A lot of things have been happening over the last few months with regards to article marketing and not too many of them have been good. The number of article directories has skyrocketed as more and more people think they can cash in with Adsense by publishing a ton of articles on all sorts of topics. So I want to take a look at what is going do wrong here.

The reality of course is that these idiots who are accepting articles from all and sundry are risking their Adsense accounts by serving ads on what amounts to either totally duplicate content, or badly re-written or spun PLR articles that are often less than 30% original and in most cases are barely readable or intelligible. In short, 90% of all the articles that are clogging up the SERPs are pure crap.

In a way, I’m not surprised that people are spamming the proliferation of article directories that are out there. I’d say 90% of them are doing it purely for the links to their sites in the mistaken belief that Google will rank them better if they have a guzillion links pointing to their site from as many places as possible.

Well, in theory, that is actually true, but what most of these idiot noobs don’t realize is that Google ignores links in duplicate content, so 99% of all the duplicated crap that gets mass splattered around the web is ignored. Very little of it ever makes it to the first few pages of Google’s index for most keywords, so we’re at least saved from the worst of it.

But even the 1% that does get through is still annoying in the least, so I can sympathize with anyone trying their hardest to seek out new, viable niches. All that regurgitated dross clogs up the SERPs and makes keyword research a lot harder than it ever was.

I know so, as I’m doing plenty of that research myself to build my own niche sites with.

There was a time when I could sell plenty of articles on Constant Content for around $25 per 500 word article (after they took their 35% commission) but not any more. Too many bulk article writing companies pay their writers peanuts to provide articles for less than $5 a pop, so people looking for content now go to the cheap alternatives. But the old saying holds, “you pay peanuts, you get monkeys!” and that’s what most of these articles look like they’ve been written by!

Its madness and there seems no end to it. But the vast majority of articles are written not to get people to their resource box, or even to funnel traffic to a site or sales page, but to get links. Pure and simple. That’s why there is so much of that dross out there in the first place.

Article marketing has taken a nightmare pill with marketers believing they have to get as many links as possible to rank their sites in the SERPs. The truth is that Google are changing their algorithm to favour authority sites and not thin MFA type sites with tons of backlinks propping them up. Sure, the links are still the major contributor, but Google are altering the way they count those links. If they come from duplicate articles, forget it - they are ignored. If they come from short, badly written articles on mass article directories, the majority are given such low value as to be almost worthless.

In one way, that’s good for people like me who are working hard on creating good, relevant and original articles for their own sites, whatever the niche. Better for those that use authority sites to get their links. I know Ezine Articles is getting snowed under, but at least they still human edit articles and don’t let through any crap. That means articles published there are given a lot of juice by Google, because its usually pretty good content and the site has a lot of authority because of it.

People who use article marketing the smart way are getting rewarded for their efforts (I’m seeing enormous gains in some niches by doing thing the right way). The clueless noobs that are doing no different from what spammers do are scrambling around like headless chickens getting nowhere fast.

Is there any end to this craziness? Of course there is, as soon as all the noobs realize they are, as usual, going about things in all the wrong ways. The problem is that as those noobs learn how to do thing the right way, more noobs come in to fill the vacuum left behind by the previous wave. And because there are still so many A-listers selling their snake oil to clueless noobs chasing the get rich quick dream, they are all learning how to spam the SERPs with more crap articles because the ebooks they are shelling out $97 a pop for are telling them to do that. Because it’ll make ‘em rich overnight, of course.

And as I look out the window, I see a herd of pigs flying over…

Terry Didcott
Blogging Web 2.0

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Welcome back as its time to explore some more on the subject of how to make money from Adsense. This post will be rather more brief than my usual outings, but that’s not to say it won’t be informative. I’m looking at a certain side of the Adsense revenue accumulation strategy here, so here’s how this works.

A while ago, as most of you probably already know, Court launched the infamous 100 Hubs in 30 Days Challenge. Plenty of people picked up on it and were real champions at it for a while, then most of them faded away. A few persevered and a few of them started to see their Adsense income improve. It was slow at first, then it gradually got better. And better.

I can probably count the successful Hub challengees on one hand, but that hasn’t stopped a minor revolution over at Hub Pages. At first they embraced the challenge, then the social set turned against it with their usual arrogance borne out of ignorance for the logic of the Internet Marketer. But who gives a flying rats turd what social bloggers thing. We’re here to make money from the long hours we spend sitting on our computers, not wasting them chin wagging with a bunch of social types who have obviously got nothing better to do with their time.

Anyway, I digress. Did I not say this would be a short article?

The long and the short of it is that the few who are now making more money from Adsense than they have ever done are doing so all thanks to the logic of the original Hub Challenge. If you’re wondering, yes, I have also been following that same logic hand have watched my own Adsense earnings improve drastically as a result. I didn’t get involved with the challenge as it happened, but I have been pretty prolific in the meantime building not just Hub Pages, but many mini sites across several platforms that all generate Adsense income, such as infobarrel.com as well as my own hosted mini-site hub that gives me 100% of the revenue I generate.

That last statement is where its at. While the original plan to make money from Adsense came about by building lots of Hub Pages, it morphed into the setup that I now work, which is in the linking structure of the plan. Its pretty basic but it works well. I start with keyword research to find good long tail keywords with a decent estimated CPC. Then I write three Hub Pages around the keyword. I link them together in a circle so each gives the next a one way link. I then create an infobarrel page and a self-hosted mini site around the same keyword. The hub pages link to the infobarrel and the infobarrel links to my own mini-site.

I can see the result in the SERPs quite plainly as the Hub Pages will index fast and rank quite well initially. The infobarrel also indexes fast and ranks better than the Hub Pages thanks to the links. My mini-site then outranks the lot of them because of the strong links. Not only do my mini sites rank well and pay me 100% of the Adsense revenue they generate, but they also generate more authority for the hosting domain. As its authority grows, each new mini site I create on there will index quicker and rank better as the host domain passes down some of its authority.

Its a sort of circular authority boosting mechanism that just gets better over time!

Terry Didcott
Blogging Web 2.0

Filed under: SEO | 13 Comments »

It’s no secret that blogging is big right now, actually it’s HUGE! It seems like everyone and their dog has a blog. Thousands of blogs are created every day, and more “bloggers” are hitting it big all the time. Some of the reasons blogging is so big is that people naturally love them, they are easy to update, it’s easier to get links to them, they tend to rank higher in search engines, and you can make money blogging without needing to learn a lot of technical stuff.

Many people even trust information on blogs more than they do the popular news sites. There was a study done recently that showed a large percentage of people would rather get their news and information from blogs than from other sources. The idea is that most sources are far from biased anyway, so if you’re going to get information, you might as well get it from a blog that fits with your world view.

People looking for solutions to problems they have such as how to make money, debt cures, dog training, business tips, various illnesses, travel advice, and just about everything else often turn to blogs for information because they give a personal view point from the blogger. They are a “been there, done that” type of thing.

Because of the real feel of blog, they can also be a great way to sell stuff online. It’s a very natural progression from reading about someone’s experiences with acne on an “acne blog” to buying an affiliate product with acne cures from that same blog.

One huge advantage that blogs have over “real” work is that you can work from home, or anywhere else you choose. Successful bloggers can also make a lot of money. Many professional bloggers earn at least $100,000 up to over $500,000 or more per year while traveling the world, or just sitting at their home computer.

The average American spends $2,500 every year on gas commuting to work. Plus automobile accidents are one of the most frequent causes of death in the United States. Not to mention the wasted time sitting in a car while commuting to and from work. Bloggers can work from home and avoid having to commute, which is a big advantage.

Stress can be a major factor in the average person’s life, but having a blog that is making money for you without you needing to leave your house or listen to a boss can massively reduce stress. Not only can you make more money than you earn working for someone else, but your stress level would be much less.

This “blogger lifestyle” sounds too good to be true but it really does exist, and there are a lot of people taking advantage of it. You can too!

All you have to do is learn how to make money blogging, set up your blog, put in the time and effort it takes to start seeing a good income and your future will look a lot brighter. Building up a money making blog isn’t the easiest thing in the world and it will require a lot of work, but it’s more than worth it in the end!

So, where do you learn how to blog? How can you create this make money online lifestyle for yourself? There are countless blogs and resources online that will teach you. In fact, you are reading one right now. You can also do some searching on Google for “how to make money online” or “make money blogging” and you’ll find several resources in a matter of minutes.

Dedicated to your success,
Trent Brownrigg
Internet marketing expert, blogger, and owner of the work at home blog.

Filed under: Blogging | 1 Comment »

All newcomers to the world of Internet business want to know how to make money online the quickest fastest surest way by doing the least amount of work and quitting their job at the end of the week regardless. Well lets look at how that can be done, or not as the case may be.

Funny how we’re all attracted to those magnetic, almost mesmerising ads that promise to show you how their author’s just made three grand in a week by pressing a few buttons and sitting back in their chair to wait for the money truck to roll up outside their door! As newbies, we all sat there marveling at just how that could happen and wondering just how easy it would be to pull off. Yes, we all believed that hyped up crap when we were first initiated into the ways of the Internet money-go-round. And the few of us that managed to resist temptation by keeping our credit cards firmly locked away are probably the ones that survived to tell the tale.

But what is the reality behind all that hype? Can you really make money online as easily? Well, there is no definitive answer to that one, because although the resounding truth of it all is that no, you cannot easily make a lot of money online so quickly, there is a way to bend that truth.

What I’m saying is that there are ways to make a lot of money online in a short space of time. But that takes intelligence, knowledge and guile. So looking at the title of this post, you now know why I worded it in such a way that this post might be ale to show you how to make money online with guile! And you’d be right.

The knowledge can be learned by anyone willing to put in the time to do it. You have to be able to filter out all the horseshit from the nuggets of truth, but with intelligence you will be able to do that. And let’s face it, you wouldn’t even be here looking at how to make money online if you weren’t already blessed with the intelligence to realise that it might be possible!

There is some work involved, but you have to box a little clever with this. You will need to set up a series of free blogs on different hosts,such as blogger, wordpress, blinkweb, squidoo, hub pages etc and there all going to be loosely based around the topic of celebrity news. You are also going to have to nominate one blog, or a hosted domain as your main money site. The work involved will come from you populating all those free blogs with content that is mostly original and relevant to that topic. As you can see, celebrity news is a very wide topic, so you have an enormous amount of latitude for what you can write about. You can also cheat by using spun articles - you write the original, set it up in spin notation and run it through a free spinner such as jetspinner. You get 50 articles that you post around your free blogs.

There is some time involved too. You need these blogs to all get indexed by Google along with their posts. That means you’ll have to get links to them all from sources such as social bookmarking, blog comments, forum posts, article marketing, pligg site submissions (such as digg, bloggingzoom etc) the whole nine yards. This will probably take you three months or so but in that time you will have acquired a collection of blogs that will assist you in making that fast, easy money. As to your main site, that will be populated with only original, relevant content and you’ll be getting more links to it than the others from whatever sources you can. Also submit it to as many RSS syndication sites as you can. Post as often as you can about any celebrity that is in the public eye at the moment, no matter how crap the story is. You should also go about getting blogroll link exchanges as a good way to boost its authority.

But this is not what will supercharge it into making the money for you. That comes a little later.

Once your main money site has ranked for some of its longer tail keywords and is attracting some traffic from Google and the other search engines, its time to put Adsense on it. Check out my previous post about how best to do that: How to Make Money with Adsense. Once all the preparations have been made you can begin in earnest. How?

You wait and watch.

What you are watching for is breaking news about a high level celebrity, whether they be movie or TV, sports, political… any high profile well known name will do. The breaking news will be something big that a lot of people will want to read about. And you’ll be ready.

Quick as you can, write a 250+ word article outlining the breaking news story, entitle it with the most relevant phrase concerning what they are in the news for (it must also contain their name) and publish it on your money site. If you can upload an image of the celebrity into that post do it and put their name in the alt field. Use Onlywire to bookmark it and a good ping service to ping it to as many blog services as you can. Now edit ALL your free blogs. Take a recent post on each and change the title to include the name of the celebrity you are now targeting, add a link in that post straight to the post on your main site anchored with the celerity’s name and maybe the phrase that is most prevalent in the news story about them. No need to write any more articles, just use what you already have as it will be generic anyway. Publish and ping each free blog, then Onlywire the post you just changed.

If you get all that done quickly enough and beat the big syndicated news sites to the drop, your money site should enter the SERPs on the front page, maybe even take the top spot. If the phrase you chose is the one most people will search on, then within the next few hours your traffic should explode into many thousands. If your Adsense is optimised as best you can for that kind of site, then you should get a big flow of clicks that could amount to a lot of money in a very short space of time.

Let the site run as is for 48 hours max, or until the story dies down and your traffic drops off, then remove Adsense from your main site. This will help prevent you getting smart priced.

And that’s how to make money online with guile! Ok, it also takes work and preparation and then some luck, but its doable and repeatable. And if you do it, you just proved the myth that you can make a lot of money online in a short space of time!

Freelance Writer Terry Didcott
Co-Author of Blogging Web 2.0

Filed under: SEO | 1 Comment »

Just lately, there’s been a minor flurry of Internet Marketers who are beginning to turn their backs on the supposedly hard and fast rules of making money by building up a huge list of noobs and then pimping all the latest Clickbank crap to them. They are, instead, re-learning the basics of how to make money online with Adsense.

I say re-learning, because so many beginners to the business are put off trying to learn how to make money online with Adsense when they build a great looking blog, slap up some Adsense then sit back waiting for the clicks that never come. They have probably been told in the beginning that they need traffic to their blogs in the first place and that traffic has to be targeted. What they’re probably not told is that targeted traffic is really only going to come from the search engines, and for that to happen, they need their blog to rank for its main keywords first.

Second they need their keywords to attract sufficient searches in the first place. That means a decent number of people coming toyour site direct from the search engines looking for something to do with your keyword. because that’0s how they found you in the first place.

The minor revolution in how to make money online has been sparked off by a few people in particlular, who have all been featured and linked to in this blog in previous posts, namely Griz, Vic and Court amongst others. But there is a method in my own madness here, because while its nice to link out to these guys, its also important to use blog posts to link out to your own sites when they need a little lift. Which is the underlying reason for this post.

You see, in order to rank for your keywords in any niche, you need backlinks form other blogs and static websites that live on different servers (and therefore IP addresses) to your own. It helps if you have access to such blogs so that you can post on them and include a link or two to these fledgling blogs and help them up the ladder. Sort of like this blog is for me. Ok, I’m co-author with Monika, but it lives on a different server to the blogs I’m going to link to and so give them some nice juice to help them on their way.

This is really a part of article marketing which is the Internet Marketer’s bread and butter when it comes to obtaining links to their sites. Unfortunately, the main search engine which drives most of the organic traffic around the place has done something to its internal gubbins that has managed to devalue the link juice coming from the traditional article directories. Which is why posting unique articles yourself by hand in blogs such as this one (because I can and you can’t unless you sign-up) is teh way to go now, because they still carry the most link juice.

So, one self-serving blog post all about how to make money online with Adsense later and my own blog has got its link and is sent happily on its way to ranking in its niche, which will doubtless take a rather long time seeing as how in this instance it is working the highly competitive MMO niche, which every astute marketer will tell you to steer clear of as you are up against too many knowledgeable people who will continue to outrank you. But that’s not going to stop me from getting a foot in the door with a growing network of blogs that will, in good time, make the difference between nowhere and no way, to somewhere and a definite way!

So how does all this tie in with how to make money with Adsense?

Well, 90% of the work is in getting your site ranked in the search engines, and in particular Google. Once you’ve achieved that and the targeted traffic is flowing, then and only then do you put up Adsense ads on your blog. The clicks you will get will be targeted and they will therefore attract the most CPC, meaning you will be making money from your Adsense ads. It helps if your blog is set out with only Adsense, and the ad block is prominently placed. It also helps if your blog is not to fussy - the plainer the better with as few distractions as possible as you don’t want visitors clicking out on other links that don’t make you any money!

It doesn’t take a lot of brain work to figure out that the more traffic you get from the search engines, the more you will make from Adsense. If you can do that for one blog in one niche, then you can repeat it with more blogs in other niches.

How to make money with Adsense demystified or what!

Freelance Writer Terry Didcott
Co-Author of Blogging Web 2.0

Filed under: Internet Marketing | 8 Comments »

If you are reading this then I will assume you are looking for ways to make money blogging. You probably started your blog with high hopes and dreams of making lots of money from it but so far that hasn’t happened and chances are it never will. However, there is one way you can quickly and easily make money from your blog. And the best part is that you can do this again and again with as many blogs as you want to keep making money!

So, what is the fastest way to make money from your blog?

The simple answer is to sell it. Blog flipping is one of the most popular ways to make money online right now and you can easily start flipping blogs for quick cash if you want to.

I know that selling a blog you have put a lot of time into might seem stupid but if you aren’t making any money from it or if you aren’t making as much as you hoped at this point, then selling it for a lump sum of cash can be a wise decision.

You can keep building (or buying) and selling blogs to make money online as often as you want. Blogging isn’t going anywhere and there will always be more people coming online looking to buy a blog that has already been built for them, so blog flipping as a way to make money will be here for a long time.

If your blog isn’t making the money you thought it would, head over to the Sitepoint Marketplace and do your first blog flip right now.

Confused about how to flip blogs? Visit the Blog Flipping University for all the information you need on how to make money blog flipping.

Dedicated to your success,
Trent Brownrigg
Teaching you how to make money online.

Filed under: Blogging, Internet Marketing | 2 Comments »

As a follow on from my last post Make Money by Working With Search Engines,where I looked at several methods of working with the search engines rather than against them, I’m going to mention a linking strategy that you can use to boost the authority of your main site from which you make money online while remaining within the guidelines of the search engines.

First and foremost, you have to understand that this is by the book and legitimate, but the trade off is that it takes quite a lot of work on your behalf.

Ok, now that statement has probably frightened of the tyre kickers, the serious contenders can read on…

This idea of how to make money with a linking strategy is simple, obvious and actually quite simple to set up. It just takes time and some planning and using what we know about SEO to make money online. Time is something we all have plenty of, its just that a lot of it is wasted on non-essential pursuits, so instead of checking your stats 20 times a day, use that time to do this. Find a niche that you believe you can make money in. Avoid the Make Money Online niche as it is saturated and very competitive. Find a less competitive niche. You’ll have to do the research and come up with one that has several well searched keyword phrases that combined, will generate sufficient traffic for your main website or blog to make money. Then you need a plan.

Build Your Plan:

If you have the basics on how to use a spreadsheet like Excel (or if you prefer free, Open Office’s similar offering) then crank it up and make yourself a simple spreadsheet. On this you are going to make a list of blogs in the left hand column. Those blogs are the ones you are going to create on different platforms but in the same niche. Use free blogging platforms like Blogger, Wordpress, Blinkweb etc and create set of around 8-12 blogs. Divide them up into two groups and split blogs on each platform up as best you can so you don’t have, say all Blogger blogs in one group. They need to be split across various platforms for this to work best.

These are your first tier sites and they are going to be fairly general themed around your main niche. They are also going to provide your main site with the links it needs to dominate the SERPs for your chosen keywords. Getting the keywords part right is one of the methods of how to make money with SEO and has been covered in provious posts here and at the sites that are linked to in this post. Of course, the number of first tier sites you make will depend upon how competitive your niche is. So look at the top 3 sites in Google’s SERPs (this is the search engine you need to rank in by the way) for the keywords you want to rank for and find out how many anchored links they have pointing at them. You can do this with software like SEO Elite.

The strategy is simple in that you need more links than your competition to beat them in the SERPs.

Now build up each of your new blogs with posts, using relevant content. It doesn’t have to be quality content, just mostly original and relevant including your keywords both in the title and text of your posts. You can get links to these sites using the common variety of methods such as dofollow blog comments, forum sigs, article submissions, pligg site submissions etc. Once they have been indexed by Google you can start including links to your main site in each post.

You can also link some of the first tier blogs together but not all of them. This is why you split them into two groups. Only link blogs together within each group and do not link to blogs in the other group. Better to be frugal with interlinking and don’t daisy-chain them together but rather link out to maybe only two other random blogs in the group from each blog.

Why?

There is every chance that even though your blogs are perfectly legit, a competitor in your niche might not take kindly to a new site coming along and knocking them off their pedestal. They may check the back-links coming into your site and if they see a large group of blogs that not only link to your main site but are also interlinked, they will smell a rat and report your blogs as spam. Now, even if they are not spam, Google will shoot first and ask questions later and your blogs may get de-indexed until the Google visual inspection team can satisfy themselves that they are legit. During this time, your links will be discounted and your main site will drop out of the index.

It takes a while to get it back there and in that time you will lose money. So by not interlinking all your blogs, you minimize the risk.

Ok, now to the linking strategy itself and how off site SEO works its magic. All links must come from within posts. So no blogroll links. The links must have a keyword text anchor and either point directly at the homepage of your main site for its main keywords, or point to a post on the main site with the title of the post as the anchor. The title of each post in both first tier blogs and main site must include your keywords. This is highly important and what will help you to beat your competition, because chances are if the niche is not competitive, they will not know what you now know. Generate a mixture of links all containing variations of your keywords to make it look more natural.

Don’t overdo it. Keep it to a maximum of two links out from each post and work of a basis of one link per roughly 200-250 words for maximum link juice.

Well, that’s the strategy. It works but it takes time. Google take their time indexing sites, indexing posts within blogs and counting links. Several months may pass before your links get counted and your main site rises up onto the first page in the SERPs, let alone takes first place. So you need plenty of patience and keep diligently working all your blogs to keep providing fresh links to the main site.

Good luck, be tenacious and stick to your guns and you will succeed.

Freelance Writer Terry Didcott
Co-Author of Blogging Web 2.0

Filed under: SEO | 1 Comment »