When I first started out with my internet home business, I spent lots of money on solo ezine ads, ppc ads, and so-called leads. Results were pretty average and not worth the money spent, so I began to look for ways to earn free money online. The idea is to utilize free methods of marketing your web site, such as blogging, article marketing and SEO (or search engine optimization). This means a greater profit yield and often better traffic rates in the long term. So, let’s look more closely at SEO.
SEO is simply optimizing your site with the effective placement of relevant keywords and undertaking a linking campaign to increase the number of back-links pointing back to your site. This increases your ranking in the search engines, with the aim being to get on page 1 for your keyword phrase. If you can get on page 1 for your keyword, you will have lots of people clicking on your listing and visiting your site. Provided that you maintain this position, you can earn free money online indefinitely.
The first step in your SEO campaign is keyword research. Grab a pen and paper and write down all the keyword phrases you can think of, that visitors might type into a search engine to get information on your niche. Once you have your list, go to your favorite keyword suggestion tool and start entering your phrases into the tool. Each time you enter a phrase, it will give you a heap of other related keyword phrases as possible options.
I always target low-competition phrases that have had about 1000 searches in the past month. I then enter this phrase into the main three search engines, within inverted commas, to see how many other competing sites there are for this term. I try to aim for less than 100,000 results per phrase.
My strategy is to build a web page around each low-competition keyword phrase (and have lots of phrases). That way, if I can get just 20 visitors from the search engines per day for each page, and have at least 50 pages, this is a total of 1000 visitors per day to my site. To me, this is more achievable than targeting a highly-competitive phrase and working my butt off constantly to maintain a high ranking for that phrase. Now, let’s look at on-page and off-page optimization.
On-page optimization is the work that you do on the actual web page itself. What you need to do is place your keyword phrase in your URL (if possible), in the title tag of the page, in the description tag and in the keywords tag, Then, sprinkle your keywords in the body of the text, in the first and last paragraphs, and make sure that you bold, underline or italicize the keyword phrase to give it more emphasis in the search engines. Don’t over-do it though. I aim for about 1 to 2% keyword density on my pages.
Off-page optimization is basically your linking strategy. The more back links you have pointing to your site, generally the higher your ranking with the search engines. Two great ways to increase your links are by submitting your URL to the link directories (preferably with a high PR), and to write and submit articles (with a link pointing back to your site) to quality article directories.
Once you have implemented all the steps of your SEO campaign, you need to keep the momentum going. Keep adding more and more pages to your web site, targeting good keyword phrases, and continue getting more links pointing back to your site. The results and the pay-off are definitely worth it. There’s nothing better than getting highly-targeted, free traffic from the search engines and earning free money online.
Tag Archives: Free Money
Can You Earn Free Money Online?
The ultimate lure of the Internet these days is the promise of making money online. With the likes of John Chow earning over $10,000 a month from his blog, everyone wants to jump in and quit their day job by building an online income.
There are three basic ways to make money online without putting up much of your own money.
Create a blog that sells advertising space Participate in a site with a profit sharing plan Participate in the “paid to click” programs
Make Money Blogging
This is the most difficult of the ways to make money online. The key to making a living blogging is to write an interesting enough blog that you build a loyal readership. Readers are the lifeblood of a blog, and the ones who actually click on your advertisements and make you money. One of the biggest mistakes beginning bloggers make is expecting to make money immediately.
John Chow, for example, did not put advertisements on his blog for nine months. That was nine months of writing blog post after blog post, just because he enjoyed it, and building a readership who enjoyed reading them. When he then put advertisements on his site, he knew his readers would stick around because he had built a relationship with them.
When I find a blog that has only one post, but advertisements all over the blog, I usually leave. That gives the feeling of a person just trying to make money, not a person who has something interesting to say.
So while you can make money blogging, it is a long-term investment of time and energy. It also does require a small investment, since your success will be much higher if you have your own domain name.
Profit Sharing Sites
Profit sharing sites are the ones that give their members a portion of their advertising profits. Sites like Squidoo and AGLOCO are good examples. The portion of the profits you get generally is proportional to the amount of traffic you bring to the site.
A Squidoo page, for example, is rated by the number of visitors it gets. If your Squidoo pages get a lot of traffic, you will get a larger percentage of the advertising money. AGLOCO gives you a higher percentage of the profits for recruiting new people, since that means more people are viewing advertisements.
The amount of money to be made with profit sharing sites depends entirely on the amount of effort you put into them, and the results will build over time as you continue to put effort into them.
Paid to Click Programs
These are the programs that pay you to read emails, fill out surveys, and view advertisements.
This is easy work, and at times mind numbingly boring. If you are an easy mark for advertisements, you probably want to stay away from getting paid to view advertisements, since you may spend more than you earn!
The basic idea with all of these is that you register for free at the site, and then begin receiving emails. Each email will have a link you click to get credit for reading the email. Clicking that link will take you to an advertisement you need to view for some amount of time (on the order of 10 to 15 seconds) to get credit.
Pay for these is low, around $0.05 per email. You cannot control how often you receive emails, so cannot put more work into the system to earn more. Generally you want to sign up for as many of these as possible.
The same sites will often pay your for filling out surveys. These are legitimate surveys seeking public opinion. Payment is usually anywhere from $0.50 to $1 for about five to ten minutes work. Surveys are generally demographic based, so you won’t qualify to take every survey they offer.
Most of the paid to click programs will give you a signup bonus, usually from $5 to $10. This should tell you how valuable you are to those companies.
Conclusions
You can make free money online, but need to be careful to avoid the “opportunities” that require investments from you. Anything that requires an investment from you will typically require a significant amount of Internet marketing for you to be successful.
If you are looking to make casual money online, stick with the above techniques. Good luck!