“Make Money Online” is Not the Only Keyword Out There

So I know everybody who visits my blog is most likely a reader of John Chow dot com as well and have been following his blogging experiment over the past few months. I have seen so many mini John Chow sites pop up over the last few months it’s insane – not that there’s anything wrong with seeing that something works and trying to emulate it. There is, however, a distinct difference between copying one or two ideas of a successful individual and re-creating every single one of them stride for stride.

What I’m referring to specifically here is the whole “make money online” keyword thing. I won’t link to any specific blogs because all of them seem to be good in nature, and I don’t want to seem like a jerk. But almost all of them follow the characteristics of 1) a blog about blogging 2) a journal of how their blog about blogging will lead them to financial freedom. Like I said, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with this, it just irks me a little bit to see so many people copying what John is doing either not knowing or ignoring the fact that their chance at success is little to none.

So you want to do like John and create a blog that teaches others how to “make money online” – that’s fine. I admit the final push that led me to start this blog was seeing John’s success. The problem I have is when people start duplicating what people like John do word for word without stopping to think why or actually weighing the pros and cons. Yes I took a page from the John Chow playbook and started doing reader blog reviews. There’s nothing wrong with taking an idea that works and implementing it. But if all you are doing is re-creating someone else’s success stride for stride, word for word, you’re destined to fail. In this case I’m talking about the people trying to do the same as John by ranking in the SERPs for “make money online”.

Let me ask you guys a question, what is the probability that any of these new “Make Money Online with John Doe” websites will successfully rank for the keyword phrase “make money online”? Slim to none. John was able to do it fairly easily by leveraging his tens of thousands of readers to skyrocket him to the top of the SERPs for “make money online” (although its relevancy has been questioned by some, but that’s for another post). This in turn led a ton of his readers to target the same keyword phrase. Why can’t they recreate John’s success with this particular keyword phrase?

1) The bulk of John’s readers (at least the ones who come to his blog for advice and not just entertainment) don’t have tens of thousands of readers to leverage.
2) When John started to optimize for “make money online” it was a moderately well-searched keyword, but there was still a managable amount of competition. Now that John has posted this SEO experiment there are so many people trying to rank for this phrase it’s crazy.
3) Most of these people have just seen how easy it was for John to rank for this phrase by just putting up a little incentive for his readers to linkbomb him. Most of them don’t know that for the non-celebrity SEO is much more difficult and much more expensive.

Can some of these people actually rank well for “make money online”? I’m sure they can. But be realistic. Unless your blog is getting a few thousand uniques per day at least then there’s no way you’ll rank for a competitive term (especially this one as the competition has skyrocketed now) without investing a hell of a lot of time and money. Anyone can rank for any phrase, but it costs.

I’m really not trying to rain on anyone’s parade here because I think it’s great that so many people are trying to break into the internet as a money-making medium. But you have to take lessons such as the “make money online” experiment and apply them to your own ventures. Just because John linkbombed his way to the top of the SERPs for one keyword doesn’t mean you have to try to do the same. Take his method and apply it to a different keyword. Revolutionary, right? You’ll see much better results. And who knows, you might actually learn to make a living online.

Use Aaron’s Keyword Suggestion Tool to get you started.