Secrets Of How A 21 Yr Old Student Earn $11,353.80 Using Yahoo Search Marketing
This summer I did a project on Yahoo Search Marketing. I wanted to find out how reasonable it is for a person with $0 to be able to make money on the Internet. This search marketing course has set me up for future success and helped me get my dream job of being an SEO Manager at Brainlabs!
One of the things I learned about is how well paid keywords are, like "payday loans" or "auto insurance". The prices vary from $25-200 per click depending on the country; so when people are looking for these services in their area, clicking through that ad and going onto that website could earn someone an excellent amount of money.
I stumbled across this really awesome article written by John Rosica, titled "Secrets of How a 21 Year Old Student Earned $11K Using Yahoo Search Marketing". I highly recommend you read the whole article because it gives great insight into how to get started with search marketing and how to make money on Yahoo.
Soon after I read this article, I was offered a job at my local school's technology department doing computer programming, so I knew that if I wanted to continue with the program, I would need to find more work-related opportunities. The next day I found some more places online where you can make money online, and one of them was as an affiliate for paid traffic for my website.
I signed up for the free trial, and after a couple days of learning more about how search marketing and SEO works I was able to set up my campaign. I went back to that article and found that you can make $1 per click on Yahoo by putting ads on your news websites or blogs, so I came up with an idea.
There were a couple of blogs that I wrote under the name "Nick Youngson". Some of those blogs got some hits, but the most popular one was one about how to play basketball. It had good traffic so I deleted all the posts except for two that were about basketball and added a Yahoo Search Marketing ad to each of them with my affiliate links and keywords in them, then I flagged the posts at the bottom.
Over time people started clicking on the ads, and traffic began coming in! Before long I had made $50 and I added another ad, plus a few days later I had made $400! That was when it hit me that this could be cool extra money if everything works out right.
I finished my project at the tech department and the next day I was offered a job on the school's website doing software design and then I suddenly had an extra 30 hours a week that I could use to work on websites. From there I decided to keep working my way up in the company's website department, which meant writing better code and fixing bugs in different websites, which would end up helping me improve SEO while getting paid as an affiliate for paid traffic.
At that time there were four main marketing channels: search engine optimization, social media marketing, traditional advertising (such as newspaper ads) and things for local businesses like Google Adwords. I decided to take part in all of these, seeing as though I wanted to become a programmer and do a lot of work with computers.
After a year and a half at the job I was given new responsibilities with helping create better websites for the school's technology department, which gave me the chance to learn even more about coding. During this time I wrote my own WordPress software, got better at SEO and learned a lot about social media. Then just before I started college, my dad gave me an iPod touch for Christmas so I could find music that wasn't on iTunes! It was really cool because after that you can download apps from the app store onto your iPhone or iPod for free (I used it for Snapchat).
I started college and I really liked it for two years. When I was a freshman in 2014, Apple announced their iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, so I got one of those and then the app store had a bunch of apps that were really useful for college like flashcards (to help you with using your time better) and more advanced apps for studying for tests like the Official SAT Study Guide by The College Board. So I got those apps to learn how to study more efficiently.
This is when my life took a turn…
In 2015, my school offered an online course called "Google Apps For Business". I had already taken the technical course before and during these years, I had been programming on my own and learning HTML and CSS, so I was able to do good in classes like this one. Each week we would test each other on what we had learned, so after a while of that my teacher couldn't believe how much knowledge I could find out about computers and coding just by doing an online course.
When I got this school's technology department in 2015 (for my junior year), we were given an opportunity to choose our two majors at the end of that year's spring semester. However, technology wasn't a major offered at that point so the final year was all about finding the perfect major for your goals. I finally chose to go with Computer Science as my major, but I wanted to do more research on the topic.
At that time I was studying hard and doing a lot of study sessions in between classes, which is when I found the website for hackathons (a term which means a computer programming competition). At those competitions you can earn credits towards your degree and even some scholarships sometimes. If you want to go to college or university and major in Computer Science, it's a very good way to break into it. You are also pushing yourself further by doing it, so if you do well at your hackathon you become better at hacking. And if you do badly you learn how to do better the next time.
There were a couple of hacking projects I was interested in, but I decided to apply to one called "HackNY". This hackathon was at the end of April in New York and it was all about making a website that did something that helps people. There were three teams who all entered and they had a lot of sponsors and support which made me excited to be able to participate!
At the Hackathon
The night before our hackathon we had an event where we got more ideas on what we wanted our websites to do. The first one my team started working on was call "IDAP" (Invisible Doggie App).
Conclusion
At the end of the hackathon we had a website that was attached to somebody's wrist by a sensor, which would activate an alarm whenever something wrong happens and also notify their family when they got up to let them know. It also had a button they could press to record themselves saying "I love you" and then be sent to them as an email attachment with audio and video recorded of them saying it. It sounded like a great idea, but sadly it didn't work very well…
Afterwards I really enjoyed my time at the hackathon and actually made some friends from other programming classes who said that I was really helpful during our time there.