Ways To Make Money Online

OK, so we’ve taken the first step in our process of how to make money online and learning how to start a blog: We’ve decided to put up a blog about guitars, that links to sales of both real guitars and a popular guitar playing course.

At the end of the previous post, we were reminded that our new blog’s domain name (the www.yourdomain.com address at the top) can either have an highly-searched “guitar” keyword in it, like www.guitars.com, or not, like www.shiznaz.com. Because as we saw in another post – Stop Dreaming, Start Doing – even a domain called Amazon.com became a huge seller of books, even though, orginally, “amazon” was not a keyword people would type into a Google search to find books. But Amazon.com built their reputation, over many years, as the online marketing one-stop for books and thousands of other consumer goods, and made themselves into an “authority site,” so it didn’t matter that they didn’t start out with a name like books.com.

You can also build an “authority site,” with hundreds of pages of authoritative information and product sales, and years of time and big money invested, and it won’t matter what name you give it…it can be just a cute word like Yahoo.

But as a beginner, who needs to see some easy initial success or you’ll probably quickly give up on ways to make money online, I suggest you start with a smaller affiliate blog that does have a highly-searched, low competition keyword, right in your domain name, to help you pull some quick organic traffic to your new site.

A highly-searched but low-competition keyword, simply means you want to find a keyword that get’s a lot of monthly searches – 3,000 and higher is a good starting point – but at the same time doesn’t have thousands of other bloggers and internet marketers also trying to “rank” for that same keyword. “Rank” just means how high of a position on Google your blog shows up for each keyword, and of course, if you want lots of traffic and sales, you want to be on page 1, near the top.

So it may seem like the ultimate domain name for our guitar blog would be www.guitars.com. It describes our site perfectly, and probably a ton of people searching for guitars, or guitar lessons, type “guitars” into a Google search every day. There’s a free tool provided by Google to see a fairly accurate estimate of just how many people search for the keyword “guitars” and hundreds of other guitar-related keywords – it’s called the Google External Keyword Tool, it’s free, and you can link to it here.

Now the interesting thing is, if we type “guitars” into this Google Keyword Tool, it shows that the keyword “guitars” does actually get a ton of  searches – about 40,000 Exact Local searches every month. Try this now. Open a separate Firefox tab or window and go to the Google Keyword Tool. Type in “guitars,” “guitar lessons,” “guitars for sale” and “all about guitars” into the search box at the top (without my quotes,) hit “Search” (you may have to enter a Captcha to proceed,) and see what comes up.

On the left sidebar of the Google Keyword Tool you’ll see check-boxes for “Broad,” “Exact” and “Phrase” – your best true indicator of whether or not a keyword is going to bring you lots of traffic is to always choose “Exact” and to always look at the numbers in the Local Monthly Searches column, not the ones under Global Monthly Searches. If you check off only Exact and you look under Local Monthly Searches, you’ll see “guitars” does show 40,500 searches, “guitar lessons” shows about 27,000, “guitars for sale” about 9,900, and “all about guitars” only 140 searches a month. So it seems like “guitars” would be a great keyword to target, and www.guitars.com would be a great domain to buy, right?

But wait, there’s two big problems here:

• If you type “guitars” into a domain search at GoDaddy.com, you’ll find www.guitars.com is already taken, as is www.guitars.org and www.guitars.net – the 3 prime endings, or TLDs, that you want your domain to end with. It is possible to rank a website with one of the other TLDs, like .info or.biz, but these ones carry less respect with both Google and customers, so for our purposes, I’m going to recommend you stick with either .com, .org or.net, in that order of preference.

• “Guitars” is a fiercely-competed-for keyword, with thousands of other marketers trying to get to Google position 1 for “guitars.” Many of these are highly-experienced in SEO (Search Engine Optimization,) meaning they know all the tricks, or have the big money to invest, or both, to get their website up to #1 for that keyword. How do I know that? Well there’s two great free tools that show who you’re competition is, and what their rank on Google, or SERP (Search Engine Rank Position.) is for any keyword. So let’s look at those in the next post.