header, sidebar - all cheese.

The first possible thing that any one can click when landing on this page is the money maker. (back icon accepted) The top adsense ad - the $.50 a click ad. Everyday 10 people click that ad. Another 40 people click other ads and each day I make another $10 or more. I used to make $30 to $40 a day on this site but I stopped targeting keywords and started targeting readers. You may say $10 is no big deal and it isn't but compared to what I hear most of you make it is a landslide. Most bloggers I know don't make $10 a month with adsense. I have just over 20 sites pulling in this much a day or more. You do the math - it's the easiest money I know of. I have many many more sites pulling in $3 - $4 a day on top of this. If you don't believe me there is nothing I can say to convince you but then again I am not selling you anything either. Why would I lie?

The reason most of you don't make money with adsense is because you don't optimize your pages for prime keywords and you don't gather backlinks using the prime keywords in the anchor text. You also don't get backlinks to your sub pages - only to your home page. Check the backlink I gave Court - it points to the page the article is on, not his homepage. Your homepage has PR and will get indexed for whatever you have on it today. This will change the next time you make a post. If you had been targeting a keyword today and getting traffic for it you wont see traffic once it hits your sub-page. Unless the sub-page has good PR as well.

The other day I optimized my page for the term "Payday Loans". I did this by using the term in my title, sub header and several times in my post. I also included lots of relevant long tail terms and had relevant content in the post. Google could not mistake what the page was about. After that I sent a few backlinks to the sub-page and home page optimized for the keyword. And then I waited...

I admit that I was nervous doing it - would I be flagged for spam? Blogger has a nice little message it gives you when you have been flagged. Basically they stop you from posting a flagged article until you get a manual review done to ensure that you aren't a spamblog. I was happy to see that I didn't get the message.

I got my first traffic hit the next day. See below.



This wasn't for the term "payday loan" and I didn't expect it to be - I'll explain why in a minute. The hit was for a long tail keyword and this was enough to let me know that Google indexed the page and didn't flag me or drop me to the supplementals.

I also was happy to see my adsense ads on the page slowly converted from make money ads to payday loan ads. I was worried Google would give me the old "public service" ads - a sure sign you are dead in the water.

This is good news and now I know that I can start targeting long tail keywords relevant to payday loans. I will do this gradually in a series of posts. The plan is to crawl to the top of the long tail keywords first which will help me crawl up the main keyword listings in the process. As I get more hits on the long tails I will start getting clicks on the highly targeted ads. I am anxious to see what the CPC will be. If it is high I will keep going with this. If it is under $.30 a click I will abandon this target and find another.

Now here is the real challenge. Getting on page 1 for "Payday Loans". The sites that make it on to page 1 for taboo keywords don't have adsense on them. Generally they don't have any ads on them at all. Why? Because they are actual businesses engaged in providing a product or service related to their niche. The top payday loan sites actually give out payday loans! Sheesh - go figure.

If you have adsense on your site it's pretty obvious to Google that you probably aren't a payday loan company and you're not likely to see page 1. This is just the type of challenge I built this blog for. This is an experiment to see if I can. I have done it before in other niches and I want to see if it can be done with a taboo keyword. I am not going to tell you what I am going to do just yet - I'll fill you in as progress is made.

Having a high PR blog in the "make money online" niche has a huge benefit that my niche sites don't have. In my "shoes" niche I can target lots of keywords related to shoes but as large as this niche is there are only so many profitable keywords. Once I have dominated the money makers there is not much more I can do except wait for the next "ugg boot" or "croc shoe" fad to come along. This doesn't happen often enough. This type of niche does OK on adsense but really makes it's money selling product through affiliate links.

With this blog I have a huge lateral range of keywords that I can target - bigger than any other niche with the exception of "news". Even then I could probably get creative and make any keyword relevant to this blog. If I write a review about the whole payday loan industry and how it has been targeted by spamblogs over the years am I not talking about something that is relevant to my blog as well as giving my readers something that they might be interested in? If Google decides to put a review like that on the front page of the "payday loan" serp are they wrong? It's relevant to people searching for payday loans. What if my article was about scam payday loan companies and what to watch out for? This might be very appropriate for page 1.

I've babbled along as usual but there is one more point to make.

This cheesy little blog is just over 10 months old - it will have made me $20,000 by the time it hits the 1 year mark.

I made most of it in the early days by targeting hot keywords. The keyword below took off for a week and then leveled out. It is still bringing me money at a steady pace as I still rank number one for it.



If you want to make money with adsense then target keywords and optimize each post for that keyword. The tougher the keyword the more posts you will need. You will have to give your whole site relevance to the keyword and not just one page. Get sub-page backlinks with proper anchor text. I have explained how to do this here "How to get Traffic and Backlinks" Don't just target your homepage. It's the sub-page PR where the post will sit for an eternity that needs the backlink. This is important - it will get you lots of pages indexed (high) in the serp's. If all your PR is only on your home page then only the content on the homepage will get high indexing and only until you add a new post.

A final note - if you have read this far then you are one of my readers and not likely someone who found this on the search engines. If you have a blog then you probably belong to one or another of the social networks and have probably made a few friends. Do yourselves a favor and ask your friends to optimize the anchor text in the links they give you. And you do the same for them. You don't want to get ranked high for your names - get ranked for your subject matter. Like this "Dumping Google Adsense seems Inevitable"

If you have a nice non cheesy looking site - stick to A-list building and start over with new blogs aimed at adsense. One thing to remember is that Post Titles are extremely important for driving traffic. If you are after readers you need something snappy and memorable to peek a visitors curiosity. "Paris Hilton uses Payday Loan for Coke". If you are after search engine traffic you need keywords in your title and preferably nothing else."Payday Loans" is much better than "How to Get Payday Loans". You can use your A-list blog to help out your newer blogs. When you build up a nice stable of quality content sites you will find there is plenty of money in adsense to make a living.

There are a lot of bloggers who are adamant on getting away from adsense because "Google can't be trusted" or "google will crush you on a whim". This is not true at all. Google has followed a predictable and reasonable path from day one. If you do what they ask then you wont have a problem. This blog is totally white hat and complies with everything Google wants to see. I provide quality content and make the site bot friendly. They don't like spam or anything that manipulates the rankings. I followed the rules and got rewarded with a PR5 - others broke the rules and got downgraded. Google isn't perfect and has made mistakes but in the overall picture they are moving in the right direction. Many will argue with me on this but there is nothing better than a good argument. You can let me have it but keep it civil.

I will keep you updated,

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