The Honest Way

A slight apology to everyone for leaving it so long since my last post How to Make Money with Keywords. I’ve been very busy putting together my little army of sites and blogs and it takes up all my time, which is ok as I’m building a small empire that will eventually make enough money to allow me to slow down a bit!

I’ve just been over at Griz’s blog, you know the one that tells you how to make money online, and read through another brace of comments (sometimes they’re almost as entertaining as the post itself - only kiddin’!) and right at the bottom, an anonymous reader posted the question “Do you have any books to recommend?”

Well here’s my own answer to that!

Anonymous, why do you want more to read? Everything you need to know is right there in that blog.

The rest you’ll get with experience - the experience of doing!

I, like just about everyone else, started out reading a load of stuff and most of it was bullshit. If I counted up all the hours wasted reading all that bullshit that could have been better spent in actually doing what they were telling me, I’d be far more advanced today than I am.

Getting past the hurdle of wanting to do it and actually doing it can be tough and most people simply don’t go past that point. They continue to read every post that every knowledgeable (and plenty of not so knowledgeable) people write and then wait patiently for the next post that is going to reveal “The Big Secret”.

But that post will never come.

That’s because it doesn’t exist. The big secret to making a success of this (and any other) business lies within each and every person. They have to make the breakthrough themselves, because no one else can do it for them.

I’ll be blunt and say most of the commenters in Griz’s blog are readers, not doers.

Why do I say that? Because they’re still there, asking the same old questions just re-phrased a bit.

Then you’ll see them over at Vic’s blog asking the same rephrased questions. Then they’ll turn up someplace else. They’ll never do anything with the information, but they’ll keep on believing that if they ask enough questions, they’ll eventually find their holy grail and then figure out how to make money online.

They’ll also be the first ones to get upset by reading this apparent tirade, because they won’t believe the truth about themselves. Nobody like the truth when it hurts!

The truth is that 95% of everybody that sets out to make money online will fail. That’s a big number but also a truthful one. You got to ask yourself, do you want to keep reading and asking questions and join the 95%’ers? Or do you want to take a chance and join the 5%’ers who are the ones spending their time doing this stuff?

Ok, that’s pretty a pretty tough cookie to swallow, but its also a good wake up call to those people who really do want to make money online. It’s in the doing stage that results start to show up. Believe me, they take a while to show up when you do things as legitimately as possible, maybe with a few shortcuts and underhand tricks, but Internet Marketing is a hare and tortoise race. The hares go for it with all guns blazing and in some cases will make some good money before being shot down by the search engines that soon see through their shenanigans.

The tortoises are the ones who take it slow and steady, building up their sites naturally and gathering links over time. Sure, it takes a lot of time and you need a lot of patience because results are a long time coming, but they will come and when they do they’ll keep on coming because you won’t have burned out too fast, like the hares in the race.

You see the secret to making money online is no big secret!

Its all about getting people to see what you’re offering. Get enough people to window shop at your store and some of them will come in and buy from you. Selling stuff is a numbers game. It always was and it always will be. Doesn’t matter what you’re selling, be it affiliate products, your own ebooks or software packages, advertising space, or PPC. You absolutely positively must get people to see your goods. And to do that you need traffic. Not any old traffic, but organic search traffic - people who will find your website or blog by typing in a phrase at Google and your site coming up on the front page of the search results.

Enough has been said about why attracting organic search traffic is essential to the success of your business. Go re-read Griz’s blog in the link I gave you at the start of this post. He explains it much better than anyone else I know.

What I will tell you is that to attract that search traffic you need to do plenty of work and have lots of patience to get your site up there onto the front page of the keywords you’re working. You need to not only optimize your site, but you need lots of strong anchored links to give your site the authority to deserve its place on page one. That’s because all the other sites that are on page one have that authority and you’re going to have to come along and get more authority than at least one of them in order to displace them. You might have a fight on your hands, because no one is going to like a young upstart coming along and nosing their site out of its cosy place. They’ll likely respond by getting more links for themself.

Well, you’re going to have to keep going, getting more and more of the authority that you’ll need to out-rank all of those sites to get to the top of the front page, because that’s where you’re going to get most of the traffic. Depending upon the competitiveness of the niche you’re working, it will either be fairly simple, or damn difficult! It could even turn out to be an all-out war, but its one you’re going to have to win of you want a slice of a very big pie.

This is all about doing, by the way.

Reading about how to do it is not going to get your site up there. Doesn’t matter if you know everything there is to know and some, you still won’t get up there unless you start rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty.

You’re going to have to find places to get those links from and if you can’t find them, then you’re going to have to make some yourself. The more you make, the more links you’ll be able to send to your main site. I’ve talked about this strategy plenty of times in here not to have to repeat it again.

But, I will repeat this one more time for good measure: Nothing will happen until you start doing it for yourself!

If this post raises a few hackles, then so be it. That’s what a good pep talk is designed to do because it’ll make some people more determined to get out there and do something. The rest will go bury their heads back in the sand and wait for that next post…

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

How to make money with keywords is a question that a lot of people don’t even ask, because they don’t know what significance keywords have with the idea of making money. So after the mammoth review of Frank’s software in my last post Blog Content Wizard Review, its time to talk about putting it to use.

First of all, for those that don’t know, keywords are single words or short phrases that surfers type into search engine search boxes when they’re looking for something online. Here’s an example.

Say you’re a student writing an essay on how to make money online with adsense. Ok, cliched to death, but a relevant example all the same! You’re highly likely to go to Google and type in a relevant keyword to get some information on what you’re looking for. Say you type in “make money online” for example. You’re likely to get a few hundred million pages come up in the results that you’re going to have to plough through to find what you want. The keyword you used, “make money online” was too broad and you got too many resulting pages. Not only that, a lot of those pages will not be relevant to what you really need to know, which is how to make money with adsense. So you try again, only this time narrowing it down to “make money online with adsense” and get a couple of million pages.

Well, its a lot better than the last search, but its still fairly difficult to get exactly what you want. So you then type in “how to make money online with adsense” and that gets it down to just over half a million pages. Better. At least the results are showing website that at least seem to want to tell you how to make money with adsense, although in reality the vast majority want to sell you an eBook for a small fortune that will maybe or maybe not tell you what you want to know.

But that’s not the reason for this post, this is.

What you have done is used keywords to find certain websites in the search engine Google. Which is what millions of people worldwide do every day,although they’re all looking for something different. Well, not necessarily.

Many thousands of people make the same search for various items every day. These are the terms that Internet Marketers latch onto as a way to make money with keywords.

Now obviously, many thousands of people will be looking to find out how to make money online and start their own home business and that is why any keywords associated with that phrase will bring up many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of competing websites all vying for the attention of the surfer. Of those, only a handful will actually be found. They are the ones of page one of the search results and maybe a few on page two will mop up the dregs. That’s because most surfers see ehat they want on page one of Google’s results and simply click the first site they see, which 9 times out of 10 is the top site in the list.

So it stands to reason that if you want to make money with keywords, you had better make sure your site sits at (or very near) the top of the search results for the keywords you’re targeting.

Why?

Because when you sit up there on top and there are thousands of people typing in your keywords every day, the vast majority of them will land on your homepage, where you can either try to sell them something like a product of your own, or an affiliate product. Or you can present them with some ads like adsense or lead generation banners that they’ll click and make you some money each time. With conversion rates anywhere between 1% and maybe 7% for adsense type ads or lower for affiliate this will convert to a veritable sackful of money coming your way every day if you choose the right keywords and are sitting pretty right at the top of the tree.

I just described the holy grail of Internet Marketing. That to which 95% of marketers aspire but never attain. Of the remaining 5%, only a tint percentage of them are at the top and raking in the money hand over fist while the rest are fed the scraps.

So what do you need to do to get your site to the top of Google for a particular keyword?

First you have to research your keyword and make sure there is not too much competition sitting up there, or its likely you’ll never displace them. If you try to target a fiercely competitive keyword, such as Credit Cards, or Car Insurance, where huge sums of money are made each day, you don’t really stand a snowball’s chance in hell of making a dent on page one. And if you did, its likely that the owners of the sites that are up there will not take too kindly to a young upstart trying to muscle in on their piece of real estate and will either take steps to leapfrog back over your site, or resort to less than honest measures to have your site removed.

Yes, it does happen!

So you want to make sure you are taking on a much less competitive keyword. Ok, you’re earning capacity is much less, but of you could make a few hundred dollars a day in an easy niche, isn’t that better than going for the thousand dollars a day but never seeing it?

So we’ll assume you’re now looking at a keyword that still performs ok, with maybe a thousand or so searches on average per day but the cybermafia are not controlling it! You’ll need to find out what the top three sites for that keyword are doing to be where they are. I find a tool like SEO Elite is invaluable for this as it will tell you what in-links a site has and their quality. Why do you need to know that information?

Because you’ll need to know that so you can get more in-links than the top three sites.

How do you do that?

Well, there are several methods. You could buy the links. Don’t cringe, most of those top sites got where they are because they bought their way there. If that seems like a tough call, you could ask for link exchanges with other site owners. Of course, for maximum relevance and link juice, you’ll need to contact owners of sites that are also targeting the same keywords as you. Well, ask yourself this: “Would you give out links to a potential competitor who could, by doing so take your number one spot in Google and take a big slice of your income?” Um, there is only one possible answer to that.

The other way is to generate your own links and stick your finger up at the competition.

How do you do that? Well, you could do something that is quite underhand and will, if you get caught, cause you all kinds of problems and maybe even get your site de-indexed. That is to join a paid link farm system where you pay a monthly fee and acquire high quality in-links to your site. Before you ask.. No, I don’t do that, which is why I don’t make a huge amount of money with this or any of my other “make money” sites.

There is another option open to you but it is long, hard work and will only push your site up the search engine ladder slowly and that’s to do it yourself. I mean create your own supporting sites that can provide links to your main keyword targeting site. Which, in essence is a small link farm, which search engines like Google frown upon big time. So I don’t condone that you do that, but as I believe that information should be kept free and in the public domain… well its possible to do that.

But to do it takes a lot of work, as I said and there will be some trial and error involved. But you can do it free by using the many free blogging platforms that are available, such as blogger (owned by Google, funnily enough), blinkweb, wordpress etc and create your own system of blogs that can send the odd link here and there to your money making site. Of course you need to populate those blogs with plenty of keyword relevant content that is not duplicated anywhere else. So using PLR is out as is plagiarising other people’s articles and placing them on your blogs. Google will simply discount any links coming from them. So you do need original content. But here’s the rub.

That content does have to be original, keyword rich and relevant. It does not have to be particularly grammatically perfect. Just readable and relevant. Which brings me nicely back to my opening paragraph all that time ago when I mentioned Frank’s Blog Content Wizard software package. You see that little gem autogenerates keyword relevant content that is readable (ok, better understood by a 6 year old and a dumb one at that!) which saves you having to write it yourself, which ultimately saves you time. Time that could be better spent getting links from other sources such as forums, article marketing begging etc!

Which, ultimately is how to make money with keywords!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

This post will be my Blog Content Wizard review. Its been a little while since my last post in here RevResponse Update, so I apologise for the long gap but I’ve been busy with so many other things it gets harder to keep up with all the blogs I’m running at the moment. Still, the more the merrier if you really want to know how to make money online!

So what exactly is Blog Content Wizard?

Well, for those of you who do not already know, Frank Carr over at OpTempo.com, the popular product review site, has created Blog Content Wizard, which is a nifty piece of software for generating, well, in a word… content!

Lets get the major downside of this product out of the way first so that I can do the rest of the Blog Content Wizard review and tell you what it really comes into its own for.

Downside:

The first thing you need to be aware of is that Blog Content Wizard does not produce the sort of content that will enable anyone to generate ezine quality articles. So if that’s what you’re looking for, you have a long wait ahead as there is NO software that can produce such good, human looking results, no matter what anyone else claims. Frank makes no such claims either.

So what exactly is the use of yet another piece of content producing software that calls itself Blog Content Wizard.

The clue is in the name.

Blog Content Wizard is primarily designed and created for generating low quality blog posts that you would use in low quality blogs for padding out the content. But it comes with this very useful and priceless bonus. Importantly for SEO purposes, Blog Content Wizard produces keyword rich content, using keywords that you specify.

It is what it is, a low level keyword rich random content generator that will produce basically readable articles which tell the search engine bots what they need to know, ie what keywords your site is targeting and what niche it fits into.

If you’re still shaking your heads and thinking to yourself that its no use posting crap content as the search engines will only give you grief, then think again. The only people that will give you grief are live readers of your blog. So if you have a social blog that you are attracting genuine live people to read your writings, then this is not for you. What Blog Content Wizard is for is those blogs that you do not expect to attract anyone to except the search engines.

Still shaking your head? I can see you thinking, “What is the use of a blog if no one except the search engines are going to read it?”

In social terms, not much. But in SEO terms, everything!

I’ll explain. If your intention is to make money online with your blogs or static websites, there can be no arguing that you need traffic in order to make sales or generate clicks with PPC ads. Also, there can be no arguing that you need a certain kind of traffic if you want it to generate that income for you and the best kind of traffic for that is organic search traffic. The kind that finds your site on the front page of Google,  Yahoo, MSN etc.

So what if your site isn’t on page one of any of those search engines.

Then you need a way to help it on its way. Well, one way of doing that is to set up some, shall we say search engine readable blogs, that can send the all-important authority, keyword anchored links to your sites that are displaying the ads that you want the organic search traffic to find and click. This is how to make money online! You must have links to your money sites so that they will rise in the search engines’ index and be found by the right kind of traffic - organic search traffic. In large numbers. The more the better!

But setting up more blogs to do that is time consuming and then filling them with sufficient keyword rich content is even more time consuming. That’s if you were to write the content yourself. Or expensive if you were to buy it.

Enter the Blog Content Wizard, reviewed right here.

Blog Content Wizard creates that rather low quality but still human readable content with all the right keywords in the right quantities (ie not over-stuffed) to satisfy the search engines that the blog is focused on that particular niche. Then when you send links to your money making site (or sites) from blogs that you have filled with keyword rich content, those links have much more authority than they would have coming from nondescript or irrelevant blogs, regardless of their page rank.

There’s the rub.

This is why so many sites that occupy high places in the SE index for certain less competitive keywords can be overturned by your own sites. Because they may have lots of links coming in and they may come from high PR sites, but they’re often not keyword anchored and not coming from tightly focused sites that have keyword authority for the keywords you are targeting. By using Blog Content Wizard to create exactly that type of content for these types of sites, you gain an edge the competition is unaware of.

Guess what that will do to your money site?

Yep, it will give it a nice leg-up in the SERPs. Which is what you want and need if you’re going to make any money from it.

So how does Blog Content Wizard work?

Well, Blog Content Wizard has access to a huge library of phrases in common use that it chooses randomly to form roughly coherent sentences. To generate articles with your main keyword and some secondary keywords that you want to see in the finished article, you simply enter them in the relevant fields in the software’s main panel. You can also, on a separate panel, add your own phrases that may be niche specific to give the finished article more authenticity. Then you simply hit the button and the software randomly generates the content.

In a concise nutshell, that’s how Blog Content Wizard works.

As I’ve already pointed out, the finished article is a little rough around the edges. But if you want a more readable article, it can be improved by copying it into a word processor like MS Word and doing some cosmetic tidying up yourself That way you can create a more readable article that would pass a visual inspection. Ok, its a little more work for you, but far less than creating your own articles from scratch. On the other hand, if you’re not all that bothered about quality and only want the article purely for search engines, then its good to go.

Simply copy and paste the full article into your blog editor and publish. Voila, instant content!

Now as I mentioned earlier, the finished product is only barely readable and while it will make perfect sense to a search engine bot, it might leave a real human visitor scratching their head. This is why this product is not for populating money sites or adsense sites with content. You never know when a visual inspection of a money site might be triggered and if your content is not up to scratch you may attract more unwanted scrutiny than you’d like. So this is purely for blogs you don’t expect anyone to read and that are used for providing links to sites you do make money on.

Disclaimer: Just so that you know where I’m coming from with this Blog Content Wizard review, there is no affiliate program with this product, so I’m not taking a cut. Nor am I being paid to write this review. This is just my way of saying thank you to Frank for producing Blog Content Wizard for such a reasonable price ($47) and that I have bought it and am more than happy with its results.

If you want to see for yourself, please check out Frank’s site where you can buy the software if you want or just read about it if you’re a tyre kicker! The link to the site is: Blog Content Wizard

If you’re serious about wanting to make money online, this software tool is something you might want to consider adding to your armory!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way