A long but informative read. You are right it is a lot of work to set up a farm but it does pay off. I have recently set a small one up for a client (my first) and it is already paying off with a move to page one. After reading this I will have to focus and go large on my own money sites.

Thanks
Steve

I was wondering if you could make a post sometime about buying websites? I’ve got some spare cash and want to expand my “web portfolio” but it’s hard to know what to look for, what price is a good deal, if the website already makes money, where to go etc. There’s not a lot of information regarding this on the web so it makes it kind of difficult for those who have never bought a site before.

Cheers,
Staz

Truth be told, I’ve been putting most of my time where it makes money which is actual website projects. It’s quite time intensive writing huge posts about topics in the IM/SEO/MMO sphere and frankly, there is not a lot of money in it unless you want to try and go the route of “gurudom” to the masses and hype up shitty product after product to score money from your followers. The other way is to charge for information or make a membership site, but even that requires a lot of work (you can make more just working on sites).

In terms of my “Make Money Online” ramblings, I split my time between BacklinkReviews.org and this site (I focus more on reviewing products on the other site, while this site is more “general” SEO/MMO type stuff.

I have been doing a lot of experiments actually (such as the current one with the deindexed site). I’ve just completed one that involved buying an expired domain, building it up with content for 6 months, then monetizing it for fairly big money. Stuff like that. If there is interest, I can maybe do one case study a month and follow it on this site. It’s a bit difficult though writing case studies for the masses though — the fact is that if you reveal some extremely specific strategies, you end up destroying that model because the masses do the exact same thing. That’s why I’ve been leery with publishing case studies these days.

If there is interest, I may move the forums from this site to a dedicated domain, reopen membership to the public, and start being active again. I believe backlinksforum.com closed down last month, so there is a dearth of “free” no BS forums that center around SEO these days.

Cheers

Ben

I am one of the people that checks your site often looking forward to each and every post that you make. This probably will sound really cheesy, but it would be a dream come true if you posted even once per week. Anyway, good to see things are going well for you, and your pictures are really amazing.

Do you still do experiments and such, like with minisites, things like that. I know the Internet landscape has changed a lot just in the last couple of years, but experiments will always have their place, and they are really fun and motivating.

Take care Ben.

What a forum (or active comments) can do is provide consistent fresh content updates to your site, which can (and likely will) boost your site in the rankings. There is a fresh content bonus google gives and you keep that bonus by having a stream of new content added every day (through things like forums and such). If your site has authority and the forum topics relate to the terms your site has authority for, you will also pull in more traffic from the forum posts.

An (active) forum really does provide a lot of value to the reader and Google really likes that sort of thing.