But there are those who make a full time living at blogging. Top earners pull in over $1 million a year, just from one blog site (exact pecking order changes through time).

That’s not to say anyone and everyone can earn $1 million a year, merely to say there is money in blogging: good money. Whether blogging for cash is right for you depends on your temperament. Not everyone can write, for sure.

But blogging isn’t about being a “writer”, it’s more about being a personal communicator. If you have something to say and could say it to your friends over a coffee, you can blog. For sure.

All you really need is a passion or interest and an attitude!

There are pros and cons to blogging for dollars.

The biggest pro by far is that it costs next to nothing to get started in blogging. Anybody (but not everybody) can do it.

The biggest con is that it takes time to build up a successful blog.

However, not as long as you might think!

The great thing about blogging is that search engines just LOVE blogs. They push you forward. They even seem to hang around to see what you are gonna write next! Then rush to post it.

Seriously, though, the search engines’ algorithms definitely favor blogging technology. You could spend months or years on SEO, struggling to get yourself up the ladder of organic pages.

Or find that you write a blog and it’s on page 2 within a few hours! No justice, I know. But you need to go with what works.

There are two secrets keys to building a blog fast. The first is you MUST post often, at least once a day if you are serious; sometimes more than once a day.

The second is you must try to be current. Stay on the news and world events. If you write about the weather and moan, nobody is interested. But if you write about the hurricane that just hit and then complain about weather in your county, you’ll get many more visitors.

Why? It’s easy. When Katrina or Ike hit the land, there are tens of millions of people typing in the words “katrina”, “hurricane” or “ike”. Some are going to spot your link and click through to see you what you are saying (make sure you talk about the news “keyword” first, then go on to your stuff. Otherwise people feel cheated).

So what about making money? I can hear you ask ?
There are several ways:

1. AdSense. Display Google’s mini ads.
2. Other kind of pay-per-click ads, such as AdBright
3. Text link ads.
4. Affiliate links
5. Affiliate display ads
6. Special promotions
7. Your own products

There’s a lot to this, so let me hold over these techniques to the next blog. Meantime, get yourself a blog domain and install Wordpress or whatever platform you are going to use.< /p>

Let’s suppose your keyword is “raise my child’s reading skill”. Note that keywords can be more than just one word. They can be a short phrase, which we would call a “long-tail” keyword. You certainly know what’s in a person’s mind who types in this phrase, right?

If – and ONLY IF – you can answer that person’s needs, then you can go fishing.

First stop might be to register the domain raisemychildsreadingskill.com. If you can secure a keyword related domain name, that’s great. Don’t forget raise-my-childs-reading-skill.com. That could work. In fact some people think the hyphens make it easier for the search engines to “read” your domain.

Then there are all the .net, .us, .biz and .info type variables. Even if you don’t live in Canada, .ca might work. There are not many people living on the island of Tuvalu, but hundreds of thousands all over the world use their .tv suffix!

Then there are variations on the phrase, like improvemychildsreading.com and so on. There’s always a best domain but innumerable variations that come close and are workable, if not exactly what you wanted.

Some people even get serious and register misspellings of important domains. If you had “reddhotsex4me.com” you might get a lot of visitors thinking they are going to redhotsex4me.com (neither domain is in use, I checked, but you get the point?)

Next you place your keyword in your titles and meta tags. You may not own the domain name but there is nothing to stop you giving your home page the title “Improve my child’s reading skills by Betty Jo” or just “How to improve your child’s reading skills”.

Then come the meta tags. These are hidden in the code. If you can’t write metatags, you have 2 choices: find a friend who can or get one of the wysiwyg html editors to do it for you. Good programs, like Dreamweaver and FrontPage, have a button you click that says “type your keywords here” or similar. Folks say they are not important these days. Common sense says do every possible thing in your favor.

So make sure to put your keyword and others like it in your meta tags.

Then we come to the headers in the body of your page. Again, these are special designations. You might think of just writing like you would with a word processor; you know, capital letters and bold, maybe a different color, because this is my heading!

That’s not what a header is in a web page. A header is a little tag or special selector which marks out a word or phrase as IMPORTANT! The visiting web bots (robot crawlers) don’t care about grammar or text formatting. They just look for the little tags that say “This is my header 1” and this is my “Header 2” and so on. Headers 1 through 6 are decreasing in importance. But they are all more important than just the text.

Finally, in the text, you can use your keyword. Use it a few times but not too often. Not only will your writing seem wooden to the visitor. But the search engines don’t like you to try and cheat by pumping too many keywords into clumsy prose.

“Stuffing” keywords like that, as it’s called, will get you penalized (a much lower ranking). Don’t expect to get away with it, just because some people do. These ‘bots” are computers and you can’t fool them forever.

You’re allowed to set out your shop, they don’t even mind a but of exaggeration. But if you go too far that’s called the “black hat” approach. Remember, the cowboys in the black hats were always the bad guys.

Well, Google and Yahoo are gunning for the guys in the black hats.

Paid Google advertisings (AdWords) will allow your ad to be shown when somebody types in a particular search term. You choose these search terms or “keywords” and you have to bid on them. The more you bid, the nearer the top of the display list you come.

As competition has increased over the years, you may find yourself having to pay $5, $10 or even as high as $50 a click, for the very popular search terms, if you want to come out top of the front page.
Not everyone wants to approach making money online with this pay-per-click (PPC) method. It need can be quite demanding in time and money. PPC managers spend dozens of hours a week, tracking their clicks and costs. Bidding can mean you are risking $1,000s.

The alternative, which is free, is simply to make yourself more visible in the organic listings by making certain changes in the settings and wording of your website. We call this  call search engine optimization.

Obviously, if you sell golf equipment, you don’t expect your site to be shown when somebody types in “Ranch style cooking”. But you do want people looking for golf clubs, golf clothing maybe and improve-your-stroke DVDs to find you.

The important thing is to get yourself as high as possible in the organic listing for your search terms. Being on the first page is best, at the top if possible. The first few pages isn’t bad (people will look through several pages of listings to find exactly what they want).

But if you are a dozen pages down or more, that’s no good. You won’t be found often.
The way you get yourself higher in the list is to be clever about what people are looking for vs. what you are trying to sell.

If your chosen keyword is “golf equipment” Google returns nearly 8 million listings (check for yourself).
But if your keyword is “extra long golf clubs”, the search results drop to 356,000. That’s a little more in your favor. But you know what? Not one site on the first page the whole keyword, exactly as typed. One site on the first page had “extra long golf club” (singular).

So there is a lesson. Pay attention to every single letter in your keyword. If you had chosen the plural spelling, you might have been right at the top, the first page seen by someone looking for your product.

Notice also that if you type in “Maxfli clubs” (2 words) you get 691,000 listings. But for “Maxfli golf clubs” (3 words, same item) it drops to 169,000. So choose carefully.
But the important factor in your choice, of course, is not other websites. It’s simply ARE PEOPLE TYPING IN THAT SEARCH TERM?

That’s where Google’s keyword tool will help you. If you sold “Maxfli golf cubs”, 2,900 people per month type in that phrase.

If you narrowed it even more, to “Maxfli left hand golf clubs”, only 53,000 sites were listed and, once again, nobody carries the EXACT keyword. You could be top of the list.

A left-hander who likes Maxfli clubs would be almost certain to become your customer.

Do you see the value of narrowing the target down? “Inch wide and a mile deep” is the motto for keywords. Too broad a term and the competition is enormous; you won’t get a significant share of the traffic. Choose a more narrowly targeted segment of the market and you have a chance of competing for customers. Understanding these simple rules will save you a ton of money when it come to making money online with SEO.

Seriously though, it’s a critical decision, whether to create your own products and sell them, or whether to just act as a sales broker for other peoples’ products—the so-called “affiliate” role.

You can do both, of course. But at the outset the choice may seem a little baffling to the beginner. There are pros and cons of both methods. Let’s talk about that…

Selling your own product may seem obvious and easy: you make more profit. You get rich faster! But it’s not quite that simple. If you don’t have a product, you have the time delay and hassle of creating one. Also, the unknown factor: will it sell?

Not just that but what would be the optimum selling price? You experiment and track, we all know that. But it takes time and weeks may go by before you hit the winning formula. And if you can’t get sales, no matter what you try, you’ve wasted a lot of effort.

There is another complication, which is that maybe the product would sell fine—if only you had the right sales page. But you’re new and can’t be sure you are working with the best possible sales message.

These objections remain valid, even if you already have a product and want to sell it. Just because YOU love your own creation doesn’t mean Internet surfers will want to grab it like an iPod or iPhone.

So it’s wise to give careful consideration to the other role, that of being an affiliate. You only make half the money (typically an affiliates share of the sale is 50%, though some vendors go higher). But the rest is all in your favor.

You don’t have to dream up and create what you hope will be a best-selling product. You choose one you know is already selling well and has proven itself. After all, it’s only logical that 50% of a lot of sales is better than 100% of few or none.

It gets better, because most vendors will help you with selling aids. You can get sales banners, pre-written emails and even, in some cases, whole web pages supplied by the vendor. In fact a sales web page may not even be necessary: as an affiliate you just direct your people to the sales page on the vendor’s site, using your unique ID link.

This saves you a lot of time and allows to you gain valuable experience of the marketing process, without having to create every single detail of the step by step stages of parting the prospect from his or her money.

For a beginner this is especially important because you won’t need a payment system (shopping cart) or merchant gateway ID for processing credit cards.

One other consideration to bear in mind, which could be very important for some products, is the issue of follow up support. If the product is your own, you will have extra work to do answering queries from customers who just don’t get it. Trust me, there can be a lot of issues, no matter how carefully you design and explain the product.

Then, if you have your own product, you really should try to attract affiliates to market it for you. You need to offer them 50% or more of sales. So in fact you DON’T make that much more money selling your own product.

And finally, to make the choice seem very easy, there’s the problem of refunds. People do ask for their money back. You have to refund them, otherwise it gets ugly. But you may not feel comfortable about deducting the refund amount from your affiliate. This is especially difficult if you have already paid out the affiliate checks. It’s hard to ask for your commission back! Sometimes, you just have to take it on the chin and accept the loss.

I would recommend affiliate marketing for beginners. I still do a lot of it. It makes me a ton of money. Not quite a no-brainer but definitely a no pain-er!

I want you to get really good content from this blog. Keep checking, there will always be something useful here.

One of the key issues I keep getting asked about is whether it’s better to do launches with JVs or use traffic control and pay-per-click to get steady sales.

Both have their values but I can tell you right off I’m biased towards launches. That’s where I made most of my money. In some ways it’s harder to do; it will test your networking and people skills. But it doesn’t have nearly the same complexity as pay-per-click campaigns and riding the search engines.

The plus side of the “launch” formula is that you make a rash of money all at once. It feels really empowering. On the down side, there is huge chaos at the office while the promotion blast goes out, followed by the stresses and strains of getting the fulfillment right. And of course the JVs all want their cut: typically 50% or more.

The steady pay-per-click traffic approach brings in income all the time, which is good. But that means you have to work the system constantly. It’s getting very hard to master the real skills of pay-per-click, as the big search engines seem determined to make it difficult to succeed. And, of course, it’s not really cheap. In fact you may also end up paying out 50% (or more) of each sale in PPC fees to Google etc.

I’m clear which method I prefer to make money online, as I said, but I’ll try and weigh the pros and cons carefully for you.

Let’s take the PPC approach first.

I consider it quite complex. There is a LOT to learn. You can buy into available courses (not much useful teaching that’s free, I’m afraid). Or – the one which everybody forgets – is use the free Google help pages. Most of what you need to know is up there, though some of it is hard to find, I admit.

But if you want to be serious about the game, any game, you MUST read the rules. How can you play Mah Jong or Texas Hold ‘Em if you don’t know the rules? Duh!

However, right away, there is one of the problems. Google keeps changing the rules! As a business company, they behave shockingly and outrageously and will suddenly change the “rules”, without telling their clients. No other company has the arrogance or stupidity to do that.

Their pretext is that they are looking after the surfers’ interests, first and foremost. That is their main mission purpose, of course. But Google is now taking hard cash from advertizers in AdWords. That changes everything. The AdWords advertizers are now the CUSTOMERS. In any other sphere of business, the guy that pays you for your services is entitled to a contractual agreement which both sides have to abide by. Google just don’t seem to see it that way. The constant and unannounced alterations in their famous algorithm (calculation process) at times seem almost spitefully directed towards hurting their paying customers.

Their excuse is simple enough: they claim to be trying to block the scamming and spamming activities of certain people who appear dedicated to trying to dishonestly game the system and gain an advantage over everybody else. There are plenty of them out there, it’s true. We call them the “black hats”: guys (cowboys in the black hats are always the bad guys, right?)

All very laudable of Google – but the people who are getting hurt are good decent people with a lot of time and money invested in their online businesses. Not everyone is a crook! You can’t go round hanging everybody, just so you take down a few murderers! No sense.

That’s not to say PPC is busted and doesn’t work. I’m just pointing out that you are always working under something of a shadow.

JVs and launches

With JV marketing, on the other hand, you know where you are. You work with pals. We all form a club and help each other along.

But why the drama of a big “launch” event, you ask? Why not just do JV marketing on a drip-drip basis too? Emails could go out every week to different JV lists. That would create a regular flow.

True. But you’re missing one key element that’s important. We call it the “buzz”. If you get a whole bunch of people talking about the same thing at the same time, it starts get to get a fizz all of its own. Excitement. It seems like the “in” thing.

This is critical if you are not a so-called “evergreen” product. There’s no question: there are fashions on the Internet. Some of this is because things go out of date pretty fast. Some if it is because people are fickle; they move on. You need to ride the wave and, in certain cases, create the wave.

So a massive world-wide launch can be very important, create a huge buzz effect, and that results in many times the number of sales.

That’s why we do launches, OK?

The rest is easy and you know the great thing? The JVs are definitely motivated to sell for you. Every sale they get 50%. So they are going to try to move your product, using every tactic known. Typically, a JV will add in lots of his or her own bonuses, as an inducement. JVs even try to outdo each other, adding more and more value. One guy earlier this year was offering lifetime free holidays in his mountain cabin, if you bought via his affiliate link!

This bidding with extra bonuses can mean your product gaining a great deal in perceived value. Hey, that can only help sales :-)

That’s why I personally like the JV system.

The old ways were best (maybe!)

I’ve been talking about a couple of different tactical approaches. But there is one strategical element you must never overlook. Getting a good organic listing position in the search engines. Whether you do JV and launch style or PPC, it does no harm to also have lots of free traffic coming to your sale page, simply because they found you by chance.

It’s not chance, of course. You lie in the road and trip them up as they go by! You engineer for them to find you. We call that search engine optimization (or SEO). Some people get all their traffic that way and the major advantage is it’s all free traffic.

Not easy though.

In fact that’s another topic all by itself. I’ll look at that with you another day.

]]> http://www.keithwellman.com/make-money-online/pay-per-click-or-joint-ventures/feed http://www.keithwellman.com/make-money-online/new-online-money-making-university http://www.keithwellman.com/make-money-online/new-online-money-making-university#comments Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:08:41 +0000 Keith Wellman http://www.keithwellman.com/?p=142 This idea is so BIG it’s not gonna fit on the page!

I just want to share with you guys the real excitement I and the Everyday Wealth Team are feeling over this one. This will start an online revolution.

The major component that’s going to drive success in the Autopilot Wealth Institute is learning- not selling but learning.

I’m not content any more that people just buy my programs and then put them on the shelf. I want people to learn and DO IT. To make money, fix up their lives and really feel the kudos that success online will bring.

With that in mind, we are going to introduce something nobody ever thought of before, which is that students will have to take and pass a test (almost said that dread word exam). But, hey, it’s not meant to be a barrier, like an examination. More of a quality check. We want our work to succeed, so that you guys succeed.

I got this idea from looking at the difference between the courses marketed online and what happens out there in the workaday world. People could buy and download a course, not follow the steps, learn nothing and then bitch “It didn’t work”.

In a real university, if you don’t study and learn what you are supposed to, you don’t get the diploma and that’s that. I think more Internet marketer should take this line and follow through on their delivery, not just take the money and shrug when a student doesn’t get the results he or she paid for.

My model for this learning Institute is that you don’t get to go to the next module until you’ve shown you’ve completed the step before. We won’t even give you the password! That’s how strongly I feel about this.

Stay tuned daily. This launches tomorrow and will explode fast.

It’s big.  In fact, it’s the biggest idea I’ve ever had.

It will change the face of Internet Marketing and change the lives of thousands.  I can’t say anymore so I’ll leave you with an image.  Let me know what you think!

UPDATE: I realized after I wrote this that I sound like “just another I’ve got the next best thing”.  I want to clarify WHY I think what I have will change the face of marketing and those wanting to make money online:

The Autopilot Wealth Institute is a way of learning.  A proven method to learn.  Time tested through years of research.  There has been NO ONE to my knowledge that has provided a “marketing school” so to speak, like I am developing.  For the skeptics out there, you should be as there is too much crap out there to take my word for it.  The Autopilot Wealth Institute isn’t a new product, it isn’t a big launch I’m up to, it’s above that.

Great comments by the way, many (in fact most) of you love the new logo, and a few of you aren’t too impressed.  To clear it up a bit, palm tree represent freedom to me.  Autopilot represents the ability to create residual income.  Wealth is what we all strive for.  Institute implies that you have to learn and work for it.

Keith Wellman

Autopilot Wealth Institute Logo

People often associate Internet Marketing with scams. They couldn’t be further from the truth. When I teach people how to make money online I teach business. Creating your own information product to sell online. There are other methods too. For example you could set up affiliate pages and sell other people products to earn commissions.

One of my new favorite methods to start making some good cash on the internet is blogging.

While I don’t use it on this blog, I do blog for traffic which builds my list. I can then recommend products and services to my list to generate revenue. I could also pimp out my blog to advertisers but I’m not looking to do that on this blog.

My mom (Lorraine Wellman - Greatest mother in the world) is a GREAT example of blogging to pull in massive traffic.

She loves to write. Not only that, she’s great at it. So my Dad showed her how she could set up her own blog on Wordpress.com

Every single day she’ll post articles that she writes on things that interest her. From Oprah to scientific discoveries, she’ll write about it.

She is now getting over 1,000 unique individuals going to her blog every single day. That’s over 30,000 people looking at what she writes every month.

So how did she do it?

She wrote.

It was simple for her, write every day on topics that are big in the media. Politics, war, TV shows, etc. It started with 10 - 15 people reading and grew every day. In fact I think she’s only been posting for about 6 months (maybe less).

How can she turn that into cash?

Advertising. She could get people looking to pay for text link advertising and put their ads on her blog (a sponsor if you will). Adster is just one of those type of companies that allow you to buy and sell text ads.

My moms even inspired me to follow a passion I have and now I’m getting ready to launch my own tech blog that I’ll support with advertising. It’s an enjoyable hobby of mine to write about technology and science so why not get paid to do so :)

To check out my Mom’s blog head over to: http://writeasrain.wordpress.com/

To Your Success!

Keith Wellman

You can learn details of the new “Gateway To Wealth” in Atlanta, October 17th- 19th 2008, by going to the GTW website. You’ll hear some great testimonials from Orlando attendees.  If you’re looking to make money online, this is no doubt something you must do.

Once again we have a cavalcade of star speakers booked for you, including the man who wrote THE book which changed everything for me: Stephen Pierce, “The Truth”.

All the speakers are committed (and briefed by me) to give you high impact value content. There is no better way to kickstart your pathway to wealth than to attend this mega-event.

Block out your calendar and get your ticket booked.

All details are on the website. Here’s the link again Gateway To Wealth Seminar

If nothing else, you get one visitor for every link you click (tit-for-tat). You read 50 other ads, for a minimum of 15 seconds, and you are rewarded with 50 clicks to your sales page. You don’t have to buy anything, just click on the ads and read them briefly.

You can make the viral traffic page your home page; then you get a click every time you load your browser. It adds up.

But the smart thing to do is get other people to sign up under you. Then you get override links, like MLM. Some plans go down several levels. That can mean hundreds and even thousands of clicks - thousands of visitors to your site (or your Clickbank hoplink page).

This is one of the easiest ways to make your first $100- 200. Free traffic to your hoplink (affiliate) link, for a product you know converts. It’s like GoogleCash but you don’t have to pay for the Adwords clickthroughs!

Try it.

But remember, the REAL money online comes from having and managing your own product. These are just baby steps.