If you are reading this then the chance is that you are looking to earn money online. Regardless of the product or service that you are looking to make money from, whether you succeed or fail will often simply come down to whether you rank well on the search engines or not.
For any given search, the websites showing on page one of Google take as much as 95% of all clicks and the top three positions take almost 60-70% of that, meaning that if you manage to dominate Google results for certain relevant keywords, you can earn money online without any problem whatsoever!
The thing that you really need to think of is keywords. I personally believe that too many people don’t give their keywords enough thought and believe that choosing keywords is “obvious” and “easy”. However, people don’t seem to remember that people search in a different way than they speak and so if you are not doing proper keyword research, you can be missing the opportunity of ranking at the top of Google for keywords you haven’t even considered!
I had a client recently who sells fireworks for weddings in London. When I told him to do some keyword research, he said he didn’t need to, he just wanted to rank for the keyword “fireworks”. This, at first glance, can make perfect sense to people and seem like the perfect keyword to rank for. However, in reality, the keyword “fireworks” is going to be incredibly high in competition, making it very hard to rank well on Google, and at the same time it is such a generic search that even if you did rank well for that keyword, it is unlikely that you would earn money online anywhere as much as you would think you would.
The problem here is common. People who want to earn money online think that ranking for the most obvious keyword with the biggest amount of traffic is the simple way forward. The fact is that by using keyword research and certain keyword tools such as Market Samurai, you can find keywords that you would never even have considered that have much less competition but relevant traffic.
Let’s take the fireworks scenario again. People may well search for “fireworks”. However, if they live in Yorkshire, then a London firework company is of no use to them. Therefore, although “fireworks” may have loads of traffic, only a fraction of that is actually relevant to this client.
So, people then refine their searches. Users regularly refine their search three or four times until they actually find a site to click through to. This normally starts with something generic and then gets more specific. That means if you research the specific, longtail keywords, this is where the money is at. So, a much easier keyword to rank for could provide much better quality traffic. Let’s look at a typical user searching for fireworks, it could go something like this:
“Fireworks” – User finds too many companies in the wrong areas, so refines…
“Fireworks London” – User sees companies in her area, but specifically wants wedding fireworks..
“Fireworks London Weddings” – User sees relevant listings but they look above her budget…
“Cheap Fireworks London Weddings” – User sees much more relevant results but notices one advertises pink love heart fireworks which she always dreamed of…
“Cheap Fireworks London Weddings Pink Love Heart” – User sees a selection of websites that really appeals, clicks through and registers her interest.
Without using keyword research tools it is highly unlikely that you will ever find the keywords that are really generating actual business rather than just searches. Therefore, if you want to earn money online, it is essential that you start using keyword research tools right away!
Filed under Keyword Research, Traffic 
I’ve been having a look at the free reports and software that Ryan Diess has been giving out this week in the build up to the launch of his Perpetual Traffic Formula. I didn’t bother downloading his Cherry Picker software as I already have the full version of market samurai which does everything and more that Cherry Picker does. I’ve read people saying that these two software programs give different results, and asking which is most accurate but seeing as you can’t get fully accurate results for this kind of thing anywhere anyway, it seems a bit pointless to worry about that.
The two reports that have come out contain a few interesting stats and some solid bits of content, but most of it wasn’t new to me and won’t be news to anyone who’s done much search engine optimization. He starts with the ‘Perpetual Traffic Report’ showing some stats on the decline of pay per click traffic and a switch back to organic traffic which was (if true) pretty interesting, I have to admit I didn’t realise that sponsered ads got such a small percentage of clicks these days although I don’t do much PPC so that’s not surprising.
Getting to the meat of the first report, he claims that a combination of content, backlinks and activity will boost your rankings but that you MUST do all three and most people just concentrate on the first two. He emphasises that if google doesn’t see activity on your site in the form of comments, feed subscriptions and changing content then they will not rank your site highly. I’m not sure whether this is true, he talks about a google algorithm shift but seeing as google never realeases information like this I am currently taking his claim with a pinch of salt. It seems his course will teach you how to use google tools like feedburner to make it look like your site has a lot of activity, although he’s making the assumption that google uses these tools in it’s website search engine rankings.
Of course, results are king in my book. I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with in his course next week and if implementing it shows the massive gain in traffic that he is claiming it will then he obviously knows what he’s talking about!
The second report, the authority codes, is useful if you don’t know them but they’re not really secret codes they’re just search expressions to find high PR blogs that you can comment on to get links. If you don’t know how to do this then download them by all means.
Filed under Traffic