Posts Tagged ‘make money’

How To Make Money With Google – The Beginner’s Guide

January 5th, 2010  |  by Court  |  Published in Explanations, For Beginners  |  113 Comments

Introduction

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.

How To Make Money On The Internet In 2010

October 12th, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in Content, Link Building, SEO, Web Traffic  |  28 Comments

2009 has been by far my best year ever for making money on the internet. Despite the recession, my online businesses have grown amazingly well and that’s the beauty of running a business that gives you a limitless upside. When your business is online, you can create profit from all over the world – what a beautiful thing. I noticed today that one of my sites has had visitors from 176 different countries in 2009.

How crazy is that? It’s obviously a lot easier to produce a lot of money when the world is your marketplace.

Making money online is one of the most exciting things out there, but it’s also one of the hardest things to learn. There will be more money to be made in 2010 than ever. However, it will also be harder to learn. Why? Because there will be more and more garbage to sort through. There will be more crap blogs to read and more ebooks written by people who only know how to make money by selling ebooks. If you get sucked in by too many of these products, you will find it very difficult to get anywhere. You will find the information to be very contradictory and that will cause you to freeze up as you try to implement what you have learned.

If you would like for 2010 to be an awesome year for making money, this guide will serve as a road map. If you get off track, revisit the concepts presented here. They have helped me to create a lot of income for myself and have also helped me to avoid putting time into things that don’t pay off.

1. Follow your interests. I believe that one of the biggest reasons I have done well is that I have always either created sites that I was really passionate about, or have been able to get really interested in the topics I wanted to create sites about. I have made plenty of money with other types of sites (that I wasn’t as interested in) but my sites that have really flourished are that ones that I like the most.

2. Develop web real estate, aka build web sites. There are a lot of ways to make money online, but there’s only one that can provide you with near-residual income. Plan out sites, get them up, and start developing. If you want to produce in 2010 you need to start now. Income doesn’t appear overnight.

If you have already created some sites you’re ahead of the game. If they aren’t producing, move on to #3.

3. Research, research, research. Liking the topic of your websites can definitely help you to grow your income, but this won’t happen if there isn’t a market for the information/products your provide. Take a look at whether there are already sites that cover the topic you’re thinking about. If there are, it’s a good thing – it means that there’s probably money there and you’ll be able to emulate some of the things that those sites are doing.

Digging into your markets to discover additional keywords and subtopics is a hugely important aspect of the game we play. There are probably a lot of untapped traffic sources that you haven’t found, simply because you haven’t looked hard enough.

4. Help a lot of people. Your site will produce 100 times more if you want to really help people along the way. I get a lot of satisfaction out of knowing that what we’re doing here at The Keyword Academy helps people to produce real income. In our forum we have earnings badges that help us to see how our members are doing and there’s a huge payoff every time I see people with new badges (this is especially true when I see earnings badges pop up for members from third world countries). Since we really care about helping the people who use our site, it makes it a lot easier to market. Our members help us to get the word out because they know how much we can help the people they know.

If you’re only in it for the money, it’s going to be a lot harder for you. No matter what the topic of your site is, there will be people who have problems and questions. If you can figure out ways to provide them with solutions to those problems, you won’t have any trouble getting business or traffic.

5. Reduce your information intake. The people I know who make a lot of money online spend very little time reading blogs, watching videos, and interacting with their online pals. A certain degree of interaction is important for everyone, but money comes because of work. If you spend all of your time trying to learn, you aren’t getting much closer to actually producing income. In fact, you might be filling your mind with knowledge that will be detrimental to your success.

Don’t get me wrong, knowledge is very important. However, it can also become a huge addiction that can waste way too much time. Be wary of unproven sources of information.

6. Focus on volume. If your site provides information, provide a lot of information. If your site provides tools, provide a lot of useful tools. Creating more content will help you to increase your site’s traffic, especially if you’re creating keyword rich content. You may be trying to figure out why you have little traffic. A mental shift toward increasing volume can be extremely beneficial. A site that only has one keyword rich article would perform a lot better with 10. A site with 10 keyword rich articles would perform a lot better with 100. A site with 100 would perform a lot better with 1000.

Think about the people who would read your site and map out all of the information that they will need to accomplish their goals. In a lot of niches this will give you an unlimited supply of topics to cover.

Ask any real marketer and they will tell you that search traffic converts better than any type of traffic, for sales, clicks, and leads. In order to create that traffic you will need to do your research well and then create content based around your research. If you create more content, you can obviously plan on getting more search traffic. You should read our 100 blog posts experiment if you need further proof.

7. Squeeze the orange. In other words, think about how to get more from your existing traffic. Is there a product that you can create and sell? Can you upsell from that product? Can you sell more advertising? Can you use better placement on pay-per-click ads such as Adsense? Can you sell more affiliate product?

Some of the biggest gains I have been able to make in income in 2009 came with no traffic increase. Mark and I talk all the time about how we can get more out of our projects and when you have it on your mind, ideas will manifest themselves.

Make Money With 100 Blog Posts Final Stats and Recap

September 22nd, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in Content  |  60 Comments

On July 27th, I started a very interesting experiment. I decided to find 100 keywords that weren’t super competitive, write blog posts about them on one of my blogs, and track the results. I believed that if I chose the right keywords, I could create a lot of extra income.

The experiment produced great results:

  • During the first week, the experiment produced $371.98.
  • During the second week, the experiment produced $678.62.
  • During the third week, the experiment produced $780.40.
  • During the last 9 days, the experiment produced $848.59.

That means that the grand total of the 30 days was $2,679.59:

Obviously I’m pretty happy about how well the experiment went. It goes to show that know which keywords to post about can go a long way.

Now that this experiment is said and done, I can offer some advice for people who are thinking about taking on a project like this. There are a few things that come to mind:

  • Spend enough time on the research phase. Choosing the right keywords is key. If you have keywords that are too difficult, it will be pretty difficult to get amazing results. If you have worthless keywords, they won’t produce any income, even if they produce traffic (You can use the Adwords Tool to look at the prices advertisers are buying traffic for).
  • Learn how to write well. I’m not saying that I’m a world class writer. I know that I’m not. However, I try hard to write posts that will give people the information that they are looking for. I can tell you that I get a lot of natural links because of that and it makes all the difference in the world. If you can learn how to write what people are looking for, you’ll be better off in the long run.
  • Consider keywords when you write. I would still focus on writing what people are looking for, but it would be completely stupid to not include your keyword(s) in your writing. I try not to think about keyword density and that stuff – I simply make sure that my keywords can be found within my blog posts.
  • Stretch yourself. Doing a lot of writing is difficult for anyone. However, volume is a key aspect of the game and the more content you have, the easier it is to get traffic.
  • Continue to develop your sites. There are a lot of people out there who jump from site to site to site and there are some fundamental problems with that. In order to really get a site to perform well you have to continue to develop it over time. As time passes it starts to work in your favor, as long as you continue to develop. People usually quit before they get that far but if you can get there, you can make some pretty crazy things happen.

The biggest lesson that I learned through this experiment is that volume matters. It isn’t the only thing that matters, but it matters. It seems that most of us don’t push ourselves as much as we should to accomplish more and sometimes it takes a challenge or an experiment like this to get us to actually perform.

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