Ok, friend, here it is. This is how I think anyone reading, can go from $0 to $100 a day in affiliate/ad income with almost no work and but a minor investment in 2012. 

Is this a plan for income overnight? No. This is a 12 month plan. It’s a plan for anyone who can put their entrepreneurial ADD on hold long enough to focus on one thing for an entire year (you know… the way real business people do). This is a plan to generate a lasting income from a solid business; A plan to reach $100 a day initially, and push from there to $1000 a day and beyond. 

This is not a “new” concept either. It’s just a smart one. You ready? Here goes…

(Note: If you were able to buy one of our Unstoppable Authority Sites last week, you can implement this on them. If you didn’t, you can build a new site for them, no worries at all.) 

Overview 

This plan is about good keyword research, extreme(ly easy) long tail traffic, and outsourced content.

It’s based on the idea that the long tail of search becomes longer by the day, and as much as we see those exact money keywords becoming ever more competitive… the tails of those keyword markets are growing longer too. The original principle of the “long tail” is that the tail grows towards a length where there’s more traffic to be gained there across all the different keywords than there is by getting ALL the traffic that can be got from that major 1 or 2. 

Anyone who’s gotten traffic from the search engines knows that when you look at your traffic sources, you always get traffic from long tail keywords you didn’t even know existed; much less intentionally targeted. And the way you get that traffic is by publishing quality content on long tail keywords, to your quality, authoritative site. You’ll end up mentioning words in your articles that will make them match search queries for other weird long tail variations. And the longer a keyword is, the more variations (of word order alone) it potentially has. 

The most important factor however, is that the longer a keyword is – generally – the more specific it is, and the further the searcher is along that “buying scale”. Here I’m talking about long tail BUYER keywords. Keywords 3, 4, and 5 words long that are the name of a product or some question about it. Those are money keywords and in tens of thousands of keyword markets across the web, no one’s targeting them. In fact, people don’t even know they exist. 

This plan is how you can take advantage of that fact with minimal effort, and maximum long term reward. 

Step 1: A Niche 

As always, you need a niche to get started in. Don’t think of the most way out, bizarre market here. Think mass markets. The bigger the market, the longer the tail. It doesn’t mean you’ll be competing with the big dogs for any keyword like “weight loss”. It just means you’ll be following the money, and picking out a spot in an already profitable market to claim as your own.

This is a niche too, not a product name this time. Like I’ve said before, nothing wrong with that, this is just something that also works. 

So pick weight loss, or Forex, or dating, or electronics. Something with a tonne of products available that’s always coming out with something new, where there are a lot of products that get searched for by name and a huge amount of search volume overall. 

There are plenty of markets like this and at this point you don’t even need to be too discerning (we’ll do that on your keywords). Anything with a tonne of products, and a tonne of searches, where money is being made, and you should be fine. 

Step 2: Get a domain 

If you can, try to find an old domain on the subject/main keyword that’s indexed in Google. (Just grab the url of it, go to google and search info:thedomain.com to check indexing. If it comes up there, it’s still indexed.) 

See if you can find something that’s cool, neutral and informative sounding. In big niches like those, it’s not hard to do. You can use Godaddy domain auctions, dynadot auctions and many other services, (like those we talked about in UA for those who have it) for this purpose. 

An old domain will be a big advantage in your new market, particularly in ranking for your long tail keywords. That said, if you can’t get an old domain, it’s not the end of the world. Register a new domain with a neutral sounding name, the major keyword in it if you can, and you’ll be all set. 

Step 3: Keyword Research

 What you need here is about 100-200 long tail keywords that relate to product names in your market. 

NOTE HERE: The ONLY way this plan can go wrong, is if you pick keywords that can’t be monetized well. I’ve made that mistake before. So sticking to product name keywords (even if it’s products you can’t be an affiliate for… you can always monetize with Adsense) is vital. 

This is the first place your small amount of work is to be done. You probably need to do this research yourself. But 100-200 keywords in a big market is not at all difficult to find. 

What you want here are keywords that APPEAR in the Google Keyword Tool. That’s it. It doesn’t matter if Google shows they only get 10 exact match searches a month. That’s enough. Writing an article on that keyword will mean you get traffic from it and other variations of it. And even if that keyword doesn’t bring traffic, the next one on your keyword list will (Remember you’ll have 100 of them). 

So if your niche is LCD Tvs, and you see the keyword “Vizio 42 LCD x1090” and it gets 100 exact match searches a month… that’s a winner. You’ll probably end up finding one product, say “Sony Bravia B1080” and that’ll have 5 or 10 keywords below it that all get over 50 exact match searches a month. Grab all 10 of them (not including variations where you could have the same piece of content rank for multiple keywords). You’ll reach 100-200 keywords before you know it. 

You don’t need the keyword with over 500 or 1000 exact match searches with this plan. When you’re targeting a product name term for a one product minisite, that opposite is true… but again, this plan is different. We’re going to be making money on the aggregation of lots of small chunks of traffic from lots of keywords and lots of pieces of content. 

What about competition? It won’t much matter. 

There aren’t a lot of keywords that only get 50 or 100 exact searches a month that are replete with high level competition so you’ll be fine on most of these keywords. Plus, even if you get a handful of the keywords with competition that’s too high, remember, it’s a balance thing. Publishing enough content on enough of these keywords and you’ll run into an equal number of keywords where you instantly rocket to position 1, as keywords that are too hard to break on to the first page for. 

Finally… I’m saying that keywords with any amount of search volume is fine, but I don’t mean higher volume keywords are bad. If you come across good keywords with higher search volumes, that have 3 or 4 words in them and don’t seem too competitive, by all means include them too! 

The key here is continual posting, and continual growth. That said, once you’ve gotten 100-200 product name keywords in your niche that get at least 50 exact match searches each per month, you move to step 4. 

Step 4: Set up a WP blog on your domain 

Won’t go into detail here. Do it like we recommend in Firepow, NBI, UA or if you can’t do that, find a good tutorial on youtube somewhere. There’s nothing much you can do wrong here that would destroy your chances of success provided you’ve followed the other steps.

Are there things you can do to tweak things here? Of course. But you can worry about those later. 

Step 5: Find a content writer 

This is key. You’re going to find a writer who’s going to work for you on a part time basis, continually writing and posting content to your site each week.

There are no shortage of content writers available online. You can use Elance, try the Warrior Forum, or use the writers we use. You just need someone who can write great english, with some decent research, to a formula you’ll give them, and who can also learn how to post to WordPress based on your instructions too. 

Your creating good instructions for a writer is your next little piece of work. Only needs doing once, so it’s no big deal. You want at least 600 word articles, divided into subheadings, with a neutral tone, information and possible reviews on the product. You can use the exact formula from UA if you have that, but if not, sticking to the above works fine. 

You should be able to get a quality article like this written for $7-9 a pop. 

When it comes to posting to your blog, you’ll have to show them: 

- How to write a good Title for the article (to include the keyword but be catchy and curious at the same time)

- How to set the permalinks with the little feature below the post title bar (just making the permalink the exact keyword)

- How to set the Meta Title (just copy/paste the post title) the Meta Description (an interesting and benefit driven sentence or two about what’s in your article) and the meta keywords (just the single keyword that the article is on)

- How to set a “More” tag (just click the little Split Box icon in WordPress) on each post.

- How to bold each subheading (Obvious)

And that’s almost it. 

This set of videos I did is a couple of years old but will still show your writer each of these points above in a simple fashion.

You should be able to get them to post your article for an additional 50c or so. It’s a 5 minute job of copy/paste once they know the instructions. 

NOTE On Monetization: To begin with, you don’t even need to monetize your site with an affiliate link or ad block. You’re not going to be earning money overnight with this method so there should be no rush. Further, it may yet prove to be a benefit in the eyes of Google if you don’t monetize your site immediately, but wait until it’s indexed (or re-crawled if an old domain) and even ranking before you throw aff links in.

It’s a test of your discipline too. Are you really in this for the long term? Can you handle waiting two months to even put up your monetization links? If you can’t, then this model isn’t for you.

 Next… 

You need to decide on a frequency for posting.

This comes down to your budget. At minimum you’ll need to do 2 articles a week, but if you want to push right up to 1 article a day, that’s even better.

That’s minimum $15 a week investment. Probably less than you spend on coffee or eating out each week. There aren’t any other costs than this, so it should be affordable. 

Picture what’s happening so far… 

You’ve got an authority site set up, possibly on an old domain, that’s publishing two articles a week, every week, on long tail, low competition money keywords.

In a month, you’ve got 8 pieces of content out there. After a year you’ve got almost 100.

What happens to that content and how does it make you money? 

Let’s have a look as we move to step 6… 

Step 6: Promote that thing 

Right now, you’ve got quality content targeting money keywords coming on to your site afresh each week, with no work of your own. That’s a powerful position right there. 

As long as your site is indexed, you’ll find that a percentage of the content you add, will rank, and bring traffic for SOME keyword, even without you doing anything to promote it. That just happens with these types of keywords. Not all of them will do that, but a percentage of them will.

To take it up a notch, you need to convince Google of this site’s authority. And you have to do what you can to grow that authority.

How do you grow the Authority? With Backlinks. 

So if you like, your work each month can consist of merely trying to get backlinks for your site. It’s not even important that the backlinks point to the individual pages in this method, and it’s not even important that you build 10 links a day or anything like that. If you were able to get just a handful of quality links each month to this site, that would add up, and the effect would be felt. 

It’s mostly just important that link juice passes through that homepage of your site and filters down to each of your pieces of content. This will demonstrate your authority and make it so that eventually every piece of content your site publishes carries more weight in the search engines.

For this, I don’t even need to lay out a specific plan for you, because most kinds of link building will help for this purpose. If you can get 5-10 good backlinks for your site each week, just pointed to your home page with a related anchor text, that should suffice. But you can take it to a higher level if you wish/are able. Let me instead just make suggestions: 

1. Get an Onlywire.com account, create accounts at each of the services and submit every second post that goes to your blog, through Onlywire. That will be a tonne of backlinks worth over time.

2. Use your services like ActuallyRank or BuildMyRank to submit maybe 10 posts/comments a month with a backlink. See UA for full instruction on using those services.

3. Ask your writer to write an EXTRA two articles per week of just 300 words each, on any keyword in your niche, and ask him/her to submit them to an article directory like GoArticles with a link in the author bio of one of your target keywords. That should cost an extra $7 a week and will have a tangible effect on your rankings when it accumulates over time.

4. Buy some links. Use somewhere like DigitalPoint forums to buy some anchor text targeted high PR links from blog posts on related sites. Even a couple of PR2 blog post links a month (cost, maybe $15) will have a big effect on rankings.

5. If you’re committing just to this site, you might even choose to get a bit social. Set up accounts on Stumbleupon, Twitter & Facebook for your site, build a community of relevant friends, share links of all kinds, and drop a link to something of your own once in a while (Note you don’t have to link to your money posts here, and you don’t just have to add posts to your site that are for monetization… something to think about ) The links/likes/shares you get from this will benefit your SEO 

The key here is consistency rather than a big blast. As long as you’re feeding SOME new link juice to your site each week, you’ll notice the rankings and traffic of each of your pieces of content growing over time. 

You’ll also notice that new pieces of content you add start to get indexed more and more quickly. If you can do this for even 6 months you’ll see how much authority your site can build up. After that, you can claim long tail keyword rankings almost at will. And it only gets better from there on out.

 KEY: Try to put some plan for your link building in place. Even if it’s only a 5 link a month plan, make it something that happens every week and every month. And repeat it. Repetition and gradual growth is the key to this plan.

 Expected Outcome 

Continuing to follow this promotion plan while your content is continually being added should gradually see your product name posts ranking page 1 for their target keywords. As visitors start to flow from those keywords, sales will be inevitable, even if your presell content isn’t that great. You’re getting motivated buyers to your site. The rest is easy. 

The more you post and promote, the more ALL of your content should gradually rise in the SERPS. 

Then you can look at your traffic stats, see which keyword areas and product names are (easily) getting the most attention and you can expand those ones out, adding more content there, focusing more link building there, and so on. That will scale up your income even faster. 

There’s nothing else involved in this plan. You’ll just keep doing the same things, over and over, and watch them yield greater and greater results thanks to those all powerful laws of compounding. 

How Does It Get You To $100 A Day? 

Let’s look.

I’ve done scenarios like this many times before, but let’s take the worst one I’ve ever done.

Let’s say you earn $10 commission from your affiliate offer. And your offer converts 1 visitor in 100. You need 1000 visitors a day across your site to make $100 a day. 

If you have 100 pieces of content, that’s each article on your site getting 10 visitors a day. It rarely works out like that, and will usually be something like 2 articles on your site get 100 visitors a day each, another 6 get 50 a day each, and another 50 articles get 10 visitors a day each for a total of 1000.

There’s nothing unrealistic about that. Remember, these are all long tail keyword gems. None of these are high competition phrases.

And if even one of those factors is different (say a $20 commission, or a conversion rate of 1 in 50… neither of which is even close to unrealistic) you’re looking at $200 a day instead of $1000. $6k a month instead of $3k. 

If you’re reading this, there’s no reason you can’t make this plan happen and achieve these results. 

Final Notes

 Remember: LONG TERM. This method isn’t going to be making you money in month 1, maybe not even in month 2. But you HAVE to persist. When you do it for 12 months, there’s NO WAY… read that again… NO WAY, that you can’t have a valuable, profitable asset on your hands, that’s both making money, and has the potential to be sold for a good sum. 

UAS Owners: You can do this in addition to pursuing a “multiple product site” strategy laid out in UA, where you try to rank for one new product in your market at a time. Don’t do it instead of. You could feasibly get a plan like this cranking while you’re just working away link building for your first 3 keywords. The linking you do for those three pieces of content will help out all the content that gets added by your outsourced helper. 

Questions: I know not every little detail of the plan is covered here – what exactly you should say in your bid for an outsourcer, or what widgets you should have in your sidebar – but I want to stress the simplicity of this plan. If I haven’t mentioned it above, it’s because it’s not important. It’s because you can make money without knowing the answer to it. 

Don’t get bogged down in the tiny questions you don’t know the answer to. Focus on what you DO know the answer to, and work on that. Your chances won’t be destroyed if you get some small detail wrong. A small hole WON’T sink this ship. Ready, Fire, Aim. I find myself telling people this a lot lately.

All of that said, if you think you have a big important question, I’ll do my best to answer in the comments below. 

So happy holidays my friends! Here’s to an extremely prosperous 2012! 

>Click here to visit the original source of this post

Here are 15 simple ways to get more traffic to your WordPress blog, starting today!

1. Use Social Media: Facebook and Twitter both experienced triple digit growth in 2009, so it’s vital to tap into their trillions of visitors and use them to promote your blog.  Search engines also rank pages according to how many external links you have.  Plug-ins such as ShareThis and Sociable invite your visitors to submit your posts on their social sites.  Plus you can use a feed, such as Twitter feed, which puts your latest posts as RSS feeds on your Twitter account and updates your blog with any Tweets. You can download all of these plug-ins for free on our resources and plug ins page.
2. Promote on forums: another way to increase your external links and therefore your search engine ranking is to promote your blog on forums.  Sites such as Bloggeries and Digitalpoint can be really effective.  Do inspire potential visitors with a bit of your content, rather than blatant advertising.
3. Promote through prizes: get friends to promote the competition on their social networking sites, as well as using other forums, blogs and even local press to increase awareness.  This is a great way to increase a loyal readership that comes back regularly. 
4. Local promotion: can you get some free publicity by running a competition in your local newspaper or radio station?  You could also give away freebies at a gig or hand out flyers at your local college.
5. Freebies:  if you’re selling a product, send some free samples to journalists, national magazines, local press, review websites and any other relevant organization that might give you a free plug.
6. Comment on other blogs: commenting on other relevant blogs not only allows you to check out the competition and what they’re writing.  You can also become one of their top commentators, which can increase exposure for your own blog.
7. Track what works and what doesn’t: if you know which posts are most popular and what your subscribers tend to like, you’re more likely to increase their loyalty and encourage them to bring more readers with them.  Using a plug-in such as Google Analytics or StatPress, which can tell you everything you need to know about your visitors.
8. Search Engine Optimization: it’s important to write with search engines in mind, which means paying attention to relevant keywords.  WordPress have a free All in One SEO plug-in which is so simple to use and does the job for you.
9. Add Multimedia: by adding images and video clips you can drive traffic to your site through multimedia search engines.  You can also optimize your search engine ranking by adding relevant keywords to your images and clips.
10. Create a Sitemap: using the Google XML Sitemap plug-in is so easy.  Each time you edit or create new content, the sitemap will be updated and all major search engines notified.
11. Create good content: take care of your loyal readership and give them content they’ll enjoy.  It’s important you take care of your consistent readers, who are likely to spread the word about your blog and encourage other readers to join.  Keep it fresh and update your blog three to five times per week to keep your visitors coming back for more.
12. Make use of RSS feeds: RSS feeds allow you to keep your subscribers informed of new content on your site, as well as increasing traffic.  They are one of the most effective ways of publicizing your site and improving your search engine ranking.  The basic WordPress package from any free website builder involves RSS feeds, which you can then customize to maximize your traffic.
13. Make friends with your visitors: people who enter your site will come from a variety of different routes and each with a huge network of their own friends.  Using the Referrer Detector plug-in increases interactivity with your visitors from different routes, and allows you to customize your greeting.  For example, you can remind Diggers to dig your story, or ask Tweeters to Tweet to your post.
14. Improve your article descriptions: description meta tags should contain your keywords, which can increase your search engine ranking.  Also make your meta tag description enticing, as this is what readers will see on the search results page and will make the difference as to whether they click on your site or not.
15. Keep subscribers coming back: by using the Subscribe to Comments plug-in you can inform a user by email when someone has replied to their comment.  This increases traffic because they’re likely to keep coming back every time the conversation continues.

1. Twitter Blog:  this plug in is great for increasing your external links, which is vital for search engine ranking.  What it does is tweet your blog post, then check for any replies to your tweet and put them in the comments box under your post.
2. WordPress Thread Comment: a great plug in for creating a dialogue of comments, which motivates people to join in the conversation and keep coming back for more.
3. Top Commentators:  this is actually a widget for your sidebar which motivates people to comment more and more, as they fight for the top spot of Top Commentator.
4. Comment Approved Notifier: this is such a simple plug in that emails a commentator to tell them their post has been approved.  This has a double advantage, not only pinging the author again to encourage them to come back, it may also motivate them to check any replies to their comment.
5. CommentLuv: motivates you as the blogger to comment more and more because it shows the latest blog post at the end of each comment you make.  This fosters a community spirit and makes your blog highly interactive.
6. IntenseDebate Comments: this really gives your WordPress comments area the wow factor, using Ajax to write, reply and rate.  It also includes comments voting and allows users to connect to Twitter and friendfeed, which enhances promotion of your site.
7. Highlight Author Comments: this plug in makes your words stand out from the crowd by automatically displaying author comments in a different and distinctive style.
8. Do Follow: this is great for search engine ranking because it removes the “no follow” attributes in comments links, enabling search engines to follow them.
9. WP Content Filter: nobody wants a blog full of swearwords, so this filters out any unwanted words automatically and replaces them with wild card characters.
10. Custom Smilies: allows users to put in emoticons to comments, adding color and fun to your blog.
11. Whisper Comment: this allows commentators to “whisper” their comment to one or a group of other users.  A great tool for allowing enhanced interactivity and a sense of ownership for subscribers, which could encourage them to revisit and bring more people with them.
12. Live Comment Preview: do you want your commentators to be able to preview their comments before posting?  This plug in enables them to do just that.
13. Comment Rating: a brilliant way to allow subscribers to feel some ownership of the blog, by voting on posted comments.  Time to let your readers decide which comments deserve to be shown!
14. Most Commented: a widget that allows users to quickly access the most popular posts, by displaying those with the most comments in the sidebar.
15. Akismet: finally don’t forget that spam can be an issue with any WordPress blog, with comments boxes constantly being bombarded.  This is an essential add-on to any website builder and this is one of the most popular to kick spam comments out.

If your pages are taking too long to load, people are not going to wait. They expect lightning speed in their browsing activities and they are quick to move on if they get bored waiting for your content to appear. What can you do?

There are actually several things you can do to speed up your WordPress site’s loading time. Begin by finding a site that offers a free website speed test to find out just how long it is taking your pages to load. If it’s taking more than just a few seconds, something needs to be done. Here are some tips you can use to help increase your site’s loading speed:

All Plugins mentioned in this article are available in our Plugins Directory.

Adjust Your Theme

It’s possible, likely even, that your chosen theme is using PHP rather than HTML. Every time your page loads, it has to translate the PHP into HTML. You can install the WordPress Super Cache plugin to automatically convert your PHP into HTML.

Plugins Bogging You Down

Perhaps when you first built your free WordPress website, you went a little overboard with the plugins. Go through and get rid of any plugins you don’t need or use on a regular basis.

Check Your Web Host

Sometimes you get what you pay for in a web host. It could be that your web host is hosting more sites than it can efficiently. Do some research to determine the best website host to choose.

Control Your Image Size

If your images are large files, the chances are good that they could be slowing down the loading process for your site. Use a photo editing program to reduce the file size of your images.

Adjust Your Database

If your database is not optimized, it can really slow the loading time down for your site. If you know how, manually adjust your database. If you don’t know how, get a plugin that will do it for you like WP Database Optimizer which is in our Plugins Directory.

Disable Hotlinking

If people are copying your images and linking to your site, this will also drain speed from your loading time.

Post Revisions Are A Drag

Every time you revise a post, WordPress is adding a file to the database. Disable the “Post Revisions” option and get rid of old posts that have been revised. If the site doesn’t have to read and load them every time, it will speed up.

Combine Javascripts

Reduce the number of javascript codes you are running on your page. Often, five or six can be reduced to two or three, and that can make a big difference.

Compress the CSS

You can compress your CSS into a single file using special compressing tools online. You can also do this with your javascript.

Clean Your Options

One plugin you should install and keep is the “Clean Options” plugin. It will remove any remnants of deleted plugins.

There are other ways to improve your site’s speed, but these 10 steps will help you create a website that loads with impressive speed, and will stay that way.

The tools you have at your disposal can make it easy for you to increase your sales, your site members, your discussions and more. Knowing which ones will make the biggest difference when there are so many to choose from can be tricky, but here are ten plugins that every WordPress website user should know about.

You can find all 10 Plugins in our onsite directory.

1. Mobile Press

This plugin makes your site as useful to someone visiting from a mobile device as one visiting from his or her computer. You can customize your site for mobile viewing and even track mobile views.

2. Wapple Mobile Architect

Since not all mobile devices work the same or use the same web programs, it only makes sense to customize your site to work with individual devices. This plugin does that for you, offering consistency for your mobile viewers.

3. WordPress Wiki

This plugin allows you to create a wiki within WordPress.

4. TDO Mini Forms

With this plugin, you can create customizable forms that let your members and users submit posts that you can approve or disapprove for publication to your site.

5. Members

This plugin is great if you have multiple users contributing to your site. It allows you to set boundaries for users, and determine what capabilities and role each user or member has, and allows you greater control over your content.

6. WP e-Commerce

The e-Commerce plugin for WordPress provides you with a full-feature shopping cart to accommodate sales on your site or for collecting required fees.

7. eShop

Another e-Commerce tool, but this one gives you more flexibility, allowing downloads, sales completed through email, as well as shipping options for products. It also includes an auto-responder for completed sales.

8. Business Directory

Let your customers input their own business information that you can include in a directory right on your site. Users can include descriptions of their business, URLs, contact information, and any other information you want to make available. This can also be a powerful SEO tool for your site.

9. Calendar

Make a calendar available on your site to list upcoming events, sales, and appointments. You can list multiple events per day, and users can see the details of each event, by either clicking on the date or hovering over the date with their pointer.

10. Social Bookmarks

One of the best ways to promote your site or business is through social sites, like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. This plugin allows visitors to post your site to their social networking page, making it visible to all of their friends and followers.

While there are many powerful plugins you can include on your WordPress website, the tools you use will depend on the type of site you have, and can determine the reach and impact of your site will have to the online community.

If you have a WordPress blog, almost all your traffic will arrive from a search engine, so you need to start talking their language.  Here are some simple solutions that will help you improve your search engine ranking and dramatically increase the traffic entering your site:

Basic Steps for Improving Your Rank

Search engines use many different parameters for ranking web pages, so it can take a lot of time to tick every box.  So when you receive your website builder, work on getting the basics right and half the battle is won.  Firstly, keyword density is important.  Putting a list of keywords together that make no sense just won’t work.  You need to form natural sentences using the keyword phrase and try to scatter it five or six times within the text, including in the first sentence and last paragraph. The keyword density monitor plug-in allows you to quickly check each post, ensuring you keep the search engines happy.

You can also improve your ranking by looking for similar keywords on the same theme and scattering those in the blog once or twice.  Simply type part of your keyword phrase into Google and it will list other phrases and the number of searches.  For example, if you type, “how to write a WordPress blog” you’ll also see that “how to write a WordPress post” is a popular search keyphrase.

Create a Sitemap

Using an XML-sitemap for your blog allows search engines to quickly check through your content and look for keywords, which can improve your ranking.  The Google XML-sitemaps generator is compatible with all the major search engines and an excellent addition to any free website builder program.

Make Use of Multimedia

Adding images, video and sound makes your site more exciting for the visitor, as well as helping to drive traffic through Google’s multimedia search engines.  Using a plug-in such as SEO Friendly Images is really useful, because it automatically updates all your images with proper title attributes to increase traffic from Google Image Search.

It’s not just about your site!

Finally don’t forget external links, because search engines also rank pages by the number of links to your site.  You can easily achieve this using a free social media plug-in, which invite your visitors to submit your posts on up to 100 social bookmarking sites.  Some of the most popular social plug-ins are ShareThis, Sociable or Gregarious, all available through our WordPress Resource Directory.  Or even more simply, LinktothisPage is a plug-in that allows visitors to quickly and easily link your site to their own.

People won’t know your site is there unless you tell them, and the best way to build traffic to your website is by making it easy for them to find you in a web search. WordPress has many plugins that use SEO techniques and optimizes your content by helping you choose the right tags to use, how to create killer titles, and to use terms the search engines will latch onto.

All of these plugins are available in our Plugins Directory.

All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack is probably the most highly recommended plugin for SEO on WordPress. In can be an effective tool for both beginners and veterans. This plugin will help you come up with the perfect titles and keywords, and site descriptions to get your site noticed and drive web traffic to your website. The more you work with the plugin, the more you can make it work for you.

SEO Watcher

This plugin checks the pulse of your site daily by checking your Google rankings on WordPress. You can enter up to three URLs and keywords, and the plugin will tell you if the sites are listed in Google’s top 100.

SEO Title Tag

The SEO Title Tag optimizes your title tags throughout your site, including all of your content, not just titles. This plugin allows you to do mass editing of title tags and pages in one shot. You can replace a page’s title tag with one that’s customized to improve search engine visibility.

Google XML Sitemaps

By generating a XML sitemap for your pages, the search engines can index your site more effectively, and that will generate more traffic for your site. Every time you create new content or a new post, the XML sitemap will alert the major search engines, like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask, and that helps build traffic to your website.

SEO Smart Links

This plugin not only helps you create personalized keyword lists, but it also links your keywords and phrases with other posts and pages within your site, automatically interlinking your posts, and allowing you to link affiliate sites to your own.

While there are hundreds of free plugins on WordPress that can help you build a website that gets you a higher ranking with the search engines, not all of them are worth the effort it takes to make them work for you. The five listed are must haves, and are all easy to install and operate, and will make a noticeable difference in your visitor stats. Once you begin working with the plugins and can tell how they are making a difference in your traffic, you will learn to use them even more effectively, and their value to your business will continue to grow.

Knowledge Is Power

The key to making your site attractive for search engines is to understand your target market.  As soon as you begin with your website builder, you need to know which keywords are being searched for, how your viewers arrive and which pages they like best.  This enables you to make the most of your content, ensure you’re using the appropriate keywords and helps you to create a loyal readership.  Google Analytics, StatPress and PostRatings are all free plug-ins which analyze various statistics about your visitors.  Go to our WordPress Resource Directory where you can download one for free.

Making The Most Of Your Content

The basic rule of driving traffic to your site is to write with search engine optimization in mind.  Content is key because a search engine cannot actually see a site.  It’s the words that do the talking.  You still need to create interesting, relevant and original content, otherwise your visitors won’t return.  Yet don’t waste hours with your website builder focusing on themes, fonts and colors.  If you don’t drive traffic to your site, no one will see it anyway!

Here are some basic rules to optimizing your content:

• Stick to a single topic: each page or post should be focused and relevant.  Don’t just put in random keywords, as search engine technology can detect this.  They look for how tightly focused a page is, so it’s better to write about a single topic.
• Don’t overdo the keywords:  you need to use your chosen keywords throughout your post several times, plus you also need to place them in the title.  Try to naturally integrate them into the structure so that your content is easy to read.
• Don’t forget a title and description:  these appear when your site is listed in search rankings.  They should also contain your keywords or keyphrase, which can boost your ranking as well as enticing the reader to click on your site.

All In One SEO

If you’re new to search engine optimization, there’s a great plug-in called the All in One SEO pack, available in our resource directory.  It effectively helps you increase your search engine success with very little effort, by automatically optimizing your titles and metatags.  This package is excellent for beginners and best of all it’s completely free.

1. Be specialized! Find a niche and deliver great content.  Don’t try to write about everything because this will just put people off.  Choose something you know a lot about, for example dog training, how to build a shed, acrylic nails or how to customize vintage clothes.  If you specialize you can focus your promotional efforts on your exact target market and pull in a larger segment of that specific market.
2. Post on other forums: find forums in your niche area and use your writing to develop a following that will lead them back to your website.
3. Cross-promotion: find a blog with related content that’s not in direct competition with your own.  You can then agree to cross promote each other using RSS feeds, again supported with the Feedvertising plug-in.
4. Invite readers to subscribe: this may sound obvious, but it’s okay to ask!  At the end of your posts, add a line recommending people subscribe for more of the same great content.  Don’t forget a link to your subscription page too!
5. Show how popular you are: if people see that over 500 people are already subscribing, it’s good sign that there’s something worth coming back for.
6. Keep your blog active: you need to keep updating your content to make readers want to come back again.   You should be adding fresh content 3 to 5 times per week to keep your blog’s traffic growing and your visitors happy.
7. Feed to Twitter: some people like receiving their feeds direct to Twitter.  You can also use Twitter and other social sites to publicize your blog and spread links to your network and beyond. Twitter Feed, ShareThis and Sociable are really useful WordPress plug-ins to do this and are available on our resources and plug ins page.
8. Content is King! Finally don’t forget without great content that’s meaningful to your subscribers, they simply won’t come back for more.  It’s easy to create great content using a free website builder.  Just choose your niche, do your research and find out what people what to read about.

All you need is to spend a bit of time researching how the Adsense program works.  What you’ll discover is that even with high volumes of traffic, simply sticking a unit anywhere on your WordPress website won’t convert to decent earnings.  Yet there are some simple tried and tested methods for maximizing Adsense revenue, which could see you triple your earnings within 30 days.  Try them out and you could be well on your way to your first $100 day, with many more to come.

Location is Everything

One of the most important lessons Adsense entrepreneurs have learnt is to get the placement of ad units right.  You’re looking to increase your click through rate, and by simply choosing the best location and following a few simple rules you can dramatically increase your earnings.

Successful entrepreneurs report their click through rates skyrocketing when they employ a 336×280 unit placed below the post titles on their WordPress site.  This proves to be much more successful than between the post and the comments section.  Also using the left hand sidebar can be successful, much more than the right.  The best thing to do is to try different locations and see which has the best conversion rate for your site.  It’s easy to check, just try the unit in several different places and see which generates the most conversion.

Use a larger unit

To make decent earnings from Adsense you’ll need to place a fairly large unit on your WordPress site.  Some people even use up to three per page.  Overall the 336×280 unit appears to have the most success.

Add aggressively to low traffic sites

Having a few sites scattered around the internet that yield just a small amount of visitors is a simple way to generate some extra Adsense income.  These sites are so easy to set up using a free website builder and take very little maintenance.  Because traffic is low you don’t have to worry about aggressively using Adsense units, meaning you can place three per page in the prime locations (below the post titles, on the left side bar and below the body of the text).  These sites can yield a high click through rate, despite the low traffic levels.  Don’t underestimate the earning potential of your smaller websites.

Protecting your loyal readers

Some people worry about annoying loyal readers by placing large advertising units across their sites.  One way to get around this is to place larger units on posts more than 7 days old.  This works because loyal readers log in more regularly and see more recent posts, plus they oblivious to advertising units over time anyway.  Then you can rely on search engine traffic, which tend to come to older posts, to click on the ads and increase your revenue.

Quality not quantity

If you choose a niche, you can successfully optimize your lower levels of traffic and it can be just as effective at generating good levels of income.  If you are creating a new site for Adsense rather than using it on an existing site, do your research and find a niche you know will pull in a lot of well converting traffic.

Test to see what works

The best way to work with Adsense is to try different things and see what works for your site.  Don’t give up just because you have a low conversion rate.  Try different things to see what increases your percentage.  Simple techniques like changing the layout, theme or ad design can increase your conversion rate significantly.  For example, simply removing the Adsense border can increase the click through rate on some WordPress sites by up to 2%.  Try it out and see if it works for you!

Just because you’re making money elsewhere…

Don’t underestimate the power of Adsense, even if you’re already making money from affiliate marketing and direct sponsors.  You could still use Adsense to increase your earnings, even by $100 per month, by placing some strategically placed units.