Tag Archives: Make Money Online Without Investment

Lesson #4 – SEO and Backlinking

June 7 4:56 pm ⋅

Make Money Online Without Investment Mini Course – Lesson #4

If you missed any of the previous lessons, catch yourself up here:

SEO. Backlink. If you’ve been working online for any amount of time, you’ve heard those terms. So what exactly do they mean? In lesson 4, I will give you some basic understanding of each, and how you can implement them.

SEO

It’s a very simple concept. SEO means Search Engine Optimization. Basically, you are making it easy (optimizing) for the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc) to know what your site is about, so when people search for things, the search engines will list your site.

The goal is to be #1 or #2 for the keywords you’ve chosen. For example, if I have a website about dog grooming, and the keywords I wanted to be ranked for was “how to groom a german shepard”, when someone typed that into the search box on Google, I would want my website to show up as #1 or #2. The higher up in rank you are, the more traffic you get.

Backlinking

Backlinks are just what they sound like…links pointing back to your site. This can be a text link (a link in the form of words), or a URL (the actual website address). The more quality backlinks you have pointing to your site, the better off you are. The search engines use this as a way of measuring the “authority” of your site. The key point here though is quality. You want to make sure you’re not getting spammy back links. Stay away from buying “thousands of backlinks!” You’ll see it all over the internet…but it will usually only harm your hard work.

So How Do You Go About Getting Both?

SEO and Backlinking are basically one in the same. Backlinking is a method of SEO, but without backlinks, you stand no chance in ranking for your keywords.

It’s like this: You need backlinks to optimize your site for the search engines.

So how do you get backlinks?

There are actually many ways, and we covered them in the previous lesson about getting traffic.

  • Sign up to forums and participate in the discussions. You can create a signature with a link back to your website. Every time you post something new, you’re signature with the link back to your site will be posted. (This also serves as 2 purposes – you’ll get free traffic to your website, but also you’ll get backlinks to your site. Backlinks are extremely important for SEO.)
  • Post on other people’s blogs, with your website link. People WILL visit your website this way. Just make sure you’re not spamming the other blog. Post something valuable, and include your website link.
  • Yahoo Answers. Very effective way to get traffic to your website. Again, just make sure that you are not spamming.
  • Sign up for various Article directories, such as Go Articles, or EZine Articles. Every time you submit an article, make sure you have the link back to your website. When someone reads your article, if they are looking for more information, they will click on your link. Another reason this will get you traffic is because if someone else uses your article, they will publish your link on their site as well…giving you traffic, and also backlinks.
  • Post your site/post on social bookmarking websites, such as Stumbleupon, Digg, or others.

Just remember, building links to your website can be tedious and can (and SHOULD take some time). It’s not an instant payoff. Continue to build as many links back to your site as you can, and in time, your hard work will pay off. Keep in mind, while you’re building back links to your website, you’re also getting traffic.

SEO is a very complex thing, and there is much more to it. In the interest of not overloading you with too much information at a time, I’ll leave it at that. You can Google SEO and backlinks and get a ton of information for free – and make sure you do. It’s an animal all of it’s own and it’s constantly changing as the internet changes. I will also post more complex and in depth articles about each in the future, so make sure you bookmark this website and subscribe to my feed.

Just remember, it’s not an instant result! SEO and backlinking are a constant effort that can take days to even months before you see results from it. Don’t give up. When you start seeing floods of traffic from being ranked #1 for your keyword, you’ll be glad you did! (You can read more on search engine optimization tips for the average Joe here.)

Whelp, you’ve finished the mini course! Hopefully you have a bunch of information that can get you started. Don’t wait – good things happen to those who don’t wait around for them to happen. Experience is something we needed one second before we got it, and success only comes with many failures before. Enjoy the ride!

If you’re looking for more ideas on how to get traffic to your website, here is a previous post I wrote that you will enjoy : How to Market Online – 8 Marketing Tips You Can Use Now

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Lesson # 3 – Getting Traffic To Your Website

June 7 4:33 pm ⋅

Make Money Online Without Investment Mini Course – Lesson #3

By now, hopefully you’ve had to time digest the last 2 lessons. If you missed any of the previous lessons, you can read them here:

The goal is to get a website up, add unique and relevant content (about things you know and like to write about), add products to promote or other advertising reviews onto the site, and viola! You’ve got a money making website. Or do you?

The biggest disappointment is when you put so much work into your website, you’ve spent hours making it look perfect, adding the perfect articles and content, and then…nothing.

I have news for you and it may come as a surprise, or it might not. Getting the website up and running is only HALF the battle. The next step is promoting your OWN website, and getting visitors (traffic) to it.

So How Do You Promote Your Website?

There are many ways you can do it. There are paid ways, or free ways. Keep in mind though, unless you pay for traffic, it’s not going to be instant. The best way to get free traffic is by doing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and letting the search engines send you traffic. That’s an entire process, and requires a lesson of it’s own (it’s gonna be in the next one, so be ready!)

To start though, there are many different ways you can get traffic to your website. Below are the most popular (and effective):

  • Sign up to forums and participate in the discussions. You can create a signature with a link back to your website. Every time you post something new, you’re signature with the link back to your site will be posted. (This also serves as 2 purposes – you’ll get free traffic to your website, but also you’ll get backlinks to your site. Backlinks are extremely important for SEO.)
  • Post on other people’s blogs, with your website link. People WILL visit your website this way. Just make sure you’re not spamming the other blog. Post something valuable, and include your website link.
  • Yahoo Answers. Very effective way to get traffic to your website. Again, just make sure that you are not spamming.
  • Sign up for various Article directories, such as Go Articles, or EZine Articles. Every time you submit an article, make sure you have the link back to your website. When someone reads your article, if they are looking for more information, they will click on your link. Another reason this will get you traffic is because if someone else uses your article, they will publish your link on their site as well…giving you traffic, and also backlinks. :)
  • Post your site/post on social bookmarking websites, such as Stumbleupon, Digg, or others.

All of these traffic generation techniques are free, and will definitely bring in some traffic to your site.

The next lesson will cover SEO, and how to optimize your site to bring in even more traffic. Lesson 4

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Lesson #2 – Why Should You Build Your Own Website to Promote Affiliate Products?

June 7 4:03 pm ⋅

Make Money Online Without Investment Mini Course – Lesson #2

In the last lesson, we discussed how it is that people make a living online – with Internet Marketing. I told you about a specific way to market online, called affiliate marketing. (Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money, because you don’t have to do all the hard work on making the product, or market research, or any of that…all you have to do is send visitors through your affiliate link.) If you missed the first lesson, you can read it here.

In the second lesson, we’ll talk a little more about how to start a website from the ground up, and what you should be aware of, and WHY you should get your own website.

Why should you build your own website to promote affiliate products?

Having your own website gives you much more flexibility and freedom in a lot of ways. You can put whatever you want on your own website, you can add or remove things at will, and you have an endless supply of space for content. (In case you haven’t heard it yet, according to Google, content is King.)
With your own website, you can continually add more content (articles, posts, etc), which will ultimately bring you more traffic (traffic is visitors to your site, in IM verbage).

Let’s simplify things a bit.

  • You build a website around your niche (let’s stick with the “how to lose weight” niche). – You monetize your website, and put affiliate links throughout your site.
  • The more traffic you have, the more sales you will make.

So, the more content you have, the more traffic you will get…which means more sales for you. It’s a domino effect.

So How Do You Get Your Own Website?

You can go about this a couple different ways. You can buy your own domain name (this usually costs about $10-$15), and then purchase your own hosting (this will run you between $6-10 a month). Once you have your domain name and hosting, you can start the fun part – making your website! (I recommend installing WordPress and using that as your website platform. It’s easy to use and edit, and search engines love them – you can read step by step tutorial on how to build a website using WordPress). I recommend using Blue Host as your hosting service. You can buy a domain and get hosting all in one place. I’ve been with Blue Host for years and love them. (Click here to sign up for Bluehost.)

Or….

You can start out the free way. When you’re just starting out, there is going to be a learning curve, and there is no reason why you SHOULDN’T do it the free way. I highly recommend that as you get deeper into it, eventually you get your own domain and hosting, in the future. This gives you a thousand times more freedom and flexibility than free website platforms. Trust me. :)

A good free platform is Blogger. If you go there, you can sign up and have your very own website/blog in a matter of minutes. Then, all you have to do is customize and edit the theme of your blog, and start writing. And of course, monetize your site. ;)

Keyword Research

When thinking about what type of website you want, it’s extremely important to make sure you use keywords that are going to get searched. Keyword research is a huge huge part of the success or failure of your website, and I can barely touch the basics of it. Google “keyword research” and learn as much about it as you can. I can not stress this to you enough. I will eventually post a keyword research post dedicated entirely to how to do it, but for now it’s out of the scope of this lesson.

A keyword is how the search engines know what your site is about. It’s also how people search for things they are interesting in. Think about this…when you go to Google, and you want to find out a new way to train your dog, you’ll probably type in the search box “new ways to train dog”, or “a new way to train my dog”, or something similar. Those are all keywords. Google then goes through all the websites, and the ones they believe to be the most relevant around those keywords will be shown first.

Because there is so much involved in keyword research, as I said, I will dedicate another post specifically on the subject, but for now, I will leave it at that.

Ready for Lesson 3?

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Lesson #1 – How Do People Really Make an Income Online?

June 7 3:36 pm ⋅

Make Money Online Without Investment Mini Course Lesson #1

(If you missed the introduction to the mini course, you can read it here. The link will open in a new window so you don’t lose your place on this page.)

How Do People Really Make an Income Online?

It’s called Internet Marketing. Internet Marketing is just what it sounds like – it’s marketing on the internet.

One way to do this is:

  • Build a website
  • Monetize it (affiliate products and Adsense are big ones)
  • Send traffic to your website
  • Make money

An even more specific way people make money online is by AFFILIATE marketing. This is marketing someone else’s product, and making a commission for every sale you make. The basic steps to this are as follows:

  • Find a product you want to promote (there are so many options it’s ridiculous. We’ll cover that more in detail.)
  • Build a website or page around the product you’ve chosen.
  • Send traffic to your website.
  • Make sales.

There are so many products you can choose to promote. Clickbank is one of the biggest marketplaces you can go to to find products to promote. Just go to Clickbank.com, and you can browse all the products they have, you can see how much you’ll make per sale, how popular the product is, etc. There are many other affiliate programs you can join, but for beginners, Clickbank is probably the best one to start with. Once you sign up with Clickbank, you’ll be able to get your affiliate links from any product you want. (Your affiliate link is what tracks your sales – it’s how Clickbank knows what affiliate gets the sales.)

Once you’ve chosen a product you want to promote, the next step is to build a website around this product. An example of this would be: You choose a product about how to lose to weight (there are plenty of them). Your website might include a review of the product, some articles about how to lose weight, different ideas on how to keep the weight off… You want your website to be relative to the product you’re promoting. Make sure you put your affiliate link in various places throughout your website. If someone buys the product through your link, you make money.

There are so many different ways to get traffic to your website. We’ll cover that in another lesson.

For now, think about everything we’ve covered today.

Visit Clickbank, browse their products, and the website. Familiarize yourself with it. Also, I suggest Googling different ideas and look at the first 5 websites in the search results. Get ideas on how you want your website to look, feel like, or portray. Also, think about ideas you want to write about. That will help you when looking for a product to promote. Only promote products with topics that you feel you can write about. Otherwise, it won’t be worth your time. :)

In the next lesson, we’ll cover How to Start a Website, more details on picking a product to promote, and keyword research. Ready for the next lesson? —–> Lesson 2

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