It’s been a busy two weeks — sorry, haven’t not gotten around to update the blog as per my weekly schedule and I’ve been getting crap from some of my readers about it. I’ve made it up to you with a record setting word count. You are going to need a pot of coffee or two 
So a lot of changes the past two weeks.
The biggest change is that I finally decided to step up and quit my job. I handed in my resignation last week. This is a big step – I wanted to diversify my online portfolio enough that I could survive a ban from adsense and I’m not yet into that position, but there’s no going back now! I’m going to make working on different revenue streams and getting multiple adsense accounts set up ASAP. When you don’t have a job, you don’t want to find your livelihood gone overnight. Quitting was more of a business decision than anything. I took a look at how much I can accomplish (well, as long as I am not writing these 6 hour posts for this blog!) by staying home and how much more I can earn with a month of full time IM over going to work and it didn’t make sense to stay at my job anymore. So, wish me luck on my full time IM venture.
Now that I don’t have a job (or won’t in less than 3 weeks), I’m pretty much free to go anywhere to work. So I’ve decided to live the dream. I’m going to work full time, 14-18 hours a day for the next 3-6 months on IM, and then leave Canada for Asia to live abroad for a few years. I’m going to travel around and live in different places across Asia (Taiwan, China, Japan, Tibet), working on my niche websites and mastering landscape photography. It should be VERY interesting. Who doesn’t want to be a professional bum. Now, you hear a lot about loser foreigners bumming around in Asia because they can’t make it back here in North America (or the UK/Europe). These types usually end up teaching English. My goal is not to go there poor though — I’d like to be making between 15-20k USD a month. The only sort of bumming around I want to do is in my various rented penthouses and… we’ll I’ll stop there. But, good times ahead. Provided I can keep Google away from my properties. There’s always that…
Internet Marketing is the best job in the world because you can do exactly this. You can earn lots of money while working anywhere in the world (well, anywhere that has electricity and high speed internet). And since it’s a passive income, you can set your own schedule and enjoy lots of free time. Work fucking hard, play fucking hard. I’m particularly interested to see if I can use my 2 years of traveling as fodder for money making websites while. I know there are plenty of region specific IM opportunities — directory sites, local niche websites with targeted ads, travel websites, etc. I’m going to see what I can come up with, just for the hell of it. Of course, I’ll be doing all the usual IM stuff I am currently doing, but with a more relaxed schedule.
So dare to dream guys — those dreams can become a reality with MMO. I’ll be sure to take you all on my journeys through Asia as well.
Ok, back to the business of making money online. This post I want to spend some time talking about authority sites. It seems like everyone’s talking about authority and I’ve been wanting to discuss the topic more in detail, outlining how to do it and some strategies.
How to Build an Authority Site
Now, first of all, what is an authority site and what differentiates it from a niche site. Generally, authority sites are massive sites with hundreds of articles and lots and lots of backlinks. Authority sites generally provide solid information that’s actually helpful to the reader. Niche sites tend to be small sites (3-10 posts) with a few targeted posts and a couple to several hundred backlinks. Authority sites are generally provide much more relevant (and much more) information than do mini sites. As such, Google has a big hard on for authority sites.
Why am I focusing so much on authority sites when I can make quicker money with sniper sites? Good question and it comes down to the direction Google is moving with their search algorithms. You will notice that authority sites have a tendency to dominate keyword search terms on Google. It’s not impossible for small niche sites to rank high, but authority sites seem to be crowding out the smaller sites. Taking a look at where things are going, I think we are going to see more and more of this. Smaller niche sites without a lot of content and backlinks may well vanish from the searches pages. Google wants authority type sites guys, and if you want to make good money in the future, you want to provide google with exactly what they are looking for.
What seems to be happening is that Google is giving a lot more keyword ranking to sites that have niche authority. You can see this when you search for any term – the sites that usually dominate the top 5 are authority sites. You will also note that it’s very easy to take a post/page on an authority site and with a bit of backlink work, get that page ranking high on the front page — much faster than you could if say you took a page from a non-authority site and bombarded it with lots of links. This is especially true when you have an authority site in a very competitive niche — you can rank your individual long tail targeted posts very easily.
Now say we have two sites – one site is a 400 article authority site about red widgets, and one site is a 5 article site about red widgets for worms. You will find that quite often, it’s the authority site that ranks in the top 5 spots for “red widgets for worms”, even if there is no specific article targeting this keyword. You can see the advantages here – if your site has a lot of authority for the “red widget” term, you can rank high for virtually any term relating to red widgets … maybe even rank for keyword + widgets. This “blanket” ranking authority can be lucrative because you can rank so easily for so many different terms. Compare that to my red widgets for worms niche site. With enough backlinks, I may rank well for “red widgets for worms” by any other “red widgets” term I may not rank for, not unless I’ve been building backlinks and targeted posts.
Authority sites are also much safer in the long run as well. I’m beginning to think Google despises Internet Marketers – they readily seek to hunt down and destroy our properties. I guess we are viewed as a search parasite – we skew the true rankings by gaming the system and we have a tendency to spite out regurgitated content that doesn’t provide any real help. What is Google’s answer to IM’ers, spammers and people who game search?
Authority sites. By giving sites with authority more keyword ranking power, Google ensure that searchers find EXACTLY what they are looking for. I’m not saying your 5 post (or shall we say my) hairy midget thong niche site is not providing legitimate information about thongs, but pound per pound, authority sites tend to deliver a much higher search experience for relevant information.
Why can I make this claim? Common logic. Someone with an authority site is not going to publish shit content. When you spend a year or more building up a site, you are not likely to hire .25c-an-article writers to write your content. Your content will be high quality, helpful, and relevant.
Basically, authority is something very difficult for spammers and internet marketers to easily replicate. In fact to get authority status, it usually takes quite a few links from other authority sites. If your site reeks of a MFA site you won’t be getting many natural links – and you won’t find too many authority sites willing to link to shit-content sites.
Since authority sites offer relevant and well written content they are exactly the sort of site Google wants to see ranking on the first page. You can either against Google and make shit niche sites and hope with enough backlinks you can keep your front page position, or you can work with Google and deliver what they want: relevant content for search.
So, how to build an authority site? Good question. Like everything in this game, there are many reads that lead to the same path. Here is my method for building authority.
Domain Name
Guys, domain name is huge these days, absolutely huge. If you ignore the power of exact keyword (or as close as you can get it), you throw away one of the best SEO strategies out there. I haven’t really done a post on domain name power, so I’ll save most of the information.
There are some compelling reasons why you want to get the exact keyword domain name.
1. Natural links are properly anchored
The average webmaster knows fuck all about backlinks, anchor text, and SEO. If they see a site they like, they either use the your website domain name or use “site”, “here”, “website” or some other useless anchor text. If your website domain happens to be the exact keyword you are targeting, most of the natural links you get will use your keyword as the anchor text. This means is your site is “redwidgets.com”, a fair share of people with send links with “red wigets” or “redwidgets.com”. Guys, this is pretty huge at the end of the day for your ranking power. Just this alone should sway you to try and get your keywords in the domain
2. Exact Domain Bonus
These days, exact keyword domains start with some serious “prebuilt” authority for that keyword in the domain name. Now, I’m not saying if you get your hands on say “redwidgets.com” you will automatically take the top 5 spots just on the power of your domain name. If it’s a competitive term, you won’t. If it’s not a competitive term, you may find you eventually start to rank high on the front page just because of your domain name. In competitive niches though, you have a big one up. Everything being equal link wise, Google will give ranking to the person with the exact domain in the keyword.
Don’t believe me? Do a search for a keyword, 70-80 percent of the time, you spot an exact keyword domain on the front page.
I’ll give you one of my strategies here for free guys. Use it and abuse it if you like. Exact domain keywords get a lot more attention from searchers. I know people are more likely to click on the top 3 searches, but you can do things to convince people to skip the top sites and come to your lower ranked site.
If for the search term “red widgets” you see “widgetcentral.com”, “amazon.com”, “worldwidgets.com”, “harymidgetthongs.com” pop up, and your exact keyword domain “redwidgets.com” shows up at #6, you are going to have a fair amount of people choose YOUR #6 site because the domain has the exact keyword they are searching for. There is a lot of “trust” people instinctively have for domain that contains the keyword they are looking for – more so if it’s the exact keyword.
I recall hearing that Google did some usability studies on this phenomenon – and people do want to see the exact keyword domain show up in the top 10. It’s better for searchers and thus it’s better for google.
For SEO purposes as well, I’ve noticed it’s much easier to rank an exact keyword domain for the associated keyword than it is to rank a domain that isn’t an exact domain. I’m not saying you can’t SEO “brownoranges.com” very high for “red widgets”, but I’m saying if you have “redwidgets.com”, it’s way the fuck easier to rank it high for that term.
There is more I can talk about with exact keyword domains, but I’ll save it for a dedicated post.
Lots of Targeted, Related Content
The more content you have, the easier it is to rank. You will find it’s easier to rank high with a niche blog that has 20 targeted posts then a niche blog with 1-2 posts. It seems that Google takes the number of articles found on your site into consideration when ranking site.
Now, if you are trying to build authority for a niche, you want your site to article targeting as many keyword under that niche as possible. That means you need to have dedicated articles targeting specific keywords. If I am trying to become an authority for “red widgets”, my site should have at least 100 or more articles targeting various long tail combinations of ‘red widgets’. Article 1 targets “red widgets’, Aricle 2 targets ‘blue widgets’, Article 3 targets ‘Red widgets for worms’, article 5 targets ‘widgets for red people’ etc. This is pretty important. What happens that in time, those articles will start to gain authority for they keywords (assuming you have the long tail keyword as the title and good onpage SEO for the keyword). The authority given to these articles will trickle up to your main domain – especially if you link your articles back to your main domain.
Backlinks supporting articles
Now, it’s true that in time some of your article can gain some authority about a topic. This can happen either because your index domain is getting backlinks + authority which can trickle down to the pages/posts on the domain (think hubpages or infobarrel) or they gain gain authority if you send some backlinks to the post pages. In fact, if you do want to build an authority site, you should write targeted posts targeting longtail searches for a short tail keyword. Then, you need to send backlinks to those articles. This will pump up the authority for those articles and they will start to rank for those keywords bringing in traffic. Because you have backlinks, the authority trickles up to the domain itself. If enough of your articles start to get authority, your whole domain starts to get authority. And an authority site is born.
Every post on your authority should be hit with links. If you just write lots of articles and don’t back them up, it will take you much longer to get traffic + authority. Yes, you can work on building authority to the domain itself, but I feel it’s better to start with your individual articles. You start to get instant traffic for those keywords while building your domain authority in the niche as a whole.
What sort of backlinks to get? Any and Every. I’d say hit them with ezines, hubpages, infobarrels, goarticles, article dashboards, blogger links and anything else. The idea is to get the individual articles ranking high. With hundreds of articles on an authority site, you can see the magnitude of the task ahead and why it’s no small task building an authority site.
You do of course want to send links back to the index domain, but make sure to try and keep at least 50% of the links targeting the pages (80-70% as deeplinks is actually better than 50%) and of course use a wide variety of anchor text tags. Read my on page seo post for more information.
Support blogs targeting long tails
You should also create dozens of support blogs that target some of the main long tail keywords and build these sites up. The idea here is to start building authority for different long tail keywords. That authority can be transferred to your authority site (usually to an article that targets the same keyword your support site is targeting).
The idea here is to build outside authority for long tails then transfer that authority to your site. With enough long tail authority for a niche, your site will begin to gain authority for the short tails. For example, if I have a lot of support blogs gaining authority for “red widgets + keyword” and I link those sites to my “redwidgets” domain, google will start to give your site broad authority for “red widgets.” To get your support sites up to par, you are going to have to make them legitimate sites with good info and their own support sites helping lend them support (use blogger blogs and self hosted blogs with Magic Article Rewriter spun content, create ezines, infobarrels, goarticles, and as many other web 2.0 mini sites as possible).
Authority Links
This is pretty key. To become a true authority, you really need links from other authority sites in your niche. While it’s possible to become an authority only through your own efforts, you make your task so much easier if you get links from other sites in your niche. If you can get 10-30 authority links from blogs that have trust rank for your keyword, your site will probably become an authority site as well. Now I use “30” as an artbitrary number here. But the point is that it doesn’t take too many relevant authority sites in your blog linking to you for your own site to become an authority.
Now the trick is to actually get those links – that’s where the real work comes in. Most of the authority sites are your competition and won’t want to give you link love. However, it is possible to squeeze out those links – I leave it up to you to think of some creative ways. But this is what sets apart the men from the boys, or the ladies from the girls for you female readers. The point is that you should be selling your left testicles (or if you are a women, your left breast? Ah, nevermind) to get as many authority links as you can.
Summary
Building authority sites is not an easy task. But if you can get a true authority site in the right niches, you are laughing all the way to the bank. I’d rather have a handful of authority sites than thousands of spammy blogs any day. Ok, so let’s look at what I’ve been up to the past few weeks.
Grizzly’s New Ebook, Sorta
So, most of you probably know about Grizzly’s Official ebook – or at least a book fully endorsed by grizzly. For the 2 people who don’t: basically, this is the book that he would have written if he wasn’t to busy earning oodles of money online. One of his long time students, Janet, compiled all his scattered blog posts into a single, how to make money online ebook. I’ve read through the ebook and it’s bang on in line with what Grizzly teaches.
Now, this book is not a book for people who are long time readers of Grizzly’s blog or people who know what they are doing. But if you are new to this game or just want to find out the heart of Grizzly’s methods, then this book mashes all his blogs into a rewritten and well thought out method. It’s about 37 bucks or so for the book, but it’s really all you need to know how to make money online. Keep in mind that I learned what I know from Grizzly so I can verify that Grizz knows his shit and this book is the shit. Damn, I sound like a rapper now!
Make Money Online Projects
Authority Site Project(s)
I’ve been talking about authority sites for a while now and I’ve been working on a few projects. I’ve already got one authority site set up with 250 or so targeted articles. I’m going to add another 200 or so over the next couple months, aiming to get about 500-700 laser targeted articles. It took me a while to get the right layout and let’s not talk about the nightmare of putting together 250 articles and putting them up. I have not slapped on any monetization yet, mainly because I want to keep my authority sites on different ad sense accounts from my sniper sites. This is to protect myself in case google goes on the deindex or adsense banning warpath – a very real possibility.
With a solid set of articles up, I’m going to be spending a lot of time sending backlinks to actual articles to get the articles ranking and the money flowing. I’m in for the long haul with these authority sites. I’m hoping I can see some money over the next 2 months if I focus on backlinking individual articles – which is my strategy. This will help build my domain authority as well.
I’ve also got another 2 authority sites in the works. One of the sites I’ve spend 2k buying a short tail (2 word) keyword domain. 2000 USD for a domain! I must be crazy right? There is some method to my madness here. Having a good domain is huge now. I talked about this earlier in the article, but let me expand a bit here.
It used to be when domain names were easier to spot than a topless Britney Spears that good keyword domains could be used for spammy type sites. But most good names have been registered and you’re lucky if you find a decent .org or .net. Now, with shorter (2-3 word domains) .net/.org domain names selling for 300-5k and good .com’s going for 10k+, it’s domain names are a valuable investment. People who end up spending a thousand dollars on a domain are not going to put shitty content up. They are not going to create a 3 article niche MFA blog. No, they are probably going to build an authority site. Spammers are also not going to shell out money for good domain names.
So, there is actually some good reason why domain names are weighed so high as part of the search algorithms. As good domains become increasingly more valuable and hard to find, I suspect google will continue to keep the SEO bonus for exact keyword domains very high – maybe higher in the future. For most searches you often find the exact keyword domain on the front page – and usually, that site ends up being the most relevant site to the keyword.
The idea of “brand” has also become an important issue in search these days. Google was having an issue where major brand names were not showing up for in the top 5 — even on the first page for their own brand search. Google addressed this by giving more weight to exact domain name searches (because, obviously all major brands will own the brand.com domain). Now obviously, just having so much weight given to exact keywords would make search easy to game — and it was, a few years ago. But since most good exact keywords are all registered — especially exact domains in competative niches — anyone who actually has a good exact keyword search won’t be making a shit site — the domain is worth too much.
Personally, for an authority site, I much prefer a short (2 word) tail domain to a long tail. I know you can go the other way and get a longtail domain as an authority site and work your way down to the short tail by getting authority for the longtail and building it up to the short tail. That works too.
But you can also do it with a short tail. Is it easier? Well, I’d say if you are trying to target the short tail for the getgo, yea maybe — but I’ll be finding that out shortly. I know with my site: makemoneyonlinewithseo is a long tail. Yea, it is but if I could have found a makemoneyonline.com/.net/org, I would have snapped it up right away and used that domain instead. The reason we end up on long tails is because we don’t have the 100k needed to buy the short tail exact domain we want.
There is also something NICE about having a two word domain (or the exact domain) – it’s much more ‘brand’ friendly. As effective as “red widgets for dirty worms” may be for targetting that exact search, “red wigets” looks so much less spamy and it can be much easier to gain broad authority for that entire niche because of the exact domain bonus for the borad niche, people using proper anchor text, etc.
Back to the topic at hand…where was I? Getting a thai backmassage in Thailand? No, sorry mind wandered a bit with this 3k+ word post of mine. Yes, paying 2k for a domain. I don’t mind shelling out big bucks for a very good domain name – a two word exact search. Since this keyword domain is the exact match of the root keyword I’m targeting (“red widgets”), I should be getting a very niche SEO boast from natural backlinks. In addition, all long tail articles and the backlinks to them should help boast my authority for the two word domain I have (backlinks to my “red widgets for worms” posts will add authority for my “red widgets” domain).
I don’t want to tell anyone that exact keyword domains are a subsitiute for backlinks — but man, it sure as hell helps, a lot.
New Project: Make 30-60 bucks a day with a single site
I’ve done some research and I think I’ve found a way to make between 30-60 dollars a day fairly quickly with a single site. Fairly quickly could be anywhere from a month to three months, but I’ve very interested in testing this new idea out. I’ll keep you posted on this – it will take me 2-3 weeks of back breaking labour to get this site up. I’d like to try it out next month, but that might not happen. This idea is an expansion of some of the other MMO tricks i’ve been testing out, but I’ve very excited about this. I’m pretty sure it can work, but the only way is to test it.
Niche Devil
These died an unpretty death. I was just starting to make some real money with them 30-70 bucks a day when they all got mass deindexed. I’m now only getting 1/12 the ebay clicks I was getting 2 weeks ago. I have another 100 .info domains I can put up with ND, but at this point, I’m not going to bother. I made a decent amount of money with ND and it allowed me to test out some potential niches with ebay.
I’m going to try and launch phase 2 of my ebay projects.
New Community Authority Site
I’ve been tossing up the idea of making an article directory or a public authority blog for about 4 months now. I’m working on a blog where you can post your own articles. It will basically be a community blog – you can write articles with 1 backlink. I will include a revenue sharing (50/50 split I think) module so people will have the chance of getting adsense clicks from 50% of the impressions on their articles. The idea is that in time with lots of QUALITY content, the site will start to gain authority. Now, there are several of these “build your authority” blogs in this community. I think there’s room for many. After all, you want backlinks from as many unique IP’s as possible. I’ll be working on building backlinks to individual articles, so if you end up writing content, you may find your articles start to rank high because of my backlink work.
Anyways, this is an idea that’s been kicking around in my head for a long time. I hope to go live with this next month sometime. Hopefully, as a community, we can build up a nice authority site that benefits everyone.
200 Ebay Sites
Since I’ll be quitting next month, I need to diversify as much as possible. Multiple adsense accounts, multiple streams of revenue. Ebay is a great way to make money and I think I’ve cracked the new ebay payment scheme. I am going to deploy 200-250 self hosted ebay sniper sites out there. I’ll be using PHPBay to create these sites. These will be legitimate 5-10 keyword rich posts that offer good information about products. Based on what I’ve seen, it’s possible get between 5-20 people a day without any SEO work done on these sites, just through some tricks and targeted content. I’m banking on the fact that each site can pull in between 2-10 ebay clicks a day. With 200 of these sites out there, that could be anywhere from 400-1000 clicks a day. Folks, 400-1000 ebay clicks is big big money. With the new payout scheme, that could be anywhere from 100-500 bucks a day. Now, I won’t know until I try, but I’m basing these predictions from my ND experiments and some other PHPBay sites. I’d like to start this experiment next month, but I may have to wait a month or so.
Hubpages…done?
I’ve seen a lot of debate going on about whether hubpages has been slapped or not. I’ve talked to some people who say they’ve lost a lot of traffic. I’ve probably lost 40% of my hubpage traffic over the past month and a half. My earning are now remaining somewhat stable, but I’ve lost probably 30-40% of my hubpage revenue. This kind of set me back about a month in regards to my income, but I’ve managed to more than make up for the difference with my own sites I’ve been developing. So, a short term setback.
Now there may have been a slap or may not have been a slap. For sure, google knew what was going on and probably applied some sort of penalty. I suspect google may have applied a blanket penalty to some of the niches — it’s not longer possible to get the easy traffic you once had. Old hubpages (3+ months ago) still get a fair amount of traffic, even if it’s less, but new hubs in some niches just don’t get traffic anymore. If you put out hubs a few months ago, you probably have locked in your earnings or at least a portion of them. But for new timers, it’s not easy anymore. I can personally verify that putting up 300-400 hubs in some niches will only bring in 10-15 visitors a day. No doubt if you want to kill yourself backlinking every single hub, you can still make money, but why bother? I can’t say this about every niche, but it’s clear from what I’ve seen, something is going on. Use hubs to support you money sites but focus on your own sites!
100 Adsense Snipers Update
Let’s take a look at how they’ve been doing the past week.
Not bad. I pretty much reached the 100 bucks a day border yesterday. After a month, I finally started to put some time into backlinking the past few days – hence the large jump income. I’d say I’m, pretty close to being on track for 100 bucks a day with snipers sites. There are some dips, but the earnings are definitely going up.
For my snipers, I’ve been really focusing on just getting them out there, not spending the time I should to backlink and optimize these. I really haven’t been trying to make money so much as just get the content done. All though I have close to 80 done, only 25-30 get traffic + earn. This is because I’ve been too busy just creating them (Creating the content for snipers + putting them up + working on authority sites + job leaves me no time) to really spend the time I should have. I also changed my tracking around a bit for the sites. I want to get the rest of these snipers done and do some solid backlink work on every single one of these sites. The income should go way up at that point – 80-100 will be earning instead of a quarter of that. I’ve already reached the 100 bucks mark a day yesterday.
I’ve been cracking away at these for 1.5 months now and I’m a bit behind schedule. I’m going to see if I can power out the last 20 this week. I wanted to get these sites up and spend a solid 10-15 days backlinking and optimizing every single one of them. I then plan on taking the handful that do very well and fleshing them out with lots of content and doing some real backlink work on them. With some solid backlinks to 100 of these sites, it’s feasible to be getting 200-300 bucks a day. Even more when I pick out the best 5 or so sites and really work on setting them up as solid sites. So, looks like it will be another 2-3 weeks before I’m “done”.
I’m going to see if I can be earning a steady 150-200 bucks a day in a month after 2 weeks of backlinking. It’s certainly possible.
I’m also waiting to see how these all do with some solid backlinks. I’m going to look at my stats and optimize my strategy for the next 100 sniper sites. I hope to start on my next 100 self hosted adsense snipers in three weeks or so.
I was going to create 100 blogger blogs, and I’m still game to try. I’ve got a very bad feeling about whether I can make money quickly with blogger blogs though. They rank for absolute shit with google right now – not unless you can pump out some serious backlinks to the blogs. But, what I think I’ll do is take niches that have done well with sniper sites and make a parallel blogger blog and see how they do. Regarding preowned domains, I’m going to cancel on that idea. It’s a pain in the ass to get one, let alone 100 and there is some delay once you buy one. I’ve had success with new domains. So, I’m still on track for my 300 or so adsense snipers. I’ve almost got a third done. I’m hoping in 2 months I can have the other 200 or so snipers done and earning.
One of the problems I’ve had is that I’ve just had no fucking time. My productivity has been down because of work and personal reasons. Once I’m full time, I’m really going to be able to get stuff done – I’m predicting I can get 4x more shit done each day – so, 2 months is a realistic time table.
Your Own Make Money Journey
A lot of you guys site back and watch my progress with some interest. And yes, I’ve figured out this whole How to Make Money Online thing. At this point, the only limitation right now is time and I hope to help fix that in 3 weeks when I leave my job.
But the thing is, you guys don’t just have to watch, you can be proactive in your own life here and seize your own destiny. The question is, how bad do you really want it? How bad do you want to make money? How bad do you want to quit your job and work at your own hours and at your own pace?
If you are spending most of your time reading about how to make money then you don’t want to make money online bad enough. There is a time for preparation and a time for action. The best way to get out there and make money is not to discuss make money online theories or getting “ideas” from forums. It’s by god dammit getting out there and building sites and getting backlinks. It’s pure hard, shitty work – but it’s your own god damn work. You are not slaving away making someone else rich – you are building your own destiny.
The money’s out there guys, it’s just a matter of putting the work in to get there. Making passive income online is not a pipedream, it’s real and I’m riding it. If I can do it, so can you. So, get out there and start building sites. Build one, two, five, 10, then 100 and you’ll start to see the money guys. Put up and do the work or shut up and work for the man. Be an internet marketer, not a problogger.
So there we go 5600 words about building authority blogs, making money online and the meaning of life. I think I broke my own record for word count in a post. Next post I’m going to talk about a few Internet Marketing tools I’ve found very effective for keeping track, promoting, and managing my 100’s of domains. Also be sure to check out my Make Money Online Forum. If you’ve got Internet Marketing, SEO, or Make Money Online questions rattling around in your brain, it’s the place to ask them.
Now go make money online
Ben Out
51 Comments
Congrats on quitting the job! Sounds like you’ll have a great time travelling. Do you have a photo site btw? I’d love to see more of your pictures.
Not sure I like the idea of ‘Google with a hard on’ for my sites…LOL!
I like the authority site info. I’m focusing most of my efforts on building my first authority site too, though I’ll continue to spend a bit of time playing around with Hubs and small niche sites just for some variety. I enjoy working on my main site more though - it feels good to be building something ‘big’ & of the best quality I can produce - I don’t write crap for the niche sites, but have never really given my best efforts before. I think I’ll be doing pretty well in a year’s time (though probably not as well as you - my work ethic isn’t quite that strong!)
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admin Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 10:08 am
It’s always a good idea to write good content. I adming, after 10 hours of writing the same thing over and over, a lot of the creativity gets drained from my writing, but I like to at least point people in the right direction. It’s good that you do write good content. You can work slow or work fast — but as long as you are doing work, you’ll see results!
Ben
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What a monster-post. Great content, and hope you get more done when you can work with it full-time.
My tactic when it comes to authority sites is that I upgrade my niche-sites to authority-sites when I feel it’s worth it. Some of my niches are just too small to transform into bigger sites.
Any thoughts on this? Do you always know a site will be either a niche-site or and authority-site from day 1?
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admin Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 10:10 am
You can certainly turn niche sites into authority sites. But, I don’t like niche sites taht are too focused..eg. “red widgets for dirtly green peas” to become an authority for the broad topic. You can do it with backlinks and content of course, but if the domain is way too targetted it can cause some confusion. I’d much rather make an authority site “redwigetworld” where there domain has some sort of generality to it. But this is a personal preference.
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Ben, your pictures and Anthony Bourdain’s show have made me want to move to Asia (although I never would). I’m a bit jealous.
Congrats on your success and quitting your job. It’s all very exciting. And thanks for all the info you continue to share, it is inspiring.
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admin Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 10:11 am
thanks Carrie!
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It’s amazing how you can bang out so many projects! BTW congrats on being able to quit your job…If you don’t mind me asking but how long did it take you to accomplish this goal?
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admin Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 10:23 am
I’ve been involved with computers and the web for 10 years (i did a computer science degree), but other than a few hobbie websites and school projects over the years, I never got into IM or made a site fror money. I actully got thinking about this a few years ago when i read problogger. But it wasn’t until about a year ago when I stumbled on grizzly’s site did I decide to do it seriously. So about 1 year — but a year of serious serious work.
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Good luck with the move. I did the same thing as you in 2006 - quit my job and went traveling. I have been traveling pretty much since then and now living in Bali.
I actually started doing less work on my sites when I quit my job. The good thing though is that it is cheaper to live in Asia than US/Canada/Australia.
If you stop by Bali let me know and I will buy you a beer!
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admin Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 10:26 am
Yea, there is something to be said about only having a limited amount of time — you have a tendency to make more of your time because you have less of it. I’m hopping I will actually get way more done though.
I’ll let you know if I stop by Bali!
Ben
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admin Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 10:28 am
Yea, there is something to be said about only having a limited amount of time — you have a tendency to make more of your time because you have less of it. I’m hopping I will actually get way more done though.
That’s one thing I am banking on — asia is much cheaper. I can live for 1/3 of what I pay here. And if you are willing spend the same up here for living expenses, you can live like a king. I’m still trying to decide if I want to live cheap and save or spend a healthy sum enjoying life while a broad. Maybe a combination of the two. If I can my earnings around 20-30k a month though, then living a good life while saving up money won’t be an issue though. We’ll see if I can get there.
I’ll let you know if I stop by Bali!
Ben
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Ben,
Congratulations on getting out of the ball and chain. Do you prefer us to ask questions on the forum than here? I did have a few on this post.
1) Do you think why an authority site comes up high for random longtails without excessive backlinking to those phrases is due to the fact similar phrases are linked to and the site has some pr? One of my sites seems that is big does do better for new longtails I put up compared to other niche sites I compete with. I think it’s due to age, size and backlinks generally to it. But since you have adsense snipers doing well, do you think that it can be done with smaller sites if you allow more time and backlinking? Or will authority sites end up eating them up over time? Are your adsense snipers able to keep their rankings?
Oh, this question got very big so I will not add to it.
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admin Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 10:33 am
There will always be small sites around, so they won’t be going away. And i’m sure in 10 years from now, mini sites can still earn money. But it’s clear that if you want to rank high for a term these days, authority is the best way to get there and STAY there. I’m not saying that your 10 page adsense niche site with enough backlinks can’t get #1 spot, but if your competition starts putting up 100+ page beasts about your topic, you may find your position under threat — you either do the same with your site or lose the battle.
You can take small sniper sites and expand them with content and backlinks to make them authority. I just feel that the age and day of 5-10 page mini sites dominating the top search results is going away. For no competative terms, i’m sure they will rank, but for niches with competition and money, they won’t be high.
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I just got back from 2 weeks in Japan. I could access all my accounts but I couldn’t look at many of my ads because I was accessing from Tokyo and not the US where the offer was available. I assume there is a way around that because that is something you will have to deal with.
On a good note, I had my single best $$ earning day while in Japan on vacation. Only in IM can you do that!
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Great post Ben, and congrats on leaving your day job!
Quick question: Are you going to use .info domains for your php snipers?
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admin Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 10:34 am
no, .info domains have a tendency to suck for ranking. You can rank with them, but it seems there is a big penalty applied to them — google treats that domain with heavy suspicion.
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Geesh that was sudden with ND. The deindexing happened sometime this week for me. I think they found that footprint and hit some mass deindex. I remember checking out maybe monday or tuesday, that they were still indexed, and today nothing. No wonder my chitika earnings tanked LOL. I am still admiring your adsense sniper success. If only I had that keyword choosing skill that you have
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I don’t completely agree with your take on how Google hates long tail niche sites.
Let’s say some Joe Nobody wants to try to make money online. He picks a long tail with very little competition and scattered information all over the web. Eventually, after collecting some info with little effort, he takes the number one spot for his long tail. Now let’s look at the 4 parties involved - the person searching for that keyword, the company promoting themself through ads, the webmaster, and the ruler of the internet, Google. In the end, the person finds what they were looking for, the company’s ads are exposed to targeted traffic, Google will make their money, and Joe Nobody gets his slice of the pie. As long as everyone is happy and Google is making money, why should they care?
I don’t think it’s really that they hate niche sites - it’s just that they love authority sites a lot more. There are really only two ways to decide which provides better and more relevant info. They can go through each website manually to determine which is better, but this requires an impossible amount of manpower. The second, and more efficient way, is to rank them according to easily quantifiable characteristics. On paper, which would you trust more - a 2 week old blog with 5 posts, or a 4 year old authority site with hundreds of pages of content?
However, the kicker is if there are people telling Google that your 2 week old blog is more relevant. How do they do that? With, you guessed it - backlinks. It always has been and always will be about the backlinks. And of course, we’re talking about the high quality backlinks, not just a bunch of crappy ones. Would you trust a website more if a thousand strangers called you telling you how amazing that site is, or if your single best friend told you?
In the end, I don’t think niche marketing is the devil in Google’s eyes, but they really encourage you to put some heart into it. I don’t think Court’s internet marketing school would rank on the first page for “internet marketing” if Google thought otherwise. Ezines and Info Barrels can only get you so far, but the amount of sustainable success you have with long tail niche marketing is directly related to your success in getting quality backlinks.
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admin Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 10:37 am
I don’t believe google “hates” long tail sites. Google hates Internet Marketers. If you actually create a legitamate long tail site with loads of good, relevent information, there is no problem. If you create loads of MFA long tail sites, google doesn’t like that. And must of us tend to do the latter rather than the forumer, because the former takes a lot more time.
Authority sites get more love because they delvier higher quality information, for the most part.
Backlinks have always been king, and will likely be so in the future. I’m sure you can get a mini site ranking very high with quality backlinks. But in the future, big authority sites with lots of content and quality backlinks will crowd out the little sites with backlinks. It’s bigger fish eating smaller fish.
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Joshua Reply:
October 2nd, 2009 at 6:03 am
Of course Google hates Internet Marketers… why? Because YOU ARE MAKING GOOGLE LOOK DUMB. When you make Google look dumb, Good bye!
Congrats on the Job! I was there 1.5-2 years ago… I can’t even remember now… and what do you know… I am in Madrid now. Don’t think I am coming back to the States either.
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Wow! That’s a very handy technique. Opens up a whole new range of possibilities for me as I’m still learning this. Thank you.
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congrats leaving “the man” , now you get to be Googles bitch full time…LOL
Where did you build your 80 adsense snipers? Infobarrel ?
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admin Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 10:38 am
No, all selfhosted sites.
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Are they single pagers or like 5 page microsites ?
I know you probably mentioned it before but I don’t see it.
My Nd’s are gone too, Splorked called it right on the fucking money.
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admin Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Yep. Well, I did make money with ND — a total of about 500 bucks. I paid 97 + 180 for 200 domains. I came out ahead by about 100 bucks — so no loss for me. I did spend a good deal of time. However, I found a bunch on niches that did well with ebay so I’m opening up legit ebay sites there. Was it worth it for me? For sure — i learned how to make good money with this new pricing scheme (thanks to the ND market research), found good niches, and covered the cost of the effort.
Was ND a good deal for other people? Probably not. Stuff like that is not good for people looking to make long term money. For blackhatters, yea it’s great. I think it’s best to invest your t ime in legit sites anyways — you don’t lose your work. I was lucky and came out ahead, other people probably didn’t.
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Congrats on taking the leap into self-employment! Just make sure you don’t spend all your new freed up time working. All the self-employed people I know work even longer hours than they did before - it’s something to do with being able to get to their desk by walking downstairs in their pyjamas - they end up never leaving the desk till bedtime.
Re Google’s love-hate relationship with internet marketers - internet marketers compete with them for advertising revenue. The only time they love you is when you are ranked highly in Bing and Yahoo and you have Adsense - they then get to profit from another engine’s traffic that way.
What I really want to know is what is Google’s relationship with about.com - those pages are everywhere and they even rank higher than wikipedia (even though wiki provides better info compared to about!) It’s puzzling.
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admin Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Google has a majority stake in Ezines and About.com
Hah, just kidding but it seems like it. About has so much authority because of the massive content.
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Oh my goodness - you are living my dream!! Congrats on the progress you have made and the decision to jump ship as it were.
As you will see from my own money making efforts, I am more like the tortoise to your hare. I am making progress albeit at a much sloooooooooooower pace.
I have definitely learned a lot just from creating lots of barrels and hubs so am looking forward to getting even better.
My dream is to be able to travel too so if i step it up a gear, I might just make it some time next year.
The most important point that you keep on banging on about is to own your own sites. I was always worried (scared?) about making mistakes and losing money but when you break it down, a domain is not that expensive and even with my limited knowledge, i am confident that I can recoup the costs anyway - that is something I would never have been able to say just a couple of months ago.
Thanks again.
PS. Do you actually have any time left to actually have a life at all or are you chained to your laptop?
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admin Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 8:15 pm
No life. At work then at my laptop. But in 3 weeks, I’m going to take a couple hours out of the day for weight lifting and cardio. But other than that, i’ve accepted my life will be only IM for 4-6 months.
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Hey Ben
Congrats on firing your boss. I agree Ben that it seems like the authority sites are best for long term strategies. I’ve been working a site of mine for a major major keyword for 18 months with 1/2 billion in competition and my site is settling between page 1 and sometimes top of page 2..Still doing some Google dancing…abit of work to go but it will be worth it when I hit within the top 3 spots…
Thanks for the update…Now time to get back to more article writing, so you know who can can share some G-bucks….
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Ben,
Great, great post. Currently, I am spending all my time building my own adsense mini’s and promoting a couple of amazon sites. I am only just beginning to devote myself to this work and I often hit the wall after about 3 hours and lose my focus. But I am pushing through.
I am down to only reading two blogs, yours and griz, and I find that I am a lot more productive.
BTW, at 1and1, .nets are $4.49 for the time being. I use .net’s a lot and haven’t found a better deal.
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admin Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Great find…i’ll check that out…4.49 is a big savings for me, especially when I’m buying so many! Thanks!
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The thing I find really amazing about you, Ben, is that you just don’t stop. I know if I was making anywhere near $100 a day from my sites I’d probably downsize my efforts considerably. I’d end up building more like 1 site per week probably. Or, more likely, just pumping up the sites that are doing really well and maybe expanding more into those niches. But you’re planning to backlink your lower ranking sites and then do 100 blogger blogs + all the other crap you’ve got going on! I’d have long since burnt out; but more power to you man and congrats on taking the big step and getting out from under the “man”.
But your new project- $30-$60 a day from a single (I’m assuming non-authority) site sounds interesting. Do you mean through just one method or a group of methods?
Oh, and one thing I meant to ask you for no particular reason other than the fact that you’re becoming the go-to guy for how to make money online with a variety of different methods. Have you ever worked with CPA offers?
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admin Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Thanks. I have a few CPA things, but I am not an expert at it by any means. People make good money with it though.
No, just a single method. There is no guarantee that I can make 30-60 bucks a day in 1-3 months with this site. It’s a bit of a gamble, but I’ve taken a look at a strategy on a smaller scale and looked at some stats with some of my sites — I feel I can get a single site earning this much in a couple months, but I’ll have to see. The main issue is I’m going to need 2-4 weeks full time to do this.
For CPA, I’m hoping in 6 months to 9 months I can start looking into CPA stuff. Right now, adsense, amazon, ebay, and clickbank seem to be keeping me locked down. I do want to give the CPA model a good shot though.
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Congrats on leaving your job and living your dream. You are a great photographer, I hope you will keep us updated with pictures of your travels.
THANK YOU for saying something about Hub Pages. I just started there and I’m like whaaaaat? HP totally sucks as far as I can tell. Does not live up to the hype at all.
M
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i faint everytime i hear the work you do with your sniper blogs and authority sites .. are you really human? ..lol…thanks a lot Ben for sharing MMO info with us.
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Nice post. Good luck with your IM business. It’s very cool you are striking out to follow your dreams. I wish you all the best.
Reading this post was very relevant as I have been mulling over the last few days how I can get a new and decent authority site off the ground. I have grown weary of the effort involved with niche sites. Maybe it’s a “grass is greener” perception but it would seem to be easier to maintain and promote one site than to try to juggle hundreds across the intrawebs. Particularly as hard as things are getting these days.
This site will be my focus for months to come with little effort on any other niche site. This one will be on a topic I love and will be updated daily with fresh content, ideas, thoughts, etc. Hopefully affiliate sales will be the money maker rather than having to worry about Adsense.
You know we in the niche slinging business have been trained to revile bloggers like Problogger and such because they apparently do not know how to build what we build. They perhaps do awful with Adsense because they want readers and visitors to stay on site. We hope for a person to find us and click away quickly for the info. If I build this authority site I want people to hang out and read my shit. To make comments. To debate. Screw Adsense clickers. I have plenty of those sites littering the intrawebs at this point.
You know that old adage that we ignore while slinging hundreds of niche sites - ‘build what you know’. Well I am finally going to build on something I actually give a shit about. No it won’t monetize like “credit cards” but it will be a helluva lot easier to write 200+ articles on the topic. Writing an Ezine article will be quick and possibly enjoyable. I can create a video and know what I’m talking about. Writing comments for backlinks won’t feel fake. I’ll be able to write articles about my experiences. About what I think. Not just PLR crap and scraped ideas from other sites.
I’m tired of writing about stuff I could care less about. I’m tired of having keyword research dictate what kind of site I build. Keywords will obviously remain important but I am wading into the niche regardless if the keywords are too competitive or not competitive enough. Screw it. It’s time to have a little fun.
Heh, I was going to post something like this on my blog. Discussing this stuff seems to sound better coming from you. Maybe you saved me some time and grief.
splork
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Hey ben! I have failed 60% + of my classes in the last 3 years in college and got kicked out… I actually enjoyed the learning process of school and education but could not get the homework and projects done, probably because of my concentration problems that ive had since a child.
However I found great inspiration from reading your blog, ive been reading the past couple of posts and also some older content of yours aswell, It is amazing to read through your journey and I wish you well.
Also if you could answer a question: Myself am preparing articles to start in one niche with two main related and similar keywords of each 120k monthly searches as said by google adwords keyword tool, but not by seobook keyword tool (says 5-6 searches a day only) So Who do I trust, seobook keyword tool or google adwords tool?? If the adwords keyword tool is true then I could be lucky
Also, I live in Canada too - Quebec to be more precise and the tax system is 30% of income if poor or a big 50% of salary if I make 55k or more… Do I really have to pay 50% to the state in taxes for work done on the net and paid by Google or can I work it around by opening a bank account somewhere else in the world and receiving adsense checks and paypal checks directly there?
Anyway Good luck in asia, and watch your back!
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I have tried to create an adsense account but never succeeded. I am having some page issue problems. Any advice?
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Ben,
With your ebay project, may I recommend that you mix up a percentage of ebay javascript sites with your phpbay sites.
I have close to 200 sites between bans,nd,ebay widget,phpbay,and msb sites.
It appears to me that google targets the rss feed used for scripts ike php and bans. So…phpbay sites get deindexed.
Try both and see.
MaTT
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admin Reply:
October 3rd, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Good idea. I do have 3 solid PHPBay sites now (5 months old) and they haven’t had any problems. What sort of content do you have on your PHPBAY sites? I’m included to think with 5 pages of quality content surrounding your listings, you won’t get deindexed as the site is not a thin affiliate site — though if you are seeing quality sites deindexed, then I’m worried.
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matt2257 Reply:
October 4th, 2009 at 12:40 am
Ben,
The sites that got deindexed all had solid content. What I did was build a sniper site ala the original courtney tuttle strategy, and then just added in the phpbay widget. At minimum 5 posts of 500 words.
I would get the new content flush of traffic, then deindex. So, Im not sure what or why, but the only thing I could figureout was the rss feed which all those scripts have in common and is a potential foot print.
But hey, maybe it’s just me…
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Peter Reply:
October 4th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Hi,
I have a number of phpbay sites. The ones that have content associated with the ebay links are going from strength to strength. Those that are a little thin on content are getting slammed by google, literally overnight.
Sam Reply:
October 5th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
I had a ton of my PHPBay sites get deindexed over the summer - but not all of them. The main trends I noticed among the sites that got slammed were - most of them were extremely thin on content, a lot of them were using the same themes, almost every site I had the Search 2 Post plugin on got banned, and all my sites that had a large amount of auctions on the home page were hit.
Based on this knowledge, I put up 100 content rich EPN snipers in August (before I knew about the QCP change). 80 of them are using Phpbay Pro, and all 100 are currently indexed. So far, so good.
I don’t think PHPbay is the problem at all. I think it’s that people are generally inclined to go overboard with it, when it really isn’t necessary.
admin Reply:
October 5th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
interesting. I like the whole PHPbay setup. It’s good to hear that your sites kept in the index. I think that sites that have a lot of good content should do ok. I may mix up the sites between ebay widget and php bay though.. maybe 50/50.
Congrats on quitting your job Ben. You’re doing awesome… It’s just great to read your blog because it has tons of personality and always solid advice. I’ve been working on about 2 authority sites. It’s a little bit tough since I’m in school, but I honestly like the idea of getting my income up so that I don’t need to rely on a college degree / the job market.
You clearly have more motivation than the majority of people and are a very polarizing individual! Thanks for sharing bro…(as usual).
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awesome. for a look at expat life in asia, stop by my expat in vietnam blog (NOT a money site)
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matt2257, tell us more on the deindexing.. You mean all your PHPbay sites were deindexed.. and just use Original Content for Pages and use javascript to add the ebay listing to the sites?
So ebay does’nt think you are keyword spamming them?
so the engines dont see the words in the titles are just ebay feeds then? So when people come to the sites the people see them, but the search engines see no words and descriptions right?
Is this what you Mean?
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matt2257 Reply:
October 4th, 2009 at 12:43 am
Scott,
For me, it has been my experience that the sites I put up with phpbay got deindexed.
So now, I use the ebay widget which is the javascript, and yeah, it doesn’t have the markov effect that the rss feed creates.
And yes, google doens’t crawl the javascprit, only human eye see them.
So you lose the freshness content from markov, but it has been my expereince that it stays indexed…
Frank Carr at optempo, also has had some similar experiences…
and I believe Steve McGrath at mystarterblog….
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is this your : http://www.benkongphotos.com/ ?
I love the pictures!!!
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admin Reply:
October 5th, 2009 at 9:18 am
Alas, no. It’s actually a photographer with the same name that I have. A good photographer though, I’ve looked through my twin’s gallary. I do more landscape stuff rather than portrait.
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Hi Ben:
I have a question regarding EzineArticles. I sometimes find articles with 0 backlinks that have been around for quite some time that can’t seem to be taken by another article with backlinks. Do you have any thoughts on this? Is it possibly because the article gets a boost if the author of the article has several other articles? Does the age of the article come into play? I know that lots of people talk about backlinking ezinearticles - I was wondering your thoughts on this as an effective technique.
Thanks,
Kathy
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admin Reply:
October 7th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
It has to do with domain age. Ezines can get a fair shair of natural backlinks from scrappers that use the content. If there are no backlinks, the reason is that the age of a page/domain count for a lot in google search algorithm right now. The means that an old site with few backlinks can quite often beat a newer site with a lot of backlinks. The same goes for ezine articles that have been around for a while. You can still beat them, but you will need to send links to your ezine and wait. Ranking is not an instant process. But with links and age, your article will eventually overtake older ezines that have no backlinks.
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Kathy Reply:
October 7th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Wow - you are fast!!! Thanks! One more question relating to this… From an SEO perspective - should you have one author with several hundred articles across nichees (to get a perceived boost in the search enginees due to the ’strength’ of the author) or does that not matter at all? I understand that you might not want to have everything under one pen name (or you will expose all of your niches) - but had read somewhere about the ’strength’ of the sheer number of articles boosting your rankings.. Hope this makes sense (and thanks for your quick response!)
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admin Reply:
October 8th, 2009 at 12:16 am
I don’t know if having more articles gives your articles gives you more strength — I’ve never heard of that to be honest. I think that’s probably not the case. An no, you don’t want to have 1 author linking to all your sites. Your entire network of sites is wide open at that point.
Ben
Great post Ben
You make me feel lazy. I only do a measly 7 or 8 hours a day.
Hey, sod Ezine give your articles to me (just joking). I think you are right about authority sites. Recently I have resumed a few ages sites of a year or so old I made before I knew what the hell I was doing and a shed load of content on an aged sites is like some kind of magic. Ranks amazing for all kinds of competitive keywords to the point that for a lot of keywords I don’t even look at how much competition there is.
Google seems to love age combined with a lot of content and I am not even talking about relevant content you want to rank. This is definitely the beauty of an aged and authority site. You can slip in something unrelated that you want to rank for and get high in the serps with so much less work that a handful of authority sites can mean a lot more cash with a lot less work.
The travelling is making me jealous. We bummed around in Thailand for months and months on two occasions a good few years ago and the memories are still like yesterday. You can’t beat lazing on deserted beaches.
Now I seem to spend my time writing crap, um quality content, online and shouting at Dogs, growing veg and looking after chickens. At least we are well out of the rat race and living on the side of a mountain in Spain rather than in wet UK which I am forever grateful for.
Gonna challenge Grizz’s fishing article? I am even thinking of it myself as the long posts definitely give a site as a whole a lot more love and it really does seem to give a slight increase to traffic overall and not just the individual post. Maybe a comp to see who can write the longest post in Internet history! Although I do believe that strange guy with the ghost seeing wife writes some loooong posts even if he does still support site build it (what the hell is his name?).
Laters
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admin Reply:
October 9th, 2009 at 9:21 am
Thank’s Dave!
Yea, I don’t actually like spending 15 hours writing articles are creating sites, but it’s something I am able to do if I focus — but days like that have been a rarity the past 2 months actually. But, in a couple weeks, I should be able to put those hours in. It’s not something I’d want to do for more than another 6 months to a year though, which after I want to slow things down a bit.
Age is pretty key for sure. You can beat a lot of new sites that have backlinks with an aged site. It works really well if you have a domain + content and a few strong links that are a couple years old. You can turn a site like that into authority very quickly with some work. Much harder to do with brand new domains or even preowned domains. I’m personally trying to turn out 12-15, 300-1000 post authority style sites over the next year just to let them age. Once I get around to really backlink them, they’ll be much easier to rank. Key think is to get your stuff aging.
Cheers
Ben
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I think it’s the longer blog post I’ve seen since I’m online.
Anyone following what you’ve just said here can build a real authority site.
Thanks,
Franck
the Body Guard marketer
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okay, so I have a question regarding hubs that you write. I was going to comment on one of your older posts, but didn’t want it to get lost in all the old comments. Do you use “bum marketing” to find super long tail low competition for writing hubs? or do you find maybe keywords that fit Court and Mark’s formula with PR?
Or do you first find those that fit Court and Mark, and just find the longer tail variations of those keywords?
Or do you just have even stricter requirements then TKA and just look in top 3 for super low PR, like PR of 2 and under?
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admin Reply:
October 9th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Court’s formula is a good rule of thumb, but I don’t follow it — I’ve got my own style of doign keyword research; i’d be breaking the forumula so much that there wouldn’t be any point of following it.
However, for a lot of people starting out, you won’t go wrong with that formula — if you do see niches PR 2< it’s a very good sign you can jump in there. But, remember, PR means very little these days. IT is an indication of authority, but not always. Basing your niche sites only on PR can cause you to miss out a lot of opportunities. Just because you see clouds in the sky, doesn’t main it’s going to rain. Same idea with PR — just because the top sites have higher PR in a niche does not mean you can’t squeeze in there if you make a focused sniper.
To be really sure, disregard PR and do a backlink check. If the top couple sites have lots of anchor text links with the keyword in them and the keyword is in the title/domain then you are going to need an authority style site to break in there. But if you have high PR sites that are not focused specifically on that keyword or niche and the anchor links show this, you can take the niche with snipers.
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Great stuff by the way…
(forgot to check “notify me of followup comments via email” last time)
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Ben I think You are right.
I know you put up a hell of a lot of content and I have been doing similar although not on such a grand scale. I am seriously thinking about simply concentrating on the sites that have been making some cash and turning them in to real authorities that no one else can touch buy sheer volume of content and really regular backlinks.
There is no doubt that a site of six months or so can really get ranked highly for any post with less backlinks. But they also move up real quick if you blast them with low level article site backlinks. New sites just won’t get the serps results if you blast them, more likely they will disappear altogether.
I really am thinking that like you a handful of authorities may be the way to go. Especially as they mean a great source of quality backlinks for any new stuff you want ranked.
I just did an experiment for some stuff where I used 3 or 4 authority sites of mine to give backlinks to a single post that I did and even with very dubious related content from the posts where the backlinks came from the jump in the serps is pretty phenomenal. The trust of authority sites, even for unrelated terms to the overall niche means they are a great leverage for boosting anything even remotely related.
This is definitely going to be the future of getting some serious money coming in ( at least for now).
I am truly amazed that a few sites I resurrected from a year ago when I had no clue can be brought to the fore with such little comparitive work. Even though they had little in the way of content or backlinks the age MUST be the factor that allows them to rank so well for whatever I decide to do with them. At least for now age is a strong factor.
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griz’s shit is the shit, and his shit is legit,
so if you get what I spit, then read this or throw fits
Im a seo, make money, cash money bit by bit
if money is pussy then seo is the tits
and you get what you put in so hard work is the dick
first throw a bunch of mud and see what shit sticks
those niches are for keeping like social sites are like pricks
then take those niches and build authority slow or quick
just make sure to diversify or get licked
get shunned shot down get slapped like a bitch
by the G, homie, that’s it… off switch
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Chad S Reply:
October 16th, 2009 at 3:56 am
Mate I just pissed myself at that, good stuff.
Might make it my wallpaper for some motivation haha =]
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Hi Ben,
thank you very much for such a post. You, Grizz, Leo and Vic are really fountains of inspiration (and information) for me.
I would like ask you three question connected to the authority side development:
a) what kind of monetization do you use for authority website? because there is different approach in adsense placement on niche and authority site (does the authority trafic make its job compare to targeted niche organic trafic?) Or there is more space for CPM and/or monthly rates?
b) in case of building authority site you recomend the supporting links from small blogs, hubs, eza, … Could it be compared to the suporting layer as you spoke about in the blog farm building article? (and I am not speaking about shity content on them - maybe spined but original content on these supporting sites)
c) if you speak about the links in between the site, do you mean the sidewide links (sidebar, footbar) or do you use the in-post links to links you websites?
Again, thank you very much for you website
J.
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admin Reply:
October 10th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
a) Depends on the niche completely. For information type niches, adsense is good. But for website about products ebay, clickbank, amazon, etc.
b) Yes
c) In post 1 way links, never in the side bar or footer if I can help it — those do not give as much link juice as properly anchored in post links.
Ben
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mike Reply:
October 10th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
C)
That is what I don’t get because Griz said something similar… I’v always been confused about this. If I was on a sidebar of a blog with 500 pages indexed, wouldn’t I have 500 backlinks from that class C IP? even though having 500 individual in posts one way links is better than 500 on side bar, wouldn’t 500 backlinks from footer or side bar be better than only 1 single in post link?
Obviously if I owned the blog, I could do all individuals, but if I’m doing link exchange, shouldn’t I just tell the guy to put my link in the sidebar once to count for 500 posts rather than putting in only 1 single post in that situation?
Wouldn’t that be more link juice overall? Shouldn’t it depend on how many posts a blog has?
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admin Reply:
October 10th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Mike, google put’s almost no link juice weight on side bar and footer links. At one point, they were effective, but google has changed up their algorithm. 1 properly anchored in text post (especially on a relevant site within a post with a relevant title and content) can pass more link juice then a sidebar link. It’s not a matter of a sidebar link giving you 500 links versus 1 in text link — google barely gives any link juice to a sidebar and footer links these days. The bottom line: an in text link counts for way more than blogroll/footer links.
Ben:
Here’s a technical question for you. I also have an IT degree. What is your theory on how google indexes the data on the pages? Does it create a relational database containing all words on the page - or does it store the full ‘text string’ of the page. I saw something with Stomper.net where they talked about a full relational database - but I’m leaning more toward storing the string- or the indexing/searching performance would be terrible.
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admin Reply:
October 11th, 2009 at 11:45 am
I’m not sure how the search algorithm works exactly. Relational database search would be way to slow I’m thinking. You can do some interesting stuff with relational database stuff, but they tend to be slow. However, i’m no an expert in how to build search engines, so I could be wrong.
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Amazing post! I am glad that I took your advice and decided to stop wasting efforts on building hubs and started focusing on building up my own sites. I can definitely see your points about authority sites and the direction Google is heading with them. It definitely gave me a better perspective about my own sites.
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Hi Ben,
Court and Mark are stressing out not to link your websites with each other if they have both adsense on it. How do you feel in this matter? Is linking your websites a real threat?
Greetz and keep up your work, you are very inspiring!
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admin Reply:
October 11th, 2009 at 11:43 am
Hey Alexander. I have not done any experimenting about this — so I can’t tell you from experience here. Google knows all your websites by virtual of having adsense on all of them.
There may or may not be a risk there — you could link your adsense website to a web 2.0 property or another website with no adsense, then link that website to your other adsense website to help “mask” the connection between the two.
As a policy, I prefer not to link lots of websites together that have the same adsense — especially if they are sniper type sites. But if I have two or more quality websites with adsense on em, I don’t mind linking one to the other to help “support” it.
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Good on you for making the leap! You have an absolutely amazing work ethic, Ben, and I can’t imagine this going any way but WAY GOOD. I can’t wait to see your pix!
CONGRATS!
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Hi Ben, thanks for your reply….I had another question about your ebay snipers. Will you target specific products and write reviews about them? For instance: toyoto corolla, or a topic like black cars? Because if you make snipers about products I believe you can not use brand names in the domain!? So if toyota corolla is a green keyword I can not use toyotacorolla.com and therefore I lose the domain keyword bonus. How do you solve this problem?
Greetz keep up and thanks for all the info. Your website is a great inspiration to work like a madman on IM
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Noob question: Does Amazon let you use Blogger Blogs for selling?
Or do you need your own site like ebay wants…??
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admin Reply:
October 15th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
You can use blogger blogs to hawk amazon stuff. It’s hard to get them ranked right now due to spammer abuse though.
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I think I might know who’s behind the blogger abuse. there’s a guy to outsourrce it to. He only sells blocks of 500 but he’ll make 500 blogger blogs with a computer generated article with all your desired keywords for under $100.
I think there’s also a few software’s that have cracked captcha and that can automate the process of creating accounts anywhere
…
what do you think 10 blogger blogs per keyword linking to a wordpress blog? or link them to somewhere else (livejournal?) or is blogger not going to pass off as much juice now too?
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admin Reply:
October 18th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Passing juice is all about keyword authority. If a blogger blog doesn’t rank well, it won’t pass much juice on — same as a wordpress.com blog, or even a selfhosted blog. If you have a blogger blog with age and lots of backlinks, it will pass juice.
You can create 10 blogger blogs and link them to a wordpress blog or anything else. But if those blogger blogs don’t have backlinks, keyword targettted content, and age, they may not do much for linking.
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Ben you are a legend. I’ve been dabbling in IM for the last month or 2 but I just got serious with the learning side. All I’ve done for the last week pretty much is read all of Griz’s and your posts haha, a lot of reading! I just took a year off uni and I don’t really plan to go back. I don’t really want to get a “real job” either so I’m hoping if I bust my arse for the next few months I can really make some coin and convince myself I can do it for a part-time or even a full-time income.
Thanks for all the info/inspiration. Wish me luck! =]
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admin Reply:
October 18th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
good luck! Work hard and money will eventually come!
Ben
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Ben - First time commenter, long time reader of yours and Grizz’s stuff. I have a question about linking second tier sites to first tier sites (and the first tier sites are linked together - this is not necessarily a MMO thing - more of a get to the first page of google thing). Can you link one second tier site to more than one 1st tier site? And what if the first tier sites are linked together (but have no adsense or anything else like that associated with them)?
Thanks for all of the information and help.
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admin Reply:
October 18th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
The idea is to keep things hidden. If 1st tier are my money sites, I won’t like them together — not unless they have a lot of authority, age, and in the same niche.
Second tier sites I keep isolated. I don’t want them all linking together in a big chain because if one get’s a check, all the sites are exposed. If you have say 20 second tier sites than you maybe can link small clusters of 2-4 sites together if you want. I like to keep things seperate though.
In general, I don’t put adsese on second tier sites. The rule of thumb is to make sure your money sites are protected. Mass interlinking between 3rd tiers, second tiers, etc defeat that purpose.
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The new recommendation at TKA is to not have adsense on hubs or IB that point to your money sites. The idea is that the big G is devaluing the links if it finds a site with adsense linking to another site that has the same adsense account.
Do you agree with this theory? If it were true than perhaps we could get around this by only linking your hubs/IBs to your support sites (that don’t have adsense).
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admin Reply:
October 19th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
I don’t know if this is true or not Geoff. I’ve added infobarrel links containing my adsense and I’ve seen search movement. So I am not inclined to believe this theory from personal experience. There are a lot of legitimate sites out there with lots of link juice that have the same adsense account associated with them. Does that mean that a quality authority site about redwigets can’t link to a sister related site with the same adsense ID for bluewidgets and give juice? So I’m not convinced.
It’s a valid argument though. If you are concerned then what you can do is link your site/minisite with adsense to an ezine or some other web 2.0 with some prebuilt authority that doesn’t have your adsense ID on it, (as you suggested) and use that to launder the link juice to your money site. Or get another adsense account for your support sites.
Ben
Ben
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what did you tell your colleagues as the reason for quitting the job,Ben?did you say you have found a gold mine on the internet or some other reason?
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Okay, so I’m trying to brainstorm the “types” of links that you can have. There’s the command in the anchor texts that open in new window, same window, or new tab, and then of course there’s image links. Then there’s links that link from PDF docs or .doc, .xls and other filetypes.
There’s .edu and .gov which are important.
There’s links from .com, .org, .net which are top level domains. Then there’s the .info’s and.mobi and other various less important domains.
and then all of the various country codes such as .uk, .us, then all of the 50 states government sites like .wi.us or .mn.us or .ia.us .fl.us and so on.
There’s sidebar links, footer links, header links, graphic and image links, title links, in post links.
In terms of PR you could vary your range on that too. I think you should probably have a lot more low PR links since they’re easier to get and more common, and use the lower PR to vary your anchor text, and types of link while focusing exact keywords on important links.
Then if you want to go into the types of sites you link from… There’s related links, unrelated… social bookmarks and social news, forum links, blog comments
Anchor text there’s exact keyword(how to bake cookies), parts of keyword in part of anchor text(how to on baking cookies), related keyword(learn to bake cookies, making cookies), exact keyword plus additional words (how to bake cookies for beginners), fragmented exact keyword with additional word(s) (how to bake chocolate chip cookies)
okay… so what have I missed… and how important do you think having these different types of links i?
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Thanks so much for posting this information… really good stuff here.
I’ve been doing research on your site and grizzly’s site trying to scrape together the basics so I can start publishing niche blogs monetized with adsense…
My concern is that a lot of the articles I have been reading on Grizly’s site are from 3 years ago, and i’ve been reading some more up to date articles (like yours) saying that things are changing and that folks are being banned from adsense, de-indexed, etc.
Could you elaborate in a future article about some (up to date) ways to manage multiple sniper / niche blogs monetized with adsense while avoiding bans?
My biggest fear is that I will spend months applying things I have learned only to find that everything is outdated, all of my sites have been deindexed and I have been banned from adsense for using “old tricks” that google is wise to.
Also, you mentioned that you intend to set up multiple adsense accounts. I would be really interested to hear how this is done as the folks at nonpoint meerly chant in unison “only one account per person” whenever this question is asked.
Thanks for putting so much time and effort into this blog.
-N
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Sorry… just found Griz’s updated 2009 site about adsense… it’s always easier to ask someone than look yourself though. :/
Still, would like to hear about setting up multiple adsense accounts!
-N
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Hey man, great post as always!
I’m gonna try to set up an authority site myself, I’ve got way too many mini sites kicking around. How do you get backlinks for it though? If you put in 500 articles on your authority site and try to backlink every article like you said, don’t you have to find over 50 different places to get backlinks? If you make more than 10 ezinearticles links to your site you get very little link juice out of them, so how do you back up the rest of your 490 articles?
Also do you recommend tier backlinking for the articles (backlinking your backlinks backlinks) or just individual backlinks here and there?
Thanks again for all the info man, you’re an inspiration to us all!
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Alin Reply:
September 7th, 2011 at 4:52 am
I could honestly ask the same question as Lennard!
Would much appreciate an answer on this.
We all know what panda is doing to massive link building strategies, bitch slapping everything in its way!
So how can you make successful backlinks that actually get you ranked, no mini site bullshit, just straight up high quality informative site that you are trying to turn into an authority one.
Thanks!
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admin Reply:
September 7th, 2011 at 7:13 am
You can create your own super link network — a long term strategy — full of lots of sites with quality content, links to them, and related content. Each site has to be legit and you can’t be obvious about how you are gaming the system.
The other option is to actually create a site that offers amazing content or “stuff” the competitors don’t. You then market that content to readers, spend time networking with people in your niche/related niches, and grow your site. Takes a while this way, but if your site does take off, you can win big. Most IM’ers don’t opt for this path because it’s a substantial investment in time and effort over the long run. But the rewards can be worth it if you put in the work and your site (depending on the niche) may end up attracting those ultra valuable natural links. You need to think creatively though and simply rewriting a bunch of content and tossing it on a wordpress them, then trying to get link exchanges won’t do it.
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