Adsense is one of the things that has always intrigued me. (Before I forget, grab this blog’s free 55+ report on how to make money with adsense).

My first earnings in ‘passive income’ was through Adsense – a proxy website in 2007/8 that was making $20.00+ per day without me working on it. I promoted it in the standard way you promoted proxies at the time – social bookmarking swaps (Digg/StumbleUpon) mainly and for some reason it shot up to those levels in less than a week.

I used to get excited logging into my account every day, realizing I’d done jack all work and seeing that twenty dollars. Eventually I moved onto other things after I was scammed out of that site… but I’ll always remember the ease of it.

I’ve recently (as in the last few months) concentrating on focusing on niche website development again, focusing on building basic websites around long tail keywords and using Adsense/affiliate products on them. This was the main reason for starting my company – I want to build up enough passive income so that I can retire I can relax a bit more than I’m currently doing so.

Anyways, I’ve seen a reasonable amount of success with Adsense, but wanted to take it a step further and build it up to higher levels… here’s my strategy, the tools I used and how you can get started.

My Adsense Inspiration

There are two main people that are the reason for this focus:

a) Grizz – I suck up to him all too often on here (when I owned it in the past, at least ) and it’s because he’s awesome. There’s enough free information on his site to get you started – check out How To Make Money For Beginners. Solid info.

b) Xfactor – another Adsense king (to the tune of $300 – $500 a day). Read his Warrior thread for 30+ pages of free information that will help you get started with Adsense.

Now see, the main problem people have is getting traffic. Once you get that targeted traffic, you can pretty much use it for whatever you want – Adsense, affiliates, products, whatever. My primary goal is Adsense and self created products, but what you do is up to you.

What John (Xfactor) recommends is that you go after product keywords, where the searcher is looking to buy something / information about buying something and thus are more likely to click your ads. I’ve followed this for some sites and have found it works pretty well – a CTR of 50% and over at times depending on the template used.

Now of course there are tools that help shorten time with various parts of this however knowing that a lot of people don’t have money to get started I’ll provide both the free way (how I started) and a few tools that I use now.

The Free Way To Making Money With Adsense

Blogger vs Hosted Websites

Although I used to look down on Blogger, despite starting with a blogger blog myself (about football, in case you were wondering), Grizz and a few other sites changed my opinion. See the misinformation I was given after reading various ’social’ blogs was that blogger blogs couldn’t rank, were less powerful than standard sites etc. Through experience (I’ve tried blogger blogs to rank for one day/week “hot trend” keywords that I didnt want to buy and setup a site around) and from looking at Grizz’s blog, which is a Blogger blog and ranked for top keywords, I have to admit that Blogger is just as powerful as Wordpress or HTML sites – it all depends on how you use it.

However, if you’re going after a keyword that has any kind of long term value I always recommend you buy the domain ($9 from Name.com using the coupon code CRUSHIT) and setup a Wordpress site on hosting ($0.01 your first month with Hostgator using the coupon code 404page or jury).

The main reason for this is because I love Wordpress, being a code newb and more importantly this gives you a way out.

See I’ve always been someone that looks at the immediate rather than the long term, which has been stupid in the past (for example I’ve taken an up front $2,000 for a site making $200 passively per month), something I’m going to change however if you have a need you have your way out in the form of selling the site when you own it. Selling a Blogger blog is against TOS whereas you have no problem listing your own site (say you have an emergency and need $$$, or don’t have the time for online stuff anymore, you get the idea).

So get your own domain and hosting.

Okay, now step by step the free way to making money with Adsense.

Finding a keyword – Google Keyword Tool

Google Keyword Tool gives you suggestions for keyword variations (for example, if you type weight loss it’ll give you 50-100 long tails/related keywords).

Type in a keyword of your choice and play around with it. Make sure you change “Match Type” on the drop down box to Exact.

You’ll get dozens of keywords. Look for anything with 2,000 searches per month and up on the Global Monthly Search Volume after sorting it in descending order.

Above is an example search for “table” shown sorted in descending order (taken a long time ago but the tool hasn’t changed since then ).

Your next step is judging the competition for individual keywords.

Read this post on how to analyse your competitors to see whether you could outrank them.

A simple rule – I’ve found that if the exact keyword is available in .COM / .NET / .ORG and there isn’t another site developed with that keyword (for example, if dressingtable.org was available and .COM and .NET weren’t developed sites) the term is easy as hell to rank for.

Domains are powerful – I’ve found simply by setting up a Wordpress blog with plugins and the exact keyword as my domain I’ve ranked top 5-10, sometimes without any backlinks at all.

If there is another site and it’s developed, it means ranking is still possible but you’d be pitting your skills against another internet marketer. Never scared me but if you’re starting out you may not want to do that.

Once you find a keyword, and after checking out your competition you want to see if the domains are available.

A site that helps you check whether the keyword is available as a domain in .COM / .NET / .ORG extension is Instant Domain Search. Simply enter your term and it’ll automatically search for you.

You may want to do this before you analyse your competitors.

Next step – is this keyword going to make me any money?

Two ways to do this.

Easiest way is Spyfu.com – plug in your keyword and see if are ads.

Generally you’d estimate you get around half of the ad cost so look for a minimum ad cost of $0.40 per keyword.

Here it’s just under $0.40, but there are a lot of advertisers – depending on competition strength we’d still probably go for this keyword.

Now we’re still covering the free way to get started – this can take a lot of time but I’ll list it. If you’re going to use Blogger.com, you’d check if your keyword is available as keyword.blogspot.com and setup a site.

I’m going to assume you have enough money for a domain and hosting (under $10 for your first site – if you don’t have that write a couple articles or sell something you own on ebay) so let’s cover Wordpress setup.

With Hostgator your control panel has Fantastico – I’m not going to cover that as that would make this post too long but basically it’s a breeze and takes about 2 minutes to setup.

Once Wordpress is setup, you need a theme:

Best Free Themes for Adsense

There are two I’ve used in the past:

1) Pilkster

2) Bluesense

I’ve found that Pilkster tends to do slightly better CTR wise but Bluesense looks a lot more professional (a lot less like an MFA site )

Plugins for your WP Blog

1) Google XML Sitemaps

2) All in One SEO

The first two are the main ones you need. If you want to save time, though, get:

3) Easy Privacy Policy

4) Ultimate Google Analytics

5) Contact Form 7

The bottom three help track stats, and add a privacy policy / contact form to your site (needed for Adsense sites)

Also get an Akismet API key (if you don’t have one) and activate it to stop most spam.

You’re looking to setup a website with 2-5 articles as pages, targeting your main keyword and any sub keywords you’ve managed to find.

An example niche site that was sold on Flippa recently is Cheap Picture Frames (this site is HTML).

Once that is done your aim is to build backlinks to it. John recommends article marketing, but you can also use forum signatures, blog commenting, social bookmarking, linkwheels… or even hijack existing links.

Sites will bounce around for the first couple weeks so build a few and build backlinks depending on whether they’re ranking (ie if you’re ranking at no5, building a few backlinks may see you rise to no2).

The paid way to make money with Adsense

There are three things I recommend you get that will save you time.

1) Micro Niche Finder (aff link)

Basically does all the steps of the keyword research above in about 3 minutes for all your keywords. I’ve heard Market Samurai is decent too and plan to try it soon, but I’m pretty happy with MNF.

MNF costs $97 and if you have the money get it as it drastically saves time. If you don’t want to spend, that’s fine – you can get it later.

Here’s a couple examples of the results MNF gives you:

Keyword, local / global results, ad cost, strength of competition and domains available (exported into Excel).

Here’s what the actual results from the tool look like. Pretty slick.

So instead of going to Instant domain Search, Spyfu, Google Keyword Tool and Google to check the various results, you have everything displayed for you.

Again, you don’t need it but it’ll save you time. You can get Micro Niche Finder here.

2) Clickbump themes (non aff link)

Another thing that’ll save you time. The Clickbump theme provides you with five variations of a theme made for Adsense / affiliate sites, and have a sweet backend that lets you input your ads, change theme, colour etc easily.

Costs $47. Not needed again (you can go with the free themes) but it gives you some variety if you want that. Check it out at clickbump.com.

3) Xfactor course (non aff link)

Basically all the content of the thread and a little more than that summed up into 90+ pages of Adsense advice. Costs $77. Not needed (spot a trend here…? ) but it’s very detailed and will help you understand Adsense better / save you some time. Check it out at Adsense Masters Course.

Another couple resources:

Forum thread with more Adsense information

Make Money With Adsense Today.com Griz

Unfortunately since I rebought this blog the posts seem to be way too long… but I hope the information above helped. And of course if you have questions/comments etc, the comment section is below.

One of the biggest (and best, in my opinion) ways to make money online is to rank for simple, long tail keywords using basic SEO skills and use that traffic to generate money either through Adsense, product sales or affiliate marketing.

First off, let me state that I’m no SEO legend – unfortunately if you’re looking to rank for terms like “credit cards” or “weight loss” which get millions of search hits per month, I can’t really help you there. However, if you’re looking to rank for longer tail keywords which see anywhere between ten visitors a day to a few thousand visitors a month… this report should help.

The problem with ranking for a term is that there are other people that you have to outrank, either because they’ve specifically decided to rank for that term or have done so without knowing.

Those guys are preventing you from making money, and the nicest thing to do is (politely) annihilate them.

No, you won’t be using blackhat techniques or illegal methods to cause harm to them, just using your own awesomeness and new knowledge to outrank them… and steal their traffic.

This was originally part of a paid product I wrote to build a list with a partner titled Google Hijack… it’s edited slightly and republished here so you guys can take advantage of the information.

This is the exact strategy I use for part of my own niche marketing business, and it works pretty well.

Please note that this is my SEO advice which I have learned from a couple years of trying to develop niche websites (and eventually doing this successfully). You may not agree with parts of it – SEO is not an exact science – although the way I’ve detailed works for me and those that have put this into action. Just a little disclaimer.

Your first step is finding a keyword. I’m assuming you already have one – I’m not going to go into keyword research or anything in this post, although I will do a post about this soon if you guys like this type of content.

You’ll need a couple tools to begin (free)…

1) SEO Quake – http://www.seoquake.com

SEO Quake adds a toolbar to search results when you Google your keyword. Below is a screenshot example:

Here’s what the important terms mean…

PR: the pagerank of the domain. Pagerank in itself is a worthless number, but here it helps because it tells you the authority of the links linking to the website you’re trying to outrank.

L: Number of links to the exact page which has ranked for the term. So Wikipedia has 5,190 links to its Internet Marketing page.

LD: Number of links to the website. In this case, Wikipedia.org has over 104 million links pointed at it

Age: The older the website, the harder it will be to outrank as Google likes age. Luckily for you, most long tail websites will have been created within the last 3 years so they’re easy enough.

Now basically, Google looks at two things:

1) On page SEO (how your website is optimized for the keyword)

If you grab the exact domain keyword for a term (for example, internetmarketing.com (or .ORG or .NET) you have a much better chance of ranking for it than someone without.

If you install basic Wordpress on the keyword domain, with the All in One SEO Pack plugin (and input your keywords) and the Google XML Sitemap plugin, you will outrank 95% (and sometimes 100%) of your competitors just doing this, depending on their strength.

2) Off page SEO (in bound links and their quality)

Google rates links to your website by three things:

Number of links x quality of links x anchor text

So for example, ten backlinks with the anchor text “internet marketing” from Wikipedia, InternetMarketing.com etc would be a lot more valuable than 1,000 backlinks with no anchor text from unrelated websites.

Your basic hijack strategy is to look at the pages competing for a search term, better their on page SEO and better their off page SEO. It sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Your second tool you’ll need for the hijack strategy…

2) BacklinkWatch.com – http://www.backlinkwatch.com

This tool tells you the anchor text used in the backlinks for the domain.

You could replicate exactly the backlinks already pointed to a competitors website, add a couple of your own and bam, you’re outranking him/her easily once those backlinks kick in.

Now here’s what you do to outrank someone for a long tail keyword:

1) Buy a domain with the exact keyword in it. If they aren’t available in .COM / .NET or .ORG, grab keywordx.tld.

So for example, weddingcakesx.com

Or you could add shop / details / info… you get the idea. But you want your main keyword to start the domain and your terms to be all together.

2) Setup Wordpress and get the following plugins:

- All in One SEO Pack
- Google XML Sitemaps

3) Change your permalinks to /%postname%/

4) Add content to your website.

I’d like to add a special note about content.

You want to have your keyword mentioned around 3-5 times per 400 word article. No more, no less.

You want your content to be boring if you’re using it for Adsense websites (of course, grammar, spelling etc should be alright but don’t engage your visitors as they’re one time and all you want them to do is click your ads) and interesting if you’re using it for affiliate websites (so that they believe your content has value and will click through to the product you’re offering, or sign up to your list)

That’s it!

Some rules…

If the competitors for your keyword have less than 50-100 links pointing at the page and less than 300 links pointing at the main site, they’re insanely easy to outrank. (They’d be PR2-PR3 or less, anything more than that is still possible but will be a bit harder as generally that means quality of links is higher)

If your competitors are less than 2 years old, they’re easy enough to outrank. If they’re greater than 2 years old, they can still be outranked depending on the number links to the page.

If your competitors don’t have the exact keyword listed at least in the title and in the meta description (the text below a link for a Google search result) they’re easy enough to out rank unless they have thousands of links.

Now of course there are some exceptions…

If your competitor has a high PR, but is not optimizing for the term, they may rank simply because the authority of their website is strong. They’re easy to outrank if you optimize yours better than theirs.

If the competitor has very few links, but a high PR this may mean that they cannot be outranked (look at other examples on the page to see what the general strength of those ranking on the first page is).

Why? Because as mentioned above, 10 links from Wikipedia.org with the proper anchor text (you can use BacklinkWatch to check where links are from and their anchor text) is more powerful than 1,000 links with rubbish anchor text. And if a competitor has a high PR, it generally means links are from authority websites.

Your first step after this is to go look at different keywords and get a feel of the domains ranking for this. Once you examine competition for a bit, and try ranking yourself, you’ll get a better idea of exactly what it takes and whether or not you can outrank a term.

Now one of the ways I love to get websites that I can outrank is by surveying Flippa.com or DigitalPoint.com websites for sale section and looking for websites already on sale and making money.

Generally they want 7-10x revenue (so for example, a website making $10 a month the seller would want $100).

I can take 25-50% of what they want, invest it in a website and have it outranking theirs pretty soon.

That way I save 50% of the asking price, build my websites from the ground up and set up easy income streams that last ages if not forever. I can then sell these for 100% (or even more, if I optimize it and rank for other terms or increase it’s ranking to the top three so it makes more money).

Your goal is to build more backlinks than they do, either on the same pages or on pages that are ’stronger’ than theirs. So if they have 15 backlinks of which 10 have the anchor text required, you build 20 with 15 having anchor text.

It’s as simple as that.

Building 20 backlinks (which would take a day or less than $10 if outsourced) will take  you above the website you’re targeting. And you could keep building more with that anchor text – having 50 backlinks with the anchor text would see you outrank some of the results above it and increase your ranking.

Find a keyword, optimize your website for it and destroy your competition. Sounds easy, right? You’ll find out how easy it is when you do it! There’s no point in having the information if you don’t use it.

The “hijack strategy” works for pretty much any non-authority website (it will work for an authority one too, but will take more time obviously as they have age on their side).

The basic concept (in case you skimmed the above post) is you find a website that looks hijack worthy, optimize your page to match it and then build more/stronger backlinks than it currently has. Once your website is making money, you either keep building backlinks until you rank #1 (or focus on other keywords as well) or create a new website. Rinse, repeat, etc.

Feel free to ask questions, otherwise good luck!

It’s been so long I’ve almost forgotten how to start a blog post. I just about remember, though.

Some of you will remember me as the person who created this blog in October 2007. I recently was informed that Stanley was looking to sell this blog (again) since he had university issues and I thought… why not have a go.

Although I’ve been away from blogging seriously for a while now, and been involved with a tonne of other stuff (a long vacation being one of them, along with offline marketing, seminars and moving to India to start my own company – more on that later) I’ve always felt selling this site for the amount I did was a mistake. And now that mistake has a chance to be rectified.

Firstly, the main thing which I’m sure anyone that reads this post is interested in – price. I paid just over $3,000 USD for this blog, which is the same price I sold it for. Some of you may feel that was a huge waste of money, others may feel it was a bargain. In my point of view when I sold it around April 2009, it had similar statistics to this one – traffic has slightly increased, comments on posts etc are pretty much the same, and although earnings were next to nothing, the subscriber count has roughly doubled… for me, that’s a reasonable deal.

Kind of like having someone else who’s experienced maintain your blog for almost a year at no cost.

Anyways, let me know whether you think the decision to buy the blog was a good one below…

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I think I was the only person interested in the price of $3k, so that’s food for thought. But this is the site I created, and I do see the potential in it considering I probably did nothing to promote / monetize in the last 6-8 months I was running it, I think I could make it bigger than before.

I’ve merged the website I had posted on sporadically with a partner (Make Money Dynamo) to this one, so if you’re confused seeing this in your email box you now know why you are. Hope you’ll stick around

With the MMD subscribers added on this blog now has almost 3,000 subscribers, which is pretty sweet. I’m aiming to take that to 10,000 before the year is up.

To all the old readers of this blog that have stuck around till now, howdy and I hope all of you still remember me. To those that have found this site after that, welcome and I hope you’ll give me a chance to wow you.

Of course I have ideas of what I’m going to do with this blog, the type of content I’m going to put out… however I’m always open for any suggestions. You can contact me through any of the below mediums:

MSN: JPereira.Owns@gmail.com

Skype: leonetworks

Yahoo: jasonpereira34

Email: use the contact form

Phone: +919036133170

I’m still working on things in the background so there may be some screwups on here in the next few days… one of the things I’m looking at is finding a good theme designer as this theme doesn’t quite look right. I also have a few (around 20) employee interviews over the next few days for my offline company – I’ll explain about that in a post in the next few days.

I feel that blogs have so much potential as a medium, both in terms of boosting brand reputation, marketing things online, making big connections in the form of joint ventures and of course to make more money online. I think I’ll stick to what I did when I was running this blog – a mix of entrepreneurship / make money online posts, and maybe some interviews as they seem to be pretty popular on here. Again, all suggestions welcome.

Welcome to the blog whether you know me or not and I hope I can give you the type of content that’ll keep you coming back again and again. For starters, check out the report in the sidebar – It’s a product about how to make money through Warrior Special Offers, around 30 pages of solid content that explain what they are and what you need to do to start making money with them.

Jason

Would you follow what I’m about to teach you if I guarantee you that you will get FREE targeted traffic? This is one of the most underrated and rarely used traffic generation methods.

You are probably wondering how much it would cost you to implement this method. $0. That’s right. It won’t cost you any money although it will cost you time.

If you have a lot of time and no money, this is surely the best method to get targeted traffic.

And the method is…… Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is the process of writing an article for a blog which will in return link back to your site.

How will this help you?

1. You will get free backlinks with anchor text of your choice. This means your page rank will increase and so will your site’s ranking for the keywords you choose.

2. Targeted traffic. You will get high conversions whether you are selling a product or getting them to subscribe to your list. (Side note: If you want to learn about getting the most out of your email list, read this post on “Do you make this mistake many email marketers make?“).

3. Expert status (More on this at the end of the article).

How is this different from article writing?

I know most of you are already confusing this with article writing. When you write for article directories, you get backlink and traffic but the traffic you get from guest blogging will be much more targeted.

You will also have access to a huge reader base by writing for another blog.

Here’s what you should do:

1. Find blogs in your niche (Go to google and search for “your niche blog” with/without quotes)

2. Comment on the blog a few times so that you get to know the author

3. Send them an email asking whether they accept guest articles or not

4. If they say yes, write an article and send it to them

Things to note before writing for the blog:

1. Always make sure the blog has good pagerank.

2. See how many readers the blog has. You check the blog feed subscribers count. If they don’t have one, see their alexa traffic (not accurate though).

3. Check if the blog posts receive comments. A good blog will receive at least a couple of comments.

How you can modify this method?

Find internet marketers who have huge lists and ask them if you can write a couple of informational emails to their list for a link back. There are many marketers who don’t have enough time to send useful emails to their subscribers. Even if they do have, they wouldn’t mind someone else writing for them which will give them a week’s rest.

So stop thinking whether this method would work or not and start writing articles to be submitted as guest posts or emails.

Once you do this for a few weeks, analyze which blogs are getting you the most traffic and concentrate on them. Write more and more articles for these blogs.

When you submit an article to an article directory, you will be just another person because most people who read your article will be search engine visitors. They won’t remember you. But if you are writing for a blog, you will be read by a targeted group of readers. When they see your articles often, they will start seeing you as an expert.

Have you tried guest blogging before? What results did you have? Will you be trying it now? Please share your views in the comments.

If you are making this mistake, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. Don’t build your optin list before giving a thought about this. You could be earning 2 to 3 times more money than what you are earning now with the same list.

So what is the mistake that I’m talking about?

Not caring.

That’s it. You should care for your subscribers. It is the best thing you can do.

Agree or not, that single word is the main reason why you are not earning the money you should be.

I know some people care for their subscribers but still don’t show it enough. If you are one among those, this post is for you.

You are a smart marketer and have very good products than most of the gurus, but you are not earning to your potential because you are not showing to your subscribers that you care for them.

Let me give you this simple formula:

Care = More Trust = More Sales

How do you show to your subscribers that you care? I’ll share a few tips here.

1. Connect With Them

How many times have you become a fan of a marketer only because they replied to your email? If replying to an email can have that much effect, how much will people like you if you start connecting with them in every way you can?

I know some of you are thinking “Oh well. I don’t have time for connecting.”

But hey you spend time tweeting everyday right? You use facebook too right?

Then you don’t need extra time. All you have to do is, reply to your subscribers in twitter and facebook.

Homework: Do this now. Send out an email asking your subscribers to follow you and you follow them in return. Reply to tweets they send to you and also answer their questions if they have any. Do the same in facebook also.

2. Send Out A Freebie

It might sound like a lot of hard work but let me tell you, this is one of the best ways to build trust.

Create a small report. It need not be 100 pages. Even 5 or 7 pages would do. If you don’t have time, combine two or three blog posts and create a report.

People love freebies. They will pass it on and you will get many new subscribers.

Don’t worry that your subscribers will become freebie seekers. If that was the case, no blogger would be earning money because they give away free content all the time.

It is often the other way round. Your subscribers will think that if a freebie itself has so much information, your paid products will have tons of useful information.

A Tip: For those who do not want to spend time creating a report, find free and useful tools and send it to your subscribers. I use stumbleupon a lot to find interesting websites. Once you find something very interesting, pass it on to your subscribers. They’ll love it.

3. Ask The Problems Your Subscribers Are Facing

You send out promotions all the time. Why not send an email asking your subscribers about the problems they are facing right now. Reply to every mail you get.

The specialty about this method is that even people who don’t share their problems with you know that you care for them.

The ones that shared their problems and got it solved will become your fan.

You can build a tribe by doing all these. There are many more ways to build a tribe. I recommend you to read this book called “Tribes” by Seth Godin.

Do you care for your subscribers? How do you show that you care for them? Please share your views in the comments.

Wish you a Happy New Year. Hope you achieve success and live a happy live.