UPDATE NOVEMBER 2016 – Yup BubbleWS is long gone- the only good thing is that I have copies of most of the content I wrote there so I can reuse it. If you are still using 3rd party sites- PLEASE make sure you keep copies of content!
Yes – I know it’s been a while – life got busy – to great advantage of my bank account, not so much my blogs. Long story short, I got some lucrative freelancing opportunities, which were fun and paid well. Plus I found a brand new online distraction.
Friends on Facebook talked about it, and talked, and talked.
I ignored them, for weeks. They said it was more fun than Hubpages in the early days.
I ignored them, Hubpages made me my first $1 online, and broke my heart later when their business model went bad. I was well over third-party writing sites. I was focussed elsewhere.
And still they went on about it. After a 12 hour day, I took a peak.
They said it was a Facebook killer – that sounded good to me – Facebook is annoying me more and more with their intrusive ads, and my inability to contact my own followers without paying $5.
The new site was interesting – I went for a minute, I stayed for an hour.
I signed up – and posted something short about the earthquake we’d just had – earthquakes, even ones that cause no damage make it quite hard to concentrate.
I checked my stats – I’d made a $1.
I was hooked. Not for the $1 – but for the fact the site is fun. It is quite like Facebook – it’s not just another site to write SEO articles. In fact that might be worst thing you can do. Real people looking to socially connect with you probably won’t click through to an article titles “25 Ways To Attract Women” – they are far more likely to click on “Why my love life sucks”.
BubbleWS For Writers
What I do think BubbleWS is good for is that it’s fun for writers. If you have never written online- it’s the easiest way I’ve ever seen to get an audience. Plus you get paid for every view, every comment, every “like” you get.
Plus it’s bloody addictive – because most of the people there are real people. So they will give you real feedback – want to write humour or fiction – no problem. There are almost no restrictions.
It’s a great way to improve your writing – by practice. You will learn how much difference a compelling headline makes. You’ll see what works and what doesn’t almost in real-time. That’s an education you can’t buy.
BubbleWS For Cynics
I’ve seen plenty written about how this will fail, it’s not sustainable, and anyway they can’t be making any money. They probably aren’t making money (neither is twitter, tumblr, or facebook until very recently). They have investors, they have traffic, they have raving fans. That’s a bloody good start for a site which is only a year old.
They are getting ad revenue based on impressions not on clicks. 90% of their traffic is NOT from search. Though Google likes the site and seems to index my bubbles quickly.
That said, not every $25 (the minimum redeem level) is paid. Most non-payments are probably due to people breaking the rules. The rules are pretty simple:
don’t steal – words or photos
don’t use exchange groups to artificially increase your views
don’t use traffic exchanges, proxies etc etc
no porn
minimum of 400 characters (NOT words)
no pictures only
use English
no referral links to other sites.
Note I’ve played it VERY conservatively – all images are either copy-free, free to share with attribution, or mine. I’ve done very few external links. I’ve just asked for my first $25 redemption – should take 72 hours – we’ll see.
Why Use BubbleWS?
I still get emails people desperate to make money, any money online. If you can’t make money on BubbleWS then you probably can’t make it anywhere. Seriously, I’ve never seen an easier site to earn small amounts of cash. You need a Paypal account, the ability to follow the rules, and a lot of effort. I’ve seen people make money there that have tried for years. If this is you, give it a go.
But try it NOW, most of these sites get less generous as they mature – now may well be the sweet spot for revenue at BubbleWS.
If you need writing practice – the place is perfect. If you need to figure out what will engage an audience and what won’t – BubbleWS is your place.
Next Steps:
Signup – yes of course that’s my evil affiliate link. It’s not worth it for affiliate sales though 20c one time. What I really want is for you to connect to me.
I’ll connect back – my current theory is that the single biggest thing (given that you can vaguely write) that drives income on BubbleWS is the number of connections that you have.
Remember you and I don’t control the site – it may disappear tomorrow. It does go down quite often because of over-loading – I strongly suggest that you write offline and keep a copy – I use Evernote for this and other reasons.
I originally published this post in November 2011 pointing out that people really didn’t understand how to use link networks. I’ve now updated it = UPDATED: March 2012 after Google de-indexed Build My Rank
OK guys apparently the world changed and some of you didn’t notice. Ironic really, I’ve heard plenty of people whinging about not being able to get good backlinks. Or asking for alternatives to Build My Rank because the BMR blogs didn’t look “real” and weren’t niche specific.
There are two really obvious things that are apparently from Google’s swipe at backlink networks. First obviously backlinks from these networks were effective (otherwise Google would have just ignored them) and, in future you are going to have to play smarter.
Build My Rank was not the only network to get deindexed and devalued, it was probably just the highest profile one amongst the make money crowd. SEO Nitro, SEO Linkvine. The sites that have not got hit are generally keeping a VERY low profile.
This is quite specific – Google isn’t targeting spammy backlinks from forums, automated bookmarking or the other stuff you can buy for $5 at fiverr. People who have spammed the hell out of their own sites are reporting no drop in rankings and no nasty messages in Google tools about “unnatural links being noted on their sites”
This is all about networks which insisted on 150 -odd words of unique content. Google has found them and taken them down manually.
So what do you do now to rank – what are the alternatives to BMR?
Alternative 1: Forget Manufactured Backlinks Make Your Site High Quality
Yeah I know I probably just lost 90% of you. And no I’m not saying you don’t need backlinks – what I’m saying if you write really good content, engage with your readers, and be genuinely helpful. You will then, over time get natural backlinks, when people link to and promote your content. Its a sound approach, which will take a while, but at the end, you will be mainly Google-proof. Not entirely – because you’d be an idiot to trust Google after this week – but a lot more than if you just have a mini-site of thrown together content that you don’t actually know much about.
If you want to learn how to develop a long-term, high quality websites – CLICK to check out the Keyword Academy
Alternative 2: Find a Few High Quality links
I started a new site – 3 weeks later it was a PR3 – nine months later its still PR3 and on page 1 for its desired keyword? What did I do? I gave it one single link from a PR3 site which I controlled which was relevant to the niche and didn’t have too many outbound links.
It not rocket science, it hasn’t changed any time recently. Some links are more useful than others. When you have access to strong links you will find it easier to rank your websites.
Getting just one really, really good backlink can do more for your rankings than a 1000 crappy links. It will also look more natural to Google.
What is a good backlink? A link from an authority site? So WTF is an authority site? A site which ranks well in the same niche as you, a site which has an engaged audience who find it useful, a page which has similar or the same keywords as you want to rank for, a site with PR (this is the least important factor).
How do you get those links? Well as I said above the best way is to have such an awesome site that people in the same field WANT to link to you. But you can hurry up the process a bit. Its not rocket science. Its called guest posting. Try to find a blog who will accept a guest post from you. You’ll have to write really good content. You’ll have to make it possibly even more useful than the stuff you would publish on your own site. And in return they will give you a link. And you know what – you might even get visitors from that link – there’s a thought!
Its pretty tough finding guest posting opportunities. You’ll have to contact a lot of webmasters, and expect a lot of rejections – or ignores. I hate doing it. On the other hand after a while you get to know a few people in the same niche and then its a little easier.
It probably all sounds a bit overwhelming – and I can understand if you are pretty discouraged after the news of BMR. But if you give up now – Google wins – and I HATE letting the bullies win!
Check out the Keyword Academy – really – you’ll be pleased you did – its also free for the first month – so no risk to you. Really check out my new Postrunner V2 Review – a great opportunity for quality backlinks.
Gum Digger with His Tools - (Kauri gum made some people a lot of money in 19th century NZ - if they looked in the riight place) Dargaville
Who needs new keywords then? Well any of us who want to make money online in my experience. As I mentioned recently, I’m using Wizzley to make some fast cash – though this approach will make you money regardless of the platform – so long as the website is in Google’s good graces.
So does it work? Let’s see – I was aiming for 7 articles/day on Wizzley – hmm not quite – I’m up to 17 articles on my main account on wizzley – so what have I have I earned?
As as of 13 Jan – I’ve made $46 from Amazon and as of 15 Jan $30 from Adsense, that’s not bad given the age of most of my articles and how few of them I have.
I’m also getting a 10% order rate ie from around 450 clicks – I had 45 orders – I don’t have a huge amount of Amazon data to judge this by – but to this looks like a pretty darn good conversion rate.
Gum Digger with His Tools - (Kauri gum made some people a lot of money in 19th century NZ - if they looked in the riight place) Dargaville
What I am doing with Wizzley is a slightly new approach to me. As some of you will know most of us have been continuously frustrated with Google’s Adwords Tool inability to provide long-tail keywords. I’ve pretty much given up on it myself for long-tails.
Instead what I’m using is a tool which scrapes queries from Google’s autosuggest feature – Keyword Researcher. Basically it takes a few minutes to basically give me 500-1000 suggestions on everything I’ve tried it on.
Now KR won’t give you either competition or numbers searched. But obviously if a term is even in KR it must be searched for more than once (which is by some stats I saw ages ago is about 40% of all Google searches).
Basically for the length of time it takes me to write a Wizzley page – I’m not too worried about how many searchers there are either.
I basically throw a seed keyword into Keyword Researcher – and let it do its thing (incredibly fast I might add)!
I add all the keywords I have into Keyword Strategy tool and sort by search volume – you will see a lot of zeros ie no search traffic, but the term is from Google’s own “auto suggest” – Google lies – proof positive!
I basically start at the top – focus on the terms with the most searches and create about five pages – all targeting different, but related keywords. I create exact match urls with Wizzley and I interlink these pages.
Anything that raises its head in the top 100 – I start sending links to from SEO Cobra (using a link wheel at the moment – which seems to work great!) . Eventually they will all probably get backlinks – but the ones that show most promise get prioritized.
Rinse and repeat as they say.
Wizzley is not my site. They could go away tomorrow – I’m using them as a supplement to my income – they are not my main focus long term. If I find some nice new keyword groups that I think I can rank – I’ll build my own site and use the Wizzley pages for backlinks and traffic funnels.
Its nothing new – in fact its almost exactly the approach advocated back in the day when Court from the Keyword Academy – got excited about Hubs. (well except he was using Postrunner for backlinks and Hubpages not Wizzley) – it works.
Doing exactly the same thing will work on your own site – it will work faster if it has authority. How do you know if a site has authority? Easy, does an easy keyword rank with little or no backlinking? In fact its a perfect tool to use to build out a niche site to be a larger one – you really will have too many keywords to deal with!
Would I go out and buy Keyword Strategy just to get the search volumes easily?
Probably not – you can get them (about 75 at a time) – using Google’s Adwords Tool – or you can just figure out that if you are going after a competitive term like weight loss – is going to take a while and a lot of links, while going after “travel to Burma” – not so much!
If you are doing a competitive niche focus on 3 or long word phrases. Google will tell you there is no searches of course, but my stats beg to differ, and so does its own auto-suggest tool!
Do You Need Backlinks?
I rank #1 for “wizzley review” and “wizzley scam” . I haven’t built a single backlink for those terms – but this site has lots of authority for “review” and “scam” because of previous backlinks. For “empower network scam” – I started at #8 but dropped to #14 – so now I’m building links and I’m back to #11 – this is a competitive term – some people are making a lot of money with this scam.
So if you are using a tool like Keyword Researcher to find long tail keywords – you may or may not need backlinks depending on a) how competitive the niche is and b) how much authority the site you are putting content on has.
I was introduced to the Empower Network by an acquaintance at a rare blogging meetup in my home town. I have said that I’ve sworn off scams – but this one came looking for me – its not just a scam, its a pyramid scheme – so illegal in most decent countries (including New Zealand). I’ve written my review on the blog they so kindly set-up for me for my $25/month. I’m curious to see if it will rank for the appropriate terms before I get terminated! Anyways here’s my review on the Empower Network ScamLooks like they noticed it!
Lets take them one at a time :
Wow a blogging system how cool is that? Very not cool – its just a WordPress install on their domain – you aren’t developing your own blog – you are providing content – for them. That’s why the original review got removed – because they could. Interesting aside – when I put the original review on my very own blog on their system – I thought it would outrank this review in the search results, it never did. In other words their own domain called “EmpowerNetwork.com” couldn’t rank for a term like “empower network scam”. For once Google and I agree – the domain has no authority at all 🙂
High converting lead capture page. That sounds cool doesn’t it! Its the ugly form that shows up when you arrive on their site. I have one to – its called the email form on my sidebar or sometimes pops up (I change it around). I do it using a service known as Aweber – it costs about $20/month for the entire email management system – not just for the form!
8-Part Video training. Yeah right – nice if you want to see the lifestyles of the “rich and famous” – rich on other suckers money of course. These are very brief teaser videos each is only about 10 minutes long. The real content of course is in the upsell- oh you’re surprised there is an upsell? Also the only detailed information they give you is how to set up a merchant account – so you can get paid you know? I’ve been paid for years online and I’ve never had a merchant account: paypal, checks, bank accounts, they all work just fine. Unless you are running something somewhat illegal…
Yeah website hosting etc. Like I said above – all you have is a blog on their site. If you want someone to host your blog for free then use wordpress.com – its free, or blogspot.com or blogs.com or tumblr.com – yes there are heaps of them. If you actually want your OWN blog – buy a domain name ($10/year) and some hosting ($7/month). I don’t know what “sales phycology” is – maybe they should spend all that money on a proof-reader? Anyways they sales are slick – look at what they are doing, not what they are offering.
The right to resell to others – yeah that makes not just a scam but a pyramid scheme
So they are selling what exactly? Precisely – they are in fact not just offering an over-priced scam. They are offering a pyramid scheme. A pyramid scheme is when what you buy has no value at all. You buy in because you want others to buy in on your “down line” and you get their payments.
It works for those at the top. The other 95% of members generally lose money.
That’s why pyramid schemes are illegal in most countries including the US, Canada, UK, Australia and most others.
Oh and the $25/month that’s the start of it – you’ll need to pay considerably more to get to the “inner circle” where they might actually teach something about making money online.
Really its the old, old story – if it sounds too good to be true, it is.
Picture of this C-List Blogger Living The High Life, Ko Samui, Thailand
This stupid MMO blog is a curious thing. It started as my online learning journal/personal diary thing. But its become something a lot more than that.
You see, while publicly, calling out the A-List bloggers – I have somehow become one: a C-lister anyways, woops no, now a Z-List Blogger! I am making money from you guys, that’s the truth of it. Its not what I set out to do – but over the years – its just kinda happened – and an incident over the weekend really highlighted it to me.
I’m sorry – that’s my dirty little secret, it would have been obvious to some of you for some time, but not to others and its always made me feel apologetic and uncomfortable.
I have probably been reading way to much personal devlopement stuff recently – but I’m not happy with my record here – so I’m putting that record straight.
It Started With A Cashflow Crises
My cash flow was ugly in October, and not looking much better for November – HubPages is not playing nicely, and come the new year will be screwing me out of significant Amazon earnings. Late on Friday night I did the Oct figures – and there were as bad as I thought they would be.
I needed cash, not today, but it was getting borderline as to whether my income covered my living expenses. A few years ago I would have checked the job sites.
Now that’s not an even an option for me now – instead I looked a minimizing expenses in my business, sent out some over-due invoices, they all paid within hours. Wow that was easy! I felt a bit better – why the heck do I find it hard to ask for money I’m owed?
By 10pm I was surfing Facebook – I noticed that a new backlinking service that I hadn’t been using much, and that I nearly cancelled last month (but missed the date), opened up for affiliates, several days earlier.
Hmmm – I make $300 or so dollars a month selling Build My Rank – might try promoting the new service a go. By 1am the review was up (including typos in the title and url LMAO – I am too old for late night stuff). I promoted it here, the Pond, Facebook and TKA. Within 48 hours I had signups – by the time the initial offering was sold-out (genuinely – not bullshit false shortage BTW) – I had sold the majority of the memberships available. I had made a lot of money.
I’m ranked #1, 2, 3 AND 4 for “seo cobra review” and similar terms in the search engines. I don’t think I’ve had a single visitor or sign-up from that though (yet – SEO is the long game).
Hmm looks like I’ve turned into one of those scammer A-list bloggers, ie one who make a living selling stuff to their followers. Its hard to ignore the fact that if I recommend stuff on this blog – you guys buy it- and thank me for it…
Shit – I make money from selling make money online services (albeit good ones) to people who follow me online and think that I’m knowledgeable, helpful and probably think I’m successful! Well two outta three ain’t bad, as the old song says.
Knowledgeable: I’ve been doing this since 2007, I’ve been making my income entirely online since March 2009, I’ve followed lots of gurus, several of whom no longer post at all (or rarely) – yes I have some knowledge – I’m the personality type that likes finding out stuff – there’s some Myers-Briggs label for it – I call it analysis paralysis;
Helpful: yeah – I am, its innate, happens in real life too, having found all that information, I like sharing it, I quite like writing too -hence the blog keeps on getting updated (but don’t hold me to a schedule!).
Successful: – now that’s the bit I’m not sure on – that’s what I want to fix up
Is Lis Successful At Online Marketing?
I made a profit of NZ$37,900 in the last 12 months, in the same time the US/NZ exchange rate varied from 74c to 88c in those same 12 months – so in US$ that’s an income of : US$28,000 or US$33,300 depending on the rate on the day (you understand the nightmare then?).
That’s not gross sales – its income less expenses – I claim all the obvious expenses – hosting, domains, memberships, but also my home office (power, rates, ISP) – this is the real money I earn – its what I have to pay tax on.
Is this a successful income? For me its a start – my aim has always been around US$5000/month. At my current earnings level I can pay 1/2 our household expenses, but we own our home (no mortgage), and I only doing minimal retirement savings, we do do a lot of travel and dancing, but we have no children to support, nor an expensive shopping habit; your mileage may vary.
Picture of this C-List Blogger Living The High Life, Chaweng Beach, Ko Samui, Thailand
So if you thought I was making 6-figures and throwing the cash around – if you didn’t realise that rather nice lunch we had just after that photo was taken, cost about $10 and we took a $2 tuk-tuk to get there, not a $25 taxi ride – sorry. Genuinely.
So What the Heck Is Lis’s Problem? That’s Not a Bad Income and She Never Said She Drove a Porsche!
I make about half my income from this site. That’s my issue. I do make money from other sites as well – but this one site is my solid month in, month out, pay-the-bills website. Over the years, through a bit of luck, some great friends, and the fact that I didn’t give up on it, Passive Income Online now makes me half of my income, and the stable 1/2 at that.
I make half of my money from selling stuff to others who are trying for the same lifestyle as I am. Inadvertantly I’m doing what the A-Listers do all too deliberately.
There’s another reason why I have been coy about putting out my detailed income figures recently. I don’t want to encourage the rest of you, particularly the beginners into thinking that THIS is the way to make money, particularly not short-term.
It doesn’t work like that. I’ve developed an online reputation over four years, for longer even than I’ve had this blog. Most of the time I wasn’t doing it deliberately, its sure as hell evolved. In fact until very recently (hmm like this month) – this site has been deliberately only focussed on search traffic, because I was so bloody uncomfortable about the fact that some of you think I know something useful, and I was selling to you.
What’s happened – well basically I’ve playing the old – go with your strengths card – I didn’t expect to make serious money with a MMO blog, its happened despite me. So now I’m going to develop it – it appears this personal relationship stuff works – and I want to develop that – so I can apply it to my other, non-MMO, niches.
But you guys don’t go away – you keep emailing me with nice comments and intelligent questions, you seem to appreciate what I am doing! So really in short – my readers have driven me to it and its not my fault – you asked for it and now:
That’s Me Out in the Open – Welcome to Lissie: the World’s Only C-List Blogger!
Lis Is Embracing Her Spammy C-List Blogger Status – Passive Income Has An E-Mail List!
See you can sign up just below. I’ve always resisted email lists – its the A-listers weapon of choice – but a list will allow me to do what I can’t do with just the blog.
I will use the list to publish my regular monthly income reports. The monthly reports will NOT go on this site . To see them – you will need to sign up, plain up and simple. The WHY – that’s for the list too LOL.
Also the list will allow me to give you heads up on stuff that is happening – but is not worth a post.
Hey I might even throw in a summary of posts – but if that’s all you want – then the feedburner service already does that (email or RSS reader options).
So yeah that’s more than enough soul searching for the day I think! Leave a comment, sign up, or unsubscribe, sorry if you feel pissed off or misled by my little corner of the Interwebs – feel free to leave – and apologies I annoyed.
For the rest of you – well – normal service (or lack thereof) is probably going to be resumed.
And the question on the form? I’m curious as to whether I should be reusing some of my basic stuff and putting it out onto the list on a regular basis?
UPDATED January 2012. The Keyword Academy drives me insane sometimes! If we could just get Mark to dot some “i’s” and “t’s” it would be so much easier!
Its been a long time since I did my first Keyword Academy review – nearly 3 years in fact. So is the Keyword Academy still working in 2012? Yes it is but some of wish Mark would hurry up and update his bloody sale’s page from time-to-time – like once every couple of years OK!
Google is always changing the game, and in 2011, in response to changes in Google (known as “”Panda-monium” by those of low humour standards) – so-called TKA2.0 was released. The core lessons were updated, changed from video format (really hard to update) to written form, some tools had to be retired because they just didn’t work with anymore with the changes to Google’s programming feed.
But now the buzz is that The Keyword Academy 2.0 is out and I’ve had emails asking – is this program still good to go – is it worth it could you please update your Keyword Academy review? What’s changed – will it still work for me? Does Keyword Academy work in a post-Panda SEO world and as always – is it a scam or legit ?
Quick Summary of Keyword Academy 2.0 for the Attention Challenged Reader
Yes TKA 2.0 still works
The Keyword Academy is not a Scam
No I don’t know whether you can earn $2000/month in the next year from online marketing (but I know that I do ).
You will need to put serious work in to make money – but your work ethic is far more important than spending a whole lot of money up front.
Yes I really do use the program to make me money – and not just from the commission I get if you sign up NOW .
Yes I will get a commission if you do – but there is no real hurry so keep on reading, hang around, think about it – and remember if you cancel in the first 30 days you will pay nothing.
The Longer Version for the Procrastinators and For the Long-Tail Searches (thanks Google)
Lissie hard at it doing more research for you!
First is TKA2.0 a marketing ploy? Any of you who have been around the Internet Marketing/ Make Money Online world for more than a year or two will have seen how programs are always being updated and changed, usually accompanied by a price hike. The reason is usually pure marketing – make it new – make people buy now – before time runs out, hike the price while you’re at it.
That’s never been TKA’s style – lets face it they are yet to get around to creating some decent images for us poor old affiliates to use!
So why a new TKA now?
Does the change in TKA mean that the old approach of niche sites doesn’t work anymore? Did Panda (Google’s 2011 update in March and April) – ravage niche sites developed using the TKA method? Well my sites have been just fine – some have gone up, some down, but no I didn’t wake up one day and discover they are all gone.
Its true though that some people on the forums did see some of their sites dropping. From what I’ve seen I’ve seen no real pattern – though newer sites, as always, are more vulnerable to bounces up and down the search results. From my moderately successful point of view – nothing much has changed – Google still counts backlinks, Google still can’t read or appreciate the finer points of English usage – but Google can find a keyword and related terms – just as well as ever.
What is changing is that competition is getting heavier and nastier. Google can’t tell very easily whether a site is purely a made for Adsense (or affiliate) income – but your competitors can – and its very easy for them to report you. That’s when you need to have a legit site – a site with real readers and which offers more to the web than the chance to click an ad.
So What is The New Keyword Academy Method Basically its not a change of direction – more a change of emphasis. The emphasis is on fewer larger sites – emphasizing more personal experience and insight.
Ahh the cynics amongst you might say, well I did, like SBI or blogging – make a name for yourself, write your passion, the visitors will come and then you parlay that into a career as a speaker, writer, or (my own personal definition of Hell) a public speaker. Build your list, sell to your list retire to a pleasant beach bungalow on a Thai beach (for which you get a heavily discounted rate in return for a glowing review on your site).
Nope the heart of the Keyword Academy method is still keywords. That’s the key difference between The Keyword Academy and the “the blog it and they will come approach”. Rather TKA combines finding something you are interested in – then finding some related keywords – writing about them and promoting them. This is not about acquiring 100,000 twitter followers or 1779 Facebook likes.
What Does TKA Offer in 2012 And Beyond
A clear and precise set of instructions on how to start your online business – instructions on how to choose a topic for your sites, how to setup your sites, how to write, monetize and build traffic.
Postrunner – I’ve described a detailed case study about how I use Postrunner for real in my business. Postrunner is the easiest way on the planet to get guest posts and backlinks for your sites. In fact Postrunner even makes me some of my income as I (and you if you join) can have sites within the system.
Forum. The one thing I find that is huge with working on-line is the loneliness and isolation. Not one of my real life friends and family understand what I do online to make a living – they just kinda hope its legal! Having a forum for bouncing ideas around in, is sanity saving! Its so much better than talking to yourself about it – trust me on this one!
Webinars. Mark does a weekly webinar – I dont’ always make it live – but still, after 2.5 years I make a point of listening to each and everyone (they are recorded). Mark really is an awesome trainer/coach – he should get out and do this in person – but maybe not as he’s in the US and I’m not I probably wouldn’t get to hear him in person!
Which brings me to my final point – and I think the most important development for the Keyword Academy for 2011 and beyond. Mark Butler has done the hardest thing of all – and realised that he can’t do it all by himself. I don’t know why, but most entrepeneurs I have met are control freaks, they can’t delegate to save themselves, or their businesses. Its a character flaw which basically means their businesses grow to a certain level and no further. Mark has managed to get past this though and has partnered with a couple of new teachers to greatly expand the core lessons and basic support. He’s also opening up the Academy to other members who may have their own unique methods of making money online to add their 2c as well.
And that to me means that the Keyword Academy will continue to prosper in 2011 and beyond. So for those of you who skipped to the bottom of the page looking for the quick solution to making money online – sorry don’t have one.
If you want to learn how to build a genuine business online though – feel free to check out the Keyword Academy through my HONKING BIG AFFILIATE link – free for the first 30 days and then billed at $33/month – you cancel via Paypal at any time.
My Dutch is about at the same level as my php - I can recognise some bits but I can't write it!
OK this is another instalment in my collection of articles about how the premium WordPress theme Catalyst: it may not be free but it allows even the technically terrified to do cool stuff!
On of the things that I like about Catalyst is that its one theme that I can use for everything – from a mini-site to this site, to a client’s professional site. I use Catalyst for all of them. Today I’m concentrating on using Catalyst with Adsense.
Now there are plenty of WordPress plugins that promise to manage your Adsense easily with any theme. But plugins have their own issues- every plugin you add to a site adds a level of complexity and invariably need upgrading every time WordPress upgrades, and sometimes they break and sometimes they even send a quiet percentage of impressions to their author’s Adsense publisher ID!
There are a number of ways to deal with Adsense using the Catalyst theme – I think I have the simplest – and I will point you to a couple of alternative solutions at the end of this post.
How to Manage Adsense on a WordPress Blog
My Dutch is about at the same level as my php - I can recognise enough to order lunch but I don't speak it!
My requirements for when I want Adsense to show – and more importantly NOT to show on my websites come straight from the terms of service provided by our friends at Google.
I only want to display at most 3 ad units and 3 link units on any one page.
I don’t want to display ads on “filler” pages such as the privacy policy and “thin” pages like the “about” page.
More specifically I want:
to have a front page which consists of my last 3 posts;
a link unit in the header to show on all pages and posts except the “filler” and “thin” pages;
a honking big rectangle of ads to show near the top of each post floated right in the text – including the 3 posts on the front page;
I want an ad block to show at the end of the post and in the sidebar – but only on single posts – not on the front page.
Now if you know php you will be already shouting something like “use php if single command to only display on single posts” – but remember I’m an idiot and I don’t know anything about php, I struggle in html and my CSS only got fluent since the last upgrade of Catalyst gave me the brilliant – “hold your hand point and click CSS builder” thingy.
Adsense Using Catalyst Theme Layouts
If you are used to free themes you may expect that every page and post has to have the same basic layout of sidebars and widgets. With Catalyst there is no such limitation, Every post and page can have a different layout.
Catalyst allows you to create an unlimited number of layouts – each of which can have a different arrangement of widths, widgets, sidebars – anything really. I use a combination of custom widgets and layouts to control where my Adsense ads show. This involves no php coding and a very little CSS – it goes like this:
Create a custom layout called supportpage – this is for use of the privacy policy and about page. After creating the layout – you need to edit each page or post that you want to use the new layout by changing the drop down below the edit post area. Now you have a simple layout for these ancillary pages – job done.
I also create a layout for each post page I want to display Adsense on – this I called “postpage”.
Now for the custom widgets – I create three widgets: bottominpost, rectangleinpost and headerlinks – I think you get the idea what I might be putting in these! Each custom widget is hooked into a different place on the catalyst theme – a hook is just where you attach a widget into a theme – that’s how I have the yellow boxes below the header on this blog – there an awful lot of them – here is the visual for the main default catalyst home page hooks!
For each widget I have the option as to which of my layouts I want to use the widget on: so I control that none of these widgets show on the supportpage layout – but the headerlinks and rectangleinpost widgets shows on the default and the postpage layouts and the bottominpost layout shows only on the postpage layout. You may be getting the idea about now – using descriptive names is good- because you end up with a lot of widgets!
Now this is the techie bit – sorry – you need to click on the custom CSS option. The only thing we haven’t done yet is made sure that honking big rectangle of an Adsense ad floats right within your text – you can build what you want with the CSS builder option (this is a good place to change the colour or other styling of a widget too!) – or you can steal my code -here its is – suitable for the large rectangle Adsense layout:
Now head over to your widgets page and drop text boxes in all your new widgets – into each text box drop the correct piece of Adsense code – job done!
Bonus – using the layouts will give you a new sidebar (if you chose that option) on your posts – so you can toss another tasteless skyscraper Adsense block in there as well.
Adsense on Catalyst Using Hook Boxes
Costa’s post on How To Create An Adsense Optimized Child Theme will walk you thru this one- must admit that post meant I kinda understood hook boxes for the first time too! But it has that scary stuff php again …
Adsense on Catalyst Using Widgets
RT an American living in the Philippines has a similar approach to mine and wrote How To Display Adsense on a Single Post with Catalyst Theme as a guest post for Costa. But because he isn’t using layouts he’s forced to use the evil php stuff in his widgets – ugg!
Seriously there are lot of ways to achieve the same result in Catalyst – all of these approaches will get you to the same place – but your mileage may vary depending on your skills and exactly what you are trying to achieve.
I actually think the use of layouts is really powerful – if for example you wanted to have different advertising (or no advertising) on different types of posts – e.g. some of your articles may suit Amazon ads – while others will have an affiliate offer or Adsense. In fact I may play around with something like that on this site – keep watching 🙂
I tell you what however you do it – once you have used the power of a decent framework theme like Catalyst you will NEVER EVER want to edit theme’s code again – just avoiding the whole drama of upgrading and losing all your customizations is so worth avoiding!
Google can be more than annoying sometime – I mean, as Leo asks, what would you do if you woke up one day and all your rankings had disappeared?
But that’s not what happened to me today. Instead I was talking to Dave – who runs the awesome travel blog GoBackpacking which allows old backpackers to guest post about Google Alerts – and I noticed something had changed…
Waterfront, Wellington, New Zealand
But first rewind: you do use Google alerts don’t you? Its the fastest way to keep an eye on what the great web is saying about you. I have alerts on my name e.g. “lis sowerbutts” my blog’s names e.g. lissowerbutts.com. But I also have some more subtle alerts:
site:mydomain.com – tells me every time Google indexes a url on my site;
link:mydomain.com – tells me every time Google counts a link to my site. NOT Yahoo – Google
Now most of you know probably all know that and have had the alerts for years. But today I noticed there is a new column in the Manage my Alerts screen. As well as “type” and “how often” there is a new column “Volume” – the default of which is “only the best results” – I turned it back to “all results” .
I thought about it and realised I hadn’t been seeing many alerts for the last few weeks – suddenly they are all back. So what does this new feature tell me about Google:
there are sites and there are sites – Google trusts some more than others – and PR has very little to do with that.
What is a keyword – or more specifically what is a long tail keyword phrase – caused me endless confusion when I first began. I totally didn’t get it – that’s why products like Scribe SEO exist – to prey on beginner’s confusion. That’s unacceptable in my view – so here is the information that you need about keywords. Its here for free, you don’t have to sign up for any membership site or even a one off payment.
There are heaps of erudite SEO expert posts on keywords out there – this isn’t one of them. Instead this is an attempt to take it back down to basics – stick with me because I want to start to with a real world business example – and then we will move onto niche sites and blogs.
Keywords For a Service Business
I’m going to tell you how to do it for free. Lets assume you offer house washing services – purely because I am in the market for the same at the moment. Now I may search for “house washing” now this gives me a mixture of results including DIY articles on how to wash my house down and news results for house washing. But I am not interested in learning to wash my house down – I want someone to do it for me! The result is somewhere there in the 7 million pages returned by that first query – but its too hard to find. Instead I try again and type “house washing service” now I have the right sort of result – but they are in Michigan and Atlanta – its (now) obvious I want a local service – so I try “house washing service Wellington”.
So pretty much your keywords are all terms that should appear on your business card; what services you provide and the geographic locality that you service. Most businesses will have a number of keywords. House washing dude may end up with a list that looks like this:
house washing Wellington
house washing northern suburbs Wellington
water blasting Wellington
window washing Wellington
quick quote house washing Wellington
guaranteed house washing Wellington
So basically the keywords for a service business include each service you provide (house washing, water blasting), the location you services (Wellington, northern suburbs) and your unique selling points (guaranteed, quick quote). And all of these are in the language that your customers will use to find you – not the industry terms common among the experts!
Keywords for a Consultancy Business
One of the things I learned in my brief tenure over at Third Tribe Marketing was that an awful lot of people start with the thought that they are going to use the Internet as way to drum up services as a consultant. Common trades seem to include:
Social Media Consulting
WordPress Blogging Tips and Tricks
Marketing Strategies
freelance writing
This is a little trickier – basically because its harder to define a consultancy business – a plumber has regulations about not doing building or electrical work, possibly unfortunately, white collar consultants do not. From a business point of view you really, really should define your services very clearly. If you are planning on providing “web services” to the world and can’t define it any further – your problem is not keyword identification – its a business plan!
Next you should be aware that not all keywords are possible to rank for easily. Some have more competition than others. In broad terms the longer the phrase the more likely you will get to rank for it fairly easily and the more likely you will get a paying customer. For example which of the following phrases typed into a search engine by a potential customer do you think may convert to an actual customer? Lets assume you are selling writing services
freelance writing
web freelance writer
freelance writer for hire
freelance writer for hire cost less than $500
freelance writer to write about home improvements
Now before some freelance writers jump on me and say some of those terms are not grammatically 100% – I say that’s the point – people tend to type into Google as they think – they don’t edit for perfect grammatical structure. Useful keywords are ones that reflect how people search – not the text book!
Now those last couple of phrases will show in the Google Adwords tool as having no searchers – that’s an approximation. The same tool tells me there is no searches for people looking for family home for sale in Khandallah but there is at least one – I have shown her the house… At that’s the point I need exactly one person to buy the house, if you are freelance writer a client a week or even a month could be the start of a profitable career – you don’t need a thousand new clients a month to launch a freelance writing career – so find very long tail keywords that relate to the services you can offer and use them for post titles – it really is that simple.
So Which Longtail Keywords Should I Use on My Blog?
Many people start off in the general – this is my life or my work or my passion blog. These seem to particularly struggle with adding keywords to their posts – because its an after thought. Often they have bought into posting an excessive number of times a week – i.e. more than the once I manage around here. They’ve been told they have to post all the time – guys YOU DO NOT! Some of my favourite bloggers post once every few months – but when they do post its a useful, worthwhile and generally long post – it usually then has another few thousand words added in the comments – if you are good enough people won’t forget you! I’m not that good – but I can go weeks without posting anything here – and it rarely drops my subscriber count, doesn’t hugely effect my traffic, and makes little to no difference to the income I earn from this site.
Oh and you can ignore a site for months and suddenly start posting again to – I just did with a site of mine – posted for the first time in 4 months- indexed within 24 hours!
Why? Because most of the people who buy from me come from search traffic – often they will stick around, clearly dazzled by my deathless prose, but I measure success by income not subscribers (blame it on my bank – they are more interested in dollars in my account not my feedburner stats!).
If you are trying to kick start a new blog – or an old one which has the classic 10 readers, one of which is your mother – think about what you are offering your readers: if you aren’t offering them something then that could be part of the problem. This is why focusing on a niche for a blog is easier – if you start writing about the joys of being a first-time step dad and then continue onto to home renovation – your original audience may fall by the wayside. Which is not to say that you can’t have several topics going at the same time – but starting with one and expanding it will be easier – not just to bring your audience with you but also for the search engines to rank your posts because they have already ranked you for related terms.
Which is not to say you can’t change topics and introduce new things. For example when I started getting a significant number of readers here a lot of us knew each other from online forums – most of my readers knew more about keyword search than I did. But recently I seem to have acquired some new readers who may have missed some of these basics – so hence this post. Some of my regulars will have dropped off by now – but they should be off doing some work anyways- those that are still awake may have learned something.
So What’s a Buying Keyword?
Canon SX20 IS SuperZoom Camera
I thought this was magic for a while too. A buying keyword is also known as commercial intent. Sometimes we search to buy stuff – sometimes we don’t. Consider these search terms which I just made up:
When I typed in the query about fish recipes – I got the recipe for the kedgeree that I was looking for – there were ads on the page but Iwasn’t interested – recipes are great things to find online but don’t expect to start a recipe site and make money – you visitors want the recipe – you’ve answered the need – end of story. I site about cooking techniques would possibly do better
Passive income – its kinda in between – people are looking for information – they may want to do something with that information – they may become regular readers or subscribers (in the way the fish recipe person probably won’t) – but they don’t have a huge urge to act now.
The Canon SX20 IS is my latest oh so cool gadget – its a top-ranked megazoom camera with a 20X optical zoom and a 12MB maximum file size and does cool video too – I love it! Now I bought it recently and I was aware of how to search online but basically I started with a search along the lines of “wide angle, 20x zoom, AA batteries” and came down to narrowing it down to this one and another I searched on the very specific model number to understand the pluses and minuses of that particular model. Its an expensive camera I wanted to be sure. I spent 5 minutes going to a local shop and holding it in my hand – I spent hours finding all the reviews for it. It should have been a buying keyword for someone – unfortunately I don’t live in the US and the cheapest place I could buy it doesn’t have an affiliate program – and that’s one of the reason that usually US traffic will convert better (Amazon won’t ship the camera to New Zealand (or Australia) and that’s very common for electronics). Not all search traffic is equal – luckily you are unlikely to get serious numbers of visitors to your camera review site so don’t worry about it too much!
Generally as you get closer to spending money the longer the keyword you type in “Florida vacations” could be a school assignment on American domestic travel or a bored office worker dreaming at their desk, “family Florida vacations” – is someone getting a bit more serious about actually spending some money: “Florida Disney World Vacation hotels” – is getting better – but “Florida Disney World Vacation hotels coupons” could be a very good buying keyword indeed (it may or may not be – its not mine, its just my opinion, your mileage may vary etc etc).
Oh and engage brain about buying keywords before you use a tool – if someone is looking for a free WordPress theme – do you really want them on a blog you are trying to sell paid WordPress themes from?
So find specific keywords for your niche – sure start with the Adwords tool for brainstorming – but look at what is being pushed on TV and newspapers as well.
Optimizing Images
You’ll notice that cool camera pic is named for the name and model and has a similar caption and alt-text. Google can’t “read” images – it reads the name of the image, the alt tag and the caption …
Double Indexing in Google and Retrofitting Keywords
Now this is a bit of confession – not every post here is written with a keyword in mind – in fact in the early days – none of them were. Even these days I will sometimes just post cause I want to share with my readers and can’t be arsed with the search traffic.
But there is a secret to old posts – and I don’t do this often enough – the edit key. This is the trick to getting a double listing. Obviously ranking on the first page for a keyword is nice – but getting double listing is even better: one that looks like this:
The trick is this – each post has a link within the text of the post which links to the other one with the anchor text “third tribe review”. I usually work it something like . In the second post I will say that as a follow up to my recent post on (and I ad the link) <long tail keyword phrase here> blah blah. Then I edit the first post and often at the end of the post I will add a sentence or so that that says – read my follow up of <long tail keyword phrase> here.
FAQs About Keywords
Does capitalisation matter? It may to the grammar police – but not to the search engines – the key word lis sowerbutts is exactly the same as Lis Sowerbutts – how do I know – try the two searches and compare the results – you will find they are the same.
Is the plural version of a keyword the same as the singular? No its not – but they are very closely related. Rank yourself for “blue widget” then getting the ranking for “blue widgets” will be much easier.
Does punctuation matter? To EzineArticles definitely, Google – no. Whether you link to “blue widgets” or blue widget’s” or even “blue widgets’ ” its all the same to Google – they are all the same keyword phrase. Same goes for punctuation – whether you link to: ” Products are available in red or blue. Widget and doodas are available ..” Or “blue widget” the keyword is the same keyword.
On Page SEO
That is the book as far as I am concerned about on-page SEO. The short version of how to write for your readers is something like:
write descriptive titles (headlines);
I link to relevant posts on the same topic in the text of the post;
use subheadings if it fits in – use your keyword in them if reads naturally;
include useful information in the post about the topic – this means I will naturally use terms related to my my main keyword;
If I am writing for search engines I do:
all of the above
I try to include my keyword in the first 60 characters so its automatically in the post’s excerpt which is shown in the search engines;
more words is better than less – the reason that this post is so long is hat the main keyword is quite competitive – the more I write the more likely I am to hit some obscure phrase that someone may search on…
if I am using WordPress -add relevant tags to each post and make sure the blog is set up to index the tag pages
if the whole blog is about a specific keyword I include that in the title and sometimes the tagline
My point is that none of the stuff I do for the search engines to find my keywords – has any affect on my readers, if you are in a non-make money online, non-SEO niche they won’t even notice.
This really is all you need to know about what you should be writing on your site as far as long tail keyword research is concerned. If you want to seriously increase you traffic then spend a bit more time find long tail keywords you can easily rank for and less time pushing out more and more content which is unlikely to really engage your readers or show up in the search engine results.
Of course the on-page SEO stuff I have been talking about here is the 20% – the other 80% of your effort should all be about Back Links – but that’s another post and fortunately Allyn’s already written the definitive post about how to get backlinks check it out !
Friends on Facebook talked about it, and talked, and talked.
