Don’t get scared. I’m not saying that it is impossible. There are still loads of ways to make money online in Pakistan. I’ve already touched a lot of parts on how to make money. I’m just going to be briefing a bit about how different it is in Pakistan and how you can overcome those problems.

I remember how frustrated I used to be when I started off with making money. My initial strategies also included trying to sell stuff at eBay. Unlucky me, you need paypal for a good functional eBay account and paypal doesn’t offer services in Pakistan, which is pretty much messed up.

The bad thing is, eBay does not make use of any alternative to paypal. Which means if you’re in a country like Pakistan, you’re absolutely left out. In the coming days I’ll be writing about these issues and more on how you can earn money online if you live in Pakistan (like me, :D).

I’ll be talking about eBay, paypal, adsense, any other request I get or anything else I can think of. After all, Pakistan is a great place to live. Many people might disagree with me on this because of the recent security issues here but it sure is and I will teach you how to earn money from this country of ours.

I’m certain you read my post about the Google caffeine update or would have already read about it elsewhere. While it wasn’t in the Google search operating before the holidays but now it is.

I’m sure I would be among the last ones writing about the effects of this update but I think I should be letting everybody know a little about the effects of this update on my websites. So you know that it’s not fluff.

I track my website’s rankings on the tool rank checker by seobook, which is one of the must-have SEO tools that I mentioned a few months back. Since I’m updating to have a look at my rankings everyday and rank checker is kind enough to record updates every time I check the new ranking so that I can compare my rankings over time.

Please bare with me as I do not really know how to get graphical representation from excel data, so instead I’ll just point out some sudden changes that I noticed on my rankings.

I did not get time to read other people’s experiences but for my website, I saw a sudden bump on the 3rd of January 2010. More than half of my rankings had changed and this is not some sort of a Google dance.

I know this because I did not have any such thing done to my website since the last few months. Luckily, for me the bump was positive.

The Caffeinated Results

So basically, I have around 10 keywords on my rank checker list. Out of them I see an improvement in 5 of the keywords. With most of them moving from the second page to the top five of the first page.

Keywords with other websites improves as well so it is very hard for me to decide what has changed, although I have used different marketing strategies for almost all of my websites.

A little thing that I think has affected my website might be a little LSI. I don’t know what you call it but I find my website getting traffic from keywords that were not even mentioned on the page even once.

Those keywords were never even used in my linking and still my website was ranking fairly well for them. By this, I mean ranking above other websites which had this keyword optimized on their pages and also in their links. I find this pretty odd.

Maybe Google has started categorizing keywords and has made has made hubs of synonyms and knows that some content is related if it is trusted for the main keywords it has.

I’ll be looking further into this because I’m sure there is something bigger cooking up. Lastly, I’m stunned by the Google developers. Matt cutts was right. The whole Google algorithm change was so ‘under the hood’ that hardly any SEO out there can pin-point factors that have changed in their ranking methods.

So what changes have you experienced on your websites? Have you also seen an increase in the amount of visitors you get from Google? Or the vice-versa? What are your guesses might have changed in their algorithm. I would love to know.

This business event is being held at LUMS university, Pakistan. I know there are not a big number of pakistani bloggers out there. But I think many people might be coming to this event. It’s the first time I’m attending YLES, and I’ve heard good stuff about it in the past years.

Moreover, since it’s the young leaders and entrepreneurs summit, I’m not going to bored at all. I look forward to learning lots of new stuff. Because if you know about me, you’d know that business and entrepreneurship runs in my blood.

It’s a 4 day event, with different forms of activities that are all fun-filled. I’m mostly looking forward to the business events and would love to hear from fellow pakistanis. Since, the main motto this year is ‘Sustainopreneurship’. I would be keen to know how people integrate this into their business plans.

It’s a four-day event from 19th to 23rd January. Oh well, if you are coming to YLES 2010, then let me know through the contact form or through the comments below. I’ll definitely be looking forward to meet new people. Tell them how cool I am. Maybe we could learn a thing or two from each other. So let me know if you’re coming through the comments below and we can meet-up at the event.

I’m definite you’re among the mass internet population that uses Google. If you don’t know yet, then please get to know that I love Google a lot.[sarcasm] After all it has done for me through it services, it has given me a head start in my online ventures[/sarcasm].

Jokes apart, I really think that Google is a great service and sends a lot of traffic to my website which makes it even better. So, this news has been surrounding the SEO community for a while and I just got to know about it a week ago.

Google’s officials have told that Google will be updating their search engine algorithms in the new update called ‘Caffeine’. In fact, this has been around since August and Google was kind enough to give a test of the caffeine run data center for us to check the difference on.

Well, they’ve taken it down now (sorry guys) but there would definitely be a few things for us to keep up on for good search results in 2010. I would highly recommend you to check out Matt Cutt’s blog post on this which includes a video explanation about it too. Or, you can view the video below:

For the record, this is going to be the biggest Google update after the post 2005 or early 2006 ‘big daddy’ update. While we can just expect for the search engine result pages to maintain the listings of our websites, such a thing might not be the case because Google had a total re-architecture built and lot of things changed.

Matt Cutts says that they tried their best to keep the Google index as it is. He also says that the results wouldn’t change so much and the average google searcher would not even notice the changes.

The power user, however, will notice some changes which is Google’s self-proclaimed ‘increase in search quality’. If you’re interested in knowing a few guesses which I think might be playing a big part in the coming up Caffeine update, then you can read on.

Internal links will have a little less effect

Unlike previously, according to some tests I put on the Caffeine sandbox, I noticed that pages that were highly defendant on internal links (links to a page from within the site) had a little negative change in their rankings.

Social media will play the BIGGEST part

It is still my guess, but I think that soon the ‘linking game’ in google’s algorithms will decrease in weightage over time. We all know that it is quite tough to game websites like digg, stumbleupon, etc. and this can be used by Google to it’s advantage.

When a website gets 500+ diggs it is obvious that this website is trustable and has good content. So I noticed a few results up on the demo Caffeine engine that seemed to be driven by social media backing.

Well, these are my guesses for the changes that might take place. I’m pretty sure that the changes will prove useful for the ‘white-hat’ seo-ers out there and I would definitely like to hear some stuff from the black hatters as well.

In paid to click websites, you look for referrals who can come, click ads and make money for you forever. Since posting a whole bunch of links at places to let people know about it was kind of a tedious job, instead I created a blog, filled it with reviews and my referral links and then promoted the blog instead.

My initial aim was to get visitors to it and then have them to sign up for the paid to click website. It wasn’t long until blogger disabled my account with all of the blogs including the one I was using to promote the referral links. However, I was doing that for a reason, I was actually making money by the efforts that I put into getting visitors to the blog.

These days, I see a bunch of fully seo loaded blogs with no ads. The thing is, there is no point in doing SEO on a blog if you don’t have intentions of making money from it. Straight up. Unless you have other aims for the blog.

This thing gets even more emphasis when your main source of traffic is referral traffic. You can always play around with organic traffic because you know that more will be coming later on and you aren’t really losing a lot of money in the long run.

But usually the referral traffic comes and goes. You don’t have a chance of them returning or more of them coming in to your website after you’ve done the promotion. In that case, it is complete nonsense to have no monetisation on your blog which completely makes it promoting for no reason.

The most widely know fact is: Traffic is money. However, you need to learn how to convert that traffic into money else you’ll end up in the blues with no money and probably a loss in form of hosting fees.

My advice to all new bloggers is that: Monetize your blog from day one! There is no harm, I repeat, no harm whatsoever from monetizing a blog. If you think it will discourage visitors, no it wouldn’t. If that was the case, Google wouldn’t have been the number one search engine. There are thousands of other search engines without advertisements.

It will have no impact on your SEO. Why it will have no effect on your SEO is because Google will always be in benefit if you have adsense on your blog. Since, when Google sends traffic to your website, it clicks the adsense ad. Not only do you get paid but Google gets paid as well. I know this theory sounds totally absurd but it was just to diversify your minds from not monetizing a new website. So yeah, you can laugh!

Around a year ago someone told me about compete and how it was very accurate when it came to ranking as compared to Alexa. I was convinced because it was accurate as of my visitor statistics according to then.

I used to get around 6000 unique visitors back then and it should near 4500 people coming to my website. I lost track of the compete rankings ever since and decided to focus more on getting traffic rather then checking statistics again and again.

Just happened to have a look at it again a few days ago and I was astonished to read the figure. As of now, my website gets 13000 + unique visitors a month and instead of increasing the number of people to my website, Compete decided to reduce it to 1300.

This just proves how inaccurate these ranking websites are. I still doubt Alexa’s accuracy. In fact, it can’t be accurate, it’s common sense. But in the long term it follows my blog’s traffic pattern which shows that it gets a hint of the traffic using whatever way it is.

However, compete doesn’t have a clue about these things. My alexa ranking is in the range of 160,000 and the compete ranking is near 700,000. The difference between the two might be the inaccuracy of the websites or maybe just the noob-ness of Compete (Is there really a word noob-ness? )

Along with my usual rants, just wanted to let other people who have a website or blog that: Compete and Alexa both are inaccurate but out of the two Compete is more inaccurate. I just compared the results of 3arn.Net here but I actually noticed this on several other website of mine as well. Leave you with the golden quote:

Don’t give a tweet about ranking websites. If you’re into making money on the internet, third-party statistics don’t matter a bit.

Juicy Sitelinks!

For me, this is the distinction between an average and an above the average website. Although the notice on google’s webmaster tools about sitelinks says:

Sitelinks are links to a site’s interior pages. Not all sites have sitelinks. Google generates these links automatically, but you can remove sitelinks you don’t want.

Though the only bad thing about Google’s sitelinks is that Google selects them by itself and you basically get no choice to select which ones you want. However, in my case, I have got the best pages on my website on sitelinks.

They only give you the choice of blocking a sitelink that you do not want to show on the google search engine result page, which I would definitely not want or maybe in the future.  Below is a screen shot from this page:

Well one thing that I’ve noticed is that sitelinks change quite often. When my website first started showing sitelinks, it was showing 6 of them. I decided not to block even one of the them because they certainly gave my website clear dominance on the search engine results page.

However, here I am checking after almost a week and now it has left my website with only 3 sitelinks. This is also a very common thing that I’ve seen in websites. In fact, it is very smart to have found two of my best articles on the website. Although I’m not so pleased with the Advertise page on there but I guess it is going to work out just fine.

Here is a screen shot of this page showing this blog with the sitelinks:

It might as well be that by the time that you check this link, the sitelinks of my website would have already changed because I saw a change in them after four days and since it was last updated on 8th November, it might be updated next on 12th November.

How To Get Sitelinks?

I know you might be thinking this for a while and while I’m not an expert on this topic and neither do I know that my advice will work for you or not. To me, the sitelinks have proven to be the links that:

• Are given the most importance throughout the site
• Have the most internal links
• Have the most links to them

These might be the measures that Google’s “Automatic” bot assigns sitelinks to a website for. While this is still a guess, I’m pretty sure that one of those three factors has do play a crucial role for the assignment of sitelinks to a website. In fact, if you know of any other thing that matters or have something to say about sitelinks in general then please do so in the comments below.

That’s right, I’m talking about dozens of adsense ready templates ready to make money for you. That is, if you know how to make money with adsense. So basically adsense free gives you a whole bunch of adsense templates that already have adsense on them, they also have a theme and some content on each page.

This is perfect for adsense newbies, people who want to make money with adsense but don’t know how to create a website or simply for those who don’t have time in setting up adsense on hundreds of pages and then finding content for each page. So  by now I know what’s going on in your mind

What’s the Catch?

You must be thinking: Why is this website giving away free adsense templates, there must be some catch. They must be charging some money for the templates in one way or the other.

The fact is, you will not be charged a single penny for the templates and all 155 adsense templates are going to be gifted for you for free. All you have to do is sign up for a normal hosting package which you would have done so if you ever wanted to start up a website. That’s it!

Just for signing up for a nominal hosting package (which you will be needing anyways), you will be given 155 adsense templates ready to do the work for you. Plus, you get many other free gifts from them. Once you sign-up through their recommended host, just send them an email and you will get the reply very soon with the file attached containing  155 adsense templates and other important information.

Now those are not just 155 pages with content on them. I’m talking about 155 templates/categories each of which has their own sub-pages as content fillers. So, each category has around 70 - 150 pages filled with content regarding that category. So if you do the math, that is around 0.15 million pages ready with content and adsense on them for you to make money.

It doesn’t end there. Think how tedious it would’ve been if you had to insert your adsense publisher id into each one of them pages manually. It could easily take you a few days if you are a newbie.

But this sweet package includes a little program which will ask you for your adsense publisher id and then edit each and every page with your adsense publisher id to make sure that those pages make you money once they get traffic.

If you were to put the 0.15 million pages on a brand new website, it would take you a maximum of ten minutes to have thousands of content rich, adsense-ready pages floating around your website like they’ve been lying there for ages. That is the best part of it. However, now comes the real review of this thing which shall tell us whether this thing is good for making money or not.

Can This Thing Really Make Me Money?

This is by far the most important point of this post. You would only want to check this out if you were assured that it would make you money or not and if so then how would it make you money. The only drawback that this thing has is: That the content is not unique.

The content that is put on individual pages under each template or category is taken from article directories. This kind of ruins your plans of getting traffic from search engines to it unless you are really a professional.

If you are a complete newbie, first you should know how to make money with adsense because just putting up a website with 0.15 million pages and not getting even one visitor to it will not make you even a cent for decades.

So, I wouldn’t really recommend this to you if you are a first time adsense user. However, if you already have some experience with adsense prior to this then you might know how to make money with adsense without involving SEO or organic traffic.

For the PPC lovers

This might be the perfect thing if you are a PPC junkie. That is because you have 0.1 million pages and each and every one of them is targeted to a specific thing. So after this if you ever want to get any niche, you might check this website because your little niche might already be a part of this monster empire. You can pin point traffic from adwords, etc. to individual pages and make money off it.

This is called PPC/Adsense arbitrage. This is kind of tough to get a hang of but many people have made several hundreds and thousands of dollars with this (not me) and it gets cumulative with time. Just to let you know if you want to try it out and take the risk, it involves buying cheap traffic through adwords on low-bid keywords and then targeting high-bid keywords on your page and getting clicks on those ads. When your adsense earnings surpass your adwords expenditure, congratulations, you’re making profits!

But what about SEO?!

I know it is sad but SEO might be a no-no situation for this monster empire of yours unless you’re a SEO professional. I already said this before, but what would that SEO professional do here that could get your content indexed and probably get a little share of the organic search traffic is one thing: Domain trust.

By building domain trust you let Google know that you’re not one of those pesky spammers that have thousands of pages with the same content and want each and every one of them to rank in the top.

Simply because, a person whose domain has some authority would never really do such a thing and this differentiates you from the spammers. So my advise would be to try to get links from high page rank websites.

Usually, high authority websites do not link to spam websites. So, you’re standing out of the crowd right there. This can really help your website get indexed and then given traffic eventually. But I must warn you, relying on this can take a lot of time and patience is required.

There you are. I’ve given you the good sides and the bad sides of this program. I’ve told for whom this might not work and also mentioned whom this would work for and how it can be used by them to make money. Whether you go for it or not, the decision is up to you. If you have any experiences with this program, I encourage you to share with others through the comments below.

The fact is, there is hardly a chance that you actually build a consistent income. The way I built consistent income was by creating a team of website including this one. There is an average amount of money that I make from these websites every month which is quite consistent. It involves a lot less risk.

However, what I learned from a few famous money makers on the internet was that you don’t have to look for a ’set-it-and-forget-it’ kind of system if you want to hit big. In fact, you can hit big cash lots of time and actually make those ‘big hits’ consistent.

One thing that has been bothering my mind for a while is PPC. Most of the internet marketers I know of are making deadly profits using this little advertising tool with Google, Facebook and other social networks as well. The biggest thing this involves is: Risk.

Risk is not something that I’d be willing to undertake at this level. Moreover, PPC involves a lot of money. For example, there is a guy Jon who recently made a net profit of $1.6 million in 30 days. This was his come back after a long time.

However, he had totally grossed $2.2 million and the rest $0.6 million was the expenses of PPC or other advertising that he used for making that money. Usually people use offers from CPA networks to publicize on these and then make affiliate commisions per offer completed or per lead generated.

I started with CPA networks a while ago but so far haven’t really gotten the gist of it. I have set up campaigns (not PPC) and tried getting them some traffic but so far have had no luck. This just made this whole PPC craze look a little unachievable for me. However, I intend to learn more about how CPA offers work.

I’m doing a little reading around other blogs and I will also be sharing some good reads that I find on this topic. Meanwhile, if you have any good articles or blogs to share, please let me know about them in the comments. Thanks in advance.

Some niches define themselves by name and the audience is automatically targeted while visiting. For example, the visitor on a golf blog would definitely be interested in golf if he sticks around. This would not be the case if the blog would be a blog about all sorts of sports.

However, the case is separate when you have a very general niche. For example, the niche of my blog is the very famous and now saturated ‘Make money online‘ niche. Me and my fellow bloggers in this niche are interested in teaching people how they can make money on the internet sitting at home.

However, now we cannot define our audience in a very accurate manner. For example, readers for my blog are ranging from the age group of 10 - 60+ and they come from all sorts of backgrounds and interests. It is very general and making money off a targeted audience is much more profitable and easier.

So, if you’re starting your blog in a very general niche then define your audience with the type of people your blog is for. You can target bloggers, newcomers / newbies, webmasters, internet marketers, etc. and I have seen many blogs in my niche which are targeting different audiences.

This is the catch, you actually don’t realize it but if you have trouble in understanding some posts on a blog then you can understand that the blog owner is not targeting audience like you. Before this little theory gets any criticism. For example, if you go on a blog about making money online and the first article reads something like: ‘How I used ABC to double my income from PPC advertising’, it clearly shows that this blogger is targeting all the internet marketers and definitely not newbies.

There is nothing complicated in this, neither is there any problem if you don’t have a look into this matter. It’s just that, if you define your audience at anytime after you start your blog (preferably earlier) or even before that, you will have a more clearer angle whom you’re talking to when you write posts.

Is This All Theory, Or Does It Have Any Benefit?

Well, I suppose the benefit will be quite clear. When you try to capture leads and want to create visitor loyalty on your blog you need to make sure that you’re communicating with your target visitor in an easy and understandable manner. The only way that your blog will be easy and understandable better to the user is when you have it more targeted.

On my blog, I am mainly targeting newbies. I know that majority people are newbies by the sources of my traffic and the number of emails that I get everyday. Most of them don’t even have blogs so I try to be as understandable for first-timers as possible.

Once again, this is not a must for bloggers. My intentions were not to increase your complications. Instead, I’m just helping you communicate with your readers in a more efficient manner. I know I didn’t put in much examples, I’ll leave them to you in the comments.