Political Humor

If you like me want to make money writing and creating websites, you will notice that there seems to be a bountiful supply of keywords that can bring in the money, but are about as interesting as watching dry paint. That can be fine if you don’t have to write any of it yourself. You could always outsource all your content if you want. But I enjoy writing, and I want to enjoy what I am writing about.

Yes, I said dry paint. Watching wet paint is more interesting because at least it changes from wet to dry.

I’m not going to walk you through all the basics of how to build a website, how to research keywords, and all that. What I will do in this post is let you in on a secret. Now, the reason I am doing this is because I don’t fear competition. I reject the notion that one person’s gain is another person’s loss. My philosophy is more along the lines of “when the tide comes in, we all float higher.”

Today, The Planet’s Best Political Humor will take a break from making fun of President Obama to focus on writing a political humor, or satire site, and understanding how you can do that profitably. You, like me, have probably noticed that the CPC (Cost per Click) for humor oriented keywords sucks. You don’t want those ads. You want good ads showing up.

Now, the first thing you need to realize is that if you are going to monetize political humor is that the keywords you are really targeting are about something else. Everything relates to politics in some way.

The world of politics affects everything, because when laws, taxes and regulations are passed, this has an effect on everything. In one way or another, politics is related to money, finance, business, and the economy. It also has an effect on individuals personally.

I don’t know, maybe you live in a cave, or have been too busy cruising your time travel machine back to the 13th century, but most people are aware of something or other happening with the housing market recently. Mortgages, real estate, insurance, and loans. Nope, no good keywords there. Let’s try something else.

Another one of the biggest topics right now is, what? Health care. Hmm. What’s that now? Prescription medications, surgery, doctors. There couldn’t possibly be any good keywords there, could there? Probably not.

Of course, politicians are always looking to raise your taxes. This can influence people’s spending habits, their employment status, the success of their business. You know, it’s the economy stupid. So, we have tax help, accounting, legal help, business, retail and products, money, saving money, jobs, and stocks. You know what. I’m starting to think that I was wrong. There’s just no way to get good keywords on a political humor site.

Obviously I’m being facetious here. My point is to try and expand your consciousness and creativity. The opportunities you have available are as limitless as the number of keywords there are to target. By now, you know that you are going to go after profitable industries with your humor site. You know that one way to get people to click on ads is to write lots of keyword strong content that really doesn’t solve the visitor’s problem. But the ads might.

You want to take a conservative approach though. So you need to have solid, original content that will stand up to a review by a Google quality checker. It also needs to stand up to review by competitors. You need to keep out of trouble, so you don’t want your content to be crap. That’s no fun anyway.

So, you write a satire on the topic. I suggest looking at how I did this with a few posts here, because I walk the walk, although my own approach isn’t all about the money, so not everything is strategic, but these are. Here’s a recent one that is doing pretty well for me, with a competitive keyword. Obama Work at Home Government Jobs Program. Since posting that, it has the highest CPC and one of the highest click through rates of anything on the site. I haven’t even built backlinks to it yet.

I’ve got money saving tips, and more money saving tips. Of course, “Going Green” is a topic that is getting set to just explode on the market. I can’t help but wonder if that repetitive post-hypnotic suggestion for everyone to be green will result in a generation of little green men. Literally.

Speaking of ecology, this is a hugely popular, high ranking page on global warming. Haha. Or maybe you just want to cut to the chase and know about how to save the planet. Well, if that’s what you want, that post probably won’t help much.

That should be adequate link flogging to make the point that all you need to do is write about something that targets a keyword that pays money, and do it with satire. Another thing I was demonstrating just now is how to anchor links with good, keyword strong anchors, because this will also be an important part of creating pages that work, rank, and make money. By using a little creativity now you know how to make money writing political humor.

If you do need help with the basics, You should check out Grizzly’s Make Money for Beginner’s site. There’s a lot there, so hit the archives link in the sidebar (Way down the sidebar) and get reading. All of it. Including comments. You should be done by 2012.

Someone named Dave wrote a condensed version of the Grizzly Method to make money online. It’s still a book, but you should be able to finish it sometime this year. And Carla showed how to make money with Hubpages. Although that is geared towards Hubpages specifically, she does a great job explaining the basics, such as keyword research whether for hubpages or not.

If you really feel like you need someone to walk you through the whole process of getting started, I highly recommend Court and Mark at the Keyword Academy. They will walk you through the entire process from keyword research, how to buy a domain, how to install wordpress, and a schedule for content and backlink building. They have a forum full of veterans from the program, videos, webinars, and flat out everything you could need to know about making money online.

Of course, backlinks, backlinks, backlinks are the key to ranking well. There’s no better place to start for exchanging links than the page Grizzly created for niche backlinks exchanges. So head over there and get to work… Oh, right, you should head over there too. I need to stop talking to myself all the time.

If you expand your awareness, and expand your creativity, you will realize that there are so many different ways to make money online. Don’t get trapped thinking that just because one person has a method of doing things a certain way, that you can’t find another way to do it.

Many people think that it’s always either/or. You have to do things this way or it’s wrong. I hope that even if you’re not looking to use a political humor site to target keywords, you have still come away from reading this with some new perspectives on the variety of options you have available for for your Internet marketing strategies.

UPDATE: Here’s what happens when you have an authority site and you get a perfectly anchored link from a related authority page. This screenshot is from a search query run on Scroogle.Org to keep out Google results customizations. The number 4 result is the linking page, or course.

The long tail keyword is already conquered. With further linkbuilding efforts, this page will be able to compete in a truly competitive market.