I suppose you could call this a continuation in what will be a series of screw EZA posts. I know that a lot of you hate being dependent on Ezinearticles and I feel the same way. But why not take advantage of it? There is such a huge advantage here to make cash online taking advantage of what this directory makes public. With the amount of information that this directory shares I can’t believe there aren’t people that use.
I’m sure this has happened to a lot of you. You go to Google’s keyword tool and do a little keyword research. You find a great keyword and decide that you’re going to rank for it. You buy a keyword rich domain, write content for it and build links over several months. One day in the future you’re checking on the progress of the site and you see that you finally pushed into the top 10. You take a peak at your stats and notice you’re not getting much traffic for your keyword. So you head back to the keyword tool and check the traffic volume. What do you see? A low number like a 1000/month.
The problem is that these keyword tools aren’t necessarily accurate. Sure they can be extremely accurate and other times they’re not. The only way you can get the real numbers is to rank for them and see what comes in. That really isn’t a good answer for us that are looking to make cash from as many sites as we can.
This is where EZA can help us. EZA is an authority site and that allows articles to rank very high for no backlinks. The odd thing is that EZA actually shares the view count at the end of each article. This tells us exactly how much traffic an article gets. Most people that write for directories understand the concept of keywords and using them, so you can reverse engineer articles.
EZA ranks in the top 10 for these articles, but it isn’t a strong ranking. I laugh anytime I see an article directory in the top 10. Seriously, you should be laughing too because you can easily outrank it. This is what I mean. Why be a bitch to EZA writing all the time for them, when you can just reverse engineer all the articles on their site and take it.
I have to admit that today I wasn’t planning on posting on this subject. I made a post over at DP in a thread about someone banned from EZA. I said that this was the best thing that ever happened to them and that this directory was a crutch for most people. Some guy made a cocky one line reply like “yeah $5000 a month is a crutch” or something along those lines. I find that incredibly funny to post on a forum.
When I use the word “crutch” it refers to slowing you down making cash online. You can’t run if you have crutches, but it doesn’t suggest that you can get to places. But it’s still a crutch even if you make $5000/mth passively. And I’ll prove it.
If you’re making $5000/mth article marketing we have to stipulate a few things.
- You’re writing a shit load of articles each and everyday OR
- You have a lot of articles ranking in Google pulling traffic
If you’re in category 1 than you’re just doing bum marketing. It’s not different then doing double shifts at McDonald’s everyday. I’m sure if employees were allowed to double shift everyday they’d make good money. I’ve already addressed this in my post titled the Biggest Mistake in Affiliate Marketing.
The second scenario is the one that I want to address for this post. The idea that the articles are getting a significant amount of search engine traffic and that is what makes a nice passive income. This is great and everything, but it disturbs me when people think that it is good. Here’s why:
EZA Articles Aren’t Strong
I know that the articles are going to rank in the top 10 with absolutely no keywords, but that happens only on keywords that are relatively weak to begin with. A little bit of work with your own site and you can out rank them. It’s not like the articles are invincible or something. Every time I see some sort of directory in the top 10, I laugh. I laugh because I know that I can rank for it with virtually no work.
It’s so damn easy that a keyword rich domain would be enough for you to get the top 10. A few backlinks and you’re golden. Obviously getting your site in the top 10 at Google is more important than EZA in the top 10 because …
EZA Only Gives You 30% of the Traffic
Gurus will tell you that a good respectable click through rate on your articles is 30%. In other words, 70% of the traffic goes to the directory for their profit. The CTR on your articles will generally fluctuate though, so it is hard to say. You may only get 10% on average.
If your site is in the top 10 getting the traffic than you’re getting 100% of the traffic. Hmmm, 30% vs 100%. I don’t know about you, but I prefer 100% of the traffic. If the 30% coming from EZA is helping you make five grand a month, than 100% would make you $16,667/mth. If you were looking how to make cash online, which would you prefer? I know, which one that I want.
I can hear the objections now…
But But But this is a lot easier than making new sites
That is true. It does take a lot more work to make a site and see if it works. You have to build links, make content, monetize it, etc. Well, if you’re writing articles you’re going to have to drive your traffic to something. Can you sell your articles VALUE (IE: ranking) on a directory? No. Can you sell your sites that are ranked? Yes. I suppose this is the difference between renting and buying.
I know the deal though. I get it. This is really how to make cash online for beginners and I agree with that. But that doesn’t make it right or something that you should continue doing. There is something that is a lot easier for beginners to use. Something that is much more accurate. Much more fun and makes much more money…
Reverse Engineering EZA
The people on EZA that are making a nice passive income of $5000/mth, I’m gunning for you. I’m literally gunning for you now. It’s nothing personal. It’s not unethical. It’s business and I’m taking you out. At this point you should know exactly what to do, but I understand some of you don’t know how to read between the lines. Here are the most important pieces of information I listed above…
- EZA lists the number of views an article receives at the bottom of the page
- Even though EZA articles make it into the top 10, they’re weak and easy to beat
- 100% traffic going to your own site is much more valuable than 30% coming from EZA
What I’m talking about is going to EZA and looking through the articles. Find the ones that are getting the traffic and dissect them. For the most part it should be relatively easy to identify the keyword of the article. It will be in the title and all through out the article. You can search the term at Google to verify that it is ranking and you can check the search volume at the keyword tool.
Okay, A Walk Through
I guess the best place to show you this method is with a walk through. There are a number of ways to find articles with high visit counts, including a Google function way. I’m not going to show you how to do that one. I’m sure if you learn the syntax methods of search engines you might be able to figure it out.
But you can just do the most obvious thing and that is going to an article and looking at the most viewed. For this walk through I’m looking at an article in the mobile computing section. I’ll point out that this was completely random. I clicked on the first article on the front page of EZA.
Using the technology niche probably wasn’t the smartest choice since this is a niche that has a social aspect of it. People like to talk about their laptops and gadgets, but it’s still good. Take a look at the one I highlighted. It appeared to me as the one that was the most “webmastered”, if that is a word. But you can take a look at the views and see that it has a ton. Actually EZA is fucked right now because this article is older than 90 days.
This article has been up for around 20 months now. That means that it is getting roughly 1300 visitors a month. That’s not a ton of visitors, but it’s enough to make it worth wild. If 1300 visitors a month over a year can make over $10 (cost of a domain) than you’re profitable. Obviously you want to make more, which you should be with 1300 visitors a month.
So what is the keyword? The keyword stuck out like a sore thumb for me. It’s “free laptop for students”. I went and type that in Google (without quotes) and it comes up in third position. It came up in first for Google Canada.
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The last step in this whole thing is to take a look at the keyword in Google’s keyword tool. This is where we can see if it is actually the keyword that is the driving force for the article. Inevitably it is the keyword that is going to help you make real cash online.
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I just noticed I took the wrong screen for the keyword. Laptops is plural in this one. But doesn’t matter. Same amount of searches. As you can see it gets around 2400 searches a month. It’s not something that I’d personally go after. I don’t think 2400 is a enough for me. Though, you might dig through the niche and see a lot of other related keywords that get 1000’s a month too. You could rank for all of them and have a site getting a hundred unique visitors a day. I’m not going to investigate this particular niche for you because I just want to demonstrate how you can use and abuse EZA for keywords.
For the keyword “free laptop for students”, it’s something that you can can go after. I actually didn’t document this to show you how easy it could be to rank. I just did this spur of the moment thing. So if you’re planning on going after the keyword, it is all yours. No one else is in the niche and since EZA ranks 3rd you should have no problem over taking it.
What if you can’t figure out the keyword? This happens a lot. The article gets a lot of views, but I can’t figure out the keyword right away. I’ll admit, some of the articles are a mystery. I can’t figure out how they got that many views because I can’t find the keyword. It’s life. They could be an abuser of the system sending traffic to it, but I don’t know. I do have a method you can take advantage of to find the keyword. Just use SEO Quake Firefox addon. Just click on the Page info option and you’ll get a screen like this:
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There is a lot more analysis done than just what is listed there. But essentially what it is doing is checking the keyword density of words on the page. If the page has traffic than it will probably have some keyword with a high density. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in the title.
This is one keyword that I found in around 120 seconds of searching this directory. Is it a perfect keyword? Probably not. But it is something that can help you earn cash online and it demonstrates the entire exercise of how you can get good PROVEN keywords on EZA. And that’s what you want. You want PROVEN KEYWORDS that you know work.
I could end the post like this, but I would have only taught you how to abuse EZA. I want to show you how to SCREW EZA.
Dominate the Keyword Then Dominate the Niche
When I say dominate the keyword, I don’t simply mean get to position 1 at Google. It’s a matter of getting position one, two, three and all the way to 10. Of course there is no guarantee that you can get them all, but ideally that is what you should be aiming for. Don’t get me wrong. Getting position one or two or whatever the hell EZA was ranked at. You’re going to get 100% of the traffic instead of 30%. But you can always have more. In my Make Cash Online with sniper sites post I pointed out how much the top spot at Google gets and it’s not that exciting.
Here they are again for your convenience:
- 42.30%
- 11.92%
- 8.44%
- 6.03%
- 4.86%
- 3.99%
- 3.37%
- 2.98%
- 2.83%
- 2.97%
As you can see the first spot has the most (obviously), but it’s only 42% of the total search volume. If you get the first spot of Google for an awesome keyword than congrats, but that is only 42%. You can get much more off that traffic. If you got to position one than you can obviously get 2, 3, 4, etc.
Before you go dominating crazy, you want to make sure whether it is worth wild. Make your first site and take over the position that the EZA article holds. See what happens. If it is profitable than your goal should be to have every single position on the front page.
You won’t be able to do it with the same site though. I’m not even sure if you can do it from all the same host (same IP). I haven’t tested that though. You can always get a blogger blog, hubpages, squidoo, etc to rank in the top 10 and take up positions. While you’re taking over the top 10, you’re pushing EZA off the front page. That is how they screw them.
Reverse Engineer Your Own Articles on EZA
I hope you guys are aware that EZA does share search engine stats for your articles. They only give you the top 5 search terms over a month period. But that is usually enough to give you a rough idea of what you need to know.
Just go into your articles where you get a list of them. Click on the views number. It will be a link that you can click. It will take you to a page where you can see all the search engine traffic over the month. One thing to understand is that the numbers they give aren’t accurate at all. For example, I have an article that gets like 3000 views a month. That’s roughly 100 a day, yet it lists like 10 visits for my top keyword. I know that is wrong. The important aspect of this feature is the actual keyword. You can verify for yourself that you’re ranked for it and you can check with Google’s keyword tool to see the volume.
There is absolutely no reason why you should have a 3000 views a month article on EZA. I know I shouldn’t have lol. That particular article is in first position too. I am in the works of taking over that position. I want the top 5 at least.
I hope this post has been enlightening. This explains how to make cash online by screwing EZA and it rocks. All the guess work is taken out of the equation because you can see the views. Mmmm mmmm GOOD!
I thought I should do a little case study to demonstrate how this works. I spent a few hours this week coming up with some keywords. I found a few that were getting 10,000 searches a month and EZA was ranking for it. Yeah, I’ll take over them and laugh all the way to the bank.