Hi all,
This is my first post to Steemit, and in the theme of making money online I thought I'd share some insights on ranking micro niche websites in search engines. The goal of this post is to educate a newcomer into the world of internet marketing, an alternative methods to making money on the internet. It seems like this would be of interest to the Steemit community.
What is Search Engine Optimization & Micro Niche?
Search engine optimization is the process of tailoring your website's content to rank for specific keywords in search engines. Search engines work by spidering the internet for new content, and matching it to the appropriate keywords that people search for. Everybody you ask will give you a different answer on what their definition is and tricks of SEO are. This guide will walk you through the basic steps of researching keywords, setting up a website, and profiting with Google Adsense.
With micro niche websites, the goal is to rank for very specific keyword phrases. For example, "brake fluid flush". It's usually not something with massive amounts of searches a month, but if you can rank #1 - you'll receive, on average, 66% of the clicks from searches. But if you can rank one website and make a simple $5 a day with it, then you can make 9 more and be making $50 a day. Then 10 more and $100 a day. They're very basic blogs, and almost all the work can be outsourced outside of the research and developer operations.
Step One: Keyword Research
When it comes to keyword research, a helpful first step is to find an exact match domain. That means whatever keyword phrase you decide you want to mainly rank for should be available as a major TLD.
Get started by heading to the Google Keyword Tool and toggle the first dropdown for "Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category." Lets do with the example keywords, brake fluid flush from earlier. Search and go under "Keyword ideas" - you'll see that the phrase brake fluid flush is searched 4,400 times per month, low competition with a CPC (Cost Per Click) of $4.11. This is a great keyword pair that I researched for this post, I expect somebody from here to rank for it soon ;) Typically, you want to aim for a keyword pair with 1,000+ searches per month, low competition with a CPC of $1.00+. Anything above that and you're doing well. Assuming you rank #1 and capture that 66% of clicks, you could expect $666 a month, or $22.50 a day with a 1,000 search per month / $1.00 CPC.
Do your research, play with keywords, and find an exact match domain with IWantMyName. "brakefluidflush.org" is available!
Step Two: Domain Registration & Hosting
When it comes to registering a domain and purchasing hosting, I recommend two companies for a few different reasons:
- FREE domain privacy w/ purchase - most places charge $$$ for this.
- You get a discount off every renewal per the amount of domains you have in your account. Example, $0.50 off every renewal when you have 5+ domains in your account
- Standard, very competitive pricing, and cheap web-mail.
- Cheap monthly and yearly rates for web hosting.
- Unlimited domain, allowing you to host all your websites on this one server.
- LetsEncrypt built in, allowing you to install FREE SSL certificates in one click.
- Easy mySQL interface, allowing you to build your database in a few clicks (needed below).
In example if you registered your domain with Hover and webhosting with Dreamhost, you'd then point your nameserver's addresses to "NS1.DREAMHOST.COM", "NS2.DREAMHOST.COM", "NS3.DREAMHOST.COM". Then in your Dreamhost panel, you go to "Manage Domains" and "Fully Host A Domain". It creates a directory in your main server as /breakfluidflush.org, and your domain will then forward to it within the hour. You can connect to your server via either FTP or SSH, whatever you designate when you went through the "Fully Host A Domain" process.
Step Three: Setting Up Your Blog & SEO Plugins
If you plan on doing more than one website, I reccomend downloading Wordpress from here and keeping a copy locally on your computer. Copy the un-zipped contents to your server under the /breakfluidflush.org and navigate to your URL. The contents will take some time to transfer.
When the files are transferring, go to your Dreamhost panel and under "Goodies" in the sidebar there is an option for SQL Databases. Create a hostname, a database user, and a database. Add the user to the database. You'll then have a username, password, hostname, and database name. When you hit your main website's URL after Wordpress is transferred, it will ask for these credentials to configure your installation. After that, it's a few more button clicks, and you're done!
Find yourself a nice theme somewhere online. There are free and paid ones, and some great Adsense Optimized themes for WordPress. Customize however you please.
Plugins to install:
- Google Analytics - register your website in your Google Analytics account, and install the plugin via search. Copy in your UA- code, and all your pages will begin tracking.
- YoastSEO - Yoast will take care of 90% of the optimization you can do for your website. Install, and configure your website title, meta description, etc with your target keyword - "brake fluid flush", and pick a sentence to be consistent with for your description. Example: "Need to learn how to complete a brake fluid flush? There is three key points ...."
Step Four: Outsourcing Content Writing
For each website you run, you'll want to aim for x5 500 word articles ideally. You can find people on websites such as BlackHatWorld that will write 500 word articles from anywhere $2 - $5 - $10 - $20. The quality is what you pay for. If you can read over the writing and revise it a bit, you can go cheaper. If you want plug and play, pay a bit more.
Tell your writer the keywords you are looking to rank for, and they will optimize the content for those keywords. When you go to put it into a new Wordpress post, you'll see Yoast in the bottom, and they have a great tool showing you exactly what you need to fix to get your SEO score higher. Create your title, description, tags, and featured images. You want to have
header titles with your keywords in it. Following Yoast will make your micro niche websites better than 90% of what's out there.
Step Five: Google AdSense
Register for an account with Google Adsense. You can create ad blocks in your main panel, and then copy the HTML code to either a text widget in your Wordrpess menus, and inside your posts themselves.
You are allowed (3) display ads and (2) link text ads with AdSense. If you run more than this, you will run the risk of being banned. Do not click your own links. The goal here is to rank your website organically and bring in passive income.
AdSense will make you money via CPC (from above and before), and also CPM, which is cost per 1,000 impressions. You will receive money for just displaying your ads to people!
Step Five: Sit Back, Watch, Analyze, & Repeat
After about 2/3 days, you should start seeing a visitor or two come from organic search in your Google Analytics. Let this run, and play with other SEO techniques. Do NOT go blackhat - you will be banned by AdSense and it's not worth it.
Try your hand at another website. Domains are cheap, and for ~$100 you can get 10 .com's. Some websites will start making $1 a day, some $5, some none. You analyze, and adjust. Start reading more into ranking techniques, backlinking, and driving traffic from other organic sources (Facebook, Twitter, G+, and Reddit are all great places to start).
If you have any questions, please ask away below and I'll try to reply to everybody. Please leave feedback on my first guide here, and any recommendations on future pieces! I will happily go into more detail with anything there.
Happy building your army of micro niche websites :-)