How to Make Money Online with SEO

Micro Niche Finder Review

20-Feb-10

Jade Snow Dragon Mountain -- Lijiang, Yunnan Province, China

Me again. Back from hiding. It’s been a while since I’ve posted last…a month and a half about. Sorry, been like mega busy with personal projects. Like really fucking-too-busy-to-take-bathroom-breaks kind of busy. Right now it’s my 4th month as a full time Internet Marketer and I’m finally hitting my stride. With the 2010 Winter Olympics in my city right now, I’ve been a bit less productive because of the festivities going on (read, getting drunk with hot Olympic athletes in downtown Vancouver), but I’m pushing myself to work at least 12 hours a day.

I’m also (finally) taking a month and a half of (May 1 to June 15) to do a trip to Tibet/China. I’m going with some seriously expensive camera equipment on a photo tour of some of the most beautiful places in asia, so expect some nice new photos. Gotta supply you guys with new landscape photos. I’m also going to blog about doing Internet Marketing while traveling abroad (in asia). I’ll probably do so on a different blog to generate some support authority for this blog.

Anyways…back to topic.

I normally don’t give any sort of product review here unless the product actually has some merit. However, I’ve had quite a few people asking me whether Micro Niche Finder is any good. Last post I promised to see to investigate whether Micro Niche Finder is a scam by doing an experiment. So true to my word, I bought the program last month to test it out. I used it to do my keyword research for the month and built sites on those keywords.

What do I recommend? Here’s the one liner review: Fucking buy it.There, saved you from a 1000 words of reading.

So far, I’m really really liking this program. In fact, I’d say if you are serious about making money online, then you’ll want this tool. It really will help you save time. There’s a lot of software out in the IM world and most of it is complete fucking crap that you don’t need. I’ve only found a handful of what I call “essential” IM tools in a year of IM – tools that actually will help you make money online or save you a shit load of time that are worth ponying up the bucks for. Micro Niche Finder is one of them.

Why?

Because it makes keyword research a breeze. A note though: You still need to know HOW to do proper research – don’t think MFN will do this for you. If you know what to do, good you are ready to start finding those keywords. If you don’t have your keyword research down pat, MFN won’t save your ass and you won’t make money through niche marketing. This program is not some magic pill for the noobs.

Now, I want this clear as crystal: You don’t need MNF to make money online. If anyone or any website tells you this, it’s bullshit. I’ve made a good full time income WITHOUT using MNF and only using Google Keyword Tool and a few other IM tools for keyword research. What MNF will do is cut out a lot of the extra steps involved with keyword research and put all the essential keyword information into a nice, aggregated matix. If you want to make money with niche sites, you are going to need to put in a lot of work. I don’t want anyone thinking that using MNF will make you money online — it won’t. It saves a hell of a lot of time with the research though and makes it less tedious.

What I like about this program is that it really integrates the Google keyword tool in a more streamlined interface. There is a matrix that displays all the important keyword research information – CPC, traffic per month, trend chart, and exact phrase count. Like Google Keyword Tool, you enter a keyword to get the keyword information. But this program is like Google Keyword Tool on steroids.

What really makes this program great is that you can filter keywords out depending on your specific criteria, check to see if the exact domains are available with a single click (huge time saver and worth the 97 bucks JUST for this imho), add domains you want to buy to a list with a click (no need to write them down like I’ve been doing), and launch a Google search for that keyword to scope out the competition right from the program. The program also shows a Strength of Competition rating and Online Commercial Intention rating – two keyword research criteria that some internet marketers look at. There are also some other cool features like the ability to search clickbank, google products, or amazon for products that come up for that keyword.

A search for Midget Thongs using MNF!

The way I use this program is to do the basic keyword search but then apply a few custom filters to the keywords with my personal keyword research criteria, then cherry pick the keywords on the list that show potential. I then analyze the strength of the competition for those keywords. MNF let’s you easily click on the keyword in question to open a search in your browser for it.

If you are a rank noob to IM or you just don’t know how to do proper keyword research and have not been having any luck with making money online, you better learn or start handing out those resumes. I suggest giving Court’s Keyword Academy for the 1 buck trail month – probably the only honest make money online school out there – a shot. It will get you up to speed on how to do keyword research. Grizzly’s unofficial ebook, also gives you the guts and meat on doing keyword research as well. Yea, you have to pay something for these training programs, but you learn the real deal — unlike most of the crap you’ll find online.

If you are one of those “I’m too cheap to pay for anything types”, then you can crawl through my blog to find some of my strategies (though I don’t give the whole shabang like Court does), or troll through Grizzly’s 3 years of making money with adsense blog posts. Between all of the resources there, you can learn how to find those keywords that give you the best (and easiest) chance of making money.

So, I give Micro Niche Finder my full recommendations. If you can afford it, it’s the best 97 bucks you’re going to spend. If you can’t afford the cost, you can still make do with the ol’ Google Keyword Tool. But if you get serious about Making money online and you can pick up enough pennies on the side of the road, you will want to give MNF a buy.

Ok, enough blathering. What you really want to know is what was I able to do since the last post? Talk is cheap and I do like to provide some proof of my experiments. Here’s a list of the income my new Micro Niche Finder sites from the past 40 days – since my last post. I also tabulated the last 7 days earnings. The income is actually a bit off by a few bucks because not all channels were added, but oh well. Note that this is complete NEW experiment from my other adsense sniper project. I opened a brand new adsense account for these sites and I switched up my strategies completely, trying to test some new things.

Adsense total for the sites created using MNF the past 40 days (Jan to Feb 2)

Adsense total for the sites created using MNF the past 40 days (Feb 3 to Current)

MNF sites last 7 days Total

So there we go. All in all, not bad. It took me about a month and half to grow my income from 1 -2 bucks a day to the 40-50 USD a day range. I’m now seeing consistent 40+ days (the reports were off by a couple bucks a day since not all channels were added – i forget some), so it’s pretty safe to say that at the current revenue projection, these MNF sites will generate me (assuming no increases) between 1200-1500 USD a month. The plan is to get this new account to about 200-300 bucks a day then open another adsense account for a new project in a couple months. Now, I usually get a huge list of questions about how, and why, and such stuff. I keep the exact details of what I do private these days for obvious reasons. For the How’s, read my blog or my forum – I throw some of my strategies out there. But to fend off the questions that people ask, I can offer you a few pointers for generating a good adsense income.

Test new niches constantly
Backlinks. Backlinks. Backlinks.
Optimize Adsense placement to increase CTR (can mean difference between .20 a day and 4 dollars a day with a site).
Self hosted domains with keywords in the domain (forget blogger blogs or free blogs if you want to generate an income quickly and can’t get shedload of authority links)
Good keyword research (you will absolutely fail without this)
Spinning (this saves you a shitload of time when getting links if you do it right)
Blackhat can be your friend (but be careful!)
You (usually) need more than ezines, hubpages, infobarrel links to rank you high!
Get links from as many different IP’s as possible
Actually doing work online – not reading forums
Work. Good old fashion work.

If you want results like I get guys, there is no magic bullet as I’ve been telling people for months. I work 12 to 16 hours a day. This is all I do – I live and breathe IM. Don’t put in a couple hours a week and thing you are going to take home a full time income in a couple months – try more like a year or three.

How long will it take for a full time income? This is the typical question people always ask. If you know EXACTLY what you are doing, I’d say 2 - 3 months of like 14-16 hour days. But keep in mind that to learn the “know exactly what you are doing” part it might take you six months of 6 hour days! And there are no guarantees here either. Some people stumble on all the right things right away and make money quickly. Other people need to learn the ropes the hard way and it can take them months or even years before they find the right path. I don’t want anyone quitting their job because they plan to make 100 bucks a day online in only 3 months because I said it’s possible. It’s possible in the way that it’s possible to run a marathon from Texas to New York, but you to “hone” yourself to the point where you can do that without having a heart attack. And that my friends can take a hell of a lot of training to get to that point. I’ve spent almost a year putting in full time hours doing IM. I’ve tried things that didn’t work, I’ve failed completely many many times, and had some success.I know that I spent a solid 3 months of full time work testing different strategies that did not directly increase my income. I’ve learned from my many mistakes and took what works and built on that.

So it takes patience and work and a bit of luck too before you find something that works. Once you do, you scale the hell out of it to make the big bucks. The most important thing you can do guys is to experiment! Don’t be afraid of trying new things. I see a LOT of people one the fence about trying strategies online because they might wast time on something that doesn’t work. But…what if it works. What if it REALLY works. And that’s what I do guys.

I notice that people also tend to jump on one IM fad for a month or two then seize on another. This is exactly how you will fail to make money. Stick to a single method until you make money. If you want to master adsense, do it. If you want to master amazon/ebay instead, focus only on making a full time income with these instead. You will find that a lot of “techniques” that work for say adsense won’t work for creating amazon mini sites, for example. This is why it’s better to stick with one method of making money until you really make it work before jumping on to something else. Do too many things and you are more likely to fail at all of them. Do only one thing and you’ll probably master it if you put in enough effort.

That’s it for today folks. I’ve got a solid 3000 word juicy post about how to hijack your competitor’s networks already written for out you guys. It’s going up in a week or so – so you won’t have to wait another month for a post

I’ve got some more experiments coming up:

Wordpress Mage — To be honest, I’m not convinced I can make money any faster with WP Mage than just creating a bunch of new websites with ebay integrated into wordpress. But we’ll see.
Adsense vs. Amazon — I’m going to convert 100 sites that make money with adsense into Amazon sites and track which makes more money over 1-2 weeks. I’ll also track the income when you put both on.
60 .info domains + BCW content + chitika ads

Some further topics I’ll be making posts about the next couple months:

How to test keyword CTR without ranking for the keyword
How to increase search traffic without increasing rankings
How to optimize Adsense to Maximize earnings

There we go guys. Work hard guys and make money online!

Ben

Making Money Online in 2010

02-Jan-10

qixitang Back from hiding guys. I know I said I would post more often, but I’ve been keeping my head down, working on new projects. Here’s a nice long post to break in the new years.

It’s a new year and it’s time for one of those self reflection and “what I learned” and “what I will do” sort of posts.

So I’ve been doing Internet Marketing for a bit over a year now. Last October, I created my first “niche” website. Since then my empire has expanded into the hundreds (I probably have thousands of properties when we count web 2.0’s). Not bad for a year. I started out making about 100 bucks a month after the first month. Since then, I’ve been able to quite my job and become a full time Internet Marketer (3 months ago).

I’ve learned a lot, had a lot of failures, but also met with success too.

Here’s some of the key things I’ve learned over the year.

1. Don’t trust the Google keyword tool

The Google keyword is not complete accurate. It’s sometimes way way way off. In terms of looking at the exact searches, take 50-75% of the total number you see – that’s what you are likely to work with. Remember, even at #1, you will never get all the searches. It’s my experience that you can bank on maybe 50-75 percent of the exact search you see, then count on getting 20-30% of those at number one. There are a few tricks you can do to increase the visitor counts I can talk about as well, but let’s save that for another post.

2. Create Lots and Lots of Sites

I’ve talked a lot about this being my current strategy. I want to be careful and say that this is certainly not the only strategy. You can make good money one fewer sites with more content and backlinks, or a single authority site in a competitive niche. The model that I’m trying to master right now is the adsense mini site. I’m also juggling a few authority sites, but I’m finding myself unable to do any backlink work because I don’t have the time. I’m going to have to go back to the authority site model in 6 months when I’m done with my mini site spree. I have one authority site that’s made almost 1000 bucks during December, for example. There are people with 10k a month authority sites (or more) out there too.

3. Diversify your income streams, niches and types of sites

I’ve talked a lot about this and for good reason. You need to protect your own ass. Don’t be a slave to any one model of making money. My suggestion is to build up a full time income (I consider this to be 3k USD a month, but you can “get by on 1500-2000, though you will be counting coupons) with each revenue source. You can try and diversify right away, but I personally find this just leaves you floundering around. Pick a way to make money, master it, and move to the next.

4. Adsense and Holidays don’t like each other

Adsense, especially in those niches that people are prone to visit while sitting at work, bored out of their mind, goes way the fuck down during any sort of holiday. My adsense took a trashing for the last 8 days of December. All holidays will see you with a decline in your Adsense earnings, so don’t panic. Weekends, especially for some niches, also tend to go down 30-50%. You can reduce this by diversifying into different niches – some do better on weekends and holidays than others.

5. Make your own damn sites, you are the master of your own ‘domain’

Web 2.0 sites like hubpages and infobarrel are a great way to make some quicker(er) money, but you have to split your earnings and you are always under the control of someone else. If these sites fall prey to spammers, the entire domain may get slapped by google. You also need to treat each “page” you create on one of these sites like a website and do basic run of backlinking. If you don’t, be prepared to see your earnings drop.

Backlinks, at least with Google’s current algorithm, are what prevent erosion of your search engine rankings.

6. Keyword research is king – If you fail at this, you will fail to make money

If you are working your ass off trying to make money online and failing, you are either doing one of two things wrong: your keyword research is crap or you aren’t getting backlinks. Fix one or both and you will make money.

7. Backlink every property you have

Support your support’s support sites. Bit of a tongue twister, eh? If you create a hubpage, infobarrel, squidoo, ezine, or whatever, try to at least send a few crappy backlinks to these. A web property with 0 backlinks gives very little juice. Add just a handful of easy backlinks to your property, and in time (especially if we are taking about a web 2.0 with some domain authority to start with), that little property can give a good shot of link juice. If you have dozens or a hundred backlinks that are backlinked, you may find you yourself sitting and staying high on the front page of google.

8. Experiment!

You’ll be surprised at how much money you can make by leaving the beaten internet marketing path. Try new things. You may fail, but hey, you might stumble on something new. I’ve made most of my money by trying things people haven’t. Remember, even failed sites are valuable because they can be used as link farms.

9. Network. The more friends online you have, the more success you may find. People in the MMO niche are generally pretty helpful, minus those trying to sell you products.

10. PR doesn’t matter

PR and search engine ranking are becoming less and less related. PR *can* indicate how easy it is to break into a niche, but it’s not always bang on and sometimes PR is way off. You need to look at other variables too.

11. Full time marketing does not equal full time work

I learned this one the hard way. Just because you quit your job to work as a full time marketer, it’s not easy to get work done when you have all this free time. You actually have to treat your job like you have a boss looking over your shoulder. It took me a full month and a week to get back into the groove of pushing myself to work.

12. Prepare for Christmas

I, regrettably, didn’t have a network in place for the Christmas shopping. I won’t make the same mistake next year — I think I’ll drop everything next August to prepare for the November/December shoppers. You can seriously make a year’s income in 2 months if you do it right.

Since every other make money online site out there is setting a New Years resolution, here’s my Top 5 Internet Marketing goals for the next year.

1. Make 20-30k a month. I still have some work to do here, but I think 20k a year is realistic. I’m going to work my ass off to make this a reality.

2. Set up 3 solid authority sites

3. Diversify into Amazon and EBay. Aim for 3k a month with each revenue type

4. Actually SEO this Make Money Online blog. I’ve done 0 SEO for this site. But, I’d like to actually spend some time trying to rank this site for some competitive Make Money Online terms – if only to help cut through most of the shit out there.

5. Start promoting Hairy Midget Thongs – I’ve been talking a lot about them, maybe I should start selling them?

Yet Another Homily About Making Money Online

Persistence

The key to making money online is persistence. All about persistence. You try something, it doesn’t work. You try something else, it doesn’t work. You try something else it doesn’t work. You try something else, it works. Bingo, repeat this 100 times and you can quite your day job.

I’ll tell you something – the only way you can fail to make money with organic search engine marketing is failing to really try. I guarantee if you continue to create new sites, get backlinks, and test different markets, you will make money. The problem people seem to have is that they don’t realize how much work you actually have to put into the process and that instant results don’t always happen.

Making money on the internet is not an instant process. It can take months to start to see the fruits your labour. But I will promise you one thing – it get’s easier. You learn what works and what doesn’t. You optimize what works and discard what doesn’t. And you start to make more and more money.

Set Goals

It’s easy to get lost in this business, especially with my current strategy of mass producing mini sites. If you are going to juggle a lot of different sites, you need to really have some concrete goals. I strongly suggest you set yourself daily goals – 5 articles a day, one site a day, 10 backlinks a day, or whatever you feel you can REALISTICALLY set each day. And stick to this schedule. And for fucks sake, stick to it. Hand your kids to your hubby for a few hours, spend time working online rather than watching whatever crap passes as TV these days. Give up that Xbox 720 or whatever new video game system you got for Christmas. The point is, start spending time working online. For some people, you might have to sacrifice something, but anything valuable in life always has a cost. If you aren’t willing to pay the cost, don’t expect to get it.

I’m not trying to become the Internet Marketing version of Toney Robbins here with all this hurrah hurrah “I can fly if I put my mind to it” talk. But there is something to be said about your state of mind.

I’ve found that making money online is a MENTAL exercise. You need to have the right state of mind to achieve anything because you are putting yourself out on a limb, taking a risk trying to commit to this pie-in-the-sky model of making money.

It’s not easy to spend hours every day, hoping that at some indefinite point in time, you will make some money. It’s not easy explaining to wife, husband, uncle, aunt, or friend-at-McDonalds that you are spending hours every day trying to make money online.

We probably all have that Uncle who’s trying the next easy way of making fast money. I have one and every week he’s trying some new Amway scam, telling everyone within ear shot how much money his new business idea will be making.

But you know what, Internet Marketing is not some sell-bullshit-to-desperate people kind of thing – you can make money. And the proof is in the pudding when you can show those nice checks.

Experiment

Guys, I can’t stress this enough. You need to try different ways of making money. Play with different revenue streams, play with different niches, play with different types of sites, play with different themes, play with different layouts, etc.

Test, track, test, track, optimize. A lot of people just want to put up a site and leave it in perpetuity, but this is a good way to leave money on the table. I like to set up a site and leave it for a couple months. I think change things around for a few weeks/month and track the changes.

I also encourage you guys to branch outside of Adsense. Adsense is great for some niches, but suck ass for other niches. And in some cases, you can make a lot more money with affiliate marketing.

Making Money Online with Long Tail Keywords

I thought I’d talk a bit about long tails, you know – “how to buy a cheap hair midget thong” or “brown hairy midget thongs” or “hairy midget thongs for children”.

When targeting organic search engine traffic, a good deal of your search engine traffic can come from “untargeted” long tails. Now I’ve been creating lots of mini sites for months, tinkering with different strategies for getting traffic. One strategy I played around with was setting up sites to only score long tail traffic.

Does it work? Partly. For SOME niches, you can set up sites and get long tails, but with a brand new site with no backlinks, you likely won’t get more than 2-4 people a day (if that) in long tails. Older sites and sites with backlinks get more.

In the RIGHT situation, you can actually get more long tail traffic than your main keyword.

Long tail searches can really add up. I’ve got one site – an authority site – that gets 1200 or so visitors a day. I’d say I get about 500 or so people a day from unplanned “long tail” searches.

Now there seems to be a lot of confusion about long tail traffic. You only get long tail traffic, in significant quantities, by getting backlinks to your site – there more the better.

Here’s why. If you set up a new site that doesn’t rank high for any terms, you won’t get a lot of long tail traffic – 1-4 people a day at most, usually.

To get a decent amount of long tail traffic, you are going to have to build up some keyword authority for a niche. Let’s say I create a new blog “How to buy a Hairy Midget Thong.” If you just sit on it and forget about it, say goodbye to getting anything other than trickle traffic.

There is a strategy with trickle traffic that can still make you money – either with Adsense or Ebay, but you need hundreds of sites to really see something tangible.

If you want more than trickle traffic, you need to develop some keyword authority for some terms in your niche. Once you get some authority for some long tails, google also ranks you for other “unplanned” combinations that contain those longtails or related longtails. For authority sites that rank for dozens (or hundreds) of terms, the long tail traffic can be substantial. For a mini site that ranks for a single keyword, you might only pull out 10-20 people a day from long tails. For a mini site with no ranking, get used to a couple people a day at most from long tails.

New Experiments

My work has been frozen t he past 10 days, ever since Christmas has come up. I’m currently working with some more sniper sites in different niches. I’ve got plans to test out Wordpress Mage – there is some real potential there to rake it in from thin affiliate sites. I have the software but I haven’t had any time. This month I want to see about getting 10-30 sites set up though. I’m also going to do an experiment with micro niche finder. I’m thinking about creating 50-100 sites with it and we can collectively track the results. This software has a very good reputation, so I’m going to see what I can do with it. I pretty sure I can put it to good use here. I do have some plans for doing 100-200 solid ebay sites, 100 solid Amazon snipers, and so on. But right now, I’m building adsense sites for the next 4-6 months. After that, I’ll switch all out to affiliate sites and see what I can do.

So there we go guys. It’s a new year. Set a goal for your productivity and get to work. The mountain of Make Money Online is tall, but it’s time to start scaling it. If you haven’t made money yet, this is your year.

Happy (Late) New Years. I’ll see if I can cough out a new post in a few days. I don’t want to make any promises though – it takes me some real time to create a post here. I need to have a couple, fuck-around posts where I don’t have to come up with something profound.

Now go Make Money Online.

Filed in How to Make Money Online, Internet Marketing, Niche Marketing | Tagged internet marketing, make money, make money online new years resolution | Comments (50) »

How to Make Money Online Quickly

13-Nov-09

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Well, I guess it about time to post something on my blog. Blogs are supposed to be updated, I suppose.

Well, full time. Not what I expected. I’ve been officially “full time” since October 23 – about 3 weeks. How much have I been getting done…Um I’m embarrassed to say, not that much. Oh, I’ve been pretending to work for a while, but I can honestly say I’ve probably put in 5 days of good work.

Now, part of the problem is that when you go full time, you all the sudden have all this spare time. And the work you put in doesn’t directly affect your earnings, so you are still getting paid for sleeping in all day or doing a superman session at the computer.

I’m getting back on track to my usual 15 hour days though – I did put in a 12 hour day yesterday. I might have needed a couple weeks to recharge. But whatever, even machines break down without a break once in a while. Looks like I should follow a few of Leo’s Internet Marketing Full Timer tips.

The Story of Dorris and Dofus

Today, I wanted to tell you the tale of two internet marketers, Dorris and Dufus. These two new marketers decided they were going to find a path to a full time income by each creating 100 sites. Dorris decided to go after keywords that had barely any competition in off the wall niches while Dufus decided that he had the “cure for cancer” up his sleeve and knew the best “acne treatments”.

After two months of building sites, Dorris finds she’s making 40 dollars a day while Dufus, despite the fact that he has an incredible wealth of knowledge to share about cancer, skin care and Obama loans, is only make a few pennies a day.

Does this sound familiar? If you have been working at this game (and I mean real work) for several months are getting Dufus’s results, I can tell you right now folks, there are probably two things you are doing wrong: you are picking niches that have TOO much competition or/and you are picking the wrong niches

I don’t dispute that going after high paying competitive niches can pay off in the end. BUT, you better be willing to sell your soul to the gods of backlinking for a year or two OR have a powerful personal network to help aid your ranking.

If you don’t, you are going to try ranking your sites very hard for three months, then give up when you find that your 10-year old niece made more money selling lemonade on a Monday than you did with 4 months of Internet Marketing.

It’s possible to make money online QUICKLY (as in a few weeks or months) if you do your keyword research right. Impossible right? You need months of hardcore backlinking to make money, right? Dozens of pages of content? Google holy water blessed by Matt Cutts? Nope, nope, nope, and definitely fucking not.

Let’s talk about something called the .50 a day site. Not a lot of glory, but they can make you consistent money en bulk. Everyone wants a single 3k a month site. I imagine it’s nice. You can call up your dad and say “Gee Dad, I’ve got this cool website that makes me 3k a month. I’m balling. Now I can wear midget thongs and watch Hero reruns all day AND get paid for it.” Good for you and I hope you like Heroes, because I sure don’t.

But you see, golly geez, it actually takes you a lot of god damn work to make a couple thousand dollars a month with a single site. Unless you seriously luck out with your keyword search, you might be looking at thousands of backlinks and 6 months to a year of work.

But our little modest .50 a day sites can make money faster. You see. .50 a day ain’t a lot. But when you times that by 100 or 200, all the sudden you have an income.

I’m not saying this is the only way to make money. But if you want to make money online sooner then later, you need to stop looking at the sky and start looking at the ground.

Now, I’m not saying if you want to pick out 10 paying keywords in competitive niches and play SEO for 6 months or a year that you can’t make oodles of money. You can, and Internet Marketers with a lot of experience (and the networks to back them up) do this. But if you are not a star SEO, an experienced marketer, or some young backlinking hotshot, you’re going to find it’s not that easy to rank those 10 sites for acne, obama loans, and make money online niches.

I’m also not arguing that spending a lot of time on a few authority sites is not the way to go long term. I’d love to have a nice harem of authority sites that earn me thousands of dollars each, but alas, that’s not going to be for a couple years.

You can look at going deep to make money (authority, lots of backlinks) or you can go wide (lots of little sites). Ideally, you want a mix of both. But if you have to choose between the two, I’d say go very fucking wide, build up a full time income, then dig down deep.

I’ve realized that for people to succeed with making money online, they need to see some results. It can be pretty damn rough spending a year working hoping in a pie-in-the-sky sort of way that you will make money. But if you start to see results, you are going to more likely bust your ass even harder, which will help you earn more.

Because no doubt people will be asking for me to write a tutorial on “how to make .50 cents a day with a niche blog”, here are eight points:

1. Get Exact Keyword Domains

2. Don’t be afraid of very low exact searches

3. Don’t trust google keyword tool CPC – it lies big time. .05 cpc could give .50 clicks and $80 could give .05 clicks.

4. Create between 50-100 domains

5. Have 5 posts of targeted, well written, helpful content on each site

6. PICK NICHES THAT OTHER MARKETERS DON’T HIT

7. Use the most god awful ugliest theme you can find

8. Pay pal me $100 – VERY IMPORTANT OTHERWISE YOU WON’T MAKE ANY MONEY!!!

Well, I lied about #8, sorry.

It’s important that you guys pick niches that aren’t the weightloss, health, skincare, dating that every other IM loves to spam. There is money in these niches, yes. But a lot of competition too. Competition, guys, means it’s a lot harder to get your pages RANKING high enough to get traffic. However, you will have to experiment for yourself. But there are a lot of niches out there that don’t have to do with getting rid of bad skin, losing fat in 30 days, finding Obama loans, and guessing the color of Britney’s underwear.

There are millions of untapped niches guys. Many of these are easy to rank for. Which means you get traffic fast and, if the audience is receptive, clicks.

Adsense Sniper Progress

Ok, so how are these snipers doing? Well, I’ve been working on backlinks for the past 3 weeks (cough…i mean for 5 days) and I only have about 1/10 actually backed up.

Here is my last week’s revenue:

snipers

As you can see, my earnings have gone up, somewhat. Maybe not dramatically, but I’m breaking 100’s often and sometimes did deep into the next hundred. Average is almost at 100 bucks a day. A full time income right there. Now, in about a month and a half I probably put up an additional 40 sites and I was doing some other things and in the process of quitting my job.The past 3 weeks, I’ve also done almost fuck all, so definetly not as much progress as I could have had put putting 3 weeks of real work into these.

However, I’ve finally started do SEO work on every single one of the snipers. I’m currently at 12 out of 105 (started past week). I’m hoping to god I can be done with the 105 by the end of this month, but I don’t have my hopes that high. It might take a few more weeks after the end of the month. Once I’m done, I’m going back and picking out the top 5-10 sites that I fee can earn 20-60 bucks a day, and will spend a solid month building backlink networks for each site. This should drastically jump up my earnings. We should see a pretty big increase in my earnings as I will only be backlinking these snipers over the next 2 weeks to a month. It may be early to make predictions, but I’d like to see these sites, after I finish the initial backlinking run on all 105, doing about 200 (6k a month) in adsense a day, though I’d LOVE to see 300 a day (9k a month). When I pick out the 5-10 winners and do some real SEO work on them for a month, I may be able to get another 100-200 bucks a day out of the snipers. Now, these are some heavy predictions…200-500 bucks a day from these sites, but based on what I’ve seen, very possible. But, we’ll see how it goes.

After these 105 are done, I’m going to do another 100. I may do 100 ebay snipers before I do another 100 adsense snipers, just to diversify. We’ll see how that goes.

So there we go. Sorry, not an uber long post like you are used to. One of these days, I’m going to come out with a 14k word post just to break Grizzly’s super post record he’s always boasting about

Some more MMO food for thought. Have a great weekend guys and go make money online.

Filed in How to Make Money Online, Internet Marketing, Make Money Online Experiments, Niche Marketing, SEO | Tagged adsense snipers, internet marketing, make money online, make money with seo, SEO | Comments (103) »

7 Reasons Why Google Adsense Rocks

29-Oct-09

Summer Palace, Sunset -- Beijing

First post in a while. I’ve been so busy, my bad.

First, I’m officially a full time, very sleazy internet marketer now — mothers, be sure to keep your daughters away from the likes of me!

First, I want to apologize to person with prostate cancer — I know I told you that buying my organic Mediterranean-grown carrot seeds will cure it…but I lied. Sorry. And to the person, who bought that natural dog toothpaste I wrote a review about, well the only thing natural about it is that it’s produced in china by dollar-a-day workers using “Chinese natural ingredients: (read: dangerous industrial-strength chemicals). Opps, must have forgotten to add that part to the review. Maybe next time.

Another day in the life of an internet marketer. When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I’m a professional liar. It’s sad, but it’s true. If you want to make money in the game folks, you need to take little things like ethics and morals and dignity and toss them out the window. An honest internet marketer is a poor internet marketer.

Note: It appears my little comment about having to lie to make good money has offended some people. Folks, you can certainly make money online honestly — only give legitimate reviews of products you can vouch for, don’t make up bullshit when you write, etc. However, it’s going to be MUCH harder. I admire you if you take the high road, but I’m in this business for the money and nothing else. But, my hat’s off to you if you want to be an honest internet marker. It’s just that in this business, things like morals and honest really fucking get in the way of making money online sometimes.

Think for a second what it will means for your make money online strategy if you never lie when you write. From my angle, I’m hearing the cascading sound of many doors of opportunity slamming shut.

On this blog, I tell things the way it is and what it takes to make money. If you want a sugar coated version of how to make money online, look elsewhere. I tell you what works and make no apologies for it. Doesn’t mean you have to sell out your good christian morals to make money on the internet, but you will have to find a more difficult path sometimes.

As a note, if you have problems with lying online, you can make good money with adsense without lying. For the world of affiliate selling, your are going to face harder decisions about whether you should BS or not.

Anyways…

It’s great FINALLY being free of “the man.” I dithered about quitting my job for months because I didn’t feel like I was diversified enough, etc, but quitting was the right decision and as it turned out, the only decision. It was pretty funny trying to explain to my wage-slave coworkers my reasons for quitting. I pretty much gave up on explaining to them what IM is and how I wasn’t actually going to be “jobless.” From now on, I think I’ll just tell people I sell drugs when they ask what I do – it’s just so much easier.

It’s actually good that I quit. The second to last day at work, 60% of my coworkers were fired out of the blue (my job position was completely axed so I would have gotten the boot too). Nice.

And that folks is why you don’t ever want to trust in “job security.” That’s the way the way the working world sells it to you. “Join us for job security and dental benefits.” What they fail to tell you on that little promotional job pamphlet is if the company only make 200 million in profit and not 205 million in profit, they need to “streamline” the workflow. This is corpspeak for giving the boot to a few hundred hard-working employees.

It’s true that IM has it’s risk. You can get your Adsense banned by Google, get your sites deindexed, etc. But how is this really different than a normal job? You put in your 9-5, work your ass off, and you can still kicked kicked to the curb because the company didn’t meet its monthly sales expectation and that board member living in Tahiti can now only buy a Porsche instead of a Lamborghini.

So full time, how is it? Bloody good. Now don’t get me wrong, I haven’t quite my job to sit around getting a tan on the beach (in Vancouver, it’s rain rain rain everyday for the next 4 months anyways). I quit so I can get even more work done and make a lot of fucking money so that I can leave to travel around for a couple years. But now that I don’t have to go to a “job” I can set my own hours. If I want to put in an 18 hour day, I can. If I want to put in 3 hours then take the day off, I can. If I want to go live abroad, I can. The point is, I have the freedom now.

So one of John Cow’s followers guest posted an article , “7 Reasons Why Adsense Sucks”.

I read it and had a nice laugh. Most of it was way the fucking off. Clearly the author is making or has made peanuts with adsense and assumes that’s the case for everyone else. Well, maybe people on Digital Point Forums or Warrior Forums, but not REAL internet marketers.

Let’s deconstruct this article.

#1) The CPM’s are Weak

Really, that’s news to me. In fact, I’ve been only seeing MORE money from my clicks. Now, I have to agree with what Chad Randall or whatever his name is, that Google is pretty shady on how they split them money with publishers. It’s all smoke and mirrors. If the CPC is 30 bucks, you can realistically only expect about 20% of that or 6 bucks. And, to be honest, you will probably only get 2-3 bucks. Google magic formula doesn’t usually work in the favour of publishers.

But, Mr. Chad Randall, disciple of John Chow, CPC can be sky high if you know what the fuck you are doing. I regularly see single clicks so high that a handful of these clicks could provide someone with a full time income. So when I hear that CPM’s are weak, I call bull. I have no doubts that in our “Great Depression” that we are living through, as CNN loves to remind us every fucking day, CPM’s are lower than what they were. But people are still buying and web advertizing is only growing. Folks, there is PLENTY of money to be make despite “lower” CPM’s. You just have to experiment. As a hint, don’t trust what the google adwords tools says – high CPC doesn’t not mean you will get high CPC and low CPC does not have to mean .10 clicks either.

#2) They Look Like Crap

So, you want people to come to your site and ooo and ahh about how beautiful the fucking google ads look? See this is the big different between a blogger and an internet marketer. Bloggers are so caught up with making things look pretty and entertaining visitors. Internet Marketers are all about function over form. Function = money folks. Give the people hungry for what they are looking for something to click on, don’t put pretty looking distractions in the way of this, and you’ll make money.

The simple rule is that ugly sites make money. People come, see an ugly ad that offers them information they are looking for and click. Remember folks, if you are entertaining people, you’ll be funding their entertainment out of your own pocket.

#3) Inverse Relationship to Revenue
Now, I agree with this. The worse your content, them more people click. That’s the price you pay when using content-relevant ads. The worse your content and the more uglier your site, the more attractive the ads are. Now, they key is to actually find the perfect balance. You can still make money from ads if you have great content – less money for sure, but still good coin.

#4) PSA’s
One word: lousy SEO or keyword research. If you do proper keyword research you will know that there are relevant ads that will be displayed for that keyword search (you can test this out by doing a google.com search with your keyword. If you see 4+ ads on the sidebar of the search screen and the ads are RELEVENT to your keyword, then you won’t have PSA problems.). With proper keyword research, you can be sure that there are actually some ads that CAN be displayed if you put adsense ads up. The other half of the equation is to make sure the adbox has some keywords to use as ad fodder. This requires proper onpage SEO – keywords in title, keywords above the ad and below the ad, bolded keywords, etc.
This means if you have a general blog with post after post of unrelated content, you are not going to get relevant, high paying ads or end up with a lot of PSA.
The author of the blog is suppose to be an SEO or IM’er or something, but if he was, he should know this.

#5) Anyone is Approved
Not exactly – I know a lot of people who get rejected. Yes, it’s fairly easy to get approved. But it you start putting up dup content, shitty content, or splam blogs, I can assure you it’s only a matter of time before you get permanently banned from adsense.

#6) It Makes You Lazy
I do quite well with just adsense. I agree, it’s so damn easy to make lots of money with adsense that you get lazy in your diversification. I know plenty of people pulling in 5-10k a month from a single site with adsense. I’ve got a couple little old 3 post niche sites that sometimes pull in 20-40 bucks a day– not a “killing”, but not a bad income for 3 fucking posts on an ugly ass theme.

I’d rather earn passive income from adsense anyday than to have to muck around with advertizers. You slap up adsense and that’s it – go sit at a beach and get a tan. If you want to sell adspace, you’ve got to hunt down interested parties, answer annoying emails, send stats, and basically whore out your time trying to convince people to pay you. You may like doing that, but I’ve got better uses for my time, thank you.

#7) They keep your Money
I’ve heard of this, but never experienced it myself. In general, goggle is pretty fair when it comes to paying out. Quite often, bloggers get sick an tired of waiting for those .5 cents a week to add up to $100 bucks and decide to enlist the aid of friends and family to “help” reach that total faster. Clicking on your own ads is a great way to find yourself banned before getting a payout. The being banned-before-100-bucks phenomenon occurs is probably because Google doesn’t look too deeply into how you get your clicks until your 100 payout. I could be wrong, but I suspect this is the case.

So, to counter this “7 Reasons Why Google Adsense Sucks” Bullshit, I’ve come up with my greatly compressed “counter” list of “7 Reasons Why Adsense Rocks”:

1. It’s easy as fuck to set up
2. It’s passive income
3. You can make massive amounts of money
4. You can make massive amounts of money
5. You can make massive amounts of money
6. You can make massive amounts of money
7. You can make massive amounts of money

There we go, enough said. So go out and make a full time income with Adsense.

Other news:
A friend of mine is releasing a new Press Release service. He’s a very good SEO that’s been ranking high for competitive terms for years – so no bullshit there. He’s company owns a well known Web 2.0 Property.

His press release service can give your high potential niche site or authority a very nice link boost with hundreds of links from good domains. Remember, the more links you have from different IP’s, the better you can do in the SERP’S, so if you have a couple hundred dollars kicking around, you might want to give the service a try. I’m not being paid to promote this service in any way.

That’s it for today folks. I’ll post an update later this month about my MMO efforts. Things are going good, FINALLY finished my 105 adsense snipers and I’m working on backlinking every single one of them for the next 3 weeks. Talk about bitch work, but it’s got to be done. We’ll take a look to see how much they are earning then. I’ve got a few other experiments lined up like 200 ebay snipers in 30 days coming up next month and, when i finish promoting my first 105 adsense snipers, another 100 snipers to do. Now that I’m full time, I’ll see if I can post a couple times a week on this blog.

Cheers and Make Money Online

Filed in How to Make Money Online, Internet Marketing, SEO | | Comments (59) »

Make Money Online with Authority Sites

30-Sep-09

It’s been a busy two weeks — sorry, haven’t not gotten around to update the blog as per my weekly schedule and I’ve been getting crap from some of my readers about it. I’ve made it up to you with a record setting word count. You are going to need a pot of coffee or two

So a lot of changes the past two weeks.

The biggest change is that I finally decided to step up and quit my job. I handed in my resignation last week. This is a big step – I wanted to diversify my online portfolio enough that I could survive a ban from adsense and I’m not yet into that position, but there’s no going back now! I’m going to make working on different revenue streams and getting multiple adsense accounts set up ASAP. When you don’t have a job, you don’t want to find your livelihood gone overnight. Quitting was more of a business decision than anything. I took a look at how much I can accomplish (well, as long as I am not writing these 6 hour posts for this blog!) by staying home and how much more I can earn with a month of full time IM over going to work and it didn’t make sense to stay at my job anymore. So, wish me luck on my full time IM venture.

Now that I don’t have a job (or won’t in less than 3 weeks), I’m pretty much free to go anywhere to work. So I’ve decided to live the dream. I’m going to work full time, 14-18 hours a day for the next 3-6 months on IM, and then leave Canada for Asia to live abroad for a few years. I’m going to travel around and live in different places across Asia (Taiwan, China, Japan, Tibet), working on my niche websites and mastering landscape photography. It should be VERY interesting. Who doesn’t want to be a professional bum. Now, you hear a lot about loser foreigners bumming around in Asia because they can’t make it back here in North America (or the UK/Europe). These types usually end up teaching English. My goal is not to go there poor though — I’d like to be making between 15-20k USD a month. The only sort of bumming around I want to do is in my various rented penthouses and… we’ll I’ll stop there. But, good times ahead. Provided I can keep Google away from my properties. There’s always that…

Internet Marketing is the best job in the world because you can do exactly this. You can earn lots of money while working anywhere in the world (well, anywhere that has electricity and high speed internet). And since it’s a passive income, you can set your own schedule and enjoy lots of free time. Work fucking hard, play fucking hard. I’m particularly interested to see if I can use my 2 years of traveling as fodder for money making websites while. I know there are plenty of region specific IM opportunities — directory sites, local niche websites with targeted ads, travel websites, etc. I’m going to see what I can come up with, just for the hell of it. Of course, I’ll be doing all the usual IM stuff I am currently doing, but with a more relaxed schedule.

So dare to dream guys — those dreams can become a reality with MMO. I’ll be sure to take you all on my journeys through Asia as well.
Ok, back to the business of making money online. This post I want to spend some time talking about authority sites. It seems like everyone’s talking about authority and I’ve been wanting to discuss the topic more in detail, outlining how to do it and some strategies.

How to Build an Authority Site

Now, first of all, what is an authority site and what differentiates it from a niche site. Generally, authority sites are massive sites with hundreds of articles and lots and lots of backlinks. Authority sites generally provide solid information that’s actually helpful to the reader. Niche sites tend to be small sites (3-10 posts) with a few targeted posts and a couple to several hundred backlinks. Authority sites are generally provide much more relevant (and much more) information than do mini sites. As such, Google has a big hard on for authority sites.

Why am I focusing so much on authority sites when I can make quicker money with sniper sites? Good question and it comes down to the direction Google is moving with their search algorithms. You will notice that authority sites have a tendency to dominate keyword search terms on Google. It’s not impossible for small niche sites to rank high, but authority sites seem to be crowding out the smaller sites. Taking a look at where things are going, I think we are going to see more and more of this. Smaller niche sites without a lot of content and backlinks may well vanish from the searches pages. Google wants authority type sites guys, and if you want to make good money in the future, you want to provide google with exactly what they are looking for.

What seems to be happening is that Google is giving a lot more keyword ranking to sites that have niche authority. You can see this when you search for any term – the sites that usually dominate the top 5 are authority sites. You will also note that it’s very easy to take a post/page on an authority site and with a bit of backlink work, get that page ranking high on the front page — much faster than you could if say you took a page from a non-authority site and bombarded it with lots of links. This is especially true when you have an authority site in a very competitive niche — you can rank your individual long tail targeted posts very easily.

Now say we have two sites – one site is a 400 article authority site about red widgets, and one site is a 5 article site about red widgets for worms. You will find that quite often, it’s the authority site that ranks in the top 5 spots for “red widgets for worms”, even if there is no specific article targeting this keyword. You can see the advantages here – if your site has a lot of authority for the “red widget” term, you can rank high for virtually any term relating to red widgets … maybe even rank for keyword + widgets. This “blanket” ranking authority can be lucrative because you can rank so easily for so many different terms. Compare that to my red widgets for worms niche site. With enough backlinks, I may rank well for “red widgets for worms” by any other “red widgets” term I may not rank for, not unless I’ve been building backlinks and targeted posts.

Authority sites are also much safer in the long run as well. I’m beginning to think Google despises Internet Marketers – they readily seek to hunt down and destroy our properties. I guess we are viewed as a search parasite – we skew the true rankings by gaming the system and we have a tendency to spite out regurgitated content that doesn’t provide any real help. What is Google’s answer to IM’ers, spammers and people who game search?

Authority sites. By giving sites with authority more keyword ranking power, Google ensure that searchers find EXACTLY what they are looking for. I’m not saying your 5 post (or shall we say my) hairy midget thong niche site is not providing legitimate information about thongs, but pound per pound, authority sites tend to deliver a much higher search experience for relevant information.

Why can I make this claim? Common logic. Someone with an authority site is not going to publish shit content. When you spend a year or more building up a site, you are not likely to hire .25c-an-article writers to write your content. Your content will be high quality, helpful, and relevant.

Basically, authority is something very difficult for spammers and internet marketers to easily replicate. In fact to get authority status, it usually takes quite a few links from other authority sites. If your site reeks of a MFA site you won’t be getting many natural links – and you won’t find too many authority sites willing to link to shit-content sites.

Since authority sites offer relevant and well written content they are exactly the sort of site Google wants to see ranking on the first page. You can either against Google and make shit niche sites and hope with enough backlinks you can keep your front page position, or you can work with Google and deliver what they want: relevant content for search.

So, how to build an authority site? Good question. Like everything in this game, there are many reads that lead to the same path. Here is my method for building authority.

Domain Name
Guys, domain name is huge these days, absolutely huge. If you ignore the power of exact keyword (or as close as you can get it), you throw away one of the best SEO strategies out there. I haven’t really done a post on domain name power, so I’ll save most of the information.

There are some compelling reasons why you want to get the exact keyword domain name.

1. Natural links are properly anchored
The average webmaster knows fuck all about backlinks, anchor text, and SEO. If they see a site they like, they either use the your website domain name or use “site”, “here”, “website” or some other useless anchor text. If your website domain happens to be the exact keyword you are targeting, most of the natural links you get will use your keyword as the anchor text. This means is your site is “redwidgets.com”, a fair share of people with send links with “red wigets” or “redwidgets.com”. Guys, this is pretty huge at the end of the day for your ranking power. Just this alone should sway you to try and get your keywords in the domain

2. Exact Domain Bonus
These days, exact keyword domains start with some serious “prebuilt” authority for that keyword in the domain name. Now, I’m not saying if you get your hands on say “redwidgets.com” you will automatically take the top 5 spots just on the power of your domain name. If it’s a competitive term, you won’t. If it’s not a competitive term, you may find you eventually start to rank high on the front page just because of your domain name. In competitive niches though, you have a big one up. Everything being equal link wise, Google will give ranking to the person with the exact domain in the keyword.

Don’t believe me? Do a search for a keyword, 70-80 percent of the time, you spot an exact keyword domain on the front page.

I’ll give you one of my strategies here for free guys. Use it and abuse it if you like. Exact domain keywords get a lot more attention from searchers. I know people are more likely to click on the top 3 searches, but you can do things to convince people to skip the top sites and come to your lower ranked site.

If for the search term “red widgets” you see “widgetcentral.com”, “amazon.com”, “worldwidgets.com”, “harymidgetthongs.com” pop up, and your exact keyword domain “redwidgets.com” shows up at #6, you are going to have a fair amount of people choose YOUR #6 site because the domain has the exact keyword they are searching for. There is a lot of “trust” people instinctively have for domain that contains the keyword they are looking for – more so if it’s the exact keyword.

I recall hearing that Google did some usability studies on this phenomenon – and people do want to see the exact keyword domain show up in the top 10. It’s better for searchers and thus it’s better for google.

For SEO purposes as well, I’ve noticed it’s much easier to rank an exact keyword domain for the associated keyword than it is to rank a domain that isn’t an exact domain. I’m not saying you can’t SEO “brownoranges.com” very high for “red widgets”, but I’m saying if you have “redwidgets.com”, it’s way the fuck easier to rank it high for that term.

There is more I can talk about with exact keyword domains, but I’ll save it for a dedicated post.

Lots of Targeted, Related Content
The more content you have, the easier it is to rank. You will find it’s easier to rank high with a niche blog that has 20 targeted posts then a niche blog with 1-2 posts. It seems that Google takes the number of articles found on your site into consideration when ranking site.

Now, if you are trying to build authority for a niche, you want your site to article targeting as many keyword under that niche as possible. That means you need to have dedicated articles targeting specific keywords. If I am trying to become an authority for “red widgets”, my site should have at least 100 or more articles targeting various long tail combinations of ‘red widgets’. Article 1 targets “red widgets’, Aricle 2 targets ‘blue widgets’, Article 3 targets ‘Red widgets for worms’, article 5 targets ‘widgets for red people’ etc. This is pretty important. What happens that in time, those articles will start to gain authority for they keywords (assuming you have the long tail keyword as the title and good onpage SEO for the keyword). The authority given to these articles will trickle up to your main domain – especially if you link your articles back to your main domain.

Backlinks supporting articles
Now, it’s true that in time some of your article can gain some authority about a topic. This can happen either because your index domain is getting backlinks + authority which can trickle down to the pages/posts on the domain (think hubpages or infobarrel) or they gain gain authority if you send some backlinks to the post pages. In fact, if you do want to build an authority site, you should write targeted posts targeting longtail searches for a short tail keyword. Then, you need to send backlinks to those articles. This will pump up the authority for those articles and they will start to rank for those keywords bringing in traffic. Because you have backlinks, the authority trickles up to the domain itself. If enough of your articles start to get authority, your whole domain starts to get authority. And an authority site is born.

Every post on your authority should be hit with links. If you just write lots of articles and don’t back them up, it will take you much longer to get traffic + authority. Yes, you can work on building authority to the domain itself, but I feel it’s better to start with your individual articles. You start to get instant traffic for those keywords while building your domain authority in the niche as a whole.

What sort of backlinks to get? Any and Every. I’d say hit them with ezines, hubpages, infobarrels, goarticles, article dashboards, blogger links and anything else. The idea is to get the individual articles ranking high. With hundreds of articles on an authority site, you can see the magnitude of the task ahead and why it’s no small task building an authority site.
You do of course want to send links back to the index domain, but make sure to try and keep at least 50% of the links targeting the pages (80-70% as deeplinks is actually better than 50%) and of course use a wide variety of anchor text tags. Read my on page seo post for more information.

Support blogs targeting long tails

You should also create dozens of support blogs that target some of the main long tail keywords and build these sites up. The idea here is to start building authority for different long tail keywords. That authority can be transferred to your authority site (usually to an article that targets the same keyword your support site is targeting).

The idea here is to build outside authority for long tails then transfer that authority to your site. With enough long tail authority for a niche, your site will begin to gain authority for the short tails. For example, if I have a lot of support blogs gaining authority for “red widgets + keyword” and I link those sites to my “redwidgets” domain, google will start to give your site broad authority for “red widgets.” To get your support sites up to par, you are going to have to make them legitimate sites with good info and their own support sites helping lend them support (use blogger blogs and self hosted blogs with Magic Article Rewriter spun content, create ezines, infobarrels, goarticles, and as many other web 2.0 mini sites as possible).

Authority Links
This is pretty key. To become a true authority, you really need links from other authority sites in your niche. While it’s possible to become an authority only through your own efforts, you make your task so much easier if you get links from other sites in your niche. If you can get 10-30 authority links from blogs that have trust rank for your keyword, your site will probably become an authority site as well. Now I use “30” as an artbitrary number here. But the point is that it doesn’t take too many relevant authority sites in your blog linking to you for your own site to become an authority.

Now the trick is to actually get those links – that’s where the real work comes in. Most of the authority sites are your competition and won’t want to give you link love. However, it is possible to squeeze out those links – I leave it up to you to think of some creative ways. But this is what sets apart the men from the boys, or the ladies from the girls for you female readers. The point is that you should be selling your left testicles (or if you are a women, your left breast? Ah, nevermind) to get as many authority links as you can.

Summary
Building authority sites is not an easy task. But if you can get a true authority site in the right niches, you are laughing all the way to the bank. I’d rather have a handful of authority sites than thousands of spammy blogs any day. Ok, so let’s look at what I’ve been up to the past few weeks.

Grizzly’s New Ebook, Sorta

So, most of you probably know about Grizzly’s Official ebook – or at least a book fully endorsed by grizzly. For the 2 people who don’t: basically, this is the book that he would have written if he wasn’t to busy earning oodles of money online. One of his long time students, Janet, compiled all his scattered blog posts into a single, how to make money online ebook. I’ve read through the ebook and it’s bang on in line with what Grizzly teaches.

Now, this book is not a book for people who are long time readers of Grizzly’s blog or people who know what they are doing. But if you are new to this game or just want to find out the heart of Grizzly’s methods, then this book mashes all his blogs into a rewritten and well thought out method. It’s about 37 bucks or so for the book, but it’s really all you need to know how to make money online. Keep in mind that I learned what I know from Grizzly so I can verify that Grizz knows his shit and this book is the shit. Damn, I sound like a rapper now!

Make Money Online Projects

Authority Site Project(s)
I’ve been talking about authority sites for a while now and I’ve been working on a few projects. I’ve already got one authority site set up with 250 or so targeted articles. I’m going to add another 200 or so over the next couple months, aiming to get about 500-700 laser targeted articles. It took me a while to get the right layout and let’s not talk about the nightmare of putting together 250 articles and putting them up. I have not slapped on any monetization yet, mainly because I want to keep my authority sites on different ad sense accounts from my sniper sites. This is to protect myself in case google goes on the deindex or adsense banning warpath – a very real possibility.

With a solid set of articles up, I’m going to be spending a lot of time sending backlinks to actual articles to get the articles ranking and the money flowing. I’m in for the long haul with these authority sites. I’m hoping I can see some money over the next 2 months if I focus on backlinking individual articles – which is my strategy. This will help build my domain authority as well.

I’ve also got another 2 authority sites in the works. One of the sites I’ve spend 2k buying a short tail (2 word) keyword domain. 2000 USD for a domain! I must be crazy right? There is some method to my madness here. Having a good domain is huge now. I talked about this earlier in the article, but let me expand a bit here.

It used to be when domain names were easier to spot than a topless Britney Spears that good keyword domains could be used for spammy type sites. But most good names have been registered and you’re lucky if you find a decent .org or .net. Now, with shorter (2-3 word domains) .net/.org domain names selling for 300-5k and good .com’s going for 10k+, it’s domain names are a valuable investment. People who end up spending a thousand dollars on a domain are not going to put shitty content up. They are not going to create a 3 article niche MFA blog. No, they are probably going to build an authority site. Spammers are also not going to shell out money for good domain names.

So, there is actually some good reason why domain names are weighed so high as part of the search algorithms. As good domains become increasingly more valuable and hard to find, I suspect google will continue to keep the SEO bonus for exact keyword domains very high – maybe higher in the future. For most searches you often find the exact keyword domain on the front page – and usually, that site ends up being the most relevant site to the keyword.

The idea of “brand” has also become an important issue in search these days. Google was having an issue where major brand names were not showing up for in the top 5 — even on the first page for their own brand search. Google addressed this by giving more weight to exact domain name searches (because, obviously all major brands will own the brand.com domain). Now obviously, just having so much weight given to exact keywords would make search easy to game — and it was, a few years ago. But since most good exact keywords are all registered — especially exact domains in competative niches — anyone who actually has a good exact keyword search won’t be making a shit site — the domain is worth too much.

Personally, for an authority site, I much prefer a short (2 word) tail domain to a long tail. I know you can go the other way and get a longtail domain as an authority site and work your way down to the short tail by getting authority for the longtail and building it up to the short tail. That works too.

But you can also do it with a short tail. Is it easier? Well, I’d say if you are trying to target the short tail for the getgo, yea maybe — but I’ll be finding that out shortly. I know with my site: makemoneyonlinewithseo is a long tail. Yea, it is but if I could have found a makemoneyonline.com/.net/org, I would have snapped it up right away and used that domain instead. The reason we end up on long tails is because we don’t have the 100k needed to buy the short tail exact domain we want.

There is also something NICE about having a two word domain (or the exact domain) – it’s much more ‘brand’ friendly. As effective as “red widgets for dirty worms” may be for targetting that exact search, “red wigets” looks so much less spamy and it can be much easier to gain broad authority for that entire niche because of the exact domain bonus for the borad niche, people using proper anchor text, etc.

Back to the topic at hand…where was I? Getting a thai backmassage in Thailand? No, sorry mind wandered a bit with this 3k+ word post of mine. Yes, paying 2k for a domain. I don’t mind shelling out big bucks for a very good domain name – a two word exact search. Since this keyword domain is the exact match of the root keyword I’m targeting (“red widgets”), I should be getting a very niche SEO boast from natural backlinks. In addition, all long tail articles and the backlinks to them should help boast my authority for the two word domain I have (backlinks to my “red widgets for worms” posts will add authority for my “red widgets” domain).

I don’t want to tell anyone that exact keyword domains are a subsitiute for backlinks — but man, it sure as hell helps, a lot.

New Project: Make 30-60 bucks a day with a single site
I’ve done some research and I think I’ve found a way to make between 30-60 dollars a day fairly quickly with a single site. Fairly quickly could be anywhere from a month to three months, but I’ve very interested in testing this new idea out. I’ll keep you posted on this – it will take me 2-3 weeks of back breaking labour to get this site up. I’d like to try it out next month, but that might not happen. This idea is an expansion of some of the other MMO tricks i’ve been testing out, but I’ve very excited about this. I’m pretty sure it can work, but the only way is to test it.

Niche Devil
These died an unpretty death. I was just starting to make some real money with them 30-70 bucks a day when they all got mass deindexed. I’m now only getting 1/12 the ebay clicks I was getting 2 weeks ago. I have another 100 .info domains I can put up with ND, but at this point, I’m not going to bother. I made a decent amount of money with ND and it allowed me to test out some potential niches with ebay.
I’m going to try and launch phase 2 of my ebay projects.

New Community Authority Site
I’ve been tossing up the idea of making an article directory or a public authority blog for about 4 months now. I’m working on a blog where you can post your own articles. It will basically be a community blog – you can write articles with 1 backlink. I will include a revenue sharing (50/50 split I think) module so people will have the chance of getting adsense clicks from 50% of the impressions on their articles. The idea is that in time with lots of QUALITY content, the site will start to gain authority. Now, there are several of these “build your authority” blogs in this community. I think there’s room for many. After all, you want backlinks from as many unique IP’s as possible. I’ll be working on building backlinks to individual articles, so if you end up writing content, you may find your articles start to rank high because of my backlink work.

Anyways, this is an idea that’s been kicking around in my head for a long time. I hope to go live with this next month sometime. Hopefully, as a community, we can build up a nice authority site that benefits everyone.

200 Ebay Sites
Since I’ll be quitting next month, I need to diversify as much as possible. Multiple adsense accounts, multiple streams of revenue. Ebay is a great way to make money and I think I’ve cracked the new ebay payment scheme. I am going to deploy 200-250 self hosted ebay sniper sites out there. I’ll be using PHPBay to create these sites. These will be legitimate 5-10 keyword rich posts that offer good information about products. Based on what I’ve seen, it’s possible get between 5-20 people a day without any SEO work done on these sites, just through some tricks and targeted content. I’m banking on the fact that each site can pull in between 2-10 ebay clicks a day. With 200 of these sites out there, that could be anywhere from 400-1000 clicks a day. Folks, 400-1000 ebay clicks is big big money. With the new payout scheme, that could be anywhere from 100-500 bucks a day. Now, I won’t know until I try, but I’m basing these predictions from my ND experiments and some other PHPBay sites. I’d like to start this experiment next month, but I may have to wait a month or so.

Hubpages…done?
I’ve seen a lot of debate going on about whether hubpages has been slapped or not. I’ve talked to some people who say they’ve lost a lot of traffic. I’ve probably lost 40% of my hubpage traffic over the past month and a half. My earning are now remaining somewhat stable, but I’ve lost probably 30-40% of my hubpage revenue. This kind of set me back about a month in regards to my income, but I’ve managed to more than make up for the difference with my own sites I’ve been developing. So, a short term setback.

Now there may have been a slap or may not have been a slap. For sure, google knew what was going on and probably applied some sort of penalty. I suspect google may have applied a blanket penalty to some of the niches — it’s not longer possible to get the easy traffic you once had. Old hubpages (3+ months ago) still get a fair amount of traffic, even if it’s less, but new hubs in some niches just don’t get traffic anymore. If you put out hubs a few months ago, you probably have locked in your earnings or at least a portion of them. But for new timers, it’s not easy anymore. I can personally verify that putting up 300-400 hubs in some niches will only bring in 10-15 visitors a day. No doubt if you want to kill yourself backlinking every single hub, you can still make money, but why bother? I can’t say this about every niche, but it’s clear from what I’ve seen, something is going on. Use hubs to support you money sites but focus on your own sites!

100 Adsense Snipers Update
Let’s take a look at how they’ve been doing the past week.

snipers

Not bad. I pretty much reached the 100 bucks a day border yesterday. After a month, I finally started to put some time into backlinking the past few days – hence the large jump income. I’d say I’m, pretty close to being on track for 100 bucks a day with snipers sites. There are some dips, but the earnings are definitely going up.

For my snipers, I’ve been really focusing on just getting them out there, not spending the time I should to backlink and optimize these. I really haven’t been trying to make money so much as just get the content done. All though I have close to 80 done, only 25-30 get traffic + earn. This is because I’ve been too busy just creating them (Creating the content for snipers + putting them up + working on authority sites + job leaves me no time) to really spend the time I should have. I also changed my tracking around a bit for the sites. I want to get the rest of these snipers done and do some solid backlink work on every single one of these sites. The income should go way up at that point – 80-100 will be earning instead of a quarter of that. I’ve already reached the 100 bucks mark a day yesterday.

I’ve been cracking away at these for 1.5 months now and I’m a bit behind schedule. I’m going to see if I can power out the last 20 this week. I wanted to get these sites up and spend a solid 10-15 days backlinking and optimizing every single one of them. I then plan on taking the handful that do very well and fleshing them out with lots of content and doing some real backlink work on them. With some solid backlinks to 100 of these sites, it’s feasible to be getting 200-300 bucks a day. Even more when I pick out the best 5 or so sites and really work on setting them up as solid sites. So, looks like it will be another 2-3 weeks before I’m “done”.

I’m going to see if I can be earning a steady 150-200 bucks a day in a month after 2 weeks of backlinking. It’s certainly possible.

I’m also waiting to see how these all do with some solid backlinks. I’m going to look at my stats and optimize my strategy for the next 100 sniper sites. I hope to start on my next 100 self hosted adsense snipers in three weeks or so.

I was going to create 100 blogger blogs, and I’m still game to try. I’ve got a very bad feeling about whether I can make money quickly with blogger blogs though. They rank for absolute shit with google right now – not unless you can pump out some serious backlinks to the blogs. But, what I think I’ll do is take niches that have done well with sniper sites and make a parallel blogger blog and see how they do. Regarding preowned domains, I’m going to cancel on that idea. It’s a pain in the ass to get one, let alone 100 and there is some delay once you buy one. I’ve had success with new domains. So, I’m still on track for my 300 or so adsense snipers. I’ve almost got a third done. I’m hoping in 2 months I can have the other 200 or so snipers done and earning.

One of the problems I’ve had is that I’ve just had no fucking time. My productivity has been down because of work and personal reasons. Once I’m full time, I’m really going to be able to get stuff done – I’m predicting I can get 4x more shit done each day – so, 2 months is a realistic time table.

Your Own Make Money Journey

A lot of you guys site back and watch my progress with some interest. And yes, I’ve figured out this whole How to Make Money Online thing. At this point, the only limitation right now is time and I hope to help fix that in 3 weeks when I leave my job.

But the thing is, you guys don’t just have to watch, you can be proactive in your own life here and seize your own destiny. The question is, how bad do you really want it? How bad do you want to make money? How bad do you want to quit your job and work at your own hours and at your own pace?

If you are spending most of your time reading about how to make money then you don’t want to make money online bad enough. There is a time for preparation and a time for action. The best way to get out there and make money is not to discuss make money online theories or getting “ideas” from forums. It’s by god dammit getting out there and building sites and getting backlinks. It’s pure hard, shitty work – but it’s your own god damn work. You are not slaving away making someone else rich – you are building your own destiny.

The money’s out there guys, it’s just a matter of putting the work in to get there. Making passive income online is not a pipedream, it’s real and I’m riding it. If I can do it, so can you. So, get out there and start building sites. Build one, two, five, 10, then 100 and you’ll start to see the money guys. Put up and do the work or shut up and work for the man. Be an internet marketer, not a problogger.

So there we go 5600 words about building authority blogs, making money online and the meaning of life. I think I broke my own record for word count in a post. Next post I’m going to talk about a few Internet Marketing tools I’ve found very effective for keeping track, promoting, and managing my 100’s of domains. Also be sure to check out my Make Money Online Forum. If you’ve got Internet Marketing, SEO, or Make Money Online questions rattling around in your brain, it’s the place to ask them.

Now go make money online

Ben Out

Filed in How to Make Money Online, Make Money Online Experiments, Niche Marketing | Tagged adsense snipers, authority sites, creating authority sites, ebay snipers, make money on the internet, make money online, niche devil | Comments (90) »

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