Adsense

Archive for 'Adsense'

Getting Ranked In Search

September 14th, 2008 by Scot, under Adsense, Making Money. 10 Comments

So far you’ve picked a niche that has the possibility to be profitable in step one.

In step two we went over how to determine the competition of the niche vs true profitability.

Step three showed you how to setup your domain and hosting, and then we went over a few must-have SEO plugins and other necessary Wordpress modifications.

Then I showed you in the last installment how to create tons of unique content with WP Uniquefier and WP-O-Matic.

Now to get ranked in search you will need to get quality inbound links from sites that are already established. Google determines the legitimacy of your website based on what others that are already established have to say about you.

Grab Up Free Links
Jon Warass recently reminded me of a post made by BluehateSEO where he talks about grabbing up virtual real estate that is freely available to you. This is something I have always done but I like the way he explains it. Create landing pages with your keywords anywhere and everywhere that will allow you to for free.

24 Places For Free Rank

The idea here is to create an account with your keyword (dinner-recipes.wordpress.com, etc.) Wordpress.com and others have already done the SEO work for you and Google will generally recognize these sites as authorities. These pages generally rank very quickly in Google and you can easily convert traffic from these to your main website.

Get Free Social Links

There are tons of people out there trying to link and share your website, if only you could show them what you have to offer. Social networks will give your website some good link juice if you can manage to take a few minutes to submit your sites. There are several social networks that allow you to link back to your site so it can become quite a time-consuming process.

I recommend either outsourcing this work if you can or using a service that I have used and still do a lot for my own projects, Social Submit.

Once you’ve created an account, with the help of Social Submit, you can easily add several pages to all of the major social networks.This tool will save you hours of busy-work. The only time investment required here is the initial time it takes to register an account on each network– and you may already have one on some of them.

Comment On Do-Follow Blogs

You can always get something out of commenting on blogs, but making sure they are DoFollow will ensure you are getting the proper love– and that you aren’t wasting valuable time. If you’ve never heard of NoFollow you can read more about it here. This is another busy-work type of job which you can outsource or just put in an hour or so a day to get a few links out there. Tools like CommentKahuna can help you find blogs relative to your niche, or you could just go through this list of DoFollow blogs which should suit the purpose just fine.

Comment A Lot On Blogs With Top Commentators Plugin

The Top Commentators plugin for Wordpress lets a blogger link back to the most active commentators on their blog with a DoFollow link. If you can manage to find blogs with this plugin and decent PageRank, you can definitely get some good links out of this technique. Blogoninja has a good list, and so does ThouShallBlog — even though some are the same. A quick Google search may reveal more.

Market A Wordpress Theme

Post a contest on DigitalPoint for someone to design you a Wordpress theme. You can usually get one made for under $100 if you do it right. Add some links and market it on all the major free Wordpress Theme Sites. Once users have downloaded and installed your theme you’ve got a continual flow of good back-links.

Write Articles

I hear this a lot and it’s actually something that I don’t personally do just because I don’t like writing for hours. If it’s something you could do, it’s a great way to get back-links and I know a lot of people who are successful with it. A quick search shows lots of places you can market your keyword-rich articles.

Analyze Your Colleagues

This is sometimes the best way to learn new tricks and techniques to propel your business to the next step. Step back and take a look at what your competition and colleagues are doing to get links. Type a domain into Yahoo or Google and see who is linking back to them or what sites are linking back to uncover some dirt on the techniques your competition and colleagues are using to be better than you.

This will get your creative juices going, now you must think outside of the box to help yourself getting inbound-links. Put some elbow grease and creative thinking in and you may be surprised at what comes out.

Getting Unique Content Easily

September 14th, 2008 by Scot, under Adsense, Making Money. 12 Comments

You can produce content a couple of different ways. You can hire freelance writers from different forums like DigitalPoint. You can use the technique I outlined before with language generators. Another way to get unique content on a regular schedule (auto-pilot) is to scrape content.

Scraping content can, in some cases, be considered copyright infringement. If you decide to scrape content or RSS feeds, please do this at your own risk. There are several ways to scrape content but by far the easiest for Wordpress is by using a plugin.

WP-O-Matic is an RSS agregator wordpress plugin that allows you to essentially automatically pull updates from pre-defined RSS feeds on a regular basis. Scraping content could not possibly be any easier.

WP-O-Matic is free, can be setup with a cron job, and is easy to install. Once installed locate a few RSS feeds relating to your niche, add them to WP-O-Matic and fetch the feeds to get it started. Let a cron job fetch your feeds once every 2-3 hours or once a day.

Google Hates Duplicate Content

If you just use WP-O-Matic your site will be penalized by Google and you will not rank for anything, which defeats the purpose. You must do something with the content that has been aggregated before putting it in to posts. In comes WP Uniquifier.

Petre kindly introduced me to his plugin for Wordpress that creates any content you have scraped, or otherwise… well… unique. The plugin is not free but it comes at a very reasonable rate and is absolutely worth the small $14.99 investment.

This Worpdress plugin is revolutionary in that it does not require you to do any work adding synonyms for words or anything else, simply install the plugin to Wordpress and go. Uniquefier adds special characters to the html of your posts so that search engines see your site unique but the content remains the same to the human eye.

Optimizing Your Blog For Search

September 14th, 2008 by Scot, under Adsense, Making Money. 3 Comments

Wordpress is a good platform to start your website, but there are several enhancements you can make to improve the way you rank in search engines. Wordpress has an easy plugin system to add even more functionality to your installation as well as a few built-in features that you simply need to activate.

Must-Have SEO Wordpress Plugins

Google Sitemaps
This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.
Technorati Tags
This plugin allows you to manually tag each post for some extra traffic from Technorati.
Platinum SEO Plugin
This will handle most of the SEO-related modifications you’ll need to do to your blog automatically. Everything from optimizing page titles to generating meta tags automatically from your post content. If you’re new to SEO just know this is what you need if you’re using Wordpress– it’s awesome.

Modifying Your Adsense Blog

Theme Up
You can find and install hundreds of themes on the web to change the look of your blog free of charge. Find something bare and simple like I have at Recipe Samurai. When I install a theme like to do a few modifications to keep it simple and to the point. The fact is that the more distractions from your content you have, the fewer conversions you’re going to make. You want to keep your visitors very targeted and guide them exactly where you want them.

Strip The Junk
Once your theme is installed, strip anything that isn’t necessary. I use my Wordpress categories for the actual navigation and organize content through those categories. If you’re just starting out with Wordpress you’ll need some experience with CSS/HTML at least to do some of this so consult someone if you aren’t able to do this. It’s necessary. Strip everything that isn’t content or navigation. Check out Recipe Samurai to see what I’m talking about.

Stop Comments And Spam The Easy Way
Remove comments from your posts by simply editing the theme and removing the comment variable. You can also turn comments off in the Wordpress control panel but it will throw out a message saying “Comments are currently disabled“, and I don’t even like that. You won’t be needing comments on the kind of blog that’s focused on earning you Adsense dollars.

Enable Permalinks
Permalinks will help search engines understand what your content is about. Turn them on. There are several options to organizing your permalink structure but I like to keep it simple with just my category tags in the permalink. The date, etc. isn’t really necessary.

Getting Started With Your Site

September 14th, 2008 by Scot, under Adsense, Making Money. 1 Comment

So now that you have a good idea what keywords are getting decent traffic and aren’t too competitive, it’s time to create your Adsense website.

Pick a Domain

Register a domain name that matches the content you plan to publish. My favorite domain registrar is GoDaddy. Don’t forget to check RetailMeNot before registering your domain for coupon codes you can use to register your name. I am going to start by publishing recipes so I’ve chosen RecipeSamurai.com.

Get It Hosted

Once you have your domain you need somewhere to host your content. My recommendations are MediaTemple, Dreamhost, and HostGator for starting out. They all offer one-click installation of Wordpress, and you’ll see how this can be a time-saver shortly. MediaTemple offers $5/year domain registrations with new accounts.

Get Statistical

You’ll want to track where your visitors are coming from, who is talking about your website, and how much traffic you’re getting. Set up an account with Clicky and Google Analytics. I prefer to use both because Clicky allows for real-time stats tracking and Google gives you redundancy with your tracking. CrazyEgg allows you to see a heatmap of where your visitors are moving their mouse which is helpful with ad placement.

Install Wordpress

If your host allows for one-click installations (CPanel Fantastico or other) it will be much easier on you to get multiple sites setup without having to upload, configure, etc. Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform on the web and offers the most expandability. It’s also very easy to install.

At this point you should have everything you need to get started.

Niche Traffic VS Competition

September 3rd, 2008 by Scot, under Adsense, Making Money. 4 Comments

Once you have successfully decided on a niche as outlined in Choosing a Niche for Adsense, you now need to do some keyword research. Keyword research is essentially deciding which keywords are going to be competitive enough to get traffic, but not so competitive that you can not rank for your terms easily.

Google has recently implemented a feature in its Keyword Research Tool that will allow you to see a rough estimate of average monthly traffic over 12 months, as well as average search traffic in Google for the previous month. Before this you would have to go across several sites to do your keyword, so this will make the job a lot easier.

Your Niche Keyword Research

Load up the Keyword Research Tool, key in a few of your niches that you have already picked and lets do some comparing. Typing in a broad term such as “Cooking” will reveal several sub-niches and micro-niches which can also aid in your niche brainstorming process that we outlined previously. Once you have done this a few times you will probably use this tool to do your niche brainstorming before picking a niche.

So, I’ve found that “Cooking Breakfast” has little competition and also 100+ searches per day. I’ll take this information directly to Google.com and perform a search for “cooking breakfast”. It’s important to include the quotations to get an exact match rather than a broad match which we will get in to later. An exact match will only take sites that are attempting to rank for that exact term in to consideration in the search results.

Examine the Competition

I will be using Google.com to get a better idea of competition and really what it’s going to take to get a term ranked. This is where some experience comes in handy, but even if you’re a first-timer there is no science to this so you should be able to get it.

The first thing I’m going to analyze is the amount of pages or competition Google is displaying for this keyword or phrase. For “Cooking Breakfast” I see 149,000 results.

While this can be accomplished, I usually go for terms that are under 50k to be sure I can dominate the first page fairly easily with a minimal amount of work. If I had a few months to work on this and it was something I was truly passionate about, 149,000 isn’t too much competition to kill. But, for only 100 searches per day it may not be worth your trouble for this particular phrase.

The next thing to look at is your competition directly.

The first line is the competition’s TITLE tag. If you don’t see an exact phrase match in this it means they may not really be trying to rank for this term and probably don’t have much work put in to it.
You also look at the meta information pulled from the site by Google. If you don’t see an exact match again, it shows they aren’t optimizing for that exact copy.
The last but not final thing to take in to consideration is the actual URL the content is sitting on. If it does not include the copy you’re researching, it shows another weakness that you can exploit.

Tip: Use SearchStatus plugin for Firefox for further research (Google PageRank, Inbound Links) to get a better idea of the work you will need to do to rank above competition.

Now, go do it!
Take some time today to go through Google Keyword Research and find 10-20 sub-niches that have around 50k results in Google and weak competition. We’ll be taking these keywords and putting them all together in the next lesson.

Choosing A Niche For Adsense

September 2nd, 2008 by Scot, under Adsense, Making Money. 12 Comments

So, now that you’ve decided to take this journey with me your first step is to choose a niche that you will be developing. There are a few different types of niches and several ways to choose a niche in each type.

Choosing a Hot Niche

A hot niche is what I like to call a niche that has stories in the news or is hot on the press. These niches are easy to rank for if you get them early enough and already have a network of sites in place to promote them (which we will get in to a bit later) but for the long-term they won’t do you a whole lot of good. If your desire is to continue making sites that become popular quickly and die just as quickly day-in and day-out, this is the type of niche for you to get in to.

You can start your hot niche search with of course the main-stream news sites. For instance, CNN has a list of hot topics that updates daily. There are also several other areas depending on the type of niche you want to get in to, to find new ideas. Here are a few sites to check out:

AOL Hot Searches
EBay Hot Categories Dynamic Report
EBay Pulse
EBay Seller Central - What’s Hot
Yahoo! Buzz
43 Things - Today’s Most Popular Goals
Google Trends
Trending and Tracking The Blogosphere - SEO Book

Once you have a few topics, subscribe to updates with keyword in Google News so you can constantly ping updates in that niche. Hot niches constantly need immediate updating to stay on top of SERPS.

Choosing an Expandable Niche

An Expandable Niche is one that has lots of room for expansion and micro-niches inside of itself. These are my favorite type of areas to hit because I would personally rather build my sites up over a long period of time and have them rank for years rather than hit hot topics every single day to see corporate sites knock me out of Search Engine Rankings within a weeks time. These kind of sites are more of a property than Hot Niche sites that only last shortly.

To get an idea of what you are going to create your site about, get out a tablet and a pen and start brainstorming a few subjects to begin with. Think of several general topics and write them down to begin your expansion. For my first site I am going to be using Cooking.

Cooking is a good choice because there are so many different areas inside of cooking that can be exploited. And this is the same for any other niche. I suggest you consider a niche you’re interested in and use the same techniques. So for the subject cooking this would roughly be my thought process on expanding the niche:

Each of these sub-niches can be distilled down to several other sub-niches. Each of those sub-niches can be distilled to smaller, micro-niches. So for instance, Food is a sub-niche of Cooking. Recipes is a sub-niche of Food, and Restaurant Recipes is a sub-niche of Recipes. Arby’s Restaurant Recipes is a sub-niche of Restaurant Recipes and Arby’s Horsey Sauce Recipes is a mico-niche of Arby’s Restaurant Recipes.

Once you have a pretty good idea of the direction you want to go, enter your notes in to Notepad or I personally like to create an org-chart so I can see visual direction of where I’m going. You can find a few places to create an Adsense mindmap here. I will save you some time and recommend MindMeister.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to send me an e-mail with the contact form or just drop a comment and I’ll be happy to reply. Once you have your niche nailed down I’m going to be showing you how to find what is getting traffic and what is not getting traffic inside of that niche, and how that will better help you determine what direction to take it.

Most things you will read will recommend you do traffic research first, but I believe you can get traffic and rank inside of any niche with sub-niches and micro-niches and it’s more important to choose a topic you’re passionate about before even looking at traffic stats. Don’t forget to subscribe to updates if you haven’t already!

$100 A Day With Adsense

September 1st, 2008 by Scot, under Adsense, Making Money. 1 Comment

I used to make some pretty decent money with Google Adsense. Once you make $1 per day you’ll know exactly how to make $10 a day. Once you make $10 per day, you can make $100 a day, etc. The nice thing about this is that it’s completely expandable and niches will never stop becoming other niches and micro-niches. Your business model always has room for growth. I want to get back in to Adsense, and am willing to help you along the way as well.

The next few posts will be an easy step-by-step guide to help those of you who haven’t used Adsense or are using Adsense but need a few ideas to bump you over the edge. In the process I’m going to start a few domains as case-studies and want to share my process and knowledge along the way to help motivate me (and you!).

If you haven’t already got an Adsense account, please register now and follow along. You’ll need a few dollars to spend along the way for a domain, hosting, etc. but it won’t be terrible. Of course I also have a full-time job so this training won’t take but an hour a day, if that.

I’m going to start with keyword research, go on to a domain, and then into getting your site ranked in Google, Yahoo, and MSN for keywords to make you moola. Not all of the techniques I’m going to share have been seen before so even if you are ranking in competitive niches, you may want to watch and see if you can pick up a tip here and there.

And of course, please welcome yourself to throw in tips and knowledge along the way. This series is going to last for around a week– so if you’re not interested in making $100 with Adsense please accept my apologies ahead of time!

Revvenue