Way back in the day, there was a sort of consensus among search engine researchers that followed Google and used their knowledge to instruct website owners in the practice of search engine optimization that Google only indexed the first 300 words on a webpage. More to the point, it was said that only the first 300 words were used by Google to determine a webpage ranking in its search results. Thus, anything you wrote after 300 words was "wasted."

That may have been true at one time, but it has long since ceased to be the case with Google’s determination to index more of the web. Still, this time honored SEO advice was repeated constantly over the years.

Worse, a 300 word post is seldom sufficient for covering almost any topic in enough depth to make it valuable to a reader. Most web publishers were well aware of this, but they chose optimizing for search engines over writing for their readers.

Google’s recent search ranking updates have slaughtered those who were slaves to the 300 word article rule.

Google Website Rankings Update

As more information about Google’s new search rankings algorithm has emerged, the consensus now is that a plethora of 300-word posts will actually hurt your website rather than improve your search rankings.

Google has stated that it has improved its search rankings by downgrading websites with thin or limited content. In fact, even the good webpages of a website can be penalized if they are on a domain with too much junk content. Those highly ranked, well-written articles are now dragged down by all of those keyword stuffed 300 word posts used before to prop them up.

This is all good news for writers making money online by writing. No longer is it advantageous to pay $1 for fifty 300 word articles from the cheapest freelancer you can find on elance.com. Such thin content actually hurts your website and makes your webpages rank worse. Websites looking to improve their traffic and even those looking to recover from a Panda hit that they took will be better off actually generating or commissioning worthwhile, informative, and yes, longer articles.

This website was started with the writer in mind. Instead of advice of how to make money with websites using tricks and techniques that gamed Google’s search engines, the idea is to show someone who can (and does) write well and publishes useful content how to turn that content into a way to make money writing online.

Make no mistake. The content mills and affiliate marketing scammers are hard at work on finding the next bare-minimum they can get away with.

Don’t fall into that trap. Keep writing the good stuff. Keep using the techniques to link it, index it, build it and monetize it, but keep making it good.

Google is said to be updating the Panda algorithm on a monthly basis now. Whatever garbage method the junk publishers come up with next might work for a month or two, but as soon as it becomes known, Google will be looking for a way to knock it down.

Content to Advertising Ratio

One recent metric to emerge from the AdWords / AdSense world is that of ads to content. It seems that in some cases, Google measures how much content there is relative to how much advertising there is.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that longer articles will fair better in this ratio. A 300 word article, for example, is 10 percent ads with just 30 words of advertising, versus a 1,000 word article offering up to 100 words of advertising for the same ad ratio.

In other words, if your blog is monetized with Google AdSense, those longer articles you have been writing are paying off for you right now.

Death of the 300 Word Post originally published at Make Money Writing Online

It’s Not What You Know, It’s What They Know

There are a lot of SEO resources out there that will teach you the tricks of the trade for SEO. SEO tactics like getting the right title tags, using header tags properly, and most importantly of all, building backlinks can help your webpages and your online writing rank higher on Google and everywhere else. However, there is one factor of search engine rankings that is often overlooked. It is overlooked, because it actually has nothing to do with SEO, targeting keywords, or ranking highly for a desired phrase.

For a good writer, the most important factor in determining whether or not you can make money writing online is not how well you can rank for the keywords you want to rank highly for, it’s how well you can rank for the keywords THEY ARE LOOKING FOR.

A good freelance writer can write an informative and useful article about almost anything given enough research. Therein lies the rub. The Google search that most people are making is the research that they are doing. Unless your article title and its associated title tags match what they are looking for, another article that does match will rank higher for the search they are performing, regardless of its quality. That means you not only need to write quality content, but that you must do it in such a way as to match what someone less informed might be searching for.

For example, after doing some research, you might know that someone upgrading the memory in a netbook would need 200-pin DDR2 RAM. However, if your article jumps right into referencing RAM, and DDR2, and 200-pins and so on, it won’t ever be seen by someone looking for information about how to upgrade netbook memory, because they will type into Google, “netbook memory upgrade” or maybe even, “put more memory in netbook.” Notice how the words RAM, DDR2 and pins are all missing. Eventually, they might know some of those words, but that will be a smaller search segment.

When writing about topics that you don’t know or that you need to do significant research about, write your title and introductory paragraphs before doing the research. That way, you’ll be coming from the same place as your reader and be much more likely to hit them on their searches. Be sure to include lots of synonyms or other ways of saying the same thing to catch all the possibilities. From our example above, the intro paragraph should incorporate the words netbook, laptop, computer, memory, RAM, upgrade, and so on. Otherwise, you are just leaving money on the table for someone else.

Real Secret to SEO originally published at Make Money Writing Online

It takes more than just fancy flying.

Read to earn money by writing online? Selling advertising to monetize your published content online is one of many ways to make money by writing online. It is also one of the most popular thanks to being able to generate passive income for a long time without the need to do any additional work. That is the theory, anyway.

The catch to making money with Google AdSense once you have been approved or another advertising network is that people have to click on the ads you display.

Technically, that is not true since there are advertising programs that will pay you based on how many times an ad is shown, something known as cost per impression, or CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Unfortunately, the pay rates for CPM or impression-based ads are typically very low. Without tens of thousands of pageviews these ads won’t generate enough money to cover your morning cup of coffee.

When it comes to CPC or cost per click, advertising, the need for high amounts of traffic is much lower. One can actually make very good money on just a few thousand visitors per month provided you generate the right kind of content, that content ranks highly, and most important of all, that content leads people to click on the advertisements displayed.

It is that last piece that trips up most people. Just because something is popular, just because you rank #1 in Google for that keyword, and just because you get a million hits per day, doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone is clicking on the advertisements displayed on your website. The fact is that certain types of people click on ads and certain types of people do not. One area that trips up a lot of new writers looking to build an online money making business writing, is that the more technilogically savvy a user group is, the less likely they are to EVER click on an ad.

Think it through.

A techie user most likely abandoned Internet Explorer for a better browser years ago. That same user almost certainly has taken advantage of the more powerful browser’s ability to use extensions by installing those that make surfing the Internet faster and easier. The first plug-in on that list is an ad blocking plugin, which means that not only are technically savvy readers not clicking on Google ads, they are never even seeing them in the first place.  This is not good news for those of us who are professional technical freelance writers.

In other words, if you want to make money writing with Google AdSense or any other advertising program, you will need to write about non-technical topics.

Earn Money Writing Online with Ads originally published at Make Money Writing Online

The question, of course, has to be then, what Yahoo plans to do as a business in order to make money if it will not be a search engine company. The answer has been a scattered set of developments, online services, and technologies that Yahoo! has rolled out over the last year or two, including Yahoo buying Associated Content.

Ironically, in many of the new areas Yahoo is focusing on are ones where the company is also the #2 provider (or less). One of the areas that Yahoo has been working at expanding its online offerings for is real estate listings.

Searching Real Estate Listings Online

Some industries were ripe for the Internet from the moment the technology and bandwidth speeds were in place to handle them. Searching homes for sale was one of those areas. The Internet allows users to browse through hundreds of real estate listings, including pictures without having to drive around just to see a dozen houses. What’s more, computers are great at parameter based searching. Users can select to only see houses with more than three bedrooms, or only those with at least a two-car garage, and so on.

Yahoo! Real Estate has been providing just such an online home search service to users for some time. However, it has languished behind other websites with a real estate focus. The company has made a new move to increase its real estate listing offerings, as well as provide more advertising sales and opportunities to local real estate agents via a new partnership with Zillow.

One of the things that make this deal interesting for those looking to earn money by writing websites or making money writing online by using AdSense or other online advertising is that Zillow has shown up as one of the Google third-party ad networks for Google AdSense. With Zillow offering ads on both the Google publisher network and on Yahoo, savvy webmasters and professional writers creating online content will need to keep an eye on whether or not their Google approved AdSense sites continue to get “the good ads” or whether the CPC for third-party ad network ads drops due to Zillow serving up lesser or left over ads on Google content publisher websites.

(Note: The deal was just announced and no one knows what, if any affect, it will have on AdSense earnings or publisher websites. This is only one more reason to closely monitor the level of AdSense success each website has, not a statement that things are already worse, or that things will change at all.)

Yahoo Partners With Zillow For Real Estate Listings originally published at Make Money Writing Online

Who is right?

Unfortunately, that is a pretty tricky question to answer.

Early on in the launch of the third-party ad networks, many webmaster claimed that they saw their revenues and earnings in the form of cost per click or CPC decline. They further claimed that after disabling all of the third-party ad networks that their ad revenue increased back to “normal” levels. That might have been all she wrote, except for at that point one of many unofficial Google spokesmen turned up on that forum and said that the 3rd party networks were being rolled out very slowly and therefore, whatever those guys were seeing was not the result of lower payments from third-party ads. He went on to say that it would be a “mistake” to follow the disabling course of others. Curiously, no other information has been forthcoming sense.

It is difficult to no how much value to give to various forum posts since users are notorious for inflating their importance and income. Reading many user’s posts leaves one with the considered opinion that the author has never published anything other than a handful of token websites in their life, let alone have any sort of ability to provide a valid analysis.

Testing Google Certified Ad Networks Impact On Earnings

Unfortunately, truly testing the impact of Google certified ad networks would require either directly violating Google’s confidentially terms and conditions or violating the rule against having more than one AdSense account. Since AdSense publishers can only enable or disable third-party certified ad networks on a whole account basis, there is no way to turn them off for one set of sites and leave them on for another and then compare the results. To publicly compare results would violate rules against disclosing cost per click and eCPM metrics.

Thus, Google leaves us with no way of knowing whether or not the new 3rd party certified ad networks are good for us publishers or not. Are the Google Certified Ad Networks hurting earnings, or are the new 3rd party ad networks helping earnings? I guess we’ll just have to go ask Mr. Owl.

Who Are Google Certified Ad Networks

The only thing we can see is who the certified third-party ad networks are. If you were expecting to see the names of numerous advertising powerhouses or other well-respected online vendors, you have a surprise coming. Most of the certified ad networks list reads like that starting lineup for the Cleveland Indians at the start of the movie Major League, “I’ve never heard of most of these guys.”

As always, successful AdSense publishing requires diligence on the part of the publisher and webmasters. Monitor your sites and check in periodically to see what ads are showing up. Find out whose ad is on your webpage and add those served by undeserving advertisers to your competitive ad filter where both Google and 3rd party ads will be blocked.

Determining which, if any of the third-party ad networks to block will be much more difficult. For now, monitor your AdSense income and respond to any substantial across the board drop by blocking all 3rd party ad networks immediately.

Remember, this is the holiday season, when AdSense earnings are at their highest. If you are publishing real, legitimate content and honestly building links and authority to your webpages, your AdSense income should be going up through the end of the year, not going down. So, now is the perfect time to over-react. Next year, you can re-evaluate if necessary. And, the good news is that you will have a baseline of data from your “blocked” period to use as a starting point in evaluating whether or not to continue allowing the Google Certified Ad Networks back onto your websites.

List of Google Certified Ad Networks

Here is a list of third-party ad networks as of 11/28/09:

Adchemy
Invite Media
Specific Media
Turn
[X+1]
OwnerIQ, Inc.
Adconion Media Group
Adtegrity.com
AudienceScience Inc.
Dapper Inc.
Dedicated Media
FetchBack
LucidMedia
NetSeer Inc.
QuinStreet, Inc.
ReTargeter
Teracent Corporation
ValueClick, Inc.
Aggregate Knowledge
Atrinsic
Brand.net
BrightRoll
Chitika
Collective Media
CPM Advisors, Inc
DataXu
Efficient Frontier, Inc.
InterCLICK
Media6Degrees
MediaMath
OpinMind
Quantcast Corporation
Rocket Fuel Inc.
Semantic Sugar, Inc.
TellApart
Traffic Marketplace
Triggit
Goodway Group
Ad Marketplace
VivaKi
AppNexus
Epic Advertising
Reply! Inc.
Criteo Europe
Criteo UK

If you have any data to share, or experiences to report, regarding 3rd-party ads on your website, please don’t hesitate to comment or email.

Google Certified Ad Networks Who Are They? originally published at Make Money Writing Online

But, since this site is about helping writers make money online by doing what they do best, that is writing, I’m not going to go there right now. Instead, I will tell you that the three-word phrase you see on everyone’s how to make money posts, Content Is King, is 100% true.

I am currently in the midst of an ongoing project to build a big money making empire of websites. I could use all those SEO tips and webmaster tricks out there to try and make crappy sites rank high, or I could just do what I do best, write quality articles and posts for these sites and let Google do what it does best, separate crappy MFA sites from good ones.

That being said, it would take very fast typing fingers to write daily content for even a dozen websites, let alone several dozen. Trying to do that while running a small freelance writing business would require the aid of some form of time stopping ability.

What is a budding writing web entrepreneur to do?

Write ahead.

Every day, you will be writing. After all, you are a writer, and that is what writers do.

However, some days you will fill like writing about certain topics and not about others. Save the forcing-it writing for paying clients with deadlines and use your want-to writing to write for your sites. You’ll write faster and better.

Don’t just write one post or article and move on. Write three. Write a dozen. Heck, write 20. Then take advantage of WordPress’s scheduling ability to meter those posts out in nice search-engine friendly increments. Personally, I like to publish every other day, not including weekends. That makes a Tuesday-Thursday publishing schedule fairly attractive.

Sticking to this schedule gives you two major benefits. First, your content is always new and fresh, which Google loves.

Second, since you know that your “automatic posts” go out every Tuesday and Thursday, when you need publish something a little more timely, or you just don’t want to put what you just wrote at the end of the queue, you can set it to post on any of the other days of the week and know that you won’t be overlapping without having to go into your control panel and look it up.

Do this for each site as you set them up and have maximum enthusiasm for the topic. You should easily be able to crank out 5 posts. With the 2 a week schedule, they’ll last 2 1/2 weeks before you have to come back.

Chances are, you’ll have plenty of good ideas before then.  Keep going and pretty soon you’ll have enough posts queued up to take a vacation and not miss a beat.

Keep Making Money Online By Writing Ahead originally published at Make Money Writing Online

It also covers why almost all professional freelance writers should be incorporated as an LLC business type versus sole proprietorship.  Then, it tells entrepreneurs how to setup a writing business LLC by filing Articles of Incorporation with the Secretary of State of your home state.  (Technically, LLCs are formed without articles of incorporation, but people commonly refer to it in this manner anyway.)

Start Up Writing Business Guide originally published at Make Money Writing Online

Try writing resumes.

With the economy’s current troubles layoffs are hitting many people hard.  For some, their last job hunt was 5, 10, or even 20 years ago!

Dusting off the old resume and then trying to update it to include the most recent job and duties, as well as make it look and feel current by today’s standards can be a daunting task.  People will gladly pay a professional resume writer to take care of the whole thing.

How-To Start A Freelance Resume Writing Business

1. Brush up on your resume writing skills.  Read some of the career resources out there, contact your alumni career center.
2. Hunt For Freelance Gigs.  Guru, Elance, and other sites might be good for regular freelance writing gigs, but job seekers aren’t experienced in the freelance writing world.  They go to Craigslist and places like that.
3. Start a Job Hunting Blog.  The easiest jobs you’ll ever get are the ones that come to you.  Write a job hunting blog filled with useful and relevant information and job hunters will find you before they even know they want a professional resume writer.

These quick and easy tips should be able to get you started.  Writing resumes may not be your end goal, but they can be a great way for a writer to make ends meet while building up that dream freelance writing practice you want.

Need to make a certificate? Here is how to make one with Microsoft Word certificate of appreciation templates.

Useful Resume Resources:

• Free Microsoft Word Resume Templates
• Resume Tips and Free Resume Templates

Make Money Writing Resumes Online originally published at Make Money Writing Online

In the meantime, visit my professional freelance writing blog for great freelance writer tips.

Thank you all for your support so far.

Freelance Writing Pays Off originally published at Make Money Writing Online

I know what you are thinking, “Aren’t there already a million make money online websites out there?”

The answer is, “Yes, there are, but this isn’t one of them.”

You see, I’m a professional freelance writer.  I have numerous paying clients and I pay the bills with my writing, but I’ve noticed something.  Many of the online sites out there generating content are nothing more than page mills.  They hire writers as $5 or $10, or maybe even $15 per post and then have them crank out whatever 300 to 500 word articles they can.

Just what are they writing about you might ask.  Whatever.  Seriously.  It doesn’t matter.  What these content mills (they call themselves article directories or article depositories, or something) do is watch the Google search keywords and then ask their army of writers to write something (anything) to match those keywords.

The objective is not to educate or even build up a readership, it is mearly to get people onto their sites via search engine results and then serve up as many ads as possible.  That’s it.

So, it doesn’t really matter if the person writing about 1035 exchnages knows a darn thing about 1035 exchanges, real estate, or taxes, just as long as the article they deliver has the proper keywords and is in the ballpark of being accurate.  After all, these websites doen’t care if you find out anything useful about 1035 exchanges, all they want is for you to click on their ads.

What’s my point?

Imagine if a professional writer were to actually sit down and write useful, inspired, and educationaly content.  What if that writer actually knew the same tips and tricks that these content mills knew?  Then that writer could produce a quality website on 1035 exchanges AND make money writing online about them.

I’ve begun my journey.  I continue to write freelance articles for several clients both online and off (including some of the content mills).  This pays my bills today.

But, I have also started building up a set of websites that I am calling “The Empire” which I will use the techniques I have come to learn to position not only as top search results, but also as informative and trustworthy sources.  Along the way, I will make money writing online, and eventually will not bother freelance writing for others as my online web empire begins to generate enough money for me to live on.

Then, I will truly be living the dream.  A writer who gets to write what he loves and makes money doing it.

Come along for the ride.  I could use the company.

Make Money Writing Online originally published at Make Money Writing Online