Category Archives: eBook

eBook Series: The Money Making Part

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The basic steps to making money with your site are:

  • Put advertising on your site (easy)
  • Get lots of people to come to your site and click those ads, or buy the products (hard!)


Advertising Programs That I Used:

I started with Google Adsense
The biggest, easiest to use advertising program out there is Google Adsense. Adsense is great because it’s easy to use, performs well, and has the potential to make a lot of money. Many website owners make over $100,000 a year with Adsense alone! Of course, many make very little or nothing.

I signed up for an Adsense account when I opened my blogger.com account – I think it’s Continue reading →

eBook Series: Promoting the Site

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How I promoted the site: Creative Marketing

I now know that if I just let the site sit there after I created it, nobody would ever know about it. Since then I learned that I had to get out there and promote the site, being careful not to cross the line into ‘spamming’. This type of promotion is aimed at human visitors, not just search-engine bots and spiders. I think that many new webmasters don’t realize how important “Creative Marketing” is and this is one reason why so many new websites fail.

These are some of the things I did:

  • Made posts in related blogs, with deep-links to my site
  • Made posts in a related forums with deep-links to my site (I had to be careful, because some forums don’t allow this)
  • Submitted the site to leenks.com, stumbleupon.com, slashdot, Netscape.com and DIGG – Be warned: for this to be successful, the site or the page you submit has to be worth looking at. You also have to be careful not to cross the line into spamming. After several tries (over 8 months) I hit it big on Digg.com for BOTH my website and the blog – this resulted in over 100,000 hits in just a few days, and still generates about 300-500 visitors per day a year later. It also resulted in a hundreds, if not more links from other websites and blogs which I think is more important in the long run than those initial 100,000 hits from Digg.
  • I called a syndicated radio show related to my niche (helping new computer users) to “ask a question”.. of course, in asking the question I casually mentioned that I have a “computer help website” – I got lucky and the radio show host looked at the site, saw something very interesting and funny on the front page, and talked about it for several minutes! – Something that would not have happened without good, original content – This resulted in a lot of immediate direct traffic, but it also resulted in thousands of people using Google searches to find the site by name – I am convinced that these thousands of searches for the website name increased my Google rankings.
  • I Looked for relationships with podcasters and other website owners: I was able to ‘team up’ with a few podcasters that had podcasts with subjects related to my site, but did not have sites of their own – offering to let them talk about my site as if it was theirs, and in return I would post their podcasting ‘notes’, etc. I could then refer to their podcast as “mine” – making my site look bigger or more important than it actually was. I don’t do this anymore because those podcasters have stopped making their podcasts and it was a lot of work, but it was worth it at the time. I also teamed up with other webmasters and did such things as trading links, promoting each other’s sites, etc.
  • I tried to create pages that would create a ‘buzz’: At least once a month I tried to make a page at the website or in the blog about something wild, outrageous, or popular in the news at the moment. After doing this many times it finally paid off big time when one of these pages hit the front page of Digg.com – I then created a post in my blog related to the page that hit Digg and it also hit the Digg front page! It took a long time, and many tries, but it was worth it.
  • I tried advertising – I tried to use Google Adwords to drive traffic to the site, but I was not successful and gave up after a week or two because I was loosing money. Don’t overlook this option just because I failed though. Many webmasters rely on AdWords or other advertising for traffic to their websites and do very well by it.
  • I tried some “Myspace marketing” but that did not seem to generate any traffic to the site. I also started reading that Google Adsense may not like large amounts of traffic coming to the site from Myspace bulletins, so I stopped all of my Myspace marketing efforts after one or two weeks. I still get a lot of inbound links from Myspace pages (as stated in a previous page) but this does not generate a lot of traffic.

Things that I did NOT do:

  • I didn’t use any ‘get rich’ or “get lots of traffic to your site” systems
  • I did not submit my site to ‘traffic generating’ services. These are sites/services (that you usually pay for) that promise to send thousands of visitors to your website. This kind of traffic is worthless because the visitors don’t really care about what is in your website, and it will probably get you booted out of Google’s Adsense program.
  • I did not worry about “keywords” – I did not try to stuff my pages full of ‘keywords’ to try to grab the attention of the search engines or try anything else tricky. I used natural language.
  • I did not worry about CPC, eCPM, PR, or all that other stuff. I did not even know what these things were for the first few months! Only very recently have I started to pay attention to these things, removing poorly performing ads from my site, etc.

After the site was up and running with a moderate amount of traffic, I started to focus on the two most important items: Content and Traffic. Once I had those mastered, I felt it was time to move on to fine-tuning and optimizing things.

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eBook Series: More on SEO and Generating Traffic

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Continued from Previous Section

I used Drupal’s “Recent Comments” in a menu-block to increase interlinking:
One great way for Interlinking I found is to turn on the “recent comments” block in Drupal, and configure it to display on all (or most pages). This will create a sidebar area on every page with links to comments that visitors have posted on other pages, using the subject of the comment as the anchor text. Each time Google or other search-engine spiders visit pages, they will see this a link to other pages – and if you get lots of comment posts, it will be different each time the search engine spider visits. I believe that this interlinking has had a big impact on why I rank so high for many keywords.

I modified comment post subject headings to make them “Search Engine Friendly”:
By editing the subject line of posts that people made I have seen a huge increase in search results for that particular term (the subject line on a comment) – for example, I made sure that every day there was at least one ‘recent comment’ that said “how do I get Myspace at School” – literally within a week or two I was number two or three in MSN search results for that term! I think this works because the subject headings show as <h2> type headings to the search engines – giving those words more importance in search engine rankings. These subject headings also show in the ‘recent comments’ box, which creates interlinking on all pages, using the subject as the anchor text as I mentioned above. Now, since I don’t often get people posting comments with this particular phrase I have dropped in search-engine ranking for this term, but the site still ranks pretty high for the term.

I put outgoing links on almost every page:
On virtually every page, on the bottom right below the “related links” section, I put at least one link to a website that ranks high on Google for a search of whatever that page is about. For example:
On a page about ‘switching to Vonage, I would do a Google search on “switch to Vonage” and find the #1 ranking website on the subject – I would then link to that website’s page from the “related links” section on my page. I have read that this helps my Google rankings, but it is also good for your website visitors when they have links to more information on a subject. Many experts disagree and may warn you to limit the number of outgoing links from your pages. I don’t know who is right, but this is what has worked for my site.

I was concerned about making it so easy for visitors to leave the site and never come back. On many pages I made the link open in a new window/tab by using the target=”blank” tag.

I set meta tags for all pages:
I use the Meta Keyword module, Nodewords in Drupal, which allows me to specify meta descriptions and meta keywords for every page. Google search does not give any weight to meta-tags for search results, but other search engines such as Yahoo still do. Meta keywords can also result in better ad-targeting for Adsense ads.

I watched my logs very closely:
I kept a close eye on my raw logs, looking at the referral strings. This told me what someone was searching for if they came to the site from a search engine. I then knew which terms I was beginning to rank higher in the search engines with. I would then “work” on those terms by adding more links from my blog with that term as the anchor text, and making sure that I had lots of “recent comments” displayed in the Drupal Recent Comment block that had that same term. This really paid-off quickly and I began ranking very high for many of the terms that I focused on.

I posted more of the kind of content that people were coming for:
As I watched my logs to see what people were searching for, I added more and more content about those particular subjects. This has taken the website in a totally different direction that I had planned for. The site is still about “Help for Beginners”, but now a sizeable amount of content and traffic is related to help for Myspace. Because Myspace is such a popular subject these days I quickly began to get a lot of traffic as my rankings for keywords related to Myspace began to improve. As more people came, more people posted comments – creating more content, bringing more people, who posted more content. It kind of snowballed to what it is today. When I first started the site, I would have never thought about posting anything Myspace – If I was not watching my logs, and adding more of the type of content that people were looking for, I don’t think the site would have done as well as it has.

I tracked my daily stats carefully:
I used webstats (free from my website host) and then signed up for Google Analytics so I could see how much traffic I was getting every day and where it was coming from. Drupal has an Analytics module that makes it simple at add Analytics to the site.

I did not change Title tags once I created them:
One major problem that I learned about (the hard way) by tracking my website statistics is that changing web-page titles can effect your rankings in the search engines. I had one page that was doing very well in MSN (ranked #3 when searching on certain Myspace terms) and number 5 or 6 on Google. I re-designed the page and changed the “title” of this page – not the URL, but the title. Within 3 or 4 days, this page dropped from #3 in MSN down to about number 85, and it dropped completely out of Google! It took about two months for it to return to normal. Now I choose my titles very carefully, and never, ever change them.

I used URLs with “-“ instead of “_”:
When making a new page, I make the URLs with – instead of _ for example, I use:
http://www.mysite.com/this-is-a-webpage
instead of
http://www.mysite.com/this_is_a_webpage

By using the PathAuto module in Drupal, I was able to make new forum posts use dashes (-) and not underscores (_) using the title/subject of the post.

This is a simple tip, but using - instead of _ can make a huge difference in your search engine rankings.

I pushed traffic from my high-traffic pages to my lower-traffic (higher earning) pages:
When I first started getting a lot of traffic, most of it came to only a few pages. I used those pages to promote other pages on the site by displaying prominent links with text/descriptions of why visitors would be interested in visiting those pages also.

I listened to what my visitors/members asked for:
By taking the advice of members and paying attention to their feedback and requests, the site has changed even more from my original plan. Some ideas from members weren’t very good and failed, but most of the ideas have been great and have resulted in even more popularity. This is partially why our site has slowly changed into a very popular ‘community’ with a family-like feel amongst members.

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eBook Series: TRAFFIC

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The biggest secret to making money online: TRAFFIC

After I got the site up and running, and had something for people to see, it was time to start working on getting traffic (visitors) to the site. I think this is where many new website owners fail. Simply creating a website and letting it sit there will not necessarily get you listed in Google, and it certainly wont get you to rank high when someone searches for something in Google or other search engines – you have to do some work!

I actually had to work to generate traffic
That’s right; work.. The “W” word.. Not ‘real’ work like digging ditches, but it took substantial time and effort to generate traffic to the site. These are some of the things I did to generate traffic to the site:

I Created a blog at Blogger.com:
I created a THIS blog originally as an SEO tool. I used the blog to write about general things related to the site, and included links from the blog to pages inside the site. For example: If I created a new page on the website about “cleaning widgets”, I would make a short blog post about how important cleaning your widgets is, with a link that says, “check our main site to read more about it”. Doing this makes links for search-engine spiders to follow into pages ‘deep’ in the website (instead of only to the main page), and it also makes what I call a “Google net” – giving Google (or other search engines) more keywords for people to hit on when searching – bringing them to the blog, which they will hopefully then follow to the main site. I also put other posts in the blog, not necessarily related to the website. This created more ‘stuff’ that people may hit on while searching for things in Google, bringing them to my blog – then hopefully taking them to the main site. I choose Blogger because Google owns it and I’m assuming it will ensure that all pages get listed in the search index. Today Google fully indexes new pages from my blog in as fast as 20 minutes.

I created one-way links from the blog to the site:
I did not link from my website back to the blog – I only linked from the blog to the website. I think that Google favors these “one-way links”.

I manually submitted the site to search engines:
MSN and Yahoo have ‘submit a page’ features. I also did a Google search on “submit your site” and submitted to a lot of other smaller search engines – but I was careful not to submit to any search engines that were ‘shady’ – like ones with gambling content, adult content, lots of popups, etc.

I read and learned about SEO
Search Engine Optimization:
There are entire books written on this subject, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a bit of a ‘black art’. Here are some of the things I learned and did:

I sent lots (many, many, manyyy) “Link requests” to other webmasters.
One of the ways Google decides who will rank well when showing search results is by how many incoming ‘links’ it has from other websites. These links count as a vote for your website. To get these links I searched for other websites with similar content as mine, checked the FAQ, or “contact” page and sent the owner a personalized email asking for them to link to my site. I worded my link-requests in a way that asked them to comment or give me feedback on my site if they decided not to give me a link – that way if they said ‘no’, I could at least get an idea why and make changes to the site if appropriate. I tried to send at least five link requests per day – and on average I got about one link for every 10-20 requests I sent. I can’t emphasize how important I think this step is, and I think it’s something that most website owners do not do, or don’t do enough.

I got many incoming links with good anchor text
I got a lot of one-way incoming links to the site (as stated above) – with good ‘anchor text’. Anchor text is what is written in the link itself. For example, a link such as http://www.mysite.com contains no anchor text, but a link to your website that says “how to clean widgets” will increase your search engine ranking when someone searches for “how to clean widgets”. To create a link with anchor text, you would use this html tag:

anchor text
I created these links with specific anchor text from my blog, from comments in other blogs, and I specifically requested them when asking other webmasters for links. Now that I’ve been a webmaster for a while, and now that I’ve seen many of these requests sent to me, I can tell you to be careful about ‘explaining’ anchor-text to other webmasters. I think it is safe to assume that any webmaster with a popular website knows what anchor-text is… Don’t try to “teach” him or her unless they ask. I hate when people do this to me.

I invited visitors to link to my site from their blogs, Myspace pages, etc.
I put code on my page with good anchor text that visitors could copy and past into their web-pages, Myspace pages, etc. This got me a lot more incoming links with good anchor text – Mostly from people with Myspace pages. This did not get me a lot of traffic at first, and since the majority of these links are all from Myspace, I’m not sure how good it affects my Google rankings. I didn’t start doing this until my site was about 6 months old, and the site was already doing very well at that point – so I’m not sure this had a lot to do with how successful the site is, but every little bit helps I suppose. I do worry though, that Google may see all these links coming from Myspace and discount them as ‘spam’.

I posted in many related blogs
I visited many blogs related to the content of my site, or particular pages of the site and made posts, with links back to the website. Being careful that the posts weren’t just ‘Spam’. I also kept a close eye on Digg.com and made posts in blogs that were related to the site, that did not yet have a lot of ‘diggs’. Eventually, I got lucky and one of the blogs I posted in with a link to my site made it to the front page of Digg.com – resulting in a dramatic increase of traffic to my site.

A note about posting comments in blogs and forums: Many blogs/forums use the NoFollow (rel=”nofollow”) tag. This tag instructs search engine bots/spiders to not follow the link. Searching for blogs/forums that do not use the nofollow tag and posting comments with links to your site will help your SEO more than posting in blogs/forums that do use the NoFollow tag. You can easily see if a blog/forum/page uses the nofollow tag by opening the page in Internet Explorer or Firefox, and selecting “Source” or “View Page Source” from the View menu. If you see “rel=”nofollow” in other links on the page then that site is using ‘nofollow’. Don’t disregard these blogs/forums completely though, because humans will still follow those links!

I DIDN’T use forum signatures to spam my website:
I don’t think it’s a good idea to put a link to my site in a forum signature and then go posting all over. I think Google sees this as ‘spam’ and may penalize the site. Also, since virtually all forums use the “nofollow” tag, it will not help your search-engine rankings by counting as “link vote” for your site. Some ‘experts’ disagree with me on this, but this is MY eBook and I say it’s not a good idea. Recently I have added my blog URL (not my website url) to my DP Forums signature, and it generates a decent amount of traffic. As more and more people at DP see or read about the kind of traffic and earnings that I’ve been able to generate in such a short period of time it seems they are more willing to listen to (or read) what I have to say.. Funny how that works.. :-)

I submitted a sitemap to Google:
Google will let you submit a “sitemap” at https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps
A sitemap is a listing of every page of your site, so that when Google starts indexing your site, it can find and get get every page into the search-engine index. A sitemap will not increase the speed that your site gets indexed by Google, but it will help to ensure that all your pages do eventually get indexed. Drupal has a “Google Sitemap” module that will automatically generate the sitemap for you. For more information on the Drupal Sitemap module that I use see the Drupal XML Sitemap page.

A quick note on Google indexing – even if you do everything right, it can take up to 1-2 months before you start showing up in Google’s search results. Other search engines like MSN and Yahoo are usually much faster, taking only days or weeks.

I did a lot of interlinking of pages
I found that Interlinking, or linking from one page of my website to another page, with specific anchor text helped increase my search engine results dramatically – When I first started the site this was more true with MSN search than Google, but recently the trend seems to have reversed itself and I see it helping more with Google search results. At the bottom of almost every page, I put a section to “related” pages with one or two links to other pages on my site – using good “anchor text” on every link.

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eBook Series: User Generated Content

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I let my visitors create the content for me:
That’s right – why should I bust my butt writing ‘stuff’ when other people can do it for me? The reason for wanting as much content as possible on your site is because Google and other search-engines love it. The more new, unique ‘stuff’ you have on your site, the more Google will favor your site in search results – resulting in more visitors, and popularity.

HOW I LET USERS GENERATE CONTENT:
I enabled the comments feature of Drupal. Drupal has a feature that allows users to post comments on pages. Activating this feature and inviting visitors to comment or ask questions is like giving food to the Google-bot that indexes your website into it’s search engine – Each time Google visits your site it will see more ‘stuff’ (Google likes that) – Also, having more ‘stuff’ increases the chances that people doing Google searches will hit on something on one of your pages. For the first several months I allowed anonymous users to post comments/questions. I had to watch every post very carefully to watch for trolls, spammers, bad language, etc, and I had to delete many ‘bad’ posts.

On some pages I got the commenting started by making ‘anonymous’ posts:
At first, when I wasn’t getting many visitors to the site, I would make my own anonymous posts to get things started. Eventually other people started posting comments and I didn’t need to do this anymore and was able to delete all those posts. There are also websites and services that will allow you to ‘buy’ posts or exchange posts to help get things started.

I created a forum within my site:
Another feature of Drupal is integrated ‘forums’. A forum is another great way to get visitors to write content for you. In Drupal, each time someone makes a new forum post, it looks like a new page to Google’s search engine spiders & bots. I waited a few months, until I was getting a lot of traffic before I activated the forum. Activating the forum, which was one of the smartest thing’s I did, was not a calculated move; I was simply following the direction that visitors were taking the website. There came a point when the number of page ‘comments’ per day made it obvious that the site was turning more into a forum than a static site.

I used the PathAuto module for Drupal:
The “Pathauto” add-on module for Drupal will automatically create URLs based on the title of the forum topics that users post. This makes for better search results from Google and other search-engines. This ‘on-page SEO’ is important for long-term traffic from search engines. When configuring PathAuto, be sure to specify using “-” (dashes) between words, and not “_” (underscores). Google will see words with dashes between them as individual, search-able words. Words separated by underscores will be treated as one, long word (more about this in a later chapter).

Also, by activating The Path (different from PathAuto above) module I can easily modify URLs so that they match popular search terms.
For example:
By default when using PathAuto a forum post with the title “Help, my computer isn’t working” will have a url of “http://grownupgeek.com/help-my-computer-isnt-working”
I will often change the URL to something like:
“http://grownupgeek.com/how-to-recover-windows-xp”

Changing the URL to a popular search phrase related to the post greatly increases the Google ranking for that particular phrase. You can only change the URL’s if you have activated the Drupal Path module.

After some time, when I had run out of things to write about, comments and forum posts by visitors allowed the website to continue to grow. There came a point that I could just sit-back and let it run – for me this took about 8 months. This does not mean I was “done”, it just means that my content creation was now on auto-pilot.

I use newsletters to keep members and non-members coming back:
After the website began getting popular, I started restricting posts to members only – requiring visitors to register (and give their email) to make posts. I then used Drupal’s simple-news module to send out a newsletter to all members each week. The newsletter mentions what’s been going on at the website, and keeps members coming back. I also use the newsletter to point-out pages with Commission Junction links – pointing out how wonderful those products are. Now that the site is older and has more members I only send out newsletters about once per month. I have found that members and subscribers don’t like the be overloaded with too much email.

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eBook Series: Building the website

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Now that I had the site up and running it was time to start customizing it to make it look the way i wanted. I spent a few days getting the site to look the way I envisioned and I still tweak/change the site to this day.

I made the site simple and easy to navigate:
To me it was important that the website be uncluttered, easy to read, and simple to navigate. I hate the look of those websites that are jammed with advertisements, are hard to find your way around, hard to find anything useful, and have text so tiny you need a magnifying glass to read and it was important that my new site not be like this. I think this strategy has worked because I have received many comments and feedback from visitors that they love the simple, clean and ‘plain’ layout of the site. Although the site does have a slightly ‘amateur’ look because of it’s simplicity, I believe it’s simplicity and ease of use/navigation is partially why it is successful.

I LOOKED at the entire site every day for months:
Every day, I went through the entire site tweaking it, making it look the way I wanted, customizing it, making sure everything worked, etc. Even after a year I was still constantly checking the look and layout of the site, making changes as I saw fit and even adding new features. I think it is very important to LOOK at your site and ensure that everything looks and works the way you want. If you don’t pay close attention, it’s very easy to miss something and have a stupid-looking website, broken links, etc. Watch out for mistakes (I make them all the time).

I created as much unique, new content as I could:
The plan was to add at LEAST one new page per day, for a year – this can be difficult, especially if you aren’t a great writer, like me. I tried to keep my pages short and focused on one particular subject. This was to help the contextually-based ad-targeting in Adsense and it was also easier for me to write pages this way. I was able to write approximately 100 pages in about a month – that was about the best I could do. This is where my next step came into play:

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