TechnologyInsanity.com

Well I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stay quiet about Market Samurai. I’ve been using it for a long time now, almost daily. Before I had MS, I did everything manually. First I would go to adwords tool, then I would put the keyword in Google and check some things with SEOQuake. Then I would go and analyze the title, url, and description to see if the keyword was there. Then I would have to go off to site explorer on Yahoo to analyze the backlinks manually. What a waste of time. Seriously, this whole process would take me forever to find decent keywords.

So, what does MS do? It does all that stuff and more automatically. The keyword research module obviously investigates keywords, but it displays the number of searches in a much better way. It shows per day and the number of clicks you might expect if you were ranked #1 for that keyword. There’s actually so much more there as well, like OCI (worth of the keyword) and broad versus exact. In the SEO competition module it even color codes how bad the competition is with green, yellow, and red. There’s no need to EVER analyze the competition further down than the front page because searchers rarely go past the first page. The SEO competition module also analyzes the backlinks, showing anchor text and PR. Then you can go on to find content for that keyword that you can either republish or use as a source for your content. Then there’s a promotion module to help find places to create backlinks for your site. If that wasn’t enough, there’s also a module to track your rankings on various sites.

This simplifies almost everything for me, I don’t have to do anything manually saving me tons of time and effort, getting the same task done in a fraction of the time. Is this tool a magic bullet to instantly getting good rankings and finding great keywords? No, you have to be able to understand the data presented to you, but if you’ve been doing SEO for any amount of time you should be familiar with most if not all of the data presented to you.

Is it worth it? Well, it depends. If you do a lot of SEO then yes I would say it’s worth every penny. If you only do a little here and there maybe you can just do keyword research the manual way. I only paid $97 for it since I got it while it was on sale. To be perfectly honest, I would’ve paid full price if I couldn’t get it at a discount. The more I use this tool, the more I love it. Guess what else? They’re not even finished with it yet and if you buy now you get updates for free. Publish content, monetization, and the adwords module have yet to be added.

There’s not much else I can say about this tool, if you’re serious about SEO this will save you a ton of time.

Rank Tracker

I think that people are really confused about how to properly monetize their blog. The truth of the matter is it will take some time to set up properly. In fact, it’s really not going to be that easy at all, and believe it or not, it doesn’t even have to do with your content. (I mean if it’s total crap the conversion rates might be low )  Here’s a short explanation of how I feel you could properly monetize a blog in any niche.

First of all you need a traffic source. No I’m not talking about crappy Entrecard, untargeted, rubbish traffic that’s not worth ANYTHING. How do you get the good traffic?

Well, you can go the Adsense route and just pay for your traffic. Wait! Pay for traffic? Are you insane? We’ll get to this later. You’re actually not going to be losing money if you set things up correctly. Adsense is not something to play with or take lightly. I’ve heard a lot of horror stories across the net of how people lost tons of money by not optimizing campaigns correctly. I’m not going to go into full fledged detail about adsense, that would take forever, and there’s a lot of reading material out there if you want to get involved with it. Keyword elite is a decent tool for adwords, you can check it out here.

The second option is SEO. This is where we generate a bunch of keywords with adwords tool or similar, then analyze all of them. How? I just look at the traffic for that keyword and analyze it with Market Samurai. It saves me tons of time, but you can do it the manual way if you want. By manual I mean get a plugin for FireFox called SEOQuake. You need to analyze backlinks to that page for that keyword and look at if the site is even targeting that keyword. Does the site have the keyword in the title? The URL? The description? The header? If it does then it’s most definitely targeting that keyword You’ll need to analyze the strength of the links pointing to that page as well. Generally more links = harder to rank. Targeting the keyword + a lot of links = harder to rank. I could probably go on and on about SEO for ages, this is just basic stuff.

The absolute best way is to combine both!

Now you have some traffic, how do you monetize it? FORGET ADSENSE,  PROJECTWONDERFUL, ADGITIZE, and OTHER CPC. All that stuff is really useless if you want to monetize your traffic FULLY. If you thought that stuff was going to make all your money then you’re mistaken. You can leave that stuff up, but it shouldn’t be your main focus, ever.

The best way, by far is affiliate products. Think clickbank, CPA, and being a regular affiliate of various products. What’s your niche? What would they be interested in? For example, if you have a blog about technology (tee hee ) then if you recommend any kind of software or hardware that you can be an affiliate of, don’t be afraid to plug in your link. No one cares, the product is good to begin with correct? So if they’re going to buy it, why not buy it through the person that spent time to write the post related to the product? Anyway, if you find it’s converting with SEO traffic or other traffic sources that just seem to visit that page, you might want to add in adsense. Run some traffic to that page with some keywords and see if you can get a decent ROI. (Return On Investment, which means you make more then you spend.) You’re basically turning your blog pages into landing pages. I don’t do this really, but I’m sure it would work fairly well.

Now, I was reading John Chow’s blog and stumbled on this post: http://www.johnchow.com/how-i-make-40000-a-month-from-a-blog/. I watched that entire video, this guy really has it down and I really see how it works, and it works well. Basically what he does is try to get every visitor to his site he can to sign up on his email list with Aweber. He basically runs down through some steps about setting up your blog and monetizing it. The tools and services he recommends in his guides he’s an affiliate of. He just sends 1 email a week going through the guide. So, he’s being helpful and making money at the same time. This method would work well for any niche really, watch the video it’s a really nice system. He uses pay per click campaigns to just get people to sign up for his email list. He’s already calculated how much each visitor is worth and how much he can spend per click to get a decent ROI.

This is a very generic guide, I’m just trying to wake everyone up from their dream of making thousands by just throwing up an adsense banner and writing blog posts. That’s not how this game works, if you really want to make money with your blog you need to think outside the box, implement your own methods really and investigate opportunities. What I’m getting at is to properly monetize a blog, you basically have to be an Internet Marketer. Nothing in life is really that easy, this is no different. Wake up guys

Side note: I’m going to set up an Internet Marketing blog really soon so I don’t bore my tech audience with this stuff

I did a little research before buying this keyboard, I was wondering what the difference was betwen the Saitek Eclipse II and the Saitek Eclipse. Apparently the only real difference is that the Saitek Eclipse II has different LED colors you can choose. So, I decided to just go with the Eclipse since blue elimination is all I wanted anyway.

Getting down to it, I basically just plugged it in and it was auto-detected by Windows XP, and lit up right away. As far as looks go, it’s pretty sleek. I was more interested in overall comfort though, and this keyboard seems to be delivering me plenty of comfort with the wrist wrest at the bottom. I type A LOT so comfort is pretty important. I didn’t want any ergonomic keyboard, I’m too used to the “regular” keyboard layout to bother with anything fancy. The keys feel pretty nice and responsive. Another thing that’s nice is it blends really well with the rest of my desktop. My computer case (the Antec 900) glows blue pretty heavily, the other color being black. My mouse is black, my mousepad is black, my LCD screens are black, my speakers are black, so yea it blends really well with the rest of my desktop. The only thing that doesn’t blend is my mouse which glows green, for some reason I didn’t get a blue glowing mouse.

Enough about that though, doesn’t really relate to the product itself The illumination isn’t 100% the same over all the keys, but it’s good enough. I never look at the keys anyway, since I know exactly where pretty much every single key is anyway. I just wanted illumination because it looked cool Oh yea, and when I’m typing it doesn’t make a ton of noise, my last keyboard made much more noise when I typed.

If you’re just looking around for a nice regular keyboard that feels nice and looks sleek, this might be your keyboard

You can check it out at Amazon here.

For one, I don’t have time to drop on Entrecard, and I really think it’s a waste of time. I have a lot of other things to do that are actually worth my time. Not anything against the Entrecard community, I’ve stated a few times that I like to connect with other bloggers out there, but I really just don’t have the time. Now my focus is more on search engine traffic. If they like my blog maybe they’ll subscribe. I’m not going to show my stats on the side like a lot of bloggers, with their 1,000 subscribers or whatever. I don’t do this for subscribers, I don’t do it for anyone. I do it for my enjoyment, and after awhile I just didn’t enjoy dropping on Entrecard so I stopped.

As I said, I do enjoy blogging about this and that here and there so that’s why the posts keep coming

Entrecard really doesn’t interest me anymore – I mean look at some of the top blogs on there they have some serious OCD over Entrecard. In my opinion, it’s like artificially inflating your stats. People are only subscribing and posting comments all the time because you’re on top of Entrecard. Would they be there if you stopped dropping and advertising on Entrecard? I doubt it. So these are in a way not real comments or subscribers

My plan is to let people become subscribers IF they want to, and comment IF they want to. I’m not DOING anything to get them to comment or subscribe. That’s the way I want it. I don’t have any dreams to become a “ProBlogger” or anything like that. I have no dreams of becoming rich off my blog either. Most of the people at the top of EC have that dream stuck in their head and can’t get rid of it.

Me, yea I make money online, but I do not make money from this blog. Well maybe a little, like $80/mo, nothing to brag about. Pays for my hosting and a little more so that’s great The real point here is – if you want to make money from your blog, don’t even bother with Entrecard. Search engine traffic is the only way you can monetize. Maybe possible if you’re really really sticking to a specific niche all the time and all your readers would be interested in all the products you’re talking about. It would have to be laser targeted though.

I’m not dropping Entrecard from the site yet, people can continue to advertise on my blog if they want