Simply put, keywords are words or combinations of words that are used more than others. For instance, if you told 100 people to search online for information about making money with online surveys, you would find they type in a whole bunch of different words into Google. Perhaps as many as 75 of the 100 people might type in something totally different than everybody else. However, the remaining 25 might have some similar choices.

Out of those last 25, you might have 2 that are the same, 3 that are also something the same, 7 that are the same, and finally the last 13 might all be the same exact words that people used to do their research. So the last 25 might look something like this:

make money surveys – 13 people
online surveys- 7 people
how to make money surveys- 3 people
surveys for money- 2 people

Those 4 keyword phrases are what you would want to investigate and depending on the competition, you might want to try to get ranked for them. There are many free and paid keyword tools online but the two I use are G Trends and Adwords Keyword Tool which are both free.

As I have stated many times, most CashCraters don’t have a clue about keywords and by default try to get ranked for the word “CashCrate” or some other variation. This is not a good strategy as I have proven that there not a lot of money in the keyword “CashCrate”.

One tactic commonly used to get ranked for CashCrate is to buy a domain name with the word “CashCrate” in the URL. Although this may work for a week or two and your new blog may even get to the first page, you will suddenly disappear because you have no BACKLINKS. You need anchored backlinks to get your blogs to Google’s front page and for them to stay there. Simply buying a domain name with the word in it is not enough because there is too much competition. If you want to learn about anchored backlinks you need to read more of this blog as I can’t cover the same material over and over.

You should spend a lot of time trying to figure out different keywords to shoot for. Once you decide on some keywords, you then need to write posts with those keywords in the title and body of the post. You then need to get anchored backlinks using those keywords. You then need to write more posts with those keywords in them and then get more backlinks. Eventually, if you have chosen keywords that are not too competitive, you will see some movement in your blog in the SERPS. Making money on the Internet and with online surveys for money referrals is not easy. If you keep at it though, you will eventually start to see some progress and more hits for your blogs.

The concept is that you have a choice when you start a blog and write posts for it: you can try to make money with or without bullshit.

Most of you might know the “without bullshit” part which means you write the best blog posts you can in an effort to entice your reader to sign up for something. You want to sound credible and give a good review of the product or service in the hopes of convincing your reader to click through to sign up. Your blog is the written pretty much as well as you can because you want to sound professional. This blog, for instance, is pretty much “without bullshit” as most of the writing is done a bit deliberately and meant to be read and followed (even though most readers don’t give a shit and click away because all they want are quick CashCrate referrals the easy way because they are lazy).

The other way to make money online with blogs is by writing bullshit. For this you really need to use Adsense, Chitiqa, Yahoo publisher ads or maybe even some affiliate products but probably NOT CashCrate. You will be composing blog content that is not your best writing and quite general in nature. This works well for many niches like home improvement, gardening and many others where you can write very unspecific posts about a topic and never answer the readers question. The longer the posts the better and the more boring they are the better too.

The goal here is to write accurate yet long and boring posts that will bore the hell out of the reader and have them trying to get out as fast as they can. Many will hit the “back” button but some will click on an Adsense ad or an affiliate ad just to get out. Rather than wanting people to stay and read what you have to say, you WANT them to leave…preferably through one of your ads.

Most CashCrate blogs I see are not really either of these two options. They are just a page or two of copied verbage from the CashCrate site. Those will never get referrals which is why there are threads started everyday in the forum whining about “I can’t get any referalls, booo hoo hoooo”. Well if you got off your butt and started writing and putting some EFFORT into your blog and got anchored backlinks, you might get somewhere.

BTW even though I don’t care and there are not many hits to be had for the word “CashCrate‘, this blog is now often on the first page of Google for that term. And where are all the blogs that actually have “CashCrate” in the URL? Several people bragging in the forum about buying URLs with great CashCrate names. Where are you guys? No where to be found! Oh, THAT’S BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE ANY OPTIMIZED POSTS AND ANCHORED BACKLINKS! 

As I mentioned earlier, the bullshit strategy is probably NOT a good strategy to get online surveys for money referrals for sites such as CashCrate. For that type of referral you want to convince your reader through your honest writing or through payment proof in the form of check pictures and videos that good money can be made. CashCrate is legitimate and you can make a lot of money with them which is what you will be trying to prove to your reader. You can’t prove anything with bullshit so use that for one of your other niches.

The casual blogger puts up a family blog of photos or their life’s journey and they have no intention of ever making money. Yet other bloggers and potential bloggers have heard about blogging for a living and easy money making by blogging and so they set out to try to do it. Unfortunately for them, they have no clue how it’s done and have all the wrong expectations.

I am not a blogger but I do make money blogging. Does that make sense? I have a lot of blogs (including this one) and on none of them do I ever want to become well known, famous, or have a huge following. Really, I don’t care about anything other than making money. The blogs, and blogging, are the instruments I make money with and nothing more. All I care about is learning how to make money and getting more CashCrate referrals.

I am an Internet marketer and not a blogger. I set up a blog and from the first post I try to strategically figure out what to write about, what keywords to use, how to get links, and how to get traffic. If I do succeed in getting traffic, then and only then does the fun start. Once I get traffic I then can figure out how to monetize it. Of course I have an idea before hand of what I will do but sometimes things change.

Being an Internet marketer instead of a blogger means that I pay special attention to figuring out what affiliate products to sell, where to put the ads, where to put the Adsense ads if I have them, and all things to do with ad placement and making money. Each blog is a big puzzle and when you get traffic to it you need to be able to figure out how to capitalize on that traffic and turn it into money. Internet marketing is a business and blogging is just how I do my business. With each new blog I begin, I am starting a small business online, or at least I am trying to.

Many of the CashCrate newbies set out to make a blog as they hear that is the best way to get referrals. CashCrate tends to get a young audience and many of them are teenagers and people in their 20′s. Blogging for 15 year olds is not something many of them want to do or have any interest in. All they end up doing is copying and pasting a few things from the CashCrate website and putting them on their “blog”. They think that is enough to get paid online surveys referrals but you can’t make money being lazy.

Blogging can be a business if you set out to make it a business and get search engine traffic. You can make a lot of money with the right kind of targeted traffic but you can’t make much money from return visitors which is what most bloggers are hoping for. The standard make money blogger hopes to create a following and become so popular that everyone will buy affiliate products from him. This is a dream that will never happen to 99% of the bloggers out there. Yet they are too naive to ever recognize this and they keep on trying.

Do you want to make money or do you want to be a blogger? That is the question you need to answer before you go to far with your blog. If you are writing blog posts and hoping they get Tweeted, Stumbled, and Digged, then you are a blogger and are not going down the right path to making money. If you want to learn how to make money blogging, then you need to learn about keywords, keyword research, getting links, on and off page SEO. You need to also learn how to sell things to your readers.

If you want to make money online and with paid online surveys, you need to target audiences that HAVE NEVER HEARD OF CASHCRATE! Do any of you understand that?

Whenever I take a peek at the CashCrate forum, I see newbie after newbie bragging about their new blog which proudly has the name CashCrate in it and is a one or two page piece of spam blog. I guess their goal is to get lots of hits from people searching for CashCrate if they have any plan at all which they don’t.

I have proof that there is NO MONEY IN THE KEYWORD “CASHCRATE”. In other words, even if you are successful and get to the top of Google for that word (which you won’t), there are not enough people searching for it to make it worthwhile.

The proof is in this post from Broke Grad Student where he writes about having made $1000.00 with CashCrate. He shows his payouts for 2009 which total $594.70 and that is great accept that I sometimes make that in ONE WEEK and he did it in 7 MONTHS! (see my CashCrate check proof and note that very few if any of my referrals come from this blog)

Now if you do a Google search for the word ”CashCrate” you will see that Broke Grad Student is in position #3 (and #4)  for that term that everyone is chasing so hard. (see below)  His blog has been in that 3rd position for quite some time and all he has gotten out of it is $594.70 and that proves there are very few searches for “CashCrate”!

This blog has also briefly been on and off the first page for CashCrate and I have hardly gotten any hits at all. So, before you run out and make a new blog, figure out some other strategy and make a blog about people who need money. Make your blog about college students or out of work workers or any other segment of the population that needs some extra income. Target those keywords and when you start getting people who need money or want money, then you start selling them the CashCrate paid online surveys opportunity.

Just a short post here about the progress of this blog in relation to where it stands on Google for the keywords I am targeting. Again, you need to pick keywords that people use and get anchored links back to your site using those keywords. That is how you move up in the search engine rankings and make money getting CashCrate referrals. If you want to learn more, start reading my blog from the very beginning.

A great free tool you can use to see where you stand in the various data centers around the country for various keywords is this one – Google Data Center Tool. There are data centers around the US that all will give you slightly different search results. So, for instance if you search for “CashCrate” in San Francisco you might get different results than you would if you did the same search in Atlanta. Usually they are very similar though so it is not a big deal. If you are near the top of Google in your area, you are probably near the top in other areas too.

The main keyword I am targeting now is ”paid online surveys” and this blog is in about 13th place for that term (next day now and it is #21 so it bounces around alot).  I have also gone after “online surveys for money” and this blog is in about 12 place for that one. I’m not making much progress with “surveys for money” as the 26 spot is the best I can do so far and I will probably back off of that one to concentrate more on the first term I listed.

Lastly, I discovered that I was anywhere from 9th to 12th for “CashCrate” and I haven’t even been trying for that one! Now maybe I will attempt to move up for that term even though I have preached over and over to concentrate on other keywords. If I can get on the first page of Google for ‘CashCrate” without much effort, I might as well do it I guess.

This blog is around 4 months old and it is probably averaging about 40 uniques a day. That is not a lot for all the effort I have put in and many people would probably be discouraged if they were in my shoes. But I know that the numbers are slowly going up and if I can move higher and onto the first page of Google for “paid online surveys” it will help. After I do that I will then target some other keyword and then another and another all the while trying to maintain or improve my position for the ones I have. That’s how it is done.

Well, after building a Hub page, trading a link or two, doing a guest post, and writing some articles, this blog is now in about the 83rd position on Google for “surveys for money”. That is a nice bit of improvement but there is still a long way to go.

Guest posting on other people’s blogs is a way of getting anchored backlinks that I haven’t mentioned but it is a lot of work. You usually have to write an original article for any blog owner to accept it and it has to have some quality in it.

I do a lot of article marketing which is writing articles and putting your author bio in with a couple of anchored backlinks to my sites. I submit the articles to more than a handful of directories and that is also a lot of work. Everything is work and that’s just the way it is. If you want to succeed you have to work. Kinda like real life.

Will this blog ever make it to the first page of Google for “surveys for money”? I have no idea but I know it will take awhile. That means months….maybe even 6 months to a year depending on how much time I put into it. But you see, I am in no hurry because I have other blogs I can be working on and have to write stuff for too. All my eggs are not in one basket and neither should yours.

This might seem strange at first that you actually want to make friends with your competitors. After all, every other blog out there that promotes any of the survey sites is your competition. There are hundreds of CashCrate blogs and they are all trying to do the same thing: get CashCrate referrals and make money. If you help each other out, won’t you be helping out your competition?

Making Friends Is Always The Best Option

The answer to that is that in most cases, two blog owners can help each other whether they are competing or not. This is another reason why it is important to pick keywords you think you can rank for and try to stay focused at moving up Google with those keywords. There are only 10 spots on Google’s 1st page and that means everyone can not rank for the word “CashCrate”. When you find someone to exchange links with, they really should be targeting different words than you. I have talked about that in this post about how to get survey referrals.You need to think creatively when targeting words and find keyword combinations that are searched for and are not directly related to CashCrate.

Even if you find someone who is targeting the exact same keywords as you, is it still beneficial to trade links with them? It is and this is because you will both be strengthening your keyword authority for your keywords. Remember, every anchored link that you give out and that you get back in is telling Google what you blog is about or what the blog you are linking to is about.

3 Way Link Trades Are Best

Trading links 1 to 1 with someone is OK but it is not the best option. If I link to your blog and you link right back to mine, all we are doing is passing Google juice back and forth. It is obvious to Google that this was arranged and so the value of the links is less than if someone links to you from out of the blue. Ideally, you want to have links coming into your blog and not going out to the same places.

As an example, lets say you write the most spectacular article or post on your blog that has ever been written. This article is so fabulous that all the major networks pick it up and link to it. CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC and all the others have blogs and news services on the Internet and they all link to your spectacular article of the century. So do hundreds of other blogs and the visitors stream in to your site by the thousands. Of course this is fantasy for the normal blog owner but in that case all the incoming links would happen because of something you wrote and people would be linking to you voluntarily and you would NOT be linking back to them.  

This is what Google likes to see: one way links. In that example, Google would very quickly figure out that with all the links streaming in to your site from all the news sites that your article was something spectacular and newsworthy. All those links would tell them what the article was about and they would most likely quickly rank it in spot #1 on the 1st page of the search engine.

You Need More Than One Blog

In order to get 3 way link exchanges where your links don’t cross, you really need to have more than one blog. If you just have one blog and the other person has only one blog as well, you are pretty limited in your options. If you each have multiple blogs though, you can figure out ways to exchange links and get the most out of them.

The quality of your blogs will also matter at some point as people don’t want to be exchanging links with blogs that look like crap or like spam. I know it is very difficult to write quality material when you are just starting out but it is to your advantage to start a flagship blog that you take ownership of and work hard on. Unfortunately most people will fail at making CashCrate referrals and money online because they just don’t have the time or want to work hard enough to do this.

The more successful you become at making survey referrals,the more you will understand the value of making friends, exchanging links and favors, and having at least one quality blog. You want to grow your assets into something that people will want to exchange links with and that means putting in some time and effort on at least one blog. Not every blog has to be your best but when the opportunity crops up for a possible link exchange, it would be nice to have at least one blog you are proud of and not embarrassed by. Remember, make as many friends as you can, exchange anchored links, watch your blog move up in the SERPS, and you will start to make some CashCrate referrals. 

StatCounter will work on all WordPress self hosted blogs and most importantly it will work on Blogger blogs. There is a whole list of blog platforms it is compatible with so if you have something else, sign up and investigate. Again it is free for the basic account and that is all you will ever really need.

You will have to follow instructions on how to set it up properly but once you do, it will keep track of the most recent 500 hits to any of your blogs or websites that it is installed on. Five hundred hits is more than enough and you will never need to upgrade to get more although you can if you like. You can see a picture of what some of the traffic looks like for this blog so far below.

Right now, you can tell that there is just a hodgepodge of words and no real trend that has materialized yet. A couple of the searches were for backlinks, a few for survey referrals, and a few more for some sort of proof of payment search. At this point, all that information is useless to me because I am interested only in finding a trend that I can identify. Maybe something like get paid for surveys or some other keyword phrase that might have potential.

You need a stat tool like this because you need to see what keywords people are using to find you and then you can go get anchored links for those keywords and move up even further. When you write your posts, you may be targeting a certain keyword or keyword phrase but sometimes you will find that people find your blog by searching for groups of words you never thought of. This is the tool that will help you find those hidden keyword phrases that you can take advantage of. If you don’t have such a tool and you never keep track of how people are finding your blog, you can never do the proper link building you need to do to get your blog higher in the search rankings.

Many people who start CashCrate blogs just have a few posts and one or two pages. This limits the amount of material that is on their blog and the different ways people can find them. The longer you make your posts and the more posts you make ulimately will help you find keyword phrases that you might never have thought of that can make you money. Getting CashCrate referrals is not easy and you have to work to get them. Those that work harder and put more material on their blog and make their blogs look professional will have a better chance (with correct link building) of getting referrals than someone who just slaps something up and calls it a day.

Of course there are exceptions to what I have just said. You can put up a one page blog and if you hit the exact right set of keywords or are in the right niche, you might get traffic and be able to keep it coming. That doesn’t happen very often though and the best way to increase your chances of being successful with getting referrals to the surveys for money sites is to make a good looking blog, write long targeted keyword posts, and constantly get anchored backlinks. Then you need to keep track of the hits you are getting with a tool like StatCounter and look for keyword trends so that you can take advatage of those opportunities as well.

In my last post I started the discussion about the importance of having a plan with your blog and targeting specific keywords to get traffic. So many people start a blog with no plan and think (hope really) that visitors will just start showing up. I know this because I was once one of the clueless people starting a blog and having absolutely no idea how get traffic to come to it. That was years ago before I learned how to make online survey referrals. Folks, the Internet is not magic and unless you do certain things, NO ONE WILL EVER FIND YOUR BLOG! Period.

Many of you are taken in with trying to get traffic to your blogs from the social websites that are all the rage right now. I’m talking about sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Getting traffic from these sites is what all the “A-List” bloggers preach and most people go down that line all the way to failure. Social traffic will not convert for survey referrals or any other kind of referrals you want to make to make extra cash. You need targeted search engine traffic and not social traffic to make money online.

The only way people are ever going to find your blog is if it shows up in the search engines (Google) on the FIRST page for specific search terms you are strategically targeting. Targeted traffic for someone hoping to make referrals to any of the online surveys for money sites would be people searching for ways to make money. You need to think about who and what type of people need money, what they are searching  for, and go after them.

Most people who start a CashCrate blog are hoping to get visitors who search for CashCrate. I know this because they use “CashCrate” or some variation of that in their URL and title. I know that because that is all they talk about: how great CashCrate is and how they are making money with it. Meanwhile they make a referral here and there but it never adds up to much and they only get a few visitors. Most of their visitors have probably already heard of and signed up for CashCrate anyway and they have no chance of making a referral.

So, how are the people who do so well in the referral contests making all those referrals? Again I show you the results for the February contest where the 10th place person had 361 active referrals in just one month all the way up to the 1st place winner with over 1000 active CashCrate referrals! Since probably only 50% of referrals become active for anyone, all these people were probably signing up at least double the numbers you see on the chart!  

Many of you that will read this blog may never get that many active referrals in your lifetime. I am not saying that to be condescending but just because I know it is true. I see on the CashCrate forum when people get all excited and brag that they made 2 or 3 referrals in a day. Then there is the thread where everyone tells each other how much they have made for the month. Poster after poster is ecstatic if they make enough just to meet the payment threshold for the month! I can tell you I am unhappy when I make less than $50 in a DAY!

If you don’t change the way you are doing things and learn the right way to get paid surveys  for money referrals,you will never have numbers like you see in the graph shown above. I can also tell you that those people  have not targeted the keyword “CashCrate” to bring in those referrals. There probably are hardly that many searches for the term in total for the month.

The people who know how to make referrals bring people in from the back door. By this I mean they are finding people who are searching for something unrelated to CashCrate but related to making money. You have to think to yourself: Who would be interested in making money and what would they be searching for? If you can find people who want to find ways to make money, you have found the perfect type of people who might be interested in signing up. Finding people who want to make money online is the exact targeted traffic you are searching for and trying to find.

Here are some possible types of web surfers and keywords that would make the perfect kind of targeted traffic for any paid surveys blog hoping to make referrals:

college students
just laid off
just lost job
need a job
make extra money
earn spending money
earn extra cash
part time jobs
night time jobs
seniors looking for jobs
how to make money

If you use your imagination, that list can go on and on into the hundreds of terms I am sure. In each case above, that type of person or people searching for those things would be potential referrals to CashCrate. Also, those people would probably have never heard of CashCrate before so they are just the ones you need to target. In short, you need to find people who are looking to make some extra spending money and have never heard of CashCrate. That is the type of targeted traffic you seek to explode your online survey referrals and start to make more money than you ever thought you could. Those are the terms you need to build your blogs around.

online surveys
paid online surveys
surveys for money
online surveys for money
paid surveys
paid surveys for money

When you pick your blog domain and plan out a strategy for your blog, keywords that you want to target are extremely important. Without a plan targeting specific keywords and keyword phrases, your blog will probably be ranked nowhere and  never found by anyone. Choosing your keywords and your overall plan of action is perhaps the hardest thing you will have to do to make CashCrate referrals online and make money on the Internet in general.

To pick keywords you have to get information about how many people search for specific groups of words. For that I use GTrends and the Google Adwords keyword tool which are both free. Listed below is a chart of 5 of those keyword phrases showing how many searches per month there are for each as well as what people are paying for Adwords for them.

So these are the main keywords I hope to target along with “CashCrate” and “referrals”. If I  can get this blog on the first page for those terms I will start to see some generic search engine traffic which is what every blog owner should want.

It should be noted that the numbers you see on this tool or any other tool you ever use might be incorrect. Even if you are using a tool you paid for the numbers may be wildly incorrect. Sometimes the only way to really know how many searches a term gets is to get into that number one position on the first page and see what kind of traffic results. This is not what you wanted to hear and sometimes it will mean you waste time on a term or blog thinking it will get more traffic than it acually does. There is not much to do about it other than move on to some other term. It’s all part of the Internet marketing game we play.

Now an important point I want to make, and I will write a whole post about this later, is that most people wanting to make Cash Crate referrals would only think to target the word “CashCrate’. That word does, according to the keyword tool, get about 12,000 searches per month but you need to expand your mind and think out of the box.

Bloggers build their whole blog around CashCrate hoping to get people searching for “CashCrate”. The problem with this is that some of the people, maybe even many of the people who search for “CashCrate” have already heard of it. You know they have already heard of it otherwise they couldn’t be searching for it. So, it stands to reason, that some of them have already signed up for it and are just looking for opinions or tips and tricks. You can’t make a referral with these people no matter how great your site is because they are already members!

You need to figure out other types of people who want or need to make money and are likely to sign up. You need to figure out what those people would be searching for and then target those terms. For instance, if you could get your blog to the top of Google for the words “make extra money” or “how to make money” then you would have people finding your blog who are very likely to sign up to CahsCrate and who have most likely never heard of it! Bingo! You would then have a great opportunity to make tons of CashCrate referrals and to sell them other things too. Again, I will cover this concept more completely in a future post.