What's in a Keyword?

If you are a first time visitor you probably won't even read this - what on Earth would a cheesy looking blog like this know about making money online. Most first timers take a quick look and then hit the back button and are gone. A percentage leave by clicking a link somewhere on the page. If you are still reading this then chances are you are one of my readers that has got past the cheese and knows that I actually have real content on these pages - the vast majority of it really does explain how I make money with this free no frills Blogspot blog.

In a nutshell I make money with this blog by explaining the SEO techniques I use to target terms like "make money online". I make money by simply ranking high in the serps for terms related to making money. That's it. I don't even need a single person to read a single word of a single post on this blog and I still make money. Good money too.

This blog will be a year old on December 23.

I have spent the past year writing posts that optimize various keywords that I have chosen based on the amount of traffic those keywords generate on the search engines. I built this blog without ever expecting or caring if I ever had a real audience of readers. My goal was simple - generate large amounts of search engine traffic and convert that traffic into Adsense clicks and affiliate sales.

I have had to modify my tactics somewhat from my initial plan due to the fact that I seem to have built up a small but growing readership and in deference to them I have had to shelve my affiliate sales pitches - you won't appreciate me hawking products designed to entice the unwary blogging newcomer. I haven't totally given up on this revenue stream yet it's just I haven't figured out a "Reader Alert" system to warn my regular readers when they should simply ignore a post logged for the purpose of affiliate sales. I will work it back into the mix at some point as there is just too much money sitting on the table with affiliate sales for me to ignore. I know because the first six months I made a decent buck from affiliate sales by optimizing this blog for those types of keywords.

The loss of affiliate sales has been mediated by the sharp increase in Adsense revenue as my main keywords have slowly climbed Google's search engine rankings.

For all of you that think Adsense is crap and doesn't pay much I have news for you... it is still the single easiest and best source of long term income online. If you haven't made money from Adsense it's because you don't know how - not because it doesn't work.

I now rank in the top 1-2 pages on Google for all the main "Make Money" keywords. This past week I finally hit page 1 for several highly searched terms and before I show you what this has meant I want to show you a few of those rankings.

I have yet to reach page 1 for my Prime keyword - "make money online" - but I am on page 2 of Google.com (The US region)
(click images to enlarge)



I have however hit page 1 for "make money online" in most of the smaller Google regions like this serp from a query originating in the Netherlands.