Build it Right to Learn How to Make Money Online

Ok, listen, don't make the same mistake that I did not that long ago. I built a fairly successful site a couple of years ago that was moving up in the Google rankings - I can't say it was one of my more carefully thought out sites, but, had a fair amount of content nonetheless.

You see, about a year ago I started to get very excited about keyword optimization by focusing more on my blog titles, headers and highlighted information. Thinking that I was helping my other site, I went in and altered all of the headers, meta tags, main page title, etc. Guess what? Google dropped my site like a rock out of their top listings. Ouch - that's one tough way to learn how to make money online!

After sitting back and pondering this a bit I realized that I had shot myself in the foot by over optimizing (and, really over thinking) the problem at hand. Google got it as well - my site had changed too much - thus the search king had to re-index it. Lesson learned (or, as the oddly say in England 'lesson learnt').

Today's web marketing lesson is all about building it right the first time - why keyword optimization must be a priority when you plan and prototype. Yes, you can change core keyword phrases along the way but, you must do it very gradually. That's really beside the point here.

What I want to stress to you is the need to start with good keyword research first - targeting your core keyword phrase and then all relevant variations on it. Let's take a great example that, I think, will show you how to approach this problem with some powerful ammunition for your own work.

If you've done some research online for sites devoted to earning money online - you may have noticed a site appear about 1-2 years ago for the search term 'make money online'. Go ahead and type it into Google without the quotes.

The #1 site is Alan Liew's Blogger site (yes, a Blogger site!) - here's a screenshot:



Now, if you pay special attention to his site you'll see that the keyword phrase 'make money online' is the predominate term on his site - from the main page and throughout his post titles and links. What's not quite so apparent is that all inbound links to his site are also titled 'Make Money Online' from forum posts to articles.

What Alan did right was focus immediately on the keyword phrase he desired to dominate and did it in about two years! Kudos to him and his perseverance - his example is a complete success in a massively competitive market (157,000,000 results).

This shows that staying the course with your keyword phrase is one of the most important steps to building your site. Be sure to use one of the keyword tools out there to find a phrase you want to market to and stick to it! If you keep diligent - you will succeed.

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IM101 Step 7: Using Blogger to Build Your Affiliate Site

I've talked about Blogger many times before on The Agile Marketer. It is, in my mind, the easiest way to get a site online that can generate revenue for you quickly. With built-in RSS feeds, Adsense and the ability to customize using Javascript or HTML additions you can actually build a fully functional website.

However, your goal is not to get too wrapped up in site design - remember, the key to your success is getting content out there quickly and to notify blog search engines that content is being updated.

I'm not going to go into the details of how to sign into Blogger and set up your account - you can find many tutorials out there on how to do this - here's a great one if you need it: Vance's Blogger Tutorial

Make sure you choose a more vanilla, or sparse template. The reason for this is that you can make things stand out much better - the colors of a header or inline page photos really stand out when the template is mostly white. In case you haven't noticed, The Agile Marketer is a Blogger blog (highly customized, though).

I realize it has been a while since my last tutorial - but, part of the reason was to show you how this Blogger affiliate site I was building, namely, The Diet Solution Program, is doing in Google!!

Take a look at: Natural Weight Loss with The Diet Solution Program

I completed the first part of the blog in October and submitted only some free press releases and one, single article. Over time I added some more blog posts, submitted my site to a few social sites such as Spicypage and Blogcatalog, submitted the single article to some more directories and pinged some blog search services. Actually, not much work overall - I didn't do some of the standard traffic building techniques such as YouTube or a load of article submissions.

So, in two and half months - how are we doing with our keywords?
1. 'The Diet Solution Program' - now ranked 42nd in Google (534,000 results)
2. 'Isabel De Los Rios' - now ranked 22nd in Google (361,000 results)
3. 'healthy diet plan' and 'natural weight loss' - (524,000 and 2,640,000 Google results) no ranking yet for those specific phrases (but indexed by Google if the search is refined)

I haven't spent any time on optimizing the keyword phrases in #3 yet - just letting organic growth work with these. However, my future approach will be to add keyword density in my Blogger posts as well as articles that focus on these.

Not bad for the small amount of work I've put into the site - I would guess I've put in about 8-16 hours of work. With only a single article, six submissions to article sites, three press releases, about seven social site networks I'm generating some traffic, getting Adsense revenue and a few Clickbank sales.

The key with Blogger was getting my content posts out there so that they will be searched by Google right away. Keywords make the difference - you can see how just a little work can get a site moving up the organic search result ladder. Just image if you have 5 to 10 of these Blogger affiliate sites working over time....

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IM101 Step 6: Tuning Your Affiliate Product Keywords

Finding the best keywords for your affiliate site is not too difficult but essential to learn how to make money online. The key is finding the right terms that will have the highest density on your page with hopefully the additional benefit of a low competition in the search engines. This also works for your own product or informational sites as well.

Since I had picked a dieting product this is not as easy as something with a smaller niche such as a hobby or an aspect of a professional skill. The basic strategy for a high competition keyword subject area is to narrow it down to smaller segments by using longer keyword phrases. From my last article using the keyword tools provided can give me a very good indication of what keyword phrase is going to a) have less competition, b) ranked faster and c) visible in the first ten results of a Google search. It is important to try and analyze this before you kick into gear building your sites.

For example, the word 'diet' alone has a Google page return of 163 millions results - that is, 163 million references to external web sites. Getting to the top ten results in Google for just the word 'diet' would be a very, very tough task.

You may have noticed that I waited some time before continuing this article to work on my own articles and my ebook. But, I was also waiting for my affiliate sample site to start gaining rank in Google. Part of this plan was to focus on my core keyword phrases within the affiliate site's content.

For my example I knew that a couple of key phrases had to be part of my solution. Since I was focusing on a diet guide I had to use both the guide's title and author as keyword phrases. This is an important step for the future since I knew the guide was going to gain in popularity over time. In this case - 'The Diet Solution Program' and 'Isabel De Los Rios'. It is key to use these for future keyword phrase searches as the product gains popularity.

But, I also wanted to find a keyword phrase that has a more general health and diet search with a smaller Google result. After a couple of hours on the tools using the words 'diet', 'dieting', 'health', 'nutrition', 'diet plan', 'healthy diet' I finally hit the phrase I wanted - 'healthy diet plan' which I found to have a decent set of results in search but low enough to get ranked quickly. (Remember, to use these tools just type in the core one or two word phrases and see what results come back. Then, go to Google and see how many results come back from your phrases. The lower the number of results the easier it is for you to get ranked in the top ten.)

I typically look for keyword phrase results in Google with near one million results. Here's an example that is close:







If you focus on key phrases with results under 100,000 but greater than about 25,000 then you can get ranked very quickly in Google. The downside is that the daily search volume for your phrase may be too low so this would only generate 10-20 hits a day.

I was able to get a keyword site ranked in the top ten of Google for a result of over 25 million in the search return. However this took about six months and a lot of work. Be sure you pick one keyword phrase that has about one million results - but, don't focus on it first. Let it become a natural part of your site as you build it.

So, now I'm ready to start building a site. I'm now armed with my keyword phrases 'The Diet Solution Program', 'Isabel De Los Rios', 'healthy diet plan' and 'natural weight loss'. Enter these into Google as full search phrase enclosed in both quotes and not enclosed and you'll be able to see for yourself how many results are returned for each.

Next up, using Blogger as a simple, free way to build your site.

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