How much is enough? I guess that is the first question anyone needs to answer herself – not just in online business but in any other business or job. When I started this adventure seven months ago I knew it wouldn’t be that easy – I was already making money online but I really couldn’t say that it would be enough for two people to live from it. We need two full-time incomes and not just one which makes the thing not easier.
During the last month or so we could increase the earnings; actually we do every month a little but we definitely need to speed up the process a bit. I was searching here and there and looking around to find another way to increase the earnings – but actually I couldn’t find the answer to my question or I would have just applied it.
On Monday this week I finally felt so burned out that I decided it would be time for a break. Yes, the never going on holiday and taking a break girl – ME – was finally ready to take a break. I was ready to throw in the towel if I wouldn’t find a solution to my problem.
After two days off and doing just a bit to keep everything running smoothly – I finally stumbled over a tool which seems to provide the answer to my questions. Again, if I wouldn’t have given myself some time to relax I wouldn’t have found this tool.
The tool is called Market Samurai. You may have already heard from it as successful online entrepreneurs like Pat Flynn are promoting this intensively.
And because I took the time off the normal daily routine I got myself the free trial of Market Samurai and started exploring the videos, which are simply fantastic. After watching them half an hour I had a whole luster turning on over my head – not just a small light bulb 
If you are also not making enough money online – keep reading, it’s well worth… my findings are most probably also yours, and if not you get the idea what is going wrong.
As you may know I own a digital scrapbooking site, called Digidesignresort.com, nearly four years old. After four years of hard work and over 130,000 back links later anyone most probably would expect that I make a good amount of money from the site.
Well, keeping in mind that we are talking about a site for digital scrapbooking supplies where many designers do their best to kill their own market (please don’t feel offended, I know not anyone does) by selling their products for a very small amount of money, the earnings coming in from that site are good but not good enough. With 30,000 visitors we would and could expect a much higher income than we actually have.
The other site I have, a Mac Tutorials based site, is also getting a good number of visitors. But here, the income is also very slow. So what’s wrong with my sites if a site based on Security Training (such as Pat has) makes over 2,000$ per month while mine are just floating with the masses?
Please note that all what I will show you here is usually highly sensitive data but I want to be as open as possible so that the learnings from this will help you as my readers to get the most benefit as well as myself to get clear about the things I need to do to improve.
So what went wrong?
When I first started out on my digital scrapbooking site I had no idea about SEO, Backlinking or anything similar. I just worked by butt off. I didn’t think of any backlinking – I just thought of working attracting as many people as possible. I went to forums and set up an incentive to sign up for our newsletter – so I got a good amount of users (right now about 8,600) signing up.
But what I didn’t do – I didn’t target any keywords. So here is what it looks like now:
Targeting Keywords
100s of keywords of mine are not just not ranking for anything but they have nothing to do with the site. So I have a huge amount of visitors daily but you can call it “junk traffic” as they come and quickly leave as I have nothing to do with what they are looking for.
What can you do if your site looks similar – targeting tons of keywords but not the right ones?
Fixing is the key.
1. Get yourself a SEO tool for your WordPress Blog, e.g. SEO by Yoast which is the best I know. Another good reason to use it is because it’s free.
2. Invest – yes, I call it an investment as it will improve your business – in Market Samurai. There are tons of keyword research tools on the market but Market Samurai has a huge advantage – it has just a one time fee to pay and is not a monthly investment.
3. Check for the best keywords for your site. The best though are long-tail keywords, e.g. not digital scrapbooking but digital scrapbooking tutorials. When I optimize posts on digital scrapbooking tutorials I target both – digital scrapbooking and digital scrapbooking tutorials.
4. Market Samurai does not just show you the value of a keyword but also the competition. I have optimized the videos/tutorials I created on “digital scrapbooking tutorials”. Let’s see why I didn’t optimize for “digital scrapbooking”
Here is what I found out:
Ranking for the word “digital scrapbooking” can be really tough but it has a high value and daily traffic:
Keyword Research – Value and Traffic
SEO Competition
When I check out the keyword “digital scrapbooking tutorials” I see that it has not a huge amount of daily traffic and a low value but at least it targets the right keyword 
Keyword Research – Daily Traffic and Value
What I can see from using Market Samurai is that it has not a very high competition and therefore, with a little optimization, it shouldn’t be hard to rank for it. So good news!
Keyword Research and Competition
Lesson learned.
First of all – you can just start and still make money but you’ll never climb to the tops of your niche without proper preparation, speaking of SEO. Targeting keywords and even better the right, long-tail keywords will truly help you to avoid junk traffic and support your sales and rankings. Of course it would be MUCH better to rank for digital scrapbooking instead of digital scrapbooking tutorials. But I now have to think about fixing my ranking problem quickly in general. Therefore I will try to rank for lower competition keywords such as digital scrapbooking tutorials and try to target the high competition keyword digital scrapbooking at the same time.
After all – my site is highly relevant for the keyword. So if Google and the Penguin, Panda or Icebear update (however they may call the next one ) do improve their search results my site should rank not too far from the top results any time soon.
Resources I use:
Hope you found this helpful. Thanks a lot for reading!
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