Payday Loans Update

How to Make Money Using Targeted Traffic - Payday Loans

I have been targeting the term Payday Loans for the past few weeks. If you are just joining me you can catch up by reading the "Adsense lessons" posted in my sidebar. The purpose of this experiment is to make page one on Google's index results for the keyword "Payday Loans". This is a high paying keyword for Adwords users and as an Adsense publisher I want to attract people who will click the Adsense ads.

I started out with a single optimized post and then sat back and waited for visitors to show up. I collected the keywords used by each visitor and then added these terms to updated posts. Since the last post I have collected several more terms listed below with search engine rank after the term;

payday loans work from home 10

payday loan business opportunity 38

how payday companies loans work? 4

payday loan no need to work 4

roi payday loans 15

payday loans seo 6

how does pay day loans work 6

payday loan content 10

payday loans (AOL) 84

make money payday loan 2 and 3

tips for marketing loan companies 13

payday loans canada 41

no faxing payday loan 22

does google loan money 10

make money online selling insurance 1

~no faxing payday loan 20

links+payday loans 10

I have now added more related keywords to the ever growing list of "Long Tails" that searchers have used to find my blog on Google. I have gone from 1-2 visitors a day in the beginning to 10-15 a day presently. Not large numbers but enough to confirm whether this campaign is worth pursuing. I have been able to confirm a few clicks from the "Payday Loan" crowd and was pleased with the results.

I won't go into all the gymnastics of figuring out what page my ads were clicked on (I don't use Google Analytics - another story) but I will say that you can never be sure exactly which ad has been clicked so the best you can do is ad up the circumstantial evidence and make an educated guess. I happened to be up on two occasions when Google rolled past the witching hour and I was able to isolate the stats on my first clicks of the new day.

The screenshots below told me that someone had clicked a $0.95 ad. I was able to track down both clicks shown to my Payday Loan page which displayed Loan ads in the sidebar Adsense block and regular "Make Money" ads in the Lead or Top block. The "Make Money Online" ads typically pay $0.30 - $0.40 per click but have fetched over a dollar at times. Using my statcounter stats I was able to determine that I had a visitor to my payday loan page at the time the click occurred and coupled with smart pricing guidelines I am pretty sure that the click came from the targeted traffic.

(Click images to enlarge)

This is the query used to find my payday loan page.



This is the $0.95 click recorded on my Adsense account.



These are the ads I was displaying on my page at the time.


On a second occasion I matched this query...



... with this result. A $1.80 click. Bingo! - this is definitely worth pursuing.



Now it is possible that the targeted traffic didn't click the ads and someone else did but not likely. To get better paying clicks you have to meet a few Google guidlines which are best understood by explaining how Adwords works.

An advertiser using Adwords allows Google to manage what sites it displays the advertisers ads on. An advertiser wants conversions and doesn't want an ad appearing and getting clicked on a bunch of sites that aren't likely to convert. To increase the advertisers ROI Google instituted smart pricing which basically states that they will charge less for clicks that are less likely to convert and more for highly targeted clicks.

A crude and simplified example of how this works.

If someone queries Google and finds my site using the term "make money online" and then clicks a Payday Loan ad, is this targeted? From Googles point of view this click would be considered less likely to convert as there is no connection between what the visitor was searching for and what they chose. In short if one of my "make money" searchers had clicked the payday loan ad I wouldn't have received the high payouts. Conversely you can see direct relevancy and how a searcher looking for "payday loans" would be more likely to convert for the advertiser. In this case Google charges the advertiser full price and I get top CPC by providing a highly targeted visitor to the advertisers site.

If this is confusing just think in terms of a relevancy trail. If everything is relevant then you get paid more and if you have people dropping in from stumbleupon and clicking the odd ad you will get paid pennies because that type of traffic is not targeted and is not relevant to the ads clicked. Large amounts of social traffic also bugger up your CTR and invariably if you draw social traffic you will be "smart priced" by Google and only paid pennies for all the Adsense ads. This is the reason most web 2.0 or A-List style blogs don't make any money with Adsense - they don't draw the right type of traffic and draw lots of the wrong type of traffic (from a money making standpoint only).

To make money with Adsense you only want large amounts of "targeted" traffic and basically nothing else.

The shot below lists the latest keywords or queries used to find my blog on the search engines. 90% of my total traffic comes from Google and these are the typical terms used to find me.



In essence I know exactly who my visitors are and what they are looking for - and so does Google.

Because I have optimized all my posts for specific keywords Google sends me highly targeted traffic and then puts highly targeted (the best converting) ads on my blog for the visitors to click on. I am not smart priced and get the better paying clicks. This is the reason that page optimization is so important - your content and how you optimize it determines how targeted your traffic is. If you can't provide targeted traffic then you can't make money either with Adsense or with Affiliate sales. Selling ads is also hard if your traffic while large, is diffuse. To make money online you have to provide the people paying you what they want - converting traffic.

To summarize the "Payday Loan" campaign I have been tracking my index rankings for all the keywords I have collected and have made good progress in climbing the serp's but my main keyword has stalled out at a rank of 36. This appears to be as high as content and my PR5 can take me. From here on in I will be adding backlinks with highly targeted anchor text to boost my rankings.

It is at this point that many of you can't do what I do. I have access to a lot of sites that I can use to link to my pages. If you are just starting out then you will find getting backlinks more of a challenge and you won't have enough PR to target the competitive niches. This is why I have recommended starting out by targeting niches that you can overcome with content and a few backlinks that you can get using articles and services like Yahoo Answers and Squidoo. As your PR and content increases you will be able to target better keywords and build a successful Adsense site over time.

At some point you will be faced with the "ethical" dilemma of whether you should or would cheat. By cheating I am referring to the practice of buying links. I am not advocating anything but I will tell you that every successful niche marketer buys links - they have to. If you want to make any serious money online then you will be faced with this decision at some point. Just thought I would mention it now.

Before I leave you I want to address an comment I received recently. The writer mentioned that she had read that it wasn't a good idea to rely on Adsense for all your income online as Google can take it all away in an instant. This is true and I should mention that this is not the only way I earn an income online - it is just one of the ways. I have found that some niches are ideal for Adsense and others are better suited to affiliate sales. Lead generation has become my main focus lately and I have found learning how to make money with Adsense is a great way to hone the skills needed in generating leads. At the moment lead generation is dominated by the Black Hatters and you may find the article below illuminating if you are wondering just how far you can take a niche like "Payday Loans" and make money from it.

This article will give you a good idea of the kinds of people you are competing with online and the tactics experienced marketers use to make money. I have not used hypertext as I don't want to link to this site - black hats don't make good link partners.

http://oooff.com/php-affiliate-seo-blog/affiliate-marketing/
making-big-easy-money-with-google-local-search/

(I have broken the URL to fit the page - cut and paste both lines as one long URL)

Thanks to Paul for bringing this article to my attention unfortunately he didn't leave a link. The only thing missing in the article is how the lead generation sites managed to rank high for the Payday Loan terms they targeted. The answer is using the same optimization techniques that are used for Adsense.

Now that I know there are profitable clicks in this niche I will continue to add links over time - slowly - and work my way up the "Payday Loan" serp pages. I am already adding income to my bottom line and I'm not even ranking that well yet. I will update you when I get enough payday loan traffic to have a significant effect on my daily bottom line. At the moment my daily earnings on this blog fluctuate between $10 and $15 - when I start seeing higher earnings I will know that the payday loan clicks have started to accumulate.

Cheers,

Grizzly

Update Below

Follow along with me step by step as I show you how I pick a target and then optimize my blog in order to make money with Adsense.

I outline my "Payday Loans" experiment in sequential order below.

Payday Loans

Payday Loans Review

Payday Loans and Adsense

Payday Loans - Adsense Update

Payday Loans Update

- Griz