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.

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.

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. 

Up until now I have just talked about picking keywords to target and build your blog around. These are the words people will type into Google and if you have done things right, your blog will pop up on the first page of the search engines and you will have the type of laser targeted traffic you need to convert into survey referrals.

Once you pick your keywords that you want people to find you through, what is the next step to actually getting your blog to start rising in the search engine rankings for those words? What makes your blog stand out from all the others that also use those same words?

The first thing you have to do is write posts around those words and use those words within the posts. You need to structure your post titles and the body of your posts around those keywords. For instance, if you want to go after people looking for how to get referrals to CashCrate, you need to write posts about how to get referrals to CashCrate. If you get bored and start writing posts on your blog about camping outdoors, it won’t help you reach the people you are trying to target.

Ideally you need to keep your blog on topic and on target. If you are also interested in writing about camping outdoors, start another blog about that. Keep each blog to one subject or one general subject area. Unfortunately though, that alone won’t help your blog enough to start it climbing the rankings. Anchored back links will.

Anchored backlinks are links to your blog which have the words you are targeting in them. With this blog I am hoping to find people looking for paid online surveys and that is an anchored link. The more of those anchored links I can get pointing to this blog from other blogs, websites, and what have you, the more authority this blog will have for that term.

Let me explain with this example. When you go to Google and type in anything you are searching for (lets use the words how to get referrals), Google has a big decision to make. How does it know which sites to pull up? I am sure there are tens of thousand of sites that have the words how to get referrals somewhere in them or are about that topic. Remember, there are BILLIONS of sites on the Internet. Google prides itself on being the best search engine and so it had to figure out a way to pull the best sites up first and then the farther you go down the list the weaker the matches get.

Above you can see what you get when you type those words into Google with ” ” around them. It shows 50,900 sites with the exact words how to get referrals.

Now if you type in how to get referrals without the ” “, you get the results as seen below. It looks like there are 14,400,000 sites with those words or some combination of those words out there on the Internet. Thats 14 MILLION! Now, a lot of those sites will be easy to beat because they don’t have those exact words but either way you look at it, there are a lot of sites ahead of you and somehow you have to pass all of them if you want that exact traffic.

A simplistic way of explaining links, anchored links, and anchored backlinks is that Google has decided that an anchored link to a site is a vote for that site. So, when I make a link to this site with the words “how to get online survey referrals“, I have just told Google that I think this site is about how to get online survey referrals. My other two links toward sthe top of this post also tell Google that my site is for slightly different things as well. Each anchored link is a “vote” for my site being about whatever the link says it is.

This is a very complicated subject that could never be covered in one post. All links are not of equal value and the three that I have put in this post won’t really help a whole lot but they won’t hurt. What I need for this blog, and what you need for your blogs, are as many anchored links that you can get from other blogs and websites that all have the keyword terms you are shooting for.

So, going back to the “how to get referrals” scenario from above, if that is what your blog was about, you would need as many anchored incoming links from other blogs and websites that all had to do with that subject. You would want everyone to link to your blog using any variety of terms that all had to do with ‘referrals’, and “how to get”. Some examples might be:

how to make referrals
how to make CashCrate referrals
how to refer
how to get survey referrals
how to make online surveys referrals
how to get more survey referrals
how to refer people to CashCrate
how to make paid surveys referrals

These are all keyword terms that you would love to have people link to you with if you had a blog specifically about making referrals to the survey sites. This would build your blog’s authority for all those terms and eventually you would move up the search engine rankings (SERPS) and be on the first page of Google for many of those phrases.

There are many ways to make money on the Internet and one of them is with blogs. Whether they are free blogs or not, you can make money with blogs if you know how to get referrals to the surveys for money sites. Really it comes down to doing three things: keyword research, writing content, and getting links. All three of those things are important but once you have done the first two, it is all about the links. You can never get enough targeted anchored backlinks and most of your time should be spent getting them. Much more about this in future posts.

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.