Internet Marketing Tips

Google Vs Bing – Google By Choice or by Compulsion?

Shabbir — Sat, 12 May 2012 06:52:07 +0000

Google has gone too far with over optimization penalty. I am sure every Webmaster who has been hit by Google would say those things after each update but today I am going to speak from Google’s users point of view and not from a Webmasters point of view.

Last few days I have been reading lot of articles all over the Internet about the impact of over optimization. Webmasters will talk more about impact on traffic but when you are talking from user’s viewpoint then what matters is the quality of search results.

The Impact

Google has been penalizing so many sites that many queries started pointing to parked domains or blank page websites.

Searching in Google for the term Make Money Online leads to parked domains and blank pages in the top search results. Check out the article High Quality Empty Content Pages by Aaron Wall.

Arguing in favor of Google terms like Make Money Online – the top position can be taken by highly skilled SEO people and so chances of being over optimized cannot be ruled out but SearchEngineJournal analyzes the term something where searching for something pops up the site that showed in first position was a one page website. Read “Something” is Wrong with Google (since 2004)

Few more articles on bad Google’s search results.

Is Bing a Solution or a Bigger Problem?

Now you tend to get the feeling it is time to move to Bing but then I did not find satisfactory results with Bing either. In fact Bing disappointed me more than Google yet again.

Indian Premier League or IPL 2012 is undoubtedly one of the trending terms now and if you search IPL 2012 in Google, I see a site on the first page of Google and it is ranked on 8th position.

Remember we are talking from view point of Google customer and not from view point of Webmaster and so I will not analyze the site for keyword research or link analysis because that has been done by most of the links I shared above and so let us visit the site as Google’s user.

We see a black banner at the top with logos of all IPL teams and an H1 tag to blend the content with the banner with keywords for users to understand that this is site all about IPL 2012.

Now I searched the same term IPL 2012 in Bing and this is what I see.

Not even worth discussing because the official site IPLT20.com is not among the first 3 results and some WordPress site on .in domain is top of the list even beating Wikipedia.

Question to Readers

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Are we Google-ing by Choice or by compulsion? Sound off your choice in comments.

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Ways to Make Money Online – The Complete Guide

Shabbir — Sun, 06 May 2012 06:38:07 +0000

My free course deals with ways to making money online but there are many readers who gave me the feedback that they cannot wait for each of those chapters to be delivered and want to know instantly what are the ways to making money online. So let me craft a complete guide to understand ways to make money online. I still recommend my course because each chapter is followed by action item to help you decide the right way to get started.

Blogging
Freelancing
Consulting Services
Affiliate Marketing
Product Creation
Online Auctions
Online Forums
Niche Sites
Membership Sites
Website Flipping

1. Blogging

Everybody is blogging. At the time of writing this article WordPress.com Stats say they host more than 73 million+ blogs.

Blogging is one of the best ways to setting up business online and make money out of it because it leads to multiple source of income. You can use blogging to

Promote your product or services
Get freelancing opportunities
Network with like minded people to promote your products
Make affiliate sales

And the list continues but the ideas of making money from blog is based on the principle of generating value to your blog reader first and then possibly monetize your blog. Blogging is a long-term money making option where you provide values to your blog readers and then monetize your blog but many new bloggers try to monetize blog very early and in the process fail miserably.

Blogger by Google can be wrong choice to getting started with blogging and see why here. If you want to get started to blogging check out my step by step guide to getting started with WordPress

2. Freelancing

Freelancing is one of the most effective ways to make money online. In fact it is one of those few ways to making money online where you can start cashing in from the day one.

August 11, 2010 is when I shared my $10,000 milestone in elance. 20 months from that post this is what my elance account stands at.

Approximately $500 per month doing freelancing through Elance and yet freelancing is not something I am very actively focusing in 2012.

We all have certain skills and expertise. It is about realizing the expertise and then helping people with it and making money out of it. If you think you don’t have those skills that can help you make money online, you can work on developing them. I was more of a C++ programmer in college days and in my job profiles but as of today most of my freelancing income is by optimizing vBulletin for large forums or marketing and traffic generation for websites.

There are several sites to get started with freelancing and the most popular ones are Elance.com, ODesk.com or vWorker.com

3. Consulting Services

In my wildest of dream also I could not imagine myself being a consultant for finance and as of today I also think that I should not be the person to consult on financials because I don’t have formal education and till date I admit that I am not aware of many investment option myself. Yet I see lot of my blog readers asking for my consultation services. It is one of those pages of my blog that is not very actively promoted by me and yet I see so many people asking for my consultation service.

This is yet another way to making money online and it is yet another example of developing your skills. I learned trading in market because I wanted to trade and profit in market. Once I started making profit in market I shared it on my blog transparently and readers could relate their trading losses with mine. Now they want me to be their mentor and teacher. I never thought I would write an eBook on finance and this is the opening line of my eBook as well.

It is very important to build credibility online (See Simple Tips to Build Credibility and Trust). The more trusted you are, it becomes that much more easier for you to offer consulting services online.

4. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is great way to make money online but when you talk about Affiliate marketing people think it is:- Find a product to promote and then register a keyword-rich domain name related to that product. Copy one page review from product site itself or somewhere else and then start spamming in blogs and forums about the one page website to generate traffic and backlinks.

I don’t like to call it as affiliate marketing but it is spamming.

Affiliate marketing is more about reviewing and recommending products that you would like to be associated with. As an example I recommend lot of resources here at IMTips and it is not because I want to be making money from those recommendations but because I use them myself to make money online.

Let us take example of Elance.com under freelancing way of making money online. I recommended Elance because it has helped me make $20,000. I would be paid only $1 if someone sign up at Elance as developer with free membership but the recommendation is not because of the commission it will generate but because I think if it has worked for me it is more likely to work for others and I don’t mind endorsing Elance. There are many other freelancing sites that would pay much higher than Elance but unless I have used them personally, I would not recommend them.

You don’t necessarily need to practice unethical marketing to make money from affiliate products. You can make lot of money doing affiliate marketing promoting good and genuine products.

5. Product Creation

What if a niche does not offer any genuine product that you can endorse? It is not something that should discourage you but instead it is an opportunity for you to come up with really good product for you blog.

Indian market don’t have any product that teaches people about technical analysis online but there are thousand of stock tippers who provide stock tips that can make people millionaire if they pay them few hundreds every month. Instead of promoting those stock tips services on my technical analysis blog for an affiliate commission I preferred creating a product that can help my blog readers understand market in a better way.

A secret way to make lot more sales and make more money online is by adding more value to your product by adding bonuses. Bonus can be anything like a personal one on one interaction with you for an hour or offering free access to private member area of your site or an audio version of your eBook etc.

6. Online Auctions

You can make money online by selling items on eBay. Let me share my experience of 2004 to make money from eBay.

In 2004 GMail was launched and you could only create account if you had an invite. So I purchased a GMail invite for $2.5 in eBay.

Once I had my GMail account, I remember correctly that I got 6 invites to share and decided to sell them in eBay. The process I followed was to sell 5 invites and create a new account with the 6th one to get more invites to sell.

If I remember correctly I generated more than $25 in the process. Nothing big but those were my starting days into making money online. Apart from that in 2004 I remember that PayPal was virtual money for Indians i.e. you could not withdraw money to your bank account in India but still I was fine making money in PayPal to spend on things online.

The idea is to see the items selling on auctions site like eBay and see if you can also sell those items. I have seen people order Goods from China and sell them on eBay but I don’t suggest doing it.

7. Online Forums

Online forums is yet another way to making money online but it is yet another method with lot of misconceptions. I see lot of new forums coming up but the second step after making it live is to add Google Adsense everywhere they can. The focus should be to generate user engagement and content first and then possibly try to monetize it.

I have shared a detail article on How to REALLY Make Money From Forum but remember that forums are comparatively more difficult to get going because you have to make sure members are around that can get the conversations started and drive other people to join the discussion. If you expect new members to get the ball rolling for you, that will never happen. You have to take needed steps to generate lot of content for your members to interact.

8. Niche Sites

Niche sites is something which I am experimenting and so I will recommend you article by Pat Flynn on How to Build Niche Sites which is undoubtedly the best article on internet for building niche sites.

9. Membership Sites

Membership site’s is yet another avenue for me to explore but you can read How to Launch membership sites by the best in the business Yaro Starak.

10. Website Flipping

I purchased CodeItWell from DigitalPoint in August 2008.

The purchase was not for flipping website for profit but was mainly to add more technical sites to my list of web properties and so flipping website is not something I can talk about with great conviction. If flipping website for profit is something that is done successfully by many webmasters and if it is something that interests you, you can read about How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit by Yaro Starak

Final Thoughts

What’s your preferred way to make money online? What other methods you want to add to the list? Feel free to share your thoughts in comments below!

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Do You Need New Account For Every Product You Sell On Clickbank?

Shabbir — Fri, 04 May 2012 15:20:08 +0000

User Question :

Do I have to create a new account for every product I sell on clickbank?

The answer is NO you don’t need multiple Clickbank account to sell more than one item in Clickbank. You can use one Clickbank account to sale upto 499 items. Each Clickbank item is assigned an item number ranging from 1 to 500 and so you can sale 499 items from one clickbank account and the payment link for each item that you place on the sales page becomes

http://ITEM_NUMBER.YOUR_CLICKBANK_VENDOR_ID.pay.clickbank.net

Like for my Technical Analysis eBook it becomes

http://1.sbhimani.pay.clickbank.net

Check out Step By Step Guide to Start Selling With Clickbank

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How to Add infolinks to vBulletin Forums

Shabbir — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 08:50:07 +0000

infolinks Ads in vBulletin

Infolinks works best on content rich pages. So I prefer to have infolinks ads confined to the post content of threads and inside the blog posts of vBulletin Blog. Let us see how we can add infolinks into vBulletin with the following options.

Show infolinks ads only on content pages.
Show infolinks only in content area of threads and posts and not in navigational and other area of a page.
Optionally show infolinks ads only to Guests.

Controlled Ad Placement tags

Controlled ad placement can be implemented by adding and HTML comments to the content pages. There is no limit on how many times you can place the ON and OFF comments. So let us add the comments near the content.

Edit postbit template (If you are using the postbit_legacy template edit the postbit_legacy template).

Find

$post[message]

And add Infolinks controlled html comments tag before and after the message

$post[message]

If you are using vBBlog product in your vBulletin 3 you may need to add controlled ad placement to the following 4 templates as well.

blog_entry
blog_entry_featured
blog_entry_profile
blog_show_entry

In each of those 4 templates search for

$blog[message]

And add the ad control convertion comments before and after the message

$blog[message]

Ad tags

Grab Infolinks ad code and place them in the SHOWTHREAD template just before the closing BODY tag. The infolinks ad code looks like

If you have vBulletin 3 Blog as an add-on, you will need to place the above code in the BLOG template like SHOWTHREAD template just before the closing body tag.

Only For Guests

If you want to show ads only to guests and not to members you can restrict the ad code with a conditional if statement.

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Really Funny Business Proposal That Made Me Freak Out

Shabbir — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:41:15 +0000

I get so many emails each day with lot of business proposals for forums and blogs but this one was just too funny . The story begins with some Guy Mainak from Kolkata contacts me through my Google+ Profile for a business proposal and wants to share it with me. Normally I am open to meeting people but as it is April time I become lot more busy with my taxation and other non-technical stuff and so could not meet him. I thought the best option could be to meet him at my home on a weekend but that did not work as well.

Suddenly after I ask him about his blog or about page where I can read more about him, he says

have you understood my proposal

And that shook me off. 9 minutes ago he said this

i will send my propsal on Monday.After that we can proceed

Proposal that he will send few days later and he is still expecting that I know it already. But things like those can happen in a chat and so we still end the conversation with a note that he would send me the proposal on Monday.

5 days later i.e. on Wednesday he pings me and this is the conversation. You may fall off your chair reading it.

He starts with

here i go with my proposal

And the next line

do you have wordpress blogs?

He probably forgot yet again that he had a glanced over my blog’s about page, which is a WordPress blog. Again these things can happen because 5 days have passed. The next statement made me go mad at him.

how many wp blogs can you add to my system?

I know nothing about the system. What it is, where it is and how it works and so I said NO. But then he assumed that I know how to read his mind.

He said people are ready to add blogs to his system without meeting him and we know what type of blogs he is talking about. Though I could not understand his idea but I can sense it was something inline with some blog network to make money from it.

Moral of the Story

If you have a business proposal for anybody make sure you have a proposal that conveys what you have in mind before asking someone to be part of it or else it could be on left for others to laugh at

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Can Site Wide Links Trigger Over Optimization Penalty?

Shabbir — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 11:51:44 +0000

My friend’s 6 month old site saw a traffic dip around 20th March when Google Announced penalizing over optimized sites.

The very next day I got a call from him saying that he did nothing to trigger over optimization penalty. He wanted me to have a look into his site’s Analytics and Webmaster tools to see if I can come up with a reason for such a hit in traffic from recent Google update.

Why the Drop?

After digging Google Analytics and Google’s Webmaster tools I realized that he has done a very common thing that many of us do that could be the only reason to trigger such a fall. He has few sites in the same niche and all he did was place a site-wide link to the new site from all those established sites.

I was very keen on knowing the exact cause of such impact because the question that I had in my mind was – Can a site-wide link impact the penalty of over optimization. As far as my understanding of over optimization goes the site and blogs for giving backlinks were penalized and de-indexed (I updated my Link Building Strategy to avoid such Blog network).

In fact I also link to my sites site-wide from related sites. As an example IMTips is linked from my MBA Forum site-wide in the top yellow bar but there is no major impact on IMTips for over optimization.

The Real Reason

After discussing the links details I realized that he had a do-follow site-wide link and IMTips incoming site-wide link are all no-follow. It could be the only reason that his site is penalized but IMTips is not penalized. Apart from that site-wide links means there is no variation in anchor text link and March Google updates were more focused on Anchor Text enhancement.

Now we probably know the real cause of fall in his traffic.

So what’s next?

I asked him to remove links from those sites or at least make them no-follow i.e. links for traffic and not for search engine benefits and after 3 week’s his feedback is his traffic is recovering from Google but very very slowly.

Share your March traffic impact from Google in comments below.

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The Most Common Internet Marketing Mistake Bloggers Make That You Should Avoid

Shabbir — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:03:08 +0000

The most common Internet marketing mistake new bloggers make is trying to copy other successful bloggers and work on single aspect of marketing of those successful bloggers. There is no harm in copying the formula of success from successful bloggers but looking at only one aspect of it may not give you the right picture.

People try to reverse engineer the links and keywords of the successful blogger in the niche using Google and then try to get rank for those keywords using those links. Soon they realize that those links are not very easy to get and those keywords are not the kind of keywords they can rank for and conclude that blogging is not right for them. I have seen this happen time and again for so many bloggers especially Indian bloggers.

I have seen many people try to copy Problogger or CopyBlogger or any other such great bloggers and fail miserably because they try to reverse engineer those blogs based on Google only. They try to find number of back links or the keywords that drive traffic for those blogs or may be article count those blogs have and tend to forget the most important thing which is the amount of time those bloggers have spent building relationships and helping others.

Next time you think about becoming like an authority blogger in your niche, try to focus on all aspects of marketing and not only Google. Focus on building relationship with your readers and help them.

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Get Started with Pinterest & Drive Traffic To Your Website

Shabbir — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 10:41:54 +0000

Pinterest is the hottest social networking platform of 2011 and has over taken some of the established social networking platforms by a big margin. Are you still wasting your time with Digg and Stumbleupon? Its time to start pinning. Let me share how you can get started with Pinterest.

How Pinterest Works?

Pinterest is a social network that allows users to share and discover new interests by pinning images, videos or content to pinboards that have a common theme. As with any social network, users can either upload from their computer or pin things they find on the web using pin it button.

Apart from that Pinterest is well integrated with other social networking platform and so when others are browsing through pins, they will also have the ability to share through Facebook, Twitter or email.

Why Pinterest?

Online businesses rely on driving traffic to websites. Many independent studies have shown that Pinterest is more effective at driving traffic compared to other social networking sites like LinkedIn or Google+ (here or here). On top of that every single pin includes a link back to the source of the element (Image or video). If an image is pinned, it will link back to the page where the image was found. However, these are no-follow links and so will not help much in SEO but then the pinners and re-pinners can visit your pages.

How Pinterest is Monetized?

We all know social networking sites are not well monetized because advertising revenue model does not work that well on them. May be one of the reason why we don’t see ads on twitter and Google+ but Pinterest is different. Pinterest is still in beta and is already making money.

They partnered with Skimlinks, which automatically scans through every link posted on the site to see if it can convert that link into an affiliate link and ensures pinterest will make cash from sales generated from pinned links. Pinterest has taken a unique path of generating revenue early.

How to get a Pinterest Account?

Pinterest account can only be created with an invite. Visit www.pinterest.com, click “request an Invite,” and enter your email address to be notified when you have access to create your account, or you can ask a friend who already has a pinterest account to invite you. If you are looking for pinterest invite share your interest in comments and I can invite you.

Can I use Pinterest for marketing?

Pinterest is designed to categorize and share things you love and not a tool for promotion but if you’re a blogger, a pinboard on your blog topic would not be a bad idea. You can find my Internet Marketing Pin Board here.

Build Your Pinterest Pinboard Following

Any social network requires building followers for networking and traffic. However, pinterest is a lot different when it comes to following users. In typical social networking terms you follow people on twitter, facebook and linkedIn but pinterest has option to follow interest (specific pinboard) of a user. It makes much more sense.

I blog about Internet Marketing and Technical Analysis but people reading this blog may not be interested in knowing what I do in Indian equity market. So you can follow me on Pinterest or my Internet Marketing Board on Pinterest.

Add your pinterest pinboard everywhere you can.

Add pinterest follow button to your website.
Create the best board on a topic and don’t hesitate to promote other users’ pins to enhance your collection.
Promote your presence of Pinterest on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter.

Final Thoughts

Pinterest is a visual social network and so you need to create pin boards that have the best visual content like infographics, charts, ebook covers. Are you on Pinterest and using it to your advantage? Share your views in comments

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How to Get Started Blogging With WordPress?

Shabbir — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:51:15 +0000

New Bloggers aren’t sure if they can blog. So it is important to have a step by step guide that can make new bloggers understand blogging and let them decide if blogging is the right choice for them or not. So I will share the basic of blogging and detailed step by step guide to getting started blogging with WordPress.

The Mindset of New Bloggers

Getting started to blogging by getting a domain and hosting does not work especially with new Indian webmasters when they are not sure if they can blog or not. So it is important to get your feet wet with blogging. When you are trying to blog you are actually not trying to be a blogger but you want to see if blogging can work for you or not and test the blogging model yourself.

If you are into the same mindset read below or else you can directly jump to the next level.

Getting Started with WordPress.com

Self-hosted WordPress blog is the way forward for money making blogs but we need a domain name and hosting for self hosted blog. I recommend Bluehost but if you are not comfortable getting yourself a domain and hosting, you can get started with WordPress.com blog that will be on WordPress.com subdomain like http://shabbirbhimani.wordpress.com/

WordPress.com blogs are difficult to monetize (can see why here) but the idea is to get the feeling of WordPress and blogging before you move to self hosted WordPress blog. Your risk is only the time you invested learning WordPress and nothing financially which I think should be very much an option for anybody who is trying to be a blogger or webmaster.

Your effort of WordPress.com blog will not be wasted at all and it will help you build links to your self hosted WordPress blog that you get in the future.

This article has lot of steps and so I will recommend you book mark this page for coming back to the article.

As you have bookmarked this page I would suggest go and get your WordPress.com blog NOW.

Finding the Right Niche for your Blog

Let us now find the right niche for your blog. Finding Niche is very tough task but finding niche of your first blog is simple and let me help you get that done.

Take paper and pen and write down all your hobbies. At least make a list of 3-5 hobbies and don’t worry it can be anything like cricket, bikes, gyms, reading books or even playing games.

Sort the hobbies in decreasing order of your liking.

The niche of your blog is the one right at the top of your list. Find 10 topics that you would search in Google for finding information about the niche. Those ten topics will become your first ten posts in WordPress later.

Why don’t you promote your blog in my comments before proceeding further? Share your blog and niche with me in comments below.

Blog Themes

You have your WordPress blog and have selected the right niche for your blog and its time to find Good theme for your Blog that suits your niche.

If you have started with WordPress.com blog you have the option to choose the themes in your WordPress admin interface. Select the theme that is best suitable to your niche. If you have a self hosted WordPress blog you can either opt for thesis (I use thesis on IMTips because it is the best WordPress theme) or you can choose from thousands of free WordPress themes.

Once you have your blog, the right niche and the needed design, its time for the first few articles to go live on your blog.

The First Few Posts

Time to go blogging. While choosing the niche for the blog I suggested you to have ten topics and so the first step is to get those articles online.

Once you have your first set of topics as posts in your blog you can have hard time finding new topics (and every blogger can have that issue) and so I will share with you one very important tip about finding topics for blogging. Make blogging part of your day and soon you will notice things from a blogging perspective. You will find lot of things that would tell yourself, “Hey, I can write about this.”

You are passionate about the topic and it is your hobby as well and so it should not be very difficult for you to read and learn more about it.

You can also visit related forums and read queries from members to find topics for your blogs. Apart from that you can also read other authority blogs to learn more about the topic as well as read comments on the authority blog and see what questions people have and answer them on your blog.

Things to Avoid As New Blogger

Don’t focus on traffic stats – Don’t focus on traffic stats and even if you do, don’t feel depressed if no one visits your site for the first few months. It will take some time for your blog to get noticed and readership and so you should focus on getting good quality articles before trying to get people to read them. If people land on blog with only handful of posts, they may not consider you seriously.

Avoid Social Media Marketing – Social network sites are good but they do eat up lot of your valuable time that you can dedicate to writing posts.

Avoid too many options in the sidebar – New bloggers tend to add lot of distractions like twitter and Facebook streams. These things never work and make your blog slower. Apart from that it gives lot of options to your users to click away from your blog.

Why Blog?

The most important question is why you should blog? It is not always the money that drives people to blogging and there is much more than just money which is

Create great relationships with people you may never meet.
Learn lot of technical stuff – I was not taught PHP or WordPress in my Bachelor’s degree but now I can say I know them because of blogging.
Learn lot of non-technical stuff – I am not a marketing guy and yet I do lot of experiment with online marketing for my websites. The credit of learning of internet marketing goes to blogging.

What to Expect from your New Blog?

Many people expect immediate results from blogging and are deeply disappointed when things don’t go their way. I prefer building a blog before expecting anything from it.

Do you think you can blog? Do you understand WordPress better now? What all queries you have that you want me to answer? Share in comments below.

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Why I don’t Recommend Google’s keyword Tool for SEO?

Shabbir — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:13:53 +0000

Google’s keyword tool is useless when doing keyword research for SEO and yet most people prefer doing keyword research using Google’s Keyword tool only. Rather I must say Adwords Keyword Tool. The choice of using it is obvious because – It’s free, it’s by Google and last but not the least Internet is full of recommendation to use it. We need to understand one thing before using it, which is it is not SEO keyword research tool but it is a PPC Keyword research tool.

The question may come what is the difference between the two. There is difference of hell and heaven.

Google’s Keyword tool is not for analyzing SEO competition but for analyzing PPC competition.

Let me try to explain this with an example. Let us take a broad keyword say blog or blogging. Google Adwords Keyword tools reports both of them as low competition keywords.

Now let us look at the same keywords into Market Samurai, the tool I use for my SEO Based keyword research but you can use any other SEO competition-analyzing tool of your choice.

See the RDP column in screenshot above, which means referring domains as back links to the ranked pages. You will find that you need 10k+ links pointing to your page alone to rank for the keyword blog or blogging and this is by no means a low competitive keyword.

You may wonder is Google keyword tool reporting wrongly? NO the Google keyword tool reports competition for PPC and not for organic SEO. You can see there are no ads for the terms Blog or blogging.

So what does this mean, You can get cheap traffic if you target keywords like blog or blogging for your Adwords campaign but it gives you no idea on the keywords competitiveness for Google’s organic rankings.

So never use ~~Google’s~~ Adwords keyword tool for SEO and only use it for PPC keyword competition analysis.

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