Google's Wonder Wheel for SEO

(Google continues to give us more help in search engine ranking)

A newer innovation in the world of Google is the Google Wonder Wheel. You may have heard about this new search related feature you can tap into, or it may be news to you. I honestly learned of this just a few days ago, but already see it as a useful tool when it comes to crafting blog content and even creating hubpages to make money online.

Apparently, Google unveiled the Wonder Wheel experimentally to select internet users. If you do a simple Google search, you may notice under your search box and to the left a bit it says "Web" and then "Show options". Click "Show options" to unveil a panel of various Google search info you can tap into such as:

Videos
Forums
Reviews

Recent results
Past 24 hours
Past week
Past year

You'll also notice "› Standard view" which has the Wonder wheel below it. Click on that and you'll launch the Wonder Wheel for your particular keyword(s) search. In my example below I did a search on the late Michael Jackson. What it gives is a branch out from the original term to other terms and keyword phrases that internet users tend to search for.



This is helpful as it allows you to create a smart linking structure around your keyword you want to rank for. It gives you related material to write about on blog posts or Hubs or Squidoo lenses, which you can link back to the keyword phrase you're trying to rank for. Make sure to use SEO optimization when crafting your related posts and good internal linking. This cwill help solidify your ranking for key terms and bring you the extra traffic and potential money you're looking to earn.

Squidoo Policy Updates

For those of you who are fans of the fun web property creation and self-promotion site, Squidoo, they just recently sent an email to all lensmasters announcing some bigtime policy changes. Previously Squidoo didn't care about "spammy" lenses too much, as compared to Hubpages (see make money with Hubpages). One of Squidoo's policy changes involve spammy lenses, and a new outbound link policy.

In case you missed it, here's Squidoo's official email I received 6/17/09:

1. No Spam. This one's not new, but it's worth saying again.

It's simple: given our pedigree, our point of view and our dyed-in-the-wool, we-will-never-change-our-mind conviction on this issue, spam is not okay at Squidoo. For a few years now we have had a very strict and enforced stance against spam. That's staying the same, and if anything, getting even more rigorous. If you actively spam people with your Squidoo lenses (by email, in blog comments, by stalking and harassing people on Twitter, by tricking people with the content in your lenses, and more) we'll lock your entire account.
2. No more X-rated or Porn lenses

If you came to Squidoo to create X-rated or pornographic content, the time has come to say farewell. We're not discontinuing these lenses because we've suddenly grown shy, or because we no longer believe in the freedom to publish what you want. We do. Practically though, supporting X-rated pages no longer makes sense, and it invites more spam and empty traffic and wasted overhead than anything. Find out more about why we're making this very hard decision, and what it means for your X-rated lenses. (Don't panic! You can export your content and take it with you).
3. No Junk Topics from our "SquidDon't" List

Lenses on free movie downloads. Toenail fungus cures. LoseBellyFatNow promotions. Reverse Phone Lookup 4U. You know junk when you see it. And lots more examples.

Unforunately, topics like these are overwhelmingly conditioned and proven to attract spammers. If a topic has displayed enough trickery and spam and bad activity, we choose not to support it. If we find a lens on a SquidDon't topic or something very similar to it, we'll lock it. For good. Our best recommendation: Don't bother with topics like these. There's plenty of incredible stuff to write about and recommend online without having to go near the edges of what we're got going here.
4. A new limit on overly promotional lenses

Making a lens to promote or recommend something is a terrific endeavor. It's a big part of why a lot of our people are here. But: Less is more! Sales lenses far too often turn into junk lenses, as described by the relentless number of outbound links to the same exact domain. Being overly promotional rarely works. "Buy here buy here buy here!" never does.

So to help you focus your lenses, and sell even better--and to help surfers find our pages more useful overall--we're introducing a limit to the number of outbound links to the same domain that you can have on a lens. If you have more than 9 links to the SAME domain on a single lens, your lens will get locked for review. Of course we'll have domains that are whitelisted out of this (meaning, you can have as many outbound links to them as you like), as well as sites that are blacklisted (meaning, even a single link to that domain will get your lens locked).

Please read all the important details on how this works.

Make Money Online with Hubpages

Some of the readers here at the Monetizer blog may have participated in the Hubpages 30 day challenge which encouraged "Hubbers" to create 100 Hubpages in just 30 days time (the challenge ended about a week ago). To this day, I completed 23 of them, simply knowing it wasn't realistic for me to ignore the other projects I'm working on regularly. However, I've already enjoying the potential of Hubpages as a moneymaker and also a great source of "link juice". Thanks to Courtney Tuttle for the inspiration to start with the Hubs again, since I had left them for dead a year ago and turned to Squidoo. I found Squidoo user friendly and fun, but in all reality Hubpages offers much more potential because of the kind of profits you can generate. I've read several success stories of members who are pulling in anywhere from $300 to over $1000 a month from the site, by using unique monetization strategies. And there's no reason why you and I can't enjoy similar success. After all, more money/passive income is always a good thing. Those of us with current web properties (blogs, niche sites, etc) can benefit from making hubs to support those as well.

I took Courtney Tuttle's advice from The Keyword Academy and just started finding topics which were somewhat competitive, with keyword CPC's (Cost-per-clicks) of anywhere from $2 and up, using the Google Adwords Keyword tool. Court recommended you find those with a $5 or more CPC, but in my experience using the Google Adwords Keyword tool, those can be quite competitive. Kudos to Court who really knows his stuff, I think it'd be interesting to be a fly on his wall and see how he finds good keywords (and how long it takes him). I focused on several gems I found in various niches, and also went for a few more competitive ones just to see how they might fare. I figure if you add plenty of relevant tags on your hubs you may draw traffic that way. Also, your hubs may show up as related pages on other people's hubs. As for how I selected keywords, I went for those with at least 3,000 searches a month, and at least $2 CPC. Generally the gurus say that you can expect to make 25% of whatever the average CPC is for keywords. So if you're keywords are in the $5 level, you'll make $1.25 a click and so forth. I figure that sometimes if you pick the right niche, even if you're making 50 cents a click, yet getting 20 clicks or more, you're doing well.

I did my research for my various topics, and in some cases discovered the hubs are easy to write, but it's not something I'd want to do 5 or more of per day. I'll tell you that probably the best and easiest hubs you could set up are those about various products you own. Consider doing product reviews for everything and anything you own (tech may be best but there's other areas), even if you're not seeing it on the Adwords top keywords searches. There's most likely other people out there who may be searching for that same product as you have already. They could be the lucky moneymaker you stumble upon too. Also consider those products and any issues you had with them and found yourself frustrated at how tough it was to find an answer to your questions. That may be another way you want to go with your hubs, by helping others answer the question you had to search for.

Hubpages are in fact much like Squidoo as they offer various components you can add to your hubs. Those are the text, photo, video, rss, news, links, ebay, amazon and poll components in addition to several others. You simply click to add one then edit it as you see fit. You're able to position the eBay, Amazon and photo's very nicely right inside your text blocks to give a wraparound look. Quite helpful if you want to "pitch" or talk about various products and then have 4 eBay auctions for the product next to that.

The forms of monetization for your hubs are Google Adsense, eBay partner network, Amazon Associates and Kontera. If you're a member of all four programs, great. If not, you'll need to sign up and be approved. Adsense is the easiest to be approved for, followed by Amazon, then Kontera, then eBay. When you're official, there's a spot called Affiliate Settings where you go and plug in the required ID's from your various accounts. Google Adsense ads are pretty much automatic on all hubs, and you'll receive 60% of the impressions revenue. Hubpages makes the other 40% which is generous considering they house your free web properties. The 60-40 rule applies to eBay and Amazon ads as well. Those you'll need to implement into your hubs on your own, but they allow you to control the keywords that bring up the various products. As for Kontera, you'll need to specify whether you turn it on for each and or every hub. Hubpages recommends that unless you're earning at least $50 a month with Adsense that you consider keeping Kontera turned off. They also note that if you don't earn at least $5 with Kontera in a given month, your earnings don't roll over to the next month. Good to keep in mind.

I strongly recommend that you add Google Analytics into your Hubpages account, and also create URL tracking channels for each and every hub on Google Adsense. When I first started out I was seeing some money in my Adsense earnings which I couldn't account for. It's much better to know what's making you money and what's not. Also, with Analytics you'll be able to see just what keywords/phrases are bringing you search traffic and then you can work to either make that page stronger for the keywords, or create a new page just based on a new term that looks hot.

Use Hubpages to help your current web properties and niche blogs get better rankings too. But don't overdo it, play by the rules. Here's some words of wisdom about linking from hubpages:

1)Maintain a Hubber score of 84 or above to make links you put in your hub pages "Do Follow". You can up your score simply by creating at least 5 or more hubs.

2)Don't make hubs spammy. Don't place more than 2 links to the same site (i.e. your blog or site) in the same hub page, and don't make a hub that's all affiliate links.

Folks, Hubpages is definitely a moneymaker and way to get some nice link juice to your other web properties. I sent some hubpage links to a particular blog page that I had been trying to rank page 1 on Google for over a year. Within a week, the page ranked on Google search results page 1 right behind two very prominent companies' listings for the same thing. I also discovered in these few weeks I devoted to making more hubs that I earned more money off just one hubpage in about a week, then I made in total with all of my Squidoo lenses last month! Think about that, because while Squidoo may look cool and be talked about more, Hubpages seems to have better Google rankings, and the ability to help your blogs or sites rank better.

So, if you're not a hubber yet, why wait? Sign up here and start your hubpages!

Million Dollar Mattress Thrown Away?!

In some offbeat money news, an Israeli woman recently tossed out an old mattress for her mother in favor of a new one. What she didn't realize was that the old mattress was being used to hide away a million dollars. Once she found out that startling news, she immediately rushed out to try to find the discarded mattress. She searched frantically searched through three different landfills with no luck in finding the million dollar mattress. A manager at the dump explained why the lady is going to have quite a challenge finding her million dollar mattress...

According to Times Online:

Yitzhak Borba, the dump manager, told the radio station that his staff was helping the woman, saying she appeared “totally desperate”, but the mattress was hard to find among the 2,500 tonnes of rubbish arriving at the site every day.

Mr. Borba said that he increased security at the site to keep would-be treasure hunters at bay. For her part, Anat is displaying an admirable stoicism. “People have to take everything in proportion and thank God for the good and the bad,” she said.

I can see it now, a mattress company or store starts their own promotion or contest, where one lucky shopper or couple of shoppers buys the bed containing a cool million dollar prize!

But really, where should you keep your extra money, checking, savings accounts, the stock market or in a safe place? With the recession going on in the States it was seeming like a good idea to hide your extra money in your mattress because of the stock market and banking woes. But now it seems like you better think twice because you just might throw away a million dollar mattress!

Plentyoffish.com Login Issue - Poor Customer Service?

(Firefox displays that Plentyoffish.com server is down)

You've more than likely heard the story of successful internet entrepreneur Markus Frind. He's the brains behind a completely free dating site, Plentyoffish.com (down as of 5PM EST 6/8/09). The website operates as Markus' one man project, although he has admitted to hiring a staff of 6 or so to help out in a small office. He's made as much as 10 million dollars per year with his free dating site, just by running Google Adsense ads, banners and various affiliate ads such as an ad for "Double Your Dating", a $40 downloadable book. And the most surprising aspect of them all (or envy-inspiring) is he claims to work just a few hours a day, 10 hours a week and earns millions of dollars.

Markus find programmed and created Plenty of Fish all on his own, which in and of itself is amazing. Not that the site is beautiful, but it certainly became useful and profitable for what it is. Recently, Markus noted on his May 1, 2009 blog that he hired a programmer to start working on his site, which seemed revolutionary for this one-man internet million dollar business. Many people had called Markus a bit arrogant and nonchalant when it came to customer issues with the site, as he seemed to think it was always fine how it was and things that many users reported as issues, he saw as insignificant. For example, user pictures of themselves were distorted on certain pages because the programming wasn't done to fix the issue. As of today June 8, 2009 (6/8/09), it seems that the website is down. A plentyoffish.com login issue has arose and when you enter the site's address www.plentyoffish.com into your web browser, you're left hanging. This is something that happens with all sites, big and small. The difference here seems to be in the fact that there's no word of warning given to anyone about what the issue is with Plenty of Fish. A site like Google will at least inform members that the site is going to be down, or a splash page tells them that the site is currently under construction.

A few lessons can be learned from the Plenty of Fish login problems. Number one, you can become a millionaire off Google Adsense by creating a valuable, highly-trafficked internet property. Number two, that property should be run as a business with customers ranking first. It's the customers who drive a site like plentyoffish.com to be as successful as it is. Unfortunately for the head honcho, when a site is down that generates $10,000 a day, it's definitely losing income and potentially losing its members.

Read From 10 Hours a Week, $10 Million a Year at New York Times for more on Plenty of Fish and Markus Find.