The Online Marketing Guy

Thanks for reading my site. I finally decided to gather all the bits and pieces and tidbits of knowledge I’ve accumulated over the last 5+ years of search marketing and make this book. The goal here is to provide folks who are new to this concept the idea of building a topic-focused website and generating income with it – a chance to start from a stable knowledge base. I’ve detailed everything I personally dealt with when I developed my first website. Sure, it was easy to say “I’ll build a site, sell some ad space and make a few grand a month on the side.” The reality was very different. I fully expected to be the Sales Manager as well as the search optimization guy and copywriter for this little venture. I expected to be making cold-calls to businesses I knew would benefit from having ads shown to my visitors. I knew it’d take a while to get moving, but eventually those advertisers would see my content was great and they’d want to be seen next to it. In the meantime, I needed something to act as a “place-holder” for that ad space I was going to sell. Google’s Adsense program was perfect for my needs. I had many sizes and layouts of ads to choose from and could customize the colors for a perfect fit into the existing look and feel of the website. This would be the perfect “place-holder” for me until real businesses started buying the spaces for themselves each month I thought. Knowing it would take time to grow the traffic I’d need to support actual ad sales, the first few months were lackluster to say the least. It was me building content and paying the fees to float things. The $30 or so everything was costing me was not a hardship, but I wanted this venture to begin paying its own was as quickly as possible. Things started very slowly in the Google Adsense account at first. Just a couple of clicks a day. In a few more weeks, the traffic was increasing and so were the clicks on the ads I had in place. It suddenly seemed as if the idea of the website paying it’s own way was very close to being real. Sure enough, after the first full month had passed, the revenue generated by users clicking on the Google Adsense ads covered my costs. The only stumbling block now was the minimum $100 USD payment limit. Fast-forward just over one year from that time and the site is on its way to a solid $700 USD per month – and growing. That’s the beauty of using a system like Google’s Adsense program, since clicks on the ads are generally a percentage of traffic, the more traffic you get, the more clicks you see. …and the more money you earn each month. While $700 USD isn’t going to allow you to retire, think of what you could do with this extra income each month. Vacation each year, pay off bills, save for retirement or maybe just throw the money towards something new for yourself, like a car or motorcycle. Whatever your desire, I’m sure you wouldn’t say no to the extra money each month. Still not sure that $700 or so a month isn’t worth the effort? Look at it this way: Let’s assume the entire venture never generates more than $700 a month moving forward. So you’re seeing an extra $700 each month from this website you built. If you built a second website, in about a year’s time, maybe less, you could be potentially seeing $1,400 a month in revenues. A third site, you could be seeing over $2,100 in extra income each month. Now, it’s easy to see that this isn’t going to happen over night. It also requires lots of work on your part. If you ask yourself what you’d like to be doing in 2 – 5 years from now, the answer probably won’t be “exactly what I’m doing now”. If you built one site a year over the next 5 years, you’d potentially be seeing revenue of over $3,500 USD per month – real income. Depending on how you live, this could be enough to free you from needing another job. If you were close to retiring anyway, this would be a very nice addition to your retirement income as well. One key point to remember in all this “potential income” chatter is we’re assuming the earnings from each website will remain flat. In fact, over time, they will most likely grow. Sadly, for some folks, they will never achive this level of income form their site. The bottom line is if you build a basic site with unique content and work in sound search optimization practices, it works. The driving force behind this sustainable income is organic search engine marketing. This simply means you are not going to be spending hundreds of dollars each month marketing your website(s). Instead, this site will serve as a guide to show you how to build a site that will incorporate search optimization techniques as part of the building process. Yes, you will learn new things. Yes, you will face new challenges. Yes, you will wonder what to do next. The information shared here will show you how to use those new things you’ve learned, how to understand and overcome the new challenges and most importantly, it will help guide you to other resources (many of which are free if you know where to find them) that will provide quick, accurate answers to pretty much any issue you encounter. Here’’s the quick list of topics: 20 Top SEO Tips - free for everyone SEO Tools list - a full list of the tools I use every day Search Optimization Checklist Keyword Research - you always start here first Link Building Guide How to Monetize Content SEO for Blogs Getting found by the spiders Directories and Search Engine list - a who’’s who in the zoo list Advanced Search Functions - use these to find yourself Analytics and KPIs - you need a plan, here’’s the starting point Building effective sitemaps Cross linking and internal link architecture Domain Age Checking and tools SEO for Images More on optimizing images for search Page Rank and Alexa Ranking explained - what they are good for and how to use them Building SEO friendly pages - this is not a lesson in coding or programming Google Sandbox and patience - SEO is not a fast sport, everything takes time to build Hosting Issues that can affect rankings SEO Resources - places that will help you learn more SEO Software - and why you should avoid it’