Many internet marketers see link building as just writing articles and submitting their website to directories as well as comment spamming. People like to talk and read about link building because it seems to work. However, building links isn’t just about gathering links from different sites. It’s all about marketing. In other words, everything you do that eventually results in getting more exposure to your site is just marketing and in business, marketing is everything.
Whether you comment spam (please don’t this, it’s annoying), do guest posts on popular sites in your niche, take some guy out to lunch who works for a major online news website who eventually mentions your site in one of his articles, creating a Facebook fan page, making a Youtube video and having the link appear in the actual video, writing high quality content in hopes that it’s good enough that people will link to it, it’s all link building, it’s all marketing, it’s all about getting more exposure.
With marketing, it’s all about return on investment. Your strategy of getting more exposure could involve a slew of things but some tactics will make more sense in terms of the incoming profits compared to the outgoing expenses. You could spend a lot of time and energy making deals with small companies under 10 employees or you could spend time closing a deal with a major corporation. You can spend time getting thousands of links from small, unknown websites or you can spend time building a relationship with a major, high traffic website and get mentioned by them.
The bottom line is that if you’re doing anything that involves eventually getting more people to mention your site somewhere, then it’s a form of marketing, it’s a form of link building. They all have the same purpose: to make more money online.
I get emails from internet marketing companies almost on a daily basis telling me how they can help to improve my rankings. They tell me how I’m not ranking for certain keywords and call me out on my lack of links. They tell me I don’t have social presence then go and use big, useless online marketing jargon to try to make me think I don’t know what I’m doing.
Here’s my question to all you internet marketing companies out there:
If you’re so damn good at increasing rankings and driving traffic, why the hell don’t you just use that knowledge and make money with your own sites?
Is it because you’re really incompetent and don’t know what you’re doing and your real aim is just to rip website owners out of their hard earned money? I’ve checked out some of these SEO services and I can say with confidence that at least 90% of the crap that many of them spew out of their asses about what they will do for you is meant to either make you feel like a total newbie or to make it seem like they are going to do some really important stuff.
Things like premium site and traffic analysis, super secret onsite SEO diagnostic analysis and optimization, enhancements to title, meta tags, and alternative text, social media recognition, critical search engine submissions, reputation management, and continually coming up with other nonsensical terms and phrases to make you think they’re experts.
Don’t get me wrong, some of these companies really do know what they’re doing and work for big fortune 500 companies. The ones I’m talking about are the ones who contact owners of small websites and charge them hundreds or thousands a month for their expert services. What a bunch of scamming rip offs.
Why am I writing this article? To let you know that unless you run a huge company and don’t have time to do these things yourself, don’t use these internet marketing services. You can learn how to do this stuff yourself. I did and that’s why I can look at their service list and tell they’re BS.
This is my Build My Rank review. Two words… GET IT. (free trial)
Okay, more details. The cost is $59 a month. Whether or not this sounds like a lot to you depends on how much money you’re making online. To make money online with websites, you need to get traffic. One way is to rank highly for key terms by writing articles that link back to your site. BMR gives you access to those sites to submit articles to. Most of their sites have a PR 2 or higher. I’ve been using this service and the results are simply amazing.
If you can’t afford $59 a month, then try it out for just 1 month. Write as many articles as you can and then cancel. From there, track your rankings. Once you find out how much your rankings improve, you can decide whether or not to rejoin.
That’s all for my Build My Rank review. So if you want higher rankings, get BMR and write like crazy. (This post is about the length of articles you’ll be writing. Nice and short.)
The internet marketing business is constantly changing. Your methods that have been working like a charm for the past several months can all of the sudden backfire on you. Over the past few months, there has been a lot of talk about the quality of websites and that if you want to survive in the long term, you better put up quality content or you’ll eventually get slapped by Google.
What is quality? If I’m looking for a pair of socks, do I want to come to a site with a bunch of pictures of socks to buy or do I want a site with detailed information on which socks are the best? For me, I just want to buy socks so in this case, the first site would be of better value to me and therefore, is of better quality.
Quality is largely a matter of opinion. I hate coming across sites that analyze the crap out of everything with their fancy calculations and numbers. I’m a more succinct kind of guy. I want things to be laid out and to the point and
Everything
In
Bullet
Points
Perhaps I ramble a lot with my posts but maybe it’s because I read longer posts do better. How can you have quality content with just 150 words right?
Another thing, if English isn’t your primary language, then I guess you’re screwed. If you have decent ideas but just happen to not be very good at writing and getting your ideas across, I guess you’re screwed as well.
Quality is personal. I’m sure some of you who read my posts will say it’s all crap while others of you might say it’s very useful. Who’s right? The answer is everyone is. Whether my content is quality or not depends on what you were looking for as well as what your previous knowledge on the subject matter is.
If I came across a blog about how to make money online and all it talks about is putting your keyword in the title and using it in the articles, then I would think it’s crap because I already know those basic things. For someone brand new, it could be revolutionary to them.
Perhaps quality comes down to intent. When you write content, is your intention to deliver truly useful information and helping people solve a problem or is it merely to just have content on your site with the right keywords so you can hopefully rank? Or perhaps it’s just bore your readers into just clicking one of your ads.
Then again, your intentions can be good but if Google thinks your site is crap because you don’t talk about the process of how socks are made or the different types of fibers used to create the world’s greatest socks even though most of your visitors just want to find the lowest price socks, what can you do?
In my Keyword Academy Scam or Not review which I wrote a while back, I outlined the training course and gave my thoughts on its pros and cons. I have been a member for about a year now and thought I would update what this program has down for me since I joined.
Like most people who try to start an internet business, a lot of time is spent trying to figure out how to drive traffic. Many people believe that all you have to do is write amazing articles and people will automatically find your website. Not true at all. I know of plenty of websites that have pretty great content but get very little traffic. This training course basically teaches you how to drive traffic to your website.
When I first joined, I was making about $8 a month. Yes, barely a quarter a day. Less than one year later, about 10 months after joining the Keyword Academy, I surpassed the $1,000 a month mark. To be honest with you, I didn’t really do much until my 3rd month as a member. I still felt that I needed to read different blogs and learn as much about this business as I can. Perhaps part of me didn’t really believe that it would work. Anyway, in the end, it was a waste of time. My income was still dismal so I decided to stick only with the methods I learned from the Keyword Academy and started to work like my life depended on it. That’s when everything started to change.
So if you take that into account, it took less than 7 months for me to hit the $1,000 a month mark. I know, it’s not that much compared to getting a regular job but the great thing is that it’s all residual. Ask around, 99% of the people you know don’t make any type of residual income at all. Residual income is what will set you financially free. In fact, the month before and the month that I actually surpassed the $1k mark, I didn’t really do much work. Try doing that with a business that you need to physically be there or a job. You’ll go broke or get fired.
Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of outsourcing. I barely write articles anymore, yet, my income keeps increasing. That’s the beauty of this business.
I remember when I first started, the amount of money I’m making now was a dream. Now that it’s a reality, although it was exciting at first, I have my eyes set on bigger goals. You’ll experience the same thing. You might think making $100 a month is great until you actually hit it month after month. After a while, you’ll want more.
Ultimately, you will want to make enough to be financially free and enjoy whatever lifestyle that you want. How long it will take will depend on what sort of lifestyle you want and how hard you work.
Anyway, that’s my update on the Keyword Academy Scam or Not Review.
This program literally changed my life so I highly recommend it. You can sign up at the following link. It’s FREE for the first month.
Once you sign up, I recommend reading my post on The Science of Niche Internet Marketing. I wrote that back when I was still doing everything on my own, before I was making enough to outsource. It’s a long read so grab a cup of coffee or something. In that post, I basically outline what it really takes to succeed in this business and it’s basically how I got to where I am today.
Just because you sign up as a member of the Keyword Academy, it doesn’t mean you will be successful. It takes work and patience. Knowing what to do isn’t enough. A lot of this business is mental as you will soon find out.
So is there a science to niche internet marketing and how does residual income play into it? If you are into reading personal development books then one of the keys to success that you may have came across is that sustainable success isn’t something that happens by accident. People who are successful at what they do, do certain things over and over again. We’ve all heard that to be successful at making money online or at anything really, you have to take massive action. That’s all well and great but I don’t care if you’re the hardest working person around, if you’re doing the wrong things over and over, you’re not going to get very far. Just look at the thousands of bloggers who crank out tons of posts a day and don’t make squat!
In order to be successful at niche internet marketing or at any internet business, you have to be able to not only work like a madman, but to also analyze and notice what is working and what isn’t working. How do you do this? By keeping track of your efforts. Every day when I sit down at my laptop and work on closing the gap between my dreams and reality, I take note of the things that I’m doing. I keep spreadsheets of the time I put in, what I do during that time, the keywords that I find, highlight the ones that work, the ones that don’t, and figure out any patterns that are taking place.
You see, what gets measured, gets improved. If you are just blindly throwing up random sites and not taking the time to figure out why some sites work better than others, then you will just end up putting in a lot more work than you have to. So how exactly do you do all of this?
The first step, which is the step that very few people do anyway, is to crank out a ton of sites. This could be hubpages (see update down below), infobarrels, blogger blogs (never again), or your own hosted sites which is ultimately the best way to go. Until you have more than 100 of these, then you won’t have much to work with in terms of figuring out patterns. Don’t worry, I don’t mean 100 huge sites. Some can be just one page.
UPDATE (2/28/2011): Hubpages was hit hard by Google and at this time, I don’t recommend using them. As I stated above, it’s always better to own your own sites.
Get the Formula
If you sign up with the Keyword Academy, you will learn a precise system, a formula, for choosing the right keywords. That is where I learned how to do this stuff by the way so don’t think I’m just trying to advertise some random program. I support them wholeheartedly. When it comes down to niche marketing, it’s all about choosing the right keywords. Now once you learn their formula, you will need to work like your life depends on it. There has been a lot of different contests going on around the MMO world recently. Things like 100 posts in 30 days for example. If you are really serious about living the life of your dreams, then you need to step up your game.
Possibilities with Niche Internet Marketing
Imagine bringing in $167 a day on average from your websites. That’s $5,000 a month coming in that you don’t have to do much to maintain. How would your life be if you had an extra 5 grand coming into your bank account every month? What different life choices would you choose? Would you perhaps pursue your dream of becoming a musician or an artist? How about a teacher? Will your vacations be a bit different? I don’t know about you, but that term the media has come up with, “staycation”, is a bunch of bull. Life is crazy short guys, you either do what you need to do to get the most out of it, or you waste it working your whole life away.
It’s not just about the money here. It’s about giving yourself more time freedom. Money just gives you more options. Instead of going to the park because you can’t afford anything else, you can choose to go to Disneyland. Instead of eating from the dollar menu at McDonald’s everyday, you can choose to eat slimy exotic sea creatures. So what does it take to put your life in that type of a situation? Work.
The Ultimate 1 Day Challenge
Here’s a challenge for you. Choose one day out of the week where you have 4 hours of free time. On that day, during those 4 hours, you’re going to do nothing but write. Whether you do hubpages, infobarrels, other sites, or posts on your own site, it doesn’t matter. If you can, I’d stick with working on your own sites since, in the long run, it’s a smarter idea. The point is to put in 4 hours of total concentrated work. The goal here is to see how many posts or articles you can write. You will want to take short 5-10 minute breaks every 60-90 minutes or so and maybe 15-20 minutes for a meal, but that’s it. You will also want to spend an hour the day before to find enough keywords for this experiment.
You don’t have to spend 4 hours. If on a typical day, you have 2 hours to work on this, then do 2 hours.
Increase Your Standards
The point of this is to expand your mind and to help you see what is possible if you focused your efforts on one task without doing anything else. Let me give you my own experience so it will help explain the reasoning behind this.
I used to ‘work’ for hours and hours a day but only write maybe 3 articles on a good day. The majority of my time was spent reading forums, checking email, looking at stats, checking my rankings, and a bunch of other useless crap that wasn’t making me any money. So one day, I decided if I could beat my 3 articles in a day out of curiosity. I chose a day where I had all day free and just worked with 100% concentration. I ended up doing 20 articles. That blew me away! Since I time everything I do, I added up the amount of time it took me to writes those articles and guess what? I put in about the same time as I did those other days where I only finished 3 articles.
Because of that experiment, my mindset and standards are now at a whole different level. Do I do 20 articles a day? No. I average about 10 a day. You see, 10 a day used to be something that seemed impossible to me since before that, 3 a day was the most I did. On top of that, with the whole 100 articles in 30 days challenges that have been going around, 3 a day seemed pretty damn good to me. But after that experiment, 100 articles in 30 days seems like a walk in the park. 10 a day is quite easy for me these days. Apparently, out of the hundreds of people who signed up for that 30 day Hubpage challenge, less than a dozen people actually accomplished it. When Court over at the the Keyword Academy was doing the challenge, I was still in my “3 a day is lot” mentality so I didn’t even try it.
So since I have been busting out 10 articles a day, which takes me about 3 1/2 hours to do by the way, my income has increased steadily. Most of my articles are between 550 – 650 words. It really depends on what platform I’m writing them for. For hubpages, they are normally closer to the 700 words range. If it takes you a lot longer than 20 minutes to write a 400 word article, including research, then you may want to check out the 7 minute articles program. It has helped me speed up my writing a lot. It used to take me over an hour just to write one article including research.
My Personal Project
I have my own personal challenge which is an ongoing one but the first phase of it will take me 3 months. At the end of the 3 months, my goal is to have 900 articles. There will also be an additional 1,800 mini articles for link building purposes as well. Now when I say articles, this includes any hubs, infobarrels, posts on my own sites, or ezine articles. Those 1,800 mini articles will be on different directories.
I am focusing on certain types of things at a time since I work better that way. Some people will do a few hubpages, then jump to infobarrels, then jump to something else. For me, I found that I am much more efficient when I focus on just one task. So I’m doing things in sets of 100. Meaning, I’ll do 100 hubs then jump to doing 100 infobarrels and so on. Afterward, I’ll do some analysis of what is working and what is not, adjust some things, then go through the cycle again using what I learned. Then I’ll be buying domains with Hostgator for words that are doing well.
The Science of Niche Internet Marketing
So let me go back to the science of niche internet marketing. The reason I am cranking out so many articles is because that’s the only way I can analyze what works and what doesn’t work. I’m on week 3 of my project and have well over 200 articles. I just did some analyzing this morning and I’m starting to see some patterns already. I haven’t gotten it down completely yet but I’m getting better and better. Again, the reason I’m recommending that you crank out a ton of sites is to have access to a large amount of data that you can use to help you become more efficient at choosing the right keywords. The formula from the Keyword Academy is an excellent start. Within that formula though, there are certain things that will make certain keywords pop out at you as being the one you should choose.
On a typical day, I will do about 1 hour of keyword research and find maybe 25 that will meet my criteria.
**Update: The Keyword Academy came out with a tool that automates this step so what used to take me 4 hours to do (finding 100 keywords, checking potential, determining competition, etc., now takes me 20 minutes. This tool alone is worth the monthly membership price but it was included for free. If you’re not part of The Keyword Academy yet, you’re seriously missing out.**
I write 10 articles a day but I find around 20-30 keywords to do those 10. This makes it a lot easier to bust out articles because if you only have 10 keywords, then for sure you will come across a keyword that you just don’t want write about and this will just slow you down. I have a couple hundred of keywords that I haven’t touched yet and adding more to the list every day (now with the new tool, I have thousands). Many of those keywords I will probably never touch but by having much more than I can use, I will never have to slow down my work just because I don’t have enough keywords. So I would recommend spending at least 30 minutes a day looking for keywords. I always like to have a fresh set of keywords each day for my 10 articles. (With the new tool, you can spend 30 minutes and find enough keywords to last you for months)
This is the kind of work that it will take you initially if you ever hope to be making money online. Forget all of those empty promises of making millions by doing nothing. Many people will use the excuse of “working smarter” and not “working harder” to not work hard. It’s as if by working hard, they are being stupid or something. Listen, making money online is the “working smarter” part. Compare that to working for a company and living life on their terms. If your goal is to make money with an internet business, then you are already working smart. Now, you just need to work hard to make it happen.
Working hard alone won’t make you successful. You need to know what to do. That’s why signing up with The Keyword Academy is so crucial. I know I keep mentioning them but I honestly wouldn’t have this much progress if it weren’t for them. It will save you a lot of guess work and years of trial and error since the guys that run this training program have taken all the guess work out for you. But knowing what to do isn’t enough either. You have to combine the know-how with consistent hard work. Even with this, it can take several months to make any decent amount of money so that’s why you need to be consistent.
How to Work Hard Consistently
Anyone can work hard for a day. It’s easy. But how many people can consistently do it for a week? How about a month? 3 months? 6 months? 1 year? 3 years? 5 years? I don’t have a crystal ball but I’m willing to bet that if you consistently work hard, doing the right things, for 1 year straight, your life will never be the same again. Keep in mind that when I say work hard, it doesn’t mean spending a lot of time in front of the computer. It means spending time doing concentrated, focused work. Whether you have an hour a day or 10 hours a day, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that for the amount of time that you have available, you do everything you can to produce as much as you can for that amount of time.
You don’t want to burn yourself out though. Pick an amount of work to complete that is a bit of a stretch for you but isn’t something that will kill your motivation. Can I do 20 articles a day? Sure. I could probably do 30 400+ word articles if I wanted to, but I chose to stick with 10 a day which ranges from 4,000 – 7,000 words a day. It’s something that I know I can consistently do. I see this all the time. Someone will get all pumped up and bust out dozens of articles for like 3 days, then burn out and do nothing for the next 2 weeks.
A smarter way is to produce a consistent amount of work every day. There will be times when things will come up where you won’t be able to work. I have accounted for this so that’s why 10 a day is perfect for me. If I know I need to spend the weekend doing something else, I can just do 15 – 20 articles for a couple of days and take the whole weekend off. But that’s just me. If you’re crazy and think you can go all out hardcore style, then be my guest. Just make sure you do that consistently. Even if you can only handle 1-3 articles a day, as long as it’s consistent, you’ll do fine.
Ultimate Goal
The ultimate goal in writing all of those hubs and infobarrels is to figure out which keywords have the greatest potential of ranking well and making you money. You will ultimately want to own your own sites. Who knows what the future holds for those sites like hubpages and infobarrel? Plus, with your own sites, you make 100% of the profits. So once you see which one of your keywords are ranking well, buy a domain name from places like Godaddy.com and host them on hosting services like Hostgator where you can host unlimited domains for under $10 a month.
UPDATE (2/28/2011): Hubpages was hit hard by Google and at this time, I don’t recommend using them. As I stated above, it’s always better to own your own sites.
When you start getting a huge cluster of related keywords, you can make it all into one power house site which, in the long run, is the best way to go. You don’t have to start with hubpages though. You can learn the formula and dive straight into creating your own niche sites which is better in the long run. Doing a ton of hubpages or infobarrels will at least give you a lot of experience on how the game works, and it’s free.
Bottom Line
I know I have rambled a lot here but my main point is that in order to get good at the science of niche internet marketing in order to make residual income, you will need to do a ton of work. From there, you need to figure out what is working best and do more of it. Until you have at the very least 100 money making pages out there, you have no right to complain or ask why you aren’t making any money. Once you know the formula, just do it. People who are making a ton of money online have put in their time and until you do, don’t wonder and question why you aren’t making any money online.
Step up your game. Do the Ultimate 1 Day Challenge and see just what is possible if you put in 100% concentrated, focused work for 4 hours or however many hours you have on a typical day. Once you realize what is possible, your standards will be higher. Once your standards are higher, continue to put in the work. Do this until you reach your monthly residual income goal. Remember that every day you produce, you will be one step closer to making your dreams a reality.
If you don’t produce, you won’t get what you want. Period.
If you have the money, you can outsource a lot of this as well but either way, put in your time and effort and you’ll eventually make it. With the right mentality and work ethic, making enough residual income online with an internet business to be financially free is well within reach.
I’d like to end this post with one of my favorite motivational video clips about giving your all. You have more within you than you think.
Pumped up? Good! Now go out there and explode your internet business!
