Back from hiding guys. I know I said I would post more often, but I’ve been keeping my head down, working on new projects. Here’s a nice long post to break in the new years.
It’s a new year and it’s time for one of those self reflection and “what I learned” and “what I will do” sort of posts.
So I’ve been doing Internet Marketing for a bit over a year now. Last October, I created my first “niche” website. Since then my empire has expanded into the hundreds (I probably have thousands of properties when we count web 2.0’s). Not bad for a year. I started out making about 100 bucks a month after the first month. Since then, I’ve been able to quite my job and become a full time Internet Marketer (3 months ago).
I’ve learned a lot, had a lot of failures, but also met with success too.
Here’s some of the key things I’ve learned over the year.
1. Don’t trust the Google keyword tool
The Google keyword is not complete accurate. It’s sometimes way way way off. In terms of looking at the exact searches, take 50-75% of the total number you see – that’s what you are likely to work with. Remember, even at #1, you will never get all the searches. It’s my experience that you can bank on maybe 50-75 percent of the exact search you see, then count on getting 20-30% of those at number one. There are a few tricks you can do to increase the visitor counts I can talk about as well, but let’s save that for another post.
2. Create Lots and Lots of Sites
I’ve talked a lot about this being my current strategy. I want to be careful and say that this is certainly not the only strategy. You can make good money one fewer sites with more content and backlinks, or a single authority site in a competitive niche. The model that I’m trying to master right now is the adsense mini site. I’m also juggling a few authority sites, but I’m finding myself unable to do any backlink work because I don’t have the time. I’m going to have to go back to the authority site model in 6 months when I’m done with my mini site spree. I have one authority site that’s made almost 1000 bucks during December, for example. There are people with 10k a month authority sites (or more) out there too.
3. Diversify your income streams, niches and types of sites
I’ve talked a lot about this and for good reason. You need to protect your own ass. Don’t be a slave to any one model of making money. My suggestion is to build up a full time income (I consider this to be 3k USD a month, but you can “get by on 1500-2000, though you will be counting coupons) with each revenue source. You can try and diversify right away, but I personally find this just leaves you floundering around. Pick a way to make money, master it, and move to the next.
4. Adsense and Holidays don’t like each other
Adsense, especially in those niches that people are prone to visit while sitting at work, bored out of their mind, goes way the fuck down during any sort of holiday. My adsense took a trashing for the last 8 days of December. All holidays will see you with a decline in your Adsense earnings, so don’t panic. Weekends, especially for some niches, also tend to go down 30-50%. You can reduce this by diversifying into different niches – some do better on weekends and holidays than others.
5. Make your own damn sites, you are the master of your own ‘domain’
Web 2.0 sites like hubpages and infobarrel are a great way to make some quicker(er) money, but you have to split your earnings and you are always under the control of someone else. If these sites fall prey to spammers, the entire domain may get slapped by google. You also need to treat each “page” you create on one of these sites like a website and do basic run of backlinking. If you don’t, be prepared to see your earnings drop.
Backlinks, at least with Google’s current algorithm, are what prevent erosion of your search engine rankings.
6. Keyword research is king – If you fail at this, you will fail to make money
If you are working your ass off trying to make money online and failing, you are either doing one of two things wrong: your keyword research is crap or you aren’t getting backlinks. Fix one or both and you will make money.
7. Backlink every property you have
Support your support’s support sites. Bit of a tongue twister, eh? If you create a hubpage, infobarrel, squidoo, ezine, or whatever, try to at least send a few crappy backlinks to these. A web property with 0 backlinks gives very little juice. Add just a handful of easy backlinks to your property, and in time (especially if we are taking about a web 2.0 with some domain authority to start with), that little property can give a good shot of link juice. If you have dozens or a hundred backlinks that are backlinked, you may find you yourself sitting and staying high on the front page of google.
8. Experiment!
You’ll be surprised at how much money you can make by leaving the beaten internet marketing path. Try new things. You may fail, but hey, you might stumble on something new. I’ve made most of my money by trying things people haven’t. Remember, even failed sites are valuable because they can be used as link farms.
9. Network. The more friends online you have, the more success you may find. People in the MMO niche are generally pretty helpful, minus those trying to sell you products.
10. PR doesn’t matter
PR and search engine ranking are becoming less and less related. PR *can* indicate how easy it is to break into a niche, but it’s not always bang on and sometimes PR is way off. You need to look at other variables too.
11. Full time marketing does not equal full time work
I learned this one the hard way. Just because you quit your job to work as a full time marketer, it’s not easy to get work done when you have all this free time. You actually have to treat your job like you have a boss looking over your shoulder. It took me a full month and a week to get back into the groove of pushing myself to work.
12. Prepare for Christmas
I, regrettably, didn’t have a network in place for the Christmas shopping. I won’t make the same mistake next year — I think I’ll drop everything next August to prepare for the November/December shoppers. You can seriously make a year’s income in 2 months if you do it right.
Since every other make money online site out there is setting a New Years resolution, here’s my Top 5 Internet Marketing goals for the next year.
1. Make 20-30k a month. I still have some work to do here, but I think 20k a year is realistic. I’m going to work my ass off to make this a reality.
2. Set up 3 solid authority sites
3. Diversify into Amazon and EBay. Aim for 3k a month with each revenue type
4. Actually SEO this Make Money Online blog. I’ve done 0 SEO for this site. But, I’d like to actually spend some time trying to rank this site for some competitive Make Money Online terms – if only to help cut through most of the shit out there.
5. Start promoting Hairy Midget Thongs – I’ve been talking a lot about them, maybe I should start selling them?
Yet Another Homily About Making Money Online
Persistence
The key to making money online is persistence. All about persistence. You try something, it doesn’t work. You try something else, it doesn’t work. You try something else it doesn’t work. You try something else, it works. Bingo, repeat this 100 times and you can quite your day job.
I’ll tell you something – the only way you can fail to make money with organic search engine marketing is failing to really try. I guarantee if you continue to create new sites, get backlinks, and test different markets, you will make money. The problem people seem to have is that they don’t realize how much work you actually have to put into the process and that instant results don’t always happen.
Making money on the internet is not an instant process. It can take months to start to see the fruits your labour. But I will promise you one thing – it get’s easier. You learn what works and what doesn’t. You optimize what works and discard what doesn’t. And you start to make more and more money.
Set Goals
It’s easy to get lost in this business, especially with my current strategy of mass producing mini sites. If you are going to juggle a lot of different sites, you need to really have some concrete goals. I strongly suggest you set yourself daily goals – 5 articles a day, one site a day, 10 backlinks a day, or whatever you feel you can REALISTICALLY set each day. And stick to this schedule. And for fucks sake, stick to it. Hand your kids to your hubby for a few hours, spend time working online rather than watching whatever crap passes as TV these days. Give up that Xbox 720 or whatever new video game system you got for Christmas. The point is, start spending time working online. For some people, you might have to sacrifice something, but anything valuable in life always has a cost. If you aren’t willing to pay the cost, don’t expect to get it.
I’m not trying to become the Internet Marketing version of Toney Robbins here with all this hurrah hurrah “I can fly if I put my mind to it” talk. But there is something to be said about your state of mind.
I’ve found that making money online is a MENTAL exercise. You need to have the right state of mind to achieve anything because you are putting yourself out on a limb, taking a risk trying to commit to this pie-in-the-sky model of making money.
It’s not easy to spend hours every day, hoping that at some indefinite point in time, you will make some money. It’s not easy explaining to wife, husband, uncle, aunt, or friend-at-McDonalds that you are spending hours every day trying to make money online.
We probably all have that Uncle who’s trying the next easy way of making fast money. I have one and every week he’s trying some new Amway scam, telling everyone within ear shot how much money his new business idea will be making.
But you know what, Internet Marketing is not some sell-bullshit-to-desperate people kind of thing – you can make money. And the proof is in the pudding when you can show those nice checks.
Experiment
Guys, I can’t stress this enough. You need to try different ways of making money. Play with different revenue streams, play with different niches, play with different types of sites, play with different themes, play with different layouts, etc.
Test, track, test, track, optimize. A lot of people just want to put up a site and leave it in perpetuity, but this is a good way to leave money on the table. I like to set up a site and leave it for a couple months. I think change things around for a few weeks/month and track the changes.
I also encourage you guys to branch outside of Adsense. Adsense is great for some niches, but suck ass for other niches. And in some cases, you can make a lot more money with affiliate marketing.
Making Money Online with Long Tail Keywords
I thought I’d talk a bit about long tails, you know – “how to buy a cheap hair midget thong” or “brown hairy midget thongs” or “hairy midget thongs for children”.
When targeting organic search engine traffic, a good deal of your search engine traffic can come from “untargeted” long tails. Now I’ve been creating lots of mini sites for months, tinkering with different strategies for getting traffic. One strategy I played around with was setting up sites to only score long tail traffic.
Does it work? Partly. For SOME niches, you can set up sites and get long tails, but with a brand new site with no backlinks, you likely won’t get more than 2-4 people a day (if that) in long tails. Older sites and sites with backlinks get more.
In the RIGHT situation, you can actually get more long tail traffic than your main keyword.
Long tail searches can really add up. I’ve got one site – an authority site – that gets 1200 or so visitors a day. I’d say I get about 500 or so people a day from unplanned “long tail” searches.
Now there seems to be a lot of confusion about long tail traffic. You only get long tail traffic, in significant quantities, by getting backlinks to your site – there more the better.
Here’s why. If you set up a new site that doesn’t rank high for any terms, you won’t get a lot of long tail traffic – 1-4 people a day at most, usually.
To get a decent amount of long tail traffic, you are going to have to build up some keyword authority for a niche. Let’s say I create a new blog “How to buy a Hairy Midget Thong.” If you just sit on it and forget about it, say goodbye to getting anything other than trickle traffic.
There is a strategy with trickle traffic that can still make you money – either with Adsense or Ebay, but you need hundreds of sites to really see something tangible.
If you want more than trickle traffic, you need to develop some keyword authority for some terms in your niche. Once you get some authority for some long tails, google also ranks you for other “unplanned” combinations that contain those longtails or related longtails. For authority sites that rank for dozens (or hundreds) of terms, the long tail traffic can be substantial. For a mini site that ranks for a single keyword, you might only pull out 10-20 people a day from long tails. For a mini site with no ranking, get used to a couple people a day at most from long tails.
New Experiments
My work has been frozen t he past 10 days, ever since Christmas has come up. I’m currently working with some more sniper sites in different niches. I’ve got plans to test out Wordpress Mage – there is some real potential there to rake it in from thin affiliate sites. I have the software but I haven’t had any time. This month I want to see about getting 10-30 sites set up though. I’m also going to do an experiment with micro niche finder. I’m thinking about creating 50-100 sites with it and we can collectively track the results. This software has a very good reputation, so I’m going to see what I can do with it. I pretty sure I can put it to good use here. I do have some plans for doing 100-200 solid ebay sites, 100 solid Amazon snipers, and so on. But right now, I’m building adsense sites for the next 4-6 months. After that, I’ll switch all out to affiliate sites and see what I can do.
So there we go guys. It’s a new year. Set a goal for your productivity and get to work. The mountain of Make Money Online is tall, but it’s time to start scaling it. If you haven’t made money yet, this is your year.
Happy (Late) New Years. I’ll see if I can cough out a new post in a few days. I don’t want to make any promises though – it takes me some real time to create a post here. I need to have a couple, fuck-around posts where I don’t have to come up with something profound.
Now go Make Money Online.
34 Comments
Happy New Year, Ben. Glad to see a post up here, I was afraid you had fallen back into the J*O*B trap.
You make point here that is critical to many folks thinking about giving up their day jobs (or who have lost their day jobs) tto go full time.
I had a ‘real’ job for more thna 40 years. I had some good bosses and overwhelmingly a lot of assholes pretending to be a boss.
But I never worked for a worse boss than me, myself. “My boss” either pays no attention and let’s me fritter away the time searching for cartoon porn and free poker sites, or else ‘he’ is a son of a bitch with unrealistic deadlines that I rebel against. (back to the porn and poker, vicious circle, eh?)
Sounds silly but to be successful working for yourself, you have to figure out how to be a consistent, fair, yet goal oriented boss to yourself.
And if you have family with you … spouses, children, parents, etc., better figure long and hard on a way to convince them you are actually working, rather thna ‘playing on the computer’. No, they won’t figure it out just because you _tell_ them you are working. And the kindest and best of them still have no concept of how much time just one, “Hon, can you open this pickle jar for me?” can do to your concentration and productivity.
Not trying to be negative at all, I think working for yourself is the best situation possible, but like any job, there are stumbling blocks that it is easier to figure out a plan for _before_ you stumble over them.
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admin Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 11:55 am
Thanks Dave. It is tough when you first start out full time. Your own worst enemy is yourself. I’ll give the 9-5 job one thing — you at least accomplish a minimum amount of work, especially if you have a boss that rides you hard.
I thought I would get way more done when i switched to full time. But it took me almost a month and a half to discipline myself. Now, I put in a good amount of work, but that transition period is hard.
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Dave Starr Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 4:26 pm
Amen to that, bro. It’s almost 7 years now since I retired from my last ‘real’ job and you know what I miss most? Weekends and holidays. Think of it, I haven’t had a day off or a Federal holiday in 7 years … where’s that employment application I had lying around? *LoL*
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Hi Ben, Happy New Year! I wish you to achieve all your goals and on Jan 1, 2011 draft a huge post on how to get to 25K a month
Pls help provide perspective on backlinking:
1. Minimum/Base Sniper Backlinking. When you make big number of snipers, what is the “basic” backlinking you minimally need to ensure to them? The best is as much as possible, I know, but initially, just to ensure a kick-start what would be it?
2. Sources for initial sniper backlinking. Is article marketing - 1,2 directories and web 2.00 - infobarrel, enough? Are do-follow forums and do follow comments on authority blogs in your niche fine?
3. Backlinking Networks. Can you pls share an updated perspective on this one? UAW - is it still fine, but you use it only on support sites? Any experience with LinkVana - can be used on primary sites / is there any risk if network will be slapped, except loosing the juice? What about others - eg have heard anything on “Paul’s quality backlinks” - giving ca 50 links per month within PR4 pages?
4. Bookmarking Deamon. Still recommend this one for support sites? Support sites backlinked with this give more juice than just support sites with no backlinks?
5. Self Created Support Networks. After you create an initial network, after how much time can you assess results and how much you need to expand / strengthen the network? I ask this because, in order to build KV authority for the sites in the network it would take time, probably months…Also, how do you use spun articles - post differend spinned versions of the same article on different support sites?
Thanks!!!
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admin Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Because people will rape the shit out of any specific backlinking strategies I give out here, I’ll keep mum on that — just so my methods still work for me.
But, get backlinks from everywhere and anywhere untill you rank high. You only ever make consistent money on a site when you reach #10 spot. Keep on getting links to your site is #1-3.
As far as Backlinking networks go, UAW is the best, BS is good, AMA is questionable, Link Vana is worth it, but expensive, Link Vader is good, Traffic Kahuna I don’t know. The problem with link networks is that google also seems to clean them out. That means any ranking you get from a link network, if it’s directly to your money site, can get devalued pretty quickly. It’s a good idea to mix in your own links too — article directories links, support blogs, commet links, link exchanges, etc. This means your site still has ranking.
Bookmarking deamon — it’s worth getting if you have the money. It won’t rank your site, but those shitty links are good to hide your network a bit and for fast indexing.
It will take you months, maybe a year to build up your own network. But it’s a gradual thing. Make a site, build a network for that site — that network becomes your farm. Repeat. In a year or two, you’ll ahve a network.
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Definitely have to agree on the keywords tool. I have realized that it is often way off. I can’t remember where I read it but a recent blog post I read reckoned that only about 10% of Internet searches will even show up on keyword tools.
That’s a lot of lost opportunities that you can try to grab by simply making sites around keywords using your common sense and no tools at all. Try to get in to the mind of the average search engine user. We forget that people use them thinking they will actually answer a question, there is a lot to made from “who has”, “where can I”, “best price” etc etc.
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admin Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Yep, keyword tool is pretty inaccurate. And many of the best keywords are not shown… OR if they are shown, the exacts and CPC are way off. This can be good for those who are willing to explore. You can break into niches that other people won’t touch, and make a killing.
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Thanks Ben for the post…
@Carlo
yes i actually have the same queries because having a proven set of backlinking for minisites is very critical as to diversify IPs is an ocean where you get lost especially when you are dealing with many sites at a time.
Hope Ben will shed some light on the updated version of it.
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I was afraid till now to create something because I was afraid of failure. But I have experienced some small victories and which are enough to tell me that this thing can really work. I am also going to start working on building stuff on slightly larger scale and take some risk. And thanks for all the inputs you are providing. Hearing stuff as it is really boost the morale.
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admin Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 12:02 pm
MMO is a hard climb. But the more you do it, the closer you get to the top.
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Happy New Year, Ben! And thanks for the post!
That’s my problem - it is difficult for me to be persistent, at least for a long time. I’m afraid of wasting my time if I start doing something persistently, and it won’t bring any success. Although I have some sites and hubs, that bring some small money each, I’m still somehow not sure that if I multiply them, the amount of money coming in will increase. I often switch from one strategy to another, though I understand that it hurts my progress in each way. But I’m inspired by what you’re doing, so I still keep going. Hopefully the new year will see positive changes in me.
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admin Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 12:02 pm
Happy, late new years
Best of luck to your this year!
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Carlos, Zane,
Whey would Ben share his source of backlinks. The answer is you need backlinks.
Are your ranking #1 for your chosen keywords? Yes/No
if No - get more links
if Yes - Build links to maintain rankings.
Simple
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Getting links is not the hard deal, the thing is how when, how much minimum links required to get to 1st position, because it is not good idea to risk your site by building huge no. of backlinks in a very 1st week as your sites are unmatured.
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Happy New Years Ben! Now’s lets kick some ass in 2010 with our web empire
You really nailed it here that if you want to make money online, then persistence and setting goals is key.
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Arshu,
What? You build links until you are in the first position. These type of niche sites you don’t need a ton of links, nobody is saying go out and use some BH program to get links. Build/use your network, use web 2.0 properties, get a few links from friends. Rinse repeat
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“But you know what, Internet Marketing is not some sell-bullshit-to-desperate people kind of thing – you can make money. And the proof is in the pudding when you can show those nice checks.”
Unless you’re one of the gurus, lol! Totally agree- not just with this segment, but everything. It’s so hard to tell my friends I’m “making money online” when it’s taken me months to start seeing consistent sales, and then that’s just a sale per week. Ah well, I’ll be living it up using my laptop on beaches one day.
Wordpress Mage sounded awesome, but it was WAY too expensive for me. I hear you have to buy preowned domains to really get the most out of it too, which means it’d be even more expensive. But I am curious to see if you can actually pull in some sales from a wordpress mage site; can’t wait to see the results of this experiment.
And it seems like everyone is using Micro Niche Finder or Market Samurai now. I used the trial of Market Samurai back in July for the 30 day challenge and it was awesome.
Good luck with your goals for this year- I’m hoping to reach 1/10 of your income from basically $100 a month.
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Good luck to you Ben. I am looking forward to your experiment with MNF. I Currently use it and like it alot. It has become one of my primary tools.
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admin Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Hi Leo. Good to hear from you. Yea, I’m pumping out massive amounts of content as usual. But, I’ve also start to put a lot more emphasis on backlinks too, which is really starting to pay off (duh!).
It’s my experience with the authority site that I do have that longtails bring in more than half of the traffic I get (400-700 people a day from long tails). Grizz has stated that a huge chunk of his traffic is longtail based. From what I’ve seen from my own sites, once you get broad authority in a niche, you can really rake in the long tail traffic.
Thanks for visiting leo. Look forward to being entertained by another one of your posts as well. Liked what you had to say about brand being the new authority — I agree completely.
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admin Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Doing an experiement with it now, will let you know next post. So far, it’s goood.
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Hey Ben,
Good to see you rise to the surface and get a bit of air. Figured you were killing it with content though.
Long Tail keywords are especially interesting once you have an authority site. What most believe is that if they can rank for something like “make money online” and they have volumes of content that the majority of their traffic will come from “make money online”. In reality, the big **secret** for those of us who have actually ranked for high traffic keywords is that generally speaking, your long tail traffic will almost always give you more traffic collectively than the keyword you are focusing on.
In fact, I would bet my left arm that most of Grizzly’s traffic comes from other long tails…not the make money online keyword, like most probably believe.
Anyway, good to see you writing a little on this blog.
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Wow man. The new post was out of this world awesome. The fact that you share this type of stuff to the public should be illegal but yet I’m so thankful cause your helping me SO Much. I’ve read your new here probably around 23 times and have come up with a set of questions for you. ALSO, the fact that you reply sometimes the day of.. breath taking. OK here I go.
1. How do you feel about the idea of combining keywords in domains to make sense as one statement. Example: keywords are “MN plumbing” and “plumbing in st paul.” Therefor going for the domain of http://www.mnplumbinginstpaul.com.. or do you just stick to one keyword in your domains?
2. Do you bother with “other blog backlinks” and leaving anchored texts in the name portion for seo-ing your small niche sites or no?..
3. Whats the smallest amount of monthly visits you will even deal with on optimizing for your long tails?
3. Do you list all your keywords at once in the h1 tags that you “desire” to reach or do you wait to rank for one then add more later?
ok ok I’ll be done. I’m a huge fan man, and love the site. I’m gonna share some love by twittering it and facebooking it.
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admin Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 12:16 pm
1. longtail domains are fine — for snipers. For a site that you are trying to make an authority one that looks legit, shorter looks a hell of a lot better. Still you can turn a long ass domain into an authority site. But i like to get 2 word domains for authority sites. For snipers, i’ll have 6 words if I need to.
2. Don’t know what you mean here
3. I like to keep this a secret — when I give out my exact strategies here, I create an army of competition lol, so I keep the 1-5 steps of what I do under wraps for the most part. But look at the CPC and the exacts and decide if it’s worth it. I like sites that can make at least 10-15 bucks a month, if some combination of CPC + exact matches give me what I’m looking for, I’ll take it.
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Hi Ben,
Happy New Year!
Thanks for your valuable advices.
I am seeing some improvement at the moment.
I am focusing now on accelerated growth in 2010.
The best lessons learned from you are:
1) Hardworking - Nothing is easy
2) You need to spend to make money
“No Failure! It was the Wrong Result”
Change strategy to get the right result!
Thanks again Ben.
Lets strive for a successful 2010!
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admin Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
Looks like you understand the biz, jarod. Good luck in 2010!
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I agree with you that this whole thing is a huge mental battle. I’ve been struggling with it all throughout 2009 and I am hoping I’ve learned enough to actually move on and make significant headway in this business. It’s tough but I really want, i’m actually quite desperate, to get out of the rat race and be 100% free of The Man!
It’s just very frustrating how difficult it is to maintain the balance between my day job and my online racket and I find that my performance dips in both when I try too hard. I do still want to get at least 7 hours of sleep a day but with two jobs that require a lot of time, it becomes a struggle sometimes.
Thanks for the inspiration. I shall persist!
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admin Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Yep. If you can conquer the mental side of things, and you can continue to grind every day, you can make money. I’ve been teaching my brother the ropes and he’s struggled for 4 months. Now the guy is making close to 30 bucks a day and it’s going up. Persistence is KEY.
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Another great post and another fantastic photo.
I hope you, me and everyone here sets and reaches their goals in 2010 and beyond. You in particular deserve it with the amount of work you put in and the amount of knowledge and personal experience you share with all of us. I look forward to you reaching your goals especially if it means you get to do some more world travels AND you promise to post some of your photography along the way. Promise??? :o)
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admin Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Thanks K-Man. I taking a solid month and a week off to travel china from May 1 to June 10th. I’m going on a photo tour of Tibet, mongolia, xinjiang (right by everest…in the far remote part of china). I’ll have plenty of new photos to share with you guys. I’ll let you guys know how IM and “travelling” work together, lol.
Cheers
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Good to hear from you again Ben. I always look forward to reading your posts as they are a great source of inspiration.
I am slowly but surely trying buy and build up my own domain portfolio and hope that in 2010 will be a great success.
Look forward to reading more from you and hearing about the results of your experiments.
Good luck.
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admin Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Good to hear from you too, Tiptopcat. Keep doing what you are doing, slowly build up your network and sites and you’ll do well. Good luck in the 2010!
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Happy new year Ben, great post as usual. Glad you took a break over xmas - I did too, but am very happy to be back at work on my sites now - this is going to be a great year!
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admin Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Thanks, Cat. A good year to you too.
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Hi There,
Thanks for the wonderful blog post and for all the information you’ve provided in the past few months I’ve been following your blog.
I like your point about the need for making online friends. Well, just to get you on board do you know there’s a broken link on your blog? Its on the sidebar (the link going to commission junction).
Catch you lata
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admin Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Thanks for the note, graduate. Yes, it’s great to have a good community of friends. You can dominate niches together. Just make sure they are trustworthy friends though!
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Those were quite useful lessons for anyone in this business. Goodluck for the rest of the year and especially for x-mas 2010!
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Nice Post, Ben. And Happy New Years !!
You have lots of interesting things going on.
Dont take this wrong but IMHO I think you tend to try to put your hands in too many different pots at one time. I have learned the hard way that the quickest way to wealth is to go with a proven system in IM and stick with it for awhile. After you have found Success over a period of time with it then you can move on.
I just think that telling newbies to try this and try that and experiment with this and that is potentially a conflicting message and could do more harm than good !! What happens is this usually produces an overload of information and will cause the newbie to skip from one strategy to the next without seeing it to fruition. After not seeing results they get frustrated and quit.
I suggest to newbies to stick to a proven system with IM and work it for a couple of years as these things just take time.
Just my .02 !!
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hi Ben and happy new year !
I want to ask something regarding the link farm model you explained earlier. You said “not to inter-link the support sites which are directly linking to your money blog” but interlink the support- support sites”
there is one more model of link-farming, called link-wheel, where inter-linking of support sites as well as support-support sites is recommended.
i wanted to ask why do you not recommend not inter-linking the support sites?
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YeahSure Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 6:16 pm
I guess because Google can easily find out that you are the owner of all those websites.
In that case, they could de-index all your sites in one keystroke or at least remove the link-juice from your backlinks.
From what I hear, linkwheels are less and less effective these days.
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Zane Reply:
January 12th, 2010 at 9:30 am
Yea I agree.
thanks man!
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Hey, thanks for posting, great comments. Just getting started with my blog and made a few notes from you guys. Looks like this is really going to help. Thanks again for a very helpful post
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Well, I must say that that’s really some big goals that you have set for yourself! Can’t imagine myself being able to churn out hundreds of sites in such a short time. For now, I’m already struggling to keep afloat 5 websites.
Anyway, for this year, I certainly would hope to be able to speed things up a little. Like you, I’m looking into creating more mini-adsense sites before I consider venturing into affiliate marketing.
Thanks for the great post!
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Hey Ben,
Have you started on your ebay sniper and amazon sniper sites? What kind of product will be best for ebay compared to Amazon?
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The thing about the search volume is it’s based on adwords. It’s based on the entire google search network. This means blogs and pages with adsense will get views as will people search through the adsense google toolbar, as people will also do a google blog search and a http://www.google.com/unclesam search and all other kinds of searches. Some of the other searches will have the same #1 as result, others will not. Some have the majority of the traffic coming from google, others have most coming from blog and 3rd party networks associated with google.
However, if you use “exact match” you are still only getting the keyword that you search.
When I make a site, I target a keyword and all of it’s long tail terms that I can find. So really all I want to see is a decent CPC and a decent broad matched terms, and I put more focus on the competition.
So if I target “how to get rid of ants” I might target “how to get rid of red ants, how to get rid of black ants, how to get rid of fire ants how to get rid of ants in my house how to get rid of ants house, how to get rid of ants now, etc.
If the related keyword has enough search volume on it’s own, I might also create an entire new post on that site/blog/whatever, or just add a longer peice to that same main article/post/blog. But if you get backlinks for every single related keyword, although the search volume may be less, it really doesn’t matter because you’ll still be getting longtail traffic.
Additionally, when I get the long tail traffic, the ads for the “broad” matched term are still giving me a good CPC.
So if I get 1,000 visitors for “how to get rid of ants” at $3.00 per click, and I get 500 visitors from long tail keywords that by theemselves only get 0.05 per click, I’m still probably going to get $3.00 per click for those as well.
I think the trick is to understand the CPC for broad terms. If the CPC for “ANTS” is super high, then you may end up with an even higher CPC than the $3.00 that the “get rid of ants” shows, simply people have bid on “broad match” keywords on adsense for ants to cover more traffic.
So I think that if you’re going to do keyword research, you may want to use Court and Mark’s Formula, only cut it in half. but you also may want to look at “broad” match search volume (if you target keyords like I do), and use the CPC of the “main” or “super” keyword. (ants). I think in reality google will put a combination of the highest bidders for the content network and the most relevent.
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THE END OF BLOG FARMS?
On Griz’s recent post, makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com/2009/12/grizs-first-video.html
a comment:
December 04, 2009 1:44 AM
Hi, Grizz! My question is separate from what everyone is asking here. It’s about creating a gmail account so I can register for a Blogger account. Looks like G is asking for SMS verification by requiring cell phone numbers now to limit specific numbers of accounts per cell phone number. Since Blogger now requires a Gmail account (and doesn’t let us use anything else), does this mark a turning point?
Another comment:
Regarding Sydney’s comment of Dec 04 and mine of Jan 19, about SMS verification, and related
that looks like Google is addressing what it regards as the “blug furm” problem. And it would not surprise me to see that they next automate a procedure to retroactively contact and require all present Blogger blogs to verify by that means, or get pulled. [Added here: And those verified but exceeding the quota could be pulled by Google. Farms decimated. ] A lot of PR4, PR5, whatever, sites/blogs will then become PR- or PR0.
I myself tried to set up, yesterday, a new blogger account with a live.com email address and was not accepted because I did not give a cell phone number.
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hey Ben thanks for another great post again, I thought I try micro nich finder like you… and so far its really help in finding niches …just wondering how you finding micro nich finder?
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Hey Ben I’ve read all your posts and you inspire me–keep it up. I’m definately going to get into this after I graduate this year and do one more summer of book-selling.
-Southwestern Book Seller
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Ben! I’m a big fan of your many site strategy. Do you happen to know of any software, which allows you to make sites in bulk? Sort of like making websites with the speed of hubpages?
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Another meaty post. I don’t know how you find the time to write these with all the other work you are doing. I spent much of last year working with mini sites, but just found the going too tedious and repetitive. This year I am going the opposite direction and building 2 authority sites on subjects which I have am both knowledgeable and passionate about. Hopefully I can get them both rolling in 2010.
I’ve seen you mention authority sites briefly in past posts. Can’t wait to see what kind of results you have when you get the time to tackle that strategy.
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Thanks for this chuncky post. I find it so interesting to see the actual results of a real Internet Marketer.
Your post definitely boost me in getting organized and getting things done.
So thanks a million, Good luck and looking forward to your next posts.
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Hi Ben, nice and interesting post as U always do. But this is my first comment anyway. And your review about MNF was really good an promising. But it will not be a good idea for starters like me. But thanks for that informative review.
I have a lot of questions in my mind particularly regarding the Hubpages experiment. May be I think I should write a detailed mail asking my doubts to you. And I will be sending them soon. So please kindly read and answer my doubts. It will be greatly helpful.
I used to read (subscribe) only to Court’s Keyword Academy Blog and I was a former member. But I think I should read yours too. Because you both have some things in common - Honesty, Sincerity, Good writing style.
Tanks for the post, Bro. I enjoyed it!!! Yeah, Truly..
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