Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of making money online. If you fail to choose the right keywords, money won’t come easy at all. Whether you are an affiliate marketer and promote other people’s products, sell your own products or build niche sites, you need to target the right keywords to attract search engine traffic because it is that kind of traffic that will click on your ads.

I think I’ve mentioned before on several occasions that social media traffic is great for numbers, but it does jack all for income. People who opt into social media networks are people like you. Most join these groups to connect with others and clicking on people’s ads on their sites is the furthest thing from their minds.

Links are the cream of every website and blog on the net. Without links, you might as well stop right where you are. What many newcomers to the online world don’t realize is that they won’t get traffic just by writing a blog post every now and then.

The whole picture is a lot deeper than that and once you understand this you will look at online marketing in a whole different way.

When I came online I made all the classical mistakes of a newcomer; I joined hundreds of social networks, I spent hours in industry related forums in the hopes of getting a bunch of traffic and bought just about any money making product under the sun. You can probably guess that this didn’t make me any money at all.

The unimaginable thing happened to me over the weekend. I stuffed up my main blog. So much so that I accidentally deleted the public_html file through my FTP server and as a result I lost not only my blog (which is on the /blog extension), but also my main website which was built with NVU.

I’m not too worried about the main site because it has been a thorn in my eye for some time. Since I update the blog on regular occasions, this hurt a lot more.