Yesterday I found an article and news clip about Google’s official response to the Google scam I have written so much about. Check it out here. You will find Googles response just above the over 500 comments.

Having the right mindset for making a living online is crucial. I remember many years ago I said to myself, “If I could just make $300 a month online that would be so great because it would pay my car payment…” Does that sound familiar to anyone?

Now I don’t have car payments anymore but knowing what I know now I would instead say if I were just beginning, “If I made $300 a month online that would be perfect because I will have $300 a month to help me get to $2000 a month.” Right now $300 a month probably sounds like a lot of money but once you get there you will be surprised how little it is.

Don’t start using the money for your own  personal use until you are consistently making $1000 a month. And then only take out $500 and use the rest for buying links, getting programming work done, advertising on relevant sites, paying copywriters and making your site better. Don’t be satisfied with mediocrity (although I think mediocrity doesn’t come until you are making $2000-$3000 a month).

Keep setting new goals for yourself and build the business up. If I would have stopped and only worked on the first website that ever made me money, I would make a respectable income every year, but I wouldn’t have been able to quit my job and I wouldn’t have the lifestyle and freedom that I enjoy now.

Yesterday I decided not to come into work so I could work on editing a movie I shot with my two boys (Adding over 70 laser gun effects takes a long time). As I was home working on it I realized again how lucky I am and how grateful I am to have the freedom to do those kinds of things. It never would have happened if I didn’t build my online business to where it is.

Set your sights high. Take time to learn the things you need to be more successful. And NEVER give up!

One of the most common questions that our readers ask us is how to increase traffic to their website. To make this as simple as possible I would tell you that there are 2 things you should always be doing: Adding unique useful content and building your link popularity.

Adding Content - When I say you should add unique useful content to your site I really mean the content needs to be 100% original and useful to other people. Writing content just for content sake is a big waste of time, especially if you are the one writing all of the content. When you write useful content people will have a reason to come and read it. People will show it to other people, and people will link to it.

Let me give you a great example of how by writing one good post I increased the traffic to my website by 1000%. I came across a new product a couple of months ago and saw that the product was in my same industry so I looked at the site for a minute or two and then went on with my day. The next day I found a site that was almost exactly the same making the same claims and showing the same pictures of checks and sportscars.

I quickly realized that this new product was a scam. I decided to write an very in depth post about this scam and warning people what to look out for. Little did I realize that this scam was so widespread that thousands of people a month were searching for the name of this new product to find out if it was legit or not.

Because I took the time to write a very detailed post about the product we jumped to the top of the rankings for the product name. The result of this one post was going from a couple of thousand visitors a month to over 20,000 visitors a month. Imagine what your business could do with 10 times the amount of traffic it gets now.

Building Links - Because this is such a hard thing to do people will try to tell you that this is not that important in getting more traffic to your site. In reality, link building has proven to be the most influential factor in the rankings and traffic I have achieved with the internet. Nothing sways rankings more powerfully than good quality one way links that point to your website. (Read more about how to link build here) I acheived #1 rankings in Google with my old SEO website for the term “SEO services” when my site had much less content and far fewer pages than all of my competitors. How did I do it? A consistent flow of good links.

If you want to know my secret to success I just gave it to you. Good quality content and relevent quality links. If it sounds too simple then try it another more complicated way. All I can give you is what has helped me become successful online.

Since we have posted on the internet scam “Posting links on Google” and other money making schemes like Clickety Split many of you have asked about other similar services. One that was recently brought to my attention was iNetGlobal. They are an internet company that claims they will help you get a “piece of the internet pie”.

Based on the information on their website it looks like you download their software and then you have to visit certain websites for at least 20 seconds or so in order to earn credits. They then allow website owners to pay to have their website put into the software so other members have to look at the website in the rotation.

The major problem with this model is that people that are using this software only care about one thing, earning credits for visiting the required sites. They are not going to engage with the websites they are required to view (1) because it is a complete shot in the dark if it is relevant to something they want to see and (2) because that would eat into the time they can visit more sites and earn more credits.

This is a model that has been circulating around the internet for many years. If people like looking at sites that they have no interest in then more power to them. I just don’t think this is the answer to the question how do I make money online?

My big question is, why is this company using an MLM model? If they have the know how to teach people how to make money online, why don’t they just do that? I have to admit that they do a fantastic job getting people excited about these “opportunities” but in reality your time is much better spent building your own internet empire.

Here is what you need to understand: If you want to make money online, you need to start your own internet business. Don’t join an MLM and try to make money that way. All you will do is make money for the people who started the MLM. A common marketing tactic for companies like iNetGlobal is to show you the founders of Google, or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) in order to try to get you excited about the prospect of making millions online. The point they don’t make is that the thing all of these people have in common is they started their own internet business, they didn’t join an MLM.

Decide what you are good at, think about what the internet world needs and start looking into internet businesses you can start from there.

One of the most common questions I get from our readers is how to specifically do link building. The biggest thing to realize with link building is that you need to have a purpose in mind. You need to be targeting specific key phrases that you want to rank for.

For example, let’s say you own a website in the hunting industry and you are really looking to rank for the term “archery targets”. You need to go out and get links that point to your website where the clickable text (aka ‘anchor text’) is the term “archery targets”.  If that is your #1 term you want to rank for then you need to get most of your links with the anchor text “archery targets”.

In order to keep your link building looking natural to search engines you need to also get links that have a different mix of anchor texts but similar to your main term.

For example if you were going to get 50 links pointing to your website, an effective link building program to target “archery targets” would be something like this:

30 links with “archery targets” as anchor text pointing to your main page where you want to rank for this term

5 links with “3d archery targets” as the anchor text

5 links with “archery target” as anchor

5 links with “buy archery targets” as anchor.

1 link with “discount archery products” as anchor text

1 link with “archery website” as anchor text

1 link with “archery targets site” as anchor text

1 link with “online archery store” as anchor text

1 link with “hunting targets” as anchor text

As you can see from the example above I used about 60% of the links for the main phrase and then spread out the other 30% of the links to other similar phrases and used the main term inside some but not all of the similar phrases. The more natural the link appears to the search engines the more effective the links will be.

You really want a good mix of phrases but the majority of the links should point to your site using your main phrase.

This is how you will start to see an increase in rankings for key phrases you are targeting.