TheBitBot Organic SEO & SEM Blog

Over the past year I have spent a substantial amount of time researching the subject of internet marketing. I must say, this is really a much more fascinating pursuit that I ever could have imagined. There are so many variables and steps involved and the learning curve can be quite long and span several years if one does not know where to look or what questions to ask.

For that reason, I have decided, for this post, to condense everything I have learned into one short article that can act as an outline for anyone who has not yet obtained a personal road map to this end. So, here we go.

Step 1) Select a niche that you will write about. Take a moment and reflect on your life experiences, your interests, your pastimes, things you are passionate about, things that have consistently held your interest over the years or problems you have worked hard to overcome.

So far in this series, we have determined that we want to build an online business, selected a niche, determined whether or not there was money being spent in that niche and we began to venture out to determine whether or not suitable products are available for resale in this niche.

In the last installment,  we began to discuss sourcing digital products from vendors such as Clickbank. Monetizing your online business using these types of products is a very simple process. Simply, all one is doing is presenting the visitor with sales copy that sells the product behind the affiliate link.

In this chapter, we will discuss selling our own product, perhaps one that we host on our own site. This is much more fun in my opinion because we are the owner of the product and not just an affiliate. Additionally, this gives us the opportunity to branch out and develop some new skills in that a landing page and download page will have to be designed and uploaded to our server. So how do I sell my own product online and set up my process so that my visitors automatically get a link to my product download upon my receipt of payment?

So far in this series, we have talked about selecting a niche, researching our niche so as to determine if there is a demand in this particular niche and finally additional research to see if there is money being spent in this niche.

If we determine that the niche is profitable, we can now begin searching for suitable products to sell on our website. There are many information products that we can sell online. All you have to do is Google information products for resell. Additionally, you could search for products with master resell rights (MRR) or private label rights (PLR). Please note that selling PLR items is not the same as using PLR content. You can actually use PLR items when selling because the information contained in them is not used as content for your site. Other people may also be selling these same PLR items. As a reminder, all content used for your site that is readable by search engines and counted as content must be original. That is the only way you will ever have a decent rank or SERP.

Making money with blogs is not difficult but at the same time, it is very difficult. What does that mean you ask? Simply put, there are two different methodologies that you can follow if you are going to launch a website or blog and use it as a source of income. One of these methods is quick and can earn you a small amount of supplemental income and the other one is very slow and has the potential to turn into an online business.

The first method, the simple one, entails signing up at at one of the following outfits or something similar:

1) https://www.blogger.com/start 2) http://www.weebly.com/ 3) http://www.sosblog.com/ 4) http://www.thoughts.com/ 5) http://wordpress.com/ 6) http://weblog.com/ 7) http://wordpress.org/

Please note that number seven does not include hosting. You will need to acquire free hosting if you are going to use the WordPress.org PHP blogging script. Additionally, your host will have to allow PHP and FTP. There are some free hosts that do allow these. Some will install it for free in the CPanel.

Whenever browsing SEO forums, it is not uncommon to see threads dedicated to “techniques” built around manipulating search engine results. Recently, I posted on this blog about how SEO techniques, if used incorrectly, can actually harm your search engine results. I am not talking about getting “slapped” by the search engines for using “black hat” or “spamming” methodologies, I am talking about “white hat” techniques used incorrectly. What?!? White hat techniques used incorrectly?!? Is that possible? Sure it is.

I am actually thinking about writing a series of articles that hopefully debunk a variety of myths concerning SEO techniques that have long been used and considered “white hat”, but, in actuality, do absolutely nothing to help the search engines determine what your page is about or give your visitors what they need, that being relevant information.

So, for my first installment in this series, I will discuss one thing that I have personally done in the past that does not work and makes your copy of very poor quality for your readers and that is keyword stuffing.

In the last chapter of this series, we discussed the answer to the question: “Does this niche have enough interest to pursue?”. Accordingly, if we have indeed found a niche in which there is sufficient interest to pursue, we now move to the next logical phase of our marketing plan and that is to determine if there is actually money being spent in this particular niche. If there is, then we can start thinking about creating or sourcing products to market to the individuals making up this niche.

So how do we determine if there is money being spent in this niche?

One of the simplest ways and probably the one most commonly used is that of paid listings. In short, paid listings follow the money because there is an inherent ROI or Return On Investment. This means that for every dollar spent on advertising, some multiple of that number is being made back. Hopefully, the return is greater than the investment. Keep in mind that there are no guarantees, but generally, paid listings are a good starting gauge.

Whenever a new website is launched, one of the first things concentrated on during the process of adding content to your website is optimizing it for search engines. Whenever one optimizes content for search engines, they are essentially making it easy for search engines to understand and index. Keyword research is done to make sure that the genre of content is placed in a high traffic niche where it will be seen by many.

However, after creating your content and performing basic on-site SEO, you job is still not complete. You now need to drive traffic to your site by advertising and linking to it. This begins the process of off-site SEO. Again, you perform keyword research and link to your content using a variety of niche related keywords so as to place it in the path of keywords that have an appreciable amount of traffic. For example, if you have a website about how to sell ebooks online, after doing a little keyword research, you will find that the keyword “how to sell ebooks online” receives about 720 searches per month. Not very impressive. Now you discover that the keyword “how sell online” receives 49,500 searches per month, a major jump in potential traffic. Additionally, Google Keyword Selector Tool shows that it has much less competition. Let’s optimize for that instead! STOP RIGHT THERE!

There are sever glaring problems with this logic that will absolutely KILL your conversion rate should you decide to take this route. For starters, the Google Keyword Selector Tool is only good for one thing if you are a publisher and that is showing you how much traffic you can potentially receive for any particular keyword. It is important to not that the metric that this tool gives for “competition” IS NOT the metric that you use to gauge how much competition you have when attempting to rank high in the search results for certain keywords you are targeting. It is something completely different. For a quick and dirty way to see how much competition you really have for any particular keyword, simply open your browser, point it to Google and search for your keyword. Next, make a note of how many results are show just under the search field.

With all of the nice content management scripts available these days, it is now very easy to setup a website and launch it within about an hour. Once the website is up and running, monetizing it is as simple as adding a small block of adsense code. In this post we will walk through the steps required to setup an autoblog and see just how easy it is to create a source of income based around syndicated content.

To begin, we have a checklist of items that we will need before we get started. You will need:

1) A web domain 2) Hosting 3) An Adsense account

To begin, purchase a domain name from a registrar like GoDaddy. Select the dot com domain name of your choice and purchase it. If you want to save money, you can stick with a dot net, dot org, or a dot info domain. Dot info domains are the cheapest and usually have more of a selection of available keywords to use as domain names. If you already have a domain, then you can skip to step two.

This is installment number two of how to sell online. In this particular post, we will discuss determining if there is even a demand for the information or product that you are interested in selling.

I have made note on several occasions where professional internet marketers have launched products only to find that the demand that they thought would be there, in fact, wasn’t. This is unfortunate, because a great deal of time and effort as well as money can be spent on developing a product as well as advertising before the launch. It is enormously discouraging to build a large campaign from the ground up only to not have it not convert on the back end.

For instance, the individual selling the product may have outsourced a massive back-linking campaign building up their landing page, written tons of articles and posted them to article directories, posted links in blogs and forums as well as bookmarking pre-sell articles, all in an effort to prime the demand for their product only to be discouraged when it doesn’t move off of the digital shelves.

I have been doing a little bit of experimenting lately in an attempt to drive more traffic to this blog. This pursuit, of course, has taken me down several roads at once. Some methods work great. Some methods are not so great. To track activity, I installed a counter at the bottom of the right hand column of this blog. I know this is a bit “old school” but it is fun to watch the counter roll none-the-less.

The funny thing about traffic is the fact that, occasionally, it comes in waves. Different marketing methods bring different results and sometimes you will get a small surge. If you focus your efforts on bringing targeted traffic and providing content relevant to what your readers are searching for, then the odds are that you will find that those individuals will return once more to see if you update regularly. If you consistently update your blog with fresh, relevant and informative content, then the odds are that those same visitors will return on multiple occasions. Fresh content is absolutely key in this regard. Additionally, as it was stated to me, you have to give your readers your best information. You have no reason not to. If those who seek you out do not find what they need on your blog or something of value, they will easily find it somewhere else. This helps establish reputation and trust.