Google Lowers Rankings For A Small Blog Of Mine

A small niche blog of mine about cheap airsoft guns called Cheap-Ass Airsoft Guns has had its rankings lowered by Google!

The site used to earn a couple of dollars each day from Google Adsense, so it wasn't a major earner, but it was a nice supplemental income given I very rarely updated it. I do not know why the rankings has been lowered! It was making money for a few weeks in a row, then suddenly the rank is lost for all its referring kewords.

The lesson is don't rely on Google for all the traffic!

P.S.
My keyword experiment for ranking for Facebok was a success! Or at least it was temporarily!

How To Get Targeted Visitors To Yours Website

First of all I would like to say hi to all the readers of Matt’s blog Successful Online Money Making. I’m Haroon author of Earning Blog and Blogging Haroon and I’m very happy that Matt is publishing my post on his Blog. It’s a post on SEO and in this post I will tell you how to get Targeted Traffic To Your Website.

In order to create a successful website you must have traffic or visitors to your site. Without traffic your perfect site is useless. Because traffic is an essential element of any successful site, many webmasters make the mistake of believing all traffic is generated equally. That’s where they make a huge mistake.

And if traffic is the King then targeted traffic is the God. Any type of traffíc is good, but there is a great distinction between ordinary traffic and targeted traffic.
So here are some ways you can take to get targeted traffic to your site:

Search Engines are Your Key To Sucess

Google is still the important one you should be worshipping online. Don't ignore the other two major demigods Yahoo! and MSN, but Google will deliver most of your traffíc. Your website stats will point this out to you daily, so you must optimize your site for Google. But if you need traffic coming quickly optimize your site for Yahoo because from my past experiences I have learnt Yahoo gives you traffic quickly. Google takes times to get to send some good amount of traffic.

Target The Right Keywords

You must target the right keywords in order to get useful traffíc to your site. You must first check the number of searches and amount of competition for your chosen keywords. You can use sites like sites like www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ and http://inventory.overture.com which will give you the Overture and Word Tracker monthly stats to help you pick the right keywords for your site. Instead of picking highly competitive keywords, take the middle road and milk the 'long tail keywords’.

Have Relevant Content

Relevant, helpful content will also be the biggest magnet for targeted traffic. Surfers are usually looking for information, give them what they want and your site will reap the rewards. Original, high quality, relevant content will draw in targeted traffíc to your site so make sure you have some good content to satisfy your visitors and the search engines. Keep everything on topic and within the scope of your site.

Use Traffíc Modules

One of the most effective ways to bring in targeted traffíc is to create traffíc modules: whole areas of your site devoted to one sub-topic. For example, if you have a general site on cars, you could develop a whole section on a car-buying guide. Another section could be on car accessories, link all these pages together into a neat traffíc cluster on your site. The search engines will love these closely grouped pages and reward you with lots of targeted traffíc. Never stop learning new ways of how to increase website traffic.

Use Social Media
Build links and contacts in all the important social media networks such as MySpace, YouTube and Flickr. These social networks are a great source of targeted traffic.
On this note I’m finishing this post and I hope to write more articles for Matt in the future.
Thanks
Haroon

Why Bloggers Need a Personality

By know most people have heard the phrase 'content is king' and all that jargon about the importance of creating original and unique content. The 'business' reason for this is that content forms the basis of SEO. In short it does this by providing material for the search engines spiders to crawl and a way to categorise and rank a site. Secondly good content creates linkbacks; this sort of content has become known as 'linkbait' and is a productive and honest to make your site popular. My example of this is Maki from DoshDosh who has been cranking out post after quality post, which has created numerous linkbacks and brought popularity to DoshDosh.

So what does having a personality have to do with it?
In this day and age it is very hard to find a totally unique original topic that has a demand for it. This means bloggers have to develop new ways to make their site stand out from the competition. One of the easiest way to do this is to be honest and speak your mind. You don't have to follow down this line of thought very far to see why it works. Whatever your beliefs about life, the universe and blogging, everyone has experienced something different in their lives which makes their views unique.

Everyone has clicked on different pages on the internet and read different articles about blogging (well at least all bloggers have). This means all our views are going to be slightly different! My example of this is Kumiko from Kumiko's Cash Quest. She is gradually becoming known for writing quirky posts that are never quite what people expect. It is important to remember at this stage that repeatedly writing controversial posts isn't going to get you anywhere. Providing you have read enough about any given subject you will have formed a view of your own and there will be no reason to exaggerate your views.

A wise blogger (I can't remember who) once said that there are two paths to becoming a successful blogger. Either, by becoming an expert in your niche, or by becoming a well-known personality. My example of this is John Chow. The chances are that if you read this blog you also read JohnChow.com. This is because he has become both and expert in his niche (making money online - ish) and he is a bit of a celebrity. He shows what happens in the rare occasion someone manages both.

There are other added bonuses of 'having a personality'. These include the worship and fan mail of readers as well as hate mail and devastating spam attacks. Hate mail is a bonus simply because it ads some excitement to what at times can be a (dare it say it) boring profession of blogging. Perhaps I am being naive having never experienced hate mail, buy you know what they say, don't knock it till you've tried it.

SEO Tools

Just a quick post about some free SEO tools that are essential for any site that you want to rank highly in the search engines. Sitening provides some great tools that you can use for free to analyse your SERPS (search engine results page) and other SEO related bits n bobs. (It doesn't have an affiliate program or anything, I'm not trying to sell you it!). A lot of bloggers would do a great big 'in-depth' analysis of Sitening, but it is pretty self-explanatory. A better use of your time would be to be check it out for yourself. So take a look!

BTW, one or two of the tools do charge you, but most are free.

short n snappy,

bing bang bosh.

SEO Video Tutorial Series - assessment

You may remember a few weeks ago I posted part one of Brendon's SEO series. Here's the second part and it's pretty useful. You can watch the rest of the series at tailored.com.au. I know this is a bit of a short post, but they say a picture speaks a thousand words... so a video probably speaks even more!

Garry Conn! and the Best Deals Online

Every now and then I mention Garry Conn, without really explaning who he is and what on earth he has to do with me. The answer is that he is an online friend of mine and we have worked together on the Best Deals Online. The site has a very wide variety of products, ranging from computers to jewelry. At the moment many are from Amazon.com with special discounts on them but we are constantly introducing new products. As well as working together Garry has helped me get my new site Affiliate Programs up at running. At this point I must mention Jennifer from The life of a School bus driver who suggested BlueHost to me and has generously shared her WordPress wisdom with me, which I am eternally grateful for.

Enough of my thank-yous, Garryconn.com contains a wealth of information about SEO and making money online. He kindly wrote this description of his site for me to post:

"Hello! My name is Garry Conn. I write about successful blogging, Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Online marketing tips. I enjoy writing for the purpose of helping new bloggers become successful by giving them the tools they need to take their ideas and dreams and turning them into something real. The articles I publish are designed to give new bloggers and even professional bloggers the resources to make their dreams become a reality.

To be successful blogging you need to be able to create a blog site that is search engine optimized (SEO) for all search engines with heavy priority on Google Search Engine Optimization (GSEO). Luckily for you, I have a natural talent for SEO and I am eager to share what I have learned with you. Successful blogging starts with SEO and Online Marketing. On this site you will find articles that teach you how to optimize your site for search engines. Additionally, you will discover how to be successful with Online Marketing. I will teach you how to get traffic to your site. I will teach you how to get your articles, pages, posts, and publications appear on the top page of the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP and GSERP).

"

As you can see he is very 'to the point', just like his site, so have a look at Garryconn.com and be sure to bookmark it; I have.

Beginner Tips for SEO

This is a really useful Network Solutions video I found earlier today for those of you who are just getting started on your site and need some pointers about SEO (search engine optimisation). The first 30 seconds are just introduction so you can just skip past that onto the good stuff. The three essential points made are:

- Good Content
- Links to your site
- Title tags and meta tags

They are the basic things that all sites need, in order to get organic traffic from search engines. So have a watch of the video and learn something new! Or for those veterans out there it’s a nice refresher.

8 Simple Rules for...Successful Blogging!

They are in order of importance, 1 being the most important.

1. - - --Create good content to act as what everyone has been calling 'linkbait'. This can be done a number of ways:

a) By saying something controversial. This can only be 'used' a few times as it gets old after a while. This is a way of grabbing the attention you deserve and is especially effective if it is the Title of the post. Of course the main content must stand up to the expectations that the controversial title brings.

b) Say something Useful. Your readers are human beings and they want to experience pleasure, be it through reading an entertaining/controversial article, or by learning a valuable lesson. You can think of learning is an investment in future pleasure. I.E. preparation. If your content is so useful that they cannot stop themselves using it then you have succeeded. They may reciprocate with an encouraging comment, a digg/vote or maybe even a link back if they refer to your article.

c) Say something inspiring and LEAD BY EXAMPLE. People don't want to hear that they are 'never going to make it'. People like to hear success stores and they need role models. I have mentioned John Chow as mine and Darren Rowse. This does not mean lie to people about your earnings, but you need to be genuinely ambitious and believe in yourself.

As a rule of thumb, be specific, original, get the grit and use keywords in your articles to make Google smile on you.

I often find it useful to think about content this way:

Thousands of people are going to read what your write (over time). Imagine reading out your article aloud to all of them (if you are shy then use the old trick of imagining them being naked). Would you be proud of what you said? Would they applaud you? Of course you would write in a slightly different style if reading aloud, but otherwise that analogy is sound.

What good content achieves:
- A sense of pride in your blog.
- Keeps readers coming back
- Acts as 'linkbait' to generate inbound links
- Is good for SEO (from the keywords and the linkbacks
- Trust from your readers.

I.E. Good content creates traffic.

2. Submit your site to the major Search engines, such as Google, MSN, DMOZ. They are free but can take some time to list your site so submit it early on. (Especially DMOZ which can take FOR EVER!). The benefits of this are obvious, Google organic searches provides over half of this blogs traffic. Organic Google is also more likely to click on ads unlike Digg traffic which is ‘trained’ not to.

3. Exchange links with sites relevant to your niche and that have more inbound links than your own. This is especially important in the early stages, just to get your blog of the ground. It helps SEO, traffic and all that, because each inbound link is viewed as a 'vote of confidence' in the eyes of the search engines.

4. Submit your blog to ranking systems such as Technorati and Spicypage.

Benefits:
- Useful for your own knowledge about the number of inbound links your blog has.
- Useful for advertising your blog, I.e. gives you the ability to state your blogs rank.
- Great for networking. I used the Technorati searches to find blogs in my own niche which were also slightly more popular. Then I had a look at those blogs, learnt from them myself and requested a link exchange. Spicypage is a great place to do much the same thing, only it is much smaller. Note: Social Networking sites like Mylot can be used in a similar way to make contacts online and promote your blog.

5. Monetise your blog with Ads. These could be with Google AdSense ads orText Link Ads among others. People often make the mistake of doing this first in the desperate hope of getting a couple of clicks. This is pointless. Unless you have a decent amount of quality content your blog will appear to be a sleazy MFA site (made for AdSense) which will have a negative effect on traffic.

6. Join a few trustworthy affiliate programs such as AGLOCO and Bestcashrewards. These will earn you extra income and they give you something else to blog about, although you shouldn’t write about your affiliate programs too often.

7. Submit your better posts to article directories like Digg, and Go Articles and isnare. Don't forget to leave information about yourself and a link to your blog where allowed. Digg is a little different; it is focuses on news about technology, politics, business and gaming so there is not point in going through your old posts and submitting a news post that you write a year ago to digg.

8. Submit your site to niche/smaller directories. This brings traffic directly from the directory as well as giving a helping hand in SEO for the major search engines.

That was an abnormally long post for me. If you made it this far I succeeded!

Got Content?

Being Successful Online, whether you are after money or admirers, depends on content. Keyword rich content attracts new readers and new original ideas helps keep the ones you already have. It can be said that the readers you already have are not as valuable as first time readers because they do not click on the ads. They have another purpose and that is to spread the word. Your content must be so useful and wisdom-full that they must come to depend on you. Once they do they will find themselves coming back just to check if you have any new tasty advice and may end up adding a link to your site. If your content is really good they may even recommend you to other bloggers who as for their help.

There is a downside:
Good original content takes TIME to create. It takes time to write it and to 'come up with ideas'. Quite frankly if you are struggling with ideas to write about then you are not spending enough time online digesting other readers ideas. It is very important to 'stay in the game' and not to limit yourself to your current knowledge. You should constantly be learning and getting closer to becoming an expert in your niche.

Content is also the one and only thing on a blog that can bring its creator satisfaction. This is not because it is the most significant way to get traffic to your blog, but because after completing a post you get (well I do) a sense of achievement, which I find to be encouraging. Often it is just what I need to get my ass in gear and do some SEO. It is all to easy to slip into habits of posting less and less until you give up, which has caused the grizzly end of many a nerd.

Regularly posting new content is a MUST in the eyes of the search engines. As written in my previous posts about SEO (search engine optimisation) Google does not like 'dead' sites. This is one of the big advantages blogs have over websites, that they can and MUST be updated at least once a week. Once a day to have visible progress and more than once a day is even better. The search engine spiders crawl though your site picking up the new post and its tags, adding it to their database.

So remember, as long as you keep developing your knowledge you will have something to write about. Feel free to use my amazing knowledge :p to grow your blog!

How to Drive Traffic to your Blog

I have previously explained about ways of profiting from your blog and about affiliate programmes like bestcashrewards and AGLOCO. It is all well and good to be a member of such programmes, but how are you going to promote them without have a constant stream of traffic to your site?

Well, a major contributing factor is Search engine Optimisation (SEO). Traditionally this has been done by link exchanges, because each link is viewed as a 'vote' in the all-seeing eyes of the search engines. However this is all changing. The search engines are using more and more complex algorithms to help separate out the wheat from the chaff.

This does NOT mean link exchanges dead. You simply have to more picky when making them. There is little/NO value in having a link from a unknown, unrelated site. It will bring you no traffic because it doesn’t get any itself, and it is worthless in the eyes of the search engine because it is unrelated and is considered almost a sort of spam. This is BAD news for your site.

The solution is to attain links from RELEVANT AUTHORITY SITES. This means sites that are popular, get large amounts of traffic (you can find this out by using and Technorati, the biggest blog ranking site on the net). And as you know by know, they must have RELEVANT CONTENT.

This need for relevant content is why in some lines of Internet business, link exchanges are dead. If you think it through, if you are trying to sell a product, you are just putting links to your competitor’s sites right there for your customers to run off to. So DON'T use link exchanges if you are selling something!

For those of you who are not selling something, you can get link exchanges from authority sites by e.g. offering to write a review of their site containing links to their site and putting it on yours. For an example of this see my review of JohnChow.com

For more advice on making money online STAY TUNED!

Successful Blogging For Money

Whether you are getting 100s, 1000s or 10,000s hits on your blog per day, you are GARENTEED to make more money if you DIVERSIFY.

What is Diversification?

It is when you generated MULTIPLE sources of income. This does not have to mean e.g. selling a physical product AND having adverts, it simply means don't put all your 'eggs in one basket'. This means you must not ONLY rely on adsense as your source of imcome. There ARE other ways to get ads on your blog out there. On of them is:

Text Link Ads

Text Link Ads have a far more stable level of income and can be displayed on the same page as adsence. The only 'down side' is your site needs fairly high levels of traffic, and good site content. In the wider schemes of things this is actually a good thing, because it motivates bloggers to fill their blog will original content and actually make them worth reading.


I have given you an alternate source of income from ads, now for another source of income altogether.

To generate income from this method you do NOT need any product to sell.

This method is known as AFFILAITE MARKETING. As everyone knows, there are scams out there so you must judge carefully. There are some affiliate programmes that have become so popular, OTHER people have taken the risk for you. One of these programmes is AGLOCO. You only have to read a few of my previous posts to understand the potential of this programme.

However this is only one affiliate programme and seeing as the lesson of the day is to DIVERSIFY, I will let you know about 1 more. This one is called bestcashrewards. I have a post about this in my archives. You can either go take a look at that, or click here to take a look.

And there it is. People ask me; 'why do you do all that stuff online?'. I used to have no choice that to say 'because I can' in a dramatic manner, now I can say, 'because I make lots of money'. And YOU can too!