Internet Marketing Word

Nov 2009 - income

E-Learning £0

Website Design £66.99

Other Web Businesses £0

Afiliate advertising $31.43 (£21.10)

Total Income Earned for Nov 2008 - £88.09

Number of monetised websites

8

Discussion

Still disappointing  advertising results - only one pound more than last month. It seems that the holiday niche is dead at the moment, and the student niche has dwindled to next to nothing. The seniors niche continues to do exceptionally well. However, I am averaging over one dollar per day now. My next goal is two dollars per day.

My blog type sites still been getting virtually no traffic yet - they have now been launched for two months.

E-learning work has been non-existent.

Yet again my website design work has produced the usual trickle of income.

I have been much more thorough on my keword research this month and came up with two keywords that should pay two or three dollars per visit. These were lauched this month, so I don’t expect to see any income from them until February/March time.

Running totals for 2008 (April start)

E-Learning TBC

Website Design TBC

Web Businesses TBC

Afilitate Advertising $150.90 (£98.15)

Breakdown:

Feb - $0.20
March - $1.60
April - $2.72
May - $8.83
June - $20.40
July - $17.54
August - $12.39
Sept - $27.31
October - $29.07
November - $31.43 (£21.10 or 70p per day)

Total Income Earned this year so far - TBC

October 2008 - income

Oct E-Learning £900.11

Oct Website Design TBC

Oct Web Businesses £640

Oct Pay per Click Advertising £14.57

Affiliate £0

Total Income Earned for October 2008 - £1540

Number of monetised websites

6

Discussion

Disappointing pay per click advertising - only one pound more than last month - and that included two newly monetised sited (although both of these sites were poorly researched, so it is hardly surprising). Missed the one dollar per day target by a whisker.

My blog type sites have been getting virtually no traffic yet, although they were only launched last month. I need to get a better grip on promoting the sites once they have been launched. I also need to investigate Affiliate advertising - especially Amazon.

As usual, the e-learning work is the largest proportion of my income, although I expect his to drop in November as I have no work.

The website design work has produced the usual trickle of income.

Running totals for 2008 (April start)

E-Learning TBC

Website Design TBC

Web Businesses TBC

Pay per click advertising £59.77

Feb - 20p
March - 80p
April - £1.35 (4 p per day)
May - £4.40 (14 p per day)
June - £10.20 (34 p per day)
July - £8.50 (27 p per day)
August - £6.15 (19 p per day)
Sept - £13.60 (45 p per day)
October - £14.57 (46 p per day)

Total = £59.77

Total Income Earned this year so far - TBC

Tags: goals, income, internet, marketing

One of the reasons that I am creating this blog is that it will be resource for me to keep perspective on my projects.

My current project income flows are as follows (Oct 2008):

E-Learning
Website Design
Web Businesses
Internet Marketing

My income goals

My goal is for Internet Marketing, Website Design and Web Businesses to become may main income flow within two years. And over a five-year period, I would like my Internet Marketing activities to become my main income flow.
My internet marketing income to date (September 2008)

My Internet Marketing monthly income for 2008 is as follows:

Feb - 20p
March - 80p
April - 1.35
May - 4.40
June - 10.20
July - 8.50
August - 6.15
Sept - 13.60

Tags: income, internet, marketing

It is very tempting to choose very high paying keywords for your niche website. But this is a big mistake. For example, the following keywords are high payers - the advertisers will pay mega bucks for your click:

Home loans
Mortgage
Mesothelioma
Attorney
Lawyer

These  keywords pay extremely well. But the downside is that is would be nearly impossible for a one-person-set-up to get traffic for these key words.  Internet marketing professionals work very hard for their organisation to rank for these keywords and have huge budgets. The competition for you is simply too intense. Your only chance would be to choose one of these high paying keywords and drill down to find a derivative which pays well but is more obscure.

The advantages of low paying keywords

The easier option is to find a keyword where the competition is not too great but pays between $3-£4 per click. It is not difficult to create a five to ten page niche site that will rank highly for these type of keywords as the competition is low. It may only generate a a few dollars a day, but that translates to fifty to sixty dollars a month…this month, next month, and every month.

Building a portfolio of niche sites

The benefit of using low paying keywords (not too low though - stick to the $3-£4 per click range) it is not that difficult to find dozens of keywords with low competition. You can build a portfolio of simple five to ten page sites, each earning $50 per month. Because the competition is low, it’s reasonably easy to  rank well in the search engines for these sites.

Getting traffic
Of course traffic is the real key. No traffic means no clicks, which means no profits! You need to rely on natural methods of obtaining traffic which do not cost you anything. These mainly include building backlinks via social networking sites, directories and forums.

Tags: adsense, high, keyword, low, niche, paying, traffic

A good formula for determining the profitability of a key word is:

Amount of traffic for the key word x the cost per click (CPC)

Let’s look at each part of this equation.

Traffic

The more visitors your website gets, the more the potential revenue for the site. If your site only gets 20 visitors a day, is will be very hard to make it profitable (but not impossible).

Cost per click (CPC)

The cost per click is the amount of money an advertiser will pay the ad provider (Adsense for example) for a click on their link. Of course you as a publisher will only get a small amount of this money. For example, if keyword has a stated average CPC of $1 , you might only get 20 cents. On the other hand, if the stated average CPC is $5, you may get $1.

It stands to reason then, if you multiply traffic by CPC, you will get an indicator of the potential profitability of a keyword. But remember, it is a vague approximation only and it’s only real value it to compare one keyword against another.

Example 1 - Keyword A:

Daily traffic = 100
Average CPC = $2

Profitability factor = 200

Example 2 - Keyword B:

Daily traffic = 450
Average CPC = $1

Profitability factor = 450

Example 2 - Keyword c:

Daily traffic = 20
Average CPC = $6

Profitability factor =120

So in the examples above, Keyword B looks like the most profitable and would be worth investigating further.

Tags: adsense, cpc, formula, keyword, profitability, traffic

There seem to be many tools around - some paid for, some free that help you decide which niche to choose for your sponsored advertising website.

The choice is enormous - and all make claims about making the process easy. But is the process so difficult in the first place?

There are two key criteria to consider when identifying profitable niches:

1. Can I get traffic?

2. Can I convert that traffic into clicks?

Nothing else matters really. But the big unanswered question is how do you do this?

Finding your niche

There are loads of blogs around that offer advice on how choose a niche and do keyword research.

The key messages seem to be as follows:

1. Start with your personal interests

2. Use online stores such as amazon.com and/or other sites like wikipedia etc to go through their categories to get niche ideas.

3. Drill down further to find potential untapped niches

But what I really want to have are some metrics to guide me - at least to begin with.

Here are the keyword lessons that I have discovered so far:

1. The best niches are ones with commercial intent (people doing searches because they intend to buy)

It makes sense sense to opt for a Adesnse niche where there’s ‘commercial intent’ - put simply, visitors intend to buy what they are searching for. There’s no point in creating a niche where there is little or no commercial intent - ‘how long does it take to boil and egg’ for example. It is unlikely that someone who is searching for ‘how long does it take to boil and egg” actually wants to buy anything which means you will not get many clicks on your sponsored advertising. Eggs perhaps? Or saucepans? Or maybe cookery books?

Well you can check commercial intent by using a tool like Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find out how many people advertise for this key word. You need to look at the little bars under the ‘Advertiser Competition’ column. If the bars have very little green, this means that there are not many advertisers for this keyword - so there is probably little commercial intent. If there’s lots of green, that means that there a plenty of advertisers - so there must be a demand for your chosen keyword or phrase.

Another check is to do a search on Google. If no advertisements come up - it’s a good indication that your chosen niche is rubbish from a potential earnings point of view.

And even if there are advertisers, they are likely to pay a low amount of money for each click - less than $1 (which means that you get a few cents per click). Common sense should tell you that niches like eggs, saucepans or cookery books are not going to be high payers. There’s more about this aspect of keyword research in a moment.

RULE ONE - CHECK YOUR KEYWORD OR PHRASE FOR COMMERCIAL INTENT / INTENT TO BUY

2. Choose keywords or phrases that have a decent cost per click (CPC)

Following on from the last point, you need to choose a niche were the adverts pay a decent cost per click (CPC). There are many websites that give you information on top paying keywords. In truth, no one knows exactly what keywords will pay. All the tools are estimates. Spyfu is one tool you could try. Some people say it’s good, others say it is rubbish. This uncertainly is why keyword research can never be considered an exact science.

Here are a few examples of reported high paying keywords (not from SpyFu - just from a Google search to give you an idea of the variations that can be found - according to SpyFu, the figures are a lot less):

Mesothelioma $100
Asbestos lawyer $100
Cord blood $41
Vioxx attourney $38

Very tempting eh? But here’s my first word of caution: don’t bother going for the highest paying keywords because these are usually targeted by many aspiring internet marketers who want to make money online, and many professional internet marketers too. They are overcrowded, and you will need to spend an enormous amount of time creating an enormous site and probably still wont get anywhere near the top - in other words, they are difficult to attract traffic due to excessive competition.

So the big question is, what CPC should you go for?

Generally, if your niche has an Adwords CPC average of $2-3, it should be profitable if you have decent traffic - say 4,400 per month or 146 per day, providing you get to the number one or two spot on the SERPs. $2-3 is not high enough to attract the masses where you would run into enormous competition problems, but is not too low for you you to require an absolutely massive traffic volume to become profitable.

Here is a list showing you the type of words that come under this category:

Accounting software
Acne
Art school
Asic design
Canada fishing
Cash drawer
Casino
Charity

The problem with this list is that each item will have a huge number of searches, and lots of competing websites. So will be very difficult for you to get to the top of the Google rankings for any of these terms. You will need to investigate further - more about that in a moment.

RULE TWO - LOOK FOR KEYWORDS THAT PAY $2-3 PER CLICK

3. Searches, traffic and competition

Searches (are people searching for your keyword?)

A keyword that receives no searches is worthless. A keyword which receives just 10 to 100 searches each month may be very profitable (if the CPC is high enough). Your first task is to find out how many searches are made each month for your keyword or keyword phrase.

Use the Adwords keyword tool to determine the number of searches per month. Also remember, the top keywords with hundreds of thousands of searches a month will have the stiffest competition - there’s more about that later.

Traffic (are people visiting your website?)

Traffic is how many people actually visit your website or blog. Once you know how many searches are made for your keyword you can find out how much traffic you will get if your site appears on the very the first page  of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages - Google, Yahoo or MSN). The nearer you are to the top, number one placement will determine the % of these monthly searches you will receive. You need to aim for the number one spot, or maybe number two. Generally, you will find that most of your traffic will come from Google, even if you get the number one spots in all three major engines, Yahoo and MSN tend to result in less traffic.

The best way to get to the number one or two spot in the SERPs is to choose a niche with low page competition - more about this next.

Page Competition (how tough is it to get to the number one spot?)

So let’s assume that you have found a keyword phrase “diet”  and it is shown to have an estimated monthly search volume of 450,000.

That is a huge amount of traffic that you could have visit your site each month and all the visitors will be looking for diets - lots of commercial intent. So this must be a good word right? Wrong! To create a site based around ‘diet’ would not be a good idea. The problem with just using these keyword, “diet” is that there are a many websites and blogs that use these this keyword, hence, you will face a large amount of competition each time a person searches “diet” in one of the search engines.

You can check the competing website count by typing an exact match search into Google -  “diet” (including the quotes) into Google.com yields 177,000,000 results, aka, one hundred and seventy seven million competitors for that keyword phrase!

So, how do you decide what is a good keyword phrase relevant to your topic, which will not have too much competition for it? One way to accomplish this is to drill down for related keywords and then do a search on Google for each one. The number of pages that Google returns from the search is the number of competitors you will face for that keyword phrase.

A worked example

For example, if you do a search for “dog diet”, there are only 224,000 competing web pages (which is still a lot though).

(At this point, I think the Market Samurai tool would come in useful as it analyses which of the top websites have been optimised for the key word. If they have not been optimised, then you might be in with a chance if you create a largish, fully optimised site. I am currently experimenting with Market Samurai.)

Let’s go with “dog diet” for the moment. Remember Rule One - Does the key word have commercial intent? Check this by using the Adwords Keyword Tool. Look at the Advertiser Competition column. You’ll find that the bar is nearly all green, so there are lots of advertisers out there. Good news!

But what about searches - how many people actually do a search for “dog diet” every month? Again, the Adwords Keyword Tool will give you the answer - 4,400 per month or 146 per day. Not bad. If you can get on the first page of the Google rankings for “dog diet”, you should get a good share of the 146 daily visitors and a few clicks on your ads hopefully, as you know that some of the visitors will be looking for dog diet products.

But how much will each click pay? To find out, you need to use the SpyFu tool. SpyFu says that advertisers will pay $0.49 - $1.36 every time someone clicks on one of their “dog diet” ads. Of course, you as a publisher will only get a proportion of this - so your income per click for this keyword could only be a few cents. Another tool you can use is the Google Adwords Traffic Estimator which will also show you the CPC figures. It also has a green bar indicator for search volume. To work out the profit potential of your niche, you should go for something that has a pretty good search volume (as indicated by the amount of green in the bar - unfortunately Google does not disclose actual numbers of searches made by users on particular terms) and a CPC of between $2-$3.

So, let’s do the metrics (not very scientific I’m afraid):

146 potential visitors per day (assuming you are on page one of Google)
Out of that, you may get say 50 visitors
Out of the 50 visitors you may get say 5 clicks on your ads
Assuming you get 20 cents per click, your income per day is going to be about $1.
Your monthly income will be $30 (or about £18)
Your yearly income will be $365 (or about £200)

Hummm…. you are going to need a lot of websites like this to make a living out of Adsense! You would need 50 websites like this to earn £900 per month. If each website takes you say 2 days to create - that’s 100 working days for you. (Read on if you think this doesn’t sound too bad.)

Of course the trick is to find a niche which gets a decent amount of traffic, has good commercial intent, has low webpage competition, and a cost per click of at least $2-3.

In the example above, let’s assume that you are getting $1 per click (the stated estimate will be higher - $2-$4 - remember that you only get about half of what the advertisers pay Google, assuming that Google thinks your site is good).

146 potential visitors per day (assuming you are on page one of Google)
Out of that, you may get say 50 visitors
Out of the 50 visitors you may get say 5 clicks on your ads
Assuming you get $1 per click, your income per day is going to be about $5.
Your monthly income will be $150 (or about £90)
Your yearly income will be $1825 (or about £1,100)

Hummm…. You would now need only about 10 sites to £900 per month. If each website takes you say 2 days to create - that’s 20 working days for you.

RULE 3 - FIND A KEYWORD OR PHRASE THAT HAS A DECENT AMOUNT OF MONTHLY TRAFFIC, LOW WEBPAGE COMEPETION AND A COST PER CLICK OF $2-3.

Conclusion

Let’s look at the three rules again:

RULE ONE - CHECK YOUR KEYWORD OR PHRASE FOR COMMERCIAL INTENT/INTENT TO BUY

Make sure that people come to your website with the intent to buy.

Free tools for checking commercial intent:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool -  look for the amount of green in the bars in the ‘Advertiser Competition’ column.

Google search - see what ads come up

RULE TWO - LOOK FOR KEYWORDS THAT PAY AT $2-3 PER CLICK

Free tools for checking cost per click:

SpyFu - gives you an estimate of much advertisers will pay Google each time an ad is clicked

Google Adwords Traffic Estimator which will also show you the CPC figures. It also has a green bar indicator for search volume. To work out the profit potential of your niche, you should go for something that has a pretty good search volume (as indicated by the amount of green in the bar - about 2000 - 3000 searches per month is average) and a CPC of between $2-$3.

RULE 3 - FIND A KEYWORD OR PHRASE THAT HAS A DECENT NUMBER OF SEARCHES, LOW WEBPAGE COMPETITION AND A COST PER CLICK OF $2-3

Free tools for checking searches:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool -  look approximate monthly search volume columns. If the search volume niche is low, say 1000 per month, the niche will only be profitable if the CPC is high. If the search volume is reasonable, say more than 10,000 searches a month you can go for a lower CPC.

Free tools for checking competition pages:

Google search - check the competing website count by typing an exact match search into Google and checking the page competition figure:

< 100,000 - worth looking at
< 50,000 - definitely worth looking at
< 20,000 - great prospect
< 10,000 - a real find (providing the pay per click is at least $2-3)

In short,  the characteristics of a profitable niche for adsense are:

• Commercial interest
• Keywords that pay more than $2 per click
• A high monthly search volume -  2000 clicks per month is good if you are looking in the $2-$3 range (although anything more than 300 clicks per month for the perfect keyword combination in the domain is pretty interesting if bid prices are high.)
• Low page competition - at the very least below 100,000 competition pages and preferably much lower

Tags: adsense, competition, cpc, intent to buy, keywords, niche, porfitable, searches, traffic

Domain names are important because search engines use them to help determine if a site is relevant.

With my first experiments with domain names, I went for the cheapest - the .info and .co.uk names for example. Having now read much more about the subject, I now realise that this was a big mistake and from now on, I will always invest a bit more and buy a .com name. Why? Well there are a two main reasons:

1. .com names are the heavyweights of the domain name world. They cost more, but they are better recognised and if you ever want to sell a site in the future, a .com domain will allow you to sell on at a premium. I like the analogy that a website is a bit like bricks and mortar property - the better the address, the more you can charge.

2. There is a rumour that Google prefers .com names. I’m not sure if this true or not, but anecdotal evidence from my own projects is that .com names seem to get listed quicker. I’ve heard that Google considers .info names as spammy, as internet marketers then to buy these to create niche websites as they are cheap.

Choosing the words for your name

When you choose a domain name, you need to include your keyword, preferably at the start of the name. My preferred choices are as follows:

1. www.keyword.com (a single word - it’s most unlikely you will get this!)

2. www.keywordkeyword.com (a keyword followed by another keyword)

3. www.keyword-keyword.com (keywords separated by hyphens - use only one, or two at the most. If you have too many keywords it sounds spammy)

4. www.keywordsomething.com (’something’ is an extra word - could be a word like online, news, info, articles, reviews etc)

5. Any of the above options but using .net instead.

A quick word here on length - it is rumoured that Google thinks that long domain names are spammy - so keep them short and snappy. Never use long phrases such as www.goodwaysofmakingmoneyonline.com as these sound very suspicious and I would opt for a shorter version if possible.

Tags: choose, domain, name

On of my tasks yesterday was writing articles for my financial niche website. I am quite excited about this site at the moment as it was only launched a week ago, and has already been indexed by Google and is receiving traffic from the internet. Interesting, this is the first site I have developed following the using one of the The Thirty Day Challenge methods for promoting your site - Social Book Marker. This is a method for submitting your website to any number of the big social networking sites such as Stumble Upon and Digg. The amazing thing is that it seems to work - my lastest site has been indexed by Google and is receiving traffic in a week - far quicker than some of the sites that I developed a few months ago (having said that, it is quite a large site already and has over 30 pages of content). It also has a .com domain name. Caroline Middlebrook recommends using .com names over any other as some of the cheaper names can sound spammy and off putting for Google. I will be doing this from now on.

Anyway, back to the subject of this article which is how to write articles for the internet. Here are a few guidelines.

1. My articles are all unique. Google know is an article is not unique and will penalise the site containing the article.

2. I will do research on the internet and copy and past articles of interest into a Word document. I will then sit down and rewrite these articles word for word. It’s the only way. My websites are all useful, informative websites that visitors will learn from. I do not publish rubbish.

3. I will make sure my keywords are included liberally throughout my article - but not too liberally - that sounds spammy.

4. I aim for 250 to 400 words.

5. All my articles are grammatically correct and spell checked.

6. How long does it take to write an article? Well it depends on the complexity of the subject matter really. If it’s simple, I can re-write a 300 word article in about half an hour.

7. One good internet marketing tip is the Copyscape website where you can check if website content has been plagiarised. If you are rewriting articles, it’s quite a good idea to publish the article and then run the page through Copyscape to make sure that you have not retained too much of the original article which might result in it being considered ‘duplicate’ content by Google.

Today I am setting up my new Blog called Internet Marketing Word. So it seems appropriate for my first ever blog post to document the process.

First, I am amazed at how simple it is to set up a Wordpress website ( I will be using the words website and blog interchangeably). It has been made easy because my host provides automated Wordpress installation, so I don’t need to go through the rather complicated sounding manual installation process.

PHASE 1 - GETTING GOING

Here are the initial steps to follow to get up and running.

1. Register a domain name - mine is www.internetmarketingword.com.

2. Install Wordpress using Heart Internet’s Wordpress installation facility (if your host does not provide this facility, you will have to do it manually - there are plenty of tutorials on U Tube).

3. Set up an email - info@internetmarketingworld.com.

4. Type in www.internetmarketingword.com into your browser address bar.

5. Follow the instructions to complete the Wordpress installation (make sure you make a note of the password - at the very least, check the ‘remember password’ box).

6. Create a site profile in FTP Surfer (my favourite FTP transfer tool) ready to receive plugins (more about that in a moment).

So that’s all there is to it! You are now ready to start creating your blog or website.

PHASE 2 - LEARNING ABOUT WORDPRESS AND WHAT IT CAN DO

Phase 2 is where you discover how clever Wordpress is and how it makes traditional website design using Dreamweaver look like building steam engines. One of the first things you will discover is the power of Themes, Plugins and Widgets.

Themes allow you to change the whole look of your website in an instant. And the really cool thing is that there are loads of websites that offer free WP themes.

Plugins and Widgets are clever bits of code that you can use to do almost anything you can imagine. Simple examples include forms, calendars, stats etc.

Phase 1 and Phase 2 will be the subject of more detailed posts to follow.