I probably should update this blog since I haven’t touched it since, good grief, October – I have been slack!

I don’t have any other excuse other than I don’t try and rank this blog for anything so it doesn’t mean all that much to me except for keeping in touch with people who seem to be interested in what I have to say.

Well I had a good Christmas with Amazon earnings, but January was awful – I guess people have lost all spending interest although it’s starting to pick up again now.

Lately I’ve been trying to increase my adsense earnings. So I’ve been building backlinks and writing content for some of my information blogs. It’s slowly creeping up, but I do get impatient sometimes I wish I could crack the $20 a day mark with adsense (it’s getting closer hasn’t seemed to budge much).

I like the adsense model but haven’t pursued it much in the past due to concentrating on affiliate sales and Amazon. But you should never concentrate on just one method of making money online in case something happens to that source of income. Likewise you should never have just one blog or website either – the more you have out there the better your income will be and the more stable it will be.

What does it take to make money online?

Recently my mother told me she was in a bit of credit card debt so I suggested internet marketing to her to try and help her get some extra income. That was back in November and she still hasn’t shown any interest in finding out how.

That’s pretty typical for most people. They want to earn money online but aren’t willing to put in the effort to do so, or they make one HubPage or one blog and wonder why the money doesn’t roll in immediately.

The truth is that it takes work, just like anything else, to make money from your blog or website. You need to write the content, get backlinks, monitor your rankings and work out the best monetisation methods to use.

It’s actually a lot of writing in the beginning, unless you outsource this – although I don’t recommend you do this unless you are making a decent income first.

So to answer the question how to make money online – it’s WORKING by writing articles, content, getting backlinks etc.

How much money can you make and how soon can you see the money?

Most people like to know what is possible when it comes to earning an income on the internet. And while I don’t have an exact figure for you, I believe that if you put the effort in, you could see a small amount of money within around a month or two. It won’t be much to start with but as you continue to do more work, it will grow and grow.

Let’s say that after two months you were able to see a monthly income of $50. Not much you might say, but let’s imagine that you kept going at your business and after twelve months got to around $300 a month. (and I’m being conservative here – you might earn much more).

You could of course fast track that by writing more articles and building more blogs, (I’ve know some people who have got to 5k a month within a year). It really depends on how much work you are willing to put in.

That’s all well and good, but what do you mean by work?

I think the first step to really making money from the web is to build a blog (either self hosted or free) or lots of hubpages based around products that people are already buying.

Finding good keywords isn’t hard, but it does take a big learning curve to know what you are looking for and how to choose a good one.

I usually prefer product keywords simply because people buy products more than they buy information (generally speaking).

I’m experimenting more with info based keywords now, but I still make far more money with product keywords.

So how do you find keywords?

Stop looking at your computer screen and have a look around the room you are in. What do you see? In my case, I see a TV, mirrors, pictures on the walls, couches, a cat sunning herself on a mat, books, sunglasses etc etc. This is a good start – I could choose any of these.

Let’s say I wanted to focus on sunglasses more. The keyword sunglasses is just too general so you need to drill down a bit. Often times I’ll put the keyword in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and see what comes up. I like to look at exact match phrases generally (but this isn’t a hard and fast rule). Try and look for keywords that have around 3 or more words in them. A few caught my eye because they have lots of searches (more than 5000 per month exact match):

Cheap designer sunglasses
mens designer sunglasses
sunglasses for women
marc jacobs sunglasses

Next I like to see what sort of competition there is for those keywords. Just look at page 1. You really are only competing against the first 10 websites anyway.

You can also expand on those keywords to find ultra specific phrases like:

cheap designer sunglasses for men
cheap designer sunglasses online
where can i find cheap designer sunglasses
where to buy cheap designer sunglasses

It’s much easier to go after longer phrase keywords when you are starting out anyway as they are easier to rank for (even if they don’t get as many searches).

So start a hubpage about cheap designer sunglasses (or even a whole blog if you prefer) and start targeted the smaller and easier phrases that have virtually no competition and work your way up to the main keyphrase you are going after.

Write one article (or blog post) and make it at least 500 words. More if you are in the mood.

Next get some backlinks from article directories, forum sigs, blog commenting, rss feeds. As many different places as you can think of.

Once you’ve got about 10 to 20 links to your site, move on the next project. Come back to this in a month to see what traffic you are getting and how people are finding your site. Expand on those keywords. Get more backlinks.

That’s what I mean by work. Just keep doing something – adding content and more importantly getting backlinks everyday.

That’s how to make lots of money online.

Personal Stuff

I’ve had lots of people ask about the pregnancy and yes everything is going along great. Less than 2 months to go now.

We are also in the process of selling our tiny two bedroom house to move to somewhere bigger (crazy timing I know!)

I wanted to go into a bit more detail about how to do keyword research because

1. I promised that I would and
2. I think it’s one of those parts of internet marketing that newbie’s tend to skip or not do correctly.

Now I need to say that this is how I do keyword research but many people have other methods that are equally successful. This is just my method and it works for me.

Firstly I do research slightly differently depending on whether I’m promoting products on Amazon, or if I’m promoting ClickBank products.

How To Do Keyword Research to promote Amazon products

For Amazon I target actual product names. I will first choose my product on Amazon by going to their bestseller lists and see what is already selling. They have bestseller lists in nearly all categories they do. I also look at their Movers & Shakers page to see if a product has been gaining sales quite rapidly.

Choose around three to four products.

Next go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and put those product names in.

You are looking for product name keywords that have at least 1000 search Exact Match per month. (By default you will be shown broad view, but it’s much more accurate to look at exact match which you can change under the Match Type drop down box). Write down all the keywords that have 1000 or more searches per month. (I usually use an excel spreadsheet for this).

Now it’s time to check out your competition. There are many methods for checking competition, but this is how I do it:

Type in intitle:”your keyword” into Google. This will show you how many other pages online use those exact keywords in their page title. It’s good SEO practice to have your keywords in your page title and it will help you rank better online.

Write down the results next to your product name keywords. If you find any keywords that have less than 1000 competing sites then you have found a great product to try and rank for. It has very low competition so your chances of making sales are very good. That’s pretty much all I do to find products to promote as an Amazon affiliate.

How To Do Keyword Research to promote ClickBank products

I use a very similar method as above, but instead of putting keywords or product names in the Google Adwords Tool I put in the website address of the clickbank product. You can do this by choosing Website Content instead of Descriptive words or phrases.

You will get returned certain keywords that Google thinks are relevant to that page. (It just saves time trying to think of them yourself ).

Sort that list from largest exact match to smallest and save that out (I usually save it as a .csv excel file).

Delete any keywords that have only one or two keywords and any that you don’t think are relevant.

Next go through my intitle method above to find competing pages of less than 1000 that use that phrase.

I’ve found that keywords in the make money online field often have a lot of competition and you’ll end up with rather obscure long tail keywords like business earn money online opportunity. (Yeah I know – you have to be creative to be able to use that in your post title!)

But ClickBank products in other niches are pretty easy to find good keyword phrases in. Even those ones that you think are fairly saturated already.

And that is how I do my keyword research! I hope it has helped.