Million Dollar PortfolioReal Strategies for Making Money Online

This is Part 2 in the series. I haven’t decided how many parts I am going to encompass here but at some point I will number them again.

In Part 1 I discussed link campaigns and the importance of building links to and from your blog or site. Incoming links mean directional traffic. The best links come from high PageRank sites. These links mean authority for your site and tell Google’s servers how important your site is compared to your peers.

Organic Search Results

Ever wondered how some sites seem to always appear at the top of Google search results day in and day out? Chances are these people have perfected the craft of organic search results. Organic search results, as the name implies, are the most valuable results because they are the most likely results people are going to click on. Organic search results stem from keyword rich content.

Content Is King

Everyone keeps saying this…what do they mean? Simply put, if you aren’t writing something people want to read, you aren’t going to get any traffic. You also have to consider the kinds of keywords being used to find your content. Periodically I check my Google Analytics statistics to find out what content is being found in relation to the keywords used in searches. If you haven’t already signed up for Google Analytics, you should. It’s one of the most valuable tools you will have in making your blog or website successful.

What makes for good content? Nearly everything can be a good subject for your blog, the bigger question is Do I have anything interesting to say? Think about that for a minute. I subscribe to several blogs but I don’t always read every post on every one of these blogs. Why? I don’t always find what every blogger says to be interesting. That doesn’t mean it’s not good content, it just means it doesn’t appeal to me. This is important because although you want to write something people are going to read, you don’t want it to be just anything. Writing for your reader without a point of view is just empty content. You also need to speak from experience. Ever heard the saying “write what you know”? It’s true. In general if you write about what you know, like minded people are going to find you to see what you have to say.

Marketing

Now that you have something to say, you need to get people to read it. We already talked about search engines and how ranking is important for engines like Google or Alexa. These trusted sites are used by affiliate programs to determine how much your site is worth and thus how much they can charge advertisers to list their products on your site.

So how do you market your site? How do you get people to read what you have to say? Although there are methods you can use that cost money, I like to find the ones that are free. Cheap is good, but free is better.

Use Other Blogs

Commenting on other blogs is a great way of marketing your site because in general people like to see what other people have to say. On some blogs, the owners list the top commentators in the sidebar so you can see who is discussing different topics. This is a great way to get exposure. Going down the list of comments you can see names and even faces so it personalizes the experience a bit. I guess I’m somewhat narcissistic that way because I always check to see if my photo shows up in the comments.

MySpace

Want a way to potentially increase your PageRank as well as get some quality links to your site and bump up your technorati authority? Create a MySpace account and use their blogging tool to blog about the post you just put up on your blog. Isn’t that cheating? Well yeah, but traffic is traffic and MySpace has a huge user base which means you can potentially reach millions of eyeballs for your content. I like to create what’s called a teaser. A teaser is a small portion of your full post that you write in a blog post on MySpace that includes a link to the “full story” on your real blog.

Why does this work? Since MySpace is a trusted site (due to the vast user base and sheer size of the site) in Google and Technorati’s search engines, more weight is put on the validity of the information found there. What this means is you get a quality back link from a PR 8 site that also has an Alexa rank of 6. I do this pretty frequently for both of my blogs and my Alexa ranking has moved from 5 million to under 700k in less than 3 months. Since Google’s PR update hasn’t happened yet, I can’t tell you what my current PR is.

FaceBook

To be honest, I don’t have any experience in using facebook but with an Alexa ranking of 8, just below MySpace, I would bet that you could use the same techniques I have blogging on MySpace. Try it out and let me know what your experience is.

YouTube

This has to be one of the best viral marketing tools out there for creators of video podcasts or vlogs. YouTube has an Alexa ranking of 4 and a PageRank of 8 because millions of people are using it to showcase their talents and make their projects available to the world. That being said, it’s a great place to store your content (again if you are making videos) and not only keep your bandwidth from being eaten alive, but also gain a following there with the ability to subscribe to channels. Chances are if you are popular on a site like YouTube, people are going to want to know what else you do and where they can find it.

Wrap Up

So you can see that content is and will always be king and I am probably beating a dead horse by saying that but it has to be said. Finding your own voice and having something to say is an important factor in creating a successful site. Off topic posts are also ok now and then as long as your readers know they are off topic. I have found that in the process of writing my blogs, the blogs themselves have changed and evolved. Million Dollar Portfolio isn’t the blog it started out to be in May. I have since evolved the concept to something I enjoy writing about. Some of the same principles that I wanted to convey originally are still at work, but the focus has evolved.

Just keep writing, keep promoting and do what you love. Success has a way of finding those that persevere.

Related Posts: SEO Strategies Part 1

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