5 Minutes from my house in Phuket, Thailand

Back again folks. I’ve been living it up large here in Thailand the past 5 months that I just haven’t gotten around to post anything new. Bad bad I know. As much as I’d like to say I’m living the life of the party every single day, my life is actually more spartan than a monk’s! All I’ve been doing is training training training to the tune of about 6 hours a day, 6 days a week, so I actually have a good excuse when I say I had no energy to post!

Ok Ok, enough excuses.

One of the biggest fears people have is having their site deindexed. If you have an entire network of sites deindexed, you can forget about getting every single one of those sites back. But what about a couple of the top money making sites? Or what if you have only a few big sites and they suffer a deindex. Is it possible to bring these sites back from the dead?

I suspect with a big of elbow grease and a lot of pleading with the google spam team, you can. I’ve actually brought a few brand new domains that had some deindex penalty associated with them I back into google’s good graces.

The Basic Process of Resurrecting a Deindexed Site :

1. Take off all monetization (affiliate links and adsense)

2. Ensure the theme/site design looks great, is user friendly, and looks like an authority site. This is critical if you want to bring a site back from the dead. I’ve had Google reject re-inclusion requests for a few of my sites with stellar content because the site layouts were not easy on the eyes.

3. Update site with at least two new posts. You want to try and prove you actually care about the site.

4. Make sure you have at least 10 posts on the site. The most recent article should be huge: 1500 to 3000 words. You don’t want a bunch of articles about the same damn keyword topic over and over either.

5. Ensure post titles are not spammy or longtail phrases pulled straight out of the Google Keyword Tool

6. Include plenty of pictures and links to authority sites sprinkled throughout your posts. A few videos inserted into the post won’t hurt either. Do NOT link to spammy sites or thin sites. We are talking wikipedia/cnn style sites

7. Add your site to webmaster tools and submit it for reinclusion via Google Webmaster Tools’ re-inclusion request. Make sure you write a 2-3 huge paragraphs about how you didn’t know the site was violating quality guidlines and how you are creating the site to benefit the reader blah blah blah. Basically you need to convince whoever looks at your site that it’s a legit site and you won’t be doing anything questionable with it.

There are really two strategies you can try and employ here to “convince” whoever is looking at your site that you deserve a second chance.

Strategy 1: Admit Guilt and Swear You’ve Seen the Light

Complete bullshit, I know, but the goal here is to eat humble pie, tell google you fucked up bad, but you are now dedicated to creating a quality site that will serve the interests of the reader. It’s pretty key that your site has been completely revamped here and you’ve taken off ALL monetization. You won’t play a convincing part if your “reformed site” is full of affiliate links. This is the strategy I’ve taken a couple times.

This is sort of like when a cop pulls you over for going 25 mph over the speed limit. When they saunter up to the window and ask you if you knew you were speeding and you look them in the eye and say “Yes, there’s no excuse I can give you.” What happens is the cop is often quite shocked that you admit this upfront (they hear BS excuses all day long). Because of the honestly you actually might get a warning.

Strategy 2: Claim You Purchased the Website

You can also claim you recently purchased (or was given) the website and have no clue why it’s not indexed. It’s best to do this ONLY if you don’t have it added to webmaster tools (yet). Don’t bother  with this if it’s verified with Webmaster Tools and you have Analytics on it (easy to tell you are full of bullshit).

If you’ve done steps 1-6 right, you should have a pretty good chance of getting your site back. I’ve had a few sites that have been rejected 2 or 3 times, but persistence paid off in the end and I was able to get it re-added (Google is extra picky about the quality of a site when you request a reinclusion. Make sure your site looks REALLY good on the eyes!)

My Case Study

This post is going to be a bit of a case study on how to bring bad a deindexed site. I had the google ban hammer come down one of my old sites about 9 or 10 months ago.

The site was about 3 years old, had 30 or so posts on it, and a few hundred backlinks. Before it was deindexed, it ranked #1 for a generic health term word and #1-5 for variations  on that term. It was in a fairly competitive niche. It was getting over 2500 uniques a day. It was an exact domain for a long tail term (one with very good exact traffic for a 5+ word long tail — roughly 45k exacts per month), but ended up ranking for the short tail term.

I can’t say the site was a huge money maker — I was probably only pulling in 200-400 bucks a month from the site with affiliate sales and adsense. I didn’t optimize it for money as much as I could of as I was busy with a bunch of other projects. However, I probably could have sold the site for a nice 7-12k because of the niche it was in, the keyword it was ranking for, and the traffic it was getting. The site is worth trying to bring back from the dead — if I can manage it, I can try and sell it and will have turned something completely dead into something that could make me 10kish.

To be frank, the quality of the site in terms of content was fine, but there was no way it should have been ranking number one for that single word term with the layout it had. Generally, I’ve found that if you start ranking for “big” generic keywords, your site really has to “look” like you deserve that ranking, otherwise it gets kicked out by the google team. You really want lots of articles, the ability to support a community (f0rums or such), a custom (or at least a well designed layout) layout and such.

Unfortunately, the site was an affiliate site that I had been meaning to convert over to an authority style site. I did not do this soon enough however and as soon as it started ranking for  that single word generic term, it shortly got a manual inspection followed by a deindex. It could be one of the competitors for that term reported the site.

So I will be following steps 1-6 exactly and I’ll report back to you guys with an update in a couple weeks. It usually takes about a week or two for google to process your reinclusion request.

Cheers from Thailand!

Ben

I still get questions (emails and comments) about how one should go about internet marketing. I know from my own experience, it’s a scary world out there when you first start looking at trying to make some money online. As a marketer, you have to adapt quickly to change. The SERPS/Marketing world is dynamic and if you don’t evolve yourself, your boat will sink and you are going to drown. Just look at my own efforts:

2009: Web 2.0 “Bum Marketing”

Worked for about 6 months straight, building as many niche hubpage articles as possible. I ended up with something around 600 hubs. Managed to derrive my first “full time income” from my hub effort. Focus was on Adsense. This sort of marketing really took a nose dive early 2011 when Google declared open war on UGC (User Generated Content sites). This had huge ramifications, one which not only saw rankings for article directories/web 2.0’s tumble but also the tightening up of author rules. My feeling is that there are some legit platforms for user generated content, but on the whole, Google wants information to be disseminated from trusted sites (be the niche specific or general authority with some credence to them) not some joker writing bullshit hubs targeting adword longtail keywords. Really, what would you, as a reader, trust more if you typed in “How to Prevent Herpes”: a hubpage of dubious origin with no editorial monitoring or an article from health.com?

2010: Mini Sites

I spent part of 2009 building mini sites. 2010 I really ramped up my efforts though. In my heyday, I must have had close to 400 mini sites. The focus was on adsense. This model abruptly collapsed when a good 200 sites were deindexed May 2010. It was clear to me at that point that Google was moving in a different trend: brand and authority.

Mini sites really don’t offer too much in the way of user experience. There is nothing a large site (or “branded website”) can’t offer better than a mini site in terms of content, user engagement, or user experience. Many an authority site has started out as a mini-site, but if you don’t bother  growing your best niches beyond the mini-site phase, you are losing out big time and you may lose out completely in the end.

2011+: Brand & Authority

The strategy this year has been to diversify my efforts into building big authority sites with an emphasis on “Brand.” The search engines have really been changing the past couple years — there has been a big shift to Brands having blanket authority. The heyday of the micro site is really coming to an end (it actually did a couple years ago!). The focus here has been affiliate selling, though I’m seriously looking at moving in to the direct advertizing market or offering legit services.

One model that I’m really delving into is to buy premium generic domains and work on building a brand on that domain. You get an amazing, top-notch generic keyword domain (helps brand yourself as a player in that niche and people REMEMBER that domain), you get instant “trust” from your readers and more opportunities for link building via networking (people trust you more because you own the generic domain), and you even get natural links because of the domain. This might not be fore everyone though, since many premium generics cost XX,XXX to XXX,XXX but it’s one (of many) strategy you can pursue if you want to focus your efforts on flagship sites. Note that you can still build a strong brand/authority site on a non generic domain or some wacky “brand” domain name too. I find it’s just way easier working with generic domains for a focused NICHE. If you want to go really broad though, a brand-type domain is better. (See my post about exact match domains).

So why all this talk about branding and authority? I know that not everyone can become a quote “Brand” in terms of say TripAdivsor or Amazon. But you can, with some foresight and (a lot of) elbow grease, brand yourself in a niche. Building a “brand” is more than just throwing up some information about a topic. A Brand is more than that. A brand resonates with the users, a brand does not necessary require Search Engine love to sustain itself (though by God it helps).

Now, if you want to successfully tackle a niche, you need to at least try mimicing some of the branding signals. Yes, that means reaching out with social media as a means to engage your readers on some level. That means finding out WHAT the readers are looking for and catering to their needs. That might mean you need to get yourself out of your basement, throw a shirt on (because god only knows how many internet marketers spend all their time locked up inside wearing only their underwear), and actually gets some on-the-ground information.

If you think rewriting someone else’s information is going to give you authority status in a niche, don’t waste your time. Building a real site these days can be a substantial investment of both time and money. You might need to actually hire real writers, real experts about topics, that sort of thing. You might be able to trick your readers (and Google) for a short time, but eventually you are going to be found out for the fraud you are if you go this route. Google (and other search engines) are getting very good at detecting so called “branding” signals. Can you mimic these with SEO? Yes, perhaps, but it’s getting harder and harder. At some point, it’s just so much damn EASIER to go the legit route and do the real thing. You certainly won’t sit around worrying about getting your site canned.

Just some food for thought for you newbies looking to make some money online. It’s still possible and the web is still a bit in that “wild west” phase, but slowly but surely civilization is moving in. Now is the time to get started — in 3-5 years from now, the landscape will be even more competitive. If you stake your claim now and develop a collection of authority sites, you could be laughing in a few years while sitting on a beach somewhere!

Ben

Hubpages Ban

So the “Hubpage Experiment” which launched this blog several years ago officially ended last month when they unceremoniously deleted most of my hubpages and banned my accounts. The Panda Updates freaked them out big time and they pretty much went on a rampage, banning/unpublishing any hubpage with a whiff of internet marketing to them.  Hubpages (for a while) pretty much lost like 90% of their traffic with the Feb panda update. They will (now) aggressively go after what they term low quality hubs. It’s a definition they are pretty loose with.

Some reasons for account termination: linking out to too many domains from hubpages (they like to call these doorway pages now. This wasn’t an issue as of 6 months ago), including affiliate links in your hubpages, writing about too many of the same topics, not having 2000 word articles full of pictures and videos and other bullshit, writing about certain topics, being too promotional with your hubs, or simply because one of the staffers got dumped by his girlfriend that day and they’re pissed as hell the day they review your hubs.

Basically, if you do anything with a marketing bent to your hubs, you might lose your account — especially if you have a lot of hubs.

Word is the hubpages has been able to restore their traffic to pre-panda levels by using subdomains. My feeling though is that the subdomain “fix” is just a short term solution. Google seems to change what they say every six months and no doubt when everyone tries to copy the subdomain solution to Panda (in the case of UGC), google will smash that fix too.

Here’s my final take on parasite hosts like hubpages:  if you want to use them to write legit articles to promote yourself as a brand/author, that’s fine. Some people have made that work for them. They write high quality articles about various topics (especially about topics they know about), they participate in the forums, answer questions, that sort of thing. This is useful if you want to make a name for yourself and funnel traffic to a single site (some people have done this well). Personally, I’m not in the business of becoming part of a community to brand myself. I want to make fucking money, not to spend time chitty chat.

IF you want to just flat out make money via adsense or sell products, hubpages and the ilk are not the best way to do it. Don’t wast your fucking time.  My feeling is that putting work into someone else’s property where you have no control is crazyness. You are too much at risk for getting the boot and losing all that effort. Put the time into your OWN sites and your own network.

My Other Blog

I’ve had quite a few people ask my about my other blog and a few of my landscape photography stuff. Yes, out of boredom I created another Internet Marketing blog last year. It’s called Backlink Reviews and the whole purpose of that blog is to review backlink software that I use/have used. This blog is more of my general make money online/ Internet Marketing. Though, there is quite a bit of cross pollination between the two blogs. So if you want to read MORE of my ramblings about IM/MMO/backlink software topics (and I don’t know why you would want to, I’m a rather boring writer), then check out that blog. I go under the Pseudo-name “Spider” since you know, I like hiding in the shadows and all!

Photography Site?

I’ve also had a few people ask me about links to my photography site. I’m currently working on putting up a landscape photography one. I only have the domain right now and nothing else, and I haven’t posted any photos on it. I will let you guys know WHEN it’s up so you can take a look at my pictures. Right now I’m still in vacation mode over in South East asia, but it’s back to biz next week, regardless of how enjoyable it is living on a comfortable beach drinking coconut water and getting foot massages. Ok, that’s just mean! But if anyone hasn’t been to Thailand yet, I suggest you get your ass over here. It’s like heaven, but without all the holy stuff.

Anyways,

Best

Ben

Another random post by yours truly — the laziest blog poster online. Sorry, I’ve  really let this blog go the past year. To be honest,  I’ve created an alter ego writing articles on a different internet marketing blog the past while — so I suppose all the posts I should have put on this site have been going there. But once in a while, that old nostalgia comes back to me and I’ll throw something on this blog. This is one of those posts.

Google and Panda

To make money online, you need to keep evolving your strategies. I’ve learned this over the three years I’ve been doing this. If you don’t change your strategy, you are going to fail online. Sometimes, you need to radically shift the way of doing things.

I first started out gaming the search engines to make easy money. It was easy to spit out a bunch of crap and make some quick money. But that’s not really the case anymore (you can do it, but you’re sites don’t stick around for long). Gaming the SERPs has become harder and harder though, as the the years have gone by. In fact, I would posit that it’s in fact easier to just create solid websites that offer a lot of value to  the searcher and spend time “networking” to build legit links. If you do it the right way (build a legit site, network for legit links, do proper online marketing as opposed to SEO trickery), your work will stick around and you can keep building on it. Eventually, you WILL make money.

The Panda updates have been a real nightmare for many webmasters, SEO’s, and internet marketers.

Let’s see, there’s been

• Panda 1 — VERY bad for UGC and Webmasters
• Panda 2  — BAD for smaller websites (longer tail searches)
• Panda 2.1 — More Bad for Webmasters
• Panda 2.2 — Bad again
• Panda 2.3 — Reports of webmasters regaining some of lost panda ranking (an actual positive change)

I think the average internet market has felt the effects of the Panda updates — some have been wiped out, some have been hurt only a little, and some a lot. A few have gained through the Pandas (and likely only those who have really built a solid foundation from the start). There have been a ton of legit sites penalized as well though, so I don’t want to say only good sites have made it through the Panda unscathed — there have been a lot of false positives hit by the Panda too.

Most of these Panda updates are perpetuating the Brandspam that we are all getting familiar with. Large brand names (Amazon, Wikipedia, etc) being given blind authority to rank for anything. It was bad before the Pandas but it’s worse now. Google assumes that Brand = Trust. To some degree, this may be accurate — brand names have more money and will throw more money into online marketing. The quality of the information/products *may* be higher. I would like to say Google will change this in the future, but I don’t see this going away. The solution for the little guy is to “brand” yourself as well. You don’t have to have to be a corporation or have a XXXXXX budget to create a brand. There are some things YOU, the small guy, can do to mimic the brand signals over time so Google things YOU are a brand too. Mind you, it takes time. Perhaps I’ll have a post about this in the future.

My whole theory on all the Panda updates is that the early panda’s went after sites that were dominating the single and two word keywords (the mega traffic terms), while some of the later Panda updated targeted the longer tail rankings (which is why some smaller sites/mini sites, were effected since these types of sites usually target longer tails).

Here’s the bottom line with Google: they are not your friend, especially if you are making your sole income. What’s best  for Google is not always best for webmasters. If you want to play this game called Making Money Online, you’ve got to work within those constraints.

The Death of The Informational Site?

Informational types sites, I believe, have a shelf-life. Or at least, the usual small niche sites you see peppering the web have a shelf life. Smallish sites making money from adsense/hawking affiliate products might be make something now, but in 3 years, in 5 years, in 10 years? I think not. The direction of Search seems to be favoring Brands and large scale sites, and expert niche sites. Small sites are getting pushed out.

My feeling is that you have to go big or go home now. You are either going to be an Ant or an Elephant but not in between. And it’s the ants that get crushed by the elephants.

Sorry, the 20 page site that you update three times a year won’t be outranking a dedicated niche-authority sites with daily (insightful) posts. And as we move forward the next few years, it’s GOING to take an niche site that offers the best information online, frequent updates, tons of real articles about the topic, and an active community who end up ranking on the front page for that niche term. That’s the direction we are going. If you are going to make an information site, it’s got to be big, it’s got to offer real value, and it needs to be maintained.

Affiliate Only Sites = No NO

I’ve noticed there seems to be a bit of a craze with some people who have been switching from Adsense mini sites to Amazon mini sites; the reason being, that Adsense is more dangerous and unstable than Amazon. Yes, having Amazon ONLY sites is safer than having adsense because you are not on the “map” as much to Google. But that doesn’t mean you are safe — either form one of the thousands of outsourced Indians working for Google who manually inspect websites. You are also not safe from the various big search updates that come along seemingly every month or two now. They WILL/ARE weeding out affiliate sites from the index.

Because of this, I feel that really pushing the heavy affiliate site model  is NOT the way to make a stable income online. You might make an income, now, (perhaps a LOT of income) but chances are you won’t be keeping that income in the future.

Case in point. I had an affiliate site ranking for a single keyword health term. The site was getting about 1500 uniques per day. Two days ago, Google dedindexed the site out of the blue. I had about 30 posts on the site. The theme was pretty plain (I would even say, a bit ugly and certainly not very pretty). The information was great, the posts were huge (5000 word ones), but I was VERY aggressive with affiliate links through the posts and site. Looks like one of my competitors reported the site (you get that if you start ranking high for competative single work terms) or Google manually inspects sites ranking for competitive terms to make sure they qualify for that position. Whatever the case, it was deindexed. I now have to change the theme, strip out all the affiliate links and sales stuff, add a few more posts, and beg google for a re-inclusion with a sob story.

That might scare some of you people who make money tricking the search engines, small posts ONLY to hawk affiliate products, and create (fugly) blogs with the sole purpose of funneling as many clicks to Amazon, but this sort of model is NOT the way to make a long term income.  Ask yourself this: does my sites provide real value to the searcher or is it simply a funnel to some affiliate product. If the answer is the later, your site might not be sticking around for the long term. YOU WILL LOSE YOUR SITE EVENTUALLY. I’m not just speaking out of my ass here either — it’s happened to me multiple times.

I’m not saying don’t throw on affiliate links on your site or don’t make a site with no intention of making money. We all want to make money. But if you are going to go the affiliate route, you need to REALLY strike a fine balance between affiliate hawking and legit content. To keep an affiliate site that getting a good amount of traffic in the index/ranking, you are going to have to offer EXTRA good content and have a LOT of content that’s DOES NOT CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS.

Google (rightly) views affiliate/review sites with a lot of suspicion because:

1. Affiliate sites often create one more level between the searcher and the product they are looking for anyways

2. Affiliate sites usually don’t provide real information (it’s biased — all focused on getting a click or sale)

If you are going to go the route of an all out “affiliate” site, you may be better off just creating an eCommerce store directly — certainly this seems to be what Google prefers anyways. Ecommerce sites are legit service-based sites. Affiliate sites are parasites (according to google).

Some food for thought anyways.

Value Matters

The key is VALUE right now. The web is very quickly mirroring the real world. The name of the game is NOT SEO, but good marketing. If you can market creatively both online and offline, you can attract interest, visitors, links, and ultimately, money. The new approach is to set up a REAL business online. Sell products directly (not affiliate marketing) offering something that your competition does not or set yourself up as a market/niche expert. For some of you who have some solid sites up and running and have used your time to test out markets, you are in a good position to set up a real business online. Others who are churning out crap and spamming automated links in order to rank — you won’t be around for long. My recommendation is to approach creating a website like you would setting up a real world online business. If your approach is to set up a wordpress blog, outsource 10 articles from the Philippines, run some Article Marketing program, comment spam, and profile spam, you won’t be making any real money in this game anymore.

Do backlinks matter? Of course they do! I really don’t see any way around the backlink issue — they will always be the most relevant (and important) ranking factor. But social factors are going to be a big part of ranking in the future. The quality of the backlinks will be even more important. It’s been getting harder and harder to game google with automated links and this is no doubt only going to become harder in the future as the search engines get smarter and smarter. Having a “clean” backlink profile will become even more important that it is. Why build your empire on sand — and building crappy links IS building your empire on sand.

One issue with gaming the serps is that if you do manage to game your way to the top for some competitive keywords, your competition won’t have any qualms about going through your backlink profile and reporting anything suspicious to the Google spam team. At that point, it’s only a matter of time before your site either gets penalized or deindexed. This had actually happened to me a few times.

Personal Stuff

I’m about a week away from leaving Canada and moving abroad. I’ve been talking about this for a while, but it’s finally going to happen. I’ll be living in Thailand and Bali and making various forays through South East Asia, Nepal, and Tibet over the next year or  two. Yes, I will still be working online while traveling.

For those who are interested, I’ll send a link to my personal landscape photography site so you can keep track of my pictures/journey. No doubt I’ll pop on this blog once in a while when the (rare) mood strikes me.

Work hard guys and make money online.

Ben

Now, there has been a lot of talk the past couple months about the quality of Google search engine results. Quite a few major newspapers have been

writing articles complaining about all the thin content and spam sites that pop up in the SERPS.

The New York Times recently called JC Penny to task for sloppy SEO. Now JC Penny is by no means the only major corporation that employs “dirty seo” techniques, but they got pretty lazy about how they went building links (putting links on non-relevant, spammy support sites for one and spamming profile links to the page another). The article pretty much forced Google to openly spank JC penny.

But the fact remains that Google has been getting a lot of bad press lately – and these JC Penny incidents showing how people/companies are gaming the search engine certainly don’t give people confidence in Google.

So with all the publicity generated about google “low quality results” it was only a matter of time before they did something – if only to shutup all the naysayers.

And it happened. About three days ago.

|Google has openly declared war against the content farm model. Thursday, Google made a massive update to their algorithms, absolutely punishing the so called content farms.

Here’s a list of the top 10 most spanked “content farms.” You can see the whole list in sordid detail here

1. wisegeek.com
2. ezinearticles.com
3. suite101.com
4. hubpages.com
5. buzzle.com
6. associatedcontent.com
7. freedownloadscenter.com
8. essortment.com
9. fixya.com
10. americantowns.com

If you are an internet marketer, this change likely affects you in some way. EzineArticles, for example, has been the classic “easy” whitehat linkbuilding strategy many marketers have applied. Write a couple ezinearticles, send a couple links, and end up with a pretty decent backlink. I can’t comment on whether Google has lessened the link authority given from sites like Buzzle, Hubpages, and EzineArticles, but I suspect the links may not be worth as much. But we’ll have to see how things pan out over time, since MANY sites on the web have backlinks from at least one of the content farms on the list. The spank may end up affecting a lot of small sites and marketers promoting their domains via these sites. I pity the poor EzineArticle bum marketers who ONLY made money by promoting stuff via ezinearticles.

If you’ve been using hubpages to make some coin, you’ll be directly affected by these changes. Hubs, according to some of the stats out there, lost a significant amount of ranking.

In the one link I’ve given, the data shows hubpages went from 150k ranking keywords to around 50k ranking keywords. That’s a pretty big loss right there. EzineArticles, you will note, also had a big drop. I suspect they are going to lose 50% of all impressions over the next month. The owners are pretty much freaking out at this point and are now dead set on making ezinearticles too draconian for anyone to actually bother posting an article there. Interestingly enough, eHow (the one site that’s been getting a lot of bad press as being the king of content farms) didn’t get touched. In fact, it’s actually doing better with the update, and that’s not even counting the fact that most of eHow’s competitors have been knocked out of the competition at this point.

Note: I’ve you’ve been making money with hubpages, you are going to see a crash in your earnings from this – you may end up with around 50% of your usual impressions from now on. Now, the drop in rankings seem to be mostly indirect longtails and hubs with few to no backlinks. Individual hubs with a lot of backlinks won’t have likely been affected.

So What Does This Mean?

When I first launched my hubpage experiment to see if I could make money, I was amazed at just how easy it was to make money by only writing (keeping in mind good onpage seo and internal link structuring). However, it soon became apparent to me that hubpages would eventually get spanked…and they just did, officially.

What can you take home from this? The best thing you can do for yourself as an internet marketer is to build your own websites and not build up third party sites, like hubpages. I’ve seen some people on forums gung ho about building 1000 hubpages or whatever. Big mistake. Seriously, if you are going to devote a few years of your life to build up someone else’s domain, you might as well send them your resume. And we won’t even talk about the money you end up losing by sharing your revenue for the host site and the fact that they can delete your content on a whim.

As I’ve been saying for almost a year, the name of the game now is to focus on a few, quality sites and build them up big time.

Forget about trying to build a zillion hubs to make your money. As I’ve said, Google has publically declared war on the content farm model. That means both the revenue sharing, user generated content model of hubpages  and the churn as many niche articles out as possible “wisegeek” model are a no no. Now to be clear here — About.com or Wikipedia.com were not touched here (let’s forget about the joke called eHow), but these sites really focus on quality and all the article are written by actual experts, rather than some guy sitting around in his underwear in his mom’s basement. I think the writing is pretty clear right now: don’t put a lot of emphasis on 3rd party websites.

Now all things considered, ezinearticles and hubpages (and say Buzzle) actually offered pretty decent articles. Now, it’s more likely that an even worse POS niche articles will rise up to fill the ranking voids. We may see over the next month Google teak the algorithm somewhat so they don’t throw the baby out with the a bathwater and hubs and the like may rank better a bit. But then again, that might not happen.

Forget about building little mini sites – the era of the micro site is finished (you can find a horde of other bloggers online who’ve had their entire networks deindexed or spanked in the rankings just the past few months). I STILL see a bunch of marketers promoting the make money online with mini site method these days, and boy if you are still pursing that model as a serious income source, you better start tossing your resume out there as backup. I see way too many of you guys trying to take shortcut methods to making a stable living online. Fuck the short term and think long term. Building up a quality authority site takes some real sweat and blood. You don’t just throw up couple articles, run spambox and send a few build my spam links and sit back and cash in on your authority site. These type of sites can take a year or three to really build up. But you can make the bank on just one or two such successful websites.

So if you want stability, focus completely on owing a niche with a single site and proving as much quality information to the readers as possible.  That’s all you need to do and as a plus you don’t have to watch your back every time google does an update.

Personally, this is a great opportunity for some of you to rank your own sites even higher seeing as that a large portion of the longtail niche competition just got knocked out. So there is a great deal of opportunity here.

The sky is not falling. Changes are part of the game – for good or for the ill. Do things the right the first time and you won’t pay the price later on.

Ben K

Some travel pictures I took a few months ago to get this post warmed up…..

To see the above picture in all it’s panoramic glory, CLICK HERE TO SEE IT.

Anyways, there’s been a lot of rah rah about Grizzly’s newest post. I thought I would toss out a few of my own musings, for whatever the pennies they are worth.

We’ve seen a bit of an evolution in the way the search engine algorithms have shifted in favor of larger sites and out of favor for the small micro niche sites. A lot of this happened during the Mayday Update last year, but I’ve noticed every update, something seems to shift around each update in an attempt to cull those micro sites with bad link profiles.

Regrettably, I was pretty dead set at one point about making money online via lots of little sites. I had a wake up call when I lost what some people would consider a full time income . This is a small fraction of what I made, so it was survivable, but it was a clear wake up call to me that I was doing things wrong. Because of that, I backed out of typical IM stuff and I also backed out of this blog for a while too, feeling I pushed people in the wrong direction.

I started this website as Make Money Online with SEO, but in reality, that’s name sets people on the wrong path.  Perhaps a better name would be Make Money Online with Internet Marketing. Yes combining SEO with internet marketing is a sure way to make a buck online, but sometimes it’s easy to forget that SEO is simply a tool that you, as a marketer, employ.It is not the end all and be all of this business.

We are all of us internet marketers and we need to use MORE than just SEO. We need to use sound marketing tactics too — and that includes in the way you get backlinks. Marketing is, in my limited opinion, about making a connection with the audience, be it for the purpose of sales or to attract “attention” to whatever it is you are marketing. The more “attention” you can attract, the more backlinks you well get, without having to build them yourself. What am I trying to say?

Pull back a bit from the pure SEO aspect of this business and look at ways to connect with your audience/readers. If you can build that connection, links will follow.  The trick is figuring out how to build that connection — and this holds true for any niche out there.

Anyways, I’ve had a few people ask me specifically if SEO is dead and should you still get links blah blah blah.

The answer is NO Seo is not dead and you still need links. The change needs to be in how you get them

Put it this way, it’s not the links you get that are bad but the manner in which you get those links. If the manner in which you get them is clearly contrived (and it’s very very easy to tell if they are), you will probably run into problems in the future. Maybe not now, maybe not in a year, but at some point, you will.

For the average person, if you don’t linkbuild, you won’t rank your sites. The issue I’m pointing out here is that taking the “quick” path will lead to a short term gain, but may lead to a long term loss. There is a lot of hurah about “natural linkbuilding” being tossed around on MMO blogs right now as the best way to build links. In fact it’s seems to be this who natural linkbuilding seems to be a new IM buzzword. It’s nothing new, it’s  the oldest way of getting links.

I’ve seen this formula banded about online by some bloggers: Building Links = Bad. Natural Links = good.

But it’s not quite that simple.

The truth is that most of you will target the same old IM niches that every other market goes after. You’ll outsource a cheap writer who will basically recompile a couple ezinearticles or if you are broke, you’ll do so yourself. Say you don’t do any linkbuilding. You just sit around and..wait..and wait..and wait

What will happen? Fuck all. You won’t be getting any natural links.

The bottom line here is that if you the standard niches and set up the regular sort of internet marketing site, you are going to have to actively linkbuild to rank your sites. If you don’t linkbuild, then you are going to have to come up with some other indirect ways of gaining some natural links, which, I admit, can take some time and for non-authority style sites, it’s not worth the time.

You can certainly do quite well linkbuilding, provided you are smart about it (aim to get quality links, watch your link velocity, if you go with spammy links, make sure you filter them through secondary sites). This is search engine trickery, but it’s a powerful tool that you should utilize.

But it’s not the only tool and not by far. Another often ignored way to build links is through natural backlinks. And gosh darn it, you might find that natural backlinks are the best links of all.

Keep in mind there are also more creative ways to linkbuild that don’t involve using Post Spammer, Buld My Spam, Scrapespammer, ArticleSpammer and other mass backlinking methods. But that’s another post that I’m too lazy to write right now.

Now back to topic. If you are building up a “bigger” site, then you have a shot of some natural links. If you don’t have a bigger site that’s clearly not of any sort of quality, then forget about it and go back to linkspamming since that’s the only way you are ever going to rank your site.

Natural links, in my experience, only happen in a couple cases.

1. Your site does something completely new or is perceived as one THE authorities in the niche (not likely for you small fries)

2. You write content in such a way that it attracts links — a couple ways to do this

3. You are in a niche with a huge “passion” factor.

4. Bigger sites = bigger chance of links

Ok, let’s break some of these down a bit.

1. You are THE Authority

If you’re site is clearly the authority in the niche. You will attract links. Keep in mind that most natural links won’t be coming from you via your competitors, especially if they are marketers. There’s been a lot of real info about linkbuilding and real SEO these days. Chances are, anyone ranking for your typical IM terms knows a little something about SEO and they know enough not to promote their competition via links. However, if your site is pretty damn useful, you’ll pick up some natural links here and there. Maybe not a lot, but over time they can add up. A couple dozen natural links from real sites (especially if they are in related niches) can do more for your ranking than hundreds and hundreds of shitty links. What’s even better is that these natural links don’t just up and vanish overnight as spam links (comment spam, profile spam, etc) or backlink network links often end up doing.

The problem is, you don’t just “become” and authority in a niche. It can take some time. This is a whole nother post, but there are several ways to skin a cat.

• Become an authority through Social Marketing

People rag on the whole “social media thing” because it may not translate directly into sales. But you see, if you cultivate social media right (and I’m not just talking facebook/digg/twitter shit, I’m talking about join forum discussions with links back to your site, leaving real and relevant comments on related blogs, and basically involving yourself in the community). Join the community, contribute real advice, write about stuff, build up an audience, and links will come naturally. Or if you don’t get links, you will still build up a reputation/brand and related referral traffic. Quite often you will find that as your online “reputation” goes up, so do  the number of natural links. This should not be a surprise as links are THE main way search engines determine your online value. If people know about you, you get linked to. Let me stress, again, that there is a TIME process involved. You don’t become a perceived authority in anything overnight, especially through social media. As a good example of someone who has done it in this niche, give Leo’s Internet Marketing Blog a look. He’s built himself a very good reputation through a combination of informative, and GREAT content and through socializing with many bloggers in this niche. If you apply the same strategy to other niches folks, you might just find you can build a reputation as well. The kicker is  that you kind of have to know what the fuck you are actually talking about. You can try faking it till you make it, but for some niches, you’re bullshittery will be called out pretty fast (and your reputation as well). For the time and effort you put into the process, you’ll probably want your topic of interest to be a topic you actually care about. I don’t know about you, but I’d find myself hard pressed to find the energy to be the resident “expert” on Over 40 Women’s Cheap Yeast Infection Treatments or some such topic.  You’ll find that those typical “passion” niches that you might be nuts about (say travel) have a million other people interested in them so the competition is fierce. So maybe you should be interested in Over 40 Women’s Cheap Yeast Infection Treatments…

Remember guys, building an authority through “networking” doesn’t mean you are going to automatically rank for top terms. But it’s a fantastic way to get natural links pouring in. In in time, those links will translate to organic search traffic and targeted referral traffic. Social authority translates, in time, into search engine authority.

• Become an authority through linkbuilding

Well this is the other method and one that most marketers that make money use.  You can certainly linkbuild your way to the top, but you have to be smart about it, depending on the niche. If you backlink your site wrong, you can fuck it up for good. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t backlink.

There are some basic good seo tactics you should follow and it’s a good idea to know different ways to build backlinks so you have some options. In my opinion, the main thing to keep in mind when you linkbuild is you should have a mixed backlink profile. If all your links come from shitty sources (profiles, article directories, comment spam, blog networks), that’s NOT a “natural” linking pattern and can land you in trouble. Even if you don’t end up penalizing your site, there is always the risk that google mass devalues these type of links which, if your site is propped up primary through these kind of links, will plummet. It’s a very good idea to mix in quality links from your own quality support network, have real links from other people (link exchanges, guest posts), and best of all, have a number of natural links with no “connection” to your site in any form. If you have this type of mixed link profile, you’ll rank well and won’t have any problems.

2. You write content in such a way that it attracts links

This is where your creativity comes in and this is where a lot of people hit a wall. There is a term out there that you should know about : linkbait. It’s a term you should know well because this is the key to getting a lot of natural links.

Method 1: The BEST Content

The first way is to have the BEST content in the niche. Look at your competition and see what they do. Then better it. You will never go wrong with this. It takes way more time, but trust me, it will pay you back big time. Sometimes you need more than just great content. Your site might need to cater to a community or provide some sort of service that people can utilize (other than to just read your content).

“Best” is a relative to what else people are doing in the same niche.

The “First Best”

If you are the first website in a niche, we’ll it’s not hard to have the “best” content since your site will have the only content. In this case (provide your site is not some joke of a mini site) your site will be perceived as THE authority and links will come in be virtue of that. This is true for MANY old websites — they often started out as shit sites run by some guy living in his basement walking around in underwear. Fast forward 10-15 years later, these sites are giants in competitive niches and that same guy is now loafing around in basement wearing underwear made with gold while a couple of ex playboy models are bubble bathing in a $100k jacuzzi…

The Do Something No One Else Did Best

For most of you, “The First Best” is not an option. Well, the next thing to look at is to do something no one else has done, or something else no one has the balls to do. For this example, I’ll use this site as an example. Not that I’m saying this site is amazing or I’m an amazing writer, blah blah blah. I swear a lot and I have problems spelling. Not exactly a call to fame or anything. But when I first started this blog, I decided to showcase my progress with real pictures of my income and valid information on how to replicate  that progress for anyone. And in many cases, it was a shock for people to see that you could legitimately make a lot of money with adsense/hubpages. Considering that most people talking about how to make money online don’t actually make any money online or are complete scammers, this brought some attention.

People got talking and the links started rolling in. I’ve done 0 SEO on this site, ZERO and I believe I have close to 4k raw backlinks to the site.

Now, I’m not saying I’m ranking for a zillion things or anything, but I’m just pointing this out to show that if you head into an established niche and do something new and interesting (whatever it may be), you can get natural links from related sites.

Method 2: Write Something Dramatic/Controversial

Another tried and true method is to write something very dramatic or controversial. For a prime example of the “dramatic” style linkbait, just look at Grizzly’s newest post that I linked to at the beginning of the article. He had something interesting and dramatic to say (i’ve was wrong, I never “link build anymore” etc). And people, including myself and a lot of other people who are in this “niche” respond (and send natural links). This works BEST if there is a community in the niche where you can milk links from. It’s harder to do  this if there is no community, but still possible.

Another variation of this is to attack someone or something. Grizzly was famous for doing this to guys like John Chow and Darrin Rowse. For a prime example of this sort of linkbait. There was an incident where Liz from Passive Income wrote a really negative site build it review that brought down the site build it community en force to defend their piece of shit scam system. Pitting one community against another community is a great thing to do — it can really bring in the links and lots of comment content. The only downside is you end up really pissing off one of the communities (sorry, hard to play both sides if you do this). One of my favorite linkbait tacits here is to look at a niche I’m targeting to see if there is something I can say  that excludes one group. For example (DISCLAIMER: and only and example here I’ve made up on the spot) , If I had a work at home site, I might write an article with a catchy title along the lines of “5 Reasons Why Women Are Not Suited for the Workplace”. Pissed off a lot of you women with that title eh? Exactly, and maybe enough get some of you ladies to link to “that bad mouthed, pig headed blogger guy.” Now of course, there are the moral implications of something like attacking a gender for the sake of backlinks, but I’m just giving that example to show you what can be done if you are creative. You don’t have to choose a subject that’s offensive to people, but I will say the more offensive it is, the more links you get. Sad but true.

Now I’ll admit, there are some niches that even with great content, those natural links won’t pour in.

So if you are in a niche where people won’t link to you, what can you do?

Method 3: Write Linkbait Outside of Your Niche

One “trick” is to write a catchy article of some sort that just begs to be linked to, especially by people outside of that niche (since your competition won’t be linking to it). The distinction here with Method 2 is that you are not targeting a specific community in your niche — this is to attract links from outside your niche. Now I know for you people with Cheap Toaster Sales, it’s pretty hard to write something that will be picked up an linked to.

This is where the creativity has to kick in and a lot of elbow grease used. You need to come up with an “angle.” That angle might be something like “Top 10 Ways to Die From a Toaster”. This type of title might be familiar to you — say cracked.com. There is a reason those guys get a shitload of comments and links — because their articles are interesting to read. Now I know that an article like that might not be directly tied to the content of your site, but it’s somewhat relevant. If you have a static site, great, add a blog and start writing those sort of articles. If you have a blog site, then make a section for those articles.

It might be possible to just write a post like that and links eventually find you, but don’t count on it. There is a saying “The more work you do  the luckier you get.” I prefer to make my own luck. Get your ass on the web and start promoting that post. It’s likely you’ll have to contact blogs with related content (not your direct competition though) and tell them they might be interested in sharing that linkbait post with their readers.

You can also set up an entire site (call it Site B) based around this content to use as a link resource — in each article, include a targeted link with your keyword to your main site (Site A). If you can attract those links to Site B with those linkbait posts, you can use it to push up Site A.

This is just a couple of ideas and there are plenty more ways to attract natural links. This is by no means a definitive guide to linkbait, but rather a primer on how to get started. I’ll let YOU get creative here. Note that if you want to do this yourself you need to be a decent writer (if not, you need to hire someone who is).

I will say this: linkbaiting can take a lot of work and practice, but nothing in life worth having comes without work. For those looking for a set it and forget it method, good luck to you — you won’t be seeing very many natural links.

3. You are in a niche with a huge “passion” factor.

Fantastic, it’s much much easier to get natural links in these type of niches.

But what is a passion niche? There are a couple kind of “niches” as I call them. The first are the commercial niches — these are those standard niches that you can make pretty good money from because there is a lot of commercial intent behind the searches. People are looking for something specific — maybe to buy midget thongs, maybe for cheap condoms. You can make money if you rank and offer the right product. It’s pretty hard to directly extract natural links because for one, the people searching for that term will typically be your joe only concerned with buying the product or your competition scoping you out. Those are not the people who will sending you links.

The other type of niche is the “passion niche”. These are those niches about sports, entertainment, or anything where there is a lot hobby sites. If you have an informative and highly useful site in these type of niches, it’s fairly easy to get natural links. There is usually an avid amount of passionate readers who are just itching to join in on discussions and link to sites they feel are authoritative in that nich. It’s also pretty easy to “network” in these niches if you join the community.

The same tactic of writing linkbait posts applies for these type of niches — in fact, it’s usually easier to get “links” from a passion niche via linkbaiting over a commercial niche. Good content also goes a long way too. If people in that niche perceive your site as useful, they’ll likely link to it.

Of course the the only problem with this type of niche is it might be hard(er) to extract money from it. I personally like to go after the commercial niches but create a couple semi related passion niche sites to support the commercial site. It works well, but it’s not something you can “do” in a couple weeks.

4. Bigger Sites tend to yield more links

The final point I want to make is that the bigger your site is, the more chances you have to get a link. If you’ve got a smaller 5 pager site, well, you only have say 5 pages that might potentially get a link. But if you have a site with 100 pages, that’s 95 more “chances’ to get a link. If you’ve got a site with 20,005 pages, that’s virtually 20,000 chances more than your 5 pager site will have to get natural links. Bigger sites also tend to seem more authoritative too just by appearances — if you had the choice between linking to a 5 page site or a 1000 page site, where would you place your link? Exactly. There is also the issue where the search engines seem to give sites a lot more authority over small sites, by just the number of pages the site has. I can’t prove this, but I have a deep suspicion that it’s true — you stand a much bigger chance of gaining SERP authority with a big site than you do with a small site.

Well that’s it — a few things to think about for the new years. Another big post. And I really thought I’d do this post in under 1000 words. When will I ever learn!

Happy New Years Guys

Best
Ben K

The famous longi rice terraces of Ping'An villiage, Guilin, China

The utterly remote and desolate landscape of the Karakorm Highway -- the road from china to pakistan (highest paved highway in the world (4000 meters)

Magic happens in the Yellow Mountains of the Anhui province, China

More pictures to come when I post again…IF I post again

But back to SEO and Making Money — this is a Make Money Online blog and not a photography blog afterall.

Ok first, no, I’m not dead, injured, or broke. I’ve been busy the past 7 months and writing make money guides hasn’t been my primary focus the past 5 months (since I’ve been back). In fact, I haven’t posted specifically for one reason: I always seem to pay a price for posting real information here. And I earn all my money outside of this niche. These days, I’m only really inclined to do work when it leads to money. Call me a lazy, money grabbing bastard, but oh well.

Back to the topic of Adsense Myths. I see a lot of pure shit out there in terms of information about adsense. There is fact and there is fiction and from where I stand, most of the stuff you read on forums and pick up from the table of gurus is fiction. Let’s talk a bit about what I’ve learned with Adsense the past two years of making hundreds of thousands with it.

Sense Myth 1: You Can’t Make a Real Income with Adsense

Fact: This is &(&*(##.

I’m not going to bother proving my income anymore. Been there, done that. But you can make absurds amount of money with adsense if you know how. I’ve talked about how, Grizzly talks about how. Court over in his Keyword Academy has an entire program about the topic, and there are countless other sites that detail strategies (most are wrong though).  Now, just because you CAN make easy money with adsense, doesn’t mean you SHOULD. But we’ll save that for another post. Or maybe later this post!

Adsense Myth 2: More ads on your site mean more money

Fact: Not necessarily.

I can’t say for sure, but I’ve noticed some ad sections seem to pay more. It’s usually the bigger 250×300 ads that seem to give out the best paying clicks. And it’s also the MAIN ad that usually get’s the best click values. I suspect that Google tracks the conversions on each of your ad bars and gives the best CPC to the highest converting. In some cases, I’ve noticed that throwing on too many ads can lower the CPC. It’s up to you to specifically test this, but it doesn’t always pay to go gungho with plastering as many ads as you can on your site. There is another reason for keeping the number of ads down that I’ll address later on in the article.

Myth: Mixing adsense and affiliate offers decreases your adense earnings

Fact: More rubbish.

You can do quite well mixing adsense and affiliate offers on the same site. The key is HOW you do it folks. I will admit, for some niches, pure adsense works best. But putting on a few related affiliate offers won’t usually take from your adsense. In fact, you might even increase your income. I’ve had sites literally double in income by combining adsense with affiliate offers.

Adsense Myth 3: CPC is Everything when it comes to keyword research for adsense sites

Fact: Google Keyword Tool CPC lies more than Hilary Clinton

Sites will tell you to go after high CPC, but I’ve found over the past few years that the CPC shown in the adwords tool if far far from true. That’s 80.00 CPC can bring in .10 cent clicks and that .25 cent CPC can bring in 10 dollar clicks. Don’t believe it at all.

You have to remember that just looking at a single keyword’s CPC is no way to really judge your total potential earnings either. I’ve seen some so called formula’s floating around that guestmate your potential earnings based on the expected traffic and your CPC. Rubbish and half!

For one, not all of your ads will display the keyword you are targeting. You might be targeting the keyword: Midget Thongs with a CPC of $10 according to the keyword tool.

Now, depending on the content on your site, the ads might display ads that target the Midget Thong keyword or it might not. If it displays the right ads, then the CPC is generally accurate. But there are a lot of factors.

1. Is the ad actually targeting the keyword or displaying another keyword ad
2. Is the traffic geo (i.e. adsense often displays different ads to people from different locations)
3. The awords bid fluctuates from day to day
4. There are no bidders for that keyword
5. The page the ad is displayed on is not focused on the keyword you are targeting and thus the ad is not the keyword CPC you are targeting

These are only some of the factors. So basically what I’m trying to say is that CPC is only a rough guestimate. I talk a bit more about this on my forum.

Adsense Myth 4: Google is just waiting to BAN your ASS if you slap adsense onto your site

Fact: Only if you produce shit

No, despite the fear people seem to have, Google is not waiting with a big stick to bash people who monetize with adsense. The thing is, there are really two teams out there: the Search Team and the Adsense Team. Both seem to have contradictory views. Adsense wants to increase revenues for google while the Search Team wants to ensure the search results are as high quality as possible. Sometimes, what’s good for one is NOT good for the other.

That means while you 500 one page xfactor mini sites might make Google 100 bucks a day, it also fills the index with 500 pages of pure crap that pisses off the searcher and lowers the brand value of Google. Not good.

So what’s to be done? If you want to make stable money with adsense, you need to really build up your sites. It’s not necessarily HOW much content you have on your site, but it’s more about the presentation of your content (though you need to have a certain amount of content on your site, of course). If you are tricking users into clicking on ads or offering the user nowhere to click but ads, that’s bad. If your site is so fucking ugly that your reader’s eyes scream in agony, that’s bad. And if your site is bare bones, that’s fucking bad.

Just build sites that offer easy navigation to the user. Sites that answer the user’s questions. Sites that link to relevant authority sites about the topic, sites that don’t have a crazy amount of ads.

I know there has been a few automated messages from google telling people to put more ads on your sites, but don’t take this as gospel to make your site an adspam site. If you can use the maximum 4 ads in a friendly, non spammy way, go for it. If your 4 ads are all above the fold and invasive to the user experience, don’t.

Adsense Myth 5: It’s easy to get your adsense account banned

Fact:Yes and No

no, it’s actually not. If adsense went around banning everyone who used it, they’d be filing Chapter 13 very soon. But there are a few easy ways to get your adsense banned:

1. Clicking on your ads regularly
2. Having someone click on your ads regularly
3. Breaking the TOS in some way (having gambling, porn, or other “naughty” content on with adsense
4. Delivering non-converting traffic

It’s #4 that I want to address here, since it may be news to a lot of you. Let’s talk a bit about it. Adsense is a CPC model. That means it’s a cost per click for the advertizer. You click, the advertizer pays for that click. Now, the advertizer is expected a certain return for a certain number of people who click. Just like you expect a certain number of people to click on an ad per set of people. Despite the seemingly random nature of the whole process, there actually is a very defined “ratio” of conversions. Now you can mess with this ratio with your site layout, the number of ads you have, how focused your content is to the topic, the desperation of the people searching, etc.

Now when a certain number of people click on an advertizer’s ad, they expect results. The could be a sale for every 10 people deliver via adwords, a lead generation, etc. When they pay for traffic but get no conversions from that traffic, they naturally get pissed. And they bid on less adwords or stop altogether. And google loses customers. This is bad folks.

If any of you work with lead generation, you’ll know what I’m talking about. You might be able to induce targeted traffic to fill out leads for an advertizer, but if those leads don’t end up converting for the company paying for the leads, they will cut your ass from the program.

The same goes for google. If your sites (or some of your sites) REGULARLY deliver ad click traffic that does not convert for the advertizer, you risk having your account banned.

Now the question is, HOW DO YOU DELIVER NON CONVERTING AD TRAFFIC

Adsense is generally pretty good at delivering converting traffic. It’s highly targeted for the most part. BUT this is where the layout of your site is VERY important. If you throw ads that masquerade as a navigation bar (vertical or horizontal), you are playing a dangerous game. Folks, you don’t want people to click on an ad thinking they are navigating to a page on your site. They won’t convert for the advertizer. Get enough of this non-converting traffic and you put your account at risk of a ban.

Simple, right? That’s why it’s much preferable to have a clean website layout where only the people who actually WANT to click on the ad will click on it. Integrate that ads rather than have them shout out from above the fold. Those kinds of layouts have higher CTR, but the traffic is often less converting for the advertizer.

Xfactor style themes and other so called “adsense” themes are created by idiots who don’t really understand the simple concept: don’t fucking bit off the fingers from the hand that feeds you.

Nough said.

Adsense Myth 6: Good Content = Higher Adsense CPC

Fact: The opposite actually

The sad reality is that crap content almost always has a better adsense CTR than does good content. I’m sure a lot of you folks who work with adsense have already realized this. But for those who don’t know, here’s why.

When you write an article that really engages the reader and does a pretty damn good job of answering all the questions, the reader won’t be as inclined to click on an ad and will spend more time reading your article.

I’ve found that a higher bounce rate almost always means a higher adsense CTR. This is why it can be so hard for those used to earning adsense money with crap content and spammy themes. If you switch to reader-friendly themes and fill out your sites with good content, your CTR may tank by 50 to 75 percent.

Now, this does not mean I’m advocating producing shitty sites to make money with adsense. I’m just saying it’s a lot easier to make money with adsense by producing shit. But it’s not a stable way to earn money. I’ll take the loss in CTR in trade for a site that stays indexed.

Adsense Myth 7: Adsense is the Best Way to Make Money Online

Fact: Adsense is in fact only good for certain niches

If at all possible, it’s better to try to convert your traffic with affiliate sales or lead generation over adsense. Almost always, you can make more money per same amount of traffic. The fact is that adsense is the lazy man’s way to make money. But it’s not necessary the most profitable way to make money.

Adsense is the middle man. Cutting it out gives more of the revenue chunk to YOU.

When internet marketing, keep one thing in mind: the monetization method that requires the LEAST commitment from the user will convert the best. But not all conversions are equal.

• CPC (Cost Per Click, aka adsense ) requires the least commitment by the reader. They click and that’s all.
• CPA (Cost Per Action, aka lead generation) requires a bit of commitment by the reader. They click and commit some sort of action, one that usually does not involve spending money.
• CPS (Cost Per Sale, aka clickbank, commision juncion, amazon, etc)  requires the most commitment: the reader must spend money.

But just because the CPC can generate the highest CTR, doesn’t mean that you will earn the most money.

Think of it this way: if 1000 visitors have a 5% CTR with adsense with an average CPC of .30, that’s going to be $15 dollars earned from that 1000 visitors.

Now say you replace adsense with a link that sends users to a form they can fill out (a lead). You have a 2% conversion and 4 dollars per lead. That’s 20 people who fill out the form and a total of $80 dollars earned.

For CPC, you might have a 1% CTR on a product that’s earns you 30 dollars a sale. 1000 visitors might net you $300 dollars! Hell even if it’s something like 5 dollars earned per sale, that’s still $50 dollars!

So as you see, adsense is often the montetization method that earns you the LEAST amount of money per given number of visitors.

So Ben, tell me exactly what to do here! Sorry, won’t do that. You are going to have to figure this out yourself. Now here’s a few rules of thumbs you can follow that I’ll toss out there for you. Even better, I won’t send you to a spammy sales page and charge you $37 dollars in WSO fees for it.

• Rule of Thumb 1: For traffic with a need that does not convert with sales, lead generation (less commitment) usually does well.
• Rule of Thumb 2: For target commercial traffic (product searches, health problems, etc) , CPS almost always earns you more money as the traffic will open up their wallets.
• Rule of Thumb 3: For everything else, Adsense works best

In case you didn’t understand what the fuck I was talking about, here it is in plain man’s English: Monetizing ONLY with adsense is often the way to make the least amount of money. So make sure you experiment with OTHER revenue streams for your niches. You might find you can double your earnings (or more) just by switching to some other revenue method.

So there we go, 7 Adsense Myths that I’ve seen floating around the web that, in my opinion, are (mostly) wrong.

Another Rant About Mini Sites

Now there were a few BIG changes to the Google algorithm a few months ago (MAYDAY as some people call it). There were, in fact, two updates – one that happened around the end up May and one that happened June 3^rd. There were a few major changes last month too that rocked the boat. Google is really starting to crack down on exact domain names — so if using exacts is your sole strategy for ranking, you better change that.

Mayday was designed to cut the crap from the index; it specifically targeted micro niche sites that have been developed a certain way. Oh, I know that’s not exactly what Google official said, but in reality, a lot of people saw their entire mini site empire crumble. From what I’ve seen, a lot of micro sites lost anywhere between 40-50 percent of all long tail traffic, due to sharp drops in rankings. I have one friend who lost 80 percent of all traffic.

I’m not positive exactly what sort of criteria G man used to knock sites back, but here’s a couple things I’ve noticed that may have been “looked for” by Google when targeting sites:

1. Sites with less than 10 pages of content
2. Sites that had the same theme (especially that Xcrapter theme that pretty much ruined the mini site model for everyone)
3. Titles scrapped just from keyword tool
4. Very few backlinks (less than 100)
5. Individual pages lacking backlinks
6. Backlinks from the same sources
7. Exact keyword domains
8. No outgoing links (to authority sites)

Yep, that describes about 95% of the mini sites out there. There are some crapo mini sites that did escape the update/s and are still kicking around. Probably not for long and certainly not if they leave a big wide footprint of sorts.

Where does this leave you? As I’ve been saying the past few posts, focus on quality not quantity. It’s still important to cast your net wide in terms of the number of web properties, but you should really focus your efforts on a core of sites you can really build up. The days of the 10 page set-it-and-forget it mini site are coming to an end, folks. You might get away with ultra thin mini sites for a while, but you are always going to risk waking up in the morning to find your sites gone from the index.

Now you’ve seen me rant quite a bit about the whole mini site thing. And I still get people asking me the following: “Can You still make money with mini sites.” So for the last time, here is my answer: Yes, but it’s not worth it. Mini sites are coming under heavy fire from google these days (just do a search, read a post on my forum about it,  or other forums — stories of mass site deindexes are cropping up everywhere).  I have a friend of a friend who actually lost 1.5k a day in adsense with a mass deindex about a month ago. Bad times indeed for some.

The proof is in the pudding as some people would say: Google has taken a clear stance against these type of sites and by pursuing this path seriously means you are going to lose. In a Me Vs. Google battle, I’d put my money on the guy with 50 billion in play cash and thousands of PH.D’s to order around.

Now this leads to another question that’s on a lot of people’s minds: Should You Pursue Adsense as a valid Revenue Model

Answer: Yes, but it’s a bad idea to solely pursue Adsense as a revenue source. Adsense is the easiest way to make money because you can simply do:

1. Basic Keyword Research
2. Write Targeted Posts
3. SEO your site to the front page
4. Get clicks

Pretty easy when it comes down to it. You don’t have to mess around with learning how to write a good cover letter, learning the ins and outs of marketing to people, hunting and testing various affiliate programs, etc.

However, Adsense is not necessarily the “best way” to make money as I detailed in a previous section of this post. Folks there are a number of other revenue models out there to look at:

• CPA (lead generation)
• CPS (affiliate selling)
• Direct Stores (drop shipping, etc)

I see people so caught up in the Adsense thing they miss the trees from the forest. Guys, to survive in this game you need to diversify. If most of your money comes from one source (especially Adsense), I weep for you. Something bad is going to happen, eventually. Apply the same principal you apply to investing: DIVERSIFY. If you had all your money in a single stock, that wouldn’t be smart, would it? The same thing goes for putting all your passive income eggs in the basket called Adsense. Way too much risk, especially with what’s been going on. To most new comers, I would say it’s actually better to ignore adsense as a model until you make a full time income with affiliate selling first. Way safer.

I may, if I feel generous, talk about how to break into the CPA or CPS market as I’ve been doing a lot of experiments with these models the past 7 months. But I’ll have to be in a particularly good mood to do so.

Internet Marketing Software That’s Not Bullshit

Now here’s the recommendation part of the post where I try to convince you to sign up with my affiliate link for various services. Hey, for this much keyboard pushing, I deserve a few bucks. Despite the fact that I am attempting to make money by pushing IM products on you, I actually do use and abuse these programs myself.

The Best Spinner

Any internet marketer who’s serious about backlinking is going to need to get acquainted with spinning. I’ve recommended Magic Article Rewriter before, but the new kid on the block, The Best Spinner, is hands down, the-size-of-Texas better. It’s 70+ bucks a year, but worth every penny. My highest recommendation for it.

Sick Submitter

Forget about any of those other article directory submitters, rss bots, or profile link builders. Sick submitter is your all in one SOURCE for automated backlinks. It’s a bit complicated to use, but if you master it, you can be the Darth Vader of backlinks. Well, well worth the 21 bucks a month you pay. Get it and you have no need for bookmarking demon, article demon, magic article submitter, rssbot, dedicated profile builders, and any other stuff like that

Ubot

UBOT is hands down my FAVORITE solution on the web to automating your workflow. If you are not a programmer type, don’t bother spending the 249 or so bucks to buy it. But if you are willing to spend a month or two learning HOW to create your own bots, you won’t have to buy another piece of internet marketing software again. Anything you can do in your browser can be automated. The kicker is YOU have to create the bots yourself to do it and that can take some time. But in the right hands, Ubot is deadly. If your interested, use my coupon code to knock of 50 bucks from the price: BUBU

If there is enough interest, I may create a recommendation thread for some of the better internet marketing programs. Such programs have their place and are useful, but they are not the end all, be all of backlinking. Not by far. It seems that most people don’t want to go the old fashioned way of building manual, quality backlinks. A pretty big mistake, in my opinion since these are the best backlinks you can get, better than hundreds of spam links by far. Still software can help a great deal, especially if you have many sites.

And  On to Other Things..

Ok, that’s it for now folks. I was only going to do a 500 word post and it’s already topped in at almost 3500 words. I think I’ve opened my big mouth enough for the time being and my fingers hurt. So I’m going to go do something that makes me money now.

Make sure you check out the new forum, which I completely overhauled with updated software. I’m also going to soon change the layout of this site. No need to have an ugly theme on it now.

Oh yes, I’m heading off abroad in 3-5 months again, this time for a year of travel across south east asia, Europe, and Africa. I’m going to be creating a new website detailing my travels and internet marketing while abroad. Should be interesting to read, I hope. I’ll let you know when it goes live. A few other projects I might share about later too.

Next post, when I feel like writing it, is titled “Dirty SEO”. Have a Merry Christmas in case I don’t get around to posting before then. Should be interesting.

Go Make Money Online,

Ben

Hey guys. I’m a few days away from launching on a 2 month trip to the Tibetan and Middle Eastern parts of China and thought I’d get a post out before going.  I’ve been chugging away, doing my thing. I thought I would bring this experiment I started a few months ago  to a conclusion.  Let’s take a look at that one adsense project I’ve been nurturing the past 4 months.

As you can see, 4 months of hard work flushed down the toilet. Not all channel were added, so the account was making a bit more than the ~100 bucks a day that was listed there. It does suck because I was probably looking good to get that account up to 130-150 bucks a day by the end of this month — that’s a nice 35-50k a year. Until that deindex. As you see, the sites are earning 1/10 of what they were earning only because of Bing and Yahoo. Google graciously gave all my sites under this adsense account the Spammer VIP treatment. It took the adsense mini site model for a good ride. But, as I’ve found, that ride leads to a dead end. I wasn’t going to post any more income reports, but I figured I’d show the final result of that experiment.

If you’ve been following this site, I’ve been a huge proponent of the adsense mini model, practically since I’ve started this blog. That model is no longer valid. If you want to read my 4000 word post about why this is the case, feel free. But for those who are impatient or who want to get back to producing MFA sites, I’ll just say this: don’t bother with putting adsense on a lot of sites, you’ll lose your sites and maybe your account. Simple. For those who want to read on, you’ve been warned.

The future is changing folks and it’s time to adapt and evolve. It’s pretty clear from Google’s actions that the Adsense/Google search team is on the rampage to clean up the SERP’s. Any site that remotely looks like an MFA site is likely to get tossed out of the index and the owner’s adsense account banned.

The problem is not that the mini sites with adsense can’t make money anymore, the problem is that it’s too easy to make money if you know what you are doing. If you know how to optimize your pages, get targeted backlinks, etc your little mini site can often crush more general authority sites for single keyword rankings.

I want to be clear here: I don’t think there’s anything “wrong” with putting out shit to make money.  If there’s a way to game game Google to make money, well that’s what Internet Marketers do. Good or bad,  that’s the system in place. I can say my sites did offer decent content — all hand written and pretty informative content. My stuff was certainly better than a lot of the shit out there, that’s for sure. However, when I look at the cost versus benefit ratio at the moment, the cost part is outweighing  the benefit part. Because of this, I say just go with the flow and produce a limited amount of high quality, helpful sites that rake in the traffic. You are far less likely to run into problems over the long run. I’m not saying don’t work the adsense mini site model. I know for most of you, this is/was the model you have been pursing. I’m basically saying I personally don’t believe it’s worth pursuing — but, hey, if you think you can make the gold using them, it’s no skin off my teeth.

Fact: the made-for-adsense model has become too popular. Grizzly has blogged extensively about this model for years, Court’s set up an entire school around this model,  I’ve been talking about it for about a year, and there are a number of so called gurus who sell popular “mini site” ebooks floating around on the web. When something becomes too popular, it no longer becomes effective. And this adsense mini site model is now coming under some heavy fire from Google — so heavy that I’m throwing in the towel with mini sites.

Keep in mind I am not saying the mini site with Adsense model is not effective for making money — It’s just not stable at all. There is a big difference. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want  to rely on a steady income when I’ve got a couple dogs, a couple mortgages, cars, and a couple wives (just joking ) to pay for. If your income has a big fucking chance of going BOOM at any second, that’s not the sort of passive income I want. Though, if you are say a black hatter, that’s you’re entire model. I prefer stability.

Having a few thousand internet marketers monopolize a portion of the search with zillions of MFA sites doesn’t seem to be the direction Google wants to go with its search. Google has no qualms about treating your sites like vermin if they class them as MFA.

Now I’ve been contemplating this post for about a week now. It’s kind of an irony that some of the other MMO bloggers are on the same page as I am in regards to this. In Grizzy’s latest post about Making Money with Adsense, he reveals why MFA sites are pretty much finished as a stable model. The #1 ranking blog (a blogger blog too) for the term Make Money Online was recently deleted by the blogger.com spam team – ostensibly because the blog was “spam”, which is not, but really because the blog talked about how to optimize made for adsense style sites. And then there’s me – I’ve had my last 4 months of work knocked out in an instant by Google – hundreds of sites completely deindexed last week. They were nice enough to leave my adsense account intact, nice of them, especially since I’m sure the account is flagged with a “let’s inspect all news sites added each month”. No thanks, I’ll pass.

Some of the other bloggers have gotten some sort of warning from Google, but I got the hammer and nothing else. A deindex is a severe blow – worse than getting your adsense account banned. Your traffic pretty much dies to all sites.

I want to build a business that’s not in imminent danger of being wiped out overnight. Churning out a zillion little sites with the intention of making it with adsense is NOT a stable model.

If you go the mini site model, it takes a shit load of sites before you can really pull in the cash. And this is exactly what Google doesn’t want – a shit load of MFA sites clogging up the index. To make money with this model, you need to make a lot of sites and by doing so, you end up putting yourself in danger of losing it all at any second. Sorry, that type of model doesn’t fly for me. I can make a killing with these types of sites – I have it down to pretty much a science now when it comes to making these sites make money. But, I’d rather spend my time to build something that offers some real value.

And that’s why the MFA model is dead – there is no inherent value to these sites. If you’ve got 5 or 6 posts of hastily rewritten ezine article content (and the sad fact is that 95% of all content churned out by internet marketers tends to be a rewrite of someone’s rewrite of someone’s brother’s hired writer’s rewrite who rewrote some PLR content, which just rewrote some articles from About.com), a big honking ad bar under the title, a plain (or ugly) theme, and a bar bones sidebar, you’ve got a MFA site.

You can argue till you’re blue in the face that the quality of your content is so good that your site is not a MFA site. I’ll tell you right now, the person inspecting your sites does not give a fuck about how informative your 4 page site is or the style of your writing. If your  site even has a hint that it’s MFA site, your entire account and all sites on that adsense account are at risk. The sad thing is that you might have 80 sites that are pretty good, stellar even (though I’m hard pressed to believe you actually have time to create 80 fantastic sites — no one has that kind of time) but if the few sites the inspector looks at happen to fall in the “my 20 shitty sites I forgot about a couple years ago” category, ALL your sites might get the boot. The adsense/search review team don’t usually check out more than a few sites on your account — they certainly won’t look at say 100 sites, especially if they all look exactly the same…

There is a pretty big debate about what constitutes a MFA site. There are a lot of people making a living out there teaching other people to make a living with adsense. Make a site, slap on adsense, repeat with the next site. Maybe a year or three later, you’ve got yourself a bit of an income.

I don’t support this model anymore because I know it’s not sustainable. Sure, you might get away with it for a while but you are eventually going to lose your sites. As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t think telling people this model is a house of sand is going to make me popular, both with people who have a vested interested in promoting this model and people who are hoping “make it’ with this model, but that’s the reality.

Now, I should address this question here before I get it in the comments: “how many sites is too much?” My answer is, how many real, legit sites can you actually create? I’m not talking those 5-6, page set-and-forget sites, but living sites that are updated semi regularly and don’t feature McArticles that you churn out in 10 minutes (or some poor Joe in Abustakeshumastan churns out for 5 bucks). My bet is that you’d be hard press to maintain 50-75 sites like this. Some might be able to do it, some might not. In my case, Adsense only belongs on large sites with high value now — the so called authority site, if you want to call it that. If you want me to throw a ballpark figure out there, let’s say for the average person 20 sites or less on an adsense account (i’m not counting hundreds of hubs, IB’s or whatever other shared web 2.0 you put on, those seem to be fine). Most people not trying to milk the adsense mini site model don’t have more than 20 sites anyways, so by virtue of just having a shit load of domains with adsense, you risk become flagged as one of those MFA spammers.

So, aim for value with your sites now. Wow, I might be suggesting something very un-IM here: actually try and deliver some value. Value guys, does not come from rewriting ezines, it comes from delivering something new — if not in information then the way it’s delivered. If you want to write about midget thongs, well hey, maybe check out a few circus books about midget thongs and try and become a legitamate expert about that topic — you might find you can actually write your own articles. And mini sites, as far as I’m concerned, don’t offer any sort of value to the searcher — they (usually) create another barrier between the user and what they often want (legit info, products, etc).

People who defend this model will go to great lengths telling you how their mini sites are not made for adsense. I call bullshit. If you have 20+ sites and you’ve created them fairly quickly, they are MFA, no matter what you say. Any sort of adsense site that’s churned out in a sort of factory style is not a legit site. I don’t care if that’s 100 sites a month or 10 sites a month.

I’m not Google guys and I can’t read the mind of the google employee who may decide whether to crush your sites or not. However, YOU KNOW when you’ve created a made for adsense site. To have a site stick around with adsense, you need to create some real value. Churning out a few bullshit articles that you have no idea what the fuck you are writing about or paying 3-5 bucks an article to someone else who has no fucking idea about the topic either is NOT the way to go about this business.

This is why the so called authority broad authority sites like About.com and niche authority sites get such blanket trust ranking from Google – the content is informative, reader friendly, and importantly, not written to fucking score those clicks!

I’ve made a few posts about this on my forum, but I don’t think a lot of people really understand. You tell people you’ve been deindexed and they immediately go back to their thin sites and add another one or two posts of rewritten, bullshit information on the same MFA theme and feel nice and secure.

That’s not the way to do it folks. My opinion is that instead of spending a shitload of time building of a shitload of crap, spend a shitload of time building a handful of quality sites.

Now before everyone get’s paranoid about their 20 MFA sites, if you’ve got a handful of sites MFA  and you are not making some serious coin, then it’s unlikely that your account will be flagged for an inspection. I’ve heard other people talk about 100 or 200 bucks a day bringing a visual. In my case, my account had broken the 100 mark and 2 days later all sites on that account were deindexed.

I’ve talked to 5 other people who make money online and they’ve all lost their money making sites the past year too. In every instance, they had Adsense on the sites taken down! In many of the cases, these people had 50 or more unique articles on their sites and the content was informative, etc. However, all these people had dozens of sites on the same adsense account with similar style layouts (though different themes).

I’ve concluded that if you have a lot of sites with adsense and you start to pull some coin, you are probably going to get your sites removed, no matter if you’ve got a lot of content or not. If Google feels you are creating websites specifically to make money from the search and it looks like you are repeating that same formula over and over, you’ll lose your sites, no matter how much content you shove on a site.

Now since people always want to know the How’s and the Why’s, here are 10 things you can do to get  your sites deindexed. Guys, I don’t work for Google and I can’t say any specific one of these can cause problems, but I do know from my own experience and the experience of friends who have been spanked by google that these are some of the elements that may have caused problems with losing sites and accounts.

1.  Less than 10 pages of quality, informative, and non BS content.

It’s definetly helpful to have more than 10 pages of content (most “thin” sites don’t have 10 pages, but 1-6 pages). But…..This alone won’t save you, I had 3 page sites removed, I had 6 page sites removed. I’ve talked to more than a few people with site that had 30 unique article sites get deindexed). I’ve talked to a number of people who had 50 page sites deindexed, just because the site had a MFA style layout. If you’ve got an information rich site that’s poor on the presentation of that information (spammy ads blocking the text, ads looking like menu bars, etc), the amount of content you have might not help.

2.       Same Theme on All Sites
This is a big one. If you are putting the same theme on all your websites, god helps you. This is a huge sign of a MFA clone factory going on. I can’t tell you for sure that just having the

same theme on 30 websites will get your sites removed from the index, but the people who deindex sites for a living are not stupid people. If you see someone putting the same theme on multiple sites, they certainly are not putting a lot of TLC into that site or they are trying to mass produce sites – a big no no these days with Google.

3.       A MFA or SEO Theme (especially a well known ones)

There are a few themes floating around that everyone seems to use for adsense. Do NOT use these themes. Any theme by bloggers in the MMO or SEO niche, don’t use. Don’t use that Grizzly theme that’s been floating around for a couple years, don’t use any of those SEO themes produced by members of the MMO community. Don’t throw on that stupid theme that seems to be on every fucking exact keyword domain out there. These themes usually have big footprint AND it ties your sites to the whole MFA system – something you definitely don’t want to be associated with if you sites are getting inspected. You can bet even quality sites that use these themes are likely to be associated with the MFA crowd on inspection. Use unique themes for EACH site, themes that are optimized for user experience and not clicking! That means those big honking ad bars under the title — think about removing. 2-3 adds per page, remove. Bare bones layout, don’t do it! Google has and WILL remove your sites just because you have a certain theme on.

4.       Rip Titles out of the Keyword Tool

Ok, we’ve all done it. But don’t do it now. You want to write keyword optimized posts about keywords and the best way to go about that is to use the exact keyword phrases only, right? Right if you want torank. Wrong if you want to get deindexed. As good as writing titles for SEO is for rankings, it’s also a good sign that your site is MFA.

Let’s see, if I’m writing about “Midget Thongs” and I write five posts with “Child Midget Thong, Childs Midget Thong, Child Midget Thongs, Midget Thong for Child, Chidren’s Midget Thong and Kids” it’s pretty fucking obvious these posts are not written with the reader in mind. Don’t do this shit – it’s a one way ticket to the deindex hell. Use real titles that your English teacher might be proud of. You can still incorporate a few choice keywords into the mix and still write a good title. But don’t make all your titles seem like a copy and paste right from the keyword tool.

5.       SEO Writing

Repetitive and clunky inclusion of long tail phrases, bolding of the keywords, always including an awkward keyword in the paragraph and conclusion of the article, etc. This might work wonders for ranking, but it’s annoying for readers and you can bet it’s something you don’t want the google  gods reading over when trying to decide whether they should ban your little ass from the SERPS. Write something that’s actually helpful, something that sounds natural, please.

6.       Use Same Hosting Account

If you guys have a lot of sites, please oh please don’t put them all on the same hosting. You might think you’re safe but it’s easy for google to deindex all your sites just based on this criteria. I suspect google’s formular for deindexing goes something like this: MFA looking site, lots of them with similar layouts, same hosting account = BAN. Even if you don’t use adsense and something like amazon,  you should break up your sites into 20-30 sites per hosting account.

7.       Put all sites under the same adsense account

If you’ve read this far, this should be pretty obvious to you by now — I’ve been talking about it for 3000 words. In one word, don’t have lots of sites under the same adsense account. Just…don’t. If you’ve got a lot of sites and you’re a stubborn fucker who still insists the adsense mini site model is the way to go, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. You’ll still get banned eventually, but it will take longer.

8.       Too Many Ads

More is not always better guys. I’ve found that having a single ad can sometimes make more money than having more ads (this is not a set fact, it can vary depending on theme and niche of course) — and I suspect you get all  the higher paying ads if you use a single ad bar instead of like 3. I like to opt for one or two ads  these days. I can tell you if the ratio of ads to content is on the low end for content, your site is a MFA. In fact, as much as like the CTR of putting the ad right below the title bar, this “above the fold” approach may actually be too aggressive. It’s certainly one of the signs of a MFA. I’m not saying you can’t put that ad right below the title, but you better be careful that there is more for the user to click on (and see) than just an ad.

9.        Ads Pretending to Be Menu Bars

MFA right there. If people are clicking on your ads by accident, you can bet your site’s crossing into MFA country. If people click on an ad by accident or because they think they are clicking on one of your menus and end up at an ad, they won’t likely convert for the advertiser and Google doesn’t like this. Plus, it’s bad user experience. Make a CLEAR distinction — either by adding an “advertiser” note or making some other way to distinguish menus and ad.

10.      Use Adsense on Your Sites

Yup, the easiest way to get your sites deindexed is to…drums roll…use Adsense. You cut your chances down remarkably of ever getting sites deindexed just by not using adsense on your sites. All sites that have your adsense ID on easily spotted by google. Indeed, it’s a great way for them them to weed out all that crap — simply target guys who are making a certain amount of money with adsense for a visual review. Deindex, repeat. Maybe google employees get paid by the dozen (deindexed)sites? Who knows. Adsense is great guys — I’m not saying don’t use it — you certainly can make a lot of money. But for sites that are…well…thin, it’s probably not a good idea anymore.

What does this mean and where do we go?

The bottom line is that Google does NOT like people like us, people who use their own keyword tool (which was designed for ADWORDs btw) and knowledge of how their algorithm works to spit out sites that are manufactured only to draw in clicks. They don’t like the whole mini site model, period. I believe in their eyes, your small site won’t ever have the sort of value or trust that a mega authority site will.

So where do we go from here? I’ll just say this: there’s a lot of other ways to make money besides adsense. If you want to use adsense – and yes, you can make a killing with adsense – focus on those high quality, large authority style sites. Based on what I’ve seen the past month, those are really the only type of sites that Google wants adsense on, which is ironic since the smaller, spammy types sites make them more money. Those are certainly the only type of sites I’m throwing my adsense ID on ever again. The era of the small adsense site is coming to an end and if you are hoping to churn out site after site with adsense, you are going to get your sites deindexed eventually. With adsense, the option is to either go big or get banned now. If you’ve got mini sites that show potential, the answer is simple: develop them. And diversify into other income streams. There are a lot of ways to make money besides adsense mini sites guys.

What about me? Well, I’m still making good money through other sites so I’m still alive and kicking hard, but for obvious reasons, I’m not going to talk about those here. I’m going all out and diversifying into affiliate sales from now on.

I’ve always been pretty good about posting my earnings because so many people here talk bullshit about how to make money but can’t back it up. I think if you are going to offer advice or teach anyone about making money online, you need to have some sort of pedigree to back it up – otherwise, you’re just one of those moneyless noobs haunting DSP or Warrior forums. I think I’ve proved my point that I can make money online and I won’t be demonstrating that anymore publicly.

Since I’ve started this blog, I’ve seen a lot of the same people asking the same questions over and over, waiting for me or others to give them the magical information to help them make it rich online. If in a full year you haven’t made some decent money online, there are some pretty good reasons: primarily, you’re not fucking working or you’re waiting for some magical information that will give you an easy ride. You can make it big in this biz, but don’t sit around a table waiting for the scraps that whatever “guru” throws your way. Go out and learn new stuff and work hard and results will come.  There are no shortcuts in this biz – the shortcuts that do exist won’t lead you to a stable income. If I have a get rich formula, I’m certainly not going to share it, because after 1000 of you use that formula, it’s not a get rich formula. This is why ANY sort of formula to make money online, by virtue of other people knowing it, becomes less and less effective. If you do the same thing based on a formula that other people know, you can bet your car that thousands of other people are too. That’s why people who “make it” usually keep their mouths shut about how they do so – they don’t want to bring down their entire income. Most of the “real” MMO bloggers stopped publicly talking about what they do and I’m now going to join the club.

Anyways, a long rambling post. Have a good one guys! I’ll be living out a backpack the next couple months, pursing my photography. I hope to have some winners to share when I get back.

Ben K

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.

1. Test new niches constantly
2. Backlinks. Backlinks. Backlinks.
3. Optimize Adsense placement to increase CTR (can mean difference between .20 a day and 4 dollars a day with a site).
4. 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)
5. Good keyword research (you will absolutely fail without this)
6. Spinning (this saves you a shitload of time when getting links if you do it right)
7. Blackhat can be your friend (but be careful!)
8. You (usually) need more than ezines, hubpages, infobarrel links to rank you high!
9. Get links from as many different IP’s as possible
10. Actually doing work online – not reading forums
11. 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

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.