Well I took the plunge and spent almost 2 bucks to join Problogger.com to see what all the hub bub was about, and to let some of you guys know whether it was enlightening or if anything had value there. So here is what I found.

Its pretty much just a forum. I didn’t see any valuable tools to help people build better sites, or learn how to build a website with real long term value. What I did find was a couple links to an eBook about building a better blog by yours truly, Darren Rowse. If you join the forum, some of the topics you will be discussing include Blog Promotion, Finding Readers for your blog, making money with your blog, writing content etc..

I did find a lot of newbs in there trying to find out how to grow their social traffic to engage readers. Lets stop right there. I hate it every time I talk about social traffic as being worthless when someone comes up right behind me and says that “blogging” is not about the money, but about building friendships and having a readership and building trust. Here is what ends up happening with that trust. Just like these A-list bloggers who abuse it, so do their followers who promote the same trash they do, leading people to believe its a hidden jewel. They write a stupid review on something that is crap, making it appear that the product is helping them make tons of money just to add another $3k or 4k into their pockets at the end of the month. Then they show you the reader that they made $40,000 and tell you that you can do it too. But they never tell you about how to get organic traffic which can help make you money consistently with a blog .

If you are a big A-lister I challenge you to come up with something that has real value about making money. Stop telling people that as long as you are passionate about writing about any subject that you will make money. I know some people think I am a jerk for being real about this, but if I reinforced a positive mentality about making money online, but never really gave you tips on how to build a sustainable income, would you keep coming back and kiss my butt? I bet some might. It’s what quite a few followers do with Rowse and Chow every week. I’m willing to bet that some people joined that forum in hopes of truly learning how to make money with a blog, and they aren’t going to get that. If you join the Problogger forum, You aren’t going to hear about the type of links to get in order to improve rankings, or how to get a double listing in Google, or even how to do proper keyword research. What you will get is a community of people that are clueless with the exception of a few, and you will be learning how to grow traffic through social means which will put you back in the hamster wheel spinning for nothing.

Bottom line is you either treat this as a business or you don’t. Do you want to be a Pro Blogger? Do you write for fun, or do you write to make money. Do you want to build sites that you can walk away from and make thousands of dollars a year off of, or do you want to write on sites that require you to go out and get more Twitter fans, more Facebook fans and more feed readers to make you feel good?

Here are my final words on joining Problogger.com. If you want to make some buddies, and talk about twitter followers and answer polls then go for it. But… if you want to make real money and have a real knowledge of how and why people click on ads, as well as how to get sustainable traffic that will help you make money online for ages, then its a waste of time.

If anyone wants one on one training, all you have to do is ask and I will be more than happy to answer any questions you may have for free. All you have to do is shoot me an email.

The big question that people still ask despite the proof is whether you can rank for terms with a blogspot blog as with Wordpress.  The answer is YES. At this point you can either believe me and move on, or you can read on and see the proof and why you can. First off, contrary to what some people will tell you, even so called SEO experts, you can rank for very competitive terms. For starters lets take one of the toughest terms to rank for, make money online.  If you do a search in Google on that term you will find 2 blogger blogs out of the top 5 spots.

Lets look at another example, since it has been said that you can put any word in Google and add blog after it and you won’t find any blogger blog ranking. I did a search for “my blog” and what I found was some random guy I have never heard of from Indonesia with a blogspot blog ranking right after mybloglog.com. He titled his blog, “My Personal Blog“. Lets take some more examples since blogspot blogs suck and can’t rank for anything. Look up something as simple as “happy blog” and tell me what you find? Yet again another blogspot blog. And now lets take a more comical approach. Do a search for butt implants blog in Google and tell me what you find? If you want to get a few more laughs and read further on the subject then you need to go on and visit Griz post about problogger.com but I warn you, he has a blogspot blog which ranks at the top in Google for make money online, so don’t take him too seriously.

If you want even more laughs then go visit one of the funniest vloggers I know, Allyn Hane at his video blog. He will show you how to properly drink a beer and make a video at the same time.

OK, now that you know a blogger.com blog can rank for just about anything a Wordpress blog can, lets talk about why that is possible.

The first reason is because ranking well is 90% offpage SEO and 10% onpage. What I mean by that is simply, the more relevant links you have coming into a site whether it is a Blogspot blog or a Wordpress blog is what matters most. For those of you who are going to tell me that Wordpress is just easier to customize, I’m not going to argue with you on that point, but I can tell you that a blogger blog can be set up even faster. I’m not being partial here because I use both platforms. I am simply stating a fact that you will find a bunch of A-list bloggers speak contrary too.

Here is another bit of information based on my experience. A blogger blog will have a lot higher CTR than a Wordpress blog. Primarily because they are ugly, and people like to read pretty blogs. If you want to get some serious clicks, then you really should give blogger.com a try. If you are going to focus more on affiliate products then you do need to maintain some type of professional look to your site to gain more trust and improve conversions. If you want to follow the lead of the A-listers that’s fine, but I am going to keep using blogger as a way to make money and test the waters for keywords at no cost.

If you want to learn more on the basics of how to make money blogging then read part one in the series.

If you enjoyed this post then I am going to ask you to subscribe to my feed right now.

This is part one in a series on how to make money blogging. This post is for beginners, and this post assumes you know how to set up a blog. If not then I will create a tutorial later for that.

I guess we could call it blogging if we wanted to, but its not so much blogging as it is marketing. I say that because a lot has to do with who you target. Let me begin by saying that websites which focus on tutorials probably have the least CTR (click through rate) when it comes to making money with advertising such as Google Adsense. CTR is measured by the amount of visitors that come to a page, and the percentage of those visitors that click on an ad.That means if 10 people visited your site and 1 clicked an ad that would be a 10% ctr of your website.

Much depends on not only your subject matter, but the traffic you bring into your blog. The highest CTR is always going to be with sites centered around a service or a product. That means a blog built around Hamster cages will do better compared to a blog built around taking care of a hamster unless you are marketing an ebook or guide for the consumer to purchase which we will talk about in another post. Right now we want the visitor to click on an ad. Unless ads are being served up on taking care of hamsters which is unlikely then the CTR is going to be lower.

Hopefully you are still with me on this. Lets examine why the blog focused more on hamster cages is more effective. First off the person visiting our site is interested in a product. We know they most likely already have a hamster and want to purchase a cage. If you want people to click on ads, then you need the traffic that is looking for a product or service rather than just simply information. I bolded that last sentence, so get that into your head.

lets go a bit further. There was a recent article I saw on Yahoo about the induction of Michael Jordan into the Hall of Fame. I’m not going to say you can’t make money off ranking for Michael Jordan Hall of Fame induction when its a hot topic, but its going to be short lived and probably is going to be a horrible CTR on your ads. Wouldn’t it be much better to rank for Cheap Michael Jordan jerseys instead? Not only will that be sustainable since we all know Michael Jordan is a legend and has popular clothing, but also because its a buying keyword. That means people searching for the latter term want to buy a Jordan jersey at a lower cost.

This should hopefully make it very clear to those of you reading this article how important it is to get the right traffic. Lets talk a little about subjects that get lots of clicks on ads because of having desperate people. Remember that some people that search with Google or any other search engine for that matter search for something out of desperation.

Don’t hate on me for what I am about to write since I have gained a load of pounds since I got married myself, but people who are overweight fall into that desperate group of people who are looking for answers on losing weight. They will try just about anything in hopes for a miracle. Similar to those trying to make money online who think that there is a magical way to make it big if they fork out the big bucks for some worthless ebook. If you have read this far into the blog post you may or may not be that type of person. If you are a person that believes in a magical make money program then you might as well leave this blog right now because I am going to tell you how much work is involved to make it in this biz. If you are hungry to quit your day job like I did and become a professional internet marketer and SEO master with tons of freedom, then read on.

You can make money on the internet with a blogger blog or with a wordpress blog, but key factors that must be taken into consideration to determine whether you are successful or not comes down to the type of traffic you bring in, the keywords you research, getting links to your blog, and how well you keep your mouth shut. Don’t worry, we will cover all of these things if you are scratching your head right now. Lets move on though. Stay with me!

Choice of Keywords

Now that you understand the type of traffic you need from search engines, the next thing is choosing your keywords. Lets talk about the importance of that from a different angle now.

Choosing the right keywords can mean ranking #1 or ranking #1000. Obviously ranking is what its all about. Do you have any clue how much sites make that rank on page one for the term credit cards? Millions of dollars. Could I rank on page one? Sure, with about 100,000 links and some time I sure could. But lets be realistic, for those of you who are beginners, it would be absolutely stupid to go for a term like credit cards right off the bat. Heck, it would be stupid to go for a term like best credit cards for a beginner from the start. Thats why its important that you choose your terms wisely.

Don’t try to rank for something that is going to take you a lot of time from the start. I’m going to say that for beginners… terms that are between 3-7 words long are going to be winners. This is important for being able to not only see some success, but also making a little money quickly rather than targeting and focusing energies on tough keywords.

We will be talking about how to measure how tough a keyword is in a following article, but for now lets think about keyword combinations. So lets say that I have made the decision to build a blog about hamster cages. What type of keywords might I target? I might target blue hamster cages, red hamster cages, large hamster cages, hamster cages with hamster wheels built in, and so on. As a beginner its best to not limit yourself to targeting a few keywords because not ranking for a few things is very much possible. That’s right you didn’t read that wrong so let me rephrase that. I said, NOT ranking for just a handful of selected keywords is very possible as a beginner. That is why I recommend if you are absolutely green to making money online that you focus your energies on tons of keywords at a time.

Lets talk a little bit about planning your niche based on keywords. I like to use the Adwords keyword selector tool to choose my niches, but I do not entirely rely on the number of searches it returns to me after typing in a keyword, and you shouldn’t either. That thing is definitely flawed, and doesn’t track every keyword there is. What you should use it for however is gauging whether there is enough keywords to work in your niche or not. What do I mean by that?

You may be really cutting yourself short by working a niche that is to tight when you are starting off as a beginner. Take this as an example… if you plan on working a subject like black sharpie (I saw a sharpie in front of me so I used that as an example), then you may run into a dead end fast. There is only so many longtails (A longtail could be…. best sharpies in Texas as opposed to a short keyword like sharpies) related directly to a black sharpie you can work. On the other hand, if you are talking about cheap coloring supplies, you could go in a million different directions. You could talk about crayons, markers, pencils, and so on as well as the different brands of coloring supplies, while still sticking to the main subject of coloring supplies.

Remember, you want to stick to a central theme, or subject so you can have good ads and keep tightly focused on something, unless the CPC is high which is another method we will talk about later. But for now focus on this method. This will bring you traffic quickly, and allow you to make some money rather quickly as well.

As I said before, I am willing to help. Feel free to email me. If you ask a newb question, I won’t scorn you, I will merely give you a link to a post that can answer that question. If I haven’t already answered I will either reply directly or write a post to answer it.

Just a quick post for you folks having problems with indexing and deindexing recently with Wordpress. Read on.

If you are having issues with your blog indexing only a title, and then going away you might want to first read this post over at Quick Online Tips.

Also if you haven’t noticed already on the new wordpress version you might have your Privacy settings ticked to block search engines. Be careful, and tick it to be visible to everyone like below otherwise you are not going to be listed in Google.

Thats it!

Making money online is one of the easiest things to do once you get established. I can tell you though about 2 years ago making money on the internet was just a dream for me. If you have been wanting to make money for some time now then get started today. If you always say you will but don’t do it then it will never happen for you.

I have a buddy who started niche blogging about 2 months ago. He bought all new domains, and started making money with adsense in less than 2 weeks of putting his first site up. If you were to ask him now if this is easy, he would say yes, and that it just takes some time. If you were to ask him 2 months ago if this is an easy way to make money online, he might tell you that it seems like a lot to remember.

In reality there are just a few simple things that get you to making money within a relatively short period of time. I have been using these basic techniques over and over and over again to make money within a week or 2 of putting up a brand new site with a brand new domain. And here they are.

• Buy a domain with keywords in the name if possible.
• Use a very basic theme with very few flashy graphics if all possible.
• Use keywords that you can rank for in the titles of your posts.
• Use multiple rich keywords within your posts that will give you variations of searches.
• Get anchor text links for the terms you are trying to rank for.

If you follow these basic principles, you will make money, as long as you are not going after niches that will take you years to rank for.

On a completely differen’t note, there is something that I always find people doing that bothers me quite a bit. Using ezine articles to get links is one of the best things a person can do, but so often people hurt themselves when they use ezine articles.

Since EzineArticles has so much authority and clout and lots of love from Google, they seem to rank for quite a few terms. If you are going to get a link from them, why would you use the term you are trying to rank for in an Ezine Article’s title? Why people do this and create more competition for themselves beats me. If you do this with all the places you write to get links from then please stop right away. You don’t have to use the exact title to create more competition for yourself. Let me give you an example.

Lets say that I wanted to rank for how to make money online with ezine articles. Would I go to ezine and then write an article with the exact title how to make money online with ezine articles? Of course not. First of all the keywords ezine articles are already held with authority by ezinearticles.com, and second I would just be creating another entity that would be competing with me even though I am still using it to give myself a link. The content is fine to use similar words that are related to making money online with ezine, but the title is probably the most prominent piece in helping a site rank for specific keywords, so it would be a lot better to make your title Ezine articles is another way to bring in cash. While Google can very much associate the title as well as the content with what you are writing about, it does not use the exact kewyords you are trying to rank for, thus helping you out the same as far as your link goes, but not infringing on your ranking strategy.

Back to what we were originally talking about. Making money on the internet easily and fast. Well as far as the fast part goes, it won’t get fast for you until you have built an array of sites or until you have all your resources lined up like ducks. Once you have everything in place, and you get a good grasp then the rest is like butter.

Sorry for not posting for a while, some other personal things have come up and I have just been away. But I hope you have taken something away from this post to digest which will make your efforts to make money online that much simpler.

Do you have to be popular to make money online? I think that there are actually a lot of people out there that think so. There are guys like Darren Rowse, John Chow, Maki and others who have some online fame. Some of them built their blogs from the ground up over many years, and some built their blogs through social media. So does that mean that these guys make a killing from their make money online blogs? Some of them do, but that’s not what you should be focusing on.

Let me ask you a question reader. Do you blog because you enjoy it or you want to make money with it?

What was your answer? If you said to make money then you are looking at the wrong people. The people that make real good money online are guys that work niches. Let me give you an example. Did you know that not but just a month or so ago, a guy sold his blog for about 15 million dollars? Do you know what his name was? He wasn’t so famous until recently. his name was John Wu, and he sold bankaholic.com for more than most people make in a lifetime.

How was John Wu able to make so much money on a blog he worked on for only 2 years? Several things. He targeted a high paying niche which was everything related to banks. And he posted about targeted keywords everyday over that period of time as well as built links.

I can’t begin to tell you how important it is to be selective about choosing the subject (niche) you will be blogging about. It can mean wasting tons of time building for months only to find you chose something that is low paying, or building something that pays extremely well.

So now what? Do you think you have to be popular online to make money? Of course not. I mean look at me. I was in a bunch of movies with Han Solo, his career kind of took off but there weren’t many other gigs for a hairy Wookie so I kind of got into blogging when I realized that it was profitable. Blogging isn’t the only thing you can mek money online with though. There are plenty of other make money online options I will talk about in my upcoming posts so stay tuned.