I came up with this topic when helping someone with their book idea recently.  I just finished writing one of my own, so I had lots of thoughts to share.  The thing with books and blog posts is that they are one and the same, except that books tend to be a lot longer than most posts.

The book title he told me sounded a bit negative, so I told him that something more positive might sell more books.  We’ll analyze his book title later.

Titles are important!

There are too many blog posts for one person to read each day.  A reader has to make decisions about which posts to read and which posts to skip.  Potential readers will generally use the post title to decide whether or not to read the post.

A search engine user will often see dozens, if not thousands of results for their query.  They need to use the title and to a lesser extent the description to decide whether to click on your link and get to your blog.

Google looks at post titles to help determine what information your post might contain.

You write a post or book to sell it

Why do you write posts?  Why would you write a book?  In most cases writers want to sell their material.  This doesn’t just mean selling for money, writers want to be read and get reactions.  If I write a blog post and it gets linked by 50 different sites and gets 100 comments, then I would be very pleased and that would be payment enough.  Money is also another acceptable form of payment. 

If potential readers decide not to read your post, you haven’t sold anything and won’t benefit at all.  I don’t really like the idea that most readers will decide whether or not to read my post based on the title, but that is just the way it is.

Try to align yourself with the potential reader

It’s nice to think that we can change the world with each blog post we write – if we have a bad experience, maybe writing a post will help discourage others from making the same mistake?

Fat chance.  The reality is that if someone is looking for information on a topic, they have already decided on a plan and are just looking for details.  You might think that trying to warn people of the perils of credit cards might be doing them a favor.  You might even be right.  However, most people who are searching for credit card information have already decided to get a new card and just want information about which card is best for them.  You can try to put up roadblocks but those potential readers will either never see your post or will just ignore it if it comes up in the search engine results page.
Give readers what they want

If you want to warn people about something, align your post topic with what they are looking for.  Give them the credit card information they are looking for (and affiliate signup links of course) and give your warnings as well.  Those warnings might not be heeded, but at least they will get read.

It’s easier to sell useful information than a rant

People want to read posts that will either entertain them (which won’t make you any money) or provide them with useful information.  The problem is sometimes writers will hide useful information inside a negative, ranty post (sorry Evan, your post was just too perfect).  For example a post entitled “I hate [big American cable company]” might be full of great ideas on how to save money on cable bills and tips on how to deal effectively with customer service representatives.  But most readers will assume this post is simply a rant from a disgruntled customer or ex-employee.  Rants have very little value other than as a warning not to use that company.  Given that the best companies still make mistakes once in a while, seeing the occasional criticism of that company might not mean much.

If I’m looking for an entertaining article, then I might check out that rant.  If I’m looking for useful information, then I’m skipping it.

A more useful title?

• How I saved 20% on my [company name] cable bill with one phone call.  Write about comparing packages, picking an appropriate package, threatening to walk etc.
• Why I switched from [company name 1] to [company name 2].  The emphasis on this article should be the good things about company 2, rather than the bad things about company 1.
• How I solved [problem] with [company name].  Was it an over-billing problem that got you angry?  Did you get it resolved eventually?  Describe how you got it fixed – that might be of use to people in the same situation.

You can still include the negative stuff in the post

If your post and title contains useful information and is desirable to readers, then they will read your post.  You can still include all the gory details of your bad encounter with company X if you want to.  Maybe add it to the end of the post and keep it short.

Pick a topic, write a useful sounding title and then write the post

If you write the post first, your title will be constrained by the content.  If the post is one long rant about your local grocery store, you can’t then title it “10 tips to save money on your grocery bill“.

The title helps sell your post.  The title has to accurately describe the contents.

• Figure out the basic topic first.
• Come up with the post title.
• Write the content to match the title.

Let’s look at the book example

My friend wants to call his book “Things about the used car industry nobody will tell you”.  This friend is extremely knowledgeable about that industry and I’m sure the book would be both entertaining and useful.  The plan is to talk about all the bad things and then suggest solutions to those problems.  The book will contain a lot of “how to” information.  Sounds great except that someone reading that title might think the following:

• Book will contain all negative material.  I want to buy a used car and I want to read about how to save money, not just hear about the problems.
• Book sounds like it was written by a disgruntled ex-employee.  Will they be constantly whining about their personal “mistreatment” in that industry?  This will provide no value to me at all.

What is a more positive and useful sounding title?

• The complete guide to buying a used car – Step by step guide to successfully buying a great car at a great price.

I’m sure there are many other great titles as well.  Of course this book will still discuss negative topics like slimy salesmen, but that will be in the book – not in the title.

How about a post example?

I wrote about how to do keyword research and came up with a post topic which ended being titled “Canadian Dividend Stocks“.

The post is about Canadian dividend stocks (obviously) and provides information about various dividend stocks, as well as sources of information on how to get started with these stocks.  It occurred to me as I wrote this post, that the title could be improved.

At the time of writing the title is made up of the keywords “Canadian dividend stocks”.  It’s accurate and not a bad title.  However, it is a bit ambiguous – what information does it contain?  A list of stocks? Recent prices for stocks?  Something else?

Now I’m thinking that the title should be a bit more specific and describe the content a bit more.  This particular post is very good and contains a lot of useful information so having a neutral title might be underselling it a bit.

More useful titles:

• How to start investing in Canadian Dividend Stocks
• How to invest in Canadian Dividend Stocks
• Information about Canadian Dividend Stocks

Can you think of any others?  Leave your suggestions in the comments and I might use it!

Conclusion

• The post title sells the post and helps determine if it will be read.
• Make your post titles and content useful.  Can the reader take something from the article and actually put it to use in their own lives?
• Make the title match the post content.
• Don’t forget about formatting the title for SEO.

In the past few articles we’ve discussed how the type of content can affect your blog income, how to do some basic keyword research, and even the best way to format your posts for SEO, to make them more alluring to search engines.

Let’s quickly review the main keys for making more money with your blog:

• Content – Certain topics make more money than others.
• Links – Inbound links to your posts and blog help with monetization.
• Format of the article – Search engines use algorithms to figure out what your post is about. Use standard formats to make it easier for them.

This post is all about links. First we’ll discuss why links are good, then talk about the different link types and formats. Finally I’ll offer some suggestions for getting links.

Before I continue with this lengthy post, I’ll summarize the whole thing by saying that links are good. With a few exceptions, the more links you have pointing to your blog, the better off you will be.

How search engines work

There are two things you need to know about how search engines work:

1. They find new pages by following links from old pages
2. They evaluate pages by rating the links pointing to that page.

Now those aren’t the only factors search engines use when finding and evaluating a web page, but for this discussion, they will suffice. It should also be noted that nobody outside of Google really knows how Google works, so take everything you read with a grain of salt. This includes any information provided on this site.

What is Google Juice?

This is a made-up term which refers to the amount of search engine currency that an inbound link can give to the receiving web page. If the incoming “Google Juice” is higher then it should help a web page rank higher in the search engine results page (SERP). If the “Google Juice” is weaker, then the page might not rank as high.

Let’s learn about links.

Internal links

An internal link is a link from one web page on your blog, to another web page ,also on your blog. These are very useful since they can help lead your visitors to other related relevant material on your site.

An example of an internal link which links to another page on my site would be:

How to make money with your blog posts.

Search engines will also use these internal links to help find and rate pages on your website. There is Google juice passed through internal links, but not as much as for an equivalent external link.

External links

An external link is a link from a web site other than your own, which points to a page on your site. For example here is an external link to my other site. This would be considered an external inbound link from the point of view of the other site.

Money Smarts Blog

Note that this link is not to a specific page, but rather the home domain or the front page of the blog. This is still a valid link. Links can be to an individual post, category, archives or the main page. If there is a url, then it can be linked to.

All other things being equal, external links will pass more Google juice than internal links.

Link hypertext

If you do any reading about SEO methods, then you will have run across the term “hypertext”. Basically, hypertext is the visible text which is linked to another post.

For example – The brown fox jumped over the hypertext example, and then fell down.

In this example the words “hypertext example” is the hypertext portion of the link. The words used in the hypertext are very important, because they are used by search engines to figure out the keywords or topic of the post being linked to.

Ideally you should use descriptive, relevant words when setting up an internal or external link.

For example if you are linking to a post on the direction of interest rates, it will increase the “Google juice” or SERP rankings to use the words “interest rates” or “interest rate direction” in the hypertext. Using words like “click here” as the hypertext is not good practice. This can be tough to do sometimes, since you want the hypertext to be readable within the context of your post.

TIP:
You can’t control the hypertext that other sites use when linking to your post, so put your keywords in the post title, because the post title often forms the hypertext for external links to your site.

Number of links to a page/site

The amount of Google juice being passed from internal and external links to a page is cumulative. A page with a greater number of external and internal links to it, will have a better chance of ranking higher than an equivalent page with less links.

More links are good!

Link authority or weight

One of the key concepts with link building, is the idea that not all inbound links are treated equally by the search engines. Search engines will evaluate inbound links by evaluating the sites where they originate. They do this by looking these factors (among many):

• Age of site.
• Number of inbound links.
• Authority of site.
• Relevancy of site/page topic.

Let’s say you write a post on dog grooming on your animal site, and several sites link to it. Let’s take a look at these sites and try to guess how much weight Google will assign to those inbound links. We’ll assume they all use the same hypertext.

Link 1 is from a brand new site about kids, has two posts and has no inbound links.

Evaluation – Although, this link is better than nothing, it is probably close to worthless. Of course, if that site gets bigger and gains authority, then this link could become more valuable.

Link 2 is from a well-established dog site, 3 years old with thousands of inbound links.

Evaluation – This kind of link is great. The originating site has plenty of Google juice to pass and this should help your post rank higher in the SERPs.

Link 3 is from a big government site or university.

This is the best kind of link to have. Educational and government websites have the most “Google juice” to pass. It’s not a coincidence that these kind of links are hard to come buy. Having one link from NASA to your astronomy website, will be far more valuable than links from 40 small Star Trek fan sites.

10 links from 10 sites are better than 10 links from 1 site

One of the factors that search engines consider is the popularity of your post or blog. Getting many links from the same 3 blogs each week is not as good of a popularity indicator as getting different links each week from different blogs.

The ratio of links to text on a page might diminish Google juice

I don’t know how accurate that statement is to be honest, but intuitively, it makes sense that if a search engine is crawling a page – it might give more creedence to links if there are less of them. On the other hand, if a page is full of links and very little text, which you might see on a link roundup or carnival page, then perhaps a search engine might downgrade those links.

My suggestion is that a natural inbound link that is inside a related post will be more valuable than an inbound link that is on a page with many other links.

Do-follow and No-follow links

When you create a link on a blog post, you have the option of setting it to be “do-follow” or “no-follow”. The “do-follow” option is the default and the “no-follow” has to be set.
If a link is “do-follow” then that means you are telling any search engine bots that the link is ok and go ahead and let them pass any Google juice they decide from your site. “No-follow” means that you don’t want them to necessarily continue through the link and definitely don’t pass any Google juice.

To determine if a link is do-follow or no-follow, then you must look at the html. Go to a web page, select “view” and “Source” which will display the page html.

In this example, there is no mention of either “do” or “no” follow which means that the default “no-follow” is in place.

<a href=”http://www.obliviousinvestor.com/how-do-you-pay-your-financial-advisor/”>how do you pay your advisor?</a>

This link shows what a “no-follow” link looks like – you can see that they just added the ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ to the beginning of the link.

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.obliviousinvestor.com/how-do-you-pay-your-financial-advisor/”>how do you pay your advisor?</a>

This is one area where the rules have been changing, and I’m not 100% sure how effective the no-follow tag is anymore. I wouldn’t be surprised if the rules keep changing, so it might not be worthwhile to plan any major strategies around this information.

The main use for the no-follow tag is to conserve your Google juice. The theory is that your web site or web page only has a certain amount of Google juice, and by linking to other sites with a do-follow link, you will lose some of your juice. I personally haven’t followed this this strategy, but I have thought about doing it.

Different parts of a blog have different Google juice power

Not all links from a blog are equal. Posts which have more inbound links should have more Google juice to pass than posts with less inbound links. Links from the main page of a blog (such as in the sidebar) are generally worth more than links from any of the posts.

Not all inbound links are good

Yes, it’s true – a link from a site which Google has deemed as “bad” could have a detrimental effect on your rankings. What does “bad” mean? Well, one example could be a link farm ie a site which is just a million outbound links. If you follow reasonable link building practices, then you shouldn’t have to worry about this problem.

Suspicious link activity

This goes under the category of “Mike does some speculation”, but if I were a search engine, then I would be on the lookout for these types of red flags:

• Many links to a page with identical hypertext. This just isn’t natural. Change up the hypertext in different links.
• Many links from unrelated sites. Again, this just doesn’t happen by itself on a large scale. Why would a website about surfboards link to a post on cats? Sure it will happen once in a while, but not on a regular basis.

Link building strategies – or how to get more inbound links to your blog

At this point we have completely exhausted my link knowledge, so let’s move on to something more practical – how to get the damn things!

Internal links

Internal links are easy to get because you can just create them yourself. Of course it takes a bit of time, but that is time well spent. Make sure the posts are related and the proper hypertext is used.

External links

Here are some suggestions for getting external links, roughly in order of ease.

Link from other sites you own.

If you own more than one related site, then creating links between them will be as easy as doing internal links. Of course this strategy is fairly limited, since most bloggers only have one site.

Comment on “do-follow” comment blogs.

Most blogs have their comments set to “no-follow” so if you leave a comment and put your blog url in the “site” section – there will be no Google juice passed. However, some blogs will use plugins or change their settings to allow the comment links to be “do-follow”. Find out which blogs you frequent have do-follow and try to comment more on those blogs. Keep in mind that you need to leave good comments and it’s not considered good form to put the url of a specific post into the “site url” box.

Link out to other blogs

One good method for getting inbound links is to link out to other sites. This won’t work everytime, but if a site owner notices that you are linking to their material, they might try to link back to return the favor. This probably works better if you are linking to similar blogs of roughly the same size.

Enter blog carnivals

Blog carnivals are a very easy way to get links. The idea is that you submit your post for a carnival, then host of the carnival decides if they want to include your post. If the post is accepted, then you are expected to link back to the carnival.

Hosting blog carnivals

I truly believe that hosting blog carnivals is the most time-efficient way to get a lot of varied backlinks to your site. You can put together most carnivals in a couple of hours (hint – just skim the posts to make sure they are on topic and not spam) and can expect probably 50% or more of the participants to link back to your site.

Yes, the links will be to the carnival page and won’t have good hypertext, but I don’t care – there will be a lot of links from different sites, and that is not a bad thing.

Tip – if you are hosting a smaller carnival or even a larger one – try to solicit posts from larger blogs. They often have less to gain from entering carnivals, but will do so if prompted. The reality is that most carnival participants are new blogs looking to build a readership and links from them are not worth much. If you can solicit another half dozen links from decent sized blogs, then the Google juice received will be much higher.

Create your own carnival

If you find that there are not enough related carnivals then create your own. Using Google forms you can create an input form which allows people to enter links which will port to a spreadsheet. You put up the links (after weeding out the crap) and then they will link back to your blog.

Link exchanges

It’s quite common for 2 or more bloggers to agree to “exchange links”. This could be in the form of exchanging 2 specific links or an agreement to link to each others blogs on a regular basis, ie once a week. These arrangements can be quite beneficial, but sometimes they don’t work out if one blogger is not living up to the agreement.

Blogger network

Another method for getting inbound links is to join up with other bloggers and agree to share links on a regular basis. This is a great idea for smaller bloggers who need more readers and links.

A perfect example of this is the Yakazie Challenge. Some might argue that this is a blog network gone wild, since I think they have almost 100 members, but I think it has really helped the members who participate.

That particular network has been using the Alexa ranking as their measuring guide, which I think is quite flawed, however their methods of linking to one another will definitely help their blogs to become more popular and have more income potential.

Here are a couple of very time consuming methods to get links

These methods are not all that useful for the typical part-time, not-enough-time blogger, but they are effective.

Guest posts – Write posts containing links to your blog for other blogs to publish. Check out my Guest Post Secrets post for more tips on how to do effective guest posts.

Article directories – Sites like Ezines.com will accept your posts and can contain backlinks to your site. These posts are typically shorter and easier than a proper guest post but it still take a bit of time, especially if you want to submit to several article directory sites to create links for one post.

Beware of link automation or services

There are services available which will place links to your site around the internet. I would suggest steering clear of such services – you have no control over where the links will original from, and risk getting penalized by Google.

Conclusion

Links are good.

Getting any links is better than no links. In conjunction with having content that has income potential, and good formatting, links are the other key to making more money.

If you are planning to increase your link-building activities to make extra money, then make sure you focus on posts that have income potential.

Any other ideas out there for getting links to your blog?

In this post I will give some details on how to do keyword research using the Google external keyword tool.  Of course Google changed the default tool just after I posted it but the old tool is still available at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?forceLegacy=true

If you feel this method is too technical or too much work then don’t worry.  It is only one way to do keyword research and we will be discussing other methods in future posts.  I would strongly suggest you at least give the keyword tool a chance since it is quite useful.  If nothing else it will help determine if a topic has any $$ potential at all.

The goal here is not to turn everyone into keyword fanatics but rather add another tool which will help you either look for profitable topics or decide if a particular topic is worth writing.

Keep in mind as well that I am not an expert at keyword research.  I have read quite a bit about it, I’ve had some success but there are other sites with people with far more knowledge than I.  The goal of this post is to help bloggers use some basic keyword research to increase their earnings – not to become keyword research ninjas.

In a previous post – How to Make Money With your blog posts, I discussed how your content needs to have the following three criteria to make money:

1. A topic (or keywords) that people are searching on.
2. The topic can’t be too popular (too much competition) or too rare (not enough traffic).
3. A financial connection between search engine visitor and a company that might advertise on Adsense.

There are a number of ways to approach keyword research.  One way is to take a somewhat general topic and use the keyword tool to help you come up with a specific topic that has earning potential.

Let’s say that you like writing about debt and frugal living.  You are in mood to write a post about “reducing debt” which of course could include a lot of different topics.

Let’s use the keyword tool and see what we find for the keywords “reducing debt”.  Select the “previous interface” link in the upper right hand corner.

First step is to enter your keywords into the box where it says “Enter one keyword or phrase per line”.

Then fill in the kaptcha – you only have to do this once.

Then press the “Get keywords ideas” button.

You will now see the results for these keywords in the default format.

To only see the data that is relevant for this exercise then complete the following 4 steps.

1)  Hide the “Advertiser Competition” column by clicking on the “Choose columns to display” dropdown box and select “Hide Advertiser Competition”.

You will now see that the Advertiser Competition column is gone.

2)  Using the same method as #1 – Hide “Local Search Volume”.

3)  Using the same method as #1 – Show “Estimate Avg. CPC”.

4)  Change “Match Type” to “Exact” using the drop down box shown here.

Once this is all done you should see the following columns

• Keywords
• Estimated Avg. CPC
• Global Monthly Search Volume
• Match type should be set to “Exact”

Now we have the tool setup the way we want and have our first data results.  If you want to try other keywords then just go up to the original keyword box and enter them.  You don’t have to do all the setup steps again.

Before we look at our results – a bit more about the different sections of the results page

Keywords - This column contains various derivatives of the keywords you entered.  You can use these suggestions to look for possible topics or to change a topic you have already selected.

If you scroll down the page you will notice that the results are broken into two sections.  The first part is “Keywords” and the second is “Additional keywords to consider”.

The first section will contain derivatives of your keywords (reduce debt) whereas the second section will contain related keywords which might not contain either of the words “reduce” or “debt”.  This section can also be useful for coming up with topic ideas.

At the bottom of each section is an option to download the results into a .csv file which can be imported into a spreadsheet.  This is a great idea for more advanced keyword research but for this exercise we are going to keep things simple and just look at the screen.

The next column is “Estimate Avg. CPC” which is short for “estimated average cost per click” which is what advertisers would pay for clicks on those keywords.

This column tells us if there is any earnings potential in our keywords.  I don’t put much stock into the actual CPC values but suffice to say if the CPC is $15 then the amount of money paid to the blogger per click is likely to be pretty decent.  Probably a dollar or more.  If the CPC is only $0.05 then needless to say the poor blogger isn’t going to get much.

CPC quick points:

When I look at these values I generally choose keywords with a CPC of $2 or more.  This is a pretty arbitrary number – the main thing is don’t choose topics with a very low CPC value.

I also avoid CPC values that are too high.  There are people who make their living doing advanced keyword research and trying to get posts to rank high for top paying keywords.  They earn their money by using their skill and time to out compete.  Bloggers like me make money by choosing topics with good (but not great) earning potential and with volume (lots of posts).  The higher the CPC, the more competition there will likely be.

In a future post we will be doing some more research using actual examples to see what kind of values make sense for your blog.  For now – just use trial and error and see what works for you.

Global Monthly Search Volume

This is the number of searches executed worldwide for those keywords.  Again, I don’t put much faith in the accuracy of these numbers but it is useful to compare the volume for different keywords.  This number will help you eliminate keywords that don’t have any searches on them.

Volume quick points

I generally want to see volumes of at least 200, and less than about 50,000.  Again, this is very arbitrary and subject to trial and error.  Suffice to say that if the volume is too low then nobody is searching for those keywords.  If the volume is too high then there is a good chance that there is stiff competition.

The last part of our tour is to point out that by clicking on the column headers – we can sort by that column.  For example clicking on the Volume header will sort the data from highest volume to lowest.

Now that we know our way around the keyword tool results page – let’s look more closely at our data.

There is no one perfect way to analyze the data.  This is how I typically approach it.

1)  Rank by CPC from highest to lowest

2)  Start browsing down the list.  I’ll skip past the first few since the CPC values are too high.  What I will do is look at the keyword column to find a possible topic.  I’ll do this for keywords that are from maybe $15 down to $2.  Usually a keyword might make a good topic if it fits into a possible blog title easily.  For example the keywords “reduce debt faster” could be a post called “How to reduce your debt faster”.

Once I find a keyword that sounds interesting – I’ll verify the volume to make sure it is not too high or low.  Again, these numbers will be dependent on your blog.  If you have a big blog that ranks well then you can use higher numbers – if you have a small blog then go for smaller volume numbers.

In this case, when I go down the keyword list the keyword “reduce credit card debt” speaks to me.  I’m thinking of a post called “How to reduce credit card debt” or “9 easy ways to reduce credit card debt“.  The CPC on this keyword is $10.91 which is good and the volume is 4,400 which is also good.  For someone who is worried the volume is too high – just go further down the list and choose “reduce credit card debt quickly” which pays almost as much and as has a volume of only 320.

You can continue this research and find other possible topics or stop right here and move on to the next step.

Determining competition.

When you write a post with keywords – you want people who type those keywords “reduce credit card debt” to be able to find your post.  If you only rank 467th on the search engine results page for those keywords then you are not likely to get much traffic.

This is why it is important not to get carried away with the CPC and volume numbers – the keyword tool gives the illusion that you are using a fine-tuned instrument but in fact once you factor in the rankings and competition - there is a lot of guesswork.

To make money on a post, you need some decent CPC value, you need some traffic volume and you need to get a high enough rank to get some of that volume.  If you are lacking in any of those 3 categories then the post will likely not make any money.

I have to be honest here – rating the competition is the part of keyword research where I am quite weak.  I don’t know if it is because I haven’t done enough research or if it is the most difficult.  Regardless I hope that some of the examples I’ll be using in this blog will help my own knowledge as well as yours.

The rank you need to make $$ is dependent on the CPC and the volume.  If the keyword has high volume then you could probably rank in the top 20 and still see some traffic.  If it is lower volume then you might have to be in the top 10 or even top 5.  With a higher CPC values you don’t need to get as much traffic to make it worthwhile so a lower ranking might work for you.  A lower CPC with a low volume means you need to rank high, probably top 5.

Some methods to figure out the competition

SEO for Firefox extension tool can be used to determine the pr values for your competitors.  I’m going to refer to a real expert on this topic because I don’t feel like adding any more screen prints to this post.  This post shows how to use the tool to look at the pr values for sites that rank high for your keywords.  I’m not that confident in the accuracy of this method but let me know if you have had some success with it.

Common sense

Another quick check for competition is the keywords themselves – do they form a common or obvious phrase?  “Reduce debt” seems to be a good candidate based on the CPC and volume, but I know that this is a common phrase and will likely have a lot of competition.

“Reduce credit card debt” seems to be somewhat common to me but it is four words (longer keywords generally have less competition) and I’m a bit biased since I see this sort of topic all the time.

Eyeball it

One of the methods which I like to use the most is to just do a search on the keywords and see what pops up.  If the top 10 sites that come up are Wikipedia, eHow, various large newspapers, a couple of government sites and a couple of the largest blogs in your niche then you know the competition is tough.

If the top ranking sites are smaller sites – perhaps some of your blogging colleagues then you know you probably have a good chance of ranking high for those keywords.

When I search on “reduce credit card debt” I see nothing but big sites that I recognize which means I’m going to have a hard time competing.  When Mint.com is ranking 14 then you know you are in trouble.

That said, at this point you can still go ahead and write the post if you are keen on it.  This isn’t an exact science and the reality is that if you write a good post with lots of useful information, there is a good chance that you can rank for other keywords.  We know there is traffic volume when talking about reducing debt and we know the CPC values are decent so there is still a chance of making money.

I don’t have a huge interest in writing about reducing credit card debt so I’m not going to write this post since I’m just not confident that I can rank high enough to make it worthwhile.

The next step is to go back to the keyword tool and see if I can find any more possible keywords to write about.  Unfortunately it looks like all the keywords that have a decent CPC are very competitive.

Now I’m going to try a different test.  I like writing about investing so I’m going to try the keywords “dividend stocks”.

I can see that the first entry is “Canadian dividend stocks” which is very interesting to me since I am Canadian and I’m quite familiar with Canadian dividend stocks so I’d be able to cobble together a post pretty easily.  The CPC value is $5.66 which is fine and the volume is 1,000 which is also fine.

Now let’s check the competition.

For this search I’m going to use google.ca since that it probably used more in Canada.

The results are very interesting indeed.

First of all I don’t see any big sites in the rankings such as Wikipedia that I don’t have any chance against.  Secondly I see the top six (unpaid) results are the The Financial Blogger, Million Dollar Journey and The Dividend Guy who are all fellow Canadian bloggers.

This is very encouraging because my site is similar to those 3 sites in terms of size which means I can compete with these keywords.  I may not beat them, but at least I have a chance.   My blog writing partner Mr. Cheap covered this topic last week and our ranking is #5 which is pretty good.

Summary methods

Pick a topic – money, investing, gold fish, dried beans and run it through the keyword tool to see if there is any money and traffic.  Check the competition to see if you can rank decently.

So there you have it.  I’ve covered some basic tools and methods to help do keyword research.  Please indicate in the comments if you have any other info to add on this topic.

Here are the basic rules for formatting your posts so that they are more accessible to search engines.  You want Google to easily figure out what your post is about.  The benefit of doing this is not just for Google but it also makes the article more readable/scannable for your human readers as well.  If you find this is too much work then just skip down to the bottom for my “short form” must do suggestions.

The list we’ll be looking at is:

• Keywords in the url.
• Keywords in the meta title (and hopefully post title as well).
• Use and bold the keywords in the first paragraph.
• Use the keywords in the first subtitle which should be H3.
• Use H3 subtitles to break up the post.
• The post title should be H1.
• Keyword density – use the keywords in the post but not too much.
• Set the meta description.

Url – keywords have to be in the url.  You can leave the default title (your post title) in here or strip out the extra words.  For example, your post title might be “Why I chose Ally Bank for my savings account” – the url can be shortened to Ally-bank-savings-account which are your keywords.

Keywords (convert rrsp rrif) should be in the url.

Title - put the key words in the title.  I’ve read that putting them earlier in the title is better, but I doubt it will make much difference.  Don’t forget that you can have one title which will show to your readers and a second (meta) title which the search engines use in the search engine results page.

You should write a title using your keywords that is directly relevant to the post topic.  “Where art thou Romeoil?” is an amusing title for a oil price-based post but search engines won’t get the joke.  Use something like “Is the price of oil going down?”.  The title should be in the H1 format.  You can check the format of your title by looking a post and clicking on “Edit” and then “Page Source” in your browser.

The post title is in H1 tags in the html.

Meta title – if you look at the source html for a post page you should see the meta title which is in the <title> </title> tags.  This is the title that shows up on the top line of the browser as well as the title that is used by search engines.

The meta title appears on the top line of your browser.

If you are using an SEO plugin or if your theme supports it then you can set the post title to your clever title and then set the meta title to the correct title with your keywords.  This way you can impress your readers with your punnery and keep the search engines happy at the same time.

Leaving the meta title blank means the actual post title will be used for the meta title.

Bolding – use the keyword in the first paragraph and bold it.  Bolding tells the search engine that you are emphasizing those words.

Subtitles – use subtitles to break up the post.  Use h3 for the subtitles and use the keywords in one of those subtitles – preferably the first one.  If your H3 subtitles are not formatted to your liking then change your css settings to make them bigger/smaller etc.  Can you use H2 for this purpose? Sure, the whole point is to differentiate the subtitles from the rest of the text.  The difference between a subtitle (with no special formatting) and a very short paragraph is not obvious to a search engine.  I’ve read that H3 is the standard for subtitles, but I suspect you can use H99 and it will still work.

Here is the html showing an H3 subtitle.

Keyword density – This refers to how many times in a post you repeat the keywords.  Using the key words too often makes the post unreadable and could be a red flag for Google.  I would suggest not using it more than once per one hundred words maximum.  I really think if you use it in the title, url, first paragraph and the post topic is indeed all about those keywords then you should be fine.

Meta Description – This is the description which should show up in the search engine results page.  Similar to the meta title, this can be entered using an seo plugin such as All-In-1 seo plugin.

You'll notice that the description is the same one shown in the all-in-1 seo plugin screen shot.

Post length – If the post is too short then it’s hard to imagine it contains much useful info.  On the other hand some of my highest paying posts were quite short (around 300 words).  One benefit of longer posts is that you can have more than one main keyword so your overall income might be higher (ie income coming from several different keywords).

Smaller paragraphs.  This really has nothing to do with search engines but I’ve found that shorter paragraphs are easier to read.  The paragraph you are currently reading is a perfect example.

Short form must do items

Ok, so maybe you are thinking the list above looks too hard.  It isn’t, but if you want to get started with formatting right away then just do the following items which I feel have the biggest impact.

• url - keywords in url (this should happen automatically so just don’t do anything)
• title - write a title with the keywords that is about the topic. If your settings are correct the title in the <title> tags should be the same as the post title.
• subtitles (h3) to break up major paragraphs.  This really makes it more readable.

Conclusion

None of these rules are set in stone, but most of them are intuitive if you know how search engines work.  Do the best you can with formatting – you can always go back and improve old posts so in the interest of time you might want to just do the “must do” items for new posts and only go back and improve posts that end up getting some search engine traffic.

You’ll notice that I didn’t mention the “keyword” tag which has been used extensively in the past.  According to Google, they ignore the keyword tag so there isn’t much point in populating it.

Example of SEO post formatting

If you look at this post, you’ll see that I have followed all the rules indicated above.  You should know that I actually could not find a post of mine that followed all the rules listed and had to modify this one to use as an example.  Apparently I don’t use bolding very much. 

• My keywords for this post are “converting rrif rrsp”.
• Keywords are in the url
• They are in the post title as well as the meta title.
• I’ve (recently) bolded those keywords in the first paragraph.
• I used them in the first H3 subtitle
• I used several H3 subtitles to break up the post
• I use the keywords 3 times in the 800 word post (not counting the subtitle).
• I’ve set the meta description – <meta name=”description” content=”Rules and strategies regarding converting your RRSP account to a RRIF account.” />

Most bloggers start thinking of making money with their blogs at some point.  Some start their blogs with the idea of making extra income and some only start monetizing their sites after years of blogging.  I think it is a great idea to try to make at least a little bit of money from your blog so that it will give you motivation to continue posting.

I’ll be doing more detailed posts on the topics discussed here.  This post is an overview of the the three main keys for making money:

1. Content – Certain topics make more money than others.
2. Links – Inbound links to your posts and blog help with monetization.
3. Format of the article – Search engines use algorithms to figure out what your post is about.  Use standard formats to make it easier for them.

What kind of content?

On occasion you will hear big bloggers give out such sage advice as “write good content” when asked about how to make money.  Unfortunately this advice is completely useless.  Who sets out to write “bad” content?   How do you know what “good” is?  What if you aren’t a good enough writer to produce “good content”?

If you currently monitor statistics and earnings on your blog per post then you might notice the following:

• Some posts get more search engine traffic than others.
• Of the posts that get at least some search engine traffic, the clicks are worth far more on certain topics compared to others.

This is because of the content and the topics you discuss.  In a nutshell, if you want to write a post that has the potential to make money you need the following:

• Understand that most of your income will come from search engine visitors.
• A topic (or keywords) that people are searching on.
• The topic can’t be too popular (too much competition) or too rare (not enough traffic).

There has to be some sort of potential financial connection between the search engine visitor and a company that might advertise on your post.  For example if you write about a product or service that can be ordered online then those companies will have a financial incentive to advertise on your post.

If you just write about what you had for breakfast every day then there might not be any kind of financial connection between a potential advertiser who might buy ads on Adsense and the product you are talking about  (ie bacon and eggs).

Inbound links

Inbound links are what search engines such as Google use to determine if the material in your post is trust worthy.  The more links you have and the higher the quality of the source, the better off you are.  Site authority is also important, if your site has been around for a while (1 year+) and has lots of inbound links then that tells the search engines that the site is probably legitimate which means you will rank higher in the search engine results page.

Article formats

The following guidelines are not written in stone, but they will all help to some degree with the search engines.  Worst case scenario they make the post easier to read and won’t hurt your rankings.  If these terms don’t mean anything to you – don’t worry, they will be discussed in future posts.

• Keywords - should be in the url, in the title, in the first paragraph, bolded somewhere, in one of the h3 subtitles.  If nothing else put the keywords in the url and title and somewhere in the beginning of the post text. 
• H3 tags – should be used for the subtitles within the post.
• Title tags should be used for the meta title.  The post title should be using H1 tags. 

All of these ideas will be discussed in excruciating detail in upcoming posts with suggestions on how to implement them ie link building strategies, keyword research methodologies.

We’ve discussed the idea that you get most of your income from search engine visitors.  Does this mean that increasing your search engine traffic will automatically increase your earnings?

Unfortunately it’s not that simple.

There are many different types of search engine visitors, all with their own motivations for searching and possibilities for outcomes.  Are they surfing because they want to buy something online? (We love these guys)  Are they surfing because they are bored?  (Boo-urns – can’t make money off them).

I’m going to categorize search engine visitors into three simple categories which will be useful for us to understand what type of search engine visitors we want visiting us.  I’m also going to do a very rough earnings estimate for comparison.  If you don’t feel like reading through my scenarios then I will sum it up by saying that some search engine visitors have a much higher earning potential than others.  I would encourage you to look at the examples since they are intended to help you learn how to evaluate potential post topics for their potential earning power. 

We’ll list them in order of desirability.

The best

Dude wants to order his new camara NOW.  Gal wants to set up a lower cost bank account today!

Dude and Gal are motivated buyers.  They have already decided to buy/set up something and they want to do it now and they want to do it online.  Drool…$$$$.

It will take a while to get through all the juicy reasons why these people can make you money if they arrive on your site so bear with me.

1)  Action

They are going to take action.  It might not be on your site but it will be on someone’s site.  If you can get 100 Dudes and Gals on your site then a very high percentage of them will either order something through an affiliate link or click on an ad which means $$. 

2)  $$ conversion. 

In both of my examples there is a lot of money to be made with the products they are buying.  A camera might cost $300 and most camera companies are happy to pay $5, $10, $20 or whatever to get that camera sold.  In the case of a financial account like a savings account – same thing.  There is no immediate financial benefit for the bank but over time it will be profitable.  Most banks will pay $20 or more for a client who sets up an account and funds it with at least a couple hundred bucks.
If those companies will pay say $15 to sell one unit then that will trickle down to you.  Clicks on ads which they buy might pay $1 or $2 which is quite high.  If you have an affiliate ad set up then the payoff will be much higher (and of course you will have less conversions than clicks).

3)  They can order online.

The fact that both of these products can be ordered and paid for online increases the payout because there is less uncertainty for the product company.  They aren’t paying a lot of money for a tv show ad and wondering what the return on investment is.  With online sales campaigns every single click, sale and cost can be measured to the penny.

4)  Targeted traffic

I’m making the assumption in this scenario that Dude and Gal didn’t just show up on some random page on your blog.  Hopefully they landed on a page which directly relates to the product they want to buy.  For example if you write a review of the wonderful Canon 200sx point and shoot camera and Dude types in “Canon 200sx” into a search engine – then he might end up on your review.  This is good since he will probably check out the review and maybe click on an ad.  If he instead ends up on a page about “red light cameras” then your chance of conversion is much less.

If you had a post that received 150 visitors a day from people like Dude and Gal then that post might make the following income:

Click through ratio = 10%
$ per click = $1.50
Monthly traffic = 4500
Monthly income = 0.1 *4500 *$1.50 = $675

Reasonably good

You write an informational post on the Social Security payout amounts retirees can expect once they stop working.  The idea behind the post is that people approaching retirement can use that information to calculate the Social Security payouts they can expect and use that data in their own retirement planning.

The post ranks #9 on the SERPs (search engine results page) for the keywords “Social Security payments” and it generates decent traffic – 150 unique visitors per day.  You check your stats and it turns out that 2 visitors out of every 100 click on an Adsense ad.  (ie Click through ratio or CTR is 2%). The average payment for those clicks is $0.11.  While the click values are pretty low, the CTR and traffic volume mean that this post will generate about $10 per month in income for you which is pretty decent. 

$10/month per post is a great deal – why complain about that?  The problem is that this $10 is mainly made up of volume.  While at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter how you make your money, the fact is that it is difficult to come up with posts that receive 150 visits per day.
The other issue with this post is that the traffic is somewhat untargetted.  What kind of ads are they clicking on?  Are there any affiliate ads that will fit the traffic?  (NO!).  

Earnings estimate for this post

150 visits per day = 4500 per month
CTR = 2%  (2 clicks per 100 visitors)
$ per click = $0.11
Monthly income = 4500 * 0.02 * 0.11 = $9.90.

The worst

Little Johnny decides to make a romantic soup for his sweetheart Little Susie.  He’s not much of cook so he decides to Google the words “romantic soup recipe”.  After perusing the SERPs he decides on a page which has a soup recipe and a nice picture of a soup with some sort of heart design on it.

He then makes the soup, has a great date with Little Susie and is appreciative of the effort that the blogger put into the soup recipe post which was very helpful to him.

While this story is one of the main reasons most of us blog (to help people) it didn’t do much for the blogger’s bottom line.  Here are the problems with this search engine visitor:

Didn’t want to buy anything

You can make money from people who don’t want to buy anything but it’s not as easy and most likely not worth the effort.

Found what they were looking for

Ironically, since the visitor found the exact info they were looking for, they had no desire/motivation to click on any ads or even look at other pages on the site.  Mission accomplished. 

No financial conversion

Even if the person did want to buy something – what would they buy?  More soup recipes?  Soup dishes?  Valentine’s day flowers?  There are possibilities but they aren’t all that likely.  This kind of traffic is very untargeted.  This kind of post will often show ads in Adsense that are unrelated to the post which means the odds of anybody clicking are near zero.

You need great volume

Another way to make money is from CPM ads which pay for each page impression.  This is one way to monetize a post/site which gets good traffic but no clicks or conversions.  The problem is that CPM rates are typically fairly low and you need some solid traffic to make $$.

Earnings estimate for this post

150 visits per day = 4500 per month
CTR = 0.2%  (2 clicks per thousand visitors)
$ per click = $0.08
Monthly earnings = 4500 *0.002 * 0.08 = $0.72.

Actually $0.72 per month isn’t horrible since the vast majority of my posts make much less than that.  Of course the vast majority of my posts don’t get 4500 visits per month either.    Regardless, the $$ from this post pales in comparison with the other scenarios.

It should be noted that it is possible that this post might make more in CPM ads.  Given the topic matter however I’m not sure what the fill rate would be so the CPM earnings might be quite small.

Conclusion

Some search engine visitors are far more valuable than others.  It is probably not worth trying to get the most valuable search engine visitors (scenario 1) since there is a lot of competition for those clicks.  It is worthwhile to write about topics which will attract search engine visitors who will make you at least a little bit of money (scenario 2).  There is absolutely nothing wrong with writing a post with very little earning potential (scenario 3), but understand that you are only writing that post for fun and not money.

If you are going to increase your blog income with limited time resources then you need to know how your blog makes money.  By reducing the time spent on activities which don’t create income and increasing your time spent on income-earning activities, you can increase your blog income without changing the total amount of time spent on your site.

*Note that for this particular post I mainly use search engine visitors as an example.  If your site is quite new then it probably doesn’t get many search engine visitors yet but it will!

A typical blog which has been around for 6 months or more will get traffic from many different sources:

• Referrals from other sites – If other sites link to your site then you will likely see some traffic from them.
• Regular readers – This is more or less the same as direct traffic.  People who subscribe to your feed might click through to your site.
• Search engine traffic – Visitors who find your site after doing a search on a search engine.

All traffic is good and if you are trying to build up regular readers then getting traffic from other sites is probably the best type of traffic to have.

But what if you are trying to make money?

In that case it is search engine traffic that you want.  The problem with regular readers and in most cases visitors from other sites is that they are visiting your site to read what you have written and for no other reason.  They won’t click on your ads and are not likely to sell any products you pitch.  When a regular readers visits your site they want to be entertained and informed.  They are not likely to be in the process of buying something.

Of course the previous paragraph is not 100% true, but it is true enough that for this discussion I’m assuming it is 100% true.  I always assume that I don’t make any money at all from my regular readers when planning my income-earning activities.

Search engine visitors on the other hand are always looking for specific information of some type.  They don’t always want to buy something but in a lot of cases they are researching for an upcoming purchase.  Someone searching for “best high interest savings account” could very well be shopping around for a new savings account.

Regardless of the reason – search engine visitors are far more likely to click on your Adsense blocks and affiliate links than visitors from any other source.

This fact alone isn’t going to make you more money, but it is a key concept which I’ll be revisiting in other posts.  One of the keys to increasing your blog income is to take a good look at the time you spend on your regular (non-paying) readers vs time you spend on (paying) search engine visitors.  Changing this ratio should increase your income.  In the next post we’ll take a closer look at different types of search engine visitors since they are not all same.

Why only focus on one income stream?

In my case, probably 90%-95% of my online income is earned from search engine visitors so it makes sense for me to assume that if I want to increase earnings then I need to work on activities geared towards getting more and higher quality search engine visitors.  If I was a full time blogger then I might try to create income earning products for my regular readers, but I’m not.  My time is very limited so it doesn’t matter if I’m “leaving money on the table” by ignoring certain income possibilities.

I have to focus on getting the highest return on my limited time.

I should point out that I consider my sites to be a hobby as well – the reality is that I don’t “enjoy” the search engine posts as much so I still like to do a post a week which is just for my enjoyment.  You CAN mix up different types of posts.  It doesn’t have to be all work or all play.

Don’t believe me that search engine visitors are where the money is?

Try this simple exercise

Look in your Google Analytics and go Traffic sources/ Search engines/Landing page – you will then see the most visited posts by search engine visitors for the past month.   Then look at Content/AdSense and look at those top earning posts.  See if you can see any similarities in those two lists.  When I do this on my blogs I notice 2 things:

1. The top money making posts all have at least some search engine traffic.
2. Not all posts with good search engine traffic make good money.  This concept will be discussed in the next post.

Don’t have Google Analytics or if you do then it’s not integrated with Adsense?  Let me know in the comments and I’ll write about it.

 One of the best ways to promote a new blog is to do guest posts.  Guest posts are articles that you write and give to another blogger to publish on their blog.  Usually there will be some kind of introduction with a link to your site along with a couple of links in the guest post itself.  If the guest post is successful it should be able to drive some traffic to your site and hopefully you can gain a few new readers.

Another big benefit of guest posts is to get more links to your blog.  This will give you some SEO benefit which might help certain posts rank higher with the search engines.

This post is mainly focused on how to write a guest post to gain new readers.

There are a number of different criteria to measure the “success” of a guest post.  Having it accepted and published is one criteria.  The amount of traffic it creates is another.  New readers as measured by RSS count is another one. Comments on the guest post could be another.

Here are a whole pile of suggestions on how to have a successful guest post:

Quality – Make it top quality – It has to stand out or nobody will check out your site.  Try to make it interesting and a bit controversial if possible.  You don’t need to hit it out of the park but don’t submit your “B” material.  In most cases the host blog will allow you to reprint the post after a certain period of time (ie 30-90 days).  This is a great feature because if you can use the post as part of your regular schedule then it won’t be any extra work.

Topic – Make sure the topic fits the host blog.  Submitting your “Mixed Martial Arts/Ultimate Fighting” post to a “Mommy” blog is a complete waste of time.  The post topic has to fit your blog as well.  There is nothing wrong with adapting your style a bit to fit a potential host blog but there has to be a connection between the host blog and your blog.   If you do a debt reduction post on a debt reduction blog but your blog is a stock trading blog then you are not likely to get any new readers no matter how much the readers like your guest post.  Here is a post which covers How to write guest posts which generate traffic.

Technical details

One of the keys to getting your guest posts accepted is to make the post as close as possible to a finished post on the host blog in order to cut down the time necessary for the host blog owner to publish your post.  If the blog normally has a picture then find a picture and include the link and attribution info.
The idea is to reduce the amount of work necessary for the host author to publish.  If someone provides a guest post where the host has to:

• Find a picture.
• Write an intro with links to your blog.
• Edit the post.

That’s a lot of work and might not be any easier than just writing the post themselves.  If some other blogger has provided a well prepared guest post that requires no extra work then it will be an easy choice as to which post will get published. 

The less work the host blogger has to do, the more likely they are to accept and quickly publish your guest post.  Make it easy for them.

Keep in mind that most blogs have some sort of rules regarding intros, outros, links within the post, so try to find out what those rules are and obey them.  If there are no rules then I suggest including all of the following:

Introduction

Having a sentence before the post which contains a brief description of your blog, a link to your blog and a call to action to subscribe along with your feed link.  Here is an example of an introduction.  A little bit of investment knowledge goes a long way.

Links in post

Make sure you put at least 2 links to your blog inside the post (assuming the host blog allows).  Getting link juice to your blog is part of the benefit and exposing the readers of your guest post to different articles will increase the odds that they will check out your site.  Make sure these links are relevant and don’t be shy about putting more links rather than less.  But don’t stuff the post with links.  I would say don’t use more than 1 link per 250 words as a very general rule of thumb.

Another benefit of links is that they will draw the readers to relevant posts which might be buried deep in your blog.  Just sending them to the front page might not work so well if your last post is a contest update or some other announcement.

Try to put any relevant keywords in the hypertext of the links to your blog ie rather than have “See my post on budgeting <link>here</link>” it should have the main topic in the link hypertext.  “See my post on <link>budgeting</link>.”

Another subscription call at the end

I always duplicate the introduction at the end of the post.  This will often get removed by the host blog but lots of times it doesn’t.  I figure having a subscription call at the end of the post is a great way to get people who have actually read your whole post and might be interested in subscribing or visiting your site.

Picture

If the host blog normally include photos then you have to find one and provide it to them in the same size they normally use.  Either give them the file or link plus the attribution info.

Typos/grammar

Take the time to reread your post for errors.  Get someone else to read it too – a second set of eyes will ALWAYS find another typo.  A post that needs too much editing will not get published.  Sometimes a host will barely read the guest post and won’t correct any errors.  This doesn’t help you since now you have a guest post that has a lot of spelling/grammatical errors which reduces the effectiveness of the guest post.

Every guest post you do is a one time shot – Do it as perfectly as you can or don’t do it at all.

Length

This is highly dependent on the topic and the host blog.  Look at some typical posts on the host blog and count the words – I copy and paste the article into Word and then do a word count (tools/word count).  If you don’t have any direction as to the proper length then as a general guideline I would suggest not submitting a post less than 400 words or more than 1000 words.  This also has to fit your blog style as well.  If you write a nice concise 550 word guest post and then the new readers find out that most of your regular posts are 3,000 words then they probably won’t come back.

Welcome post

If you have a guest post on a big blog then it might be worthwhile to create a welcome post on your own site.  This will say something like “Welcome XYZ readers” and give a brief outline of your blog – some links to popular posts and a call to action with a subscribe button.   Once you create this post you can change it and republish for different guest posts so it doesn’t just have to be for mega-blog posts!  I don’t often do the “welcome post” – usually just for the biggest blogs and big media mentions.

How to choose a host blog

I’d say go as big as possible.  The more exposure you can get, the better off you will be.  However size isn’t the only factor.  Here are some other considerations:

• Style/topics have to match your blog
• Lots of comments – typically a host blog that has an active community will be a good choice for a guest post.
• RSS can be misleading.  If the blog has been around for a long time then the RSS number might be far higher than the number of active readers.
• Frequency of publishing.  Ideally you want a blog that only publishes once a day or less.  Some blogs publish 2-3 times per day and your post will not get as much exposure as you might think.
• Publish during the week - Tues – thurs are the best days.  Weekends are awful.  Unless the site is really big then I would ask for the post back if they are going to publish on the weekend.  Try to negotiate this – don’t forget in most cases you are doing the host blog a favor!
• Don’t submit guest posts when the host blog author is going on holiday and is asking for guest posts.  This might be a seemingly easy way to get published on a big blog but if the author is not publishing for a week or 2 then most regular readers will just tune out for that period of time.  You are much better off if you can get a day where most of the readers are expecting the regular author to be publishing.   Don’t be fooled by stats – some hosts will tell you how many unique visitors they get a day.  This number means nothing to you since most of those visitors will be search engine visitors to older posts.

Read the blog for a while (or go back and read the last few weeks worth of posts).  This will help you determine if the site is a good fit and perhaps give you ideas for topics.  Commenting on the blog is a great way to get to know the author if you don’t already know them.

This can also give you clues as to when would be a good time to pitch an article – if they mention they are moving next week or are on a business trip then they will probably be thrilled to get a good guest post to help them out.  This will also give you more leverage in terms of getting it published during the week (Tues-Thurs).  Several times I have submitted a post on Sunday or Monday to someone who I knew was short of material.  This helped ensure that it was published mid-week which will maximize results. 

How to pitch

I’ve had a very high success rate with my guest posts.  In fact only one blog has ever turned me down out of about 30 guest posts that I’ve done.  My suggestion is to email the post to the potential host blogger and ask him/her if they will consider your post as a guest post.  It helps a lot if you know the blogger – maybe you have emailed in the past or commented on their blog or Twittered with them.  But if you haven’t – no big deal – just send the email and see what happens.

It should be said that some bloggers prefer if the potential guest poster ask them for topics or approval of a topic before it gets written.  This is fine but I have yet to have anyone turn down any of my topics.  The worst case scenario if a blogger asks for a different topic is that you just use the other one on your own blog or as a guest post on a different site.

Repeat posting

If you have good success with guest posting on a certain blog then try to repeat the experience.  After a few months or even a year – try submitting another guest post to the same blog.

Patience

Some blogs will accept your post but won’t publish for a long time.  There is nothing wrong with asking them for an update but don’t worry about the timing.  Once the post is submitted then monitor to make sure it eventually gets published but otherwise just get going on the next guest post.

Guest posts just for link juice

If you are doing it for link juice only then the rules are very different.  The goal here is to do the minimum work/quality necessary to get the link(s).  A short and simple post is better for your purposes.  Pick a topic you are very familiar with so that you don’t have to do any research.  Perhaps take an existing post and do a rewrite of it.  Don’t go overboard – I get lots of crappy guest post requests that are just offered to get a permanent free link.  If they are too short, too basic, too obvious then they are useless and I just ignore them.  Try to do something more specific that might help it be more unique and interesting.
Again – the bigger the blog the better but it’s not as critical. 

Checklist before submitting your guest post

• Find out the first name of the blogger you are submitting to.
• Proof read the post.
• Get someone else to proof read.
• Create an intro.
• Put links in post – make sure they work.
• Create an outro (can be same as intro)
• Find a pic (if applicable) and attribute link.  Resize if necessary.
• Make sure your blog is ok (ie up and running).

Hi there, welcome to the re-launch of Blogthority.com – the website designed to help bloggers increase their earnings without spending any more time on their blogs.

I’ve been blogging since May 2007 and have been successful in making a decent online income since the beginning of 2009. My main sites are Four Pillars and ABCs of Investing.

The two main challenges I faced when trying to increase the revenue of my sites were:

1) Knowledge – it took me about 18 months to really figure out how to make some decent money. I make no claim to being an “expert” since the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know. However, I hope to pass on some of the lessons I’ve learned since that knowledge would have been helpful to me when I started.

2)  Time – I have a full time job, a wife, 2 little kids and a house.  I can’t just “work harder” since I’m already giving everything I got!  I found that one of the keys to increasing my income was learning to figure out which parts of blogging were making money and focusing more on that.  This meant cutting back on other aspects of blogging in order to increase earnings without spending more time on blogging.

What kind of posts will Blogthority have?

Most of the posts will be either points about how to make more money or blog improvement suggestions.

I would love to say that this material will be helpful to all bloggers but I think the following types of bloggers will benefit the most:

• Someone who has been blogging for at least 6-12 months and isn’t making very much money. Once you get past the 1 year mark and have a good archive then you are at a point where your blog should have good earning potential. If you aren’t making at least a couple hundred a month then you need to make some changes.
• Just starting – It is almost impossible to make any meaningful dough in the first 6 months…or more likely 12 months, but knowing how to set your blog up for greater earning potential will pay off down the road.
• Already making decent dough. This person already has things figured out and I doubt I can add much. However, you are welcome to stick around and add/correct to my information.

I would love to hear from anyone who can apply any info from this site and experiences an income gain (or even if you don’t). I’m not promising huge increases, slow and steady gains are the key to long term earnings growth.

FYI – the material will not be posted in a “course” format (ie sequential). Once I have posted enough material then I’ll create a summary page which I’ll link to in the sidebar which will serve as a guideline to the material.  There won’t be any set posting schedule – just when I have something to publish.

I was browsing Greatnexus Internet and Web page and came across Yoast’s Optimizing WordPress Database Performance article. This article caught my interest because I have been having issue with my VPS crashing more often than it should and was trying to figure out what’s wrong.

In the article Yoast, mentioned a new Wordpress plugin called Debug Queries and said that it’s design to help you find inefficient database queries — naturally, I was interested. I downloaded the plugin and installed it on my main blog. The result was very surprising. Debug Queries found that my home page was making 1,776 database queries per page load — yes, almost 2,000! Upon further inspection, I found the offending plugin to be Cross-Linker. After deactivation of Cross-Linker, the number of database queries dropped to 21.

This is unfortunate because I like the plugin. But fortunately, I found another linking plugin called KB Linker that works just as well, and impressively, the number of queries remained at 21.

So I just want to shout out to Joost de Valk, Frank Bültge, and Adam R. Brown.  Good job guys. Thank you for terrific blogs and plugins.

Last time I wrote about using Google Analytics to boost your AdSense earnings, this time I am going to show you a simple process where you can use Google Analytics Advanced Segments feature to methodically improve your search engines ranking.

How To Find Web Pages With The Most Search Traffic

First let’s find your top performing web pages with the most search engines traffic. Here’s how you’ll find that information from your Google Analytics account:

• Click on Content
• Click on Top Content
• On the upper right, click Segment

• Uncheck All Visits and select Search Traffic
• Click Apply

You’ll see a screen similar to the one below — note that I filtered mine for privacy reason. Note that you now know your top performing web pages in term of search traffic, and can expand the list to see more results.

How To Find Top Performing Keywords For Your Web Page

Take note of these top search traffic articles and follow these steps to find top performing keywords:

• Click on the URL link under the “Page” column
• In the Analyze pull down, select Entrance Keywords
• In the Content pull down, search for and select your chosen article
  

You’ll see a screen similar to the one below that shows all of the keywords for that particular article with all the vital statistics.

How To Improve Search Traffic With Google Analytics Advanced Segment Data

This is a very powerful piece of information that you are looking at, and there are several things you could do to leverage it. Here are a few ideas you can use to improve your search engines ranking using the data provided.

1. Keywords Optimization

You can start by rewriting the article to emphasize these top keywords.  Make sure they appear in important places like the title, first paragraph, meta description, headings, etc. You also want them to appear a few times in your content so that you can achieve a 3-5% keywords density.

If you want to rank well for a particular key phrase, then make sure you optimize the key phrase verbatim as per the suggestion above. For example, if I want to rank well for “new frugal ideas”, then I should have that exact phrase “new frugal ideas” appears a few times and in the headings, first paragraph, etc.

2. Link To This Article From Other Articles Using Various Keywords

Another approach is to link to this article using the keywords you’d like to improve from existing articles within your site, or better yet, from other web sites. Of course, the former is easier, but the latter is much more powerful.

3. Write Follow Up Article

Another idea is to write a brand new article that target similar keywords — i.e., an update to the original article, or a different look at the same idea, etc. In this new article, you also want to link back to the original article using the most important keywords as the anchor text. However, limit the number of links to 1-2.

If you’re lucky enough, you may even get the valuable indented search listing.

Conclusion

These are just a few examples of how you can optimize your web page, and there are other optimization ideas that you can apply to leverage the information made available by Google Analytics Advanced Segments.

Another nice touch about Analytics is the ability to change your timeframe on the fly so that you can see if what you’re doing is actually helping or hurting your site search ranking. However, try to keep your timeframe long enough so that you’re not fooled by daily fluctuation.

Most personal finance bloggers make money from their sites through advertising. The current next big thing in making money online is to develop paid content and/or consulting income. For personal finance bloggers like me, paid consulting about personal finance is almost impossible. There is already an industry that consults on finance issues — financial planners and independent financial advisors — it quite rightly requires serious study, qualifications and liability insurance. Very few financial advisors are personal finance bloggers (or very few personal finance bloggers are financial advisors), most like me are providing information for entertainment purposes only.

More Than Advertising?

All the above means that if you are a personal finance blogger who wants to extract more income from your site or brand than you can get from advertising, you need to develop paid content. To my mind, there’s nothing wrong with this. Think about the news. I can and do read the news online for free, but not all the content of my favourite newspaper (The Independent) is there. If I want everything I have to pay for it.

Some personal finance bloggers are starting to go down this route. Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar has written and published a book — what’s in the book is generally along the same lines as some posts in his blog but it isn’t a duplication of blog content. Trent has also collected together some of his blog post series as e-books and charges $2 for them to be downloaded. With the sort of traffic that he gets (approx 40k subs), that’s likely to be a nice little earner since $2 is fairly nominal for a visitor, but the work involved in setting it up is a one off cost.

Paid Content: A Case Study

Ramit Sethi is always looking for a way to do something different with his blog I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and preferably make a little money whilst doing so. His latest idea is a paid subscription to a money saving email. From the description it sounds like you pay $8 a month, and in return you get an email with detailed ideas that will save you large amounts of money. It’s worth stating that Ramit’s audience is typically young and high earning with a high disposable income — I’m sure that the cost of the subscription is pitched at the level that most of his readers wouldn’t even notice.

Ways to Make it Work

Personally, I think one of the key selling points of blogging is that it produces free content. Free content ranks highly in search engines, and is a great stand alone advertising technique. Writing free and focused content as part of your blog should be the core of your blogging strategy — if you’re trying to market content about widgets, people are going to be looking for blog posts about widgets, not blog posts about marketing widgets.

It’s also going to help to deliver your paid-for and free content separately, and differently if you can. This distinguishes the two offerings more easily, and means that you won’t be caught by having information similar to your paid content on other free blogs. Just something as simple as packaging it for easy reading on a kindle, or maybe podcasting, or producing content designed for emailing rather than web display can give your readers and visitors a reason to buy.

After blogging for a while, you will notice two inevitable trends.  One, other bloggers that you used to link to, or leave comment on your blog with links to their site stop blogging.  And two, some of your advertisers — specifically affiliate advertisers — stop running their program.  In both cases, when your visitors follow these links, they are either going to a dormant web site or a parked domain — both of which contributes to bad user experience.

If you follow these bloggers, or if you get a notice from your advertisers, there are a few things that you should do.  In the case of other bloggers, I don’t generally go through these steps until the blog is completely dead; specifically, I’ll keep the links as long as the site is up.  Here are the steps that I go through:

• Clean Up Your Blogroll — First, if the blogger is in my blogroll, I’ll remove the blog.  It’s also a good idea to periodically go through your blogroll to see if you are linking to any dead sites.
• Clean Up Your Posts — Second, I search my posts for the dead blog.  In WordPress admin menu, click on Posts > Edit and do a search — i.e., “deadblog.com”.   Then I go in and either remove the link noting that it’s no longer around, or completely delete any reference to that blog.
• Clean Up Your Comments — Third, I do a similar search in the comment section, and remove the dead URL from comments.

This used to be tedious, but WordPress 2.7 made this easier with “Quick Edit” function.  Now you may ask if this is worth the effort.  Personally, I think it is.  First, it shows that you care about your blog and your are keeping it current.  Second, your user are not visiting parked domain, or worse, domains that have been turned into spam sites or Made for AdSense sites.  Third, if you are concerned about SEO, it will cut down the number of unnecessary outgoing links.

One of the free tool you can use to detect dead links on your site is Xenu’s Link Sleuth (TM).

Do you go through your blog to clean up dead links?  Do you think it’s worth it?

So, you’ve heard that people can make money from blogging, but you’re wondering “how exactly does that work, and what approach would suit your blog?”.

Text Links

You have a website which has outgoing links, other websites want to rank with search engines, and one of the main measures for page rank is the number and quality of incoming links. So, there is money to be made from selling links on your site, and the advertiser is generally not that bothered if nobody ever clicks on the link.

This can be a reasonable source of income both from aggregators and private sales, but it doesn’t scale that well — after a certain point, you can’t earn more money as your blog grows. The main downside is that it is not at all popular with search engines and you may find your own ranking in searches is lowered as a result.

Ad Networks

You have a website which has visitors who click on links on your website. Other websites are are willing to pay for visitors. There is money to be made from selling advertising space on your website, you either get paid when someone views an ad, or when they click on it.

Making money this way requires a reasonably sized audience, and search engine traffic is considered to click more on adverts than regular readers or subscribers. Ad network income generally scales very well, and it is possible to make this the cornerstone of a money making strategy reliant on a single blog in the right sort of niche. The downside is that unless your website is very large, you’re unlikely to make private sales and will be reliant on an ad aggregator (e.g. Adsense, ). In practice this means that you will give up a fair amount of control over which ads are shown, and there can be restrictive terms and conditions.

Affiliate Links

You have a website where you mention products and services. Other companies are willing to pay commission for leads, inquiries or sales. There is money to be made by linking to the product or service if your visitors are likely to click on the link and follow up with a purchase.

Affiliate links scale well, and there is the potential for using both aggregators and private arrangements. You generally have complete control over which affiliate links are shown on your blog, and existing readers and subscribers are more likely to click on affiliate links than straight advertising. The downside is that making money from affiliate links depends strongly on the niche you are working in. There needs to be an obvious relationship between the topics you write about, and some products or services. So, for example review blogs do very well from affiliate sales, as can blogs related to expensive hobbies, but if you rarely mention specific products or services then you will probably struggle.

Consulting and Sales

You have some skill or product that you wish to sell. Your blog is strongly related to this skill or products. Other people will pay money for your skill or products.

You need to have genuine skills or a product to sell that people are interested in. Your blog needs to be strongly positioned towards making sales, in fact becomes somewhat of a sideline. You need to research any legal issues thoroughly before offering consulting, and ensure that you have back office systems set up for dealing with clients or completing sales. This works very well with business to business internet sales (e.g. selling WordPress themes, or blog consulting services) and fairly well with anything that can be done remotely, it is much harder to do if your skill requires you to be actually present. The biggest downside is that this is not passive income — you’ll actually have to work for the money, as well as blog.

Issues to Consider

You need to have the right set up in order to make money. Some free blog networks like Wordpress.com don’t allow their bloggers to run advertising so check your terms and conditions. It is generally easiest to grow your blog’s income with self-hosted web hosting and your own domain name, but other approaches have worked for some people.

It’s possible to use a mix of approaches to making money, but be careful. If you are selling a product or skill then you might not want to use Adsense for example because the ads that come up are likely to be for competitors. As mentioned, selling text links can have a negative impact on your search engine visitors which are the primary source of income for most of the other forms of advertising.

Invariably, making money means paying taxes on the net income. Check out the regulations in your area, but you can usually make deductions for legitimate business expenses like hosting, domain names and Internet access. If you have a tax advisor or accountant already, you should contact them with your plans, often tax departments have phone lines you can call for advice on issues.

Finally, the standing of your blog is always dependent of having good content, and your credibility can be harmed by having a blog design with intrusive advertising. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by letting your desire to make money overcome your common sense.

Best of luck, and here’s to your first million (or at least hundred)!

Recently Google made AdSense-Analytics integration available for my account.  I only have a few days worth of data, but I am very impressed with the information so far. As I analyze the data, I am beginning to see some potential uses. If you have no idea what I am talking about, you should start with this Inside AdSense’s article: Make a date with data in Google Analytics — make sure you watch the video, which is included below.

Make More Money With AdSense, The Basics

Before I go into more detail about how I am planning to use the data, let’s cover the basics. In short, your AdSense income depends on three key factors:

1. Clickthrough Rate (CTR) – There are several things you could do to improve clickthrough rate.  This includes experimenting with:
   • Ad size (e.g., Skyscraper, Leaderboard, etc.)
   • Ad type (i.e., text versus image) — In general, I prefer text ads over image ads.
   • Ad placement (i.e., location or locations on the page) — Based on my experience ads below the Post Title perform very well.  Likewise, Skyscraper ad on the left also performs well.
   • Ad format (e.g., color, border, background, etc.) — My general preference is to have title link that matches the color of links on my site, no border, and matching background color.
2. $ per click (CPC) – This is mainly determined by the topic and keywords of your blog/posts.
3. Traffic – In general, the more the better.  However, different traffic type can have significant impact on the CTR.  For example, social bookmarking traffic tends to have very low CTR.  On the other hand, traffic via links from mainstream websites and traffic from organic searches tend to have much higher CTR.

Use Integration Data To Improve Your AdSense Income

Now that we have the basics covered, I want to go over two specific ideas on how to use the new data.

High CTR / High $ per click Pages

The first set of pages prime for optimization are the high CTR / high $ per click pages.  You want to drive more traffic to these pages because they are money makers that just need more traffic.  Here are a few ideas:

• Link to these pages from your sidebar or from your home page.  For example, you can call these “Featured Articles”.
• Link to these pages when you are writing new articles.
• Link to these pages from your high traffic pages.
• Buy ads that drive traffic to these pages.  This requires some tinkering since you have to figure out how to spend less on the ads than you are earning to keep some profit.

Low $ per click Pages

Another idea revolves around low $ per click pages; especially for pages with high traffic and high CTR.  For these pages there are several things you could try:

• Look at the ads that appear on these pages and try blocking them. Hopefully, this will bring up the $ per click.
• Tweak the keywords to attract higher paying keywords.
• Stop showing AdSense and experiment with other types of advertisement — e.g., relevant affiliate ads, CPM ads, etc.  For example, I am doing this with one of my page that has high traffic and high CTR but with $ per click that’s around 5 cents.
• Another idea is to replace AdSense with links to your other high CTR / high $ per click pages.

Anyway, this is a relatively new and you may not have statistically significant amount of data to work with. However, it’s worth exploring and sees what you could do to positively impact your earning.  Here’s a good article I found on this topic: 10 Ways To Analyze AdSense Analytics To Make More Money from RobMalon.com.