Earn Money Online with Brandon Hopkins

I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but SEO degrees have been flooding the market. Unfortunately for the people attending these seo classes whether online or offline, they’re not learning nearly as much as they can through blogs and forums, and they’re paying too much money to get a piece of paper that anyone hiring should laugh at.

If someone applies for a SEO job and lists a degree as qualification, you should laugh and move on. Some people were born to sell cars, they don’t need degrees because their performance speaks for itself.

It’s the same for SEO (and especially SEM), your past performance is what should set you apart from the people who have wasted their time getting a search engine optimization degree. After all, isn’t SEO dead yet? Who really cares about on page SEO? Google surely doesn’t, neither does Digg or Delicious. Your Twitter followers don’t care if you’ve optimized your meta tags or what your keyword density is.

Quit living in the past, you don’t need a degree. This business is still the wild west, there are no rules you should follow, you should do whatever it takes to get your site ranked #1.

This week I’ll have a review of a unique directory I found online, don’t miss it. Yes, you read that right, a unique directory.

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I outsource a variety of my daily tasks, simple and complex stuff. I tend to outsource the tedious (writing) and the stuff I’m not great at (PSD to PHP/HTML conversion). If you’ve never outsourced, take a look at this guest post at Shoemoney.com. It can change the way you do business.

Typically I find my workers/employees through forums like DigitalPoint, but the Craigslist Philippines is a great idea, one that I had never thought of. Give it a go and let me know how outsourcing works for you.

By the way, I’m always looking for talented people, send me a message if you’re one of them!

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There is a lot of talk about people who try to “make money online”. Those keywords in particular. The funniest thing to me is that the great majority of people who are writing about making money, don’t actually make any money online. They just think that the making money niche is profitable, which I assure you it isn’t. Of course, there are superstars who post pictures about their earnings and detail how much they made with their make money online blog, but 99% of the blogs in this niche find out the money isn’t there.

So with that said I’m going to be shifting my focus away from “making money” to “earning money”. I still do everything the same, but with a focus on what kind of work you need to put in to get the desired results.

Earning money though web based ventures isn’t for everyone. I have a family member who told me that he had extra time and wanted to try to turn that time into money with the internet. I spent hours with him explaining what he needed to do, we bought a domain, got hosting set up, installed WordPress and wrote him a sample post. I detailed everything he would need to do over the next month in order to make it a successful month.

At the end of the month I went back to his site and guess how many posts he had…1, and it was the post I made for him.

I called him and asked what the problem was and he said, “I don’t think this is for me, it’s a lot more work than I thought it would be.”

Therein lies the truth. Making money online is not easy, but earning money online is possible. You’re not going to get rich overnight. That PPC campaign will not take off, your website will never rank number for for “laptops” and you will never be paid $50,000 to speak at a conference. However, you can make a very good earning online.

You’ll need to be prepared to work hard for little return in the beginning and trust that one day down the line it will pay off. That’s what I’ve been doing since 2004 and I can tell you that it has truly paid off!

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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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