Site Finder Pro Finished (5 Months In The Making)

So I spoke with the guys at Flippa and got permission to create a software tool designed to help make the research process on Flippa faster. This isn’t a due diligence replacement, but it does provide a bunch of data about a website without having to do more in depth digging. Here’s the sales / demo video which covers a little bit more about why I created this tool:

Site Finder Pro Is Opening May 17th at 8:00 AM EST

If you’d like to be notified when the product releases at it’s lowest price join the email list below:

How I Recommend Using The Tool

Beyond just looking at active auctions, determining how the site makes money, where it gets links from and just saving time on research (which is the primary purpose of the tool). I’m also going to be viewing auctions that have ended, then researching that URL to see what other sites the person may own and contacting them about sites they haven’t put on auction yet. (There are a few other tactics I’ll be employing as well)

Overall there are a lot of ways to buy websites and this tool is just one solution towards helping you speed up the time in evaluating websites worth buying.

Let me know what you think of it and if you’d like to buy it feel free to join the email list above to be notified first.

P.S. I’ll be selling this on the Warrior Forum first. I know some people think the forum is cheesy at times, but it’s a really good way for me to be able to release the software projects that I’ve been working on (in this case – 5 months now) at the lowest price possible. After that I’ll be putting it onto Clickbank.

P.S.S. It should go without saying that I’ll be documenting some of my Flippa buys here on the blog so stay tuned for those as well.

How I Made Over $10,000 Teaching People How To Play Halo

Yes, that’s right – I just tallied up the numbers and I’ve made over $10,000 teaching people how to play Halo. I’ve written before about how Halo is a large part of how I was able to build an online business in the first place, but I wanted to share an update on my income stats for Halo.

$3,000+ via Paypal From Halo 1 On 1 Lessons

When I first started making money online I was running video game forums. After getting up to 500,000 page views per month on my top forum and only hitting $500 a month with Adsense I knew I had to reevaluate how I could make some extra income from my online endeavors if I wanted to leave my job. One of the ideas I had was to try leverage the fact that I was well known in the Halo space and genuinely really good at the game (still am). So I decided to start selling Halo lessons at $50 an hour. At the time I was still working a day job that paid me a lot less than $50 an hour so I thought it would be a good way to generate some extra income. The strategy worked pretty well and for about a year I was making some decent extra money for the amount of “work” I had to put in playing Halo. The only problem is that because I was working by the hour for the money Halo started to feel like a job and so I grew tired of it stopped doing lessons. So I decided that when the next Halo game came out (Halo Reach) that I would create a video training course and put everything I knew about Halo into these videos instead of doing one on one lessons.

$7,000 From Clickbank BecomeAProGamer Sales

After closing down my lessons I simply filmed videos of myself playing the new Halo game with my friends (just the screen of course) put together the product, put it up on Clickbank and did some minor affiliate emails. Since that time I’ve generated $7,000 passively from sales of my Halo training course:

Income dip in 2012 now that Halo Reach is old. Halo 4 is due out in November 2012 though.

The actual creation process of the product was relatively easy and I documented that in more detail here. Half the reason why I created this course was to prove that you can pretty much make money doing anything online so I could write about it on this blog. If you weren’t already familiar with my story then I bet you didn’t know that people would be willing to pay $50 for a one hour lesson on Halo or that hundreds more people would be willing to pay for a video training course on how to get better at Halo.

Realistically I’d probably have been able to sell even more of my training course had Halo not taken a dive in popularity following the release of the Call of Duty games, but things should pick up again when Halo 4 comes out. I haven’t decided if it’s worth it to film a new update to the training course for the game because I’m making even more money from my main business than I was when I filmed the videos. Overall I’ve really put very little time into this project and at least from Clickbank earned over $7,000 in passive income from it that’s not too bad.

Overall – Have You Thought Of Creating An Info Product?

This mini case study just goes to show that the field outside of internet marketing is pretty wide open especially if you were focused on just one niche. Remember, I created this product in my spare time (when I’m not running my main business) and after setting up the sales page never updated it again. I didn’t even contact affiliates until I had one affiliate who sent me a noticeable amount of sales. In fact, I know a lot more money is made than “just $7,000” in the video game training niche because I’ve spoken with some of the other product creators AND that’s just one niche.

Have you thought of creating an information product before?

Spencer is not the only one as I’ve seen banned as numerous other bloggers were banned by Adsense as well including Zac Johnson, Eric Gati, Ghauer Chaudhry and a few of my friends who don’t write blogs but were earning thousands a month with Adsense were banned as well. Pamela does a good job of highlighting the frustrating aspects of working with Adsense to restore an account so I’d like to focus the discussion on something else:

Can you have too many websites?

For the past several years I’ve been making money with websites I’ve gone with a mix between smaller niche websites and larger authority websites as a way to spread out my risk. In 2011 and more so in 2012 I’ve also been buying websites as well. Right now I have a few dozen websites and rather than focusing on quantity at this stage in my business I’m trying to focus heavily on building high quality websites (for example, I just finished software development on a website that cost me roughly $20,000 to complete – not sure yet if I’ll be revealing it or not). The reason why I’ve been shifting towards higher quality websites is simply because of the huge potential upside a large website can bring both in terms of it’s monthly cash flow as well as the cash it can bring from selling it. The way I look at it is that although I could continue building my niche website income up I’ve always been too risk averse to focus on just one thing. This aversion to focusing on one strategy has downsides as well, because if I were to focus on just one business model I’d be much better at putting systems in place to automate that business model.

The real question to consider with building too many websites is to decide if Google has specifically targeted Adsense account holders that have a lot of niche websites in their account to manually ban because of their belief (unfounded or not) that niche websites provide less value for advertisers (or whatever reason they’re justifying for the ban). Whether or not that is true it just means that one solid strategy for niche websites would be to just focus on niche websites that generate income from Adsense for only a small portion of your portfolio. That way you could have an account with Adsense for 35 websites, but then have another 65 websites monetized via ShareASale, Commission Junction, Linkshare, Amazon and other affiliate networks. Niche doesn’t have to just = Adsense.

How much risk do you want?

Ultimately you just need to decide what type of strategy you want to pursue. You can start with niche websites to begin with and build your income up to thousands of dollars a month and then move onto some larger website projects or you can try and do both niche and authority websites at the same time (which is what I’ve done) or you can even just focus on a small handful of websites. I’ve also met over a dozen successful website entrepreneurs who’ve built a stable six figure income off of only one website.

My 2012 Plan Hasn’t Changed

At the beginning of this year I outlined my goals for 2012 and the pillars of my business I would be focusing on which includes building new websites, buying websites and creating software/information products (with a bigger emphasis on software). For the foreseeable future Google will continue to be around and remain an integral traffic source for niche and authority style websites alike. Whatever game you decide to play whether it’s the niche site game or the authority site game (or both) it’s important to remember that you really need to dive into a specific strategy if you want to make it work and be willing to invest your time to get there. That’s ultimately what allowed me to make Amazon niche / authority style websites to work for me along with anything else I’ve been successful with.

Unfortunately Google keeps the reasons for bans like this a secret, so you ultimately need to decide for yourself what these bans mean and keep it in mind as you work towards building a job replacing online income.

Have your plans changed for the year? If so – how?

Spencer earns thousands of dollars from Adsense with his niche websites and I’m sure you’ll learn a lot of great advice from him during this podcast.

After a few month’s hiatus the podcast is now back (I’ll explain the hiatus in a future blog post.)

Update: Shortly after publishing this podcast Spencer got banned from Adsense! I’ll be addressing this in a future blog post…

Items Discussed In This Episode:

Google Adsense
Long Tail Pro
Unique Article Wizard
Build My Rank
TextBroker
Niche Website Theme
Niche Pursuits

How To Get The Podcast:

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via RSS to get future episodes automatically

Download the podcast MP3 here (Right Click + Save As)

When You’re Done Listening To The Podcast Please Review It

When you’re done listening please leave me an honest rating or review on iTunes – I really appreciate it and it helps to get more people to listen to the podcast. Currently each podcast episode receives well over 7,000 downloads and I’d love to get that up to 10,000+ downloads!

Why The SEO Sky Is not Falling:

No matter what the future holds – Google still has to collect and rely on external information to determine rankings

The way we SEO as it is today may look a lot different years from now, but the simple truth is that Google still has to look at a variety of external factors such as links, social signals etc. to determine how authoritative a website is and whether or not it should rank for a keyword or not and these external signals will always be possible to game for at least the next several years.

So when Google does something like go through and deindexes a blog network like Build My Rank all that tells me is that building links with blog networks is/was an effective strategy (time to build my very own private blog network lol) and serve to remind me that Google really is just an algorithm that can be beat with a little bit of work and effort. So now that they’ve gone and slapped down one strategy (and it’s not really even “dead”) what should you do?

Balanced Link Building Has Always Been The Best Strategy

I was in the process of doing a case study on link building using just blog networks (again just to prove you can build ranks with only blog networks) continuing the case study with just blog networks isn’t the best idea because this most recent attack by Google has shown that relying on one link building strategy isn’t a good idea (something I already knew, but for sake of controlling variables wanted to just use blog networks). The best strategy for building links has always been building links from a variety of sources. If you look at some of the recent niche site blogger updates on how their sites fared you’ll see those who weren’t hurt the most are people that didn’t rely on just one link building method like Spencer from Niche Pursuits.

What I’m Specifically Doing

When it comes to building links I’m specifically going to focus on some guest posting, some article marketing, some blog commenting, some social book marking and some profile link building. Before you ask, I don’t have a magic ratio of link building for various types of links (nor do I think that would be entirely helpful – or maybe it would help to have a general starting point – let me know in the comments below). What Google looks for is links that are built unnaturally so if you rely on any one specific source for link building you’re putting yourself at a higher risk of being hurt (like in the most recent targeted hit on private blog networks). So it only makes sense to build websites and subsequently links using a variety of link building methods (all of the strategies I’ve mentioned are scalable and can be easily outsourced).

I personally hate link building (boring), so even with guest posting I’m not doing that myself. I’ll pay someone to write the article, put my own link in it and then pay someone to find a website to put it on.

An Alternative Strategy – Authority Website Model

If all of these strategies around building links so that you can (in some cases) rank a site above others when it shouldn’t be there in the first place sound too tedious, hard or boring to you there is another strategy to consider – building authority websites.

An authority website would be something that would take a lot more time and effort to build because the goal is to actually be the best in your niche (or at least strives towards being the best). This is another strategy that I’ve used and it can be extremely profitable as well.

The biggest question to ask yourself is what can hold your interest longest?

1. Do you like the idea of building quick websites, playing the SEO game, outsourcing link building, testing new link strategies and constantly building new sites?

2. Do you prefer to build a handful of websites with the effort to be the best within your niche?

I’ve done both strategies and fluctuate between the various strategies I use based on what interests me at the time. I will still do some link building case studies since it’s clear people need help with this, but I need to re-think how I execute them.

Let me know what you would like to see in the comments below

My Donation Goal:

One of my goals was to donate at least $35,000 to church / charity. One charity that I’m a huge fan of is Charity Water and because today is World Water Day and I’d been planning to buy a well for a while now I thought today was the perfect day to buy my first well for $5,000.

(MyCharityWater campaign page)

What a $5,000 well provides:

Clean water to 250 people and more great stuff for the community it serves (see more details here)

World Water Day Statistics / Why You Should Donate:

Almost 1,000,000,000 people don’t have clean drinking water (Yah that’s 1 billion and I agree damn that’s a lot of people). So as I sit in my comfy office chair and write this blog post while drinking from a glass of water that I only had to walk 10 steps to fill it annoys me when we (especially as Americans) complain about so many things in life when we don’t realize how good we have it (I toss myself in there of course because in no way am I saying that I’m without blame). In fact it reminds me of this hilarious clip from Louis CK that should resonate with everyone:

I just think it’s important for us to remember that if you even have access to the internet and are reading this blog post, you’re better off then the almost 1,000,000,000 other people who don’t even have water. In any case, I don’t want you get the impression that I only wrote this blog post to toot my own horn and say oh look what I did. I wrote this blog post because I made a public goal about my income / donations and so I thought it best to update you, but what I’d really like is that as you finish reading this blog post and recognize (as I constantly try to remind myself) just how great you have it.

Donate To Charity Water Here

Now donate some money for water today. The reason why I’m a big fan of Charity Water is because 100% of your donation goes towards funding water projects (private donors cover the administration costs). So donate below and remember how awesome life is for you compared to nearly a billion other people who don’t even have clean water to drink.

Donate Here

P.S. I’ll get back to business with some more blog posts relating to online marketing soon.

How To Increase Earnings Without Increasing Traffic:

Update: Webinar replay removed. We will be re-opening the theme for sale in late April

Sign up to get on the list for when it opens again here.

If you have any questions about the theme feel free to post in the comments below – thanks!

P.S. In a few days I’ll be making another cool announcement (not a new product or anything but just an update on one of my goals for the year) so be on the lookout for that.

We’re going to be talking about how to maximize earnings with niche websites and specifically will cover these three topics in great detail:

1. How niche website design can help (or hurt) your earnings
2. How to select the best ad layouts to maximize click through rates
3. How to properly use colors in ads and design to increase income

On this webinar we’ll also be finally releasing our new WordPress theme that helps to address these issues and solve many other problems that plague niche website creation. Altogether we’ve been working on this project for literally 6 months and have spent thousands of dollars on the theme development, the past several months testing internally and have had roughly a dozen beta testers helping to craft and refine the theme as well.

This will be an information packed webinar showcasing some actionable advice on how to improve your existing niche websites, as well as, an opportunity to get our new WordPress theme at the lowest price it will ever be offered for so don’t make sure you miss out.

Sign Up For The Free Webinar Here

P.S. If you want to beta test any of my future software projects, be sure to like my Facebook page as that’s where I post requests for beta testers.

P.S.S. The theme really is awesome. I’ve mentioned it’s existence in past blog posts and Spencer and I are excited to finally make it available on the webinar.