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 That model is no longer valid.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.

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

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

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

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

The Story of Dorris and Dofus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Get Exact Keyword Domains

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

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

4. Create between 50-100 domains

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

6. PICK NICHES THAT OTHER MARKETERS DON’T HIT

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

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

Well, I lied about #8, sorry.

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

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

Adsense Sniper Progress

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

Here is my last week’s revenue:

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

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

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

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

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

Summer Palace, Sunset -- Beijing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyways…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s deconstruct this article.

#1) The CPM’s are Weak

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

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

#2) They Look Like Crap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers and Make Money Online

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

So a lot of changes the past two weeks.

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

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

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

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

How to Build an Authority Site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support blogs targeting long tails

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

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

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

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

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

Grizzly’s New Ebook, Sorta

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

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

Make Money Online Projects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Own Make Money Journey

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

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

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

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

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

Now go make money online

Ben Out

Ok, time for another update on my MMO.

I’m still working my job, somehow. I’m not exactly sure why – I make several times more online than I do at work. At this point, I think I’m probably losing a lot of money by staying at work, as I could at least double or triple my productivity (adding another 8-10 hours a day of work makes a difference). I’m hoping to make that move in a few months though.

Any of you who reach the point where you are making enough to quite your job will probably face the same issues.

Ok, let’s look at these updates.

Clickbank Snipers

Lo and behold, I’ve had my first Clickbank “sale.” It’s been about 2 months in coming. When I saw this first sale, the angels in heaven were  trumpeting and I ended up doing one of those Ashley-Simpson-gets-kicked-off-SNL dancing jigs — in a place where no one could witness it, of course.

You will notice I have one sale for 1.83.  This is one of those try it for 14 days for less than 2 bucks and we charge your credit card 100 bucks a month for life scams when you forget to cancel (and folks, you should cancel if that’s you who bought that product — got help you if you believed my bullshit sales pitch). So, in 14 days (less now), we’ll see if that person actually wizens up to this fact. Well, for the sake of the 75 bucks I’ll get, let’s hope they don’t.

I seem to be getting about 200-250 hops a month (I deducted some hops from a non CB sniper source). You will also notice there is another sale there — but that’s non-sniper related.

Note: “hop” is Clickbank’s name for when someone clicks on your affiliate link. In my case, people click on the link and end up on the merchant’s site. I find for every 100 people you get coming to your site, you may get 5-30 hops. This can, of course, vary depending on your sales copy, nice choice, etc.

I have a friend who sells 2-3 CB products a day with 400-500 hops each day, so considering I’ve probably had a grand total of 500-600 real hops in two months, the “sale” is in line with expectations. Your sales will depend on the quality of your cover letter and how responsive your market is. If you end up in the wrong market, or sell the wrong product, your CTR for sales is going to be crap. My 1 sale with 500 hops is < .02 CTR – pretty damn crappy. Keep in mind that you can still make money with low CTR sales if you have enough traffic. My trickle traffic is clearly not cutting it here. To find some success with these 20 or so sites I have, I will have to SEO them to the top of the google search for the main keyword.

Now, since my CTR is shit low, this tells me that my cover letter is shit, the affiliate product sucks, or the market is unresponsive, or I simply don’t have enough traffic for trickle traffic sales. My sniper site format is effective – I have a few friends using the same format and making thousands. I think it comes down to the market and traffic. It looks like I can only expect a sale every month or two with my traffic. Let’s say that’s 6 sales in a year. Potentially 120-400 bucks from those sales. Enough to cover the domain costs at least, but not enough to buy that brand new Porsche I was looking at the other day…

Solutions: More Traffic, Different Niches, Different Affiliate Products, Different Monetization

More Traffic

The More Traffic can be solved by actually doing some SEO on these — something I completely neglected — or by creating  a zillion more of these sites. This is a case where I don’t feel the volume approach is a good investment of my time. Say I create 200 sites — I may only potentially see about 133 hops a day. It could take me 3-5 days to see a sale. 6 sales a month (120-400 bucks) is not enough to entice me to spend 2 months pumping out 200 sites. Now, I know, proper market research and finding niches with lower competition could yeild far more hops. I’m probably only getting a couple people a day to most of those sniper sites, and only a few hops each couple days from each site. Getting ranked high, either through less competition niches or solid SEO, would mean a dramatic increase in the number of hops.

Different Niches

Different niches will yield different CTR. One niche may have a .02 CTR while another niche may have a 5% CTR. Folks, this is a Huge increase. Higher CTR means less traffic required to make money.

Different Affiliate Products

Not all affiliate products are the same.  With a program like CB, your generally send a person to a landing page. If the vender’s landing page sucks shit, people will not be convinced to buy the product. This is especially true with a sketchy ass program like Click Bank that generally sells Dry Ice Heater Pads for Cancer Sores. What are Dry Ice Heater Pads for Cancer Sores? I sure as hell don’t know — and if the person you are trying to sell said product doesn’t know and the affiliate’s landing page doesn’t do a stellar job at convincing a person to buy Dry Ice Heater Pads for Cancer Sores to give them true happiness, then you won’t get the sale.

Different Monetization

Don’t tie yourself to one form of monetization. If ClickBank sucks for a product, you may want to try eBay, if ebay sucks, Amazon may yeild better, etc. The more IM you do, the more you start to see which affiliate is best suited for each market. For example, CB is good for health/alternative health/MMO — basically products that are shitty and scam people from money. Amazon products were great for reviews — specifically something someone wants to buy new, but is willing to wait a few weeks for much cheaper price. And eBay tends to be good for hard-to-find products or products where people are interested in the absolute cheapest price — even if the product is used. One may affiliate may yeild very high CTR for a niche while another may bomb.

I may actually throw up adsense on all these sites and see what happens, or I may  try ebay out. The point folks, is to fucking test the niches with different affiliates. Always try new thigns — you never know what you are missing if you don’t.

About the CB Project and CTR

I’ve done zero SEO and these sites are basically only getting trickle traffic (a few a day). Some of the sites are getting 10-20 people a day. But overall, I don’t have enough traffic. You can make money off of trickle traffic for sure – I do it all the time with ebay and Adsense. However, you better make SURE your market is responsive and you need enough volume to make that trickle traffic amount to something significant.

Based in my experiences, you need a CTR of 5-20% to do well with trickle traffic. The standard 1% CTR will make you shit money unless you have hundreds of sites. Think of it this way. If your CTR is 1% and you have 100 domains bringing in 100 people a day, you can expect 1 sale/click or whatever. With affiliate sales, that sale will be 20-40 bucks standard. With Adsense, you are going to get at most only a couple bucks.

If it takes 1000 domains to get 1000 people (a grossly low estimation by the way), you can expect 10 sales – and therefore, say 200-400 bucks a day. Not bad money eh?

However, if you end up in wildly unresponsive markets, such as my CB sites, and your CTR end up like .02%, you better divide those profits from 1000 sites by 1/5, which gives you 40-80 bucks a day. A livable income, but for the amount of work it takes for 1000 sites, not fucking worth it.

What does this tell you? You better be fucking sure you can get decent CTR for your sites if you want to rely on trickle. If you end up in the wrong markets, simply massing flinging out 100’s and 1000’s of sites won’t yield you good returns.

Back to CTR. Not too many people want to make 1000 sites to score 40-80 bucks a day. But what if your CTR is around 5%? That means you need 1/5 the sites to make the same money. In this case, we could have 200 sites that make 40-80 bucks a day. Or if the CTR is 10%, 100 sites  that make a combined 40-80 bucks a day.

Now, it’s a bitch to estimate the CTR of any market — it could be so many things — affiliate product, site format, your cover letter/sales pitch/writing, the market itself, etc. The only way is to start launching sites into a market and test to see what the market response is. If the response is good, you can expand into that niche because you have a good idea what the CTR may be.

You actually need to get a decent amount of traffic to really tell — you can do this buy launching an adwords campaign for the term (this could be very expensive if you fuck it up, so I don’t suggest newbies do this), spend a few months SEO’ing a couple sites high to get a lot of organic traffic, or just taking a gamble and pumping out a lot of sites in the niche and see what happens over a few months. Anyways, some food for thought.

So with all this talk about different affiliates yielding different results for some markets, let’s take a look at at a real world example of trying a  different approach to affiliate marketing through another affiliate company: ebay.

Now, the idea behind ebay — or at least my strategy to selling with ebay — is to create a zillion little sites, all geared around topics and keywords that have people already holding their credit cards. My theory is that if a person reaches your ebay site who is looking for a specific product or kind of product and they are presented with ebay pictures of that product/type of product with low prices shown (i.e. auction format), they are likely to click on the link.

Ebay nicely deposits a 7 day cookie into that person’s browser — so even if they don’t buy anything that day, they may well buy something on ebay in a week and you get a sale, commission, or whatever.

With ebay, the uglier the site, the more likely people will click on the pretty pictures. This was the theory behind BANs and ND — a theory that I’ve seen works. However, the problem is that google hates this and is always on the warpath to beath these sites down with the deindex stick. However, ugly and spammy is not the only way — you can still make very good money with ebay by using a wordpress ebaystore plugin like phpBay to create ebay sites with good content that brings targeted traffic to your site (this is actually something I am personally going to do. Phase 1 of my ebay experiment was ND. Phase 2 is to create quality ebay mini sites with phpBay).

The beauty of eBay is that you don’t need a freaking million hops/visitors or whatever to get commision. You simply point a few people a day  towards ebay and watch your commisions rise. This is quite different to ClickBank or Amazon affiliate selling — with those types of affiliate sites, you need to do a pretty damn good job to convince the reader to buy a product — this is especially harder to do with CB than amazon, since CB is so damn shady while Amazon has the brand power and trust.

Let’s look at my Niche Devil ebay stats.

Niche Devil Update

Niche Devil? Remember that?– the supposed scam Vic was putting over his loyal followers to rip them off.  While there was war raged on Grizzly’s MMO blog and Splork’s Make Money Online blog, I figured the program had some merit. Vic has done a lot of good things for the MMO community, so I trust what he has to say.  I predicted that putting several hundred out there would in fact make money based off the trickle traffic. I ended up buying a couple hundred domains and putting about 120-130 of these up. I still have another 100 domains to put up.

Let’s take a look how my ND sites are doing the past 10 days.

The force is strong with this one, yes?

Not bad, I’ve made over 200 bucks in 10 days. It took these sites about a month and a half to warm up – but I’ve made a total of about $300 so far, 75% of that the past 10 days. I paid 97 bucks for the software, so I’ve already paid it off and earned an additional 200 bucks. The revenue has skyrocketed this month. Based off what I’ve seen, I should be seeing anywhere between 400-2k this month from ND alone.

An additional benefit of ND: I’ve explored so many niches and found many that look like there is some serious potential with ebay. So I’m deploying my own ebay snipers into some of the best niches I’ve found with ND. Unlike ND though, these are sites that can pass the visual inspection by google.

ND sites are my real time “research” into the best eBay markets. I’m adding an additional 800 or so ND sites

Now, the only thing I am worried about is whether those sites can stay in the G man’s index. Some of my ND sites have been deindexed but the majority seem to have survived Google’s war on affiliate sites though. I hope the new sites I put out stay indexed.

So a message to Vic: Anytime you want to sell some shitty ass software to “rip” people off – let me know, I’ll be first in line to buy it.

If you have missed Niche Devil, I’ve heard the wordpress plugin Caffinated Content does similar things, in regards to populating your blog with insta content like  Niche Devil, but it’s less spammy looking and with far more legit content. I have not used this program yet, but check out this  forum post about it.

You basically add in a keyword and hit a button to populate your blog. Note, you will need an ebay store plugin like phpBay or some amazon store plugin.

I’m actually thinking about getting this plugin and pumping out 100 sites to test it out. Anyone want to join me for a ride?

As an aside, I saw a lot of dithering in the MMO community about ND. And not just ND – about everything. Typical story here – people afraid to risk time and effort on something that might pan out.

I’ve had people asking me if it’s worth spending 100 bucks for 10 domain names, since they might “lose” money. I’ve had people ask if it’s worth spending the 7 bucks a month for a hosting account rather than using blogger blogs.

One thing I’ve noticed: people are afraid of failure here. Based on the questions I get in my forum and in email, people don’t want to try something unless there are guaranteed results.

You know what guys? If you are not willing to take risk, get the fuck out of MMO. You won’t make it if you are not willing to risk your time on some new strategies. I don’t care what anyone in the MMO community tells you – no “formula” is going to make you money.

I keep on hammering on this “no magical formula” point over and over every post I write, because I see time and time again, people want that “get rich quick” pill. Or if not get rich, a guaranteed “retire in Thailand” pill with 6 months of work.

It’s not that simple guys. Not by far.

There are methods that can help lead you to the right path, but at the end of the day, it’s your own god damn brain and hard work that will make you money. I keep on having people ask me to open up some sort of SEO School or pay program to teach you my methods.

What methods are those exactly? My method is as follows: a willingness to work 10x harder than anyone else in this game, the fact I am not afraid to try new things, not too-cheap assed to spend money on domains, tools, and outsourcing to improve my productivity, and a healthy understanding of SEO.

No school is going to make you the money online  guys, it’s your own hard work and willingness to get down and dirty. I’ve seen plenty of people learn all the right techniques, get told all the right things, but at the end of the day, they still don’t make money.

One of the causes for this, I feel, is that people who don’t make money get stuck with indecision and are afraid to take risks. I’ll tell you something I’ve learned: the bigger the risk (maybe your time, maybe your money, etc), the more you can gain. If you are willing to take the “pain” that comes with fucking building a lot of sites and doing SEO, then you won’t see any “gain.”

People, come-on, if you are fucking afraid to risk 100 bucks on some domains and hosting to potentially make some serious money, then go work a no-risk job, maybe a teller at McDonalds or a dishwater at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

In this industry, the risks are pretty damn small – you are not throwing down thousands of dollars here on something that might cost you’re your home. If you are not willing to think big and risk your time (and maybe a little money, god forbid), then enjoy making pennies – it’s probably all you are ever going to make online.

Listen, I don’t talk bull shit to you guys and I never have. When I say take risks with time and money, I don’t do what 99.9% of the other MMO “experts” tell you how to make money. I show you how, with my own hard fucking work. Think of an idea and give it a shot — it may not work, but it just might.

I hope you can see that with some risk and a willingness to work your ass off, there are a lot of rewards. Anyways, back to business.

200 Ebay Snipers in 1 Month

Well, I’ve been really trying to diversify. My initial success into ebay indicates there is a lot of money to be made with these sites. I’ve taken a look at their new quality pricing index. They claim the new quality index is to help ensure the clicks are coming from quality sites.

Pure bullshit. I compared the new quality pricing system to my ebay and found that I’m making abut 190 bucks – a loss of 10 bucks from the original system. Last’s months’ ND earnings, according to the new quality system, actually doubled over the old system!

So, deliver what ebay wants: a lot of clicks from thin, spammy, affiliate sites – it’s exactly what they seem to want.

My legitimate eBay sites actually lost about 50% of their revenue. It seems like the new system fucks people over with big authority type sites that promote ebay products and reward mini ebay sites and thin affiliate sites.

Some notes about the new system, it seems that ebay does NOT give you commission from the sales anymore. From my observations, if you get 200 clicks a day and don’t sell anything big, you make more money with the new system. The old system seems to give you a percentage of the sale as commission or something, as a sale really adds a lot more to your quality score variable. With the new system, you don’t get the massive ARCU value that you did. But, with a lot of clicks and some activity (people sign up, a few small sales) you can still pull in 30-60 bucks a day if you know what you are doing.

Based on what I’ve seen, I think I can game the new system. I’m going to make 200 ebay sniper sites with actual legitimate content. I’m going to try to replicate what I’m doing with ND, but with legitimate sites. I have an idea how to make it work out in my favor. I’m hoping I can end up with 100-300 dollar ebay days with those sites.

For anyone interested, I’ll be using the phpBay wordpress plugin for my snipers — I’ve had good sucess with it in the past for ebay sales with a handful of blogs. I’d like to see what I can do with 200 of these.

I’m going to see if I can start this project next month, in tandem with my authority sites and Adsense blogger sniper project. I’m going to have to outsource the content for this project though, something that’s going to cost me thousands. Ah well, we’ll see if it’s worth the 4k I’m going to pay.

I see my 200 eBay snipers as more of a long term revenue generator than ND sites. I’ve seen you can make a hell of a lot of money with ND sites – but eventually all your ND sites may slowly get zapped by google. My hope is that legitimate, quality driven ebay snipers won’t get the deindex.

Adsense Snipers

I’m adding more and more each day. Still not at 100 sites yet, but I will be in 2 or so weeks, definitely by the end of the month. I’m trying to do 3 projects at once and they are each fighting for time.

We’ll take a look at how much these are earning at the end of the month. I’m definitely making more than I was before, on average. We’ll see how these do with 100 out there and more backlink work. After these 100, I’m going to work on 100 blogger blogs, then 100 pre-owned domain sniper sites. I’ve seen a lot of success during the first phase of this experiment, so I’m keen to see how I can do with all 300 – it will be interesting to compare how bloggers and pre owned domains do.

Authority Site Project

Well, I’ve got 75% of my content for my first authority sites project done. The preowned domain has been purchased and I’m waiting for full control. This is going to be a long term project. I want to slowly shift my long term focus to authority sites because, frankly, that’s exactly what Google wants. Most results in the search engines are dominated by those massive 200-500+ article authority sites.

Now, it’s my experience that a focused sniper site with a decent amount of content and good backlinks will beat an authority site for a single keyword every day. But, I’d rather have a massive site that can rank high right away for any keyword in a niche, rather than have to build an entire site full of content and wait for it to rank. Authority sites, once you get them going, are just way less fucking work.

I’m already looking at next month’s authority site project. I’ve got a stellar pre-owned domain I’m in the process of buying. It’s costing me about 2k, but the value I pay is worth it. I have not really talked about the importance of domain in any of my posts, but let me say that getting the right domain is huge, both for SEO and authority.

Well, that’s about it for today folks. If you haven’t checked out this site’s Internet Marketing Forum, make sure you do. Quite a bit of good information, and best of all, it’s free.

Enjoy your weekend and make money online.

Ben

New Make Money Online Forum

I’ve added a make money online forum to this site. I’ve been getting nonstop questions about MMO, IM, SEO, etc for months. I figure it’s would be easier for people if they could find answers in a forum (much easier than a blog), rather then me answering the same questions over and over (it’s hard because the information in a blog can be scattered). There are a couple MMO forums out there that I trust in terms of real MMO/SEO advice given out, but pretty much all of them are either private or paid forums.

And of course, all the “big” IM forums are pure crap – just pickup zones for fake MMO gurus. So if you have questions about anything related to this biz, I suggest you post them on this site’s new Make Money Online forum.

My hope is that in time a community will form and people can get the help they need from fellow marketers, not just myself. If you have a Make Money Online, SEO, or Internet Marketing question not related to a current post, I suggest you ask me through the forum now. I would rather have the answer out there for everyone to see — easier than answering the same question over and over.  I’ll be posting some tips, strategies, and some of my favorite IM tools on the forums as well — stuff that might not be on the blog, so it will be worth to have a browse once in a while.

Now, back to the topic at hand…

How to Increase Search Engine Ranking with SEO

So you want to rank your website? If you’ve ever heard anyone promising you instant ranking results — you’ve been lied to. Short of that person having a massive authority site to use as a link factory, no $99 SEO job is going to get your high on the SERPS for any keyword that has competition.

The good news is that you can indeed improve your search engine rank through search engine optimization. It’s not hard, but it takes work and time.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a combination of things. The three core things you can do to rank higher in the search engine results are:

1. Page Optimization for Keyword (On Page SEO)
2. Keyword targeted Content
3. Backlinks

However, if you want to rank your website, it really comes down to one thing: backlinks. If there is an equation, I would say it’s 70% backlinks, 20% content, and 10% on page SEO.

It’s very possible to rank a page for a keyword, even if that keyword is NOT in the content or the title, but used as the anchor text for backlinks. This tells you that on page SEO is not as important as backlinks, though it can certainly help, and in many cases, a lot.

Let’s walk through the two major steps you need to take to SEO a website to the top of the Search Engine Rankings:  On Page SEO and Backlink SEO.

On Page SEO
To rank for a keyword, you need to specifically target that keyword, either with your entire site (called a niche blog), or a page. Here are the steps

1. Use Your Keyword as the Title of the Page
- this is essential if you want to rank your page. Search engines place a lot of emphasis on the title of your webpage. If you are trying to rank for “Blue Widgets” but have “Green Donkeys” as the title of your page, you confuse the hell out of the search engines. Yes, you may still be able to rank for “Blue Widgets” if your content is focused about that topic, but why make things harder for the search engines. You will vastly improve your rank with a proper title. And here is the conflict between the blogger inside of you and the Internet Marketer. If you want to come up with a witty, human friendly title, that title is not something understood by the search engines. If you want to rank, you may have to sacrifice witty writing for writing that cater to the search engines. This is always a a difficult thing for some. The trick is to really balance between writing for SEO and writing for an audience.

- You can add more keywords to your title that are not the keywords you are targeting, but you need to include the keyword you are trying to rank for, preferably near the beginning of the title. If you are trying to target “How to Cure Cancer”, you can get away with “How to Cure Cancer Quickly”, or “How to Cure Your Cancer” or “5 Ways How to Cure Cancer.” You don’t want to have “10 Ways to Make Cancer Disappear”

2. Use Main Keyword through your site
If you are creating a niche blog focused about a specific keyword, you want to make sure you use that keyword across many different pages. If I have a site “how to cure cancer”, I would want to ensure that this phrase shows up in a lot of different pages — not just a single post/page. Having a targeted phrase show up across your whole site shows google that your site is all relevant to a single keyword — and you may be given more authority for that keyword.

2. Bold Main Keyword Once
Try to bold your main keyword once in the content of your body. This adds a little semantic weight to that keyword for the search engines. For example, I want to rank increase search engine ranking with this post. By bolding it, I give the keyword more semantic weight and might get a bit of a SEO boast for google. It’s not going to beat the other blogs in this niche with 30k focused backlinks though. But every little bit can help, and it’s easy to do.

3. Use your keyword 3 times per webpage.

Once in the first paragraph, once in the body, once in the conclusion. It really comes down to the keyword density. If you use your keyword 2-4 times per 400 words, that’s about the right balance. Using the keyword too many times can put you in danger of keyword stuffing.

4. Use as many related keywords as possible
You can get flagged for keyword stuffing the same keyword over and over, but what you can do to get around this is use synonyms and related terms in your text. The more LSI keywords (related keywords) you use, the more “relevant” Google may rank your page/site for that main keyword. If you are talking about “how to cure cancer”, you could use related phrases like “how to get rid of cancer”, or “how to treat cancer” etc. It seems like google is starting to shift a bit away from backlinks to on page SEO (as listed in their new Caffine update). Putting relevant, related keywords in your content can really help improve your ranking. It won’t beat backlinks, but it all adds up. If you are going toe to toe with someone in a backlink word, on page SEO is huge for getting you a higher position than your competitor.

Backlink SEO
These are the true guts of your ranking. If on page SEO is the icing on the cake, backlinks are the cake. The concept of backlinks and “Google juice or backlink juice” are related. The way Google determines how important your site is centers around how many backlinks you have. Each backlink you get is a “vote” for your page.

Now, in case you have no clue what backlinks are, they are simply links to your site — be those internal links or external links. Here is a backlink to my own site:

Make Money Online with SEO.

I have just given myself a ranking “vote” for the term “Make Money Online with SEO”. In fact, I have given myself a vote for every word in that term. Because I am using a “long tail” keyword as the anchor text, I am also ranking myself for the short terms like “Make Money” and “Make Money Online” — though you get a smaller vote.

Each backlink you get passes “link” juice to the site receiving the backlink. Think of linkjuice as “ranking power.” The more link juice for a keyword you are given, the higher you are going to rank. A simplification of the process, but the analogy works.

There are a few rules you should follow for back linking. I’ve you are an experienced SEO, there are more things to worry about. But the 5 step criteria are really all you need to worry about to rank for any term:

• Backlinks from different domains
• Backlinks from domains with Authority/Trust Rank
• Backlinks containing anchor text to rank for
• Backlinks with varied anchor text
• Backlinks targeting both index and deeplinked pages
• Appropriate use of Internal Backlinks
  

Lets explore how to rank your site with backlinks.

1. Backlinks from different domains
It’s vital, if you want to rank for competitive terms, that you have as many backlinks from a wide variety of IP’s as possible. If you get too many backlinks from the same IP (or more accurately, the C-class IP), Google starts to decrease the “juice” it gives. For example, if I send 100 blogger.com links to one of my sites, there is a law of diminishing returns. Most SEO’s feel that after 5 or so links from the same C-Class IP, the link juice starts to diminish. This means with 100 or so links, you are not going to be getting too much backlink juice after 10 links. By the 100th link, the linkjuice given will be miniscule.

This is why you always want a varied link portfolio. The more links you have, the better, but there is certainly something to be said about the quality of links over quantity.

2. Backlinks from domain with Trust Rank
Google puts a lot of weight on authority or trust rank. Basically, if a site that has been around for a while and has gained “trusted” status from Google can give your site a lot of linkjuice through a properly anchored backlink. Trust Rank is not equivalent to PR, though PR can be some rough indication of this. It’s possible to have a PR 0-2 blog that has a LOT of trust rank. It’s possible for a PR 5 blog to have little trust rank. In general though, PR 4+ blogs tend to have a lot of trust rank. This is why people put a lot of weight on PR. What people don’t understand is that it’s not the PR that counts, but the level of trust a domain has.

Google gives trust for terms a website ranks for. If it’s a domain will millions or article like EzineArticles, that domain will have a “general” trust rank for a lot of different terms. If a niche blog has gained authority for a specific keyword – there is a lot of trust rank associated with that keyword. Getting a link from that domain with they keyword the domain has trust for as the anchor text can give a HUGE boost of authority for that keyword to your own domain.

In short: the more backlinks from sites with authority – especially sites about your keyword, though any site with authority can help rank you – the more linkjuice you will get. If you have enough authority links, your own site may acquire Google authority for a term.

3. Backlinks containing the anchor text you want to rank for
You need to get backlinks that contain the anchor text you want to rank for. If I want to rank my site for “Make Money Online”, I need to get links to my site with that anchor text, or phrases that contain part of that anchor text. The point is to get as many votes (and quality votes) for keywords to rank for.

4. Backlinks with varied anchor text
It’s essential that if you want to SEO a site, you are going to have to get backlinks. The trick to SEO is to SEO a site without making it look like you are SEOing. Google does not like SEO because it games their system. In their ideal search world, sites will naturally rank because people naturally link to helpful sites. Those helpful sites with the most links are the most authoritative sites, and thus should be ranked high. However, in the real world, this is simply not the case.

One way to have Google slap you a few is to have EXACTLY the same anchor text for a significant percentage of your links. If you have 200 links for a site “how to cure cancer”, and 95% of those links contain the anchor text “How to cure cancer”, do you think this looks like a natural link building to Google? Not at all. It’s clear the owner has been gaming the system by building links. You should always have a mixed link profile containing varied anchor text. My general rule is to only use the exact keywords I’m trying to rank for about 20 percent of the time. This figure can vary, of course, but the key is NOT to have a significant portion of anchor text the same – with natural linking, there is a huge variation on what anchor text is used. Quite often you get a lot of “website” and “Here” anchor text used (and you should do this too to mimic natural links) with natural links.

The bottom line: it’s fucking suspicious as hell if all your links are the same term, which ironically, happens to be a keyword with 30 dollar CPC. Oh, and those zillion ads on the actually site — it couldn’t be run by a SEO or Internet Marketer, could it? If it’s an a google engineer asking these questions, you may be getting ready to enjoy a nice google slap.

Varied anchor text links also helps drive additional traffic for your site. Your site will start to rank for other combination of keywords. And folks, ranking for longtails can actually pull in MORE traffic than your main keyword. For example, I have one blog where the main keyword brings in 200 or so people a day and longtails related to the keyword bring in an additional 700-900 people.

If you are doing a link building campaign, you need to be vary careful with how you build links. Ideally, you will need to keep track of your links so you can keep your ratio of exact keyword + varied links proper.

5. Backlinks targeting both index and deeplinked pages
It’s also important that you link to your actual pages, not just your index. It’s very unnatural to have 200 out of 220 links for a site all pointing to the index — that just screams SEO to Google. Think about how natural links occur. Most people find a page on your site they like and link to it. You want to imitate natural link building as much as possible. Also, by building up links to your individual pages, you increase the overall ranking and authority of your entire domain.

I suggest keeping 30% of your links to the index and 70% of your links to your actual pages.

What do I mean? If I have 100 links to Make Money Online with SEO, I would want to keep 30 of those links to www.makmoneyonlinewithseo.com and another 70% to www.makemoneyonlinewithseo.com/name-of-blog-post-name-here.html

6. Internal Backlinks

One trick you can do is to channel your own site’s link juice into a specific area. For example, if my main index has a lot of link juice and is ranked say PR 4, I can sent a properly anchored text from the index to another internal page to “bump up” the ranking for a specific term. Say, you have a pretty cool Make Money Online blog  (check out the link for some funny shit — another one of Grizzly’s students). But you create a post about Internet Marketing. Well, you may be able to bump up that post’s ranking for the term Internet Marketing, by sending a link from your index (which has the most authority in some cases) to your subpage. This is a great way to quickly get one of your internal pages ranking for long tail keywords. It doesn’t do too much for competitive terms, but for non competitive longtails, especially if those longtails are in your niche, it can do wonders. This is part of my Authority Blog SEO strategy that I may go more into detail in another post.

Tying it all together

SEO is not an exact science. Google does not tell us, other than in half truths, how their search algorithms worth. There is a lot of guess work involved. A lot of this stuff comes down to trial and error. You will learn new SEO tricks the more you get into this game and try to get websites ranked.

One thing that has to be said here is DON’T hammer your sites with too many links. If you have a brand new blog, don’t send hundreds of links to it the first day. I’d say build links slowly over a couple months. The more links you have, the more you can get each day without throwing a google alarm. If you get some sort of spamming software and throw 10k links at your new domain, yes you may indeed find you rank quite high — for like 1 hour. Google is quite good at flagging domains that get too many links at once — one of the hallmarks of a spammer.

Try to keep your link building for new domains with no links to a couple a day with some pauses in between. Once you get enough links, you can start to add 5-10 links a day. If you have thousands of links, then getting 100 a day is possible.

Links from trusted sources are better than links from untrusted sources. This means that you can probably get more high quality links without risking a google alarm than if you beat your new blog to death with tons of shitty links from say a backlink network. Always play it safe and build links slow. If you feel the need to drop link bombs on your properties, bombard Web 2.0 properties that have a lot of trust with links.

Trusted Domains (or domains that have Authority) can be bombarded with lots of links without penalty. This is why you can toss a few hundred links at your new Ezine Article, Info Barrel, or Hubpage as soon as you create one — the domain authority has so many links that a few hundred means nothing. Your new blog on Viagra, however, doesn’t have this sort of leeway.

The first question everyone wants to know is “how long does it take to rank number one?” The answer is “I have no fucking clue.” Ranking can be quick or it can be long.  There are a lot of factors google uses to rank a domain. Here are some of the major factors used to decide your rank:

1. Number of backlinks

2. Quality of backlinks (are backlinks authority backlinks, backlinks from related content, PR of backlink source, proper anchor text in backlink, the age of the links, etc)

3. Source of Backlinks (are backlinks from different C-class domains, etc)

4. Doman Age

5. Age of the Content (i.e. new content gets fresh content bonus)

Keep in mind this list is not anywhere near completed — I could certainly add more to it. But for general purposes, it’s enough.

The key to link building is to get lots of links from different sources linking to both your index and your actual pages, vary up your anchor  text for all backlinks, add good content with lots of relevant longtails, add proper on page SEO to all pages, and build links slowly.

Some niches you can rank right away. Some niches you wont’ rank for months — it all depends. In general, the more competitive the niche (and the more money to be made), the harder and longer it will take to rank high. For some niches, you will need to think in terms of months and years for ranking high, not days. The key, like everything I’ve been talking about, is persistence.

SEO is really about persistance.  You just need to consistantly beat the shit out of your site/s with link in a manner that does not raise google flags. And that’s all there is to it.

So there you go, how increase search engine ranking in a nutshell. That should be enough free information to get anyone started on ranking your websites.

Now go make money online.

Ben

Famous mountain range in china, Huanshang

A real long post today folks. Sorry, I didn’t mean to, I swear.

I’d thought I’d talk about content generation today, and some ways to simplify the process. I’ve been promising a post like this for a couple months now, so it’s probably long overdue.

As any internet marketer knows, one of the greatest challenges is to generate content for your sites. The more sites you have, the more of a headache it becomes to fill them with content. I know it is for me, with over 1k web properties out there in addition to a 100 or so farm blogs. At some point, it becomes absurd – you spend all your time just posting to your existing properties and not getting backlinks or creating new sites.

I’m not going to lie to you – there is no easy solution. Well there is, but it takes a lot of money, something most of you probably don’t have at this point.

There are really two ways of getting unique content: paying someone to write it for you or doing it yourself. Well there’s a third way, one that involves opening your own article directory ala Hubpages/Infobarrel/Ezine Articles. The third option is obvious the best one, but it’s probably something that’s beyond the ken for most people, so we’ll discount it.

I’m actually going to do a bit of an experiment and try to set up my own article directory. My idea is that if I can convince people to use it for article submissions, it’s free content for me to make money with and a good source of backlinks for them. However, to make it have any sort of value, it’s going to take some serious backlink work to give some domain authority to it. More on this in another post.

Generating Articles through Outsourcing

The best outsourcing I’ve yet found are Human Rewriter. You can check out my human rewriter review for my thoughts on this ( you are going to have to hunt through my massive post for it). In general, I’ve found the quality to be very high – higher than other outsourcing solutions. The catch is that you have to find an article to submit and, if you want to know a buck or two off the price, do a little bit of editing. This can be a major fucking headache when trying to submit 300-400 articles – so much of a headache that I gave up on the editing part completely. In my case, my time is more important than shaving a few hundred bucks off my outsourcing. You are looking about 10 minutes per submission, which includes finding an article to be rewritten, pasting it, adding an SEO title, keywords, and editing the article to lower the price (less sentences = cheaper prices). For batches of 20-30 articles, you are looking at 3 or so hours – not bad if you can get a very well-written 400 word article for say 3.50. If you are looking at 300 articles, well, expect to site there for a week. Still, if you are really trying to maximize your buck and money is more important than time, it may be worth it.

I do suggest you take advantage of their free 5 credit offer (5 bucks worth of articles) – you can at least get 1-2 free articles out of them. Free is free. I currently use human rewriter for hundreds of articles a month.

Another outsourcing company that seems to be popular is Textbroker. I can’t say how the quality is, since I have not yet used them. But I’m going to buy 100 or so articles from them – probably on the lowest quality tier. I’ve heard mixed reviews. I’m sure there are some people here who can give their opinion on this service.

For people who like to play craps, you may try CyberHub. You can get articles for 3 bucks. However, it’s a real hit or miss as far as quality goes. With 10 articles you may find 1 that could win the Pulitzer, 2 that are decent, and 7 that make something written on a notepad while riding a bucking bull look good. The waits can be very long though.

My personal rule is not to outsource unless you make 1k a month or more. The reason is that just pumping out content is NOT enough to make you money on the web. I know I have been preaching volume, and it works – fantastically well. However, you need targeted content in niches you have experimented in – niches that you know will do well with enough content in them. So for you people starting out MMO, don’t take out a couple G’s on your credit card or secure some high interest payday loan and pump the money into a few hundred articles. Get your hands dirty with writing articles for a few months, find out what works, then, once you KNOW you can make money (and your 1k a month track record proves it), look at outsourcing to improve your productivity.

And from personal experience, do not hire Indian writers or troll through MMO forums looking for 1-2 dollar articles. You get what you pay for – if you get anything at all. Seriously, who can fucking afford to spend 30 minutes writing an article for 1 buck? At best your work is going to be outsourced to zoo monkeys randomly mashing keyboard buttons with the intent to produce the first sentence in the bible. You get someone trying to prove evolution while taking your money. Nice.

I had some jackass steal 800 bucks a few months ago and not deliver shit. Paypal WON’T give you a refund if your hired writer decides to hit up a few nightclubs with your money.

With outsourcing, I find you have to pay about 5 bucks for a 400 word article to get something that sounds native-written – less with places like Human Rewriter. But remember, if something looks to good to be true, it probably fucking is!

Where to Use Outsourced Articles?
Money Sites and Solid authority sites or sites with adsense on them like infobarrel or hubpages. If you guys are making more money than you know what to do with, then sure, buy articles for backlink support – go articles, ezines, Squidoo, etc. However, I personally only use outsourced articles for money sites and good support blogs. Articles for backlinks, I do myself.

Generating Articles through Spinning

Now, what about generating content for your support support sites or your blog farms. Well, you can either spend a zillion hours writing bullshit for these sites, or you can do what the rest of use IM’ers do – spin.

Spinning articles is NOT a new concept and if you don’t know about spinning, I suggest you learn. Spinning is a great way to take a unique article and get another 100 unique articles from it. The main issue with spinning is that it takes a god damn stupid amount of time to create the syntax.

There are basically two types of spinning: single level spinning, and nested spinning. Single level spinning can make the article pretty unique, unique enough to get indexed by Google. Nested spinning adds a whole other dimension and can really make the article unique.

Here is an example of single level spinning:

The {best | top | most efficient way} how to {get rid of | eliminate| cure| stop} cancer is to not {smoke| inhale| puff} cigars.

Basically, everything enclosed in { } are a choice. Each time software converts spin notation to text, a random selection is made from the words in the { }. When you write an entire article in this format, you get a fairly unique article.

With nested spinning, you basically something even more unique. Here is an example of a nested spin:

{The {best | top | most efficient way} how to {get rid of | eliminate| cure| stop} cancer is to not {smoke| inhale| puff} cigars | {Get rid of | eliminate | stop} your cancer by not smoking}.

It looks more complicated, but what happens is that software will look at the first set of choices (in this case, the two full sentences that are serrated by the “|”)

{ sentence 1} | {sentence 2}

And fore each of those sentences, the software, spinner, or whatever will look for spin notation {}, and if any spin notaion is found for that specific sentence will select from the choices enclosed in the {}. Basically, you get something really unique. Still confused? Do a search on the web, or visit the www.jetspinner.com website. It’s not that hard to figure out how spinning works if you spend a few minutes playing around with it.

So, what’s the advantage of spinning? You can take a unique article (or a PLA article, or even someone else’s article) and rewrite it in SPIN notation, then use that spin notation to generate hundreds of unique articles from it. The more time you spend working in spin notation, the more unique your article will be and the better it will sound. Typically, you want 30% unique to get indexed by google and avoid the whole duplicate penalty. If you can get it up to 60-100% unique, you pretty much have a fountain of unique articles to use.

There are automated spinners out there – two types actually. Some auto spinners will only give you the spun version of the article you input while others will actually convert the article to SPIN notation – and you can use the SPIN notated version of the article for your own purposes (more on this later).

Jet Spinner is one such website that will spin articles for you – probably the most popular one and it’s free — if you input the spin notation. There are also a zillion programs you can downloan or buy that will spin articles as well.

Stay the fuck away from auto spinning though. There are programs that you can imput an article and generate a machine spin. Auto spun content is CRAP CRAP and in my opinion, not worth it. You get absolute garbage text back – any person reading such an article will know it’s spun. The search engines may index the article if the spin is good enough, but typically what happens is that all the long tails – those keywords that the search engine will index your support site for, which then can build some authority for that keyword to transfer to the site it links to – get mangled as well. And don’t even think about putting Adsense on an auto spun article. You are asking for a ban.

Now, the downside of spinning is that it takes a long time. If you are fast, you probably can do a 1st level spin of a 400 word article in about 1-2 hours. If it’s a nested spin, it can take 4-6 hours for a 500 word article (I know, I’ve done it.).

But, there’s a trick – and this is Magic Article Rewriter. I have this linked to under “Best Content Generation Software” and it’s true. I used this all the time. For creating high quality SPIN-notated articles, there is NO better tool out there. Basically, this lets you turn any article into SPIN notation in 10-40 minutes, depending on the level of SPIN you wanted added. The program basically streamlines the spinning process – but you choose the words. This results of a pretty high quality spin version – I’ve used some articles on support blogs and even a few on money sites as well.

For a nested spin, it will probably take you 20-45 minutes to do a very high quality, unique article. This article can probably pass on your support blogs or your money site.  If you just want a fast 1st level spin for some low quality support blogs, you are probably looking 10-20 minutes if you really burn it.

What can I do with a SPIN Notated Article?
Spun article are GREAT for crappy support blogs or for blog farms – especially if you have a bunch in the same niche.

For example, say I have 30 blogger blogs about cancer, 10 hubs, 5 Squidoo, and various other web 2.0 properties about the same topic.

You can spend an 30 minutes (with MAR) or several hours (spinning by hand) creating a spin-notated version of an article in the cancer niche. You can then use spinning software (MAR, Jetspinner, or whatever) to generate as many versions as you need to populate ALL your crappy support blogs with the same unique versions of the article. This allows you to get that fresh content bonus from google and build up your support sites with unique content. This all helps the sites being linked to by the support sites.

How long would it take to put unique handwritten articles on 50 sites? Exactly — a long long time. Creating spin-notated articles let’s you one shot the entire batch with a single article.

Keep in mind that if your hubpages has adsense on it, I would not advise putting crappy spun content on any hub — or your money sites. Any site that has editors (like infobarrel, ezines) or peer watchdogs (hubpages), don’t give them crappy spun content.

With Magic Article Rewriter, you can create very well written spins that you can use for quality support sites and maybe money sites, but you need to make sure you spend some good time ensuring the article sounds good and is very unique.

In general, if I’m going to submit a spun article I use MAR on my money sites or web 2.0 properties with my adsense on, I’ll spend a solid 45-50 minutes doing a very unique spin that reads very well. Possible with MAR in less than an hour, but if you do it by hand, you are looking at 4-6 hours (that’s what it takes me).

Another use – probably one of the best uses – is to combine the power with spinning with some of the backlink networks. You can use SPIN-notated articles directly with Article Marketing Automation and Backlink Solutions (with some changes) and indirectly with Unique Article Wizard. These backlink networks basically submit you SPIN notated article to hundreds of blogs. Since each version of the article is unique, the article has a much higher chance of getting indexed. I’m going to talk about how to use backlink networks effectively (with some tricks) in another post. Backlink networks, in general, are NOT a replacement for solid, high quality links. But you can get a lot of quantity which can give you movement in the SERPS, hide your good links, and for no competition/ low competition niches, let you reach the top 3 spots. They are really useful for support sites – especially web 2.0 properties with domain authority that can survive a massive assault of links. More on this in another post.

I’ll be talking about backlink networks and how to use them effectively. I am tossing up creating a bit of a tutorial about how to create a niche wordpress blog – but there may be no need for these, since most of you out there SHOULD already know how to do this. I *may* add a forums to this site for people to help each other.

Auto Content Generation

One more content generation tool that’s very handy is Frank’s Blog Content Wizard. Frank is another one of us IM’ers, part of the Grizzly (Make Money) crowd. His tool is fantastic for creating Search Engine fodder. You can basically export keywords from Google’s Keyword tool into the program, specify how many articles you created, how many words, and the frequency of your primary keyword appearance. And hit a button. In a couple minutes, you will have content for your blog farms. The program has a massive database of English phrases, and it randomly inserts your keywords into the these phrases. You basically get an SEO rich article full of your primary keywords and related keywords. The articles actually, somehow make twisted sense. With an initial glance, it looks you like are reading something an English as a Second Language student or something someone taking a lot of LSD would write. But, if you clean up the first and last paragraphs, it probably won’t get flagged. Keep in mind, only put BCW articles on third tier support sites. Never on your money site or any site with adsense on them. If you want to know how this works with setting up a support structure for your site, read my how to create a blog farm post.

I  won’t get into automatically generating content and sending it to blogs (that’s in the realm of auto scraper sites). You can make money like this — and it’s something I am testing. But, it’s a pretty risky model and something you probably should not invest time into unless you really know what you are doing.

Make Money Online Experiements

A few very quick updates.

Niche Devil
Lo and behold, I’ve managed to squeeze out about 100 bucks with my Spammy ND sites. I’ve done NO promotion on these things and a significant portion have not been indexed yet. I still have another 100 domains to throw up. Based on the success I’ve seen with just a handful, I’m interested in putting hundreds of these out there. However, I’m just not sure what money there is to be made in a couple months when ebay changes its pricing scheme. With pay per click instead of pay per lead, it could mean pennies per click – something not worth the time and effort.

I do have plans for creating 100 solid PHPBay stores in a couple months. I’ve already created a couple of these and they are earning consistently – 10-20 bucks a month. In the right niches and some promotion, I can see you could make a 100+ bucks a month witch each one. Again, waiting to see what this whole pricing change is going to be.

Authority Site/Flagship Blog Project
Finally started my authority site project. Got most of the content outsourced now. The site is going to have probably 300-400 targeted articles. And I’m going to have to build backlinks to every single post. I’m shopping around for a domain right now – preowned. I don’t want to deal with the headache of a new domain. A good preowned may save me months of work. My goal is to start a 300-400 article authority site EVERY SINGLE MONTH from now on. I can then rotate my link building from month to month. I’m not sure how many authority sites I can juggle at the same time, but I’d like to have 12 of these in a year, each major niche.

This is going to be a long term project. I don’t expect to see any money for a few months. We’ll see just how long it is before I can make any money. These types of sites take a lot of work and time to build up an authority site. I can make a killing once I get some authority though. I’ll talk more about how to build an authority site in another post.

Adsense Snipers
Love these. These are my biggest earners so far more than matching my Hubpage earnings and everything else. I’m behind with my schedule though. I’m trying to put out 3 of these a day, but that’s REALLY pushing it. I’m already at my max time wise. I simple don’t have enough time in the day (I still work a job) so hubs, snipers, backlinks, and authority sites in a single day.

Other Updates

New Infobarrel Revenue Sharing Module

Infobarrel is going to be announcing a new additional source of revenue sharing, so for those who are raking it in (and I know a few of you who are doing VERY well with just infobarrel), you will be able to add to your earnings.

About infobarrel. If you guys are trying to make money with infobarrel, you need to BACK your infobarrels up with solid links. Just throwing a ton of infobarrels out there without any sort of backlinks won’t see you too much money now. Once, it was possible, but there is a TON of competition now, so you need to send ezines, Hubpages, or other links to each IB you write if you want to rake in the cash.

WebSeo
So a bit over a month ago, I used Justin’s Web SEO service on 45 of my hubs. The results have been great. Traffic has gone up for those hubs and I’m making more money consistantly with them. I’d actually say the hubs that were submitted to all 3 backlinks services have the most traffic out of all my hubs. If you are looking for a quick SERP boost to your sites, but don’t have the money or time to use some of the expensiveve backlinks networks, give Web SEO a try.

In general, I don’t suggest touching your money site with backlink networks. They are best used on supporting blogs without adsense on them. You can get away with using backlink networks on web 2.0 properties that have a lot of trust with google (hubpages for example), but I would not advice on a self hosted blog you own — especially if it does not have a lot of authority in google’s eyes. They can do wonders at pumping up your support blogs, especially for low competition longtails. I’m going to post about backlink networks and how to use the right in another post.

How to Make Money Online without Work

Simple. You can’t.

The more I do this whole make money online thing, the more I realize how much work this is. I’ve been harping on this for months now, and it’s just as true now as it has been in the past. If you want to make money online with internet marketing, you are going to have to put gobs of work in. Anyone with delusions of spending an hour a day creating websites, give up now.

My model, right now, is volume. I pump the web full of my properties, send a few links and let them age. If I put out 1000 properties in a month, I know those properties will bring in money. Maybe not this month, or next month, but in time, they will. In a year, they will bring in far more money than in 3 months for now. All these properties can be used to sniff out niches which to deploy my own sites. All these properties can be used as a very high quality link farm. I can tell you folks, it’s a big big leg up to be able to start a new site and send 200 quality links from your other sites to support the new site. If you happen to have solid authority sites for link juice, you are laughing to the bank – ranking will be easy if you have authority sites in a related niche.

Unless you are incredibly lucky, you will NOT be seeing any real money within 2-4 months spending a couple hours a day building websites on the weekdays. To see quick results, you first need to understand how to make money online (as taught by Court, Grizzly, Vic, my blogs, or other people who know what’s up) and you need to do the work to get there.

If you can only do 2 hours a day, 5 days a week – that’s fine, but be prepared for the long haul before seeing money: 6 months, a year, maybe 2. Why? Because it’s hard to get enough shit done in 1- 2 hours a day to make a difference. Is it impossible? Probably not, but from what I’ve seen with my own MMO journey, that’s not enough time to make money in a short amount of time online.

I’ve been putting in 8-14 hour days, 7 days a week. There is no “secret” to my making money here. Oh, I know SEO and I’ve learned quite a few “tricks” from months of experimenting with niches, sites, SEO etc. But the basic difference between me and many of you is that I simply work 10 times harder. While you watch the latest episode of Heroes, go shopping, or sleep, I’m sitting at my computer, writing content, creating sites, and doing keyword research.

I have a lot of people asking me to teach them how to make money fast or asking me if I can show them a different method than Court or Grizzly shows. Some secrete trick to make a full time income in a few months. Because, hell, I’ve done it.

Sure, I’ll tell you what to do. Throwing your TV out the window, disconnecting the phone, lock yourself into your house, stop all social activities, and work for 4 months straight, all day and most of the night. Folks if you put this level of commitment into ANYTHING, you are going to be good at it – no matter what it is.

I realize some of us actually want to have a life – and that’s perfectly understandable. You can certainly make a full time income online going at it slow – as long as you are consistent. Go at this slow (but consistent), but make sure you are willing to wait a year or two before making solid money. There are no shortcuts here – you either do the work in a short period of time or the work over a long period. No matter what you do, the mountain is the same size and it takes the same amount of steps to get to the top. It’s just how fast you are willing to climb.

Damn it. And this was suppose to be a short post. Clocked in at 4k words this time.

See you next week. If I have the time.

Ben

Victoria Peak -- Hong Kong

Been VERY busy this past week, between my real life job and my IM activities. But, always time for another massive post…

Niche Devil

Time to give a bit of an update for this one. I’m not going to post any stats because there’s not much to post. My clicks are steadily increasing (around 50+ a day now).

Well, I have mixed feelings on this one. I only have about 130 sites up with probably 20-30 indexed. My grand plan for 500-1000 ND sites is on hold for a couple reasons. I am busy making money with Adsense snipers, I am not convinced about the long term viability of these, and ebay is making some massive changes to their pricing scheme just to combat sites like this.

Now, how eBay structures their current pricing scheme is all Vodoo to me. But this new pricing scheme is even more Vodoo than the old system. Ostensibly, it’s to “help” affiliates make more money, but the writing on the wall is that eBay is trying to “help” themselves to our commission. What this change does to say clicks coming from thin affiliate sites like ND, I don’t know – but I suspect it’s not going to be good. They are going to pay by click now – if I can produce a mass amount of clicks with ND sites, there still could be money. But I don’t want to drop 1000 of these sites out there, only to find ebay has pulled the rug. There are of course Chitika or whatever that ad network is called. I have not put it on any sites yet.

There has been a lot of controversy about Niche Devil. A lot of people were initially sold on the fact that ND were untraceable, etc. This is not the case and the software won’t be making any noob IM’ers any money. If you know what you are doing and willing to put on the black, you can make some money. The long term sustainability of thin affiliate sites is a big question – google (and now, presumably ebay) really detests sites like this. You put yourself squarely against Google when you start mass producing these. I would rather put my time in making hubpages, infobarrels, or legitmate sites.

I’ve probably made about 20-30 bucks from my clicks so far. From direct sales, about 5 bucks, but when the clicks are added to my quality score, the money goes up.

To be honest, I really have not spent the time I should have creating these though. I’ve been distracted with my snipers which take a god aweful amount of time to produce. I’m going to put up another 70 or so ND sites and try and backlink all the sites that are not indexed and see what happens. I’m not sure how this whole ebay change is going to effect these — it may be for the worse.

If you have ND sites, there are a few things you can do to keep your sites indexed:

*Don’t use buying keywords in the domain (www.cheapcoffecups.com) with a .info
*Don’t use buying keywords as the Title or in Headers WITH a .info
*Change your CSS template every single ND site you have

So I’m still going to put some work into ND, but I’m not going all out on them at this point. I want to see if I can get what I have indexed first before comitting to massive amounts.

Edit (Aug 22): I’ve made about 130 bucks so far — probably half of this from ND sites. I’ve put no effort into these other than putting my original 130 up there. Only some of those are indexed, but considering I’ve made close to 100 bucks, I’m seeing some potential here — it’s well worth putting more effort into these, so I’m going to try to continue to my 500 goal. I’ll just have to make sure the next round, I make sure to avoid buying keywords.

Adsense snipers

Ah, my new favorite toy. The force is strong with these indeed. On the internet, you’ll find a lot of people talking utter bullshit about their earnings. I like to back my claims with some tangible proof. Here we go…

As you see, not a bad start. I’ve started my snipers about two weeks ago, and I’m kicking out at close to 60 bucks a day. I’ve just gotten warmed up with these as well – I’m going to have over 300 snipers out within the next 2-3 months. I’m a bit behind on my schedual for these, but I hope to churn out several of these a day. This past 2-3 weeks has NOT been as productive as I’d like, mainly to work and various social obligations. I’m really going to have to up my productivity soon if I want to stay on schedual. 300 of these in 2 months is possible, but there is no way I can add quality content + backlinks and get 300 done in 2 months. I’d have to quite my day job to do this — something I may do soon actually.

I’m sure there are plenty of questions about how I went from 0 to 60 bucks a day with sniper sites in just two weeks. I’m keeping mum about the exact details guys for obvious reasons.

I will say that I’ve been working on something I like to call my “Adsense sniper”. These are laser targeted niche blogs that are very effective for getting ranked high in some situations. Now, there are no “miracle” ranking system here that will let you dominate the SERP’s, just some strategies I have been testing out for several months, and some solid tricks I’ve learned during my (failed) click bank sniper experiment. If you know what you are doing, it’s downright easy to hone in on the money. It’s really true in this game that failures are never failures. I’m actually still testing to see what’s possible with ranking, but my initial success tells me my personal method can be very sucessful for quick(er) money if done right. I’m still in the experimental stage. I’m going to give blogger.com blogs my best shot as well and see if I can start earning with free blogs, ala Grizzly style. That’s going to be pretty cool to try!

Rather than flood me with questions about my niche blogging techniques and tricks, I’ll point you somewhere else for your answeres. If you want a basic idea about how to go about making niche blogs, join Court’s Keyword Academy course for 1 buck (yes, thats an affiliate link). I do my niche blogs different than court’s method, but the basic process is the same in regards to keyword research and putting together a blog for SEO purposes. It may take you 3 months to a year, but you can make some pretty damn good money. If you are already Court’s student (as half of you guys seem to be), then just keep on doing what your doing, get backlinks, and wait. The money will come if you are persistant.

I’m going to keep my method a secret, for now. This blog is simply too public to start giving out my tricks. Grizzly from Make Money found this out the hard way when he started posting his strategies.

I love helping you guys make the money — as long as it’s your own work and creativity you make money from — and each person telling me that they have made money with my advice makes me feel reeaaaly good. But if I give out my personal methodologies here, it results in hundreds (or maybe thousands) of clone websites out there doing exactly the same thing as me. Besides costing me money, it may call down the Google gods — something I’m not keen on seeing anytime soon. I’m not making the Grizzly bucks yet where having 400 other Ben clones out there won’t make a dent in my income.

I tell people this time and time again: you need to find your own way. Use what I’m telling you, Grizzly, Court, or anyone who is actually making some money, and put your own spin on it.

The problem I see is that too many people want both the dinner and dessert handed to them on the same plate. Everyone wants a 10 step program that will guarantee them a full time income online. That’s why those make money online shams you see on adsense do so well — people want an easy fix, and easy solution where there is no brain juice required. Sorry guys, it’s not that simple and life doesn’t work that way.

The simple truth is it’s the people who experiment, the people who do new things, and the people who are willing to put in a godaweful amount of work into this business that will make the money. You can’t be afraid of trying new things, of stepping out on a limb and giving an idea a go. You need to get out there and try new things. Heck, get out there and do anything. Posting on forums is not the way to make money online. Talking about making money online is not the way to make money online. Writing, creating sites, and getting backlinks will make you money online.

Right now, I feel the best (and most secure) way to earn money online is untimely have a fleet of flagship blogs that produce valuable content. Flagships are the best bet because you can command serious traffic, Google won’t deindex you on a whim since the content is usually very high and you provide some value to your readers (unlike cough Niche Devil, cough).

I’ve stated it before, everything I do is to build myself up to the point where I can deploy flagship blogs. Adsense snipers are great, but you never know if Google is going to put the slap down on those types of sites. I have friends who have lost 5-7k a month ovenight when google did a mass deindex of all their adsense niche blogs.

So, I’m dicking around with this small fry so I can make that 20-30k a month to buy massive amounts of content and authority sites.

When you create niche blogs, I can’t emphasize enough that you should focus on producing VALUE to your readers. Write good, useful content. Put in some useful links to authority sites. Add some pictures even. Basically, you need to trick Google into thinking your MFA site is in fact not MFA. A big lie, of course, but if readers are getting value out of your site, then Google won’t have a beef with you.

Flagship Authority Blog Project

I’m hoping I can start this in 2 months. I need to start establishing a portfolio of authority blogs ASAP. With Authority blogs, I can focus on some SOLID content and SEO tactics. Currently, I’ve been trading SEO in favor of volume, but when you are working authority sites, it’s back to SEO. I’m going to pull out every trick in the book and I’m looking forward getting dirty with SEO.

Make Money Online with Flagship Blogs

There are essentially two strategies for making money online. Volume, or Authority. I’ve been going with the volume route. Making money on the internet is all about traffic. Not just traffic, but targeted traffic. Anyone can pull in a few thousands people a day wasting time on twitter, stumble upon, digg, or any of those other useless social mediums, but these visitors won’t make you money.

Your goal is to generate traffic. You can either have a few blogs that pull in a lot of traffic, or hundreds (or thousands) or mini websites that pull in a few people a day, but as a whole add up. There is work involved either way. A flagship blog is a long term project. You are going to need to have a lot of high quality articles and you are going to need to SEO yourself high in the SE’s. All that time spent producing a zillion smaller sites will be going into SEO. A flagship blog is your most stable income generator online. If you do things by the book, you wont have problems with The Man.

The volume route is an “easier” way to make fast money online. The reason is that it’s not that hard to get a handful of targeted people a day to mini websites. By themselves, you’ll make crap, but hundreds will make you a living. Unfortunately, Google does NOT like mini websites that snipe keywords. The reason is most of these websites don’t really provide the value to readers that an authority blog delivers and most are purely MFA.

So what to do? Well, diversify. Derive a solid income from authority sites and from niche sites. You are safer this way.

I can’t say anything for certain, but my gut feeling is that authority is the future of MMO. The blogs that have the trust rank are going to get the a lot more traffic, and those sniper type sites are going to get the boot. This is my personal opinion, mind you, but it does seem Google is moving towards this model (a few websites dominating everything in a niche).

How to Dominate a Niche to Make Money Online

Time and time again, I see you guys thinking small. You worry about a handful of blogs when you should be looking at the whole picture. If you are dicking around with a couple blogs, you are wasting your fucking time. Either put all your efforts on a handful of authority sites, or throw out more mini sites than the number of Madonna’s ex boyfriends.

Time and time again, people are looking at a puzzle piece when they should be looking at the whole puzzle. This really tells me most people seem to have a lack of strategy. If you guys fail to plan, then you plan to fail. Period. If you decide to take on a niche, don’t fucking throw up a couple desultory niche blogs and think you are going to “own” the keyword. If sometime types ANY combination of keywords, your site should show up. How? Buy owning virtually all of the content relating to that niche. I have some niches where 6 or more properties show up on the first two pages for any search. If you can do this, you OWN most of the traffic. Remember guys, there are 10 spots on the search results – there is no reason why you should just aim for the 25-40% traffic the  top spot gets. Why not take an additional 30% by owning the next 4 spots?

You want to know how to utterly dominate a niche?

1. Use mini sites to feel out a niche, hijacking the domain authority of parasitic domains that have a lot of trust rank with Google (ezines, Hubpages, etc)
2. Branch into niches that work with your own websites
3. Solidify your position with a Flagship blog

It’s a hell of a lot of work, but then again, if you are not willing to work, stop wasting your fucking time with MMO and get a real job. I’m sure there are more than a few bosses who would love to yell at you all day long.

Ok guys, that’s it for today. I’m cutting my usual 3k post down today.

Ben Out