We’ve talked a lot about HubPages in the forum and people have asked what would happen if the same amount of content was added to their own sites.

Obviously I haven’t tested that out yet but I plan to.

HubPages will produce a lot more profit than you could get out of a brand new site. This is because HubPages is a strong site and it’s been around for a while. You aren’t going to be able to pull the same amount of traffic to a brand new site, pretty much no matter what.

The question in my mind is whether I can do the same experiment on a site that’s been around for a year and produce more/just-as-much profit. I know that not everyone has an older site to work with. If you’re in that position, this is what I would do to get things going:

• Get some sites up NOW. With a Host Gator Baby account you can host as many sites as you want for less than $10 per month. There will be more experiments and lessons that you can use if you have a site. If you don’t have any sites you’ll feel like you’re missing out again and again.
• Get your sites indexed. This will start the traffic clock now. As more time goes on, it will become easier to get traffic to these sites.
• Use HubPages to build up cash flow to pay for your hosting. It isn’t hard at all to make $10/month on HubPages.

I personally have multiple sites that I started over a year ago and I’m going to use one of them for this experiment.

About The Experiment

This experiment will be a lot like the experiment that I did with HubPages, except instead of adding 100 articles to HubPages, I’ll be adding them to one of my existing sites as blog posts. The site runs on WordPress and the posts will be created around keywords that I believe I can get ranked for.

I’ll be tracking this experiment with a unique tracking channel in Adsense and will post the results each week. If you don’t want to miss any of the updates, make sure to subscribe to our RSS feed.

At the same time, we’ve realized that there’s a whole world out there we’ve ignored - the world of the small business owner looking to find new customers and clients through the search engines. So we’ve decided it’s time to establish a new brand that gives us a chance to reach out to that market. We’d like to introduce you to SEO Educators (http://seoeducators.net - the site is under construction at the moment). SEO Educators is looking to help the small business owner that knows she could be pulling customers and clients from Google and Yahoo! every month, but doesn’t have thousands of dollars to pay an SEO firm to help her get ranked. Our goal is to give this kind of entrepreneur an SEO plan she can implement with the resources (time, money, and staff) she already has.

But the point of this post isn’t to sell you on SEO Educators, so I’ll stop there. You can check out the site in the next week or so when the copy is written if you’re interested.

So what is the point of this post? There are actually three:

1. Help Us Out with Our Logo Design Contest

Court and I are notoriously bad when it comes to design. Not only do neither of us have a shred of design ability, we can’t even really say what we like or don’t like in a design. Some friends of ours turned us on to 99designs.com. For somebody as design-impaired as me 99designs.com is an absolute heaven-send. In a nutshell, you sign up to run a design contest, write a brief about what you need, and then tens of thousands of designers have the chance to submit an entry in hopes of winning the cash prize you established at the beginning of the contest. Seriously, this is brilliant. You can read more about what 99designs can do for you here.

Court and I would really love to have feedback and suggestions on our logo design contest. Pop over and check it out if you like. We need all the help we can get.

2. Do You Have Access to Small Business Owners? Join the SEO Educators Affiliate Program

We need affiliates! 99% of our traffic is geared toward making money online, and we need to talk to small business owners. If you’re a web designer, developer, marketing consultant…or anybody else that knows some business owners, send me an email (mark[at]thekeywordacademy[dot]com) so I can get in touch with you about becoming an affiliate. We’re tentatively planning a lead-based affiliate program where your job will be to get people to reach out to us, and you’ll be paid healthy commissions when we convert those leads to clients.

3. Sales Experience? Become An Independent Sales Rep for SEOEducators.net

Some of you may know I spent four years as an inside sales rep and sales manager before quitting to work full-time with Court. I miss sales and I’ve looked forward to creating a product with Court that would give us the chance to partner with a solid group of independent sales reps who could take our product to market and earn a great living at it. We know there are quite a few corporate sales types out of work right now, and we’d like to give a good opportunity to a few people who want to make a full time living talking to small business owners about our SEO educational products.

Initially, we’re looking to work with three or four people who’d like to earn upwards of $50,000 per year as a rep for our business. Wow, did that ever sound like an MLM pitch, so let me clarify. This will be commission-only sales; you’ll be paid one commission if you prospected the client yourself and a different commission if we generate a lead and you make the sale. The reason I say upwards of $50,000 per year is not because we can make any guarantees about your earnings, or the number of lead you’ll get etc. I say $50,000 because we’re looking for people to work full-time on this, and I don’t think it would be worth it if you were going to make less than $50,000 for your trouble. Ideally I’d like to see our reps making in the $75,000 to $100,000 range.

As I said, I was in commission sales for years, so I don’t throw those numbers around ignorantly or lightly. If you have sales ability and confidence, get in touch with me and we’ll talk about whether this could be a good fit. I can tell you this would have been my dream sales job when I was in sales - working from home (or wherever I wanted) making as many sales as I decided to make, and not having an annoying sales manager bugging me all the time because he’s trying to beef up his bonuses. We’re looking for some independent spirits with the ability to explain value and close. Most people reading this just shuddered in semi-horror. We’re looking for the three of you who think that sounds friggin cool. Again, email me if this has any appeal at all to you and we’ll talk about the details.

And that’s it! Check out our logo contest, become an affiliate for SEOEducators.net, and let us know if you’re interested in an independent sales job.

Have a great one everybody.

Before I got started the Marketing Manager (Ryan Hupfer) at HubPages contacted me and got involved with the experiment. We turned it into a contest and a lot of people that already use HubPages joined in.

Week 1 Recap

I worked really hard the first week because I knew that in order to make anything within 30 days I would have to get a lot of work done in the first week. I was able to create 40 hubs during the first week. I knew that the hubs would produce some money during the first week but honestly they exceeded my expectations. By the time I published the week 1 update I had already made $56.20. I didn’t start tracking with Google Analytics until after week 1, so the best I can do for the first week is a screen-shot of the Adsense channel I used:

Week 2 Recap

The second week went amazingly well - read the week 2 update here. Between May 18 and May 24 my hubs produced $112.56 with Adsense. I had a day during that week when the hubs produced $23.21. The performance during week 2 was definitely more than I expected when I started the experiment. During week 2 I didn’t create as many hubs as I did during the first week, but I had over half of them done by the end of the week. Here’s a screen shot of the results, taken from Google Analytics:

Week 3 Recap

Since I didn’t create as many new hubs during week 2, week 3 didn’t go as well. I had a pullback in the income from the hubs I made during the first week and didn’t have many new ones to take their place. The pullback didn’t really surprise me because I have had this kind of thing happen on almost every experiment I’ve ever done. The income for week 3 was still solid and the hubs made $88.88:

A ton of work was done during week 3 and I completed all of the 100 hubs. Originally I thought that I might be able to create them all in the first two weeks but that didn’t happen. Fortunately I got them done in the third week and that led to a solid fourth week.

Week 4 Recap

During week 4 I was able to focus on making the hubs more useful. I did this by creating a lot of links from my hubs to other hubs that had related content. This makes it more likely that a reader finds information that they’re looking for and also allows them to see multiple sets of Adsense ads. It also provides an SEO benefit.

During week 4 the hubs made $164.11. Google Analytics wasn’t working when I created the week 4 update so I had to use an Adsense screen shot for the results:

I have now run a report with Google Analytics and that’s returning slightly different results because Adsense resets at 1:00 in the morning where I live and my Google Analytics resets at midnight. According to Analytics, the hubs produced $160.04 during that week:

Overall Recap

The total amount made during the 30 day experiment was $475.26. This includes the income from the first four weeks plus the income from days 29 and 30.

By my standards this experiment went amazingly well. A lot of other people have also created a lot of hubs in fact I know of more than one person who took this experiment bigger than I did. This makes me really happy because those people learned during this month that you can do really great things if you’re willing to work harder than other people.

Things That Contributed To The Success Of The Experiment

1. Keyword Research. I never could have done as well as I did without choosing keywords that I know I can rank for. My basic philospohy is that you need to know whether you can rank for a keyword or not before you decide to use it. You should also know how much you can make with a keyword before you go after it. Some of this information is available in The Keyword Crash Course ebook, which you can download by entering your email at the top of our right sidebar. Guys choosing keywords is huge and honestly if it isn’t clear as a bell for you, you need to become a member of The Keyword Academy. It costs a total of $1 for your first month and you can cancel at any time. We get email after email after email gushing about how clear keyword research became for people after watching our first video.
2. Keyword Targeting. Targeting a keyword with a page really isn’t rocket science but it’s definitely something that I used. Look for the four steps in that post and follow them. Along with this I tried to create value with my hubs. Most of them are around 800 words. Some of them are longer and some of them are shorter. Part of my goal for this next month is to make them more useful and longer.
3. Links. The Keyword Academy members know exactly what I did to get links for my hubs and I’ll say this: If you can get a clean link or two for your hubs you’ll be able to make more money. Hubs are strong on their own but a solid link or two will only increase that strength.

The Future Of The Experiment

I’m not done with this experiment, in fact I’m just getting started. I have a new goal to turn these hubs into a full time income ($3000 per month) and think that I can do it within the next three months. I’m going to be adding content to the hubs and as they get older they will definitely do better with Google and other search engines.

To be clear I won’t be creating any new hubs for a while. I am going to increase the income by improving the hubs that I already have. I’ll provide updates as I go and am also looking at a few other experiments.

It was nice to already have the hubs done (as I said in week 3 of the make money online experiment, they were completed in the first 3 weeks).

Week 4 produced great results and the hubs made $164.11, nearly double what they made in week 3:

Google Analytics is on crack this morning, so the report was created in my Adsense account. I’ll switch it out for a prettier version when they get Analytics working again.

Right now I’m REALLY happy about how this experiment is going. I have a nice upward trend going on and expect these 100 hubs to make some solid income in the near future. The income should continue to produce because I’m taking the time to make sure that the hubs are useful.

Don’t Make Low Quality Hubs!

Lately I’ve seen some comments that have been of a philosophy that’s different than mine. Some people are saying that they are going to make crap hubs because Google can’t read content, more people will click ads, etc. Don’t fall into this trap. Google CAN read content, in fact eventually you will probably have a Google search engineer looking at your content, especially if you start to produce significant income with your Adsense account. Do you really want to have crap content on all of the pages that your Adsense is on? Let me answer that question for you - no, you don’t.

The way that you’re going to make a lot of money in your lifetime on Adsense is by keeping the properties you have and creating new ones. If your current properties are total garbage, your entire portfolio is at risk. Creating a bunch of hubs that are total garbage might make you some short term cash but it’s only a matter of time until Google figures out that all of your content blows.

All of my hubs are at least 500 words and most of them have a lot more. I believe that they provide the information that people are looking for. Sure, this will lower my click through rate on my ads, but it will allow me to have income from the hubs for years. A high CTR doesn’t really seem that great anymore once your sites get deindexed for being MFA (made for Adsense).

A problem that I see is that some people are having success by publishing garbage. The problem is that some of you are believing that this is an ok idea in the long term and it’s compounded by people publishing on their ‘make money online’ sites that this is a good idea because it saves time. It isn’t in fact this is a terrible idea. It might be true that Google’s algorithm isn’t going to know the difference right now. However, what do you think is going to happen when you’re producing $5,000 per month or $10,000+ per month? Do you really think that Google isn’t going to look into the sites you’re making the money with once you start producing well?

I’m definitely not saying that you need to spend all day making one hub, but if you aren’t at least trying to give people the information they’re searching for, I think you’re going to run into trouble eventually.

A Few More Days In The Experiment

Those of you that are participating in the experiment have a few more days to finish up! It’s all over June 10th.

As you can see, the hubs during week 3 made $88.88, down from $112.56. That brings the total so far to $257.64. We still have another 10 days in the experiment and it will definitely be interesting to see how the hubs do overall.

Why The Hubs Produced Less In Week 3

During week 3 I focused a ton on getting all of the hubs up and did very little to them. I didn’t give any of the hubs links from other hubs. Overall that makes the hubs less useful and makes them weaker. I’m going to be catching up on that this week - I simply didn’t have the time to get it done. Fortunately I have all 100 hubs published and that means that I can focus on other aspects which will help the hubs.

The hubs that were created in the first two weeks dropped a little (as is expected) because they lost the fresh content bonus. That means there’s less income there and the new hubs didn’t make up for it because I haven’t completed what needs to be done on them.

The next few weeks will be really interesting and I’m really excited to see how well the hubs do in the second month of the experiment - that’s when we’ll be able to tell how well it’s going to work. I’m pretty happy with how it’s gone so far.

I have never (and I do mean never) seen a site or project go up and up and up without losing ground. You will always see natural dips no matter how hard you’re working on something. It’s part of the game we play. You have to learn how to keep working even when things don’t improve. Week 3 was one of my most productive weeks on the HubPages experiment and will create a ton of long term value.

Week 2 went really well. During the seven days of week 2 my hubs produced $112.56:

On the worst day of week 2, my hubs made $8.01 and on the best day they made $23.21. The average day of week 2 produced $16.08. Multiply that out over a 30 day period and you’re looking at $482.40. I still expect that number to grow a lot for month 2 - that’s just how it works. With a little more age these hubs will start to do better in Google, Yahoo, and MSN and that will bring more traffic and more revenue.

New Income Estimates

Since week 2 was surprisingly strong, I need to adjust my estimates for growth. I thought that the experiment would make at least $300 for the month and it has already made $168.76. I think that it should make at least triple that number in month 1, which would give us $506.28. The hubs should easily be able to triple that number for month 2 so I’m going to raise my month 2 estimate to $1500.

I now have over half of the hubs done. I planned on having them all done by this weekened but I’m a little behind that pace. It might take me the entire month to finish all 100.

General Advice For Making Money With HubPages

• Target non-competitive keyword phrases that have decent Adwords CPCs.
• Make solid hubs. Most of my hubs are at least 800 original words and contain useful links, feeds, news, and videos.
• Give links from hubs to related hubs that you have.

The whole point of using sites like Ezine and HubPages to get links is to increase your site’s link juice, and ultimately its rankings. You can of course use a bunch of different methods but links from HubPages and Ezine are quite strong, which is why I recommend using them. Stronger links make a much bigger difference in rankings than links from weaker sites.

Steps For Getting Links From HubPages

1. Sign up for a free HubPages account.
2. Build a hub that’s related to your topic. If you need help, check out the HubPages quick start guide.
3. Create a link back to your site, within your hub.

It’s that easy… BUT there are a few things that you should know about getting links from HubPages.

First, they are extremely efficient at not getting spammed. In order to get real links from HubPages you’ll need to create some quality hubs. If your author score isn’t 75 or higher, your links will have nofollows, which take away the link juice. You will have to create a handful of decent hubs to be able to get your score above 75. I would make sure that each of your hubs has at least 400 words of unique content - most of mine have around 800. Yes, that’s a lot but is also the reason that my hubs rank well in Google.

Second, you are only supposed to link out to your site once within your hub. If you link out more than that it will make the hub overly promotional, and it will be de-published until you fix it.

The bonus that comes with this method is that you can use Adsense and affiliate programs to make money with HubPages.

I’ve already done a lot of work, but it has definitely been worth it. The nice thing about committing myself to this experiment here on the blog is that it’s easier to motivate myself to get it done. So far I’ve been doing the experiment for a week and have written about 40 solid hubs. So far the experiment has made $56.20 (it’s 100% Adsense income). I expect the experiment to yield at least $300 this month and more than $1000 next month. I’m sure that you’re going to want to know where I’m getting these numbers from. I haven’t made a spreadsheet for this or anything but generally speaking, any web property will perform better as time goes on. I see this time and time again and know that these hubs probably aren’t going to get worse, they’re going to get better.

By the end of the experiment I will also have 60 more hubs out there and that adds to the potential. I would expect them to perform just as well as the ones I have so even if the hubs I already have stay the same, I should make $140.50 during the last week of the experiment. That’s approximately $56.20 for the hubs I have and $83 for the 60 hubs that I still need to make.

The total income for each of the next two weeks should be somewhere between the $56.20 and the $140. It could be better than that or slightly worse - we’re just going to have to see.

The $1000 number for next month is based on the fact that there is almost always more traffic to be had after the pages are up for more than a month. If they produce $140 during the last week of the 30 day experiment, they should for sure average over $200 for next month and probably over $250.

General Advice For Making Money With HubPages

• Target non-competitive keyword phrases that have decent Adwords CPCs.
• Make solid hubs. Most of my hubs are at least 800 original words and contain useful links, feeds, news, and videos.
• Give links from hubs to related hubs that you have.

As most of you know, last week I wrote about a new making money online experiment. I’m going to be creating 100 hubs on HubPages. When I wrote about the experiment I talked about how I was amazed at how well the few hubs I had were performing.

When I first started on HubPages, I created just a few hubs and didn’t really put any time into them. I didn’t try to get any other sites to link to them or anything, I was just going off of the strength that’s already on HubPages. It worked and I was very quickly earning $3 or $4 per day. That led me to want to try a much larger experiment with HubPages, which I am now doing.

The guys at HubPages got involved and asked me to wait until Monday to start so that they could issue a challenge to their members. I went with that, so Monday was my first day of making hubs.

My First Day Of Creating New Hubs

A very interesting thing happened on Monday and it’s a little thing, but I thought that sharing it might help a few of you. I worked quite a bit on my hubs Monday and I was all suped up to get a bunch of hubs done. I got curious about how much my existing hubs had made on Adsense, so I decided to check it out. I logged into my Adsense account to find that I had made exactly $0 from my hubs. As much as I try to act like I’m invinceable - I’m not. I was bugged. I had gotten myself all pumped up and honestly that stole a lot of my energy. Even though I was bugged, I decided to work anyway and got my hubs done.

Later that night I decided to make some more hubs. Stupidly, I logged into my Adsense account to see how I was doing with my existing hubs. I had made a whopping $0 for the day. No matter who you are this is deflating. I thought back to when I was a newbie and how almost every day was like this, except much worse. See, now it’s easier for me because even though my hubs hadn’t made anything, my Adsense account still looks pretty dang good. I know that many of you don’t have that luxury right now. To tell you the truth that didn’t help me a ton, I was still really bugged that my hubs hadn’t made anything.

Naturally you start to ask yourself questions. You don’t want to waste your own time. “Am I doing this right?”, “Is this really going to pay off?”

At that point in the game you have two options. You can accept defeat or you can fight through it. I chose to fight through it. I don’t think I’m all that great or anything, I’m fortunate to have experience on my side. I know that it will work if I pay the price. I decided to let the roadblock motivate me to massive action. I had 8 hubs done by the time I went to bed.

A pattern that I’ve seen again and again in my life is that if I will persist through adversity, I get rewarded. Yesterday I made $8.55 off of my new hubs. That isn’t a million dollars but it might as well be - it feels like a million dollars to me. Adversity tried to shut me down on Monday and I overcame it.

Making money online is a very mental game. You have to get yourself to believe that you’re going to overcome.

A Solid Hub Dropped From The Rankings

I found a really solid keyword and decided to make a hub about it. Those of you that are paid members of the crash course here know exactly how I go about choosing my keywords and this keyword is a real winner. I created the hub and was STOKED to find that it ranked top 10 in Google within a few hours of publishing the post. It’s obviously never a bad thing to pop right into the rankings out of the gate.

The interesting thing is that this morning, that hub is nowhere to be found. I have to believe that this has happened to a bunch of you because it happens to me all the time with all different types of sites, posts, and static pages. Poof! Ghandi…

There we go again guys - these are the deflating obstacles that we all have to face every day. I bet when this happens to you, you start questioning whether you’re doing it right or not. I bet you start questioning me and the methods I outline. I bet you consider giving up. Don’t do it. These things have a way of working themselves out.

My hub isn’t gone for good in fact I can all but guarantee that it will be back and better than ever. When this stuff happens you have to go back to the basics and make sure your bases are covered. The basics are targeting the keyword and using links to strengthen the post, hub, or page.

Guys I can promise you that when all is said and done, it’s going to come down to those two things. The mystical force that booted my hub from the rankings is just a fickle, stupid thing. I probably had enough links from HubPages.com to make it show up in the SERPs and when those links dropped from wherever they were, it dropped out. I’ll give it a few links from other hubs and it will be right back where it was before. This might take a week or more and I’m not going to beat myself up over what happened. I’ve seen pages resurrect themselves a hundred times and this time isn’t going to be any different.

This might be hard to stomach but in the end no one deserves to do great things if they can’t overcome obstacles. Our minds fight against us every day and we have to learn how to persevere. When you get knocked down you have to get back up.

When I really need a pick-me-up, here’s a video that I like to watch. I hope you guys like it as much as I do.

Most people sit back hoping that somehow the biggest sites in their industry will magically find them and link to them. Honestly this isn’t just going to happen by itself. It will happen only if and when you make it happen.

There are a lot of different ways to get to know the people that have solid sites in your industry but the first step is simply making a list of the people/sites that you need to get to know. There are a few key things that I would note down when you make your list:

• Name of each site owner
• URL of each site
• Contact information for the site owners
• Whether each site has one author or multiple authors
• If the sites accept guest articles/posts

Keep in mind that you aren’t going to get to know each of these people all at once. You’ll start by trying to get to know that ones that have sites that are more at your level. The people that have really popular sites probably won’t be as approachable because they’re going to have a bunch of people trying to contact them every day.

Finding Sites/Contacts To Add To Your List

There are a couple techniques that I use to make a list of contacts to add to my list:

• Searching Google for my keyword and for related keywords
• Searching Technorati for my keyword and for related keywords

Usually I can add a ton of contacts to my list by going through those two sites. The sites that rank well in Google will be the ones that can help you the most, but will also be the hardest to get help from. The next step in the 30 Days To Better SEO will cover contacting these people so today we’re going to stop here. Make your list!!

Our specialty is Search Engine Optimization - and this site is the proof. Court’s Internet Marketing School:

• ranks #5 for the term “internet marketing” out of nearly 100,000,000 pages…ranking ahead of sites with full-blown corporations behind them and a multi-year head start.
• has been found by searchers typing in nearly 5,000 different keywords in just the last 30 days.
• has received hundreds of thousands of free organic visitors through Google and the other major search engines during the last 12 months.

And this site isn’t our only project…if you take our portfolio as a whole you’ll see that over 1,000,000 visitors find our sites through the search engines each year.

We offer several different products and services that will help you rank better…fast. But SEO isn’t a “one size fits all” game - your business is unique and your SEO strategy should be too. That’s why we’re offering you a free 30 minute phone consultation. We’ll take some time to get to know you and your business so we can intelligently advise you on the best ranking strategies.

These consults aren’t your standard “pitch fest.” By the time you hang up the phone you’re going to have a better understanding of what you need to do to start pulling free traffic from the search engines.

Answer the questions below, click submit, and you’ll hear from us soon!

Update: This site was sold for a very nice amount. Congrats to the new owner AND to the seller. Now maybe he can afford to send his kids to a nice boarding school.

Social Traffic Isn’t Worth It, In Most Cases

If you just want to throw up huge numbers there are a lot of ways to do it. StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit can send you huge numbers of visitors. Many of you have already chased that traffic and some of you have probably succeeded. I personally have been able to get loads of traffic that way so I’m a good person to listen to on the subject. The honest truth is that it’s incredibly difficult to make money from those traffic sources. Those individuals typically have very short attention spans and will leave your site just as quickly as they found it. If you don’t believe that, I highly doubt that you’ve tried to sell to them before.

When you go through the process of learning how to increase website traffic, I want you to focus on the most important type of traffic there is - search traffic. Once a stream of traffic starts coming from Google it will come day after day after day, whether you continue working or not.

There’s only one type of person that can make social traffic work and that type of person is naturally gifted. If you are an extremely gifted writer or personality, social traffic might be an awesome fit for you. If you aren’t it’s going to be an enormous waste of time because you won’t be able to influence the short attention spans that will find you.

Search traffic is honestly a lot easier to work with. There’s a huge difference with search traffic because they are already looking for you. Since they already want what you have to offer, the process is a LOT easier.

How To Increase Website Traffic From Search Engines

Getting more traffic to your website from search engines is actually fairly easy to do. I want to keep this lesson fairly simple for you so I have organized the basics into four separate tasks:

1. Researching your market.
2. Choosing keywords.
3. Creating keyword-optimized content.
4. Getting links to your content from relevant pages.

Most people go wrong because they don’t do any research in the first place. To fully understand this process, I want you to take a look at how you found this article. You probably did a search in Google for ‘How To Increase Website’ traffic, or something similar (or you are a regular reader of mine). You found me because I anticipated that people would be searching for this, and created a solid article on this topic.

Researching Your Market

You may be curious about how I was able to anticipate that you would be doing this search. This is pretty easy if you take a look at the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You start by typing on topics that are related to the content of your site. In this case I started by searching for ‘website’ because I help people to learn to make money with websites. The tool showed me a bunch of keywords that people search for and are related to websites. Website traffic was one of the terms that came up. Since I understand a lot about getting more website traffic, it’s obviously pretty easy for me to write about.

Hopefully you can see why this article came to be. I want to be found by people who want to get more targeted website traffic.

What you need to do is use the Adwords tool to take a look at topics that people are searching for in your market. You will obviously know your market better than I would so you need to think about different aspects that people need to understand. Type those terms into the tool and take a look at what comes back. Expand on the terms that come back and you’ll probably find some winners in there.

Choosing Keywords

Choosing keywords to me is a matter of looking at your competition and deciding how strong it is. I wrote about this concept extensively on The Keyword Academy: Choosing A Topic For A Website. I was actually talking about choosing a topic for a site, but the same concepts apply. You can use those metrics to choose topics to write about that you can realistically get ranked for.

Where most people go wrong is that they only choose the super competitive keywords that everyone else is using. Finding the easy ones will make your life a lot easier so I would definitely start there. Increasing traffic to your website becomes one of the easiest things ever when you write about topics that have weak competition.

Lately I picked up a site that’s about food and honestly it’s one of the easiest things ever. I’m barely trying and getting ranked really well. It’s so much easier than my internet marketing topics it’s not even funny. If you can try to find keywords that aren’t that competitive it will be a lot easier. Obviously you don’t want to write off topic, so your search will be limited to the scope of your website.

Creating Keyword-Optimized Content

Creating content that will rank well for a keyword is honestly really easy. I have written extensively about this and so I’ll point you to an article I wrote about this: How To Target a Keyword With a Post Page. The only thing I want to add to that is that the better your post, the better it will work. If your post excites people enough to get them to point some links at it, it will rank better and it will rank more quickly.

Getting Links To Your Content From Relevant Pages

If you’re starting out, this might seem like it’s pretty difficult but after you get going, it really isn’t. The first thing you should try to do once you create your website is find some friends in your industry. This will help you a ton because when you need to get some extra links, they will be there to help. There are also a lot of other methods that you can use. You can write articles for EzineArticles and they will allow you to link back. For that matter, you can write articles that can be submitted with Unique Article Wizard, or a similar service.

Getting links is often as simple as asking. When I started CourtneyTuttle.com, I looked through all of the make money sites on Technorati to find beginners who had sites similar to mine. I then participated on their sites and made friends with them so that we could help each other out. We have helped each other a lot over the last few years and the links we have passed back and forth have made a huge difference. Now that I have some people reading my site building links has also become a lot easier. That said, I started out with zero traffic just like everyone else and overcame that with hard work.

Article Marketing Services That I Have Stopped Using

Those of you that are familiar with article marketing will have heard of a few services that I have discontinued over the past year. Here are the ones I’ve tried:

• iSnare - I got rid of them because they took weeks to approve my articles.
• Article Marketing Automation - I discontinued use because they didn’t get my articles out to very many sites. Most went out to about 30 sites.
• Article Marketer - This is the one I liked the most after UAW but I discontinued use after I started using UAW. Article Marketer has been taking a few weeks to get articles out, and doesn’t get you nearly as many indexed links as you can get with UAW. I made a lot of money because of Article Marketer so I guess ultimately I wasn’t too unhappy with it - I simply discovered a much better service.

What You Can Expect Out Of Unique Article Wizard

The only reason to use a service that helps your articles to get out there is so that you can get links for your site. UAW will give you a lot more links than each of the competing services I’ve tried and as far as I know, I’ve tried all of the big ones. If this service wasn’t by far the best I knew of, I wouldn’t have written a Unique Article Wizard review. I honestly would be reviewing one of the other services.

Since UAW gets your articles into quite a few blogs (mostly WordPress and Blogger blogs) you can get a lot more direct traffic than you would get from Article Marketer, iSnare, or Article Marketing Automation. It still isn’t a huge amount, but it’s more than you would think.

If you’re going to get the most benefit out of UAW, you want to find keywords that are medium and long tail. I would try to find keywords that are three, four, or five word phrases. Make sure to integrate the keywords into your site and then you can use UAW to write and distribute about the same topics. Links from related pages help more than links from unrelated pages and this will help your links to have more value.

You can expect to get at least 100 indexed links from a UAW submission. I have a few articles out there now that have been indexed with over 400 results in Google. This is because with UAW each site gets a slightly unique version. One of the Unique Article Wizard reviews I read before buying the service also said that he was getting over 100 indexed pages that contained links to his site from each of his submissions.

My articles have been getting approved and submitted within 24 hours (they don’t work Sundays). This is a huge improvement over Article Marketer and iSnare, who were both taking over 2 weeks when I last used them.

Using Unique Article Wizard

Using this service is quite a bit like most other article distribution service with a few useful changes. With UAW, you create unique versions for each article directory. UAW won’t let me tell you how this is done but I can tell you that what you have to do is easy and it takes an extra 20 to make this happen. This seems to help a ton with the indexing in Google. With Article Marketer I could usually only get indexed on like 20 pages as of late but with UAW I almost always get a few hundred.

Another big change that’s awesome with UAW is that you can submit as many resource boxes as you want. That means you can use a lot of variety in your links and that’s a huge benefit. You can also put links within the articles if you want to.

Results from Unique Article Wizard

I have done a few experiments with Unique Article Wizard and have been able to get some great results. I recently did a test to see how much improvement I could get out of a single site in 30 days by using UAW and I was to improve the site I was testing from an average of $19.03 per day to an average of $38.72. I didn’t use any other promotional techniques because I wanted the test to be pure. The money was made with Adsense, here’s a screen shot of this channel for the last week from my Adsense account:

Based on the results I have been able to get with UAW so far I’m going to give it a huge thumbs up. They are out-classing all of the other companies right now by a land slide and are running a very professional shop.

A lot of people have been asking me tons of questions about how I use UAW so I’ve created an advanced UAW video that will help you to see the tricks that you can use to get the most of out this service. If you are interested in the video all you have to do is take my recommendation, sign up for the service, and email me that date and user name you signed up with at uaw[at]thekeywordacademy[dot]com.

Please let me know in the comments if you have any questions or concerns about UAW. Hopefully this has been helpful and best of luck with your online businesses!

About BloggersBase

BloggersBase is an online magazine that has a definite social aspect to it. The readers have the chance to gain influence by voting, commenting, and otherwise participating. If you are a person that likes to find useful content, this site should be a pretty fun one to add to your arsenal.

The hook for BloggersBase is that any user can become a major influencer of the magazine. The more active you are, the more you can influence which content gets the most exposure on the site.

The site has a nice design, as you’ll be able to see here:

There are quite a few different ways that a blogger could use this site. Blogging is obviously about gaining influence and since this site allows you to socialize and promote, that shouldn’t be too difficult. They do allow you to link out from the articles and posts that you put up, so it shouldn’t be too tough to gain some extra exposure.

If I was going to dig in on this site I would probably do as much as I could to increase my influence score, which is kind of like karma. I would then create some really good articles that pointed to additional resources that I have on my own sites. It seems to me like this would work out quite well, after this site gained more traction. Right now it doesn’t seem like there’s a ton of action but based on the research I did the site is growing nicely.

My Recommendations

Right now it’s pretty easy to see that this site wasn’t created by a native English speaker. If I was on the team at BloggersBase I would make sure to have a native English speaker go through the site to work on some of the grammatical errors. This will help the branding and will allow more people to see that site as a professional magazine.

Since this site will probably eventually have a fairly large amount of user generated content, it will probably be able to grab a huge amount of search traffic which will help it to grow. If this site were mine, I would probably try to create a stronger hook that kept people around. I would hope that if I was going to take the time to write for this site, I could have some decent exposure. This could probably be helped quite a bit by adding a section on the home page for the top users.

Overall I think this is a pretty fun site if you’re really into social media.

The first is The Affiliate Academy and is Vic’s membership site. If any of you out there aren’t familiar with Vic, you need to become so in a huge hurry. You can check out his free blog at Make Money Online with Blogger Unleashed.

The second is Griz’s new WordPress blog. You can find it here: Make Money Online with Grizzly. While most of his work is done at his other site (How To Make Money Online), I can see the new site quickly moving up in the rankings.

These two guys are geniuses and these two shouts are long overdue. You need to become familiar with them if you’re serious about making money with the internet. Sorry it took so long fellas, you guys rule.

Now that we’re almost done with our new content, I’m super excited to be able to blog again. I’ve REALLY missed it and I look forward to being able to interact with you all.

To get this restarted right, Mark and I have created an email series that I think you guys are going to love. It’s called ‘Five Days To Success With Keywords’. You’ll get one email each day for five days and each will help you to learn more about keywords and SEO.

Along with the new email series, Mark and I will now be blogging on a new site. I’m probably a little biased, but I think the concepts we’re going to be covering over there will be super important for all of you. The new blog is called The Keyword Academy. You can get the free email series there.

So far we’ve published one post there, it’s called ‘3 Reasons People Fail To Make Money With Keywords‘.

If anyone would like to sell a site, please let me know. You can use the contact form on my contact page!

I’m basically looking for sites that are at least 6 months old that have at least a little income. I guess that means that I’m looking for sites that make between $10 and $1000 per month.

Why do I want to buy a few sites? So far when I have purchased sites I’ve had pretty luck getting more out of them than the previous owners. To be honest and up front, you can probably get more out of your sites than you’re getting. That said, you may need some cash now and if that’s the case, it will be a win-win.

The going market price for sites in this income range is 10x monthly earnings. I’ll be making offers in this range unless there’s a reason I can see that should change the multiple. Sites that are older than five years and sites that are PR5 or higher would be worth a higher multiple to me.

Let me know through the contact page and I’ll make you an offer!

~ Court

Please give the last sentence some serious thought. If you’re site is struggling, I’d bet the farm that you have one of those two problems.

Most sites don’t have the rankings they would like to have, but I guess that’s obvious. Based on the number of people reading this site and others like it, we can reasonably assume that people still aren’t getting to the traffic numbers they’re looking for.

Search engines can be literal gold mines for individuals that are able to take advantage. Google especially can provide you with a residual influx of traffic, amazingly composed primarily of a specific group of people that are looking for the information, product, or service you provide.

So what do you have to do to get Google to see you as an authority for the keyword you would like to get ranked for.

The Quickest Way To The Top

With this game, there are a lot of ways to play. The easiest way to win is to enlist the help of the ‘authorities’ - better said, the people that Google already trusts for the keyword you would like to come up for.

Let’s say that I wanted to become an authority for a keyword phrase like ‘how to teach a gerbil to swim’. Well, first things first, who are the ‘authorities’ for this keyword?

Doing a quick search in Google will tell you exactly who Goog believes the authorities are, and it all starts there. If you could get the top ten URLs that are ranked in Google to link to you, you would become an instant authority and would likely have earned a great ranking for that keyword. With an easy keyword like this, you would probably get ranked first, unless your site was brand new.

Yeah I hear you, “Well how do I get those sites to link to me, Court?” Well that’s the question isn’t it?! It’s not always going to be possible. I said this was the quickest way to the top - it’s definitely not easy to get everyone to link to your site.

That said, if I wanted to get sites like these to link to my gerbil-swimming site (ha, can you imagine if I really had a site about this?), I would probably create some kind of free download that I could offer. For some reason, I have always had better luck getting people to link to downloads (as opposed to posts or articles).

Alerting a bunch of gerbil sites about your download would likely draw some links.

Most people never get this far because they don’t want to create something of value in the first place. If you honestly created the best report ever written about ‘how to teach a gerbil to swim’, it’s very likely that you would eventually climb to number one for that keyword, based on the fact that gerbil lovers would link to you. Creating a garbage page would put you in a much more difficult position.

The reality is that some keywords are much more difficult than this one, but the same principles apply. If you want to rank first for cell phones, they keyword authority you need will be a lot harder to get. Why? Because the sites that are currently ranked are seriously strong sites.

I would say that a healthy majority of you will never try to create the amount of keyword authority it would take to get ranked for a term like cell phones. Why? You don’t believe that you could do it. I think that many of you could achieve something like that. The problem is that people tend to quit before they get there.

I think if you took a hard look at the sites that currently rank for anything, you’ll find that they don’t do the greatest job ever of explaining their information. Any of us could probably do a better job and if we did, we would create some keyword authority out of thin air. Why? People always link to the best site that covers a topic.

I bet a good 90% of you would be capable of getting on to the first page in Google for a term like ‘cell phones’, if you were willing to pay the price. Of course, it wouldn’t be mathematically possible for you all to do it at once. It doesn’t matter anyway because 99% of people would just quit anyway - that doesn’t have to be you. You can be different, if you want to be.

How To Get Started With Your Site’s Keyword Authority

Going after a huge term like cell phones usually isn’t the best way to build keyword authority. If I had a site about cell phones, I would break it down into tons of subtopics that I could provide solid information about.

A subtopic like ‘how to change a cell phone battery’ or ‘which is the best hosting company‘ would be easier to move up the rankings for, and would still help you to build authority for ‘cell phones’. Stringing together 50 or so keywords like that one on a single site will help you to start getting somewhere for ‘cell phones’, even though you haven’t tried specifically for cell phones. Why? Google and other search engines know that the terms are related.

The more specific, sub-topical terms you can rank for, the more keyword authority you will build for the more difficult keyword - the keyword most people would call a pipe dream.

Make a list of keywords that work well with your site, use those keywords to create awesome articles, notify other sites that cover the topic, and repeat.

So What Is Keyword Authority Exactly?

It’s a measure of how good your site is for a specific keyword. Google uses a lot of metrics to determine this, including use of keywords in your site (throughout your entire site), which sites you’re getting links from (and how authoritative they are for the keyword), and what words they use when they link to you (anchor text). Improve any of those metrics, and you will improve your keyword authority. Improve more than anyone else, and you will find yourself with a #1 ranking for your keyword.

There are, of course, lots of different methods that you can use to create keyword authority. We’re not going to cover them all today but I hope that this lesson will help you to understand a little more about what keyword authority is. Please let me know in the comments if you have any questions!

Does the answer to that question fly off your lips? Did you have to think about it? Can you answer it even after thinking about it?

How about this - fill in the blanks in the following statement:

“I give my users _________ and I get ________ in return.”

Am I overstating things if I say the key to success with any website is found in those two blanks?

A couple of examples…

On my ecommerce site: “I give my users a variety of trailer hitch accessories and I get money in return.”

On my wife’s personal blog, she would say: “I give my friends and family updates on my life (and about eight million pictures of our 11 month old son) and I get a feeling of connection and happiness in return.

On CourtneyTuttle.com: “We give people simple insights into how they can get traffic from the search engines and we get coaching clients, membership website subscribers (until recently ) and joint venture offers from other businesses in return.

If you don’t have a written plan for your site, you should at the very least be able to make a clear “I give this and I get that in return.” statement. If you don’t have that mantra in your head every day, how can you expect your business to progress?

I don’t do a lot of blog reading, but often I’ll click through to sites I find in comments here on the site. I’ll read a post or two, and all too often I find myself saying “What’s your point?” On most of the sites I visit I don’t see any clear message of “The author is giving me this, and hoping to get that in exchange.”

Now you might not care if your users/readers see an obvious “give and receive” message on your blog, but think about this: In the last 30 days, I have spent over $5,000 just on information. The crazy thing is I’m GLAD I’ve just shelled out five grand for knowledge, because I know I’ve purchased some really high ROI solutions to a few of the problems we face in our business.

If you want to make money, you have to be the provider of a solution for which a large enough group of people is willing to pay.

I don’t think that sentence reads very smoothly, but I’m leaving it alone. Go back over it a couple times and let it sink in.

What problem (faced by a large enough group of people) does your presence on the web solve?

Your primary goal, maybe even your obsession, should be to answer that question.

If you can’t fire off the answer, stop whatever else you’re doing and start figuring it out. Our experience at Court’s Internet Marketing School is the earning power of a site really takes off after a) the author discovers what problem he/she can solve for the audience, and b) the audience agrees.

Let’s Brainstorm Together

Maybe we can help you get started today by going through a little exercise in the comments section. Here’s how it will work: anyone who feels like they have a clearly defined “I give this and receive that in exchange” statement, please leave it in the comments. It’s some free advertising and a branding opportunity for your site. For those of you who aren’t quite sure yet, make your best attempt.

Everybody else, click through to the sites behind a few of the comments, then come back and reply to the site owner’s statement. Did the site match the give/receive statement? Leave some POSITIVE feedback. I’m putting everyone on notice now that any sarcastic and/or critical comments will be immediately deleted. Court and I have very thick skins; you can feel free to call us morons all day long. We’re not in the business of setting other people up for that same treatment though, so if you can’t say something nice…

I hope a few of you who are just getting started will put yourselves out there. This is a chance to have a very clarifying moment in establishing the direction of your site.