Guest post by Shaun Connell

Let me explain how to make money online using a method I started in September of last year: building a blog, putting an advertisement on it (I get paid a dollar or so every time the ad is clicked), and then getting traffic from a search engine.

This is also known as “SEO” – ranking your website on the search engines.

Does it Work?

I know it works because I’ve been doing it less than a year, and I’ve already got my college paid for, and the income keeps increasing – meaning I’ll be graduating college with a fantastic income already. That’s more than most college graduates can say.

But don’t think I’m trying to build up a bunch of hype: this method of making money online will take a lot of hard work, planning and determination. If you’re willing to work hard to make money then this is for you – otherwise, you’ll have to find another way to make money on the Internet.

An SEO Income is a Passive Income
Ranking high on the search engines provides a steady source of traffic. For example, one of the keywords I’m result #2 for brings in about 800 visitors per day. These visitors consistently click on my advertisements, in the end making $40-50 per day. It’s not much, but it’s nothing to cough at.

The cool thing about this is that it’s a passive income – once you rank for a keyword, you don’t have to work every day to get paid. As long as your page is ranking for that search keyword, you’ll make the money. That’s why I’m a fan of SEOing for money.

How to Rank on the Search Engines
This isn’t just theory – this is what I’ve done successfully. I don’t put much stock in theory – I just want to make sure you can actually do what works, without wasting your time.

Let’s get to the good stuff: how to actually rank on the search engines for your term that you want to rank for. There are literally two steps for ranking where you want to rank, once you have a website.

Get Content.

Search Engines deliver relevant content for people who use the engines. Google, for example, pays tons of attention to the text that’s on a website. The more new articles and posts, the better. It gives Google plenty of content that searchers might be looking for.

What Google likes the most are long articles about a specific topic. I’m extra cautious and I make my articles 850 words targeting two keyword phrases, like “financial planning” and “financial advice”. This is long enough and specific enough that Google likes it.

Your website will need quite a bit of content before it can rank well in the search engines – of course, every website differs a little. I try to get 30 articles on my site before I move on to step two…

Get Links.

Google ranks articles on the basis of how many links go to the article. For example, if I have an article on “financial tips” and there are 1,000 links from 1,000 trusted websites pointing to that article, I’ll probably be ranked first.

There are tons of things to learn about links, but for the purpose of this article, I’ll keep it short: your links need to be from websites that aren’t spammy, and look “legit”. Also, you’ll need a lot of links. The more the merrier.

For example, getting a 5 links from national newspapers like the Wall-Street Journal and New York Times is probably more important than getting 5 links from Spammy-Money-Internet-Riches-Get-Quick.org. ;-)

Also, the “anchor text” is extremely important. Your keyword that your trying to rank for needs to be in the links. Try to target a few different keywords – if all the links have the same keyword, Google might get suspicious.

How to Build Links to Your Website

But how will you get links? This is the hard part, and takes mostly just a lot of patience, in my experience. Here are a few ideas:
Guest Posts. Write an article for blogs that are also writing about your keyword. These links will be powerful – much more so than most links. The best links come from the biggest blogs, usually.

Article Marketing. Write an article and publish it on websites like Ezinearticles.com. There are programs that let you write one article, put it into the program/software, and it’ll automatically go to literally hundreds of websites. I have a software that I use that sends out my articles to nearly 2,000 websites. Make sure to look around my make money online website to learn more.

Link Trading. Find websites about the niche you’re writing about, and offer to trade links. This isn’t as useful as it used to be, but if you can get a bigger website to link to you, you’ll be doing great.

Buying Links. You can even pitch an offer to bloggers for a link to your website. This is considered a little dangerous, in case the search engines find out. I stick exclusively to the above three link building techniques – though there are hundreds of ways to get links to your website.

Author Bio
To learn more about this strategy for making money online, check out my website about making money online. I only describe what I’ve done to make money with a website – no theory, just facts.