The Wealth Gang

The great thing about making money online is that it can be done without spending a dime. If you’re looking for the best free blog platform, for instance, you have many options to choose from. By the beauty of open source software, there are many people much, much smarter than me that like to create useful programs for the world to enjoy.

Because of these open source programs, everyday people who have little to no technical know-how can start a website in a matter of minutes. That, I suppose, is a good thing and a bad thing. Because anyone can start their own websites in a matter of minutes, there Internet is full of spam and junky websites. But, I guess it’s the search engine’s job to filter those out and put valuable content accessible.

If you have something interesting to share with the world and you’re ready to start profiting from your very own website, a blog is the easiest and arguable the best way to do that. Even if you don’t plan on “blogging” per say, the blog platform for your website is often an ideal solution. It’s user friendly, easy to use, and search engines love them.

As far as options go, there is always Blogger and WordPress for free sites. If, though, you plan on taking your new website seriously, you’ll want to have your very own website. You can still get the software for free, but you’ll have to pay about $5 a month for web hosting. But that way you completely own the content, you have more control, and you can make money any way you like.

The self-hosted version of WordPress, in this case, is the most popular and favorable option. It is very user friendly and has thousands of templates/themes for you to choose from for free, so you can pick the design you want at the click of a button. Also, if your hosting company provides Fantastico with your hosting package, like HostGator does, you can have your new website up and running in less than an hour. I showed you in a previous post how I did it in less than 15 minutes.

All you have to do is log in to your hosting account, click the Fantstico button, and enter some information about what you want to call your blog. Push install, and BAM – it’s installed. From there you just log in and start typing away to fill up your blog with new content and get that puppy indexed by Google.

Probably the most frequent question I receive has to do with getting a new site listed in Google and getting more traffic. One way, to do this is with long tail keywords. Google has a complex algorithm, and the more competitive the keyword, the harder it is to rank your site or blog post for that keyword.

For one, the age and depth of your website is one of those factors. If you have a new site, you won’t be able to effectively get your site listed on the first page of Google. If you do, it will only be temporary. Some people will try to do this by building a lot of backlinks to their site, but this is only a strategy that is bound to fail — especially in competitive niches. Once a Google sees that a new site is receiving abnormally high backlinks, they will ban you site and leave you with no search engine traffic.

That’s coming from experience, unfortunately.

That’s not to say to focus the foundation of your site on competitive keywords, but you have to think long-term. Do everything in moderation, and build those keyword rich blog posts and meta tags now so 9 months from now you can rank for those highly desirable keywords. Start the aging process now.

Long Tail Keywords — The Key to Instant Search Engine Traffic

Typically, what are known as long-tail keywords are less desirable because there is less traffic. For instance, the keyword phrase, “credit score” probably gets millions of searches a month. If you are competing for that keyword, good luck. You are competing with major companies that have teams of SEO professionals and developers working on making sure they keep their rankings.

What you can do is rank for something like, “how to check your credit score online free.” While something like this may only get a few hundred searches a month, you are more likely to get your site noticed. The long tail typically has less competition and, therefore, Google has no option but to list your site closer to the top of the first page.

There’s something very powerful about long tail keywords that makes it desirable to rank for. Quality Traffic.

The long tail keywords are highly targeted, making those visitors highly qualified. If you are promoting something on that particular web page, you will increase your chances of a conversion because of the quality in traffic. These are people who are actively seeking for a very specific solution or product, and you are giving them exactly what they want.

Just because the long tail does not produce a lot of traffic doesn’t make it worthless. Those are more coveted visitors and, secondly, hundreds of blog posts with long tail keywords can mean thousands of visitors daily. Highly target visitors that you ultimately want. Think long-term as you build your sites to reap the most benefits.

If you have the initiative it takes to make a little extra money in your spare time, blogging for money is not only one of the best ways to make passive income online. It’s one of the best businesses to start, period. But that’s just my opinion.

I probably don’t need to go into the details as to why an online business is such as great business model, but let’s review some of the key biggest benefits:

• Passive Income: With the Internet, you do the work once, and you get paid for it over and over again.
• Residual Income: There are strategies and income methods that will pay you a referral fee. Often times these referral fees are for monthly membership programs, which will pay you over and over again, as long as that person remains a member.
• Make Money In Your Sleep: Regardless if you are working or not, once you have created your “system” it is producing profits for you 24 hours a day. The Internet is never closed for business.
• Part-Time Profits: This is something that anyone with any experience level can get involved with. Stay-at-home moms and high-income earners can spend 45 minutes a day or over the weekend to build their income empire.
• No-Risk: There are not many business that you can start without spending any money out of pocket. If you fail, who cares! You are that much closer to succeeding.

Now, as far as blogging for money goes… I believe it is one of the more powerful ways to make money online. The reason is two fold:

1. Content
2. Relationships

If you like free traffic like I do, then the best way to do that is to please Google with lots of unique content. There’s no better way to put hundreds of pages on the web than by sitting down every day and writing a new blog post. Google loves blogs. Blogs as they stand are Search Engine Friendly.

They are updated regularly, there is already an internal linking system in place, bloggers tend to write about interesting, valuable content, and help the Internet community find the information they need. That’s why Google loves blogs.

Secondly, the great thing about blogging for money is that there it has a loyalty aspect to your blog. Blogs tend to have loyal readers and followers that brings them back to the site regularly. Very few websites have that characteristic.

Loyal readers means you have the opportunity to build a relationship and trust with your readers, which means they are more likely to purchase or try out things you recommend. Secondly, because they are repeat visitors, you have an ability to profit off of them over and over again. Whether that simply means AdSense revenue, selling them your own product, or earning affiliate commissions.

In addition, you get to know who your readers are intimately. That means you can charge higher advertising rates because you know the demographic of your site and the type of things they respond to, and you can communicate with them to make your website better. What better way to make your blog more attractive by asking your readers exactly what kind of information they are looking for.

Which brings up one last point… your readers help create your content. They comments that are left are picked up by Google and may just include keywords that could attract more visitors. Remember that Google likes websites that are updated regularly? Each time someone leaves a comment, that single blog post is updated and Google has fresh information to put in its search results.