Each topic warrants its own lengthy post but, for now, I’d like to focus on ethical link building. Why? Because the links that come into your site are probably the single most important element in building an online business. They represent authority which, in turn represents page position. And, of course, page position means everything in terms of getting the visitors you need to click on your ads or buy your product. So that’s what today’s post is all about; link building and how to do it as honestly as possible to stay in Google’s good graces.

As mentioned repeatedly, the only real way to get your site on the map and ranking high in the search engines is through quality anchored text links. You can try a dozen different strategies but you’ll find again and again that the guy with legitimate anchored links coming back to his site will beat you every time. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “yeah, that’s great, Dave, and we keep reading that here and everywhere else but HOW do we get those links?!”

Look around long enough and hard enough and you’ll find solutions to your problem. There is, of course, the option of submitting articles to authority sites like Ezine or Go-Articles. There’s also the option of doing spammier article writing with anchored links to article submission sites or by using article submission software. Keep in mind these are low-value links but can make up a lot in volume for what they lack in quality. Then there are options like writing hubpages or infobarrel articles and linking back to your money site. Finally, there’s the option of building link farms or using link sharing techniques.

All of these methods are covered in great detail by other marketers so I won’t dwell on them. Just know that, used in moderation, these solutions can do a lot to move you up in the search rankings particularly if your keyword competitors aren’t engaging in any link building efforts. But, at the end of the day, none of these methods earn Google’s stamp of approval.

You may be wondering if that means you can get banned by Google for engaging in those practices. The answer really depends on degree of abuse. It is Google’s playground, after all, and if they don’t like what you’re doing they are perfectly in their rights to devalue the links you have coming in or ban your Adsense account entirely. But is their reasoning sound? What would they rather you do?

In a utopian Google world, you’d put up lots of great content and complete strangers would naturally link to your site (lending it legitimate authority) without any prompting by you. This “organic” link activity lends your site credibility in Google’s eyes and in that they are right. But their thinking is a bit naïve and misguided. Think about it for a moment.

Let’s say there are a thousand sites out there about fuzzy widgets and you decide you’re going to put up a blog about fuzzy widgets. You are the world authority on fuzzy widgets and have devoted your life to their study so, presumably, your fuzzy widget site will be better and more informative than any other fuzzy widget site out there. You’re also extremely altruistic and honest so you decide you’re going to play strictly by Google’s utopian view of the world and do no link building at all. You’re the master of all things fuzzy widget related, after all, so it’s a no brainer that people will be linking to you naturally.

You set up your site, write novels worth of brilliant content and, after a year, are still ranked 800th for fuzzy widgets. Nobody knows about your site, almost nobody comes to your site and you only have 3 or 4 links from people saying “click here” for fuzzy widget information. What the hell went wrong?!

Well, in Google’s view you did everything right. You wrote tons of great and helpful content. So why isn’t it panning out? Simple. In order for people to link to your site, they have to find it first and who in the world is ever going to find your wonderful content if your site is sitting somewhere on page 80 of Google’s search results for fuzzy widgets? I don’t know about you but when I do a Google search I check the stuff on page one, MAYBE even page two and go as far as page 3 once every blue moon. But page 80? Hell no. And nobody else bothers to dig that deep either.

While you’re playing an “honest” game, hundreds of competitors are out there soliciting or developing links in one way or another. Your most direct competitors are either already established or working diligently to get established. They aren’t just sitting there resting on their reputations in hopes of getting somewhere in the SERPs.

There’s the flaw in Google’s philosophy because it assumes a level playing field with all parties engaged in honest competition. That’s simply not reality and that’s why you’re unlikely to get banned for engaging in SOME conservative self-serving and self-motivated link building efforts. Google realizes that the best content simply can’t float to the top when there are so many people out there self-promoting their content. By them doing so, your very valuable and legitimate content never gets eyes on it and, therefore, never gets the natural link love it very much deserves.

Self-promotion isn’t a naughty thing in and of itself. Companies advertise their products all the time and nobody bats an eye, after all. What does matter is that the self-promotion you engage in be legitimate and legitimately warranted. That deserves a bit of elaboration.

If I develop a minimal content, made-for-adsense blog about fuzzy widgets and then link build the hell out of it, that’s a serious evil in Google’s eyes. A site like this will be very thin on content, offer no real value to visitors and the link efforts will be geared solely at getting visitors to the practically useless site in hopes of getting ads clicked. Google frowns on this behavior and, frankly, so do I.

On the other hand, some self promotion for a valuable site with solid content geared at a specific topic or product isn’t evil and Google seems to agree. By self-promoting (through legitimate methods which do not include link-farms and the like), you don’t run much risk of a Google slap. By gaining some visibility you will draw in visitors to your high-quality content and that, in-turn, will lead to legitimate, unsolicited organic links gradually growing on your site. Ultimately, though, Google still wishes your content alone would be enough to draw in visitors who would subsequently build your authority by linking to your site. Believe it or not, there’s a way you can remain in Google’s good graces while gaining some visibility and getting those natural, unsolicited links Google really loves with minimal self-promotion. I call it bottom-up blogging. Here’s how it works.

Let’s say you have a ton of knowledge about carpet cleaning. You decide you want to develop a blog about the subject and sell some steam cleaners through Google Adsense. Now, the problem you face is that there are probably a lot of internet marketers and legitimate companies out there pursuing this market. How can you build ranking in the search engine to get visitors rolling in who will link to you and build authority for the term Steam Cleaners when there are already so many competing sites occupying the first three pages of Google’s search results?

Start with Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are simply expanded terms associated with your main keyword. The longer they are, the less competition there is likely to be pursuing them. By extension, the less work you’ll have to do self-promoting your site to rank for those long tail keywords. Each long tail you rank well for (having invested minimal self promotion) will further result in more visitors and more natural, unsolicited links coming in (assuming your content is valuable).

Using our example of a site about steam cleaners, you might first try to rank well for “how to loosen stains before steam cleaning.” Compared to the keyword “steam cleaners” you’ll encounter far less competition for a long tail like “how to loosen stains before steam cleaning.” A nice long and informative post plus a few Ezine articles and hubpages linking back with anchored links for that long tail might be all it takes to get you to page 1 for that term. Next you might write some quality content geared around the super long tail keyword “a how to guide for maintaining steam cleaners for best cleaning results” and “why hoover makes the best steam cleaners” and then build some link love for those before going after even more long tails.

The point is that each of those long tail keywords (or key phrases) for which you gain authority also lends you some credibility for each of the words the phrases contain. For example, using the three long tails above, you’ve built up some authority for:

• Steam cleaning
• Steam cleaners
• Loosen stains
• Hoover
• Hoover steam cleaners
• Maintaining steam cleaners
• Best cleaning results
• Etc

Every legitimate long tail you rank for which also contains your main keyword (and even those that just contain associated words in the field) will result in related searches reaching you. Some of those searches will result in legitimate links from people writing for other sites or blogs. You win, Google wins, the visitors win and Google’s Adsense advertisers win because the visits you garner are contextual, related and more likely to result in legitimate ad clicks.

Now I won’t lie to you. The simple truth is there are plenty people out there gaming the system and sucking up links by any means necessary. Competing against them honestly is a pain in the rear. But, by playing as close to the book as possible, you have one advantage over them. Sooner or later, Google will slap the daylights out of each and every one of them. Every one of them smacked off the top will result in your moving that much further up in the ranks with your valuable content and legitimate links. The closer you get to the top, the more searchers will find you and the more legitimate links you’ll get. It’s the tortoise vs. hare approach. By getting there legitimately (albeit more slowly) you will solidify your position until you will be practically unbeatable by most Google scammers and only vulnerable to those who can offer up legitimate content and links that genuinely compete with what you offer. That’s a good thing, like it or not.

The message here is that you should learn to work with the system rather than learn how to work the system. The black-hatters out there are exceedingly good at what they do. To my way of thinking, learning how to scam with the best of them would take up far too much of my time and result in far too much of an ethical sacrifice to be worth my time. I’d much rather get to the top page honestly. In doing so, I can be fairly secure in knowing that Google is happy to have me there and I deserve the visitors, links and ad clicks I get. Furthermore, my business is has legitimacy and longevity. I don’t want to be a flash-in-the-pan, self employed flop. I want something lasting that can carry me comfortably to retirement. Hopefully, you do too. If not, Google’s ethics police will someday catch up with you and you’ll be fighting a constant losing battle of short term gains vs bans. Consider yourself warned.

I know it has been a painfully long time since I’ve updated anything to this blog. Heck, my last post was in March of 09 and, ironically, discussed how often you should post to your blog. My reasons for the extended absence are simple - I’ve been working at my “real” job. Yeah, not the work I want to be doing either but the very demanding and depressing work of winding down a global business. Simply put, I’m working myself out of a job. The good news is that the end is near and I’ll have some spare time to apply to updating this and other blogs. The bad news is that I’ll be unemployed and very much burdened with hunting for a “real” job because I’ve been so neglectful in hunting for self-employed business alternatives that I’m in no position to get out from under “the man.”

Having said that, I’ve not been entirely idle. I’ve continued experimenting with internet marketing and have learned a lot of valuable lessons that will lend themselves to some good content here. A lot of these lessons are of the learn-from-your-mistakes variety but, frankly, those are the most valuable lessons we can learn. It is tough to learn strictly from success. You have to fall face down in the mud a few times to learn how to avoid those mistakes as your online business grows. And, let me tell you folks, I’ve learned plenty.

One of my early experiments was with Amazon affiliate advertising. I’ve set up a handful of blogs selling Amazon products and one Amazon store but did little to nothing to promote those sites. Until last Friday I managed to sell about $900 worth of products. That sounds ok until you realize that my cut of those sales equates to barely $40 of revenue in almost a year of these sites being up. Hardly worth the effort, right? Not so fast.

All told I’ve sold barely a dozen items. In comparison with my favorite method of internet marketing using Google Adsense, those are terrible returns. But a recent experiment coupled with the application of some analysis has me actually encouraged.

First, I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was at my meager earnings. When you first sign up as an Amazon affiliate, you can clearly see you’ll make about 4% on sales. Sell a $100 item and you’ll pocket about $4.00. In my book, that’s a weak return, but there are some ways you can do better and the clear solution is volume.

If you want to make money online with Amazon affiliate sites, your philosophy should be no different than with any other blog or online store in that your objective is to maximize earnings with a minimum amount of effort. If I want to work my tail off for money, I can simply work two jobs. I don’t want that, though, which is why I keep coming back to internet marketing when I think of ways to become self-employed. Regardless the type of internet marketing you set your sights on, the single best way to improve earnings is to increase volume. You can either increase the number of sales you get based on a relatively fixed number of visitors or you can increase the number of visitors in hopes of capturing more sales.

The former approach is the most difficult and most limited in terms of improvement but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored. Experimentation is the key. That means experimenting with ad placement, ad colors, themes (if you’re using a blog) and content. For example, an ad at the bottom of a post will almost always perform worse than an ad above or immediately below a post title. As another example, weak content may or may not perform as well as a quality, in-depth review chalk full of info for your prospective buyer.

There’s an upper end on returns with the first method because, once optimized in terms of ad placement, content and other variables, you can’t really do anything more to generate sales on a fixed number of visitors. That’s where increased visitor volume becomes key.

As I’ve mentioned before in posts relating to other types of internet property monetization, just slapping up a blog with content (no matter how good it is) and ads (no matter how optimized they are) will lead you down a path of discouraging failure again and again. If you really want to make a go of this internet marketing stuff, you simply can’t neglect the importance of marketing your blog or site to attract visitors. The single most important element of that is links. Keyword anchored links, specifically. For those of you who haven’t read my previous posts or those of the pros I’ve linked to, I’ll quickly explain what a keyword anchored link is.

Let’s say I want to promote a great post on a cool site so I tell you to click here for a great video blog about internet marketing. You’ll notice that the words “click here” are a clickable link and if you click on it you’ll find yourself at Allyn Hane’s brilliant video blog where you can learn lots of great information on internet marketing from a guy who is really getting it done (he recently sold a site for $30,000.00). Unfortunately, that link doesn’t do Allyn a bit of good. If a billion of us link to Allyn’s site using the words “click here” then Allyn’s site will rank well in the SERPs (think Google search) for the search term “click here.” Anybody going to Google and searching for information on the words “click here” would wind up on his site. That doesn’t do him any good because he isn’t selling anything related to the words “click here” and you aren’t buying anything related to the words “click here” even if he were selling it.

For a fun experiment that illustrates this point, go to Google and type in “click here” without the quotes in the search field. The number one item for that search term is Adobe’s website. Why? Is Adobe selling some click-here-products? Of course not. The reason they rank so high in search for click here is because millions (or billions) of people and sites have sent them authority for that term by telling people things along the lines of “to install adobe, click here.”

For a link to have value to an internet marketer, it must be keyword anchored. To illustrate that, I’ll recommend Allyn’s site again but this time will recommend you visit Allyn’s site because it is probably the best internet marketing video blog out there. Now that link has real value to Allyn (or, it would if my site had any value in its own right and were passing on real juice). That keyword anchored link provides Allyn some authority for a whole variety of terms based on the words it contains.

• Best internet marketing video blog
• Best internet marketing blog
• Best internet marketing
• Best blog
• Best marketing blog
• Internet marketing video
• Internet marketing blog
• Marketing video
• Marketing blog
• Etc…

So all that tangential information leads us back to what I’m saying about Amazon affiliate sites; no matter how good your blog or its content or its ad placement, if you aren’t getting sufficient visitors, you won’t make sufficient sales and you won’t be able to translate that lousy 4% cut on each sale into real, legitimate profits. If you want to make a living with Amazon affiliate advertising, you have to follow all the good advice Griz and Courtney Tuttle and Allyn have repeated again and again… you have to build keyword anchored links to your site in order to build keyword authority in order to elevate in the search rankings in order to capture a bigger visitor share in order to get more sales in order to make Amazon affiliate advertising worth doing.

To summarize, the key to earning money with ANY web property is to:

1. Market a salable product
2. Earn the highest possible search engine ranking for key terms related to that product
3. Attract the greatest number of visitors possible to get their eyes on your advertising or sales pitch
4. Convert the maximum possible number of visitors into buyers as you can

To do all of the above you need to:

1. Take the time to research your product and related keywords
2. Build authority for your keywords by earning quality keyword anchored links
3. Produce quality, useful, helpful content
4. Optimize your ad styles and placement

As I said, I threw up a few Amazon affiliate sites and links but did nothing to build search engine position for those sites or to optimize ad positions. Needless to say, my earnings and converted sales have been nothing short of dismal. But just last Friday my wife and I decided we’d add Amazon links to one of our sites that is getting an unexpectedly high visitor rate and a wonderful thing happened.

The site in question was actually a forgettable one. Not even a site, actually, but a hub page we set up on hubpages.com with no real thought or interest of making any money off of it. To our surprise, though, it is one of our most visited hubs because it is helpful to parents. You’ll find that’s often the case as you experiment with various keywords. Sometimes they do exactly what you expect but, very often, their performance (for better or for worse) is surprising. Those that legitimately help people in any way often exceed our expectations.

Anyway, we tossed a few Amazon ads on this single hub and, in one day, sold more products (relatively inexpensive products though they may be) in a single day than we’ve sold on all our other Amazon affiliate sites combined in a year. Almost 3 times as many sales, in fact! Yes, they are low priced products and, yes, it’ll take a long time before those sales translate into any earnings worth writing home about but the message to me is clear… Amazon affiliate sites CAN work providing they get enough visitors who are interested in a product.

I won’t tell you you’ll get rich overnight with Amazon affiliate advertising but I will say that, done right, the money you earn IF you do it right can be pleasantly surprising. Just remember that the same rules about building authority and search-specific visitors applies just as much here as it does to any other web property and that the real reward is in the simplicity of the venture. Setting up multiple blogs or hubs with Amazon affiliate ads will require some upfront effort but shouldn’t be a non-stop time bandit for the rest of your life. Once you have a good property up and have generated good content, strong authority and a good visitor rate, you can move on to your next project. You’ll only need to come back to update content when needed (for example, when a new product or new information comes out).

In terms of being self employed through internet marketing with Amazon affiliate sites, your objective is to build multiple streams of income through multiple vehicles that don’t represent a constant burden to your time in terms of upkeep so you can continue to build more earning vehicles. Amazon advertising fits this bill perfectly. All you need to do is get to it, experiment and learn from your mistakes as I have. And, rest assured, I’ll be revisiting some of those stagnant sites that mislead me down a path of presumed defeat and turning them into earners I can be proud of.

Happy New Year to all.

As you develop your niche blogs following the lessons learned here and at other sources I’ve referenced (see blog roll links to Court and Griz), you might find yourself wondering how often you should add to your content. As an advocate of the work-smarter-not-harder approach, I’m pleased to be able to tell you that the answer is - probably nowhere near as often as you’d think.

That’s tremendously good news to me but it’s something I didn’t realize at first. When I set out to explore self-employment opportunities I had several requirements in mind; a target income, flexible hours and a self-sustaining system were among the most important things I identified. As I began exploring blogging as one potential form of self-employment, I initially encountered some discouraging claims. The guys who were really making an effort seemed to post prolifically. They posted while riding in cabs. They posted on the bus, on the train and with any spare time they had at their day jobs. Hell, these guys were even posting while on vacation and they were doing this to the tune of 3-4 posts each day.

3-4 posts each day? That’s how often I should post?! That’s not what I consider a self-sustaining system which I define as a system that continues to generate revenue whether I’m actively engaged in it or not. If financial success through blogging required me to constantly be engaged, researching material, interviewing people, chasing leads, writing, editing, rewriting and finally posting 3-4 times every day (all of this for just one blog) just to earn a meager living, it would have been the absolute worst fit for me possible. But a few gems-in-the-know boldly countered that the “real successes” out there were seldom really successful and were, for the most part, going about it all wrong.

In my earlier post on the potential of earning a living through blogging after a layoff I referenced former blogger and Newsweek writer, Daniel Lyons. Daniel exemplified the model I referenced above, working himself to the bone for his online offerings, and he did it all to the tune of a lousy $1k per month income (after drawing in 1.5 million visitors for the month!) The lesson Daniel took from his blogging experience is that you can’t make money (real day-job-quitting money) through blogging. In my last post I pointed out that this is the entirely wrong lesson to have learned so I won’t belabor that point here. What I will belabor is the point that there’s another lesson Daniel’s experience helps illuminate and that is that more work is not necessarily better work.

As we’ve gone over before, the key to success with Google Adsense is traffic. Organic traffic, specifically, which means traffic that reaches you by naturally searching for something you offer. Social traffic is as much as worthless from an Adsense perspective, something I discuss in my post on how pointless it is to try to make money through social blogging. You don’t want to attract Stumble traffic, for example. Sure, your page impressions might skyrocket, but Stumble visitors aren’t likely to stick around your niche site and, more importantly, they’re even less likely to click an ad.

What you want in a visitor is the guy who wants to know whether he should attach his yellow gizmo to the purple whatzit using a crescent thing-a-ma-jig or an adjustable doohickey. If you’re lucky, it’s the adjustable doohickey, which he doesn’t happen to have in his tool chest but for which a contextual ad conveniently appears right there on your yellow gizmo tools page. Click! Cha-ching! Thanks, Google!

What you want to attract is the woman who is frustrated by her inability to find a nice quality iPod Nano skin that offers both whacky style and arm-band function while also providing super-luminous, driver-blinding, fusion-powered glow strips for those who like to listen to their music while jogging at night without fearing being run over.  Her Google search for such a product lands her on your page where you happen to discuss the safety benefits of fusion powered glow strips on whacky iPod skins and, hey, look at that… an ad for fusion-powered, glow-strip-equiped, fashionable and functional iPod skins with animal prints appears and… CLICK! Cha-ching! Thanks, Google!

Now I’ll confess I’ve never read Daniel’s blog but I suspect the problem with Daniel is not that he wasn’t good at what he did. Daniel didn’t fail as a blogger. In fact, I’d suggest he was wildly successful as a blogger because he did a fantastic service to those who were interested in what he wrote and he drew in tons of visitors. He provided constant content which made his readers very happy. But what I suspect he didn’t do is provide people (with a need for a product) with a resource to direct them to something of value (the product for which they had a need). Daniel probably gave the milk away free of charge. Why should anybody buy a cow while at his site? Or maybe he didn’t even sell milk (or anything else) other than opinion. And who is going to pay for an opinion? The unfortunate outcome is that he worked himself to the bone in the process and never achieved his goal of being self-employed through blogging. He probably didn’t even do keyword research or target a specific keyword term.

And the take away for you, dear reader, is that how much you post has almost NOTHING to do with how successful you’ll be if you want to be a niche blogger. I’ve used Daniel as an example from one perspective, now let’s look at it from another side. Let me backup my claims.

I did a search on Google recently. I was actually doing research for a niche blog I plan to put up, not looking for or targeting a specific keyword intentionally. I just needed some information. I’m not going to tell you the search term or what niche I’m targeting (you’ll have to find your own, thanks). Anyway, my Google search brought me exactly what I needed, right there at the top of page one. It was an article that answered exactly what I was wondering and allowed me to complete a post I was writing. Sometimes, when I write a post, I save it as a draft and walk away for a day before revisiting it. This allows me to reframe my thoughts, think up different angles and reread it with fresh eyes before putting it up. I don’t always do this (as evidenced by some of my more plainly un-proofed posts on this blog) but I happened to do so with the particular post I’m discussing now.

I revisited the draft post the next day and, sure enough, a couple new thoughts cropped up. So I hit that link I’d searched the day before and noticed something very important I’d missed the first time. The date of the article was 2003. Folks, I want you to think about that for a minute. The #1 link for page #1 on the search I’d done in Google resulted in an article almost 6 years old as of this writing.

Now surely in 6 years there have been innovations in the topic I was researching. Surely there have been more studies conducted. Certainly new information has come to light or processes have changed or prices have altered. I assure you the answer you all of those is yes. But despite being out of date by 6 years and not updated, changed or modified in any way from its original incarnation, that article still holds the number one spot for the term for which I searched. What does that tell you?

It tells me that once you’ve written a quality offering which targets your keyword, provides good information and gains sufficient back links, mission accomplished. The only reasons to continue feeding new posts to an established niche blog are:

• Keep the blog fresh and current and alive (from a Google perspective)
• Keyword or new-keyword density.
• Keep ahead of anybody trying to compete with you in your niche (though you’ll be better served by tackling this with more quality back links)
• Purely altruistic reasons such as wanting to keep your visitors informed on the latest and greatest developments in your niche.

Let’s address those one at a time.

By adding another post to your blog every few months, you present at least an illusion of an actively maintained blog. But my honest opinion (remember, I’m not a pro, just passing on what experience is teaching me) is that this is largely pointless. Think about it… if the article I mentioned above had ads on it, that person would still be collecting money for a post that hadn’t seen a single change or update in 6 years!!! And to delve further into that line of thinking, any content on your blog has stand-alone value. Each post is its own entity. A Google search is more likely to land them directly on a page of your blog related most closely to the term for which they’re searching than it is to land them at the top of your home page. But you aren’t going back every day and updating each of those posts individually, are you? Of course not. But they each retain their own value, right? And they each contribute to the authority of your blog as a whole despite being old (assuming you’re getting back links to them).

Adding additional posts will also provide you the opportunity to get your keyword in more frequently without “stuffing” it in a single post. That, in turn, will give you better footing for that keyword overall. And every new post you put up will provide you the chance to target additional related long-tail keywords. For example, if you’re targeting after market corvette mufflers, the majority of your blog will be working towards ranking for after-market mufflers and corvette mufflers. But perhaps you want to begin targeting after-market mustang mufflers as well? Just throw up more posts to begin working mustang into your keyword empire.

Competition is a good thing for the consumer. Like it or not, it’s a good thing for us publishers too as it can serve to keep us honest. But it can be wholly unpleasant when you’ve worked hard on a keyword-focused niche and some young gun flies in and steals your #1 ranking. Now the internet marketing pros out there are going to tell you that it’s far more important for you to work on beating them in back links and they’re absolutely right. More (and better) back links are what’s going to enable you to beat your competition. But having more (and better) content will contribute slightly as it will allow you to gain greater keyword density and allow you to draw more back links to more individual posts on your overall blog. It isn’t really the posts that help so much as the elevated back link opportunity they represent that matters here.

Finally, let’s discuss the altruistic element. While it is entirely true that you can create blogs geared strictly at bringing traffic to Google ads, I’m not a fan of this approach. More importantly, Google isn’t a fan of this approach. It’s against their terms of service and generating websites or blogs for no other reason than drawing Adsense clicks can very easily get you banned.

Google serves two masters - their advertisers and their clients (the people who are searching for good information). The third element in this mix is you, the publisher, and I’m sorry to say you don’t rank in importance as far as Google is concerned. They aren’t here for you. They are here for the people who are looking for good content and for the people who keep their lights on by paying them to place ads.

It’s in my nature to want to help people so I’m perfectly content to play by the rules here. I research every niche I target. I read everything I can with the intent of becoming as much of a subject matter expert as I possibly can in as short a time as I possibly can. Then I repackage everything I’ve learned in a way I feel will best leverage my position.

For example, there may be some top-notch sites out there on widgets but nobody really targeting fuzzy widgets. So I go out and learn everything I can about fuzzy widgets - their history, origin, uses, problems, associated solutions, related tools/parts/components. I then create a niche blog that provides all of that information. What I don’t provide is the fuzzy widget or its components or related tools and parts. That’s what my advertisers are for.

So a searcher will find my blog because they have a broken fuzzy widget they desperately need fixed and they typed how to fix a fuzzy widget in their Google search. They land on a post on my blog which is titled how to fix a fuzzy widget. Better yet, they hit my landing page titled how to fix a fuzzy widget and see a dozen posts listed covering everything from how to fix a twisted fuzzy widget to how to fix a bent fuzzy widget. From this post or page, they learn what exactly is broken on their fuzzy widget and what likely caused it to break. From the ad they click they purchase a fuzzy widget repair tool and fuzzy widget lubricant to keep their fuzzy widget from breaking again. Put it all together and 1) I’ve provided useful information to the searcher making both them and Google happy 2) the advertiser sells a product earning them a profit and making them happy 3) I helped a person and got paid to do it, making me happy. Everybody wins.

But at the end of the day, if I’ve written 30 informative posts on what can go wrong with fuzzy widgets and what’s needed to fix them, I don’t feel compelled to write another 30 posts on fuzzy widgets just to keep my site fresh. The information is there. Value for the searcher is provided. Information around which to place contextual ads for Google is provided. A potential client for the advertiser is provided. Nobody is being scammed, used or mistreated and I make money with a clear conscious without having to work my fingers and brain to the bone by updating content 3-4 times per day, every day. Why should I? Why mess with perfection? What more could a broken fuzzy widget owner possibly want from me? That’s what I consider a sensible self-employment strategy.

So the message you should be taking away here is that self-employment through blogging does not have to be a consistently work-intensive process requiring diligent, daily, weekly or even monthly updates to a single blog. You put in work up front creating a keyword-targeted niche blog. You get good information out to your readers right off the bat and then you leave it alone. Work on getting back links. Work on getting another niche blog up. Don’t kill yourself constantly updating an established blog after you’ve already dominated your niche.

My personal model is a minimum of 8 to 10 quality posts within the first month or two. If I don’t feel 10 will be enough to provide useful information, I’ll go higher and will take longer. I don’t rush all 10 posts out because I like my niche blogs to age gently and naturally. If I happen to get on a writer’s high and spit out a bunch of posts in a day or two, I stage their release so they go out over several days or weeks. Once I have all 10 posts out or how ever many I think I’ll need to be offering a quality product, I’m done. From that point on I’m focused exclusively on building links (which I’ll confess I’m terrible at committing to despite realizing the importance) or I’m working on another niche. In 6 months or so I might revisit my old niche blog and, if I feel it could use some fresh content or if I have a bug up my tail and really want to get some new information I’ve learned out, I’ll write another post or two. But that’s it. Then repeat every 6 months or so.

I want to wrap this up with a story I learned in a business class. I hope you read it because it represents the single most important lesson I took away (at considerable expense) from this class.

Bob and Dave live in a tiny village called Dryville whose well has (ironically) run dry. The nearest source of clean, fresh water is a pristine river four miles away. The village elders gather together and decide on a solution. They will pay $1 per bucket to anybody who delivers water to the village.

Now Bob and Dave are both entrepreneurial spirits with dreams of being self-employed so, the next morning, they both set out to the river. Bob is carrying a bucket. Dave is carrying a tape measure and a level. Bob thinks Dave is an idiot.

When they get to the river, Bob fills his bucket and glances over to see Dave taking measurements and doing strange things with the level. Shaking his head, Bob heads back to the village with his bucket where he collects his $1. Realizing he could double his earnings, Bob grabs a second bucket and heads back to the river.

When he arrives, he sees Dave is still there. He’s still taking measurements and looking at his level. In fact, the only thing that’s really changed is that Dave has stuck a few sticks in the ground leading in a general direction back towards town. Bob fills his two buckets and heads back to the village to collect his $2. There’s enough daylight left to make one more trip so Bob does so, finding Dave still busy measuring.

When the day is done, Bob has collected $5 (big money in Dryville). He’d planned on celebrating with a couple beers at the village tavern, but, exhausted from his trips to the river, he opts to collapse in bed to get an early start in the morning.

The next day, Bob grabs his two buckets and sets off again. As he leaves the village he sees Dave through the open door of his hut, huddled over some paper with a pencil and ruler. The two nod to each other and Bob heads off, convinced Dave really is a lazy moron. Bob manages 3 trips again with two buckets each trip and collects $6 from the village elders (record profits). That night, at the village tavern, Bob is the talk of the town. Everybody admires his enterprising spirit.

This goes on for a week. Though the work is tiring, Bob is bringing in decent money. The problem is that the villagers (though no longer dying of thirst) still don’t have enough water. They can’t bathe or wash their clothes or water their crops from 6 buckets of water a day. Bob decides to hire some help in the form of his cousin. As the buckets belong to Bob, he gets to keep 60% of the profit from every bucket his cousin hauls. Together, the two men manage to bring 12 buckets of water a day to the villagers. Of Dave, there is no sign. Rumors have it he went to the big city to talk to somebody about aquatic ducks. Bob is a little confused but perfectly content with his monopoly and Dave’s apparent stupidity.

After 3 weeks of this, Bob has himself a thriving little business going. He’s earning more than he’s earned before but the exhausting work is really beginning to take a toll on his aching joints and back. Worse, the villagers still aren’t getting enough water. They now have enough to drink and cook but their clothes are still filthy, they can’t bathe and their gardens are still barren. Dave is finally back with a bunch of strangers and they’re building some strange tube-on-a-wall thing up at the river. Bob has no idea what it’s for but he’s content to have his little water-hauling empire up and running. To better meet the demands of the villagers, Bob buys two more buckets and hires his brother to help haul water.

A month later, Bob’s water hauling business is bringing in a steady 18 buckets of water to the village every day. It would be more but an attempt at hiring his friend as a night-hauler ended in disaster when Bob’s best friend was mauled by a lion which he barely managed to fend off by beating it on the head with one of the buckets (spilling all the water and profits in the process). In the interest of safety, their water-hauling operation only runs during the day. Bob is trying to decide what to do next as the villagers (no longer thirsty, able to cook and now able to bathe once a week if they ration their water) really wish they could have more water so they could grow crops again. Bob mulls this over at the tavern after a full day of water hauling before finally going to bed with no real solution in mind.

The next day dawns and Bob grabs his buckets to head out of town. He’d slept poorly due to the racket from Dave’s construction project which has finally reached the edge of the village. As he emerges from his hut, Bob notices the entire town gathered around Dave at the edge of the village. Oddly, they’re all holding buckets. With a signal from Dave, somebody turns something and out from a pipe in the contraption he’d been building, pours a steady stream of clean water. The villagers cheer and each steps up with a pair of buckets, hands Dave a dollar and fills the buckets to the top. Dave is selling water at only 50 cents a bucket! Half what Bob is charging!

Bob is devastated. He desperately tries to think of how to keep his empire going. For a week he tries to keep his business alive. He hires more help. They make more trips. He eventually gives up. He simply can’t compete because anybody who wants water at any time of the day or night can simply walk up to the contraption (Dave calls it an aqueduct, not an aquatic duck) and fill his buckets for half of what Bob is charging. Bob concedes defeat and goes to work for Dave keeping the aqueduct maintained and clear of debris. Dave pays well but expects Bob to be at work by a certain time and to stick around until a certain time. Also, Bob must put in a request for vacation time and plan it around his coworkers. When Bob was self-employed he could stop fetching water whenever he felt like it. Boy did he miss the good-old days.

As for Dave, he didn’t hang around much. A virtuous and honorable people, the villagers of Dryville were trustworthy enough to follow an honor system. Each simply put a dollar in the collection bin before filling his two buckets. The price was right as all the villagers were earning record profits from the crops they could now grow using the water from Dave’s aqueduct. Dave only came along when the collection bin needed emptying. Eventually he hired somebody to do that for him. His profits, it was rumored, were mailed to him at his beach house on the tropical island of Smartypants.

The message here is that, while it pays to work hard, it pays more to work smart (and the rewards are more than monetary in terms of free time). Post what you need to post to provide value, rank well, attract visitors and reward your advertisers. If you do a good job there, you will get paid. Why in the world would you want to tie yourself to your keyboard everyday? Dave’s water business brings the village water every day whether he’s manning the spigot or not. Your blog should be generating revenue for you everyday whether you’re updating posts or hanging out on a beach on some tropical island. Once you’ve built your quality aqueduct (blog with good back links) you shouldn’t have to invest anything more than maintenance (occasional updates and link building efforts) to keep it bringing water (revenue).

But, Dave, if quality is more important than quantity, why did you just write such a long post and include a story about Bob’s failed attempt at self-employment? That brings us to this blog’s first multiple choice quiz.

 Dave wrote a long post because:

1. He loves the sound of his own typed-voice.
2. If his typing falls below 55 words per minute, the bus will explode.
3. This blog is in a highly competitive niche and needs a lot of content to compete.
4. Dave sincerely wants you to learn how to do this right.
5. Both 3 and 4.

 Hint - it’s 5. 

Here endeth the lesson.

Yes, you can make money blogging. The methods I’m slowly experimenting with here do work and the brilliant internet marketing geniuses I’ve referenced in other posts will show you how to do it. Free of charge, no less. It won’t cost you a dime to learn their methods and your expenses setting up your blogs will be next to nil. Remember, I’m not one of the gurus. I’m a just a guy trying their methods and finding them sound. How sound? Well, my earnings are pathetic by the standards of anybody trying to make a living at this but I’m realizing 30%-96% (yes, 96%) growth every month. 

Do the math, folks. Actually don’t bother. I did the math in my post on the Importance of Earnings Growth in which I admonish those practicing niche blogging not to focus so much on their earnings but on their month to month growth. And I’m happy to report that my estimates are bearing fruit. I’m a living, breathing example that this stuff works and I learned it all free of charge.  Come back here in 2 years and I not only hope to be retired from my day job, I EXPECT to be retired. 

What really burns me is that there’s always some internet earnings failure out there more than anxious to tell you that there is no money to be made with blogs. While I’m equally annoyed by the unwarranted make millions blogging overnight garbage out there (and, yes, it’s prolific), at least there’s some hope in that lie. But when you read something like the recent Daniel Lyons article over at Newsweek, you’re left wholly defeated and demoralized. Heck, if this guy couldn’t do it while posting 10-20 times to his blog a day and bringing in 500,000 visitors (in a single day!) then what possible hope do I have?! 

And that’s the frustrating part because Daniel, despite his talent, potential and impressive dedication, apparently doesn’t know the first thing about making money blogging. Or at least, he doesn’t know enough to earn enough to become self-employed. He’s selling an apparently authoritative opinion on how there’s no money in blogging and deflating thousands of self-employed wanna-bes in the process. Now for the shocking reveal… for most of us, he’s right. There is no money in blogging for all but the precious few elite. What Daniel is missing is that blogging isn’t the means to financial independence. Internet marketing (with blogs as a delivery vehicle) is where the money is made. Bloggers don’t make money with blogs. Internet marketers DO make money with blogs. Guess which one Daniel is? 

I almost didn’t write this post because one of those niche blogging geniuses I was mentioning already dissected Daniel’s mistakes over at his Make Money with Adsense blog in a post titled Adsense for Beginners. I highly suggest you read what Griz has to say about where Daniel went wrong in his efforts to make money blogging and I strongly suggest you believe every word Griz has to say. The man knows his stuff inside and out. Enough about Daniel’s mistakes, though. The point is, there is money in this medium and my first objective was to try to convince you not to let the nay-sayers (be they “pros” like Daniel or your even your own family) steer you wrong. Now for the injection of reality. 

But (you knew we’d come back to the “but” word), the problem with niche blogging is that growth over time doesn’t do a damn thing for you if you’ve just lost your job and come here looking for salvation. I would love to see living proof of an overnight internet success. I would love to point you in the direction of a number of people who have found the formula to build a blog (or set of blogs) and turn them into legitimate, bill-paying income vehicles in under a month. I just don’t think they exist. Or, if they do, I think they were just so damn lucky (or experienced) that they don’t represent realistic aspirations for the novice blogger. 

The majority of the repeating successes out there (folks who do this for a steady living and can repeat their successes on demand) grew into this. Their success is measured, at the very least, in terms of months or even years, not days or weeks. Why? Earning steady internet income through most mediums (blogs, niche blogs, websites, reseller stores, etc) takes work and time and requires the following: 

• Profitable product - either your keyword has to attract paying advertisers or you have to be selling a product that is in demand. 
• Traffic - If people aren’t coming to your blog or website to click on or see your ads or purchase your product, you might as well not be selling anything at all. The more traffic the better. Getting that traffic requires both an interested audience (customers) and - 
• High placement in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). This is where your page shows up when somebody searches for the terms your blog targets. If you’re selling gizmos and so are hundreds of competing websites, the only way you win is if somebody searching for gizmos finds your page first and that means you need to rank high in the SERPs. Anything beyond page 3 might as well not exist. Anything on page 2 may get some love. How often have you dug deeper in Google than page 3 for something? Page one is the place to be and, ideally, you want to be number 1 on page 1. Getting there requires several things including… 
• Age - An aged site is going to carry more authority than a brand new site and is more likely to rank higher. You can beat older sites easily enough but, all else being equal, two sites with everything identical but one being older, the aged site has the advantage. 
• Targeted keywords - Somebody hunting for yellow gizmos is more likely to find a website which is dedicated specifically to yellow gizmos on page one of their search. If you’re targeting all the gizmos in the rainbow on your blog or website then it’s likely your yellow-gizmo-focused competitor has more keyword density dedicated specifically to yellow gizmos than you do and, therefore, it is more likely he’s on page one for the search term yellow gizmos. 
• Backlinks!!!! - Nothing matters more. I link to Griz’s websites because I consider him to be simply one of the best resources out there for how to make money blogging. I’m hardly the only one doing this. There’s a virtual army of us out there who so respect his approach and so value his information that we routinely link to one of his blogs. Google sees this as a vote of confidence that Griz is an authority on the keyword terms we use to link back to him. More accurately, back links represent his site’s authority. The more targeted keyword links you have coming into your site, the higher your site climbs in the SERPs. It’s the single most important element to growing a blog into something with the potential to make money. 

There are other important elements such as search engine optimization and networks which further contribute to your blog’s potential but I don’t want to focus on the details in this post. What I want you to gather from all of this is the simple reality check that making money blogging isn’t something you do overnight. You build your blogs, your network, your backlinks, your authority, your page rank, your traffic, your paying advertisers and any number of required elements over time. Some manage it faster than others. The experienced gurus can pull off many of the listed items in a shockingly short amount of time (with the exception of age). But even they require time before their creation reaches its full earnings potential and even they will acknowledge that sometimes, what seemed like a winner idea, turns out to be a dud. The good news is that a select few of them are out there giving away this information and that means you can speed up your own success without going through all the trial and error they had to endure. But even so, it won’t happen for you overnight. 

So I’m sorry to say that if you’ve been the victim of downsizing, cost cutting, reduction in force, layoffs, bankruptcy, any of the painful and tragic realities so many of us are facing these days, I’m not here to tell you that blogging is the solution to your money woes. In the short term, it isn’t, and you’re better off focusing on hitting the streets and trying to find a regular “legitimate” job for now. 

But, (there’s that word again) when you’ve wrapped up your search for the day, circled all the places you’re going to send your resume to tomorrow and had your last interview of the afternoon, instead of wallowing in your misery, why not get started with internet marketing? Why wait? If you’re here reading this, you clearly have an internet connection and that’s all you need to get started. Get your first freebie blog going on Blogger or Wordpress (after reading about keyword research over at Griz’s sites). Hell, get a couple blogs going. With a little luck, in a year or two, the economy will have stabilized. And while everybody else is still a little gun shy about the next big collapse and just happy to be slaving under some ungrateful CEO, you’ll be well entrenched in the internet marketing process with a healthy internet empire and well on your way to early retirement, self employment and the freedom of knowing that nobody can ever cut your job again. It isn’t hope for today, but it is certainly something nice to dream about for tomorrow, right? 

And know that, though I may never meet you, you and your family are in my prayers. Being jobless is a tough spot to be in. Hang in there and keep at it. A new beginning may be just around the corner at your next interview.

Ok, as epiphanies go, that one was pretty weak but I’m sincere when I say that the realization of just how limitless our options are had been lost on me recently thanks largely to the single-minded focus I’ve been applying to make-money-online and work-from-home efforts. It’s been nothing but niches and blogs and websites and affiliates lately and I’ve, perhaps, done you an injustice by having so narrowed my scope. In my defense, I’ve never suggested that this blog or the lessons I learn would move at anything other than a snail’s pace. Before I can review or even intelligently analyze any self-employment solution, I have to really dig in and try it out, after all.

It was an email exchange with a reader which brought the light shining down and I thought I’d share a little bit of that enlightenment with you. The reader was Kris Stecker, President of Spa Tech Institute. Kris was just asking general questions but the exchange reminded me of a colleague many years ago whose wife had taken massage courses and, over the course of a couple years, turned her hobby into a thriving business. Though I haven’t been in touch with this former colleague in years, when last we spoke his wife had opened the doors on her own spa and he, the colleague, was planning on resigning from the company for which we worked to join her in running their business.

What I learned, or more accurately, was reminded of as a result of my exchange with Kris, is not to let myself become too narrowly focused in my quest. In your pursuit of self-employment, don’t limit yourself exclusively to a work-from-home option. Self-employment isn’t just about where you work but also about for whom you work. It’s about independence and freedom. It’s about being your own boss, owning your own company and answering only to your own clients or schedule. If you are a talented baker, consider opening a bakery. If you aren’t but still dream of being one, you owe it to yourself to enroll in a program which will teach you what you need to know to be successful. By the same token, if you want to open a spa or become a massage therapist, get the education you need in massage therapy and cosmetology at a place like Spa Tech.

I’m a huge proponent of continuing education both through formal institutions and by actively paying attention to the world around me and taking the extra step of analysis required to turn a simple experience into a lesson. Your goal should be the same. Learn from everything around you. There’s a lesson in just about everything. And when simply observing and analyzing your world isn’t enough, take classes. Whatever path you choose in your hunt for a life without a boss, it’s up to you to ensure you have the tools to succeed. Never stop learning.

Oh, and if any of you are wondering, no I’m not being paid anything for mentioning Spa Tech. I considered trying to squeeze Kris for free massages for life but assumed the request would be politely declined. However, should any of you enroll, I’ll gladly volunteer if you need a back on which to practice your newly-learned massage skills.

This post was inspired by a question posed by a friend. We were enjoying lunch together and discussing blogging to earn money. The conversation was casual and I didn’t go into much detail on the concepts at the time. Before we finished our meals, my friend announced he’d give blogging a try and would setup a blog focusing on his conservative political opinions and earn a few bucks in the process. I hated to do it because I’m a fan of anybody who takes the time to expand their minds through writing, but I had to warn him not to expect much if anything in the way of earnings.

“You don’t think there’s any money in that?” My friend asked.

“Well, no, but there’s more to it than just the subject matter. It’s not what I’d recommend if you want to become self-employed through blogging for several reasons.”

I went on to explain that, while I thought of the guy as a brother and valued his opinion, why would a complete stranger in some far-flung state or country care what he had to say? What clout, reputation or particular value did he bring to the equation that would make somebody else care what he thought? It is true that money can sometimes be made in a social niche market but it’s rare and there are other factors that make any potential earnings possible.

A particularly talented writer, for example, might do well blogging well-researched satirical commentary. Even as a relative unknown, his particular writing style, in time and coupled with aggressive marketing to get his blog “out there” could translate into legitimate traffic which, in turn, could translate into legitimate earnings. But, by his own admission, my friend isn’t a talented writer. In fact, he loathes writing. “So you’re talking about doing something you already hate with no raw talent in an effort to break into an extremely competitive market with already limited earning potential,” I went on, “all the chips are stacked against you.”

“I thought you said earnings were potentially unlimited on the internet,” My friend countered. Recognizing the conversation was going to require more time, I ordered another beer and settled in. I’ll try to keep this short for your benefit, though.

I explained to my friend that, yes, earnings (in general) are potentially limitless providing you’re moving a product people have an interest in buying. If you want to make money online and be self-employed doing so, the first questions you have to ask before you do anything else are 1) what is my product? And 2) will it attract customers? I asked my friend to think for a moment about this before expanding on it. Do you think there’s anybody out there shopping for opinions on conservative politics? Maybe some newspapers or periodicals, but how many are looking to buy your opinion? Assume there are potential customers. Is there anything about you or the information you’d be providing that will set you apart so dramatically that you’d attract enough customers to even buy your product? Last, but not least, assume you actually were so well known that people cared what you thought. What are they buying when they come to your blog? You’ve already given your opinion away free of charge. At best, somebody might want to hire you as a writer but now you’re right back at square one. You’re a slave to an employer and locked into somebody else’s schedule. That’s what you want to get away from, isn’t it?

My friend’s idea came with major hurdles - a limited interest and talent in the medium in which he’d be working (the written word), nothing else such as fame, infamy or celebrity status to attract readers and potential customers and, finally, not much in the way of consumers and no real salable product when all is said and done. It’s for these reasons that so many bloggers fail to make any real money online. They want to blog, to journal, to opine. Not to be rude but, really, who cares what you think? Does that mean it’s impossible to make money online as a social blogger? No. Think Perez Hilton. He’s rolling in internet money and he got there through social blogging. But he’s the exception, not the rule.

To do well in social blogging you need one key element and that’s the ability to attract traffic to your ads. A lot of traffic. TONS of traffic. Enough traffic that advertisers are willing to pay you just to host ads on your site. Whether or not your visitors click or purchase is not relevant here. You get paid simply because you bring so many eyes to the ads you display that it is worth advertiser’s money to pay you to host their ads. In the make money online world, this is known as CPM or Cost per Mille - payout based on how many thousand visitors you bring to the page on which the ad is placed. Advertisers are pretty stingy here, too. We’re not talking a thousand or so visitors a month. They want you to bring in thousands or tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands visitors per day before they’ll pay you any real money! For the overwhelming majority of us, those numbers aren’t just unrealistic, they’re a virtual pipe-dream.

The secrets to success here are fairly simple - Be famous, be infamous, know something nobody else does or be exceedingly talented. Perez Hilton, for example, first banked on the fame of the name he butchered. By associating himself with Paris Hilton, he drew an audience. By getting his name, face and opinions out there, he then banked on infamy and expanded that audience. Finally, by scooping gossip (true or not) he subsequently solidified his position as a legitimate internet earner. As for talent - well, other than knowing what vapid, useless, celebrity garbage people will be interested in dining on, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not Perez is talented. But nobody can question his success and, therefore, you have to give some credit where it’s due. Can you do the same? Can you offer something which will propel you to the rarified air in which a few people like Perez dwell?

I’m first going to paraphrase and then introduce you to one of the real make money online geniuses out there. He goes by the name Grizzly (we all call him Grizz) and he’s one of those select few I’m always talking about who, to my way of thinking, is deserving of sainthood simply because he’s making an honest effort to help others realize financial success on the internet.

Grizz has pointed out, again and again, that there are bloggers and there are internet marketers. Both can use the exact same medium (blogs) in hopes of making money online. The vast, nearly overwhelming, number of bloggers out there will rarely make any real money online. They’ll bring in some spare change, but they’ll almost never strike it rich or even earn a living. Bloggers write social blogs. They express their feelings, their opinions, their moods and they almost all do it free of charge and often at a loss in the form of hosting fees with no revenue to counteract those fees. Some cover their costs and even earn a bit of money. Their lunch is paid for now and again. Even fewer (a precious few) actually earn a legitimate living at it. Every once in a blue moon, hell freezes over and a blogger makes it big. Now contrast that with internet marketers.

Most internet marketers can easily make money online well in excess of what they pay out in the form of hosting fees and domain-name purchases. A dedicated internet marketer can earn a comfortable living through the internet. Though the super wealthy are still comparatively rare, there are far more internet marketers making big money out there than there are bloggers. If you want to make money online, be an internet marketer, not a blogger. The odds are MUCH better.

Grizz offers a wealth of information on how to make money online and it is, without question, in your interest to get a cup of coffee and, starting with his archives, read his entire blog from beginning to end. When you’ve finished reading this post I strongly recommend visiting Grizzly’s How to Make Money Online for Beginners. Trust his wisdom. Don’t question, just do. If you are serious about making money online, you’ll thank me for having sent you to his site. Oh, and if you think his blog is ugly, that’s just fine. It is, in fact, part of his strategy. Trust me. Ugly works. And, by the way, look at the anchor text there I’ve used to link to his site. It’s a perfect example of the long-tail keyword Grizz is targeting which I’ve talked about in other posts.

My friend took my advice and abandoned his plans to start a political blog in the hopes of making money online. Unfortunately, he abandoned any blogging or internet marketing plans all together because…, well, he’s a lazy bastard, honestly. He’s a great friend, but not all that motivated (I love the guy, but we all have our short-comings and lack of motivation is his). For the rest of you, by all means BLOG! Blog to your heart’s content. Write down your whacky gripes, feelings and opinions. If nothing else, it’ll be cathartic. But unless you are extraordinary, nefarious, infamous, famous, brilliant, exceedingly knowledgeable or well informed, don’t expect to earn a living doing it. If you want to be self-employed and attain that goal through the internet, internet marketing is the horse you bet on hands down, every time.

It’s a darn good question and it’s with that question in mind that you should decide up front what you want to accomplish with your blog. Unfortunately, the answer requires more than just pointing you at the nearest source of inspiration. If your objective is minimal work and growth over time, you’re going to take one approach. If you want to put your all into a single blog, you’re going to take another approach. Since we’re focusing on optimized niche blogging, we’re going to focus on the former but I’ll touch on the latter a bit to help you make the distinction.

With optimized niche blogging, your focus is on volume. You want many blogs covering many precise topics which cater to a very specific clientele. Drop the word “optimized” and you’re left with a niche blog. Rather than spending your time building many blogs targeting very specific keywords, you will invest your time becoming an expert in one or two fields and writing a lot of very good content. Either way, your objective is to offer value to your visitors but, with a niche blog, you’re offering it virtually to the exclusion of all else.

You may be able to apply some of the concepts you learn here to niche blogging but that’s not my objective. Again, we want to optimize our time, our effort, our potential and our niche blog in an effort to minimize the effort over the long term. So why was all that information about non-optimized blogs important ? Because, if you are going for optimized niche rather than just niche, it helps to think of the visitors you want to target.

If you are writing a regular niche blog, your objective is to be a subject matter expert. You want to provide the best information out there on your particular niche. In doing so, you will garner the best traffic for that subject and place high on search. Months or years later, when you do decide to monetize the site, you may or may not do well. Again, you’re giving away the cow with the milk as far as subject matter information is concerned. Still, sponsors will be willing to pay you to show their ads based, if nothing else, on the high volume of traffic you bring to the table. That’s important.

Sponsors are not Adsense. Sponsors may be perfectly content with paying you CPM – for every thousand views, you get a little money (potentially a LOT of money). Adsense pays per click (on the ads). If you’re getting thousands of visitors everyday on a non-optimized Adsense site, you might very well not manage to convert those visits into clicks because, again, all the information your visitor needs is right there on the site (unless it’s about a product they might want to purchase.)

Now with an optimized niche site, your focus is on introducing visitors to ads relevant to their needs. You need them to click on those Adsense ads or you aren’t getting paid. They are looking for very specific information. Your blog provides information on the topic in which they’re interested but also provides ads which are very well suited to their needs. The visitor clicks the ad, sees the perfect solution to their need and buys from your advertiser. Everybody comes away a winner. Which brings us to the important question – who clicks on ads?

As you analyze the keywords you want to target, keep your audience in mind. High tech terms don’t convert well. Neither do blogs focused on keywords like this blog you’re reading now. The more tech-immersed your readership, the less likely you are to convert readers into clicks and money. Why? Well these are people who likely spend hours of their week online. They are so internet-saturated that they effectively become ad-blind.

Having seen thousands of sites just like yours and owing to the fact that they are familiar with page layouts, their eyes naturally skim over what they consider to be non-relevant (even though an ad may be exactly what they need) and they just peruse the true content of your blog. Not finding exactly what they needed, they move on. Or, worse, click a link in one of your posts to another site better suited to their needs (ouch). Now consider the alternatives. Who do you think might not be as web-savvy? Who do you think might be just as happy with the content of an ad targeted at the information or products they are searching for as the information on your page?

I read somewhere that the best keywords target the young and the old. Though true, I think that approach omits a large potential audience. Yes, grandparents looking for good information on a toy or product for their grandchildren are more likely to click on an ad than, say, the father of those children who works in the tech industry. But the farmer shopping for parts for his combine might be inclined to click ads too. The elementary school teacher is also inclined to click ads. The sweet lady working in the craft store down the street might be a clicker. Your uncle Charlie, the fisherman, he might be a clicker. There are plenty people out there who are not so jaded to online advertising that you can focus your optimized niche blog on. No need to just target the very old and very young.

So at this point you’re probably thinking I’ve gone completely off topic. Wasn’t this supposed to be a post about finding keywords? Yes it was and no I haven’t. I had to take you through those considerations because without that information you might have used what’s next to go out and hunt for what you thought were great keywords but which, in fact, cater to audiences unlikely to click your ads. Now that you have the information you need to begin your hunt, let’s talk about inspiration.

When I first started optimized niche blogging as a vehicle to self employment, I really struggled with where to find ideas. I thought there was some formula, some font of inspiration that could help me. Now that I’ve been at it a while, I find there are, indeed, great sources. In fact, in researching one keyword of interest, I often find several completely unrelated ideas. I can’t describe to you how I got to that point other than to say that time and familiarity with the process make it easier and easier. But you need a jumping off point and I’m going to give you several.

First, look around your room. What do you see? I’m looking at an IPT phone, my Blackberry, several computers, the speakers for my computers, my aquarium, several cans of Mountain Dew, a flash drive, my Climbing magazine (and right there’s another source of potential ideas), some quarters on my desk, some decorative pottery, a VPN concentrator, my guitars, and on and on. From that alone I can find several ideas to start with. Acoustic guitar strings, for example, or rock climbing shoes. Saltwater aquarium fish might be an idea as might antique gold coins. Now I’m not saying those are good keywords. There’s research still to be done to determine if that’s the case, but I hope I’m showing you how everything in your world can serve to inspire ideas if you just open your eyes.

Get in the habit of looking at the world differently. Whether at home, watching TV, driving to work, at lunch with a colleague, just take in the world around you and look for things people might search for online.

Second – Ebay. Go to Ebay now and look at the long list of categories. From there, browse into one of the categories and dig a little deeper. For example, we might click on Crafts. From there we might click on Airbrushing and find ourselves subsequently inspired to create an optimized niche blog on airbrush compressors or airbrush spray guns.

Third – Amazon. Go to Amazon and check out their offerings. They don’t just sell books, folks, but if books are your interest, fine. Rather than just “books,” for which you’ll never rank above someplace like Amazon, dig deeper. Books could become books on forts and fortresses. Maybe you’d want to focus further on Ancient Roman Fortifications. Look at some of their sporting equipment. Maybe there’s some inspiration there. Heck, look at anything and everything.

So to summarize, in the optimized niche blogging element of evolving into a self employed life, targeting an optimized keyword is critical but so, too, is considering your audience. Avoid catering to an audience unlikely to visit your advertisers. Think moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, teens, farmers, dock workers, car nuts, hobbies, collectors, etc. Think of people who don’t live with a broadband connection practically wired into their skulls. Find your inspiration surrounding you every day as you work and live. Finally, write out a list of 10 keywords you think you’d like to start with and come back soon. We’ll be covering how to research those words to see if they’re worth pursuing in our next post.

Assuming you’ve decided to start an optimized niche blog or any other website, for that matter, you’d be wise to pick a keyword to target. On first starting out, when the idea of being self employed was a vague dream rather than an honest pursuit, my wife and I each wanted to setup websites around our hobbies and interests. I’m an outdoor adventure nut. She’s an animal rescue fanatic. With no clue about keywords and even less clue about setting up websites, we invested countless hours and tons of blood, sweat and tears into our first sites. And we made several unfortunate mistakes; not the least of which were absolutely no efforts to target specific keywords.

After months of building our two websites, we wondered why the traffic didn’t flow. Why weren’t we millionaires? Why weren’t more people showing up? The amount of work put in wasn’t translating to money or visitors. More than a year later, I’m much more informed and much wiser and no why. We weren’t optimized. We didn’t target keywords. So what’s a keyword?

First, the term ‘keyword’ is a bit misleading. A keyword may, in fact, be a single word. It may also be a series of words. Really, though, it’s what you’re looking for when you head to Google or Yahoo. Whatever you type in to find what you’re looking for is a keyword some savvy internet entrepreneur could be targeting to attract you. The main keyword for this blog, for example, is ’self employed.’ I am slowly building this blog around that word and will gradually gain page rank on Google as the months and years go by. Why not faster? Because this isn’t the blog on which I hope to make money. It’s the blog I write in hopes of helping others make money.

I’m also going to mention long tail keywords. A long tail keyword is simply a longer, more targeted term for which people might search. For example, red tail hawk migration patterns. If you’re looking for that, you’re looking for some extremely specific information.

As you’re thinking about setting up your first blog, jot down your high level keyword. Let’s say you like cars. The word ‘cars’ is our starting point. Now, how many sites out there do you think there are about cars? Do you think that’s a smart word to start with? Do you think you could quickly move up the rankings in Google and take page one if you’re targeting that keyword? Maybe you could… but only after beating out the 694,000,000 (as of this writing) competing sites. Not likely. You can see how much you’ll be competing against by typing your keyword in the Google search field in quotes, by the way. For this search I typed in “cars”.

With ‘cars’ as our starting point, let’s narrow the focus. You could immediately narrow the focus a bit if you limited yourself to a particular type of car. Being a bit of a speed demon and a motor-head, you decide you’d like your first blog to focus on sports cars. Our first filtering now and we’re focused on ’sports cars.’ Hey, look at that. Already we’re down to 6,010,000 competing pages. That’s quite an improvement but still a lot of competition. We might be able to rank against that eventually but, unless you have years to kill, it’s still not a good starting point. Let’s narrow the focus even further.

The next keyword combination I’m going to try is “Italian sports cars.” And, bam! Just like that I’ve found a keyword that might actually be worth targeting. At 20,800 competing pages, I might actually be able to rank up there. I know 20K competing sites sounds daunting but, remember statements I’ve made in previous posts. The internet is littered with the decaying corpses of failed, unwanted, never-updated sites and blogs. Many of those 20,800 sites will fall in that category or will be poorly optimized and beatable.

It’s that narrowing of focus to a long tail keyword that makes optimized niche building what it is. Had you begun with just “cars” as your target, you’d spend years of link building and content writing and probably never get anywhere. By narrowing your focus, you dramatically increase the likelihood that you’ll make it to the top of Google’s first page for that term. Think of your own search habits through Google? Isn’t your inclination to hit the first item that shows up in your search? How often do you go beyond page 1, 2 or 3? See how important it is to rank well for a keyword?

Does that mean you can’t ever go for that broader term? No it does not. Over time, assuming you continue to grow your blog, you very likely will target other keywords. Also remember that every time Italian Sports Cars appears in your blog you are actually building some juice for each of those 3 words and every possible combination of them (Italian, Sports, Cars, Italian Sports, Italian Cars, Sports Cars). As you write about them, you’ll also find search traffic hitting your site for word combinations you never even thought about.

Now, don’t start jumping for joy and planning your retirement yet. On the road to self employment through optimized niche blogging, there’s a lot more to it than just picking a keyword. Heck we still have to determine if that keyword is worth targeting from an earnings perspective. At this stage, we’ve just surmised that it may be possible to rank well for. There are other variables to consider and we’ll move along with those in our next post as well as introduce you to some free tools. See you again soon.

It’s almost a taboo keyword (keyword sniping) which people are avoiding. I won’t hide from Google and erase my earlier content because I’m simply reporting on a technique described by somebody else. In the interest of fairness to you, Google and Courtney Tuttle, I’m leaving the few posts I’ve put up on sniping but emphasizing honest use rather than abuse. Why? Because I respect Court and because I want you to learn about methods which might help you realize your dreams of self employment.

That said, there have been some changes and will be future changes coming, so read on.

Instead of keyword sniping, we’ll focus on Optimized Niche Blogging or ONB. The difference between Optimized Niche Blogging and regular niche blogging will be explained in a detailed subsequent post.

Next, I’ve edited my previous posts on keyword sniping slightly to emphasize a point I tried to make but didn’t make clearly – INTEGRITY is paramount. I refuse to pass on anything blackhat or even greyhat I may learn in my studies, nor will I use such techniques myself. When it comes to optimized niche blogging, we will focus on methods to expedite the process, but not by throwing away our scruples. Court tried to make that clear to folks but there were still people who abused his technique and cost him dearly.

If you want to learn shady ways to make a living online, move along please. I’m not smart enough, crooked enough or wicked enough to take the time to learn that stuff. In my post Goals and Objectives for the Self Employed I stated “100% legitimate. I do not want to engage in scams, shady dealings or any other activity that isn’t completely up front. Integrity with my clients and adherence to all local and federal laws is of paramount importance to me. I never want to feel guilty about a single penny earned nor do I want to ever jeopardize my long term livelihood for short-term gains.” That goal remains unchanged.

Finally, since Court no longer provides his methods, I’m going to try to reinvent the wheel as well as introduce you to some additional people out there I consider the real pros in this business. You’ll have to judge for yourself if their methods are suited for you but I will be borrowing a little bit from each of them so you’d be well served to study them in detail yourself.

As a brief preview to what Optimized Niche Blogging will cover, I’ll describe from step one how to select a keyword, buy an expired domain name dirt cheap, set up your hosting, install your blog software, write enough valuable content to begin drawing traffic, develop good link building habits and then rinse and repeat.

Over the course of your blog’s life, you will not invest every day writing content for that blog. Your objective will be to let it stew for a while, then add a bit to it. Eventually you’ll monetize the blog (which I’ll also explain) and then move on again to work on the other blogs you’ve developed.

You will experience slow growth in income over time but you’ll be surprised at how much fun it is to watch that income grow from pennies into a few dollars into a legitimate income you can be proud of with only a few hours a week invested. It ain’t a get rich quick gimmick, folks. It is work and you won’t reap rewards immediately, but you will eventually.

In the meantime I want to emphasize this… Courtney Tuttle’s Internet Marketing School is invaluable with or without his keyword sniping posts. I fully endorse him, his personality and his techniques and hope you’ll continue to visit him often. His videos alone should go a long way to getting you started on this element of your self employment strategy.

At the heart of our current economic crisis is credit. Poor lending, ill-advised borrowing and unwise debt management have left companies challenged to secure loans for such things as expansion or even payroll. Folks… PAYROLL!? Don’t you think you should be a little bit shocked that the companies for which we work have to borrow money to pay us for the work we’re doing? Don’t you think the work we do should result in profits from which we’re paid? Does this sound like wise money management to you? But I digress.

Now conventional wisdom will have you believe that debt isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, they’ll tell you, if you haven’t held debt, you haven’t gained credit and, by extension, will be hard pressed to get loans in the future. Ask any average first-time credit card owner if they got the best possible rate with the highest possible credit line. Odds are they were handed a starter package with painful interest and a low line of credit. But the statement is valid. A credit history (preferably positive) is practically essential in this country.

My problem with building credit is that there are so many incentives to just go out and do it without any real education afforded the public on what to watch out for. You are told debt is a good thing. It’s pushed day in and day out. Get a mortgage because you’ll get a tax break on the interest, they tell us! And we fall for it even though this amounts to handing somebody a dollar, being handed back 30 cents and thinking you came out ahead! In so many ways, we’re sold debt without being handed a very much needed instruction manual on just what the upside and downside is. But my personal favorite is the department store or gas station credit card.

Go to a department store and they push their company credit card on you. “You’ll save 20% on today’s purchase,” they proclaim. You’ll earn points! You’ll earn rewards! You’ll earn, you’ll save, your hair will grow back, your foot odor problem will be cured, you’ll finally understand your husband and your children will love you! Ever stop to ask yourself the down side? Why is this complete stranger so darn desperate to provide you with the apparent plastic equivalent of the crown jewels with no apparent strings attached? I’ll tell you why.

For that one time 20% savings on your single purchase (let’s say it’s $100) you’ll only spend $80! But for the lifetime of that card, you’ll be handing that company hundreds or thousands of dollars more than what you thought you’d be paying for those future purchases.

Friends, those stores don’t love you. You may have charm and a winning smile, but there isn’t a gas station or department store so charmed by your charisma that they want to lose money on you. They are pushing those cards on you because they make HUGE PROFITS on the American habit of floating debt from one month to the next and on the hidden fees you’re probably paying just for the privilege of carrying that thing around.

Store credit cards cost you. The rates on these things are atronomical. They don’t save you a dime in the long run and it’s the long run those stores are banking on when they push you to apply for one of their cards. There are individuals out there who do fine with any kind of card. They may use a card for the convenience at the moment, then go straight home and cut a check to pay it off before that interest hits. But, trust me on this, people, most of us don’t do that.

So, this first post in our debt management series offers you one simple solution - NEVER EVER EVER EVER accept, register, apply or sign up for a store credit card. If you currently own any, get rid of them. Yes, you heard me, get rid of them. Gather them together, pay them off or consolidate them and pay them off. We’ll discuss consolidation in a future post.

But don’t you need a credit card? Yes, you should have a credit card because it is a simple and effective way to build a positive credit history but be rational. You don’t need 8 credit cards. You don’t need store credit cards. Carry one or two major credit cards with the lowest interest rate you can get, build a good credit history with them and that’s it.

And one last thing… if you are accumulating store credit cards because you are so cash strapped that it’s the only way to get what you need, stop. Really put on the brakes here. Falling deeper and deeper into credit card debt because you are hurting for money is applying the same logic as cutting deeper and deeper into a wound to get rid of infection but then never applying an antiseptic. The bigger wound gets infected again, you cut deeper again, it gets infected again and on and on.

Recognize that in such dire circumstances you have to STOP. Take a long, deep breath and accept where you are. Don’t hate yourself for it, just recognize that accumulating more debt is not a solution, it’s just compounding the problem. Once you’ve taken a deep breath it’s time to consider responsible options such as reprioritizing needs, eliminating expenses, consolidating debt and speaking to credit counselors. Nothing pains me more than the idea of a family strapped with debt sinking themselves deeper and deeper into a hole from which they are ill-equipped to escape.

There are many ways in which you can start down the path to more intelligent debt management to ensure you don’t sink yourself when you are self employed. The insane APR and uselessness of store credit cards makes this a no-brainer starting point. Next up we’ll talk about those major credit cards. Though your Visa or Mastercard is an improvement, poor debt management strategies here can be just as bad.