Victoria Peak -- Hong Kong
Been VERY busy this past week, between my real life job and my IM activities. But, always time for another massive post…
Niche Devil
Time to give a bit of an update for this one. I’m not going to post any stats because there’s not much to post. My clicks are steadily increasing (around 50+ a day now).
Well, I have mixed feelings on this one. I only have about 130 sites up with probably 20-30 indexed. My grand plan for 500-1000 ND sites is on hold for a couple reasons. I am busy making money with Adsense snipers, I am not convinced about the long term viability of these, and ebay is making some massive changes to their pricing scheme just to combat sites like this.
Now, how eBay structures their current pricing scheme is all Vodoo to me. But this new pricing scheme is even more Vodoo than the old system. Ostensibly, it’s to “help” affiliates make more money, but the writing on the wall is that eBay is trying to “help” themselves to our commission. What this change does to say clicks coming from thin affiliate sites like ND, I don’t know – but I suspect it’s not going to be good. They are going to pay by click now – if I can produce a mass amount of clicks with ND sites, there still could be money. But I don’t want to drop 1000 of these sites out there, only to find ebay has pulled the rug. There are of course Chitika or whatever that ad network is called. I have not put it on any sites yet.
There has been a lot of controversy about Niche Devil. A lot of people were initially sold on the fact that ND were untraceable, etc. This is not the case and the software won’t be making any noob IM’ers any money. If you know what you are doing and willing to put on the black, you can make some money. The long term sustainability of thin affiliate sites is a big question – google (and now, presumably ebay) really detests sites like this. You put yourself squarely against Google when you start mass producing these. I would rather put my time in making hubpages, infobarrels, or legitmate sites.
I’ve probably made about 20-30 bucks from my clicks so far. From direct sales, about 5 bucks, but when the clicks are added to my quality score, the money goes up.
To be honest, I really have not spent the time I should have creating these though. I’ve been distracted with my snipers which take a god aweful amount of time to produce. I’m going to put up another 70 or so ND sites and try and backlink all the sites that are not indexed and see what happens. I’m not sure how this whole ebay change is going to effect these — it may be for the worse.
If you have ND sites, there are a few things you can do to keep your sites indexed:
*Don’t use buying keywords in the domain (www.cheapcoffecups.com) with a .info
*Don’t use buying keywords as the Title or in Headers WITH a .info
*Change your CSS template every single ND site you have
So I’m still going to put some work into ND, but I’m not going all out on them at this point. I want to see if I can get what I have indexed first before comitting to massive amounts.
Edit (Aug 22): I’ve made about 130 bucks so far — probably half of this from ND sites. I’ve put no effort into these other than putting my original 130 up there. Only some of those are indexed, but considering I’ve made close to 100 bucks, I’m seeing some potential here — it’s well worth putting more effort into these, so I’m going to try to continue to my 500 goal. I’ll just have to make sure the next round, I make sure to avoid buying keywords.
Adsense snipers
Ah, my new favorite toy. The force is strong with these indeed. On the internet, you’ll find a lot of people talking utter bullshit about their earnings. I like to back my claims with some tangible proof. Here we go…
As you see, not a bad start. I’ve started my snipers about two weeks ago, and I’m kicking out at close to 60 bucks a day. I’ve just gotten warmed up with these as well – I’m going to have over 300 snipers out within the next 2-3 months. I’m a bit behind on my schedual for these, but I hope to churn out several of these a day. This past 2-3 weeks has NOT been as productive as I’d like, mainly to work and various social obligations. I’m really going to have to up my productivity soon if I want to stay on schedual. 300 of these in 2 months is possible, but there is no way I can add quality content + backlinks and get 300 done in 2 months. I’d have to quite my day job to do this — something I may do soon actually.
I’m sure there are plenty of questions about how I went from 0 to 60 bucks a day with sniper sites in just two weeks. I’m keeping mum about the exact details guys for obvious reasons.
I will say that I’ve been working on something I like to call my “Adsense sniper”. These are laser targeted niche blogs that are very effective for getting ranked high in some situations. Now, there are no “miracle” ranking system here that will let you dominate the SERP’s, just some strategies I have been testing out for several months, and some solid tricks I’ve learned during my (failed) click bank sniper experiment. If you know what you are doing, it’s downright easy to hone in on the money. It’s really true in this game that failures are never failures. I’m actually still testing to see what’s possible with ranking, but my initial success tells me my personal method can be very sucessful for quick(er) money if done right. I’m still in the experimental stage. I’m going to give blogger.com blogs my best shot as well and see if I can start earning with free blogs, ala Grizzly style. That’s going to be pretty cool to try!
Rather than flood me with questions about my niche blogging techniques and tricks, I’ll point you somewhere else for your answeres. If you want a basic idea about how to go about making niche blogs, join Court’s Keyword Academy course for 1 buck (yes, thats an affiliate link). I do my niche blogs different than court’s method, but the basic process is the same in regards to keyword research and putting together a blog for SEO purposes. It may take you 3 months to a year, but you can make some pretty damn good money. If you are already Court’s student (as half of you guys seem to be), then just keep on doing what your doing, get backlinks, and wait. The money will come if you are persistant.
I’m going to keep my method a secret, for now. This blog is simply too public to start giving out my tricks. Grizzly from Make Money found this out the hard way when he started posting his strategies.
I love helping you guys make the money — as long as it’s your own work and creativity you make money from — and each person telling me that they have made money with my advice makes me feel reeaaaly good. But if I give out my personal methodologies here, it results in hundreds (or maybe thousands) of clone websites out there doing exactly the same thing as me. Besides costing me money, it may call down the Google gods — something I’m not keen on seeing anytime soon. I’m not making the Grizzly bucks yet where having 400 other Ben clones out there won’t make a dent in my income.
I tell people this time and time again: you need to find your own way. Use what I’m telling you, Grizzly, Court, or anyone who is actually making some money, and put your own spin on it.
The problem I see is that too many people want both the dinner and dessert handed to them on the same plate. Everyone wants a 10 step program that will guarantee them a full time income online. That’s why those make money online shams you see on adsense do so well — people want an easy fix, and easy solution where there is no brain juice required. Sorry guys, it’s not that simple and life doesn’t work that way.
The simple truth is it’s the people who experiment, the people who do new things, and the people who are willing to put in a godaweful amount of work into this business that will make the money. You can’t be afraid of trying new things, of stepping out on a limb and giving an idea a go. You need to get out there and try new things. Heck, get out there and do anything. Posting on forums is not the way to make money online. Talking about making money online is not the way to make money online. Writing, creating sites, and getting backlinks will make you money online.
Right now, I feel the best (and most secure) way to earn money online is untimely have a fleet of flagship blogs that produce valuable content. Flagships are the best bet because you can command serious traffic, Google won’t deindex you on a whim since the content is usually very high and you provide some value to your readers (unlike cough Niche Devil, cough).
I’ve stated it before, everything I do is to build myself up to the point where I can deploy flagship blogs. Adsense snipers are great, but you never know if Google is going to put the slap down on those types of sites. I have friends who have lost 5-7k a month ovenight when google did a mass deindex of all their adsense niche blogs.
So, I’m dicking around with this small fry so I can make that 20-30k a month to buy massive amounts of content and authority sites.
When you create niche blogs, I can’t emphasize enough that you should focus on producing VALUE to your readers. Write good, useful content. Put in some useful links to authority sites. Add some pictures even. Basically, you need to trick Google into thinking your MFA site is in fact not MFA. A big lie, of course, but if readers are getting value out of your site, then Google won’t have a beef with you.
Flagship Authority Blog Project
I’m hoping I can start this in 2 months. I need to start establishing a portfolio of authority blogs ASAP. With Authority blogs, I can focus on some SOLID content and SEO tactics. Currently, I’ve been trading SEO in favor of volume, but when you are working authority sites, it’s back to SEO. I’m going to pull out every trick in the book and I’m looking forward getting dirty with SEO.
Make Money Online with Flagship Blogs
There are essentially two strategies for making money online. Volume, or Authority. I’ve been going with the volume route. Making money on the internet is all about traffic. Not just traffic, but targeted traffic. Anyone can pull in a few thousands people a day wasting time on twitter, stumble upon, digg, or any of those other useless social mediums, but these visitors won’t make you money.
Your goal is to generate traffic. You can either have a few blogs that pull in a lot of traffic, or hundreds (or thousands) or mini websites that pull in a few people a day, but as a whole add up. There is work involved either way. A flagship blog is a long term project. You are going to need to have a lot of high quality articles and you are going to need to SEO yourself high in the SE’s. All that time spent producing a zillion smaller sites will be going into SEO. A flagship blog is your most stable income generator online. If you do things by the book, you wont have problems with The Man.
The volume route is an “easier” way to make fast money online. The reason is that it’s not that hard to get a handful of targeted people a day to mini websites. By themselves, you’ll make crap, but hundreds will make you a living. Unfortunately, Google does NOT like mini websites that snipe keywords. The reason is most of these websites don’t really provide the value to readers that an authority blog delivers and most are purely MFA.
So what to do? Well, diversify. Derive a solid income from authority sites and from niche sites. You are safer this way.
I can’t say anything for certain, but my gut feeling is that authority is the future of MMO. The blogs that have the trust rank are going to get the a lot more traffic, and those sniper type sites are going to get the boot. This is my personal opinion, mind you, but it does seem Google is moving towards this model (a few websites dominating everything in a niche).
How to Dominate a Niche to Make Money Online
Time and time again, I see you guys thinking small. You worry about a handful of blogs when you should be looking at the whole picture. If you are dicking around with a couple blogs, you are wasting your fucking time. Either put all your efforts on a handful of authority sites, or throw out more mini sites than the number of Madonna’s ex boyfriends.
Time and time again, people are looking at a puzzle piece when they should be looking at the whole puzzle. This really tells me most people seem to have a lack of strategy. If you guys fail to plan, then you plan to fail. Period. If you decide to take on a niche, don’t fucking throw up a couple desultory niche blogs and think you are going to “own” the keyword. If sometime types ANY combination of keywords, your site should show up. How? Buy owning virtually all of the content relating to that niche. I have some niches where 6 or more properties show up on the first two pages for any search. If you can do this, you OWN most of the traffic. Remember guys, there are 10 spots on the search results – there is no reason why you should just aim for the 25-40% traffic the top spot gets. Why not take an additional 30% by owning the next 4 spots?
You want to know how to utterly dominate a niche?
1. Use mini sites to feel out a niche, hijacking the domain authority of parasitic domains that have a lot of trust rank with Google (ezines, Hubpages, etc)
2. Branch into niches that work with your own websites
3. Solidify your position with a Flagship blog
It’s a hell of a lot of work, but then again, if you are not willing to work, stop wasting your fucking time with MMO and get a real job. I’m sure there are more than a few bosses who would love to yell at you all day long.
Ok guys, that’s it for today. I’m cutting my usual 3k post down today.
Ben Out
41 Comments
Nice job Ben. How many Adsense snipers to produce those 60 bucks? Did you use any blogger’s blog?
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I got first comment! Hey ben, been waiting on a new post from you. Found your blog from grizzly over a few days ago, and I’m loving your tips and writing style. Thanks for everything
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Thanks for the post Ben. I was also wondering about the hosting on those snipers.
I agree it seems like Google is moving toward giving the search results to the big sites with lots of content even if they don’t really offer exactly what the searcher searched for.
Also, I really enjoy your pictures.
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Hey Ben! I re-read some of your recent posts, and I apologize if I’m missing something, but would you mind writing a little bit more about what makes a blog an “AdSense sniper” site? I purchased an eBook several months ago (before I wizened up to not wasting money on those things!) called “Google Sniper”, so that’s what I always think about whenever someone mentions sniper sites. From what I’ve been able to glean, your version sounds very similar to what C&M teach, but I’ve never managed to pull in traffic or earnings within the first month of a publishing a TKA-style blog, let alone a week or two! Your success is incredibly inspiring - just curious if there’s a particular trick that helps you to hone in on traffic and clicks so quickly? I’d appreciate anything you feel comfortable sharing!
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I’ll take a gander at what Ben is doing: I think he’s going for even less competitive, less traffic keywords than Court advocates for. This way he ranks sooner and easier and “maybe” finds out there is more money there than the formula would’ve predicted. Or else makes up for it with long tails.
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I am really interested to find out how you will fair with blogger blogs. After creating hubs and barrels, this is what i want to try next. Once I can confirm that I know what I am doing, I will start to branch out and actually buy some domains but i am still in the learning and practicing mode.
Thanks for posting your adsense stats. Not sure if it is just me but it I find the formatting a little difficult to read. Whatever, I can see the proof of your experiments and wish you continued success. I wonder how long it will be til you jack in the offline job? A matter of months surely?
Cheers.
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admin Reply:
August 20th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
I’m making many times over what I make during my daytime job, so I can quite any time I want. I’m seriously thinking about doing so, as if I put 9 hours a day extra into what I’m doing, I’m pretty confident I could make an additional few thousand more a month to cover the loss of the job.
But with online earnings, you really have to play it safe though. You don’t want your earnings to dissapear in one shot — and it’s very easy for this to happen.
That means you need to diversify into multiple AS accounts, hosting accounts, streams of income, etc. I’m hoping to make that leap around January — a few more months to double or triple my income and furthur diversify. Ah well, all things in their time.
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Awesome stuff here Ben. Love your strategic thinking, always looking forward and anticipating stuff.
I believe I have lucked into the authority route myself. My site has over 500 articles, most over 800 words each. Now that I have looked and seen that the “middle tail” is making me money (not so much the long tail, or the big head) I now have a strategy for moving forward.
Got my list of good keywords to target and I am putting up 3 new articles per day. Nowhere near your pace, but pretty exciting for me nonetheless. Have to give you credit for your work ethic and inspiring me to crank out more content myself though…
P.S. I also realize that 500 posts is far from an “authority” on the web. Anyone who wants a quick example, go check your niche out on About dot com and do a quick search on their related subdomain and you will probably see about ten to twenty thousand posts about your topic. Yikes. That is an authority, and just one example out of many…..
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Hey, it is me again. You talk about having multiple adsense accounts. Does that mean you opened more than one? Also how many properties do you typically have on each account?
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Aloha Ben, very nice picture. Another update, another rise in the income - exactly what was expected. As long as you stay consistent and keep investing in yourself, you’ll see the top of the MMOuntain soon enough.
About the authority sites - I definitely think they’re a very safe bet for the long term.
Anyways… always fun to hear what you’ve been up to Ben. Looking forward to seeing the photography website when you start traveling the world!
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Hey Ben - I always look forward to a new post
do you think you will ever do an “academy” like court? would love to join if you do - I know you are busy but think about all those monthly subscriptions you would make -$$$$$
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Hey Ben. Another great post.
This is a really newbie question, but I am just a newbie, so here it goes. What exactly is the difference between a niche site and an authority site and how do you build them differently? I have a general idea of the difference, but I always get confused when people mention “authority sites in one niche.”
Also, is link exchanging any part of your niche building process? I feel like you move too quickly to just sit there waiting for link exchange requests.
Thanks again and keep up the good work!
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if i wake up one day, create a minisite, slam
5 infobarrels
5 hubs
5 ezines
5 go articles
5 lenses
all pointing in the direction of that newly created minisite, would there be any risk involved from getting a slap from google?
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admin Reply:
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:35 am
Paul, it depends what site you are creating. If that site is something like a hubpage or ezine, then probably not. Domains with a lot of Trust Rank (such as hubpages) can be sent many links at once. If it’s your own brand new blog, then yes, it may not be a good idea to do something like that. You just have to play it by ear. I probably would not be that concerned — it’s different if you slam hundreds of links, but a handful of links from trusted domains aren’t that bad — as long as switch up the anchor text
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paul Reply:
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:38 am
u fucking rock ben - thanks heaps… I might back off on the backlinking and focus on some sub blogs for a while….
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Very interesting post Ben, and I have made a conscious decision to do what you’re talking about, which is create solid content and massive amounts of it on a single site and then build a large number of diverse sites around it, saturating the niche with good content that is all owned by me.
One thing that interests me is that you are talking about a bottom up approach, where you build some hubs, barrels, blogs, etc, get a feel for the market and then climb your way up to an authority site that is linked to from all those “test” sites. This has really made me stop and think. I am brand new to this gig, but my first attempt at building an authority site has gone the other direction; build the big site and then start throwing links at it from hubs and ezines and the like.
A bottom up approach like the one you are talking about has a few advantages. For starters, you get to see exactly what the traffic is doing, rather than relying on the Adword tool, which is flaky at the best of times. During the process of setting up hubs, barrels, lenses and blogs, you’re stats will tell you what phrases people are using, and if you’re clever enough to keep a journal of this information, you have a roadmap that you can then use to build your authority site. While you are building it, your smaller properties are aging and gaining trust and value in Googles eyes, and then when you’re ready, you link it all together and BAM! you own the niche.
Man, the more I think about this the more sense it makes. It is a much more natural way of doing things in Googles eyes as well. Having a big site built and then all these little sites popping up all around it is not a natural pattern. Having little sites all over the shop that suddenly discover a big site makes a lot more sense to me.
Sorry for rambling, but you just gave me an epiphany, and I need to go and think about it for a while…
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admin Reply:
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:37 am
you have the right idea Josh. I much prefer the bottom up approach because you know exactly what you are getting at the top level. If you start authority blog first, you could end up find the niche just doesn’t pay.
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Hi Ben,
I really like your working style and i am always looking forward to a new post. I actually print them all out so i can read them when i am travelling to work.
Could you please explain what you mean by a adsense sniper site? DO you mean by this a targeted niche site where you write a few articles about the subject to get ranked only on that keyword or do you something else with it?
Greetz, Alex Mayor
(btw is this blog dofollow or nofollow?;)
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admin Reply:
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:38 am
Basically a niche blog that targets specific keywords.
Comments are no follow — otherwise you get a lot of crap posting just for BL.
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Interestingly, Jeff Lopes is just as enamoured with a theme on one of my sites, in fact he left the exact same message for me. A theme junkie, perhaps?
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admin Reply:
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:39 am
probably a spammer. I deleted his message
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Ben,
Thanks for sharing your experience. How about suggestions on utilities/strategy for managing so many freakin’ domains.
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admin Reply:
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:40 am
Domain Dashboard (Vic has post about this) which I use or Mass Account Manager.
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Hi, ben
Need help my most of articles are ranked on page 2 and 3. Few are on one. What should i do to rank all them on page one.
should i place backlinks.
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admin Reply:
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:41 am
I’m not going to bother answering that question adsense. I’ve been answering it a million times over in practically every post. Do some reading.
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Hey Ben,
Great results on your adsense snipers. How many do you have now? 100 - 200? And around 3 to 5 posts on each site targeting med to high CPC low comp keywords. Correct?
Ok, so if you have 100 up now (I’m guessing) and making (nearly) $60 per day that means each blog makes you approx 0.60 cents per day. (Sorry I like working it all out mathematically).
That sounds reasonable. In fact I think it still sounds reasonable if you only have 50 up, because that’s still around $1.20 per niche blog per day.
Good stuff. Makes it seem easy when you work it all out like that (or at least it does to me - am I weird?)
t
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admin Reply:
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:42 am
I do have a fair share up, not 100 yet, but a decent amount.
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Another great post man! I really like your strategies- they’re simply and yet you can see how effective they’d be once you find the right niches to work with them. I’m going to keep trucking too and hopefully I’ll make that $100 for an Adsense payout in the next two months.
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Planning is so important, every entrepreneur makes adjustments to their plan as the landscape changes or new information is gleaned. The plan and strategy are key. It is a must in this business.
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admin Reply:
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:42 am
Very true man. You get way more done when you look at the big picture and tackle it piece by piece.
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I found your site via a link from Griz. This is a great post. Thanks for the insight, and good luck to you.
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I found your blog from Liz and I enjoyed your posts so much I went back and read them all from day 1. I have been doing IM for the past couple of years, but I hit a bit of a wall recently.
Your comments particularly about twitter and IM forums really hit home for me and I have since been writing articles like crazy. Hubpages/infobarrel/ezine articles.
The bit of work paid off and my adsense improved 100% “working” instead of “playing” on the internet.
i hope you keep the blog going, but I realize you have to spend most of your time on the things that make money.
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admin Reply:
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:43 am
glad to see your earnings have improved. Keep it up
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Ganhar Dinheiro Reply:
August 23rd, 2009 at 2:22 am
Hi Ben
I`m a Grizz reader/follower and i`ve find out your site true griz.
” … I’d have to quite my day job to do this — something I may do soon actually”.
I`ve also leaved my day job to blogging, and in the past 3 months i make more money them i was making at work. So, the sooner you leave your day job to blogging, the better …
Cumps
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admin Reply:
August 23rd, 2009 at 9:55 am
Yea Dinheiro, that’s something I’m thinking about very seriously. I may do it in a couple weeks.
Hey Ben
Thanks for your great article…i’m always looking fww to your stuff…anyway I totally agree I really do think authoritive sites are the way the go…Iam however totally agree with josh b post about the bottom up approach I think thats fantastic…
btw regarding hubpages have you had any problems with your hubs getting index this week ..I still havnt got my hibs index its been 5 days ..
anyway best of luck with your projects …
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Random Guy Reply:
August 22nd, 2009 at 9:35 am
Use tags (3-9 results) & small categories to get them indexed fast, or participate a little bit on the site forums so your userid get picked up. The 800 I made this week all got indexed with no problems
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admin Reply:
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:44 am
generally, not really. But it can take a few days — google will get around to indexing soon enough. If not, you can run something like BMD or RSSBot on it to “help” speed up the process.
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Hey Ben~ Even if you can’t reveal your “recipe for success,” you do a GREAT job keeping us all inspired! I absolutely agree, btw, that publishing a do this-do that sort of detail would be disastrous — not just for you, but potentially for anyone/everyone following it. Your observation skills serve you well w/r/t MMO as well as photography! (Freakin’ awesome pic, btw.)
I’m curious, so I’ll ask (but it may be impolite and if so, I apologize): What sort of annual income do you earn at your day job? Quitting would seem an absolute no-brainer to me, so I’m just trying to figure out what’s holding you back.
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admin Reply:
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:46 am
It’s a pretty shitty wage right now. I had the unfortunate luck of coming back from a 3 month backpacking (photography) tour of asia right in the middle of that stockmarket crash. I ended up taking a job that pays half of what I should be getting. Probably making around 33k CAD (30k USD?) a year– very very low for what doing. I can quite anytime,but IM is a business where google can pull the rug out from you at any time. You need to have some serious diversification and some savings in case that happens. I’m trying to work my way to that point — maybe 2 months or so.
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Ben, I don’t know if you would answer me on this question. But do you build back links to your sniper sites?
I don’t want to know what type of backlink.
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admin Reply:
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:47 am
Sure, any site you want ranked requires backlinks. I can rank fairly high without backlinks, but we will eventually need them.
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It’s interesting that you are concentrating on Adsense. From my (small) experiments, writing for Adsense is very different from writing for Affiliate Marketing. The two are completely different skill-sets.
I’ve had success with Adsense, and I have one Squidoo lens (out of several that I have started) that is making money with Commission Junction. But try as I can, I can’t seem to crack selling with Amazon. I think it’s because Amazon have a 24 hour cookie - so you not only have to persuade them to click the ad, but buy right now. Whereas with Adsense, you just have to persuade them to click, and with CJ you have to persuade them to click and perhaps buy within 30 days (doable if you are affiliated to a CJ merchant with a good product and good site, as people come back to buy after initially browsing).
I guess this business is about simply trying things till you find the strategy that you yourself can actually make work, and discarding things that may work for others but don’t work for you. You clearly have Adsense nailed down cold!
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admin Reply:
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:50 am
You do have to convince people to buy now with Amazon, or hope they do buy something else. I’ve found amazon is a numbers game. You need to write a review for a product to really stand a chance of “selling” that product to a person. And the review has to be an unbiased one, not a think promotional type review. Niche is key here too — niches where there are targeted customers with need.
I have one site that sells between 8-20 products a day with amazon. Commission, at least for the products I sell, is pretty low. That usually yields about 7-12 bucks a day.
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janet Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Ben I have a question about Amazon. It seems the best way to go about making good money with Amazon is to target a product, make a 1 page review site and optimise it for the product name+review. My question is how best to so this? If you can’t use a copyright name in the url and it’s also a bit iffy in the title too what’s the best way to optimise? With a multiple page site you could have a general site then have a page with the copyright name in the url but this won’t work for a 1 page site. Any ideas?
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admin Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 5:16 pm
I think you can use an product name in the URL with amazon (I am not sure though, so you better check to make sure they dont’ forbid it). But, in general, I would not buy a domain for a 1 page review. If I did a product name as niche site domain name, I would gear 4-5 pages about that product. But not one page.
If you don’t want to do a site with the product name as the domain, I would make the general niche site idea you mentioned. Target a specific niche, put up multiple reviews about different products in that niche, each with an SEO URL extention :yourdomain.com/product-keyword-as-page-name. Then send backlinks to that page with the product name as the URL.
1 page can work well though, on a parasite host. Personally, I would create a hubpage based around a product name and write review. Make sure the review comes off as geninue and not a sales pitck — this is very important. You can do this by listing some pros and CON’s about the product. I have found sucess with this, enough that I’m going to throw out a few hundred hubs like this.
Tracey Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 10:54 pm
Hi Janet,
Most products you can use in a domain, but not all. It depends on the product. Some of the more common products names you can’t use is lego, harley davidson, and amazon itself.
That’s top level domain though, not folder or page. So you could have buildingblocks.com/legoset123.html if you wanted. But not lego in the main domain.
As for building mini sites, I do a lot of Amazon ones, but they mostly have 2 or 3 pages on them. Usually all about the one product but also often about closely related products.
I’ve never used ‘review’ in any of my domains though. I guess that could work. Just never did it.
Hope that helps
Tracey
janet Reply:
September 1st, 2009 at 4:51 am
Hey thanks for the info. Hub pages sounds a good way to go. I’m trying hard to diversify away from adsense so I think I’ll give Amazon a try
Hey Ben,
Thanks for all of the great info here. Just wanted ask a question about backlinks from infobarrel. I’ve written a bunch of these things, with some of them I’ve including an outbound in text link if I had a website that was related to the article and others I did not.
When I check for backlinks I see nothing showing up from info barrel. I’ve even gone back to other peoples articles where they link one info barrel to another and checked the backlinks for those and can’t find any links coming in from info barrel. Some of those articles are a few months old.
I could be wrong on this, but I just thought that this might be relevant if we are using the info barrel as a backlink to our site or a hubpage.
thanks for any info!
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admin Reply:
August 23rd, 2009 at 9:58 am
hmm, I have sites that show infobarrel articles as backlinks — they certainly do show up, eventually. It also depends on whether you are checking yahoo or google — most people look at yahoo backlinks which, of course, are only an estimation of google’s backlinks. (google’s link:domain comman only shows a fraction of the google backlinks)
The backlinks will show up — for sure.
Ben
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Hi Ben,
Just discovered your site from Grizz’s site makemoneyonlineforbeginners. Love your site, have learned lots, so much so that I even wrote a post about your site, kind of a review if you want to call it. Anyways, thanks for your long, long, long articles. Keep up the great work and DON’T you dare disappear… Veraz
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admin Reply:
August 23rd, 2009 at 10:10 am
Hey Veraz. Thanks for the review/post and glad you enjoy my blog! No, I’ll be around for a while!
Best!
Ben
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Ben, you seem like quite a risk taker with your various ventures, but at the same time very strategic. It’s a good idea to make sure you have extra funds to fall back on if you do quit the J.O.B.
That said, are you planning to do any sort of business incorporation for tax purposes? I know Google can be a bitch when it comes tax time for me…are you going to incorporate yourself as a LLC? Just curious…keep up the great work here and elsewhere!
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admin Reply:
August 23rd, 2009 at 8:09 pm
I’m in Canada, so I don’t know what goes on. We don’t have LLC here, but you can incorporate here. I’m going to incorporate and pay myself as an employee– but in regards to MMO tax in canada, that’s something I may need to ask Grizzly about, since he’s also in Canada.
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Really solid article Ben. I’m wondering about the mechanics of your hosting arrangements. With most hosting, your dozens or hundreds of domains will share IPs, meaning cross linking among them won’t give you much juice. How do you overcome that?
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admin Reply:
August 23rd, 2009 at 8:08 pm
Yes John, as far as linking between domains on the same server, not much juice there. For the most part, I don’t link between self hosted sites…yet. But, one thing you can do if you want to link lots of self hosted blogs together is to launder the links from one self hosted domain to a web 2.0 than from that web 2.0 to another self hosted domain. That will give a lot more juice to because your two blogs will be separated by a different IP. Now, I know if you want to link a lot of sites together, you are going to need a lot of web 2.0’s — but there are plenty different web 2.0’s to use, so there should not be a problem. Of course, if money is no object, you can pay extra for unique IP’s — that can really add up.
Another thing you can do is to take advantage of various hosting deals. For example, I signed up for a dreamhost shared hosting deal …20 bucks for 2 years. Find 5 or so cheap hosting offers (all on different companies) and for 50-80 bucks a month, you’ve got yourself 5 different IP’s to use for your farms. Toss web 2.0’s into the mix and you’ll have a lot of flexibility.
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Phillip Reply:
August 27th, 2009 at 1:48 am
Where did you get that $20/2yrs coupon? I only found a $20/1yr for dreamhost…
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Ben,
I wanted to thank you and tell you about my first submission to Ezine. The article quickly showed up in the first position in Google for the entire longtail, then No. 1 for a shorter version of the longtail, and now it is on page 1 (9th position) for a shorter longtail that gets appx. 2k searches a month. It took about three days to happen. This is awesome! It’s one thing to read how to do it, but quite different to do it yourself and see the results. Thank you.
Also, I noticed I am not getting a lot of clicks from my anchored links in my Ezine article (maybe 15%). Does this even matter? The main reason for linking from directories to my sites is the link juice to help my websites show up in the serps, right? Or should I tweak my article to try to get more clicks?
Thanks again for all the great info and inspiration!!!
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admin Reply:
August 24th, 2009 at 10:35 am
KC, ezines are great for referral traffic + backlinks. But if you want referral traffic, you have to write a good article. People are not going to want to click on your URL if the article is crap. With ezines, you shoudl go for banklinks + referral traffic.
You can spend a lot of time writing a perfect ezine article to convince people to click that link, or you can write crap ones but get a lot of them out there — it depends on what your strategy is. Either is valid.
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KC Reply:
August 24th, 2009 at 11:50 am
Thanks Ben,
I am going to follow your earlier linking advice on my next Ezine article. Ezine to InfoB to Hub then to my website.
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Btw a small update on ND for ben… I have a very small amount of sites NOT indexed. Currently almost 85% of my sites are indexed and the majority of the 15% that are not, have been created in the past few hours. Even with “cheap” “discount” etc. in the urls. tities and articles they have been indexed for a few weeks already. Amazon is definitely not converting at all and I just switched everything to chitika which has been shown to work ok. IMO don’t even bother with amazon since their ads simply don’t work. Even if you can manage to get the products you want while using their search, you will get totally unrelated items using ND (or any other website if you use their keyword related product searches..). My clicks are high which show that there are people wanting to get away from my ND sites, but since the items are so unrelated they don’t want to buy… Conversion is below 1% and I have not made a dollar yet. No backlinks for any of the sites exept a few; I just bought BMD and I will probably start running that for the sites…
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admin Reply:
August 24th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Thanks for the update phillip. I’ve made close to 100 bucks from my sites with ebay. At this point, ebay is probably the only viable method of making money with these sites. I see some good potential with 1000 of these up there. BUT i dont’ know how this whole ebay affilaite payment change is going to work. If you start getting paid pennies for clicks, it’s not worth it anymore.
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matt2257 Reply:
August 24th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
We are starting to see manual deindexing from new .info domains. For now, if you use .com or preowned, they seem to go by fine.
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admin Reply:
August 24th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
manual deindexing? Oh man, that’s not good. It’s simply not worth paying 10 bucks for a domain to put a ND site on…
What camera do u use?? Shots are great
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admin Reply:
August 24th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
I used a Canon 5D with a 17-22L lens for most of the landscape shots. I am hoping to buy a Canon 5D Mark 2 soon, but we’ll see.
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also, would u use connect content for links directly to your money site?
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admin Reply:
August 24th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
CC is pretty safe — I would. It’s all very relevant links for the most part — exactly what google wants.
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looks like google engineers from india are going through all newly purchased .info’s and quickly hitting the deindex button.
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Peter Reply:
August 27th, 2009 at 2:00 am
Matt is seems you just copy and paste what Victor Franqui (your master) tells you…
because he has a direct line to google doesn’t he?
LOL
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matt2257 Reply:
August 27th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Is this the same peter I think it is?
Funny thing, it wasn’t the master that said that! It was another of the kool aid drinking groupies…
I did check, and all sites I have that got the boot were visit by the same google center in india. The day before 100 uniques, the next day 0
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Sorry, maybe this is lame question but how do you extract keywords from Hubpages? Integrate Analytics with Adsense? Thanks.
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Ben,
Has anyone mentioned the fact that at the KWA, the new deal of the program is what they are calling a super site? And it is basically a flagship…
It’s really interesting to see how your evolution is also following some of the things that Court is teaching now….
funny, just like in business, seems like all the successful started out doing lower quality stuff to get cash flow, and then go the high road eventually
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Excellent site, keep up the good work
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I’m so glad I found this site…Keep up the good work
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Thank you! I would now go on this blog every day!
Elcoj
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Okay, so I have a question regarding link laundering. Say I use the “web seo” service (TK+BS+AMA) and send all of my links to a 3 sites that link to my blog farms. Does the anchor text I send to these sites even matter? should I send the links using the exact keyword for my money site as anchor text? a long tail version of the keyword? a synonym/related keyword? a short tail version of the keyword? or just “click here” and whatever else I feel like? I don’t want these 3 “filter blogs” to outrank my money site fi they are linking to blogfarms, so what should I do?
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admin Reply:
October 20th, 2009 at 9:51 am
you should use anchor text you want your money sites to rank for. The reason is that you want to build keyword authority. By sending links with a certain keyword anchor text to your support sites, those support sites will start to rank for those keywords. When you link from those support sites with the same anchored keywords to your money site, you pass some of that keyword authority. Vary your anchor text up — even use “click here” occationally.
Some support sites/web 2.0 sites will outrank your money site — initially. But as long as you continue to build backlinks to your money site, it will eventually float above the rest of your support site — no big deal.
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