The word “guru” implies a blind faith which many embrace in their religions, but it iisn’t appropriate for business.

Don’t buy a “course” or “system” or even an ebook about “How to Make Money from AdSense” or “Internet Success Secrets” or “Money Machines” or any other gimicky name.

And don’t pay money to buy “secrets.”  There really are no “secrets” about how to make money. There are strategies, of course, which can often work when properly applied — but they aren’t secrets.

The information is already out there, available for free (with expert commentary, including lots of warnings about how techniques being “sold” by gurus can backfire).  You just need to invest the time to read and to think critically.

If you want to earn money from affiliate marketing, or from web site advertising, don’t spend your money on “gurus” or ebooks — instead spend your time on forums like ABestWeb.com. (Go to the forum; register as a new user; read through the introductory forums; and do not post any messages until you’ve spent at least 20 hours reading and using the “search” function to find the answers that are already there. Yes, I’m serious — at least 20 hours spent actually reading posts (not just “taking time to reflect”) before you post anything, not even an introduction or a “thanks for the advice” post.)

Of course, what the “gurus” promise, and what we all wish we could have, is a “foolproof system” where all you need to do is follow a very simple set of instructions and then watch the money roll in.  Guess what: those instructions will always include “steps” that require you to apply experience and wisdom that you probably don’t have. For example, to earn money from AdSense and affiliate programs, or from PPC spending on AdWords, you need to develop expertise on a specific topic, and then do extensive research, and then do extensive, careful testing.  And 90% of the people who “buy the system” or “pay the guru” never earn a profit. Many find that the “foolproof plan” is a fast path to bankruptcy.  Of course, the “guru” disclaims any responsibility because the failed venture didn’t follow the steps correctly.  (In fairness, most of us simply don’t follow instructions; we’re all looking for shortcuts, and sometimes the shortcuts are especially tempting, when we “don’t know what we don’t know.”)

Think about it: If someone shares a “secret” of how to make money, and the “secret” is easy to implement, then a bunch of people follow the advice until the opportunity is fully exploited or saturated. And of course, if someone really does know a good way to make money easily, they’re not likely to share it with others who might drain away the opportunity.

I’ve been doing this (affiliate marketing) for 12+ years, and right now I’m struggling to earn a living.

Don’t pay a guru. Ever.

That’s the answer to many “how can I” questions:

• “How can I make money from my web site?”
• “How can I get more traffic?”
• “How can I increase my sales?”
• “How can I attract links from other sites?”
• “How can I increase my ranking in the search engines?”
• “How can I grow my list of ‘followers‘ on Twitter?”
• “How can I make people like me?”

Yes, folks, it’s just that simple: Be useful and relevant.

Of course, “simple” isn’t the same as easy.  In fact, “being useful and relevant” can be an incredibly complex and difficult task.

You can’t be “useful” or “relevant” to everyone – only to a specific audience.  That’s a huge “problem” for many web publishers: you can’t be all things to all people; you must narrow your focus in order to serve a particular audience.

Of course, being “relevant and useful” isn’t enough to guarantee any particular results — but I absolutely believe that it’s an essential foundation.  Many web publishers over-rely on “search engine optimization” techniques that lead them to shift away from “relevance and usefulness” — for example, rewriting articles, titles, and headings to optimize “keyword density” and “keyword position” for search-engine crawlers (web robots), or splitting articles into “chunks” that are each optimized for a specific keyword.

Finally, I must emphasize one key point: it’s not enough for your site to appear useful and relevant — it must actually be useful and relevant.  Web publishers whose sole focus is on “attracting traffic” often over-emphasize “keywords” (search phrases) without actually delivering on the “promise” that comes from a high ranking for a particular search phrase. That “promise” is that you will answer the question, meet the need, or solve the problem.  If your web site doesn’t deliver on the promise, you’ll quickly lose that high ranking.

Link: Google search for the 18,000 web pages that contain the terms “relevant and useful” and “seo” together.

First, walk in the consumer’s shoes.  If you sell widgets, then imagine that you are a prospective customer, seeking to buy widgets.

– What would they search for? Maybe they’ll search for widgets (“blue widgets,” “discount widgets,” “widgets overnight delivery”). But maybe they’ll search for something else: they’ll describe the problem they need to solve, or the task they’re trying to complete.  Start building your keyword list, but always considering the “needs” and “interests” of the consumers you want to reach.

– What does the consumer want to see in search results, and on your landing page? Relevant, useful information. Usually, they want their question answered or their need met.

Second, put yourself in the shoes of the search engine’s staff.  They want to provide relevant, useful search results to consumers. To achieve this goal, they’re going to “tweak” the algorithms used to select and sequence the results that will be displayed to the consumer.

If your landing page isn’t relevant and useful, then neither the consumer nor the search engine will want to include it in search results.  You might find some “technical tricks” to push up your ranking in search results for a while, but if it’s not relevant and useful, it will probably be pushed down.

Third, you must make sure that your preferred “landing” page for each search phrase is relevant and useful.  At the same time, you must avoid creating “duplicate content.”

Your primary focus should be on meeting the needs of consumers who search for that keyword. I really need to emphasize this: you should not focus primarily on “technical” strategies (such as “keyword density,” or “meta tags,” or “inbound linking” and “page rank” — you can’t ignore these, but “useful and relevant” is always the primary goal).

This isn’t rocket science: if you want a consumer to come to your web site, you should seek to meet their “wants and needs,” hopefully including their desire to buy something that you sell.  But if they’re not quite ready to buy, you should try to meet their “intermediate” needs and desires.

Fourth, start focusing on the “core tasks of SEO.”

– Build a list of search phrases (keywords). “Grow” the list by identifying variations that consumers might include in search phrases (from “widget,” consider “buy widgets,” “widget specifications,” “blue widget,” “widget replacement,” “cheap widgets”).  Building and growing the search-phrase list is an “iterative” process, aided by a wide range of tools (including your own log files and various “keyword discovery tools”).

– Assign priorities to each search phrase. Some search phrase variations may have a “negative” priority (“widget repair,” if you don’t repair widgets; “cheap widgets,” if you sell only the best-quality at appropriate prices; “widgets overnight delivery,” if you can’t meet this need).

– Consider how to “mix and match” search phrases on landing pages. You’ll almost never create a unique landing page for every search phrase, because you won’t want to trigger “duplicate content penalties.”

– Identify the information that would be “relevant and useful” for each search phrase (or grouping).

– Your “useful and relevant” content should be well-written, grammatically correct, and “readable” by the target audience for that search phrase.  This may mean that some landing pages will use more technical jargon, while others will be simpler, but you should strive to maintain a consistent “voice” throughout your site. (Yes, some sites can benefit from having two or more “voices.”)

– Choose images that will be useful and relevant, and use “alt” tags and captions that may allow the images to be well-ranked in “Google Images” and other image search engines. (This means you should also consider how an image might appear when “out of context.”)

– Use robots.txt and “canonical tags” to avoid duplicate content penalties.  With some marketing strategies (especially PPC search), it sometimes makes sense to create a unique landing page for every single search phrase (even singular/plural variations) — but those pages could trigger “duplicate content penalties” if they’re indexed “normally” by search engines.  There are two “special strategies” to avoid this: First, you can set up your “robot exclusion file” (robots.txt) to allow certain pages to be indexed for PPC search purposes but not for “regular” search-engine purposes. Second, you can use the “canonical tag” to identify a single “primary” page, so that other similar pages won’t be indexed.

– Create and maintain a useful and effective site map. (You may also choose to create a special site map in the format specified by Google Webmaster Tools — but I also encourage you to create a “human-readable” site map.) Ideally, any site maps should be auto-generated (dynamic) so that they change as the structure of your site evolves.

– Don’t forget the “fine-tuning,” such as insuring that your URL file names, page titles and “meta descriptions” match your content, and optimizing HTML/CSS so that the relevant and useful content appears first in the HTML file, with menus and other content pushed to the end of the file, even if they visually appear “above” the more important-content.

SEO can be a lot of work, but the most important parts of SEO are just common sense.