In all this talk about making money online, it’s important to have a reality check. If you’re starting up a make money online blog, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

It might sound hypocritical, but here are the two major reasons that you shouldn’t get into the MMO niche:

1. Amount of competition
2. Quality of competition

Everyday 100s of MMO blogs are started

Every month top bloggers show off how much money they’re making, like JC’s latest $32,000 haul . It’s these constant reminders that push newbies into making their own John Chow blogs, making it harder and harder to compete.

With smaller niche sites, the money is still made every month, but no one is around to flaunt it. Advertisers have fewer choices and usually pay better. This is because people in the MMO niche are more ad-blind, and RoI is much lower.

You’d be amazed at how many people are willing to click through gardening affiliate links as opposed to another making money ebook. The CTR is not great on the millionaire league–the market is saturated.

Rankings are tough to crack

I might be making good money with my site, but the Google SERPs are still a long way off. My traffic comes in from smaller, long tail keywords. Imagine trying to rank yourself in the top 10 for the term ‘SEO’.

For one thing, the top 10 are probably SEO experts and know how to link build. The top 10 in other niches often have poorly optimized SEO. I’ve been able to quickly climb to the top 10 in smaller niches, which some top sites don’t even have properly optimized title tags.

Instead of opening up a new affiliate marketing blog or your first MMO site, try engaging in another niche and see how easy it is to climb the ladder.

If you’re in the process of website optimization and website promotion, you need to stop and rethink your strategy. If you’re involved in promoting a website that has CPC ads (adsense, YPN) or sells on a CPA basis (clickbank, affiliate programs), you need to focus on search engine optimization for your site.

SEO = Targeted Web Traffic

All these web 2.0 geniuses will tell you to start building your site around social bookmarking and viral marketing. These are new and amazing ways to build traffic, but is it targeted traffic?

If you’re primary purpose is to make money, you need to focus on website optimization. Search engines drive targeted traffic your way. If someone searches for a term and your site page is one of the top results, chances are your page has some relevance to this visitor.

Targeted traffic = affiliate marketing success

So this visitor searched for keyword SEO, and finds your site, there’s a good chance they’ll either

1. Click on adsense and make you money
2. Click through an affiliate deal and make you more money
3. Read and enjoy your post and subscribe to your blog

Either way, you win.

Social media traffic = affiliate marketing failure

People from social media sites (Digg, Reddit) are very smart internet users. These people don’t click google ads and they can spot an affiliate link from a mile away.

Let’s take for example my review of the millionaire league. If this post was heavily promoted on Digg, it wouldn’t even get dugg because it contains affiliate links. These people HATE being sold things. The home cash course review didn’t stand a chance.

Search engines = constant website traffic

Once you’ve ranked well in google, you’re guaranteed a stream of visitors for your keyword (at least for a while). Ranking well in digg usually means getting a wave of traffic until your site crashes and then being deserted 24 hours later.

Once you’ve ranked well in google all you need to do is continue to keep up your search engine tactics. To keep up with digg visitors means writing digg bait posts like crazy and praying that your post gets dug and spread around at the right time by the right people.

Optimize your website

Now you know the key to success in affiliating marketing and adsense. Start using these SEO tips on your Wordpress blogs if you want to see real website promotion.