A Brief Intro to SEO, or, “How Do I Turn That into Making Easy Money Online?”
So I was talking with my buddy Serge yesterday about this project, and he was intrigued. he asked for details about how to make money online with little to no up-front investment. Serge is a professional Poker player, so he has plenty of flexibility with his time, and wants to build up some passive income to help smooth out his earnings.
Making “Easy” Money Online is Not Always So Easy
The advice is always the same: find a need and fill it. That holds true for most anything, including information - and that’s where the Internet comes in. I told Serge to find a search term that has the three magic properties for making money online:
- People are searching for it.
- There is not a lot of information out there on it (Read: Not many competing pages).
- Advertisers want to reach the people who are searching for it.
I then pointed him to some free tools like the Google Keyword Research Tool, and WordTracker’s Free Edition. He did some poking around, found a few words that seemed to fit, and said, “OK, how do I turn that into making money on the Internet?”
Sometimes I forget that not everyone is a geek like me, and some folks won’t know how to throw up a web page off the top of their heads. Super Apprentice is a great tool for making money online whether you’re a gearhead like me or not. They automate 95% of the process and little to no technical knowhow is needed to get started.
Of course it isn’t free, so I haven’t been using it for the game, but I do use it for my other projects, which earn me a very nice online income.
SEO in a Nutshell
Back to the topic at hand. The short answer to Serge’s question is to use Search Engine Optimization, a.k.a. “SEO,” to get a high ranking on search pages for the keywords you have identified, then put ads on those pages. The search engines will bring you traffic (eventually), which will earn you revenue. It’s really quite simple in principle. In practice, SEO is a complicated process, but there are great sites like this one to help you get started.
In brief, SEO is mostly about getting inbound links from other sites that have your keywords as anchors. You can do this any number of ways. Super Apprentice makes getting inbound links pretty easy, but the stake isn’t big enough to pay for it yet, so I’m sticking to other methods for the time being. More details on this to come.
The first step is to find those topics. Find the need! Then fill it, by writing some content with information on the topics. Give people what they are looking for. If you do that, the traffic will come. And with the traffic will come revenue.
Until next time!
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