The local search is a less mature or saturated market but there is a lot of demand on local search. Even when people buys from local stores, they always tend to do online searches first. Therefore these local searches are harder for internet entrepreneurs to monetize. However, there are a couple of ways you can still profit from local search traffic.

The first is through affiliate programs. For example, if your site gets people who is searching for life insurance in your area, you could join an online insurance affiliate program that pays for leads. You can generally search engine optimize your site to get very targeted local search users who would be happy to fill out a simple lead form for discount auto insurance quote and/or life insurance quote. You could also provide auto insurance quote comparison information to your visitors to gain their trust by providing something valuable.

The second is to operate a niche directory listing website. You will charge members, usually local businesses, a monthly fee to list their website, product or promotions on your directory site. There are big sites that already do this in a very broad industry. Sites such as citysearch.com and craigslist.org have tens of thousands of listings in various industries. You want to target a very specific niche market so you can add value to your business members by providing better services and more targets leads. For example, you can set up a directory for local businesses that sell holiday gift baskets or corporate gift baskets in New York. These business will be happy to pay a nominal fee to get qualified leads.

There are more ways you can make money from local search traffic. The above are just two starters. Feel free to add your favorite ways to profit from local search engine traffic.

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Even if you have a relatively new site and you have not started search engine optimize your site, it is never to start your PPC search campaign. The simple reason is that when Google looks at your site and decides whether to include your web pages to its search index, it factors in whether your site is getting visitors. Just like a linkback link, a real visitor is also a vote for your site.

Of course, when you don’t have money rolling in, you should be mindful of your budget. Be sure to set an AdWords campaign daily spending limit. But keep your campaign running for at least two weeks. Hopefully by then your SEO campaign would have started sending your organic traffic.

Send Traffic To Deep Content Pages

When sending PPC traffic to your site, do not just everyone to your main page. You should alternate your pay per click campaign landing page, and send real visitors to pages deep inside your site. These pages should serve as your content hub pages and should be indexed by Google first to pull in other deeper content pages. An added benefit of this approach is that using rich content page as your AdWords landing page will help you improve your keyword quality score and dramatically lower your ppc cost.

Don’t Put AdSense Ads On Your Site Yet
The biggest mistake for a new site is to put on AdSense Ads immediately. That will drive away your visitors not attain them! Instead, you should put on email signup form and feedburner feed signup form in prominent places, and start communicating with your readers / audience.

PPC Search Engine Traffic Tools

• Attack of the 50 Foot Woman movie

If you have done your keyword research right, you already used all the tools you need to drive smart PPC search engine traffic. All I had to use is freely provided by Google. You need learn as much as possible about these free Google tools.

Google Keyword Tool: you can study your keywords, get estimated traffic and bid price from this tool.

Google Analytics: The most important part of Google Analytics is to learn how to use its conversion tracking capability. There are a lot of content on the internet that shows you how to track conversion with Google Analytics.

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So how do you speed up the process of getting more organic traffic?

One technique we tried to boost our search engine ranking is to use PPC campaign to drive traffic to targeted content pages on your niche web sites. Here is what we did. We started with searching for some low-cost keywords that are related our website. We then setup some campaigns at Yahoo Sponsored Search,. Because of the careful selection of keywords, we were able to pay under 10 cents for each click on Yahoo’s search network. Make sure you one of your ads points to your website’s home page, one or more ads points to an internal page on your site. More over, you need to have a link from your main page to all internal pages that you are driving traffic to.

A few days later, when Google updated its PageRank, our home page get a PR2, not too bad for a new site in less than one month. What’s more exciting is that we started to see organic traffic from Yahoo flow in after a few days. Once we have almost equal number of organic and paid Yahoo traffic. We stopped Yahoo PPC ads. But the organic traffic from Yahoo just kept growing, which is terrific.

Our educated guess for reasons behind this interesting search engine rank boosting is that search engines (especially Google) will rank your pages higher if the pages are getting real human visitors. With Google Analytics running on my site, Google knows way more about the traffic to my site than I can imagine.

This trick may not work for all websites or all search engines. However, if you can afford to spend a few bucks a day on PPC traffic, this is a worthy SEO strategy to try. Post your experience below if you had similar situation.

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There are literally millions of making money online blogs out there. Hence the competition for page ranking, link building etc are pretty high. A new blog like ours is very lucky to have achieved PageRank4 this quickly.

So in the past two months, this blog had 15 posts and only 3 comments. Clearly we want to do more to engage our readers. We just need to find out what kind of topics interest our readers in the blogging for profit community. Maybe our posts tried to appeal to a broad affiliate marketing audience or search engine marketing professionals.

The question is, how do we know our website visitor’s interests? We plan to look at two major factors.

One is study the keywords that visitors used in search engine traffic. The other is look at the posts that gained the most links from external domains. The winner of this study revealed two popular posts on our make money online blog.

• The Worst Search Engine Spam I Have Ever Seen
• Why Adsense Arbitrage Is Dead

Both posts provided some quality information in the content, not just personal ramblings etc, which I suspect is why both Google search engine and people loved them.

What would you like to see posted? What question would you like to get answered?

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I accidentally noticed this when I was reading Jeremy’s (a.k.a Shoemoney) post about his ringtone experiments. For example, if you do a search for “verizon ringtones“, 9 of the top 10 links are affiliate links on the first page of Google. And a good portion of these affiliate links are ‘hosted’ on EDU domain, presumably giving them more weight on Page Ranking. While these guys achieved an amazing thing by ‘beating’ Google on the SEO game, the implication for this kind of stuff is pretty profound. Basically this is bad for everyone except the spammers. It is not about who gets to make money and who does not. It is much worse for the internet marketing industry. If people start losing confidence in the major search engines, you can bet that the whole search advertising business and everything else is going to falter. What do you think?

Smart Google engineers, it’s time to fight back!

Update: Google has a page for you to report Spams here http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. But a manual process is always at a disadvantage in this game.

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• Google AdWords Keyword tool – use this tool to find out synonyms of your keywords and average estimated Cost per Click price. Another great feature is to use the ‘Site Related Keywords’ option to discover your competitor’s keywords.
• SEOBook’s Keyword Tools – this great tool gives you an estimated search traffic for your keywords on Google, Yahoo, MSN. Very handy tool to find out if there are sufficient volume for your keyword rich content pages.
• webconf’s website keyword suggestion tool – feed this tool with your domain name it will return a list of keywords you can try writing your content and the search volume for each of the keywords.
• Marketleap’s Keyword Position Verification tool – you can check your Search engine ranking for your chosen keywords that you spent so much time trying to do SEO …
• Keyword Rich Domain Names – this tool comes handy if you don’t yet have a domain name for your keyword rich website idea.
• A Bonus: Digital Point Keyword Tracker – if this is your first hearing about this tool, you are out of luck. It requires you to have a Google SOAP API key, which Google no longer gives out anymore.

There are also commercial tools you can buy. I heard that Keyword Elite is a decent tool but I have no experience with it.

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