This question is typical of the frustration of anyone just starting out trying to make money online. Not only is there tons of confusion about what to do, but if they do continue on and work hard, will it all pay off? Will their blog ever make money? Will anyone ever see it?

It is easy to get discourged and that right there is why most people quit. Much of it has to do with the keywords you target. If you target something too competitive, you will never make it to the first page of Google. If you target something too easy, you will get to the top but there may be no one searching for those keywords and that is why it was easy to get there. Either way you may never get any search traffic and it is all because of the words you targeted.

Of course that is all if you even know what keywords are and know how to plan a blog with a specific course of action. People who are in tune with current events and the things happening around them are best able to make money online. They are able to figure out what words people are searching for.

Take my blog that you are reading and look at the content I have written. It contains tons of content by most people’s standards (47 posts I think) and now I am really trying to figure out what direction to go. I have mentioned this before but it seems like I may have targeted some bad keywords like online surveys for money. I don’t want to go into my whole thought process for this blog but right now I have spent more time than it was worth.

However, I still have an asset. I have a blog that is getting older by the day (that is good) and it has a PR 2. I can use it for link exchanges and I can also change course at any time and target different keywords. Just because it is not producing right now like I want it too doesn’t mean it is and always will be a failure.

My advantage is that I know I can make money online and most beginners don’t know that. I know that not every blog I make will be a success and that is why I have many blogs. Most of you have one blog and all your eggs are in that one basket.

Back to the readers question: you should write at least 4 more Ezine articles and link to your main page for one link and an inner page for the second link using anchor text. You need to get your Hub score above 75 and keep it there. You need to write more content for your site. And after that you need more content again. The more you write, the more words Google has to pick from when looking at your site. Sometimes people search for things you would have never thought of and if you have tons of content on your blog, maybe those combinations of words are there.

You can write guest posts for other people’s blogs and they will let you put in a do-follow anchored link or two to your blog. That is why you need a good looking blog with MORE content so that other blog owners will accept your posts. You would need to save your best writing for those guest posts so they are accepted. Don’t just ask anyone though: find a blog that has a little PR or some authority and has been around a while. Try this one as I and many others have done guest posts here:  http://moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com/. But you need a bigger blog before you do that so you have some credibility.

Finally, you need to find people to exchange links with. This is hard but if you have the guts it will help you greatly to contact other blogs and try to work out 3 way exchanges. That is why it is smart to have 2 or 3 blogs for every niche you have and to make them look better than some of the crappy CashCrate blogs that are out there.

If you want to see an example of a successful blog please see my review of make money online free and click through to Trini’s blog. She has turned that into a money making blog that anyone would like to exchange links with. Look at the work she has done there.

The reader who asks this question has a blog that has about 3 posts and is brand new. Seriously, if anyone thinks they can slap up three posts and a few articles, they need to go back and read my whole blog again. IT ISN’T EASY AND YOU HAVE TO DO TONS OF WORK AND IT MIGHT NOT PAY OFF FOR SIX MONTHS! In fact, if you target too competitive keywords, you might never get any traffic. That is why 99 out of 100 fail and give up. Sorry, but its true.

The reality is that the only way you will ever succeed is to keep on trying and keep targeting different keywords. You have to slap things up against the wall and see what sticks. Did I mention that just about every CashCrate blog I have seen is NOT A BLOG and need more original content? If you can’t put up some original content then your chance of making money online is pretty slim.

BTW, I might be trying some things and looking for new keywords on this blog very soon myself. You might see some weird posts that don’t teach you much.

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.

The second you land on her blog you know that the blog owner really cares about it (and likes pink). The main reason I chose her blog is that it has the makings of a real flagship blog that she can use down the line to join affiliate networks and make money. It is better than 99% of the other CashCrate “blogs” which people slap up on Blogger.

This blog looks pretty and it looks coordinated and you can tell that someone has spent a lot of time putting it together. Most of all, the pink color helps to give it a personality and that is a good thing. The blog looks alive, it is updated regularly, and through it you get to know a little bit about the person called TriNi.

 What Is The Goal Of The Blog?

The real question though, is what is her goal with the blog. Many people like to blog and just like having a place where they can record their thoughts and maybe have someone read them. They don’t care about making money. Other people blog because they want to make money and that is the only reason they do it. A third group might fall somewhere in between those two. In other words, they like blogging and would probably blog for free but they would like to make some money too.

I am going to assume the one and only goal of this blog is to make money in which case I have a few suggestions. The first is to do away with as much of the “clutter” as possible. If you have a blog that you want to make money with, you need to do away with as many of the distractions as you can. Your sole purpose with the blog is to get targeted traffic to it, have them sign up for an offer, and then leave. That’s it. Come, sign up, leave.

Get Rid Of The Clutter

In my opinion, the PayPal piggy on the right sidebar needs to be taken out because I bet not one person has ever donated a dime. It looks great but it is a waste of space and a distraction that will never make any money. Same thing for the Associated Content widget as that makes no money either and it a way people can leave or get distracted before they sign up.

I also do not like Twitter (I might be in the minority about this) and would take out the “Follow Me On Twitter” and the Twitter updates at the bottom. This is purely my opinion but I just don’t see how Twitter will ever make any money for a blog owner. An argument can be made that it does help legitimize the blog as a “social” blog but then again if you want to make money you are not going to do it with social traffic. I understand the reason for leaving it in but I just wanted to make the point that the more things you have like Twitter that distracts the viewer from signing up for offers, the less money you might make.

I would also try to consolidate the categories in the middle widget that goes way down the page. Holy cow, I have never seen so many categories on a blog and all the bottom ones only have one entry! Again, all those categories serve as a distraction. You want things simple so that they arrive on your blog, sign up for something, and leave.

Too Many Choices Are Bad

One thing you learn in advertising class if you have ever taken one is that you don’t want to give the viewer, listener, or reader too many choices. Many people make the mistake of covering their blogs with banner ads, text link ads, and any other kind of ad they can think of.  The mentality is “well, I just want to give my readers lots of choices and lots of variety of choices” and “maybe they will sign up for everything”.

In actuality, too many choices is a bad thing. When presented with a lot of choices, most people usually just move on because it is hard to make decisions. Making a choice between A, B, C, D and maybe more is hard because it requires you to evaluate things and that is more than most people want to do. Also, almost no one is ever going to sign up for several or more offers so putting lots of offers up hoping that people will sign up for them all is a dream.

I rarely have more than 2 or 3 choices on any one of my blogs that I hope to make money with. Again, you want someone to land on your blog, concentrate on the one or two things you have to offer, and then either sign up and leave or just leave. If you present only one or two options for them and they don’t like either one, they will leave and there is nothing you can do about it. But you want to make it easy for them by saying “this is what I am offering you: A or B and hopefully you will try one of them”.

All this being said, TriNi’s Make Money Online Fast  has 7 GPT sites that she hopes you sign up to but THAT IS NOT ALL BAD. In this case she is displaying the sites she belongs to and that is what her blog is about so it might be OK. I think the offers kind of run together too much and are a bit hard to tell what is what but that is just a layout issue. Again, make things as simple and clear as possible. I would maybe have less offers but that is a personal choice. I would for sure have the best performing offer on top and the second best one below it etc (which she probably does).

This Can Be Her Money Making Flagship Blog

One of the really good things about this blog is that she can write about anything money related and it will fit in. If she wants to change focus to some other way of making money or write posts about something else related to money it will look pretty natural. The blog looks great, as I mentioned before, and she can proudly point people to it and say “that is my blog” and get accepted into affiliate networks if she wants to. It is also something that she can continue to grow over time and hopefully be able to make into a money making machine.

In order to make it into that money maker though, TriNi will have to continue to get links, links, and more links. She needs to write articles and submit them to EzineArticles as well as a few other article directories. She needs to always leave comments on other blogs with keyword anchor text and not her name when possible (some bloggers will delete your comment if it is not your name).

Most importantly if I were she, I would try to do link exchanges with other bloggers. The problem here is that her blog is such a good blog that she doesn’t want to be linking out to many of the crappy CashCrate blogs that she might come across. 3 way link exchanges are best anyway and if I were TriNi, I would develop one of her other make money blogs  a little more, and then she can offer a link from one of her other blogs in exchange for a link to this blog.  If she has multiple blogs that are all decent, then she will be able to facilitate 3 way link exchanges more often.

It is too bad more CashCrate bloggers don’t have well thought out blogs they take pride in like TriNi does. If she works hard, she will be able to make it into a solid money maker and all her efforts will be rewarded. But in order for that to happen she needs a lot more anchored backlinks.

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.