How crazy is that? It’s obviously a lot easier to produce a lot of money when the world is your marketplace.

Making money online is one of the most exciting things out there, but it’s also one of the hardest things to learn. There will be more money to be made in 2010 than ever. However, it will also be harder to learn. Why? Because there will be more and more garbage to sort through. There will be more crap blogs to read and more ebooks written by people who only know how to make money by selling ebooks. If you get sucked in by too many of these products, you will find it very difficult to get anywhere. You will find the information to be very contradictory and that will cause you to freeze up as you try to implement what you have learned.

If you would like for 2010 to be an awesome year for making money, this guide will serve as a road map. If you get off track, revisit the concepts presented here. They have helped me to create a lot of income for myself and have also helped me to avoid putting time into things that don’t pay off.

1. Follow your interests. I believe that one of the biggest reasons I have done well is that I have always either created sites that I was really passionate about, or have been able to get really interested in the topics I wanted to create sites about. I have made plenty of money with other types of sites (that I wasn’t as interested in) but my sites that have really flourished are that ones that I like the most.

2. Develop web real estate, aka build web sites. There are a lot of ways to make money online, but there’s only one that can provide you with near-residual income. Plan out sites, get them up, and start developing. If you want to produce in 2010 you need to start now. Income doesn’t appear overnight.

If you have already created some sites you’re ahead of the game. If they aren’t producing, move on to #3.

3. Research, research, research. Liking the topic of your websites can definitely help you to grow your income, but this won’t happen if there isn’t a market for the information/products your provide. Take a look at whether there are already sites that cover the topic you’re thinking about. If there are, it’s a good thing – it means that there’s probably money there and you’ll be able to emulate some of the things that those sites are doing.

Digging into your markets to discover additional keywords and subtopics is a hugely important aspect of the game we play. There are probably a lot of untapped traffic sources that you haven’t found, simply because you haven’t looked hard enough.

4. Help a lot of people. Your site will produce 100 times more if you want to really help people along the way. I get a lot of satisfaction out of knowing that what we’re doing here at The Keyword Academy helps people to produce real income. In our forum we have earnings badges that help us to see how our members are doing and there’s a huge payoff every time I see people with new badges (this is especially true when I see earnings badges pop up for members from third world countries). Since we really care about helping the people who use our site, it makes it a lot easier to market. Our members help us to get the word out because they know how much we can help the people they know.

If you’re only in it for the money, it’s going to be a lot harder for you. No matter what the topic of your site is, there will be people who have problems and questions. If you can figure out ways to provide them with solutions to those problems, you won’t have any trouble getting business or traffic.

5. Reduce your information intake. The people I know who make a lot of money online spend very little time reading blogs, watching videos, and interacting with their online pals. A certain degree of interaction is important for everyone, but money comes because of work. If you spend all of your time trying to learn, you aren’t getting much closer to actually producing income. In fact, you might be filling your mind with knowledge that will be detrimental to your success.

Don’t get me wrong, knowledge is very important. However, it can also become a huge addiction that can waste way too much time. Be wary of unproven sources of information.

6. Focus on volume. If your site provides information, provide a lot of information. If your site provides tools, provide a lot of useful tools. Creating more content will help you to increase your site’s traffic, especially if you’re creating keyword rich content. You may be trying to figure out why you have little traffic. A mental shift toward increasing volume can be extremely beneficial. A site that only has one keyword rich article would perform a lot better with 10. A site with 10 keyword rich articles would perform a lot better with 100. A site with 100 would perform a lot better with 1000.

Think about the people who would read your site and map out all of the information that they will need to accomplish their goals. In a lot of niches this will give you an unlimited supply of topics to cover.

Ask any real marketer and they will tell you that search traffic converts better than any type of traffic, for sales, clicks, and leads. In order to create that traffic you will need to do your research well and then create content based around your research. If you create more content, you can obviously plan on getting more search traffic. You should read our 100 blog posts experiment if you need further proof.

7. Squeeze the orange. In other words, think about how to get more from your existing traffic. Is there a product that you can create and sell? Can you upsell from that product? Can you sell more advertising? Can you use better placement on pay-per-click ads such as Adsense? Can you sell more affiliate product?

Some of the biggest gains I have been able to make in income in 2009 came with no traffic increase. Mark and I talk all the time about how we can get more out of our projects and when you have it on your mind, ideas will manifest themselves.

There are three big reasons you should become one of over 1,000 active subscribers to TKA Pro:

1. The Method

After you register we’ll start you off with our Core Videos – nearly six hours of “over the shoulder” instruction where we explain our entire income generating method as you watch us walk through the process on your screen. What is that process?

If you feel like you already know everything you see there, think again. Take Keyword Selection for example – do you have a tried and tested method for comparing the profit potential and competitiveness of one keyword to another? What about comparing an entire family of keywords to another completely different set? We do – it’s called The Formula, and our students rave about it. Don Lawson – a full-time internet marketer who joined TKA Pro back in February – had this to say about The Formula:

All I have to say is OMG! This is exactly what I was looking for when I bought the course. I got my money’s worth the fist half of the 1st video! The formula for evaluating keywords is the missing link that I’ve needed for years. This explains why some of my sites make money while others don’t even though I get the traffic. I’ve often felt like my Keyword research was one  of my weak areas even though I’ve tried most everyone’s method of finding keywords. This formula proved to me that I was leaving money on the table. – Don Lawson, AffliateWatcher.com

2. The Community and Support

After five years of teaching people to make money online, we know the biggest reason people fail (other than a lack of a proven method to follow) is a lack of support and encouragement from knowledgeable, experienced people who can get them through the rough initial learning curve.

From the minute you join TKA Pro you’ll get answers to any question you have – quickly – inside our members only forums.

Isn’t it nice to know you won’t have to fumble around in the dark anymore when you have questions about building your online income?

But our support structure doesn’t end with the forums. Every Thursday we hold a live webinar for our members (one of which is scheduled to accommodate our European and other international students). That’s four webinars per month. Three of them are open Q&A sessions where we show up and our members are able to ask us anything they want about how to make their sites more successful. These Q&A webinars last about an hour; we’re able to answer a lot of questions in sixty minutes. The fourth webinar each month is a New Content Webinar, and during these sessions we lay out new angles on our method, as well as teaching principles from the core videos more in depth.

Here’s a quick list of our last six New Content Webinars:

“August ‘09 Webinar: The Anatomy of a $5000 Per Month Super Site”

“July ‘09 Webinar: Winning the Mental Game and Creating Momentum”

“June ‘09 Webinar: Hubpages – Who knew this would be such a solid money maker?”

“May ‘09 Webinar: Google Changes, the Trend Toward Quality, and Protecting Yourself from Adsense-related Penalties”

“Running Your Business Like a Business…April ‘09 Outsourcing Webinar”

“March Webinar: Multiply Your Income by Targeting Multiple Keywords on Your Posts and Sites”

(By the way, when you pay your dollar and register for your 30 day trial to TKA Pro you’ll be able to download all six of these sessions in both windows movie format and mp3 audio format. Same goes for the most recent Q&A sessions. Call it a thank you for giving our program a shot.)

3. The Tools

The most difficult and time consuming part of getting the search engines to trust your website and send you traffic is getting quality links to your site. When you join TKA Pro you’ll get immediate access to two powerful link building tools. That’s all we’re going to say about that, but trust us that these tools are worth a look.

This isn’t your typical sales page.

Rather than bombard you with all caps red font, double exclamation points, and artificial “expiring offers,” we’ll let the program speak for itself, because the truth is it’s awesome. Here’s what some of our 1,000+  members have to say about it:

(These quotes are taken from a thread we started in the forum, asking students to tell us why they joined and why they stayed after their trial membership expired. We’re grateful to these students for sharing their thoughts and letting us publish them.)

Hi Mark – I’m only about a month into this membership…I don’t even think my first $33 payment has been processed….but it should be soon. I’m happily going to pay it and just so you know, I’ll be staying. I’ve learned more here than dozens of other courses. (And dozens is not an exaggeration.)

As to why I joined:

1) I’ve seen this “low initial price” offer before – it’s quite a popular tactic these days. I look at these offers with a skeptical eye. I’ve been scammed before, but I thought I’ll take this $1 offer for the 30 days and cancel if I’m not happy. If I don’t like it, I’m out one whole dollar.

2) I didn’t know you guys from any other “guru” membership site, so I was going to let your product be the determining factor in whether I stayed subscribed. I liked the fact that you didn’t use any screenshots of earnings, big claims of making money online, or anything like that. If I felt you had something different to offer, I’d keep going. If not, I’d leave.

What I think now that I’ve been subscribed a while:

1) This is a great site full of high quality information. Those intro videos finally made Adsense and other Internet marketing make sense for me. That’s after I’ve spent thousands of dollars on other courses and software.

2) The forum seems to be a genuine place that good people hang out. I haven’t participated much yet because I’m still working through my keyword research. (I’m slow I know.) But there seems a genuine willingness to help others and some of the students here are quite successful AND still help the newbies. This is VERY different from most other sites.

3) You and Court seem to care and take an active role on the forums proving that you have a vested interest in your students success vs. having a vested interest in only selling more memberships. I’ve seen responses from the TKA folks quite a bit in the forum postings and that is encouraging. Many other membership site gurus sell the customer on joining and then disappear never to be heard from again.
That’s my thoughts. Thanks for offering a great service.

- John H, Illinois, USA

Mark,
I actually looked at joining you guys last winter but I wasn’t willing to spend the one time fee [when we had a program that cost around $600]. You even offered to talk to me but I didn’t want some high pressure sales pitch. Now that I’ve seen your integrity I know that wouldn’t have been the case but back then I figured it was just another internet marketing gimmick to get my money.

When you came out with the $1 offer I joined – I figured I could spend a buck and see what the program was about.

Once I saw a few videos I liked what I saw and I starting putting the steps into action. I had a few sites from last winter but had never made any money and I knew I had to try something new. I liked the step by step method as it really helped me to get focused.

The forums have really added a lot to my understanding and they’ve allowed me to feel like part of a community of like minded people. It is hard to find anyone who is not online to discuss this with because they don’t understand what we are doing.

For me it was really important to not risk a lot of money to see if you guys had a clue – which you do.

Here’s a timeline that shows my income:

Aug 08 -Dec 08 $0

Jan 09 – mar 09 $44 total for 3 months

(Realized I had a lot more questions and joined TKA Pro)

Apr 09 $50
(Wife said it was a scam.)

May 09 $126
(Wife gave a little smile at check.)

June 09 $155
(Wife nodded at check.)

July $439
(Wife said, “we’ll see.”)

Aug 09 $634
(Wife strangely silent.)

All I did was take the basics and then get focused by Court and Mark. This system makes money if you actually apply it.

- Andy B, USA

I joined on the recommendation of someone I trust, as at $1 I didn’t see anything to lose. I was looking for a program like this – one with good support, where questions would be answered, and where there was a fairly detailed program to follow to get started.

My hesitation was that this would be one of those programs, like I found [program name removed] to be, where there were too many people giving conflicting advice, too much information and a lot of people into methods that didn’t interest me at all. I was also concerned that it would be too ‘big’ and impersonal to the point that a total newbie like me got lost in it all. Thankfully it was nothing like that.

Since participating in this, I feel the strengths are the good support, the on-topic forum where help is freely given, your active participation in the forums, continued progress and advancement, new tools to use being developed, and the opportunities for networking with others via contact on the forum. A big plus for me when initially joining was that all the training and information was available right from the start, unlike [program name removed] where they give you one dose a week, and it’s an 8 week course so if you want to learn ‘all they have’ you have to stay on 2 months (and the last week’s stuff isn’t worth it anyway).

What’s keeping me here is the forum and the link building tools, and the feeling of being in touch with what’s happening in the internet marketing world a bit as in new challenges you undertake, and being privy to your ‘experiments’ etc. All a fantastic learning experience.

- Robyn W, an American living in Taiwan

I almost got sucked into an internet marketing scam just before starting this course. The pricing structure was similar, but they required the first payment in full, and didn’t really give you any idea of what you were getting until you paid. I got all fired up, because I’ve wanted to make money online for years. I really needed a specific set of instructions to follow (that’s just the way I am).

The group I signed up for (who will remain anonymous, mainly to save my own embarrassment for falling for them in the first place) had absolutely no idea, and were just trying to make money online themselves. Lucky for me, I had done some reading over the years of some really trustworthy bloggers, and knew to a certain extent what was right and what was wrong.

In my frustration over being scammed, I started looking at the your site as well as some others I trusted, and was elated to find TKA Pro. I had no hesitation in paying the dollar at all. I’m still not sure whether I’ve been lucky or not, but I’ve covered my costs as I’ve gone. I’ve just paid for my 3rd month and have earned over $100, doing nothing but following the steps.

I can’t imagine leaving any time soon. This business is so damn fluid, that you need to constantly stay on your toes, and this is the best place to do that. With the monthly webinars and the knowledge in the forums, I see it as being a necessary expense in order for me to succeed at this business…

Some people need to be pushed, motivated and assured that they are doing it right. I am one of those people. Every time there is an announcement of a new Earners’ Club** badge in the forums, every time someone starts a thread saying that they don’t know if they are doing things right, the support from the regulars in here is overwhelming. Some people may not need this type of support, but for me, it’s what keeps me buzzing.

- Josh B, Australia

**The Earners’ Club is a progress tracking system we’ve set up for our members. When members reach certain income levels, they privately submit proof of earnings to us and we award them the corresponding earnings badge. The badge displays alongside their name when they post in the forum. Not all members choose to participate in the Earners’ Club, but we’ve found it really helps people stay excited about working toward their goals, and it’s fun for us to be able to publicly congratulate our members as they progress. A side benefit of the Earners’ Club is that it makes it very easy to identify exactly who knows what they’re talking about when they answer questions in the forum.

Speaking of the Earners’ Club, these comments are from a student who’s earning over $3,000 per month after working with us for a little over a year:

For me, the strongest part of your program is that it gave me a plan to follow – everything laid out for me in a step by step fashion. Of course in the beginning I thought you were holding things back, but I was lucky in that I realized early on that you were giving us the whole picture. I knew if I followed this plan (and didn’t allow myself to get distracted), I could be successful at this.

I just checked my traffic stats and my top five sites have received just under 2,500 visitors since yesterday, which is pretty typical for me at the moment. I’ve promoted all five of these sites using the principles you teach. One of those sites I’d started in another program (where they really had no clue about how to get traffic to a website), and it’s now earning over $900 per month thanks to what I learned from you guys.

I know I have said this before Mark, but I think what you and Court are doing is truly life-changing for some people. The income I make from this now would be enough for many people to quit working the 9 – 5. Unfortunately I’m still caught up in it until the end of the year, but only because I have a wife with expensive tastes (you can print that, she will never read this)!

- Ray B, United Kingdom

Here are some answers to commonly asked questions about TKA Pro:

1. How many hours per week do I need to invest to see results?

We’ve been teaching people to make money online for a long time, and we always tell new students the same thing:

If you want to create progress and momentum you need to be able to dedicate 10 to 15 hours per week. It doesn’t matter if it’s ten hours in one day or about an hour and a half each day. You just have to put the time in.

We’re all busy. We often get emails from students who are canceling their membership because “I just don’t have time to fully dedicate myself to this right now. I love your material; I’ll be back in a few months!”

Let’s be real. They’ll never be back. Life happens and you’ll always be busy. The problem is the weeks, months, and years fly by and you’re still not making any money online. It’s tragic.

Besides, we’re not trying to give you a full-time job. If all you can put in is 15 or 20 minutes per day, you will still make some progress. The students who are sporadic in their effort and generally flaky….STILL do better then the students who say “I don’t have time but I’ll get back to this in a few months.” Trust us, we’re saying this after five years of coaching people. You can not afford to keep putting off your goals while you wait for the stars to align and timing to be “perfect.” That’s a fantasy. Start today, do the best you can, and look to all the other busy people in our community for support and motivation. Taking action always pays off.

2. What’s the deal with this ‘$1 now and then $33 per month’? I don’t want to be locked into some lame subscription I can’t control.

Yeah, we know this whole teaser price deal is one of the most abused tactics in the internet marketing world. But here’s why we do it:

• There’s no way for you to see the full value of our program until you get inside and tinker with it. We’re not going to ask you to pay full price to take a test drive.
• Our content and community are awesome. If you’ll just get in there and give it a serious look you will be pleasantly surprised. We give it all away for a dollar because we know plenty of people will be so impressed that they’ll keep their membership active for a long time to come.
• YOU control the subscription. We run everything through Paypal, which means you can log into your Paypal account and cancel anytime you want. And if you don’t know how to do that you can just contact Paypal and tell them to cancel this subscription. Not that you’ll need to -  we have a full time support guy (name is Eli) who will take care of canceling your subscription the very first time you email him about it.

The point is we have no interest in trying to keep you subscribed to a program you aren’t excited about. If we can’t impress you enough during your $1 trial membership, you’re always free to leave and there will be no hard feelings.

4. How much money will I have to spend (outside the membership fee) to make this work? What hidden costs are you not telling me about?

Running an internet business is cheap, but it isn’t necessarily free. If you’re going to make this work you should be prepared to invest around $10 per month in a web hosting account and $10 on a domain name for your website. If you have no idea what web hosting and domain names are, don’t worry – we’ll teach you what they are and show you how to use them.

Down the road you should be prepared to reinvest some of your profits back into the business so it can grow more quickly. There are tools we’ll recommend once you get going, but initially all you’re going to need are the web hosting account and the domain name.

5. How long will it take me to start making money with your program?

The answer, of course, is “it depends.” Every student is different – some have more experience than others, some have more time than others, some have more motivation than others. We have seen students create a nice income within a few months of joining our program. Unfortunately, we’ve also had students let months pass without applying what they learn, so their income takes much longer to develop.

It may not sound sexy, but we tell everyone who makes an investment in our program that your second year in internet marketing will be a lot more exciting than your first year. You can get some results in the first few months, but if you don’t have a long term perspective – if you aren’t committed to sticking with your goals for over a year – don’t join this program. Get rich quick scams are called get rich scams for a reason. Success comes to those who will persist longer than all the people who lose interest when they don’t make money within three days of starting a project.

6. How much can I really earn with your method?

We can’t make any claims or specific promises about how much money you will earn in the program. 

What we can say is when we started the program we asked ourselves “How can we show people a way to create an extra $1,000 per month online without having to live in front of their computers?” The method you’ll learn inside is the answer to that question.

We’ve been happy to watch as many of our students have taken our “$1,000 per month” method and used it to earn quite a bit more. We have students earning $1,500 to $2,500 per month, and we’ve even had one student get let us know he’s earning in the neighborhood of $9,000 per month using the techniques we taught him.

We’ll sum it up like this: If you make a $1 investment and take a trial membership of our program, we’ll show you the steps these successful students used to create their income. After you’ve seen the method and experienced the support we provide, we’re pretty sure you’ll want to hang around after your trial membership is over.

7. How will I get help with my problems and answers to my questions?

A few ways different ways:

• When you join as a Premium Member ($1 for your 30 day trial, and then $33 per month), you’ll have access to The Keyword Academy Forums, where you can get fast answers to any question you have about any part of our method. We participate actively in the forums, and so do many of our more experienced members. You never have to worry about getting stuck when the community is right there to get you back on track.
• Each month we hold multiple live Q&A webinars where we don’t bring any prepared material; it’s just an open forum for the students to ask any question they want. We hold two Q&A sessions in the evening, and one in the early afternoon. With this schedule we’re able to get accommodate most of the time zones around the world. For students not able to attend the live Q&A we make the most recent three sessions available as downloadable recordings in two formats – windows movie files and mp3 audio files.
• You’ll have the opportunity to have at least one personal coaching session with either Mark or Court. The session will last 30 minutes or so, and it’s completely up to you what we discuss. Most students want to talk about their keyword selection, their websites, and how they can get to their goals as quickly as possible. In order to get your 30 minute session with us all you have to do is sign up for your web hosting account through our affiliate link. Your hosting account will still only cost about ten bucks a month, but the hosting company will pay us a nice commission for sending them business. That commission lets us spend some personal time with you to make sure you’re on the right track.

The bottom line is you’ll have the support you need. There’s no “read a book and struggle through it” in this program.

8. I don’t have a website, and I’m clueless about web design and programming. Are you sure I can make this work?

Yes. Our students use free software to build their websites, and we provide some extra instructional videos that walk you through the site setup process. It will take you about 20 minutes to have your first website online.The reality is you’re going to be a lot better off as an internet marketer if you have some basic web publishing skills (being able to set up a simple website and publish content on it), but we’ll show you how.

9. Is this program for beginner, intermediate, or advanced internet marketers?

All three groups will benefit from TKA Pro. Beginners and intermediate students will get the most from the program because they’re most likely missing a specific method to help them build momentum and actually create some cash flow. Advanced internet marketers (those already making a good income online) will find that they know a lot of what we teach, but they’ll still get new insights from the forums and Webinars. Not to mention the linkbuilding tools, which will benefit anyone no matter how much they’re already earning.

If you’re making less than $1,000 per month online you are crazy not to take a trial membership of The Keyword Academy Pro.

We hope to get to know you better on the inside!

Mark Butler and Courtney Tuttle

Compare Memberships	Basic	Premium
The Keyword Academy Pro Core Videos
Monthly Live New Content Webinar
Weekly Live Q&A Webinars
Linkbuilding Tools
BONUSES
Webinar Recording Downloads (both movie and audio format)
Access to the TKA Pro Forums

Basic Membership ($1 for 30 days, then $29/mo)	Premium Membership ($1 for 30 days, then $33/mo)

The experiment produced great results:

• During the first week, the experiment produced $371.98.
• During the second week, the experiment produced $678.62.
• During the third week, the experiment produced $780.40.
• During the last 9 days, the experiment produced $848.59.

That means that the grand total of the 30 days was $2,679.59:

Obviously I’m pretty happy about how well the experiment went. It goes to show that know which keywords to post about can go a long way.

Now that this experiment is said and done, I can offer some advice for people who are thinking about taking on a project like this. There are a few things that come to mind:

• Spend enough time on the research phase. Choosing the right keywords is key. If you have keywords that are too difficult, it will be pretty difficult to get amazing results. If you have worthless keywords, they won’t produce any income, even if they produce traffic (You can use the Adwords Tool to look at the prices advertisers are buying traffic for).
• Learn how to write well. I’m not saying that I’m a world class writer. I know that I’m not. However, I try hard to write posts that will give people the information that they are looking for. I can tell you that I get a lot of natural links because of that and it makes all the difference in the world. If you can learn how to write what people are looking for, you’ll be better off in the long run.
• Consider keywords when you write. I would still focus on writing what people are looking for, but it would be completely stupid to not include your keyword(s) in your writing. I try not to think about keyword density and that stuff – I simply make sure that my keywords can be found within my blog posts.
• Stretch yourself. Doing a lot of writing is difficult for anyone. However, volume is a key aspect of the game and the more content you have, the easier it is to get traffic.
• Continue to develop your sites. There are a lot of people out there who jump from site to site to site and there are some fundamental problems with that. In order to really get a site to perform well you have to continue to develop it over time. As time passes it starts to work in your favor, as long as you continue to develop. People usually quit before they get that far but if you can get there, you can make some pretty crazy things happen.

The biggest lesson that I learned through this experiment is that volume matters. It isn’t the only thing that matters, but it matters. It seems that most of us don’t push ourselves as much as we should to accomplish more and sometimes it takes a challenge or an experiment like this to get us to actually perform.

No matter what type of site you have, it will always help to get published. You gain exposure to groups of people that you don’t know, and you also get extra love from the search engines.

Last week I was notified by a good friend of mine (RT Cunningham) that he has a new site where people can publish their work. You can find the site at Posturown.com. The site was created with three purposes in mind:

• To help you establish yourself as an online authority in any topic you choose.
• To help you promote other relevant websites, including your own.
• To help you (and of course, RT) in making money with your articles — eventually.

If you’re interested in getting published on Posturown, I would highly recommend taking a look at the Author Requirements. Users are required to use original articles that cover topics that they know about. Content generators and spinners are prohibited.

Knowing RT, I can tell you that this will be a useful service. He cares a lot about quality control and that’s the most important aspect of this type of site. I’m really looking forward to seeing how well this site does. I think it’s going to be a winner and it will certainly help you to gain more exposure to your sites.

So far the posts I’ve written have made $1831 in three weeks.

I noticed some interesting things this week:

• People are linking to my posts. I’m not asking, it’s just happening. That’s what can happen if you really get into the mind of the searcher and deliver the information they’re looking for. This is obviously helping and is most likely responsible for a lot of the earnings increase this week.
• The earnings from posts varies wildly. One post will do really well one day and then won’t produce much for a few days. Sometimes I won’t be able to find the post at all for a few days. It will then come back and do really well again. A lot of people in the comments here as well as in the forums see this happen and freak out. They think that something it wrong. This always happens when you’re dealing with new posts – it doesn’t mean that something is wrong.

I have to laugh because I know that I’m going to get a new slug of comments asking how many ‘readers’ I had on the site before the experiment. It seems like the common explanation is that this money is being made because of existing traffic. This is frakkin hilarious because it shows me how little some people actually know about making money with Adsense. Guys, regular visitors do not click ads and never will. If you think I’m doing this because my ‘readers’ are clicking ads, you obviously don’t understand the game. Searchers are the ones who will click ads and if you want to get ad clicks, you have to draw the searchers.

As a side note, the site I’m working with had less than 10 readers before I started the experiment.

There are no tricks in how I’m reporting this stuff. I know how to find the right keywords and I understand how to write about them. If you’re wondering if I’m somehow leveraging my existing traffic to make this money let me put your mind at ease – I’m not. The traffic on this site is WAY up right now because of the addition of these new posts and it happens to be search traffic – the kind of traffic that clicks ads.

I’m a little surprised by how well this is going and at the same time I’m not. I’ve never added this much content based around solid keywords to a site before. Now that I’ve done this, I can’t figure out why this is the first time I’ve tried it. To me it’s pretty obvious that it would help any site but for some reason I hadn’t connected how much benefit I could get from this.

I think that some of you probably have the knowledge to pull something like this off and others need to learn more about keywords – how to find the right ones and how to target them well. There’s no way I could get these results without knowing what I know about keywords.

That brings the two week total to $1,050.60.

Why Most Bloggers Can’t Produce Results Like These

The more I read what bloggers have to say about making money online, the more frustrated I get. If you’re a blogger that isn’t getting results, I’m sorry but you probably either have no plan or you’re using a flawed one that makes no sense.

Most bloggers are the same people that buy lottery tickets hoping that luck will lead them to fortune. They follow A-listers or IM gurus believing every word they say with little understanding of how much they’re getting misled and ripped off. Buying lottery tickets is honestly a lot better business plan than listening to most IM gurus/bloggers. The odds of succeeding are about the same and the cost is a lot lower since many of you spend TONS of time using techniques that don’t work.

The barrier to entry with blogging is obviously very low. You can do it for free or you can choose to get your own domain and hosting for a whopping cost of less than $100 per year. Since you don’t really have to invest either way, you think that you don’t need a business plan.

I’m sure that some people are going to lace the comments of this post with f-words and uppercuts because no one wants to be told that what they’re doing is wrong. The only reason I’m saying anything is so that people can get better at blogging. If you don’t understand exactly how you are going to establish your site, I don’t understand how you think it’s going to happen.

A Plan That Actually Works

Many bloggers could establish their blogs and make money if they would simply learn how to write effectively about the right topics. Since they don’t know what the right topics are, it usually doesn’t matter how effective their writing is.

With my experiment, I am writing about topics that I know will be effective. I’m not writing posts to write them. I’m doing everything in my power to pick topics that are winners and that’s why this experiment is going so well.

When you pick topics to write about, you should be looking at your competition in Google. If you choose topics that have really strong competition, it’s obviously going to be a lot harder to do well. Since most bloggers write about the exact same topics as everyone else, they are going up against maximum competition. This is obviously a terrible plan in both the short and long terms.

You should also be looking at both the search volume and CPC of any topic or keyword that you’re thinking about writing about. You’ll get a lot better with this the more you do it. I’ve obviously done this a lot and I know what’s going to work and what isn’t. I firmly believe that you have to take as much of the luck out of the equation as possible and you do that by planning out your topics well.

The first step in the process was to plan out the posts. That actually took almost a full week in itself. After I had everything ready I started writing.

Results July 27 – August 2

So far I have been able to write 25 posts and they’ve been absolutely killing it. I didn’t in my wildest dreams think that they would produce $371.98:

As you can see, I’m monetizing with Google Adsense and am using two ad units on the posts. One of the ads is placed within the post and the other is placed under it.

Obviously anyone would be happy with these results. Assuming that I don’t improve over the next three weeks, this experiment will put an extra $1594.20 in my pocket.

Planning Is Everything

Honestly I couldn’t have done this without a lot of planning. You can’t just throw up any 25 posts and expect this to happen. Before I even started writing posts I found 100 keywords with two important characteristics:

• They had the potential to make a lot of money.
• They were somewhat easy to rank for.

In order to make good money with Google Adsense, you have to have a solid foundation of keyword research and SEO. If you can’t pick the right keywords, you’re not going to be able to make it work with Adsense. The days of throwing up content and making a lot of money are over. You have to be a lot more put together than you did in the past. Choosing the right keywords to go after is crucial.

You can use the Adwords keyword tool to check both search volume and CPC and with these numbers, the higher the better. I use a formula to calculate exactly how much I think I can produce with a keyword in a month and these 25 keywords are worth $7366.47 per month. I honestly didn’t think that they would start producing this quickly but if you consider the potential of the keywords, it isn’t too, too crazy.

We talk about using this formula in our members area to decide which keywords will be worthwhile.

The Next Week

During the next week, I’m going to try to finish at least 25 more posts. The strategy is obviously working and I don’t see any reason to change it. I’m secretly hoping that I’ll be able to finish more like 35 posts but we’ll see how much time I have. Life is pretty busy right now!

Note to TKA members – watch for an update in the forums within the next two hours.

I FINALLY have everything working in a way that will allow me to track earnings separately on the 100 blog posts and the experiment will start today! I’ll be updating you next Monday.

We’ve talked a lot about HubPages in the forum and people have asked what would happen if the same amount of content was added to their own sites.

Obviously I haven’t tested that out yet but I plan to.

HubPages will produce a lot more profit than you could get out of a brand new site. This is because HubPages is a strong site and it’s been around for a while. You aren’t going to be able to pull the same amount of traffic to a brand new site, pretty much no matter what.

The question in my mind is whether I can do the same experiment on a site that’s been around for a year and produce more/just-as-much profit. I know that not everyone has an older site to work with. If you’re in that position, this is what I would do to get things going:

• Get some sites up NOW. With a Host Gator Baby account you can host as many sites as you want for less than $10 per month. There will be more experiments and lessons that you can use if you have a site. If you don’t have any sites you’ll feel like you’re missing out again and again.
• Get your sites indexed. This will start the traffic clock now. As more time goes on, it will become easier to get traffic to these sites.
• Use HubPages to build up cash flow to pay for your hosting. It isn’t hard at all to make $10/month on HubPages.

I personally have multiple sites that I started over a year ago and I’m going to use one of them for this experiment.

About The Experiment

This experiment will be a lot like the experiment that I did with HubPages, except instead of adding 100 articles to HubPages, I’ll be adding them to one of my existing sites as blog posts. The site runs on WordPress and the posts will be created around keywords that I believe I can get ranked for.

I’ll be tracking this experiment with a unique tracking channel in Adsense and will post the results each week. If you don’t want to miss any of the updates, make sure to subscribe to our RSS feed.

At the same time, we’ve realized that there’s a whole world out there we’ve ignored – the world of the small business owner looking to find new customers and clients through the search engines. So we’ve decided it’s time to establish a new brand that gives us a chance to reach out to that market. We’d like to introduce you to SEO Educators (http://seoeducators.net – the site is under construction at the moment). SEO Educators is looking to help the small business owner that knows she could be pulling customers and clients from Google and Yahoo! every month, but doesn’t have thousands of dollars to pay an SEO firm to help her get ranked. Our goal is to give this kind of entrepreneur an SEO plan she can implement with the resources (time, money, and staff) she already has.

But the point of this post isn’t to sell you on SEO Educators, so I’ll stop there. You can check out the site in the next week or so when the copy is written if you’re interested.

So what is the point of this post? There are actually three:

1. Help Us Out with Our Logo Design Contest

Court and I are notoriously bad when it comes to design. Not only do neither of us have a shred of design ability, we can’t even really say what we like or don’t like in a design. Some friends of ours turned us on to 99designs.com. For somebody as design-impaired as me 99designs.com is an absolute heaven-send. In a nutshell, you sign up to run a design contest, write a brief about what you need, and then tens of thousands of designers have the chance to submit an entry in hopes of winning the cash prize you established at the beginning of the contest. Seriously, this is brilliant. You can read more about what 99designs can do for you here.

Court and I would really love to have feedback and suggestions on our logo design contest. Pop over and check it out if you like. We need all the help we can get.

2. Do You Have Access to Small Business Owners? Join the SEO Educators Affiliate Program

We need affiliates! 99% of our traffic is geared toward making money online, and we need to talk to small business owners. If you’re a web designer, developer, marketing consultant…or anybody else that knows some business owners, send me an email (mark[at]thekeywordacademy[dot]com) so I can get in touch with you about becoming an affiliate. We’re tentatively planning a lead-based affiliate program where your job will be to get people to reach out to us, and you’ll be paid healthy commissions when we convert those leads to clients.

3. Sales Experience? Become An Independent Sales Rep for SEOEducators.net

Some of you may know I spent four years as an inside sales rep and sales manager before quitting to work full-time with Court. I miss sales and I’ve looked forward to creating a product with Court that would give us the chance to partner with a solid group of independent sales reps who could take our product to market and earn a great living at it. We know there are quite a few corporate sales types out of work right now, and we’d like to give a good opportunity to a few people who want to make a full time living talking to small business owners about our SEO educational products.

Initially, we’re looking to work with three or four people who’d like to earn upwards of $50,000 per year as a rep for our business. Wow, did that ever sound like an MLM pitch, so let me clarify. This will be commission-only sales; you’ll be paid one commission if you prospected the client yourself and a different commission if we generate a lead and you make the sale. The reason I say upwards of $50,000 per year is not because we can make any guarantees about your earnings, or the number of lead you’ll get etc. I say $50,000 because we’re looking for people to work full-time on this, and I don’t think it would be worth it if you were going to make less than $50,000 for your trouble. Ideally I’d like to see our reps making in the $75,000 to $100,000 range.

As I said, I was in commission sales for years, so I don’t throw those numbers around ignorantly or lightly. If you have sales ability and confidence, get in touch with me and we’ll talk about whether this could be a good fit. I can tell you this would have been my dream sales job when I was in sales – working from home (or wherever I wanted) making as many sales as I decided to make, and not having an annoying sales manager bugging me all the time because he’s trying to beef up his bonuses. We’re looking for some independent spirits with the ability to explain value and close. Most people reading this just shuddered in semi-horror. We’re looking for the three of you who think that sounds friggin cool. Again, email me if this has any appeal at all to you and we’ll talk about the details.

And that’s it! Check out our logo contest, become an affiliate for SEOEducators.net, and let us know if you’re interested in an independent sales job.

Have a great one everybody.