Welcome to aaron chua make money blog

Hi, welcome to my blog. In this part of my world, I talked about how to achieve financial freedom by learning how to make money online through creating sites and earning from them.

Below are some current and past make money projects that details my learning journey.

My current experiment in making 50 amazon site niches. If you have not been following this challenge, best place to start is this resource page for the amazon challenge, that lists all the articles that I have written so far.

My experiment in making 1000 a month through adsense in 9 months.

If you came here looking for low cost startup ideas, here are 140 startup ideas that you can browse through.


Wednesday, 19 September 2012

How many keywords can you get on page one with one article

How do you sharpen your SEO skills? There are a couple of things that I do and this is one of them.

In my previous article on how to get traffic to your blog without backlinks, I mentioned that decreasing your reliance on link building improves the remaining aspect of SEO, which is mainly keyword reseach, copy writing, and developing metrics & analytics. In this article, I want to zoom in one aspect, which is copy writing.

Everything else aside, I am not a good writer by any standard. I have poor grammar, lots of spelling mistakes and no voice to call my own. So, the copywriting I am talking about is being able to think and write in the same mental mode as the readers you want to attract.

A good SEO copywriter produces lots of longtail keywords naturally. By placing myself in the same mental mode as my user:
  • I use the same terms they use 
  • I ask the questions they ask
  • I provide the questions they ask
  • I talk about related things that they might be interested in
This is how my content can meet the needs of all those longtail searches without me forcing it. This in turn is how you can increase your longtail traffic.

If you want to hone your copyrighting, set yourself a metric.

For me, every content that I produce, I target to have at least a couple keywords which the content is on the first page of the search engines. I don't care which keywords or which search engines. I focus on getting into the head of my users so that I understand the context, the timing and the reason for their search.

If you practice this long enough, it will come naturally in whatever materials you are writing. I have not completely master it yet but I have improved quite a bit since I first started sharpening this skill. If your niche sites have low traffic after penguin, time to hone your copyrighting skill as well.

Wednesday, 12 September 2012

How to get visitors to your blog without backlinks

Since Panda, I have been building niches and blogs without using any methods that Google frowns on. Specifically, I have stopped buying or manipulating links to get top rankings in google for my blog. All the amazon niche sites that I have built are done with content and by targeting the right keywords that nobody is bothering to optimise for.


In this post, I want to encourage you to sharpen your SEO skills by not building links. From my past experience, building links makes you lazy as an SEO. Everyone just buys them from places such as trafficplanet.com or fiverr or blog networks. Your whole SEO strategy becomes a routine of:
Take away the link buying option and most folks making money online will suddenly lost their way on how to get visitors to their blogs or niche sites.

If you want to improve your SEO skills, why not learn to build sites without backlinks. If you need some hints, here is what I have been doing to get visitors from search engines without placing links excessively:

How to get visitors: Method 1

Use google news or any rss monitoring tools to see what kind of news are happening in your niche. For example, in my 4 season tent site, I spotted a new trend called glamping tents. This is a new kind of camping trends that combines outdoor with luxury living. Some people hate it while some don't. The key for us is to see how to generate content that spark more interest and searches. Here is the step by step method
  • Scan for new terms in your niche
  • Identify a few terms and start writing entry level articles that targets beginners wanting to know about these new terms
  • Write a couple interesting content that can potentially be shared such as a list post or a contradictory article or even some funny images etc
  • Link these new interesting content from the first batch of entry level articles or tell your visitors to search for such information
This method is what I called link and bait. You target the less interesting but easy keywords to pull in visitors and lead them to your more interesting ones so that these can potentially be shared. You can't directly just work on the interesting articles because no one gets to see and share them. You need to build some kind of traffic funnel from the entry level articles first.

How to get visitors: Method 2

Use lots of images that are named and tagged properly with keywords.

A couple of my amazon niche sites are developed this way and have received lots of traffic from Google Image. The good news is that some of them are even buying stuff so image search can be monetised. Remember to use a wordpress plugin that helps to take visitors directly from the image to your post so that your content can be read.

How to get visitors: Method 3

Leverage of popular article directories such as Squidoo to pull in traffic for you. Say I want to build more traffic to my 4 season tent site. I will create a Squidoo Lens that targets a long tail such as the best 4 season tent for 2 people. Due to the authority of these article directories, they can rank without backlinks and pull in traffic from search engines. If the articles have a link back to your site, some percentage of the traffic will click the link and visit your page.

You can do this for multiple long tail keywords and traffic will increase over time.

This strategy was used in the past mainly to get more links but how you should be using it now is to treat the article directories as traffic funnels. This will ensure you write better quality content that will drive folks to visit your site.

Conclusion

Seo might only be about content and links but the way you combine these pieces can lead you to different traffic strategies. If you don't start to explore these different permutations, you will always be one step behind others in terms of your marketing prowess. Time to leave the backlink game behind and see what SEO really can offer.