The Online Money Making Secret You Shouldn't Know - Part 3

After getting back from a long vacation in the desert Southwest I was startled to find that my high volume search keyword site had shown some significant growth in the last 2 months (if you haven't read Part 1 you can find it here, or Part 2 which can be found here).

If you remember I mentioned that having a site devoted to a keyword phrase that has extremely high monthly search volume can be a great way to make money online and boost your online marketing strategy. After reviewing one of my own sites I thought I might show you what kind of results you may get (DISCLAIMER - your results will vary!).

I initially built my site on August 21st, 2006 with just a couple of pages but focused on three extremely high volume keyword phrases in the entertainment industry that I thought might work well. I really didn't spend much time on it for the first two months or so but then picked up in October by promoting it as much as I could (as noted in Part 2 of these articles).

My AdSense revenue was limited with my first revenue click occurring on November 4th and my November average revenue being $0.60 / day for a total of $17 - not bad considering I only put two hours into it. Now, this is a bit unfair considering the search engines had from Aug. 21st to about Oct. 20th to index my site before I really pushed the search engine optimization. I'm not sure how long the engines would have taken had I started pushing the site sooner.

In December I focused entirely on adding content with about 7 more pages of site articles and information really ignoring backlinks from external directories, forums, blogs, and articles. My AdSense revenue stayed about the same until about Feb. 12th. I'm not sure why (my guess is my search engine rankings went up) but my visits jumped by a factor of about 8x. This didn't really increase the revenue because the clickthrough rates were low.

After reading some of Brad Callen's books (be sure to subscribe to the Agile Marketer Newsletter to get a free SEO ebook from him, or, really become a SEO expert and buy SEO Elite probably the best SEO package available) I decided to modify my ad placements based on his research. By the end of April I was nearing $1 / day on one site with only five hours of total work.

By continually adding content , promoting and reorging the ads I now had a site that was curving upward in daily hits (from about 30 a day in late 2006 to 700 a day by June 2007). Well, to make a long story short here are my results from August:

By Google's Terms of Service I can't show you the clickthrough rates or page impressions. But you can see the daily earnings for just this single site (I've filtered out all my other AdSense earnings).

So, what's the moral of this story? With NOT a lot of work and some patience, diligence and focused high volume keywords you should be able to do the same fairly easily. If your goal is to work from home then this might just be one part of your arsenal to get started. Just be sure to keep the content flowing.