I am an Internet marketer (IM). Most people associate IM with spamming and that is too far off. In fact, I was doing the same thing (check out my comments). For the past couple of weeks, I am been thinking through and has decided not to continue down the same path. I wanted to create real posts, with real content so that people reading it will not be a waste of their time. Since my expertise is in making money online, this is what I will be covering in this blog.

My method of making money online is very straight and comprise the following steps:

1. Select good keywords
2. Build a niche site around it
3. SEO the site to reach page one of Google and enjoy the search traffic that will be give me money either in terms of adsense or affiliate products.

Each of the step may seem easy but there is a lot of details that I will cover in my future post. For now, I will like to briefly talk about each step in brief.

Select good keywords
Keywords are what people type into search engines to find things. They represent intent. Intent to find information or to buy something. Not good keywords are equal. To make money online, you need to find keywords that traffic and are something that has commercial value. To give an example. Twitter as a keyword has lots of searches due to its recent popularity but it has little or no commercial value to an Internet Marketer. People typing in these words are not trying to solve a problem or a pain. A good example of a commercial keyword would be something like "buy used cars". People typing in these type of keywords are searching to buy a used car.

How do you know whether a keyword has search volume and commercial intent? The most basic tool is Google adwords. Let's look at the screenshot below:



The tool shows you a couple of things. First, it shows you the amount of search volume for that keyword. Second, it shows you how much an advertiser is willing to pay Google if people clicks on their ads. By looking at these 2 numbers, you will know your potential traffic if you rank well in Google with that keyword and how much money you can make potentially if people click on the ads on your site.

Build a niche site around the keyword
Once you know which keyword to target, you can build a blog around that keyword. The blog can be any kind of blogging platform from Blogspot to self hosted wordpress. The platform doesn't really matter. As long as you can put up adsense or affilitate products on it, you are good to go.

In this blog, you will create 5-6 blog posts on everything related to that keyword. From benefits to where to buy the product, how to use it etc. The point is to have content that matches your keyword.

SEO the site
This is the part that explains why people are spamming all over the place. A large part of how Google ranks sites is down to the number of hyperlinks pointing to that site. We call these backlinks. The more backlinks you have, the higher your site will rank in the search engines. That is all to SEO. Nobody else matters as much. Country to popular belief, it is not content or how good your content is that determines a site's ranking. It all comes down to backlinks. That is why spammers are creating fake comments just so they can get a link back to their sites. The more backlinks, the merrier.

However, when doing backlinks, the most important things is to have the right anchored text. What is anchored text? They are the words that are used to create the hyperlink. Anchor text determines what keywords your site is targeting. If you are targeting new moon clothing line, the text you used in the hyperlink must always have that keyword. Like what I have done above. This is the most important in determining what keywords your site will rank for.

Once you have enough backlinks with the right anchor text pointing to your site, you will see your site gradually moving up the search results. Once you reach page 1, you wil start to see targeted traffic i.e. traffic that comes in looking for a solution to their problem. At this time, if you show them a relevant ad or an affiliate product, they are most likely to click it. That in turn will make you money.