Make Money With Internet Marketing - Step By Step Follow Along

*Note: I wrote most of this up a while back and I'm just now splicing all the information together into a post. I have some more information lying around that I'll splice up into new posts later on.

Some of you may have seen my previous post about my entry into the internet marketing arena. I had planned to keep track of my progress in that thread but I got sidetracked, so here I am now.

I started my journey at the end of August. For a little over 2 months, I was working 14+ hours per day building websites, learning php/mysql, studying and learning, writing content for my sites, experimenting with content management systems, manual link-building, experimenting with paid advertising, researching and testing different niches, etc...

This past month I've slowed down to about 6-8 hours per day now that I know what efforts produce the best results. I think I've learned enough that I can explain step-by-step how someone with little experience can use a couple hours each day to build a site that will make a couple hundred dollars per month. Once you've accomplished that, the motivation to continue will be there, and expanding will come naturally.

So, I'm going to try to take everyone step-by-step through the process of building a profitable site. I'm going to post EXACTLY what I'm doing the entire way. I will give action points that I think everyone following along should complete. After each post with a call to action, I'll give a couple days for everyone to catch up, then I'll move on to the next step.

I'm going to be very transparent with my keyword research and everything here. I am a little bit afraid that someone may try to copy my exact research and become my competition, but if I can't beat someone trying to copy me, I shouldn't be in this line of business. Even still, I would appreciate it if nobody entered my niche here

Without further ado, here we go...

Step 1: Research

I've heard some people say that this is the hardest and most important part of building any site.

When it comes to research, it is important to keep several things in mind, the first being:

The late Gary Halbert used to tell a story about opening a hamburger stand. At his seminars he would ask the crowd this question:
“If you and I were both going to open a hamburger stand and you could pick any one thing to give you an advantage over me, what would you pick?”
The people from the crowd would shout back:
“A great location”
“The best-tasting hamburger”
“A clean, attractive stand”
“Excellent employees”
After a while of this Gary would pause and say: “Go right ahead and take all those, but I can guarantee my stand will outsell yours, because the one advantage I’m going to pick is… A STARVING CROWD!"

But having a starving crowd isn't enough. Since you are doing this in your free time, you will not be able to compete with the big dogs going after those same starving people. You need to find things that people are searching for that aren't being targeted by the big dogs.

For example: In my research today, I was checking out "credit card" related keywords. There was a lot of traffic, and the people looking to consolidate debt were definitely starving for a solution, but all the keywords involved very common phrases "credit card consolidation" or "free instant credit report". These terms are very common and there are lots of results in the search engines for them.

This is why I love the diet niche so much. There is always some new pill or weight loss secret on the market. When a new term appears out of no-where, it puts everyone on a level playing field. There are no website built around that term, so it is much easier to rank for them. For example, go to www.google.com/insights and type in "diet pills" and look at the rising search terms. The top 3 rising searches with over 10x increase in search results in the past 3 months are about the "acai" diet pill. The term "acai" is very new and got a huge boost when it was featured on Oprah recently. There are very few aged sites with high pagerank and many backlinks based around this "acai" term.

I was unable to find any new breakthrough term in the credit card niche, (except for maybe "prepaid credit card for teens", if someone is looking for an experiment, you might want to check that one out)so I kept searching.

Moving on...
The total amount of time I spent on research today was about 30 minutes. I thought about going with the acai berry, but I already have a profitable site related to that and I thought it would be cheating. After not finding anything that caught my eye in the diet pill niche, I moved to credit. I skipped that niche because of the reasons above and moved to the cancer niche. I plugged "cancer" into http://www.google.com/insights and looked at the top results and started clicking down the list, looking for some term that has been increasing in popularity recently. Nothing stood out, so I went to the keyword suggestion tool over at http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ and http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ and typed in "cancer" there. That's when something caught my eye.



Obviously not what I was looking for, but that's how niche research works. You get going and things just keep hacking away and you never know where you'll end up, but ideas eventually start falling into your lap.

That word looked good. There are 500 searches per day on it (this seems a bit high for such a long-tail keyword so I think it may be inaccurate) and it doesn't seem like a keyword that many sites would target. It opens up a lot of monetization possibilities too, from horoscopes to dating/relationship to penis enlargement.

I plugged the keyword into googles keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) to double-check the number of searches, and it shows up as only 200 searches per month. This made me think it was a fluke in the seobook keyword tool. I then did a search for "how to attract gemini" in wordtrackers free keyword tool (http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com) and it showed up as about 60 searches per day. I think googles tool is a bit inaccurate when it comes to long-tail keyphrases for some reason. I also think SEObooks tool over-estimates the traffic. There is a lot of estimation going on here, but it's apparent this search term does get at least SOME traffic, and you can obviously target other horoscopes like gemini, cancer, taurus, etc, to expand your reach.

I'm actually still doing research as I type this. I just plugged in "how to attract" into seobook and wordtracker. http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/...suggest=Hit+Me
That's a VERY good number of searches.

In general, I've heard that anything with 100 searches per day and less than 20k results in google when you search for the phrase in quotes is an easy niche to place on the front page for.

Look at the 3rd suggestion on the wordtracker tool for "how to attract". You'll see the phrase "how to attract a virgo female". Type that into google in quotes. There are just 407 results.

This phrase is going to be VERY easy to rank for.

Ok, I'm definitely targeting this niche. Now I have to decide what my domain name is going to be. Domain name matters VERY much in search engine rankings. On one hand, you may want a short general domain that is easy to remember. For example, with the niche I'm targeting, I may want "www.horoscopeattraction.com" and then I can target every different keyword in that niche. But, since each keyword is along the lines of "how to attract a virgo female", and none of that keyphrase is in my domain name, it will be hard to rank for. So, on the other hand, you want your domain name to be very specific to your keyphrase to make it easier to rank.

*Note: This is where I stopped writing a couple weeks ago. I ended up buying the domain howtoattract.org and put a little content on it that I copied and rewrote from other sites, and submitted it to a few social bookmarking sites just to get it indexed. I haven't done anything with it since then and it's getting about 50 visitors per day and has made $1.07 through adsense clicks.

I'm going to go ahead and stop right here and give a few "Action Steps" for anyone following along to complete.

Action Steps:

1. Find A Niche

If you have any ideas already, look them up with with googles keyword tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and SEObook's keyword suggestion tool http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ and narrow it down to a specific keyword that is searched for often. Put the search term in google in quotes and see how many results there are. In general, you should try to find something with 300+ searches per month and under 50k results in google when searched for in quotes.

(I found the Zodiac/Dating niche)


2. Monetization

Make sure you can make money off of the niche. One of my first mistakes was finding the "Ben 10" niche and making "watchben10online.info". Yes, I got a lot of traffic and there was little competition, but the people looking for free online tv episodes are not the kind of people to spend money, and it was very hard to monetize that site.

Do a search on www.clickbank.com www.cj.com and use a google search of "niche keyword" "affiliate program" to see if there are any affiliates programs for a product in your niche. You may also consider ebays partner network as you can find almost anything on ebay. To see how much adsense clicks pay, you can use googles adwords tool and select "Show average CPC(cost per click)" in the "Choose columns to display: " selection

(I am using adsense right now, but will soon add dating and relationship books from clickbank and paydotcom)

3. Get A Domain

I strongly suggest you buy a domain (namecheap.com or godaddy.com) and hosting (hostgator.com) rather than use a free service like blogspot. This gives you much more freedom and makes you look much more professional. Even if it's just a $1.99 .info and $7/mo basic package from hostgator, it will give you much more freedom and room to build, and if you really take action, it will be VERY hard to not make way more than your investment back.

Either way you go about it, make sure the majority of your keyword is in your comain. Try every variation of -'s and pluralities and stuff to find one that isn't taken yet.

If you choose to go with a free service like blogspot, wordpress, or squidoo, I hear blogspot ranks best in google. But you should probably register all 3 anyway.
(I am using howtoattract.org, which gives me the subdomains "howtoattract.org/a-gemini-female", etc... which is GREAT for SEO purposes for that term)


That's it for now. If anyone has any questions about a niche or how to set up a blogspot or how to register for a domain/hosting, I'm sure you will get a quick answer by posting in this thread.

I'll give everyone a couple days to complete these steps and then we'll move on to getting good content and promoting to get traffic.

 

Some of the tips about checking keyword popularity will be useful for me to try out.

scott
bargainscent.com

 

Looks like the google insights link has changed. Now it is http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

 

Anyway, picking up where we left off... We have a site targeting a specific, easy to rank for keyphrase, and a way to monetize it.

I could write for days about the different ways of building a site, from outsourcing it, to hubpages/squidoo, to wordpress, to joomla, etc...

I'll try to keep it simple. If you are not very familiar with coding or web design, you should stick with Squidoo : Welcome to Squidoo, www.blogger.com, and WordPress.com Get a Free Blog Here for now. You don't need to know any coding to build a site using one of those pages. Just sign up, everything is very self-explanatory, and any questions you might have are easily answered with a quick google search. You're site will also already have an advantage in ranking since some of the pagerank of the main site will carry over to what you build. If you aren't yet familiar with the blogging platform of wordpress or blogspot, those are very simple to learn also.

Squidoo can be handy because they automatically split their advertising revenue, and offer you the ability to place amazon.com items on your page without signing up for the amazon affiliate program. All profit squidoo.com makes is split with you. Just make sure you check that option, otherwise they'll give it to charity or keep it all or something. The money you'll make won't be nearly as much as you can make promoting other products (I think I made 16 cents in about 200 visits) but there are people making a couple thousand per month solely from squidoo.

If you have hosting and bought your own domain, you can install wordpress on your own site using "fantastico" if your hosting uses cpanel. If not, you can upload the wordpress files over FTP. Refer to WordPress › Blog Tool and Publishing Platform for exact details on how to do that. Note: WordPress.com Get a Free Blog Here is the site that you'll want to use if you are going with a free wordpress blog.

For my site, I chose joomla simply because I have not used it yet and wanted to experiment. example of joomla - howtoattract.org or top2reviews.net. in fact, if you want to see the backend of joomla, you can login to myacnediary.info with username twoplustwo password 123456 and you can mess around with adding articles and categories and stuff.

I am fairly familiar with html, but i suggest not coding a site from scratch because it takes so much longer to get a decent looking site compared to using a CMS (content management system) like joomla or wordpress. Knowing HTML is very handy and will make things like putting links in your text or making font colors pretty a lot easier, but you don't need to know how to build a site from nothing with it. W3Schools Online Web Tutorials is the only site you'll ever need for anything related to html.

One other program I guess I should mention is Xsitepro. I built one site in it and it is very convenient and fast to use. But, it's a bit limited in customization. I couldn't figure out how to change a banner, for example. It comes with a lot of default templates for gambling, gaming, gardening, business, whatever. But if you want to customize it, you are SOL unless you know a lot about html template design and stuff. Plus, the software costs about $200 I think. For an example of what xsitepro looks like check out roulette-sniper.org (yes it's my site, don't buy the product it's a scam)


Anyway, enough about the different types of sites. I think a big problem with this industry is analysis paralysis. There are too many options and it's too easy to get stuck trying to decide what to do. Don't go experimenting with every different type of site. If you are just getting started, choose one and do it. Let me make it easy for you.

MAKE A BLOGGER BLOG AT https://www.blogger.com/start



Next you'll need content. Keep in mind, this isn't your high school english class. This is the internet. Your content does not have to be good in most cases. You can always improve on it later as your site starts getting more traffic. The important thing at the beginning is that your site has a lot of unique pages and that all of the pages target very specific keywords. The software that google uses to scan pages can not recognize grammatic errors, but it does recognize which words are bolded, used most often, and used as link text. Focus on getting lots of content up fast more than getting high-quality original content. As your site gets traffic, use tracking software to see which content is getting the most views, and focus on optimizing those pages and make more pages around those keywords.

To start, I usually browse wikipedia, yahoo answers, or do a google search for my keywords and copy/reword a lot of material. The initial stuff is really just going to be placeholder content while you write more targeted and converting stuff.

To speed up the process of getting unique original content, there are 2 things you can do. You can outsource the articles - I use Rent A Coder: How Software Gets Done -- Home of the worlds' largest number of completed software projects - or you can get some good speech to text software - I use dragon naturally speaking.

With a freelance site like rentacoder or Elance | Connect with Qualified Professionals, you can usually get 400 word articles written for around $3-$4 per article. You will get a lot of bids from people with broken English and poor grammar. I immediately ignore those bids. If you don't mind re-writing and prettying up someone elses article, you can get a 400 word article for around $1, but the grammar will be bad. I rather pay $3-$4 and get perfect grammer/spelling.

Dragon naturally speaking costs around $100, so you might hold off on that until you start making money.

Either way, make sure this content is targetted around specific keywords.

For example - I am targeting the keywords around how to attract different zodiac signs. My site is howtoattract.org. My content articles are focused around the keywords "how to attract a gemini", "how to attract a pisces", etc... If your site is focused on how to build a six pack, your domain might be howtobuildasixpack.blogspot.com and your pages might be focused on the more specific phrases like "how to build a six pack fast", "how to build a six pack quickly", "how to get a six pack fast", etc...


To be continued...

 

Just bookmarked. I'm interested on reading the next steps you lay out.

 

You have gone into some massive depth here, good work.

 

Gr8 info man.. thanks looking forward to your posts

 

That is great info there, it will help everyone.

 

I wrote 24 short articles targeting 24 very specific and easy to rank for keywords. I named each article "how to attract a [zodiac sign] [male/female]" and I tried to include that phrase a couple times in the article. If you do a search for "how to attract a sagittarius female" or "how to attract a leo male", etc... you'll see I am on the first page of google for those keywords. They aren't as high traffic as I thought, but it does get some traffic. I don't yet know why some keyphrases are so inflated in their search results. If you do a search today for "how to attract a cancer woman", which was getting 543 daily search results in seobook keyword tool when I first wrote this, you'll see that now it only shows 4 total searches per day. But, after looking in google's keywordtool and comparing the results, I was confident I could at least get a little bit of traffic from these terms.

You can see which keywords are getting the most traffic in the screenshot below.



Which sidetracks me to my next point.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS
https://www.google.com/analytics

You need to have this on every site you make. Remember I said knowing your way around HTML wasn't necessary but would make life easier? To install google analytics, you have to copy the HTML code that google gives you and paste it onto your site, just above the </body> tag. Click here if you want to learn how to install google analytics onto blogger.

The amount of information you get from analytics is incredible. You will find which content your viewers like the most. You'll also find out where your traffic is coming from so you can focus your efforts where they will be most effective. Use google analytics.

Back to my content/keyphrases...

I've got about 35 pages of targeted content up focusing on specific keyphrases. That's a good start, but you should never stop adding content. The site is far from being optimized for search engines, you will need to go back and bold certain keyphrases, and make sure your meta data is accurate (google search "html meta data seo" for more info). But, search engine optimization is pointless of the search engines can't find your site. We need to get your site out there on the web so the search engine spiders (and people) can find it.

The easiest and fastest way I've found for getting a search engine to visit and index your site is to social bookmark. www.digg.com, www.propeller.com, www.misterwong.com, those are social bookmarking sites. People submit websites and then everyone rates them. The most popular sites get featured on the front page. Your sites probably won't get featured on the front page any time soon, but at least you will get links to your site out there on the internet and the search engines will be able to start crawling it.

Plus, some of these social bookmarking sites rank well in google. For example: at the time I write this, a google search for "how to attract a gemini male" has the #4 result as http://www.jumptags.com/tag/how to attract a gemini malewhich is my site. Google analytics shows that I've got 30 visits in the past month from jumptags.com. I'm sure a lot of those visits found my site through google.

Social bookmarking can be tedious though if you do it all manually. There are a few ways to make the process quicker though. You can use www.socialmarker.com which will automatically fill in the forms for about 40 of the top social bookmarking sites for you. I did this for about a month. You can also outsource social bookmarking at the price of about $3 for 100 social bookmarks. Or, you can get software like bookmarking demon ($97) or senuke ($100/mo) to automatically do it for you. I got bookmarking demon a couple weeks ago and it was the best money I ever spent. It takes me about 3 minutes to start 200ish submissions (~3 submissions to ~80 different sites). It could do more but I'm trying not to spam and get my ip banned from every social bookmarking site. I suggest you use socialmarker for a couple weeks first, even if you do have enough money to buy bookmarking demon right now. I know there is a huge % of people who spend money on information or tools that can help them make more money in the future, but don't know or don't care to properly use them.

I don't know what step I'm on now, but here is what you need to do if you haven't yet.

1. Get content focusing around your keyphrases. 15-20 pages should be a good start.

2. Go to www.socialmarker.com and sign up for every social bookmarking site. Have notepad open in the background with all your info on it so you can just copy/paste everything.

3. Socialbookmark 5-6 pages to each social bookmarking site. This will get your site indexed by the search engines and you may start getting traffic.

Note: Having an aged domain helps with SERP (search engine ranking position). If you have an idea for a site but don't have time to do it now, you should at least take the steps up to here so the search engines will index your site and it will begin to properly age.

 

I made my first clickbank sale from howtoattract.org.



Along with about $5 in adsense revenue.

Not bad for a site that's only been up 1 month and only been monetized for about a week.



I am almost done with the basic setup of this site. From here on I'll just be doing slow updates to keep the content fresh and modify the layout to improve conversions as I see fit. I'll also be doing a little bit of link building. I'll be submitting articles to directories and trading links with other astrology/horoscope related blogs. When I submit an article or get a link back to me, I'll want the text to be something like "how to attract" or "zodiac compatibility" or something involving a keyword I'm trying to rank for.

Regarding monetization:

You want to keep the flow of your site. Think about what your reader is searching for and what you would buy if you were in their shoes. It is going to be harder to sell a "how to attract any woman you want" ebook to a guy searching for horoscope compatibility advice than it will be to sell the same book to a guy searching for "how to get laid". Since my customers are the horoscope/astrology type, I will probably have more luck selling them personal love horoscope readings, or something along those lines.

The clickbank book I put on the site is a seduction advice book. I was a bit worried that it was too untargeted. I'm glad I made a sale, but I still think my users would benefit more from something more targeted. For that reason, I am testing out a few personal astrology reading offers from commission junction (www.cj.com). I just put those up a yesterday and haven't had enough time to see any results.

User Content:
If you can get your users to keep your content updated, you've got a golden goose. I put some forums up on my site to try to give users a way to interact with the community, and to keep them coming back, to keep content updated, etc. It's hard to get a forum started though. One thing you may consider is to create a few accounts and pull questions/answers from yahoo answers to help jump-start discussion on your forums.

You may also consider putting a little text in the sidebar saying "HowToAttract.org is looking for qualified zodiac attraction authors. If you would like to submit your work for review to be published on HowToAttract.org, please e-mail your submission to ...." I haven't tried this but I have heard of it working. Many people write for fun in their free time and would be honored to have their writing featured on a website.

Linkbuilding:
I don't think you should ever stop social bookmarking. At the start, you should social bookmark your site directly to help get it indexed quick. After a short while, you should stop bookmarking directly to your site as much, and start bookmarking sites that link to your site more often.

If ezinearticles has an article that links to your site, it will help your rankings. If an ezinearticles has an article that links to your site, and that ezine article has 20 sites that link to it, it will help your rankings a lot more, and it is less likely that your site is seen as spam.

For howtoattract.org, I found someone on www.forums.digitalpoint.com to write an article around a keyword I specify and put whatever URL anchor text with a link to my site, and submit that article to 380 directories, all for just $18. The increase in search engine rankings should be worth it. Because of the duplicate content penalty, not all of those 380 article links will be weighted the same.

I am trying to find someone offering a service that will write a spinnable article to submit unique articles to each directory, but I haven't found anyone yet.

A spinnable article is an article written in the format of "{We|I|A group of us} went to the {store|grocery store|local wal-mart} to get some {apples|bananas|oranges}." A program then randomly chooses one option from within the {} to put into the article. With the click of a button, you've instantly got practically unlimited unique articles.

Another way you can build links is by trading with other websites, or buying links outright. You can find people trading/selling links on forums like digital point http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=58

Note: these links are not so much for gaining traffic immediately as they are for gaining backlinks, which will in turn increase your SERPs, which will in turn increase your traffic.

Split test your design/monetization
You need to figure out which design/monetization methods are most optimal. Go about this scientifically

 

This process is very similar to mine so I know first hand that it works.

Your steps in your post is fairly complete. Anyone can use this process to make money on this Internet. It just takes a little leg work as well as you need to think outside the box for new web site ideas.

 

JetSubmitter/JetSpinner does this.

 

What do you get out of doing this?
You're definitely teaching me, that's for sure.

 

Super kool write up! I am going to try this!!

 

Great tips and definite guides on finding a niche to generate income online.

 

Spinning article to produce multiple versions of the original article is an excellent way to increase the quality of your links. What's better is if there's variations in the anchor text used. This way, it will look very natural to the search engines.

We currently offer this kind of service. Check out my signature.

 

Hey Daedric,

I need 5 unique articles written so that I can post them on my niche website. Do you provide this type of service? If so, PM me.

Thanks.

 

loktakwah
Where are you?

You have a dreaded BANNED title!! Why is that so??? I was so enjoying your posts. Come back Loktakwah!!!
Mods....anything you can tell us?

M

 

nice work

hopefully you are putting this up oin a blog or a newsletter for yourself to gain more exposure to the people on your list

 

I agree with ErikJ. It would be great if you could put this up on a website or blog.

Another idea would be to turn this into an eBook and give it away for free.
Just a thought.

Hope to hear from you soon.


Thanks.