6 more free steps to making money online

If you read my previous article you will know that the goal of these articles is to teach you ways to get started making money online without having to spend any money.

This is the second in the series and this time we deal with having your own blog. There are endless ways of making money once you have traffic, and your blog will get you traffic. The income we will be looking at today will come from Google Adsense.

There are multiple benefits to having a blog including the low cost (or no cost), the resources that will help you get traffic to your blog and the fact that you can provide your blog as an RSS feed. An RSS feed will allow readers to automatically receive your updates into their RSS reader.

Let's get started with our 6 steps.

1. Set up your blog. You will need to decide what you are going to blog about. You should decide on a theme and name your blog appropriately.

There are a number of free ways to set up a blog & to have it hosted for free. We will go with Blogger.com for our first blog.

Blogger will allow you to set up a blog for free they will host it for free and they will ping search engines every time you update, meaning you will get spidered & found.

Visit blogger.com & click the button on the front page labelled 'create your blog now' then follow the step by step instructions that Blogger provide.

Some key settings you will want to get right are:

I) 'Host your blog at Blogger' = Yes
II) 'Add your blog to our listings' = Yes
III) 'Ping Weblogs.com' = Yes
IV) 'Publish Site Feed' = Yes

2. Write some content. Before we move any further there has to be some information on the site & that means that you have to make some entries. You can write some of these entries yourself & some can be quotes from sites of interest to your reader that you can post using the Google Toolbar.

You can download the Google toolbar for free at toolbar.google.com. The toolbar includes a Blogger button. When you visit a site that has something of interest to your readers you can highlight the appropriate text & click the Blogger button. The content will then be added to your blog along with a link back to the site.

3. Once you have some content eg a weeks worth of blogging with 1 or 2 entries for everyday, you can apply for an adsense account. When you sign in to Blogger you will see an invitation to join Adsense. Use this link and apply for an account.

You can find out all about Adsense on the Adsense page but basically you get Google ads on your site & get paid if your visitor clicks them.

Google will decide what adverts show on your site based on the content it finds within.

You need to be aware that Google will decline your application if your site is not considered to have content. Nobody outside of Google knows the precise rules on this.

Once you have been accepted you can get some javascript from Google to add to you site. Copy this & then log in to Blogger.

Once you have logged into your blog you will see that one of the tabs across the top of the screen is labelled 'Template'. Click this. You will need to know a little bit of HTML to help find the right location to paste your Google code. But with a little experimentation you will find the right place for you. See the resource box at the end of this article for more help.

I would suggest that the ads need to be seen when the site loads but should not be too obvious or dominate your site.

4. Write some more content. Try and keep your content coming at regular intervals as a number of directories will check on your site at regular intervals & the smarter ones will visit on a schedule based on your update schedule. They will probably determine this in the hours after you first submit to them. Which is what we will do next.

5. Submit your site to Blog & RSS directories. Because you are hosting at Blogger, Weblogs.com will already be notified when you update your blog. (That means that every time you make a new entry they are automatically notified) You will need to manually submit to the various other directories some of which will require a link on your site to theirs.

You can add these links to your template below your Blogger logo. For a list of directories to get you started visit www.themoneyseed.com/rss

6. Keep writing interesting content. Ideally you want people to come back again and again. As with customers its harder to get a new visitor than to keep existing visitors. So make it interesting, in fact make it so interesting that they can't help but tell all their friends about it also.

As with most free ways to make money this will take time to get going, but if you can build a following you will make money.

Copyright 2004 Darren Power

10 Minutes to Your Google Sitemap...

Google's calling your name...

Hi, Google here. We want to index your website...

Is anyone there?

This article has a free corresponding online video tutorial that shows you how to summons the magic Googlebot to spider and index every page on your website, and it will only take about 10 minutes of your time.

Go here now to watch exactly what to do, step-by-easy-step...

http://www.gothrive.com/google-sitemap-video.htm

What you have access to with the new Google Sitemaps program is truly a gift from the Google gods. They've offering you a tool that you can use to keep your site constantly indexed and updated in the search engine database. With Google Sitemaps, webmasters can now take charge and make sure that their entire site is crawled and indexed.

One important note to make is that the Google Sitemaps program will not necessarily improve the ranking of your site's pages. It only ensures that Google knows what you've got online for them to look at.

Before reading the following statement, promise yourself that you won't stop reading if you see a term that seems a little scary. OK? Promise? Good. Go ahead and keep reading then.

The format specified by Google for "their" sitemap is XML (extensible markup language). Did I loose you yet? No? Good again.

You do not need to understand how to code XML to participate in the Google Sitemap program. There are plenty of free online tools that will create your XML sitemap for you with no XML knowledge required on your part. More on this in a second.

What information is including in this XML sitemap?

1) The URL for every file on your website.

2) A relative priority rank that you can assign telling Google which pages on your site are most important for them to look at.

3) The date last modified for each page.

4) Anticipated change frequency per URL. This again is a variable that you control.

According to Google, your XML sitemap can include up to 50,000 URL's. If your site is a real monster and has in excess of 50,000 URL's, then you'll need to create a hierarchy of sitemaps with one leading to the next. This way you'll be able to lead Google to all of your pages.

The options for generating and maintaining your Google Sitemap range from complex systems that are highly automated to very simple systems using online sitemap generators that require nothing more than clicking a few buttons.

Google now keeps a list of these 'third party suppliers' of generators on their site. Find them here: http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

The program that's demonstrated in our free video tutorial (http://www.gothrive.com/google-sitemap-video.htm) is found here: http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

In a nutshell, here are the steps involved with using online generators:

1) Start the program.
2) Enter your site's URL
3) Click the "Start Crawling" button
4) Customize URL priorities and change frequencies
5) Save the site map to your local hard drive
6) Upload your new Google XML sitemap to your website in the root directory (where your home page resides)
7) Validate your new sitemap
(can be done here: http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/internet/google/submit-validate-sitemap/)
8) Submit your XML sitemap to Google.

You can access the pages for the Google Sitemap program here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

8 steps in about 10 minutes. That's all there is to it.

One question that you might ask is whether or not you still need an HTML sitemap, and the answer is "Yes, you still need your conventional sitemap". XML sitemaps are not intended for human visitors. To see what I mean, take a look at the two following sitemaps:

HTML sitemap: http://www.gothrive.com/sitemap.html

XML sitemap: http://www.gothrive.com/sitemap.xml

Which version do you prefer? Your visitors will like the HTML and Google prefers XML.

When you add pages or new content to your site and you want Google to go back to have a fresh look, just log in to your Google Sitemaps control panel, select the sitemap to revisit, and click "Resubmit". It's never been easier to get Google to spider and index a website. Don't miss your opportunity to use this tool to your advantage.

Copyright 2005 Ron Hutton

3 Deadly Search Engine Marketing Sins

My inbox this week provided glaring examples of three all too common rookie search engine marketing mistakes. What you could call three deadly search engine marketing sins. Starting with

===> Inadequate Keyword Research

Hey! If you’re going to spend hours developing a web site, isn’t it smart to invest some time to insure you’re focusing on the most traffic laden keywords?

Especially when typically the plural form of a keyword phrase generates way more traffic than the singular form. For example "dog dishes" rather than "dog dish".

Yet just this week I was asked to look at a site that had focused on the singular form. Evidently the owner hadn’t bothered to do any digging to make sure that was their best keyword move.

Look, you’ll never know for sure unless you research it. Besides, you can access Wordtracker, the tool of choice for what? a measly $7 a day.

Even better here’s a quick and dirty way to get the most out of that day.

Search for your target keyword in Google.

Visit the top ranking sites. Use the "View Source" feature of Internet Explorer to check out the keyword meta tag of each site. You're looking for a site listing lots of keywords there. Do this with each of the top listings or until you find one stuffed to the gills with keywords. Ah-ha! There’s your starting point for your list of likely keyword phrases.

Repeat with a couple of other sites and you’ll soon have a long list of candidates to check out in Wordtracker.

Enhance your list further using this tool:

http://www.promoteindia.com/keywordtool-beta.htm.

It will give you more keyword ideas from Google and Overture.

Now you’re ready for Wordtracker.

Once you’ve compiled your Wordtracker results, you could simply sort by KEI and then by searches per day.

That gives you the strongest keywords with the most searches. (And yes, I realize KEI assumes all search engine listings are of equal value. But I did say this was "quick and dirty" didn't I? However if you want another approach that improves on KEI there’s a spreadsheet available at http://www.seo-works.com/seo-resources/keyword-effectiveness-rank.html)

Anyway, once you're sorted your keywords in some way to highlight the most profitable, simply take the top 25 on the list and create content for those first. No, not every one will be a natural born traffic magnet. But enough of them will be to get the ball rolling.

Repeat with the next 25. Don’t stop until you have at least 100 pages of hot content.

Remember, two or three word keyword phrases are usually your best bets. And I really like keyword phrases that are actually several keyword phrases in one. For example "irish setter dog dishes" gives "irish setter", "irish setter dog", "dog", "dog dishes", "setter dog dishes".

===> Site Bloat

Twice this week I was asked to look at sites that would have let me read War and Peace while waiting for them to come up. And no visitor is going to have a copy of that handy.

To avoid losing any precious visitors lose the huge graphics. One of the sites had a graphic 501K in size! No wonder it took nearly two minutes to load up on a 56K modem.

Then too lose the Flash - unless you have a very good reason for using it. Even then lose the Flash.

If you’re wondering how your site's download time measures up test it here: http://www.netmechanic.com/toolbox/html-code.htm

It won’t cost anything to find out. But a slow loading site can cost you plenty. Because as the Net Mechanics follow up reports says, it's a good idea to keep your page load times under about 12 seconds on a 28.8 modem. Otherwise your visitors will be wearing out the back button trying to escape.

===> Too Few Links

Did you know links can account for up to 80% of your success with Google? Yet someone else complained to me about how much work it took to get them.

Well doh! Ever think that maybe that’s why (in part) Google assigns so much value to links? Because you can’t quite as easily game links as you can on page content? Meaning you actually have to work to get links. Both by having link worthy content and by actively seeking them out on a regular basis.

It’s a given that most niches require you have a healthy collection of links to be competitive. Yet if you’re lucky enough to be in a niche that doesn’t, but you do, then you can easily dominate those rankings.

Anyway in a nutshell you can easily avoid these three search engine sins. Do your keyword homework. Keep your pages on a strict diet. And don't forget link up with as many other quality sites as you can.

Do all that and you’re well on your way to search engine success. Ignore this advice and you’re, well you know, your Google goose is probably cooked. Leaving you perpetually stuck in Google purgatory.

Copyright 2004 John Gergye