Matthew Allen

How I Get More Keyword Traffic with Long Tail Pro Platinum

February 15, 2014January 22, 2013 by Matthew Allen

Keyword Traffic with Long Tail Pro Platinum - 2

Keyword Traffic with Long Tail Pro Platinum — Image from Flickr by Gerrit Wenz

Since my purchase of Long Tail Pro, and subsequent upgrade to Long Tail Platinum, I’ve been getting a lot more keyword traffic to this site. I use Long Tail Pro (Platinum version) to do preliminary research before every single blog post I write now, on this blog and others. The Platinum version of Long Tail Pro enables me to quickly find low competition keywords that have a good number of monthly searches. By quickly, I mean I usually spend less than 10 minutes researching keywords before I write a post. This helps me figure out exactly how I should title the post and which keywords I should optimize for within the post. By simply taking a few extra minutes to do some simple research, I increase the amount of keyword traffic that finds my site through the search engines every single day.

Earn Free Amazon Gift Cards with Carbonite Referral

February 22, 2013January 16, 2013 by Matthew Allen

Want to hear one way that I generated some passive income throughout much of the month of December? I was able to earn free Amazon gift cards, several of them, through the Carbonite referral program. At the time, Carbonite was running a holiday promotion where the referrer (me) and the person who signed up (the customer) would each receive a $20 Amazon gift card. The promotion was supposed to end on January 3rd, 2013. I was completely shocked when on January 9th another $20 Amazon gift card showed up in my e-mail inbox! I thought maybe there was some sort of delay in the system, until I received an e-mail on January 14th stating that the promotion has been extended. As of January 4th, the $20 Amazon gift card for you and your friend promotion has been reinstated with no planned end date.

Passive Income with Peer to Peer Lending at Lending Club

August 11, 2013January 11, 2013 by Matthew Allen

Much of my focus on this blog so far has been on my attempts at internet marketing through building various types of websites to try to create a passive income. However, there is one other thing that I am doing to create passive income online that does not require the work and knowledge that it takes to build a website. I recently invested some money at a peer to peer (P2P) lending site, Lending Club. Whether or not investment income from interest of this nature is considered passive or not is debatable. For me, it is passive enough. I spend about 30 to 60 minutes per month choosing notes to reinvest my principal and interest payments into. So it isn’t completely passive. But, I am not actively trading time for money like I do at my day job. I choose the notes to put my money into about once a month, then they sit there and earn interest for the entire month while I do nothing. Allow me to explain how and why I got started in P2P lending at Lending Club.

Passive Income Opportunities for 2013

January 1, 2013 by Matthew Allen

As the New Year is upon us, I for one am excited about the passive income opportunities that await me in 2013. 2012 was a whirlwind of a year for me as I quit my original plan for a money-making blog. I wanted all of the work and time that I put in online to create more of a passive income. It’s been a long and slow learning process for me, but I am definitely heading in the right direction. I’ve attempted several different methods throughout the past year to try to create online passive income. Most of them had something to do with creating different types of websites, and that is mostly what I blogged about on this site. I didn’t have a ton of success with my niche sites, but there still is hope for a few of them in the future. I do have three passive income opportunities that I have been working on that I am really excited about and plan to concentrate on in 2013.

Analyzing “What Keywords Do I Rank For?” with Long Tail Pro – Platinum

January 10, 2013December 18, 2012 by Matthew Allen

Have you ever Googled the question, “What keywords do I rank for?” Me neither. But I know that a little over 200 people worldwide Google that exact question every month (on average). And I know exactly what they are looking for and why. They simply want to see what keywords their website is ranking for in Google, and in what position. This can be very useful information if you know what to do with it. Consider this to be a sort of internal keyword research for your website. Really, it’s more of an analysis. But if you combine your website analysis with some good keyword research, you will quickly see the benefit and understand ways that you could improve search traffic to your website or blog.

Keyword Research for Blogging: Picking the Right Keyword

October 28, 2016December 9, 2012 by Matthew Allen

Since purchasing my new tool – Long Tail Pro – a few weeks ago, and being given the privilege of testing out the beta version of Long Tail Platinum, I can’t stop doing keyword research! It’s like an obsessive addiction and I just can’t get enough. I’m finding myself doing keyword research, just out of curiosity, for other websites that I visit. Most of these sites are blogs, and I just can’t get over how overlooked and under-used this entire concept of keyword research for blogging is. It has become my new obsession to get the word out to the blogging community. My mission is to show bloggers how they could and should be taking advantage of some pretty simple tactics to drive as much search traffic to their sites as possible.

How to Use Keyword Research for Blog Post Optimization

January 10, 2013December 4, 2012 by Matthew Allen

One great way to grow an audience to your blog is through search engine traffic. You just never know which random searcher is going to land on your blog, like it, subscribe to it, share it, and keep coming back for more. There are certain numbers of people searching for different search terms on Google every single month. By knowing how to properly do keyword research and how to use those keywords to best optimize your blog posts, you can get as many of these searchers as possible to land on your blog. The beauty of growing your blog or website through search engine optimization is that you don’t get the same people coming back time and time again. Different people throughout the entire world will be typing in the search terms that you are optimizing for and at different times. The growth potential is endless if you properly optimize a post on your site for a low competition keyword that gets lots of searches!

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Keyword Research to Optimize Your Blog Posts

June 10, 2013November 26, 2012 by Matthew Allen

The importance of using keyword research to optimize your blog posts is vastly overlooked and undervalued in the wide world of blogging. I would dare say that most bloggers don’t even know what keyword research is. How can they possibly know how to use it to optimize their blog posts if they don’t know what it is? One very basic function of keyword research is to find out how often a certain search term is being searched for in the search engines (with Google being by far the most popular). You can then use that information to optimize your blog post by determining exactly what to write about and how to word it within the post.

My Niche Blog Curated Content Strategy

November 17, 2012November 15, 2012 by Matthew Allen

My number one and initial strategy to kick-start my niche blog project is to utilize curated content for many of my posts. The strategy is really quite genius, I think, and has several benefits which I will explain in this post. A few of the intended consequences of this curated content strategy include:

Building relationships with other bloggers, authors and site owners
Providing content with multiple viewpoints and from varying backgrounds
Link building and social networking for the site
Traffic generation through promotion by others

If done right, site owners or original authors are thrilled when you highlight some of their content using a curation method. It provides value to and benefits them and their site, while at the same time doing the same for your site. It is a win-win situation for both or all parties involved.

Carbonite Referral – $20 Amazon Gift Card for You AND Your Friend

January 15, 2013November 8, 2012 by Matthew Allen

I have been a happy and satisfied paid customer at Carbonite.com for several years now. They’ve always had some sort of referral program, but recently it has gotten much better. Previously, if I could get a friend to sign up I would get a couple free months of the service added to my account. Now they offer free Amazon gift cards as a reward. The normal gift card amount is $10 for each referral sign up, but this amount varies as they run different promotions at different time periods. The current holiday promotion they are running is offering a $20 Amazon gift card for not only the person who refers, but also for the person who signs up for Carbonite! Win-Win!

Blogging + Niche Sites = The Niche Blog Project

November 2, 2012 by Matthew Allen

The Niche Blog Project - Dumb Passive Income — Image from Flickr by kevin dooley

My internet marketing attempts have been fun and interesting, to say the least. I seem to keep jumping from one thing to the next, trying to find the strategy that works best for me to earn an online income. You could say that I have the shiny object syndrome. Every time I see something that looks new or better, I abandon what I was doing and jump to the next thing. My latest, the niche blog project, is actually going to combine much of what I’ve learned over the past year or so and put it all together on one awesome site. The Pay Off Credit Card Network is my brand new site and here is a little bit of background explaining how I got to where I am today.

An Introduction to My Niche Blog Project

October 27, 2012October 26, 2012 by Matthew Allen

Giving special thanks to Google’s latest EMD update, I am scratching my attempts at building micro niche sites and moving on to something bigger. My next attempt at creating passive income online involves starting and running another blog. It is arguable whether income from a blog is considered passive or not, and this could be a great topic for another entire post. I’ve taken this into consideration and have some great ideas to make this niche specific blog as passive as a blog can be. I’m going to take what I’ve learned about SEO and combine that with what I knew about blogging and add in a very specific strategy that could build traffic, relationships and even quality links.

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