SEO And Adsense Sucks… O RLY?

Hey guys,ย  I felt like writing a post about how awesome I sometimes think SEO & Adsense are. A lot of people give SEO shit or say Adsense is very unreliable but I do feel that it has some really important advantages as some staple income. Maybe this will resonate with some of you depending on what your goals are with making money online.

Why despite anything that might happen in the future, I can’t complain about SEO ๐Ÿ˜‰

Currently, I’m trying really hard to find a way to consistently break $10,000/month doing something I would really enjoy. To be honest, for the past few months I have been working about 10-20 hours a week at most because my current money makers in SEO have lost a lot of my interest. I lost interest in those niches and my biggest blog about health is kinda outdated with all the knowledge I have about health now. Nutrition/Health is one of my passions and I should redo my posts but I’m kinda unsure if I want to put the hundreds of hours it would take to update the information in my existing posts (I’m not gonna hire someone from Odesk to write for me… I want them to be high quality and with my current level of knowledge). Technically it won’t affect my rankings (Google can’t truly know that it’s “better” information). However, with better quality information maybe people will enjoy that blog more and come back? It does not really have referral/returning traffic, it’s 80%+ new visitors from SEO. An added benefit of writing the content myself is since I already read 10+ hours of nutrition information some weeks, by writing it I kinda get to “really” memorize it.

I do have to admit that SEO is REALLY cool. With only maybe an 1 hour a month on these blogs (just making sure they aren’t hacked really) I can’t believe my blogs are still making $100/day+ with so little maintenance (all I did on most of them was update to wordpress 3.1 in the past few months lol). Actually, as I write the first draft of this post, it was a really great day as you can see from just my adsense earnings of Feb 28 in both my accounts.

Adsense earnings from first accountAdsense from second account

 

 

 

 

 

What this enables me to do is to focus my life on a lot of my other growing passions which are mostly nutrition/martial arts and just hanging out with my friends. Part of the reason I want to reach $10,000/month is because I would like to do private coaching for MMA without feeling like I have to sacrifice anything else. It’s great to always have time to go out with friends when they are available. Working from home, I go out with friends almost every night of the week from 10-3am because it’s one of the only ways I get to meet people consistently since most of my friends are students or have day jobs and I do not see them during the day. Well, I also wake up at 3-4pm… for a period during the winter I completely did not see the sun for an entire week!

Missing the sun

SEO And Adsense ARE DEAD?

So while a lot of people are saying SEO & Adsense are dead well they definitely are not right now for me. My backlinking strategy from 1-2 years ago at this point has barely changed. It’s simply doing effective keyword researchย  and combining with consistent backlinking that “make sense” which I’ll touch on below.

Effective keyword research

Well for long time readers of this blog you probably already read my first post on keyword research and Becker’s great keyword post which really goes into detail on why keywords are more than words… Understand the searcher’s meaning behind them. A 1,000 searched keyword can make way more money than ranking for “funny pictures of animals” which could be searched by 100,000 people a month yet all those people want are free pictures… You can get a lot of fancy software/services like secockpit which are quite helpful when starting out (or on months when I want to research a lot of new website ideas) but ultimately most of the time I just go to the google keyword tool and type in the new keyword ideas I have. It’s much more important to understand why a keyword is good vs bad (what is the person searching for?).

Consistent Backlinks

Look, SEO is really simple when you get down to it. It’s really nothing special.

1) Get proper on page SEO which means your keyword ideally in the title/URL/a few times in your post and an image with your keyword as the “alt” tag and you are mostly done.I say mostly because this is 95% of on page SEO. Just do some proper inter linking on your websites between posts by using the anchor text you want to rank a post with when interlinking, as if you were doing a backlink. Other on page things such as doing no follow links or whatever are just a waste of time. I also try to link out to other websites when relevant, does it help with rankings? Maybe, but it most likely just helps avoid penalties by making your website more legit.

2) Off page SEO, backlinks. I still recommend article directories on new websites but most of the time now I put good content up on my website and do barely any backlinks. 1-4 unique articles distributed to article directories, mostly ezine articles… Honestly I would skip this step but later on I will re-use these articles anyway so might as well get some initial link love this way. Then at around the 3-4 month mark I use services like Ezarticlelink/AMR/BMD. Not all on the same URL! Over the past 6 months I found EZA to be the most effective “service” for me especially for the cost.. $35/month.ย  You can see some results by looking at my ezarticle link review so I mostly start with that, others might have other networks they like better, such as Blog Blueprint for Becker which is the core network we use SEO Hybrid’s backlink strategy. Then after another month I go with AMR or BMD (I might do AMR to 2-3 url/keyword groups on the site and BMD to others.. I try to always rank some inner pages along with my domain).

I’m not entirely sure on how effective AMR is currently by itself, I haven’t tested it alone in a while but it definitely does not hurt but I think I would go with BMD over AMR currently (and definitely one of the private blog services we reviewed on this site with a good rating over either…. The one time fee of AMR/BMD definitely paid itself back for me though). Ultimately you can start doing other types of backlinks such as linkwheels/stealing your competitors links which we cover in SEO Hybrid but I only worry about that after 4-5+ months, when I can truly see if more backlinks would help or not. These backlinks take more time so I want to know I “need” them first!

Might as well focus on putting up good content on your website and working the design so visistors like it and come back! And/or tweak your adsense ads to improve your CTR, think about adding an email list form, set up an auto responder series etc.

SEO/Adsense is NOT dead

In fact, as I point out it’s a really consistent source of income for me so far once it’s setup properly… I’ve been able to enjoy fully my other hobbies with minimal “work” maintenance thanks to SEO on these niche sites. I wanted to get this post out because I think a lot of people are taking advantage on the Panda Updates to sell courses on the basis that SEO/Adsense is dead but x tip will work instead. It’s false, it’s not dead. I never got really affected by any panda updates and all it takes is make websites for users (nice theme, link out to other sources of information…) and diversify your backlinks (don’t just use BB/Ezarticlelink for example). I did get new websites Google Danced late last year but to be honest I was not doing fully these basic principles on them (I got lazy). I’m diversifying my links and adding new content.. We’ll see if they come back ๐Ÿ˜‰

cry_faceHopefully I don’t get all my websites penalized/adsense banned after writing this post ๐Ÿ˜›