Find out who makes $40k per month blogging

So you're trying to earn a crust with your blog, right? Well...here's some inspiration for you!

I just stumbled across Paula Mooney's list of blogger (and webmasters and affiliates) earnings. The figures reported for annual earnings range from the multi-millions at the top to a few tens of dollars at the bottom.

Notable entries are:

• Kevin Ham. $300,000,000 empire with multiple sites including weddingshoes.com. Interesting this one in that it (weddingshoes.com) is a keyword-rich site around a niche with pretty much all links being AdSense links. The content draws people in...and the AdSense sends them elsewhere with Mr Ham making a few cents (or more!) in the middle. Also interesting from an SEO perspective is that the title tag of the home page is just 'Homepage'. And there are no META keywords! So he builds sites like that and still makes $300,000,000!?!?! Sheesh.
  
  
• Steve Pavlina who says he makes about $40k per month from his blogging activities
  
  
• The inspirational Darren Rowse of Problogger.net clocking in at around $360,000 per year.
  
  
  
• Grant from Million Dollar Project who is on his way to reaching the goal implied by his blog's title...reporting annualised income of $981. Go Grant!! Actually, he reports that part of his income has been generated by commenting on Paula's list. (So, yes, I commented too!)
  
  
  

So...even the small guys can get on her list! Of course, the key to earnings is content and targeted traffic through lots of exposure. And as Paula quotes Yaro Starak..."All I can say about this is that it pays to talk about how much money you make online if you want exposure."

In which case, you'll be wondering what I earn from this blog. That's not something that I've calculated yet. No, honestly. But when I have, you'll be the first to know!

Free keyword research guide : WordTracker

Click to download

When you create content for your website or blog it is vital to include keywords within your content that your readers will use when searching for your content. In other words, you need to optimise your content using the most popular keywords that are appropriate to your product or service.

But how do you know what those magic keywords are? Which ones will make the difference between you appearing at number 1 in Google and number 10. (Research shows that the drop-off in clicks from the number 1 to results further down the page is exponential).

The key to success in building the best, most optimised content is to carry out keyword research before you start writing. There are a number of tools out there that can help, but one of the best is WordTracker. They have a database of over 330 million keywords with statistics on each.

Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client's business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors.

As well as telling you how many searches are carried out for a bunch of keywords, it will also tell you how competitive a keyword is - allowing you to go after high volume, low competition niche keyword phrases, thereby increasing your chances of appearing higher up the search results pages.

They have a free keyword research tool which you can use to test their service and a free downloadable keyword research guide (PDF).

I've found it a great service. And with more and more competition out there grabbing visitors away from your site, optimising your content for search is vital if you're going to get your product or service in front of the right people.

Top 10 tips for SEO

Well...11 tips actually...you get one extra for free...ok, so they're all free...anyway...

I recently joined Smorty, a blog advertising brokerage, and found this easy guide to SEO on their site which has 11 great tips for search engine optimising your site.

It's nicely written (especially for beginners) and has lots of links to great, practical tools to help you optimise your site such as a keyword density checker (has a nice keyword cloud view), duplicate content checker.

I particularly like their keyword suggestion tool which, given a URL, identifies the theme of the page and then suggests keywords on the same theme, ordered by the volume of searches per month for that keyword. Very nice.

The article is well worth a read. In fact, I wish I'd written it myself!

Shopping cart software

Some time ago I was looking for a shopping cart package to use for a friend's online store I was building (Coochi - they sell baby bathing aprons). I looked at a whole load of packages but none of them really ticked the box as to what I needed, so I ended up building my own.

I'm sure I included Ashop commerce at the time of my review but I recently re-visited them as once again, I was looking at alternative shopping cart software. Back then it didn't grab me, but they must have upgraded since then and I have to say that what they are offering now is impressive.

As well as a shopping cart which is easy to use for the consumer, the admin system is great. It offers everything you'd expect:

• category management
• order processing
• customer management
• gift certificates
• custom templates

but also has some great advanced features like:

• product feeds for submitting your product catalogue to shopping.com, Google base and others
• accounting package integration to QuickBooks and MYOB

It's also nice to see that they pay attention to producing a shopping cart that is search engine friendly.

You can see the admin system and a demo store on their website and they also offer a free 10 day trial, so if you're currently on the lookout for a shopping cart, it's well worth a look.


This has been a paid review - and I’ve given my honest opinion about the Ashop commerce service

Google "launches" (shhh) behavioral targeting...or not, as the case may be

Not if you ask Google, that is, since it is trying to distance itself from the term behavioral targeting. But what they are doing amounts to something not a million miles from it though...stitching together different search queries to produce search results that become increasingly focussed, based on the combined terms used in the different queries.

Try searching for Paris and then hotel. You'll notice that on the second search, the ads are for hotels in Paris.

As Enquiro reports, the launch of this new functionality was kept low key. There were a couple of articles written about it on ClickZ and SearchEngineLand.

Is this behavioral targeting? Sounds to me like it is. But as Reuters reported, Susan Wojcicki, Google vice president of product management for advertising is distancing Google from this term. Reuters quote her saying:

"That is not something that we have participated in, for a variety of reasons," Wojcicki told reporters at a briefing at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

"We believe that task-based information at the time (of a user's search) is the most relevant information to what they are looking at," she said. "We always want to be very careful about what information would or would not be used."

Although on the face of it, this is a useful technology, I'm sure there are many people out there who will become even more uneasy about their privacy and just how much the mighty Google knows about them.

Paid submission...a rip off?

I receive a whole host of search engine related emails and feeds and a common recurring theme from one of them is the old 'Get listed in 48 hours, GUARANTEED'. I've never believed in paid submission to search engines - if you optimise your site properly, you don't need to.

There are some tips & techniques that you can use to get your site into search engines quickly which I'll post on soon. One of them that I've used is to add your site's feed to your personal MSN or Yahoo! page. Effectively, you're telling these search engines about your site...and a short while after adding your feed, you'll start to show up in their results pages. That, coupled with adding a Google sitemap should have you well on the way to being indexed.

What techniques do you use to get listed quickly? Have you ever used a paid submission service? And has it been worth the cash? Leave a comment and let me know.

Choosing the right domain name

Selecting the right domain name for your latest online venture is a major choice you'll need to make...and one which you should spend some time mulling over.

There are a couple of schools of thought worth noting here:

Keyword-rich domains
On the one hand, your domain name could contain search keywords that you are targetting in your niche - for example, www.unique-gift-ideas-shop.com which sells...um...unique gifts. There is some debate over how much having search keywords in your domain helps. From my perspective it isn't the best choice if you're trying to build a brand. After all, flickr isn't called online-photo-sharing.com is it?!

Brand / uniqueness
Another approach is to go down the brand route - build your brand around a unique name (for which, of course, the domain name is available). The down side of this is naturally that when you start out, no one will be searching for your name. But if you structure your site properly from a content hierarchy / SEO perspective and ensure your pages are appropriately optimised (good title tags, keywords in h1 tags etc) people should start to find you. Of course, you'll probably need to work a bit harder to get your brand out there, but once word of mouth starts, you'll begin to pick up inbound links and your rankings in the search results will start to gain ground.

If you plump for the brand route, the next decision has to be a name itself. Businesses can spend (literally) millions on this but it's not necessary to do so. I found a nifty set of domain tools that might at least give you some inspiration - I like the six letter random domain names which have inspired me. The page shows different domains every time you refresh it. Many of them are unpronounceable, but if you persevere you'll find gem or two!

Remember...choosing a domain name is one of the most important things you'll do for your venture. With all that effort you'll put in to building links to it, you'd better make your choice wisely. So take some time.

Let me know how you went about your own domain name choices.

Build links with Jaiku

I just joined Jaiku which, I have to say, beats Twitter with its eyes closed.

Apart from it having a very sweet AJAX interface, it has some nice features which help us SEO-ers. The principle one of which is the ability to add multiple feeds to your Jaiku presence.

Any feeds that you add (which could be feeds from your blog, a Google blogsearch or whatever) show up as entries in your presence with links to the original page...with the title as the link text...all without 'rel=nofollow'. Thanks Jaiku guys, you rock!

So you can build posts with keyword rich titles, pull them into a Jaiku feed and you've got automatic inbound links to your site. Then all you need to do is put your Jaiku presence on your site and once again you've got a nice 3-way link relationship.

It's good to link to LZZR.com

I've just been reading the lzzr.com seo blog with interest. His thoughts on backlinking are worth a read and turn classic site-promotion thinking on its head a bit. Rather than (hmmm...perhaps as well as it better) promoting your own site to gain search equity, promote sites that already link to you. Build their importance and thereby your own by the fact that (more important) sites are already linking to you. Give them some link love and the love will be rewarded.

Of course, you can see both your own visibility in search using the site: operator (like this) and how many sites link to you using the link: operator (like this). By using the latter, you're effectively creating the perfect 3-way link structure which is known to be better than utilising link farms (which of course suck).

But search engines don't generally index their own SERPs (although Netscape results do get into Google SERPs), so LZZR suggests building an intermediate feed of results pages (such as that from Google Blogsearch) that will then itself get included in results.

So in short: add links to feeds of searches that return sites that link to you where ever you can...and watch the love flow in. LZZR suggests places like Squidoo which allows you to publish feeds directly on your lens.

I'll be watching the love with interest and will report back here on this blog.

Website grader - how 'good' is your site?

There seem to be website 'graders' popping up all over the place at the moment. I blogged about BlogJuice the other day and have come across another tool that analyses any site you point it at and gives SEO tips about how to improve it.

It's called websitegrader.com and apart from having a nice AJAX interface and a very wacky 'I'm busy doing stuff' animated icon its results are well laid out. You give it your URL, keywords and competitor sites and it'll give you a score out of 100.

For this site, they gave me 49. Plus some useful pointers that I hadn't noticed already (a couple'a META keyword issues). Interestingly, they also flagged up in a big red box "Website running on blogspot.com" and pointed me to this article about why that's a Bad Thing. Some of the points they make there (like the 301 redirect thing) are valid. But the blogger platform is fine with me right now.

More tags means more pages

I discovered something interesting today. I wanted to see how much visility this blog has in Google so I did a quick search. The results showed something which I hadn't really ever considered...but when you think about it becomes obvious.

There were results in the Google SERPS for pages with titles that I didn't remember writing posts for. Such as 'bloglines' in the snapshot below...



Of course, these pages originate from the tags that I've added to each post. Which (of course) got me thinking...each tag represents an optimisation opportunity since it gives my one post numerous different URLs and titles with appropriately rich keywords. Nice.

Is this something you're using on your own blogs from an SEO perspective?

No more landing pages

I came across an interesting blog the other day extolling the virtues of no more landing pages and it got me thinking. The argument goes (from their blog):

"No more landing pages does not mean no more landing experiences. To the contrary, our point is that the landing page has itself become indiscriminate, boiled down to a one-size-fits-all, single page format. It may be better than nothing — although with many crappy landing pages out there that’s questionable — but we can do much better as marketers."

I guess there is some truth to this. But let's extend this thought a bit further by asking why we online marketers build landing pages in the first place? Of course to increase conversion. But increase it over what? The page that a visitor would find themselves on if the landing page didn't exist of course.

Landing page conversion optimisation is about matching user experience to user expectation. If someone is coming from a search result, make sure the page gives them what they're after. But if the content and (critically) usability design of our main content is good enough then there should be no need for specific landing pages. (Of course SEO is key here...to ensure visitors find the content that is appropriate to their search.) We should look at each page on our sites and ask "what would I do if this was the first page I see?" Does the page lead me down a path (to 'conversion' in whatever sense that may mean for the site).

So I agree with the principles behind the no more landing pages thought. By building great content and focusing on usability and user goals, every page on a site should create a great 'landing experience'.

How juicy is your blog?

Just came across the interesting Blog Juice Calculator. It's a free tool from Text-Link-Ads which gives your blog the once-over and indicates how popular it is. It uses a combination of rankings, inbound links and subscriber numbers from bloglines, technorati, alexa and others.

I'll be monitoring the juiciness of my blog with interest ;o)

Usability & holistic SEO

SEO should never be seen as an activity separable from the build of a website. It should be totally integral to that build - taken into account when defining

- the site architecture (how do I structure the site in a way that search engines will like?)

- the design (should I use graphical headers and if so, how can I make these search-engine friendly?)

- and the copywriting (what keywords should I be including in my copy?).

The guys over at cre8pc.com have some interesting view on web usability and SEO. Including “No matter how hard you try, there is always something wrong with your website“…there are always improvements that can be made to usability that affect conversion, referral and traffic.

Here’ their list of top 10 things that drive visitors crazy - that we should all take note of when designing our sites.

Nice way of looking at keyword research

Rob Taylor runs an internet marketing video blog and has recently posted an interesting alternative to traditional keyword research tools.

He suggests using Amazon.com (not .co.uk) and their ’search inside’ feature. This, for any given book, provides you with a list of ‘Statistically Improbably Phrases‘ (SIP) - these are phrases which Amazon considers significant. It works by looking for phrase matches across all books (that have the ‘Search Inside’ feature) - and where a phrase appears in a large number of books, it is marked as a SIP.

Gathering keyword phrases like this and using them in optimised content could really pick up long-tail searches around particular topics.

View the whole video where he talks about it here.

About me

Hi, my name is Matt Hardy (aka mcrilf) and I'm the guy behind this Its an Online World blog.

I'm 39, married with 4 daughters (yep, you read that right!), I live in the UK and work full time as technology director for a successful marketing agency. I've been involved in the internet marketing business for over 10 years now, so this blog is a culmination of years of experience - learning from successes as well as mistakes.

I have a special interest in SEO and blogging so this blog is aimed at those topics. I will, however, post on general industry news from time to time...it all helps to keep me (and hopefully you readers) up to date on what's happening in this online world of ours.

When I'm not entertaining the kids, working or blogging, I run a couple of other sites: one selling cool baby t-shirts, one selling adult t-shirts and a search engine enabling people to find unique gifts designed by thousands of independent designers. It is the learnings I've picked up from optimising these sites that has fuelled my interest in SEO and added to the experiences recorded on this blog.

I hope you'll get involved in the discussions raised here - subscribe to my feed and please let me know your thoughts by leaving comments where appropriate.