nick usborne's blog

How do I find the best keywords when I write new pages for my money-making websites?

I get a lot of questions from people who want to know how to find the keywords that have the best demand/supply ratio. The idea being, of course, to choose words and phrases which are in high demand, but for which there is relatively little quality supply.

Getting this right is a key component in the revenue model underlying my money-making websites program.

I use a few different tools.

The first tool, which is free, is the Google AdWords Tool. Designed for use by marketers writing PPC ads, it is freely accessible to everyone and enables you to “eyeball” the demand/supply ratio on keywords. With this tool you want a high search volume and low advertiser competition. This isn’t the most precise or flexible way to find good keywords, but it is a very good guide and it’s free.

When I absolutely want to be sure I’m finding the keywords with the best potential, I use one of three tools which I have to pay for.

One of my favourites is Wordtracker. It feels like they have been online for as long as I have. You can take a free trial, but after that there is a fee to pay. With Wordtracker you can really drill down and get very precise details on the potential of both your primary and long tail keywords.

Another good tool, although I don’t use it as often, is KeywordDiscovery. They slice and dice things a little differently than Wordtracker, but still give you invaluable data on the words that will work best for you.

Finally, if you use SiteBuildIt as the platform on which you create your website, there is an excellent keyword analysis tool included within the service. You can’t access it unless you buy the entire service. But, interestingly, buying the entire service costs less than the annual fees for the other major keyword search services I use. Is their tool in some way “junior” to the other keyword tools I use? Perhaps surprisingly, it’s isn’t. It’s excellent.

These are tools with which I have personal experience, although there are plenty of others out there.

Do you have to pay for one of these last three, or can you get by with the free Google tool?  You can get by with the Google tool, if you have to. But in all honesty, I would try to bite the bullet and find the money for one of the paid services. They give you much more accurate and in-depth results, and will ensure that you build your money-making website on a firm foundation.

Funny how we grasp for quick answers and the latest “secrets”, instead of asking ourselves the tough questions.

Yesterday I announced the publication of a workbook I wrote for freelancers. I sent emails to my two largest lists. I worried about my sales page. I wondered how many people would buy.

Well, the conversion rate was truly horrible. Sales were way below my estimate.

How come? What was my mistake?

Here is one way of looking at it. One of my newsletter subscribers wrote to me and described the sales page for this workbook as being “just an ad for a PDF with 25 questions and lots of blank lines”.

Ouch.

I would describe my “mistake” more like this: I offered people something they probably needed instead of something they actually wanted.

If you really want to make money selling information online, give people what they want.

What do most people want? They want the easy button.

Most people want to be told the “secret” to success online. They want all the answers lined up for them. All proven. No risk. Just get-rich-quick secrets that are guaranteed to work.

Unfortunately, they rarely do work.

Those “secrets” may have worked for the author, but that doesn’t mean they will work for you. We are all different. We are all at different stages with our businesses or business plans. We all have different weaknesses and strengths. We all have different psychological and emotional responses to what happens within our businesses.

There is no easy button. There are no secrets.

Instead you have to protect and grow the core value of your business, you have to work hard, you have to be stubborn and you have to question everything.

Regardless of what my newsletter subscriber inferred when he wrote back to me, I think there is huge value in being challenged with tough questions.

I will always prefer to engage my mind seriously with a tough question than to slip into lazy, wishful thinking with a spoon-fed, one-size-fits-all list of “secrets”.

Here is my ”ad for a PDF with 25 questions and lots of blank lines”.

25 Tough Questions to Ask About Your Freelance Writing or Copywriting Business.

I’m a big fan of questions.

Statements close doors. (“THIS is the truth.”)

Questions open doors (“WHAT is the truth?”)

In the world of freelance writing and copywriting, questions are particularly useful. Why? Because we often get stuck in a rut. We just keep stumbling forward in a straight line, even if we don’t know where that line is taking us.

Asking questions changes everything. It opens our minds to new possibilities and opportunities.

- What are your goals?

- How quickly to you deal with problems?

- What is the central “flywheel” in your freelance business?

In my coaching work I ask a ton of questions.

Unfortunately, there is a limit to the number of people I can coach one-on-one. And I know there are people who would like to sign up for my coaching program, but haven’t been able to put together the fee.

Well, it can’t replace coaching, but here is a first step for you.

Get a copy of my new question-and-answer workbook - 25 Tough Questions to Ask about Your Freelance Writing or Copywriting Business.

As it says on the front cover, “If you’re not asking the tough questions, you’re not getting anywhere close to achieving your full potential.”

What do you do if your website topic is all about images, and not words?

I received a question recently from someone who wants to write a money-making website, but is passionate about a topic that lends itself more to pictures than to words.

In a nutshell, the guy is a photographer.

I don’t think that need be a problem. But to get a ton of search engine traffic, he will have to add more to each page then just an image.

The same goes for writing a site about your paintings, your jewelry or even your favourite recipes.

When the focus of each page on your website is primarily visual, it will help your search engine results if you also add a decent amount of text to each page.

What can you write about? Tell the story behind the image.

If it’s a photo, tell the story behind the moment you took the photo. Where were you? What time was it? What went wrong that day? What went right?

The same applies to a page with a photo of a handmade pendant. What inspired that piece? When did you make it? What materials were used?

By adding a story to each image, you’ll be making the page more interesting for your readers, and you’ll be helping Google decide where and how high up to include your page in search results.

Also, be sure to complete the image Alt tags. This will help Google identify the topic of the image and then include it in its image search results.

And...upload your images to Flickr, with links back to your page.

Then...look for other site and social media communities where you can share your images and interests.

Bottom line: Yes, you can create a money-making website when your topic is primarily image-based. Just be sure to add some good text to each image page. It will help a lot.

More about my program, How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites...

My “very slow path to riches” blog is still growing.

Back in late April I wrote about a "very slow” website of mine. I started writing it in late September 2008, but had almost no time to spend on it.

Actually, to clarify, it's not a website, it's a blog.

In my April post I wrote:

Last month the site made me only $67. This month it will make a touch over $100.

Hardly seems worth it, right?  Well, take another look at that curve. Imagine where that will take me by the end of the year. I'm guessing it will bring me between $1,500 and $2,000 a month by Christmas.

I was wrong about the $100 figure. The income for the month actually jumped to about $220.

I know, $220 is still a very small number. Not very impressive for a blog that I started back in September.

But...I’m happy. I’m happy because I started the blog without knowing whether I was right or wrong about the opportunity. I spent almost no time on it. Now I know that I’m on the right track.

BTW, here is the revised chart, showing the ongoing increase in traffic over the last three months.

Again, the figures are small...but the growth rate is encouraging.

I still plan to spend only about an hour a week on this. And I’m still guessing it will bring me in between $1,500 and $2,000 a month by Christmas.

More about my program, How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites...

Are visitors to your money-making website close to making a purchase?

When you write your own money-making website, there are a few elements in play.

You need to write some great content, whatever your topic.

You need to attract as many visitors to your site as you can.

And, to make money, you need your visitors to be close to making a purchase.

Let me explain.

Let’s say I want to buy a new digital camera and you have created a site on that topic.

I might do a search for the phrase “digital camera guide”.

What does that say about me? It says I’m looking for information. It says I probably won’t buy a digital camera today. I’m still looking and learning. For now, I’m just window-shopping.

But if I do a search for “Canon PowerShot SD1100IS 8MP Digital Camera”, you would probably be right in thinking that I am very close to making the purchase. If you have a page on that specific model, you would do well to have an affiliate link on that page.

Think about this is as you structure your site and create your pages.

Ask yourself how close your reader might be to actually making a purchase as they read each of your pages.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t write high-value information pages, such as a broad guide to digital cameras. Pages like that add a lot of perceived value to your site and can attract some strong inbound links.

But if you want to make money through affiliate programs be sure that a good proportion of your pages are there to serve the needs of people who are very close to making a purchase decision.

More about my program, How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites...

Medicare will run out of money in 2017. That’s why I do what I do...

Here’s a sobering quote from the New York Times, May 13, 2009:

“The Medicare fund that pays hospital bills for older Americans is expected to run out of money in 2017, two years sooner than projected last year. The Social Security trust fund will be exhausted in 2037, four years earlier than predicted, it said.”

Scary enough?

Put simply, within a few years, we’ll be responsible for taking care of our own medical and retirement plans. The government won’t have the money to take care of us.

We have paid our taxes, but the money won’t be there when we need it.

That’s why I have always worked to be independent. That’s why I’m a freelancer.

And that’s why I write my own money-making websites.

I may not be able to depend on the government, but I can depend on my own websites.

My CoffeeDetective.com site already generates an average of $4,000 a month in revenues.

This is my personal retirement and health plan. I have that website and I am writing others. By the time I retire I’ll have enough passive revenue coming in each month to take care of my bills, my medical expenses and more.

Above all, I’ll relish my independence and peace of mind. Whether the government sorts this mess out or not won’t bother me, because I’ll be taking care of my own income needs.

More about my program, How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites...

The first 30 days of any money-making website are the hardest.

In my last post I talked about how I sometimes get close to running out of steam when working on websites of mine that have been around for a few years.

In this post I look at the problem in reverse - how do you keep the faith during the first 30 days of any new money-making website?

Believe me, this can be harder than you think.

You have invested a ton of time and energy in choosing the topic for your website. You have written and uploaded the first batch of pages. You have done everything you can think of to get the search engines to think highly of your site and start sending traffic.

And then you wait, and you wait and you wait.

Believe me, that period of waiting can be very discouraging.

Here is an example.

I recently identified what I believe to be an information gap and started writing a new website.

Here is the timeline so far:

Went online with first 15 pages- Apr 24th

Indexed by Google - Apr 28th

Indexed by Yahoo! - Apr 28th

First visitor from search engines: Yahoo! - May 2nd

First visitor from Google - May 11th

Total visitors from search engines so far (May 12th) - 13

Three weeks after the site went live, and I have just 13 search engine visitors to show for it.

I have found this to be immensely frustrating. I have done this before, know what I’m doing and expected to get more traffic by now. Remember, with this model the idea is not to pay for traffic, it’s to get free, organic traffic from the search engines.

In spite of my frustrations, if I look at that short timeline objectively, I’m doing just fine. I really am. I just have to keep adding new pages and get more inbound links to the site.

I really shouldn’t have felt frustrated at all. The timeline is fine. But in reality I was getting quite upset! I hate going whole days without a single visit from the search engines, even within the first two or three weeks of a new site.

While my level of impatience was growing over the last few days, I thought of all the people who are doing this for the first time.

Yes, it’s easy to lose heart. It’s very easy to throw up your hands and just give up.

Don’t give up. Keep the faith. Like me you’ll be able to look back at some point and laugh at the frustration you felt over the first few weeks.

Just keep adding those pages, keep developing those inbound links...and the traffic will come.

More about my program, How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites...

In the face of get-rich-quick, I sometimes lose faith in my get-rich-slowly approach. Almost.

My new program, How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites, has been selling pretty well since its launch a couple of months back. Actually, I have been really pleased. It has been selling better than I had ever expected.

But sometimes I have this small, nagging doubt.

People ask me how quickly they can start making money with their own sites. Not just $50 a month, but $500 or maybe $2,000. More specifically, they ask me how long it took me to make a reasonable amount of money each month with my own hobby site, CoffeeDetective.com.

Well, in the early days of the site I didn’t keep very good records. I wasn’t expecting too much from the site. But I do have a note that I made about $500 during the ninth month.

Now, three years later, that one site makes over $4,000 a month, on average.

But when I am asked that question it troubles me a bit.

I know that people want me to say that they can be making thousands of dollars within 30 days of launching their site.

I don’t much like telling people that it will take them about 9 months before they see an income that’s really going to make a difference to their lives. I know people want the process to work faster.

But what I say to people is the truth. This really is a get-rich-slowly-but-surely approach.

If I had found a get-rich-quick process that actually worked, and worked for anyone and everyone, I would be using it and writing about it.

There are even days when I feel a little bored with my site and wonder if I should keep working on it or not. And then a voice whispers in my ear, “Dude, this one website about coffee is making you about $50,000 a year in passive income. Don’t even THINK about abandoning it.”

Good point. You have to be pretty rich to say no to an extra $50,000 a year.

But yes, it takes time to get there.

When writing your money-making website, don’t forget to watch for seasonal keywords.

When we first start writing our websites, we all pay close attention to the principal keywords we choose for our home page, second-level pages and every other page.

That first group of keywords we select and use becomes the foundation of our website.

So hopefully you have chosen keywords which are used frequently by searchers (high demand), but for which there is a limited supply of quality web pages out there (low supply).

But if you have been working on your site for a few months by now, you’ll probably have recognized that the time of year will impact the number of people searching for your principal keywords.

For instance, with anything to do with consumer electronics you can bet you’ll see a big upswing in traffic in December each year, with a corresponding drop by the middle of January.

If you are writing about coffee you’ll discover that people drink less coffee in the summer than they do in the winter.

If you are writing about gardening, you’ll notice a big surge in traffic when winter gives way to spring.

And so on.

As soon as you become aware of the shifts in seasonal demand for the products or services you are writing about, you can make adjustments by identifying keywords and phrases that might appeal to people at a non-peak time of year.

For instance, on my coffee site I just wrote a page with cold coffee drinks recipes. I want to keep the traffic flowing to my site, even at a time of year when people are drinking less hot coffee.

Or it may be that there are subjects within your main topic that allow you to take advantage of the changes in the seasons.

For instance, if you write about food and cooking, now might be a good time to create some new pages about salads and BBQs.

Just be aware of the shifts that come with the seasons, and search for new keywords and phrases that will best match the time of year.

More about my program, How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites...