Internet Marketing, Make Money Online

OK, this post is in my SEO category, and you're probably thinking if I write about StumbleUpon I can't know what I'm talking about, after all every expert will tell you that being stumbled might bring in traffic, but it's worthless traffic that doesn't convert.

Well in most cases you'd be right, but have you ever thought of using StumbleUpon to build backlinks, no, not from being stumbled, but instead from making sure you set your toolbar to show you related websites that you can comment on.

Here's what I do. I know one of my websites is in the make money online niche, so I set my SU profile to show me other make money websites, then I click the Stumble button on my toolbar to show me the next site in the niche.

If I find one that is relevant I make a comment. If it isn't relevant I might pass and click to the next site, or I might leave a comment anyway, but perhaps using the anchor for one of my longer tail keywords.

The people who have the sites get a comment from being stumbled, and with many of them I get a backlink. It's a win/win even though Stumbleupon is usually bad traffic. This is why I don't mind being stumbled myself, I often get some great comments.

Too many people think if all you get from traffic is a comment, that the traffic isn't worth having, but I disagree. Anyone who leaves a good relevant comment increases the amount of content on my page for search engine spiders to index. That's good news for me because it means I might rank higher.

I delete poor quality comments, and I'm sure a lot of other webmasters do as well, but if I can leave a good quality keyword rich comment on another site that I found using SU, then I'm happy, and so is the website owner.

And you can confirm the link is valuable by checking Google webmaster tools. If the link shows up, chances are good you're getting a backlink.

For the last couple of weeks my Wi-Fi router hasn't been working very well, in fact it's been very slow and was dropping around 50% of all connections. So I've replaced it with an Apple Airport Express.

I use a lot of Apple gear, my laptop is an Apple, my ipod is an Apple, OK, that isn't much, only two items, but I'm a confirmed Apple user now so when my old router died I decided to give the Apple's Airport Express a whirl.

First of all it's tiny, I think it might actually be smaller than the powerpack for my MacBook Pro, but it looks similar in that they're both small white boxes with rounded corners. The old router must have been three times the size and had three antenna, whilst the new one has none.

How Apple managed to get it working as well as they have puzzles me. If my old router with three antennas and a separate power pack couldn't do the job well, how did Apple manage to get the Airport Express to work.

Configuring the Airport Express is relatively straightforward, though it does require a couple of steps to be completed first. The first step is to attach all the required cables.

My Internet is always on, so I expected to see a green light saying the Airport Express was able to access my ISP. In fact I saw an amber light. Apparently this is normal, and the disk from the package needs to be inserted and the Airport Express Utility program run.

This configures the Apple Airport Express as a network, and gives the network a password. After that you wait for a minute while it authenticates. After that you're connected. It happily works with two laptops, I haven't tried it with more. So far it's proving to be an excellent investment.

Ugly Blogger themes are all the rage amongst people who want to target search traffic so I've created a version of Grizzly's Ugly Blogger Template for all you budding make money online people.

Basically this theme is a copy of the theme Grizzly uses on his How to Make Money Online for Beginners. It's ugly, no color at all except for the blue links, but it is optimized for SEO and has a bunch of widget spots configured exactly like Grizzly has.

So, you can see from the screenshot this theme is ugly, the only thing worth seeing is the way I've copied Grizzly's description just to make the screenshot a little bit more interesting. In the screenshot I haven't added extra widgets, but they can be added above the blog title, below the description, above the posts, in the sidebar, and in the footer. Pretty cool.


Why would you use this theme, well it's quite simple. Grizzly believes that search engines put a premium on sites that are all content, not all good looks, and the content on this template is right up at the top of the HTML.

The first thing the spider sees is the title, then the description, then the first post, then the sidebar, then the footer; it doesn't get more optimized than that.

Grizzly recommends this type of blogger template for niche sites that target specific keywords, it can be a site you make money online from, or a not for profit site, or just a personal blog, doesn't matter, it's designed to be optimized for the Google Spider, and you know what, the font is bigger, and easy for people to read as well.

To install my Grizzly Ugly Blogger Template, download the zipfile, extract the xml file, then in your Blogger Layout screen click 'Edit HTML' and browse to the file, then click upload. It doesn't get easier than that. Download Blogger Template.

If you want to know why to use this theme, you really need to check out Janet Smith Nomad's Guide to Make Money Online book. She's been making serious money from AdSense and affiliate programs by learning everything Grizzly has to teach.

Her 170 page ebook gives you step by step instructions on what you need to do to research searched keywords, then write quality content that earns you money. I bought the book last week and it's already helping me increase my earnings.