One way to earn cash online is with Google Adsense. Yes, everybody and their brother’s sister’s cousin is using it on their website and they’ll probably telling you that they consider themselves lucky to be making $8 and change in a month. Why is it that they’re earnings are so low? Well, there are some reasons for that and they should become obvious to you as we work through this article.
What we want to work on are simple sites that will earn an average of $10 a day using Adsense. I know this isn’t a huge amount of money, only about $300 a month. However, it’s relatively easy to create such a blog so you can setup at least 3 sites per month without too much trouble. Soon it begins to add up to some really decent earnings. I’m also going to concentrate primarily on using free tools to do this. While there are paid tools like SEO Elite, Keyword Elite, Bookmarking Demon and many others that can help automate this process I’m going to concentrate on the cheapest route to earning cash online here.
Keyword Research
The first thing is to decide on the right niche to target. You want to avoid high competition keywords where some real Adsense and SEO pros are dominating search results. You’re unlikely to get to page 1 or even page 5 in Google search results with these keywords unless you have a lot of time to spend. You also want to avoid keywords that don’t pay well. There are many keywords that only pay a penny or two a click. What we want are keywords where we can get an average of $1 a click.
How can you tell which ones to select? Easy, go to Google’s Adwords keyword tool and enter keywords that you want to research. Keep researching until you have a short list of promising keywords. Make sure that you display the price per click and divide that number by 4 or 5 to determine the most likely price per click you’ll get on your site. For example, if the Estimated Avg. CPC in the Adwords tool shows $4.80 then your average earnings per click will be about $1.06. You will also want to find keywords that get reasonable traffic. While lower traffic niches can be profitable, they can also be frustrating. I’d recommend looking for between 2000 and 20000 searches a month to start with to get the best beginner results.
Now, go to Google and search for the keywords using the SEOQuake browser plugin. Look at the top 10 ranking sites and see what their Google PageRank, Google pages indexed and Yahoo backlinks they have. If these numbers are high and the page shown in results is an exact keyword match, then move on to your next keyword. If there is no keyword match or if they have few links you may have a winner. For borderline cases, this will require further analysis that’s beyond the scope of our discussion here. This article, Targeted Keyword Research, describes the process in a little more depth.
Oh, an remember we’re looking for buying keywords, not informational keywords. I discussed this in this previous article: Buying Keywords. Fortunately, in most cases, better paying keywords are already going to be buying keywords.
Build Your Niche Blog
We’re going to go cheap here and not buy a domain and put WordPress on it. Instead, we’re going to use a plain old ugly Blogger blog. There are some potential drawbacks and pluses associated with using them and if you want to review the pros and cons, check out this article I wrote a while ago on the subject: Niche Blog Hosting: WordPress vs. Blogger. Update: I’ve heard through the grapevine that Google now requires that you have your own domain that has been indexed at least 90 days old to be approved for a new Adsense account. If this is true you will need to buy at least one domain and wait it out, get approval for that domain and then you can use the account anywhere you want as long as you’re within the Adsense rules. If you have already been previously approved for an Adsense account you’re OK though.
You’ll want to select a name that matches your primary keyword. It is likely that your primary keyword will already be taken. If this is case, just add a filler word to the name such as ‘mykeyword’ or ‘thekeyword’ or ‘keywordinfo’. The important thing is to get our keyword in the URL.
We’ll want to use the simple Minima template, we don’t want a fancy blog, we want just another ugly Blogger blog. We will also want to set it up to show only one post per page since this helps Google’s search and Adsense ‘bots to get the exact keywords for your article and not get confused. The blog title and description should be for the primary keyword and secondary long tail keywords that you want to target with only filler words between them. You can add some navigation widgets to the sidebar if you want but don’t overdo this. I also recommend that you add in a Statcounter and/or Google Analytics counter to your footer. This will help you track the performance of your keywords.
Creating Niche Blog Content
Now we’re ready to create some content for our blog. I generally prefer to create content offline in an editor like Microsoft Live Writer, Microsoft Word or even Windows Notepad. There are plenty of tools you can use to do this. I just like doing it this way so that I have a local backup copy of my articles. Start off with writing about 10 articles. The title will use your primary keyword, for example “Earn Online Cash” with matching long tails like “Earn Online Cash with Adsense”. Begin and end your article with a sentence that uses your primary keyword and include it several times throughout the article but don’t overdo it. If you need some more tips on writing, let me know and I’ll point you to some other articles I’ve written on this topic.
You will also want to create a ‘policies’ post since this is required for Adsense. You can combine this with a simple ‘about me’. This will be the first post you add to your new blog. Remember that it should follow the same naming conventions as other posts for example: “Earn Online Cash: Policies”. Add a link to this post in your sidebar so that it will always be just one click away from any other page on your blog.
Now add 3 of your content posts to the blog. You’ll add a new post about once a week until all of your original posts are up. After that, you’ll only need to post infrequently, if at all. New posts can help bring more keywords into the blog but, as long as you’re getting good search engine traffic, updating can be at your leisure.
Promote Your Niche Blog
Promoting your blog is primarily getting it indexed and getting links to it.
You might want to start with the techniques I describe in this article: Quick Indexing. While you can’t add all those ping sites to Blogger like you can WordPress you can use some of the pinging sites to ping others. I also suggest that you submit your site to RSS aggregation sites. JR at “Get Internet Marketing Strategies” has a good list of them here: RSS/Blog Submission Sites. You don’t have to submit to all of them and some won’t accept Blogger blogs but you can find enough to get your rolling. Remember the primary idea is to use these resources for indexing of new content.
Now, we’ll want to build links to our blog. There are a number of different strategies here and people generally settle on ones that work well for them. I’ll give you a few basic methods here and you can work on it from there.
One good way to get some basic links is to use social bookmarking. JR has some good lists of sites in these two articles: Do-Follow Social Sites and High PR Do-Follow Social Sites. There are other list around that you can use. In general, you want to look for social sites that are do-follow and will allow Blogger blogs.
Another way to build links to your site is to have promotional sites of your own. You can use Squidoo, Synthasite, Blinkweb and other free sites to build single page sites to promote your site. You should also seek out other blogs and forums in your niche and related niches and leave comments there with a link to your site without being spammy. I cover this in more in depth in this article: Driving Traffic to Your Site.
With reasonable link building promotional work you should begin to see search traffic for your keywords within a relatively short period of time. What you’re looking for is for your blog to be on page one of Google for your select keyword. If it’s not, then the niche may be more competitive than you realized and you’ll have to put more promotional effort into it. If you are in the #1 position and you aren’t getting traffic then the problem may be that the keyword you select doesn’t produce enough traffic. In this case, you might try targeting different keywords or retire the blog to a supporting, promotional, role.
Add Adsense to Your Niche Blog
OK, now that you’re getting traffic to your niche blog and it’s steady traffic, it’s time to add Adsense. My recommendation is to add a single large rectangle block at the top and, optionally, a wide skyscraper in the sidebar. This should result in a good click through rate as long as you’ve selected a good buying keyword. Since you’re already getting search traffic to your site it will be easy for the Adsense ‘bot to determine what your blog is about and begin serving appropriate ads.
At this point, you should begin to see clicks and revenue from your blog. It will take a few weeks for the pricing of your site to settle down so expect some wild gyrations in income at first. Eventually, it will settle down.
If your earnings stay low this may indicate a problem with your keyword selection. Try editing your articles to better emphasize the higher paying keywords and de-emphasizing lower paying ones.
If your CTR is low, typically under 3%, this may indicate that you haven’t selected a good buying keyword or your traffic is from a niche that’s somewhat jaded or resistant when it comes to Adsense ads. If this is the case, you may want to try moving toward better keywords with new posts, move the blog to a supporting role or just live with the lower click through rate. Remember that a low CTR won’t hurt you but a low CTR with clicks that don’t convert might hurt you.
Earn Cash with Your Niche Blog
Remember the key to this method is not to get bogged down and obsess over one blog but to keep moving. The more blogs you create and the more promotion (aka links) that you do the better your chance will be at earning cash online.
Whew! This was a long article. Way too long. I should have padded it out and made it into an eBook and sold it for $47 or made some money some other way like having you sign up for a membership site or an email list, right? Well, I’m just trying to do the same thing that people who helped me, like Griz at How to Make Money Online for Beginners, did, offer good, solid, information for free with no strings attached. I hope you can use this information to earn cash online and feel free to ask any questions if you have them.
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