Here’s a timely reminder that things will be easier for you in your quest to learn how to make money online that was sparked off by Trent’s previous post here at Blogging Web 2.0. He mentioned getting your blog noticed in the search engines in order to attract traffic, the kind of traffic that will convert into revenue when you find a good niche to work in.

I’m going to expand on that part somewhat by saying that while many bloggers are spending all their time chasing social traffic. They do this by doing the rounds and reading umpteen other peoples’ blogs, commenting in them, then using social networks like Digg or Stumbleupon etc to attract more traffic to their blogs. Well that’s fine of you like looking at your stats and seeing a few hundred unique visitors coming to your blog, as long as you have posted in there, that is.

But reading your stats isn’t going to make you a dime. Neither are those social visitors, because, let’s face it, they’re all just like you. They are bloggers too and they know what ads look like and they don’t click on them. So you’re working like a trooper, posting every day and commenting all over the place and not making any money!

No matter what anyone else tells you, if you want to know how to make money online, you need Google to rank your blog on its first page for its main and several long tail keywords if you are going to stand any chance of making money from it. Other search engines will also bring you traffic, but Google are the main prize as they generate fully 67% of all search traffic. All the other search engines put together generate the remaining 33%, which is divvied up between the likes of Yahoo, MSN, All The Web, AOL etc. While ranking well with all of them will contribute to your blog’s overall potential earnings, the lion’s share will come from Google.

So instead of wasting your day doing the social blogging rounds and checking your stats, use that time wisely to get yourself lots of strong, keyword anchored backlinks to your blog. And not just to your homepage, but also to your deeper pages with long tail keywords in the anchor mixed up with your main keyword. That way you’ll begin to rank well for lots of different keywords and start attracting traffic from lots of different searches.

And don’t expect it all to happen overnight.

Be patient, because Google are relatively slow to count new links. While you’re waiting, don’t sit back and revert to the social scene and checking stats, keep at it by continually creating new backlinks. Sure, in order to keep the how to make money online momentum going, keep writing in your blog too to increase its content. Make good use of those posts and include your main and long tail keywords in the content of each post. The more keywords you can get in there (without stuffing) the more ways you will rank in the search results. And the more traffic you will attract!

And what does traffic make? Money, that’s what!

Of course, your blog will need to be monetised in order to make that money, so either put up some Adsense, or affiliate links with some good reviews of the products you’re selling.

One last thing… If you’ve been relying on the odd reader throwing some chump change into your hat by clicking on the “buy me a beer” or whatever begging method you’ve got sitting in your sidebar, get rid of it! Most serious marketers (me included) have a serious dislike of begging as it implies failure, like a beggar in the street. And you want to be a success, right?

Well, what are you waiting for? Stop reading about it and get out there and start doing it!

Terry Didcott
Co-Author of Blogging Web 2.0

Filed under: Internet Marketing