I just got a comment from Stephanie asking about what I do to make money online, and as I started to reply it turned into a massive answer so I’ve decided to make it a post instead of replying to her comment. Enjoy.

Tracey,
I think I’ve read just about every word on your site – but sorry if these answers appeared somewhere else already. Do you have any opinion on the Postrunner system? Are you still finding success with creating your own Web 2.0 backlinks (not counting Hubpages and Ezines)? There is just so much info – not sure where to focus. Creating 2.0s? Angela and Paul’s backlinks? Postrunner? Or all?
I’d really like to focus my efforts to get the best results.
Thanks
Stephanie

Hi Stephanie,

Glad to hear you are enjoying my site. Let’s see if I can answer your questions:

1. re: Postrunner System

I’m not a member of the Keyword Academy anymore so don’t exactly know what this system does. I think it’s a form of guest posting on other people’s blogs through the one system thereby distributing your articles to lots of different places online to gain backlinks, am I right?

If so then yes I believe that this can be very powerful. It’s not what I do, but it can work very well if you don’t have many of your own sites online yet.

Because I have quite a few sites of my own now, I usually use them to get backlinks to my other sites. I also use web 2.0 properties for links as well.

2. Success with web 2.0 properties?

I definately do use web 2.0 sites a lot because they work great for me. I mainly use hubpages and ezinearticles, but also occassionaly squidoo, xomba, infobarrel, snipsly, weebly, blogger and others. Don’t ignore the power of these properties – especially ones that you can directly control. I have one hubpage that is a pr5. A link from that page is VERY powerful.

3. Angela & Pauls backlinks

I don’t use these anymore. Twelve months ago they were super powerful but now because so many people (newbies) use them they have lost all their link power. I also think during the last Mayday update Google gives less juice to these types of links. Plus it’s a pain to fill out all those profiles

4. What to do now?

I like to keep my system pretty simple. I believe it’s really just a numbers game. The more pages/articles you have online the more money you’ll make.

My basic system is slightly different depending on what I’m promoting.

For Amazon sites, it’s usually set up a blog or html static site (which one depends on my mood for that day, it really makes no difference to rankings). I try and get a close match domain name like redwidgets.com although sometimes it’s more general (tip: if you are having trouble getting a good domain name just add a generic word to the end. I like adding blog or site or something, so redwigdgetsblog.com.)

Next I check Google Adwords for a good main keyword. Usually it’s something with three words in it because it’s less competition.

Next I’ll do a search for that keyword online. On the left of Google search if you click advanced options, you’ll see a wonder wheel option. Click that. The related phrases that appear are usually my secondary keywords for the site (and I’ll create a page/post for each of these).

Usually my amazon sites have around six to ten content pages (or more if they are very profitable).

Now depending on whether they ranking and if they are making sales or not, I’ll then add a few hubpages and articles pointing back to the sites. These are not always related. I might have hubs on cat breeding that link to sites about lego star wars. If it’s related then great, but don’t think it definately has to be.

Oh and another tip: always add an outbound link or two to a relevant authority site. It actually helps your own site! I didn’t beleive it either until I tried it, but it really works.

For my Adsense sites, it’s roughly the same except I have way more posts on these sites. Usually I try and get AT LEAST 30 posts on these sites but many of my sites have more than 100 pages. The posts/pages target lots of different keyphrases (please don’t try and target just the one phrase with these sites, you want them to look as authorative as possible).   Tip: do a search for your keyphrase on Google then advanced options again and just look at either News or Blogs – there is some really good fresh information you can use on your blogs that is topical and gives your site some really good articles.

Definately add some tracking to your sites (I usually use Google Analytics, but sometimes I’ll use Statcounter instead). See what keywords that Google thinks that your site is relevant for and then write some more posts on that.

Adsense sites definately need more support in terms of articles and web 2.0 sites linking to them. I lot of my traffic to my adsense sites comes from ezinearticles.

I don’t have as much luck with Clickbank as I find many of the products don’t convert well for me. My best strategy is usually to do a case study, full review website covering a product (that I’ve actually used!) giving my results and experiences with the product. Can be time consuming, but ranks so much better in Google than just have a one page review that every other affiliate does. Plus it gives me credibility because I actually do use these products.

That is really all I do. As you can see it’s not complicated, it’s just a matter of lots of writing (either posts or articles) that I spread over the web either on my own site, or for backlinks on other sites.

I don’t use any special software, I do everything by hand. (I’ve played with autoblogging before as I have WPRobot but I just don’t seem to make any money this way). I only make money when I sit down and do the hard work. Writing Writing Writing.

So there you go. My big secret to making money online. And you probably knew this already.

How would you like to make a quick $700?

Well, I thought I’d help you get there by providing some simple steps on how you can do it. I mean we can all use some extra cash can’t we?

And by the way, there is no reason that you can’t scale this up to make much more than that, but I wanted to be conservative so I think a target of $700 by using this method I’m about to share is achievable.

For this to work we’ll be promoting a ClickBank product called Info Product Killer (IPK). The reason I’ve chosen this product is because it pays a commission of $70 per sale and it was hands down one of the best products I’ve ever purchased online (which you’d already know if you read this blog). (If you’d like to purchase it yourself you can do so here – although that’s not the purpose of this post – This post is all about helping YOU to make money). So to reach $700 you’ll need to make 10 sales of this.

This product converts at around 5%, which means to make 10 sales you’ve got get around 200 people to look at the offer. And I’m betting most of you already have a mailing list of more than 200 (or know how to get lots of eyes on this offer through SEO).

Sound achievable?

Awesome.

Of course I must let you know that I didn’t write/produce IPK and I’ve never met the author (although I have emailed him a few times and he seems really nice). I just really love the product, and you can’t beat that commission! $70 a sale – that’s good money.

So how do you get started?

First, register to become an affiliate for IPK. Head over to this affiliate sign up page and enter your details (for tracking your sales).  THIS IS IMPORTANT.

The product launches on July 13th and it’s only going to be live for 2 days so you’ve only got a little bit of time.

Craig Kaye (the author) has provided some pre-written emails that you can send out, starting a few days before and leading up to the launch day.

You can use these or write your own. (I prefer to write my own).

From now until then you can work at building your mailing list or you can just set up your autoresponder ahead of time.

Easy peasy.

I’ll be doing the same. In fact if you are on my mailing list, then expect to see some promo emails from me on this one. I am an affiliate after all

Good luck to everyone, and here’s to an extra $700 (or more) in your pocket.

UPDATE – Promoting Info Product Killer 2010 without a List

I’ve got quite a few people that said they would like to promote Info Product Killer 2010 but don’t have a list – is it still possible to make money? (Oh and by the way this method will work with any Clickbank Product)

Well yes it is. But it’s going to be hard work – are you ready?

Now since a lot of big name marketers are going to be promoting this, that means that lots of people are going to be searching online for reviews and information about it once they first hear about it.

That means you are going to have to make a blog post or article with words like

Info Product Killer Review
Info Product Killer 2010 Review
What’s in IPK 2010?
IPK Scam
IPK Case Study
IPK Bonuses (if you plan to offer bonuses)

And so on.

You can add this to your existing blog, hubpage, squidoo lens etc or you can make a new page or blog.

I probably wouldn’t bother writing an article for Ezinearticles at this stage since IPK is only going to be live for a few days and EA might take too long to approve your article, so use places where your article or blog post will go live immediately.

I’ll be using my already existing Info Product Killer Review site.

Remember, if you want to promote this you need to go to http://www.infoproductkiller.com/jv/859358/ and place your details in the ‘stay in the loop’ box so you can get all the latest info and get your sales tracked.

You’ll make $81 a sale.

Craig has also added some banners on the site too which you can put on your website.

Here’s to a successful campaign!

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 had such a great response to my last post about how to make money with Amazon that I thought I’d go into a bit more detail about creating your own Amazon sites.

Oh and by the way, my mission to get a link from Griz was successful. Yippee! So over the next few weeks I’ll be paying it forward and providing a few links to some other blogs that I’ve read over the weeks that I thought were funny, informative or caught my eye in some way.

One such blog was from Roland who has written a great little post about how to make money on eBay. I just found the title of his blog rather amusing (losing the rat race) even though the picture of that mouse kind of creeps me out! LOL

So back to creating your own Amazon sites.

First you are going to need a domain name and hosting. Buy a domain name with your keyword in it if you can (being aware of certain trademarked terms). I have a hosting account where I can have unlimited websites on it so it’s very cheap to host all my sites. Many places do this so look around. You shouldn’t pay more than about $10 a month for hosting for all your sites (unless you want to spread out your sites over a few different hosting accounts for diversified IP addresses – something I plan to do in the future).

And you are going to have to know some HTML. Don’t ask me any complicated HTML questions, because I’m not a big tech person. I create my sites in Dreamweaver and while I know the basics (how to place links on images, create tables and align text) I have no idea about complicated html or anything.

So if you don’t know html or don’t want to know it, get a html editor like Dreamweaver, Frontpage or the million other ones out there to make life easier (don’t use Word to create a html page as it messes up the code and looks crap).

Ok, having said that, my sites are very simple. It’s basically a big table with 4 rows. One for the header image, one for the navigation (which is just text), one for the main content and one at the bottom for another small navigation bar.

I create all my own images in Photoshop.

I grab pictures from Amazon itself, the product pages or from the manufacturers pages. Be careful about copyright. Amazon is pretty cool about you using their images as long as you are sending traffic to them. (Don’t grab an Amazon image and send traffic to Toys R Us!)

Then I just play around with text to make my headers and add some complimentary colours. As long as they look decent I’m happy. I’m not trying to win any design awards.

Most of my mini sites have around 5 pages. 3 pages that talk about the product, a links page and a privacy policy page.

On the links page I link out to authority sites like Wikipedia or the Manufacturer of the product. I used to add links to my own sites, but notice that the sites I did that on crashed in the rankings (I’m guessing Google thought they were link farms or something). I’ve been taking all of those links off now and voila – within a month they bounce back in the serps.

The privacy policy page is just a page that Google likes to see. Don’t worry too much about what to put on this page. You can generate your own privacy policy page by going to a generator site like this one: privacy policy generator

I put these links at the bottom of the page because I don’t really want people visiting them – they are only there so Google thinks my site is legit.

Now for the main content of the site.

Practically all of my sites look like this Bakugan site. A Header, some text and big click me buttons.

The content is basically rewritten content about the product that I’ve got from Amazon or the manufacturers site. My early sites do have a lot of the same duplicate content as Amazon but I’ve found that if I do this they don’t rank as well. I’m in the process of cleaning up the text into original content across all my Amazon mini sites. I’m hoping to get that finished by the end of October.

I also like to add images and a video if I can find one. Go to YouTube and search for the product name. You’ll be surprised how many videos about specific products you can find. Try to choose one that doesn’t have some random URL from someone else in it. Having a video on your site seems to make it more like an authority site which the search engines like.

The click me images are self explanatory. They have a picture of the product and something like ‘save today at Amazon’, or ‘get today’s price from Amazon’.

Don’t try and trick people – tell them you are sending them to Amazon (or whatever site you are sending them to). You’ll have a much better CTR. Besides people trust Amazon – if you tell them you are sending them there they’ll feel much safer than if you have some obscure button that they don’t know where they will end up.

Sure you’ll get the odd person who will not click your button and type in the Amazon address instead and you won’t get any commission – but that doesn’t happen as often as you think. Most people click the buttons.

Now because I try and beef up the content of my sites, I’ll usually try and create a couple more pages of content as well. If it’s a game – perhaps I’ll have a page with the instructions on how to play it. Or if it’s a kitchen product perhaps I’ll have a recipe that you can use with it. Or sometimes I just write more text with some reviews.

The more you have written on your site the more long tail traffic you’ll get until you can start climbing the serps.

By the way if you need help with rankings and SEO, then Ben from Make Money with SEO has some great tips.

After you’ve finished your site and uploaded it, it’s time to start building traffic to it. Next week I’ll talk more about how to improve the rankings of your site and climb the serps.

Until then, take care
Tracey

Yes it’s true.  I’m snuggled up in front of the computer looking very glamorous in my dressing gown and fluffy socks.  I love that I can wear whatever I like to ‘work’.  It’s lilac if you are wondering.  And I know you were. 

This week I’ve had quite a few people ask me why I love HubPages so much and to be honest I wouldn’t say I love them, but I do like them a lot.  However, they are still just a means to an end.  Right now they rank well in Google on their own and they are great for backlinks to your own sites but I’m fully aware that they are becoming more and more popular so the good times might not last forever.

It was the same with Squidoo – at one time Google loved them, but not so much anymore.  And also with Blogger – it used to be that you could get a blogspot blog ranked within 24 hours.  It seems to take a week or more now and they don’t have the same Google love as they once had unless you can point a heck of a lot of backlinks at them.

So I’m not naive enough to think that HubPages is going to be great forever.  But for now I like them.  They work.

And of course they are a free way to get a lot of different pages up online – so they are really good for beginners.

But if you are REALLY serious about making money online then you do need to start building your own websites.  Yes it costs money for hosting and domain names.  Yes it takes a bit more work to get them going when they are new.  But Yes you have full control of them and as long as you don’t create big ol’ spam sites it’s likely that you’ll get Google’s approval fairly easily.  And of course Yes any money that you make is 100% yours.

That should be the goal of everyone online – to have their own sites that they have full control over – but in the meantime, whether you are testing out which affiliate products are going to convert well for you, or what keywords are likely to bring you the most traffic then it’s perfectly acceptable (and I encourage you) to use Hubpages.

Using eBay and Hubpages

Last week I made a lofty goal of a making lots of eBay related Hubs so I could increase my eBay affiliate income and so far I’ve got less than 20 up.  Some on my regular hub account and some on another hub account I have (yes I have more than one account because I’ve started noticing people copying my hubs so I’ve got a ‘secret’ hub account to test further products).

What I’ve found so far is that hubs that I have the article and then the ebay listings directly below it are getting a few clicks but not that many.  The hubs where I’ve put the ebay listings to the right of the text are getting a much higher clickthrough.  I suggest that whatever you are promoting on hubpages that you take advantage of that top right area as the key place to put your monetisation.

More about HubPages for beginners

I’ve had some people ask me how they get started with hubpages, so if you are a beginner then read this (if you are already a seasoned hubber then you can skip this part).

Basically HubPages is a site where you can create one page ‘mini-sites’ on any topic you like.  You can have as many of these ‘mini-sites’ as you like on whatever topics that you would like to write about.  You can add text, video’s, polls, images, links through the use of various capsules that you can use with your hub.

Each hubpage has a score, and you also have an overall author score.  If you are using hubpages for backlinks to your own site then you’ll need to make sure that your hub has a score of over 49 and your author score is also above 75 to make the links do follow.  That’s pretty easy to do if you have a good quality hub.  Because the top level domain has a PR 6 they are good for high quality backlinks.

If you want to make a good hub that will rank well in the search engines then you’ll need to write at least 400 words of original content (placed in a text capsule).  While they will accept and publish duplicate content it will get flagged as substandard  and your hub score will suffer – so it’s worth the extra bit of time to write something unique.

Because hubs tend to rank well on their own, or with a few links pointed at them they are also great for directly monetising them.  You can use the ebay or amazon capsules that hubpages provides or place your own affiliate links directly into either the text or links capsule.  (Note: you can’t place a direct ebay link on your hub because ebay doesn’t allow direct links on sites that you don’t own).

If you are thinking of promoting Clickbank products then I’ve written a hub on how to do that as well – Promoting Clickbank Products on HubPages.  I don’t have a lot of Clickbank product hubs up there myself but the ones I do I get a few sales per month – I’m looking to expand that next year.

The way most people use hubpages however is for adsense income.  And money you make from your hub through the capsules or from adsense you’ll get 60% of the revenue (hubpages get’s the other 40%).  Think that’s fair?  I do.  I’ve got tons of articles up at ezineartlces.com and not once did they give me a dime for the ads on my articles.

You need to make sure that you take advantage of hubpages tag’s as well.  Many of the tag pages on hubpages are high PR as well which means more high pr links pointing at your page.  I usually try and add between 5 and 15 depending on the subject of my hub.

Because they are free and only cost you a bit of time to write something it’s definately worth your time in setting up a few hubpages to see how you go.

More Amazon Tips

Have you got some Amazon hubs up yet?  I want your goal to get at least 20 or so up before Christmas.  You’ve only got around 2 months before the Christmas selling season starts up and people buy physical products by the bucket load.

The usual pattern is October your sales will start to pick up and in November and early December they will explode.  You want to get as many sites up as you can because you not only get credit for the products that you directly promote, but also whatever else they put into their shopping cart.  Last year I had someone purchase a stripping pole in their shopping cart as well as the item I was promoting (which was a child’s toy).  Hmm not sure how they go together, but I get the commission no matter what they buy so who cares.

If you can afford it, I’d also suggest getting a few of your own sites up as well from the products that are selling well.  (Last year I’d notice that I was getting sales for lots of products that I wasn’t promoting, so I’d quickly get a site up as quick as I could).

Well I’m off to curl up in front of the TV now.  I’ll catch you all next week. 

Take care
T xx