Our specialty is Search Engine Optimization - and this site is the proof. Court’s Internet Marketing School:

• ranks #5 for the term “internet marketing” out of nearly 100,000,000 pages…ranking ahead of sites with full-blown corporations behind them and a multi-year head start.
• has been found by searchers typing in nearly 5,000 different keywords in just the last 30 days.
• has received hundreds of thousands of free organic visitors through Google and the other major search engines during the last 12 months.

And this site isn’t our only project…if you take our portfolio as a whole you’ll see that over 1,000,000 visitors find our sites through the search engines each year.

We offer several different products and services that will help you rank better…fast. But SEO isn’t a “one size fits all” game - your business is unique and your SEO strategy should be too. That’s why we’re offering you a free 30 minute phone consultation. We’ll take some time to get to know you and your business so we can intelligently advise you on the best ranking strategies.

These consults aren’t your standard “pitch fest.” By the time you hang up the phone you’re going to have a better understanding of what you need to do to start pulling free traffic from the search engines.

Answer the questions below, click submit, and you’ll hear from us soon!

Update: This site was sold for a very nice amount. Congrats to the new owner AND to the seller. Now maybe he can afford to send his kids to a nice boarding school.

Social Traffic Isn’t Worth It, In Most Cases

If you just want to throw up huge numbers there are a lot of ways to do it. StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit can send you huge numbers of visitors. Many of you have already chased that traffic and some of you have probably succeeded. I personally have been able to get loads of traffic that way so I’m a good person to listen to on the subject. The honest truth is that it’s incredibly difficult to make money from those traffic sources. Those individuals typically have very short attention spans and will leave your site just as quickly as they found it. If you don’t believe that, I highly doubt that you’ve tried to sell to them before.

When you go through the process of learning how to increase website traffic, I want you to focus on the most important type of traffic there is - search traffic. Once a stream of traffic starts coming from Google it will come day after day after day, whether you continue working or not.

There’s only one type of person that can make social traffic work and that type of person is naturally gifted. If you are an extremely gifted writer or personality, social traffic might be an awesome fit for you. If you aren’t it’s going to be an enormous waste of time because you won’t be able to influence the short attention spans that will find you.

Search traffic is honestly a lot easier to work with. There’s a huge difference with search traffic because they are already looking for you. Since they already want what you have to offer, the process is a LOT easier.

How To Increase Website Traffic From Search Engines

Getting more traffic to your website from search engines is actually fairly easy to do. I want to keep this lesson fairly simple for you so I have organized the basics into four separate tasks:

1. Researching your market.
2. Choosing keywords.
3. Creating keyword-optimized content.
4. Getting links to your content from relevant pages.

Most people go wrong because they don’t do any research in the first place. To fully understand this process, I want you to take a look at how you found this article. You probably did a search in Google for ‘How To Increase Website’ traffic, or something similar (or you are a regular reader of mine). You found me because I anticipated that people would be searching for this, and created a solid article on this topic.

Researching Your Market

You may be curious about how I was able to anticipate that you would be doing this search. This is pretty easy if you take a look at the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You start by typing on topics that are related to the content of your site. In this case I started by searching for ‘website’ because I help people to learn to make money with websites. The tool showed me a bunch of keywords that people search for and are related to websites. Website traffic was one of the terms that came up. Since I understand a lot about getting more website traffic, it’s obviously pretty easy for me to write about.

Hopefully you can see why this article came to be. I want to be found by people who want to get more targeted website traffic.

What you need to do is use the Adwords tool to take a look at topics that people are searching for in your market. You will obviously know your market better than I would so you need to think about different aspects that people need to understand. Type those terms into the tool and take a look at what comes back. Expand on the terms that come back and you’ll probably find some winners in there.

Choosing Keywords

Choosing keywords to me is a matter of looking at your competition and deciding how strong it is. I wrote about this concept extensively on The Keyword Academy: Choosing A Topic For A Website. I was actually talking about choosing a topic for a site, but the same concepts apply. You can use those metrics to choose topics to write about that you can realistically get ranked for.

Where most people go wrong is that they only choose the super competitive keywords that everyone else is using. Finding the easy ones will make your life a lot easier so I would definitely start there. Increasing traffic to your website becomes one of the easiest things ever when you write about topics that have weak competition.

Lately I picked up a site that’s about food and honestly it’s one of the easiest things ever. I’m barely trying and getting ranked really well. It’s so much easier than my internet marketing topics it’s not even funny. If you can try to find keywords that aren’t that competitive it will be a lot easier. Obviously you don’t want to write off topic, so your search will be limited to the scope of your website.

Creating Keyword-Optimized Content

Creating content that will rank well for a keyword is honestly really easy. I have written extensively about this and so I’ll point you to an article I wrote about this: How To Target a Keyword With a Post Page. The only thing I want to add to that is that the better your post, the better it will work. If your post excites people enough to get them to point some links at it, it will rank better and it will rank more quickly.

Getting Links To Your Content From Relevant Pages

If you’re starting out, this might seem like it’s pretty difficult but after you get going, it really isn’t. The first thing you should try to do once you create your website is find some friends in your industry. This will help you a ton because when you need to get some extra links, they will be there to help. There are also a lot of other methods that you can use. You can write articles for EzineArticles and they will allow you to link back. For that matter, you can write articles that can be submitted with Unique Article Wizard, or a similar service.

Getting links is often as simple as asking. When I started CourtneyTuttle.com, I looked through all of the make money sites on Technorati to find beginners who had sites similar to mine. I then participated on their sites and made friends with them so that we could help each other out. We have helped each other a lot over the last few years and the links we have passed back and forth have made a huge difference. Now that I have some people reading my site building links has also become a lot easier. That said, I started out with zero traffic just like everyone else and overcame that with hard work.

Article Marketing Services That I Have Stopped Using

Those of you that are familiar with article marketing will have heard of a few services that I have discontinued over the past year. Here are the ones I’ve tried:

• iSnare - I got rid of them because they took weeks to approve my articles.
• Article Marketing Automation - I discontinued use because they didn’t get my articles out to very many sites. Most went out to about 30 sites.
• Article Marketer - This is the one I liked the most after UAW but I discontinued use after I started using UAW. Article Marketer has been taking a few weeks to get articles out, and doesn’t get you nearly as many indexed links as you can get with UAW. I made a lot of money because of Article Marketer so I guess ultimately I wasn’t too unhappy with it - I simply discovered a much better service.

What You Can Expect Out Of Unique Article Wizard

The only reason to use a service that helps your articles to get out there is so that you can get links for your site. UAW will give you a lot more links than each of the competing services I’ve tried and as far as I know, I’ve tried all of the big ones. If this service wasn’t by far the best I knew of, I wouldn’t have written a Unique Article Wizard review. I honestly would be reviewing one of the other services.

Since UAW gets your articles into quite a few blogs (mostly WordPress and Blogger blogs) you can get a lot more direct traffic than you would get from Article Marketer, iSnare, or Article Marketing Automation. It still isn’t a huge amount, but it’s more than you would think.

If you’re going to get the most benefit out of UAW, you want to find keywords that are medium and long tail. I would try to find keywords that are three, four, or five word phrases. Make sure to integrate the keywords into your site and then you can use UAW to write and distribute about the same topics. Links from related pages help more than links from unrelated pages and this will help your links to have more value.

You can expect to get at least 100 indexed links from a UAW submission. I have a few articles out there now that have been indexed with over 400 results in Google. This is because with UAW each site gets a slightly unique version. One of the Unique Article Wizard reviews I read before buying the service also said that he was getting over 100 indexed pages that contained links to his site from each of his submissions.

My articles have been getting approved and submitted within 24 hours (they don’t work Sundays). This is a huge improvement over Article Marketer and iSnare, who were both taking over 2 weeks when I last used them.

Using Unique Article Wizard

Using this service is quite a bit like most other article distribution service with a few useful changes. With UAW, you create unique versions for each article directory. UAW won’t let me tell you how this is done but I can tell you that what you have to do is easy and it takes an extra 20 to make this happen. This seems to help a ton with the indexing in Google. With Article Marketer I could usually only get indexed on like 20 pages as of late but with UAW I almost always get a few hundred.

Another big change that’s awesome with UAW is that you can submit as many resource boxes as you want. That means you can use a lot of variety in your links and that’s a huge benefit. You can also put links within the articles if you want to.

Results from Unique Article Wizard

I have done a few experiments with Unique Article Wizard and have been able to get some great results. I recently did a test to see how much improvement I could get out of a single site in 30 days by using UAW and I was to improve the site I was testing from an average of $19.03 per day to an average of $38.72. I didn’t use any other promotional techniques because I wanted the test to be pure. The money was made with Adsense, here’s a screen shot of this channel for the last week from my Adsense account:

Based on the results I have been able to get with UAW so far I’m going to give it a huge thumbs up. They are out-classing all of the other companies right now by a land slide and are running a very professional shop.

A lot of people have been asking me tons of questions about how I use UAW so I’ve created an advanced UAW video that will help you to see the tricks that you can use to get the most of out this service. If you are interested in the video all you have to do is take my recommendation, sign up for the service, and email me that date and user name you signed up with at uaw[at]thekeywordacademy[dot]com.

Please let me know in the comments if you have any questions or concerns about UAW. Hopefully this has been helpful and best of luck with your online businesses!

About BloggersBase

BloggersBase is an online magazine that has a definite social aspect to it. The readers have the chance to gain influence by voting, commenting, and otherwise participating. If you are a person that likes to find useful content, this site should be a pretty fun one to add to your arsenal.

The hook for BloggersBase is that any user can become a major influencer of the magazine. The more active you are, the more you can influence which content gets the most exposure on the site.

The site has a nice design, as you’ll be able to see here:

There are quite a few different ways that a blogger could use this site. Blogging is obviously about gaining influence and since this site allows you to socialize and promote, that shouldn’t be too difficult. They do allow you to link out from the articles and posts that you put up, so it shouldn’t be too tough to gain some extra exposure.

If I was going to dig in on this site I would probably do as much as I could to increase my influence score, which is kind of like karma. I would then create some really good articles that pointed to additional resources that I have on my own sites. It seems to me like this would work out quite well, after this site gained more traction. Right now it doesn’t seem like there’s a ton of action but based on the research I did the site is growing nicely.

My Recommendations

Right now it’s pretty easy to see that this site wasn’t created by a native English speaker. If I was on the team at BloggersBase I would make sure to have a native English speaker go through the site to work on some of the grammatical errors. This will help the branding and will allow more people to see that site as a professional magazine.

Since this site will probably eventually have a fairly large amount of user generated content, it will probably be able to grab a huge amount of search traffic which will help it to grow. If this site were mine, I would probably try to create a stronger hook that kept people around. I would hope that if I was going to take the time to write for this site, I could have some decent exposure. This could probably be helped quite a bit by adding a section on the home page for the top users.

Overall I think this is a pretty fun site if you’re really into social media.

The first is The Affiliate Academy and is Vic’s membership site. If any of you out there aren’t familiar with Vic, you need to become so in a huge hurry. You can check out his free blog at Make Money Online with Blogger Unleashed.

The second is Griz’s new WordPress blog. You can find it here: Make Money Online with Grizzly. While most of his work is done at his other site (How To Make Money Online), I can see the new site quickly moving up in the rankings.

These two guys are geniuses and these two shouts are long overdue. You need to become familiar with them if you’re serious about making money with the internet. Sorry it took so long fellas, you guys rule.

Now that we’re almost done with our new content, I’m super excited to be able to blog again. I’ve REALLY missed it and I look forward to being able to interact with you all.

To get this restarted right, Mark and I have created an email series that I think you guys are going to love. It’s called ‘Five Days To Success With Keywords’. You’ll get one email each day for five days and each will help you to learn more about keywords and SEO.

Along with the new email series, Mark and I will now be blogging on a new site. I’m probably a little biased, but I think the concepts we’re going to be covering over there will be super important for all of you. The new blog is called The Keyword Academy. You can get the free email series there.

So far we’ve published one post there, it’s called ‘3 Reasons People Fail To Make Money With Keywords‘.

If anyone would like to sell a site, please let me know. You can use the contact form on my contact page!

I’m basically looking for sites that are at least 6 months old that have at least a little income. I guess that means that I’m looking for sites that make between $10 and $1000 per month.

Why do I want to buy a few sites? So far when I have purchased sites I’ve had pretty luck getting more out of them than the previous owners. To be honest and up front, you can probably get more out of your sites than you’re getting. That said, you may need some cash now and if that’s the case, it will be a win-win.

The going market price for sites in this income range is 10x monthly earnings. I’ll be making offers in this range unless there’s a reason I can see that should change the multiple. Sites that are older than five years and sites that are PR5 or higher would be worth a higher multiple to me.

Let me know through the contact page and I’ll make you an offer!

~ Court

Please give the last sentence some serious thought. If you’re site is struggling, I’d bet the farm that you have one of those two problems.

Most sites don’t have the rankings they would like to have, but I guess that’s obvious. Based on the number of people reading this site and others like it, we can reasonably assume that people still aren’t getting to the traffic numbers they’re looking for.

Search engines can be literal gold mines for individuals that are able to take advantage. Google especially can provide you with a residual influx of traffic, amazingly composed primarily of a specific group of people that are looking for the information, product, or service you provide.

So what do you have to do to get Google to see you as an authority for the keyword you would like to get ranked for.

The Quickest Way To The Top

With this game, there are a lot of ways to play. The easiest way to win is to enlist the help of the ‘authorities’ - better said, the people that Google already trusts for the keyword you would like to come up for.

Let’s say that I wanted to become an authority for a keyword phrase like ‘how to teach a gerbil to swim’. Well, first things first, who are the ‘authorities’ for this keyword?

Doing a quick search in Google will tell you exactly who Goog believes the authorities are, and it all starts there. If you could get the top ten URLs that are ranked in Google to link to you, you would become an instant authority and would likely have earned a great ranking for that keyword. With an easy keyword like this, you would probably get ranked first, unless your site was brand new.

Yeah I hear you, “Well how do I get those sites to link to me, Court?” Well that’s the question isn’t it?! It’s not always going to be possible. I said this was the quickest way to the top - it’s definitely not easy to get everyone to link to your site.

That said, if I wanted to get sites like these to link to my gerbil-swimming site (ha, can you imagine if I really had a site about this?), I would probably create some kind of free download that I could offer. For some reason, I have always had better luck getting people to link to downloads (as opposed to posts or articles).

Alerting a bunch of gerbil sites about your download would likely draw some links.

Most people never get this far because they don’t want to create something of value in the first place. If you honestly created the best report ever written about ‘how to teach a gerbil to swim’, it’s very likely that you would eventually climb to number one for that keyword, based on the fact that gerbil lovers would link to you. Creating a garbage page would put you in a much more difficult position.

The reality is that some keywords are much more difficult than this one, but the same principles apply. If you want to rank first for cell phones, they keyword authority you need will be a lot harder to get. Why? Because the sites that are currently ranked are seriously strong sites.

I would say that a healthy majority of you will never try to create the amount of keyword authority it would take to get ranked for a term like cell phones. Why? You don’t believe that you could do it. I think that many of you could achieve something like that. The problem is that people tend to quit before they get there.

I think if you took a hard look at the sites that currently rank for anything, you’ll find that they don’t do the greatest job ever of explaining their information. Any of us could probably do a better job and if we did, we would create some keyword authority out of thin air. Why? People always link to the best site that covers a topic.

I bet a good 90% of you would be capable of getting on to the first page in Google for a term like ‘cell phones’, if you were willing to pay the price. Of course, it wouldn’t be mathematically possible for you all to do it at once. It doesn’t matter anyway because 99% of people would just quit anyway - that doesn’t have to be you. You can be different, if you want to be.

How To Get Started With Your Site’s Keyword Authority

Going after a huge term like cell phones usually isn’t the best way to build keyword authority. If I had a site about cell phones, I would break it down into tons of subtopics that I could provide solid information about.

A subtopic like ‘how to change a cell phone battery’  or ‘which is the best hosting company‘ would be easier to move up the rankings for, and would still help you to build authority for ‘cell phones’. Stringing together 50 or so keywords like that one on a single site will help you to start getting somewhere for ‘cell phones’, even though you haven’t tried specifically for cell phones. Why? Google and other search engines know that the terms are related.

The more specific, sub-topical terms you can rank for, the more keyword authority you will build for the more difficult keyword - the keyword most people would call a pipe dream.

Make a list of keywords that work well with your site, use those keywords to create awesome articles, notify other sites that cover the topic, and repeat.

So What Is Keyword Authority Exactly?

It’s a measure of how good your site is for a specific keyword. Google uses a lot of metrics to determine this, including use of keywords in your site (throughout your entire site), which sites you’re getting links from (and how authoritative they are for the keyword), and what words they use when they link to you (anchor text). Improve any of those metrics, and you will improve your keyword authority. Improve more than anyone else, and you will find yourself with a #1 ranking for your keyword.

There are, of course, lots of different methods that you can use to create keyword authority. We’re not going to cover them all today but I hope that this lesson will help you to understand a little more about what keyword authority is. Please let me know in the comments if you have any questions!

Does the answer to that question fly off your lips? Did you have to think about it? Can you answer it even after thinking about it?

How about this - fill in the blanks in the following statement:

“I give my users _________ and I get ________ in return.”

Am I overstating things if I say the key to success with any website is found in those two blanks?

A couple of examples…

On my ecommerce site: “I give my users a variety of trailer hitch accessories and I get money in return.”

On my wife’s personal blog, she would say: “I give my friends and family updates on my life (and about eight million pictures of our 11 month old son)  and I get a feeling of connection and happiness in return.

On CourtneyTuttle.com: “We give people simple insights into how they can get traffic from the search engines and we get coaching clients, membership website subscribers (until recently ) and joint venture offers from other businesses in return.

If you don’t have a written plan for your site, you should at the very least be able to make a clear “I give this and I get that in return.” statement.  If you don’t have that mantra in your head every day, how can you expect your business to progress?

I don’t do a lot of blog reading, but often I’ll click through to sites I find in comments here on the site. I’ll read a post or two, and all too often I find myself saying “What’s your point?” On most of the sites I visit I don’t see any clear message of “The author is giving me this, and hoping to get that in exchange.”

Now you might not care if your users/readers see an obvious “give and receive” message on your blog, but think about this: In the last 30 days, I have spent over $5,000 just on information. The crazy thing is I’m GLAD I’ve just shelled out five grand for knowledge, because I know I’ve purchased some really high ROI solutions to a few of the problems we face in our business.

If you want to make money, you have to be the provider of a solution for which a large enough group of people is willing to pay.

I don’t think that sentence reads very smoothly, but I’m leaving it alone. Go back over it a couple times and let it sink in.

What problem (faced by a large enough group of people) does your presence on the web solve?

Your primary goal, maybe even your obsession, should be to answer that question.

If you can’t fire off the answer, stop whatever else you’re doing and start figuring it out. Our experience at Court’s Internet Marketing School is the earning power of a site really takes off after a) the author discovers what problem he/she can solve for the audience, and b) the audience agrees.

Let’s Brainstorm Together

Maybe we can help you get started today by going through a little exercise in the comments section. Here’s how it will work: anyone who feels like they have a clearly defined “I give this and receive that in exchange” statement, please leave it in the comments. It’s some free advertising and a branding opportunity for your site. For those of you who aren’t quite sure yet, make your best attempt.

Everybody else, click through to the sites behind a few of the comments, then come back and reply to the site owner’s statement. Did the site match the give/receive statement? Leave some POSITIVE feedback. I’m putting everyone on notice now that any sarcastic and/or critical comments will be immediately deleted. Court and I have very thick skins; you can feel free to call us morons all day long. We’re not in the business of setting other people up for that same treatment though, so if you can’t say something nice…

I hope a few of you who are just getting started will put yourselves out there. This is a chance to have a very clarifying moment in establishing the direction of your site.