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
36 Comments
Another great post as usual! I’d like to endorse your recommendation for Magic Article Rewriter. It’s a great piece of software and cheap! I also use their social bot for bookmarking and rss bot for submitting rss feeds. All easy to use and also cheap. As we all should know by now there is no secret to making money online - it takes a lot of work but it’s so boring! Which is why I love it when you publish another looooong post so I have an excuse to stop writing content and take a break!
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janet Reply:
August 27th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
BTW that’s a wonderful photo!
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admin Reply:
August 27th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
thanks janet. Yea, the place I took the photo was really phenomenal. Hope to do a bit of traveling in a few months. I love MAR — it’s great software, and very useful if you have a lot of support blogs in in a single niche — you can justify the time it to create a spin-notated article to supply content to all your blogs. I’m going to post about my favorite backlink software next — i’ll talk about RSS bot, and the others. Haha, these posts take me forever to post — which is why I only post once a week.
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You do all that and have a real job too?
I do it differently than you do. I use Cyberhub or Human Rewriter to write all my UAW articles cause I can’t take it anymore. However, I don’t mind spending the time writing my own material for all my blogs. I would never outsource that as I want total control.
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admin Reply:
August 27th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
You can certainly do that. If I have an authority blog I’m babying, i’d probably do the stuff myself. Cyber hub is only good for backlink articles.
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Hey Ben, I’ve asked this before, but I don’t quite understand what makes a blog a “sniper” and how it’s different from TKA’s method in terms of being able to rank and earn money so much faster. A little more explanation would be fantastic! =)
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admin Reply:
August 27th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
The way you set up a niche blog is generally the same as the way Court teaches. I refer to my snipers as very specific blogs — writing, keyword research, themes, the linking structure, etc is what sets them apart from a regular niche blog. Court’s way is perfectly valid — I have my own spin on the whole process.
My snipers are basically a combination of a niche blog + other stuff I’ve learned. I basically have a very specific strategy I follow (research, themes, writing, linking structures, etc) I follow for my snipers that allow *some* of them to make money. Not all of theme do — I’m still waiting for quite a few to rank right now.
Ben
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This is a really interesting one i loved reading it. It is a nice way to generate web content.
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Hey, it is me again. I just have a couple questions. Do you sleep? If so, when? You work a lot. How long did it take before you saw results? What number of internet properties did it take to see some gains? (I am talking about $10+ a day) I remember you posted the answer a while ago. Around 100 articles? Due to all the increased traffic and competition I don’t think 100 articles will cut it to make $10 a day I think that number is more like 300. All with back-links. That is just my estimate and I am still new at it. Any thoughts?
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admin Reply:
August 27th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
I sleep a few hours a day. The results question. Everyone wants results quickly. I’ll ask you the question: how hard are you willing to work. Your results will depend on your answer. If you are willing to put in FULL time hours each day into this, every day, results can come in months — if you do everything right.
Hubs may be harder to make money with now. I’m pretty sure they are, since there is so much competition out there now. probably 100-200 hubs — but I can’t tell you for sure. If you get lucky with your niches, maybe 20.
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Wow, your work ethic is really inspiring. I’m quite new to this game, and have been devoting most of my time to tweaking as opposed to volume. Once I start to get the hang of it, I want to really pump up the effort I put into it.
Exactly how many different infoBarrel and hubpages accounts do you have? And how many different ezine, squidoo and goArticle accounts do you have pointing to them? I feel like it would take a lot of time just to create many accounts of those. How do you even manage it all?
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admin Reply:
August 27th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
I have quite a few, but I won’t say how many here. Managing is not a problem — you can just use an excel spreadsheet to keep track of things. My advice is that if you are tweaking you are wasting your time — you won’t make money.
Get traffic THEN tweak.
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Anthony Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
HAHA that is too true. I’ve been spending most of my time reading Grizz’s stuff and learning the basics and doing a “noob-friendly” experiment that I feel obligated to finish up. But I’m at the point where it’s time to shut up and work.
Next up is the hubs and infoB’s approach. Hopefully in a month or two, I can report back with positive results.
Keep up the good work and thanks for the advice.
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Interesting thoughts about the content generation. As a writer myself who has hired other writers, people expect the articles to come too cheap. Cheap writers from India and other countries have brought the prices down, but the thing is that I charge more and I know I’m worth more. It’s worth spending extra $ on something you can use, than wasting it on something that’s complete rubbish. Unfortunately many beginning webmasters can’t afford that - so I would definitely agree to try and write yourself until you get to a certain level of income for outsourcing. And if you find it hard, practice really does make perfect!
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Heck! Great minds think alike LOL! I have been actually thinking about starting my own IB/hubpages LMAO.
Nice post but I really need to stop reading and get back to writing. I had a $0 day yesterday from adsense. Don’t know wtf happened. Hopefully I will make it back today or some shit.
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hey ben! i was one of the few people who kept on asking silly questions on your previous posts, HAHA! I decided to just shut up, and do some work as you did. After 1 month, I now have 120 hubs, a couple of IB’s, and 1 authority blogspot blog, and am earning a steady $15-$20 a day. Not that big yet, but I’m happy with it because one month ago, I was earning $0 per day! At least now I understand what you meant when you said that the only way to learn this art of making money online is through EXPERIENCE and working hard. Reading your blog, Grizzly’s blog, and other MMO places will teach you the basics, but nothing beats experiencing everything by working hard.
Right now, I am already thinking about starting self-hosted blogs. In your entry, you mentioned the value of using pre-owned domains instead of brand new. Can you further enlighten me on this? Also, can you recommend good places to get such domains?
thank you very much!
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janet Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 7:15 am
Hi Price
http://www.freshdrop.net is great for finding aged domains. If you use the filter you can filter for age and for only domains that are indexed by Google. You can also filter for price. You can go directly to Godaddy auctions but you can’t filter for domains indexed by Google.
It’s important that they are already indexed as you don’t want to buy a domain that’s been deindexed. I did it by mistake once and although you can ask for it to be reincluded (which it was) that domain has never got any ranking. Maybe a coincidence but not worth risking IMO.
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admin Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 9:11 am
Fantastic Prince! Glad for you. Just repeat what you are doing! There are a few others here who have started to make money because they stopped asking questions and put the pedal to the medal.
One of the biggest problems I see in this industry is that people don’t want to risk anything — they are afraid to try stuff on their own because they may fail, or they want a 10 step program that will assure them money. Nope — no such thing. This business fluctuates so much — one person, such as yoursefl may find some sucess after a month, and someone else after 3 months. However, I can assure anyone, if they put in work to write content, get backlinks, and try new things, the money will come eventually.
Self hosted domains are good — I have about 60 of them now in total with plans for another few hundred. If a site doesn’t work out, you can always try to flip it to make a profit. I’m going to be looking at using blogger blogs in a month or so though — If I can rank well with some of them (like grizzly), I can really cut down my costs. But blogger blogs may be harder to get initial traffic and ranking, something my model of making money relies a lot on. Ah well, you don’t know until you fling a lot out there.
Janet is right — freshdrop.net is the place to go. Make sure the domain is indexed by google in the manner that Janet mentioned. I would also make sure the domain has MORE than one page indexed, because if there is only one page indexed, I’ve found it’s usually only godaddy (though if you have more than one BL from different sources it’s ok). Multiple pages indexed and you know that domain has been around for a while.
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Great post Ben!
I’m laughing so hard at the thought of people throwing an hour of anything out of the window to watch the latest episode of “Heroes”. I think I’d prefer to get stabbed repeatedly than go through that, lol.
I’m working through the now defunct hubchallenge at the same time as learning some affiliate stuff (yeah, I’m one of those internet marketers). Now my goal is to work out 10 hubs per week, and I’ve already got 12 up. So far only one click, but they’re getting 2-5 hits per day each with few of them having any backlinks. But anyway, my point is that I whole heartedly agree about there not being any shortcuts.
Good luck to you man and keep trucking. I gotta ask, though, how long does it take you to type your blog posts now? Ten minutes? All your article writing must have trained your fingers to type at 300 words per minute, lol.
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admin Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 9:12 am
The last one took probably 2-3 hours lol. It’s why the spelling is so bad, I just focus on throwing it all out there — and the post becomes too long to go back and edit, hah.
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Ben,
I need a tool for looking at the competitions backlinks. I don’t have SEO Elite. Do you recommend any FREE tools or methods for this?
[Reply]
admin Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 9:15 am
free — use linkdiagnosis.com. I actually use this more than anything else as I find Market Samarai’s keyword research stuff too slow, though maybe I have not given MS a fair chance since everyone seems to love it.
[Reply]
KC Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 9:46 am
You are the MAN!
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Phillip Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 11:55 am
Thanks for that link. I have been using just the seotoolbar but that takes it out easy.
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Hey Ben,
Great post as always. I’m working on 100 EPN snipers (started a couple weeks before the news about the payout structure) and have a couple questions - do you see any problem with hosting all 100 sites all in the same hosting account on the same IP? They won’t be interlinked or anything, but I don’t want to take any chances. Also, do you think I should avoid using Google Analytics from the same Google account on every site? And last, if I send backlinks to each site from hubs, infobarrels, etc, what’s the minimum amount of different accounts you would recommend using?
[Reply]
admin Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 9:51 am
You can, but do it on a reseller account. If you are on a shared hosting account, if there is a problem with ONE domain and your service shuts down, everything goes down. You can use a shared account, but understand its more of a risk. I’ve heard nightmare stories about host companies like dreamhost shutting down your account because one too many blogs go over the space limit. With something like a hostgator reseller account, the company won’t shut down your entire account because a few sites are using too much space.
If your EPN snipers are full of useful content, I woudn’t worry too much. In general, I use statcounter because you can have 100’s of sites per account. Analytics only has 25 per account. Analytics really should only be used on sites you are doing well with adsense — you can really optimize for adsense because you have all the important stats at your fingers. And google already knows your stuff. But if you have multiple adsense accounts, it makes sense — don’t put sites with different adsense accoutns under the same analtyics account.
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Sam Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Thanks for the advice, I really appreciate it. The snipers all have a minimum 2500 words quality, unique content. I was making a killing in the past throwing up thin EPN sites for long tail keywords but they slowly started getting deindexed back in May so I decided to change strategy and focus on good content as a foundation, so that I *hopefully* won’t have to go through the hassle of sites getting banned down the road.
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admin Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 10:57 am
Yea. There is a lot of hubbub online about ebay stores getting deindex left and right. Well, that’s because they are pretty much product listings and nothing else. Taking a quality niche blog (5-10 GOOD, useful posts) and adding something like PHPBay is not something is going to smake you around for. You have a lot of good content (if you have have written using lots of longtails) that should bring in traffic and HELP users and a means for users to buy it — just what google wants.
These sites take MUCH longer to put out there — even I, with all my speed, could probably only put out 1-2 of these a day, but I like the knowing my income is fairly safe in the future.
This whole ebay pricing change — I’m not sure what’s going to happen with that though. I’m really attemping to diversify from adsense (though by far and large, I earn 85% of what I currently make online with adsense) and ebay seems the best way to do it (though, I want to get 100 or so sites out there pimping amazon products as well). I’m just playing a waiting game to see what’s going on with this payment change. I don’t see how there is going to be an increase for any affiliates. I suspect clicks will be pennies. This means small time niche stores will make penuts.
Ben,
Does G care how many sites one person, or better stated, one adsense account has?
What if I create 2,500 blogger blogs all with good quality, unique content and only use white hat to promote them?
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Adsense Lover Reply:
August 29th, 2009 at 10:43 am
Dude i am maintaining only few. how you make backlinks for 2,500 blogger. Ben should we make hundreds of backlinks for every blogger?
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Hey Ben, great to hear about your snipers and the decision to start up some authority sites. I have some snipers up, but decided that for the long term, authority is going to be huge.
I love InfoBarrel’s new ad-layout, but I noticed that the majority of the people on there are not taking the time to back up their posts with links from ezines, etc. What happens? They get non-targeted ads for their posts and don’t earn what they should be earning…
I like IB’s and Hubs, but have decided that I am not going to write any more articles on those sites unless I need them for promo. It is way better to write for yourself and see the results in a few months with an awesome authority site than invest all of your time getting shared revenue. These sites are great for backlinks and a supplementary income, but that’s where it ends.
I’m definitely pumped for your phpBay experiment + sniper blogger blogs experiment! Thanks for the update man.
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admin Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Hey Drew. Yea man, I’ve concluded that Authority is the way to go. It’s safer and far less work in the long run. I’m making good money with small site volume right now, and I’m going to continue pumping out sites for another 6 months to a year to generate some cash and diversify, but each month I’m going to set up an authority site in different niches as a long term investment. I have one authority site that owns a niche and I love how I can make any post on a topic and the post is ranked page 1/2 the next day.
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Awesome content again Ben, I’ve been reading your posts for a few months now, almost since the beginning, and it’s amazing how quickly you have managed to make a success of this thing. I am over at the keyword Academy, but I’ve also learned so much from your posts,and made a pot load of money from your recommendations about hubpages and infobarell. I bought the magic article rewriter and with only a couple of attempts I can really see the possibilities in saving huge amounts of time and effort. I wish you good luck in everything you do.
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admin Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Thanks mate. Glad to see you are making some money from my advice! MAR is very useful. Surprisingly, most IM’ers here don’t seem to know about it. Pity!
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Ben, one thing you may want to be careful about is the phbbay thing. They are also getting deindexed now. Consider using widgets from epn. They are java script and leave a much smaller footprint than phpbay. The downside is you don’t get the markov.
I put adsense on hold for about 8 months, and have been blasting ebay (funny, I used to wonder how anyone could makemoney with it) and now it’s my biggest.
Ive heard that some are seeing a 25% or more drop in projected income with the new epn pay model.
Per your posts, Im going to get back to adsense….right now working on pounding hubs out…guess Im a late bloomer…
and get back to sniper sites….
You may also want to consider dragon naturally speaking. I hate typing, and I am using it for my hub project now.
I can pump out articles much faster that way than with typing…
Thanks for posting so much( I do like finding out any nuggets you offer) but since MMO is such a lonely business, I like to check in to see what’s up when I take a break or two in between content and links…
M
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admin Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Interesting. I just took a look at my projected earnings under the new model, my earnings have gone up 60% accross the board. What really earned money were the ND sites, believe it or not. I had earnings of .17 go out to 17 bucks lol. Almost every single earning day went up, and ND sites went up the most, some times pennies to like 15+ bucks for the day. Wow, this new ebay model LOVES ND from what I see.
Sweet. ND development full force ahead.
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Ben, I just tagged you CHUCK NORRIS OF THE INTERNET.
Get used to it, its gonna stick!!!!
BK
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admin Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
lol! Call me the internet “walker”
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Is the following method “so early 2000s” and now obsolete?
Write a dozen article headlines.
Write 3+ variations of paragraph 1
Write 3+ variations of paragraph 2
…
Write 3+ variations of paragraph 7
There should be at least 5 or 6 paragraphs with the 3+ variations.
The three variations of each paragraph are to be rewritten, saying the same thing, but may include some duplicate phrases or sentences.
Programatically or manually assemble a spun article from a random selection of the headlines and a variation for each paragraph.
Generate another spun article with another set of random selections. Etc. Hundreds, even thousands of variations possible — 3×3x3×3x3×3…
The articles will make sense, since each paragraph variation is on the same theme, and each variation of the paragraph is (should be) well written.
But, programs like DupeFree Pro might not give passing grades to the results, as it picks out snippets. I don’t know. I haven’t run a test yet, but waiting to see what your thoughts on that method, first.
I wrote a program some years ago that does that, but it needs revision as it references working with a departed guru.
[Reply]
admin Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
Dave, I do hear some people “spin” an article that way. My concern with that method is that the phrase level still won’t be unique, though on a paragraph level, they will be. People who pick out a couple sentences to check for duplicate content on google could still easily find the source article. I believe copyscape would fail it too — though, the only way to tell for sure would be to do it.
Unique Article Wizard sort of does what you are talking about. You write an article and two rewrites of it, paragraph to paragraph. The program then mixes around the sentences from each article paragraph. I know for a fact that people can still find the source, since I had someone I ripped content from come post to one of the UAW blogs claiming the content was stolen. Whoops.
I can’t say for sure though about your method. The more work you put into the rewrites (and possibly adding more, say 5-10 rewrites rather than 3), the better. I do know that going through an article and doing nested spins with a program like MAR yields a very unique article at the sentence level (since there will be multiple sentences and each sentence has different word choices). It also depends on what you are trying to spin for — i suspect the method you mentioned above will do fine for SE’s — though if someone manually checks, maybe not.
Ultimately, there is no substitution for hand written stuff — but when you have a zillion support blogs or blog farms to update, spinning can be very useful.
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I enjoy the blog and I find it inspiring that you still keep up the day job. It’s hard work, but I found the structure of a working good. I quit my job a couple of years ago now and you do tend to get lazy after a while.
I just started getting into article writing (again). I think I have a problem of trying to create quality content. I don’t do use any software rewriters to create additional articles. Maybe I am leaving money on the table. I don’t know. I like to build my internet income slow and steady.
I run a couple of forums also, which is a great way to build content on your sites. I have never found them to make much money with adsense though.
Anyway, keep up the good work. It helps make me think I should be pushing myself more.
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Another useful post Ben- thanks. I’ve been reading through your archives, & they’ve given me lots of ideas for new experiments & things to try. I’m still doing my first 100-200 hubs/infobarrels, which will hopefully boost my adsense income (while working on my own self-hosted affiliate sites too), but would also like to try adsense snipers, ebay niche sites and a few other things. My challenge is balancing all that with my desire to focus on building a few top quality authority sites for long term income. I think I’ll try splitting my work time 50/50 between my experiments and my main sites & see how that goes. Unfortunately I can’t quite manage the hours that you put in (and if I don’t take one day off a week my brain threatens to implode), so my progress will be slower, but I’ll get there eventually! A year or two is not that long in the larger scheme of things really. I’m also looking forward to reading more about building a backlink network.
BTW, do you have any experience with promoting CPA offers? This is something I’m curious about, but have never tried.
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admin Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Hi Cat, I’m playing around with CPA offers right now — they can be pretty good, I hear. We’ll see how that goes.
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Ben,
Great review about the content creation and resources galore too!
I have a couple of article directory sites that I am using right now and one has actually done quite well with income from Chitika and Adsense. It has also given me a couple of ideas on new niche sites that have ended up doing well also. I am using a WP article directory plugin that has worked really well. Shoot me an email if you need more info about it and I’ll send you the URL too…
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Magical Article Rewriter vs Jetspinner
Magical Article Submitter vs ?
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admin Reply:
August 29th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
RSS Article Bot and Automatic Article Submitter. Article Bot is good, but it does not support spinning syntax yet. MAS looks pretty good and it’s directly compatible with MAR though. I’d say MAS > RSS Article Bot until the guys add in jet spinning syntaxt. Automatic Article Submitter looks good though because you can drip submit articles.
Keep in mind though, directories only give you a fraction of a fraction of link juice now. I’d rather have a solid authority link any day over 300 article directory links. They have their place though and every internet marketer should do a few submissions at least. Just don’t expect the world.
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Ben, thanks for the comment about my spinner. Looks like I will just have to try it out. I’m thinking of trying it out to put articles on TKA article directories — making a bunch linking to HubPages for each of my Hubs. We’ll see if C&M&P think if they are unique enough to accept them.
In any event, such articles should do just fine for the “fram bolgs” below the support blogs in your “Bolg Fram Network” diagram and post back in May. With enough paragraph variations, you can generate thousands of fairly uniques.
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Ben, brilliant blog!
I have recently started building small blogs very similar to your Clickbank Snipers, but it looks like I need to investigate adsense.
I just wondered if you use a domain per sniper or subdomains? Have you tested the difference? I am thinking of testing it, but if you already have I can save some time!
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admin Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 9:40 am
Dan. I don’t use subdomains for niche sites. Subdomains are good if you want to build a general authority niche or authority site. I like to focus my snipers around a single keyword to increase the ranking potential for that term. You certainly could use something like:
healthtreatments.cancer.org
healthtreatments.acidreflux.org
healthtreatments.aids.org
and use each as a niche site or blog. But, I don’t feel this is best for a sniper site? Why? Because if google punishes your site or does a deindex, your entire domain is vulnerable. Again, for an authority site, subdomains are great. For small niche sites, not a good idea because you can lose everything in one shot.
you have to understand. Google does NOT like people like us — people who make small niche websites to score adsense or affiliate sales. Perhaps they tolerate us, but I feel they view us more like a pest then a boon. You don’t want to have a single domain containing 10+ niche websites on them — no way. You might as well announce to google and the world you are an internet marketer. And you have compiled all your niches right there in the open for every person to see.
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Ben, would it be okay to use a really spun article (working 4-5 hours on the spinning) and then post it on hubpages, infobarrels, etc? Poorly spun articles are a no go, but what about really unique ones?
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admin Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 9:50 am
Nick, I would not suggest putting spun content on Infobarrel — those guys are pretty picky about that and unless your spin is really really good, you will be backlisted. Not worth it. Hubpages, you probably could get away with it, maybe.
I think it’s best to keep spun stuff on blogger.com and other web 2.0’s that don’t have your adsense account tied to them. Use spun stuff to pump up support stuff, and real content for sites you really care about/have adsense on.
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i’m looking for an automated blog post tool that enables me to automate the uploading of posts to 20 or so different sites over an extended period of time. I know there is a product which does this soley for wordpress, but i have 20 sites on different 2.0 platforms and need the product to be able to regulate all the posts into these different sites. Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated from anyone who can in fact help.
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admin Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 9:52 am
paul, you may want to look at blackhatworld.com for more info on this. I’ve decided to keep most BH stuff off this blog — I’m sure google engineers are already reading this blog and I don’t want any more attention than I am already getting. What you are talking about may not be hard core blackhat, but it’s crossing the greyhat boundary, I’d say. Google already despises blogs like this as it is — and I’ve been talking about things like spinning and blog farms, all ready big no nos.
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paul Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 7:37 pm
k - i won’t go near it then..
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admin Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Yea, I actually don’t even know the answer to that question — I don’t really use any automated spinning tools like that, though I know they do exist. Something like SENuke might do that for you. But you will probably have to hit up BH world for that.
Ben
Ben, another excellent and informative post. I’ve found that your posts have inspired me to work harder even on the days I get up and don’t feel like writing. Writing’s always been a passion, but let’s face it when you’re writing about some of the Im stuff, it can get monotonous…The spinning and rewrite ideas you give here are fabulous, it’s always been tough for me to not write my own content, but these will help.
On a side note, ever since the whole EPN scare about having links on blogger, hubpages and squidoo…I went crazy removing all the EPN from my free properties online..for many of them I recplaced with Amazon Associates, and I’ve found I’ve made a good chunk of money with Amazon this past month, more than I ever earned with EPN. My logic now says that I’m going to create more Amazon type properties, especially in anticipation of Christmas 2009 when many more shoppers will be online…It’s definitely worth a shot to make some decent coin!
Keep up the great work here and keep the tips coming, they help a lot!
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admin Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 9:55 am
A good plan MC. It also shows you that you should not have all your eggs in one basket. If you rely only on one company too much, you are fucked if they make some policy changes not in your favor — and as we’ve see, this can happen very easily. I’d say you should work on having a wide mix of both ebay, amazon, adsense, clickbank, chitka, and Commision Junction. Even in cases where ebay makes more money than amazon, it’s a good idea to still use amazon JUST because you are not so relient on ebay. I’m going to be creating 100 or so blogs hawking amazon stuff after I finish my ebay stuff.
Ben
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MC Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 12:09 pm
I agree totally…I run Chitka on a few blogs and it gets me a payment every few months, so I may need to optimize it better. I’ve tested other monetization strategies like Widgetbucks for a bit, until I received a payout. Clickbank and CJ are two I really need to learn to master better. I’m like you right now where the majority of my income is coming from the big G, while some comes from affiliate programs or Kontera.
Question about the article spinning…I joined JetSpinner and I like the way it works, but you’re right about the fact that setting up the notation is a beast of a job. Ever found any free online databases of spin notation that you can simply take from? I felt like I was trapped in Madlibs hell trying to come up with a set of unique words every other word to make an article. I didn’t even try making it with multiple sentence variations yet…Can’t imagine how you do it.. Thanks for any insight…
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admin Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 12:35 pm
the best solution I’ve found for spinning is MAR. I have not found anything else out there that let’s you create spun-notated articles as quickly. I used to do it all by hand, but creating a very unique article after 5 hours of rewriting sentence combination after combination was just too much to handle for me.
I can now use MAR to generate a decently unique article in under 30 minutes — MUCH easier than doing it by hand.
But spinning by hand, forget about it — it simply takes too long (for me at least).
KC Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Ben,
After spinning with MAR do you use MAS to submit?
The reason I ask is I am about to purchase a spinner & submitter and I have it narrowed down to MAR/MAS ($80) or Automatic Article Submitter ($97).
I want to buy MAR/MAS because they look easier to use, but when compared to AAS they appear weaker in the following areas.
MAR/MAS - You have to use Gmail for submission accounts.
AAS - You can use any email service for submission accounts.
MAR/MAS - They suggest only using one account to submit articles.
AAS - You can use multiple “Pen Names” to spin your ID.
MAR/MAS - It does not submit to high PR AD’s like Ezine.
AAS - Submits to top level AD’s like Ezine and GoArticles.
MAR/MAS - You can only add AD’s that use Article Dashboard script.
AAS - You can add any blog or AD to submission list.
I have never used a spinner/submitter so I don’t know if these things really matter.
I hate to bug you with this, but a hundred bucks is a lot right now. Thanks for your help!
admin Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 8:02 pm
KC, I have not used AAS yet. I like the drip feature AAS offers. I spent some time thinking about the differences myself. They are both pretty similar. I think if you are comparing article directory submission software, than AAS is better than MAS, for sure.
But, MAR > than AAS as spin program, hands down and then some. Do you want software to use for spinning for you own blogs and article directories (MAS +MAR) or do you want a better article directory submitter (AAS)?
I’d personally say go with MAR + MAS for 20 bucks cheaper. You get the article submission feature of MAS and you can use MAR to spin your stuff for your own blogs as well as send to directories. I don’t place that much value on article directories anymore — except ones with authority. Google has vastly reduced the link juice.
Really depends on what you are looking for though.
KC Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 10:02 pm
Thanks Ben.
I appreciate your opinion. I am going with MAR & MAS. If you say MAR is much better than AAS that’s good enough for me.
From reading the forum the owner of MAR seems to be trying hard. He is promising better article submissions in the future and I have heard no negatives about the software.
The other day you recommended linkdiagnosis to check backlinks for free. I love it. It’s fast and clean. I found another free program for researching backlinks “SEO Spyglass “. Definitely worth a look.
Thanks again.
Phillip Reply:
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:49 am
MAR must be the best shit I ever bought. Thanks for pointing it out, although I remember checking that page out a few months ago, back then I did not think it was worth it. For me spinning is like hell - I am not a native english speaker so it is a hard ass work to come up with synonyms. Basically access to a good backlink network and MAR is all you need to be able to give some link juice for those supporting blogs. I can even do the submitting manually but spinning articles this easy is actually worth the $47 in my opinion.
ref 18 & 23 above
Yeah, that spinning thing does turn out to be so early 2000’s. I tried it on TKA/KWA article directory. I did one article, naturally no problem, but the second was rejected, even though I tried a few different “spins” on it. Even the ones that passed DupeFree Pro got rejected. Seems like even little snippets like “great for family fun”, if repeated, get noticed by DupeFree Pro and KWA. And KWA seems to be even less tolerant of several such snippet dupes.
It’s not worth it, timewise, to try and find spins that work, especially since the third would be even harder to get accepted than the second, and the fourth would be even harder than the third…
So instead of 50 articles, I’ll get only four on KWA, as that is how many variations of each sentence I made.
But, it still might be OK for articles for the “fram bolgs” (third level) on that network diagram I mentioned above.
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hi Ben,
i ve been reading your posts for few weeks now, your energy level is awesome. it gets me back to work when i feel tired.
bk said rightly ‘chuck noris of the internet’ or how is bruce lee of the internet..
can you give me some insight on BMD. how good it is for getting established domain authorities some backlinks. you talked about doing it for HPs and IBs. how is that going now? i know it is not good for your niche blogs with less authority.
would appriciate some insight.
[Reply]
admin Reply:
September 1st, 2009 at 9:08 am
BMD is useful for getting quickly indexed. You won’t get a lot of link juice though. If you have it, it’s certainly worth doing a few runs on your pages (especially for deep links), but just don’t expect serious link juice benifits.
Keep in mind that while I have BMD, I don’t usually use it. If I’m doing a link building campaign, I’ll toss it in the mix, but it’s not the first thing that comes to mind. I’d rather have a solid link from a related site anyday over 300 BMD links. It’s decent for supporting your support blogs or ezine articles.
If you are working niches that have little to no competition, BMD links can make a difference, since at that point, any sort of targeted link will send you high in the SERPs since little to no other sites have targeted anchor text.
Is it worth having? Yea, I think so — you can make use of it. But, certainly don’t make it your first choice when getting links for a domain.
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hm.. i’ve been sandboxed for my new site. how many links should i get a week to get out of it. I’m posting a heap of new content over the next few months but unsure whether i should bother getting links or not.
[Reply]
admin Reply:
September 1st, 2009 at 10:42 am
People seem to throw sandbox around quite a lot. But there is a lot of confusion about this.
A true sandbox is a new site (under a year or so usually) that starts to get some real traffic (100/200/300/400+) people a day) then suddenly gets knocked out of the SERP’s — like rank 1000+ for keyword. You go from like 300 people a day to 5/10 or so. If you are truly sandboxed, then you need to keep on adding backlinks (as per normal — don’t over do it) and keep on adding new content. Some SEO’s say that the fastrack to getting out of the sandbox is to get solid authority links from blogs with a lot of trustrank in that niche. I’d say I agree. Add new content and focus on getting backlinks, epecially backlinks from blogs with authority — if you can land some relevent links from sites that are well established (even better if they are in your niche, as it shows google that your site is to be trusted since other trusted sites in the niche are pointing to you), you can probably end your sandbox term early.
But, I’m not sure you are in a sandbox. If your site was not getting good traffic before, it’s not sandboxed.
A lot of people create new domain (or create a new post), find they rank high for a week or two, then when the domain suddenly plummets in rank, they assume google is sandboxing them. Not so. This is simply the fresh content bonus wearing off. Once the honeymoon rank is over, you need to start getting backlinks to restore your site to it’s former (temp) rankings.
Also, when you create a brand new site, Google spends a few weeks trying to sort where you belong, then shuffles you back to your proper position. For some niches, you might not even rank for a solid 2 weeks to a month (unless you send some good links). If you have created a brand new site, you are not sandboxed.
[Reply]
KC Reply:
September 1st, 2009 at 11:49 am
I was wondering about this. Excellent explanation. Thank you!
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Hi Ben,
had a question if you don’t mind. Still trying to wrap my head around SEO. So let’s say we’re trying to rank your site for “how to make money online for free” or something (hope that gives you a good longtail!). So from my understanding, you would create a web 2.0 property such as a hub, blogger, weebly or a lens by writing relevant info on that topic and then use that exact phrase as an anchored link.
However, here’s where I’m confused. What if you DON’T want that web 2.0 property to rank for the super long tail but you want your site instead to rank. I say this because lets say this site was monetized. You naturally lose CTR as it goes from say a hub > money site. I think it would be more ideal if the money site was instead ranked #1 for that term.
Would you just create maybe 4-5 such properties and link it to your site? How many links would you need to send to such properties to give them keyword authority for that term? I’m planning on doing some tests with this… but I just thought to ask. Thanks so much!
Hann
[Reply]
Hey Ben,
I’ve set up a new blog with 7 >600 word posts. I’ve set up hubpage, infobarrel and ezine links to it.
After a few weeks, it’s still not getting ANY google traffic whatsoever.
I’ve never seen shit like this in the past.
Do you ever see this sort of shit happening to your own blogs?
[Reply]
admin Reply:
September 1st, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Sure…if you pick one of the ultra competative niches, you won’t see any traffic for 2 weeks to a month — and that’s if you are on your own selfhosted blog. How fast you rank and where you rank are REALLY dependent on the niche and how competative the niche is. For example, if you are targetting skin care, forget about ranking any time soon — not unless you can pull out some PR 3/4 links from trusted blogs in those niches from ground zero. You are going to have to spend months building solid links.
If you pick a blogger.com blog in a competative niche, you won’t see traffic period, without some solid links. I have blogger blogs that are 4 months old with only a handful of links. And these get like 1 person a week if that.
[Reply]
Jay Reply:
September 1st, 2009 at 1:33 pm
When I picked a website in the teeth whitening niche, it got SE traffic right off the bat and it was making a buck per day after about 1 or 2 months.
My new site is in the laser hair removal niche (self-hosted). Is that ’skin care’?
It’s kind of hard to pick niches that:
- aren’t too competative
- have people that are desperate for a solution
You recommend that any niche you pick has these properties. It’s hard to fine one that satisfies these criteria.
Yet you say that making money online is easy once you learn to pick the right niches. How the hell can you ever learn?
Court says there’s an ocean of keywords out there that can make you money. He says people are coming up with thousands of new keywords every day.
I’m having a hard time believing this. When I do keyword research, all the keywords I find with a CPC of at least $2, have much competition already.
When you said you were going for the fruit that was on the ground and rotting, you weren’t kidding, were you?
You’re going for the absolute shit keywords with a few hundred searches per month and working your way to rank for bigger keywords, right?
[Reply]
Phillip Reply:
September 1st, 2009 at 9:18 pm
IMO it sounds like you are staring too much at the CPC that the adworrd keyword tool gives you. If the main part of the keyword has high CPC and the long tail has .05 you are going to get paid according to the higher one. Remember that the tool is meant for people in PPC and is no one else is bidding for a keyword it will shoe the cpc as .05. Also the traffic estimations are wrong just like Griz has been discussing on his blog and I am seeing proof of that on a relatively new site of mine. G-tool shows that there are about 270 searches a month for a long tail that I am targeting, and I have been seeing about 7-10 unique hits per day for that long tail even though I am not on the first page.
KC Reply:
September 1st, 2009 at 2:04 pm
I have been studying you, Griz, and Court for several months and this is the first time I have heard this about blogger blogs and competitive niches. This is the real world commentary I need to hear.
You just saved me a bunch of time and pain. I was building a blogger blog in a competitive niche, but because of that comment I am stopping work today and moving to submitting articles for authority sites. I am not ready to build a blogger blog now. It will be there when I am ready.
Thanks Ben!
[Reply]
Jay Reply:
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:50 am
This reply is @philip but I can’t reply to his own post…
Thanks Philip. I think you are right. I did target some long tails and they appeared on SERP1 pretty much instantly. Some of my infobarrels are only days old and already have >200 views. I’m going to be trying more of this now.
Phil, I read on your blow that you said that a guy who writes 15 pages of solid content daily, will be able to pay the rent pretty damn quickly.
How many words are we talking about here? And pages where? Hubpages? Infobarrels?
I can write 5 450 word infobarrels per hour. I could easily produce 20 of them per day if I really wanted to.
(ofcourse it’s gonna cost some extra time up front to select the keywords that I will be dedicating them to)
How much money should I expect to make from such an undertaking in month?
And Ben, how many pages did you create daily when you were still doing all the writing alone?
@Jay
Keep on writing ~15 hubpages/infobarrels with 1-2 ezines pointing to them. Each targeting a low competition med to high CPC keyword and you will eventually see the cash. If you van do this for a month you will have 400 hubs/IBs. Also during this process you will learn what works and what does not. Based on my own experiences with that much hubs you can be making anywhere from 20 to 50 bucks per day if you get it right. Although I think that hubs are definitely losing authority And don’t rank so easily.
And to be honest. Don’t be too serious when reading my blog. I won’t be writing utter bullshit but a lot of that is to find some keywords to target. I am not yet as talented in disguising it as Griz
[Reply]
Phillip Reply:
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:01 am
And I forgot to mention that this is all written in previous posts and comments on this blog. And that I prefer going a bit longer with the hubs. Basically as long as you can wwrite without stopping to think too much and waste time that way, you should keep on puishing a bit longer articles.
[Reply]
Jay Reply:
September 2nd, 2009 at 8:01 am
Are you saying 15 hubpages OR infobarrels daily?
I usually write 1 ezine to point to 2 money pages.
How do you point 2 ezines at 15 money pages?
I assume that you have your money pages linked up to each other.
And what’s that cell phone cash offer on your page? Should I take *that* seriously? Is there really some quick cash in that?
[Reply]
Phillip Reply:
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:11 am
I must have written it badly don’t worry I am not a native english speaker.
Write 15 hubs or 15 infobarrels per day. Doing 7 hubs and 8 IBs should be enough also or any other combination of these two.
Point 1-2 ezine links PER hub or IB. That means when you write a money page write one article that points to it and another hub or ib. Since you can add two links per article you should point each to different pages.
so when you write 15 hubs you also need to write 15 ezines.. But imo ezines are easy since you can basically just follow in the lines of your hubs and keep it in just over 250 words..
what comes to that cell phone shit (that is probably clear enough no?)… You have to make your mind about those quick riches crap that you see. We are all at that point in our lives sometimes and as I mention in my “about” page, if you read it, I will be promoting shit sometimes to just test with that blog. The thing with clickbank (and cellphonecash) is that you get a refund if it does not work for you. But basically I (and probably Ben also) would prefere that you asked the questions related to my blog somewhere else.
Jay Reply:
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:40 am
“But basically I (and probably Ben also) would prefere that you asked the questions related to my blog somewhere else.”
Sure thing. But WHY?
HI Ben,
just signed up to the forum that is listed above. How does one get access to the “bikeshed” on your forum?
thx
Matt
[Reply]
admin Reply:
September 2nd, 2009 at 10:18 am
Matt, I haven’t added decided what to do with the private forums — I just created the forums yesterday. If people start to really use the regular forums, then I may send out some invitations to trusted people, etc to discuss topics not suitable for public consumption. There’s no real point to have a private section if the regular section gets no use.
[Reply]
Cat Reply:
September 2nd, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Great, another forum for me to procrastinate on ; ) Seriously though, I mostly avoid MMO forums these days, since there’s so much nonsense spouted on them (not to mention the time-wasting aspect), but I was just thinking the other day how good it would be to have somewhere to go to ask questions & discuss this stuff with people who actually know what they’re doing. So I’ve just joined up - will be interesting to see how it develops!
[Reply]
Booyeah! Cranking out hubs has finally been worth the effort it seems! Thanks to mostly your help Ben, I’m now making around $3-5 a day. It may not sound like a lot, but 3/4 of the backlinks are not yet up and most of them have only been put up in the last 3 weeks; I cannot wait for them to slowly creep as I put more of them out there and let them age.
I am starting to make it work with IB also, just my topic selection wasn’t liked by the editors. Even though I am back of to school tomorrow, I will be definately making time to do this stuff every day so I can quit my paper round ;). Thanks once again for all your help - it has made all the difference between making it work and not. Next goal: 300 completed Hubs w/ 150 IB’s + 100 Amazon’s for Xmas partay!
P.S. Have some of your snipers come from those IB’s/Hubs that have been most successful?
[Reply]
Was curious if anyone could recommend the best free tracking software so I can track which keywords my traffic are using to find my site?
[Reply]
KC Reply:
September 2nd, 2009 at 8:05 pm
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