Making Good Money Online this Summer = Bright Future

So we just finished out July and my main website did awesome, coming in at over $850 bucks for what is normally a somewhat slow month in my particular niche. Traffic in general is down a bit during the summer months and in the last year when I look back at my adsense earnings, I see a sharp increase going from summer earnings to about October. Specifically, my earnings jumped by 20 percent or even a little more.

So there are really two key things that I focus on lately, and I can see that they are both necessary in order to succeed at this game, and that has become even more apparent based on the recent Mayday update from the Goog. One thing that is sometimes overlooked when it comes to chasing online ad dollars is that you have to have a real website.

We have all been seeing this coming for years, no? Maybe for some people it all goes back to the whole “quality content” argument, but really, G has made it at least somewhat clear that they are not going to tolerate and reward thin sites.

In fact, in my mind, the idea of the niche site is practically dead…..why run the risk of being squeezed out, unless you offer something of genuine value? Does a website have to be either:

a) Big, or
b) Growing

In order to be liked by the big G?

In my opinion, the answer is slowly becoming “yes.”

Here is my moneyshot for July 2010 earnings on my flagship website:

So “keeping it real” is my first key point and also how I avoided any sort of penalty during the big Mayday massacre this year. I have a real website with almost two thousand articles on it. Many of them are about 400 words, but lots of them are over a 1,000 words, and perhaps a dozen or two are over 5,000 words.

This is a real website. Some of the more popular (and high ranking) articles have hundreds of comments. In some cases, I do not answer any of them. In other cases I have, and I do. But it is certainly not required. The comments occur naturally enough on their own, and they are meaty comments. The average comment length is over 200 words on some of the posts!

Another point here: by “real website,” I am saying that it definitely helps that I have lots of posts that are not “super laser keyword targeted.” In other words, I do not just have post titles like “best red toaster” or “cheapest kitchen appliances” etc. Instead I have posts with titles like “Why I bought the cheapest darn toaster I could find at Walmart.” Don’t get me wrong, I do target keywords….but I have some other stuff in their to mix it up and keep it real, so to speak.

Now the second thing that I see as being critical for success is methodical and continuous action. If you do not have a system that builds your site out and promotes it then you are likely to just flounder around and get frustrated.

In fact, if I could turn back the clock, I actually would have done things a bit differently. I would have written longer posts to hit more long tail keywords, and also build links to those posts, before moving on and creating newer material. I would have been more methodical.

Get that? I would build links to every single thing I published before moving on.

At least in the early stages, this is critical, in my opinion. Otherwise you need a ton of patience, and you will end up wasting a lot of effort. For example, I have hundreds of articles that do not get any traffic at all. I just did not know what I was doing when I created them then failed to promote them.

Of course, none of the effort is completely wasted, because having more original content will always help you to look more legit to you-know-who (even if it does not rank well or bring in ad revenue).

What do I mean by a methodical system? You gotta have an excel spreadsheet, in my opinion, or something similar, where you can coordinate your efforts. Find keywords to target, publish articles, then build links to each article. It really is still that simple. Focus on fewer sites rather than more sites. Build a true resource that actually helps the searcher and has a chance at gaining natural links over the long term.

I got my fingers crossed for that 20% bump when the snow flies. But you know what? It doesn’t really matter, because I am working my system anyway, and will continue to grow my earnings regardless.

How do you like that crap…..I give away my two key tactics for success, and one is “be methodical” and the other is “be natural.” They sort of contradict each other, don’t they? Maybe that is why it is so hard to make money doing this online stuff.

The real secret here is that you have to do both if you want long term success…and that means work, work, work……

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