When it comes to discussions on, how to make money online, you will literally get differing opinions from each and every person you ask advice from. The reality on making money online starts off with the right mindset. If you truly want to have success, there is one key ingredient, that will separate 98% of the people online. Want to know what the element is? You must be willing to do the WORK!
By the way, this is truly a monster post and is not quite finished. I have a few more topics to cover. One of the best pieces of advice, that I have read awhile back, that still resonates with me, is the following; “everything you need to succeed online, can be learned.” Its just a matter of how bad do you want it. Alright, grab a jumbo mug of coffee and lets get to the meat of this article.
How to Make Money Online and Google Proof Your Online Business
The main reason for a big ass post like this is for the following reason. In the wake of all that has happened with the recent major algo update by Google, here is my in depth analysis on how to protect yourself from future algorithm updates and how to avoid getting slapped by the search engines.
The problem when looking around on making money, to much of it focuses on instant ways to get rich and that is simply BS. Stop trying to get something for nothing. Buy a lotto ticket if you must because that is the only way to get instantly wealthy. For you, me and the average Joe, its simply not reality. Hence the reason for this post.
Why spend money on stupid programs that are never going to provide you any real tangible results. So, after looking at all the other websites on page 1 for the term how to make money, I decided to do the opposite. I know for a fact, that if you click on one of those ads on the sidebar, saying how much you can make, its simply not true. I would rather promote real tools, give you tons of free advice and how to actually build a solid online business.
OK, now getting on to some meat of the article. Let me say, based on the dozens of articles I have read over the past couple of weeks about Google’s major algorithm update and my past 5 years online focused on SEO – search engine optimization, I believe this was targeted and intended to put a stop to the proliferation of content farms. I also believe this is just the beginning of some major adjustments to come in the future. Like, Google mentioned, they have been working on these changes for almost a year. Some people may disagree that this was not targeted, however, when you look at the main companies that were hit the worst, what else could it mean?
What is a content farm anyways?
Well, its described by Google as basically low quality content that doesn’t really add any value for the end user. In the case of content farms, they have thousands of pages of low quality content.
Just to give you a quick recap, here were some of the biggest sites that G penalized and indirectly labelled as content farms:
1. ezinearticles.com
2. associatedcontent.com
3. suite101.com
4. hubpages.com
5. buzzle.com
If you’ve been hit because you were using Ezine articles, Squidoo, Hubpages etc., and not sure where to go from here, read on as I examine in detail, what you can specifically do and how to avoid getting slapped in the future. Will I guarantee this won’t happen again? Heck no and nobody can with any certainty, but if you follow my advice, you will have greater clarity, than most internet marketers online today. OK, time to get busy, so put that pot of coffee on and lets get rolling shall we.
Part 1 – Limiting Beliefs
I believe that before one even gets going, you need to have the right mental foundation. It will be your cement that holds it all together. When starting out online or offline, your mindset plays a huge factor in your overall level of success. Its not enough just to know the nuts and bolts of building a business. Although my focus is to build a long term and success business online within this article, most of the information is applicable off line too.
For example, when I was building a network marketing business several years ago, I was reminded by my good friends and coaches, Rick and Cameron, that mindset is everything. I kept telling them, “just tell me the nuts and bolts and how to stuff.” I figured out later on, that having a proper mindset was everything when it comes to success. They were right – again 
I believe, that a Big Part of your overall success is about changing your attitudes, emotions, behaviors and limiting beliefs. You see, successful people realize they will have failures along the way. However, that is part of the overall success equation and what separates people ultimately from making any money in a business. Road blocks are just a temporary challenge to overcome.
What does limiting beliefs and building a business have in common?
You see, working online in your home can be very lonely at times. Depending on whether or not you have someone in your life supporting you emotionally and/or helping you out, can have a huge impact on your overall success. What you need is to be mentally strong when building your business because it will take a toll on you at some point. That’s why I have a couple of forums/websites I visit several times per week to see what’s new, what’s happening and it gives me a chance to chat with other online friends. I also chat with a couple of business partners regularly on the phone.
(insert yes i can image here) In other words, having the right mental mindset will either make or break your business, regardless of whether its a brick and mortar business or an online business. All right, lets get into the meat of this article.
Part 2 – Setting Up Your Online Business The Right Way
Before getting started with building an actual website, there is one critical step you need to do before anything else can take place. Most people that do any online business, from my experience, just put together their websites, with no real purpose or design. If you want this to be successful, or at least give yourself the best possible chance to make money online, then do some initial planning in the beginning.
What is your website and business going to be about?
Here are a few questions to consider, while thinking about your site. Are you starting a business online because you have specific knowledge about the subject? Do you have passion about a certain topic? How about having both knowledge and passion? That is the key in my opinion to long term success. When you combine your knowledge, with your passion, you have a recipe for success.
Do you even have a business plan developed?
Most people set up a website, add some content without any real strategy or purpose. Hence, the one of the main reasons I believe that most will never make money online or any significant amount. Look, you might be thinking, why in the hell do I even need a business plan for a website? Smart and successful people realize that in order to make money in any business, you need a direction, goals and strategies. Having a business plan will give your clarity and purpose about what your business is about and what specifically you need to do as your progress along and develop it.
Example 1 – Let’s give you a couple of clear examples of why this matters and what I specifically mean. For instance, if I am working on building out my about internet marketing site, I will focus in on internet related items. In other words, I am not suddenly going to talk about dog training or the best beta fish to buy in this site. It wouldn’t make sense. Instead, I would focus on internet marketing tools that I can use to build my online business, internet marketing strategies and new internet marketing opportunities to discuss.
Example 2 – Say, I want to build out an Amazon review site with lots of products. What am I going to concentrate on in terms of actual products on my site? Will I be focusing on kitchen related items, bathroom accessories, healthy stuff etc? Or will I be building out a large authority site on a variety of products that Amazon has? If you go with a big site, 2 examples of sites that are huge and built out correctly is About.com and Consumersearch.com.
Here are a few other specific questions to consider for your business plan?
What are your target markets?
How are you going to monetize your actual site?
What kinds of products and/or services do you plan on offering?
What are you short and long term goals for your site?
What kind of goals do you have in terms of money?
How are you planning to drive traffic to your site? i.e.: organic seo, social media like Facebook and Twitter, branding, word of mouth, creating great quality content that gets lots of natural links etc..
What makes your information more relevant than the other websites in your niche?
Have you differentiated yourself to actually stand out from the crowd?
What is your Branding Strategy overall?
In the online world, its never been a good strategy to only build your business via organic SEO methods. For instance, up until recently, I have mainly gone the route of organic listings for my sites. But, after the last few algo updates by Google, I realized that was simply a bad overall plan. I’ve lost positions and in some cases, I was climbing nicely towards page 1, only to disappear off the first 20 pages. Ouch! Hence the main reason for taking a look at my overall business strategies.
The fact is, many people build this way because its perhaps they Believe its easier to do, they don’t have to interact with other people online and they can set it and forget it type mentality with small micro niche sites. In other words, they listened to all the garbage online and got tricked by the BS con artists trying to take their money. You probably know what I mean and have no doubt seen tons of Ads promoting easy making money tips and making 100k per month with the newest and greatest click button technology. Its just total and utter BS is all I’m going to tell you.
I honestly think one of the big reasons people like Adsense is that they don’t have to interact with people online and don’t want to be bothered with customer questions. I am working with a small group of people online for the past few years. They are a great group and we are building out some sites for organic search results. Its been a much tougher process than we first thought in the beginning. But, one thing we are doing correctly, is we are adding some kick ass quality content to the site. We are also looking at and incorporating other traffic generating methods too, to protect our team assets.
The fact is, millions of people have set up small niche sites, placed some Adsense on it and forgot about it after they ranked. Only to find out later, if they made a certain amount of money per day, that someone would do a manual inspection of their site to determine if its MFA – made for Adsense or not. You see, thousands of sites on a regular basis are getting banned or worse – de indexed. If you are using this model and have a thin site made exclusively for this purpose – Adsense, then you are in a world of trouble. Don’t Do It!
Its far better to get your account banned/deleted, than to get your site de-indexed. The reason is because when you are de-indexed, it means your site will no longer show up for organic results. Meaning, you have effectively eliminated any way to make money online with your Blog/website.
Its far better to build alternative traffic methods and sources outside of relying on organic search results. In other words, the less dependent you are on this specific strategy, yet still increase the amount of traffic to your site, the more Google proof your business will be. Look, I don’t hate G or the search engines, but sometimes I feel like giving them the finger because they can be so damn annoying and frustrating.
Part 3 – Monetization – How To Make Money Online?
I know, I briefly mentioned monetization above, but I want to spend a little more time in going over and giving you some specific ideas when it comes to the types of monetization you could do for you site. When it comes to actually making extra money from your website, many people are not sure how they should actually go about the process, what types of monetization they should include, and what is the optimal placement of say something like, Adsense or just Ads in general.
If you are going the route of Adsense, then my suggestion here, is to ensure you follow Google’s TOS – terms of service. Its up to you to decide how and where you place any Ads. Make sure that any Ads you do place, are visible, so that, your readers can actually see them. Don’t be a knob and place them at the bottom, because you are concerned you might offend the odd person, for trying to make some money from them. Place your Ads in a tasteful manner, but don’t overdue it.
For example, prior to the big G slap on places like Ezine articles. Man, you would think I like picking on these guys, but honestly I don’t. They have some good content. But, the thing that has always bugged me big time with those types of article directories and others, is the amount and blocks of Adsense, Chitika Ads and Sponsored ads. They just plaster the articles with Ads on the top, both sides of the pages, directly below the bottom of the article, plus a couple of business sponsored Ads somewhere on the page. I just counted and even after they got slammed big time, they still have the same number of ads (8 in total) placed on their article pages.
Now, how in the hell is that really a good reader experience? The simple answer, its not and they got caught for it. Oh sure, they have implemented a high number of changes to the requirements to post an article, but have been slow to remove the number of ads from their pages. Keep doing what you are doing Ezine, because you obviously didn’t get the point the first time around (insert sarcasm).
The point being, don’t annoy your reader to the point, where you interrupt them reading the article you posted on your site. You want to engage them in the process and give them time to digest the content, ask questions or leave comments. There is a place and time on your site to put Ads or whatever you have to make money from.
Look, I want my readers to get quality information from this site, but if I don’t make money, then why on earth would I continue to invest hours, upon hours into writing all this content. There has to be a balance here, and I believe the high majority of people will get that and not have any issues whatsoever.
If you go with Adsense, make sure above all, that you have great quality content on your site (which you should always do anyways) and I would recommend, that your site is not some MFA – made for Adsense site. Absolutely do not do this in any way, shape or form. It will eventually bite you in the ass and you could easily loose a your account, rankings and all the time and effort you put into getting your site to page 1.
Part 4 – Things You Should Know About Technology
Before I go any further, there are a few areas that you will need to learn or in other words, you do need to be somewhat tech savvy. Look, when I first got started, I didn’t know jack about anything, other than how to surf the internet. I was as green as they come. I read different articles on using different systems, but nobody seemed to focus on the core essentials of what you really need to know, how to do them and most importantly, how to make money online.
Here’ are some areas that you will need to understand to do it yourself. Look, its not for everyone, but the simple fact is, you need to understand how to do it, or it will cost you a small fortune to have other’s do it for you. You can find many people to outsource these tasks and many can do it for say 50 to 100 hundred dollars, but what are you really getting for that. If someone wanted me to set up a website, just to set up the domain, hosting, name servers and get their Blog set up, I would charge them a minimum of 500 bucks. You might be thinking, no way anyone would pay that, but believe me, there are people who pay much more.
The fact is, they are not going to pay me 500 bucks for an hours worth of work at the most. They are paying me for my overall knowledge that took several years to learn how to do hundreds of different things. Setting up a basic site for me is simplistic, but not for someone that has never done it and many people don’t give a shit about learning it. And for the record, I really don’t have time to set up someone’s site, but if you really want me to do it, I will set up the basics for you at the minimum price mentioned above.
So here are a few areas that you will need to study and learn over time. You don’t have to know everything when you get started, but focus on the basics. I would suggest, depending if you are tech savvy, that to learn the following area, can be done in a about a month’s time. Some people, it may take them 3 or 4 months, but its important that you know how to do each one over time.
WordPress
HTML
Writing Content
Posting Content
Search Engines
Social Bookmarking
Pinging Your Site
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
Learning About Traffic Stats
Affiliate Marketing and Programs
Traffic Generation Methods
FTP – file transfer protocol
PDF’s
Those are just a few of the areas, that over time, you will need to learn. I will over the course of the next several months, as time allows, put together specific videos and walk you step by step on how to do each one or give you specific examples with screen shots. It will be your road map in getting started and going in the shortest possible time period. I know if you are just starting out, it can be scary because you don’t want to do the wrong things. The fact is, you will make many mistakes as you move forward with your online journey. But, when you make mistakes, you also learn how to do something next time.
Part 5 – The Importance of Keyword Research
Prior to starting anything, there is a process you need to go through, evaluate and analyze prior to just creating great content. What niche are you going after? If you pick a bad keyword, then the rest of the steps will fail. This is your foundation like a foundation of a home.
A couple of things to keep in mind, while doing keyword research – search volume doesn’t equal competition strength.
It doesn’t matter how many competitors there are. What matters the most is how strong your competitors are on page 1. In other words, you should be focusing on page 1 and doing a competition analysis. Several things you know about include; on page seo factors, domain age, domain authority, back links – amount but more importantly the quality of backlinks.
1. Create valuable and useful content is a must if you want to survive and thrive online.
Ask yourself after each piece of content that you just wrote, is this worthy to be read by others and are you adding real value to truly help other people? Yes, I know good quality content takes much more time, but doesn’t it feel better to add that to your site, than some PLR spun article? I know with this article, I started working on it yesterday after digesting literally about 2 dozen articles minimum about these changes because I wanted to really understand the potential impact and how to minimize the changes at the same time. The result, its taken me literally several hours to write this article.
People will notice truly valuable content. For example, this article by Sistrix when I last looked at the number of links to that article in just a few days since its release is around 3000 back links. Do you think its been worth his time to do the research and provide quality feedback to his website readers? Hell yes and what do you think that will do for his website long term? It makes him an authority website, which means he has less chance of being penalized by the search engines.
2. I always place original content on my websites because I know that is what Google and the other search engines keep telling us. They are telling everyone what they like. Why do we SEO people try and complicate this shit so much? Maybe because we want to sound smart and look good to our online community, but in reality the simplest approach, is usually also the best approach.
Let me give you an example of a site that I have read some articles on in the past year that offer great value in my opinion. I don’t agree with everything he writes about because he has wrote several thousand articles for starters and I haven’t had time to read all of it His name is Steve Pavlina who runs a personal development site. When he started and to this day, he has done no specific marketing for his site other than social bookmarking sites to let others know about it. He took his time and really produced top notch content. What do you think happened? Oh and he started his site in October of 2004 for about $9 by registering his domain and then a monthly hosting bill that is normally less than $15 per month.
He used Adsense after about a few months, but after a few years removed it completely. He monetized his site other ways by offering a few select products and his own book. I read his recent post a couple of weeks ago and guess what happened. His monthly traffic now surpasses 10 million unique views and his website alone is bringing in over 40K per month. He has other income sources outside his website, like consulting, public speaking etc.
So, the big question to me is, how did he achieve such huge numbers in just 6 plus years? Ya, I know it sounds like forever in the online community, but lets get real here for a minute. He was doing quite well in under 2 years actually. His site became the authority site, he developed relationships, he treated people with respect, he added great content. As a result, people by the thousands have linked back to his site. He naturally ranks for many terms, yet still his traffic sources are not from Google. Its from his brand that he built up over time.
If you add valuable content to your site and brand yourself correctly, the sudden algo changes won’t affect your business revenue in the long term. If you only build pages with low quality content and then send thousands of back links to rank a low quality page to the top of the search engines, good luck is all I can say to you. Google and the other search engines have a clear goal in mind. To only give top results to sites that provide the best content. Does it work always? Nope and it probably will never be perfect, but times are changing. Are you going to change with the times?
The main point here is, don’t rely on Google or any other search engine for all of your traffic. You need to think diversification – period. Relying on Google and their ability to change their algo’s at a moments notice is a business designed to fail. When you don’t rely on search engines, yet bring in millions of unique views each and every month from branding and word of mouth, you have a powerful one-two punch to make a hell of a lot of money. More importantly, you don’t care what the search engines do, because your regular viewers keep coming back and spreading your message around.
Look at other people like Frank Kearn who doesn’t rely on the whims of the search engines for any traffic, now that he has built up his brand – his marketing services. Its people like Frank and Steve that understand the power of the internet, when you don’t care what Google does in terms of ranking your site or not. You have a list of hundreds of thousands of people and more.
Ok, I know this is a long post, but its important that you understand the various elements to give you the best chance of being successful. Why tell you a bunch of fluffy stuff to make you feel good. I would rather tell it like it is, to prepare you for what’s to come. Having the right mindset from the beginning and realizing there is going to be a ton of work on your part to do, will make your online journey more rewarding in the long term. In fact, everything I am saying today is about securing your long term future.
Stay tuned as there will be much more content added to this particular page…
