A Make Money Online Update

Hi Folks... no... I'm not deceased!

Thanks for the 1247 emails over the past couple of weeks. I was down and out with a vicious Flu bug for a week and then spent some quality time on my favorite golf course just to get back into the swing of things - pardon the pun.

I have not made a dent in reading all the mail in case you were wondering or worse - are waiting for a reply. My email is just silly!

On a personal note - I am touched by how many of you wrote to see if I was alright or if there was anything you could do. I'm fine and amazed at how many great people I have met through this crappy little blog. Thank you all - it really meant more than I can say.

I just want to touch base on a few topics so this post isn't going anywhere in particular.

As most of you know Vic has begun his Affiliate Academy and asked if I would help moderate. I, of course, am honored and will try my best given my time constraints. I have received quite a bit of mail about the Academy and need to clarify a few things. Believe it or not but I haven't had a chance to talk to Vic yet and I'm not up to speed on what is happening over there yet. I know he has had some bugs and is busy ironing them out - the joys of starting a new program online. Unfortunately I have been blocked from most of the site as a result and am in the dark about most of it so please send your questions on to Vic. Hopefully I will get a chance to talk to him shortly and get up to speed. I really haven't wanted to add more to his plate at the moment.

For those interested in knowing more about the Affiliate Academy Vic provided me with the following link. Affiliate Academy Registration or head over and check out Vic's videos on Blogger Unleashed. Affiliate Academy Videos I suspect at this stage there won't be too many of you who aren't already familiar with what Vic is doing as we have most of the same readership. If anyone can fill me in on how things are progressing please don't be shy.

Forums

I have been getting links from forum threads for some time and a lot of them are private forums in which I can't join in - I'm not a member. I get mentioned in relation to my views on various topics and Adsense is prime among them. It appears that there is a lot of confusion over when to add Adsense to your new blogs. I thought I would touch on this briefly as I would like to explain my reasoning for NOT adding Adsense to a new blog and only adding it when the right conditions are met. I used to tell people to get some posts up - 10 or so - and wait til G started sending some traffic. I have a much more refined approach these days and I think it is worth sharing with you. I know many of you are making at least some money from Adsense after having followed my advice and I say this just to get across my bona fides. I have never had anyone tell me they make money following the advice of Joel Comm - advice they paid for. There may well be other methods of making money with Adsense but all I see is countless followers of the "get as many sites making $1 a day as you can and smart pricing be damned" method. This is just so inefficient and "2 years ago" that I'm not sure anyone else has really figured Adsense out yet.

Not long ago I mentioned how I doubled my Adsense Income. The post referred to Smart Pricing and why it was important not to use Adsense on poorly targeted sites. I won't get into smart pricing again (you can follow the last link) but I want to show you what has happenned with the blog I used as an example of in the previous post. The blog is now 7 months old. It had been earning $20 - $30 a day for several months when it suddenly grew in earnings after I quit being smart priced. This happened in early August. Below is the earnings for September from the same blog. From $900 per month to $1800 per month and growing. If you look at the last day in Sept. you will see that the blog broke through the $100 a day barrier. Actually, as happened with the blog you are now reading - it didn't just climb to the $100 mark, it raced well on by. Yesterday it made $126.38. It is now my 7th $100/day blog. It will bounce back and forth for a while as all the others do (the more money you make with Adsense the bigger the swing in earnings from day to day - a $10/day blog may make $8 or $12 but usually close to consistent. A blog making over a hundred dollars a day can make $175 one day and $65 the next in an extreme case - a $20 swing is normal.)



I harp on Adsense for a reason and use this example to point out a few things. The blog in question is only 7 months old. Many of you have been with me for longer than 7 months. Many of you have asked me how long it takes to make any real money with Adsense. I would say you have an answer although to be honest that is the fastest I have had any blog turn a $100 day. This MMO blog took a year and a half. Those of you who have been with me since the beginning have seen me take 7 blogs to that level - a little over two years. So in two years I have 7 Adsense blogs bringing in a rough average of $700 per day. I have no technical computer skills. I use free crappy looking Blogger blogs that any technically challenged person can operate and I am trying to teach brand new bloggers how to make money online. That is why I harp on Adsense so much. It is something that absolutely anyone can master and provided you don't screw up - is continuous... day after day...

Now don't get me wrong - it ain't easy but it is doable if you do things right. Yes, finding the right niche is crucial. I have many failures but have put those blogs to other uses. I can't tell you the niche to pick but I can give you some pretty accurate tips as to what to look for from my own experience.

All 7 blogs rank number 1-3 for their main keywords. They all broke the $100 barrier between 500 ad impressions and 1500 ad impressions daily. Some average as low as $0.60 per click and some as high as $2.00 - none are high CPC niches. This means you want a niche that can deliver 500 to 1500 people a day to your site. You want a niche that has people looking for an answer to a question - sounds obvious but most people don't realize this. This blog does well because a lot of people are looking for the answer to "how to make money online?" All the blogs save this one have only one form of monetization - Adsense. There are few links to leave the page other than ads or backing out.

All the blogs are highly targeted to their keywords. I say "highly" because they have to be to do well with Adsense. Google ranks them on top of the serps and you can't get more highly targeted than that. Because they are so targeted they get the best adsense ads - meaning the highest paying and or converting - whichever brings in the most daily revenue. The majority of traffic comes from search engines and not social sites. This means the traffic is highly targeted. When highly targeted visitors visit a highly targeted adsense ad good things happen for all involved - I get paid more and the advertiser gets the type of traffic they were paying for.

None of the sites are splogs - the content is decent, bordering on very good and most of all, highly relevant to their respective keywords - just as this blog is.

None of the blogs are pretty.

Only one of the blogs has a readership - this one.

So... I bet it would help if I showed you what it takes to create a perfect Adsense blog in record time in one of the most competitive niches online. Guess what? I already have...

Let me introduce you all to Make Money Online with Grizzly

Okay so you've seen it already but guess what. It is ranking on pages 1-3 on Google for the term "Make Money Online" depending on your data center. It will be 3 months old on Oct 5, 2008.

Below is a screenshot for the keywords I'm receiving traffic for - notice the prevalent keyword "make money online".



Notice the similarity to the keywords used to find this MMO for beginners blog.



Granted the new blog is only getting 20 - 30 hits a day as it bounces in and out of the top pages but this only confirms that it is moving up nicely and in record time. What it really tells me is that the site is highly targeted in Google's eyes and I could now ad Adsense to the blog. I won't get smart priced as the traffic is finding me predominantly for my main keyword. If you have a wide range of long tails that aren't closely related then don't use Adsense. This is how you know when to ad Adsense. Any sooner and your traffic will not be targeted and you will suffer poor clicks and possible smart pricing. If you can't generate targeted traffic - don't use Adsense.

How often do you post? The new blog has a grand total of 5 posts. It is a PR3 and is now ranking well in Google. You now know just how little content or PR is needed to rank well in a very competitive niche. Imagine how easy a less competitive niche is to dominate.

It has about 100 backlinks - yup - that's all.

The thing is the backlinks are mostly keyword anchored for my "make money online" keyword or are closely related. This folks is the key and what I have been going on about for some time now.

Forget all the advice you read elsewhere - get targeted backlinks and you will make money online using Adsense.

Study the blog - it won't take long. Check my links. There is no secret weapon being used. The site is an example of the bare minimum needed to make money online. You can see what I have done and how long it has taken.

Btw. I still wont ad Adsense until I get a few hundred hits a day on a consistent basis and only if the traffic remains targeted.

If you are a beginner I urge you to conquer Adsense first. In doing so you learn all the SEO you will ever need and then you can easily move on to other types of monetized blogs. Learn how to get targeted traffic and everything else will follow naturally.

I had more I wanted to talk about but this is long enough for today. I'll be back soon with something related that I want to share with you.