The Passive Income System (3)
Passive income is a income that comes from a source that the receiver is not actively involved in. In Word Wolf terms it refers to income that you can receive by writing articles, publishing them on Word Wolf and receiving money from adsense when someone visits your article then clicks on the adsense ads. Passive income on the internet is often thought of as someone with a laptop, sitting on the beach, earning money!
So you've found a great keyword (Part 1) and written an informative WordWolf article (Part 2) for your reader but no one is finding it! What's up? Well to get your article noticed you need to get some links from other sites. Some links will occur naturally from satisfied readers and these are the best links you can get, but there are some other things you can do to help yourself along.
The first place you can get yourself some links is from some sites that are a lot like WordWolf. All of these sites offer revenue sharing of one kind or another so they can boost your earnings both by helping your article ranking here, and by giving you some more web real estate. Just like at WordWolf you should always write good content and provide value to your readers with your links.
Site 1: Hubpages is a site that allows you to build a social page on almost any topic. You can include everything from videos to google news feeds. Build a solid page here and link it to a similar WordWolf page to get some link juice.
Site 2: InfoBarrel is a bit more of a basic article site but it too has some social features as well. They take a while to approve articles but offer a good source of linking.
Site 3: Squidoo is the most social of the three of these sites and likely has the least linking value, but it is a fun place to build a site. This is where I got my start building sites like these online.
Article directories are another great source of links, but the problem is that most of them have very little trust in the eyes of the search engines. There are a couple of places though that can still provide you pretty good bang for your buck.
Directory 1: EzineArticles is a good site that has a lot of trust because of its high editorial standards. They allow you to place a couple of links in your signature that can give you a good boost.
Directory 2: GoArticles is another article site that has managed to keep some authority and is a great place to get links. Their editorial standards aren't as high as Ezine and your posts are automatically approved.
When you're link building the general rule is just get them, but there are a few things you should keep in mind to get the most out of your links and to make sure you don't send off any google red flags.
Tip 1: Vary your links with different anchor text. Use different tenses of your keywords and anchor some long tails as well. This looks a lot more natural, and it will help you rank your article for more than one term.
Tip 2: Send link from similar articles on similar topics. It doesn't look natural if you send a NASCAR link from a site about baking, so don't do it. Links should always be sent from pages that are about similar things. The closer the better.
Like I say, build your links. Getting links is the most important off page factor when you try to get your articles ranked high in google and the other search engines. The key is to keep your links natural and organic.
Ok so you've got yourself a good idea about some keywords (Part 1) you want to write articles about, so now onto the fun part, actually writing them! There are a few tips you should keep in mind when writing articles, some for your reader and some for the search engines.
The biggest thing you need to keep in mind is your reader should be #1. Provide value to them and you will get value in return. People will link naturally to your article when it is useful, and this is the type of information that the search engines are trying to provide to their searchers.
Reader Tip 1: Write naturally! If you read the article and it's awkward because you are trying to make it search engine friendly then you're doing it wrong.
Reader Tip 2: Use paragraphs. Nothing turns a person off an article quicker then when it's poorly formatted. Start with an introduction, then move into the meat of your articles, and end with a conclusion.
Reader Tip 3: Give your article an interesting topic. No one wants to read an article called "Good Toothpaste", but they might be interested in one called "What is a Good Toothpaste For Your Kids".
The second thing you need to keep in mind is the search engines. There is nothing wrong with doing some things to help the search engines pick up your article and rank you well, but I can't stress enough that you should always keep your reader foremost in your mind.
Search Engine Tip 1: Use your keyword in your article a couple of times. The search engines use math to rank your article and they will have a hard time knowing what your article is about unless you include your words.
Search Engine Tip 2: Use your keyword in your title and as a tag.
Search Engine Tip 3: Use variations of your keyword. There are lots of different words that people will search for related to your specific keyword. Try tossing an extra word onto your keyword at the start, end, or somewhere in the middle, or even consider using a different tense of your keyword.
Search Engine Tip 4: The longer the better. What provides more useful information a short article or a book? It only makes logical sense that a longer article provides more information to its readers so it may get some benefit in googles eyes.
On top of these tips there are a few rules you should follow to make sure you stay out of trouble with the search engines.
Rule 1: Don't keyword stuff. Excessive use of your keyword not only looks spammy and makes your article hard to read but it can get your article deindexed. I wouldn't suggest using your keyword or even related keywords more than once per hundred words.
Rule 2: Don't use duplicate content. All articles you write need to be original works. The search engines try to not return the same article in the results multiple times so if your article isn't one of a kind you might not ever make it into the rankings.
Rule 3: Don't link out excessively or to bad (spammy) sites. Too many links out of an article can look bad on an article, so only post links out that provide more useful information to the reader. Don't link to sites that are junk, or thin affiliate sites.
I'll reiterate one last time that the best thing you can do is write for your reader. Provide them some value and the search engines will reward you with traffic. Combine that mindset with all these tips and rules and you'll reap the rewards of favor in the eyes of your readers and the search engines. Now you're ready to do some promotion and link building (Part 3).
Perhaps the most important step is making money on WordWolf is the first. Keyword selection is key and if you don't do it right you just end up wasting your time. There are two major concerns when we do keyword selection:
Concern 1: CPC (cost per click) - You don't want to be writing articles that no one is going to want to advertise on otherwise you will end up making tiny amounts of money even when people do click on the ads. You can see the CPC of a keyword using a keyword tool. Generally we are looking for words with a CPC of $4 or more, because the general consensus is that Google will pay you 25% of what they charge advertisers. Does this mean you should never target lower paying keywords? No, but you need to know what you're getting into.
Concern 2: Competition - When selecting a keyword you don't want to end up going head to head with CNN.com, because you'll lose. There are a TON of sites on the web that Google trusts a lot and we'd like to avoid them as much as possible.
Ok, so now that we know what were looking for let's develop a process to help you find winning keywords.
Step 1: First you need to think of what general niche you want to target. Just to get you started here are a few good ones: investing, banking, loans, mortgages, laywers, insurance, credit cards, and surgery.
Step 2: Narrow it down by finding a two or three word combination that you want to target. This should still be a fairly generic term that gets searched for a lot. An example would be "home loans" or "bad credit mortgages".
Step 3: Search for your word using the keyword tool. Change the "match type" from "broad" to "exact", hide "global search volume" and "advertiser competition", and show "estimated avg. CPC". If the CPC of the words isn’t around or above $4 then I toss it right away, otherwise go to the bottom of the first list and click ".csv (for excel)" to download the list.
Step 4: Open the excel file and trim your list down a little by eliminating any keywords that are searched for over 1000 times a month, or less than 200 times a month. This gives us a sweet spot of words that are not too competitive, but are still searched for.
**Repeat this process until you have a list of 200-300 words**
Step 5: Check out the competition for your words by downloading an SEO toolbar that will show PR (page rank) in search results. I like SEO Quake. Now go to google.com (NOT .ca, .co.uk, or any country specific google) and search for your word, now we need to figure out which words are worth going after and which are not. This is where the process becomes more of an art and less of a science but here are some factors:
- Toss out any keywords where any of the top 3 results are higher than PR3.
- Toss out any keywords where any of the top 3 results that are PR3 contain your exact keyword in their title
- If there is an article directory, squidoo, or hubpages type page in the top 3 I'll sometimes be a little lax on the other two rules
Going through your list of 200-300 words you'll likely end up with 10 through 30 words that are winners. If you end up with a lot more you probably were too easy in your screening (or you may have just found an easy keyword).
It will take you some time to get good at keyword selection but once you are good then you will have the world of MMO opened up to you. Best of luck and read on to the next article about writing articles (Part 2) for the best methods there.
