Experiment #1 Progress Report - 3/20/2009

March 21, 2009 – 7:33 am

This week has seen some pretty normal progress in this make money online experiment. I published another article, participated in more blog carnivals, and got another link via a link exchange. Pretty normal, run of the mill stuff. Certainly not that exciting and not that glamorous.

What is interesting and exciting is that I got my first real bona fide search visitor this week. Isn’t that exciting?!? Yeah, I know - I should be dancing in the halls and popping the cork on the champagne. In response to this massive search traffic I added a new keyword to my targeting list and wrote a post targeting that keyword this week. I am finding that I tend to simply target one longtail per post and I need to get better at incorporating many different longtails in each post. That way my content has much more for the Bot to look at and I can start ranking for more words.

Here is the current stat of the main site in the my beginners experiment:

Money Stats

  • Earned: $0.00
  • Spent: $0.00

Content Stats

  • Number of posts - 4 (+1)
  • Number of words - 5146 (+1348)
  • Number of comments - 2
  • Pages in Google Index - 5 (+3)
  • Pages In Google Index * - 2 (+1)
  • # of targeted keywords in the top 100 - 2/134
  • # of targeted keyword in the top 20 - 1/134
  • # of targeted keyword in the top 10 - 1/134

Links Built

  • Carnivals Participated In - 6 (+3)
  • DoFollow Comments Left - 0
  • NoFollow Comments Left - 0
  • Link Exchanges - 3 (+1)
    • Blogroll Links - 1
    • Post Links - 2 (+1)
  • Hubs/Squidoo Lenses - 0
  • Web Directories - 0
  • Articles Written - 2

Links According to Yahoo Site Explorer - 28 +(18)

Links According to Google - 4 (+4)

…make money online…

For those that are unaware of what I am doing, I am trying to rank for a pretty competitive keyword with nothing but free tools. I might pay for some things out of my earnings from the site, but I will not dip into my pocket before then to buy tools to rank better for the term. Instead, I am going to rely on elbow grease and high quality, original content just like the Big G would want me to.

The reason I am doing it this way is that a beginner just starting out doesn’t really have access to paid tools. If they have the money for it, they don’t know who to trust about what services to use. Too many people in the make money online niche don’t know what they are talking about or are completely into it for themselves, pulling the wool over a newbies eyes to just make $10. I obviously fall into the former camp, but I would recommend that you take some time - maybe 6 months at a minimum - of reading and learning and testing things out yourself before you go out and buy some paid tool.

But that certainly isn’t a hard and fast rule. There are some very trustworthy individuals out there who aren’t just in it for themselves and actually know what they are doing. If you have the pleasure of having them help you for free then you should listen to every word that they say, and do exactly what they still.

Still experiment, but learn from the master how to make money online.

By Steward | Posted in beginner experiment | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Can I Make Money Online - My Starting Point

March 20, 2009 – 9:14 am

Can I make money online? The question is a good one and is really what this whole blog is about. My experiments are designed to help me get free traffic that converts well to websites that I have spent a lot of time building high quality content on. You see, the type of traffic that is free and converts well is search engine traffic. Get that and you can make money online.

I have to be brutally honest here - I do not currently make very much money online. I currently take in about $250 a month from two sites that I have built - the rest earn me nothing because I haven’t monetized them yet (or had monetized them at one point but took it off because the traffic was pathetic and I feared smart pricing like it was a blue haired devil bent on destroying my will to live). My main earners are Amazon affiliate links and Google Adsense, with Adsense earning me around 80%-90% of my online income.

$250 a month has taken me an exceedingly long time to achieve - too long if you ask me - and has solidified myself as a noob trying to break into a business that I don’t yet fully grasp or comprehend. There are a lot of factors that still are mysterious to me - like triggering the highest paying ads, or improving search results, or building a network of high quality sites, or getting those links that will push your site to the next level. I mean all of my content is high quality, I just can’t seem to get things just right just yet.

Here are some helpful graphics that might illustrate my noobishness well:

Total Earnings

Total Earnings Online

Total Earnings Online

Average Earnings per Day

Average Daily Earnings Online

Average Daily Earnings Online

Mysterious Graph Due To Affiliate Program Terms of Service

Mysterious Make Money Online Graph

Mysterious Make Money Online Graph

As you can clearly see, I have been trying to make money online for just under 450 days and have only earned around $1,100.  How noob is that?  Can you see why I seriously question if I can make money online?  Sure, there are signs of making some steady progress - over the last 100 or so days I have been making a fairly decent per day total with just one site being active (decent for me anyway, certainly nothing I could retire early on).

Another encouraging point is how steep my total earnings graph is looking right now.  Steep equals good if you ask me.

In the end though, my success at doing this whole SEO thing while writing high quality content needs to do some serious growing if it is going to meet my financial needs in the future, and I have financial needs that I want this type of work to meet.

My current plan is to continue to focus the bulk of my efforts on trying to make money online with Adsense, but I definitely won’t give up on my Amazon affiliate plan. Sure, maybe working affiliate marketing has a greater potential for making lots of cash, but since I still don’t really know what I am doing we will have to see how things pan out.

So the question remains, can I make money online?

By Steward | Posted in make money online | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

Make Money Online Experiment 2 Update 3/18/2009

March 19, 2009 – 8:34 am

Things have been going pretty smoothly with my more intermediate experiment for making money online.  I have made some steady progress in my link building strategy and have written some high quality, original content that will be useful to my well optimized money site.  I am definitely on track to have completed the building part of this campaign at the end of 4 weeks, which my goal for this experiment.

Here is my updated plan to show what I have finished so far and its impact on my rankings for each keyword combination:

Strategy to Rank For Pack Gangster Switches Net

  • write long winded post on with links to other pages targeting other related keywords (3/5, 2524 words)
    • use subheadings of long winded post for hubpages
      • Hubpage 1 (3/7, 1326, links:S1(a), S2(i) )
      • Hubpage 2 (3/5, 1157, links: S1(a), S3(i))
      • Hubpage 2 (3/15, 1268, links: S1(a), S3(a))
      • Hubpage 3 (words, links: )
    • use hubpages for article runs w/ one link to S1, one link to hub
      • Article 1 (3/10, 699, links: hub1, S1(a))
      • Article 2 (3/6, 623, links: hub2, S1(a))
      • Article 3 (words, links: )
      • Article 4 (words, links: )
    • submit to long winded post to a blog carnival
  • write post on S2 that targets “Pack Gangster Switches Net” (3/10, 1205, links: S1(a))
    • do S2 article run (words, links: )
  • write post on S3 targeting “Pack Gangster Switches Net” (3/15, 1985, links: S1(a))
    • do S3 article run (words, links: )
    • submit to a blog carnival
    • write hub for S3 post (words, links: )

keyword targets

keyword searches rank prepublish 7 hours 1 week 2 weeks 4 weeks 8 weeks
Pack Gangster Switches Net 1 140 (24) (11) (9) (9) () ()
Pack Gangster Switches Net 2 260 (62) (20) (20) (18) () ()
Pack Gangster Switches Net 3 n/a (56) (19) (17) (14) () ()
Pack Gangster Switches Net 4 210 (-) (37) (35) (17) () ()
Pack Gangster Switches Net 5 140 (36) (13) (8) (7) () ()
Pack Gangster Switches Net 6 480 (-) (60) (60) (29) () ()
Pack Gangster Switches Net 7 320 (-) (139) (177) (142) () ()
Packing Gangster 201000 (42) (37) (42) (27) () ()
Gangster With Packing 54000 (36) (34) (35) (24) () ()

I am not too concerned about how well I rank for the longtail that I am targeting with this experiment even though I have broken into the top 10 for the main longtail that I targeted as well as improving my rankings in every other iteration of the keyword. Instead, I am most excited about how I have been moving ahead for the money keyword that this post is targeting.

I have jumped 15 slots after 2 weeks for a supposedly high traffic and high paying keyword (according to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool). My assumption is that as I grow my site with additional campaigns and improve my link profile that I will continue to improve this ranking. Heck, the ranking may still improve further with this particular campaign!

Since this experiment is seemingly providing such great results both in terms of SERP rankings and my ability to organize my ideas and accomplish them I have already come up with two additional campaigns for this particular niche. One of them will target the site that this experiment is targeting (S1) and the other will try and work on S2.

S2 is trying to target a related niche to S1, so strengthening that site should help the links on it improve S1 rankings in addition to helping me make some more money from S2. S2 isn’t monetized right now and is just kind of sitting there. It should be fun to dust it off and build some high quality content on it to help my visitors find the information that they are looking for.

Good luck making money online!

By Steward | Posted in intermediate experiment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Make Money Online Experiment Update 3/14/2009

March 14, 2009 – 6:44 am

This week saw the normal level of activity for my make money online experiment for beginners.  I created one more post on the highly competitive site, participated in another blog carnival, and got one of my articles rewritten and submitted to an article directory.  I am certainly not working this site particularly hard right now - just building some solid content that is actually useful to a reader who might find my site.

One thing that I did do this week that I didn’t expect when the week started was create a new blog on Today.com to support the site.  It is going to be loosely related to the “debt” niche site that I am trying to make some money off of.  It will be a “personal” blog where I talk about subjects that are keyword related to the money niche.  Once I get that site built up some I might start sending some links over to the money site.  I haven’t decided if I want to do blogroll links, in post links, or a combination of the two once I get to that point.

One of the reasons I created the supporting site was that I could very easily start submitting it to the same blog carnivals that I was submitting my money site to.  This would be killing two birds with one stone and it wouldn’t really add that much work to my plate.  I can easily pump out 500-1000 word articles on the Today.com blog so it made sense to start it now and get backlinks to it at the same time I was getting backlinks to the money site.  It just made sense to me.

So without further ado, the numbers:

Money Stats

  • Earned: $0.00
  • Spent: $0.00

Content Stats

  • Number of posts - 3 (+1)
  • Number of words - 3798 (+1298)
  • Number of comments - 2
  • Pages in Google Index - 2
  • Pages In Google Index * - 1
  • # of targeted keywords in the top 100 - 2/134 (+1)
  • # of targeted keyword in the top 20 - 1/134
  • # of targeted keyword in the top 10 - 1/134

Links Built

  • Carnivals Participated In - 3
  • DoFollow Comments Left - 0
  • NoFollow Comments Left - 0
  • Link Exchanges - 2 (+2)
    • Blogroll Links - 1 (+1)
    • Post Links - 1 (+1)
  • Hubs/Squidoo Lenses - 0
  • Web Directories - 0
  • Articles Written - 2 (+1)

Links According to Yahoo Site Explorer - 10 (+9)

Links According to Google - 0

…make money online…

I have realized that these updates might not be that helpful because they don’t do a really good job of showing the differences between weeks.  I plan to come up with a solution to make this information much more accessable to those who want to follow along.  I also have realized that there isn’t that much reporting on other aspects of this experiment: things like traffic, add placement (which is non-existent right now), and the performance of the supporting sites all come into play and make an impact on the overall performance of the money site.

On several occassions I have been strongly tempted to start using some of the paid tools that I use to get links to this site.  I have restrained myself in the interest of scientific curiosity and experimental integrity.  If I cheat, I am giving up on the notion that a noob can go around and make some money online if he applies some elbow grease and ignores the hype.  I really want to prove this to myself more than I want to prove it to anyone else.  I like to think that the internet is the last place that the American dream of hardwork reaps rewards.

By Steward | Posted in beginner experiment | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Both Make Money Experiments See Serps Change

March 9, 2009 – 3:17 pm

Last night, I discovered an interesting development in my intermediate SEO experiment (experiment #2 for those following along).  My post page has overtaken my index in ranking for the long tail keyword that I am targeting.  This is good news - or at least I hope it is.  If my noob senses are tingling a’right,  then I am sensing that it means that in the long term I will make more money online.

The reasons for this are simple: if I rank better for this long tail keyword than maybe I will rank better with the money keyword.  I will do this by increasing the overall authority of the site by increasing the number of keywords that I rank for.  I assumed that this would work just by getting my index page to rank for lots of keywords (the index page is yourblogurl.com) - but if I can get my deep pages ranking well too (this would be my post pages like yourblogurl.com/post-about-pack-gangster-switches-net/) I think that this will be better for the longevity of my rankings.

Why I Think This Change Is Good

It is my understanding that having good, authority posts makes the site more better* in the eyes of search engines the world over.  So in getting my post page to begin ranking for these terms I am increasing my overall authority on the site.

* Notice the use of the double comparative.  This means that it definitely better than a simple comparative but not quiet as good as a superlative.  For more information on this read a dictionary or linguistics book.  I ramble.

This increase in overall authority is going to be exactly what I need if I am to rank for the more competitive, money keyword in my particular niche.

What Did It Take To Affect This Change?

I didn’t have to do much to affect this change.  All it took was sending two well optimized links from two different hubpages and one keyword optimized comment signature to the post that I was trying to use to create the keyword authority on my site.  I used three unique anchor texts that fit well into the hubpages and comment content and I sent the links a few days apart (2 days to be exact).

Since both these articles are 100% original content and provide information of good quality I am expecting them to stick around for a while and to pass any inspection that a person could make of them.

Will These Changes Last?

I haven’t the foggiest idea.  I am hoping that they do, but I think that will have to do more with how many links my site gets and where I gets the links to than anything else.  If my post continues to get the lion’s share of the links the post will continue to advance in the SERPs.  If my index gets more links (or high authority links) than it will reappear as my sites representative in the high school popularity contest of the search engines.

In fact, I hope that these changes don’t last because they have actually hurt me in the SERPs for the most part.  Here is a list of how I ranked for each related keyword for the long tail I targeted and my rankings prepublish, one hour after publish, and right now:

Keyword Adwords Search Volume Prepublish Rank 1 hour rank Right Now
Pack Gangster Switches Net 1 140 24 11 28
Pack Gangster Switches Net 2 260 62 20 14
Pack Gangster Switches Net 3 n/a 56 19 17
Pack Gangster Switches Net 4 210 - 37 64
Pack Gangster Switches Net 5 140 36 13 14
Pack Gangster Switches Net 6 480 - 60 74
Pack Gangster Switches Net 7 320 - 139 -
Packing Gangster 201000 42 37 37
Gangster With Packing 54000 36 34 32

(If this graphic is a little confusing to you, check out my initial post on the topic at Make Money Online Experiment #2 - hopefully that will clear up any confusion created by my use of the fake keyword names.)

As you can clearly see, I saw an almost immediate boost to the money keywords that has been sustained over the past 5 days even with the change from ranking my index to ranking my post page for the long tail I am trying to target.  However, my rankings for the keyword terms directly related to my long tail have dropped in rankings with the change in what page is being ranked.

This experiment is only 5 days old, so I can expect things to continue to change - but I thought that this was an interesting enough development to record here.

Make Money Online Experiment #1

I have also seen a similar change in my beginners experiment as well.  A search in the Big G in the computer no longer points to by index page but now points to my post page.  And, like in my make money online experiment #2 I have seen my site drop in the rankings - this time from 6 to 58.  This is a much more competitive niche than my PGS site and this could be the explanation for such a large drop in rankings.

Definitely interesting stuff going on in my make money online experiments!

By Steward | Posted in intermediate experiment | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Experiment #1 Progress Report - 3/7/2008

March 7, 2009 – 8:00 am

At the end of each week I am going to give  a brief rundown of the stats for the site attempting to rank for the competitive “debt” related term as part of my make money online experiment for beginners.  Feel free to chime in and let me know if you want something else to be tracked in this list.

Money Stats

  • Earned: $0.00
  • Spent: $0.00

Content Stats

  • Number of posts - 2
  • Number of words - 2500
  • Number of comments - 2
  • Pages in Google Index - 2
  • Pages In Google Index * - 1
  • # of targeted keywords in the top 100 - 1/134
  • # of targeted keyword in the top 20 - 1/134
  • # of targeted keyword in the top 10 - 1/134

Links Built

  • Carnivals Participated In - 2
  • DoFollow Comments Left - 0
  • NoFollow Comments Left - 0
  • Link Exchanges - 0
  • Hubs/Squidoo Lenses - 0
  • Web Directories - 0
  • Articles Written - 1

Links According to Yahoo Site Explorer - 1

Links According to Google - 0

[][][][][][][]

Not too much activity on my part less than two weeks into this experiment.  All I have done is write two longish articles about the niche and gotten some decent links from blog carnivals.  These links alone have me ranking 6th for the title of my blog (a really long tail of the keyword I am targeting) and I expect to be ranking #1 for that term in a couple of weeks if I don’t get in the Google sandbox between now and then.  I suspect just a few more carnival links should put me over the top.

I plan on keeping up the same pace of post creation and link acquiring at least through the end of March.  One post a week, one to two carnivals a week, and one article submission a week.  I may start to throw some comments in there, but I haven’t really come up with a good plan of tracking those yet so I think I will hold off on that for now.

I suspect that when I do begin to comment I will do so generously on dofollow and nofollow blogs.  This should make my link profile look a lot more natural and maybe even make my little blog a few friends!  Friends can be very helpful when trying to make some money online.

By Steward | Posted in beginner experiment | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Make Money Online Experiment #2

March 6, 2009 – 3:44 pm

Pushing A Site Up the SERPs

The site that makes me the most money is also the site that I have been building the longest and have the most backlinks to.  It doesn’t make me very much money - maybe $7-$10 a day and I have been working on it for almost a year now.  A whole year!

The reason that it has taken me so long to get things rolling with this bad boy is that when I first started out I didn’t know what I was doing and ended up targeting a niche that doesn’t have any traffic or any money in it.  I currently rank #1 for the term I targeted - lets call it “Pack Gangster Switch” - and I have gotten a grand total of 199 visits from this keyword since the beginning of the year.

I could probably blame this colossal failure on not knowing any better, but that would be too easy.  I made a mistake and squander a lot of my time because I didn’t take the time to do my homework (i.e. read from people who knew what they were doing and ask questions) and find a niche that really was going to work.  Luckily, I have come to realize that “Pack Gangster” is a very, very good keyword to target.  Lots of traffic (according to the Google Keyword Tool) and a high CPC (according to the Google Keyword Tool) - both are a recipe for making good money online.

Targeting a Long Tail Keyword

Unbeknownst to me, I actually did something right in targeting “Pack Gangster Switch” - it was a long tail of “Pack Gangster” with relatively little competition.  Ranking #1 for PGS (it is easier to write it this way, so bear with me) has helped push my site up to 42 in the SERPs for PG.

By focusing in on the long tail I was able to gain clout in the eyes of the search engines for the shorter, money rich keyword.  This relationship between the long tail and the money word is something that I am going to be exploring in this experiment and it is a little more advanced than my make money online experiment for beginners.

For this experiment I will be focusing on ranking well for a new long tail of PG.  If everything works like I hope, increasing my ranking for the new long tail will further push me up in the rankings for the money word.

The Current Condition of My Sites

In addition to having one site that targeted PGS, I have two sister sites that also have been targeting long tails of the PG keyword.  Neither site has made money either, but they have been gaining age.  It is time to dust these sites off and get them ranking much better for their keywords.  If I can do this, I will be making more money (from all three sites instead of just one) and will help push my site that is closest to ranking well for PG up in the SERPS.

Aside from these three sites I don’t have much else.  I do not have a good portfolio of sites to send links to these sites.  I haven’t made a lot of friends who will magically swoop in and help me out by sending perfectly optimized back links to my sites from their’s.  Nope, I am going to have to do this hard way - write like a dog.

The Plan

Being a planner at heart, I put together the following plan using my trusty Google Docs (boy do I love Google docs):

Strategy to Rank For Pack Gangster Switches Net

  • write long winded post on with links to other pages targeting other related keywords (3/5, 2524 words)
  • use subheadings of long winded post for hubpages
    • Hubpage 1 (words, links: )
    • Hubpage 2 (3/5, 1157, links: S1(a), S2(i))
    • Hubpage 2 (words, links: )
    • Hubpage 3 (words, links: )
  • use hubpages for article runs w/ one link to S1, one link to hub
    • Article 1 (words, links: )
    • Article 2 (3/6, 623, links: hub2, GFT(a))
    • Article 3 (words, links: )
    • Article 4 (words, links: )
  • submit to long winded post to a blog carnival
  • write post on S2 that targets “Pack Gangster Switches Net” (words, links: )
  • do S2 article run (words, links: )
  • write post on S3 targeting “Pack Gangster Switches Net” (words, links: )
  • do S3 article run (words, links: )
  • submit to a blog carnival
  • write hub for S3 post (words, links: )

keyword targets

keyword - searches - rank prepublish - 7 hours - 1 week - 2 weeks - 4 weeks - 8 weeks

Pack Gangster Switches Net 1 - 140 - (24) - (11)

Pack Gangster Switches Net 2 - 260 - (62) - (20)

Pack Gangster Switches Net 3 - n/a - (56) - (19)

Pack Gangster Switches Net 4 - 210 - (-) - (37)

Pack Gangster Switches Net 5- 140 - (36) - (13)

Pack Gangster Switches Net 6 - 480 - (-) - (60)

Pack Gangster Switches Net 7 - 320 - (-) - (139)

Packing Gangster - 201000 - (42) - (37)

Gangster With Packing - 54000 - (36) - (34)

I apologize if everything is a little cryptic here - I heard that it is best to make money online quietly so I am really taking that seriously.

The basic strategy that I outlined above was this - write a really long article on the money site for the a long tail (Pack Gangster Switches Net) of the money keyword (Pack Gangster) and to use my existing sites, hubpages, and article directories to support the money site.

I have already completed parts of this experiment and have seen some results in the SERPs for both the targeted long tail and the money keyword.  Before the post was published I ranked 24 for the long tail and 42 for the money word.  7 hours after publishing the post I improved to 11 and 34 respectively.

I think that this is only a temporary jump because of the recency bias that search engines has where they push the most recent content to the top of the SERPs.  If I want to maintain it I will have to get the links that will tell search engines that my site is the authority on Pack Gangster Switches Net which will help them think that I am the authority on Pack Gangsters.  Since I am one of the few individuals (as far as I know I am the only individual) who writes 2500 word posts on the topic I might just be the online authority on the topic.

But to make sure I am going to build some hubpages and write some article to submit to article directories.  These articles will help give some keyword relevancy to my hubpages and my money site.  I am also going to write related articles on my two sister sites and link them to my money site - solidifying its relevancy in the eyes of the search engines.

I hope to have the whole scheme completed in 4 weeks.  In that time I also hope to rank in the top 10 for the long tail that I have targeted while significantly increasing my rankings for the money term.  If at the end of 4 weeks things look good I might target another long tail or just wait to see how things work out after 4 more weeks of waiting, I’m not certain.  What I really want to see is my rankings improve so that I can make more money online.

By Steward | Posted in intermediate experiment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Backlinks For My Make Money Online Experiment For Beginners

March 2, 2009 – 3:55 pm

Backlinks Make Money Online

I just knew that in writing a post late at night I was going to leave something out.  I totally forgot some of the really important things about my experiment that I should really make clear so that we are all up to speed on what angle I am trying to work with this little experiment.

For starters, I want to see if a noob like me can get ranked for keywords of differing levels of difficulty.  As I mentioned in my initial Make Money Online Experiment For Beginners post I am targeting three major keywords with three different sites.  The first keyword is “debt” related and has massive competition.  The second is a less competitive but still at the outside of my reach as a noob SEO, it will be a stretch for me to get to this one.  And the last is a joke competition wise (an obscure brand of a particular type of home and garden product).

In terms of monetization, the first site could rake in hundreds of dollars a month because it is in a high traffic, high CPC niche.  Adsense would be my money maker on this puppy.  I would be happy with just getting a reasonable ranking for some of the longer tail terms and scrap out $5-10 a day.  But the potential is there to make lots and lots of money if my experiment has stunning results (*fingers crossed, eyes closed*).

The second site is relatively weak in terms of monetization.  The CPC is very low in terms of Adsense and I don’t think there will be much of an affiliate presence on this site - but you never know, people may want to buy things from me.  It could happen.  This site is really more about building something that interests me and fits in with the requirements of my experiment.

The third site has a small amount of traffic but the potential for huge affiliate sales and non-existent competition make the niche pretty appealing.  It may pan out to earn me $0 ever, but it is probably a good idea to build it for the farm anyway.

Now that we rehashed the sites that I am going to be building (which I outlined in the first post), lets talk about the topic of this one: how to get backlinks.

Any good SEO knows that the way to making money online in a sustainable fashion is to create high quality content that users like … that just happens to get very targeted backlinks.  Backlinks make money because they are the way search engines like Google know that you have content worth reading.  They count each link to a site as a vote for the quality of the site and they use the anchor text to understand the topic of what the vote is for.

You gain rankings in the SERPS as more and more people/sites vote for your site by giving it the anchors that you want to rank for.

But you probably know that already.

My Make Money Online Experiment For Beginners Backlink Plan

Because backlinks are so important I am not going to be leaving much of it to chance.  I am going to write quality, original content on each of the three blogs and I am going to work at getting this high quality, original content out to the internet using public.  I will achieve this goal by using the following tools of the trade:

  • Submissions to Blog Carnivals - These are mystical online events where site owners link liberally to other sites who want their article to be linked to.  Not ever niche has a corresponding carnival (for example, my first two site have carnivals that they can fit into while the third does not), but I long for a day when every niche will.  Carnivals are really useful in getting anchored backlinks from authority sites in your niche for free and have already gotten my really competitive site in the top 10 on Google for my sites name and I just started the site a few days ago.
  • Submissions to Article Directories - This is yet another way to get backlinks to your site of your choosing.  You get to write the content.  You get to decide which category it goes in.  You get to decide which page you link to and what the anchor is.  These aren’t always the highest quality links, but a link is a link is a link and these types of links are good for targeting long tails and mixing up the link profile.
  • Submissions to Web Directories - What can be said about Article Directories can also be said about web directories.  These can possibily be more valuable than articles, but I certainly haven’t found a really good one that has let any of my sites in for free.  A lot of good web directories cost money to join so I won’t be using any of those since this experiment is designed to see if you can make money online for free.
  • Using Griz’s Niche Support Page - A great, free resource for those looking for like minded webmasters in niches that you are working too.  I can personally atest to finding a couple dozen of backlinks on this page and I have not used it nearly as much as I should be.
  • Active Commenting - Oh, the time consuming act of finding dofollow blogs to comment on!  How I rue you!  But this is a tactic that does provide some results, and every little bit is going to help when you are a noob and need to get links that look natural and legit.  Too legit to quit, yea yea.
  • Hub/Lens Writing - Again, a free resources to build backlinks with.  They aren’t the greatest resource in the world but they seem like they work decently enough.
  • Guest Posting - This is the ultimate in link building because you can get on an authority blog and get the anchor text and the link destination that you are looking for.  I doubt I will get too many of these, but I am certainly looking for them.

For now, I am just going to be using Carnivals, Article Directories, and Commenting to get some mix in my two sites link profiles (there are three sites in the experiment, but the third site is going to see how high I can rank for the term I am targeting without any link building).  I’m hoping this make money online experiment turns out well.

By Steward | Posted in beginner experiment | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Making Money With Hubpages Experiment Limited Success

March 1, 2009 – 3:00 pm

Five weeks have passed since I created a free hubpage and used a fellow make money online blogger’s AMA and UAW account to send some links to the hub. I structured the link building to be a surge and then a trickle of links to see how this type of link building works. The hub was also targeted a product that I thought people may want to buy so that I could see if hubpages was a good place to actaully make some money.

So let’s get down to the nitty gritty and see how this site is faring given the criteria I outlined for this experiment:

  • Is the page indexed? Yes, my hub is indexed and has been indexed pretty much since the beginning.
  • What are my rankings for a series of related keywords?
  • How many links do I have? Yahoo Site Explorer says that I have 60 links - 35 from hubpages, 25 from other sources.  Google says I have 2 links.
  • Am I getting any traffic? Hubpage stats tell me that 86 people have seen my hub, but probably a dozen or so have been me.  So let’s peg the number of visits to 75 just to keep numbers semi-accurate.  47 of those visitor have come from search engines.  According to my Amazon stats, I have sent 11 clicks over to Amazon from this hub and of those 11 clicks 1 person has made a purchase.
  • How much money have I made? $4.20.  This turns into $0.84 a week, $0.12 a day.  This isn’t much, but I still remember when I got excited about earning that much in one day with Adsense less than a year ago!

I am actaully very surprised that I have earned any money at all, so that is why I have counted this experiment as a success - albeit a limited one.  I classify it as limited because I don’t really rank on the first page of Google for any of the longtails that I targeted and I’m not even in the top 200 for the main keyword that I targeted - ouch!

I think there is definitely going to be a part two to this experiment (and maybe even a part 3).  It certainly isn’t the highest priority on my to-do list, but it does seem like a way to earn money online.

By Steward | Posted in intermediate experiment | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

My How To Make Make Money Online Experiment For Beginners

February 27, 2009 – 11:24 pm

Welcome to my ugly Wordpress blog about making money online!

My name is Steward and I am a internet marketing noob.  I started a blog for the fun of it back in December 2007 and thought it would be nice to make a little bit of money off of my entirely too witty and juvenile posts about personal finance.  Over a year later and I think my personal finance blog has made me a grand total of $20.  That is the result of hours and hours of work crafting the best possible posts, doing my gosh darned best to make sure that it would get all that traffic from people seeing my good titles at a blog carnival and making there way over to my site.  I even went a little crazy and added some Google Adsense to the blog to see what would happen.

The short of it is that I didn’t make any money and my witty titles weren’t even that good.  Nobody came to blog.  Nobody subscribed to my RSS feed.  Nobody left a comment.  Nobody cared about what I had to say.

Except for one article.  I wrote a post about pet monkeys that got picked up by Consumerist.  It got placed on WoW message boards.  It got on that one MSN blog about money.  It didn’t make me any money, but I got comments - real live comments from real live people.  It was awesome.

A little perplexed about how to get this whole money-from-the-magical-internet-land-and-into-my-pocket thing going I started searching around the web for people who wanted to teach me, for free, how to get by on the world wide web.  It wasn’t too long before I got introduced to a couple of blogs who this site will try to emulate.  Even the fugly blog is a hat tip to someone who has taught me a lot about this whole way of doing business here.

Don’t get me wrong, I am no SEO.  I can’t seem to figure out keywords and backlinks and on-page optimization for the life of me.  I’m a beginner still even though I’ve had sites up for almost a year now that are designed specifically to rank well in the SERPS.  I still only make a little over $200 a month.  I certainly have no new information to offer to the MMO community nor do I pretend to.

Instead, this little blog is going to be all about my experiments in making money online and it is going to come from a beginners perspective.  This could be valuable for a few reasons:

  1. Once I do begin to start pulling in $200 a day instead of $200 a month I can have some clear and solid documentation of my journey.  I’ve already missed documenting my first 10 months of the journey.  Thankfully not that much has happened in that time span. :)
  2. Once I have gotten a little better at the Search Engine Optimization other new beginners can look back on my beginnings and learn a lot from my mistakes and my successes.
  3. I am hopelessly self absorbed, so I want other people to read what I have to say and like me.  I want them to really, really like me.

Luckily no one will read this blog … ever … probably … I mean you never know, maybe somebody will read it eventually.

My Initial How To Make Make Money Online Experiment For Beginners

So lets get the party started with a little bit of experimentation.  My first experiment is a doozy and could take about a year to work itself out.  I have chosen to build three different sites and compare how an entirely free method of content generation and link building will affect the sites respective rankings in the SERPS.

Let’s start off with the ground rules:

  • Each site will be set up on blogger and will contain the phrase that I am trying to rank for
  • Each site will be ugly
  • Each site will have articles written personally by me
  • Each site will only have links that I can get for free (article directories, website directories, blog carnivals, message boards, comments, etc.)
  • Each site will not contain any form of monetization until I feel like I am leaving so much on the table that I have to add Adsense or some Amazon Affiliate links

Now a little bit about these websites.  The first one is in a very competitive nich - very competitive.  You know it is competitive because it has the word debt in it and the Google Adwords tool says that the word has around a million monthly searches and the estimated average CPC is above $20.  No that is  a niche that might have some money in it.  Oh, and I would use Adsense on this sight as my way to make money off of it.

It is also a niche that I expect to have absolutely no chance in, and that is exactly the point.  I want to see how well a decently optimized site for a specific, highly competitive niche is going to do after a years worth of free, completely white hat link building.  Well, maybe not completely white hat since any link building is kind of against Google’s rules - but I won’t buy links.  Not for the experiment anyway.

I’ll try to write one post a week for this sucker.

The second site is in a considerably less competitive niche, getting maybe 30000 searches according to the Google Adword tool.  The site will have some pretty good lateral movement if I can make it an authority site by the end of a year and that could greatly increase the amount of traffic that I can get from the site.  It is also a site that could have great affiliate sales if I do things the right way.

I’m going to write articles for this one as I feel the urge to.  It is kind of one of my hobbies so it shouldn’t be too hard for me to put some things together.

The third site is extremely weak niche with very little traffic but the potential for massive revenue off of affiliate sales.  Just one purchase a month could make me $50-$100.  When I only make ~$200 a month online that is a lot!

The plan with this one is to only write about 10 or so articles and get it some really good internal linking structure and see what happens to the site in the SERPS sans any link building on my part.  I want to see how Gooogle will rank it just based upon the content alone.  Right now the site sits around 250 with a total of 2 posts on it.  I’m hopeful.

Well, that about does it for my first post on this blog.  I hope that we all enjoy my journey to making money online … well I guess I just hope that I enjoy the journey, if you enjoy it too that would just be gravy on the cake.

By Steward | Posted in beginner experiment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)