Welcome to “Make Money Online with Griz”.
Some of you may be familiar with my work online but for those who aren’t let me fill you in on what I do and humbly suggest that you heed my advice before wasting a lot of time and energy trying to earn money online. All because you followed the advice of people who make money off of you but don’t tell you how to do it yourself.
Regardless of what niche you pick your success always comes down to one single and simple barrier – traffic. If you can solve the traffic problem or lack of it that is, then you can make money online. It really does all boil down to that. Get traffic – make money. Get more traffic and make more money.
Simple.
Except…
Getting traffic is the hardest thing to do online. There are millions and millions of websites and blogs dotting the Internet landscape and getting people to come to your site, out of all the possibilities, is the hardest task to achieve.
Lucky for you I just happen to be pretty good at getting traffic. I also like to discuss how I do it. Moreover I give the info away for free. Right now you just said to yourself… “Oh great – free! It must be crappy advice if he isn’t charging for it”.
I’m the first to admit that nobody knows everything and I’m not an expert but I have developed some techniques that work well for ranking high in the search engines for every keyword I target. I will show you some examples below.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to publicizing a website or blog. The popular model is such that you set up a site and then join every social network you can and get yourself seen. Build up friends, who become readers and work at getting your RSS Feed subscriber total into the thousands. This will attract advertisers trying to sell something to your large readership. On paper this sounds good (and yes it works) but it is a lot of work, you don’t make any money for a long time and your readership won’t buy product. They are bloggers just like you and they come for information. They know what an affiliate link is and they sure as hell aren’t going to use your link to buy something – most will use their own. Yes, you can make a decent living following this model but the odds are against it. Only the very top bloggers make good money doing this and they number a few dozen out of millions. The chance of rising above the crowd and becoming one of the few is quite unrealistic for most.
The other school of thought for getting traffic is ranking high in the search engines – specifically Google.
If your website ranks number 1 on Google’s search engine result page (SERP’s) for the word (know as a “KEYWORD”) “Shoes” then you can expect hundreds of thousands of visitors. If you can’t find a way to make money from a site with that many visitors then you shouldn’t be online. Needless to say the site that does rank #1 sells shoes. I bet they sell a lot of them…
This model simply targets highly searched “keywords” and sets about building a website or blog that is relevant to the keyword. This is called search engine optimization (SEO) and it’s what I do. The idea is to rank on top of the search engines for keywords that get searched for by lots of people. Do this and you gain steady traffic that doesn’t change much from day to day and it’s the kind of traffic that is looking for something specific. They buy stuff. They aren’t other marketers and bloggers – just ordinary people looking for something online. Get a lot of this kind of traffic and you can make money with Adsense, Affiliate Products or Lead Generation to name just a few. You can also make a decent buck from advertisers who are after your traffic.
One of the most competitive terms online is “Make Money Online“. It is the holy grail of keywords – not the toughest but one of the most coveted keywords. Ranking number 1 for this term says one thing – your SEO is better than everyone else.
I have another blog that has been around for a year and a half. It is called “How to Make Money Online for Beginners“. If the title isn’t bad enough you’ll love this – it’s built on Blogger’s free platform. It’s a plain ugly free blogspot blog. Cost me nothing.
As of today’s post this is how my other blog ranks in Google for several of the main “Make Money Online” Keywords. I said I could prove I know a bit about SEO and I present the evidence below. These rankings change regularly and may not be accurate at the time you read this.
I rank 5th for the top prize – “Make Money Online” – only 42 million competing pages…
and number 1 for several related terms.
“How to Earn Money Online”
“How To Make Money”
“How to Make Money Online”
“Make Money for Beginners”
“Making Money Online”
“Make Money Online Right Now”
“How Can I Make Money Online”
SEO is what I do.
If you want to learn – for free – start by reading my “How to Make Money Online for Beginners” blog and then come back here and learn the rest of what I do.
ps. That free ugly blog makes several thousand dollars a month.
Cheers
Griz
Monday July 7 – Update.
Rhys asked the following question in the comments below…
“Can we infer from your Domain name that G can separate out(and use) the keywords in the name, without hyphens? Humans often can’t, and I feel not using hyphens leads to confusion.”
Rhys, as you can see G can decipher the words used in a long url. While this may confuse humans I am only interested in how the search engines see my url. Humans are given plenty of visible text in the Blog Title, Page Titles and Post Titles. Url’s are for the search engines. I have said this often – if you want top spot in the serp’s you really do need your main keyword in your URL or else you will need thousands and thousands of links to make up for this deficiency.
Justin,
Thank you for the support and the link is much appreciated. I will be returning the link favors from the other site as this one is a bit short on PR at the moment. (Only a temporary setback I hope…) At the rate all of you are sending links this blog will be firing on all cylinders in record time. Thanks so much Justin!
Frank,
That pretty much answers my question – I get tons of traffic from the comments on the Blogger blog but have not heard much talk about this from the WP crowd. Glad to know you do pick up long tail search traffic from the comments… now if only I could get some comments on here… hehe
Chanya,
Wow… Fridge reading material – now I know I have made it!! Just how many of those little magnets would it take to have my post printed on them?
All kidding aside Chanya – Adsense performs best with targeted traffic. No point using it until you know that your traffic is querying the exact terms that relate to the ads. This is why it’s a good idea to wait until you start seeing a steady stream of traffic from G. Good luck with the niche sites. If you ever need a hand…
Wayne,
Thanks for stopping in. As a trucker you must just love the price of fuel these days. Any Alaska Trips on the radar this year? I have sent a few people to your site just for the photos alone – great stuff. Hope all is well and please drop in often Wayne.
Costa,
Thanks for the endorsement and the link. You’ve been a good friend for a long time now. Hopefully you can get some of your page rank back. Did you ever write G and beg for forgiveness? Seems if you admit the paid post stuff and promise not to do it again they have reversed the penalties handed out to others. It is worth a shot.
Vic,
I’ll take you up on the offer and give Terry a break. I’m making the poor guy hyper-ventilate! I know Terry has the All in One SEO plugin installed but I haven’t spent time trying to figure out exactly what it does yet…
I’d love to use the nested comments – so much cleaner than this and the Similar Post plugin is a great idea as well.
I will shoot you an email…
Rhonda,
Thanks and I hope it suits me – been living on that island now for 15 years. I appreciate you stopping by and please come again!
Diane,
Thanks for the welcome Diane. The local phone system is trying to get me hooked up to high speed so I’m hoping to join in at BU TV one of these days – it’s a bit frustrating following along and not being able to comment.
Hi Rhys,
I have added a new screenshot to the bottom of the post in order to answer your question. You will see that this blog is ranking 12th for the term “Grizzly Make Money” and G was able to decipher those 3 words out of my 4 word url even though there are no hyphens.
I must say that the new theme really fits Griz. Although the graphics are a bit ‘distracting’ compared to the ugly site. LOL! I think that WordPress will start to grow on you once it’s all tweaked out. Good luck!
Griz,
I didn’t install the Related Posts plugin as it caused me no end of problems on my WP blogs I had it on (with All-In-One SEO). When the two plugins were working together, they were re-naming all the pages and any deep links I sent in were coming up 404s.
Maybe I was doing something wrong, so if you have a parley with Vic, can you ask him about that please?
Thanks,
What kind of trouble were you having with the related posts plugin? I’m using it along with the All-In-One SEO plugin on a couple sites (I don’t have many) with no trouble. There is another plugin (Platinum SEO pack) that I read about that is supposedly “better”, but I haven’t tried it yet.
I found out about the All-In-One plugin @ Courtney Tuttle’s site, and I figured he knew way more than me so I’m using it.
Griz,
Let me know if you need some help with WP. I am running 2.5.1 on most of my sites, we can Skype or email if you need to.
Nice site, and gee, thanks for giving me something else to read!
Elliott
Those are all personalized results. You should probably have logged out and then taken those screenshots
Regular reader, although I don’t comment that much. I have this I want to ask though…
Since you’re going for a highly competitive keyword (MMO), with a brand new domain, are you going to be sandboxed? It would be interesting to see whether or not getting many high PR inlinks will help you avoid the sandbox for this new website, and of course share the results with us
Nice new blog Griz!
Of course, I am well aware that you know your shit so I am sure this will contain a lot of useful information.
I’ll be sure to come back and check it out!
Trent
Griz, congrats on the new site. I was offline for two entire days this weekend so I missed the secret launch. I added this site to the Noovy.com blogroll and will be putting it on a couple others as well. Hope you get WP figured out.
Grizz, I am so glad to have found you. My computer took a crap and I have to do some stuff at my daughters so I will be sending you a link to your new blog. Setting up my Reader Review right now. You will have this blog up on the front page in no time. I will be watching for your new posts.
Best of luck!
Denise
Griz-
Congrats on your new WP blog! Between you, Vic, Terry, Court, I’ve learned so much and am grateful for the mentoring you provide.
Vic says you are the blogspot man so will you one day let us know why the switch? Gonna start selling some .com real estate?
I’ll be checking back often to see whats up…best wishes for the whole enchilada!
Vic- Nice to see you up and around. Hope you are feeling better and getting rest.
matt
Nice digs Griz. It’s a huge change from the Blogger blog. Is the picture on top your home? If so, very nice. If not, it’s still a nice picture.
I’ve added you to my RSS and look forward to learning even more from you. Thanks for all you do to help people out.
Woah. Looks like we have a good ol’ barn raising party here.
I’ll send ya a link too, Griz.
Yup, and I’ve had tons of trouble with the statcounter plugin too.
Hi Gizz,
Welcome to hell, lol. Having always followed your advice I feel comfortable with blogger. However, the other two musketeers (Vic & Court) use WP aaargh.
Using WP is like having a woman with three tits……you don’t which bit to fiddle with next.
I know you don’t need any luck to make this site hit page 1, but just to help I will give you a PR4 anchored link with Make Money online (From z-tel.net). I hope this goes some way to paying you back for all your help.
On a side note, its nice to see a comment from Vic, I hope you are feeling better big man, see you back at the channel soon.
Good luck Grizz, all the best – John
PS – If there is anything else I can do just ask.
For a secret 66 comments on the first post is not bad LOL! I think you may have established your “brand” and got the “attraction marketing” working Grizz! Now you just sent me back to blogger world and you are off doing WordPress I don’t know about that! My ugly blogger niche blog is getting some traffic so I have dared to put Adsense on it: I wait in excitement. BTW I actually really like the theme: is Terry selling his design services ?
Aaron,
Thanks. Yup the damn graphics hardly leave any room for me to stick up that big ugly Adsense block! Not sure how I’m gonna make any money with this.
Terry,
I am creating a Vic list and will add the All in one SEO glitch to the list. If I act pathetic enough I’m sure we can get him to login and wave his magic wand…
Elliot,
Good man. You are welcome! I just knew you didn’t have enough to do…
Max,
Yup I should have but after wasting half a day getting the damn screenshots posted I wasn’t about to start over. As my accountant says – the difference is immaterial – whether I rank 1 or 3rd out of 40m pages makes little difference. The point is still the same. I will remember to log out next time though.
Will,
You my friend are on the ball. I too am curious if I will avoid the sandbox and so far I have. I am ranking p2 for “grizzly make money” so no sandbox yet. This could change but I’m hoping the quality links I’m getting from everyone will help me avoid it. I will of course keep everyone updated. I have noticed my other sites never get sandboxed when they get an authority link or two so this will be a test to see how correct my assumptions are.
Marc,
I can tell you that Vic means you no harm and would help you in a heartbeat. He has his way of getting people’s attention but it’s only to help others in the end.
The first thing you should do is contact Google and ask for your PR back (do this in webmaster tools). Tell them you bought the site with do-follow paid links but didn’t know what that meant at the time. You have since corrected the links with the no-follow tag and would like to ask for them to reconsider your PR. Make sure you tell them that it won’t happen again.
You answered your own question – “Air Soft Guns” is the correct anchor to use.
Good luck Marc – we would all like to see you make your money back and then some.
Trent,
Thanks my friend. You realize of course that you have some of those quality sites that should be on page 1 with us. A situation that we need to make happen…
Steve (Noovy)
Thanks for the link – much appreciated. The secret launch just kinda happened a little ahead of time. Still don’t know how Frank found this site but he did and that was the end of me keeping it quiet. I had planned on working it a bit first but things seem to be working out just fine anyway.
Denise,
Don’t you just love computers – they never break down!
I appreciate the link and I’m really hoping we can get the rest of you on the front pages. Hope you get your computer fixed pronto.
Matt,
I am not leaving Blogger – just expanding a bit. I will be revealing my plans a little at a time – not to be secretive, I just haven’t worked it all out yet. lol. Thanks for your support and all the best to you as well.
John Calvin,
The picture shows part of the lodge. My house is back in the trees as well as the rest of the Lodge and Cabins. I can’t get a better shot as it would require cutting down the trees and I don’t want to do that or my shoreline will start eroding.
Thanks for dropping in and hopefully I’ll have something on here worth an RSS feed!
Nice blog Griz, but this is a good-looking one.
Irene,
I seem to have the statcounter problem solved – I just stuck the whole code in the footer and it works fine. I would like to know if I can put it in the header as well – I have found I get much different results in the stats on my Blogger blogs depending if it is placed on top of a page or the bottom. (Have any of you wordpress folks tried this?)
Thanks for the link Irene – had a visit to the site this am.
Hope the move goes well!
John,
I appreciate the link and support. I will not be giving blogger up anytime soon – I can have 10 blogspot blogs up and running in the time it takes to just register a domain with this self-hosted system. For speed you can’t beat Blogger. WP does have some serious advantages for other stuff though and I want to pursue them to the fullest.
Thanks so much John!
Lissie,
Damn, I knew when I started mentioning names I was going to forget so many of you as I was in a big rush – sorry about that. Ugly Blogger blogs and Adsense work great – I wont be changing that system at all.
Glad you like the theme and Terry should sell his services but the bugger wouldn’t take a dime from me – I shall find a way to repay him though. (Thank Court as well as it’s a modified version of one of his themes)
Btw… are you the Queen of Hubpages? Seems every hub leads to you over there – very well done and very impressive. You sure put a lot of work into your sites and hubs – wish I had your drive.
Venkat,
Ha. I will try and “Ugly” it up a bit. Don’t want you to go into shock! Now if I can just figure out how to add Adsense…
Grizz, nice to see you finally ventured into the WordPress realm. Look forward to more insight into “Make Money Online”.
Nice theme BTW.
Regards
Are you ever right about the importance of your keyword in the URL. My keyword isn’t in the domain name, but if I title something /political-humor-whoever-whatever/ it ranks 100 times more easily than if I title it /whoever-whatever/
There’s your tip if you don’t have a keyword in the domain name. Choose your post slugs to compensate, but it’s still better to have it in the domain name, and there’s no need to be as conscious about the post slugs you choose.
Personal Finance,
Thanks Ray. More like belly flopped into the WP arena but I’m here now and carnage is sure to follow. Thanks for stopping by and your site looks great btw. Best of luck.
Fiar,
Yup… the URL does make a difference. You can rank well without it but it is so much more work. That’s a great tip btw – thanks for sharing.
Grizzly,
Congrats on the new blog. I’ve been a reader of make money for beginners for a long time now and learned so much from you! I can’t imagine how I would be making money online if it wasn’t for you, vic and court. I’m not a guy who makes lots of responses and therefor you probably don’t know me, but I wanted to grab this chance as a way to thank you. Also a fine list of responses for a first post, I must say! Hope this blog will also be a success (looks like it already is). Looking forward what you bring us in the future. Btw very nice theme, it suits you well, buddy.
Emiel,
I’m just waking up with my morning cup of coffee and the first thing I have read today is your comment. What a nice way to start my day. Thank you so much for that – you have set the tone for a great day indeed. Don’t be shy in the future and let us all know if you ever need a hand. Thanks again Emiel!
Ooh very posh, Griz! My, you are going up in the world! ;o)
Divinyl,
Yes, I am going to be very hard to live with now…
Hi Grizz
so is this site a replacement for your blogger site?
btw, my site is an authority for “living off dividends” – too bad its not a very popular niche like making money online!!!
I Grizz,
I’m guessing that now that you have a WP blog, I’m gonna be commenting a lot more
Heck this is my second comment on the same post! I have something I want to share/ask though!
I have a flagship blog that I had high hopes for in terms of monetization, but that was before I learned all that good stuff about keyword sniping and niche blogs that you, Vic, and Court teach. I have learned A LOT since then! I was reviewing my website, which is a PR1, and I noticed that I have one post that’s a PR3! Then I have one or 2 other posts that have a PR3 and all the other pages except the root domain are PR0.
My question is, is that normal? I was always under the impression that your homepage would have the highest PR, but it clearly isn’t the case for my blog! I would have put up the links but I don’t want my comment to get caught by spam comment filters…
Um there are a couple of typos in my previous comment…
I do have a PR3 page, but the other ones I’m referring to are PR1 (not PR3), and all the pages have no PageRank.