Make Money Online with Brandon Hopkins

A few days ago Chris Garrett made a post titled Why I Don’t Check Rankings. Ironically enough, the post is ranked 6 for the term “check rankings”.

Unlike Garrett I check my rankings, at least daily. Why? I’m in this game to make money. There is no other reason I spend a great portion of my day writing and publishing content. As much as I like my readers, I have offline friends and don’t really need online friends. Like you, I’m here to make money, plain and simple.

I don’t care to be famous, I respond to interview questions because I want the links and traffic that come. More links, better rankings. Better rankings, more money. See where I’m going?

Garrett says, “My approach is to write for audiences. I usually have my main audience and also an overlapping audience that I hope to attract with my most recent article.” That is something I understand. My audience is a search engine. I don’t care which search engine it is, I just want them to come to my site, and love it. If they love it and I rank #1 for a niche keyword, then beautiful.

If I can get 30,000 uniques per month in my niche, but can’t make $300 I’m either wasting my time, or building something bigger. Most of the time when I exploit a particular niche and it explodes with social traffic, that traffic is completely a waste. It doesn’t convert, and social visitors don’t click ads.  Traffic isn’t my goal, my goal is where that traffic goes.  Did they click and ad?  Buy a product?  Or did they hit the back button and continue surfing?

Before I go too much further, it’s important to note that Garrett and I obviously have different plans when it comes to building a profitable online presence. I’m not even sure that is his goal, so I don’t want to criticize his methods because his goal may not be the same as mine.  Maybe he blogs for the love of blogging. I blog to give you something to read, with the hope that eventually you’ll convert to an affiliate program, buy something, or at some point become valuable through RSS subscriptions or total readership. To date, that has happened pretty well. I have a full list of ads sold, a few links here and there and a few posts that have earned me some money.

So why do I track my rankings? I want to make money. If I’m ranked #5 for a decent keyword, with some effort I can probably move that ranking up to #1 depending on the quality of the niche. If you have any #1 rankings, you know that the difference in net profit between #1 and #5 is INSANE!

In conclusion, let me tell you a story from about 3 years ago. I was ranked number 10 for a high volume keyword on MSN. Keep in mind, MSN traffic is very low compared to Google. After about 30 days I moved from #10 to #1.

At #10 position I was making about $5 per day. When I went to the #1 position, I was making over $150 a day (with MSN alone) with that one site. If I wasn’t tracking my keywords (like Chris Garrett), I never would have known that I was within striking distance. When I found out I was ranking in the #10 position for my keyword I immediately went to work and made great money.

So why do I take the time to track my sites? To make some money of course!

Do you take the time to track your keyword rankings?

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Anyone know of any good job affiliate programs available currently?  How about Affiliate Program Managers looking to generate some leads to their job site?

I can send about 3-5,000 leads per month and expect to be paid $1-$1.50 per lead depending on volume.

CareerBuilder is trying to screw me out of $2,000 so I need to replace them.  If you know of any companies that offer an attractive affiliate program, please let me know!

One other thing, does Dice.com have an affiliate program?

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During the month of November, Andrew and I will be focusing as much as possible on a joint venture. Our joint venture will be all about the call center industry, especially targeting the keywords call center consultant. During November we have 3 goals:

1. 2,000 unique visitors. For the past few months this site has had about 30 uniques total.
2. $100 revenue. This site currently generates $0 revenue.
3. 150 total articles. So far we have about 6.

As the title says, we’re going to take this site from 0 (nothing) to hero (generating income) in one month. If we can do it, so can you!

I don’t know if we’ll be able to do it, but I sure do hope we can. For me, it’s fun to be working with a partner on a project like this. Andrew is an exceptional writer and we should have great success with this. I’ll keep you updated with how our goals are coming along, and if you want to help, just link to the site!

You can also view all of the posts from this project.

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