Definition of Google Adsense™

Official Description of AdSense by Google:
Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website’s content pages and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site — or matched to the characteristics and interests of the visitors your content attracts — you’ll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages.
It’s also a way for website publishers to provide Google web and site search to their visitors, and to earn money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages.

Simple Description of AdSense:
Google AdSense is the new way of life for publishers or webmasters who publish Google Adsense in their websites. It is the best and also the biggest sponsor of small, midsize and even large scale web sites. Google AdSense made it possible for all of us - the publishers - to make at least the money for our hosting expenses. So, Everyone can join Google Adsense as well as he/she has a good quality website with useful and up-to-date contents.

Short Description of AdSense:
Google Adsense is the fastest and easiest way to earn money or revenue online for webmasters who have useful websites as publishers of Google Adsense by appying or joining Google Adsense for free.

Note: It's just a quick definition of Google Adsense, you can search it in other sites that tell about Google AdSense or go to The Official Google Adsense Website.
Legal Notice: AdSense is a registered Trademark of Google Inc.

If you’re seeking to earn cash online you will need to take the time to evaluate which advertising programs have the best fit for your site. Here are some of the basics of how I evaluate these programs that feature either text or graphical banners.

I consider Google Adsense to be the ‘gold standard’ of click-thru advertising. If Adsense can’t get a decent response in an advertising slot on your blog it is unlikely that other advertisers will perform any better. If the performance with Adsense is poor it is highly unlikely that other programs will do better in the same slot. Using Adsense in a particular slot over a 2 to 4 week period will give you an idea of how well your keywords are targeted toward a buying audience of visitors. But, basically, If your CTR performance is good, you may want to stick with Adsense or you may want to consider other programs that may pay better for the same niche. If the performance is poor, then you may want to reconsider your keyword targeting. You can check with Griz on his make money online with Adsense for more information on how to do this.

When evaluating an advertising program you need to consider the terms and conditions that are imposed by the advertiser or broker. What is their payout schedule? What rules do they have for displaying advertisements? What happens when there is a problem? You need to know the answers to these questions up front. One thing that has surprised me is that many of the terms and conditions are almost cut-and-paste versions of the T&C of other programs. Sometimes it seems that advertisers don’t even know their own rules.

I look for standard sized blocks from the advertisers, ones that match those offered by Adsense. If the sizes are non-standard or if the JavaScript code causes problems with my WordPress theme or Blogger template, such as not displaying correctly in Internet Explorer or Firefox, or has serious loading time problems I probably won’t use the ad. Having a standard size that uses web standards is important both for evaluating the performance of an ad block as well as in getting visitors to click on it.

Lastly, when I’m evaluating advertising programs, I want to make sure their tracking is reasonably accurate. If, during a trial period, I see a lot of incorrect stats I don’t use their service. It’s no use to you to go to the trouble of optimizing your site for targeted, buying, visitors and not earn any cash online from doing so.

These are just some of the basics of evaluating banner advertising to earn online cash and I’ll be covering more details later on.LINK....

One the the biggest challenges faced by those who want to earn online cash is selecting the right keywordsto use. Some ideas are obvious, such as creating niche sites about things that you know about personally. But, what do you do when you need to move beyond that and where can you get ideas? Let’s take a look at a few sources.

Google Trends

Google Trends shows you the top 100 things that are being searched for via Google at a particular time. The list is currently update about every hour. It is very useful if you want to blog about current trends since you’ll find that most of the big searches are about the hot news and celebrity stories of the day. However, this traffic isn’t always monetizible since people aren’t usually looking to buy something but for information about something. There are exceptions though and those can be quite lucrative.

For long term niche site development you may not find this the best source to use. While you may get trickle traffic and a surge if an item becomes hot again, it isn’t quite what you want from stable niche blog. My suggestion is to save Google Trends for trend blogging or flagship blog traffic unless you happen to catch a convergence of buying keyword and trend that promise more than a quick traffic hit.

Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo Buzz shows the top 20 searches as well as the 20 searches that have increased in volume the most during the previous week. The interesting thing that you’ll notice on this site are the demographics. Since Yahoo’s search users are a less tech savvy bunch, the kind of people who leave their browser search settings on the factory default or like Yahoo’s mail, the demographics trend both younger and older than what you see on Google Trends. If you’re wanting to target the older or younger crowd you should look here but you may miss the hot 18-30 age trends.

eBay Keywords and Pulse

When you’re searching for the right niche to use with BANS or other eBay Partner Network site it’s a good idea to check out these two tools from eBay. eBay Pulse shows you the top 10 products that are being searched for by eBay’s visitors. This will often center around the most popular products like iPhones and so forth. However, you can drill down by category which can provide you with some great niche ideas. Also check out the most watched auctions since it can provide some insights as well. eBay Keywords allows you to see the top eBay search terms by category which is another way to get at the same information.

Lycos 50

Lycos, a more or less failed search portal, does maintain a life as a free blog provider as well as a few other services. They have a Top 50 page that shows the most searched for term on their blogs. The demographic here tends to be young so expect to see a lot of gaming and young, hip, celebrity topics bubbling up to the top here.

New York Times Most Searched

This New York Times service lets you know what the news hounds are looking for today. As you might suspect, the audience here will tend to be older and into business and political news.

Dogpile SearchSpy

Dogpile is a search aggregation site that features a running feed of meta searches going through their system. This search watcher is a bit addictive and can give you some ideas as you watch the searches go by.

WikiRage

This site shows the most recently updated articles on Wikipedia. It’s a great resource for more informational blogs since it tends to reflect the hot news items of the day.

NowPublic

NowPublic is a ‘participatory news network’ where visitors submit and comment on news stories. It’s great for spotting news trends in a wide variety of areas. You can use it to trend blog or to find ideas on niches you’re interested in.

I hope this list of sites has given you some ideas for where you can search for info to build niche blogs that can help you earn cash online.LINK....

Welcome to Earn Online Cash. My objective with this blog is to examine some of the ways to earn online cash. This includes ways that I’ve used to do it as well as others’ ways of earning it. I’ll be sprinkling in my observations on topics like SEO, Adsense and other monetization methods, which tools and other resources I use and recommend and several other topics. I’ll also be using this blog as a springboard for my own programs.

This blog came about because as my other primary blog, OpTempo, became successful as a source for online product reviews I found that this didn’t mesh well with the Internet Marketing articles I wanted to publish. So, I decided to start a new flagship/niche blog dedicated to this topic and simply do reviews and buyers guides at OpTempo. I bought this pre-owned domain, onlinecashgenerator.com, a few months ago and decided that I’d use it for this blog.

In the coming weeks I’ll be publishing Internet Marketing articles here as well as releasing free eBooks that will be an updated ‘best of’ from my OpTempo Internet Marketing articles. I’m also planning on releasing a free program in the next month or so that you might find interesting and useful as well.

Anyway, I hope that you find the information I present here helpful when it comes to earning online cash.LINK.....

One of the important things that you need to learn when you want to earn online cash is how to identify a niche. This can apply to niche marketing blogs or selling on eBay or through an ecommerce site. While there are some very lucrative markets out there, like credit cards and weight loss, the competition is quite tough and it will take years to achieve good search results placement and thus income. My strategy has been to find lower volume keywords and long tails for high volume keywords where the competition isn’t a tough.

When you’re getting started it is best to look at markets you know. For example, if you’re a baseball fan, you can draw upon your knowledge to identify the related niches. Once you’ve gained some experience selecting niches from your own knowledge base you can branch out. One strategy I use is to start in an general, top level, entry on Wikipedia, eBay or Amazon and drill down into sub-topics. Keyword Elite and Google external Adwords tool can also provide ideas. Remember that you’re looking for a small market, under 10,000 searches a month, with limited or weak direct competition.

You are also looking for buying keywords, not generic keywords. You’ll find it best to get very specific for a particular brand and/or style and include buying trigger words like ‘cheap’, ‘discount’ or ‘price’. To continue the baseball scenario, “National League Batting Records” would not be a buying keyword while “New York Yankees Gear” would be. Remember that you can also catch other, related, long tail keywords from your primary one, for example, “New York Yankees Baby Gear” or “New York Yankees Jerseys”. If you work around a basic keyword you can mix and match buying triggers and related items to create many well optimized titles and even whole articles.

You will need to examine the search competition. In most cases this will be quite low and it will be easy to capture the top position with only a minor amount of effort using Bookmarking Demon and a few other links from blog comments, article submissions and other sources. Occasionally you’ll find that an authority site has a tight grip on the top spot in Google. Use a tool like SEO Elite to determine how strong their grip is on the keyword. If they don’t have links for your specific keyword, then it may be that they’re holding the position on authority alone. In this case, you may be able to capture the #1 position with some quality link building. If they do have links to your specific keyword, it may be best to try a different keyword combination, especially if the authority site is a sales/marketing site, or settle for second place in results, especially if the top spot is held by Wikipedia or other informational site.

Another consideration is if there is a decent market to promote. If you’re planning on marketing eBay items in your niche there should be enough items being sold to justify your efforts. If you’re planning an Adsense niche, you should see a good variety of ads popping up on Google’s search pages for your terms. If there is no ‘inventory’ then you’ll need to look for another keyword or create your own inventory with an eBook if the niche looks promising enough to you.

Remember that the key thing to look for is a low competition keyword where you can easily take the number one position in Google with a minor amount of effort that has enough monthly searches and ‘inventory’ to sustain a marketing effort. When you have this process down and repeatable, you’ll be well on your way toearning online cash.LINK......

Here’s an interesting way to earn online cash that I’ve been experimenting with recently that uses Clickbank and PHP redirects. It’s still a bit too early to say exactly how well this works but the results so far look promising. Here’s a quick overview of how this method works.

If you’re like me you may have a number of unused domains sitting around and not earning you any money. You don’t have time to develop them fully by building a niche blog, setting up BANS or other scripted site and then doing a full blown link building campaign. Maybe you bought the domain based on a keyword and then realized that the keyword wasn’t right for some reason, such it having too much competition or too little buying traffic, or maybe it was just too generic. It could be a personal name domain that you aren’t ready to use in a supporting role yet. Even if you don’t have a spare domain this technique will also work with subdomains. Now, let’s get started.

I assume that you already have a Clickbank affiliate account setup. If not, go do so. Now, you’ll want to select products that are selling well so look for the top products, typically indicated by gravity, but you may want to avoid the very hottest sellers since competition will be higher. Find a product that you feel that you can promote easily. This could be an Internet Marketing product, a financial product or even a hobby product. Get your hoplink code for that product. It will in a format like this:

http://yourclickbankid.thepublisherclickbankid.hop.clickbank.net

Now that you have your affiliate link we’re ready to do some PHP coding. Stop that groaning, it’s nothing all that hard to do. Just open Notepad or another text editor and type in the following code:

sleep(5);//seconds to wait..
header(“Location:http://yourclickbankid.thepublisherclickbankid.hop.clickbank.net”);
?>

Of course, you’ll replace the link with your hoplink. Don’t forget to do that!

The idea of the code is to wait 5 seconds and then redirect to the sales page for the Clickbank product you’ve selected. While the delay isn’t absolutely necessary, having a brief delay rather than an immediate redirect can be effective in preventing ‘bots from detecting the redirect as easily. Methods that use meta refresh, javascript or htaaccess are said to be detected easier. I’m not sure if this is the case or not but I went with this PHP method. There are more sophisticated, gray/black hat, scripts available that offer more features but these don’t come cheap.

Now save the file as index.php and upload it to the root folder of your domain using FTP or the File Manager in CPanel. Next, test out your link and PHP code by typing in the domain name in your browser. If all is setup correctly then you’ll be taken, after the delay, to the Clickbank merchant’s sales page.

Now you’re ready to do a little marketing. Basically this is done by placing a link to your site in a number of places where you have a good chance of getting referral traffic.

This technique used to be a popular way to spam Craigslist and some people still use variations of it there. However, from what I understand, this is a bit of a cat-and-mouse game as the Craigslist staff battles the spammers. I’d recommend staying out of that fray and look for easier targets.

Another way is to comment on popular blogs using the link to your redirected domain. The risk here is that you may get Akismet’ed if the blogger in question decides to check out your site and finds the redirect. It’s best to find a blog where the checking is lax. I’ve found a few very popular blogs where this is the case. As with commenting for followed links, make sure that your comment is a quality one that won’t raise eyebrows.

Forum signatures are another option but, once again, heavy moderation and/or poor quality posts can draw a ban.

You may also find popular news sites and the like where you can leave a link in a comment. Of course, these are almost always nofollow links that are useless for link building but are effective for our purposes here.

Another technique is to simply leave the link in text on sites that don’t allow links. For example, lets say you’re leaving a comment on the recession on a news site that allows comments but no links. It might go something like this:

The market is really bad today, the worst that I’ve seen in my lifetime, that’s for sure. I’ve found that investing in XYZ to be a good hedge against some of the recessionary pressures in the marketplace today. Using some techniques I learned at www.myredirecteddomain.com really helped me protect my portfolio from a certain debacle.

The goal here is to get some type-in traffic from people cutting and pasting the link into their browser.

Some people use article submissions with the redirected domain in the resource box. Of course, direct traffic from articles isn’t all that great in my experience but others have reported significant sales this way.

Adding your redirected domain to blogrolls, comments or even in articles on your active sites is low risk method. You can also create Squidoo lenses and other simple one pagers to funnel traffic toward your redirected domain. This is a little bit more labor intensive but is a little less so than a full blown link building campaign.

Remember that you probably won’t be seeing a lot of traffic from this technique. The income from it is unlikely to come close to what you’ll earn from a fully developed and properly SEO’d site. But, it beats having a domain sitting around earning nothing at all and often one sale of a Clickbank product in a month will make the “$1 a Day” average you want for your sites. It only takes a few minutes to setup and then spreading a few links around to start earning cash online this way.LINK.....

One of the things that will help you earn online cash is to understand how to add buying keywords to your internal and external SEO efforts. Simply put, a buying keyword is a term that people who’re interested in making a purchase search for versus information seeking keywords that are used by people who’re just searching for info.

The objective of buying keywords is to better target the buyers you’re seeking. It doesn’t matter if it’s for Adsense, affiliate offers, ecommerce or even offline sales, you want buyers who’re seeking to buy what you’re offering and you want them to visit your site in sufficient numbers for you to make money. The good thing is that many of these long tail buying keyword terms have weak competition and capturing a top position in Goggle search results isn’t too difficult.

The way a buying keyword term works is that you take a generic that people generally search for when they’re in a buying mood and pair it with what you’re selling. They can work well as you domain name as in cheapbluewidgets.com. They can be used as a site’s H1 and title header tag like “Cheap Blue Widgets” even if the domain name doesn’t match. You can even use them as anchor text on external links to your site.

Let’s look at a few of these terms and how they work or, at least, how they worked for me.

Free – Yes, this is a commonly searched term in conjunction with other terms but is it a buying keyword? It can be but you do have to pair it with something free and offer clear and compelling addon purchases for it to be effective. For example, you might offer a free sample of a product in hopes of getting an immediate purchase or collecting an email address for a mailing list where you would make additional offers or even a forced membership. This used to be big business in the ringtone area until there was a crackdown on the practice. Now many affiliate programs prohibit you from even using ‘free’ on your page.

Buy, Where To Buy – This is a good, generic, buying keyword. It’s often easy to get a domain name like wheretobuyproduct.com or even buyproduct.com.

Purchase – Not quite as good as some others because it doesn’t seem to get as many searches.

Shop, Where to Shop for – Like ‘buy’ this one is easy to find domains for with the ‘Where to for’ although productshop.com domains are often hard to find.

Cheap – I call this one Vic’s favorite since he uses it often as an example. Cheap and related words like cheaper and cheapest work really well.

Discount – This one is kind of a rich man’s cheap. It works good when you’re wanting to promote higher end products since it has less of a stigma than cheap. It’s also a good choice on domain names since it can work well as both discountbluewidgets.com or bluewidgetsdiscount.com.

Bargain – Also like cheap and discount although it isn’t used in searches quite as often.

Used, Second Hand, Refurbished – People using these terms are looking for a deal. This works quite well with eBay affiliate sites because that’s what eBay is known for.

Best ____ for the Money – I’ve tried this one out a few times and it seems to work well. It doesn’t get as many searches as some other terms but does well so far as conversions go.

Wholesale, Wholesaler – This is another one to use where you know you’re offering low prices. This one can be effective when paired with lot sales on eBay.

Also remember you can mix and match the terms as in “Cheap Used Blue Widgets” or “Where to Buy Wholesale Blue Widgets”. Another trick is to get brand and style specific. This helps narrow down the visitors to the core of serious potential buyers because they know what they’re looking for.

Do you have any suggestions on buying keywords or questions about them? Leave a comment if you do. And remember that knowing how to use buying keywords to build targeted traffic to your sites is essential to earning online cash.LINK....

Another important component when it comes to earning online cash is being able to write articles quickly. You need to be able to write decent articles for submission to article directories as well as your own blogs. You can even write articles for profit. While my Blog Content Wizard program is great for building quick throwaway articles, sometimes you want to create content that is more substantial. So, let’s look at a basic article creation method that will allow you to write good articles quickly.

First, you have to have a good title. It should have your primary keywords as a bare minimum. You then can add some attention catching phrases to it. Here are some examples. Just replace the ## with the number of items you want to include and the ______ with your keyword.

• ## ______ Tips
• ## ______ Secrets
• Top ## Tips for ______
• Top ## Secrets of ______
• ______ How To
• How To ______
• What You May Not Know About ______
• ______ Review
• Is ______ a Scam?
• ______ News
• ## Answers to Your ______ Questions
• ## Ways To Use ______

Hopefully this short list can give you some ideas on what to use for your titles.

Next, your first paragraph should start off with either a question to your audience or a confident, but obvious, declaration of fact. For example, you might ask “Do you have trouble selecting a good carpet cleaning company?” or “Have you been wondering how to lose weight faster without extreme dieting?”. Or, you might declare “It is difficult to find a reputable carpet cleaning company” or “Everyone is looking for a way to lose weight faster without extreme dieting”. Notice also in these examples that the opening sentence contains the keywords, “carpet cleaning company” and “lose weight faster”. You want to have your keywords in your first sentence. The rest of the first paragraph will briefly state where you want to go in the rest of the article, such as “Here are some tips I can give you that will help you in your goal to lose 14 pounds in 10 days.”

Now, you have the body of your article. I prefer a 3 paragraph method where I’ll state a point per paragraph. Generally I’ll open with a statement, then provide 2 to 5 backing sentences and then a closing sentence that leads to the next point. Each paragraph should be about 100 words long and state the point you want to make. If you want, you can ramble on a bit more to pad out the article. If you’re going for something with more points, for example, “Top 10 Digital Cameras”, then you might want to use shorter paragraphs unless you’re wanting to create a 1000 word monster article.

Another pattern you can use for a 3 paragraph article, one that is popular in sales, is the “feel, felt, found” sequence. In this one your first paragraph indicates that you understand the reader’s situation. For example, “I know that you feel frustrated when trying to lose weight quickly.” The second paragraph lets them know you’re coming from the same place, as in “I felt that there was no hope when it came to reaching my weight loss goals”. And, the final paragraph lets them know what you found out about the situation that solved it for you, for example, “But, you know, I was very happy when I found that Kwick-E-Loss tablets really helped me take the pounds off and keep them off”.

Where can you get your talking points for topics you don’t know well? That’s what sites like Google, Wikipedia and so forth are for. Of course, you don’t want to cut and paste something verbatim. Just get the basic idea and put it in your own words.

Now you’re ready for the conclusion. The closing paragraph just simply restates the points or the opening paragraph, whichever works best for your situation. The last sentence should also restate your primary keyword, for example, “I hope this has cleared up any questions you had about hiring the right carpet cleaning company”.

To recap, here’s the basic outline:

1. Keyword Based Title

2. Opening paragraph with keyword in the first sentence that states the main point

3. 3 (or more) supporting points or Feel-Felt-Found pattern for additional paragraphs

4. Closing paragraph with keyword in the final sentence.

That’s all there is to it. With a little practice you should be able to use this pattern to whip up good articles within a 15 to 30 minute timeframe. When you learn the art of quick article writing you’ll have an important weapon in your earn online cash arsenal.

I’ve signed up for a lot of mailing lists of people who promised to help me earn online cash in various ways. One of these is famous blogger Yaro Starak who’s just launched a joint venture project called BecomeaBlogger.com with Gideon Shalwick. I thought I’d do a serious, unbiased, review of what they’re saying, and selling, in their free eBook, The Roadmap To Become A Blogger. Note that I’m not an affiliate for their product nor am I linking back to their site so as to make this review unbiased.

My first gripe about the ebook is that it spends several pages up front of Yaro ’selling the dream’ like some Amway diamond recruiter trying to recruit new suckers distributors into ‘the business’. I find that annoying and it’s one of the problems I see in the whole ‘make money online’ blogging arena. While I have no reason to believe that Yaro is faking anything nor that he teaches people to do this, this kind of presentation encourages others to follow the ‘fake it until you make it’ route and/or creates great frustration among those who aren’t equipped to reach such lofty goals.

As we get into the roadmap it is little surprise that ‘passion’ gets mentioned as the first step. Unfortunately, this is a trap for many people. Their passion may not be something that will earn cash online for a number of reasons. I discussed this a while ago on OpTempo in this article, Arte Moreno’s Niche Blogging Lessons, As I said in that article, one may not be passionate about DUI lawyers or carpet cleaning services but providing a good advertising space to them can give you the time and money to enjoy your real passions.

The second milestone, Discover The Need, also misses the mark. Gideon beats around the bush but never flushes the hare and that hare is keyword research. If you don’t know if a keyword is searched for in Google or what the competition for that keyword is you’ll never be able to make consistent cash online. Sure, you can work social referral traffic but that traffic isn’t known for its reliable buying patterns and it requires constant attention to maintain. Organic search engine traffic will usually remain consistent once you’ve established it even if you don’t update a site in a year or more.

The third, Test Your Market, has a good suggestion in it and that’s to create multiple blogs to test out markets. I do this a good bit with Blogger blogs to try out smaller niches and so forth. I’ve also done multiple flagship sites as well, 4 or 5 of them depending on how you count. This milestone isn’t bad although for it to be successful keyword research has to be done before hand.

In the fourth milestone, Focus Your Efforts, Gideon sings a refrain from the ‘Content is King’ songbook and talks about developing an email list. He also mentions dumping underperforming blogs. While lightweight on specifics, naturally since they want you buy the upsell, it’s good basic info for getting started building a list. This isn’t my favorite business model since so many people abuse email lists but it obviously works well for some. He also mentions dumping underperforming blogs. Of course, these blogs can be flipped or repurposed to earn some cash. Maybe this is something mentioned in their advanced, paid, lessons.

The fifth milestone, Start Making Money!, is also lightweight. It assumes that you’ve built a solid base where you can earn some cash but this might not be the case and all of the work has been for nothing.

I got a good laugh from this statement in his intro to his ‘X-Factor’ section:

“ Gone are the days of targeting a small niche, writing up some mediocre content, and making a living from it.”

Well, yeah, if you write about just one niche. But in niche market blogging we aren’t talking about one blog but a few hundred that are targeted toward organic search traffic.

Gideon’s big X-Factor is combining online multimedia with social networking. Yes, this is a workable pattern for online fame but does it make money? Yes, it can, but assembling the resources to make it stand out and be effective requires some upfront cash as well as a degree of technical skill and artistic talent. Therefore, this isn’t a pattern that’s workable for everyone. I know you don’t want to see me in front of a video camera if I can help it!

His emphasis on multimedia and social networking is great for building fame with the hip Internet crowd, ie the folks who don’t buy stuff online through Adsense ads and affiliate links because they know what they are and/or think everything online should be free. But this social networking extravaganza won’t help the average person make cash online nor will it attract the average searcher who’s looking to buy something online.

Overall, I don’t think that the information provided in The Roadmap To Become A Blogger or in its premium program will help the average person make money online. Sure, there will be some exceptions for whom their mix of passion and multimedia talent allows them to excel in that niche. But, for the average person, it looks more like an exercise in frustration and disappointment than a way to earn online cash.LINK.....

Yet another good way to earn cash online is to sell eBooks. One easy way you can do this is to buy pre-packaged PLR (Private Label Rights) packages that you can sell. Some of these even come with a pre-built sales website you can use with sales scripts like the Seven Dollar Script. That’s great if you can find a PLR package in a niche that your keyword research indicates would be good target for your marketing efforts. But, what if a product isn’t available? What you can do is create your own eBook.

I won’t get into the specifics of creating an Adobe PDF eBook in this article but it isn’t that hard to do technically. I recommend using Open Office to create your eBook since it’s easy to use and free. If you need some ideas on the basics of doing this from a technical perspective feel free to ask me in a comment and I’ll either answer you there or do a post on it.

One of the easiest eBooks to create and one that is likely to sell well is a quick reference guide, how-to or study guide eBook. People who’re looking for them are usually in a buying mood because they’re looking for answers to a particular problem that they’re having. You should know that people who have a need are willing to shell out a few dollars for an answer.

These books can be rather short, generally 10-30 pages of content, and are thus easy to create. So, where can you get the content? Well, not surprisingly, you can find most of the content online and in the public domain or under a liberal Creative Commons license. So, why can’t people find it when they Google for it? Because (a) they don’t know how to Google well and (b) it gets outranked by good marketers, ie us.

But, getting back to creating them, one option is to outsource them to a ghost writer. This usually costs more than having someone write a package of 10 blog articles. I’ve seen prices from $30 on up to several hundred dollars but remember, you get what you pay for. A quality eBook will produce more sales both upfront and on the back end. Since I like to think I’m a pretty decent writer and I’m kind of cheapskate I’ve been writing my own. The way I see it is that you have to decide where your talents lie and the time available to you and make the best use of them in the way you see fit.

OK, let’s assume that your eBook has been written, either by you or someone else, the next step is to add monetized links to your eBook. At key points in your book, add links to affiliate offers or other sites where you can earn cash from visitors who click them from your eBook. This could be links to eBay searches, links to complimentary Clickbank products, Commission Junction products and so forth. It could even be a link to another product of yours. The nice thing about this is that it allows you to lower the cost of the eBook or even give it away and you’ll still make money.

I prefer the idea of using a PHP redirect on these links. For an example of how this works, take a look at the links in my The Secret Guide to Social Blogging Success eBook and my article on Clickbank redirects. This gives you a lot of flexibility to change offers after the book is published.

Another little trick I’ve been using is to put in a ‘Resources’ page that is essentially a collection of links to my affiliate offers, blended in with links to other quality information sites on the topic. I’m not sure how well this works but I think this adds some value to both the reader/buyer and myself.

I’ve also been experimenting with having a link to an up-sell page that has a ’second chance’ for the one time offer as well as other promotions. This is something new so I’m not sure how well it will work yet but the idea is to try things out to see what works and what doesn’t.

Now that the eBook is ready to sell, you’ll need to create and setup your sales copy page. For that, I recommend that you take a look at Dave’s sales page design system. His eBook has some great tips for building a successful web site. Once again, this is something you can outsource or do-it-yourself and you should know where to best use your talents and time.

After this, it’s just your usual promotional methods with link building and so forth to attract targeted, ready-to-buy, organic search traffic. But, what about after the sale?

There are some other potential up-sell/after-sale opportunities to consider.

The first is one that Dave is using with his eBook and that’s a “one time offer” of purchasing videos that complement the eBook. This, of course, depends on your skill at either creating videos or outsourcing them.

Another is to offer a ‘hard copy’ of the eBook. While the Seven Dollar Script isn’t setup for this (it’s for digital download products) you can easily set this up with a PayPal order button or shopping cart that you can get directly from PayPal. There are also other payment methods you can use. I’ve been looking into this option some myself and I’ll probably launch some products with this option during 2009 just to see how it works. You can get a nice wirebound book printed for a reasonable price and comb bound and staple bound booklets for even less in small quantities.

Of course, there are also things like building an email list, selling a membership site and so forth that you can use as your post sale as well.

All in all, I’ve found that digital product creation and marketing is probably one of the most potentially lucrative ways to earn online cash.LINK.....

One of the things that you’ll find as you investigate how to earn online cash is that having a pretty website doesn’t really offer you that much of an advantage. In fact, it can make things worse. Why is this?

Generic, plain web sites are usually better at converting targeted search traffic while pretty, elegantly designed, sites will tend to be sticky and keep visitors on the site. If we’re wanting a visitor to click either Adsense or affiliate ads we have to make the advertising the star of the show. If the design is the star, or even the content, we simply won’t get as many advertising conversions from our targeted traffic.

I touched on this briefly in my previous post about Understanding Search Visitors. People have certain motivations for visiting a web site. If they find the information useful and/or entertaining, they’re likely to hang around and enjoy the free quality content and atmosphere.

To take a quote from one of my favorite movies, Office Space. Stan, the manager at the Chotchkie’s restaurant says, “People can get a cheeseburger anywhere, ok? They come to Chotchkie’s for the atmosphere and the attitude.” Peter and his pals go there to hang out and drink coffee when they have a ‘case of the Mondays’ but they don’t buy anything else in spite of the peppy waiter’s attempt to sell them something more. If you think about it though, the local McDonalds drive through probably sold many more cups of coffee and other breakfast items and thus made a lot more money than the Chotchkie’s did during the same time period. People didn’t go to Mickey D’s for the atmosphere and to hang out. They came there to buy something to eat and go. Also, the atmosphere, or lack thereof, insured quick turnover, ie a high bounce rate.

So, when you’re building a niche marketing blog with the intention to earn online cash you don’t want a place where people come for the atmosphere and attitude. Instead, you want a place where they come and go rather quickly. You almost have to turn everything you’ve heard about social blogging on its head and start with a new approach. What are some methods you can use to accomplish this goal?

First, if you’re using a WordPress blog, select a nondescript, minimalist, theme and avoid the fancier themes. If you’re using Blogger, go for the Minima template. I have several examples I did a while back that are available on OpTempo: Dateless Minisite Themes, Boring Memo Theme, Blogger eBay Minima Theme. A few others from other people I recommend include: Make Money Online Blue Wordpress Theme and the Zombie Sniper SEO Wordpress Theme. Avoid flashy, attention getting, graphics heavy, themes like those that are all the rage on the social blogs. Keep it lightweight and plain looking.

Next, use a hard to read font rather a reader friendly font. Also pick a font color that’s not so easy on the eyes. You don’t want to use a script font or something like that to make it entirely unreadable but enough so that the ads, which should be in a reader friendly font, stand out as compared to the content. Serif fonts, like Times New Roman or Palatino, seem to work rather well as does Courier and other monospaced fonts for this purpose.

Don’t use pictures except for advertising. Don’t get me wrong, pictures are great for a social blog where you want to attract repeat readers, you know, those folks who don’t click ads and don’t help you earn online cash. But, for your niche marketing blog, the only pictures you should show will lead to a potential sale. That’s one reason I like using eBay as an affiliate offer so much. You get pictures for your niche blog without distracting from the monetization. You can also do this with ads from Amazon and many ClickBank and Commission Junction affiliate plans. For Adsense sites, I go entirely pictureless, except maybe for a simple logo banner or background graphic.

Lastly, keep navigation options to a minimum. You do need some to look like a legit site but you don’t need them in the face of your targeted visitor. This also means that your RSS feed widgets and the like should either not be present or should be buried. I’ve gotten where I like to have the navigational elements at the bottom of the page rather than in a right or left sidebar. I’ve been trying this out on a few sites, including this one, and I’ve seen good results from this style so far. I’ll probably release a variation of my dateless minisite themes with this feature soon.

Just remember that to earn online cash with niche marketing blogs you want a site that doesn’t have a lot of ‘flair’.LINK......

Most of the methods I describe here on this blog take a while to start to earn online cash. SEO and such needs some ramp up time and other methods, like Pay-Per-Click advertising, needs up front cash or credit. But, what if you want to earn online cash quick without incurring debt or spending much money out of pocket? Well, here are some methods you can use to that will help you earn money online quickly. Remember these methods are good for short term cash and you will need to put in more work and effort for long term results. If you’re needing to buy a week’s worth or groceries, get an electric bill paid or just wanting some quick cash to finance more long term online money making methods you may want to investigate these ideas.

Should you try things like paid surveys? In my opinion, no. The amount you can earn from these offers is minimal and it often takes up to 60 days to get the money you earned online filling out surveys. That’s hardly quick, now is it? Also, you’ll find yourself getting a lot of spam emails because you have to opt-in to getting them in order to use these systems. It’s great if you want to review how everyone is trying to market the latest pay-per-action offers but not so much if you want to earn online cash fast.

One popular system is Project Payday. This system isn’t a bad option if you have a lot of free time, such as if you’re out of work. It essentially works by exploiting a loophole of a sort in the way freebie sign-up offers work. My friend Griz explained how the Project PayDay system works in this posts on his blog, Project Payday Review and in several following updates, so check them out if you want to find out more about how this program can help you earn online cash quick using Project Payday.

Selling stuff on eBay used to be a popular method to make money quickly. This still can work to some degree but today it really requires having a long term track record on eBay. If you have an established eBay account with good feedback you can sell items there still. Just make sure that you take into account the numerous rule changes that have taken place over the past 12 months or so. If you’re completely new to eBay selling then this isn’t an option for you. The rules have made it almost impossible for a new person to earn cash on eBay quickly. You can start an eBay account for selling, I recommend that you do if you’re wanting to make money online, but you’ll need to take a gradual approach in order to build up experience and feedback.

Alternatives to eBay exist out there in such sites like iOffer, BluJay and eTsy. Each of these have their own rules and culture and, if you haven’t sold there before, you’ll need to take the time to learn the lay of the land. Also, you have to consider that these sites don’t have as much traffic and your chance for a sale is a lot less than it would be on eBay. So, in most cases, your chances for making quick cash online with an eBay alternative is slim.

Craigs List is probably your best alternative for selling stuff you already have in order to make extra cash online. Of course, it’s not entirely online. You have to meet with the buyer to exchange the goods and the money. If you have an old lawn mower or appliance that you can sell this is a good way to earn cash online, provided you live in a large US metro area that Craigs List covers. If your item is a hot seller you can easily get quick cash within a day or two.

But, what if you don’t live in an area where you can use Craigs List or other online classified systems effectively? What other options are available to you to earn online cash quickly? One of the most effective ways to earn cash online quickly is to sell something you create. There are two basic things that just about anyone can create and that’s photos and articles.

Of course, to create photos to sell online you will need a decent digital camera and have a little basic photography and photo editing knowledge. You don’t have to invest in an expensive digital SLR camera, just an ordinary one will do. You can find many great photography tutorials online as well as free tutorials on photo editing to help you get started. You’ll find that the demand for stock photos is quite good although you will be competing against more skilled photographers. To help you get started I suggest that if you live in an picturesque area you can take local pictures that few other people will be selling. You can also take pictures of ordinary objects that other people who’re trying to earn online cash selling photos overlook.

Writing articles is another way to earn quick online cash. Members of web master and Internet marketing forums such as Digitalpoint, Sitepoint, Warrior Forum and others are always looking for people to write good quality articles for them. Sites like eLance also have places for article writers to sell their wares. Often the price offered is quite low and you’ll be competing against people who live in parts of the world where they can offer much lower prices that someone in the US, Canada, Europe or Australia would accept. My suggestion is not to compete on price but to compete on quality. If you’re a native English speaker and college educated, play on that aspect when selling articles online to make money.

One last suggestion I have would be for someone who’s computer savvy and knows the basics of setting up a simple website or blog. Find local businesses who’re needing assistance in setting up a web site for their business or who haven’t set one up yet. All you have to do is sell them on the idea of you helping them through the process of setting up a domain and business presence web site. I know someone local who charges $400 to do this up front plus a monthly fee of $95 afterward. This does require some sales and customer service skills too but you can soon build up a list of clients that insure a good cash flow plus getting a quick cash infusion.

Well, there are some of my ideas for earning online cash quickly. Do you have any thoughts on how to make extra cash online.

When you start to earn online cash one of the things that you will almost have to have is a PayPal account. PayPal is the main way online to accept payments from customers and affiliate programs. Many people, especially those who’ll be buying products you create and sell using the Seven Dollar Script, trust PayPal because of its long association with eBay. However, using PayPal as your payment processor does come with some risks for the Internet marketer and you need to be aware of them and how to mitigate them to some degree.

No Internet marketer likes to wake up to an email like this…

We recently reviewed your account, and we need more information about your business to allow us to provide uninterrupted service. Until we can collect this information, your access to sensitive account features will be limited. We would like to restore your access as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience

Ouch! This kind of email means that your PayPal account is locked down. You can accept payments from customers and you can’t move money out of the account. Essentially this shuts down your ability to do business online. Generally they’ll ask for information concerning your identity and business model before they’ll reactivate your account.

If you do get this kind of email, be careful. Don’t click on any links in the email because PayPal phishing attempts use emails like this to steal IDs. Instead, login to your PayPal account. This will tell you if your account is actually locked down. If it is the real thing, then you’ll need to work with PayPal to restore your account. This can be a frustrating exercise because of PayPal’s less than stellar customer service.

Why Does PayPal Shut Down Accounts?

There are several reasons why this happens but most center around an account raising algorithmic flags that trigger a manual verification of the account. What can trigger this? Well, there’s a whole laundry list of things that PayPal doesn’t allow that you’ll find in their terms of service. Since these can change frequently, it’s a good idea to check on them from time to time to insure that you aren’t unintentionally violating any rules or even getting too close to the edge.

Perhaps the biggest reason accounts can get locked down are large money transfers that occur suddenly. For example, if you’ve been making a $7 sale here and there and suddenly you have $2000 or more come into your PayPal account in a few hours due to a highly successful product launch. This trips a flag and your account is locked down.

Another reason is when there’s a violation of the PayPal TOS. For example, funding purchases or money transfers related to gambling, multi-level marketing (MLM), adult oriented materials, pharmaceuticals and many other things violate the PayPal TOS. Even giving the appearance of being involved in activities like these can trigger a lockdown.

Another common violation of the PayPal TOS is requiring a customer to complete an opt-in form before getting access to a product they’ve purchased. Another one that affected $7 Script sales early on was selling it more as a business opportunity than a product but a slight rewording took care of that problem. A large number of chargebacks or other payment problems can also trigger a shut down.

New accounts, unverified accounts, personal accounts or accounts with a limited track record seem like they are more subject to lockdowns. However, even established accounts can get locked down by their algorithms. It is best though to establish a good track record of successful transactions using a premier or business PayPal account. This seems to give your account a higher threshold but just how much is uncertain in order to prevent people from gaming the system.

The bottom line is that PayPal has to comply with a lot regulations related to money transfers and consumer protection. While they aren’t a bank they still have to comply with US federal and state laws concerning money transfers. This includes tough drug enforcement laws and the infamous Patriot Act and other anti-terrorism laws. They also have to contend with regulations from Visa and Mastercard. Since their business model is built around accepting many people who could not otherwise qualify for a merchant credit card processing account this has led to them enforcing their terms stringently and with lack of transparency. Could PayPal’s customer service be better, sure, it could. But you have to consider what they’re up against in terms of regulations and fraudulent transactions.

What Can You Do To Avoid a PayPal Account Shutdown?

The obvious thing to do is to establish a good, long term, track record with PayPal. This would include having a fully verified premier or business account that’s been established for some time and that has a many buy and sell transactions. You should also make sure that you follow the PayPal terms of service to the letter and don’t push the envelope. If you’re doing a product launch that might bring in a sudden influx of payments, contact PayPal ahead of time and let them know. This can help prevent an unexpected shutdown.

I haven’t had any problems with PayPal myself and I’ve had my account with them for quite some time. However, other people I know have encountered significant problems. For them and others who don’t fit neatly within the PayPal model, there are alternatives. You do have to consider that consumers tend to trust PayPal more than most other online credit card processors. Also if you’re operating in the Internet marketing arena people often pay for products and services directly from their PayPal account balance. Not accepting PayPal payments may limit your customer base and thus your business.

PayPal Alternatives

If you have decent credit and a business banking account you may want to consider a traditional credit card merchant account that includes an online processing option. This will typically cost you a monthly fee plus a per transaction fee at about the same percentage as PayPal’s so it may end up costing you more unless you’re doing a high volume of business. You will also have to comply with tighter regulations but, on the flipside, you’ll probably receive a lot better customer service.

There are other online payment processors around that are trying to compete with PayPal that you might consider if your business model puts you at risk for a PayPal shutdown or violates the strict PayPal TOS. Just bear in mind that these processors have the rules and regulations as well that you will still need to follow in order to avoid problems.

AlertPay was primarily set up as a way to handle Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) payments since PayPal prohibits them. They’ve been seeing a lot of business beyond that from Internet marketers who’ve become frustrated with PayPal’s rules and lack of transparency and customer service. E-junkie.com and TrialPay.comare other alternative payment processors for those wanting to avoid PayPal. Digital River and 2Checkout.comare, from what I understand, good alternatives to PayPal from more traditional ecommerce sellers. They have also been working toward picking up smaller clients who’re dissatisfied with PayPal.

I hope that this article has helped you understand a bit more about using PayPal in your effort to earn online cash.

To earn cash online you have to bring traffic to your site. This is often a struggle for the new person who’s trying to get people to visit a new site that they’ve just launched. In this article, I’ll take a look at three popular methods you can use to generate traffic to your site.

Generate Traffic with Article Marketing

This method of traffic generation involves writing articles and submitting them to various article directories. The objective is to have the your resource box link to your site appear on both the article site itself and on sites where webmasters use your article on their site and preserve the link.

There are two basic reasons for article marketing. The first is to get backlinks to your site. By having quality anchored backlinks this will improve the off-site SEO of your site and hopefully improve your search engine placement. The other reason is having the link go to a landing page where you’re selling an item or have an affiliate marketing landing page.

This method is highly regarded by some people while others find the chore of writing articles or outsourcing the writing of articles to be more trouble than it’s worth. My own take on it is that it requires a lot of work to get results. The top article directories won’t take junk articles, such as those created by a blog content spinner or PLR articles, while the value of links from lesser directories who do take them aren’t worth much. If you’re willing to put in the effort or money to do this, then it will be worthwhile. For me, I’ve only made this a minor part of my link building efforts.

Generate Traffic with Forum Marketing

This idea is like article marketing but it involves posting on forums in the niche you’re targeting and linking to your site from both posts and signature area. The value in these links is in both traffic from the forum and targeting, but usually low value, links for SEO purposes. I’ve used this method a lot and here’s what I’ve found.

First, you have to be a real participant in the forum. Most forums are a tight community and while they’ll often welcome new people who’re interested in the topic they’re also quick to ban obvious spammers and marketers. Many have rules that may disallow links to marketing sites and even personal blogs that have ads on them. Know the rules going in and select forums that have rules you can live with. The problem of real participation is that it can be quite a time sink so make sure that you budget your time wisely.

Secondly, your target site’s content has to be good. If your site looks spammy, like a ‘Made For Adsense’ blog, you’re likely to get the ban hammer. Only use this for sites where your content can withstand repeated visual inspection by forum members.

The downside of this method is that if you let your participation in the forum wane the effect of these links will wane too. This is because the pages that contain your links will be spidered less and less by the search engines and viewed fewer times by forum participants. Some forums even archive off old posts so that they don’t even show up anymore in the regular forum. The advantage of this method is that it will often provide you with good contextual anchored links to your site for SEO and the traffic from the forum itself converts better than average as well.

Generate Traffic with Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is useful in two forms. The bigger social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and so forth are good at bringing in traffic, often considerable traffic, all by themselves. Unfortunately, this traffic is generally low quality, non-buying, traffic. The other is using secondary bookmarking sites, such as those using open-source bookmarking scripts like Pligg and Scuttle, as a source of links for SEO purposes.

If you have a flagship blog where you don’t mind getting lower quality social bookmarking traffic then learn how to effectively leverage the big social media sites to your advantage. While it’s not a big moneymaker, having traffic in general is better than having none at all to your flagship site. However, you should avoid using these big traffic sites for your niche blogs and other marketing sites, especially those showing Adsense ads.

For the minor league bookmarking sites, you’re unlikely to see a lot of direct traffic from them except for other webmasters and marketers checking out your site. For these sites you’ll want to use an automated tool like Bookmarking Demon to rapidly distribute your link. While this isn’t useful for direct traffic it is helpful for off-site SEO, especially in getting a new site or new content indexed quickly.

These are three methods that you can use to generate traffic to your site and all will work quite well. Of course, there are other methods and I’ll be covering them in upcoming articles. Just remember that whatever traffic generation method you use the best way to earn online cash is to get targeted buying traffic to your site.LINK.....

One way to earn cash online is with Google Adsense. Yes, everybody and their brother’s sister’s cousin is using it on their website and they’ll probably telling you that they consider themselves lucky to be making $8 and change in a month. Why is it that they’re earnings are so low? Well, there are some reasons for that and they should become obvious to you as we work through this article.

What we want to work on are simple sites that will earn an average of $10 a day using Adsense. I know this isn’t a huge amount of money, only about $300 a month. However, it’s relatively easy to create such a blog so you can setup at least 3 sites per month without too much trouble. Soon it begins to add up to some really decent earnings. I’m also going to concentrate primarily on using free tools to do this. While there are paid tools like SEO Elite, Keyword Elite, Bookmarking Demon and many others that can help automate this process I’m going to concentrate on the cheapest route to earning cash online here.

Keyword Research

The first thing is to decide on the right niche to target. You want to avoid high competition keywords where some real Adsense and SEO pros are dominating search results. You’re unlikely to get to page 1 or even page 5 in Google search results with these keywords unless you have a lot of time to spend. You also want to avoid keywords that don’t pay well. There are many keywords that only pay a penny or two a click. What we want are keywords where we can get an average of $1 a click.

How can you tell which ones to select? Easy, go to Google’s Adwords keyword tool and enter keywords that you want to research. Keep researching until you have a short list of promising keywords. Make sure that you display the price per click and divide that number by 4 or 5 to determine the most likely price per click you’ll get on your site. For example, if the Estimated Avg. CPC in the Adwords tool shows $4.80 then your average earnings per click will be about $1.06. You will also want to find keywords that get reasonable traffic. While lower traffic niches can be profitable, they can also be frustrating. I’d recommend looking for between 2000 and 20000 searches a month to start with to get the best beginner results.

Now, go to Google and search for the keywords using the SEOQuake browser plugin. Look at the top 10 ranking sites and see what their Google PageRank, Google pages indexed and Yahoo backlinks they have. If these numbers are high and the page shown in results is an exact keyword match, then move on to your next keyword. If there is no keyword match or if they have few links you may have a winner. For borderline cases, this will require further analysis that’s beyond the scope of our discussion here. This article, Targeted Keyword Research, describes the process in a little more depth.

Oh, an remember we’re looking for buying keywords, not informational keywords. I discussed this in this previous article: Buying Keywords. Fortunately, in most cases, better paying keywords are already going to be buying keywords.

Build Your Niche Blog

We’re going to go cheap here and not buy a domain and put WordPress on it. Instead, we’re going to use a plain old ugly Blogger blog. There are some potential drawbacks and pluses associated with using them and if you want to review the pros and cons, check out this article I wrote a while ago on the subject: Niche Blog Hosting: WordPress vs. Blogger. Update: I’ve heard through the grapevine that Google now requires that you have your own domain that has been indexed at least 90 days old to be approved for a new Adsense account. If this is true you will need to buy at least one domain and wait it out, get approval for that domain and then you can use the account anywhere you want as long as you’re within the Adsense rules. If you have already been previously approved for an Adsense account you’re OK though.

You’ll want to select a name that matches your primary keyword. It is likely that your primary keyword will already be taken. If this is case, just add a filler word to the name such as ‘mykeyword’ or ‘thekeyword’ or ‘keywordinfo’. The important thing is to get our keyword in the URL.

We’ll want to use the simple Minima template, we don’t want a fancy blog, we want just another ugly Blogger blog. We will also want to set it up to show only one post per page since this helps Google’s search and Adsense ‘bots to get the exact keywords for your article and not get confused. The blog title and description should be for the primary keyword and secondary long tail keywords that you want to target with only filler words between them. You can add some navigation widgets to the sidebar if you want but don’t overdo this. I also recommend that you add in a Statcounter and/or Google Analytics counter to your footer. This will help you track the performance of your keywords.

Creating Niche Blog Content

Now we’re ready to create some content for our blog. I generally prefer to create content offline in an editor like Microsoft Live Writer, Microsoft Word or even Windows Notepad. There are plenty of tools you can use to do this. I just like doing it this way so that I have a local backup copy of my articles. Start off with writing about 10 articles. The title will use your primary keyword, for example “Earn Online Cash” with matching long tails like “Earn Online Cash with Adsense”. Begin and end your article with a sentence that uses your primary keyword and include it several times throughout the article but don’t overdo it. If you need some more tips on writing, let me know and I’ll point you to some other articles I’ve written on this topic.

You will also want to create a ‘policies’ post since this is required for Adsense. You can combine this with a simple ‘about me’. This will be the first post you add to your new blog. Remember that it should follow the same naming conventions as other posts for example: “Earn Online Cash: Policies”. Add a link to this post in your sidebar so that it will always be just one click away from any other page on your blog.

Now add 3 of your content posts to the blog. You’ll add a new post about once a week until all of your original posts are up. After that, you’ll only need to post infrequently, if at all. New posts can help bring more keywords into the blog but, as long as you’re getting good search engine traffic, updating can be at your leisure.

Promote Your Niche Blog

Promoting your blog is primarily getting it indexed and getting links to it.

You might want to start with the techniques I describe in this article: Quick Indexing. While you can’t add all those ping sites to Blogger like you can WordPress you can use some of the pinging sites to ping others. I also suggest that you submit your site to RSS aggregation sites. JR at “Get Internet Marketing Strategies” has a good list of them here: RSS/Blog Submission Sites. You don’t have to submit to all of them and some won’t accept Blogger blogs but you can find enough to get your rolling. Remember the primary idea is to use these resources for indexing of new content.

Now, we’ll want to build links to our blog. There are a number of different strategies here and people generally settle on ones that work well for them. I’ll give you a few basic methods here and you can work on it from there.

One good way to get some basic links is to use social bookmarking. JR has some good lists of sites in these two articles: Do-Follow Social Sites and High PR Do-Follow Social Sites. There are other list around that you can use. In general, you want to look for social sites that are do-follow and will allow Blogger blogs.

Another way to build links to your site is to have promotional sites of your own. You can use Squidoo, Synthasite, Blinkweb and other free sites to build single page sites to promote your site. You should also seek out other blogs and forums in your niche and related niches and leave comments there with a link to your site without being spammy. I cover this in more in depth in this article: Driving Traffic to Your Site.

With reasonable link building promotional work you should begin to see search traffic for your keywords within a relatively short period of time. What you’re looking for is for your blog to be on page one of Google for your select keyword. If it’s not, then the niche may be more competitive than you realized and you’ll have to put more promotional effort into it. If you are in the #1 position and you aren’t getting traffic then the problem may be that the keyword you select doesn’t produce enough traffic. In this case, you might try targeting different keywords or retire the blog to a supporting, promotional, role.

Add Adsense to Your Niche Blog

OK, now that you’re getting traffic to your niche blog and it’s steady traffic, it’s time to add Adsense. My recommendation is to add a single large rectangle block at the top and, optionally, a wide skyscraper in the sidebar. This should result in a good click through rate as long as you’ve selected a good buying keyword. Since you’re already getting search traffic to your site it will be easy for the Adsense ‘bot to determine what your blog is about and begin serving appropriate ads.

At this point, you should begin to see clicks and revenue from your blog. It will take a few weeks for the pricing of your site to settle down so expect some wild gyrations in income at first. Eventually, it will settle down.

If your earnings stay low this may indicate a problem with your keyword selection. Try editing your articles to better emphasize the higher paying keywords and de-emphasizing lower paying ones.

If your CTR is low, typically under 3%, this may indicate that you haven’t selected a good buying keyword or your traffic is from a niche that’s somewhat jaded or resistant when it comes to Adsense ads. If this is the case, you may want to try moving toward better keywords with new posts, move the blog to a supporting role or just live with the lower click through rate. Remember that a low CTR won’t hurt you but a low CTR with clicks that don’t convert might hurt you.

Earn Cash with Your Niche Blog

Remember the key to this method is not to get bogged down and obsess over one blog but to keep moving. The more blogs you create and the more promotion (aka links) that you do the better your chance will be at earning cash online.

Whew! This was a long article. Way too long. I should have padded it out and made it into an eBook and sold it for $47 or made some money some other way like having you sign up for a membership site or an email list, right? Well, I’m just trying to do the same thing that people who helped me, like Griz at How to Make Money Online for Beginners, did, offer good, solid, information for free with no strings attached. I hope you can use this information to earn cash online and feel free to ask any questions if you have them. LINK.....

When you’re trying to figure out How To Earn Cash Online one thing that you’ll realize is that often it isn’t the most pretty site or the site with the most engaging and entertaining content that wins the race for the dough. Often it’s a plain old ugly site. With that in mind, I created the Boring Memo theme back in June and released it on my other blog, OpTempo. Now, I’ve made a few updates, simplified the template more and now I’m ready to release Boring Memo Too. In this post, I’ll go over the basics of setting it up and some of the reasoning behind it.

Why Ugly?

I wrote about this a while back in this article: Earn Online Cash with Ugly Websites. Of course, Griz is my main inspiration behind this idea with his ugly old Blogger blog. He wrote about why ugly sites make money just recently in this article: Why Noobs Don’t Make Money Online.

Are there cases where having a nice looking blog is important? Yes, there are some, especially for things like self-promotion, product promotion, list building in certain niches and so forth. It’s also a good idea to have a personal flagship blog that looks nice in order to have a good public face. This kind of blog isn’t what Boring Memo is intended for. What it’s intended for is a niche blog that is targeted at search traffic.

Anyway, if you want more on the concept of it, read my post and read Griz’s whole blog. You’ll learn a lot.

How To Setup the Boring Memo WordPress Theme

Here’s how I recommend setting up the Boring Memo theme. I’m assuming that you already know a little bit about WordPress and how to install a WordPress installation on your hosting account and how to upload themes and plugins and maybe do a little minor theme editing.

We’ll start with the settings.

In the General Settings section make sure that your blog title and blog description use your keywords. The blog title is the

header tag for the page. The description is just a

paragraph tag although it will be the first bit of non-header text the search engine bots encounter so make it good.

Now we move on to the Reading Settings. We will want to set the “Blog pages show at most” to 1 post. This causes one full post to show up on all pages, the index page, the tag page, search pages and so forth. I’ve found that Google will often index tag pages as being the most relevant keywords for a post’s content and this can help give you a leg up on traffic for certain long tail terms.

For Discussion Settings, I usually moderate all comments on my niche blogs before they appear. I allow them if they’re on topic and non-spammy but I don’t want to let anything troublesome through.

For Permalink Settings, I use the standard /%postname%/ setup but you might also try /%category%/%postname%/ if you want.

I highly recommend that you install the All-in-One SEO or Platinum SEO plugins with this theme. You may also want to consider the Who Sees Ads plugin to help you control when ads appear.

For setting up the advertising block, you’ll want to edit the theme. Don’t worry, it’s easy to do as long as you know how to cut and paste. Just go to the theme editor section and select the adblock.php module from the list. From there, all you need to do is paste in your ad code, save it and you’re done.

The ad block is setup for 350×350 pixels which is a good size for a number of advertising scripts including Adsense and eBay Partner Network. You can modify the size if you want by editing the stylesheet. Just go to the very end of the file and change the height and width of the block. If you have any questions about how to do this, let me know and I’ll be glad to help.

For widgets, I recommend the Pages and Tag Cloud widgets. You can add others if you want but those are the ones I generally use.

Niche Blog Advertising Strategy

The whole idea behind this theme is to make the single ad you use the star of the show, the only thing that doesn’t look dull and boring on the page. That’s why there’s only a single ad block that’s presented inline on the left side. Too many ads will make the blog look ‘Made for Adsense’/'Made for Affiliate’ (MFA). A single ad block is more likely to focus attention and pull the search visitor toward it subliminally.

For compliance with Adsense rules I recommend that you leave the small print ‘Advertisements’ text above the ads. They’ve complained about themes like Boring Memo where the article title was directly over the ads. I haven’t had a problem and, to my knowledge, no one who used the original Boring Memo had a problem with this but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Also remember to add a page for your site’s privacy policies or incorporate that into your about page.

What kind of content should you use? I recommend using good content which is to say content that is focused on the keywords you’re targeting while being moderately informative to a visitor who’s bored enough to actually read it. I would make the articles long, probably at least about 500-700 words, and start and end with sentences using your primary target keywords LINK.....

Today’s lesson on how to earn cash online involves a few external SEO tricks that I’ve learned. Too often people spend time optimizing their own site’s internal SEO but ignore doing external SEO, aka link building. Most people who’ve learned a little SEO know about trying to get dofollow comments on other blogs and article marketing. Here are a few other tricks you can use to further expand your external SEO efforts.

Using Free Web Hosts

This is one that Griz has mentioned on his make money online blogs recently and one that I’ve also recommended before. There are many sites where you can build free blogs and static sites ranging from big names, like Squidoo and Blogger, to small private and semi-private WPMU and free webhost sites. How you populate them depends a lot on their level of moderation and their terms of service so make sure that you understand them ahead of time. For some sites, you can use content generated with tools like my own Blog Content Wizard or unaltered PLR articles. For others, you’ll need to have quality original content. Also bear in mind that the more obscure and less moderated a site is the more likely it is to be penalized by Google. The opposite is also true, Google is unlikely to deindex Blogger (which they own) or WordPress.com.

Discover Others’ Linking Strategies

Another way to improve your external SEO is to analyze what other people are doing and figure out if you can use it as well. The first place to look is at your competitor’s sites, especially those that are outranking you. This will give you niche specific information that can be quite valuable. Another good place to look are sites related to Internet marketing product launches since the competition is always high there. Lastly, look at sites that rank well for highly competitive terms.

Now, let’s investigate these sites in SEO Elite or even with a free tool like the SEO Quake plugin for Firefox. What we’re wanting to discover is where the site in question got its links, especially it’s higher quality ones in terms of anchor text and PageRank. While you’ll see some obvious related sites, such as a flagship blog, you’ll often see other stuff. This might include blog comments, especially comments on high PR posts on dead blogs. You may also locate abandoned forums which are left unmoderated. You may find link and article directory sites that are easy to get listed in and produce good results. You can even find guest book pages from years ago that have left the door open. You might find other interesting locations where you can add a link yourself or that reveal more about how others get their links.

Also look at “Web 2.0″ locations they’re using, like those on free web hosts like Squidoo or bookmarking sites. Often people will setup a tiered approach where lesser sites link to a free host and the free host points to the primary site. Check the links on these sites as well to discover hidden linking resources.

Pretty soon you’ll have a good list of resources you can use for linking to your supporting sites and perhaps even your primary sites. One important thing to remember is that sometimes these links get abused and lose their link juice. Should you see a sudden drop in PageRank or search engine results placement then this is probably what has happened. Your defense against this is to build a large and varied promotional network for your sites so that if one part of the network is weakened, other areas can be used to pick up the slack.

Promote Sites That Link To Your Sites

When you find sites where you can promote your site, make sure that you promote them as well. How can you do that?

One of the easiest ways to do this is to use social bookmarking to promote pages that link to your pages. If you leave a comment on a blog, bookmark it with StumbleUpon or Digg. This will often bring appreciated traffic to a blog, especially to a blogger who’s concentrating mostly on social referral traffic. Also use Bookmarking Demon to bookmark the site to Scuttle and Pligg networks. Do BMD runs for other pages, like forum posts and such, that link to your site. The idea is to build a strong cluster of links that promote your site. Not only will you get more search traffic but you may also get decently targeted referral traffic as well.

Remember, the more you can do to promote sites that link to yours the better off your site will be.

Do you have any suggestions or questions about How to Earn Cash Online With External SEO?LINK.....