WOW!!!!! All I can say is that I was thoroughly refreshed from my camping trip at the Frio River. We had a blast there swimming, tubing, kayaking, rope swinging and grilling tasty food with friends.

We spent 4 days at a Rio Frio campground called Magers. Below are some pictures I thought I might share. What does this have to do with making money online? Absolutely nothing, other than the fact that when you work from home, you have the freedom to take vacations in the middle of the week whenever you want to.

All the photography except for the first image were done by a friend who loves taking pictures. We are trying to convince her to start making money online with photography. OK, on to the photos!

CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE

The Frio River at Magers River Camp

Having fun with a camera in the dark

Throwing Light Waves

Jumping over the sunrise

Friends sitting on a hilltop watching the sunrise

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.

I want to start a basics series that will cover some of the things newbies should know about internet marketing, and making money online. With that in mind I am kicking it off with an article entitled, “how to make money on the internet“. If this is your first time reading then welcome, if its not and you know me, then you also know that this article may not provide answers to more advanced topics.

As a beginner, you know that making money on the internet is not so easy otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this article. I come across people all the time that have difficulty making cash online because they don’t apply themselves, or are always looking for something magical.

I think some of the most common questions people have when starting out which I hope to answer for you have to do with doubts. Is it possible to make money on the internet? How much money can I make online? What resources will I need to make money online? Are there make money online scams? How much time will it take me to make a lot of money on the internet? How long will it take me to make good money? How much work will I have to do when I start earning money off the internet? How do I get paid from internet money making?

The answers to these questions are relatively simple, but knowing them will not make you money. Following a simple pattern, and paying attention to simple methods will get you there. Everyone has their own thoughts on how to earn cash with a computer. They also like to make it appear complicated so that you the user can’t really see the simplicity of it.

Beginners just starting out always think they need to buy some expensive ebook to teach how to make money online. This is simply not true. Anyone can make good money with a computer and an internet connection.

Now if we get into how much a person can make then this is another story. Money making opportunities are everywhere if you are willing to do the work. So this brings us to the next question, How much time do you have to devote to earning money on the internet? Well if you have a full time job, then spending a few hours a day might be all you can do. Of course this is going to grow your earnings much slower than if you have 8 hours a day to spend.

So where might you spend this time? Blogging is one of the easiest ways to make money, and can be done literally for free if you have the patience, and know how to write and spell. Even if you can’t spell well, you can still get lots of people that come and visit your blog.

One of the best free blogging platforms to use to make this cash is blogger.com. If you haven’t made yourself familiar with it already, then you may want to start by going over and signing up for an account. You will find that it is very easy to setup, and will give you a great testing ground first before you start spending money on hosting and setting up wordpress which would be your next step if you want to have more control over your blogs.

While using blogger is a simple way to make money on the internet, you can’t make any money without first having a form of monetizing something. This is where adsense comes into play. Can you make good money with adsense? Heck yes! How much money can a person make with adsense? My answer simply is, It’s unlimited. How much do I make with adsense you might be wondering? I will simply say, “hundreds every day”. Do you have to be a professional writer in order to make and earn lots of money online? Not at all. What you do have to learn, is how to find things that people search for. For example, you probably found me for something related to how to make money online or some other term related to the making of money with a computer.

One thing you should know is that this is not an easy road. The methods are simple, but you have to apply yourself. You get back what you put into it. If you can use your mind to think like a consumer, then you will be successful with this business, but if you have a narrow mind of just what appears in front of your face, then it is going to be a lot harder for you to have your own make money online business.

So if you are truly interested in making a healthy living with the internet, and you want to know the real secret to making money online then continue to read this blog. I will not only talk more about blogging, but other methods if running blogs isn’t for you.

I want to end this simple article with a request from you as a reader. If you work hard at this, you can make it! Complaining will not get you anywhere. Most people that I see making very little money from blogging, are usually the ones that build a few blogs and hope for miracles. Don’t hope for miracles with this business, make your own miracles happen. I know some of you may have tons of questions. That’s fine. I have a lot more time than I did before to answer them. I can’t guarantee that you will get an answer fast, but I can tell you that as long as the question is legitimate, I can at least help point you in the right direction from one of my other blog posts, or I can give you a direct answer.

For those of you who are just starting to make or try to make and earn a living and legitimate income from the internet, I welcome you to the MMO world, and hope to be of help in any way possible. Below is my email if you have any questions.

chewie(at)whatawookie(dot)com

This post might not teach you what you were hoping to learn about making money on the internet, but it certainly will help you to see why I say that #1 rankings bring home the bacon.

Just like many of you, I have plenty of sites that are not ranked 1st for certain terms. On the other hand, I have quite a few sites that rank number one for the main term I was striving to reach. This past week it really helped me to see why many of you are discouraged about not bringing home the big bucks when I compared the stats of 2 sites which are shown a little further down in this post.

A lot has to do with ranking first in Google to earn money online. I’m going to paint a scenario, and then I want you to tell me if I am right or not.

You build a site, give it some time to get its age and ranking to 3rd or 4th page for your main term(s). You then begin to give it some links to move you up even closer to the first page of Google. After making it to the 1st page you just stop working the site, and feel content with the current rankings.

When you look at your traffic stats you begin to realize that being on the first page for your main keywords is not yielding you much traffic. You then get discouraged, or move on to another niche to work, and just get the occasional $1 or $2 dollars a day on your site because you feel there is no money to be made.

Do you see anything wrong here? I will tell you that the answer is quite simple. You do not hold the first position for your main targeted terms. Getting good rankings in Google is the name of the game.

Getting search traffic to make money is why you built the site right? Then why are you stopping when you have come so close to achieving the top spot? I have heard people tell me, “achieving number one spot is too tough. I’m satisfied with being on page one”.

If that’s your mentality then fine. Keep on making your small change on websites everyday. It works just fine if you have a bunch of them, unless you have some sites with big money clicks in which case its hit or miss.

If you have not started today, I suggest you look back on your sites which are position #3 through 10 in Google and dominate what you set out to dominate.

Here is a final example of why I wrote this post. I have 2 sites which I am targeting the same keyword. One of the sites hold position 1 for the term, and the second site holds position #9 on the first page for the same keyword. Both sites generate 99% of their traffic from this one keyword, but look at the difference in traffic for this month.

I can tell you the second site doesn’t even make close to what the first one holding position 1 does. But when I the the #2 spot then I will have a nice chunk of traffic on the second site as well. Look at the difference below, and don’t give up on those number one rankings.

Below is the stats on traffic for this month. Looks like we still have 5 days to go, so I should be around 14k in unique visitors for the first site by the end of the month.

I would say its time to get some more links wouldn’t you?

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!

This is a simple but valuable article for beginners on how to get quality links to your website. There are a lot of sites out there that all tell you that you need to write good content, and then people will naturally link to you. This is probably the most bullcrap thing I hear from people online. Here is why.

Lets say for starters that I write about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I am starting off with no links, and probably will rank nowhere for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Despite my content may be very well written, there are probably not many people that are going to link to me unless I do something so outrageous that my site gets viral traffic from youtube or something else that is way over the top. I’m not saying people won’t link to you, but if you don’t have something extra special, it doesn’t matter how good your content is, nobody is going to link to you (except maybe some scrapers).

What are your options?

So now that we have established that great content doesn’t always get you links, then you have to figure out how you are going to get links. If you are wondering why you need links for those of you new to SEO or internet marketing, good relevant links to your website means better ranking for the keywords you want to be found for in Google.

The first option you have is to build a bunch of sites of your own linking into your main site. This is a strategy that many use, but take a great deal of money up front, and a lot of research to get the right sites set up which link in to the main site. On top of that, is the fact that the sites you build will need to have some strength of their own in order to pass on value to your main website.

The second option involves purchasing links. This is something I have not touched on before. This is also something Google does not like very well. There are a number of reasons I could answer as to why, but I’m not going to go into depth on it. A lot of people I know have been quite successful with this method, rank well in Google for some of the most competitive terms, and make lots of money because they simply don’t have time to build a large network of their own sites, and buy links instead of waiting for a miracle, or networking with other people in hopes of getting free links. This is also probably one of the fastest ways to rank in Google as well.

The third option which I did mention slightly in the last paragraph is social networking. Obviously the more people online you make friends with who also run websites, the better chance you have at getting free links from them. This can be an extremely tedious task, and many simply do not have the time nor patience to wait for this being a viable link solution. Others on the other hand who have been making contacts for years have a large group of friends who will send a link or 2 their way when they need it.

The fourth option, and something you should already be doing is article marketing. This means getting links from article directories online. I am going to say that at one point I promoted unique article wizard, and it worked well, but now I do not use it. I have noticed Google deindexing a lot of sites that post unique article wizard articles on them. However I do recommend using Ezine Articles, Go Articles, Hubpages, and Squidoo. These can be great sources to obtain links by writing articles that are valuable to the reader.

The last tactic some have used to get links is by baiting, but in order to do this you need a blog or content management system that you can update. If you have an ecommerce site, you will find that this can be a very tough thing to do. Link baiting involves writing something about someone else or about a topic which someone else may have already touched on, and then either linking to another persons blog with that source, and writing in such a way that causes them to follow up with another post in which they link to your site or blog. This can be a powerful tactic when executed properly.

You may have other methods for getting links, such as commenting on blogs and others, but the ones I have mentioned are the most common. Getting one way backlinks can be time consuming, but is a necessity for ranking well in Google. If you have any questions on this article feel free to email me and I will do my best to point you in the right direction.

Ok I am going to make this short and sweet. Matt Cutts came out at SMX and in short confirmed that links with nofollow are treated differently than before and that the pagerank which could be moved around by putting nofollows on links now vanishes. This has gotten people in a big scurry. Matt also says that this was implemented over a year ago and to their surprise people didn’t notice it.

OK lets stop there for a second because people are going nuts over how they are going to take down comments on blogs, and now change everything to dofollow on links, etc..

Here is what I have to say about it. If they made these changes over a year ago then what has changed in the last few weeks? NOTHING!!! Keep doing what you are doing, don’t worry about page sculpting and pay no attention to these so called “professional SEO people” who are panicky.

I think I will have another beer to Allyn Hane of Blogger Illustrated. If you have not checked it out then please do so. I think this guy may have motivated me to get back to video blogging again like the good old days on Bloggingzombie.com (no longer owned by me and completely revamped). He has some great marketing tips, and will not feed you crap. He is a straight shooter.

Its been a while since I have written, and I have really been busy. Since my last article, I decided to get out and get some more restructuring done with balancing life and work. Playing games online everyday gets old when your working from home. I will follow up on a future post with what I have been doing.

But for now lets go into what I think everyone should do several times a year. That involves taking the time to log into your Godaddy account or wherever you have purchased domains and make some decisions of whether domains are worth keeping. That can get pretty freakin crazy when you own hundreds of domains. I know there are guys out there that own thousands of domains with content on them. Thankfully not me. Fortunately I can say I have dropped the trash and am down to about 350 domains.

This year I dropped hundreds of domains that I just felt were not valuable anymore. They either lost their PR, or no longer served a purpose. Below are the factors I used to decide if a domain was a keeper or not.

• Does it have PR?
• Does it make me money?
• Does it have a catchy or short name that could be valuable?
• How long have I had it?
• How old is the domain, and what is the subject matter?

If you have been building your business up for the past year and have at least 100 domains I suggest you look through them and decide to either dump them by turning auto renew off, or do something with it and see what you get on the next PR update. It is possible you have a domain that is not attached to a website, and it could have live links pointing in that you just can’t see until you develop it. Whatever you do. Don’t let a domain just sit there with nothing on it. I have had some domains that I bought a year ago that I never developed come up for renewal. What a shame. But hey we live, we learn, and we make things better.

I just thought I would share, and I hope you don’t get caught like I did last month auto renewing crappy domains. It’s like throwing money away.

Since everyone wants to work at home and make easy money on the internet, I thought I might share with you the results that working from home online can have on a person.

If you are tired of your job and want to change things up a bit, then you probably think that working from your desk at the house is the way to go. Don’t be so fast! Let me tell you over the last 2 years how making money online has been a positive thing and a negative thing for me.

The simple concept of building sites and getting links is just that, simple. Why so many people don’t get it I really don’t know. One thing I do know is that it takes a determination and fire to get up every day and work for weeks and sometimes months without seeing any real results. I should know, I have done this for over 2 years now. Now its a lot easier, but the motivation has really died out. What happened?

the first drive you get from building websites and either monetizing them with adsense or with affiliate products is crazy. I would work for almost 15 hours a day and feel like a hamster running in a wheel. It seemed like the harder I tried the less I got anywhere. Then finally it all started coming together. I was making extra money from home and still working at a full time job, but now I actually had some cash to show for all that hard work. it wasn’t a lot of cash, but it was something. That drove me to just get more excited about making money from home and quitting my day job. Especially when i was having some health issues and missing a lot of work

I finally made that plunge and quit my day job to make money from home. The money was not great so we had to struggle a little with my wife still working hard at her job. It took time, and with her support I finally made it. Things Kept growing and growing, but I was still working so many hours and it seemed so unnecessary.

Working from home was taking its toll on me, and not only was I burned out, but my social life was also suffering. I spent so much time in the digital world that i never spent time speaking with people face to face. I literally had become a recluse, and now I was getting sick more often. One of my hands was having serious problems from working around the clock typing.

Making money online has taken its toll, both physically and emotionally. It still takes its toll everyday in one way or another, and has become a miserable and dreaded job even though its still a passion.

I think I have told people doing what I do to work as hard as you can, and to get as much done as you can. However I failed to mention rest. If you do not rest from this internet money making job you will hurt yourself more than you know.

If I could go back and do it all over again, I would have made a schedule for this stuff. No working for 15 hours straight looking at a screen. No working all night long and well into the next day until my eyes are burning red.

While I have not worked online like this for a long time now, I can truly say that if you want to make a legitimate income from home, you need to think about your family and your health before making money. If you don’t you will be miserable. i just thought it was important to outline the miserable effects from spending 95% of your life in your home without seeing sunlight for 2 years.

You can still make a living from working at home and be happy, just make a schedule, and get plenty of exercise. Go to the gym, and go walking to clear your head or you can drive yourself mad, believe me, I know.

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.