Welcome back to part two of my Google Keyword SEO project, right here on theNetFool.com. In case you missed it, in week one we talked about setting up the stage for our keyword domination. By exploring the best keyword phrases available, we can learn how to rank higher for more terms… and bring in more traffic through organic hits. After a bit of brainstorming, it’s time to start phase two of the process… so let’s get started!

Understanding The Reasoning

What we want to do here to maximize the chances that Google gives us a top spot on serach results is make a new post/page in WordPress that is dedicated to search engine optimization. But why on Earth would I want to go through the seemingly unnecessary steps of setting up a dedicated page for this, when I could just as easily direct traffic to my homepage? Google worships accuracy.

Accuracy? What the heck is he talking about, right? When you search for a term in Google, they are processing this keyword phrase through every indexed website on the internet to find the best result. Because of this, Google naturally feels that an actual webpage (as opposed to a website) is a far better resource than a generalized website. They give the “page” a lot more juice than the “site.”

The “Link Bait” Landing Page

I am a firm believer that the most effective way to rank well in Google is to direct targeted keyword traffic toward a landing page that you designate on your blog. Following from this, the most effective landing page, in my opinion, is a “link bait” page. What do I mean by this? Basically, we want to write up a page that is relevant to our targeted phrase that will perform well in social media websites.

What is a link bait page? I actually wrote up a killer guide on link bait pages over the summer, so if you do not understand the concept or simply want to sharpen your skills, I suggest that you check it out. To summarize for the purposes of this article, I like to use lists of “top tens” or “top fives” as an easy template to rank well in social media sites.

In addition to a section about the topic that you are targeting, you should feel free to add in a top section to promote your own website, product or blog. For my landing page, I decided to use a horizontal bar on my page to separate a top “promo” section of my actual blog from the bottom “content” section that has my link bait material. This one-two combo punch is a pretty neat way to provide a linkable section while not missing out on potential revenue.

Setting It All Up

Now that we understand what we are doing, let’s set up a winning landing page that will have us ranking higher than anyone else in Google search engines. As you can see, this has already worked for my other blog “Bullish Bankers,” as we have the #2 slot for the popular keyword “investing ideas.” I am fully intending on exploiting this again for the phrase “make money online,” and feel like I can pull it off.

I feel like it is much better to make a “page” in WordPress, than a “page.” Why? More static. In addition, I would go so far as to modify a custom page template just so you can have a wider content area to deal with. Not sure how to do this? WordPress wrote a nice walkthrough for just this purpose. Don’t forget that you can exclude pages from your menu if you don’t want them to appear when you publish with this neat “Exclude Pages” plugin for your blog.

For The Net Fool’s link bait landing page, I have decided to write about how to make money online called, “Ten Fool-Proof Ways to Make Money Online.” Notice how my targeted term is in the title, and how i have added my targeted phrase again to the page description via All-In-One SEO. By having your phrase in the title and page description, you are going to maximize your ability to rank well in Google. Getting back on track, I wrote about the best ways to make money online because it is a subject that i feel places like Digg and StumbleUpon will eat up once I start to promote it on them. Consider social media when you write your link bait post.

On top of writing about a popular and catchy subject, I have attempted to maximize the effectiveness of this landing page by adding an obvious newsletter subscription option to anyone who sees the page. Along with this is a list of reasons why subscribing is a smart thing to do, and I even offer a free eBook to boot! Offering an option to subscribe to the traffic that comes in could not only maintain a high search ranking, but could increase my RSS subscribers as well!

Bottom Line: The landing page could just be the most effective part of your marketing campaign. Understanding how Google looks at pages versus websites is quite important in determining the best way to attack this problem. Over the next few days, we are going to take a look back on our link bait page and find out how to maximize the value behind it to drive our success.

-The Net Fool

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There are certain misunderstandings about the internet marketing world that I feel you should all be aware of. Setting itself up as kind of an “elitist” group of people, internet marketers are the ones making thousands off of websites, products and other online trades… sometimes even at your expense! But things really aren’t as bad as they appear, and hopefully after reading this you will realize that the barriers to entry are all made of glass.

A lot of marketers are going to make arguments that the following points aren’t true; in fact, they couldn’t be truer. People who tell you that it requires a lot of work, money, effort etc. just to get your bearings are trying to persuade you to stay away from their market. Don’t believe it. The bottom line is that being an internet marketer is a lot easier than you think. You all know that I don’t work as or consider myself an internet marketer, but this is really just a choice I made a while back to limit my exposure to the internet. If I wanted to sit down and make some money, it wouldn’t be very difficult at all to get in the game. Let’s get to the top five incorrect thoughts.

1. You Need a Lot of Money In Order to Make Money
Say what?! Too many people are trapped in the notion that they need to spend to earn. While you certainly can accelerate your earnings with a bit of an investment from the start, I came into the online money making business with literally an empty PayPal account and gradually built it up.

The internet is probably the only place where you can get an entire online business built for under $25 and be successful. I got my start by generating so-called “seed” money, which you can earn through any Get Paid To (GPT) website in a few minutes, and investing that in a domain name. Eventually, I had enough built up to afford nice web hosting, advertising money and the whole lot. This all started from an empty PayPal account!

2. Traffic = Sales
Too many people think that traffic is traffic is traffic… that couldn’t be further from the truth. Unless you are spinning off a website that isn’t even yours and couldn’t care less about where the traffic comes from, you are going to want the visitors that make it to your website to be legitimately interested. Furthermore, having more traffic doesn’t mean you are going to increase your sales. I have seen tons of Pay-Pay-Click and similar marketing plans fail because of poor traffic. In fact, these cases actually involved marketers that shifted away from profitable campaigns in favor of faster traffic… which eventually drained their margins.

Want an example? Say I am starting up a website about planting trees to save the environment (aw, how nice). I’m not going to put money down to target the word “tree” because that could bring me people who want anything from birdhouses to gardening tips… not the environmentalist spin I was going for and not the people who will make me rich. Relevancy in marketing campaigns is more important than you’d think!

3. The Internet Marketing Business is Over-Saturated
Ever feel like someone is trying to close the door on you? Lot’s of successful bloggers or internet marketers tell you that there is no room for you to get in the business. In fact, there is plenty of wiggle room in every niche (yes, even the “make money online” niche). Online business is accelerating at a rate in excess of 20% annually. I feel like the current levels of participation on the internet are only a fraction of what they will be, so get in now… we still aren’t even close to fruition.

Now that more and more marketing companies are coming to the table, it appears that somebody thinks there is potential there. The trend is your friend! If you see more and more internet businesses popping up, namely internet marketing companies, then it is obvious that people see huge gaps to be filled and want a piece of the pie. Why not you too?

4. You Need This Product To Succeed
In all my time online, I have never bought anything over $100 in value that I didn’t say to myself: “hey, this shouldn’t be worth more than $50.” There are literally hundreds of so-called “miracle” programs and products out there that are essentially exploiting our gullible sides into thinking that they will help. You can do anything and everything yourself. Once you get a bit more established, sure, go for it. But if you are a beginner you really don’t need any of the stuff marketers through at you to make money… bottom line.

I’m planning on launching a post soon where I analyze the appropriate value of products that I have tried and paid for personally on the internet. It’s true that if you have the money to spare, certain programs may accelerate your ability to work. However, nobody actually needs the things they recommend… and the help provided is only marginally better than what you can do yourself. For a slight increase in productivity, you probably will be better off without it.

5. You Can Make Hundreds/Thousands in One Day by _____________
One common misconception in ANY online business is that you can make hundreds of dollars, or even a few thousand, in just one day. If anyone tells you that this is possible, you should be a skeptic. Option one is that they have used days in advance to prepare in order to launch their campaign successfully with all the right keywords and niche exposure. Option two is that they are professionals doing this already, and have gradually built up positions that now make them $X dollars every day.

Lesson learned, if you are new to any business… it’s not going to be possible, at least at first, to make that kind of outlandish profit in a day. Sorry to burst your bubble, but the odds of being successful without a professional background in one day’s work are close to none. Taking your time and gradually making your presence known is the best way to fly every time.

Bottom Line: There are many internet marketing misunderstandings, but I have chosen to highlight those that deal with the whole “elitist” point of view. Never say never, but also don’t fall for things that seem too good to be true. Anyone can be an internet marketer by building up gradual positions… put in the work and you’ll succeed!

-The Net Fool

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Many people ask me how I get all these sponsored posts, a sold-out sidebar and 30-day text links all bought up month after month. While it’s important to preach that advertisers will eventually find their way to your blog, you need a killer plan to get the word out and get paid.

I’m going to take you through the best strategies to get immediate bids for your ads, and with any luck you’ll soon have publishers clawing at the gates in order to get a piece of the action. First things first, it’s imperative to have an easy to use ad management system in place. For WordPress, there is simply no alternative to OIO Publisher. It’s the system I use, and it rocks. Everything will be automated, your customers will get free ad reports, and it’s just $37… some of the best money I’ve ever spent on this blog.

How To Lock Up Sponsored Reviews
Most bloggers suggest that the best way to get sponsored reviews from advertisers on a consistent basis is to write great content day after day that gets noticed. I do believe that this is true; however, there is a much more effective method that will almost certainly get you sponsored reviews every time a company runs a campaign… which is practically constant. How do you get sponsored reviews, you ask?
Comment on other sponsored reviews.

A bit counter-intuitive at first, it is actually very smart. Granted, you need a decent blog to be able to accomplish this… but usually anything over 50 subscribers and some solid writing will work. All you need to do is drop a very interested sounding comment on another blog that happens to be promoting for an advertiser in a paid post. What happens here is that advertisers typically launch campaigns where they will buy up 5-10 blog posts at a time. Obviously, they check each one and read through the comments. We can exploit this by commenting on the posts, because the advertisers usually visit the blogs of each commenter for more leads. They see your site sells sponsored posts, you get paid. Nearly 40% of my reviews come from this tactic. It really is that simple!

Of course, in order to get an advertiser to buy a sponsored review from you, you are going to need to have great looking posts, and a few examples of past reviews. I recommend creating a new “Sponsored Posts” category, and putting that on your advertise page so that anyone can see what normal reviews look like. Trying to price your reviews appropriately to control demand? Check out The Net Fool’s Suggested Paid Review Rate Chart!

Fill Up Your Sidebar With Interested 125×125 Advertisers
The blogging standard for advertising is the 125×125 advertisement. Most well-monetized blogs will have these ads placed in a sidebar, or somewhere in the footer of their page. What’s the best way to get your ad slots filled and in high demand? I would have to say that the rates drive demand, and those blogs charging less than the spots are worth are going to have an easier time getting advertisers. You will want to track what each of your advertisements does in terms of cost-per-click (CPC)… which you want at LEAST under 1, the lower the better.

Let’s be honest, if nobody knows that you have ads available, nobody will purchase them! You need a way to get the word out. I’ve been contacted multiple times by people through email saying “hey, I have ads available for $X a month (cheap!) so check out my blog if you are interested” and I usually purchase them if the price is right. You can do the same thing by making a generic but informal-sounding email and switching out the names and websites of bloggers that you follow.

My favorite method to get the word out is to use webmaster forums like Bloggeries or even Digital Point to tell people that you are selling advertising for a limited time at just $X a month. Make it sound like a deal, or maybe even offer some exclusive bundle packages, and you’ll be sure to get bids.

One final tip, try to never leave more than one ad slot available. Even if your demand is not high, you can always fill spots with generic affiliate marketing banners to make some extra money. Making things appear in high demand is sometimes just as good as actually having the traffic to support it. Furthermore, if you make it appear that there is “one spot left!“… you can lure all those impulse buyers in for buying up your slots.

Make An Extra Dime with Text Link Ads
I would have to say that standard text links are the least popular advertising derivatives on the internet. But you shouldn’t throw them out of your ad budget just because they aren’t sexy. You can bet on around $5 a link every month, and if you have 5 links sold out then that’s an extra $25… that’s not chump change! One thing you need to make sure of is that you don’t label them as “paid” or “sponsored” because Google might just put the smack-down on your PageRank. Instead, call them “featured” or “friends.”

How can you score more text link sponsors? I actually had some luck using the Text Link Ads network, which is in the business of reselling links for your blog. My favorite method in generating more sponsors for your text links is just like any banner, telling people about it word-of-mouth over forums. I find that text links are the easiest to sell to random visitors on your blog. Why? More than likely because they are cheap, have good exposure, and offer a great way to boost link-backs on the fly.

Bottom Line: Don’t worry about being a sell out, we all like to make money… and ads can support your blog with money to re-invest for faster growth. There are many types of ads I didn’t mention, but keep in mind that you don’t want to go over the top. Experiment with your ad rates to reach the equilibrium point between supply and demand… and watch your monthly revenue soar!

-The Net Fool

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With all of the talk about making money online doing things like flipping blogs, affiliate marketing or building web traffic, we often forget of one of the more fundamental methods of earning some extra cash… being sneaky! A lot of bloggers will constantly push and promote different products for visitors to try and make sales. Is this really the most effective way to turn an ordinary post into a full-fledged money maker? Not Necessarily!

What is perhaps more effective is the casual approach. Say I am talking about making an eBook for cash… why not mention off hand that I have a cheap eBook that will go further in depth into the topic at eBook-Rich.com? Or what if I’m talking about setting up your blog to run WordPress? It’s pretty easy to say hey, I’m hosted on HostGator servers and love my service. Slip in a link, and you have yourself a few sales that could make you a few $100 in week!

Let’s talk about the advantages of making commission off of sales in an indirect way. Call it being sneaky, but avoiding the constant bombardment of “buy this” and “order that” could be your golden ticket to profit.

Profit-Seeking Bloggers Are Divided Into Two Schools of Thought
I feel that in the “make money online” niche (or entrepreneur, what have you), bloggers that write content with a profit-seeking mindset can be made into two distinct groups. In the old mantra, people would pick up extra referred income by making posts directed at selling a product to people. The new class would be made up of blog owners that openly offer advice on more broad-based topics, slipping in the occasional promotion (at an appropriate time) to make that killer sale.

Old School Technique: Market for the Sake of Marketing
Since the first few blogs have appeared on the subject of making money online, there have been a whole bunch of writers that make articles with the intention of selling you something. Many times, this comes in the form of opt-in newsletters that send occasional email advertisements intent on getting you to purchase a product. In a few other cases, bloggers will make individual posts to advertise a product that they came out with… or perhaps even try to sell you on someone else’s promotion with a referral link in place.

This “old school” mantra would suggest that you get the most bang for your advertisement by simply smacking people over the head with information. There’s nothing wrong with this method, as it does bring in fantastic sales and is probably the best way to let people know of a product without having to flat-out teach a new lesson. One example of this school of thought is when I wrote about my new eBook. A more recent example is when John Cow pitched his Traffic Kahuna service.

New School Technique- Marketing to Enhance and Enrich
As nobody is going to read a blog that contains post after post of “in-your-face” advertising, the “new school” technique of writing involves cleverly slipping in a product pitch into an otherwise ordinary article. This can be even more effective than devoting an entire post to a new product. Why? People are often turned off from the start when the title of a post reveals itself to be a simply marketing ploy. By being a little sneaky and writing about a related topic, slipping in a commission-paying link as a point of reference along the way, a lot of readers will be much more inclined to hear you out and buy your stuff.

How about a little example? Garry Conn does this in marketing the popular HostGator web hosting referral program. This program pays him commission on everyone that buys hosting through his link. So when he wrote about migrating a blog installation, he slipped in his HostGator link as his “preferred” hosting solution and got sales from people that were interested. It’s descreet, albeit a bit sneaky, but it’s a really helpful way to maintain your excellent content and make profits from marketing at the same time.

How Can Being Sneaky Make Money?
It’s a pretty simple concept. Rather than coming over the top to get people to send you some affiliate cash, it can be much more effective and rewarding to simply try and write as normal. You can turn almost any “ordinary” post into a full-fledged profit machine simply by being creative. If I’m writing about “bum marketing,” I could put in a link to a product that help users submit articles to directories. If I’m writing about how to tie your shoe, I could put in a spot advertisement for Nike shoes assuming they are my “favorite brand.”

I’m amazed that some of my older posts on WordPress plugins still generate 1-2 sales every month of the OIO Publisher plugin… getting me a quick $15 a pop. Hey, maybe I’ll get some sales from this post now that I just slid a reference in!

Bottom Line: A lot of bloggers don’t grasp how easy it can be to start making money online from your everyday writing material. The best of the best will make a great deal of money simply by being creative. Referrals to products that will help readers out can even be helpful if the service is truly worthwhile… so there’s no need anymore to actually degrade your blog into worthless marketing. Use the old school and new school techniques more effectively, and watch your income soar!

-The Net Fool

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One of the more popular methods of making money on the internet is the process of “flipping” websites for profit. It’s talked about far too often, so I’d like to let those of you who are still a bit fuzzy on the details into the big secret. Before we discuss the actual process, it’s important to understand the concept of arbitrage.

What is Arbitrage?
While arbitrage sometimes refers simply to the process of arbitration (think mediating in a court of law), financial arbitration refers to the process of concurrent buying and selling for profit. Confused? Well we all know the basic idea of buying low, selling high… right? Using arbitration would be buying something and then selling it for a higher profit. Essentially any trade where you make out ahead, is utilizing arbitration to your advantage. Now enough business talk, let’s discuss flipping!

What does Arbitrage have to do with Website Flipping?

A successful “flip” of a website is one that makes a profit. Therefore, website flipping is really all about an individuals ability to seek out a low purchase price on a website that allows for a higher selling price at some other time down the road. Now, I don’t like to mess too heavily in risk by putting down a few hundred dollars for someone else’s website. Luckily for us, flipping a website (arbitrage) can also mean starting up your own low-cost blog on a new domain name and getting it to sell.

The Process
Many people preach making $1000s every day by starting up a slew of new blogs and selling them the same day. This is a lie that is being permeated by fools that like to believe in these get rich quick schemes. Nobody buys a website that is one day old for anywhere north of $20… so best of luck if you are going to go against my recommendation and try anyway.

It doesn’t take much to buy some cheap articles and build a website up over time, so let’s aim for a two week turn around time. Just remember that we really don’t need to pay any attention to the blogs we are going to flip, so it’s kind of just money building up in the background.

Here is the simplified process: Register a creative “niche” domain name Install WordPress on your web hosting account Grab a monetized theme with a brandable logo Add articles and content to your blog List your blog for sale and PROFIT!

Arguably the most difficult part of flipping a website is finding a brandable domain name that has a keyword in it and a .com extension. You are going to want to make sure that you register domain names with .com endings only, because this will add about $20 average onto your sale price… and that could make or break your profit margin. I would recommend buying with 1and1.com because they offer consistently low pricing and have free private domain name registration on all new names ($6.99/yr).

What makes a good domain name? Basically you want something that is easy to remember (brandable), has something obviously tied to your niche (one keyword minimum) and isn’t too long. You can have a hyphen, but anything more than two words long isn’t what you are looking for (excluding word like “the” or “pro”). Check out my domain guide for more information about this process.

Setting Up Your WordPress and Web Hosting
Obviously, a blog needs to be hosted somewhere. Fortunately for you, if you don’t already have web hosting I wrote a guide as part of my “Creating a Blog” series that will get you the best deal of your life!

I recommend installing and using the WordPress blogging system if you are going to flip a blog for profit. Not only is it the most widely used system, which will give you the best profit margin on your buy-sell arbitrage, but it is one of the easier programs to install and set up on your blog. Again, if you need help installing WordPress I have a handy installation guide for you to use yourself.

Configure a Monetized WordPress Theme with a Brandable Logo
Making your blog look great is really a lot easier than it would seem at first glance. You don’t want to pay anyone to do this for you, because there are plenty of free themes from providers like WP Theme Designer or OSWD that you can use 100% free… further increasing your margins and decreasing risk.

If you have a copy of Adobe Photoshop, it’s pretty easy to whip up a free logo on your own. You can just grab a neat stock image from a free service like Stock.Xchng or a paid service like iStockPhoto, slap on the name of your website and save it! Otherwise, why not try and hire a cheap designer off of a webmaster forum (I use Digital Point)? This will run you $5-$15 a piece, depending on quality of course.

Adding Articles and Content to Your Blog
If done effectively, the set-up will take about 30 minutes per blog. So by the time you have worked through your set-up, you should have a whole army of good looking blogs ready to go. All you need now is some unique content! You could, again, either write up articles yourself or pay someone to do it for you. I recommend paying someone, as writers will give you some good work that Google picks up well for a very affordable rate. You could end up paying as little as $1-2 for each article, a very affordable down payment!

I recommend adding anywhere from 5 to 15 articles total per website. Where can you find someone to write articles for you? Try the “content” sales section of Digital Point forums or have a look on Google. You really only need around 350 words on each article, so it shouldn’t be too costly.

List Your Blog for Sale, and Take Your Gains!
Now that we have an “established” blog… or at least one that appears to be… it’s time to talk things up a bit and pitch it for sale. If you have done this effectively, you can successfully flip a blog in less than a week. However, I still recommend building blogs for two weeks before considering selling. You want to talk your website up a bit, targeting things like niche market exposure, great domain, brandable content and design, awesome start up…. things like that.

It’s pretty easy to spin off a website on Digital Point to another member, but you will usually get a higher sale price if you are using a fee-based service like SitePoint. Depending on the job you have done making the website and pitching the sale, it shouldn’t be too hard to pull in $50 to $100 for each website that you made.

Where is the “Big Money” in Flipping Websites?
So you’ve seen how easy it is to make a quick $50-$100 turn around for a blog that you make, load with content, and sell. But where’s the profitability in this? Seeing that the only real set up is day one (the rest is just putting up some easy content), you can literally do five of these websites a day and have a whole recurring train of income coming your way once things mature a bit.

Of course, the bigger money is made by picking up a blog yourself and turning it around to make a bigger profit later down the road. However, there is a lot of risk involved in this… especially if you don’t know what you are doing.

Bottom Line: By starting up and subsequently selling a bunch of niche targeted blogs you can easily “flip” for profits of a few $1000 every month. It may not be too glamorous, but now that you have the tools necessary to start “flipping” on your own… there’s nothing stopping you from seeing the money roll in!

-The Net Fool

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