The problem is trying to figure out how to convince web masters in your chosen niche to pass on some of their precious Google juice with a back link to you sites. Many Internet Marketers get round this problem by creating a huge Internet presence by building hundreds for websites and blogs for themselves which they can use to pass the juice whenever they need it.

This concept is known as blog farming and the idea is that your build many, many sites that you get indexed in Google and feed with many junky backlinks in order to inject them with some of the magical Google juice so that whenever you need link to your main money properties you can simply harvest them from your farm.

Blog farming is something I’ve never touched because Google sees it as gaming the system and if they catch you they will do everything in their power to take down your farm and all your hard work will vanish instantly, not a pretty thought. This is not to say that building a blog farm isn’t worth the effort if you know what you are doing and can hide your tracks. I just don’t have the skills or patience to make something this intricate with the knowledge that it could all end in tears. If you want to play in the time though and are willing to take the risk its something you might want to look into.

I like to stick to more white ( or maybe that should be gray ) hat methods of pushing my sites up the SERPs such as link exchanging. This is one of the best ways in which you get better results in Google and you should start communicating with others who operate in similar niches to see if you can work out a way to build some link exchanges. Remember, 3 way link exchanges are better and make sure you use varied, relevant anchor text.

Another method of getting backlinks which can work wonders especially in the beginning when creating a new site is to post articles on an article directory or three. Directories such as Ezinearticles, Hubpages, Squidoo and Infobarrel are desperate for content to fill up their sites. Provide them with these interesting articles and they will give you a couple of links which you can use for your own purposes and because these sites have authority in the eyes of Google some of their precious juice will be passed along to you.

The difference between those that get the search engine results they need to make the money they want and those that fall by the wayside is in the quantity and quality of the backlinks they manage to build. Get creative and spend more time on building the links than any other part of your make money online business and eventually you will start to reap the rewards.

Why Do We Need To Get Backlinks?

If you’re trying to make money online then you need to either get traffic to whatever it is your trying to sell, or sell traffic to someone else that has a product or service they’re selling. If you’re attempting to make money with Adsense then you are basically just a middle man funneling traffic to other people with a product that needs buyers. So in the Internet marketing world traffic is money and those who have the most traffic are generally making the most money.

You might be struggling to see what relevance this has to the topic on hand but to get the most web site traffic we need to get our sites as high up on Google as possible because Google is the big boss when it comes to controlling Internet traffic. We need to convince the world’s best search engine that we are worthy of their respect in order that they will send us a nice steady stream of visitors for us to convert into cash in whatever way we choose. This is the game know as search engine optimization.

The battle to get to the top of Google is like a giant popularity contest where the most popular site gets to sit at the top of the Google castle and scoop up 40% of the traffic for a particular keyword. Backlinks are the key to the popularity contest in that they are the way that we collect votes in our favor from the rest of the Internet community. When someone with another blog or website links to your site they’re telling Google that they think you’re one of the coolest kids in school. Collect the most votes and Google is going to start taking notice of your site and send you to the top of the SERPs.

Another, equally important aspect of backlinks is their ability to signal to Google what your site is about. For example if I link to this site with the text Make Money Online than Google knows that this is a site about making money online and will take that into consideration when deciding where to put me in the search engines.

The words you use to link to your site is known as anchor text and its vitally important if you are to make the most of your backlinks that you take so much effort to find. A mistake that many beginners make when they are building backlinks to their domains is to use anchor text that bares no relation to the subject covered in the site.

If you leave comments in blogs for a backlink with your name as an anchor link what are you telling the search engines about your site that is of any value? Do you want Google to rank you highly for the word “George” or “Susan”? Probably not! At the same time using anchor text such as “click here” as a link to your site at the end of articles is a waste of your energy.

When getting friends to link back to this site I will get them to use anchor text such as “Make Money With Adsense”, “Make Money Online” and “Adsense Make Money” because thats one of the best ways to let the search engines know what subjects I’m covering. Hopefully it will also let them know that my site is respected for the content that covers that topic though if you’ve read much of my content you’ll realise that the respect is misplaced, but that’s another story.

So get into the habit of having all your back links to be keyword rich anchor text that is related to you blog. On that point make sure you mix the anchor text up or you might be penalized for Google bombing.

What Is Google Bombing?

Google bombing is a method of manipulating the search engine results by using a specific keyword relentlessly as your anchor text in order to get ranked highly for that word or phrase. Google has cottoned on to this practice and now punishes sites whose anchor text links look unnatural. The remedy for this is to vary your anchor text between a large number of related keywords for which you would like your site to rank. This is the reason that I don’t always use one specific keyword such as “make money with google” in the resource box of any articles I write.

Now you know the importance of being able to get links and making sure your anchor text backlinks are relevant to the subject of your content to further your SEO efforts. Next time I’m going to talk about another element of your links that is important and how to get yourself the very best quality backlinks available.

What really matters in the battle for good search engine rankings is off page optimization. After all, good on-page work only tells Google that you can optimize a web page. But get a barrow load of sites from all over the Internet pointing to your domain and Google is going to really sit up an take notice, believing that the information or service you provide must be of value.

So, to get your website further up the search engine results pages you need to find ways to get backlinks that are of a good quality to your pages. This is definitely something that is easier said than done but it is imperative to your success if your aim is to make money online.

Next post I’m going to talk about the best ways to get backlinks that will make a real difference to your search engine rankings.

How do we go about getting backlinks to our websites?

There are a few ways to get backlinks to your site, the traditional way and the method that is preferred by Google is to build a site that is so awesome that people all over the Internet will love your content so much that they will link to your pages. This technique has the main advantages of being free but it also rocks due to the fact that you don’t have to do the backlink building work yourself. Unfortunately it does rely on you creating a place on the Web that’s so good that links to it appear by magic and this is an extremely difficult, time-consuming task.

Option number two in the backlinking toolbox is to get out there and beg, steal and borrow links from wherever you see the opportunity. The most popular and successful ways to do this are as follows:

Article Marketing

Article marketing is a very simple way to get some links which only costs a little of your time. Sign up for an account with an article publication site such as Ezine Articles and they will allow you to publish a short article on your chosen subject with a couple of links back to your own site.

Set up some free blogs

There are a huge number of sites out there who will give your own free space on the Internet where you can publish your own content. Publish a blog with a few short articles on it, get it indexed by Google and you can use it to get free links back to your money sites. The best place to get started with this method is at Blogger.com which is Google’s own free blogging platform.

Create Hubpages

Hubpages.com is another place where you can publish your own content and get backlinks to your sites. With their easy to use system you can quickly get content up on their server and use it to build links. Hubpages has an advantage over other options such as blogger blogs and squidoo due to the fact that they are held in high regard by Google, at least for now. Because of this, links from the hubpages domain can be a real powerful force in improving your own domains in the eyes of Google.

Link Exchanges

Creating loads of original content to fill up blogger blogs, hubpages and article directories can be a tough job so it can help to have other weapons in your arsenal which aren’t so draining. One way to get great links from quality sites is to email fellow bloggers in your niches and ask if they would be willing to place a link to your site in exchange for one to theirs.

Buying links

This is a big one that pretty much everyone in the super competitive niches such as loans and credit cards seems to use. Google have serious problems with this one for obvious reasons. If you buy a link you’re basically faking your popularity and manipulating the search engine results. Its not something I have ever done due to the fact that I don’t know enough about it, but I’d advise anyone who doesn’t know what they are doing to stay well clear. Get caught doing this and your site is in danger of getting deindexed from Google.

If your sites aren’t ranking as well as you would like then you are going to have to work on getting more backlinks. Its not a glamorous job and quite frankly its a pain in the arse much of the time but building links will make a world of difference to the amount of traffic you get.

There are a few other ways to get links that make things a bit easier but I’ll go into them more in a future post.

Well, April was a bit of a let down as far as making money with adsense was concerned. I had server problems which I posted about earlier what cost me a few days of earnings on my documentary site then my loans site was dropped 100 places down the Google Search results for 3 weeks.

My sites are all back to normal now but results were affected and last months Adsense Money was down to a paltry $116. Not exactly the results I was looking for but I suppose this game is going to be filled with ups and downs.

On a positive note I’ve been following the Make Money with Adsense advice of Court and Mark over at the Keyword Academy and feel like I’m making good progress. I’ve started sites in 4 more niches this month: exercise, coffee, kitchen and insurance. Its going to take a while to be able to tell if my efforts have been worthwhile but it feels like I’m getting somewhere. Hopefully by July I’ll start getting some Adsense income from the new sites.

What’s Required To Make Money Online

My plan of action regarding making money online has really changed recently as I become aware of the hard work that is required to make it in this game. There are no shortcuts to make money online like we all dream of. What we need to do if find a way to make money that has actually proven to work in the past and follow that religiously until we start to make money. The problem is that we are unwilling to put in the required work without seeing results for a few months, but the reality is that online money doesn’t just start flooding in after you throw up a few crappy websites.

We all need to realign our beliefs about what is required to make money online. We need to put serious amounts of work into our sites, then we need to allow them to mature and let Google build up a little trust in our sites. We have to build content, build support sites, work our ass off getting as many backlinks to our sites as we can. Making money online is not glamorous and its not easy, at least not to begin with. Hopefully by the time you’ve been working your fingers to the bone for 12 months you’ll begin to see the fruits of your labor and your sites will start to generate you some nice passive income.

Making Money Online Is All About Quantity Not Quality

I used to dream of building a website and sitting back and watching the money roll in, but I’ve come to realize that if you want to have a good chance of making money online you need to build a mountain of sites. Some of of your sites will make you no money, some will make a few dollars a month and if you lucky you’ll end up with a few sites that put real cash in your pocket.

So if you want make money online stop playing at it and get real. Put in the hours required, build as many sites as you can following good keyword research and learn how to optimize your sites for the search engines. The more I learn the more I realize that SEO is more about building backlinks than anything else so building networks of friends who can help you out with links when you need them is going to be worth pursuing over the long run.

A final note: I really feel like I’m starting to see the light with regards to making money online. This could be a false dawn of course but I can see that I have learned a great deal in the last few months and even if the sites I’m building at the moment don’t turn out to be winners none of this will be wasted time. My SEO skills may not be the best on planet yet but I’m improving all the time. When July rolls round I think I’ll have enough skills with search engine optimization that I should have the ability to, at the very least, offer SEO services to business who don’t have a clue what they are doing online. Regardless of what happens, I’m determined not to find myself back in a J.O.B. any time soon.

I’m going to avoid the ‘Finding A Niche’ step with my first proper Adsense site as I already have a site up which I built last year to do affiliate marketing with. The project didn’t work out as I had planned but the site is prefect for a little ‘Make Money With Adsense‘ project seeing as it is in a high traffic niche with high cost per click and the site has potential to do well in the search engine results pages.

I’m only going to mention the niche I’m targeting once in this post because I want Google to understand this site is purely about how to make money online. If I start mentioning too many unrelated keywords early on in the life of this site I might confuse Google, and we can’t have that!

So I’m going to get started off on my Adsense adventure with a Payday Loans site which was originally built to promote a product from commission junction. This was really my first ever attempt to make money online but I realized soon after I started that the niche was way too hard to crack for an Internet marketing newbie like myself.

I did all the standard SEO stuff like submitting the site to directories, article marketing, social bookmarking and building a small network of free sites to link back to the main site. In the end, with all my work I managed to get 100 clicks through my affiliate links and a grand total of zero sales. I threw some Adsense ads up in a desperate attempt to salvage some money from my work but with very low traffic it was apparent I wasn’t going to get rich any time soon so I moved on to something else.

The interesting thing about the site was that it was obvious straight away that if I could just funnel a decent chunk of traffic to the pages it definitely had the potential to make money from adsense clicks as both CPC and click through rate were high. The site went on the back burner anyway as I felt I would be unable to generate the traffic needed.

Step forward to today and I’ve decided to get serious and try to make money with Adsense. Since this site is already up and running and Google knows it exists I thought I’d give it another chance to bring me in the big bucks. As luck would have it the site seems to have jumped up the Google search engine results pages a little over the past week and I’m actually getting a few visitors a day at the moment. With concerted effort on my part I reckon I can turn this one into a nice little earner. If nothing else we will gain some valuable experience in the process.

The site as it stands today:

• Originally built 6 months ago and hasn’t been touched since December
• A static site meaning its easy to manipulate Adsense layout
• On page search engine optimization not up to scratch
• Contains a home page, an article index and 8 articles aimed at specific keywords
• Low traffic with only a few visitors a day
• One of my main keywords is in the URL

Here’s how the site is doing in the SERPS for a few select keywords:

Google Search Engine Results

The structure of the site up this point has been as follows:

Site Page Layout Before

Here’s What I’m Doing To Increase my Chances Of Making Money With Adsense

1. Improve the structure of my site making it easier for Google’s spiders to find their way around
2. Remove as many external links as possible from the site to prevent Google’s spiders from leaving
3. Make all external links that are left “nofollow”
4. Improve the articles on the site by increasing keyword density, ensuring all page titles are relevant and increase word count
5. Remove all affiliate links to allow me to concentrate solely on making money from Adsense
6. Rearrange Adsense Blocks to ensure maximum Click Through Rate

New Site Structure To Increase Adsense Revenue

If you want to get the maximum number of visitors to your site from Google then your going to have to pander to the robots that visit your pages. With this in mind I’ve decided to rearrange my site to keep the Big G as happy as possible.

Beforehand my home page only linked to an article page which then contained a link to all my articles, now I want to link my pages together in a chain so its easier for Google to travel from one page to the next. I’ll put a keyword rich link at the bottom of every page hoping that Google will have no choice to crawl the entirety of my site in the sequence that I decide.

New Layout For My First Adsense Money Site

Site Page Layout For 1st Adsense Site

That’s all for today, I should really get some work done. I’ll go into ad placement in my next post but if you have any questions about how to make money with google adsense, let me know!