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
21 Comments
hey ben - i’ll be interested to see how niche devil pans out for you. I still reckon it’s a risk but you gambled and it could pay off.
You said you put 120 domains up so far ..so that’s a cost of 120 x 10 = 1200 bucks so far for Niche devil
You got 200 bucks back so far. I just think it’s a gamble because of google deindex factor.
I think if you make 2000 dollars from them in a year it’ll still be failure (is 800 bucks worth the time).
If they are sustainable then, nice one ben - you win
I’m not convinced yet
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admin Reply:
September 11th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Actually, no. I paid .89 per each domain, so roughly 120 bucks for the domains. 120 bucks + 97 for ND = 217 in total, so I’ve already made 83 bucks in profit. We’ll see how the rest of the month pans out. ND is a gamble — I can’t say you can get some sustainable income out of it — but who knows, there are still people making money from BAN’s after the deindex spree. I’ll test the water with another couple hundred, then if things stick, up another 600-700.
For long term ebay, I want 200 quality ebay sniper sites.
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IM Professional Reply:
September 12th, 2009 at 12:22 am
right i see -
nice one ben - that looks like better payback
where do you get cheap domains from? do you use .info ?
by the way, what do you think of BANS version 3 - do you think it a better option ?
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p.s. yeah ebay sure are ripping us off …well if you have a legitimate ebay site. I lost 70% with there new system on a quality ebay affiliate site !!!!! I think you’re right - ebay want spam - let’s give it to them
I’m moving over to chitika and amazon now …. i’m mad at ebay!
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Nice update. What about your hubs and infobarrels?
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admin Reply:
September 11th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
IB’s are doing 8-10 bucks a day with no backlink work. I’m actually going to backlink them all up and see how that affects the income — it should, big time.
Hubs have been smacked around. I’m still making a full time income with them, but I’ve lost about 30% of my traffic in about a month and a week — somethings up. I’m doing a couple experiments to see if I can pump them back up, but frankly, I’m making more with my snipers than hubpages and those are a far better long term investment. I don’t encourage anyone to start writing hubs to make money at this point — you don’t get the insta traffic you had 3 months ago.
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matty Reply:
September 28th, 2009 at 2:44 am
Hi Ben
Do you know why the hubs are going down hill…do you think if I write another 300 hubs it will make a difference? or do you suggest using info-barrel now?
Man if i’m going to write 1000 pages..I think a authority sites ..better I know you told us to spread ourselves as you just never know..however some ways of making money seems more steady than others…..
anyway again thank you for your great knowledge and wisdom ..
bless
Matty UK
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admin Reply:
September 28th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
matty, don’t bother with hubs anymore — other than for backlinks. Infobarrell is a better option, but at the end of the day you need to get your own properties out there.
You are way better of putting those 300 articles into 30 or so self hosted sites any day.
Hey Ben can you tell me how to make money - I started reading your post but it was pretty long - you know LOL
Yeah my ND are doing pretty good - I’ve lost a couple but not recently. I don’t have as many as you but most are pre-owned which I hadn’t got aroudn to doing anything with LOL And yes it looks like they are going to do as good or better with the news CPC model - I feel sorry for the commentator above with a decent site - it really does seem that eBay loves to pay ND affiliates LMAO.
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admin Reply:
September 12th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Yea ND have been rocking. I personally can’t see them staying indexed forever — but maybe I’m wrong. I want to enter the niches that seem to be doing well with legit phpbay sites. It seems ebay wants a LOT of clicks and a lot of clicks from different sources rather than a few high arcu value clicks from a large domain.
Ben
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Re your comment above about Hubs being smacked - you are quite right about this. It’s not just about new hubs struggling due to saturation, as I originally thought, it’s old hubs been slapped.
I make it about 700,000 pages gone - see my blog for how I worked out the numbers.
P.S.: Forgot to say great post!
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admin Reply:
September 12th, 2009 at 9:45 am
yea, something is up with ups — but, I can’t say I’m surprised they may have gotten slapped. I’m currently doing a backlink campaign on some of the hubs to see how effective that is. But, given what’s happening with hubpages, I’m not included to put out another 1000 or so hubs. I was thinking about making ebay focused hubs — those might end up getting traffic, but we’ll see.
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You said you lost 30% of traiffic. But still i see hub pages alexa rank is better then before. I think hub pages got attention from all over the web.
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admin Reply:
September 12th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Rahul, Alexa is not a measure that will tell you how well hubpages with be doing in the Serps. Actually Grizzly created a post a while ago about how Alexia rankings are complete bullshit for anything but selling your site.
It may not be a hubpage slap — maybe there has been so much content added over the past 2 months that their overall searches had gone up but the traffic per article have gone down (I’ve heard this can happen with domains with a lot of content), or maybe it’s a slap. But from what I see and from what a lot of other people seem to notice is that you don’t get indexed fast anymore (in some cases) and you don’t get instant traffic anymore to competitive search terms.
As far as hubs, use them for backlinks and focus on your own sites. If you’ve been working your own sites for a few months, what happens with hubpages won’t really affect you. If you are banking on hubpages as your meal ticket, I wouldn’t quite your job any time soon.
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sarah Reply:
September 18th, 2009 at 4:39 am
well that’s because the 30 day hub challenge made all IMs and wanna-be MMOers to make hubs - they mostly have alexa toolbar and hence the rise in alexa rank.simple isnt it?
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do you use the same adsense account for all your snipers?
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eBay is an interesting creature, for sure. I think you are right about them wanting thin, spam-like affiliate sites rather than a huge, authority site. It makes no sense but certainly been part of my thinking of late. I have never been interested in pursuing an eBay affiliate relationship until recently. I have large authority site that has been mine for several years and specifically tailored to sales around the world with a focus on eBay sales (i.e., users come to my site to see what has sold and, in return, go to eBay to see what is now available). However, I can’t get the geniuses at eBay to “let me in the program”. Any tips you can give to get approved? Seems like I’m the only one on the net that can’t fucking get approved!
In any event, great site. Thanks for sharing.
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admin Reply:
September 12th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
Mace — I was rejected 4 times before getting approved. It took me about 3 weeks of begging.
First, if you get rejected, you need to send them an long email to the appeal email address about how you are a great match for ebay — tell them you want to send them quality search traffic, etc. Also send them the URL for 3-4 sites (the sites don’t have to be yours — though you will need to submit one site that’s yours for sure) that are quality sites that don’t have affiliate links or any montization. You don’t want to send them a spammy site to look at and you don’t want to send them a site that looks too commercial.
Just keep on repeating this if you get rejected — eventually they get sick of the emails and you get approved.
short of that, i think you can buy EPN id’s — people do sell them if you look around on forums. Though, it’s always better to get your own. But if you keep on reapplying and telling them how good an affiliate you will be and how much quality referrals you will bring, they’ll accept you eventually.
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Mace Reply:
September 12th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
I’ll try your “begging” method as there was some good info in there. Thanks Ben.
However, I’m at the point where it makes sense for me to go ahead and buy one. I need to get this thing going…
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IM Professional Reply:
September 12th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
join ebay with an authority site and they will accept you - use your best site to get accepted and then put ebay on all your spam sites
they don’t pay for traffic from authority site (my experience)
I’m a little confused with the first part of your post regarding clickbank and hops. I’m not a clickbank affiliate so I don’t know what a hop is for sure but I am assuming it is a click through to a sales page. Thats maybe why I am a little confused, I think what you call a hop, I call a page click through ie. CTR, and what you are calling a click through I call a conversion, unless your lander is forwarding to a merchants site. You might want to change that if so.
Either way your the numbers sound shitty, If you keep tweaking your ad copy and sales copy those numbers will improve I bet.
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admin Reply:
September 12th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Yea, my bad. hops are CB’s version of how many people click on a link. There is traffic to your page, and say 20-30% of the people will click on your “hop link”. My sites are set up so when you click on the link, you end up at the merchant’s site, so I guess it would be CTR.
The numbers are crappy, but I got my niches wrong I think. I may try out ebay or even convert the sites to adsense only.
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Your strategy with the snipers is really interesting- I’m still piggy backing off of article submission sites until I learn more about making my own site, but I definitely want to try a few clickbank snipers now. Almost as much as I want to check out Niche Devil; is it ever supposed to go back on the market?
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About the hub discussion, I’ve discovered that Google has been rotating my hubs for traffic. Meaning, one hub will have a sharp increase in traffic for a few days and then drop back down. And then a week or so later get a sharp increase in traffic again. I’ve been using back link software to for building traffic on a couple experimental hubs.
But besides that, I’m much more confident in my own domains and will spend my time on websites that I own and can control the future of. HubPages and Infobarrel, as far as I’m concerned, are strictly for good backlinking and shouldn’t make up 80% of anyone’s income.
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Hi Ben,
Do you have get backlinks for your nd sites? By the way, Great site!
[Reply]
admin Reply:
September 14th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Ron. Not a single one. There was a default ping option which pings 20 or so sites — you end up getting few very shitty backlinks from that, but in they end, all my ND sites do is score trickle traffic around product names.
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Kentucky Fried Chicken has dishes…?!
Oh, and I see how it is - I post on your forum recommending Caffeinated Content and then you swoop in and steal all the affiliate sales… That’s like the IM equivalent of cock-blocking, dude! J/K
Caffeinated Content is a good program, although it doesn’t “build an online store” like you said as far as I know, at least not by itself - you’ll need to use something like PHPbay in addition to it - Caffeinated Content just gets content for your site. So it’s not as fast as Niche Devil when it comes to the business of churning out thin affiliate sites, but the results are a whole lot better. For the most part the sites it creates will look completely legit and would probably pass a visual inspection (you’ll want to be careful if you’re using stuff from Yahoo Answers though as it can be pretty stupid). Totally worth the 80 bucks for those of us who aren’t afraid to take a risk and spend a little money…
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admin Reply:
September 14th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Haha — no never used it but I’m thinking about getting it. I’ll use your ID when/if I do sign up:).
But I do like to give credit where it is due for sure — create a post about it on the forum with a review of tge program I’ll put a link on the post with your review.
The ND thing has paid off so far and ebay seems to like spam — seems like CC may pass a visual, though there is more work involved. Gotta love the insta site you get with ND though. One thing I was thinking about is that all the content may be duplicate content. With ND, it’s not the case because it’s all spun. This means you might not get any trickle traffic — your pages might not be indexed.
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The Ice Cream Bunny Reply:
September 14th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
LOL, don’t worry about it man - I was just fuckin’ with ya. Thanks for the offer though. I’ll try to write a review for you if I can find the time but I’ve got a lot on my plate right now. I’m actually in the middle of opening up my own real world business just for fun in addition to all of my online crap. That’d be cool if you wanted to use my link though - thanks. I’m planning on submitting a few hundred articles to Human Rewriter as soon as I have the time, so hopefully you’ll get a decent commission for that…
Niche Devil is great - I’ve already made a few hundred dollars in profit and it’s going up everyday. I’m not sold on the long-term viability of the sites it creates, but I’m definitely enjoying what it’s doing right now.
I’ve been using Caffeinated Content for awhile now - way before Niche Devil even came out - and the duplicate content thing has never been an issue for me as all of my CC sites get consistent trickle traffic and rank pretty well for long-to-mid tail keywords in less competitive niches, without any backlink work. The program does have a spinner though so you can use it if you want to, but that makes the site considerably less legit and can also mess up some potential keywords. If you’re planning on entering into low competition niches, I have a little trick that can get you a few backlinks with very little effort which seems to help you rank pretty well with duplicate content just by adding a widget to your site. I’d rather not talk about it here but you can e-mail me and ask if you want to.
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another great article ben thanks
can i ask, can you put affiliate links on the same page as adsense??
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Hey Ben,
Along with caffeinated content, you might try the wp video plugin and the writeagain! wordpress rewriter plugin.. Wp video drips google videos into your wordpress posts based on a keyword you select. The caffeinated content rewriter isn’t very good, and it creates gibberish..but I guess it’s okay if you’re using it for ebay and not adsense.
Your scaling up of projects is really inspiring and making me realize how puny my IM efforts are
Keep up the great work!
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By the way, storestacker sounds pretty similar to nd.. Even though Vic says there is no footprint in nd, for sustained success, I would recommend hiring a programmer to make a new script similar to nd..this way there’s no footprints for sure! Someone is bound to leak a nd copy on the web, and it will be out on the web for all to use which will piss google off!
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Hello Ben,
Such long articles with the results of your experiments is impressive and interesting to read.
I am wondering where you bought such cheap domains at a dollar each.
Thanks
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matt2257 Reply:
September 22nd, 2009 at 12:59 pm
hey video games,
you can get .info domains for .89 a go daddy right now.
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I don’t want anyone to think that I thought ND was a ripoff or whatever. I need to do a better job if I plan to continue to blog on Lost Ball of explaining myself when I write posts or make comments I suppose. I get a lot of crap in general from people anymore because it seems I am the only one who questions the shit that is sold by marketers. It doesn’t mean it isn’t right for YOU. It means that it is not right for ME. I say as much. But people still get bent. I honestly do not care what people buy. Nor do I care how people make their money online. The criticism over what I write is getting old, my skin is getting a bit thin and I’m simply tired of the hassle. I have better things to do with my time than share my online experiences. rant off…sorry.
Ben, Ebay still does me well too. I was concerned about the quality score at the onset, but my free “widget” sites still do pretty good. It sucked having to move them off Blogger but the ones that performed seem to be picking back up with self-hosted domains. Only problem I have is that I find it harder to find products to try to sell for with Ebay than information to try to collect Adsense clicks. Basically the keyword selection is more difficult for me. If I can figure out the keyword puzzle to my satisfaction I am going to start cranking out StoreStacker sites again. They are like PHPbay type sites. You can create thick sites with thin material. They may play better down the road as Google/Bing tries to rank quality over crap.
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admin Reply:
September 24th, 2009 at 8:14 am
Actually Splork, it’s good that you throw a measure of cynicism out there. The problem is that people end up becoming sheep. Vic has a pretty good rep in the past. I MMO advice is pretty good in general but that doesn’t mean people should blindly buy anything. You have nothing to feel bad out. We need SOME people here to keep it real.
Regarding ND — i made some money on it, like I expected. But I also have to say most of my ND sites were deindexed about a week ago. Looks like Gman caught on, so untraceable ND was not. I still get a few clicks, but i’ve lost 90 percent of the clicks I was getting. I still made close to 500 bucks after paying for the domains + software though and, even more important, I found a lot of niches that can do well. As a result I’m putting up 200-250 of my OWN real phpBAY stores with legit content up.
I find ebay fairly easy to make money with — though by all means I have not really tried to really make money yet. Look for a niche with some expensive, hard to find products. Make sure you don’t have major authority sites ranking for the keywords. Then start throwing up your sites. If you are trying to make money with a single site, you will need to do the standard jump throuth the hops with SEO to make money. But if you are willing to create dozens or 100+ sites, you can score it very good with trickle traffic and almost no SEO. In fact, this is what ebay wants — their new payout scheme seems to punish single sites that get a lot of ebay clicks and reward affiliates that send a lot of clicks from a lot of different domains.
Keep hammering away Splork — success is just around the corner.
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Splork,
Do store stacker sites stay indexed?
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Lost Ball in High Weeds Reply:
October 2nd, 2009 at 10:10 am
Sorry for the followup delay matt. I hang StoreStacker sites off a main domain and then link into the store from posts. I haven’t really built many that are standalone SS sites. Those that I have are staying alive but frankly they haven’t done well alone. Probably more a function of my ineptitude than SS. If I link over to them from a post they do much better so that is how I approach them. They are indexed though as a folder so no problems so far.
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Ben, Give me an update. Need some motivation!
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“go work a no-risk job, maybe a teller at McDonalds or a dishwater at Kentucky Fried Chicken” wow. priceless. love your humor… by the way the risk is fricken high as a teller.. imagine all the creeps pulling up..
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