Is it possible to make money online?

When I first saw this question in a forum, it was actually phrased more like ‘Can I make lots of money online?’, and I guess the important question for a lot of people is ‘Can I make a living’, or more often: ‘Can I make a decent second income?’. My first reaction to the question of whether there was money simply waiting to be made online was ‘Surely not!’ I went on to say that if you wanted to make decent amounts online, you would have to really work hard at it. In the main, I think that this answer still stands up, but I am coming to the conclusion (I am one of those who has to see it work, before I will advocate it..) that actually there IS money to be made, and PAID TO BLOG is one of those opportunities. If you live in a place where the USD is very strong currency, and incomes are relatively low, then you probably can make a relatively decent income online, and if you live in the West, you may be able to make a small second income without devoting ALL your spare time…I retain the view that if you want to make a legitimate living online, you will probably need to put at least as much effort into it as you would in a regular job, and I suspect that in reality, you would have to work harder. The upside is that if you do the groundwork, you may be able to establish a base that provides an income from less effort as you get better at it. The reality is though, if you have that sort of energy, you will be spurred on to achieve more and if spending more time with the kids was the plan, you might be better off with a 9 to 5.
To read the rest of the article follow this link to my other blog

SEO - spidering

A lot of web sites nowadays use some fancy script-based navigation with menus that drop-down on ‘hover’ and the like, but apparently these links are often not read or followed by the search engine bots that index the site.What does this mean? It means that there is a danger that only your homepage will be fully indexed. How do you fix it? Very simply, you add standard HTML hyperlinks to back up your other navigation. Many sites do this and place the extra navigation at the bottom of the page. You may think you can cleverly fool the bots by adding ‘invisible’ text ie. text which is a similar colour to the background or in a very small font. Be warned – the bots are wise to this, and will not take kindly to ‘hidden’ text.
Search engine 'bots' like to see good interconectivity between pages ie. the 'web' nature of pages that all connect together - make sure that you don't create dead ends in the 'spidering' of your site. The best way to achieve this is to create a sitemap and check that everything links together. As well as sitemap pages, there are sitemap files that you can leave in the root of your website which will be recognised by search engines. You may need additional facilities on your web host to do this. Google recognise sitemaps created via XML and RSS, check out what Google has to say about this and check whether your host has the appropriate software on your server. If not you can opt for a simple text file list - this will inform the bots of the pages that they SHOULD be seeing, and if they see a problem in navigation, it can be reported back to you in Google Webmaster tools.

SEO - blogging

Techniques for SEO apply as much to blogs as they do to websites, but depending on your front-end editor, some techniques such as tagging are a bit tricky as you generally have to be able to edit the HTML if you use a service such as blogger.com.
The other side of SEO in relation to blogging, is that you can use a blog to promote your own website and get some reciprocal linking going. The theory is that regularly updated blogs are 'attractive' to the google search engine and may be in a better position to gain page ranking points than a website.
There is a vast blogging community and it is much much easier to get people to link to your blog than it is to get them to link to a commercial website. I am using two blogs - check the link to my 'other blog', and I am going to post another couple of links that you may find useful:
Ourblogreview.com - exchange links and submit your blog to be reviewed
Make Money with Ja Kel Daily - read the posts, exchange reviews, build your site traffic...

Web 2.0

Here is a hot topic, a new buzzword which requires some of the mystery taken out of it... Web 2.0 is all about the web going 'up' to another level, but there is no specific outline that defines Web 2.0 precisely. It is more of a concept which takes on board a lot of diverse ideas which might lift a website out of the boring flat HTML-only sites of yesterday. We are talking incorporating Flash, Java and good design to enhance the browsing experience and ecourage interactivity, forum-style posting and the like. How can I incorporate this into my humble little website then? Well, this is not an easy one to answer, but I can tell you what I plan to do with my site to start getting some interaction going: I have had various emails from people asking for advice on the DIY sections of my website. I plan to post the questions and answers on the relevant pages so that there is an element of interaction. You can incorporate forums into your site with a little java programming, but I have steered clear of a forum format as I prefer to have control of the posts on my site! To my way of thinking, Web 2.0 is about getting away from a static HTML site that doesn't encourage interaction and sits on the web from month to month without change. If you can find a way to get your website out of that particular rut, then you are on your way to Web 2.0....

Page ranking on my website

Mixed blessings today, I noted a few days ago that my website , not THIS blog...was showing google ranking of 2/10 on some pages rather than the initial '1' which seemed to take so long to acheive! However, my home page is still 1/10. There are elements of my website that get increased traffic as I actively post URLs here and there on the internet - these are not necessarily my home page, so I assume the extra ranking point is due to the traffic these pages get. My aim is to get to 3 or 4/10 as I think this seems to be the average for reasonable sites (I'm not THAT ambitious!!). If you want to know the rankings for your own pages, download the google toolbar and enable the page rank icon. This will then report a page rank for every page you visit - might be a bit of an eye-opener!The pages on my site that get the higher ranking are my :'DIY' section, my download page, and my section concentrating on microphones. To be honest I don't drive THAT much traffic to the 'studio' section, so that one came as a bit of a surprise, however I can also report that this section of the site appears to yeild a better price per adsense click which makes me think I should try and drive more traffic there!!

SEO - keywords and other meta tags

The old Keyword has been so overused, it has more or less disappeared up it's own meta tag.. Most search engines will use your 'title', 'description', headings and first paragraph of content as priority indicators for searching. Of course, nobody (who is allowed to say) can know the full hysteresis for Web-site ranking, so most of the advice given is mainly hypothesis. It is possible that minor search engines are using keywords, and I think it is reasonable to assume proper use of keywords won't do any harm..
(NOTE I HAVE HAD TO REVERSE THE SYMBOLS TO POST THEM HERE.. FOR '<' READ '>' etc..)
The correct format in HTML is:

>meta name="keywords" content="mylist, of keywords, here with, variations, similar words, and anything else, I want to put here"<>title<>/title<>meta name="description" content="This is my chance to describe what my web site is all about and I am not going to waste it."<>/meta<>' etc..)

SEO - Ghost domains

Duplicate sites can help to raise your website profile.
Search engines rate the domain name very highly when it comes to matching a query, thus if you buy additonal domains which contain your keywords, you may harvest more traffic.
If you have, for example a website for mobile phones, let's say it's called 'mobilephones.com' you could also mirror your website on 'cellularphones.org' or 'cellphones.net' etc.. etc.. This would help to pick up hits from searches which contain the terms 'cellular phones' or 'cellphones'. You could just use a redirect on the homepages of these domains, or configure all the links contained in the site to jump back to your main site.
Although this may seem an unwieldy promotion tool, bearing in mind the reasonably low cost of domain hosting nowadays, it is probably fairly cost effective. I would recommend duplication of the entire site and linking every page back to your main domain, this way you get a combination of the new domain name and your existing content to boost your ranking - it would make sense to have a link to your new domains on your link page just to complete the circle for reciprocal linking. Make sure you submit your new sites in the same way that you submitted your main domain for maximum impact.

Indexed Now!

Ok, a little under three weeks and this site is now indexed by Google.. I think you can pay to get faster indexing, but for a blog at least, I would rather wait...

Google Adsense

I have noticed that there are a lot of questions about Adsense around, and although I have mentioned Adsense before, I note that I haven't really talked about it in length.
Adsense is a Google product for placing adverts on a website. If you are looking for an additional stream of income for your website, you may want to consider what Adsense has to offer.
Adsense matches your site content to the large database of adverts that it has. Keywords in the content will trigger specific adverts. If you want to see this in action, you can see how the content of my site: http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk is refelected in the adverts that appear. My site is all about converting old style audio cassettes into CD's, the adverts offer hardware and software for this very purpose. If you visit the 'studio focus' pages: http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/studio you will notice that the adverts are now aimed towards microphones.
If you are worried about a competitors advert appearing on your site, you can exclude their specific URL using the 'filter' section.
It is impossible to predict earnings using Adsense because of the variable nature of the cost of adverts. Google offers adverts to customers without a specific charge, allowing the advertiser to control an advertising 'budget'. The rate of pay per click could be anything from one cent to several dollars. The trick is to get high-paying advertisers on to your site (I don't know HOW you do it...but this will be your aim).
You can choose how the adverts will look on your page, and you can combine different types of advertising, though there are limits to how much you can put on a single page. You get to choose colours and whether the ads run vertical, horizontal or as a list of links. (note that the list of links only pays when a click is made on the SUBSEQUENT list of adverts).
I can only talk about earnings in relation to my own experience, I currently get (according to Google) about 160 page impressions a day, leading to approx 7 or 8 advert clicks, yielding approx $1 per day... not a fortune admittedly, but pays towards the running of the site.
To make any real money you will have to have lots of page impressions and have adverts that your visitors are going to click on. Ideally you want to attract high-paying adverts to your website, but I have no insight of how this can be achieved.
Now, it is important tp point out that Adsense does not pay out until you reach $100, which to be fair could take some time....at the rate of $1 a day, this is going to take more than three months.
In order to use Adsense you will need to register with Google, which is in itself, not a bad idea as you can access all sorts of other tools for your website.

SEO - Google overview...

Google is not limited to business use, but you will get more business than from any other search engine.
Search Technique:
Google is ‘interested’ in density of information and quantity of repeated words – each word is a ‘vote’ as far as the search engine is concerned. Google uses a ‘deep search’ technique requiring substantial information – associated (reciprocal) links will improve your Google. The search engine will follow all the links around the host website looking for links back and forth, and will follow links to other websites – the information which it encounters along the way will add to your rating if there is a return link to your own website.
To improve repeatability and to provide a bigger network of links (and thus a higher rating) include a glossary of terms (ie a page opening links up in a separate window explaining words appearing in the main website). Also use a site map with links to each page and corresponding links on each page back to the site map. This may seem over-kill, but it WILL ultimately increase your rating.
Google will also index the media it finds on web sites, calling the pictures by their proper names rather than default jpeg names. Ie: ‘ford_Capri.jpeg’ rather than ‘SMG0036.jpeg’ - Results of media searches reinforce the overall rating (be careful of using too much media on the homepage as download time will also affect your rating).
The ALT tags (box that comes up when your mouse passes over a picture) can also be scanned by search engines.
It is important that the title of your homepage is relevant to your market – this is what the searcher will see in the search results – Your homepage title should probably read something along the lines of a short ‘mission statement’ otherwise the first x number of words of body text will be displayed which may not capture the essence of the site.

Indexing with Google

I am registered with Google and have signed up for 'Webmaster Tools' (this is all free!) here you can manage your site and submit new sites for indexing. You can also manage site maps and see how Google has rated your pages etc.. It's a good starting point, but you can get more if you also register for Google Analytics as well - here you can see where your visitors are geographically located and check visitor and page view stats. All free and well worth a look!
Now, the important thing is that you should submit your site - even if it is a blog - even if it is a google-related blog (like this one) so that google indexes your site and can drive visitors to you. I mistakenly thought that maybe as I was using 'blogger', had a google account and was registered for Adsense...that I wouldn't need to submit my blog...wrong! If you want to know whether your page is indexed by google, use the page-rank buton on google toolbar or enter: 'cache:http://YOUR DOMAIN' into your browser address bar, if it comes up with 'your search did not match any documents', then you should get the site submitted.
So how to do it?
Google will want to verify that you actually 'own' the site or blog. You can do this by adding a specific page to your site (html) you can't do this if you have a single-page blog, so the other method is to insert some html into the 'HEAD' section of your blog HTML template. Get your code from the google webmaster site and for 'Blogger' users go to the 'dashboard'/layout, edit HTML and insert the code as supplied after the 'HEAD' statement.
I tried this today, and Google has verified the page, in a couple of weeks (?) I hope to have the page indexed. I found a site the other day which will submit your site to a whole load of serach engines in one go - 'addme.com' - I have added a link in the form of a submission-box in the right-hand side of this page for your convenience... (sadly I don't get commission, but they did me a service, so am happy to provide the link). It looks like you can use this service for blogs also, so I would recommend giving it a go to get more visitors to your site. They submit to 14 search engines for free. One of the 14 requires an ROR file, which can only be added to a site rather than a blog, but still worth doing for the other 13 engines. If you opt for a paid service, they will submit to 100's of sites at regular intervals. I prefer FREE services myself!

Google gadgets

Just a short post today, but worthwhile I think:
I came across Google 'gadgets' the other day, and decided to try some on my blog - see the 'joke of the day' and 'photo of the day' in the right hand column of the blog...
There are a whole host of different gadgets and games you can use to make your site that bit more dynamic. If you are aiming to try to get visitors to use you as a home page, then this ype of content can really help guaranteeing fresh content on a daily basis.
The gadgets can be configured and come in javascript format to paste onto your site.

SEO - Linking

OK, let's take a more in-depth look at linking...
Firstly, you should set up a links page on your website, doesn't really matter what it looks like, but leave room for plenty of links...
This is what mine looks like: http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/links.htm
Your search engine rankings are boosted by links back to your site from 'good', 'relevant' web pages. By 'good', I mean pages with a ranking of thier own, 'relevant' meaning more repetitions of your keywords and phrases, reflecting the content of your own site. Obviously the actual criteria used by google is secret, so we can only speculate as to how to maximise rankings.
First off you can get links from directories, depending on how you operate, you can link into general world-wide directories or directories that are concerned with your geographical region or the area of business you are in. One tip would be to look at your competitors to see if they are listed on directories - try searching for your competitors on google to see who is linking to them. Try this format in google search:
link:www.yourdomain (or your competitors) - this will show links on the internet to any domain, you can also use a google search with double quote marks around your domain ie: ''www.domain.com'' to find pages which mention your domain (this may produce quite different results as a straight 'link' search)
There are loads of different free directories out there, only use ones which have ranking points of their own. If you want to know the ranking of a site, get the google tool bar added to your explorer window and set the option to view page rank.
Reciprocal links are the type that boost your ranking, so if you get a directory to link to you, place a link back to them on your links page.
Directories are all well and good, but they are usually too general if your site has a specific focus. You will need to link to sites which are relevant, without being competitors and importantly, get them to link back to you. This is a lot harder than it sounds...I have found very few sites which will even reply to a request for a link never mind actually create one! This task alone will take a lot of energy. You may find this task a lot easier depending on the type of site you are setting up.
If you are selling goods in a region for a supplier ie. as a local agent, you should definitely get your supplier to list you as the local agent, unfortunately I can't use this type of linking as I offer a service rather than goods. My methods have been to search for my key themes in search engines and look to see which sites may benefit from a link from my site, and look for overseas sites offering a similar service who might want to trade links (this assumes there is a geographical element to your site - ie. I am only realistically offering a service to the UK, however US sites may attract visitors from the UK, and my site attracts visitors from the US who are probably never going to become clients).
I have another way of getting links and this can be hard work, but mostly enjoyable...again searching for key themes and words and looking for where these themes appear in forums and blogs - visit the pages and post replies including a link to your site. I have found that different forums have different dynamics and appeal to different groups. I have found that Yahoo answers is a good 'fishing ground' for this type of interaction, you may find Google answers more relevant or even Mylot (see link at top of right-hand column of this page).
These forums won't generally add to your rankings, but will hopefully add to the number of page impressions that you get.
Update: 15/01/2007 - I found out today that 'google answers' is no longer accepting new questions, however I guess you may still be able to post comments, but the site is just a static forum now.

SEO - content

There are a whole load of considerations when you are looking to optimise a web site for search engine rankings. The first thing you have to look at is simply content. Your content must be good and plentiful, referring to all the keywords you want to highlight. Think about different ways to say the same thing without being overly repetitive. Whatever else you plan to do to promote your web rankings, your content has to be the best it can be. Do loads of research around your topic and keep updating the site regularly. Search engines will be interested in a site that is regularly updated and start to visit that site more regularly. Add to your content and add more pages to add depth to your site, link the pages well to ensure that all the content is picked up by search engine ‘bots’. However, don’t ‘bury’ your pages in subfolders, keep everything either in the root, or not more than two folders away. EG: www.mysite.com/subdirectory1/subdirectory2/content.htm…. But no further..More pointers to follow on this topic.

getting started..

I answered a 'yahoo' question the other day about getting a website up and running. The questioner wanted to know how to get a website 'posted' on Google. My interpretation of that is to assume the asker has a website built and a domain to host it, and is looking to get Google to crawl it and give it a rating.
I have gone through the process myself, so am happy to share my experiences...
Right from the word go, I registered with Google so that I had an 'account', then you have the option of submitting your site to google when you feel it is ready.. Having the google account means that you can also set up 'adwords' (your advertising to gain visitors to your site) for your site and 'adsense' (adverts placed on your site to earn you revenue). You can also use Google Analytics which provides data about your site visitors (including geographical analysis). All these services are free to use (there is a naturally a charge for adwords advertising, but access to the service itself is free).
I have tried all these tools on my own little site and can report that even on a small scale, these services are very useful, I would encourage everyone to register. I don't want to sound like I think Google is the bees knees or anything, but everyone is surely aware that Google is by far the biggest player in the world of Search Engines.
Be aware though, it takes a while to get a rating and then it will be low until you have worked hard on the optimisation...
There is a host of stuff you can do to your site for Search Engine Optimisation (at no cost), and I think that will have to be the subject of a subsequent post.....

web management

As a 'sole-trader' getting a website up and running you have to do all the jobs yourself (if you are starting small with no capital). This means not so much 'chief cook and bottle-washer' but webmaster, designer, accountant, administrator, researcher - and that's just the website, never mind running the service that you are offering on the web.
The only way around this issue is prioritisation and attacking one issue at a time. You can't do everything at once and if you try it you'll end up in a mess. Make a long list of stuff you want to/ need to do and allocate each task to a phase.
for example: Phase one tasks would be a basic website design, working on a name and logo, working out price lists etc.. Phase two might be finding the best webhosting package, looking into google 'adsense' etc.. Phase three might be uploading the site and getting friends to beta-test the site functions.
Once you have worked out this plan, review it on a regular basis and tick off the tasks as you go along. At the lowest moments, being able to see what you have completed so far should be an encouragement....
Your plan will inevitably change, but you need a base to start from anyhow. Having written this, I am now encouraged to get out my original plan to see how far I have come against what I was expecting, and see how much the priorities have changed. The next thing will be to do a new one for the coming year.

adsensing

I have been having some interesting results from google adsense. Adsense provides targetted adverts for my website - matching keywords from the site with advertisers keywords (Adwords). I have been impressed with the effectiveness of this service and the way that highly relevant ads are displayed on my pages, just waiting for my visitors to click on them. I have gone with the blatant style so they look like adverts, but used colour to integrate them into the site. Some users favour 'hiding' the adverts within the text so they look like part of the body text...not my style really... I'm not trying to hide anything, though I concede more visitors might click if I took a different approach. (Adsense users earn a small variable amount when a visitor clicks on an advert)
When I first got adsense on my site, I was averaging 10cents a day revenue, well I'm not going to be able to retire on that! After a few weeks, the average was climbing nicely to around 60 cents a day. My interesting episode started with a sudden jump up to $2.30 one morning as the result of only 5 clicks...I started to get quite excited by this (I wish I knew which advert was generating the income...) and by the end of the day, I had $2.77 after about 8 clicks. The other side of the story was that I had no clicks at all for the next three days... Strangely I got 3 cents added to my account over these three days even though there were apparently no clicks. I had plenty of visitors over these days, so my earning should have been around my usual average.
I note that often the adverts are the last thing to load on a page, so if there was a problem with the server, it could be that the adverts weren't loading before the visitor had already moved on??
I may look into scripting that can change the way my page loads up...

linking

What I really need to do now is get some relevant links (reciprocal) - these are really hard to come by, currently I have submissions in some directories ad a couple of links I have managed to blag - watch this space for developments.
Reciprocal links are a very important tool in getting your website ranked, my own links page is fairly heavily populated, but getting these sites to link back has proved fruitless in most cases.
http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/links.htm
I need to do some spring-cleaning here and clear out some of the non-returned links - then I need to come up with a campaign to replace the useless links with some useful ones..the work never stops

starting out

Working through the painstaking progress of getting a commercial site of the ground. I began the http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk as a service site for conversion of tapes to CD's and then moved on to exploiting the popularity of the site for advertising revenue.
I have created subsections of the site at:
http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/DIY
http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/studio
and will continue to develop.
This approach may raise the question: why would you tell you customers how to do the task that you are selling? Good question, and the answer is that I feel my customers are people who don't want to, or can't do this them selves. The folks who visit the 'DIY' section are going to do it themselves anyhow, so why not make use of their visit to my website by advertising tools they might use.
I will enlarge on some of the thing I have done to maximise the website in later posts..