Optimizing your work from home blog means you are doing things to focus the traffic you get and to keep readers on your pages longer. There are a number of things one can do to accomplish this goal so I have listed a few below, enjoy.

1. Use On-Page Markup Factors Like Google Likes It

I began my online business creating websites for others where I always remembered to use H1 thru H3 headings for proper SEO factors but later found I was as diligent on my own websites. This isn’t the brightest move I ‘ve made and didn’t give me the kind of attention I expected from search engines.

The time you spend using on-page markup is worth it so do take the time to return to those pages you missed and fix them up.

2. Be Specific With The Keywords For Your Page Titles

I have seen so many pages that don’t use keyworded titles, heck I have seen them saying things like, home, index, or other useless things. Take the time to use the keywords that are important to the page in your title.

3. Use Keyword Anchor Text To Link Your Webpages Together

Linking to other websites is important but it’s also important to link to your own relevant internal pages. Doing this on a regular basis will help you get more target traffic to your website and will often keep your readers on your site much longer.

4. Use Title or ALT Tags For Images And Text Links

When you use links be sure to use anchor text that is keyworded but also take the time to use the TITLE tag to add a descriptive title and again be sure to use your keywords. The same thing applies for your images. Use the ALT tag in the same way you use the title tags for anchor text.

5. Use SEO Friendly URLs To Optimize Your Pages

While it may sound hard to do, but it is not very hard when you know what you are doing. Basically for wordpress users, default permalink structure is not SEO Friendly, so you want to enable it in a way that it contains keywords of the post.

6. Each And Every Page Should Be Optimized For Search Engines

It’s the on page optimizing that’s a huge factor in search engine optimization. Tags can be included like the Descrition Meta-Tag or the Title Meta-Tag along with your keyword density. I personally use All-In-One-SEO to help me optimize my Wordpress blogs.

7. Duplicate Content Is A Bad Thing

A key in getting good search engine rankings today is to avoid using duplicate content. Google has already slapped many sites using duplicate content. I use Copyscape.com to verify my content is unique.

8. Try Making Your Webpages Load Faster For Your Readers

If you’re using Wordpress blogs you can quickly add a plugin that can speed the loading of your pages.The plugin I am using for this is called WP-Super Cache and it’s free.

9. Invest Time Making Your Webpage More Attractive

I’m sure you’ve landed on pages that just didn’t look right or had such poor colour combinations you just couldn’t stick around as it burned your eyeballs. Really anything that can turn your reader away is something you should avoid and that includes ugly webpages. Sometimes this problem can be solved as easily as choosing a different Wordpress theme.

10. Put A Feedback Form On Your Sites

I tried using various methods to include my email address on my pages but that just got me a lot of non related spam so today I have a contact form my readers can use to send me feedback and they never get access to my email address.

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Looking to work at home and make some extra income from the Internet? I’ve been doing just that for almost a decade now and it’s so rewarding, when done correctly.

My wife and I have found online marketing to be an awesome way to work at home part time and earn money to keep us ahead of the cost of living these days.

We reside in Canada’s east coast province of New Brunswick and I do business with people from all around the globe.

I began my online business pretty clueless about marketing online so I had to learn it all from scratch.

Note: I tried to make a go of it without learning but that left me broke, frustrated and a bit angry as I had heard it was easy to make money online.

Long story short I learned what I needed to know to start getting the free search engine traffic that makes me money today.

So the best advice I can give any newbie marketers is to invest the time learning how to make money online, before all else.

Your goal should be to find a niche you can make money in and today that takes a bit of research.

1. Start By Finding A Niche You Can Profit In

If you just jump into online marketing you will most likely go after a market that has way too much competition which leaves most new markets lost once they realize they aren’t making money.

This is wher Amazon comes in.

Amazon sells just about anything and everything you could imagine but they also have an affiliate program which will allow you to promote products from Amazon.

Joining the Amazon Affiliate Program gives you an unlimited supply of products to promote. You just need to find the products you can make money with. So let’s get on with it then.

Amazon makes it easy for marketers like you and me to find the best selling products to promote. They give you a lot of details and stats to help you make the right decisions.

Finding Profitable Niches In Amazon’s Bestsellers

In my opinionAmazon.com is one of the best places to research profitable niches for money making products, without taking hours or days of your time.

The time you save can be put to good use creating websites and content to feed the search engines which will be sending you target traffic which converts to income for you.

Start by opening Amazon.com in your web browser where you should see a list of categories on the left of the page.

You will also see a search box with a drop down list of categories. So now it’s time to find a product to promote.

Choosing A Category

If you mouse-over the categories on the left you will see the sub-categories appear to the right. At this point you would click the category your interested in at this moment.

If you wish to be a little more specific you can use the search box to find products.

First you can either search all departments or categories. I always find it’s better to click the drop down and choose a category first.

One you have your category just type in what you’re looking for in the search box and hit Enter or click Go to the right.

It’s spring here in New Brunswick, the birds are singing and I’m thinking about gardening so let’s use gardening as my example. I’m curious about what books to promote on gardening.

A really cool feature is the suggestions list that appears as you type your keyword in the search box. It instantly gives me more ideas.

I like the phrase gardening for dummies so I am going to look further into this.

Oh brother there are more than 150 books on gardening for dummies to choose from. Which is the best choice for me??

Sorting Your Amazon Search Results

Notice near the top right there is a Sort by drop down list, most likely sorted by relevance at the moment.

Click the drop down and choose bestselling and allow your page to be sorted by best sellers. How cool is that?

Once you have the column sorted by best selling you can startFrom here you can start looking at your choices from top to bottom. The best sellers now start at the top.

Evaluating Best Selling Products

BestSelling – Sorting by the best selling products is a great way to get the products that don’t sell as well out of your face so you can pay attention to the listings that will help you make more money.

Star Rating & Customer Reviews – Checking out what others think of the product will give you a good idea of what to focus on.

Mouseover the stars and a pop-up will show you how many votes this product has. How many for each star actually.

Next click the link to view all the reviews so you know what people are saying about the product, both positive and negative reviews.

I like to read the reviews so that I find more content and helpful phrases I may not have thought of.

Using Google’s Free Keyword Tool

I like using Google’s keyword tool to find relevant words and phrases based on a keyword of my choosing. But instead of typing in a word you can actually have the keyword tool scan a URL for keywords.

Copy the link, also known as the URL, for the Amazon page your looking at.

Usually I just right click the address bar and copy it to the clipboard.

Next I open Google’s Free Keyword Tool and enter the URL into the website text box and click search.

You can easily locate Google’s Free Keyword Tool by searching Google for that phrase. It’s always been the #1 result so it’s easy to find. Just be sure to bookmark it for later use.

Most Competitive Search Results

When you’re looking in the Competition column you’ll see a bar with varying amounts of green indicating the amount of competition for that keyword phrase.

Less green means less competition.

Each column is sortable in ascending or descending order.

Beginner’s Take Note: Competition is good but too much competition could mean it will take you too long to rank for the phrase so you won’t be making money any time soon.

For now just concentrate on phrases with less competition. Of course you need some competition or there is likely no money to be make with that phrase.

I like to use the more competitive phrases as my secondary keywords so that I might eventually rank for them. I do concentrate most of my focus on keywords I can rank for.

Broad Vs Exact Searches

When you look at broad match results you need to know the words in the phrase can be used in any order so to get a more accurate view I suggest you set the Match Type on the left of the page to Exact.

Global Searches Per Month

You can sort this column ascending or descending like the others. This way you can see the largest number of searches to the lowest number.

I seldom use the most searched phrases in my niches as my top keywords. They usually just have way too much competition.

Instead I will go down through the list and choose phrases that run in the middle somewhere. Maybe somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 searches per month.

Battling for the top phrases isn’t my idea of fun and it wastes my time so I don’t.

Instead I use the keyword phrases the bigger players ignore due to low amounts of traffic and make money now. However I still do use top phrases as second and third level phrases for future ranking and income.

Note: I already have some sites ranking for phrases I couldn’t be found for just a year ago. One site went from a couple hundred unique visitors a day to over 1000 which shot my income sky-ward.

I do hope this article, Finding A Profitable Niche Using Amazon helps you. If so please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Manually finding keywords that make money is how I started but as soon as I stated making money I began looking for software that would speed the entire process up.

The software I use today is Keyword Elite . Take a moment and check it out as it has allowed me to do so much more research but much faster. Now I am able to run more websites without any more work.

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There are a lot of people today that work at home income is no longer just a dream. People like me who were able to put the day job behind him.

Perhaps you even know people who now work from home. Some work at home part time as a way to make a little extra income to enjoy life a little more.

Others, again like myself, enjoy working from home full time as their own boss. For me personally it’s a dream I dreamed for about 30 years before I was able to actually make it a reality.

Making Money Online Is Easy

I could get a lot of negative comments on this one but let me continue first.

Do you ride a bicycle? Did you know how to ride it from birth? Was is easy on your first attempt? Not likely.

Well online marketing is like that. It’s something you can learn and the more you practice the easier it gets.

And it can be learned fairly quickly but of course this will have a lot to do with your ability to learn and apply what you’ve learned.

I am a great example of someone that finds it hard to learn new things. But once I learn them I practice them until they are easy.

The Clickbank Marketplace is the perfect place to find the ebooks or information products that will teach you how to work at home and make money.

Why I Prefer Clickbank

You can find ebooks elsewhere but I have had issues with ebooks authors giving me my money back if I don’t care for their product. At Clickbank I have never had a problem getting my money back so I can check out another product.

Don’t Be Fooled By Hype

The old adage “If it’s too good to be true, it just might be” is true.

I have been sucked into buying or joining things based on hype, even when my mind was screaming scam.

This is another reason I love Clickbank for my digital products. I can see what kind of sales a product has and even the percentage of returns. That’s worth gold in my books.

If someone is telling you that you will make a specific amount monthly run away. I mean it.

You really can’t predict how much a person will make or even if they will make anything at all so look at this as a huge warning sign and like I said already, run.

As a retired computer instructor I know all too well that some people just can’t follow instructions. With the instructions right in front of them and an instructor going over every single step they still can’t figure things out.

Learn One Strategy And Apply It

It’s quite alright learning multiple strategies for making money online but my advice is to just take on one strategy at a time.

Learn the strategy, make money with it and then go ahead and learn another. Give yourself every opportunity to earn.

I like Jeff Johnson’s teach and he has some free videos that will teach you successful marketing. Check them out.

Work At Home Learnin’ Earnin’

Not following instructions is the main reason behind most start up failures both online and offline. If time is not invested in learnin’ earnin’ most marketer wannabees will eventually give up without ever making a dime.

Take the time to learn how to work from home as your own boss and what steps are required to start the money rolling in.

Work At Home Multiple Streams of Income

Don’t carry all your eggs in one basket as the bottom could just fall out of your basket.

When I first started my work at home business I found an affiliate program immediately that started earning money right away. Every month my check was getting bigger and bigger.

I was just sitting back watching it all happen. Then one month the check didn’t show up.

I never heard from them again and couldn’t contact them. My income just stopped and I was frustrated and really anger at this guy.

The truth is I should never have allowed myself to stick one source of income.

Well after months without any money coming in I decided to learn how to make money but not before wasting a lot more time trying to get lucky finding another affiliate program I didn’t have to work at.

Working at home is a great opportunity these days but be smart and invest time and even some money learning how to make money. The time and money you invest now will allow you to start earning sooner.

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I work from home full time here in New Brunswick Canada making my living online and I have learned I make more money when the best keyword research is done long before I ever start building a website.

Key phrases can seem very strange. There’s many marketers online who make an awesome income using the same keywords as other who make nothing at all.

Avoid Poor Keywords

My part time work at home business didn’t do so well at the beginning because I didn’t bother doing any real keyword research. I just assumed the top keywords were the best keywords. I was so wrong. The following months I made no money at all and was quite confused.

Making bad keyword choices doesn’t mean you have picked keywords that don’t make money, not at all. You could pick all the top keywords in your niche and not make a single dime just like I did at the beginning. Going for the top keywords in your niche may just be bad keyword choices.

Top keywords aren’t the only bad choices for keywords. There are an unlimited number of keyword phrases that just won’t get the traffic that converts to income. Now I’m not sure where to turn.

Your Keyword Golden Zone

There are keywords that are in what I like to call the golden zone. These are the keywords that still have potential to make money but with much less competition.

If you think about keyword choices based on how long other marketers have been creating content for and getting backlinks for you will have a better idea understanding how hard it can be to compete with them. And then add into the mix the fact that while you are trying to compete they are still building a stronger hold on those keywords. That’s why the top keywords may just be a bad keyword choice.

My advice and something I had to come to terms with is to do the best keyword research you can to find better keywords, ones you can actually rank for in the short term.

Evaluate Your Competition

Most people tend to think of competition as the number of pages found for search terms when really it’s only the first couple of pages of search results we need to be concerned with. Those people who are listed further down that page 3 of most search results don’t get any traffic for those phrases, so why concern yourself with them.

The fact that most people don’t search past the first couple of pages of search results should tell you that your real competition is only the first couple of pages.

Conduct The Best Keyword Research First Time Around And Make More Money Online

It doesn’t matter if you do your keyword research manually like I did for years or if you have the greatest keyword research tool like Keyword Elite, which I use today, it will take time. This is an investment into your success so it’s a wise choice. It’s can make the difference between making money and going hungry.

If you have plenty of time on your hands you can do your keyword research manually using free tools. Start by looking for tutorials on Google’s Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. I did it for a long time before I purchased Keyword Elite.

You will find hundreds and even thousands of helpful free keyword research videos on YouTube.com

Purchasing Keyword Elite for your keyword research needs will save you so much time.

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Jamie T. of New Brunswick, Canada, a good friend and fishing buddy, has a fishing related blog where he shares his fishing experiences and stories, just like I do on my fishing blogs.

As usual when we are fishing we can be really foolish and talk about everything under the sun, even when it’s not sunny at all. The subject always tends to get around to our fishing blogs, of course.

This fishing trip was our last of the year as fishing season was ending in the next day or two and we wouldn’t see each other again for about 6 months. We still communicate throughout the winter using email.

Before the day was done Jamie wanted to know why and how I make money with my blogs. He told me he had tried a few banner ads and an affiliate link here and there but only made pennies and his blog has been up and running for more than a full year.

I only have a grade 9 that I got back in 1969 and Jamie has about 10 years of university under his belt but he was asking how to do something. I was ecstatic but of course was happy to help a friend.

Now we were sitting in a canoe and had been for hours so the attention span was getting short by then. I could see he was lost right away and of course we didn’t stop fishing when we talked so fish were interrupting constantly. How rude. Well I soon told him I would create a tutorial to help him learn more about keyword research and we were back to just fishing.

Before we changed the subject though Jamie wanted to know what tools I used to do my keyword research. That’s when I told him I personally use Keyword Elite 2 and explained that it immediately started saving me hours a day in research time. I then told him that time I saved on research I put into writing content using the keywords Keyword Elite helped me find.

Jamie knows I work from home and have more time on my hands than he does so he soon realized he would rather go the software route as he seldom has time to spare. Plus it might cut into his fishing time and we couldn’t let that happen. So as soon as he got home he went to my work from home website and purchased Keyword Elite 2. Now that’s pretty cool when you can make money even while fishing.

I was going to write a turorial and send it off to Jamie but instead I taught him how to use Keyword Elite and wrote the tutorial as I was teaching him so now I am sharing what I taught Jamie about keyword research and Keyword Elite.

Does the idea of making money online peak your interest? I’ve found it to be a great way to make extra income and for me personally it was a way to have more money at the end of the month.

It’s always something that’s costing us more here in Mocton. If it’s not gas it’s furnace oil or electricity. We also see items we buy weekly at the grocery store going up but pay checks seem to remain the same year after year. Now is the time to do something positive about it.

It can be most frustrating and that’s why so many are looking at possible ways to make a little extra income without taking on a second or third job.

This is where the Internet becomes a very powerful place. There are so many work from home opportunities on the web and they don’t even require you quit your day job.

Some work at home online jobs require fast and accurate typing skills which would leave me out in the cold but fret not there are lots of ways to make money online, even using hunt and peck typing.

Affiliate marketing is one of my favourite methods for making money online as it’s pretty easy to make money with affiliate marketing.My preference for work from home business ideas is affiliate marketing, where I can promote and sell other people’s products and service to earn commissions.

I was not able to find affiliate networks that have products and services for all my niches so I deal with multiple networks.

Your First Step Is Learnin’ Earnin’

I live in Moncton, NB where I work at home marketing online full time now. I have even had the opportunity to help a few others start making money online.

It sure beats working for other people. I am my own boss, which takes a bit of self discipline. I can set my own schedule which allows me to enjoy life more than when I was working my butt off all hours of the day and night.

It’s not hard to make money online once you learn how to make money online.

I started my online business working from home as a web designer and hadn’t even tried to learn about online marketing so when the urge to start marketing online hit me I went to the Clickbank marketplace to find a good ebook on Internet marketing.

I choose Clickbank because I know I will get my money back if I request a refund. That’s important as I have been ripped off by people that wouldn’t give me a refund even though they said they would from their website.

Knowledge Is Power

Knowledge really only becomes powerful when it’s used so it’s important to take action whether it’s your own know-how or some one else’s knowledge.

You can easily work from home in your spare time, it only requires about three or four hours a week.

In the second part of this article I will show you how to research to find a niche or marketing to promote along with steps that will speed up the success process.

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Knowledge has the potential to make you rich, if you know how to use it. First it has to get out of your head.

What’s really awesome about using knowledge to make money is that you can work from home in your spare-time to accomplish this. No need to think about quitting your day job as this can be done in your spare-time. A lot of people do quit their jobs, once they start making more than they earn from their day job.

Let me just say here that I was not very successful on my first attempt, more on this later.

If you were to stop and think about what people sell online you will soon realize that the things you can make money with online are pretty much limitless. However just because there is so much potential doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. It will require that you take the time to learn how to make money online and that means learning online marketing skills.

There Are Keys To Online Success

Key #1 – Taking Action

It doesn’t matter how much knowledge you have crammed upstairs if you don’t take action it’s just going to stay up there as a secret.  Those not willing to take action usually stop reading about here… Are you willing to take action?

Key #2 -  Taking Time To Learn How To Make Money Online

Great, your first action step should be to learn what is required. Allow me to give you my personal advise which is based on what I’ve done to make money online.

1. Purchase A Marketing Ebook From Clickbank

Clickbank has thousands of ebooks or electronic books which are digital products. Clickbank has a lot of categories but you will want to look through the marketing categories to find a good product to learn online marketing skills.

I suggest Clickbank because my experience has shown me that not all books are created equal and sometimes I want my money back. Well Clickbank doesn’t mess around and I usually have my money back, when I request a refund, in less than 48 hours. That way I am not frustrated at losing money and learning nothing.

You can also find online classrooms like those from Jeff Johnson. Jeff also has a lot of free training which will get you started and then you will be able to afford his paid training which will send you right ove the top.

It’s Good To Invest In Your Success

Starting your own website is not expensive today. You can go to Godaddy.com where you can purchase a niche related domain name. A domain has to be renewed yearly but you can also pay for multiple years at one time making it even less expensive.

After you have your domain you will want a place to host it. I prefer to use HostGator.com for all my hosting . Why am I so excited about HostGator.com? They have always been there for me when I need help and their techies are friendly and get the job done quickly.

I purchase domains at GoDaddy for about $10.00 a year or less and I pay less than $10.00 for my hosting where I actually host multiple domains on the same account, making it extremly affordable.

Note: When I started my first website I didn’t take the time to learn how to to make money with it. I just figured it was easy but I didn’t realize just how much competition I would be up against. For this reason I wasted many months and kept my stress levels way too high for that time because of being frustrated and spinning my wheels getting no where fast.

This is a bit embarassing but it should help you not to make the same mistakes. In just about one day, maybe two I learned what I was doing wrong, made a few changes and my life changes. Almost instantly and my stress level dropped right through the floor. Why did I wait so long to admit I was clueless about marketing?

Let me give you a work from home tip that could make you much more successful, much sooner.

Stay local with your keyword choices as it usually sends you much more targeted traffic without all the competition.

Example 1: My first blog was a fishing related blog. My target audience was everyone who enjoyed fishing. I didn’t get much traffic at all.

Then I learned about keeping a local focus and started talking about the towns around me and the city I live in. Almost overnight my traffic changed and I started getting comments, that were not spam by the way.

I started adding affiliate links related to my blog posts. They were for fishing related things like rods, reels, lures and the list goes on.

I’ve even made new fishing buddies through my website.

Example 2: My second blog was a gardening blog. I applied the same tactic to this home gardening tips blog by making my blog posts reference local places which helped to focus my incoming traffic and makes me more money.

With this site I learned about making good keyword choices. I didn’t, at first. I was using the top keywords you would find for home gardening tips which have millions of competing pages. I was fortunate that I started using local references as that got me the traffic that made some money.

Even though I started out using the top keywords in my niche I did learn to use lessor keywords which quite often has less competition. The really cool thing was that after a couple of years I was getting ranked on page 1 of Google search results for terms with millions of competing pages.

The combination of time and lots of blog post using top keywords as secondary keywords led to my current ranking.

The lesson I learned here was that given enough time and lots of work I could rank for just about any phrase. But using lessor keywords I could rank in days and make money at the same time.

I use Keyword Elite 2 to save me so much time on my keyword research. Without it I was fumbling around trying to rank for keywords that would take me years and I wasn’t making much income at all. Since Keyword Elite I have started new sites and blogs using the keywords I could rank for quickly.

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