I Don't Write Long Posts Just to Annoy You...

I also write long article posts to get more traffic.

How to Make Money with Adsense

I had mentioned in a post a few days ago that there is a disconnect between writing posts for money and writing posts with your reader in mind - the two don't necessarily go together.

Today's post title is a title you use for your readers. Unfortunately it has no SEO benefit to me at all. If I had used a different title, let's say "How to Make Money Writing Long Articles on your Blog" I would have gained SEO benefit but probably would have sent my readers packing.

Judging from a number of emails there seems to be some confusion about how to optimize your blog "type" in order to make money with it. By optimize I am referring to Search Engine Optimization or SEO. While the term would lead you to believe that this field applies to all the search engines the truth of the matter is that the term should read "Google Optimization".

Others give lip service to optimizing for Yahoo and MSN but everyone knows that Google is the place you want high rankings on. Period. There is a growing belief among the web 2.0 crowd that social sites can and will usurp Google's domination of the web. This belief has been fanned by the recent Google slap that has seen a lot of formerly high pagerank (PR) sites demoted to lesser standing in the eyes of the mighty G. People are pissed off at Google. Small bloggers have had a major blow to their income. Social networks like stumbleupon and the like are often quoted as providing huge bursts of traffic and this has got people to thinking that maybe they don't need Google anymore.

I think they are wrong.

Social networks like digg, stumblupon and all the other submit-bookmark-tag-post-rate-vote-and bury sites have a couple of major problems with them.

They take up huge amounts of time and if successful you end up with a huge burst of traffic - burst is the keyword there.

The traffic is largely from the broad community of what has been called "webmasters" but I'm not sure what to call all of us now. The community is us. The people displaying everything on the web for the rest of the non-we/us world to surf. Average people don't have a clue about these social networks (teenagers excluded). Stumbleupon is used by and large by us - not them. This type of traffic is excellent if you want to make a name for yourself on the Internet Walk of Fame. This traffic sucks if you are trying to make money from it.

If you are reading this chances are you have your own blog or website. You are an "us". Part of the community. You know what this is all about and you didn't come to my site to buy anything, you wont be clicking any adsense ads either. You came here to read what I have to say and when you are done you will make your rounds on other sites you frequent. You are looking for information or maybe even entertainment.

If you write a personality driven content site then these are the people you want to attract. If they like you they have the power to give you high PR by linking to you and a high traffic rating on Alexa because they are the people that have the alexa toolbar installed. The only problem with a site like this is making money from it.

You can use adsense but it's not reader friendly and your type of visitor - a fellow community member isn't going to click on them anyway. Ask yourself - how often do you click ads - any ads? As A rule we of the Internet Marketing Community don't click anything accept links that further our quest for knowledge. People who we respect tell us to check out a site and we probably do. We know what lies on the other side of a clicked ad - a sales pitch not knowledge.

You can try to sell affiliate products but who are you trying to kid. Your readers all know what an affiliate link is and if they were interested in buying anything on your site they would use their own link anyway.

In general these types of sites make money by selling ad space, writing paid reviews, and selling pagerank by what ever name it's called or masked under. Unfortunately Google is putting an end to selling pagerank. If you want to make money selling ad space or writing reviews (using no-follow) then you will need some high traffic numbers to generate any meaningful income. How much would you pay someone for a review on their site if they only had 100 visitors a day? What if they had 5000 a day? This method of income generation is heavily weighted in the favor of large established sites. Small and medium sites will starve and have only made money with it currently because everyone has been selling pagerank with the review or to the advertiser.

PayPerPost is coming out with a new system for ranking sites in the new year - a system not based on pagerank. Lots of people are hoping that this system will allow them to give Google the mighty finger. They think that a new traffic based system will level the field. At the moment sites with high PR can make the most money doing paid reviews. The reason is because both parties know that the buyer is buying the backlink that comes with a paid post. If the backlink has a no-follow on it the buyer will have to find another reason to part with his/her money. Traffic would be the only other reason. When traffic becomes the deciding factor most current users of payperpost will find themselves making even less money. You won't be offered the money reviews unless you pull considerable numbers.

To make matters worse a personality driven content site is by nature poorly SEO'd. It has a hard time pulling in targeted traffic from the search engines. How many of you have a "make money online" type of site - lots. Yet I bet most of you have never had a click in the SERP's for a "make money online" term. The reason is because while you know your site is about making money online you haven't told Google. You have been trying to get readers and stumbles and diggs and zoomz but you haven't been trying to get search engine traffic.

A personality driven site has to use reader friendly post titles. You need to tempt your reader to come in. Your title has to stand out - tweak your readers interest. Titles like "I Don't Write Long Posts Just to Annoy you...". The problem with this type of title is that you aren't using any keywords and without them it makes it very hard for adsense to supply your blog with optimized ads and for Google to index you for terms that you want to be indexed for. You will often get off topic ads and almost certainly only the $.01 to $.05 CPC ads.

If you see the ads for "Blogging" on your site this is Google's way of telling you that the only thing they know about your site is that you are a blog and have something to do with blogging.

If you are getting traffic from the search engines for irrelevant or out of context terms and very few for your main keywords then you know that your site is poorly optimized for your niche.

I know a lot of you are frustrated because you aren't making money with your site. I have just told you why - you are producing great content, attracting readers and seeing more traffic as a result of your social networking but you aren't getting the traffic that pays the bills. Search engine traffic. Google traffic in particular and if you are but still not making money then you aren't getting the right kind of Google traffic - targeted traffic optimized for your exact niche.

I write long articles because while it puts my readers to sleep and I love them dearly, I want the search engines to send me targeted traffic for keywords I have chosen - keywords that I have learned make money. This type of traffic clicks on my adsense ads. Better yet I get the highest paying adsense ads in my niche. I don't get $.01 clicks because my pages are optimized for highly targeted ads.

The idea behind adsense is to provide ads relevant to the page it sits on. If blog A writes a post about making money online and calls it "Making Money selling Dogs" he will be just as likely to get "dog" related ads as "making money" ads. In both cases the ads will be the cheap ones. The higher paying "dog" ads will go to the sites that aren't as whishy washy - a site that screams at Google... "Hey, I am about dogs and nothing but dogs...". By the way - your post Title is the biggest factor in what type of ad you get and it's how Google decides what to index you under. It's not the only factor but it is the "Biggest" factor and if you screw it up you stand little chance of getting good ads or proper ranking. Think about this - should a post called "Make Money Selling Dogs" rank higher than a post called "Make Money" or "Dogs for Sale". In either case a person searching for "make money" or "dogs for sale" will be given those terms first in the serp's and the hybrid title will always be farther down the list. This title is perfect if you want to rank well for "make money selling dogs" but the problem is this - who would search for that term. If you are selling dogs your buyers will be using queries like "where can I buy a dog?". They won't type in "make money selling dogs" because they aren't interested in selling dogs they are buyers.

If you have a content based site and you want to make money with it then you will have to make some adjustments - write for your readers but start using your main keywords as much as you can in your Titles, Headers, Subheaders and bold them from time to time. This may lessen your stumble traffic but you will start getting search engine traffic and you will find that these people do click affiliate links and they most certainly click adsense ads. Better yet you will start getting higher paying ads as well.

Oh... why I have just written another long post.

My experience has shown me that Google ranks sites more on content than PR or backlinks. I have no proof but can point to a familiar pattern in the rankings. I am sure you have seen sites with less PR and relatively few backlinks rank higher in the serp's than a contextually relevant site that has higher PR and more backlinks.

There are two possible reasons for this. The lower PR site has less backlink quantity but higher backlink quality. This is certainly true but most sites atop a highly competetive niche like "make money" all have quality backlinks and yet a site with 30,000 links outranks a site with 3,000,000 links. Both have hundreds of quality links. In my view it's content that is the deciding factor. And not content like you think. I am not talking about who writes better or gives more information or better information. Google can't make those kind of distinctions. I am strickly speaking of keywords - which ones are used and how many times you use them.

From Googles point of view a site that uses "make money" 30 times in a post is more relevant than a site that uses "make money" 10 times in a post. Google also checks out how many other relevant keywords for the term "make money" are used to support the main keyword. The site that uses the keyword the most and has the most relevant accessory terms or long tail keywords is and should be ranked as the most relevant site.

I can hear you already - "Wait! I will be penalized if I stuff too many keywords into a post."

Yup. Conventional wisdom states not to use a keyword more than 2-7 times per one hundred words.

That's why I write long articles - my competition will use "make money" 10 times in his/her article and I will use it 30 or 40 times. Guess who usually gets ranked higher? This also gets me very targeted traffic and the best paying adsense ads for them to click on. These long posts give Google a lot of different long tail terms to index me for as well.

Oh and one reader pointed out that my long posts cause readers to click the ads just to get the hell away from here.

Try targeting a few of your posts and see what happens.

Cheers,

Grizzly