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Make Money Online with Authority Sites

30-Sep-09

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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.

snipers

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

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Make Money Online Update

11-Sep-09

jui

Ok, time for another update on my MMO.

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

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

Ok, let’s look at these updates.

Clickbank Snipers

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

cb_sale1

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Traffic

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

Different Niches

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

Different Affiliate Products

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

Different Monetization

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

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

About the CB Project and CTR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s look at my Niche Devil ebay stats.

Niche Devil Update

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

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

nd_thismonth2The force is strong with this one, yes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

200 Ebay Snipers in 1 Month

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adsense Snipers

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

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

Authority Site Project

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

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

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

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

Enjoy your weekend and make money online.

Ben

Filed in How to Make Money Online, Internet Marketing, Niche Marketing, SEO | Tagged , , , , | Comments (41) »

How to Increase Search Engine Ranking with SEO

03-Sep-09

Yunnan, near tibet

New Make Money Online Forum

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

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

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

Now, back to the topic at hand…

How to Increase Search Engine Ranking with SEO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Use your keyword 3 times per webpage.

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

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

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

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

Make Money Online with SEO.

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

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

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

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

Lets explore how to rank your site with backlinks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Internal Backlinks

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

Tying it all together

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Number of backlinks

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

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

4. Doman Age

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now go make money online.

Ben

Filed in Backlinks, Greyhat, SEO | Tagged , , , | Comments (17) »

How to Generate Web Content for Internet Marketing and SEO

27-Aug-09

Famous mountain range in china, Huanshang

Famous mountain range in china, Huanshang

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

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

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

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

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

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

Generating Articles through Outsourcing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Generating Articles through Spinning

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

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

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

Here is an example of single level spinning:

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

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

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

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

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

{ sentence 1} | {sentence 2}

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Auto Content Generation

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

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

Make Money Online Experiements

A few very quick updates.

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

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

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

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

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

Other Updates

New Infobarrel Revenue Sharing Module

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

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

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

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

How to Make Money Online without Work

Simple. You can’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you next week. If I have the time.

Ben

Filed in Backlink Sofware, Blackhat, Content Generation, Greyhat, How to Make Money Online, Internet Marketing, Make Money Online Experiments, Niche Marketing, SEO, SEO Software | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (88) »

Authority Blogs, Niche Blogs, and Making Money

20-Aug-09

Victoria Peak -- Hong Kong

Victoria Peak -- Hong Kong

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

Niche Devil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adsense snipers

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

adsense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flagship Authority Blog Project

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

Make Money Online with Flagship Blogs

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

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

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

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

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

How to Dominate a Niche to Make Money Online

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

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

You want to know how to utterly dominate a niche?

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

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

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

Ben Out

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