Top 5 Mistakes Done By Beginners Who Want to Make Money Online

I have long wanted to discuss about mistakes done by people who have been wanting to earn money online either by promoting any of affiliate product or simply monetizing their sites or blogs using Google Adsense. I know for fact these may bring in a lot of disputes as well as objections especially from A-List bloggers. I don’t envy any of them nor do I disagree with any of their opinions. However, I feel obliged to share my knowledge on finding the right way to monetize your site or blog so that you won’t spend much time on useless methods.

Before you keep on reading, make sure that you keep an open mind so you would see exactly how I see the world (lol). Allow me to divert a little bit by sharing how I managed to earn some money from Adsense. I have been trying to earn money from Adsense since early last year. When I first started, I have no intention to make money online from Adsense. In fact, I have little knowledge about it. Only after a few months, I found out about it and I tried (like any other beginners) putting Adsense up in one of my blogs.

Obviously, the attempt failed since I couldn’t make even a single cent from Google. What a shame! However, I didn’t stop there. I spent some time in forums (sorry! I just can’t remember which forum I’ve gone) learning how others managed to make money from displaying Adsense ads in their websites or blogs. Apparently, all the methods were just mere individual opinions and none actually provide reliable methods. Now, when I say reliable, it means the methods used should not flag your site to be a spam or what they usually call as ‘splog’. Splog is a blog or site that is set up purposely to earn money from Adsense.

We don’t want that. You can get yourself banned by Google if you set up your blog or site just to earn money from displaying ads from Google. The last thing you want is to be banned by Google. You could escape a few times but please ask yourself this question; do you want to make money online which can eventually earn you auto-pilot income for the rest of your life? If the answer is yes, then read on.

Nevertheless, I finally found the right thing to do. And that is after being ‘booed’ many times in forum for not being able to make a single cent from Google. Regardless of what they said, I have learned what my mistakes are. I have managed to rectify what mistakes I had done with my site. In fact, most of the methods I have learned so far came from this infamous blogger called Griz. His make money online blog is so full of tips and tricks that are almost unknown to bloggers.

I do not want to discuss about methods preached by him. His methods are rather conventional and due to this fact, he has pissed off many of A-list bloggers. However, those A-list bloggers have not openly expressed their objections to what Griz said in his blog. Most of the disputes came from the A-list supporters. Unfortunately, they just can’t beat him in terms of making money online and none of them have actually managed to at least ‘declared’ that they make more money than Griz. None. How ironic, don’t you think so?

I’m sorry for the diversion ( I tend to write whatever came into my mind after being influenced by Griz, you’ll see what I mean once you read his blog). Let’s go back to our discussion about top 5 common mistakes done by beginners who want to make money online.

First mistake: Instantly Create a Blog to Make Money Online from Blogging

You are doing things the wrong way if you initially set your mind to make money online from blogging. Of course, I can’t stop you from making money online from blogging, but have you ever asked yourself whether you know exactly what are you doing? Do you really know where to start and how to promote your blog? So you know how to promote your blog, are you sure that is the right way to promote it?

Blogging is all about writing and writing articles by articles is a tedious task. Though you don’t have to be an expert in writings, you have to have at least some knowledge about the thing that you are going to write. But why? Why should you have some knowledge about the thing that you are going to blog about? Passion. That’s the word. With passion, you can write thousands of articles without feeling bored. You won’t lose interest if you have the passion. But to have the passion, you must first have basic knowledge. For instance, you can write few articles about dogs but if you have zero knowledge about dogs, you will lose your interest in time.

It is fun to have a blog. You can have more fun when you blog when you can actually monetize your blog.

How can you monetize a blog? What type of blog that can be monetized?

Hmm…those are questions that are commonly thrown out in forums and blogs. There are many ways to monetize your blog. However, I won’t be discussing it here as there are many other places on the net discussing this matter. I am more interested to discuss what type of blog that can be monetized.

“ I am a fan of Spiderman and I think I have a lot of knowledge about Spiderman. I can actually predict what will happen to Spiderman in the next movie. I’m going to create a blog about it.”

Wow, so you think that you have great knowledge about Spiderman and you think that you can earn a lot of money when you create a blog about it. All right, I won’t deny your passion on Spiderman, so let’s take a look at the competition.

Competition?

Yes, you have to check first how many people out there talk about Spiderman. You don’t have to check out the competition in all available search engines. Just use Google and google the word “Spiderman”.

The returned results might be different but based from what I found, there are 34,900,000 returned results shown by Google.

Can you beat that figure so you can rank in the first page of Google?

“No, I can’t”.

Good, at least you know what are you doing. But wait, maybe we can workaround a bit so you can get some attentions from people looking about Spiderman.

How about listing down all of Spiderman’s enemies?

So I typed in “list of spiderman enemies”. I’ve got 2,810,000 results. That’s a lot lesser competition. Do you think that you can beat that figure?

Maybe.

All right, now I guess you really know where are you going from here. You can now setup a blog listing down all of Spiderman’s enemies. You can choose any platform to do this; blogspot or wordpress. You can choose the title as “List of Spiderman Enemies” or just “Spiderman Enemies”. Regardless of what url is available for you, you can setup the title to be anything that you want or even resemble any of existed websites. For instance, you can setup a blog at this url using keyword Spiderman Enemies at Blogger but you can have the title of your blog to be “List of Spiderman Enemies”.

So now you already have a blog about Spiderman enemies and you are ready to go and write numerous articles on that. However, you should also know how popular this niche is. You should know how many people are actually looking for a list of Spiderman enemies.

Second mistake : Wrong Niche or Topic

Did you follow every single step I mentioned here? By now I assumed that many of you have actually wondered why would I want you to create the blog first before even researching the popularity of the niche or the topic. Well, I did that on purpose. I’m showing you exactly what beginners do when they decide to make money online. Beginners are so naïve and so was I when I first started. What we only think is how to make money online and based on pieces we learned from here and there, we think that those information are more than just enough to be put together and resolve the puzzle.

Unfortunately, doing so will eventually lead you to the dark pitfall.

After some months writing, you will finally realize that you are only writing to fulfill the needs of ten to twenty audiences. And to make that even worse, they are just readers and they didn’t do anything to contribute to your writings. They didn’t really care whether you will continue to write on the same topic or not. Sure, they have the same vision with you about Spiderman. They also love to talk about Spiderman and its enemies. They left comments and they debated with each other about it. They even voted your site as the best site ever to get the knowledge about Spiderman enemies.

However, they didn’t give you any money.

The sad thing was, you had been putting up Google ads in your blog for months. When you last checked your account, Google had not given you a single cent. Then you checked your site, trying to simulate what will the user see when they go to your blog. You typed in your blog’s name in the address bar on top of the browser as you assumed that that’s how your readers reach you. You thought that you have successfully ‘branded’ the blog.

What would you see then?

You would see that in some pages, Google is showing you the most infamous ad of all time, “public service advertisement” (PSA). And then when you go to other pages, you were happy at first to see some ‘real ads’. However, the ads were completely irrelevant to what you wrote in the page. For instance, you wrote about how Spiderman managed to escape from death, but the ads are showing some colorful wordpress themes on sale.

Suddenly you became angry and you accused Google for showing all irrelevant ads to your readers. You don’t want them to go to that sites. So you felt that it is important to report that to Google but first you wanted to know where are the sites leading you to. So you clicked on what of them. Voila! You see that it brought you exactly somewhere you expected and you really don’t want your readers to go there. So you went back into your Google account (let’s just say that you signed in back after half an hour) in order to lodge a report to Google.

You were shocked. You saw that you have managed to earn $0.50 from Google.

You just couldn’t control yourself. At last you earned some money from Google. Though it was your own click, you still feel happy about it. Hey, it seems like Google didn’t recognize the click as from your own click. That was a good sign, you thought. So you began to create a plan where you will start to click ads on your own page so you can earn some money from time to time. You would try to make it like a natural click from visitors. You became greedy and you began to write emails to your friends and colleagues; asking them to visit the blog and help you by clicking on the ads. After a month or so, the income has increased to $70 and you were so happy with the result. You were even happier since Google has not banned you at all. You were counting days to collect your first check from Google.

Finally, you received an email from Google informing that you have breached some of its policy and your Adsense account has been banned.

Well done.

Warning : Do Not Attempt to Cheat at Anytime!

Cheaters got busted all the time but real publishers won’t get busted.

How could Google know that you cheated? There are so many things that Google knows about you and how you actually behave on the net. In fact, I’m going to show you how to ‘borrow’ some of Google know-about to be used to your advantage.

Ok, let’s take a look at how many people actually look for Spiderman enemies on the net. You can do this by using an application provided by Google for free which is Google Keyword External Tool. This tool was initially designed to help advertisers to find out what keywords to be used for their Adword campaigns. We are just going to ‘borrow’ this stuff and evaluate the result.

When you go to the application page (I’m not going to provide you the link here. You can just go to Google and type in the keyword “Google Keyword External Tool” and the first result will always bring you to the page. Get yourself used to “effective googling” as you will be doing a lot of them in the future), you will see a page like the one below:

By default, descriptive words or phrase has been selected. What you need to do is just type in the box next to it. Type “list of Spiderman enemies” into it and then press the “Get keyword ideas” button (of course you have to first pass the security feature lol). Below is the result (the figure may vary from time to time depending on how many searches being done on the chosen keyword).

Look under the “Approx Avg Search Volume” column and you will see that the figure is 170 for “list of Spiderman enemies” keyword. This column is actually showing you the approximate average monthly number of search queries on that keyword in the past 12-month. Mind you though that this figure was collected based on queries performed in Google. It won’t recorded any search done in Yahoo or other search engines. Since Google is the most used search engine ever, we can at least make some assumptions and pretend for a while that that is the only figure that searched for a list of Spiderman enemies.

The figure though is not that accurate. Like I mentioned before, it was initially designed to help advertisers to search which keyword to be used for their Adwords campaigns. Just for the purpose of our discussion, pretend that there was an advertiser who wanted to sell a list of Spiderman enemies in a form of coloring book. So when he or she saw that figure 170, he or she could just multiply it with 8 or 10 to get an approximate figure of how many people are looking for the list. So let say that he or she had multiplied the number by 10, so he or she figured out that 1700 people looking for the list in the recent 12 months. Was that number good enough for him or her to continue selling the product? Maybe not, so he or she decided to investigate further by going to the next column which is “Approx Search Volume:December”. Google said that there were not enough data to be collected. That means that there were only a handful amount of people looking for the list last December. It could also mean that no one actually search for it last December.

If you were the advertiser, would you market your product to 1700 people only? Do you think that all of them will query the same keyword every month? And even they did, how many of them would actually buy your product? Twenty? Three? Can you actually earn some money from this? I don’t think so. Unless your coloring book is so ‘out of this world’ product and suddenly millions are craving to get a Spiderman coloring book, then there is just no point selling it on the net.

What have you learned so far? I know, you were expecting to see a simple, short explanations on what are top five mistakes done by beginners when they want to make money online. Instead, you are reading my ramblings until this point and you only learnt only two of those mistakes. Guys, you can actually stop reading at this point. Really. Stop now and go do your thing. I’m sorry, I have no intention to insult your intelligent, but really, you don’t have to read on if you think that you are not going to learn anything here about making money online the right way. You can also stop reading here if you think that those two mistakes we have discussed so far are good enough for you to know all about how to make money.

If you are still reading, then I’ll continue with our discussion. Back to our advertiser who initially who wanted to sell his or her Spiderman coloring book, luckily he or she had not actually created the coloring book. He or she was relief that he or she found that fact. Suddenly he or she saw the “Additional keywords to consider”. He or she was surprised to see that millions are searching for “Spiderman” keyword. And the best part was, when he or she sorted the suggested keywords by “Approx Avg Search Volume” so that the highest queries would be on top, he or she would find that “Spiderman toys” and “Spiderman posters” received thousands of queries for the past 12 months. The next column which is for the previous month also received thousands of queries. And if he or she multiplied that by 8 or 10, he or she would get a better figure.

What would he or she think then? You know exactly what the answer is.

You have now learned not to make these two mistakes when paving your way to make money online. I know, this is a long journey, but it won’t take you long enough to read this “full of grammatical errors’ article. Excuse all of my poor English grammar, I hope you can learn a lot of things around here.

Ok, so I take it from here that you have corrected your mistakes and now your blog is ready to be put into the fast lane – make money from your blog. What should we do next? We should go and promote the blog and tell people that we have a blog that talks about Spiderman posters. Prior to that, you have setup your blog about Spiderman posters and you have nicely wrote few articles on it. You even made some reviews on some posters and amazingly (Spiderman!), you have managed to make comparisons between two or three different products. You are good to go! Oh wait, you have also installed a statcounter for your blog so you can track how many people visit your blog.

So you started to promote your blog by leaving comments in any forum or blog you visit. You have learned so far from your experience that it is not ethical to spam other people’s blogs by leaving comments that are irrelevant to the topic discussed in that particular page. So you decided to search for as much forum as possible that talked about Spiderman. You put your signature as a link to your Spiderman poster blog. You managed to find a few blogs that also talked about Spiderman posters. You left your comments there by putting in your name and then your link.

For example, you went to this forum at ComicBookResources where the people talk and discuss about Spiderman. You registered yourself and you purposely put a link to your blog in your signature. Say for example that your name is Paul Straighthead and put your name in the Signature box and hyperlinked it to your blog, for example at SpidermanPoster.

Your link will look exactly like this : --> Paul Straighthead (hovering on the name will show that it linked to your blog SpidermanPoster)

You did the same when you left your comments at blogs. For example, you went to someone's blog. You left a comment there at one of his post by putting your name and your site link. Once the comment had been approved by the blog’s author, the link would look the same as I showed you guys before.

After some time, you have mastered the technique to ‘effective googling’ and you are satisfied that now whenever you typed in your name Paul Straighthead, your blog appeared as the first one in the list. You have ranked well really well in Google! Congratulations! However, you were frustrated when you couldn’t see anyone visited your blog came from Google search when you check your statcounter, apart from few clicks you got from links you left in forums and blogs. Using one of the functions available in statcounter, you found out the keywords used to reach your blog. None.

In the meantime, you have also learned about Google pagerank and all other stuff. You have learned that it is hard to earn a high Google pagerank. You also learned about ‘dofollow’ and ‘nofollow’. So you decided to create some hype for your blog by creating a popular post for your blog, for instance, “The Best Spiderman Poster in The World” (I know, that’s a lame title lmao). Then you sent out the news to all social bookmarks such as Diggs and StumbleUpon.

Oh, I think you did the right thing. Thousands have flocked to your blog and you were so happy to find out that most of them came from Digg and StumbleUpon. Again, you couldn’t find any that came from either Google or Yahoo searches. Never mind, you have got visitors already and some even subscribed to be your regular readers.

After a while, the visitors gradually reduced. Not long enough, no one visited your blog apart from those who had subscribed to your blog feed. You were worried, so you created another popular post and this time titled as “The Ugliest Spiderman Poster in the World”. Again, you posted the news about your post at Diggs and StumbleUpon and again, thousands flocked to your site to check out the ugly poster.

They then disappeared again.

The cycle continues and yet you still do not have anyone who came from Google search queries visit your blog. You just don’t have the time to think about that since now you have quite a number of readers and they want something new from you. They wanted new posts with more surprise from you. And you also wanted to make sure the post can create a ‘craze’, so you have to do a lot of research all the time.

You became a seasoned blogger after some time. However, you still wondered why you couldn’t earn decent money from displaying Adsense in your blog. Whenever you created a popular post and you submitted it to popular social bookmarking sites, thousands flocked in but you didn’t earn much from it.

How could that be?

Third and Fourth Mistakes : Relying on Social Bookmarking Sites and Wrong Way of Getting Backlinks

What I have presented to you so far is actual result performed by my friends and colleagues all over the net. I made the same mistake last time so I know exactly what was the problem.

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon are actually places for bloggers and savvy people. It’s where you socializing yourself among bloggers and internet-savvy people. You shared the same vision and you exchange opinions with each other there.

If you join the Spiderman community, you will meet people who also talk about Spiderman.

Think about if just for a second; if you are looking to buy a Spiderman bedding or poster for your child, would you join a Spiderman community first?

Or would you go to Google and google for it?

You know exactly which one is the answer, right?

And if you go to Google, would you type “Paul Straighthead” to look for Spiderman bedding or posters?

I bet that you would first type in “Spiderman beddings” or “Spiderman posters”. After a while, you might ‘upgrade’ how you search by searching for “best Spiderman poster” or “compare Spiderman beddings”.

You have learned one big lesson today; People buy things online by googling for that thing. If people are looking for credit cards, they would google the keyword “credit card”. If they have some preferences, for example, they prefer to have a MasterCard credit card, they will google using the keyword “mastercard”. If they have known an offer made by a bank to get a free credit card, they will google using that keyword “free credit card from that bank”.

If the news about that free credit card from a bank is reported by a reporter named Peter Petrelli, people won’t be searching for Peter Petrelli’s name in Google.

They would still be searching using the keyword “free credit card from that bank”.

Ok, ok, I’ve got your point. I know that by now that people don’t look for my name Paul Straighthead to get latest news about Spiderman posters and beddings.

So how do I make them to find my blog using that keyword?

Two things; think exactly how they think and fulfill that request. When you think exactly how they think, you would be writing about their needs or at least partially of what they need. You will start using the right keywords in your posts. Don’t overdo it, stuff in the keywords naturally in the post. Make the post readable by any human and at the same time make the post readable to the ‘bots and spiders’. “Bots and spiders” crawled your site and they are the villains that decided what your page is all about. If you didn’t tell these two villains correctly of what your page is all about, they wouldn’t know it as they don’t read like how we read. If you tell them that your site is about making money online, they would update it to Google and eventually Google will start to index your site/post and subsequently rank it accordingly.

Griz has mentioned many times about creating a “relevant’ content. Creating a ‘relevant’ content is making you money, not ‘unique’ content. Find out the difference between these two vague descriptions and you will know exactly what I mean. Again, just to let you know that Griz had done that job for you by explaining the difference and the importance of one of them. I am not promoting him and I am not Griz. I’m giving you a chance to extract as much information as possible from his blog since he is giving them away for free. He don’t charge anything and he has helped many people like me to make money online.

What does it mean by getting the right backlinks? Allow me to recall that in few occasions up there I have mentioned about statcounter. There’s a function in the statcounter where you can check out the recent keyword used by people to reach your site or blog. For example, if I typed in Google using keyword “Spiderman beddings”, I might found your site or blog there. Once I clicked on that link, it would bring me to your blog and statcounter will recorded exactly how you got to my page.

If statcounter could obtained that information, so does Google.

Google knows how you get to the particular website. This is fact and no one can deny this. I repeat, no one could. If you typed in “hannah montana's secret admirer”, Google would try its best to present you what it thinks that is relevant to that particular query. Since your query is specific, Google won’t be showing you Hannah Montana’s official site. So when you clicked on that first link in the first page, Google recorded that activity for various purposes.

This is the big secret; if the site you went has a Google ad on it, Google will again try its best to show the most relevant ads based on how you came to the site. If you were looking for “massage cream”, Google will try to show all ads that have paid for that “massage cream” keyword. This is where the competition among advertisers comes in; would they want to show their ads if you were looking for massage cream. The higher the competition is, the more likely you will be paid higher when people clicked on the ads on your blog.

If your website has specific information about massage cream, for example “massage cream for spa”, you might be paid higher if there are only a few advertisers bid on that keyword and not on “massage cream” keyword. However, all these are merely my opinion, but that basically explains the possibilities.

What am I trying to tell here is to optimize your site based on what people want. They want information. If your intention is to make money online, you should be optimizing your site with all the relevant contents and keywords. What you want is for people to come to your site and try to search for what they want in your site. If they can’t find any, they have only two options; go back or click on one of the ads displayed in your site. You will get the money. Period.

I want to earn massive income from displaying Google Adsense in my blog.

Then get ready to provide as much information as possible at your blog. If you talk about massage cream, try to optimize other phrases such as massage cream for women, massage cream for wrinkles, and so on. There are just so many variations of keywords that you can use. The more you used them, the more information is contained in your blog. But don’t overuse them. Remember, your aim to provide and fulfill what they want and what they are looking for.

Once you have optimized your site or blog, get yourself prepared by optimizing the backlinks. Google has never condoned to building links on your own. It’s like gaming the system which is not liked by Google. However, it is essential for you have backlinks that are using your optimized keywords. There are various ways to get these type of backlinks.

The first and the easiest backlink can be obtained from submitting articles at numerous articles sites. These sites allow you submit articles to be displayed at their sites; some for free and some asked you to pay to display your articles. If you don’t have the money, you can just use the free ones. They are as good as the paid ones. Create an article that is related to what you have in your blog. In the article, make sure you put in your link somewhere between the lines or you can just use the resource box usually provided by the site to leave your links in it. Use the keyword as the name, instead of Paul Straighthead, try to use Spiderman Posters or Spiderman Beddings.

Believe me, after some time you will start to see the difference. If you try yourself searching at Google using your keyword ‘Spiderman Beddings’, you might find your page somewhere in page 3 or 4, or may be farther. Don’t worry, as long as your site is listed, that means it has been indexed correctly by Google. It just that other sites that outranked your site/blog may have better links or due to the fact that their domain age is older. Keep building your links naturally and from time to time, the rank would increase.

You might be surprised to see how people actually came to your site. They might have typed in “light blue Spiderman beddings cotton material” or other phrases. Use that information to your advantage by optimizing those phrases. Another thing that you should always concern is do not use the same keywords each time you want to get backlinks. Use various keywords as backlinks. The more variation would means that your site has more information and are relevant to many things. The more relevant your site is, the more relevant ads will appear in Google Adsense. Relevant ads got clicked, and everyone will be happy; the advertiser, Google, you, and also the clickers.

Up to this point, I believe that you have managed to extract as much gist as possible from my ramblings. Therefore I am not going to discuss the final and the last top mistake ever done by beginners when they want to make money online with Adsense. Don’t get mad, it’s not because I don’t want to talk about it, it just that I feel that it is better for you to look out for answers at places I have mentioned before. I have written a lot here, and I want to know whether there is at least someone who really reads until the last line.

Kindly leave your comment here if you think that this article helps you. If you don’t, that’s fine with me because I still make some money out of this hard work I have put in. As for Griz, if you ever read this post, I am grateful that I have came to know you and just don’t know how I can ever repay you. Hope that this post somehow acts as a token of appreciation on how much you have indirectly taught me on how to make money online.