If you are a beginner looking to make money online then pay attention or you will waste a lot of time and money getting nowhere. Beware of whose advice you take. If you are a regular reader then you may want to skip this - nothing new just a post full of keywords... oh and a little bit of a rant.
Do you know Why there are so many "Make Money Online" Blogs?
Because it is a niche that is easy to get social traffic.
Do you know why there are so many "Blogs about Blogging?"
Because it is a niche that is easy to get social traffic.
Do you know why there are so few blogs about "oil filters?".
Because it is a niche that is hard to get social traffic.
So why do people want social traffic? Because this is a good way to get backlinks. Sure they also want to become "known" and they are under the impression that you need to get a lot of RSS subscribers and eventually this will lead to making money. Underneath all of this though is the barely conscious understanding that you need Backlinks to make all of your dreams come true. This part is true. You do need backlinks.
The problem is that social traffic doesn't provide the right type of backlinks. What generally happens is this; a blogger decides he is going to make money online with a blog telling other people how to make money online. I'm sure you are all familiar with this thinking.
Here is the general plan that I like to call...
How not to Make Money Online
Get a URL with your name in the URL so that you can "Brand" yourself. Let's call it garryconn.com
Read all the other MMO blogs and write lots of posts giving out tips you read elsewhere. Check out Vic's Podcast "Fakers, Scammers and Garry Conn"
Get your name out there. Kiss the A list ass and be sure to add links to all the usual suspects who have social blogs that claim to show you how to make money online but don't. You know all the A listers who don't rank in the serp's.
Start a newsletter to increase your RSS numbers. (Aweber email lists are included in the Feedburner count - not just subscribers)
Develop a loyal following of a couple thousand readers.
Write a post telling people they will never make money online learning from a 13 year old which is so ironic - the 13 year old actually gets search engine traffic because he dominates the keyword "make money online". The 13 year old makes money online from a MMO blog - maybe Garry could learn something...
Flog all sorts of affiliate products to your readers whether you have used the product or not. Admit that you don't use a product that everybody who does make money online uses.
Write a post complaining about not making any money with your "make money online" blog even though you have been giving everyone the impression that you make money online.
Give your readers shit for not buying stuff with your affiliate link.
Complain about how all the time spent giving "free" advice on how to make money online keeps you from spending time on your other sites that really "do" make you money online. How exactly are all the tips dispensed on his MMO blog that don't make him money because they are tips about getting social traffic going to help anyone make money. If they don't work on social blogs how are they going to work on niche sites like Garry's Airplanes or Eyeglasses blogs?
Finally give up and tell everyone that you can't make money with a "make money online" blog.
Start posting 10 non-relevant posts a day because now you are going to make money with Adsense. (Good luck with that)
After all you "do" know how to make money online.
I don't have anything against Garry Conn except that he can't make money online with a blog about making money online. How much time have others wasted by following his advice? Why should anyone read him then. Wouldn't it make sense to learn how to make money online from someone who actually does make money online from a MMO blog?. If they can make money with a MMO blog then they can make money in any niche. Just a thought...
I don't know him. At one time I thought he knew a few things but it turns out he's just another blogger who bought into the whole social scene portrayed by the A list. A victim no worse than Caroline Middlebrook. Both bloggers have talent - they quickly learned all the tricks of the social game and made a name for themselves albeit limited. Both learned the hard way that they can't make money with a make money online blog - at least not with social traffic. Both have MMO blogs telling more hapless victims how to make money online even though they don't make money using the methods they talk about.
In case you think I'm being hard on Garry Conn - I'm not. I'm just helping him out as he has asked his readers to unsubscribe from his blog. I'm just providing the reasons why people should follow his wishes. In truth you could replace his blog in this post with most of the 45n5 top 100 blogs that don't make money online either.
So can you make money with a "make money online" blog?
Yup.
I do everyday.
Do you know what separates people who do make money online from those that don't?
A Plan
Here is my plan.
Dominate the search engines.
End of plan.
How to implement plan.
Pick a niche.
Let's say "Make Money Online"
Why?
1) Because it's a great niche for a flagship blog.
2) It has thousands of relevant keywords.
3) It can produce thousands of people who will spend money and click ads. Oh yes it does!
4) Almost none of the other 10 million make money online blogs get any of this traffic leaving it all to me and a small handful of others who "do" know how to make money online.
The screenshot below is for the past 20 minutes or so. It shows the traffic this blog has received from the search engines while I have been writing this post. It also tells me what "Keywords" were used in the search queries. I want to point out that Saturday morning is the slowest day and time of the week for this blog in terms of traffic.
Click image to enlarge.
The vast majority of my visitors will find my blog by visiting Google or Yahoo and typing in the following term;
"How to Make Money"
Just about as many people will use this term;
"How to Make Money Online"
In case you are wondering how many people do this on an average day the screenshot below gives you a rough idea - the stats are not for a full day though - this was taken mid-afternoon.
A note to Garry Conn who determined that there was no traffic in the MMO niche using the SEO Book keyword tool (wtf??) Keyword tools are horribly inaccurate and the one you used is worse than most - remember Keyword Elite that you don't use? KE is bad too but still the best of a crappy tool. (The best way to find out how many searches a keyword has is to rank on top of the serp's for it. lol)
See screenshot at the bottom of this post for an idea of what kind of traffic really exists in the MMO niche.
As you can see the term (in my results above) "Make Money Online" ranks a distant third as far as traffic goes. There are two reasons for this; I don't rank as well for the term and there are not as many real searches for the term as people think. It is a crappy term - let me explain.
Who would type "Make Money Online" in a search query?
Bloggers checking to see where they rank. The search numbers for that term are so inflated simply because it gets searched continuously by bloggers checking the rankings. Not by people wanting to know how to make money online - or very few and they click on my link in the serp's because my blog is "for Beginners."
Think about this. The people who are truly new to making money online don't type "make money online" in the query. They type "how to make money" or "how to make money online"
Something else you should know. A beginner is different from a noob. Noobs have already bought ebooks and have been scammed a number of times. Noobs know about social traffic. Noobs "Are" social traffic. Noobs type in "Make Money Online". Noobs are not the target market. They won't buy from you or click ads. They are tired of being ripped off and are on a mission to read everything they can for free in order to finally make some money online.
Beginners are much different. They have never heard of "Noobs". They haven't heard of anything at all except that "apparently" people can make money online.
So they sit down at the computer, open their favorite search engine that they use to find cheap airline tickets with and not much else and they say to themselves...
I wonder how I can make money online?
Then they type in the term.
And then they find me and a handful of others.
They don't find Problogger or Shoemoney. They don't find Caroline Middlebrook, Garry Conn or John Cow. They don't find 99% of the blogs that 45n5 claims are the "Top" blogs in the make money online niche. Beginners are noobs in training - they have yet to buy all the crappy ebooks. They will though. Someone wanting to make money selling ebooks and get rich programs should be targeting these people - just imagine if I was to start flogging crap in my posts. I get a lot of virgins to this site and they do buy the stuff in the sidebar - the stuff I have told my readers to ignore. It's there because beginners don't want to read about "how to make money online" - they just want to spend money on something that will make them rich fast. No skin off my nose - they could have read my blog instead.
I do use Adsense though and the beginners love clicking those ads.
You may think this is a MMO blog.
It really isn't.
It's a "How to Make Money Online for Beginners" blog.
And while everyone in the MMO niche has been building up their Pagerank and Alexa stats and RSS subscribers and getting themselves listed on the Top Make Money Online list of bloggers I have been...
Dominating the search engines.
You were all beginners at one time. What were you looking for when you first thought about making money online. Be honest.
You wanted to make money fast and without much work. You wanted to get rich quick.
Ok. Maybe not you but most do.
Beginners are the only people who buy crappy ebooks promising instant wealth. Noobs don't.
Beginners are the only people who cick on ads promising instant wealth. Noobs don't.
So if you are going to make money online with a make money online blog maybe you should target beginners and not noobs. Maybe you should target the terms that only beginners would use when searching for information.
This is called a plan. It is something you should have before you start a make money online blog claiming to know how to make money online.
And if you are reading a blogger who claims to make money blogging and they don't rank in the top of the serp's for their own keywords then you might ask yourself if they are really making money elsewhere as they claim. (Flagship blogs excepted) If they only know about social traffic then how are they making money with their "oil filter" blog. If they know about search engine traffic (it's the only way to make money with Oil Filters folks) then why aren't they after search engine traffic with their MMO blog? Moreover the few who do rank for keywords only rank for a couple and they are the wrong keywords. Problogger ranks really well for "make money blogging" but that's about it and it doesn't attract beginners - just noobs.
It doesn't matter what niche you pick - if you want to make money in that niche then check out the top ranked sites in that niche and do what they do. If the site ranks on top of the serp's in "A Competitive" niche then you have found someone who knows how to make money online because they know how to get backlinks. The type of backlink that gets you top serp ranking for your keywords. Not the type of backlink that gets you top ranking for your name.
Try and get backlinks for "Oil Filters" - it ain't easy and you won't be getting them from all your "social" oil filter friends.
Knowing how to get backlinks for Oil Filters is what separates the people who make money online from those who just claim to. If you can get those links you can rank for anything you want. This is how you get continuous traffic. This is how you get traffic that converts into money.
This is what SEO is all about and the reason I write 4 posts a month and make more money in a day with this blog than Garry Conn makes in a month with 80 posts. 80 posts - wow - hard to believe he has time to work on those "other" sites that "do" make money. I barely have time for 4 posts. Of course you don't need a lot of posts to make money. You need a lot of posts to keep social traffic coming to your site though...
The list below contains the keywords used to find this blog on Yahoo for last night. As I've said - this is what SEO is all about. Traffic.
Click image to enlarge
(sorry the list is huge and hard to read)
It is ironic that the bulk of the people who found my blog using the terms just listed will not be reading this sentence. Most will just click away. About 12% of them will click an ad up top. They will eventually find a blog like Garry Conn's and waste 6 months creating a social MMO blog before giving up. A shame really - they were so close...
Cheers,
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