After people have been blogging for a while, they start to hear that it’s possible to make money blogging. This usually leads them to articles like this one.

Types Of Blogs That Make Money

The blogs that make the most money are almost always blogs that share advice. News blogs also make money but it’s significantly harder to make money with a blog that provides news. Personal blogs rarely make a lot of money. In order to make a lot of money, your blog needs to line up with information that a lot of people are looking for.

Advice Blogs That Make A Lot Of Money

• StevePavlina.com – Personal Development
• ProBlogger.net – Blogging
• Digital Photography School – Digital Photography
• CopyBlogger.com – Copywriting
• Lifehacker – Productivity
• Get Rich Slowly – Personal Finance

There are of course thousands upon thousands of blogs that make a lot of money. Right here in The Keyword Academy community we have hundreds of people who are making great income from their blogs. Some of them are blogging daily and others are simply providing information on blogs that are rarely updated. It’s very possible to use either approach once you understand the concepts that lead to making money.

How To Get Paid To Blog

Step 1 in this process is starting a blog that lines up with information that people are trying to find. There are a lot of people who hope that they can make money with their personal blogs. However, massive amounts of people aren’t going to be interested in seeing pictures of your kids or in hearing about your latest trip. You would be a lot more likely to generate interest and traffic if you provided tips about your profession and/or hobbies.

The technical side of getting a blog going shouldn’t be too difficult for people that already have personal blogs. The setup will be virtually identical, it’s the topic that will be different.

How To Choose A Topic

Choosing a topic really isn’t that difficult. I personally like using an online tool to determine the size of the audience that’s looking for information. The tool shows you how many people are searching for things in Google. By entering ‘digital photography’ into the tool, I can see how many people are searching for it each month. By comparing the results against those from other topics, I can get an idea of how large the audiences for each are.

How To Develop A Popular Blog

There are two keys to developing a popular blog. The first is bringing traffic to the blog and the second is providing solid information that people look for. The Keyword Academy is full of information on developing traffic. We help people to learn to bring steady traffic from Google.

How To Make Money With Your Blog

Once you have a blog that gets a lot of traffic, it’s pretty easy to make money. Some people use advertising programs like Google Adsense and others sell their own ads. Adsense is by far the easiest way to make money and it can be used to make money on most blogs that get traffic.

Further down the road you can consider using more advanced forms of making money like affiliate marketing (selling the products of other people and companies) and even selling your own products. This of course is optional and is something that you should only consider when you are already producing income with your blog.

As you can probably see, there is quite a bit to learn. We have already created a lot of material here at The Keyword Academy that can help. There are a lot of people who have used that material to get started and have already been producing significant incomes. It takes some time to learn but it’s honestly a great way to make money.

The most important aspect of choosing a good URL to use is making sure that it’s a URL that targets a keyword phrase that’s searched for in Google. The title of this post (How To Pick Your URLs For The Challenge) would ironically be worthless for this challenge. Think about it – no one will search for ‘how to pick your urls for the challenge’ in a million years so there’s no point in getting ranked for the phrase in Google.

Using a URL that targeted the keyword ‘bowling ball bags’ would be a lot smarter. Why? Because people actually search for ‘bowling ball bags’ in Google – 5400 times per month. This certainly isn’t the best keyword in the history of the universe but it’s much better than the alternative in this example.

What To Do To Get Started

The first step in getting started is to pick one URL from your portfolio that targets a keyword. This might be your home page or this might be a post page. Some of your have e-commerce sites so for you this might be a page that sells products. Any of these will do as long as they target a keyword.

Some of you may be new to making money online and for you, you may not have many URLs to work with. For you, you may need to do some keyword research, article writing, and publishing to even get started. This challenge will be extremely effective for you since it illustrates some of the important aspects of creating online profits.

Bloggers

Since many people who read TKA are bloggers, I want to address blogging specifically. This experiment/challenge can be extremely effective for bloggers but could also be a colossal waste of time. Bloggers traditionally have many, many URLs that don’t target specific keyword phrases. The post you’re currently reading is one such example. As a blogger you need to be especially careful to build your links to URLs that were created to target specific keywords. If you’re unfamiliar with this process I would highly recommend reading this post: How To Target A Keyword With A Post Page. The first step for you may be creating a keyword targeted post that you can then get some links for.

Keyword Research For The Challenge

Since many of you are quite new, I want to give some advice that pertains to keyword research. The TKA members know exactly how to pick the proper keywords – let me help you out a little in that arena.

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is your best friend when it comes to keyword research. You want to find keywords with decent search volume when the tool is set to exact match. <——- This is highly important. I would recommend finding keywords that have search volumes over about 3,000 and CPCs over $1. Once you have decent keywords you can target them with post pages.

You can also search for your keywords in Google, check the PageRank of the pages that rank up top if you want to get an idea of how strong your competition is.

Those who achieve the best results with this experiment will be those who choose the best keywords.

For Those Who Have Plenty Of Keyword Targeting URLs

Those of you who already have lots of keyword-rich content are ahead of the curve. I would make a list of all of the URLs you have that currently get little traffic. I would then choose keywords based on search volume and CPCs. Higher numbers in those two areas will provide you with more potential to make profits.

Another aspect that you can consider in this process is finding keywords that you already rank somewhere for. If you have a keyword that you rank on page 2 or page 3 for, this experiment will help you considerably.

The key here is to choose one URL each day, improve it, and then move on the next day to a new URL.

• Niche sites
• Supersites
• Blogs

Each of the three is entirely different but each can be used to make money online.

If you listen to the blogging ‘gurus’, they will tell you that blogging is an awesome way to create passive income. That belief is BULL. The whole point of a blog is the expectation that the blogger will be publishing additional content. You need your readers to believe that you’ll post updates – that’s what makes them come back for more. The entire nature of a blog goes against ‘passive principles’.

Blogging is one of the most high maintenance methods for making money online. It requires a lot more work than email marketing, niche sites, list management, and creating informational supersites. In many cases, blogging will require more work than even a traditional e-commerce site that sells products.

That said, it’s obvious that blogs can produce a LOT of income. However, before you create more work for yourself than you want to take on, you have to ask yourself if you’re willing to put in the time that it takes to maintain your blog’s income. Most of the successful bloggers I know spend all day every day taking care of their blogs and many of them don’t make as much as you would hope.

I personally think that many bloggers would be happier going with a niche site approach or by setting up informational supersites. These methods are a lot more passive, once they are set up and functioning properly.

Blogging Is Better For Certain Personalities

People who are really social seem to do the best with blogs. They crave interaction with other people so posting and taking care of the readership doesn’t seem like a huge task to them. Other people who are less social will struggle a lot more with this aspect.

When you make a decision on what type of online business you want to have, I would ask yourself how much interaction you crave. You can make a lot of money either way so I wouldn’t use money as the determining factor. If you WANT to spend your time interactiong with people all day, a blog is a great choice. If you don’t, it’s a terrible one.

In 2005, I came across a forum thread where people were talking about making money with Google, eBay, and Amazon. During that time period I also met a guy who made all of his money promoting eBay. I had no idea how any of it worked but I was really interested. I didn’t love my job and was looking for an out.

…fast forward to 2010.

In the last five years I have successfully made the transition from knowing absolutely nothing to making a lot of money with Google. This article will share some insights into how this is possible.

Google Does NOT Hire People To Work From Home

When I first started hearing about making money with Google, I assumed that they hired people to work from home. As far as I know, this isn’t the case. In the last five years, I have never met a person who works from home, for Google. However, I know a lot of people who making money by promoting Google’s programs. I also know a lot of people who make a lot of money because they use Google as a source of traffic to their websites.

How To Get Started

In order to start making money with these methods, you really need to have your own website. Fortunately, this isn’t difficult at all. I have a free e-book that will walk you through the process of setting up a site. Having your own site is cheap and somewhat easy. If you want to learn how to set up your own site, you can learn by downloading the e-book here (it also tells the story of exactly how I went from making nothing to more than $15,000 per month).

How The Money Is Actually Made

Google’s money is made by producing clicks for advertisers. This happens in two places:

1. On Google’s search engine – Google.com
2. On other people’s websites (your site can be one of these)

The second program is called Google Adsense. As part of the program, Google allows people who have websites to place ads on their website’s pages. When their visitors click on an ad, Google gets paid. Google shares that revenue with the website owner.

This means that you can start a website, place Google ads on it, and get paid when your visitors click on an ad. On average, you can count on around 5% of your website’s visitors to click on an ad. The amount you get paid varies but is usually somewhere between $0.10 and $1.00 per click. The science of getting higher paying clicks is also covered in my free e-book.

How To Get Visitors To Your Website

The visitors that I get on my websites come from a variety of sources. One of my biggest sources of traffic is Google.com. I put articles on my websites that I believe will match up with what people are searching for. This allows my websites to show up in Google’s search engine. People click on my site and visit. Around 5% of them click on an ad and I get paid.

I’m not going to include tips for getting traffic in this guide, but it’s all in the free e-book.

We’ve talked a lot about HubPages in the forum and people have asked what would happen if the same amount of content was added to their own sites.

Obviously I haven’t tested that out yet but I plan to.

HubPages will produce a lot more profit than you could get out of a brand new site. This is because HubPages is a strong site and it’s been around for a while. You aren’t going to be able to pull the same amount of traffic to a brand new site, pretty much no matter what.

The question in my mind is whether I can do the same experiment on a site that’s been around for a year and produce more/just-as-much profit. I know that not everyone has an older site to work with. If you’re in that position, this is what I would do to get things going:

• Get some sites up NOW. With a Host Gator Baby account you can host as many sites as you want for less than $10 per month. There will be more experiments and lessons that you can use if you have a site. If you don’t have any sites you’ll feel like you’re missing out again and again.
• Get your sites indexed. This will start the traffic clock now. As more time goes on, it will become easier to get traffic to these sites.
• Use HubPages to build up cash flow to pay for your hosting. It isn’t hard at all to make $10/month on HubPages.

I personally have multiple sites that I started over a year ago and I’m going to use one of them for this experiment.

About The Experiment

This experiment will be a lot like the experiment that I did with HubPages, except instead of adding 100 articles to HubPages, I’ll be adding them to one of my existing sites as blog posts. The site runs on WordPress and the posts will be created around keywords that I believe I can get ranked for.

I’ll be tracking this experiment with a unique tracking channel in Adsense and will post the results each week. If you don’t want to miss any of the updates, make sure to subscribe to our RSS feed.

Week 2 went really well. During the seven days of week 2 my hubs produced $112.56:

On the worst day of week 2, my hubs made $8.01 and on the best day they made $23.21. The average day of week 2 produced $16.08. Multiply that out over a 30 day period and you’re looking at $482.40. I still expect that number to grow a lot for month 2 – that’s just how it works. With a little more age these hubs will start to do better in Google, Yahoo, and MSN and that will bring more traffic and more revenue.

New Income Estimates

Since week 2 was surprisingly strong, I need to adjust my estimates for growth. I thought that the experiment would make at least $300 for the month and it has already made $168.76. I think that it should make at least triple that number in month 1, which would give us $506.28. The hubs should easily be able to triple that number for month 2 so I’m going to raise my month 2 estimate to $1500.

I now have over half of the hubs done. I planned on having them all done by this weekened but I’m a little behind that pace. It might take me the entire month to finish all 100.

General Advice For Making Money With HubPages

• Target non-competitive keyword phrases that have decent Adwords CPCs.
• Make solid hubs. Most of my hubs are at least 800 original words and contain useful links, feeds, news, and videos.
• Give links from hubs to related hubs that you have.

I’ve already done a lot of work, but it has definitely been worth it. The nice thing about committing myself to this experiment here on the blog is that it’s easier to motivate myself to get it done. So far I’ve been doing the experiment for a week and have written about 40 solid hubs. So far the experiment has made $56.20 (it’s 100% Adsense income). I expect the experiment to yield at least $300 this month and more than $1000 next month. I’m sure that you’re going to want to know where I’m getting these numbers from. I haven’t made a spreadsheet for this or anything but generally speaking, any web property will perform better as time goes on. I see this time and time again and know that these hubs probably aren’t going to get worse, they’re going to get better.

By the end of the experiment I will also have 60 more hubs out there and that adds to the potential. I would expect them to perform just as well as the ones I have so even if the hubs I already have stay the same, I should make $140.50 during the last week of the experiment. That’s approximately $56.20 for the hubs I have and $83 for the 60 hubs that I still need to make.

The total income for each of the next two weeks should be somewhere between the $56.20 and the $140. It could be better than that or slightly worse – we’re just going to have to see.

The $1000 number for next month is based on the fact that there is almost always more traffic to be had after the pages are up for more than a month. If they produce $140 during the last week of the 30 day experiment, they should for sure average over $200 for next month and probably over $250.

General Advice For Making Money With HubPages

• Target non-competitive keyword phrases that have decent Adwords CPCs.
• Make solid hubs. Most of my hubs are at least 800 original words and contain useful links, feeds, news, and videos.
• Give links from hubs to related hubs that you have.

As most of you know, last week I wrote about a new making money online experiment. I’m going to be creating 100 hubs on HubPages. When I wrote about the experiment I talked about how I was amazed at how well the few hubs I had were performing.

When I first started on HubPages, I created just a few hubs and didn’t really put any time into them. I didn’t try to get any other sites to link to them or anything, I was just going off of the strength that’s already on HubPages. It worked and I was very quickly earning $3 or $4 per day. That led me to want to try a much larger experiment with HubPages, which I am now doing.

The guys at HubPages got involved and asked me to wait until Monday to start so that they could issue a challenge to their members. I went with that, so Monday was my first day of making hubs.

My First Day Of Creating New Hubs

A very interesting thing happened on Monday and it’s a little thing, but I thought that sharing it might help a few of you. I worked quite a bit on my hubs Monday and I was all suped up to get a bunch of hubs done. I got curious about how much my existing hubs had made on Adsense, so I decided to check it out. I logged into my Adsense account to find that I had made exactly $0 from my hubs. As much as I try to act like I’m invinceable  – I’m not. I was bugged. I had gotten myself all pumped up and honestly that stole a lot of my energy. Even though I was bugged, I decided to work anyway and got my hubs done.

Later that night I decided to make some more hubs. Stupidly, I logged into my Adsense account to see how I was doing with my existing hubs. I had made a whopping $0 for the day. No matter who you are this is deflating. I thought back to when I was a newbie and how almost every day was like this, except much worse. See, now it’s easier for me because even though my hubs hadn’t made anything, my Adsense account still looks pretty dang good. I know that many of you don’t have that luxury right now. To tell you the truth that didn’t help me a ton, I was still really bugged that my hubs hadn’t made anything.

Naturally you start to ask yourself questions. You don’t want to waste your own time. “Am I doing this right?”, “Is this really going to pay off?”

At that point in the game you have two options. You can accept defeat or you can fight through it. I chose to fight through it. I don’t think I’m all that great or anything, I’m fortunate to have experience on my side. I know that it will work if I pay the price. I decided to let the roadblock motivate me to massive action. I had 8 hubs done by the time I went to bed.

A pattern that I’ve seen again and again in my life is that if I will persist through adversity, I get rewarded. Yesterday I made $8.55 off of my new hubs. That isn’t a million dollars but it might as well be – it feels like a million dollars to me. Adversity tried to shut me down on Monday and I overcame it.

Making money online is a very mental game. You have to get yourself to believe that you’re going to overcome.

A Solid Hub Dropped From The Rankings

I found a really solid keyword and decided to make a hub about it. Those of you that are paid members of the crash course here know exactly how I go about choosing my keywords and this keyword is a real winner. I created the hub and was STOKED to find that it ranked top 10 in Google within a few hours of publishing the post. It’s obviously never a bad thing to pop right into the rankings out of the gate.

The interesting thing is that this morning, that hub is nowhere to be found. I have to believe that this has happened to a bunch of you because it happens to me all the time with all different types of sites, posts, and static pages. Poof! Ghandi…

There we go again guys – these are the deflating obstacles that we all have to face every day. I bet when this happens to you, you start questioning whether you’re doing it right or not. I bet you start questioning me and the methods I outline. I bet you consider giving up. Don’t do it. These things have a way of working themselves out.

My hub isn’t gone for good in fact I can all but guarantee that it will be back and better than ever. When this stuff happens you have to go back to the basics and make sure your bases are covered. The basics are targeting the keyword and using links to strengthen the post, hub, or page.

Guys I can promise you that when all is said and done, it’s going to come down to those two things. The mystical force that booted my hub from the rankings is just a fickle, stupid thing. I probably had enough links from HubPages.com to make it show up in the SERPs and when those links dropped from wherever they were, it dropped out. I’ll give it a few links from other hubs and it will be right back where it was before. This might take a week or more and I’m not going to beat myself up over what happened. I’ve seen pages resurrect themselves a hundred times and this time isn’t going to be any different.

This might be hard to stomach but in the end no one deserves to do great things if they can’t overcome obstacles. Our minds fight against us every day and we have to learn how to persevere. When you get knocked down you have to get back up.

When I really need a pick-me-up, here’s a video that I like to watch. I hope you guys like it as much as I do.

That said, lately for some reason I’ve been thinking a lot about all of the advantages of having one. I obviously have profited a ton by having one and would like to share a few insights. I still don’t think that an MMO blog should be your only site, but it seems to me that it can be a healthy addition to your online portfolio.

1. You can get most tools and services for free. I honestly don’t pay for much these days and the few products and services that I do pay for and like are easily paid for with affiliate commissions. I would never continue to pay for a product or service that I don’t like and use and if I use it, I pass it on to other people that are probably already looking for something like it and/or have use for it. I don’t promote hardly anything because I don’t use most of the products I try out. The secret to selling a lot of affiliate product is not promoting stuff that doesn’t work.
2. Having a record of what you have learned. I sometimes go through the archives of Court’s Internet Marketing School just to make sure that there isn’t something important that I’ve forgotten about. Every once in a while I forget about a useful plugin or practice that worked well and I’m glad I have a journal that I can go back to.
3. You can build up a lot of influenceEven if you never become a popular ‘make money online’ blogger, you can build a lot of influence – especially local influence. I turn down local SEO and SEO consulting gigs all the time because I simply don’t have the time. If you know how to get traffic and make money at all you’re better off than 99.9% of the people in the world. If you ever plan on capitalizing on that you probably want to start your site now so that by the time your skills are ready you already have something.

I think that most people who start ‘make money online’ blogs think that it will be their primary earner and this is the wrong mindset, in my opinion. If you use your MMO blog to pay for your internet marketing type products, to record what you have learned, and to build long-term influence, it’s definitely worth having one. If you use a Host Gator hosting account with unlimited domains, you will only have to pay for the domain you use, and that will cost less than $10 and at that price there’s no reason to put a bunch of pressure on yourself. You don’t need to turn the world upside down for it to be worth it.

Right out of the gate I added about five posts to each site – I wrote a few of them myself and outsourced the others for around $4 each. I love outsourcing. I get adequate content at a great price, and my outsourcer gets a nice side income for doing some easy work.

After adding the content to the sites, I decided that I should dedicate my link building effort mostly to one of the sites so I didn’t spread myself too thin and get nowhere. I set up a Unique Article Wizard submission schedule that looked like this:

• 2 submissions per day:
• 1 submission for my main focus site.
• 1 submission rotating through my other four sites.
• All UAW submissions set to 20 directories per day (to keep things kind of slow at the beginning. These are aged sites with some backlinks, but I didn’t want to get too crazy too fast).

I’ve done okay with my UAW submission schedule, but I’m probably behind by a few days.

I also went straight to Grizz’s link support page and sent about 70 emails in one day looking for link trades. I didn’t keep track of how many I got from those emails, but it was quite a few. I managed to almost completely avoid direct reciprocal trades; I send links from one site in order to get them for my money site. That being said, I did a few direct reciprocal trades because they help too, just not as much.

Sidenote: some people have some really funny ideas about link trading. When people offer you trades it’s in your best interest to accept them. Because finding trade partners is so costly in time, Court and I regularly accept link trades that don’t appear equal on paper just because it a) it gets us links and b) it’s not like we’re cutting off a limb – what do I care if I’m giving a PR 1 link and only getting a PR 0 in return?

After working my way through Grizz’s support page I set up about 30 supporting mini-blogs on blogger and worked those URLs into my UAW rotation so they’d all get indexed. Many of them are now indexed so I’ll start using them to improve the link profile of my money sites.

And that’s about it. Where I’ve been lazy and need to improve is getting individual links from places like ezinearticles.com and hubpages.com etc. There isn’t a lot of leverage in those links (takes quite a bit of time for not so many links), but those are some authoritative domains and getting a link from them does help.

The site I’m actively building links for is starting to see traffic and clicks, albeit just a trickle really. On Feb 17 the site got 10 unique visitors; over the last three days it’s averaging about 50 uniques per day. I only have adsense on two of the sites right now (mostly because I’ve been lazy about adding it to the others) and the new sites are on pace to earn about $100 this month. Nothing too exciting, but I thought you’d like to see that it’s boring and tedious for us in the early days too. I still fully expect to reach my September goal, or at the very least make some serious progress by then.

Another point of interest might be that I’m targeting multiple keywords with all these sites. The method we usually teach is one site, one keyword – and that obviously works great. But it is possible to turn small sites into big sites, and there’s a lot of money to be made when you pull it off. I’m pretty sure our $24 webinar for March will teach something along these lines. Court and I will finalize plans for the session and I’ll probably announce the details Monday.

Have a greet weekend!

Mark