Make Cash Online with Product Creation

In September, I focused the bulk of my efforts on the concept of small sniper sites in high volume. I’m happy with the results so far. Obviously I’m no where near finished with it, but essentially I’m in the marination process. And all I mean by that is I’m basically in the waiting zone. All I can really do now is continue to throw a few links at the sites and wait for them to improve. It seems like a waste of resources to plug away at that full steam.

The reason I say that is the keywords are going to be easy to overtake. A lot of the sites are going to get into the money spot with 10 backlinks. There’s no point in building hundreds and hundreds if 10 is all I need to get the job done and the time for the site to grow older. I need to invest time still, but nothing in a significant manner and I have to find another project to get involved in.

Product creation isn’t something that I’m necessarily new too, but it’s something that I haven’t learned how to make successful. Just over a year ago I made my very first ebook product. I want to declare that it is a failure, but I still make cash online with it. Anything that makes more than $10/year is profitable and not really worth my time to take down.

The funny thing about this topic is that I’ve been thinking about it for the last 5 days or so. Just by coincidence, I had two sales for my first ebook in a matter of 40 minutes yesterday. At $37 each, that’s $74 total. The interesting thing is that all through 2009, I made one sale with this product and that is it, but suddenly I get two in a space of 40 minutes. I looked at my site traffic stats and saw that I was getting a huge numbers of searches from Google. They weren’t searching long tail keywords or anything like that. They were searching the product name.

Since no one has really had the need to search this before, I find it concerning. Most of the traffic is coming from Eastern Europe. Mainly Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. The first thing that has popped into my mind is that some business in this area of the world has a product which is the same name as mine and they’re doing some PR campaign. That is really the only logical conclusion I can come up with to explain the curiousity in the product name. Most of the traffic is coming from Google.no, Google.de, and Google.se.

The other conclusion I came up with is that there has always been a product like that in Eastern Europe. And I can only assume that I suddenly got a bump up in the Google rankings for foreign searches.

I haven’t got any sort of conclusion on this yet. I’ll keep you updated on it though. The last thing I want is to get into some legal battle with a company.

Edit: Figured it out. Apparently there is a product by the same name in Eastern Europe. I have no idea why a Czech company would call their product by an English name. I guess they must be doing some sort of  PR campaign. All I know is that this PR campaign is definitely not internet based.

Why Product Creation Now?

Lately, I’ve been on an avoidance of my own products. I’ve been just focusing on getting affiliate sales and doing shit like that. But I’ve been driven into this position and yes there is a story that goes along with it. This is a story of an anti-affiliate scam artist publisher asshole…

I’m not going to name names, yet, because I first want to launch my product first. The reason that I have to create this product is due to the fact that there isn’t any other product available. He is literally the only one that had this product. There were some ten dollar books on Amazon on the same topic, but I’m not looking for a 40 cent commission on sales.

I’ve been promoting his product for over a year. I’ve been making this guy sales month after month, with no problem at all. In June of 2009, I asked him for a review copy of the product because I wanted to be in a better position to sell it. This is a completely valid request for someone that was selling his products for a while. He flat out said no I couldn’t have access. At the time I remember thinking that was a pretty dick thing to do. It’s not like I’m a moocher because I’ve been selling his product for a while. I let it go since I have more important things to do.

Sometime in mid-August there was a PDC message from this guy saying that he was effectively ending his affiliate program in a week. I don’t receive email notifications from PDC since vendors tend to spam messages of their new products. I also log into my account only once or twice a month. There really is no need to log in and check stats when you get an email notification for a sale.

Early in September I logged into my account and there were a bunch of messages in my inbox from this guy. Obviously the one in August saying he was ending his affiliate program. I want to add that he never really ended it. I  still got sales and everything during these times. He was still on PDC and I was still a technical affiliate. He just didn’t want anyone anymore, even though he still uses the PDC payment links. One of the messages told me to take all references to his product on my site or face legal action. I had to laugh at that one because there is no way in hell that I’m ever going to comply with that. I have every right to talk about his product.

Another one of the messages too a particular interest in one of my pen names on EzineArticles and all the articles I had linking to my website. He wanted to know if they were mine, which is frankly none of his business. But I’m guessing if I replied to that he would of demanded that I removed them all. Lastly, he also awknowledged that he wasn’t going to pay me at all. He officially announced that he was going to screw me out of my last month of payment.

His particular interest in my sites tuned me into the fact that he was probably upset with the fact that I was starting to impede on his search engine territory. My site was in the June Project and I was pushing into some meaty keywords. I’m 99.9% convinced that he has a huge problem with the fact that I was starting to get a little too successful with my affiliate marketing and pulled the plug on everyone because of that fact. He just seemed way too interested in my site and was watching it too much.

Obviously, I’m pissed the fuck off and I want blood. I want to not only compete against this ass clown, but I want to ruin him. I want to take over the niche. I want to dominate it. I want him to literally cry over the fact that he ever decided to be a total prick ass mother fucker to me.

I’m probably going to put this one up on Clickbank, despite my poor history with them. I want to take all the affiliates that he lost be his incredibly stupid move. I can put it on CB where affiliates will logically be more receptive to it since it’s not like the “new guy” on the block can rip them off. They can make their cash online and I can make sure they get a higher commissions. There is also a potential for backend sales, which will only help to sweeten the deal for affiliates. My goal is to get commissions (with backend) up to around $40 per sale, which is sweet.

This is something that I’ve gotten really motivated to do. It is like my “hate fuck” of product creation. I really want this one to work.

I also have a website that I’ll probably have to make a product for. This is something that I never really wanted to create a product with, but I’m sort of stuck. I’m getting an incredible amount of search engine traffic and I haven’t figured out how to properly monetize it. I just can’t seem to squeeze enough money out of the vistors I’m getting, so I’m going to go with a product. That puts me at two projects so far for this month.

What I’ve learned from other products I made?

I have learned a lot so far when it comes to how you do this. I’m not successful, but I’ve learned a lot of little rules that need to be followed. Rules that I think will benefit you.

What niches?

This is one that I’m betting people will have a lot of different opinions on. I started with advice that I got from the Warrior Forum. The advice was that if I wanted to make money, I should go into the niches that are the biggest (hence why my first product was on weight loss). This was articulated to me in a very smart way and it is best addressed with an example from Clickbank. The top selling products on that site are mainly in the make cash online/internet marketing niches (now that I look it doesn’t appear to be that case anymore, but the example stands).

Basically all the products in this niche are essentially the same. They all teach some variation of building sites, selling products, building links and making money. That’s essentially what they all say. They’re the same, yet they have one or two features that differentiate them and there sales letter plays up a different angle. The same thing is true for weight loss. They’re all the same, except they have one thing different and they market it from a different angle.

I think the logic is sound on this piece of advice, but I still didn’t do well with my first product. This is where my advice comes into play. When it is your first product, don’t go into the competitive niches. There is a huge learning curve when you create your own product. There is the added pressure of having to compete with all the big boys.

Go into a smaller niche where you can spread your wings and learn how this particular game goes. I’m not saying that you should go into a completely non-existent niche because I wouldn’t advise that either on the first try. Find a niche that you know there is a market in, but not something that is big. If you put your product on Clickbank don’t expect to make it to gravity of 100+. Aim for 3-4 gravity and get as much out of the experience as you can. Once you’re satisfied move onto your next proect.

Can You Sell the Niche?

This is something that I think is extremely important. When I created my first product in the weight loss niche, I never thought of the fact that I struggled to sell other products in the niche as an affiliate. There are two particular reasons why this is important to understand. The first is that when you launch your site you’re not going to have the online real estate in place to immediately send traffic to your product that you know has been proven to convert. Secondly, how the fuck do you expect to sell a product if you can’t make make sales as an affiliate?

What you need to do is create products in niches that you’ve made sales in prior to making the product. This advice will save you so much frustration. I’m not saying that this is a binding rule, but it’s something that you should consider valid and put a lot of thought into it. At the time I was thinking my affiliates would do the selling for me.

Affiliates

I learned very fast that first and foremost, you have to always depend on yourself. The idea that if you build it, they’ll come isn’t necessarily true. You can’t always depend on your affiliates because no one is going to jump in head first. They’ll feel out the ground and see how your product is going, but they’re never going to throw a ton of traffic at you.

Obviously this time around I’m going to focus harder on getting affiliates, but I know now that I have to think first about driving my own traffic and driving my own sales. Affiliates might come after that point, but I still have to treat this like any other site I plan to make cash with.

Product Creation and Sales Letter Creation

There is something that I learned pretty fast when it came to these two things… the sales letter is going to be the much more difficult thing to create. I know that when you see someone’s product hidden behind a great looking sales letter you think of amazing things. You think that it is revolutionary. That is ground breaking. That it goes over and above everything you’ve ever seen.

If you’ve read these products you’ll learn very fast that they aren’t revolutionary or ground breaking. They’re essentially long informative articles. I’m not trying to trivialize the products out there, but you need to get the ‘worthier than thou’ mentality out of your head. Making them isn’t out of your intellectual grasp. You don’t need to have a 7 year University education to talk about some cure for hemorrhoids. All you have to do is write in a coherent manner and provide information that people will find useful.

And remember, your product doesn’t have to be uber advanced. Sure, some people might be looking for something way more advanced than what you are selling. Let them refund. Fuck’em. You don’t need them as a customer. There are plenty of people that are complete retards when it comes to looking up information and they’ll gladly buy your product on their horrible case of piles.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that making a product isn’t hard. It’s something that is time consuming and requires a lot of researching skills, but it’s not something that requires some ‘worthier than thou’ license to create them.

The sales letter is something that is a little more difficult to do. This is something that I have yet to perfect myself, but it’s something I’m always working on. You’ve probably recognized a few important things about them. They’re fuckin’ long. They have a lot of information. And they’re full of a lot of marketing practices you’re probably not consciously aware of. The reason that this is more difficult is due to the fact that you’re going to have to tweak tweak and tweak it some more because it’s never going to be perfect.

Refunds

One of the biggest fears I’ve had about making a product is the refunds. There is no rationality behind this. Every product that I make I sort of sit there after the first sale and patiently wait for the first buyer to immediately refund my ‘crap’ product. It never happens. My very first product was refunded once and it was expected since the conversion came from CB-Analytics. Other than that I haven’t had one. I had one refund with my $7 report project. The guy was a total asshole too, but I ust refunded their money without even replying their email. I’m not going to fight with someone over seven bucks.

You shouldn’t worry about refunds. You really shouldn’t. Chargebacks are another thing, but refunds are nothing. Most likely you’re not going to experience huge refunds, but let’s say you did. Let’s say that your refund rate starting out was 50%. You’re going to get mouthy emails for it too. You’ll find out that your product needs to be improved and typically the mouthy emails will let you know exactly what you need to improve it with. So don’t worry about that shit.

If you’re sitting on a product right now because you’re afraid some people will refund it, seriously get it up now. Don’t sit on it. We’re always most critical of ourselves and we tend to elevate the people around us (mainly competitors). It’s time to get some self-esteem and realize that you’re better than all the other pricks out there and that you can make cash online until the cows come home because you have a superior product. And even if you don’t have a superior product, you can sure as hell profit with it.

Your Goal

Knowing exactly what your goal is with your product is very important because a lot of people misinterpret exactly what their goal as a businessman should be. Let’s say you have a product for curing hemorrhoids. What is your goal for this product? I can already hear my readers speak: ‘to get rid of hemorrhoids’, ‘to help people feel better’. ‘to improve the lives of those that buy my product’, etc. Well, you’re wrong. The correct answer is to make cash online. In fact, you want to make as much money as you physically can. When you think of a product price, you don’t think about what you think is ‘fair’. You try to get as much out of a person as possible in such a way to maximize profits.

‘…but that’s greedy.’ It is. That’s the point. I’m trying to make money. That is the entire goal. I’m not saying that you make bad products or anything. I’m saying your goal is money. In fact the quest for money will help you make better and more premium products.

For example, today I was having a discussion with one of my lifetime friends in which we could have a huge untapped market. He doesn’t do affiliate marketing or anything like that, so don’t assume we’re talking about internet marketing. He works as an engineer, but he works with a sports league in his spare time and one of the league owners asked him if he’d be willing to do something for him (create a product) that the league needs. My friend didn’t have time, so he was going to pass it on to me. As we were talking about it we both came to the logical conclusion on how much to charge this guy for the work. We both concluded on as much as we can physically get out of him.

Just to side track for a minute, we start spit balling the potential of what this guy wanted us to do. We are pretty sure that we could sell this to just about any sports league in the world. The funny thing… the niche is completely untapped. I’m obviously not going to go into detail on what exactly it is, but the market is hungry. It’s a huge time consuming pain in the ass for a lot of leagues and this could save a huge amount of man hours.

Just that aside should demonstrate that all product creation is the same.

The Upsell

I think this is one of the overlooked positive aspects of selling. Upselling is the ability to sell another related product to a buying customer or sell an upgrade to the consumer. I’m sure you’ve seen the upgrades on a lot of pages. Backend products are upsells too because if they just bought they’re more likely to buy again.

And this isn’t an online phenomenon either. Some of the best businesses in the world have this sort of shit built in. I think the most classic is a funeral home. They’re selling caskets, funeral services, burials, tomb stones, etc. They upsell the hell out of someone’s death. You’ll find the same thing in electronic stores. If you’re buying a big screen television, they’re going to upsell the three year warranty, surround sound speaker pack, wall mount, etc.

Upselling is how you make the extra juicy profits on a sale. And the cool part is that people are more likely to give in if they’re planning to buy. Typically it’s just a little bit more and they’re getting such a good deal they can’t back down. That’s how you want them to feel. Let’s say that they want your $37 product… but wait, for just an extra $15 they can get the uber awesome premium version of your product with the extra bonus material.

You get what I mean.

For My Product

Building the product shouldn’t be that hard to do. It all comes down to finding information, compiling information into a logical pattern and than writing it into a coherent ebook. The plan for me is to work on this starting tonight (Friday I posted this). I want to get it all done with sales letter by the end of the weekend. That is at least my goal at this point.

I picked up the necessary supplies for this project. If you’re curious, that means basically 4 cans of energy drink. I was going to pick up some Red Bull, but there was this other type at the grocery store called Red Rain. It was on sale at the store, so I thought why not pick it up. Basically these are used for all nighters that might be required to finish this.

Sniper Sites

I guess I should give a little update on these sites. I like to wait until Saturday to give these types of updates because that gives me an exact 7 day span since the previous update. It really prevents me from skewing the results up very much. But due to the fact that I’m going to be busting my balls all weekend making a product, I’m not going to have time to really update you on Saturday or even Sunday. Even if I do update you on Sunday I won’t be able to write a mega post that I’m currently playing around with.

Let’s just get down to the numbers…

Total Invested: $354.20 US

Total Earned: $66.11 US ( $23.36 from last week )

This is actually much better than expected. Last week I did $18.58 for a full week and I did $23.36 for only 6 days. You also have to take into consideration that I had a site outtage on Tuesday of this week. Things are improving.

I also wanted to apply some extra stats for the month of September. It is going to be a complete pain in the ass to build these statistics for you, but I’m going to do it anyway.

Total Unique Vistors for September: 3372

Average Per Site (41 sites total): 82.24

Total Adsense for September: $58.92

Average Per Day: $1.964

Total Amazon for September: $3.30

Total Clickbank for September: $0.00

My only Clickbank sniper site had around 219 vistors for the month. I had 37 CTR, 2 order form impressions and 0 order clicks. Obviously not enough going on. I blame this mainly on WordPress. 7 out of 41 sites are currently on WordPress and frankly I’m really not a fan of doing this when selling products. I can’t remember exactly how this particular site ended up on WordPress, but that’s where it is. I either have to put a very simple theme up for it (like this one) or put up a static site. WP is fine for writing content and doing what I’m doing here, but it is rotten as a landing page. There is too many distractions. This is why I like this theme. The distractions are at the bottom, so you’re going to have to scroll through everything to get to it. A big aspect of landing pages is the ability to control the eyes of the reader and that is tough to do with WP.

I thought the statistics were a little interesting. Shows you how a lot of little sites can add up to give you a lot of traffic. I didn’t have much in the way of Amazon sales. Most of my Amazon sites are in the second wave of sites, so I expect to see better results from it next month. Well, I’ve passed the four thousand word mark now, so I guess I should wrap it up.

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Advanced Internet Marketing With Sniper Sites

I have a little more to say on this post and we can talk in more detail on advanced internet marketing with my sniper sites. If you’re curious, I haven’t ran out and bought brand new ones. I’m still working with the ones I have now and just keep plugging away at them. There has been a lot of changes in the way the sites are going this week, which should obviously be documented for all of you to see.

I guess the first thing to point out is that there has been about a 20% decline in overall impressions with Adsense. I think this is mainly due to some of my sites finally going through the Google dance process. It is a little annoying, but I guess it’s just part of the game. Even though I had a reduction in my impressions I still manage to earn more week over week so far, which is obviously a good sign. That means I’m making more on average per click. Frankly, I’d rather make money online with less traffic and more per click, than getting into a volume business. I also had a few interesting clicks so far from one of my new sites. It had a nice $2.41 click. I have to say that I love this kind of click value.

I’ve been creating much more Amazon sites this wave though. I think my paranoia with Adsense is starting to influence me. I don’t want to get too much vested interest in Adsense, but the good thing about websites is that I can always change things around when I want too.

The Advantages of Managing A Lot of Sites

I thought that it would be a little interesting to help show you the benefits and advantages to having a project with 41 sites to manage (not to mention all my other sites that). Maybe some of my readers are thinking that this is a little too much for them. I suppose it could be a little too much for many people. I never before had to manage this many sites before. With my June Project and my August Project I managed 8 sites at a time and I thought that this was really a max for the amount of sites I could actively work on at one time.

I was did wrong with that assumption and it really only limited me in ways. I guess everyone should take on this work on one level to see how far you can push yourself. But anyway, here are the benefits you can get from having all these sites up…

Less Mental Masturbation

The term mental masturbation was something I came up to describe when you get stuck in that unproductive state of checking stats all day long. I trust me, I like to check my stats. I like seeing the sales come in. I like seeing the traffic of conquering a keyword. The only problem with this behavior is that it’s a huge waste of your fuckin’ time. Checking your stats will not make money for you.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that stats don’t have value. Viewing them in a constructive manner and a designated time for research purposes/tweaking is a good thing. It is going to make you more profitable. If you’re looking at your stats instead of pounding out content, building backlinks and doing all that other work than you’re just mentally masturbating.

And mental masturbation extends beyond the point of statistics too. If you’re going to forums and constantly searching through new threads than you’re wasting your time. There are no hidden gems to discover on forums. No one is going to post the big secret for making big money, so stop wasting your fuckin’ time. It’s time to start avoiding forums.

Oh I should also point out something about forums. The people that seem to have the most posts are the guru/respected people, yet if they’re making all these posts how the fuck are they making money. They’re trolling the forum all fuckin’ day long. I’m saying that a high post count is necessarily bad. If you have several thousand posts that is fine if you’ve been a member for 5 years. But I see people yapping on the Warrior forum with 15,000 posts and I just feel like telling them to shut the fuck up.

And that’s another thing now that I think about it. For some odd reason, the posts that are real popular that have a very diverse crowd of people commenting on it (praising) are the posts that have the most inane over simplified “self-help” feel goodery type of post. These are the posts that contain absolutely nothing good in value. It’s mainly vague shit and makes you feel good. Advice like “don’t work hard, work smart”. Oh wow. That’s revolutionary. “provide good content”, oh absolutely magical. I swear to God if I had to moderate a forum I’d crack my skull open on the corner of my desk in frustration.

You Have to Build Links Slowly

People say that the best SEO is the slow link building over time. I can say that I definitely rushed my link building efforts with some sites. Even with my August project I thought maybe I went a little nuts and that could explain why my sites were ranking.

I have 41 sniper sites to juggle now. There’s no way that I can build links fast. They will all be slow because it just takes too much time to do them all. One article back link is 41 unique articles. That takes time. Even though I could definitely do that in a day, it’s not something that I could do day after day. I’m basically stuck building things nice and slow, which will happen over months. This should allow search engines to view the sites as much more natural and more deserving of top spots, which helps to make money online.

It’s just harder to be a “professional webmaster” when you have so many damn sites to manage. You can add 10 pages of content to your sites in one day, which Google will obviously see. I don’t know if they’ll necessarily view that as negative, but they will see it. You can only do so much at a time and that is actually an advantage to you.

I’m More Productive

I just get more done this way. I can explain this to you in a very logical manner because there is an actual psychological trick to it that makes you productive. I need to get my sites up in a fast manner because I want them to index and start the marination process. This is pressure. Basically the sooner I get things built, the sooner things can sit. And we all know that SEO takes time and we can’t escape it. I try to pound out as much content as possible and at least from a starting point my first links built are pretty fast too.

I don’t know how other people will manage this kind of stress. I know that it pushes me to get more work done and do more.

There is also the added benefit of not waiting around. I suppose this could deserve a new sub heading, but it sort of fits into this one. You basically run out of time. If you build one site, you put it up online, build a few links and than you sit around waiting. We all seen new people do it too. They come to a forum and they ask questions about why their site has indexed and it’s only been like 2 days. What they should be doing is working on something else. You can’t sit around and wait for your site to produce results.

The position you want to be in is one where you’re too busy working. You’re working your but off trying to make money online and than one day you get this large check in the mail. You have to dig through your accounts and figure out where the hell it came from. Or you log into your Adsense account after a month of not checking and seeing that you’re pulling in $50/day. This is what success comes from. It comes from busting your balls instead of waiting for a site to get successful.

With 41 sites I don’t have time to even check my daily traffic stats. There’s just too much time and frankly too many stats to go through.

More Extremely Successful Sites

The thing about this business is that sites are hit and miss. I’m not saying a miss won’t make you money, but you’re going to do your work and soon you’ll have sites. As you grow them you’ll end up with sites that just seem to make a lot more money.  When it comes to advance internet marketing you’re going to pick up the fact that if you have a lot of sites out there you’re going to at least hit some that pull in awesome earnings. Obviously the more sites that you have under your belt, the more experience you get and you become better at identifying what will work and what won’t. The issue is that you never know if something will work with no matter how much research you do. You could go after a keyword you think is weak and never get it. You could get it, but it doesn’t convert. Whatever it is, some sites won’t perform regardless of how well you do things. Just as some will out perform your expectations.

Basically if you keep plugging away at this type of sites and keep making them, you’re going to eventually hit one that is going to produce a lot of money. For example, one of my newer sites is shaping out to be one of those sites with nice earnings. Obviously the real earnings will come when I move from position 10 to something in the top 3, but I’m getting good results so far. I’m making well over a dollar per click. If I was to get 100 visitors a day and a 5% CTR, I would make over $5/day for that site. That’s with a crappy 5% CTR. You can see the possibilities considering that the keyword can get 10,000 searches a month.

More Learning, More Experience, More Testing

This is something that is very important. The first inevitability that you have to accept is that the more that you try, the more that you learn. This is all about experience. It’s okay to make sites that don’t go anywhere. If you try something and you don’t get any results than you’re just a little bit wiser. Out of these 41 sites that I bought for this project, how many of them will fail miserably? I don’t know, but I’m sure there will be some that do suck.

The point is that the more sites I have, the more information I can take in about them. With this information I can conclude on better techniques that I should be applying and become a much better internet marketer.

Testing is also an important thing to do. You have to be always testing. Even with this site right now I’ve been testing lately with very long posts because I want to know that it works. The problem is that you can’t test with one site. There are really a lot of variables that you can’t control. You can’t control the search engines. You can’t control your volume of traffic. You can’t control the niches. You could test something on one site and get something completely different on another site. The point of testing on multiple sites is that you can get an average.

For example, you can look at indexing times. You can’t just test two different sites with two different methods to see which one works better. That’s not good enough. Pick up 41 sites and try a few different methods. Group them up in 10′s and try a method on each group of 10. Whatever ends up doing the best will probably be the one with the best method.

I can do the same thing with templates. I can test templates across a lot of different sites and see what I get for click through rates. I can figure things out this way by having test results. This is how you get better. You have more sites, you get more experience, you test and figure out what works (and what doesn’t).

Research

You have to understand how important all these sites are for research. Obviously having successful sites are good, but the bigger advantage is that you can build on those successes with new sites. Like, let’s say you had a site that was dedicated to plastic dog houses (I don’t know if that is a good keyword, just throwing it out there). Let’s say that this is a really good site that you easily ranked for and are making pretty good money with.

This tells you that this is a niche that has money and that it also has the traffic. This means you can move onto other related keywords in the niche. You can grab wood dog house, custom dog house, etc. You know what is working in one area and you can spread out to dominate the entire niche. This works good. Often times you’ll be selling the same thing, but you just slowly take over the niche and make money online. This is how the game is played.

Other pieces of golden nuggets that you can find is long tail traffic. You’d be surprised at how much actual things you’ll rank for. Like I said with my most successful SEO’ed site. I went for a modest keyword and started ranking for one that got searched 10k a month. I can easily pick up a domain with that new keyword and rank. I can slowly fill up the top 10 with an empire of my sites, rule the fuckin’ niche and make money.

That’s the real value here. You have all these sites out there and you know the niches that are converting. The niches you can easily rank for. The niches that I can dominate and take over. The more piece of online real estate you have, the more power you have.

Proof Keywords in Domain Name COUNT!

The evidence continues to pile up showing how important having the keyword in your domain name. I’m not saying that you have to have the keyword in the domain name to rank. I’m absolutely not saying that at all. It is pretty obvious that you don’t need it. You  can rank for many great keywords with random letters in the domain name, but doing proper on page SEO and getting the right backlinks.

What I’m trying to say is that having the keyword in the domain name makes it so much easier. And I have proof. Basically my oldest site, has struggled to rank for a specific keyword. It doesn’t contain the keyword in the domain (I bought it before I learned about keyword research) and it has a lot of quality backlinks. A new site I bought in the August Project is ranking for only a fraction of the links and the links are crap. Every single one of the keywords are crap.

We’re talking about a site that is around 3 years old. Has a ton of backlinks, with many coming from authority sites, but doesn’t contain a keyword in the domain name. While this new site has been around for 2 months, has crappy link directory backlinks, yet out performs.

Why? Because the words in your domain name count. If I start a business like Make Cash Online Inc. I’m going to buy a domain name that reflects that business name. Corporate websites don’t necessarily have the most text on it and they definitely don’t have a high amount of backlinks, but when people search for that name they expect to get businesses website.

Google and other search engines can’t tell the differences between some keyword and even if they could, how will they know it isn’t a business. It can’t tell the difference if Make Cash Online is a keyword or a business name. It could be both. The business could of been selected based on the fact that it has a high search popularity. By default, search engines have to apply value to the keyword and a decent amount of it. It doesn’t matter if someone is gaming the system like we are. They have to apply it because they have a loyality to the people that search and if I search a business name, I expect it to come up. End of story.

All this means is that if you’re going to buy a domain name it has to contain a keyword. I don’t care if you’re buying a product and calling it the Magic Cure, you’re going to get a keyword domain name. You can brand with the domain name, you get the easy traffic . It’s not the be all end all of this thing. You can rank without it, but save yourself all this extra work.

Does Monster Content Pages Work Better?

Well, I don’t have an answer to this question so far, but I finally had Google update the site it has indexed for a site that ranks pretty well. Traffic has jumped up around 22% over the week. I don’t know if that is just the new fresh content or not. I’ll still have to wait to see what kind of results I get with other sites with this little experiment.

I think it’s also important to note that I didn’t lose any of my search engine positions with completely different content. Everything is holding, but things my go up or down in the future. We’ll have to watch that closely.

Obviously with this site I’m testing too, but it’s a little more difficult with this site because I I haven’t built backlinks. I decided that I’m going to try and slowly build some over time. I’m not going nuts. I’m not interested in seeing my page become a power house or anything. I just need enough leverage, so I can see whether this stuff is working.

There is no answer yet, but we are testing. We are seeing traffic and it might be working.

How did the Snipers go this week?

Well, like I said before that my impression count was down around 20% week over week, which is due to some Google dancing. I guess this was pretty standard and I was waiting for this to happen and it finally did. I’m sure things will bounce back, but the time it will take to happen is something I don’t know. It could be something that is back in a week or it might take a month. I don’t think it really matters since I got too much work on my plate right now.

Total Invested: $354.20 US

Total Return: $42.75 US ( $18.58 since last week )

I made more than I did the previous week even though I had around 20% less impressions for the week. I think I did about $15 last week, which doubled the week before it. I didn’t double it this week, but it is growing. When things finally even out after the Google Dance, than I can really make cash online.

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Can Old Failures Be Successes?

I’m going to have to give you a little background here to explain exactly what I mean by such a title. I was on the Warrior forum a few days ago and I read a post from a guy. Basically he said he was in top spot for a great keyword and getting a ton of hits everyday. He was buying backlinks to get him up to that point and than one day he got slapped. Basically he lost everything. At that point he said that he cleaned up his link building and after a year to the very day that he was slapped, he moved back up in the listenings.

There was something specific that I took away from this and no, it’s not about paid links. I had a site that I purchased around the end of May 2008. I really beefed this site up and within a month of having it up I was getting nearly a 100 unique searches a day in the very competitive forex niche. Than on July 4th, I received a slap for my new site and completely disappeared. I just assumed that my site was new. I was getting a lot of traffic, so Google just put me in the sandbox. At the time I was told that I could be in the sandbox for a few months to up to 10 months. Well, it has been 14 months since I was slapped and the site is still down and out.

Back to the guy at the forum. He said he ‘cleaned up’ his link building. Usually when I hear that phrase, I assumed that he started to build good links and do things ethically the way big G likes it. This time when I read it, the word clean hit me. When you clean, you don’t do things better. You clean up the mess you made. It suddenly hit me. Maybe I should remove all those links coming to my site that probably got me in this situation.

Let me explain my link building on this site because it was quite aggressive. As usual I’d make my unique sales pages in the internal directories of the site for products. I’d target keywords, product names and whatever I could rank for. I’d sign up at squidoo, wordpress, blogger, tumblr, etc etc etc. I’d write one post of them, link back to my sales page. I’d stumble each one of these sites (including the sales page) and that’s basically all I was doing. The site was getting around a 100 a day in SE traffic in the forex niche. Obviously if I was to attempt this in the future I wouldn’t be linking all the pages to my money site. That was just stupid.

At this point I’ve been logging into my old squidoo and wordpress acounts. Basically I deleted all the blogs/lenses that link to this site and we’re going to see what happens. But this really isn’t what the title of this blog post is about. The site that I’ve slapped isn’t important to me. Trust me, 14 months of being in the dark makes you completely indifferent.

I haven’t been in my squidoo or wordpress account in a long time, but I started these accounts when I first got into this. In fact, I started with the 2007 30 Day Challenge by Ed Dale. It was basically the way that I was going to make cash online. I started to log through these pages that I made for the challenge. I was blown away. The keywords I had selected are pretty weak, the keywords are supposed to get nice amount of searches a month (3000+), all the sites were ranking on page 3 or 4 on Google for the keyword and all of them were getting some sort of traffic. One of them was getting 20 unique visitors everyday.

When I gave up on these sites nearly two years ago, they were failures in my eyes. I believe I had one make it to the front page. Maybe even another one. But I just have this desire to see how far I can push them up if I take a little action with them. I was digging through backlinks for some of the sites and all the backlinking is crap. I never even took the time to write and article to submit to a directory. That’s how crazy this is. Also these sites have been around for nearly 2 years, fully indexed and receiving traffic from Google. Maybe the big G will like them more and that will help me make cash online, but I don’t know.

I’m not sure what exactly it is that makes me want to try and see. One of the main sites that I want to try out was in a niche that my mentor told me to always go into. The reason he suggested this was due to the fact that it isn’t anything hard. And what I mean by that is like hard facts and hard information. You can basically write bullshit and your readers will eat it up. Endless amounts of shit you can write and everyone will love it. I guess seeing the comments waiting in the queue proved that fact to me because I thought the posts are a little inane.

Obviously at the time of making these sites I was what you would call a poor webmaster at this and didn’t know what the hell I’m doing. Definitely not a person that would be running an Advanced Affiliate Marketing blog. Essentially all I was doing was doing a few social bookmarkings and than doing a few blog comments.

I just have to give it to my mentor for suggesting such a niche. The fact that I was writing complete text vomit blog posts, but people like it. They liked it so much that people with decent sites thought they’d link to my crap and they ate it up. If only Christine Taylor would link to my blog than I’d be set, but I digress.

It’s just an interesting and reflecting experience to see where you were when you started out. I got to see my first attempts at affiliate marketing online. It is funny to see, but I definitely want to see if I can turn these old failures into successes. I think I shouldn’t have a problem with it.

Plan of Attack

I’m absolutely obsessed right now with writing monster long posts. I’ve never done it before on any mass scale and I’m desperate to see what is going to happen. I know it helps with long tail keywords by the obvious fact that you have more combinations of words that could end up being combined in a search engine. But I’m really curious about what will happen for keywords that you actually target.

Think of it like this, EzineArticles allows you to put your keyword once every 100 words, or 1% keyword density. A lot of people think that is pretty tight and they like to do 3-5%. Let’s say you write a 300 word article for EZA, that means you can put the keyword in three times. Let’s say you wrote a 6000 word article on your blog. At 1% you could put your keyword in 60 times. Obviously that could come out spammy, but if you follow the 1% density rule you can put it in 60 times and there must be some relevancy for that. I’m not going to try for 1% though. I’ll try to go for maybe 1/2 percent.

I refuse to write a 6000 word article for EZA to test this out, but if you’re someone that wants to give that a try, please post your results. If you steam roll over the competition, I’ll have to applaud you.

Obviously I’m going to have to work on building some backlinks to these sites that I haven’t built for them in a while. It’s odd because I never actually followed Ed Dale’s rules. Back in 2007 it was all about the social media/web 2.0 game. Basically you would go to squidoo, write an article, social bookmark it and you’re on the front page. Well it wasn’t that simple for all keywords, but that was the case. The idea is that if you didn’t get on the front page, you just kept building links through article marketing and stuff like that. At the end you’d be able to see if the keyword you selected was a profitable one.

Being the lazy person that I was at the time I did absolutely no article marketing for the site. At that point I wasn’t very interested in the idea of writing articles for other sites. I wasn’t good at it and it just wasn’t something that I wanted to do. At this point I’m going to start writing articles that point to these sites. I’m not going to go over board or anything like that. In fact I just wrote two articles today to submit for two of these sites.

This is a test though that I just want to check out. You never know what could happen with this. I have no problem building websites and leaving them for a year to come back and work on them. If it proves to be something that Google views as an authority and I can make cash online doing it, than I’m going to do it.

Update on the August Project

The August SEO project that I started ended at the start of September, so that I could start my sniper work. This project was a little different because it wasn’t successful like the June Project. Less than one month into the June project I was already ranking for keywords and it was great. The August project wasn’t quite as successful. One month into it, I had basically nothing to show for it. All my sites were buried somewhere past the 500+ mark and never even came close to getting a trickle of traffic from Google. I do get a little traffic from Yahoo and Bing, but nothing that is going to produce sales.

I was actually going through my stats today and I couldn’t help, but notice that one of my sites finally hit the front page for two specific keywords that I was targeting. I couldn’t remember exactly how many searches per month these keywords were supposed to get and when I looked it up I was a little disappointed to see only 1300 a piece. Together that is 2600, which isn’t that bad. The annoying part here is that I know I didn’t go after keywords that get that many searches. This has been an annoying trend that has been happening to me (not through the snipers though), that I go after a keyword that gets 3000+ a month and work at it for months, get it and than Google revizes the numbers to something shitty.

There was another keyword that I was going after. It was supposed to get roughly 4500 searches a month. Today, Google says it gets 590 searches per month. Talk about a slap in the face.

But I guess that is life…

Don’t get me wrong though, I’m happy this site has finally started to rank in the top 10 for both keywords. 2600 a month is at least enough to be profitable and make it worth my wild. I’m hoping I can pick up at least 5 sales a month for this particular page.

Surprisingly my best site for SEO results is a site from the June Project. I know that they say that you should take what works and do it over and over again. The problem with this site is that I haven’t been able to figure out why it is so successful. I went into a niche and went after a more modest keyword (around 2000/month). Within a few weeks I got into the top 10. As you can guess a keyword like that would only result in a few hits a day, but I noticed in my stats that I was getting a lot more searches for another keyword. I ended up on the second page for a keyword that gets around 10,000/mth.

No where on this page is the three word keyword phrase found on the page. In fact, I didn’t even have the third word mentioned once on the page. I ended up jamming the keyword in the title, built some backlinks with anchored keyword phrase and by the end of the month I was in the top 10. Since than I’ve slightly moved up the ranks from hanging around the 10th position, up to the 6, 7 and 8 positions.

I have no fucking clue why it ranks so well. I don’t have any special backlinks or anything like that. The only thing that was really different about it is that it was a long sales page with completely unique content. It was only around 2600 words though, so it wasn’t as long as my previous post on this site (6000).

Since the backlinks I was building were no different than what I do with any other site, I can only assume two things. It was either the keyword was weak. I’m not sure how it could be weak on the type of subject that it was on. You’d think a bunch of Clickbank webmasters would of gotten it by now. Or the other reason is that it had some sort of on page optimization that Google loved. We have to remember that I was getting traffic for the 10k keyword before I even had all the words for the keyword on the site, let alone all the words right beside each other.

Despite the successes with the SEO side of things, I’ve been having a little trouble figuring out the proper way to monetize it. But I’m sure I’ll come up with something soon enough.

Okay, back on topic with the old failures that I have…

Squidoo is a beast that I really didn’t like and frankly I still don’t like. I think the format of it sucks.  I think it is piss poor to really grow a page internally and stuff. When I first started out, Squidoo lenses were the big thing. You’d put them up and you’d get in the top 10. Here is the thing that you got to pick up on and understand. You have to understand the philosophy of search engines. All that means is that you have to look away from what is working right now and focus on the core of what makes  a search engine great.

From this you can derive a very simple rule. If an average honest person can easily rank high in Google, than spammers can too. Spammers will always destroy what is good. That’s the precise reason why I’m not a fan of Squidoo.

Things have changed a lot because it isn’t necessarily true that all Squidoo lenses are crap. And all the same can be true with wordpress.com blogs and blogger blogs. They used to rank easy, but they don’t anymore. I don’t think the big G has slapped these sites anymore, but imposed a new set of rules on them. There is a penalized or sandboxed period where a site has to wait quietly. You also have to show that you have content on it and that you are building backlinks.

Basically, I want to make some authority blogs from free hosts. I’m not necessarily a fan of this way of doing things, but I really just want to sit down and put good honest work in to see if I can do it and how fast it produces results. I have sites that rank in the top 10 for a keyword, so I might as well get a wordpress site ranking right next to it too.

I might dick around with Squidoo, but I don’t know. I’m not really a fan of it. WordPress is something that I can build on ideas with new ideas and keep things very organized for a reader. Squidoo is just something that is just way too distracting. I think that’s the main reason that I have such a problem with it. My best lense was created on March 2008 and it gets about 180 hits a month, so it’s nothing special or anything. I doubt the lense helps me make cash or anything like that.

If I was to use Squidoo I would probably use it to supplement this site here. I probably wouldn’t even dare to link from a squidoo lens to this site cause I don’t think the links are that cool and are spammish. After the lense has been up for a year, I wouldn’t have a problem.

Google Caffeine

I’m not sure if you’ve guys checked out Google’s Caffeine Search Engine. It looks like the regular Google search, but it is obviously functioning on another algorithm. Supposedly the reason for this new engine is to compete with Bing’s new search. From what I’m gathering on forums, there are two different opinions emerging. The first opinion is that some of your sites will do better, while others will do worse, but in the end everything will balance (basically a neutral position). The other opinion is that this engine is much more dependent on the content on your page.

It’s hard to say when you look at the philosophy of search engines. Obviously on page content is a huge thing. Google has to know what is on the page, not just for figuring out the keywords and stuff, but to determine whether it is a page of value. I’m sure you’ve seen those spam blogs that contain gibberish posts. To a search algorithm, it can’t tell the difference between gold and crap. This is where a huge focus of search engines is goign to come. It is going to have to start looking at pages and figuring out the value of the content in some manner.

Obviously banklinks are still going to have a major role and always will, but content value is something that is far more important. And the way you can tell that is based completely on the people Google services. If I go to the big G to learn how to fly a kite, I don’t give one flying fuck whether the sites come up have 10 million or 10 backlinks. All that matters to me is whether the content is good.

I’ve been focusing lately on creating more valuable content for my sites. I’m hoping something comes out true, but I have yet to confirm. What I’m hoping to see is that Google will actually try and calculate an overall word count for a site. Or a word count per page. The thesis is that if I keep dumping huge pages of content on a site that the big G is going to start seeing value coming from the site.

I guess to sum up everything, I’m going to try and get my old sites that I created a long time ago and see if I can make them rank good.  With massive content posts being added and some back link building I’m hoping this will get the sites to rank and maybe help me make cash online. But we’ll see what happens and I’ll definitely keep you guys updated both on this little side project and my current sniper project.

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Can Snipers Make Cash Online?

It’s been around two weeks that I started my little adventure into the land of the snipers and at this time I think it is safe for me to conclude that you can make cash online doing this and you can make a lot. The fact is that this is a game of numbers. Obviously the more that you have out there, the more you’re going to make overall. I don’t think anyone can get around that fact. Even if you try to build up one site, the earnings increase as you add more pages. When you buy a lot of domain names you’re going to end up with a lot little sites that can dominate the search engines.

I thought I’d let you guys know that I bought up 20 domain names on the 15th of this month. I just had another one of those desires to buy up a lot of domains and so I did. That is an additional $176.20 added to the total money invested for this account. I immediately did my routine of getting content up on these sites as fast as I could and send them one simple backlink. It is just my way of getting my sites indexed as soon as possible. When I choose the domain names this time, I put in a little more work into it. I selected keywords that paid a lot more. I also picked specific types of domain names (which I’ll go into in a future post).

Here is what the results look like so far…

  1. Sites indexed very fast. Some within a few hours and the rest within 48 hours
  2. 8 out of 20 domains indexed in the top 10 for their keyword

Think about these two points for a second. I got 40% of my sites indexed in the top 10 for their keyword very fast. Literally within hours for some of them. That is how you make fast online cash. The same holds true about the first 21 domain names I bought. The sites that indexed in the top 10 are the ones making the money right now. That’s with no backlink work. That’s me just making some content pages, putting adsense on the page and putting it up.

The Keyword You Select Are Important

It’s all about the keywords and how well they’ll rank. The weaker the competition you’re against, the more likely you’re going to rank great. I’m thinking about all the wasted time I’ve put into this game where I was trying to get one site to rank for a good keyword. I was busting my balls everyday just trying to get it to the top 10. Foolish of me.

Well, maybe I shouldn’t be negative. I’ve made money that way and it definitely helped me go into this little Adsense experiment with cash to invest and money coming into pay my bills in the mean time. The fact is that I was busting my balls for a keyword that might get 4500 searches a month. That’s a nice amount of searches, but one of my sites just ranked in position 9 at Google within 48 hours of being bought and the search term gets 10,000 per month. That is exact searches by the way, not broad. Talk about instant cash online.

Ed Dale is WRONG!

Mr. Ed Dale was the first guru I heard talk about the competition numbers. It was such a new idea to hear when I first started out. You can probably dig through the old posts on my old blog and find me reference this over generalized and misinformed opinion.

Ed Dale said that you take a keyword and you search it in quotes at Google. The number of sites that are returned is the competition. I know that Ed Dale is doing his 30 Day Challenge now and I’m not sure what the criteria is for this current challenge (besides selling his Market Samurai), but when I participated it was under 30,000. Typically you’d aim for keywords that had 10k, 20k or less. This is the wrong way to look at this.

The total competition for every keyword is 10. A lot of keywords the competition will be 3. That’s right. You’re not competiting with the site that shows up in position 55. You don’t make money beating that ass clown. You don’t even make money beating position 11. The only positions that make money are the top 10. In most cases that isn’t even good enough and you’re really competiting for the top 3 positions.

That’s why I say the competition is 10. You don’t care about 20,000 other sites. You only care about the ones on the first page. This is why I have ranked on the front page for a keyword with 250k in quotations, within a week of buying a domain and with 1 crappy backlink. I’ve also struggled to get onto the front page for 8000 competiting sites after months of building backlinks. This is the precise reason that Ed Dale is wrong. If I followed his view I’d still be dicking around looking for decent keywords instead of making cash online.

Finding Good Long Tail Keywords

This is a real pain in the ass. I’ll admit it. It’s not something that can be summed up into an exact science. You just have to have your mind open when you think about things. You’ll just have something pop into your head. Instead of letting that thought disappear, immediately search it at big G’s keyword tool or atleast write it down. Often times a slight variation in wording can open you up to a lot of uncompetitive keywords. It could be as subtle as “hotdog” to “hot dog” or it could be “hotdog” to “weiner”. I hope you understand what I mean by that.

You just got to keep your mind open. It’s not an exact science and you’ll spend most of your time not finding anything good. Probably out of every hour I research, I’ll probably only find keywords out of 5-10 minutes of that time. Often I’ll find a bunch all at once and not find any for an hour. That’s just the way this type of research works.

The 10 Sites

If you want to make cash online than you need to beat out at least one of the 10 sites on the front page for a keyword that gets searched. It doesn’t matter how much competition “with quotes” for a keyword. If there is 5k competition and a major authority site in position 1, it will take you years of work to over take them (if you do).

Theoretically, you only need to find one weak site out of the 10. If you notice that position 6 is pretty weak, than that means 7, 8, 9, and 10 are even weaker. You have to set yourself a goal for what is acceptable to you. You just have to get real about how much traffic you’ll end up getting. A 3000 exact searches per month keyword works out to roughly 100 a day.  Here is the breakdown of the suspected probabilities.

  1. 42.30%
  2. 11.92%
  3. 8.44%
  4. 6.03%
  5. 4.86%
  6. 3.99%
  7. 3.37%
  8. 2.98%
  9. 2.83%
  10. 2.97%

This is just an averge click through rate for listings. As you can see anything beyond the top three just seems sort of useless. Even the third position isn’t that great. At a hundred searches a day you’ll end up with on average 3 clicks a day at oisutuib 10. You can’t make cash online with that.

It is important to note that these statistics wouldn’t consider the fact that you can have a very appealing title and description. Obviously if your site stands out compared to the rest you’re going to get more click throughs. Keep that in mind when you create your title. That’s not to say that you should have big long titles either. A long title would stand out more when other sites have short ones and vice versa. These are all things to consider. Always test test test and that is how you’re going to make money.

Oh almost forgot. Your click through rate with the big G will also be effected by the amount of ad listings that show up. Sometimes they’ll just show up on the right side of the listings. That isn’t a big deal and I doubt that would really change anything. The ones that show up at the top would definitely take away a portion of the traffic. Also take that into consideration with the keyword.

Templates

I make my own templates. I build them so I have my sites looking different instead of them all looking the same. I do play with the templates though. I want to know what the hell is going on and I want to know what is going to maximize my profits. You really have to play with this. I’m definitely working on it.

I have fat templates and I have skinny ones. I have ones with a menu bar on the right side and a menu bar on the left side. I have some with a menu bar on the bottom and sometimes I put it at the top. I’m always checking to see what is going to happen. Maybe the stupidest little thing will cause my Adsense CTR to skyrocket. But this is testing. This isn’t your first objective.

First, Get the Traffic Than Worry About CTR

The only way you are going to be successful is if you think in a linear manner. Linear just means in a straight line. What I mean by it is that you have to think in a straight line and in single steps. To make a successful site you have to do step 1, step 2, step 3… step 153. Putting up a site and worrying about CTR when you’re really on step 3 is stupid. CTR is something that is in a further step. Get your traffic first, than worry about your CTR.

The same thing can be said when you just buy the site. Your goal after you buy the site is to put content up. You’re not trying to drive traffic to it. You put up the damn content, than you build links, than you get the traffic, than you worry about CTR. Always think in a linear manner, so you don’t get caught with a severe case of mental masturbation.

Precarious Adsense

Even though this sniper project is all about Adsense (well I have a few amazon ones), I’m still scared about it. I just don’t trust the hammer and fist of the big daddy Google. They created this program to make cash online, yet they just ban people. There’s nothing you can do about it. There is no phone number to call them at. You’re just banned (or disabled) and that is that. The Terms of Service are so incredibly vague that most people that are banned don’t even know the hell why it happened. If Google doesn’t like the nature of a site, you’re done. It doesn’t matter what you think, you’re done. End of story. That’s precarious and it just makes me worry a lot.

The fact is that the value is the traffic. All things aside, the traffic is of value. If the big G gives me the boot off their network, I can always find something to replace it with. As long as I have the traffic still available to me, I can monetize it in some manner. I can put up Amazon products and start making some sales. I know there are some other click through like programs. There’s also CPAs, even though it can be tough for some keywords.

I guess the point is that if Google wants to take away my ability to make cash with them, than so what? I can replace it. I might as well just assume that the big G is going to shitcan me and all I’m doing now is making some profit while I can. I suppose it is better than sitting on the sidelines holding a self righteous attitude about how Adsense isn’t fair.

Diversification

Isn’t this what it’s all about? I want to make my money from a lot of different sources. This protects me from royal fuck ups and complete outtages by shit networks. Nothing is more annoying than busting your balls for one particular network, just to see it go to shit. Your sales suddenly disappear and you’re making 10-20% of what you were making. That’s the annoying aspect of things. That was my newbie mistake starting out. Assuming a network was good and that they would do a good job. Nah. Never again will I think like that. The only person I’m putting that much trust in is me.

Even now I don’t feel that diversified, which is probably the big reason why I’m taking a huge step into Adsense.  I have sites I make actual sales for. I have CPA sales. Now I need some pay per click traffic. If I’m going to make cash online, I better make sure that I’m getting it from as many sources as possible and protect myself against bans or screw ups.

I’d also like to get Amazon producing a decent income too. I like Amazon, even though it has some pretty shitty commissions. They do improve after you get a lot of sales. The thing I like best about them is that people will rarely ever just buy what you had them click through for. They’ll end up buying a bunch of shit and you’ll get a decent commission. The first 21 domains (wave 1) I set up in this sniper site project had a few Amazon sites. I haven’t seen any results from them yet due to the fact none of them rank yet for their keyword. I have Adsense on all the sites that rank. The 20 new domains (wave 2) I made sure that I selected a few sites that indexed on the front page already to be Amazon sites.

We’ll see how that works because I’m still currently building the sites now. I’m still waiting for some sites to index. We’ll just have to see how it goes though. It’ll be interesting with the first wave of sites actually start to move up the ranks and get into key positions. That will be the interesting times. I’m making a pledge here that if my Amazon sites do pretty good, I’m probably going to make a new wave of sites that are completely Amazon related. I trust Amazon more because they don’t appear to be total douchebags with a ban hammer ready to use.

I guess I’m being a little mean to the big G. The fact is that a pay per click program is going to be something that has an extremely high amount of abuse and that is the reason that they have the ban hammer. That sucks for webmasters because we don’t have anyway to protect ourselves. It doesn’t matter how sweet our traffic is because some asshole could come along and go nuts on our ads. We’re at the mercy of things out of our control.

At least with Amazon you’re getting paid for providing value. Someone has to buy and make Amazon money before we’ll ever make money. That is the way it should be. They’re not going to have an over zealous person looking for excuses to ban. Even if your site sucks shit, as long as you’re making them money they don’t give a flying fuck.

Things I want to try

Obviously with me having 41 sites, I’m open to a lot of different types of testing. I’m not talking about big time testing, but little tiny things to see what happens. The sites rank fast and they’re pretty isolated, so I’ll get a good idea of what can help me and what is probably useless. I’ve currently just tried out whether putting your keyword in bold in the first paragraph actually does help. I’ve heard it countless times before, but I thought I’d give it a try in an objective manner to see what happens.

Something else I wanted to try is writing much longer articles. Like I’m talking tank articles. I’ve been reading How to Make Money Online With SEO and Grizzly’s blog for a few months now. Despite the great information in their actual posts, I think there are lessons to be learned just in the way they create their sites. I noticed that both of them write absolute monster posts. They’re just huge. You literally have to dedicate a half an hour of your time reading it. I think one of the posts I read at MMOSEO was actually 10,000 words. Think about how big that is. I probably have ebooks I’ve written and sold for $50 that haven’t even contained that many words. And it’s not like they’re writing shit either. It’s good stuff.

You should be able to tell that I’m trying this out too. Right now with this post. I’m trying to write a nice long post on how to make cash online. I’m talking about my snipers and I’m trying to go into as much detail as I can to fill up this post. So far I’ve made it to 2826 words. Not even close to the ten thousand that these other guys are doing. I’m guessing this is what you need to do to get a lot of long tail keywords. I’m not sure. It’s something that I haven’t investigated really.

I actually converted my main $7 report site into this to test. I could only get to around 2500 words. I put that up and put Adsense on the page just to see how it would perform. I’m still waiting for the big G to crawl the site again. I’m still coming up in the search results for the old version of the site. I’ll obviously get some good empirical evidence from it. I might actually get some results for doing a long post on here.

When I think back, I know one particular post on my old blog got a lot of long tail traffic. In fact, it was my longest two posts that I made on the entire site. At the time I thought they were long, but they were really about a 1000 words a piece (I broke it up into two).  It was my post on How to Beat the Taxman. I never got a lot of traffic for just one term. I just got a lot of traffic for a variety of shit at Google. I get most of the traffic around tax time though, which I’m sure you’d figured in the first place.

I’m very curious to see what is going to happen with these long posts. Obviously I’m not going to be doing these really long articles for article directories. Fuck that. I’m not writing beast articles, just so the directory gets all the long tail traffic. I at least know that the long tail stuff will go to even sites with zero backlinks, as long as they actually have the words on the page. I resent writing over 500 words for article directories. I’ll save the long pages of text for my own pages.

Another thing that I’ve been wanting to really start adding to my pages is the Conduit Method. This is a program that was created by Chris Rempel, who just happens to be the author of “Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate”. Obviously you can go pick up his program if you want for $14.95. It isn’t that much. It’s really a simple idea and I’ve been doing it long before I ever heard of Chris Rempel or his method.

When it comes to selling products, people will typically list the name of it and give a review (or try and market it). Whatever you’re doing, the only text related to the product is the product itself. The idea behind the Conduit method is to throw in as much information as you can that is related to the product. It could be anything. It could be the shipping weight, to the price, the creator , to the support number. It doesn’t matter. For example, Chris Rempel has his mailing address for the Conduit Method as 103-2529 Wark St. Victoria BC, V8T 4G7 CANADA. Obviously you want to dig up as much information that is related to the product in case someone ends up searching it.

Basically is someone searched Chris Rempel Wark Street, you want your page to come up. Or Maybe they’ll search Conduit Method Victoria. The point is that you want them to come to your site. They know about the product. A lot of the long tail traffic you’ll get won’t be related to street names, but things like price or size (physical product). The reason this traffic is so good is that the person is obviously already presold. They’re just looking for technical information on the product and you want them to go through your affiliate link before they go and purchase.

It isn’t that complicated of a method to apply. In one way or another you probably applied it in one form or another. I actually sometimes get traffic to my sites from people searching the names of people that gave testimonials on a sales page. I typically grab testimonials from sales pages and put them on my site too, so it should show you the possibilities.

I have one page on this current blog that gets a lot of long tail traffic for applying the techniques of the Conduit Method. Please keep in mind that I don’t build any links to this blog. I do nothing for this site because I haven’t done a thing to monetize it. It is my Michael Jones Scammer Warning page. I think this page will give you a good idea about what I’m talking about. Look at how much of the information is filled with technical information of what I’m talking about (which is Michael Jones and how much of a douchebag scammer he is). When I created this page, I tried to dig up as much shit as I could put in there. I put in addresses, email address, other business names, names, pen names, etc. I filled it up with as much technical information as possible and I get traffic for it. In fact, most of my traffic for this site comes to this page. Apparently a lot of people are pissed off at this guy.

The difference between that type of page and a sales page is that this is all technical information. It is all facts and nothing else. People search all sorts of things with it too. If you search the phone number, my sites comes up in number 2. If you search michael jones is a scammer, my site comes up number 2. You should be getting the point. There are an infinite amount of combinations that will get me traffic, even though it won’t help me make cash online since the page isn’t monetized.

You should also understand that the conduit method is really hit or miss. Typically you have to go after products that are at least popular enough for people to search these various long term keywords. The good news is that big products typically have this volume and very little people actually add in all the technical information and facts that make Chris Rempel’s method work so well. If you look at my Sebastian Foss Scam, you can see that it is of the same format and style, but I don’t get much traffic for it. I might get a few hits a month.

Apparently this scam artists isn’t as popular as Michael Jones in the search engines. I don’t know why either because this guy had his own affiliate network. One day the site doesn’t load. One day turns into weeks. Than all the websites with his affiliate network just go to domain name parking. What a lame ass.

Okay, got to get back on topic. Oh things I want to try. I have another one here that I want to try that still sort of fits in with the Conduit Method. Instead of focusing on technicals of a product or person, I could focus on season and holiday. I’ve created themed pages before for Christmas, but that’s about it. Obviously changing your sites around all the time to meet different seasons would be a lot of work, but you would probably pick up some bonus long tail traffic.

Even though I haven’t tried this yet, the first thing I would be doing is coming up with various words for the season. Let’s just say I’m working on Christmas. Obvious you’d have words like Christmas, gift, present, tree, Jesus  Christ, Christian, Chanukah, New Years, ornaments, good will toward men, etc. You get the idea, but I want to make a huge list. I want to get every single possible keyword that would be associated with Christmas, but not to a specific product. I can fit the product around the keywords. Even something as simple as last minute Christmas gift ideas could be enough to gain a lot of traffic.

Obviously, I wouldn’t do this for all my sites. That would be a huge nightmare and would probably send me over the edge. I would probably do it for my best performing sites. The idea in that case is that I’m going to hang onto good sites for years, so I can just reuse the same articles I make year after year. It makes it easier. There would be a lot of seasons to go through though. You have Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving, Valentines Day, Independence Day and you also have themes like Summer, Winter, Spring and Fall. It is a lot of work, but something I feel I have to at least try. I might be surprised by how well it works. If it works, I make more cash. I’m not going to cry over that.

There is also another variation of this that I want to try, but this is something that is going to require very fast indexing because I want to try subjects that are hot in the news now. I suppose it doesn’t have to be even that recent, but something (or someone) with a popular name. My mentor back when I was doing adult sites told me that there was one boundary you don’t cross and that was no politics. I think that was mainly for legal reasons and the regulations on that aspect of being an adult webmaster, but I’m curious.

I think I’m in a safer arena here in the mainstream of sites. I don’t think I’ll have a problem talking about Obama’s Health Care plan or how GOP Representative Joe Wilson is a Douchebag. Obviously politics is a touchy subject and I would NEVER EVER do this on a page with Adsense on it. But the point is that I can cash in one some of these subjects. Joe Wilson is a douchebag. Someone might search that. Someone might search Joe Wilson Money and end up at this page. I don’t know.

Let me prove a point. Christine Taylor is hot. Like she is smokin’ hot. When she was in the movie Wedding Singer she dressed up in some great looking 80′s outfits. Man oh man. I’d do here. I’d plow her constantly. The things I’d do to Christine Taylor will only live in my imagination, but man. Any hole.

Despite this site not being about anything related to hotness or Christine Taylor’s tight ass, it’s something that could be searched. Obviously if someone is looking for her tight ass, I want them to come here because there is none for them. But that’s the point. You can probably go to Google over the next few days and see if you can find some combination of Christina Taylor related keywords and see if my site comes up. Ben Stiller is one lucky bastard.

Even though these examples suck ass and I’ll admit that, I’m sure I can come up with something related to the subject. If you have a site selling vintage records or something like that, you’d want to take advantage of current events. When Michael Jackson died, or at least was in the hospital, I would of been pounding out a page for a site like that. The amount of traffic that you could pick up would of been insane.

Maybe that’s what I’ll have to do with this blog. Stop thinking about how I can make cash online and try to get as many people to this site looking for the tight ass of hot celebrities. Maybe I’ll try to pick up some long tail traffic for Spencer Grammer. She’s the daugher of Kelsey Grammer. She’s also on the television show Greek. I saw her in that show wearing nice tight booty shorts. It was nice. Greek’s new season started this month, so maybe some people will be looking for a little Casey Cartwright ass.

Okay, I think I gave more than enough examples of what the hell I mean when I’m talking about the long tail of current events. I probably never even needed to go into detail, but why shouldn’t I get some weird traffic for telling you about it?

Hard Work

I don’t want you to get the idea that making sniper sites is just easy and you don’t have to do hard work. I know when I say that I ranked for a keyword that gets 10,000 searches a month, and I got in the top 10 by just indexing, I may have made you think that this is easy. Not all keywords are going to rank that easy. I have more sites that aren’t ranking in the top 10 and I’m going to have to nurse them all the way to the front. I’m hoping I won’t have to do much of it, but there will be some definite nursing.

You have to remember it is the volume here that will keep you busy. For me to add one page of content to all my sites, I’d have to write 41 articles of content. Creating the sites up to a level that would allow me to put Adsense on it requires a lot more work. There was a period last week where I wrote around 90 articles in two days. Think about that. 90 articles in two days. My brain was literally mush when I got to that point, but this is how hard I’m working. I’m not fuckin’ around.

The only way to make cash online is busting your balls working. Like I said in my previous post on this topic was that I have an objective of making one dollar per site per day on average.  That’s not a lot of money, so I’m dedicating myself to a business of volume. Obviously I could take my time. Instead of hammering out 20 decent sites over a period of a few days, I could just take my time. I’m not going to argue with that line of thinking. If that is what you want to do, than do it.

Here’s the way that I see it. All sites need to marinate, especially the new ones. It isn’t a matter of putting a site up when you want that counts. It’s how long your site has been sitting in the Google index that counts. I hope by now that you recognize it’s a lot easier to hold a strong position than it is to push someone out of that strong position. It is proven that age gives you trust with Google. The longer your site has been around, the more the big G trusts it. Slowly building decent links over time will result in a lot of trust and eventually authority.

The fact is that this all takes time. If I have a choice between getting a site up now or taking my time and getting it up in a month, I’ll take now. Because now means that it will have a chance to marinate with all search engines and be one step closer to trust. At least with this sniper project, some of the sites are indexing in the top 10. I can’t sit around like that. If I can get in the top 10 immeditately by just putting the site up, I might as well make some money. The site sitting on the sideline doing nothing doesn’t help me any.

The idea that I’ve been trying to follow is to get the sites out there and have them fully built. I’ll worry about link building and all that crap later. The fact of the matter is that you can make some money getting them out there. It’s not like you’ll be busting your balls for nothing. You’re going to make money. All my sites aren’t in the money position, yet I’m making money. I’m obviously making enough for me to go out and buy another 20 domain names without actually seeing any money position results with the first wave of sites.

Even though I’m throwing up content in an extremely fast manner, I’m not throwing up crappy content. I try to write things that would actually benefit the reader. I’m not saying that this is easy though. Some of the keywords I’ve gone after are on such inane things that it almost destroys my brain trying to figure out what the hell I can write about. Remember, a site has multiple pages, so I have to figure out multiple pages of potential content and that can be daunting. But despite that I keep trucking away at it. I can either piss and moan, or get to work. I choose work.

An Aside

I couldn’t help, but notice that some of the sites indexed and than like 24 hours later they deindexed. Just thought that was a little odd. I’ve only seen it happen with these snipers, but I guess I haven’t actually paid that much attention to results like this before. I guess I’m trying to really document a way to make cash online. I noticed one particular site that I actually indexed in the top 10. I created the full site for it. Received a click through with Adsense and now the site is deindexed. I know it will be back in like a day or two, but I just find it funny.

I wonder if this is an issue with Google’s Dance/Sandbox thing or if it is just a datacenter thing where I end up searching a different data center at a different time of the day and that leads to different information. I don’t know. I’m an engineer, so I’m always thinking in systematic fashions and want to figure out everything.

Anyway, let’s get down to the numbers here.

Total Invested: $354.20 US

Total Earned: $24.17 US

I’m pretty happy with the way things are progressing. I noticed that I have good days with Adsense and than I have bad days. Not complaining though because the bad days are a lot better than what I was getting before. The point is that there is an upward trend with what I’m making with the program. Last post I was at $8.37 for the week. This week I did $15.58, so that is just under two times what I made last week. It’s also important to note that the 20 new domains that I bought haven’t started to earn yet. I think I’ve had one click so far from the sites, so you can rest assure that the jump in revenues is due to the first wave of 21 sites.

It is important to know that this isn’t the fun time. None of my sites are in the money spot (top 3 at G). Until I have sites getting into that position, I’m not in the fun zone. That’s when the real volume is going to come through and I’ll see whether it is game time.

Keeping it all organized

I almost forgot to talk about the organization of things. Right now I’m at 41 sites. As I add more over the months it’s going to be hard to keep track. If I expect to make cash online I have to keep things organized perfectly. The only way I’ve been able to keep track of everything is with spreadsheets. If you don’t know much about spreadsheets or even like them, I suggest you learn to like them and it’s not like you have to do mathematical manipulations with the numbers.

I have all the sites listed under one column. Obviously they’re broken between wave 1 and wave 2 to keep them organized. Here is the type of information that I hold onto: date the site was created, date the site was indexed, starting position, current position, type of template, number of pages of content on the site, number of backlinks I’ve actively built.

This makes things a lot easier for me. I look at the spreadsheet and I can see which sites need a little link love. Adding fresh content to the sites is also important to do from time to time. It is important to make sure that all pages are getting their share of content. I’m obviously doing something wrong if one site is ending up with 20 pages of content, while another site is sitting there with 5 pages.

The starting positions and finishing positions are just things that I like to keep for my own information. It’s nice to see a site start at position 105 and move all the way up to the front page. It shows me that I’m progressing over time. Keep your shit together. I even made another spreadsheet for domain names. I have the domain name, registrar and the date it expires. I had to because I just had way too many to keep track of.

Parting Words of Advice

This post has been dragging on for a good while now, so I think I need to conclude it with some words of advice. The people that have actually read this post will fall into three different categories. The first will be the person that dismisses it and forgets about it. The second will end up with inane questions and will never take action until they’re answered. The third will take immediate action and figure it out as they go.

The vast majority of you will fall under the first two and it is unfortunate. If you dismiss it, well I can’t do anything for you. It is the people that have inane questions that are the ones that really annoy me. Do you remember where I said you have to think in a linear manner? Stop worrying about step 56 when you still have to take step 1.

And really the questions people ask aren’t things that can be answered. How the hell do I know which template is going to help you earn fast cash online? How will I know whether a 300×250 Adense box will do any better than a 250×250? All these are inane questions. Inane means stupid and pointless if you haven’t taken the time to look up the definition. For the people out there that want answer to these stupid questions, all I have to say is figure it out. Put up a site and find out. That is what everyone else, including myself, has to do.

This isn’t rocket science. Spend some time doing some keyword research and find yourself a few good keywords. Go out and buy domains with the keyword in the name. Put up your site. Bam. It’s that easy. If it works out and you get on the front page, congrats. If it doesn’t, you learn a lesson. Start building links and see what happens.

If you see a keyword and you’re not sure if it is weak or not, don’t sit there with your thumb up your ass. Find out. You can buy a domain for the keyword and see what happens. Even if you’re cheap you can setup a blog on Blogger or something and start building links to it.

This isn’t rocket science. If you want to make cash online all you have to do is get off your ass and try. Don’t worry about failure. I’ve had plenty of site failures. I’ve made full product ebooks I was planning to sell for fifty bucks fail. It happens, but I learned from it. I’m wiser for having the fuck up on my resume.  You should get some fuck ups on your resume too.

You have to accept some inevitabilities about life. Bitchin’ gets you no where. Whining gets you no where. Complaining gets you no where (at least when you complain about your own life or situation). Try and think of internet marketing as weight lifting. When you have to lift up a 100 pounds, no amount of bitchin’, whining and complaining is going to get that weight off the ground. It’s a weight. It frankly doesn’t have consciousness nor if it did, it wouldn’t give a shit about how you feel. Also, asking inane questions about what you do when you get the weight off the ground is stupid too.

The only thing that will get that weight off the ground is lifting it (verb). The only thing that will help you profit online is working on websites.  Sure you might try to pick up that weight and not be able to do it. Just as you’ll make a site that makes you no money. You learn from it, you get better and you eventually lift it.

And that’s what it all comes down to. I recognize the fact that the only way I can make money online is by working to put up a website, creating content and building links. It doesn’t matter if I’m tired and stressed out. That doesn’t change the fact that I have to work on websites, create content and build links. It doesn’t matter what I feel.  All that matters is that I get the work done.

I guess at this point I’m going to have to wrap this up. All I’m saying is that you just have to try. Trying is the value, not the fact that you might fail. You don’t have to know everything because I certainly don’t. I don’t know what the right template is, but I made several anyway. I don’t know the best color scheme for my Adsense blocks, but I put them up anyway. You don’t have to know everything now because you can always learn it as you go. And often learning it as you go is much more educational and much more informative than anything I could tell you here.

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Sniper Project: 1 Week In

I thought I should give you guys a little update on what week one of this project (or I guess one week since I officially announced it on the blog) went. It was a little surprising to be honest. I made one rule for myself and that was not to make any judgement calls on it until I start getting sites into the money zone. Money zone represents getting to the top 3 for the specified keyword in Google. Without that it is next to impossible to make that sort of judgement call on whether I’m doing good or bad.

With that said, I can still make an assessment of how things are going and I’m certainly going to do that for your guys sake.

Total Money Invested: $178US

Total Money Made: $8.59US

Not a bad start considering none of my sites have hit the money spot yet (top 3). I thought I should give a general breakdown of things, so you can better understand what I’m looking at here.

I picked up 21 domain names that have a selected keyword in it. Most of the keywords will get over 3000 searches (roughly 100/day) a month. That is the exact number, not broad. I have a few 2900 and one 2400 search term. Top search volume is 12,100 per month.

Of these 21 sites, 17 of them are monetized completely for Adsense. One is an Amazon site and another is Clickbank. Two of my sites are a mix of Adsense and Amazon. I’ll say that I don’t mix them on the same pages. I’ll have either an Amazon oriented page or an Adsense oriented one. Basically I select what I think will produce the most money.

Okay, now onto the more interesting stuff. Out of the 21 sites, 8 of them indexed in the top 20 for their keyword. 4 of them indexed right on the front page. None of my sites are in the money spot yet. The closest one is ironically the Clickbank site and it is positioned at 4.

Currently Adsense has generated the cash so far. I’m not really sure what a good CTR is, but I’m not impressed with it so far. I think it is hard to judge it now because I’m just not getting the volume that I need to assess things properly. Most of my sites haven’t got a click yet, so this should skew the CTR, but overall for all the sites the CTR is around 4%. With the only sites getting clicked it is just above 5%. My best site is getting a 15% CTR which I think is good.

What I’ve been finding the most interesting thing about Adsense is the amount I get per click and how it varies between sites. The funny thing is that the sites I thought I’d get decent click values for are turning out to be pretty crappy. While other ones are surprising me. I noticed one site gets around 50 cent clicks, yet related products on Amazon cost $3. Another site gets on average 13 cent clicks, yet related products on Amazon are going for $50-$300.

Getting 10 cent clicks really does suck. Next round of domain names I’m buying are going to have a little extra research on what I’ll probably get for clicks. I can’t get an exact number, but I can come up with some conservative estimates.

I have very modest goals for this little project. Actually you’ll be a bit surpised. I want to make $1 per day per site on average. That’s about $30/mth, so it’s a Clickbank sale a month, a few Amazon sales per day, and a few clicks per day.

The reason I like this goal is because it isn’t a lot. I’m not looking to make huge money with my sites. If things work out I’ll make $21/day. That isn’t a lot, but an extra $630 a month is nice to have. The philosophy here is that if I can make $1/day/site on average, than a hundred sites will make me a hundred per day.

I know that I’ll have sites that make more than that. Based on some of the results so far, once a few of my sites hit the money spot they should be able to take in $5-10/day. We’re talking on average here and I want something that is at least conservative. If I make a hundred of these sniper sites I’ll make $100/day. But if they average $2/day/site, than it is just a bonus.

Another interesting piece of information is that I made $8.37 over the last 7 days. That means if this rate of return remains, I’ll break even in 21 weeks. Which means a $178 investment per year would produce $435 return. But this information is just really for mental masturbation. I suppose I could do this 100 times (2100 domains) and make $43,500/year (minus $17,800/year).

It’ll be interesting to see what things will be like in the money spot for these sites. Well, I’m past the 800 word mark, so I’ll end the post here.

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Sniper Project a Go!

Well, I know that I haven’t been posting as often as I wanted too. I wanted to at least make a post every weekend, but I’m just getting overrun. Like I mentioned in my last post, the next project is a Sniper Site Project, but I wasn’t really sure if I’d drop my current project (schedules to end Oct 2).

Basically I said I put up 5 sniper sites, just as a test to see how they go. Now, I really haven’t seen any results from them, so I’ve jumped the gun, but I have a good explanation.

What I was doing in preparation was making a spreadsheet of all these different keywords, number of searches a month, competition, and basically if I thought I could easily rank for them. I was doing this and I was content for waiting to see how my 5 test sites would do before I made any moves, but I started to do a more investigative work on the competition and noticed sniper sites popping up for some of the keywords. What was annoying was that it was the same asshat, with the same shitty template and was ranking in the top 10 without a single backlink.

I just couldn’t wait anymore. Everyday I waited was a lost domain and a lost position. I’m not looking to compete with other sniper sites. I just want to rank with as much ease as possible.

Right now I’m 21 domains invested. I picked up an additional 16 domain names on Wednesday. Built landing pages for all the sites (as a starter to get’em online) on Thursday and got them 1 press release link each on Friday. The new 16 domains requires me to build content pages for them, so I don’t have MFA(made for adsense) sites and break the TOS. I also have some sites that are Amazon and a mix of both.

Total Money Invested: $178.00US [The cost of 21 domains]

Total Money Earned: $0.22US [Two Adsense Clicks]

It’s very early in the project though, so don’t worry about the money earned. Essentially I have 5 indexed sites. I have one that finally got bumped onto the front page and is sitting in position 4. Not bad eh. It hasn’t been 12 hours let alone 24 hours, so I can’t really assess it yet.

It’ll be interesting to see how this whole thing plays out. It’s definitely a volume business, so as soon as it starts looking like the strategy is working I’m going to start pounding out the domain purchases.

I suppose I should conclude the project I finished up. You can read up on it here. Total money invested was $50 for 8 domains. I’m not sure what I earned. 9 sales so far (probably around $250). That is mainly concentrated between two sites though. This project has been going a lot slower than my June Project. In the June Project I was ranking for some of my keywords by the time that one month mark came along. That isn’t the case here. All the domain names are all in the sandbox or whatever. I suppose I’ll be in a better position to assess results when they actually start moving out of the safety net and move toward the front page.

At this point I can’t really assess whether it was good or not. We’ll find out in a few months I suppose. If it is still in the same position in November that it is now, I’ll declare it a failure.

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Sniper Sites – Next Project

Sorry, that I didn’t post on the weekend. Right now I’m looking at another project once I finish the one I’m doing now. This weekend I was running a pretest just to see how things would go with sniper sites.

Let me give you a background.

I suppose the philosophy behind this type of strategy is to go after low lying fruit and do it mass. Essentially you go after easy non-competitive words and do it in mass. Basically where I can rank in the top 10 with very little work (if any blank links).

I’m doing pre-testing, which I don’t normally do for projects. Typically the project itself is the test. lol. In this case we’re talking mass websites. I picked up 5 domain names for low lying fruit(keywords) and we’re going to see how it goes to start out. If I rank easy, make a little money, I’ll go mass.

If you’re curious how much “mass” means, it will probably end up being around 50-100 domain names. I’m just seeing how things go first with these first 5 sites I picked up on the weekend.

The starting date for this project will be October 2nd. Basically the project I’m working on now is for 2 months of work. If the pre-testing looks really good I might start right away at this and put the other project on hold. We’ll have to see though.

I thought I’d keep you guys up to date on what I’m doing. I’m keeping busy, which I hope all of you guys are!!! It is coming into the fall, so that means more potential to make money. I hope you’re preparing to get into position for the Christmas traffic.

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In a Pissy Mood

I don’t often get into pissy, down and depressed moods often, but I’m in one right now and I felt the need to vent. My last post showed a negative aspect of having your own product, so this post I’ll give you a negative aspect of being an affiliate.

I have a product that I was selling on PDC for almost a year now. I’ve gotten a lot of consistent sales with it over time. I’ve been making maybe $100-200/mth on the site for the last few months, but I’ve really tried to bump up it’s rankings to help increase traffic.

Anyway, I logged into my PDC account the other day and saw that I had an inbox message from the product owner stating he was giving all his affiliates a week to change their links. He was ending the affiliate program. The date has passed for removing the links, but his site is still up. He still accepts payments through the PDC link. In fact I got credited for a sale yesterday.

I know what you’re thinking. “It sucks dude, but it’s just part of the game. You only lost out on a few hundred.” I know. That isn’t really what has me bummed out. A few months earlier I contacted the owner and asked if I could have access to the product so that I could sell it better. It wasn’t like I was just asking him for it like I was a leech or something. I’ve sold this product a lot at this point and he said no. He had some bullshit excuse “I have 2000 affiliates and I can’t give them all access.”

First, this is PDC. You do not have 2000 affiliates. This is a nice little niche we’re in and it is big enough to make money, but not big enough for 100 active affiliates. I bet there was probably around 5 active affiliates making sales for him.

Basically, he is one of those publishers that hates affiliates. There are a good publishers out there that know affiliates are how you make money, but than there are other publishers that resent the fact that they have to pay affiliates. I think this guy falls under that category. He’s still running his site, he just doesn’t want affiliates, which tells me he doesn’t want to make more money he just has a resenting problem.

I know what you’re thinking though, “just replace it with another affiliate product and move on.” If I could do this than I would of already done it and wouldn’t of even posted this. The fact is that there aren’t any other products. Or at least products that are worth my time. It’s hard to go from an affiliate commission of $25 per sale to an amazon book that costs $11 (that’s a $0.44 commission).

The thing that is getting me down is that I either have to dump the site with some shitty affiliate commission or build my own product and compete against him. It is going to be a pain in the ass to build such a product, but than again I want to literally beat this guy for fuckin’ over affiliates.

I was clipping at his heels on the front page of Google for the niche keyword (not long tails, actual niche name), but I just recently got slapped to somewhere in the 100 positions. Coincidentally, I was slapped down there the same time he announced he was ending the affiliate program. Maybe he was upset that I was getting close to dethroning him. I’m at least hoping my major drop in Google is just a temporary thing that will come back.

It’s just annoying when you’re doing business with someone you think is looking to make more money, but they really aren’t. They have some agenda where they resent affiliates. It’s lame. Fuck’em. Fuck’em in the ass.

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A Little Rant

Ranting is something that I don’t like to do and I suppose it doesn’t make this much of an advanced blog, but I thought I’d rant anyway. I think there might be something to learn, if you want too.

Basically, I’ve been experimenting a little bit with cheap $7 ebooks that I set up and sell. I know selling these cheap is not smart. I use these cheap ebooks to test out niches that I want to dive into. I want to see that I can get some sales with some crappy little ebook before I make a more comprehensive and more expensive product to sell.

As an affiliate, you don’t have to put up with all the shit. Even if you’re a publisher at Clickbank, you don’t have to put up with a lot of the shit from customers. You’re going to get shit from people no matter what, but for $7 (minus 50 cent fee from Paypal) it’s not worth it.

It’s been about 5 days now since someone bought this $7 ebook. I do it independently through Paypal, so after they make the purchase they’re supposed to get redirected to a page to download. Of course, some people don’t get forwarded to the download page. This is probably a problem on their side and not with Paypal.

Well, this person pays at 4:03pm. I get an email at 4:06pm telling me that they didn’t get the report and that it was supposed to be instant. At 4:25pm (when I first saw the email), I replied back with the link for them to get it with an apology. A few minutes later I get an email from Paypal saying that they opened a dispute. It hasn’t been 30 minutes since they purchased and they opened a dispute.

Here is what they wrote in the dispute: “Ordered your report, which was supposed to be delivered electronically right away. No link, no response after email sent. Send me the report NOW or I’ll continue to pursue getting my money back through paypal.”

They haven’t responded to my email since. Hasn’t closed the dispute or anything.

I suppose the point of this rant is that you’re going to have to put up with shitty customers no matter what. There is nothing that you can do about shit brains like that, but I think it is important to make it worth your wild. $6.50( $7 after fees) just isn’t worth it. E-Junkie can help with this sort of mess since it will email them the file.

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On another rant side note, EzineArticles had a 100 articles in 100 days event. I didn’t know about it at the time until I got an email telling me that I qualified. Basically they told me that I could get a free mug. Not that big of a deal, but a free mug is a free mug.

Well they eventually sent it to me, but I have to pick up the parcel at the post office. It requires me to present photo ID and a signiture to get it. That wouldn’t be a problem, but they addressed it to one of my pen names. Dumbasses.

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Dynamic SEO Search

Obviously automating what will make you money is a desirable thing to do as a webmaster. Dynamic SEO is a concept where you have a website that consistently grows its content for search engines. It’s something that is done automatically too. Not to mention that you can use the information here for your own research.

The key here is that your visitors are going to build the SEO content and they’re never even going to know how.

Check it out

Looking at this page should give you enough information for what I’m talking about. Basically you want to have a search box for people to search your site. You’re not necessarily doing this for the sake of them finding content, but merely to build a dynamic page for their search.

You’ll notice that when you do a search it will go to it’s own unique URL (/search/the-text-you-searched/). That page is now permanent. Back on the search page you can see a list of the searches, with links to the unique pages. This is so search engines can spider and index them.

You’ll also noticed that the listed search results also have a number in brackets. That’s to illustrate that if something is searched more than once it will be counted. Obviously you have no reason to share that information with regular users. I’m just showing it to illustrate that I’m counting. What you can do is make a 4122.php (or whatever you want to call it) file and access that on your own to view a list of the counts. That means you have your own proven keyword research, which is good.

Building This

The logic here is really quite simple. A very simple database is needed here.

ID auto_increment
Search varchar 100
Perma varchar 100
Count int

Basically you want to store the actual searched text. You also want to create a perma link address and store that too. If someone searches “How is that?”, your perma should look like “how-is-that”. Everything that isn’t needed should be stripped.

When you’re checking a search against the database, search against the Perma values. There can be slight variations in lower/upper case letters and punctuation. Just search the Perma and if there is a match, increment the count.

The Result Page

Your actual result page can be customized anyway you want to be. Typically you’ll want it to look like your normal page, so users at least think they’re on the same site. As you can see from my example pages, there isn’t anything there. Don’t do that, I’m just giving the basic shell of what this search thing should do.

First off, you do not need to show any decent search results. Obviously, the less dynamic the content of the page, the less likely Google will like it. That’s not to say that long tail keywords won’t get traffic because they will, but the more competitive words will not get any love.

There are few things you can try…

1. You can make a table on your database that is for affiliate links. You just basically you need ID, Affiliate Link, Title and Summary for the table. You can add in as much of them as possible and when someone searches you can use these as the results. It’s your choice if you randomly choose the top three of them or if you search the links for something related.

2. If you have a blog you can always search against that database. You can put an affiliate link first result and list related blog posts as the rest of the results and you can even give a little summary of the text. Now, I’m not going into the algorithms of searching a database. There are obviously smart ways to do this mathematically and stupid ways. I don’t care how you do it. All I know is that having different results showing up with 100 characters of the blog post showing up as a summary, you’re going to end up with a pretty unique looking page in the eyes of Google.

This is all you have to do. It is as simple as it gets to creating dynamic SEO that you don’t have to worry about. Your users will build your site every time they take a search. Not to mention the fact that you have access to actual search data, which you can use.

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