How to Make Money

Sorry for the bland Post Title my friends but I won't be giving away my topics in the titles anymore and if you want to know why then read on.

For the past month I have been fiddling with this blog in order to come to a few basic conclusions. The goal of this blog is to make money with Adsense and not just a little money but rather I want it optimized to bring in the most earnings possible. I have written extensively on this topic before and I am currently trying to fashion a short "everything you need to know about Adsense" book for others to duplicate my success so I won't get into much here. Oh for those interested, you can see my Adsense earnings for the past year here Make Money with Adsense

What I will tell you is that your post title is the hinge that your adsense income swings on. Yes there is more to it than that but in brief let me fill you in on what I have been doing.

My last post was entitled "Does Trackback Spamming Make Money Online" and no sooner did I post the article than my earnings per click dropped in half - about 30 cents per click. The post prior to it was entitled Make Money Online in Canada. While that post sat on the front page I earned 60 cents per click.

So why the sudden drop in earnings?

I'm going to keep this short and simple.

Below is a list of keywords visitors have used over the past hour and half (approx) to find my site.

Click Image to enlarge.



It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what keyword brings in the most search traffic. "How to Make Money" is by far my best traffic gatherer.

Now let me explain this so that there is no confusion.

Your post title sets the tone of your post in regards to how the Adsense Bot reads your page. Yes it looks at other factors but the single biggest factor is the Post Title.

When it read the last post it determined that my main focus was on "Trackback Spamming" and when it failed to find relevant ads for that term it then produced ads for "make money online". However it did not provide me with the prime ads for make money online because the post was really about trackback spamming. My traffic came looking for "how to make money" and clicked on the ads but G paid me half of normal because the traffic really wasn't targeted for the post title.

Today the Adsense bot will give me prime ads for "How to Make Money" and the majority of my traffic will come here looking for exactly that - and I will get the best earnings per click.

I will be discussing a number of my findings over the past month in a series of short posts (yes faithful readers - just 1 cup posts) starting soon.

I will leave this post for you to think about - if you are using adsense and not making more than a few cents a click then you now know the biggest reason for your dismal earnings.

You need targeted traffic and targeted posts.

Cheers,

Griz

Update Nov 12

I thought it might be useful to show what happened as far as my Adsense Earnings reacted to the change in post titles. I posted the "Trackback Post" late on November 6 and while the day finished with decent earnings you can see below how quickly the revenue began dropping over the next several days. I posted the "How to Make Money" post on Nov 10 and look at how quickly my earnings changed direction.

Click Image to Enlarge.

Make Money Online in Canada

Make Money Blogging - The Importance of Blog Post Titles

Wait - this really isn't just about making money online in Canada. It's about post titles and they are the lifeblood of getting traffic for your long tail keywords. In the last post I mentioned the importance of using your main keyword in your Blog Title tag and preferably in your URL if you want to attract visitors from the search engines. See Making Money Online with Social Traffic.

Whether you are trying to make money with your blog or just after social readers then the next step is to pay attention to your post titles. Most social bloggers use catchy titles in order to grab their readers interest. This, unfortunately, doesn't work too well with the search engines. If you are writing a post about a subject then you should really try and fit the topic's keyword into your post title - Google will index you for the term and with a few anchored backlinks containing the same term you can quickly find yourself ranking well for it. The thing is - you want a term people will be searching for and most searchers don't search for snappy titles.

For some reason Google doesn't rank this blog very well in several data centers - Google.ca (Canada) is one of them. I am attempting to change that and this post is step one. I could have used a reader friendly title like "Hey G, WTF! Why don't you rank me in Canada?" The problem with this is that it wouldn't get me in the right serp listings and it wouldn't reinforce my main keyword - "make money online". When possible always try and combine your post subject with your blog's overall theme. If you are trying to earn money from your blog this tip is mandatory. (Your post title determines the type of Adsense ads you will get among other things) If you are a social blogger then you can take this under advisement - I know many of you don't want to turn your readers off and prefer to use an eye catching title. I would suggest adopting more of your keywords in the post title if you can.

This isn't going to be a long post today as I'm short on time but for those of you who took my advice about changing your Blog title - well done - and now one more tip just to raise your awareness. Put the keyword first. Both Kathy and Turnip made the changes I suggested in my last post but, in both cases, they added the keyword after their regular Title. ie. Kathy's Humor for the Masses keyword follows her "The Junk Drawer" which shows up in the browser as "The Junk Drawer - Humor for the Masses". Turnip's Social Networking site now reads "Turnip of Power - Social Networking".

Both sites should read as follows; "Humor for the Masses - The Junk Drawer" and "Social Networking - Turnip of Power".

Why? Because the serp's list the most relevant sites first when users type in a keyword. Hence when someone types in Humor blogs then the sites are listed (usually) in order of who shows the keyword first in the Blog's title. Search for that term and you will see what I mean. Once all the sites with the term "Humor" used at the beginning of their blog title are listed then Google lists all the blogs that have "humor" used elsewhere in their title. Always use your main keyword first.

In the two example sites just mentioned both bloggers could increase search traffic by adding their keyword in each or most of their post titles. Kathy's latest post is called "Why did the chicken cross the road?" A better search engine title would be "Humor - Why did the chicken cross the road?" As I said this may not appeal to social bloggers as it may look a little goofy - it will bring in traffic from the search engines though.

In Turnip's case his/her (I don't really know - sorry Turnip) latest post is "Social Networking Contest Update", which is absolutely perfect as is.

Here is another tip that most Canadians know about. In Canada we spell humor as humour and color as colour and center as centre and various other words differently than in the States. I mention this because most spell checkers are based on the American spelling. If you have a site that uses keywords like Humor you can increase traffic by using the Canadian spelling in your post as a lot of Canadians refuse to spell it the American way when using search. The important thing is to only use the misspelling once in your post - G will ignore it as spam if you use a misspelling more than once. I mention this because you will find yourself ranked high in the serp's for the misspelled term and gain traffic from Canada and elsewhere. Btw - this applies to any misspelled keyword - only use a misspelled term once - never twice.

Okay that should get me started on my Canadian serp campaign as I cleverly fit Canada into this post enough to hopefully get G's attention. Hence the post title that 1) Uses my main keyword "make money online" and 2) combines it with my (short) long tail for this post - Canada. Now all that is left is to gather some backlinks that use "make money in Canada" in the anchor text.

That is really all you need to know about SEO folks.

A quick note - Google is busy doing another Google shuffle at the moment and the result is that you may find your blog ranked well one day and totally gone the next. They have been doing this periodically for most of the last year. I don't really know what they are up to other than it appears to be another house cleaning. Several readers have wrote me in a panic and I have told them to just relax as there is little that can be done. Several of my sites have disappeared for a day or two and then reappeared a few days later. Some with better rank than before and some farther back in the serp's. In the past this has gone on for a few weeks before things settled down so wait it out before making any abrupt changes to your site. You will likely find yourself back in the rankings as if nothing occurred provided your site isn't a spam blog or you have not been doing things that G frowns upon.

Cheers,