Search engine optimization (SEO) is probably one of the most desired skills to learn as a website owner. When you know how to do SEO, you have no limits to the amount of money you can make online because you can literally create unlimited traffic to your websites without paying for each visitor (like PPC).

I get asked lots of questions about SEO tricks and techniques that I use, and I try to respond to each of these the best I can if I have free time to do so.

I consider myself an SEO expert, but not because I study SEO 8 hours per day and know precisely when each search engine changes their algorithms. I’m an expert because I know the 95% core knowledge that it takes to get a site ranked in the search engines. The last 5% is the highly technical, “nerdy” stuff that nobody even needs to know to be successful.

The core concepts of SEO haven’t really changed that much over the years. The blackhat strategies of trying to beat the search engines have changed and will change frequently because those methods always get caught by the search engines.

There’s really only 2 parts to the SEO puzzle.

First is the onsite stuff. This includes your website’s title tags, meta tags, internal linking strategies, proper use of alt tags, and quality of content.

Second is the offsite SEO stuff. This includes the number of incoming links from other sites, the quality of incoming links from other sites and the anchor text being used from other sites who link to you.

That’s all there is to it. I’ve gotten #1 rankings in VERY competitive niche markets using nothing more than this knowledge.

Sure, there are other nerdy SEO best practices and lots of theories about the best way to do SEO, but if you can do the two parts I listed above and do them very well, you will get high rankings, guaranteed.

The only trick to SEO is knowing how to do these things. Knowing how to write good title tags, how to get quality links to your website, how to link to your other pages within your site, etc. You need to learn the knowledge first, then you need to use the tools to make the process faster and easier.

Anytime someone would ask me for specific advice in the past, I would refer them to Aaron Wall’s SEO book. Unfortunately Aaron changed his business model from a fantastic SEO Ebook to a paid membership site that teaches all internet marketing topics now. I haven’t joined his membership site, so I can’t speak to its content, but I know anytime you go from an expert in one topic to a jack of all trades, you tend to lose quality in each individual topics.

If I had more time available, I’d probably just make my own training course to share all the things I’ve learn about getting sites to rank in search engines. But, between the buying and selling websites class I’m running now, updating this blog plus the other 4 web businesses I manage, there’s no time to take on another project.

So, I started my search to find a new training source I could refer people to who needed to learn SEO. I ended up buying this course and was pleasantly surprised to see how in depth it was and how easy it was to understand, even for a complete newbie (I had my 62 year old, computer illiterate neighbor read it to confirm how easy it is to understand..and no I’m not joking!)

The creator of the course is also the same guy who created the best SEO tool ever created for saving time and making SEO 100 times easier.

I’ll still be sharing my useful tips and SEO techniques via this blog, but if you want the full story, in depth and easy to follow SEO education you can put into use today, then you should pick up a copy of the course. It’s about a hundred bucks, but when you think about how much you’ll spend on PPC ads if you don’t learn SEO, it’s literally a drop in the bucket.

If you get into a competitive market and have to pay $0.50 per click for 100 visitors per day in Adwords, you’ll rack up $100 in just TWO DAYS. On the other hand, you can buy the course for $100, learn SEO and learn how to drive FREE traffic to your site forever. Shouldn’t be a tough decision…

The software tool is not required for SEO, but it will save you a ton of time when it comes to getting links to your site and researching the best keywords to go after.

This training book is the perfect compliment to the niche store money making idea I told you about a couple weeks ago. There were lots of questions when I posted that case study about how I was able to get free traffic to a new site as quickly as I did. Brad’s course will show you the same techniques I used (and a couple others I didn’t even know about myself that I’ll be testing this week).

Looking forward to reading the comments after you guys start implementing some of these SEO ideas and start getting your free traffic…

• 6 Comments

How much money are you making on the internet?

Chances are, it’s right around the amount you think you are capable of earning. Call it the law of attraction, a strange coincidence, fate, whatever you want, but the results you are getting right now are exactly what you are thinking about.

When you are looking to start an internet business or a new website, how are you planning your business, specifically the monetization of the business? Are you thinking about things like “If I can get 500 people to my site per day and if 5% of those people click my google ads and I make $0.15 per click, I’ll be making $3.75 per day”.

Or maybe you say to yourself “If I can just sell 4 of these 125×125 ads at $25/month, I’ll be making $100 per month”.

You probably don’t even realize you are doing it, but you are limiting yourself based on your thoughts. You have to stop thinking in pennies if you want to make real money online.

I think entrepreneurs online have this mindset that the internet is “different” and there are certain rules that limit you from making the amount money a real business can make. That’s complete nonsense.

The minute you start thinking about your website as a REAL business is when you will start to see a drastic change in your income. I think part of the problem is, most people who want to try to make money online do not know how the real business world works.

Ford, Coca Cola and AT&T each spent $35 MILLION just to advertise on American Idol this year and Ford alone spends $150 million per year on online advertising campaigns.

A single ad in the yellow pages (which almost nobody even uses anymore) will cost a company up to $30,000 per year for one full page ad!!

A billboard advertisement can costs about $800 per month. Who ever responds to a billboard ad anyway?

National TV commercials can run into the millions of dollars for airtime…

…And you were stressed out and feeling doubtful that you could sell 4 ads for $25 each on your website?

What you need to do is convince yourself that you are WORTHY of being on the same playing field with real businesses and that you shouldn’t be settling for a measly $0.39 per day in adsense income or $20 per month for an ad on your site.

Don’t be afraid of selling products and services, and don’t be afraid of charging a premium for these products and services.

This really hit me like a ton of bricks once I started seeing success online a few years ago. When I was first starting out, I bootstrapped my startup business to the extreme.  I didn’t spend a penny more than I had to for anything related to my business.  I *thought* everyone felt this way when it came to their businesses too.

BIG MISTAKE!

Once I started making about $5,000 per month with my web businesses, I realized I could boost my business by buying things that would make me more money. I could buy tools that would increase my productivity. I could hire someone to design my logo for $50 rather than me spending 8 hours of my time making one just so I could save a couple bucks.

My mindset had completely shifted with the more success I had. No longer was I squeezing every penny I had in my business. After my mindset shifted was when I realized THIS is how bigger business owners must be thinking. They aren’t cringing over the decision of whether or not they should spend $500 on a training course to improve their skills. In fact, if they have two choices with one being a $500 training course or two being a $29 ebook course, most would opt for the $500 course because it MUST be better since it costs more.

Even if the material is basically the same, the only difference is the mindset of the person or company selling the course. One person is thinking BIG (and making $500 a clip) and the other is thinking small (and struggling to make any decent money with their $29 ebook).

If you are very cost concerned (nice word for frugal), keep in mind that not everyone else is. Just because you wouldn’t spend $400 per month for an ad on a website doesn’t mean another company won’t. In fact, if you are ONLY charging $400 per month for an ad and you offer the ad space to a large company like Ford for example, they won’t consider the ad because it’s too cheap! They have a mandatory and preset ad budget to spend each year on advertising and marketing, so they can’t waste their time on $400 per month ads.  It would take forever to split up that $150 million ad budget at that rate…

The next project you think about, try thinking BIG and see what happens.  Focus all your thoughts and energy towards that big idea, that big income and that big website traffic. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the outcome.

• 8 Comments

One of the most critical tasks when starting a new blog or any online project for that matter is finding the perfect domain name for it. While the domaining business is booming and there are millions of blogs already online, there are still great domain names out there to be had for reasonable prices. However, if you don’t know where to look or have a tool to automate the process, it can be incredibly time consuming. Enter Bust a Name…

Bust a Name

Bustaname.com has quickly become one of my favorite tools on the web. Not only can you type in a domain name and quickly see whether it’s available, but you can also input several different terms and Bust a Name (BaN) will combine them and check their availability for you. The default setting searches for any combination of the terms you input (for example, entering the words blogging and experiment would check for both bloggingexperiment.com as well as experimentblogging.com). If you added a third word into the mix, the tool would then check all 12 two word combinations possible.

Once you’ve exhausted all your own ideas of words or phrases to include in your domain, BaN has a built in thesaurus that makes it incredibly easy to brainstorm even more terms to add to your list. As your list gets longer, it can be pretty unwieldy with similar terms generating combinations you wouldn’t want to use (for example if you have both “blog” and “blogging” on your list with “experiment” the tool might spit out “blogblogging” as a result).

Luckily, the creators of BaN thought of that and allow users to create groups of terms which will keep the tool from trying to combine the terms in that group. To continue my previous example, grouping “blog” and “blogging” would tell the tool to only combine these two terms with “experiment” rather than each other.

As if that weren’t enough, you can also choose to check for domains with dashes between the terms, three word combinations, and add common prefixes and suffixes (e, i, my, the, ly, etc). As you come across domains you think you might like, you’re given the option to save the name or buy the domain through BaN’s affiliate link that instantly compares the costs across several different registrars. And last but not least, if you happen to leave the Bust-a-Name site, you’re given the option to resume your previous session when you return.

What other tools do you find helpful when searching for domain names? What methods do you use when brainstorming domain name ideas?

• 13 Comments

Seems like everyone likes to see income reports on blogs, so I figured I’d amuse you and share my April results. April was our first full month of ownership since taking over BloggingExperiment.com on March 27th. I didn’t post a March income report since there were lots of things in transition between the ownership change…

I’ve made several changes to this blog in the short month or so that we’ve owned it. You can be the judge if buying this website and making the changes was a good or bad idea.

First, I removed all paid advertising from the site. Since advertising was making up a small percentage of income, and sponsored reviews are a waste of everyone’s time, it was a simple decision. I’ll be bringing back an advertising option in the next month or two, but it will not be sponsored reviews or 125 ads.

Second, I made some layout changes by making the header section of the site smaller and added an opt-in form for people to download a free report I wrote. I also removed the feedburner subscriber counter (those things are nothing more than an ego boost, so a waste of prime screen space - the current count is 1,287 for those who are interested). Finally I shifted up the prime content to make the site more user friendly and valuable to readers.

Income

Here’s a look at April’s income. I’ve included the figures from February in the parentheses for easy comparison.

Scratch Back: $0.00 ($130)
Private Advertising: $0 ($210)
Sponsored Reviews: $0 ($100)
Affiliate Sales: $871 ($91)
Theme Sales: $750 ($1,425)
Buy & Sell Websites Training Class: $3,400 ($0)
________________________
Total: $5,021 ($1,826)

Expenses

The expenses have changed slightly from February since I didn’t renew the John Chow advertisement.

Advertising: $0 ($250)
Affiliate Payments: $25 ($100.00)
Contest Payments: $25 ($0.00)
________________________
Total: $50 ($350)

So, when all is said and done, I had profit of $4,971 this month which is $3,495 more than February’s income.

Analysis

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the results so far. If the income remains the same as April, this website purchase will have paid for itself within 4 months, which is a pretty good return on investment. This website acquisition is following the same pattern as most of our buying and selling websites projects we’ve taken on. The first buying and selling websites training class is well underway as we speak and I’m sharing the exact steps anyone can use to achieve results just like we are getting on the BloggingExperiment.

If you missed out on the class, shame on you : -)

You’ll have to wait until the next class opens up if you want to learn the exact steps I’m taking to turn this $1,500/month blog into a $10,000/month business.

Up Next

My goal is to hit the $6,000 profit mark next month, and I think that will be easily achievable at the current growth rate. Traffic is up about 20% since we bought the site and May is an extra day longer than April. I’ll be opening up the second buying and selling websites training class somewhere around the end of May, and since the second class will be $400 instead of the discounted $200 as mentioned here, reaching the $6k mark is not unreasonable.

Also, I’ll be testing a new advertising model hopefully starting in May if my programmer can get the software written by then. I have high hopes for this software program I’m having built, which will allow website owners and bloggers to sell advertising more easily. I’ll be testing the software on this site before releasing it to others.

Hopefully you can follow what I’m doing on this site and you can implement these ideas in your own business. Creating your own products are critical to your success online. Between my training class and this new software program, I have no doubt this website will be responsible for making $10,000 per month in profit within 3-4 months. We’ll have to wait and see I guess…

(image source: sehgal asad)

• 22 Comments

Ah, how great it must be to be a make money “guru”, right?

Well, I’m no guru myself, although I’ve been called that through some nasty emails lately. I’ve been getting emails like “You’re just like all the other gurus out there” or “You’ve turned into one of those gurus who won’t share the exact details of your success”.

First let me state that I hate the term “guru”, at least in a sense that most people use it online. The ORIGINAL definition of Guru is from the Indian culture meaning: A spiritual guide, teacher and leader who provides a sacred path to wisdom and guidance.

However, the definition has since changed to a more broad “person with knowledge or expertise”. I work with several Indian partners who are offended by the term guru being thrown around so often online, especially when it’s used to negatively describe someone.

But the point of this post is not to debate how the term guru is being used or what the meaning of the term is. The fact is, people love to use the term guru, especially in the internet marketing niche.

So, how do people become a “guru” these days? And more importantly, why would anyone WANT to become a “guru”?

Becoming an internet marketing guru is pretty easy. Here’s what you have to do to become one…

Step 1 - Start an internet business.

Step 2 - Work your butt off and have amazing success with it.

Step 3 - After reaching the “wealthy stage”, you decide to give back.

Step 4 - You work hard to share your knowledge with others.

Step 5 - You get criticized and scrutinized for your every move.

Step 6 - People think you are a fraud and are only out to rip people off.

Sounds pretty exciting! Where can I sign up?

I always find it amusing to see people ripping on successful people. I assume the biggest reason why people hate “gurus” is because they are simply jealous of their success and if this “guru” doesn’t literally take them by the hand and show them every tiny detail to become rich, then the guru is a fraud.

Don’t get me wrong, there are A LOT of scam artists online claiming to be a guru. Just because you hang out with other gurus doesn’t make you one yourself. But there are just as many real, honest, hard working gurus out there that ARE trying to help you become successful. Just because they might charge a fee to help you succeed doesn’t mean they are out to rip you off.

Sometimes charging a fee is the one thing that will make people accountable for their own success. Nobody puts value on anything that’s free. If you pay $500 for a coaching program, you’re much more likely to put the advice into practice because you need to recover that investment. If you get free advice, you will probably not take action because you are not out anything if you don’t.

Nobody in this world is “entitled” to anything. If you want something, you need to work for it, not EXPECT it to be handed to you. There is more opportunity in the world RIGHT NOW than there has ever been in history before. Even though the media makes it sound like the sky is falling and the economy is falling apart, nothing could be further from the truth.

There’s always an opportunity to succeed, no matter what the current economic situation is. Sure the housing market appears to be falling apart, but other people are absolutely loving it (foreclosure investors). Sure some people are losing their jobs, but many of these people are taking this misfortune and using it as a kick in the pants to start their own business, something they always wanted to do but had been putting off because they had a “cushy job”. Sure gas prices are approaching $4/gallon, but this will cause a rush to find alternative energy sources, which will help our environment and bring additional job opportunities.

This is the kind of mindset that a “guru” has. An internet marketing guru is simply, a regular person who has found an opportunity and created success from that opportunity.

If you truly want to become an internet guru, open your eyes, work hard and prepare to be criticized…

• 10 Comments