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I know, I know, I hear you saying he is no longer 13 years old. But hey, he is still quite young(at age 15) and quite exceptional in the make money online business considering his age! This goes to show that age is not a factor in earning money online. It is your will, desire and hard work that will make ends meet and bring your goals into fruition.

Well, there are no secrets revealed here, just SEO, make money online and random tips you can use in your everyday dealings in the world wide web. Unfortunately, we had our conversation in Taglish (Tagalog – English). So if you understand Taglish then that is good. For those that do not, I have added not a transcript of our conversation but points worth highlighting in our conversation. The 3 audio files below are raw and unedited. This was the first time I recorded a Skype call and posting it on the internet so please bear with it :p.

The first person to speak in the first audio would be me. We were discussing our backgrounds in making money online…

While this is the second audio. I am using a free version of the Skype Pamela recorder which can only record a call for 15 minutes max. So I have to start recording again every 15 minutes…

On this third audio, more make money online tips…

Interesting Facts About Carl Ocab:

• 4th yr high school student
• 15 years old
• His personal blog has 25900 backlinks
• Uses link baiting as primary method
• His personal blog alone earns 4 figure in dollars
• Has less than 10 money making website
• Plans to take psychology in college
• His mentor is Joel Christopher

His current focus in on:

• Creating own products / product launches
  • Example is his Ultimate Blogging Theme
• And creating social sites

Some background on affiliate marketing:

• His first affiliate marketing program that he joined – www.moreniche.com (established)
• Promotes www.opportunity.com (fairly new)

Adsense vs Affiliate marketing

• Try adsense first to get feet wet
• Affiliate marketing larger profit
• But creating own products is the best

Authority vs Niche sites

• Authority sites can earn more in the long run
• Niche sites are good if you have many of them since if one does not work you still have others

What is a good niche

• Those that solve problems
  • Sleep problems
  • Stomach pains
• Those that have products that are to be bought out of impulse buying

SEO Tips (2 categories):

• Onpage SEO
  • Keywords should be in title tag
  • Keywords should be in the start of the sentence title
  • Keywords should be in the header tags
• Offpage SEO
  • Linkbuilding
    • Article marketing
      • Web 2.0 sites – Squidoo, Hubpages, etc…
      • Guest posting
    • Link baiting – attract others to link to you
      • Post controversy
      • Give away free reports
      • Give away free tools
      • Hold contests
      • Ask for interviews

Other tips

• Some sites convert more for Adsense, some for affiliate marketing so choose well
• Use blog when creating sites as Google consider this as news sites and you will rank higher in the SERPs

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Last May 9, I read about Adsense Smartpricing in Griz’s make money online blog. One of the top make money online blogs that is truly worth considering. It offers very very relevant and informative information (duh..) which is not what you will see in other make money online gurus out there (the A-listers…).

As usual Griz, wrote very very very long posts but which I thoroughly read (I read all his posts thoroughly…). In a nutshell, what he was saying was if your site is not a niche site and not laser-targeted in its topic then most likely any quest to earn Adsense from that site would ultimately get smartpriced. After reading that, it got me worried with this blog. As you can see it contains Adsense ads to help pay for itself (in terms of hosting and domain..). This is a personal blog which talks about everything and anything under the sun and basing from Griz’s post, my site is to be smartpriced sooner or later. And not just my site but also my other sites because smartpricing is not at the site level, but at the account level.

Griz also said that social traffic is bad for Adsense. This is because visitors coming from social sites are not in the mood to click ads but to just browse around. Or if they do click, it is just out of curiosity and the probability of the them buying is slim. Granted, this is not always true. But there is wisdom in his words. Social traffic normally tend to just browse around and surf. And if your goal is to earn money online, then social traffic is not the sort of traffic you would be going after. Now what does this have to do with Adsense smartpricing?

Well, Griz theory is that since social traffic generally is not there to buy and on the event that they do click the ads and go to the advertisers sales page, they would just simply leave since they are not there to buy. This is bad for the advertiser since it cost them a click which did not result in a sale. This is bad for Google because this implies that their system does not work. And to solve this problem, Google introduced smartpricing which will give you a prorated CPC (cost per click) depending on the quality of the click. That means if an ad-clicker clicks and buys, then most probably, you won’t get smartpriced. If an ad-clicker clicks and does not buy and this happens many and most of the time, then you will get smartpriced. Well, this is just a theory anyway but well worth taking into consideration.

So on the very same day, I checked my earnings. I did see some $0.01 to $0.10 clicks and assumed I was smartpriced. On the other hand I still do have $1-$3 clicks. But still I assumed I was smartpriced. I cannot afford to turn off Adsense for a week or two (minimum amount of time to get desmartpriced…) so I looked for WP plugins that would only show my Adsense ads to search engine visitors. This was good. However, there was a problem. If an SE visitor enters my site, then the plugin would take care of showing the ads. But what if this SE visitor click on links to my other posts, will the plugin still consider the SE visitor an SE visitor? Sadly, no. This would mean that ads would have less views and thus less chances of being clicked thus my low May 2009 earnings.

Come June 6 2009 and I turned the plugin off. Back then, I wanted to see if I would still get those dreaded $0.01 clicks after 2-3 weeks of showing ads only to SE visitors. To my utter surprise, I still did see $0.01 clicks! But then again, I still also saw those $1-$3 clicks. So what’s up with that? Am I still smartpriced? I did some more research on the quality and topics of my posts. Then I came to the conclusion that I was not even smartpriced from the very beginning! I noticed that my posts that had $0.01 clicks came from posts that were tied to gaming. And as we all know such niches pay poorly. That means those $0.01 click were legitimate clicks and I earned what I deserved. Those clicks probably were just worth $0.05 to $0.10 to Google (I only earn a portion of what Google earns…) that’s why I only get $0.01.

So what have I learned from this? Smartpricing is real as can be seen from other people’s reports. But we do not have to get scared of it causing us to abandon our Adsense earning altogether by pulling them out. As one of the veterans I have talked about this said, we just have to make sure that most of our visitors come from the SE and not social traffic (90% above would do…).

This is also points out that onpage SEO is as important as offpage SEO. Never neglect onpage SEO reasoning that offpage SEO (backlinking…) is only what’s important. Creating a neat site (good HTML, CSS coding) for the SE robots and following the onpage SEO guidelines showing ‘respect’ to them is certainly important. It might have been that those sites that got smartpriced and blaming that their being smartpriced is due to their site not being a niche site were probably smartpriced because their code was cluttered thus the Google bots were not able to identify what their site is all about thus causing to show irrelevant ads thus causing low quality clicks thus causing being smartpriced.

The bottom line is this, Google is smart. We won’t know their algorithms fully and all we can do is guess. But like in real life, if we show respect to someone, more likely than not that someone would also show respect to us. So, respect Google and its bots and hope that the big G won’t smartprice you.

Image via Wikipedia

So here we are again, another month has passed by and we are back to looking back to what we have accomplished the past month of June. The month of June is certainly interesting. In this month, I have learned a lot of things and started some things that might lead to something good in our quest to earn online. I have joined several forums that claim to teach you the essentials of doing so. In my first few weeks there, it certainly has proved to be an invaluable source of information.

This is also a significant month for me since this would be the month I have surpassed the $100 Adsense mark! Woot!!! So here are my earnings for various sources of online income:

Adsense Earning to received next month – $142.06
Adsense June Earnings – $60
Chitika June Earnings – $16.21
All-time Chitika Earnings – $20.91
Affiliate June Earnings – $5.74
Infolinks June Earnings – $3
All-time Infolinks Earnings – $5.49

The earnings above come from only 2 sites. So what I am planning to do is add more site and theoretically, the earnings should increase. I have also accomplished the following on the month of June:

• setup 3 niche sites
• create high quality backlinks to one of the niche sites
• took on the hubpages challenge

I know that is not so much of an accomplishment. This is because I still have a day job. But we’ll schedule things and work things out.

As for my blog’s statistics here they are:
7807 Unique Visitors
13476 Page Views

So each passing month this blog takes on a giant leap in terms of traffic. Also, I am planning to make this blog a sort of journal of my online earning endeavor, like what I have already done but in a more active manner. I do not know how yet but I’ll think of something.

So that’s it for June’s statistics update. While here are my goals for the month of July:

• create 5-10 more niche sites
• increase online earnings to around $100/month

Let us keep it simple. So see you again with our next update.

It’s been quite a while since my last adsense secrets exposed article. But now I am proud to tell you that the Philippines Prince of SEO himself, none other than Marhgil Macuha has finally decided to let his guard down and fill me in with his best kept secrets! And as you already know there are no secrets with me. So here I am spilling them out to you ready for you to devour:

Phaw:So thank you Marhgil for accepting this interview, so how are you doing?
Marhgil:I’m fine.

Phaw:How long have you been blogging?
Marhgil:I’m blogging since 2004, so, that’s almost 5 years already.

Phaw:Other than blogging, what do you do? Do you have a full-time job?
Marhgil:Yes, I have a full-time job, a 9:00am to 6:00pm job. I’m the IT Admin of a newly opened Japanese credit card company based in Taguig.

Phaw:Do you have any plans to taking this online earning venture to the next level (full-time)?
Marhgil:Yes. I have plans on taking this full time. Maybe 2 to 3 years from now.

Phaw:How long did it take for you to earn $100 in Adsense?
Marhgil:The Adsense code was on my blogspot blog for 1 year just earning cents. When I learned SEO and applied it on a new blog, it took me 3 months to reach $100. So, if you’ll add that up, it took me almost 1 year and 3 months to finally reach it.

(Ok now to the meaty part of the interview)

Phaw:No need to give the exact figures but how many digits of income do you earn from Adsense(dollars/peso)?
Marhgil:I experienced 4-digit last December to March, but it went back to 3-digit last April and May. Hopefully, I get the 4-digit earnings back this June.

Phaw:How many blogs do you have to create that income?
Marhgil:One blog, macuha.com. I already gave textmates.blogspot.com to my wife, so I don’t earn from it anymore.

Phaw:I know you started a photo blog for monetization, how is the blog doing?
Marhgil:Procrastination got me. Haven’t updated it for a while. No SEO. No income. Maybe, later, I’ll focus on it. See, I’m procrastinating again. LOL!

Phaw:For those starting to blog, what niche do you recommend them take?
Marhgil:Take the niche they love blogging about. If you love what you do, you’ll not get tired blogging about it.

Phaw:Do you only do pure seo or do you use PPC as well?
Marhgil:I’ve tried PPC before. Masakit sa bulsa. So, I stopped it.

Phaw:So how many hours do you allot for SEO per day?
Marhgil:When I was just starting, I used every idle times in our office for exchanging links, 5 days a week. While others were busy decorating their Friendster accounts or watching Youtube videos, I was busy exchanging links everyday. Right now, I just do SEO stuff when I have a new post I want to optimize, at least once a week for an hour.

Phaw:When you say you do SEO, what exactly do you do? Or is this a secret =P?
Marhgil:It means I do offpage optimization. Exchanging links. Submitting to social network sites. Linking from my old blogs. Getting links from forums.

Phaw:When are you going to hold another SEO contest?
Marhgil:I don’t have plans yet.

Phaw:How do you optimize for a keyword?
Marhgil:I’ll just write a post about it. Do a little research to have some quality in my post. Then start the offpage optimization I mentioned above.

Phaw:Do you think content is King?
Marhgil:Yes. Content is King. Marketing is Queen.

Phaw:To the newbies (like me), what do you think is the best step we can do to increase our Adsense incomes?
Marhgil:Keep on blogging. Create quality content. Hijack more keywords.

Phaw:What mistakes do you often see newbies doing in their Adsense campaigns?
Marhgil:Clicking their own ads. Or asking some people to click their ads. That’s a no-no.

Phaw:Who is your Adsense mentor? Do you have one?
Marhgil:I learned a lot on Joel Comm’s The Adsense Code book. I ordered it from Amazon when somebody paid me an Amazon Gift Certificate for a link. Most of the optimization tips, I learned from that book.

Phaw:Have you heard of HyperVRE? What do you think of it?
Marhgil:No.

Phaw:I often see a lot of newbies get discouraged quite easily when they only see cents in their daily earnings, what message do you have for them?
Marhgil:Everybody starts from cents. So, don’t give up. Do you know that a thousand cents is $10? You’ll not get those dollars without earning those cents.

Phaw:Would you like to thank anyone for helping you when you were a newbie before?
Marhgil:I just like to thank the internet and Google. The internet for providing the information I need and Google for helping me easily find those information.

Phaw:Any additional tips for anyone wanting to earn an income online?
Marhgil:Learn the tricks of the trade. Read our guerilla blogging e-book. And don’t ever give up.

Do you know the best way to solve a maze? You probably do. But what is its relation to our goals in life? Let us find out.

When I was young, I solved maze puzzles beginning from the START. If I was fortunate, I get to solve the maze in one shot. But more often than not, I do not. I have to try several times to be able to find the correct and only way out of the maze, to get to the END.

And then I got the idea of starting the maze from the END (I assume most of us did…). And of course, I was able to solve the maze quicker! Though sometimes I do not solve it once due to the complexity of the maze, the probability of me solving the puzzle is much much higher than starting from the START! I felt like was a maze expert.

So now how do you relate this to your goals in life? I’m going to tell you a short story. When I was in college, I took up computer science. This course had a lot of subjects that dealt with mathematics and topics that would pop your brains out. Nonetheless, I had to study them to pass the course. Since I had to study them, I might as well study it good and hard. Make proper use of the time spent studying.

Now, I had a classmate who studies just as hard. This classmate of mine was good. However, I was really surprised when she said that she had no idea what and how to use the things we learned in computer science in real life. She knew how to solve the test, exams and problems in paper but she had no idea how to relate them to the things in life. My point is (this is just a side point…), we have to learn to relate the things we learn in one aspect to another aspect of life.

So back to my main point, what is the relationship between a maze and goals? It is how we solve and achieve them. Just as it is much better and mathematically correct to start from the END to solve a maze, the best way to achieve our goals is starting from the goal itself and work our way backwards.

Let us take an example. Let us say you want to make money online. You want to earn passive income thru the power of the internet. You heard that there is a growing number of people doing this and they are doing so by Adsense and affiliate marketing. So you say to yourself, “Ah! All I have to do is put up a site, splash some Adsense and affiliate code and that’s it! I’ll be living the DOT COM lifestyle”.

Days, weeks and months go by and all you are earning is just measly cents and you give up. You ‘discern’ that the DOT COM lifestyle is just a dream. But what if you started from your goal and worked backwards? What if you started with a goal of say earning $10/month (let’s fix 1 month to be equal 28 days). That is small, but for the sake of an example, let us take that. Say you know that the average CTR(Click Thru Rate) in Adsense is 3%, meaning for every 100 visitors, you get 3 clicks. Say again that each click is worth $0.50 (I am using fixed values here for the sake of simplicity…).

Let us break this down to small simple steps. To earn $10/month means earning around $0.37/day. To get $0.50, you need at least 33 visitors (given the 3% CTR – Click Through Rate). If you do some math, we would come up with 24 visitors. Yes, we need 24 visitors to our site per day to be able to earn $10/month. And all you have to do is bring in 24 visitors to your site. The quality of your visitors coming to your site is another story and another goal to achieve.

This mini lesson does not just relate to making money, it can and should be used in every way possible especially when setting goals. Learn from it and stop shooting arrows blindly at your target.

Don’t start from the START but start from the END to get to the END.

So how do you make money online by blogging? There are many ways to do that but now we are only going to look at 3 of the most popular ways to do so. That is through a) affiliate marketing b) adsense and c) paid posts.

Affiliate Marketing

What is affiliate marketing? In short, it is earning commissions by finding and leading potential customers to merchant sites where they can buy commercial products and services. Once these potential customers buy something or do what the merchants want them to do (sign-up for a newsletter, fill-out a form, etc…), the affiliate gets paid. The system is as simple as that. At its infant stages, affiliates had to search out affiliate programs manually by searching and sifting through commercial sites to check and see if they had their own affiliate program and if it was profitable. If they are, then affiliates would be given the chance to apply for their program and get approved.

Years came by and these all changed. There are many affiliate directories and sites that serves as the place to meet for affiliates and merchants alike. Examples of these are ClickBank, LinkShare and ShareASale. So instead of manually searching for affiliate programs the affiliate directories above has done the work for us.

Adsense

What is Adsense? Adsense is Google’s advertisement serving program that shows relevant ads in non-Google websites such as this one. So how do you earn? Well, first you have to sign-up with their program and get approved. Once approved, they will give a code snippet that you would have to embed into your site’s code. Once done, this snippet would “sniff” on your content to determine what type of ads to show on your site. This is what they call as “Contextual Advertising”.

Here is the formula to earning from Adsense:

Targeted Traffic + Targeted Adsense Ads = Earnings

You need targeted traffic meaning you want visitors that come from the search engines as against visitors from social sites. This is because search engine visitors are the ones that click on ads. Social visitors do not click on ads (most of the time) because they are there to read and not buy (by clicking on ads). You also need targeted ads. You can do this by having a niche website/blog. If you do not have a niche website but instead have a general one (probably a personal site) then you won’t have targeted ads since the ads would show different ads relating to the different topics on your site.

Paid Posts

This is one of the easiest ways to earn money online. All you have to do is to have your own blog and find programs that pay you when you post something that they want you to write about. In other words, you get paid to post. And one of the best ‘get paid to post’ programs out there can be found at Paying Post.

So why do they pay you to post? Here are the many reasons why they pay you for blogging. For me, the number one reason is blogging has become a powerful medium for advertisement. So instead of companies paying tv commercial advertisements, they now see blogs as a powerful tool to sell products online. This is a win-win situation for everyone. Companies get targeted customers, bloggers get paid while potential customers get first-person quality reviews on products they want and need.

So if you need some extra cash or you are tired of working from someone as an employee in the office, while not try earning money online by using one of the methods above.