The course is exactly what I have been looking for all this time but I was just to stubborn to submit to a structured learning system that the course offers because I thought all what I needed to do is experiment on my own and try to create my own system. But now I know how difficult it is to do that as most of the time you are lost trying to figure out what to do next which will cost you more time because you are doing absolutely nothing that will benefit your business most of the time.

I guess that is the very first thing that you need to understand with this racket. Internet marketing is a business and as such, it must be approached exactly like a business. You have to invest the time and the money (if you can) to achieve the business goals at the shortest possible time using the appropriate strategies. If you are doing nothing but wonder what to do next most of the time, reading other people’s blogs, hanging around in forums, watching your site stats get that trickle of traffic, waiting for affiliate sales or Adsense clicks, then you are absolutely wasting your time and letting precious money slip out of your hands. Even in online businesses, time is money and once you lose time, you will never get it back.

If you don’t find yourself doing keyword research, writing articles (if you do not outource them yet) and getting SEO backlinks most of the friggin’ time, you are letting time pass by and that means you are not getting closer to your goals. Let’s admit it, we are doing this for the money that will give us that early retirement and the opportunity to improve our way of life and be able to do what we’ve always wanted to do. To achieve this, you have to be willing to put in all the work and that does not mean commenting on other people’s blogs to get backlinks (more on this in the future).

The Keyword Academy Crash Course

If you wish to make significant headway and start making money on the internet at the fastest possible time, you absolutely need to be working with keywords. We all know this is dogma in this business but very few of us are actually doing it right. Court and Mark over at TKA is teaching thousands of their students how to do it right with their brilliant 10-part video course and the best thing about it is it is just 1 dollar for one whole month!!! (UPDATE: The course is now being offered for free on the first month! LOL Can’t get any better than that!)

I don’t like to appear like I am pushing the course too hard (it does have an affiliate program) but I would be remiss in my self-appointed mission to pay it forward if I didn’t. If you are really serious in making money online and in becoming a full-fledged, no-nonsense internet marketer but are still lost in the maze of one $47 e-book after another, I urge you to fork out that 1 dollar (UPDATE: no more forking out $1 since it’s now FREE to join!) to learn all you need to know about using keywords for your online businesses.

How I am doing with the course

I am currently doing the nitty gritty on the first two parts of the course which involves coming up with a keyword list using appropriate keyword research tools and establishing which of those keywords are doable in the competition sense. We all need to do research about the keywords that are applicable to the niches we are looking to get into. And one thing that gets people stuck in their tracks while building on a list is which keywords to actually work with in their site-building, web content and article creation efforts as this matters a lot if you are working on a time frame, say, a few months, within which you wish to see positive results.

You won’t see uniform results with every keyword. You will see better results with some keywords but suck with others. That is normal and has something to do with the nature of search engines which continuously tries to seek out the best and most relevant websites for searchers who are looking for information that relate to the keywords they use.

Now, the more webmasters use the same keywords in building their sites and optimize them for search engines, the more competition is created for those keywords. And the more that happens, the more difficult it is for most of those sites to get traffic from search engines through since you will need to beat more sites to get to the top of the search results.

The tools that I use for looking into keywords don’t involve fancy stuff and are basically composed of three tools that cost nothing. I don’t see myself buying any niche digging tools for now as I am quite satisfied with my current free ones, namely, the Adwords Keyword Tool, a spread sheet program (I use Open Office) and that gray thingie between your ears. More on tools in future posts.

Aside: A Primer on Search Engines (also known as Google)

Search engines do not divulge how exactly they determine which sites are the most appropriate sites to yield in search results but internet marketers have learned through SEO experimentation and practical experience that you don’t really need to know the exact ranking model (I assume it’s highly mathematical) to do well in this business because search engine algorithms are still based on simple human logic. And that logic is largely based on backlinks and relevancy.

Search engines figured out that the best way to judge the relative worth of a website is by evaluating the quantity and more so the quality of the backlinks it gets from other sites along with its relevancy to the topics it is associated with. The usual analogy that you will see in other dumbass blogs like this one is that search engines count backlinks as votes and the more votes it gets the better it spells for the site as far as search engine love is concerned. Relevancy is determined by the contextual value of the site and that is, in large part, assessed in the ranking model by determining what words or phrases are used in anchoring those backlinks.

If you link to this blog using “Article Marketing Strategy” as anchor text then you are putting in a vote for it and increases its rank among other blogs that are of similar nature. Meaning, if people used search using article marketing strategy, and assuming I have enough of the “votes” to land me on the top of the search result pages, you will then most likely find my blog there waiting for that clicky feeling.

—End Aside— (I’m hoping to write an article about how to figure out search engines and why we don’t need to waste a lot of time doing so… )

How I am doing with the course (Continued)

Okay so the past couple of days have been spent in researching for viable keywords using the TKA method. One valuable thing that you will learn with that internet marketing course is how to judge the competition for your keywords and key phrases and it establishes a rule that beginners can follow so they do not lose focus the way so many noobs out there (me included) are losing focus and screwing up their MMO projects’ chances of success.

The most important thing the course teaches you is how to determine which keywords to focus on such that your chances of success is increased within a very reasonable amount of time. This is huge! Because once you determine this aspect of your business, you can then pour all your time in creating the necessary infrastructure to support those keywords. Meaning, you now can focus on putting up the websites, the needed web content, and the all-important backlinks without ever wondering whether or not you are doing it right. Imagine executing SEO campaigns with a sure direction and without that shotgun approach that I know a lot of you are employing because you do not know which SEO strategies will actually work.

With a clear cut keyword research method, you will have that direction which you can go all out for every time.

Right now I’m finding that I am enjoying this aspect of building niche blogs and have spent a lot of hours doing the steps (it’s actually pretty simple) and following the rules in evaluating which keywords to consider and how to judge competition for those keywords. Next step is to get those keyword-powered niches sites up and figure out the efficient ways to create web content.

The 5-Articles-a-Day Pledge

We all know that one of the most difficult aspects of making money on the internet is web content creation. This is such a pain in the ass especially if you are still in the DIY route of things and still don’t have enough resources to be able to afford outsourced article-writing solutions.

Before going into the TKA course, I have been able to create a habit that I believe will serve me well in the months to come. I had been able to write 5 articles a day for a few days until some unforeseen circumstances such a huge ass typhoon plowing through where I am located and destroying properties and internet connection. I digress again.

I honestly doubted I could write 5 articles a day but it is now clear that with just the right frame of mind, you can get a lot of work done if you wanted to. I still have a 9 to 5 job to deal with so I can only spend about 3 to 4 hours on this business every day (more on weekends of course). So I think 5 articles a day is realistic although a little on the difficult side.

I currently can write one 400 to 500 word article in around 45 minutes. So creating 5 will take me about 3 to 4 hours. If I can shave that down further to 30 minutes the better but usually, if it involves topics that I am not familiar with, it might take longer than that but once I get the hang of the topics, I usually can whip out the words in an hour at most. Another web content creation strategy that I can adopt is to shorten the articles to around 300 words since its already sufficient according to Court. Doing that, if I can (I tend to overdo things sometimes), will save me more time.

I think I will be doing 300 words for article submissions and 400 to 500 words for niche blogs, hubs, barrels and lenses (and 2,000 words for this blog hehehe). Five articles a day means 35 articles a week. That should move me quicker but with the amount of work I’m in for, I’m thinking it’s still not enough. Will see what happens when I’ve put up my first niche sites a la TKA.

What needs to be done

I will need to wrap up my keyword competition research and come up with the final solid list of low-competition but potentially profitable keywords and start buying domains and putting up WordPress blogs and minisites on Hubpages and Infobarrels (and maybe Squidoo). After that, I will do research for web content and articles. It’s going to be rough and I might not be able to post here for quite a while. It’s okay my two readers will be fine without me.

If you are also in the TKA course you will know immediately that I am not employing its teachings on this blog. I have not really based my work on this blog on determining which keywords are less competitive. I know I’m in a very tough neighborhood but it does not matter right now. I’m using Grizzly’s gungho approach that with time and enough work, you will see positive results no matter the competition. If you are not in a hurry, I suggest just reading Grizzly’s Make Money Online for Beginners blog and follow what he does. It also works!

A general consensus among MMO experts is that authority sites are the wave of the MMO future. This blog will go in that direction and I hope to see you at the top in couple of years time. In the mean time, continue using keywords for your online businesses, your article marketing SEO campaigns, and let the search engines do the work for you.

Later.

P.S.
If you are looking for a good search engine optimization service provider, please check out this SEO company.

The main search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that I’ve found success in making money on the internet so far is article marketing. I believe the principle behind this method is sound and will never ever go obsolete as long as contextual search algorithms are around. The internet, after all, is information-driven and as long as people use it to find information, marketers who understand and take advantage of this fact will never go out of business.

This blog has two main objectives: 1) To help me focus on my efforts (more on this later) and 2) To help fellow noobs focus theirs.

Let me first be clear that I will never claim that the methods you will find on this blog are the only ways to make money online or to do search engine optimization. There are a bunch of other roads that you can take but I believe that a beginner’s best chances will be in developing their SEO skills to get their online projects ranking well in search results.

This is what it’s all about: increasing your chances of success. Yes, you can go around chasing for social traffic (Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.) rather than search engine traffic but simple logic will dictate that social traffic will not get you the targeted exposure you will need to sell your products or let the information you have find its way to those who truly need it.

This is not to say that you can’t make money with social traffic. You certainly can and will as long as you get tons of them. Most of the traffic you get from social sources will be useless in terms of conversion (visitors who actually buy a product). A visitor on your Facebook page who clicks on a link to your “oil filter” blog will most likely not have the profile of someone who’s more likely to buy than a visitor who clicks on your link found at the top of search results of, say, Google while searching for information on where to buy oil filters!

The Article Marketing SEO Strategy

The method that this blog espouses is based upon two very simple concepts: relevant content and relevant backlinks. You need lots of both.

You need to produce articles not only for your blogs but also for third party sites like article directories and blogs. The more relevant articles that contain backlinks to your sites there are, the more love you get from the search engines.

There are two ways to get those backlinks: 1) Network with other webmasters and bloggers and hope that they give you all the relevant backlinks you need and 2) Create your own network of sites so you can create your own third-party backlinks!

My suggestion is to do them both. There are various ways to accomplish both of them but mostly it will involve some form of article marketing to propagate those links pointing to your sites. This basically involves producing articles (self-written or outsourced) that are relevant to your sites’ or products’ main themes or niches and getting those articles spread around the internet. Now, since the articles will contain backlinks to your sites, it means the more you spread your articles around, the more links you propagate which the search engines love to eat for breakfast.

Article Marketing for Small Niches

The success I’ve had in optimizing my small niche blogs for search engines (e.g. Google) so far involves manual submissions to article directories (EzineArticles, Hubpages, Squidoo, ArticleDashboard, Buzzle, your own network blogs, etc.) only. Yes, it is possible to do a small-scale article submission campaign and get some really positive results. The key here is to find those low-competition niches and target the search engine users using articles for some link juice.

I’m moving up the ladder however and have acquired some tools to help me with my methods and perhaps facilitate a faster means to discover or develop new strategies. The objective is to be able to conduct larger scale campaigns to see how it does with more competitive niches to try and get me some of the bigger bucks. This blog will help me document the experiments I do with those tools.

Focusing your SEO efforts where they count

I have to admit that I am pretty much a lazy internet marketer right now because I am usually pretty slow with my campaigns and am unable to churn out as many web properties (articles, websites, etc.) out there as I would like. I am hoping to change this from here on.

The problem is analysis paralysis. You get so much information out there, a lot of them conflicting in so many levels, that you tend to freeze your ass off trying to make sense of them all. But honestly, while there are a lot of useful and helpful stuff you could read out there (including those of people I consider my mentors), the more you find yourself reading them the less productive you become.

One thing you and I need to learn in this business is that you need to spend most of your time working on your own damn sites and campaigns rather than commenting and posting in other people’s blogs and lurking in forums. Yes, I need to tell this to myself more and I’m hoping that this blog will help me become more productive by becoming my marketing campaigns diary of sorts where I can put my plans and report on my accomplishments relating to those plans.

Now, since one of my objectives is to make some money off of this blog, it will do me good to deliver on those plans and actually deliver something that is of value to the noobs and to fellow internet marketers who may be reading this blog. Be informed though that this blog will not be one of my main priorities as most of my time will be spent on my campaigns and that this blog will mainly serve as a report card of my successes and failures. Please don’t expect any frequent updates on these pages. My priorities must and should lie with my actual marketing efforts.

Develop my own internet marketing methods

The ultimate prize for all these is to develop a marketing plan that I can call my own. You can always find a guru method detailed in step-by-step fashion but I’m finding that it’s pretty difficult to adopt something that isn’t a product of your very own unique personality. The plan is to learn the fundamentals and the logical ideas behind this MMO gig and use those learnings to create my own system.

Note that the operative word here is “system”. I do have to be systematic and I have failed to do do so for the longest time (8 months to be exact since I started dabbling seriously into this). But I am determined, for my own sake, to come up with my own methods that can increase the chances of my marketing efforts and which I can replicate an infinite number of times (at least in theory).

The journey starts with the following general action plans (arranged in no particular order):

• The ultimate objective for every niche that I get into is to become an authority for that niche. Keyword research is essential here and I will always spend some quality time on this. In the coming weeks, I will be enrolling in Courtney Tuttle and Mark Butler’s Keyword Academy’s internet marketing course to help me learn how the pros do it.
• I will need to become more productive at churning out my own articles so I can create more of my own internet real estate which can very useful especially when it comes to providing those valuable backlinks. This is actually one of the toughest assignments of an internet marketing beginner especially if you don’t have the seed money to help you outsource this aspect of your marketing efforts. I’ve bought some really neat tools to help me with article rewriting to help me double my productivity with this. I’m aiming for that time when I can outsource hundreds of my monthly article needs. Although my current earnings can afford me some outsourced articles, I will choose to toil for this for now because I need to learn what works first before I go about outsourcing stuff.
• Will need to ramp up my Web 2.0 campaigns. Not so much as to make money but more so for keyword research and for some good support mini-sites. You can buy one of those fancy keyword tools or you can use a little Web 2.0 (Squidoo, Hubpages and Infobarrels) for your keyword research needs. If you’ve been in this business for some time, you’d know that those keyword tools are nowhere near accurate. It’s not uncommon that you find more traffic coming from a key phrase different from what you are trying to rank for which keyword tools indicate should bring in the top searches every month. Grizzly of Make Money Online for Beginners has indicated that most of his traffic are coming from another keyphrase which no keyword tools are catching. I have also seen this at work with my own projects. Not even Google’s keyword research tool is nowhere near accurate. I currently use Hubpages to tell me which low-competition key phrases to shoot for at the beginning. I need to ramp up my efforts with creating these mini-sites which can also be used to support your sites in terms of backlinks.
• I will try to detail the useful stuff here and try to apply it in making this blog rank for its main keywords. This blog will be a pretty good venue to pay it forward and I will try to share with fellow marketers, especially noobs, what I learn. This blog will not be like most “how to make money” A-list followers out there that doesn’t really share anything of use to MMO beginners. Guys, if you wish to put up your own make money blog, you will no not be providing any real value if you fill your pages with positive reviews after positive reviews of affiliate products that you have not even used! Well, theoretically, you can do that and still make a killing but judging from the sites that are at the top of this niche, you need to be more creative and not just promote worthless stuff that only aims to part noobs from their hard-earned cash. Providing real value is the name of the game and I hope to accomplish that with this blog with real world experiments and theory applications.

My Current SEO Campaigns

I’m currently actively marketing in three relatively small niches. I will not reveal exactly what they are but I am going to say in what general fields they belong to. They are in the electronics, sports and hobby niches. The last two are new efforts and I’m still only seeing trickle in organic traffic (search engine visitors).

I may have made a mistake in evaluating the competition in my sports niche thinking that it’s low competition. It’s actually quite competitive and I’m unsure how long it will take me to start climbing the ranks. I will keep at it though and see how article marketing will help me do just that. Right now, I’m going about things slowly by manually submitting articles to the top directories (will share my personal list here soon for the beginners’ reference) and letting the domain age a bit. I’m noticing that using automated article submission (even at a very cautious pace) at an early point of your site’s life may be turning off the search engines so I’ve stopped the campaign for now. I will continue develop it some more while I let it age for a couple of months or so. And after I get some legitimate, authority links, I might resume my automated article campaigns using various strategies (more details about this in future posts as well).

The hobby niche is something I’m doing for fun with a friend. It’s not a very serious endeavor but I’m seeing some potential in it (I might go the for some eBay monetization with this using a tool that Ben of Make Money Online with SEO is recommending (more on this in future posts, too). First objective is to determine how easy it is to rank for the main keywords. Initial findings look promising as I’m seeing trickles of SE traffic even without linking efforts yet.

My electronics niche is doing well and is my main source of inspiration in making money on the internet. I’m currently in the process of expanding my efforts into other related sub-niches in the hope of coming up with a huge authority super site that I hope could cover a lot of areas. Tall order for a beginner like me but I’m taking baby steps which I hope will count towards that end.

Immediate need right now is to produce articles, articles, articles. I’m off to do just that.

Later.