Now, granted, Blog Consulting is showing up at the very bottom of page 1, but it is on the page. Why does it even mater? A page one return is the desired result for SEO efforts. The blogs and bloggers who sites show up on page one are an amazing group of blog consultants. I often read their blogs and I know what kind of work they are producing. Just to show up on the same page is what we consider a “happening”. When you work on a blog or website and finally see some Google recognition, it is a very satisfying feeling.

There is an extremely strong possibility that the slide will slide back to page 2 or 3 and then move forward again. Over time I hope to see this Blog Consulting site stay on Page 1 and hopefully move up somewhere in the top three for the keyword phrase “blog Consulting” and “Blog Consultant”. We will keep working and watching!

On this site we have added a premium WordPress theme, then we added some affiliate links, we added five public domain articles about alternative energy stocks, and we added Google Adsense.  If you look at the site you can see that we take time to keep the sites attractive.  The Adsesne is carefully color coordinated to match the text and links on the rest of the site and the ads are placed carefully.  We added a stock market ticker to give a more professional feel to the site as well.  We want our content to be valuable, but the reality is that the best outcome for the site is that someone clicks on one of the Google ads or on one of the affiliate ads.  If the site doesn’t look professional, the chances are that people will just move away from the site without clicking anything.  This site presents well, and as we begin to see some traffic people should start to click on the ads.

A fairly normal click rate on Google is about 2 or 3 percent.  That means that if hundred people visit the site, two of them will click on an ad.  If the click is worth fifty cents or more than you can make a dollar for every hundred visitors.  If the site is only costing you one dollar a year, it doesn’t take long to break even.  It could take a while to get the first hundred visitors.  We will discuss how to start getting traffic in future articles on Blog Consulting.

For our project we chose the domain name Alternative Energy Information (www.alternativeenergyinformation.net) which we have now set up and we have added the nine sub-domains, which gives us the ten websites for ten dollars a year. We have to set up each of the nine sub-domain sites so that they are functional. This requires installing WordPress, adding a theme, and adding content. We have finished setting up the first sub-domain site, Renewable Alternative Energy. We added five public domain articles to the site (using the public domain articles is handy because it is quick, but it has some drawbacks, namely, the articles don’t help us with our search engine optimization), we added Google Adsense (there is virtually no traffic to the sites right now so the Adsense isn’t effective, but if one person makes it to the site and clicks on a link, it could pay for the site for the year), and we also added some affiliate programs to the site which provide additional information and also another possible revenue stream.

We will repeat the process for each of the other eight sites, finding content and affiliate programs that fit the site. Then we let the sites kind of simmer a while so that the search engines can begin to relate to them. We will add an article or two a month, and we will begin the link building process. We will talk more about these three components (time, content, links) in future articles in this blog consulting series.

I had hoped to demonstrate how quickly the ten sen sites could be put up but I got busy with some other blog consulting work. Each site requires about two hours to reach the set up stage, this includes all the preliminary set up with the web host. I am hoping to have all the sites up by the end of May, 2009.

I have already laid the groundwork on the head site at Alternative Energy Information, and once I get Wordpress installed on the other nine sites I will begin the process of getting them ready.  Initially, to save time, the sites will all have the same theme, I will change the colors for a little variety, but I just want to get them up to start getting some Internet time.  Time is a big factor with SEO.  So is content.  And so are links.

I have Future Alternative Energy and Renewable Alternative Energy already up and Wordpress’d.  They are just sitting there with the Kubrick theme saying “hello world”.  Normally, I would write an article. point a feew links at the site, and just let it sit.  However, for the sake of this article, I will try and get the sites up in the near future.  I am installing Alternative Energy Funds as I am writing and I am timing how long it takes from the time I edit the wp-config file until I have the Wordpress installation completed.  I just finished Alternative Energy Funds and it took exactly fifteen minutes.  I am not just sitting here watching files transfer, I am multi-tasking on three computers which makes the time go really quick, but in a little over two hours I should have these nine sites up and running with the Kubrick theme.

I spent two hours this morning doing some affiliate research so when I start customizing the sites it should go pretty quickly.  In the next blog consulting article I will write about how the sites are developed.  If you have questions about the basics of how to create a blog, I would recommend you visit My Newbie Blog (www.mynewbieblog.com) for information on WordPress basics.

We need to get a domain name to get things started.  This is what we are going to spend the ten dollars on.  We are going to do our domain name research at Good News Domains, and then we will purchase the domain name (with tax the domain name will actually cost 10.19, so I rounded down for the title of the series).  Good News Domains will then provide us with free hosting for our ten websites.  We will set the main one up with the domain name we purchased, and then we will set up the others as sub-domains with the keywords we researched earlier.

Alternative energy is very competitive and so we had to get creative to get a domain name that would work.  We finally decided on and purchased Alternative Energy Information (www.alternativeenergyinformation.net).  We will set this site up with the free linux hosting provided by Good News domains.  The next step will be to set up the sub-domain sites.  This method will work fine as we are going to be expecting the search engines to bring traffic to our sites.   Over the next couple of week we will be getting the following sites going.

Renewable Alternative Energy

Future Alternative Energy

etf Alternative Energy

Mutual Fund Alternative Energy

Business Alternative Energy

Alternative Energy Funds

Alternative Energy Investments

Alternative Energy Stocks

Alternative Energy Sources

Getting these sites started will require us to create MYSQL databases and then installing Wordpress for each of the sites.  This process is really fairly easy once you get used to it.  It requires some knowledge of how to use FTP (file transfer protocol), and how to unzip files.  Good News  Domains provides an FTP program or you can use Firezilla or any other FTP program you are comfortable with. We will continue this blog consulting series of articles after we get the sites up and running.

There are a lot of things we will have to cover in tghis series.  We will discuss how to get ten websites for ten dollars, how to set them up, and we will talk about the process of what kind of websites to start.  We want to create websites that will eventually develop traffic and that have some adsense value.

Let’s start by talking about Adsens value.   Google has a great little tool available that is called the Goodle Adwords Keyword tool.  You can access it at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This tool is designed for the people are going to advertise with Adwords but it works very nicely for giving you some idea of the value of certain keywords.  What we need to find out is if the keywords we are going to use on our sites have any measurable traffic, and what the going rate for a click for that keyword is.

By typing in a keyword phrase and checking out its estimated CPC we can get a rough idea of the adsense value for a keyword.  After much blog consulting thought, I have decided to demonstrate this process with the keywords alternative energy.  While this is a very competitive keyword, which is not one I would suggest for anyone, it shoud make an interesting demonstration site and perhaps ultimately I will be able to sell the site to someone who is trying to promote an alternative energy business in the future.

The Google keyword tool tell me the following about “alternative energy”

The important numbers are the estimated CPC $1.89 and the search volume, 368,000.  The higher the two numbers are the better, but, the keywords will be way more competitive.  Our strategy is going to be to look down on the list of related keywords and look for keywords that have a high CPC and a reasonable amount of monthly searches.  We are going to try and find ten keywords that fit our profile and then we will begin the process of starting the sites.

Some promising keyword possibilities that fit our profile are:

Renewable alternative energy, CPC 2.99, Searches 8100

Future alternative energy, CPC 5.78, Searches 1000

etf alternative energy, CPC 3.60, Searches 1600

We will continue to research the keywords and come up with a list of ten and then we are going to go shopping for a suitable domain name in our next blog consulting article.

If you are thinking that you should be able to make a lot of quick easy money on the Internet, you need some blog consulting, because you are wrong. If you would like to start your own business, that you work at part time and start by making a little bit of money that eventually develops into more money, then the Internet might be a good fit for you. There are actually a quite a few ways to make money. You can use Adsense from Google to monetize your site with other peoples ads. You get paid for clicks from those ads. Some clicks are worth two or three cents, while others can be worth one, two, or three dollars. For Adsense to be really effective you have to have a lot of traffic on your website. You can get involved in affiliate programs where you recommend products or services from your blog and you get paid by the sale or by the click. Again traffic is important. You can also sell advertising space on your blog once it is developed.

One approach to consider, is to start a lot of websites that make a little bit of money. If you can get a website online in a short period of time, that doesn’t require a lot of maintenance, that makes you fifty cents or a dollar a day, that doesn’t seem like much. But what if as you got used to starting blogs you realized that you could get a site up and running in a couple of hours. That you could easily get five new sites started every week, and if each site could make you a dollar a day, by the time you got a hundred websites running you could start making a reasonable income. You could then further develop the sites that capture the most organic traffic and turn them in to more significant income producers.

In this series of articles I will outline for you how to get blogs started for very little money, just like the title implies, ten websites for ten dollars a year. If those ten websites can make you ten dollars a day, then you have a good start. You can keep adding ten websites for ten dollars a year and over time develop a nice steady income. Each site will only cost you a dollar a year, so you can start an unlimited number of sites. In our next article in the series we will start laying the groundwork for the first ten blogs/websites.

There are a lot of blogs and websites that are desperate for content.  They will publish articles on their sites that you write and in return they will allow you to include two or more links in your article back to your site.  There a lot of these sites on the Internet.  Here are a couple of examples:

Article City (articlecity.com)
Ezine Articles (ezinearticles.com)

The only drawback to article marketing is that it takes a lot of time to submit your articles to all of the different sites.  The way I cut down the time of this process is by using a service provided by Article Marketer .  I just submit my articles to Article Marketer and they submit them to hundreds of other sites.  They offer a free service which has a partial distribution, but I pay for the full service because I feel like I can make better use of my time than hand submitting each article to the various publishing sites.

The way the process works is that you write an original article about a topic that is in line with your blog.  Do not duplicate articles on your blog.  The best thing to do is write an article just for this process.  If you cant do that, than do a thorough rewrite of one of your own existing articles.  When you submit the article to article marketers, you can include two links back to your site in the author’s box.  As part of the agreement for publishers putting your article on their site, they have to publish those two links as well.  This does two things, it will give you traffic from people who read the article and follow the links, it will also count as two links.  With Article Marketer your article has the possibility of being published on hundreds of websites.  Do the math, two links times hundreds of websites, equals hundreds of links.  If you can write two - four articles a month and submit them to Article Marketer you can generate a lot of links over time.  Take some time to check out some of the various article marketing opportunities.  Article Marketing can be time consuming, but it is a great way to build good links for your blog.

Now, take the URL’s for the sites that show up and go to Yahoo.com.  Once you get to the search engine on Yahoo type in the following: linkdomain:and the URL address.  Here is what it will look like for the top result for blog consulting.

The result for that search looks like this:

And there you have it.  40,322 links is what you would need to compete with the position one return for blog consulting on Google.  Don’t worry, blog consulting is a very competitive keyword, and your keyword choice will probably not be nearly as competitive.  When you are looking for keywords to help your blog, finding out how many links the competition has can be a big factor in determining if the keyword is worth pursuing.  If your competition has 40,00 links, you should probably look for a different keyword.

That being said, how do you develop links?  One of the first things you should do is begin to read and comment on 4 or 5 blogs that are similar to yours.  If you build some online community you may be able to exchange links after a while.  You will also generate some traffic to your site by leaving comments, and the people who come to your site are potential links as well.  It is a good first step.  We will discuss more linking options in future articles.

The site is being developed as Learn to Play a Guitar Online. Our SEO strategy for the site includes writing keyword rich articles that provide information about guitars and guitar instruction. These articles will help the site to show up on searches. Remember that the three biggest influences on the search engines are time, links, and content. Content (well written informative articles) is the most important component. Time and links count, but content is King. So far in the process we went to Good News Domains and purchased the domain name, “www.learntoplayaguitaronline.com”. This domain name, which is a little longer than we would have liked, will provide some help in our SEO strategy by incorporating several of the keywords we will be highlihgting (guitar, online, learn to play). We have installed WordPress on the site, added a custom theme, and created a logo. For detailed information on how to create a blog or website using WordPress we recommend that you visit My Newbie Blog (ww.mynewbieblog.com) which provides step by step instructions on getting a blog or website started. As we continue the development of the site we will update this series of articles.