How to make money online - Step1

Hi Warriors,

I just read another "I'm number 1 in Google for the term xxxxx - is that good?" thread.

The usual answer to these threads is "No" because they're meaningless terms that no one is searching for and you can get number 1 in Google just by being the only person to bother including them in your page/link.

This is actually a common strategy that con-artists use to sell SEM services, they claim a top Google placement and then choose an obscure term.

So, rather than keep getting these I thought it would be worth sharing a strategy that everyone can use to avoid this mindset in the future.

This is just what I have found to be my experience, so you can take it or leave it but I believe it to be sound advice for most people.

The obvious common mistake being made is that people are doing things and THEN looking at what they're ranking for and then wondering whether that's worth having.

The number one thing most people should be doing BEFORE anything else is a little research into their chosen market and the keywords in use.


Here's a basic strategy you can follow regardless of niche:

1 - Do some keyword research to see what terms people are searching with and what LSI terms go together with them.

You can use a site like KwMap.net - A Keyword Map For the Whole Internet to get an idea, or get a tool like Martin Avis's Keyword LSI Spy - Latent Semantic Indexing Word Finder for more comprehensive results.

2 - write a few articles focused on the keywords you want to focus on, but including some related LSI terms

3 - Setup a blog and post an article a day to that blog - ensure that the blog has Adsense included and that you're tracking those Adsense clicks, and include affiliate links to the top products in the niche (and track the clicks)

4 - Once a few of your articles are published, setup a suite PPC campaigns focused on different aspects of the niche and point them to the relevant article on your blog.

5 - Find the terms that get you Adsense and affiliate clicks and make a list of the top 20 keywords which result in some sort of action (clicks, purchases etc.)

6 - Turn off the PPC (unless it's profitable and you want to keep it going) and write a bunch more content focusing on the keywords which you just listed.

7 - Replace the Adsense ads that get clicked with affiliate ads or ads for your own products (make sure the product is similar to the one they were clicking through to before)

8 - Kick in all your other promotional techniques to ramp up the traffic.


This is the way to make sure that the traffic you get makes you money and that you don't end up with traffic but no revenue.

Taking the time to do this properly is like install a turbo in your car - you don't need to anything different afterwards but you get much better performance.

Andy