Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

Isn’t it funny but with the age of blogging so many of the skills that actually went into building the World Wide Web are being left behind and forgotten about. It wasn’t all that long ago that in order to have a website you had to learn at the very least HTML and what DNS meant. Nowadays with hosted blogging accounts on Blogger and Word Press it is entirely possible to forget all about that, to many publishing content on the web has become nothing more than word processing. Whilst all this is great for those that want nothing more than a place to write, for those of us interested in creating popular websites that attract search traffic then there is still the need for coding the correct way. To give yourself the best possible chance that means valid xHTML and CSS coding.

Website layout used to be all about tables, horrible nasty things that bloated your source with far more tags than could possibly be good. It was a horrible mix of content and layout. This wasn’t in fact what tables were originally for but because they could be used to provide some sort of rigid structure to your design they were hijacked and used. One major down side of using these tables was that they tending to push the content that the search engines were interested in (i.e. your text) to the bottom of your source. Whilst even today the search engines aren’t all that bothered about valid code (there are many experts who predict that at some point it will matter though), they do take into account where your text appears relative to other text in the source. Taking advantage of the many positioning attributes built into CSS it’s possible to create source that gets your text content where it should be, right at the top. Taking it to the next level and using xHTML instead of HTML offers even more benefits.

The Advantages Of xHTML Over HTML
If you can write nice clean, valid HTML source then you are on your way to getting your webiste viewed by more people.

Cross-Browser Compatibility – By using valid xHTML you have a much better chance of a browser rendering your page the way you originally intended. The days of writing differnent source for Internet Explorer and Netscape are days many of us would prefer to forget.

Portability – By using valid xHTML your web page can be reformatted to be viewed on PDA’s, mobile phones and many other portable devices that have browsing capabilities.

Cleaner Coding – xHTML is a strict language, where as HTML has recommendations, xHTML has requirements. Although this might seem like a pain what it actually means is that you have much easier to maintain source. The easier something is to change the more likely we are to keep it up to date.

It All Sounds A Bit Complicated?
With the new generation of hosted or “I’ll just download a template” (I’m certainly guilty of that one) website owners then these are skills that many people just don’t have. Either get ready for a lot of reading or hire somebody to do it for you! For example one of my regular readers (SEO Optimization) runs a webiste called xHTML Coding where they will create valid xHTML static code from any design you can supply from only $60. Alternatively if you prefer to use Word Press then for only $110 you can get a valid xHTML template. Relatively speaking then that’s pennies for something that will have a long term affect on your websites performance. If it’s a choice between a week/months advert or something that has long term benefits I know what I’d choose!

Update: I’ve just found out that xHTML Coding will also create original designs, just contact them to get a quote.

I installed the top stripe ad after reading about it somewhere (I think it was John Chow but can’t be sure). Anyway I’ve been running it for a little while now and can conclude that it’s a waste of time! Click through rates are really bad, some of the worst I’ve ever seen from any advertising method I’ve used actually. Not only that but 3 people have felt the need to fill in the contact form and complain about it. Where this is unusual is that it only shows for the first 3 page loads on the make money online dot net (my idea was to target search traffic, not regular readers) so the people who have complained are not complaining because it’s a recent addition but instead are complaining because they just don’t like it!

If you want to make money from your websites then you are going to want to sell advertising, and promote affiliate deals etc amongst your content. There has to be a line though where advertising starts to have a big impact the rest of your websites content (for me personally that line is uncontrollable pop-ups and pop-unders). Just to show that I do listen occasionally the stripe ad is gone (it’s got nothing to do with the appalling CTR, honestly! )

Funnily enough this wasn’t one of those websites that takes up too much time for too little a return (well it is actually but I have too much fun writing it to drop it). I didn’t have time to post yesterday because I was sorting out a few things the real media, not bloggers but those people that write for newspapers and do the radio and things like that. I’m not sure how much affect real world coverage has these days (it’s a been a long time since anything was written about one of my websites in the press) but I’ll let you know of any traffic spikes and that sort of thing.

Anyway, a friend of mine thought it would be a good idea to get some local press coverage of the ICU Child Monitoring product I’ve been involved with. A rather magnificent press release was crafted with help of one of his friends and yesterday was when it went out. In all honesty I expected that perhaps the local newspapers might copy and paste it as well as maybe a couple of the local newsy style websites. I wasn’t expecting the radio stations to pick up on it at all but 2 have.

I was in this morning giving some sound bites for their news slot about the dangers of Bebo, Facebook etc Child Monitoring and then trying to explain exactly what Trial Pay was. Honestly I sounded like a complete cock. ICU, child safety and things like that are fine but as soon as it comes to explaining what Trial Pay is in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a dodgy car sales man I can’t do it. Knowing I’d screwed up I dropped the news editor an e-mail later with a link to this page on the Trial Pay website. Funnily enough she agreed completely, it’s such a simple concept but you try and explaining it to somebody. I think that she’s going to just give out the Trial Pay web address as an explanation, I hope so anyway because it will save my blushes!

Imagine the scene, you’ve done your keyword research, you’ve bought the domain, you’ve created the unique content, you’ve created a nice link profile, you’ve added your monetisation methods and you wait. Two months later you’ve still not made any money. Six months later you’ve still not made any money. 12 months later and the page rank of 2 you had has long since gone with no sign of a return and your site is all but nowhere in the SERPs, you’ve still not made any money. The trouble is that every week you’re going to the effort of pumping out some new content because you know it’s a niche that has potential. At what point do you call it a day and put your time towards doing something more productive?

The trouble is that even with the best keyword research in the world some niches are more competitive that any raw keyword data can show, others are a magnet for a Google slap. Whilst hosting and domain registration is so cheap that it’s never a concern your actual time can be very valuable. At some point you have to realise that your website isn’t going to make money and that it’s time to try something new. If your website has any standing then you can even use it to provide one way links into your next project, if not then you may be best abandoning it altogether. The important lesson here is that if you’re serious about making money online you can’t afford to be wasting your time on something that gives you no ROI.

Just writing this has been a wake-up call for me, I’m of now to go and have an early spring clean. Straight of the top of my head I can think of 3 domains that I’m updating regularly that are earning me next to nothing. On the other hand I can think of another 3 that make good amounts of money that I leave on auto-pilot because they are earning money. There’s something wrong with that!

Sorry if people are getting bored with the link building posts but I tend to write about on here what I’m doing for myself. At the moment I’m spending a lot of time gaining new links, more links = more traffic = more money. I’ll try and mix things up a bit tomorrow.

Anyway, what if I told you there was a way of creating some simple content on your website that once established ran itself, not only that but you could submit that page to some very good authority websites and that it would provide link bait to other websites for years to come. Sounds great, it could be yours for a single low payment? You’d probably think I was trying to sell you some crappy e-hype product that actually delivers sweet FA? You’d be wrong.

OK, so what the hell am I talking about? A webcam. That’s it, nothing more complicated than a bog standard computer webcam. This is something I discovered by accident on my very first website and it’s something I’ve used over and over, it has never failed me yet. Buy yourself a webcam, point it out your window, get yourself some free webcam software to upload to your website and create a simple page with a bit of information about what it is pointing at and some of the things you might see. The thing is that by nature people are nosey, we like the idea that we are spying on people. I remember when I first set mine up I was still working for a company. Several of my colleagues had asked about my online activities and had nearly fallen asleep with my talk of visitors and adverts and writing software. The second I mentioned my webcam though they would brighten up. “Let’s have a look”. “Have you seen this, Paul has got a webcam?”. Quickly following by the URL being e-mailed around to hundreds of people.

There are also plenty of WebCam listing websites out there that are just crying out for new cams as well. It’s true that some will try and frame your page but for the most part it doesn’t matter because it’s still your ads that are showing, it’s still your links to other parts of your website that people will follow. Those that don’t frame can provide you with valuable one way links for very little effort. Unlike many directories these webcam directories can also provide you with real amounts of referral traffic, forget 1 or 2 a day, 50-60 visitors is not uncommon. When you get these sort of figures from a few different referral sources it doesn’t take long for your websites popularity to grow. You’ll also be surprised to learn how many webmasters are willing to link to a webcam. Perhaps my best example is my garden webcam, it does nothing but point at our garden bird table. Over the 3 years that it has been running literally hundreds of bird watching blogs and websites have linked to it. It’s link bait gold that costs me nothing more than a bag of wild bird seed a month.

I suppose my biggest webcam success came when the garden webcam ended up featuring as a webcam of the day on a national radio station in the UK. That 1 link alone resulted in over 1800 page views in 1 day (3 hours to be precise) and enough Adsense revenue to buy my camera twice over.

Even my office webcam which points at nothing more than a street has proved to be great link bait helping no end the linkability of a rather boring business website.

But what if you don’t have anything interesting out the window? How about getting creative, there are hundreds of webcam images out there that aren’t getting the exposure they deserve, why not “help” out (or get naked, that tends to work quite well too !

So unless you’re very new here I guess you know that I’m not a big fan of directories, I have used them in the past for a link source and the amount of traffic they have delivered has been very poor at best. However there are 1 or 2 out there that are known to have ranking benefits, Yahoo and DMOZ namely.

However gaining 1 way links appears to be getting harder all the time so I thought it was time to have a look at some of the directory options again. This might surprise you but it’s actually much easier to spot if a directory is high quality or not (in terms of the search engines anyway) now. Ever since Google slapped link sellers and reduced the page rank of many directories it had the adverse affect of leaving webmasters without any doubt of where it was worth getting a link from. As thousands of rubbish directories were hit hard, losing page rank and being removed from the index others were left to stand out like a beacon of quality amongst the sea of shit.

www.abilogic.com – Was once a PR5, now a 4. One of the very few directories I’ve used that had a positive effect on SERPs (all be it with Yahoo rather than Google). They offer free listings or to spped things up you can buy 5 deep links for $14.95.

www.octopedia.com – This is one of those very rare directories that has actually gained PR in recent times. By paying a one time membership fee of $25 you get 2 submissions (each of which can contain up to 8 links). A flat structure really helps this directory benefit their customers.

www.platinax.co.uk/directory/ – Holding on to their PR5 you can buy a lifetime link in this directory for £14.95. This one seems to have ducked under Google’s radar for now.

www.sezza.com – Having a home PR5 you have to pay a 1 time review fee of $14.95 to get a listing here. Look carefully before buying though as some categories pass PR much better than others.

www.yeandi.com – A little gem this one. Expect to wait 6-8 weeks for a review of your free submission, alternatively you can speed things up by paying $20. Even better PR seems to flow freely through this PR4 directory.

There you have it, 5 directories that are worth adding to your link building strategy.

Ever since I wrote my post about having a launch pad to boost any new websites you create I’ve been running an experiment. All I’ve done is create a couple of totally new blogs but instead of going through my usual approach of giving them some serious link love from my more established websites I’ve left them on their own. It’s been quite interesting for me to see that each of them has performed almost identically in terms of the traffic that Google has sent them.

So you start a brand new website, one of the first things you want to do is let the search engines know about it. A sitemap is one of the best ways of doing this, so 5 minutes later I had a sitemap that I submitted to Google’s webmaster tools. 2 days later I check and I can see that some of my pages are now included in Google’s index, excellent. Now in the first week my website starts to rank, quite well actually and I’m starting to see nice amounts of organic Google traffic heading my way. It looks like all systems go.

Jump forward to 2 weeks later, all of a sudden my website is no longer ranking anywhere and the traffic has all but disappeared. Has my website been penalised for something? What’s going on?

What I Think Is Happening
I think that Google loves fresh content. However because it’s so new it knows that it will have a very bad linking profile (if any) and so it’s rank is based almost entirely on it being brand new content. As the days pass your fresh content goes from being new to aged and at this point Google starts paying attention to who and what is linking to it. Don’t have any/many quality related links and you slip all the way down the SERPs.

How Do You Stop It?
There are 2 approaches I’ve found that work. The first is just to pump out more fresh content, that way you always have something that is fresh in the eyes of the search engines. It also helps if you can link back to some of your older content with your newer content, remember that your internal linking structure is just as important as your external linking structure. The big problem I’ve found with this approach is that after many months with none of your pages getting good links from external sources then Google seems to flag your domain as being crap (This is just my experience). At that stage it doesn’t matter how much new content your write you’ll find it very hard to attract organic Google traffic.

The second approach requires a little more work. You’ve heard of link building, well this is where it matters. I’ve found that even by having 4-5 new links to your new content every week or so can help to maintain it’s position in the SERPs. To keep your content in it’s original position for a month or 2 is not that hard with just those few links, it’s much easier to put that little bit of work in early rather than have to try and boost your content later when it’s fell of the SERPs altogether.

So after all the fuss of the last much delayed page rank update that saw many blogs and link sellers getting slapped by Google who would have thought that they’d slip in a page rank update so early in the new year?

It was certainly a surprise for me but I’ve just gone through all my websites and it looks like an improvement all around. One or 2 pages have dropped from a 5 to a 4 but other than that everything else is up at least a 1, some as much as a jump of 3. Great news for this Blog as well, not the 5 that the page rank prediction tools predict but still an increase to a 3. As the domain and content ages and Google begins to trust me more hopefully it should continue to improve.

Anyway that’s enough about me, how have you got on with this latest page rank update?