Making Money Online - Practical Applications

There is no such thing as a free lunch - we all know that. My business model is a service model. That means that my website is set up and optimized for people to call me and request bids on my SEO services, social network marketing services and other online marketing and web development services.

This model sucks! I have been reading some books about the millionaire mind and what separates millionaires from the rest of us. I certainly have a great lifestyle and have had a lot of success.

The problem is I am working way too hard and I spend all my work time MAKING OTHER PEOPLE MONEY! This is what I am changing. I am turning this website into a product based business model. With the Internet and a good website, it is like having a trained staff online 24 hours a day - 7 days a week. My store is always open. The big difference between me and millionaires is in the bottom line. I have a lot of capital but also a lot of credit. Millionaires don’t use credit and they don’t have debt. These are things that I am working on to increase my bottom line and eliminate some debt.

So, the first thing that you need to make money online, is a website, and a game-plan on what that website is going to sell. Personally I have high standards on what I am choosing to sell here. The products have to work, they have to be priced fairly and they have to be products that I can write unique and relevant content about. You see, the key to success in the search engines is in content.

You’ve all heard that in real estate it’s LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION. Well, Internet real estate is certainly important, but in reality the secret to success online is CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT.

The platform that you use is also important. I use WordPress. In fact, the main site here, getfoundnow.com is being changed to a WordPress system. The reason for this is simple. WordPress does a second-to-none job at communicating with search engines and directories. As long as you have good content and set WordPress up correctly, you are guaranteed results in the SERPS. I am going to be creating an e-book and video package that includes everything that I use in setting up WordPress, including the plugins and themes.

You see, I am now going to sell my knowledge (of which I have quite a bit of in this field), instead of renting it out to the highest bidder. I am no longer going to MAKE OTHER PEOPLE MONEY! I got started with a great video series on how to monetize WordPress which has paid for itself many times over.

Making Money Online - The Nuts and Bolts

Once you have your website planned, the next thing that you need to consider is how the money is going to get into your bank account. I use E Junkie to process online payments. It works with E Bay, PayPal, Trial Pay, Google Checkout, basically everything that you could possibly need to process payments. There is a link at the bottom of the page (the orange and black graphic) that will take you to e-junkie.com. if you click on that from my website, I will make a few bucks when you sign up for E Junkie’s services. That is an example of how to make money online.  I am referring my visitors to my service of choice to process payments.

The important thing is that I am 100% sure that E Junkie works, it is safe and secure and I have had a good experience with them. While Click Bank is also good and highly regarded, they only deal with virtual products. At this time I am not actually shipping products, I am producing a DVD package called SEO By You that will require shipping. If you are not going to need shipping services and are only doing virtual products Click Bank will work fine for you. That link is a Click Bank “hop” link that will pay me a few bucks if you sign up for their services through my site. Yet another example of how to make money online.

OK, so we have talked about the basic needs, a plan for what you are going to offer, a website domain name that has the keywords you want placement for in the domain and finally a good system to create and promote the content that will get you placed well in organic searches. There are certain techniques that you can use right out of the gate to get your website what it needs to make you money.

That, of course, is TRAFFIC. The thing is, just any traffic won’t cut the mustard - you need quality traffic. Quality traffic, or qualified traffic, or targeted traffic are the people that are looking for the goods that your site is selling. A solid foundation of SEO and continued creation of unique content will get you into the search engine ranks, thus sending your site targeted traffic.

To get the ball rolling, start with using Google AdWords. There are specific ways to use Google Ads and I recommend that you check out AdWords Miracles  - a proven system to profit from and properly set up AdWords.  These guys actually answer the phone, which is one of the criteria I use when choosing partners. I MUST be able to contact a live person instantly. I also highly recommend that any partners you choose have contact numbers or answer their email IN PERSON and RIGHT AWAY.

My next article is going to focus on the more technical aspects of Making Money Online. 

That is now replaced by what seams to be DAILY UPDATES! Google’s index is changing constantly now, causing many of us to need daily reporting on search engine placement. It’s almost as if Google got some steroids from BALCO and injected Googlebot with them.

How To Take Advantage Of Google Everflux

With Googlebot speeding around the Internet and indexing faster than ever, what is a webmaster to do? The answer is in Web 2.0 applications that provide your site with fresh and unique content on a daily basis. Of course having the systems in place are only the first step. You have to write all that content, and that can be quite a challenge to site owners that don’t have writing skills.

If you don’t have a blog attached to your website… GET ONE NOW.

If you have a small website, say under 25 pages, that is static, convert it to a WordPress system. If you don’t know how to do this yourself, give Get Found Now a call at 813-907-7688.

“Scraping” refers to copying off another site that’s not personally owned by the party doing the scraping.  Not referencing information sources and claiming that information as your own is plagiarism and content scraping. Spammer and ad-only blogs are chalked with scraped content stolen from other sites.

Plagiarism in the blogosphere is an extremely frustrating problem that is rabid on the web. In truth, anyone can steal your content and publish it on their site. After scrubbing it here and there, it now becomes “theirs.” It is extremely disheartening to see your hard work, laborious topic research and precious time cheaply ripped off.

This is precisely why I love Copyscape so much. It’s an indispensable blogging tool that uncovers plagiarism of your content. It’s also a free service. You simply type in the URL of your original page of content and Copyscape will pull up and expose any content that matches yours. It could be a sentence, a phrase, a snip-it or even an entire page of your content. 

Copyscape also has a service called Copysentry that searches the web for any copiers of your content and then emails you if any is detected. As a deterrent, you can also display plagiarism warning banners from Copyscape on your site.

If you discover that your original content is now sitting on someone else’s website, time is of the essence. See the Guide to Responding To Plagiarism for the best actions to take to get your content removed as quickly as possible.

Plagiarism/scraping is a dirty problem that most professional bloggers are unfortunately, very aware of. Plagiarism Today is a blog entirely dedicated to the subject of plagiarism, packed with insightful articles and informative tips.

We have all heard about the Google Sandbox effect. New sites are often kept in a limbo of SERP’s until they have been around for a year or so. If this is the case, how are ad-only sites getting into the top 20? Before I continue, lets look at that term: ad-only site. An ad-only site is a website or web page that has no unique content, it is serving either the maximum amount of ads allowed by Google, or in some cases is spoofing the AdSense spider using scripts that allow for more ad boxes.

Unfortunately there is nothing that we can do except to provide quality content that other sites will want to link to. Hopefully Google will do something about these weak sites that offer nothing to their visitors.

Is there anything that you need to know as far as SEO goes? Not really. It is the same old story with Yahoo, no real new developments. There is no way they will ever be able to compete with Google unless they let Microsoft’s purchase of Yahoo to go through. The fact is Google has made strides with Universal Search, and Yahoo answered with “Search Assist” a pretty lame response. In fact you have to dig deep to find blog posts in Yahoo’s index.

I did a search for “Data Recovery Services From DTI” the title of a post I wrote a week ago. It is #1 on Google’s blog search, but nowhere in Yahoo. This shows that Yahoo is way behind in new media searches.

If Yahoo is ever going to make a dent in Google’s search empire, they better start paying attention to blogs and other Web 2.0 type sites.

There are some changes that you might have to make to track Slurp’s activities on your site. Visit Yahoo’s search blog for more info. Finally, if your robots.txt file makes specific reference to Slurp you should modify that as well. Read my post SEO robots.txt validation to learn more about that important file.

I think it is imperative that everybody knows just how much information about you can be found through Google. Also make sure that your kids know NOT to ever give out their phone number to anybody over the Internet especially through chat rooms.

Why You Should Never Give Out Your Phone Number Over the Internet

If you do a search for my old phone number 727-856-4695 the results come up as follows:

By clicking on the map, anybody can drive right over to my house! This is a huge security problem since a sex offender or other type of weirdo can easily find where my kids live if they have our phone number. I strongly urge you to get the message across to your kids to not give out their phone number online. I am making all our phone numbers private!

As a search engine optimization engineer, I am hoping that this deal goes down, since both Live and Yahoo have always been much easier for me to obtain organic placement than Google. Even though I have had a lot of success in Google, having a Yahoo-Live hybrid engine that can compete with Google in the search space, is a good thing for SEO people, especially SEO people like me that use social network marketing as a tool for organic placement.

In fact Yahoo is now putting video in their natural SERP’s. Live has already been doing a lot of “new media” indexing. The majority of experts are staying focused on the paid advertising aspect of this proposed deal. That is why Microsoft is making the offer. The ramifications of a Live-Yahoo merger on the organic side have yet to be discussed in any detail. My feeling is that this will be very good for SEO people and we should be crossing our fingers that the deal happens. Any competition to Google is a benefit for us. If they continue to own the search space, than they will continue to do whatever they want, like make war on paid links. With stiff competition, Google will have to think twice before pissing off their advertisers and Adsense publishers.

WebProNews didn’t feel that Microsoft would buy Yahoo, and unlike me, don’t feel that the deal would be worth it to Microsoft. It was actually their article on May 12th that prompted me to write mine. Even though I am not a big fan of Microsoft, and I feel that they have missed the boat on the Internet since day 1, this is a really good move for them. It gives them what Google wants so bad, to be a one stop portal that takes care of general Internet user’s needs.

These posts explain why all this is important:

• The Changing Face Of Google - Universal Search is explained in this article.
• Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing - SEO and Web 2.0 Optimized social network marketing is covered in this post.
• RSS Real Simple Syndication Explained - RSS syndication is explained here.
• RSS Syndication Services FeedBurner - this post explained how FeedBurner works. It was written prior to Google’s purchase of FeedBurner which is talked about in my Web 2.0 Podcast. Also of note is the updated post about FeedBurner RSS to Email service.

I will stay on top of this story.

Google Page Rank Update January 2008

Last Thursday (1-24-08) saw a minor change in Page Rank for many sites. While domain level Page Rank remained the same on the 70 or so sites that I monitor daily, many of the internal Page Rank on pages changed, or was added. I have noticed that pages and especially blog posts that were created up to November 17th now have Page Rank.

I have a feeling that this is a new plan for Google, that they are going to be quicker about assigning Page Rank to internal pages than they have been in the past. In the Google Webmaster Center under Statistics > Crawl Stats you can see what your average Page Rank is, as well as Page Rank that has yet to be assigned:

The Page Rank not yet assigned was pretty much blank for all the sites that I noticed had gotten Page Rank updates on their pages. This is a good sign that Google is getting quicker with the PR updates. Usually the interior pages are updated along with the domains every 4 months or so. If they are doing them separately now, that will be good for Webmasters who rely on Page Rank to set the price for advertising on their sites.

Google Webmaster Center Gives You Control Over Site Links

When you do a search for a company or website, Google will put up what it feels are the most relevant in-site links. They have no given us a smattering of control over these Sitelinks.

In the Webmaster Center you can now block URL’s that you might not want to appear in the SERP’s. Under the Links tab there is now an option for Sitelinks:

Google explains Sitelinks as:

Sitelinks are additional links Google sometimes generates from site contents in order to help users navigate your site. Google generates these sitelinks periodically from your site’s contents.

Because we generate sitelinks dynamically, this list can change from time to time.

This is good news for sites that have pages they don’t want to appear in the SERP’s for a company search. I don’t know how comfortable I feel about having Google “block” anything, but you never know. The fact that they are working with us to give us more control over our sites and how they appear in Google, is a good sign.

The fact is, blogs are becoming core components to Internet Presence Management. This is most apparent in the Real Estate industry. All the major real estate informational sites like Inman and RIS Media are pushing blogging as the best means for agents and agencies to not only communicate with their prospective clients, but also as a way to get higher search engine placement. 

If you are interested in either getting started with a blog, or making your existing blog better, than this is a good place to start. There are plenty of blogging systems out there that take care of web hosting, setup and configuration of blogs. Sites like Blogger and WordPress.com allow users to create blogs within minutes and all for free! While there are benefits to sites like Blogger (which is owned by Google), to achieve the best results, you need to have your own domain and control over every aspect of your blogging system.

Get Found Now has performed extensive testing on all the major blog service sites (Blogger, wordpress.com, etc.) as well as stand-alone blogging systems (WordPress, TypePad, etc.) and have found that the stand-alone systems not only rank higher, but get into the search engines much faster. While TypePad is a solid blogging system, we chose WordPress because of the superior support and myriad of plugin and theme options. WordPress has more options and is widely supported. If you are a TypePad user, you will still find these series of articles useful because the theory behind the technology and strategy for blogging can be applied to TypePad, we do have a lot more support for WordPress so if you are making a choice now, stick with WordPress.

WordPress Blog Design Services

When designing a blogging system, there are a lot of options. The most important thing about blogs is the content. The way that WordPress delivers your content is what separates it from other content management systems and gives it the upper hand in the SERP’s.

The actual look and navigation of the blog is handled by the theme. Get Found Now uses custom themes that are the best of both worlds:

1. Website Usability- if users can’t find what they are looking for than your site won’t convert any of its traffic. By using deep link navigation your visitors will always know where they are on your site.
2. SEO Ready - if your site isn’t ranking for your keywords than nobody will be able to find it!

This new series will take a look at every aspect of blog design from install to plugins and theme customization. Please leave questions as comments so I can answer them for everyone.

Google Webmaster Center Content Analysis Tool

The new tool can be found in the Diagnostics part of the Webmaster Center. The graphic below will show you the main parts of their Webmaster Center:

The Content analysis shows you three things that you need to know about your site:

1. Meta Title - how is your title tag? Is it too long, too short, make sense? These questions and many more are answered for you by Google.
2. Non-Index-able Content - this is pretty cool as it will point out to you the stuff on your site that Google can’t spider. Things like flash or script-laden pages, also images that have no “alt” tags. This is important now that everyone is using video. Google also has a new Video Sitemap that you can use to properly index your video content.
3. Meta Tag Issues - this tool focuses on the meta description which is very important for you to be able to control the description that appears for your pages within Google’s SERP’s.

The graphic below shows an example of what the Title tag and Meta Descriptions look like:

By using these tools you won’t automatically jump to the top of the ranks, but they will help you get your site tuned up and as good as it can be in the eyes of Googlebot. The graphic below gives you a look at the non-index-able content section.

I highly recommend to all webmasters that they take advantage of these and all the powerful tools that Google is giving you.

Google Webmaster Center Sitemap Details

I surely hope that all of you avail yourselves of XML sitemaps. XML is probably the most significant programming language to a webmaster that wants search engine placement. Both XML sitemaps and XML-RPC are a gateway to higher rankings, especially within Google. Read my post Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing for more info on these tools.

Google’s Webmaster Center was initially built for site owners and optimizers to submit XML Sitemaps. It is great that they are continuing to add more and more tools to help us out, and the new Sitemap Details is a nice add-on. Below is a snap-shot of the Sitemap Details section:

While it is true that the URL’s submitted in your Sitemap don’t necessarily reflect all the URL’s that are in Google’s index, it is better than doing a site: search.

Google also added a couple of new languages for those of you that don’t like English. I got the graphics from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.