Hey everyone, I’m here to try and wrap up my “how you can make money online” series of post with Part 3, which will focus on working on your blog’s content and SEO so that you increase rank in search engines and therefore get traffic which would in turn make you money.
In case you seem a little lost in what I’m referring to, please read “How You Can Make Money Online – Part 1” and “How You Can Make Money Online – Part 2” respectively. It deals with how you can get started making a decent monthly income online using a blog or site.
Ok, so like I always say, this method of making money online; blogging, isn’t an overnight deal. It takes at least 6 months to a year before you would see any kind of income from your blog, and that depends on if you’re doing things “right” as well. And even after that point, you would need to continue working on that blog or site in order to increase and/or maintain the income you are getting from it. In fact, this blog Make Money Online Free is two years old, and even though it currently makes me a decent passive income every month without me having to do a ton of work, I still have to do SOME work in order to maintain that income. If I completely stopped doing anything at all on this blog, which includes posting, creating backlinks, etc, I am sure within time, my rankings on Google, etc would drop, and in turn so would my income!
So let’s discuss part by part, what working on your blog’s content and SEO so that you increase rank in search engines and therefore get traffic which would in turn make you money really means.
1. Working on your blog’s content.
Part 2 of this series stopped at creating your first post on your blog. Well a blog is called a blog for a reason, and if you think that it’s a one post thing, you’re very wrong. You have to keep posting on your blog or else it would die. Not just random BS either. You have to keep posting relevant useful information. This information must stick to your topic or niche, and also be “keyword rich”. What this means is, try using your main keyword phrase at least once in every post. Using it in your post titles help as well. However, you don’t want this to sound unnatural. While you’re writing keyword content for automated things such as Google and SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions), you must remember that your real readers are actual human beings, and you must write in a language that they would understand and not get bored of. Do not sound repetitive. Try using various forms of your keyword phrase. In fact, there’s even something called keyword to content ratio or keyword density which is the number of times your keywords appear compared to the total number of words in your blog. Everyone has a different opinion on what a “perfect keyword density” is. If you read around online, you would find a lot more information about this from the experts. I, personally, prefer not to drive myself crazy about it. I have been doing okay so far by just creating my content around my topic, trying to include my keywords whenever it seems fit. If you the same, I think you’d be okay.
So how often should you update your content?
This is one of the main questions I’ve seen around the web. Again, the experts might have a different opinion to mine, but I believe at least once a week is fine. I’ve read online that when you first create your blog, you should update it every single day. Again, I never followed any of these rules religiously. I only posted whenever I believed I had new content to post, but tried to keep it at least once a week. The more the better. You don’t want to post too often so that your readers have a lot to catch up on, so much that they end up missing valuable information here and there… and you don’t want to post too sparsely, so much that they forget you even exist. You want to have a consistent posting pattern.
So that’s about it for content I believe. The main idea is posting on a regular basis to keep your blog alive, and making sure you stick to your niche and use keywords.
2. Working on SEO so that you increase rank in search engines and therefore get traffic which would in turn make you money.
I think this is the part most people have trouble with. Many bloggers are awesome writers. They have no problems with creating keyword rich content and updating their site on a regular basis, yet they never seem to see any increase in traffic to their blog, and so they don’t seem to be making any money either.
For those that are complete beginners, traffic is the amount of visitors your blog gets. Like I always say, creating a blog is easy. Getting people to find it is the hard part. So well, how do you find something that you’re looking for online? I’m betting your first action is to type in Google.com and search for it! Well, that’s what 99% of other people do as well. That’s why it’s so important to rank on Google. I am in no way excluding other search engines such as Yahoo.com, Ask.com, Bing.com, etc. But it’s just that Google owns a larger percent of the market share when it comes to search engines and that’s why most people tend to focus on it.
So how do you get your blog to appear up there in the Google results?
Well that’s what SEO is about.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or SEM (Search Engine Marketing), is a big term that basically means doing certain things to get your blog ranked highly on search engines for your particular keyword phrase. The ultimate goal is trying to get to #1 spot on first page for that keyword phrase.
What exactly do you do to try to accomplish this goal?
SEO is a combination of a few things. There is on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO is basically making sure your blog is search engine friendly, while off-page SEO is what you do behind the scenes such as building backlinks. Again, all these things might sound like Greek to a beginner. I know, because I felt the same exact way. But deciding that you want to make money online with a blog, you have to prepare yourself to learn new things by reading and researching, and that’s exactly what I did. For me to explain every single thing about on-page and off-page SEO to you in this post, or to give you a step by step guide of what and what not to do, would be impossible. But I’ve found a great link that has a checklist about positive and negative on and off page SEO. Google Ranking Factors – SEO Checklist is definitely worth checking out and bookmarking. It’s a great checklist to go through and apply to your blog. If there’s anything you can’t seem to understand from it, feel free to ask me in the comment section and I’ll try my best to understand. OR, an even better option… Google it! Like I always say, Google is your best friend when it comes to learning how to make money online with a blog.
Going through that checklist, you’ll see on-page SEO has a lot to do with placement of keywords, and other things like meta tags, etc. Again, DON’T drive yourself crazy about each and every single one of those things. Your blog doesn’t have to be perfect in the first week it’s up. Day by day, you’ll learn new things and learn how to apply it to your blog. Everything takes time. In fact, I still don’t know what a few of those things mean and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’m still learning everyday.
Off-page SEO, I’ll focus a bit more on, because it has to do mainly with backlinks, which I believe is probably the most important factor in ranking highly on search engines.
A backlink is basically a “link back” to your site from elsewhere. So it’s basically a popularity contest when it comes to the way Google assesses which site they should rank as #1 for what keyword. They look at a variety of things, but backlinks play a major role. Unfortunately, with backlinks, it’s a bit more complicated than just a numbers game. It’s not about quantity, but more so about quality. Each backlink is not equal in value, and one backlink from one site can be worth much more than 10 backlinks from other sites. So how do you tell where are the best places to build backlinks?
The best kind of backlinks are “do follow anchor text backlinks from a high PR site in the same or relevant niche”.
For example, let’s stick to the blog about “easy dinner recipes made from scratch in 30 minutes or less”.
There are two types of backlinks, do-follow and no-follow. No-follow means that there’s a bit of coding in the link/site that tells Google NOT to follow that particular link, while do-follow is the opposite, and allows Google to index or value that link. Now, while do-follow backlinks are definitely better than no-follow, I still believe that Google places some value on no-follow links, so don’t go around only searching for do-follow sites to comment on or leave backlinks. I believe a no-follow link is better than no link at all.
Since “easy dinner recipes made from scratch in 30 minutes or less” is your main keyword phrase, you want that to be the name of your backlink, which is what the term “anchor text” means. This tells Google that your blog is associated with that term. Hence by continuously building backlinks with this anchor text, eventually, when that phrase is typed into Google by someone, Google would pull up your blog in their results.
PR means page rank, and it’s sort of Google’s grading system on websites. It goes from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Eg. This blog is a PR 2. It’s pretty much impossible to get your blog/site ranked as 10. PR on the other hand, doesn’t have much to do with traffic. I’ve seen some lower PR blogs/sites beat higher PR ones in search rankings. Anyway, getting a backlink for a high PR site shares the authority with your site/blog. It’s kinda like being recognized for being associated with a blog/site of authority in Google’s eyes.
Off course, last but not least, you want your backlinks, or at least 99% of them to come from relevant niches. You don’t want to go around building backlinks on “car blogs” if your blog is about cooking. You would want your backlinks to come from other cooking blogs/sites.
So now that you understand what a backlink is and what are the best type of backlinks, let’s focus on where to build backlinks, which is probably another one of the most common questions I’ve seen.
Where to build backlinks for your blog or site?
Well there are really several places to do this. Here are just a few of the common ways to get backlinks:
– Article Marketing.
– Blog Commenting.
– Directories.
– Social Bookmarking.
– Signatures on Forums.
– Networking with others.
– Buy them.
These are just a few ways I can think of while writing this post, there might be a couple of others. I’m going to elaborate a bit more on each of these ways an hopefully give a few examples as well. Again, it would be 100% impossible for me to tell you every single place I have gotten a backlink since I do not keep track of it. I just go along and try to build a few each day. Just think, if you set a limit for yourself, like maybe 10 backlinks a day, by the end of the month, you would have 300 backlinks. By the end of the year, you’d have 2400… and so on.
● Article Marketing.
Article Marketing refers to writing separate articles, aside from your blog posts, and submitting them to article directories. There are several article directories online that are free to submit to. These directories either allow you to link within an article, or there is a resource box at the end where you can leave a backlink to your main blog. These articles you write should also be keyword rich and relevant to your niche. Ensure that the backlink pointing back to your site has appropriate keyword anchor text.
Ezine.com, GoArticles.com, Squidoo.com, ArticleBase.com, and ArticleSnatch.com are just a few article directories I know of. Again, a quick Google search would give you MUCH more. If you are too lazy to Google, then you are too lazy to make money online and you will never be successful.
● Blog Commenting.
Another great way to get backlinks to your blog and also make yourself known around the Internet is by reading the blogs of others and leaving comments. Most comment fields have a place to include a link back to your site. Be sure to look at the other comments and see if the author of the site allows keywords to be used in the name field. If they do, great, if not however, maybe try using your real name and then a hyphen or @ sign, and then the keywords to your site. That’s the second best option. The last best option for a link is just your name. It might not be any keyword that you’re trying to rank for, but a link is better than no link. Off course, most owners moderate comments, so in order to have the best chance at approval, ensure that your comment is relevant to the post and adds some value, asks a questions, etc. Comments such as “nice blog, check out mine”, etc … just won’t work. A good way to find blogs within your niche is again, by Googling your keyword phrase and going through the results. You can also try CommentLuv Search, which is a search engine for blogs that have a do-follow plug in installed. Blogs with this plug in not only give you a regular backlink, but you also get a link back to your last post. It’s like killing two birds with one stone. But again, I cannot stress how important relevance and substance in your comments are.
● Directories.
Unlike article directories, there are blog/site directories, which allow you to submit your blog or site without writing an entire article. There are tons of these around the internet, one of the major ones being Technorati. BlogCatalog.com, Blogarama.com, Bloggapedia.com, TopRankBlog.com, BlogHints.com, Blogged.com, etc are just a few of the ones I know. I was able to find those within less than a minute of searching on Google for the term “blog directories”. Do the search as well, there are quite a few others. The key with these is to make sure you use anchor text keywords as your blog title, give an appropriate keyword rich description to those that allow, use keyword tags, and be sure you place your blog in the right category.
● Social Bookmarking.
These are somewhat like directories, in that they allow you to submit your main link, or a post from your blog without needing to create an entire article. Again, the main thing to remember with these is to make sure you use anchor text keywords as your blog title, give an appropriate keyword rich description and use keyword tags. A few examples of social bookmarking sites are Digg.com, Yahoo! Buzz, reddit, StumbleUpon, and delicious. There are literally hundreds of others! Google “social bookmarking” and you’ll find many lists, etc.
● Signatures on Forums.
Forums are a great way of making yourself known in your niche and gaining some traffic to your blog. Most forums allow its members to have a “signature” which is a little section that shows up at the bottom of each post you make on the forum. Be sure to read the rules of every specific forum, because each one is different in what they allow. As long as you abide by the rules, and make valid posts, eventually, you will build your reputation on that forum and people will be curious in seeing more about you and click your signature link to check out your blog/site. Joining forums that are relevant to your niche is best. If you’re blog/site is about cooking and you join a mechanic forum, there might not be many that are interested in what you’re trying to promote in your signature. Also remember not to spam. Just like blog commenting, you need to naturally engage in the conversation on the forum. Do not come across as though you’re simply there to bring attention to your signature because the forum members will be quick to point and kick you out! No one likes a spammer. Again, for the signature, be sure you use anchor text keywords as your link. Every post you make will also be a backlink towards your blog.
● Networking with others.
If your blog is constantly updated with valuable information, people will automatically WANT to link to you. You will begin to receive offers about “link exchanges”. A link exchange is exactly what it sounds like. You put my link on your blog and I’ll put your link on mine. However, the best kind of link exchanges aren’t two-way link exchanges, but three-way (or more) link exchanges. What this means is that instead of each site linking back to the other, each site only links to one other site, but that particular site does not link back to it. I know, confusing. Here’s a better example.
Site A links to Site B.
Site B links to Site C.
Site C links back to site A.
From this example, you’ll see that no two sites are linking to each other. Instead, everyone gets a one way backlink which is of more value in Google’s eyes.
So when you’re doing link exchanges, it’s important to keep this in mind, and maybe try and find a third partner or maybe if one person owns 2 sites, it can work that way as well. But remember, you want the link exchange to be valuable to everyone involved. If you’re a PR 4 site and you’re link is being placed on a PR 0, then that’s not very helpful to you. You want the site/blog to be of equal or higher PR than your site/blog.
● Buy them.
Last but not least, because of the high demand for good backlinks, there are many places online that offer the service of building backlinks for a price. I personally DO NOT recommend this. I think it is way too easy to do it on your own for free. It definitely takes a lot of work and paying might seem like a good “lazy man” way out of doing the work, but remember there are also a lot of scam services that would take your money and not build any backlinks for your blog or site. Or, the ones that they do build, would not be worth the price you’re paying. So be sure to research this method careful, if this is what you’re opting to do.
So as you can see, this post is already EXTREMELY lengthy. I tried my best to sum it all up as much as I can. This is the basic way of going about making money online with a blog or website. After doing these things mentioned, for a long period of time, you SHOULD start getting hits to your blog for your keywords, and if you monetize your blog with Google Adsense (or other programs like it), and Affiliate Marketing campaigns, then you would definitely see some income from your blog.
After writing this long post, I’m starving. So I’m going to have some dinner, and get ready for bed in a bit. Another long week coming up. I hope everyone makes it a productive one. I have a ton of payment proofs to do which I have been putting off because of this series, so my next few posts within the next week or so will be those.
Thanks again for all the support everyone has given me on my blog. I continue to get emails on a daily basis congratulating me and I never get tired of them. Thanks again!
My real name is Reanna but around the web, especially in the MMO (make money online) world, I'm referred to as TriNi. On this blog, I aim to teach people that it CAN be done; that there are legit and 100% free ways to make money online.
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