I first heard about building a network on the blue hat site and it seemed a little advanced the time that I read it (a while ago). But both these sites claim that if you want to rank for pretty competitive terms than you’re going to need a network. Or in other words, a link farm or blog farm. I sort of discounted this since I was content for ranking with the less competitive terms, but with a network it would be a hell of lot less work.

So basically, I’m going to try to build my own link network. I want to know how to make cash online with a link network and I’m starting to put that together. It really isn’t that complicated of an idea, even though the blue hat instructions can be a bit daunting. But the point is to get a lot of stuff out there on the internet. It doesn’t matter what. Big sites, little sites, niche sites, authority sites, blogger blogs, squidoo lens, etc etc etc.

This is going to take some time for it to generate cash online because it’s a  very complex thing. I’m hoping it doesn’t take too long though. While I’m walking you through this post on link networks, I’m going to spend a little time stuffing a lot of different keywords in here. Related keywords of course.

I was going through some of my old shit that I normally just left. I have some 2 year old squidoo lenses and other old stuff. I think I have a ton of old hubpages too. I guess I’ll have to dig into those too. I noticed some of the squidoo lenses had a little PR in them. Mainly PR1. They’re not great, but every little piece of link juice helps. The idea is that I put up a new site, send a lot of these links to my site and I rocket up the search engines to make cash fast.

The idea behind building this is to incorporate it into my regular site work. I don’t think there is much value in just making these sites without immediate benefit. Let’s say I’m working on a “Make Cash” site. I might as well set up networks of make cash sites. I can pick up a few domains. Pick up a blogger, tumblr, wordpress, weebly or whatever other free blog service. I start building them up. I build links to them, which will be daunting, but I at least get some benefit for my site. While I’m making cash online doing my regular thing I’ll have the chance to build my network.

I’m not sure I can talk anymore about link networks because I really have to build it before I know more about it. So I’ll leave it at that. Since I’m under 600 words at this point I’m going to talk about this site.

How to Make Extra Cash

Yes, that is a completely unrelated to what I’m talking about, except for the fact that I’m targeting the keyword make cash. It doesn’t get a lot of searches, but I thought why not. I haven’t done any link building for this site and I really need to sit down and do it. I want to let the keywords I get now to guide me.

I’m getting absolutely nothing in the way of long tail keywords for anything related to making money or cash. It’s odd. There are only two pages on this entire site (at least blog.amxpert.com) that are getting long tail traffic with no backlinks: Michael Jones Scam and my Copywriting post. In particular, with the copywriting post they have been interested in persuasive verbs. There have been a few active verb interests as well. I was ranking in position 10 for the term at Google, but I’ve slipped off the front page. The keyword says that it gets 58 searches a month. Sorry to say that it gets more. Not a ton, but if I’m getting traffic in position 10 than it must be getting something.

I don’t know. Maybe I should talk about copywriting and writing persuasive copy. I don’t know. I’m still not good at that, but it seems to be a less saturated niche. Oh. I just looked. I had one keyword related to the site: make cash online selling sit back. Not the most common terms and I’m no longer ranked for it. I also get some related traffic for sniper sites, so that is good at least.

I’ve noticed this important thing on some sites and not 0n other sites I’ve own. And I think Griz put the word to what I was seeing. Google doesn’t care about your keyword on the page, but relevance of it. For example, I have a post where I talk about Christine Taylor’s tight ass. I’m the only site on the net that has that exact phrase on their site, but I don’t rank for it. It comes down to the fact that it isn’t relevant to the rest of this site. In the same post I mentioned the phrase Casey Cartwright ass, which hasn’t been phrased on the internet and my site doesn’t rank.

I need to build up a foundation of good keywords that are related to the content of this site. My main keyword is “make cash”, so let’s derive a list of relevant keywords that I could use.

make cash

make cash online

how to make cash

how to make cash online

how to make cash online with prostitutes

how to make cash online with midget prostitutes

how to make cash online with midget prostitutes with an amputee leg

I’m getting off base there, but you get the idea that you can come up with all this shit in your niche. The idea is that I want to write a long post today and stuff a lot of those keywords into the content. I just want to see if Google sends some some traffic for it. It’s just like the persuasive verbs keyword because I got a little traffic for it before it disappeared off the front page of Google. There could be value in that.

My Clickbank sucks site ranks first for that keyword. I didn’t go out and build links for it or anything. I just kept talking about how much Clickbank sucks. I’m not saying it is hard to rank for, but relevancy plays a role. After a while Google pieces together what the site is about. Especially the fuck you Clickbank (yes, I rank top for that too). Maybe this little test in relevancy will see me ranking for midget prostitutes with an amputee leg or something. Time for me to link back to the first page of this site with my proper keyword anchor text Make Cash Online.

I tried to Make Quick Cash Thursday

I flipped on the news the other day and say the fort hood shooting thing. Instantly I thought about how I could make cash today doing this. I immediately pumped up a site and started building it. It took forever for the damn thing to index, but it eventually did. I made several pages of content on the site for it focusing on some main keywords like “fort hood shooting”. I wanted to try this to see how much traffic I could catch. Even if I wouldn’t rank for the main keyword, I was bound to pick up some long tail traffic. I didn’t have any monetized stuff up on it cause I was just testing.

Even if it was monetized I wouldn’t of been able to make cash from home with it because no one came to the site. I didn’t get any long tail traffic for some reason. Nadda. I’m thinking that if you want to capitalize on that trends stuff you’re going to need a site that already has authority to begin with. I know the time I was waiting for it to get ranked ate up a lot of the traffic. It just didn’t have any kick in the search engines. I thought since it was a new item Google would be more in the position too index things faster. Who knows.

I heard trends can send you a lot of a traffic, but it’s hard to monetize. A musician dying would be easy though. Imagine creating a site when Michael Jackson died and put up links to his music. Man, you would of been able to make extra cash online. Like a lot of it.

Okay where am I at:

• Talked about Link Networks – Check
• Talked about Christine Taylor’s tight ass and Casey Cartwright ass – Check
• Talked about midget prostitutes with amputee legs – Check
• Talked about how to make cash – Check
• Talked about fort hood shooting – Check

I still have to go because my list of keywords is still at about 15 keywords left, so I’m going to have to figure this out. What else could I talk about? Oh I see…

How to Make Extra Cash

Let’s say that some of your higher income sites are tanking. Maybe they got penalized, for whatever reason, and are moved down the ranks of the big G. Maybe your offer, product or Adsense CTR isn’t what it used to be and you’re coming in a little short for the month. What do you do? I think it is important to not dip into your savings when you’re in this type of position. I have savings and I hope you’re saving some of your online earnings. You never know when things might go to shit and the last thing you want to do is end up at some shitty fuckin’ job making ends meet.

Freelance work is the answer to this. You can do practically anything, so don’t get the idea of going into doing writing work to make easy cash because you’re going to run into some fuckwads that will want to low ball you. They’ll want you to cut your price down and they just want more and more from you. The only good customers that I had were the ones that were paying a premium. Period.

There’s all sorts of shit that people need done, so you don’t have to limit yourself to this type of shit. You don’t even have to look on the internet for clients. Local businesses will pay you big money for something you find absolutely easy. Remember how I said a friend and myself made a certain site for a sports league. Well, we’re not in the business of web design or anything like that. We coded out this site and we want to sell it again and again to other leagues. Here’s the funny thing. Our first client told another guy. He doesn’t want our sports league software. He wants his own static site. Here’s the kicker… he’s willing to throw down a $100/mth on the hosting/maintenance costs. And yes, we’ll take a grand from him up front too. Businesses have money, so sell something to them.

Just think of how much money that is guys. And it’s easy cash generation. Let’s say you’re running a little short for the month. You could easily pick up an extra grand and a recurring income. Even if you didn’t need the money you could go out and make cash now. It’s not like you need to hear yes from all businesses. You could send out a flyer to hundreds of these businesses and just one has to buy. You can do more though. You could design restaurant menus, brochures, business cards, etc. It’s insane the shit that you could be selling to a business to make cash at home as a freelancer.

But I guess we are webmasters and in the business of making easy cash online, instead of in the real world. I would never forget such things though. Making cash online doesn’t have to be hard for a freelancer, but you have to accept the fact that you’re competing with more people than you would with locally. Not to mention the fact that you have to compete with someone in India that can survive on $2/day, whereas you’re going to need a lot more than that.

If I’ve learned one thing, it’s not to be a bitch. Don’t compete on price – compete on value. People that want cheap prices will only demand more and they’ll be bigger pricks to you too.  A lot of people think that if they want to get cash online then they’re just going to have to put up with them.  It’s your headache.

Hmmm, 6 keywords left. Bah Forget it. It’s enough for now. Toddles!

Wait, I should probably end on some sort of football video since I’m playing fantasy football. Last week the Falcons took on the Saints. Some of my best players are on both teams. You can watch Michael Turner with some great runs, Pierre Thomas with some great runs and Roddy White making some catches.

I’m sure this has happened to a lot of you. You go to Google’s keyword tool and do a little keyword research. You find a great keyword and decide that you’re going to rank for it. You buy a keyword rich domain, write content for it and build links over several months. One day in the future you’re checking on the progress of the site and you see that you finally pushed into the top 10. You take a peak at your stats and notice you’re not getting much traffic for your keyword. So you head back to the keyword tool and check the traffic volume. What do you see? A low number like a 1000/month.

The problem is that these keyword tools aren’t necessarily accurate. Sure they can be extremely accurate and other times they’re not. The only way you can get the real numbers is to rank for them and see what comes in. That really isn’t a good answer for us that are looking to make cash from as many sites as we can.

This is where EZA can help us. EZA is an authority site and that allows articles to rank very high for no backlinks. The odd thing is that EZA actually shares the view count at the end of each article. This tells us exactly how much traffic an article gets. Most people that write for directories understand the concept of keywords and using them, so you can reverse engineer articles.

EZA ranks in the top 10 for these articles, but it isn’t a strong ranking. I laugh anytime I see an article directory in the top 10. Seriously, you should be laughing too because you can easily outrank it. This is what I mean. Why be a bitch to EZA writing all the time for them, when you can just reverse engineer all the articles on their site and take it.

I have to admit that today I wasn’t planning on posting on this subject. I made a post over at DP in a thread about someone banned from EZA. I said that this was the best thing that ever happened to them and that this directory was a crutch for most people. Some guy made a cocky one line reply like “yeah $5000 a month is a crutch” or something along those lines. I find that incredibly funny to post on a forum.

When I use the word “crutch” it refers to slowing you down making cash online. You can’t run if you have crutches, but it doesn’t suggest that you can get to places. But it’s still a crutch even if you make $5000/mth passively. And I’ll prove it.

If you’re making $5000/mth article marketing we have to stipulate a few things.

1. You’re writing a shit load of articles each and everyday OR
2. You have a lot of articles ranking in Google pulling traffic

If you’re in category 1 than you’re just doing bum marketing. It’s not different then doing double shifts at McDonald’s everyday. I’m sure if employees were allowed to double shift everyday they’d make good money. I’ve already addressed this in my post titled the Biggest Mistake in Affiliate Marketing.

The second scenario is the one that I want to address for this post. The idea that the articles are getting a significant amount of search engine traffic and that is what makes a nice passive income. This is great and everything, but it disturbs me when people think that it is good. Here’s why:

EZA Articles Aren’t Strong

I know that the articles are going to rank in the top 10 with absolutely no keywords, but that happens only on keywords that are relatively weak to begin with. A little bit of work with your own site and you can out rank them. It’s not like the articles are invincible or something. Every time I see some sort of directory in the top 10, I laugh. I laugh because I know that I can rank for it with virtually no work.

It’s so damn easy that a keyword rich domain would be enough for you to get the top 10. A few backlinks and you’re golden. Obviously getting your site in the top 10 at Google is more important than EZA in the top 10 because …

EZA Only Gives You 30% of the Traffic

Gurus will tell you that a good respectable click through rate on your articles is 30%. In other words, 70% of the traffic goes to the directory for their profit. The CTR on your articles will generally fluctuate though, so it is hard to say. You may only get 10% on average.

If your site is in the top 10 getting the traffic than you’re getting 100% of the traffic. Hmmm, 30% vs 100%. I don’t know about you, but I prefer 100% of the traffic. If the 30% coming from EZA is helping you make five grand a month, than 100% would make you $16,667/mth. If you were looking how to make cash online, which would you prefer? I know, which one that I want.

I can hear the objections now…

But But But this is a lot easier than making new sites

That is true. It does take a lot more work to make a site and see if it works. You have to build links, make content, monetize it, etc. Well, if you’re writing articles you’re going to have to drive your traffic to something. Can you sell your articles VALUE (IE: ranking) on a directory? No. Can you sell your sites that are ranked? Yes. I suppose this is the difference between renting and buying.

I know the deal though. I get it. This is really how to make cash online for beginners and I agree with that. But that doesn’t make it right or something that you should continue doing. There is something that is a lot easier for beginners to use. Something that is much more accurate. Much more fun and makes much more money…

Reverse Engineering EZA

The people on EZA that are making a nice passive income of $5000/mth, I’m gunning for you. I’m literally gunning for you now. It’s nothing personal. It’s not unethical. It’s business and I’m taking you out. At this point you should know exactly what to do, but I understand some of you don’t know how to read between the lines. Here are the most important pieces of information I listed above…

• EZA lists the number of views an article receives at the bottom of the page
• Even though EZA articles make it into the top 10, they’re weak and easy to beat
• 100% traffic going to your own site is much more valuable than 30% coming from EZA

What I’m talking about is going to EZA and looking through the articles. Find the ones that are getting the traffic and dissect them. For the most part it should be relatively easy to identify the keyword of the article. It will be in the title and all through out the article. You can search the term at Google to verify that it is ranking and you can check the search volume at the keyword tool.

Okay, A Walk Through

I guess the best place to show you this method is with a walk through. There are a number of ways to find articles with high visit counts, including a Google function way. I’m not going to show you how to do that one. I’m sure if you learn the syntax methods of search engines you might be able to figure it out.

But you can just do the most obvious thing and that is going to an article and looking at the most viewed. For this walk through I’m looking at an article in the mobile computing section. I’ll point out that this was completely random. I clicked on the first article on the front page of EZA.

Using the technology niche probably wasn’t the smartest choice since this is a niche that has a social aspect of it. People like to talk about their laptops and gadgets, but it’s still good. Take a look at the one I highlighted. It appeared to me as the one that was the most “webmastered”, if that is a word. But you can take a look at the views and see that it has a ton. Actually EZA is fucked right now because this article is older than 90 days.

This article has been up for around 20 months now. That means that it is getting roughly 1300 visitors a month. That’s not a ton of visitors, but it’s enough to make it worth wild. If 1300 visitors a month over a year can make over $10 (cost of a domain) than you’re profitable. Obviously you want to make more, which you should be with 1300 visitors a month.

So what is the keyword? The keyword stuck out like a sore thumb for me. It’s “free laptop for students”. I went and type that in Google (without quotes) and it comes up in third position. It came up in first for Google Canada.

Click to Enlarge

The last step in this whole thing is to take a look at the keyword in Google’s keyword tool. This is where we can see if it is actually the keyword that is the driving force for the article. Inevitably it is the keyword that is going to help you make real cash online.

Click to enlarge

I just noticed I took the wrong screen for the keyword. Laptops is plural in this one. But doesn’t matter. Same amount of searches. As you can see it gets around 2400 searches a month. It’s not something that I’d personally go after. I don’t think 2400 is a enough for me. Though, you might dig through the niche and see a lot of other related keywords that get 1000’s a month too. You could rank for all of them and have a site getting a hundred unique visitors a day. I’m not going to investigate this particular niche for you because I just want to demonstrate how you can use and abuse EZA for keywords.

For the keyword “free laptop for students”, it’s something that you can can go after. I actually didn’t document this to show you how easy it could be to rank. I just did this spur of the moment thing. So if you’re planning on going after the keyword, it is all yours. No one else is in the niche and since EZA ranks 3rd you should have no problem over taking it.

What if you can’t figure out the keyword? This happens a lot. The article gets a lot of views, but I can’t figure out the keyword right away. I’ll admit, some of the articles are a mystery. I can’t figure out how they got that many views because I can’t find the keyword. It’s life. They could be an abuser of the system sending traffic to it, but I don’t know. I do have a method you can take advantage of to find the keyword. Just use SEO Quake Firefox addon. Just click on the Page info option and you’ll get a screen like this:

Click to enlarge

There is a lot more analysis done than just what is listed there. But essentially what it is doing is checking the keyword density of words on the page. If the page has traffic than it will probably have some keyword with a high density. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in the title.

This is one keyword that I found in around 120 seconds of searching this directory. Is it a perfect keyword? Probably not. But it is something that can help you earn cash online and it demonstrates the entire exercise of how you can get good PROVEN keywords on EZA. And that’s what you want. You want PROVEN KEYWORDS that you know work.

I could end the post like this, but I would have only taught you how to abuse EZA. I want to show you how to SCREW EZA.

Dominate the Keyword Then Dominate the Niche

When I say dominate the keyword, I don’t simply mean get to position 1 at Google. It’s a matter of getting position one, two, three and all the way to 10. Of course there is no guarantee that you can get them all, but ideally that is what you should be aiming for. Don’t get me wrong. Getting position one or two or whatever the hell EZA was ranked at. You’re going to get 100% of the traffic instead of 30%. But you can always have more. In my Make Cash Online with sniper sites post I pointed out how much the top spot at Google gets and it’s not that exciting.

Here they are again for your convenience:

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%

As you can see the first spot has the most (obviously), but it’s only 42% of the total search volume.  If you get the first spot of Google for an awesome keyword than congrats, but that is only 42%. You can get much more off that traffic. If you got to position one than you can obviously get 2, 3, 4, etc.

Before you go dominating crazy, you want to make sure whether it is worth wild. Make your first site and take over the position that the EZA article holds. See what happens. If it is profitable than your goal should be to have every single position on the front page.

You won’t be able to do it with the same site though. I’m not even sure if you can do it from all the same host (same IP). I haven’t tested that though. You can always get a blogger blog, hubpages, squidoo, etc to rank in the top 10 and take up positions. While you’re taking over the top 10, you’re pushing EZA off the front page. That is how they screw them.

Reverse Engineer Your Own Articles on EZA

I hope you guys are aware that EZA does share search engine stats for your articles. They only give you the top 5 search terms over a month period. But that is usually enough to give you a rough idea of what you need to know.

Just go into your articles where you get a list of them. Click on the views number. It will be a link that you can click. It will take you to a page where you can see all the search engine traffic over the month. One thing to understand is that the numbers they give aren’t accurate at all. For example, I have an article that gets like 3000 views a month. That’s roughly 100 a day, yet it lists like 10 visits for my top keyword. I know that is wrong. The important aspect of this feature is the actual keyword. You can verify for yourself that you’re ranked for it and you can check with Google’s keyword tool to see the volume.

There is absolutely no reason why you should have a 3000 views a month article on EZA. I know I shouldn’t have lol. That particular article is in first position too. I am in the works of taking over that position. I want the top 5 at least.

I hope this post has been enlightening. This explains how to make cash online by screwing EZA and it rocks. All the guess work is taken out of the equation because you can see the views. Mmmm mmmm GOOD!

I thought I should do a little case study to demonstrate how this works. I spent a few hours this week coming up with some keywords. I found a few that were getting 10,000 searches a month and EZA was ranking for it. Yeah, I’ll take over them and laugh all the way to the bank.

I’m particularly disappointed with the Warrior Forum and the people on there. Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot of upset people, but there seemed to also be the ass suckers. The ones that were glorifying this as something good. It is something good, but to who?

When you get right down to it we all have different loyalties. Google is at war with us too. Google owes it’s loyalty to it’s visitors. Even though they make their money with advertising, they still need people to search. And that means providing the best possible results. Google is at war with us because we game it; because we market; because we don’t have the intention of giving things away, but to convert a buyer.

Where does EZA’s loyality lie? Their loyality lies with keeping Google happy (which includes search results and Adsense) and it’s visitors. I’m starting this post like this to point out that it is EZA’s prerogative to do this, but you have to understand it from an objective point of view.

The point is that EZA’s loyality is not you, but their loyality is contrary to your benefit. Remember that. Don’t ever forget it.

That is what pisses me off about the douchebags on forums saying this is good. It’s good for EZA’s benefit. Who doesn’t want nice high quality articles for free? I want some. Most of the people that are praising this move have a lack of anonymity. They have their username on the Warrior Forum as their actual name. Nothing boils my blood more than Bev Clement. Here cocky attitude and condecending attitude make me sick. This is from a person that not to long ago had a thread on the forum looking for donations because she was in trouble.  Finally after thousands have been donated we find out that she couldn’t pay rent on her little trip to Hong Kong. But I digress.

Here is why I think the move by EZA is contrary to our benefit:

What the fuck is a “quality article”?

Everyone keeps saying ‘well all you have to do is write quality articles and you won’t have a problem.’ That’s excellent advice. It’s just about as esoterically vague as ‘work smarter, not harder’.

No one has defined quality to me. And I mean not in a past tense way. An example of past tense would be the reader likes it than it’s quality. It’s past tense because the article needs to accepted and read by the reader first before quality is viewed.

That means there has to be criteria in place of objectives that must be met to be “quality”. What are they? EZA will never ever tell you them because frankly they don’t have the first fuckin’ clue what they are.

My point is that they don’t give the first flying fuck about “quality articles”. They are at war with affiliate marketers. You can bet your ass that the subject and where your landing page goes will have a much more direct effect on what determines “quality” of that article.

And I can prove it.

I was recently downgraded at EZA. After nearly 3000 articles with them, I was moved from Platinum to Basic PLUS. I didn’t even get an email telling me why. After that all my articles get rejected, so obviously I stopped completely.

The big thing that the word “quality” implies is that the information is quality. This is where the argument of quality articles will die. EZA doesn’t verify information in articles.  It doesn’t have the time, money or resources to do it. Quality other than the information provided in the article could only come from spelling, grammar, punctuation and article length. Oh and from my thesis, the writers intent *cough* marketing.

So how do they determine what is a “good” article and one that deserves to be rejected? I could write long coherent articles on how push ups cure migraine headaches. I can articulate it in a very smart way and explain it with a very convincing physiological theory. The article is crap and doesn’t help the reader in anyway, but I’m sure EZA would eat it up.

That’s the whole point. There is no way to determine what is good and bad in the eyes of EZA. That means the process isn’t equally applied to all members and it also means that some writers are going to be targets. And since they’re at war with affiliate marketers, you’re always a target to be picked on.

Old Articles Are Being Revisited

The whole reason for this crack down is all about Google. I’ve seen the results of EZA decline over the last year and I expect the trend to continue that way. This is how EZA plans to stop this and get their shit together. It isn’t enough for them to simply start enforcing a policy from this day forward, but they’re going to start applying the new standards to old articles. “In the past, we’ve grandfathered existing articles in when new quality levels are set, except when a live article is edited, today’s standard is applied to that content.” – EZA blog.

If you’ve written articles that meet the “quality” of today’s standards (whatever that is) your articles are fine and it shouldn’t be a big deal – for now.  6 Months from now they could tighten the bolts again and some of your articles are dropped. I don’t know, but that’s something that you have to think about it.

When I work, I expect my work to provide long lasting results, but you could lose it. Seriously, I could wake up tomorrow and my account be banned because my past ACCEPTED articles were not up today’s standards. You have to think of that shit.

There’s a point where it’s just too much work to satisfy the demands of someone else and I don’t feel like satisfying them anymore.

Your Articles Aren’t Ethically Used

A big selling point for using EZA is that other webmasters will take your articles and put them on their site. They’ll use your resource box, so that you get traffic and a backlink. It sounds like the perfect plan on paper.

Here is the reality: No site that has any valuable qualities is going to use your articles. I’ve never ever seen EZA articles on a site that would provide a quality backlink in any way. Do you see me going to EZA looking for articles to put on this blog? No. Even if there was a quality article on EZA, I would be interested in writing my own article on the subject and putting it on this blog. If I have a valuable site I’m not going to just play a game of copy and paste with my readers. I want to take care of them.

Obviously your articles are getting published on sites because you can see it count in your EZA stats. My stats say I have over 6000 published on other sites. I’m sure if you’ve been looking at your traffic stats you’re well aware of the quality of site that links back to you.

Most of them are spammy piece of shit sites. They have no traffic, they have spammy backlinks and they’re probably part of a blog farm. I know Google is in a tough spot here. Obviously, site owners can’t control who is linking to their site. But on the other hand it has to stop blog farms. After enough of these spammy sites use your articles, you’re just getting viewed in a negative manner by Google.

Some of the sites will bring you traffic, but not a lot. I don’t want to call these links spammy, but they’re definitely not quality. A lot of these sites are by people looking to build up their content really fast. That usually means they’re trying to flip the site.

There is no quality links coming to you from people using the articles on their own sites. Spam sites, bots and scrapers will go to the sites and autoblog 1000 of your articles in a few hours. Is that really something you want your sites to be a part of?

Just think of it this way. If I worked hard to build this authority site over years. I spent money on SEO companies to get it to the top. Am I going to EZA to get myself a free article? No fuckin’ way. Only people with nothing are going there.

They Want Longer Articles – They Just Won’t Say It

I think we can all recognize that they want more length. Often now when articles are being rejected they tell you in the email that you should write 450-700 word articles. The rules say 250 minimum, but we all know they’re looking for more. And like anything where you are asked to give more, they’ll just keep asking for more and more. Yes, that phenomenon is right of the book Influence.

Let’s stipulate the common definition of quality articles as a lengthy informative article (which EZA will never verify beyond length). What benefit is there to me? I can see the benefit to Chris Knight; more long tail traffic and higher Adsense CTR.

See, we’ll get lower CTR off to our site because of the length. There are a few reasons for that. It takes much more work to read through the article. It is incredibly easy to get bored. When I’m looking for information online I’m not reading a long article. I’ll look for something else and the first thing that you’ll see on EZA is an Adsense ad. Since there is so much text between the start of the article and your resource box at the bottom you’re just going to get less clicks.

Another problem that I have with lengthy quality articles is the fact that you have to give away too much. People say that this is the best way to sell. I disagree since we’re affiliate marketers. Let’s say I’m selling an ebook on curing migraine headaches. What keywords would I be writing my articles for? Cure Migraines, Cure for Migraines, etc. If I’m using that keyword in the title than I have to supply information for that. If I fill it with real solutions that work (an informative article) than why the fuck would they buy the ebook? There is a simple rule I learned when I was an adult webmaster and that was make them pay for pink. Simply put, we show them softcore to warm them up and they pay for hardcore (our sponsors). What EZA is looking for is you to provide “hardcore” type content for their site. It’s super beneficial to him and counter productive to us.

Another example on this point can be completely verified from my apartment when I was at University.  Moved in one day, hooked the TV up to the cable wire and it worked. It worked the entire time we were there. We got free cable for whatever reason. Do you think I called up the cable company and asked to purchase cable service from them? No. Why would I pay for something that I can get for free? That’s essentially what EZA wants. They want us to provide the free cable to their readers and try to sell it to them aswell.

The Rules of Creating Content for Affiliate Marketers

I put in a lot of thought on this point. You need standards for your articles or you’re just going to be a bitch. I’m sure you have standards for a mate. If you didn’t have them you’d end up with the ugliest looking person. It might sound mean, but you need standards. Here is what I came up with when you’re writing high quality articles…

• The Content is going to be beneficial for my visitors.
• The Content is going to be paid for if someone else wants it.
• The Content is going to provide a stellar backlink.
• The Content is going to send high quality traffic – not the lower end of quality.

I try to at least meet two of these. I’m sorry. EZA provides absolute SHIT when it comes to link back value. EZA also filters off the top quality to their Adsense ads and you’re left with the a small percentage of lower quality visitors (30% if you’re lucky). I’ve talked about this in detail on my rant about bum marketing.

If I’m going to work hard to create long informative quality articles than I’m putting them on my site. I have no desire to give my shit away to unappreciative pricks like Chris Knight. I will also create content for quality links, but you’re not going to get SHIT from EZA. They just give you nothing in return and your site isn’t going to be getting extra SE traffic. The boost you’ll get is very basic and if you do make it on the front page of Google you could of done it with a few blog comments, so let’s get real.

Plus 30% CTR are considered good, but I prefer to have 100% of my readers coming to my site and reading my content. Rather than filtering through a spammy looking page full of ads. Yes, it’s spammy and Google sees it regardless of their catch 22.

I think I’ve ranted enough for over 2000 words, so let’s get into some of the meat. The point of this post is to screw EZA. Let’s all drop them and do something a hell of a lot more productive with our time.

How to get REAL authority backlinks

The advice I’m going to share with you is incredibly simple and you quite possibly may have heard it before. The problem is that we easily get intimidated by it. Instead of working your ass off for a 30% CTR (which is the only benefit of EZA) why not write articles for the most authority website in your niche?

That sounds a little more intimidating.

I know that I was intimidated by this sort of thing. It left me trying to get authority backlinks other ways. I would try to write a comment on a blog or hope that an authority site would accept listing of websites. That’s the wussie way of doing things.

I know this is intimidating, but you need to open your mind up to this type of thing because it is possible. I have seen this for a while. I’m subscribed to the RSS feeds of some high authority personal finance blogs. And a lot of times they have guest bloggers and things like that to fill in the posts.

You have to understand that authority owners are busy people. The idea of someone producing them a nice piece of high quality content (I’m talking about the real definition of high quality). It works the same way as article writing because you’re going to get an about author section where you can place your link. You’ll have to use the About Author box properly because it’s an authority site.

But think of the value. You’re going to get traffic from this site. The CTR might not be the best because you can’t really sell your author space and you’ll be writing a rather long article, but you’re going to get the best backlink possible. We’re talking about the king shit backlink that all the other internet marketers are looking for.

Here’s the even bigger kicker for you guys… it’s easy. All you have to do is find the contact information on an authority site and send them an email. Obviously you’re not going to get backlinks from Amazon or anything like that, but others will.

You’re probably thinking that this is a great idea, but you have two specific objections that pop into your head:

• Why would they choose you?
• How do I write content worthy of authority sites?

Obviously there is only so many authority sites in specific niches, but despite what you think no one is doing this. I went around looking for links in a niche and emailed people. My reply rate is like 70-80% and they were favorable. I had two that were really happy that I emailed them about this and were very interested. I’m talking about sites that have been around more than a decade. We’re talking good links here. I had one that asked me if I’d be interested in doing Guest Blogging on a regular basis BEFORE they even seen my writing.

I owe all this to not being a bitch and submitting to EZA. All I did was look up sites, get contact information and just ask them. Wow that was hard. High quality backlinks for my articles for very little work. The owners of these sites want your content, so ask them.

The other objection that you have (and it’s the main reason why I didn’t start this sooner) and it was my ability to write the content worthy of their approval. I guess we can all get intimidated and we often look at our own work in the most critical way.

All you need to know is that the only difference between a regular article and a kick ass article is a little more time. You can talk about any topic with authority if you spend more time on it. Instead of pumping out articles every 10 minutes. Spend an hour and write a kick ass 1000 word article. An authority site owner will eat this stuff up. They want quality and as long as you can present your ability to write it than they won’t be able to say no.

Finding Potential Authority Sites

This is the easy part. Go to Google and type in your niche. Go through the top 20 websites that aren’t large corporations (like Amazon, Walmart, etc) and find an email address (or a contact form). If you can’t find an email address or contact information go do a whois on the domain (samspade.org) and see if there is an email listed.

Just repeat the process with secondary keywords. For example, if your niche is bodybuilding than secondary keywords would be bodybuilder workout, bodybuilding diet, etc.

Not all niches will be as simple as bodybuilding to find the real authority sites. You’re not going to find authority hemorrhoid site. They don’t exist. Well, I don’t think they exist. You’ll have to aim in a different direction hitting up authority health sites related to constipation or something that is similar.

Propositioning

Now that you got their emails you have to send them a message and presuade them to do this. If there is a piece of information that copywriting has taught me it is that you have to start EARLY into the benefits for the reader (ie: authority site owner).

I’m not going to give you a template for you to copy. You have to learn to do this yourself.

Your subject line has to be something that they’ll actually read. That doesn’t mean spamming up a hype like subject. Just something honest that they’ll read. The very first sentence of the email should list the benefit. If you haven’t been paying attention the benefit is a high quality article on their site. Communicate that fact without hype and without displaying your benefit (a link back to your site).

Here is a rough example…

Hello,

I wanted to know whether you’d like some high quality articles for your website. I’m a *authority in the niche* and I can produce some very honest articles. My perspective can be a very valuable asset to your readers and can help you bring in a lot more search engine traffic. All I ask in return for free quality articles is that I get an author box for exposure.

Let me know if you’d be interested in such a thing.

Thanks,

Name

That’s a very simple and to the point email. It follows a very simple pattern. Opening sentence talks about the big benefit for the authority site.  I mention after that reasons why I can provide that benefit to their readers. I follow up with some secondary benefits (good stuff for the readers and search traffic). I finally end with my author box. It’s sort of like a sales page. I write about the benefits and I end it with the price, which is just an author box. And that cost is very minimal.

You can always add more to it, but I always advise short emails. I’m a busy guy and wouldn’t read a long email. Just get to the point. You can add another sentence after the ‘let me know’ sentence that says, “In the next few days I’m going to prepare for you a 1000 word quality article for you to see exactly what I can give you.” That takes away buying pressure.

I have had nothing, but great comments from people that are interested. If you can, try to add in something unique points about the site. For example, the first person to email me back was the most receptive. There site didn’t really have articles on it. They just had a directory listing for every single authority person in the niche. I just added in an extra sentence after I mention the articles, “I know that your site is a directory of information on *niche* people, but I think having quality articles can give more to your readers.” They replied back immediately to that email thanking me and thinking that I was right.

I wrote a 1200 word article for them that they liked. The big selling point for that person was the benefit of the article, but I was able to show them that I was looking at their site and I was giving them genuine advice on how to improve it.

Writing the Articles

There needs to be a lot more care put into these articles. Unlike EZA, the owners of these sites (for the most part) know their niche and they can smell bullshit articles. You really do have to develop a quality article here. Remember, it might take you a few hours to make one, but that’s okay. The benefit you’re receiving is a kick ass link.

Think of it this way. If you can only get 1 kick ass article done a day, which results in 1 authority backlink than you’re kicking ass. It just takes a few authority links and your site will skyrocket. One authority link will outdo hundreds of article directory links, blog comments and link wheels.

Take the extra time to write something good. Go through it and make sure that it sounds correct. If an article directory rejects your article you can always submit again. With authority sites you may not have another chance, so make sure you don’t screw it up.

You may feel intimidated that you have to produce this content, but it shouldn’t be hard. All you have to do is put more time into it. Time is all it takes to produce a great piece of content.

There is a little more that needs to be done though. It’s not enough to write information on your niche, but it has to be something that the site owner wants. For example, lets say that your niche is bodybuilding. If the authority site has several articles on how to get six pack abs than he probably doesn’t want an article on the same subject.

You should take a look through their content. See what they have, and more importantly, what they don’t have.

Another aspect I learned in copywriting is the Unique Selling Point (USP). It’s the way that you differentiate yourself from others. Lets go back to the bodybuilding example. I’m not saying that you can’t write about six pack abs. You can do it if your article has a unique selling point. When I say USP I don’t mean selling, but something that makes it different than the other articles on the site. For example, if the articles on this site were about getting abs from doing unique crunches than write an article on how to get abs without doing any exercise. This is a rough example, but you have to get them something unique or it is just useless to them.

Also, you have to consider where your article is going. I noticed a lot of authority sites have their own little section to put articles. This means that you can write nice long pieces of content. But if the site owner is going to put it on a blog than you’re going to have to write it differently. I know that I’ve been writing monster posts for my site (an experiment), but most blogs are looking for something easier to read.

That’s not to say that you have to write something short, but the type of content you write is different. You might have to do a post like the “Top 5 Reasons to …” where you bold each reason as you write about it. It’s something that is much easier to read, especially for blog readers. I’m not saying that a site owner wouldn’t appreciate a long detailed article, but let’s make it as easy as we can for them to please their readers.

A Few More Resources

While doing some of these searches for authority sites I noticed that a lot of them already accept articles to begin with. Obviously they’re going to be picky as hell though. But the fact that they list this shows you that you can get one accepted. It means they are already open to the idea of taking content from others and they know how the game works.

All this means is that you can carefully prepare your article and submit it to them when you’re ready. It’s not rocket science. There is no reason to reject a quality article that benefits their visitors.

Finding these sites are really easy at Google. Just type in: Niche +”Submit Articles”

You can change the variation from submit articles to whatever you think  a site would list. I’m not saying that every site that comes up will be an authority in the niche. You have to remember that this is going to be a targeted backlink from a niche related site. This should count higher than a link from a article directory.

But I have one more place for you to look: niche related article directories. I want to emphasize that this is the lowest on all the backlinks I’ve listed today, but I still think there is more value to them. They are still niche related and I think it makes a much better link in the eyes of Google.

Finding niche related article directories is the same as above (Niche +”submit articles”). You can also search variations of that. The most common directory software should have variables you can search. You’re going to get a lot of general directories this way, but just go through them. You’ll find some niche related ones.

Conclusion

I thought I should sum this all up for those of you that aren’t interested in reading this massive post. EZA is a business that has its own prerogative. Actually it’s prerogative is to our detriment. The harder we work, the less we market and the less we make is good for EZA. Isn’t good for us.

It’s not a matter of adapting to Ezinearticles new rules because that’s no guarantee in itself. Normally when they changed rules the old articles on the site were fine. That’s not the case anymore. They’re going through our old articles right now and they’re taking them off the site. Even if you bust your balls today writing an article that gets accepted, it doesn’t mean that it won’t be rejected in 6 months time.

You’re a business. Your job is to make money. You have to work with others to make that money, but there’s a point where you can’t put up with the demands and bitching from another person. You want work with people that want to see both succeed. Despite what EZA says, they really hate us. And the less we make, the better off they are. That isn’t a good partnership for me.

The good news is that you can put your work to more productive use. There are tons of authority sites in your niche that would gladly link back to you. Just write a nice high quality article for them. It’s easier than you think.

Just contact them by email. The worst you’re going to get is a reply that says “no”. Some won’t even reply. But you’ll probably get a few emails like I did of excited site owners just dying for your content. Remember, you don’t have to get all the authority sites to link to you. Just one or two links is enough for you to jump to the top spot of Google.

Why bust your balls day after day writing articles for EZA for very little link juice? Write one high quality article a day for a week and give it to each authority site in your niche and you’re set. 

Seriously, this is so easy. I can’t believe that I was actually intimidated doing this in the past. The fact is that most people are intimidated. Some of these site owners I emailed have sites that are 12 years old and they’re excited to hear from me. They haven’t even had someone reach out and send them an email.

Trust me. You won’t regret doing this. Though I’m sure 99% of my readers will never ever try it. Remember, it just takes one or two authority backlinks to send you to the top of the search engines.

Copywriting Resume Experiment

Ever since I got my copywriting literature I’ve been dying to try this. I want to take my regular resume and make a new version of it with applied copywriting techniques. I’m going to send it out to a bunch of local job listings and see what happens.

The resume is the ultimate sales copy that I’ve never poured more than 10 minutes of my time into. It’s one sheet of paper that needs to stand out, be read and viewed by the reader as something valuable. All I’ve ever done is list who, what, when, where and why on it. I think most people do that.

I want to test out copywriting and what I’m learning. I want to try to work in as much as I can, including a headline. It’ll be a fun experiment and a valuable learning tool.

Amazon Sniper Sites

Yes sir, the next sniper site experiment is going to be completely for Amazon. I suppose the main reason for this is paranoia. I just don’t trust Google. I think they don’t like the concept of sites like this and it’s hard to tell. The rules are incredibly vague, so I’m not sure if I have made for adsense (MFA) sites or if they’re value.

I am actually pretty surprised with my Amazon results so far with the few sites that I actually have set up right now. Plus I don’t have to worry about Amazon freaking out and banning me. It’s not going to happen unless I’m spamming or something along those lines.

3 Product Creations

This is actually different than what the heading suggests. I’m going to make three products (one of which is complete) that fit into specific categories of development.

• You’re selling someone else’s product and they close down
• You’re selling cheap $7 reports
• You’re in a no competition niche

The first product creation listed has already been complete. I’m in the testing phase of the sales letter though, but you know the story. I was selling a product as an affiliate for year and the idiot vendor ends the affiliate program. Since there are no competing products I made my own. That’s the situation of the first one listed.

Second, this is for a site I have that is selling $7 reports. I actually bought a site and made a cheap $7 report for it. The idea behind it was purely testing. I wanted to see if I could sell something in this niche by myself. I planned to see how the report would sell and if it did well I would just make a better report to sell for more.

Third, I have a site that I bought in my more naive days to build a product. It was before I ever learned about market research. Creating a product in a niche that has no products is like internet marketing suicide, but there’s still a part of me that wants to try. It is in a niche that is growing and relatively new. It’s the growth I want to tap into. I rank first in Google for ‘niche name training’ and from the start I wanted to make a training manual. The plan with this one is to make a report and see what happens. If it is something that sells than I could very easily be sitting on an untapped niche.

Flip Sites Online and to Local Businesses

I’m very interested in trying this out. Flipping the sites online, just means to people that want to buy them on auction forums. That would mainly be new internet marketers looking for sites that are already set up. Depending on traffic, content and earnings you can make a little bit of scratch. Not huge amounts of it though, but something that might be worth my wild to pursue.

The business side of things seems much more profitable. Business owners are retards when it comes to internet marketing stuff. I can pick up domain names that are brandable and an owner might want to have it for that reason. We’ll see how that pans out.

Operation Screw EzineArticles

That’s right. Recently I had my EZA account downgraded from Platinum to Basic PLUS. My article review times are like 10 days now and all my articles are getting rejected now. They recently added a post to their blog that they’re at war with affiliate marketers. I won’t link to it though and there appears to be no Google cache to link to.

With 2729 live articles I’m officially ending writing for EZA. I don’t feel like writing high quality articles for them because they go on my site. I’m not producing long fulfilling articles for any article directory because EZA backlink juice is crap at best and the click through rates are pitful with a fulfilling article. Without some way to cliff hang there is no reason for clicking. So fuck’em.

The plan is to find alternative approaches to this whole thing and obviously that is a work in progress. But I have some interesting routes to go down now. Maybe this EZA crack down will make me more money because I’ve finally given up the article directory crutch and moving onto bigger things. Time will tell.

My Friend and I’s Business Idea

I mentioned somewhere in a post about this, but a friend and me are working on a project. He was actually approached by a business to do a project for them. My friend got on MSN messenger in the morning and was just going to pass the project onto me. He didn’t have time to do it and I was more than willing to flex my new PHP skills. Well that morning he messaged me we tossed the idea around. Hungry niche, a lot of customers and they have money.

We’re going full blast at it. We started at the first of October and we have to finish the project by November 1st. We are practically done now. This is going to be my first real attempt at an offline business. I’m going to keep you guys updated on this because there are a lot of valuable things that I learned from affiliate marketing that I want to apply to this business.

Well, this is all the planned topics and experiments that I want to hit on. Feel free to leave a message on anything else you would like to see. Hmm, over a 1155 words. I guess when I said that this post was short… I lied.

A big problem with bum marketing is that it works. It works quite well. Starting out it is an excellent way to make money and it helps to create confidence. And you really do need confidence that this is all going to work for you or you’ll just give up. I’ll acknowledge that point. It teaches a lot of valuable skills and gets things rolling. But that’s not the point. Bum Marketing is not a means to an end in this case. The idea is that you pound out 30 articles a day and you’ll make money. Here is what they don’t tell you…

When You Stop Writing Tons of Articles – You Don’t Make Money

This is the fact that newbies don’t ever get told. I want to make cash online, but I don’t want to be an article writing bitch for the rest of my life to earn it though. I don’t want my labor to be this onetime thing that only gives one return on it.

…but don’t all those articles get you more traffic and more sales?

Honestly? No. The truth is that the traffic isn’t always the purest or the best. Some niches will still get sales at a higher frequency than others based on the traffic, but the vast majority of articles die. That means most of your labor is producing absolutely nothing of value for you.

Sure some of those articles will stick in positions and get a trickle of traffic. The occasional one will rock the top spot of Google and hold it. But they’re typically for niches/keywords that don’t really produce much of any results. I have an article on Buzzle that has 7000 view count and it hasn’t produced a single sale. NOT ONE FUCKIN’ SALE!

The articles that do rank in Google’s top 10 don’t stay there long. If you’re ranking for a decent keyword that really does make money the article will get bumped out. Some other webmaster will out optimize you for the keyword and you lose it. You’re going to be writing 30+ articles a day, so you’re not going to have time to watch the position of your articles nor stop them from being taken over.

What’s this tell you about the articles you put out there? The vast majority of them are going to die and never be seen. Others will get trickle traffic and the quality of that traffic will vary. Lastly, you’ll get the odd one that will rank and get a ton of traffic. Those mega view articles tend to be untapped niches and they’re typically untapped for a reason.

Google Fuckin’ Hates Bum Markers and Will Slap Your ASS!

The big arm of Google is involved in this issue and they’re watching everyone’s link building. Once your site starts getting a ton of links from Ezinearticles it will get suspicious and eventually slap you. All my sites that have had extensive bum marketing linking to them have all been slapped. It doesn’t matter that the vast majority of the links are spread across a hundred different pages on the website. The domain is slapped and the Google love disappears.

…but I thought article directory links were good for SEO?

Horse shit. The SEO value you get from bum marketing is crap. You’re only going to get so much link juice from the big article directories. After so many articles the juice doesn’t come any more and finally the juice becomes absolute toxic in the eyes of Google.

I’ll point out that Yahoo and Bing tend to like this sort of thing. Repetitive linkbacks from authority sites seem to please these two search engines, but the traffic is so damn insignificant.

So what does this all mean?

Bum marketing is short sighted thinking

The vast majority of labor that you poor into following the process is just going to waste. The rate of return is poor and not worth it.

I was stuck in the bum marketing mode for too long because it made money. You’ll reach a point where the money you produce plateaus and you try to figure out how you can get more. So how do you do that as a bum marketer? Instead of writing 30 articles a day, write 40.

Well, that blows.

This is where bum marketing is a trap. You have to keep pumping out the articles or your income will decline and disappear.

When you get right down to it… bum marketing is the McDonald’s work of the internet. You’re a bitch and you work your ass off for something that isn’t going to make you money in a month.

What direction YOU should be going?

I can rant and rave about bum marketing all day, but without a solution it is just pointless. The way that you really make cash online is through leverage. It is your ability to make things that make money over time.

Let’s assume that every hour of labor you put in makes you $1/mth. If you put in 160 hours the first month you’ll make $160. Not much eh? The second month you do the same thing. You’ll make $320.

In the example you’re still making money from your first month of work plus the money you earn from new work. And that is how you have to work.

Bum marketing will make you more money starting out. But will it make you the most money over the long run? When you think about this stuff you realize you’re getting an instant gratification – rather than long term profit growth.

I’m not exactly sure what method I should recommend for you to follow because it really doesn’t matter. You can go with a ton of Adsense Sniper Sites, do product creation or even affiliate marketing. But all of these methods have one common denominator…

Search Engine Optimization for Traffic

That’s the key. It’s the only real golden bullet. Getting traffic from Google is going to give you so much more and ranking for the right keywords are where the profit is at. Think about it. Why write articles for Ezinearticles to cash in? Just look at their page…

Look at all the Adsense blocks there taking all your traffic. Getting a 30% CTR is great, but that means you’re losing 70%, which are probably are probably going to Adsense clicks. The people that click are the ones that are most likely to buy. The ones that do click through to your site are probably smarter users.

That’s an important fact to take down. Most users are fuckin’ idiots and can’t tell the difference between content and ads. If they make it to your link than it is a fluke or they know what they’re doing.

I guess my point is why would you want 30% of the traffic (the crappy 30%) when you could have 100% of it? I’d rather have 100 unique visitors a day landing on my sales page than 30 filtering through someone else’s ads.

It’s just better this way. And despite the fact that it is going to take longer to get some positions on Google, it is something that is worth achieving. If you put the effort you put into 30+ articles a day into market research, link building and making content for your own site you’re going to end up with more money in the long run.

…well 30% is pretty good. A lot of articles I write for my site only gets a little traffic.

That happens, but you want to know something? That tiny trickle traffic that you get is unfiltered directly from a search engine. I find that it converts at a very high rate and does much better than the traffic that filters its way to your site from an article directory.

I want to give another salute out to my Fantasy Football team. Michael Turner is another running back that I have and he had three touchdowns last week. Here’s a video tribute to Michael “The Burner” Turner. I like the music for this song.

Note: I’m going to stop updating my sniper sites earnings every post. I don’t like mixing everything up, so I’ll update whenever I’m talking about sniper sites.

For the longest time I had a very simple philosophy on sales letters, landing pages and any other persuasive types of words. I would try to pick apart what I thought was a good example and learn from it. There is nothing wrong with this type of method because it has made me money for a long time. But there is a huge flaw with it too and it is viewing things from an outside position.

What I mean by that statement is that you’re like an alien watching a hockey game. After a while you’ll understand some basic things like trying to get the puck in the net, but beyond that you think people are acting like irrational fuckin’ idiots.

I’ll pick up on the obvious stuff. I’ll see the statement that says we’re only selling this to the first 100 customers and recognize that it is a concept of scarcity to create urgency in a potential customer. I can pick up on those things. With the average length of a sales letter at 2500 words (not including testimonials, guarantees, and any other boxes) I am missing out on a lot that is buried right in front of my nose.

Active Verbs

Through my research this time I started to pick up on was active verbs. This is a concept that took me some time to figure out because I wasn’t the type of kid that paid attention during English class. It is a subtle difference in the way you use verbs in your sentences. You can either write active verbs or passive verbs. I think I fall under the category of using passive, when active is the more persuasive way to write your copy.

Let me show you subtle this can be:

Mr. Smith is considering my resume. – Active

My resume is being considered by Mr. Smith. – Passive

Do you see how immaterial this is? From an English language standpoint you should be thinking who the fuck cares and that is what I was thinking too. But there is the aspect of selling and making an impact that you must consider when writing. This is one of these points.

Active verbs allow you to make a much larger impact on your reader, but it also gets the point across is less words. From the example I gave the active one has 5 words and the passive has 7. Its two words shorter and you’re thinking big whoop. Well, considering a sales letter is 2500 words you can get more information in. Plus you run the problem of your reader leaving. At least this way you’re getting as much information into their head before they leave.

Stephen King’s ‘-ly’ Adverbs

Yes, I’m taking advice from freakin’ Stephen King. He wrote a book “On Writing” where he talked about these “-ly” adverbs. What was his lesson? They are a plague to your writing. They infest your text like an invasion of ants at a picnic.

After playing around with this idea for a few days I couldn’t believe how often I was using these adverbs. They were in everything I wrote. I’m sure if you dug through all my posts on this site you could pick them out. I like to use the words obviously, probably, basically, easily, etc.

Let’s see a few examples:

Basically all you have to do to make cash online is work hard.

All you have to do to make cash online is work hard.

When you work hard you’ll probably experience more rewards.

When you work hard you’ll experience more rewards.

Do you see, yet again, how immaterial the changes can be? But they all play a huge role in what you’re doing. The points get made in a concrete manner and you do it with less text. You should pick up on those examples as being the ‘-ly’ words that are pure fillers and not needed. Now that I think of it, is basically an adverb?

Let’s see a few adverb examples and replacing them:

The old lady slowly walked down the street.

The old lady inched down the street.

I spoke softly to my girlfriend when she was sick.

I soothed my girlfriend when she was sick.

Do you see the differences here? The impact and image of this should be much more apparent. When I said the old lady slowly walked, you just internalize words and their meanings. When I say the old lady inched down the street you actually see that lady inching her way down the street.

The same is true with the second example. You’re going to internalize the meanings of the word softly, but there will no image with it. When I soothed my girlfriend you have to picture it.

I know what you’re thinking now: Holy shit! I thought this site was going to show me how to make cash online, not some fuckin’ grammar lesson. Yeah, I’m just as surprised as you are.

But there is a point to all of this…

Show Them, Don’t Tell Them

This is one of those frustrating statements you’ll see mentioned when an expert reviews a sales letter. Go to any internet marketing forum that has a copywriting section and look. Anyone looking for a review will be told that.

A lot of the points above fit into that category, in particular replacing the ‘-ly’ adverbs with a much better verb. These are all methods designed to help you show your readers, rather than tell them. Or another way of looking at it, don’t tell them what to think, make them think it (or feel it).

I guess this is enough on copywriting because I have a lot more to learn. While digging around online Wednesday night I found myself spending $80 picking up a few books on copywriting that are considered the bibles of the business.

Here is what I picked up:

• “Tested Advertising Methods” – John Caples ($17.48 CDN)
• “The Adweek Copywriting Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Powerful Advertising and Marketing Copy from One of America’s Top Copywriters” – Joseph Sugarman ($17.51 CDN)
• “The Copywriter’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Copy That Sells” – Robert W Bly ($15.20 CDN)
• “Cash Copy: How to Offer Your Products and Services So Your Prospects Buy Them” – Jeffrey Lant ($19.99 CDN used)

It’ll take me months to dissect, absorb and interpret all the information in these books, but it will give me something to talk about on this site when it comes to things you can purchase. I mentioned somewhere on my earlier blog that I refuse to review products I haven’t gone out and bought (that means I won’t talk about review copies either). Up to this point in my affiliate marketing career I have bought “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” and a membership into the War Room at the Warrior Forum. I guess I now have a list that is 4 points longer.

I feel this is a pretty good investment because selling with your words is very important. Having traffic to read the words is important, but I’ve got that down.

Okay, enough of this.

An Article Experiment

This is something that I haven’t done in a while. My philosophy for online marketing has concluded long ago that bum marketing is a death trap (a future post on this, I promise). I’m saying this with experience too with over 2700 unique articles sitting at EzineArticles and countless others at different directories.

The point of this particular experiment is to determine SEO value of a lot of directories. I think all my readers should recognize that you can only get so much link juice from a site. The first link is worth the most, but as you get more and more, the juice gets weaker and weaker. I’ll go a step further and say the juice gets toxic and hurts your site, but that’s for the future post I’ll talk about.

The objective is to submit one unique article to each of the article directories out there. I think we know that there are thousands of article directories out there aside from the few big ones. I want to see what happens if I get a link back from a few hundred of them. I want to know if article directories are enough for power in the search engines, as long as you anchor your links, use a unique article at each directory and vary the page you’re linking too.

That’s all I’m looking to test out. My breakdown of link backs is going to be split. 33% will go to the domain front page and 66% will go onto inner pages of the site. I will also be varying the anchor text at about the same percentage breakdowns. I’ll get Google slapped if I kept linking with the same anchor text.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this. This week I started into this. I’m 40 directory submissions in. I thought that the hardest part of this would be writing all the unique articles, but it isn’t. The hardest part is digging through and investigating the current directory you’re about to submit too. There’s no point in uploading a unique article to a directory that has their most recent submission listed as June 8 2006. There’s no point in submitting to a site that has popups and other shit. I even submitted to a directory where the admin removed my link from the author box. There are some shady fuckers out there.

I put everything into a spreadsheet, so I could go back and review how things are progressing. There’s nothing to report after 5 days of testing, but I did find one interesting site. I never hear anyone discuss it on forums or anywhere, but my articles get a decent amount of views. It even was pushing some top 10 positions on Google.

I guess if this experiment turns out to be a total failure, I might find some good article directories to submit my articles to.

Sniper Sites

I guess I can give you guys an update on the sniper site experiment. Things this week have been pretty interesting. I had a record setting day this week, which isn’t saying much because it was like $6. But this is the first time I invested labor into Adsense. The impressions from week to week are about the same, which is fine.

I was looking at some of the sites in the first wave and was doing an analysis on their performance. This left me with a small list of a few sites that I’m going to change from Adsense to Amazon. The reason is that the click values they’re getting are pitiful or the CTR isn’t good enough. You’d be surprised how many unrelated sites that show up in Adsense that aren’t even related. What’s annoying is getting 5-10 cent clicks for products that are selling on Amazon for $150.

The odd thing is that I have another site where you can buy the product at Walmart for $15 earning $3 clicks. It makes no fucking sense to me.

Done to the numbers:

Total Invested: $354.20 US

Total Earned: $99.80 US ( $33.69 US last week )

We have to remember that this is an 8 day period, but still above the weekly averages.

That’s not going to happen lol.

The product was created in a pretty decent amount of time. I had 4 energy drinks bought since I expected I would have to work right through the night to get things done. I only needed one drink for the whole project and my latest night was around 1:30am. The main bulk of my work was completed relatively fast and better than I expected. I finished the sales letter today (Sunday) at about 7pm. I want to point out that I finished the “letter”, which means it is a Microsoft Word document.

There were a few important things that I forgot to think of while making this product and obviously they’re a big part of what it takes to make cash online.

Bonus Material

I have to supply some sort of bonus material for the product because that is a big part of selling. I’m sure that you’ve seen the infomercials on television where they say “we’ll double the order absolutely free”. You have to always create more value.

There is no way in hell that I can get a full product done, with a sales letter. And have to go and write all the bonus material up. There’s just no way of achieving it. I’m sure I could find some junk PDF that I could give full of affiliate links and that would save a lot of time, but I need good things. I need good products that meet the specific needs of my potential customers.

This is a very time consuming thing to do and it is one I totally forgot in the product creation process. Obviously I’m going to have to invest a lot more time working on these bonus ebooks.

Testimonials

I understood that I was going to need them, but since I thought I’d be submitting this for approval on Monday, I totally spaced on the fact that I’m going to need to get testimonials. This really isn’t the difficult part because I can get them. It just takes people a little time to get back to you since they’re going to have to read the guide and form an opinion.

I guess it is good in some ways since I will have a little more time to get the bonus books done while I wait to hear back about my testimonials.

The Sales Page

I have the sales “letter” done, which is currently a .docx file. Turning that into a webpage isn’t that simple. I’m going to predict that doing it will take roughly 5 more hours of my time. First I have to get all the text onto the page the way I want. That means proper spacing, alignment, headers, table, boxes, etc. This will take up probably the least amount of time, but still a huge pain in the ass.

The other overlooked issue is the graphics. I don’t claim to be a whiz with this sort of thing, but I’m not an idiot either. I can put out things that don’t look amazing or look bad. It’s just another time consuming headache to get right. Making an ebook cover can be a pain in the ass too. All of this little stuff adds up in time that you have to put in before you can launch a product.

But there’s still more when it comes to a sales page. You need other important pages like Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Contact, etc. All of these are pretty straight forward and you should be able to find a template somewhere on the internet to use. But there is also the affiliate page. I find this page a huge pain the ass to create since you’re expected to put in all this shit to help. Personally, all I want to do is give the affiliate link and where they should sign up with the affiliate program. I don’t want to teach people how to do basic internet marketing. I don’t want to make stupid banners (hello! they don’t work).

I never use the affiliate resources and I make plenty of money affiliate marketing, so other people shouldn’t have to either. Well, people that know what they’re doing don’t need it. The only thing I care about as an affiliate is conversion rates and commissions. That’s where I want to bust my balls to help affiliates.

All of this extra stuff is just another block of time that I will need to invest.

How Did I work This Weekend?

Well, I was planning on getting some solid work done on Friday night. I wasn’t planning on starting until Friday evening because during the day I have my regular work to do. I was just too exhausted in the evening to get anything meaningful done. I work really hard through the week at this stuff and I get up pretty early to go to the gym each morning. By the end of the week I need a good sleep.

Instead of getting a lot of work done on Friday night I just worked on the table of contents for the product. Basically the idea behind doing this first is to have an outline for you to follow while you’re working. It just makes the entire product come together. If you’re curious how I come up with up a good TOC, I just go to Amazon and find a book on the topic I’m writing. All of them have this feature where you can view some of the pages in the book. You can take a peak at the table of contents for a lot of different books and come up with the best topics that you’re going to have to hit.

The idea is to change things from writing a very large ebook to writing a lot of articles for various topics.

On Saturday morning I started into the book. I spent the entire day all the way up to 1:30am working on this. All that time involved researching, digging up information and writing coherent information for the product creation. I was pretty happy with the way things went with this. I learned a lot of little tricks that helped me get information in a much easier manner. I was under the impression that I was going to have a very difficult time finding information on this topic. I’m not going to say anything until I launch, but when I announce the niche you’ll see where the difficulty lies.

On Sunday I was going to start into the sales letter. The good thing about the sales letter is that it isn’t as long as the ebook, so there is a lot less writing. The only difference is that you really have to pay attention to what you’re writing and why you’re writing it because you’re selling. I started out by creating a table of contents for the sales letter. Of course specific things need to be hit when you’re writing the letter. There has to be a section for building your credibility and authority as an author.

I did find myself reading parts of Robert B. Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. This is a really good book to have. It is considered a classic by marketers and you’re going to hear it being recommended by copywriters. The book is only $12 and it’s like the bible of marketing. Not only is it jam pack full of studies, but it’s one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. I’m going to have to sit down and do a comprehensive review of this book. You’ve probably seen me marketing it on the original AMXpert.

Eventually I worked through everything and got what I hope is a decent sales letter. Unfortunately I’m not experienced enough with these sales letters to know whether I did a good job or not, but I guess time will tell.

I guess that’s all I’ll write today. It’s just over 1400 words, so it is my shortest post on here in a while. I guess you guys need a little break from all the text. I’m watching my fantasy football team right now. I’m having a really good game, but the person I’m playing is having a really lucky ass game. It’s annoying when they win based on a lucky ass defense getting two defensive touchdowns. Here’s a salute to the best player on my team, Pierre Thomas.

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.

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.

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.