1. Why did you decide for SBI?
Well, let’s go back to 2007. This is when it all started. In summer 2007 I decided  to climb Mount Kilimanjaro to experience the ultimate feeling of freedom and being one with nature.

When I finally made it to the summit in January 2008 I knew this feeling of freedom in all its aspects was something I wanted to strive for in my life. The journey started…

At that time I was already working in the online marketing field and by today I still work as a consultant. I thought about building an international online business myself, but was not sure how and what.

I knew I wanted to go international, although I am living in The Netherlands. The English spoken target market is way bigger than the Dutch!

After researching dozens of topics online I knew SBI could be a fit! Great testimonials and a logical model (Content -> Traffic -> Presell -> Monetize) made me sign up back in April 2008.

I will come back to this later, but I actually started my website Marathon-training-tips.com in November 2010 and paid around $ 750 subscription fees for nothing. But, no regrets!

Why I waited so long? I changed my job, moved to another place, met a great woman… Let’s say a lot of excuses not to start.

2. Did you know what you wanted to write about or did you have to find a niche? How did you decide?
Yes, I had a couple of ideas but which one was the best? I was not sure so I decided to search the internet for an experienced SBI’er.

In summer 2010 I came in contact with a Site Build It Certified Webmaster and decided to work together in the first phase of my website.

I decided my topic after a thorough niche finding interview. The first selection contained:
-    Peanut allergy (As you might guess I am allergic to that )
-    Social Media (A topic that I thought was really booming)
-    Running (Started running in 2004 after a bet with one of my friends in college)

Running and more specific Marathon Training was a logical choice. Social Media was too broad and competitive for a first website. Peanut Allergy didn’t have enough potential and Marathon Training is my passion and has lots of (monetization) potential.

Over the last 10 years I read dozens of books and information from other resources so I consider my knowledge of running (related aspects) to be quite good! And of course I have a lot of running experience myself!

3. How did you progress?
The first step to take was making a blueprint of all the possible keywords that were not too competitive, had good value and thereby lots of potential. We used the brainstormer in SBI and laid the foundation for my website. A blueprint of 150 keywords was the result.

My website and the first 10 pages of content were a fact in December 2010. I learned to work with SBI by clearly following the Action Guide and just DOING it! Besides that I read many, many articles online.

Major things that I remember:
-    November 2010: I registered my domain
-    December 2010: I wrote my first pages
-    July 2011: I reached 100 unique visitors per day
-    November 2011: I reached 300 unique visitors per day
-    End of 2011: I reached the 100 pages mark and my trust in building freedom was getting higher
-    January 2012: I reached  500 unique visitors per day and I received my first check $$$ (I have a lot of monetization ideas, but this was not my first priority, I know the money will come)

4. Can you share a few tips of what really worked well for getting more traffic?
Great question Tomaz, let me post 5 tips:

Tip #1: quality over quantity
It is better to build one very well researched page than two pages you wrote in less than an hour. The relevancy of your content and how appealing it is to your visitors will determine your success.

For example, if you write a great article that interests your visitors there is a huge chance that they will share it with their friends / on the internet. Automatic link building -> KA-CHING!

Bad pages will get a high bounce and lower ranking in the search engines.

Tip #2: keep building over time
In my experience it is better to build 1 or 2 pages a week instead of one week 2 or 4 and the other week no pages at all.

You will gradually feed the engines and visitors with more fresh, great content and establish a steady presence online. Of course it is no problem if you don’t publish new content every week but you got my idea. Keep feeding the engines, especially in your way to the first 100 – 200 pages.

Tip #3: establish relationships online
Over the last year I built a network of people who can help me succeed with my website/business.

For example, I am a regular contributor to other blogs. In return for interesting content I receive a few free links back to my website. In need of guest blogs? Try one of these 10 searches in Google:

“looking for guest bloggers”
“Write for Us”
“Submit a Guest Post”
“Submit Guest Post”
“Become a Guest Blogger”
“This guest post was written”
“About the Author”
inurl:contribute
inurl:guest-posts
inurl:guest-post-guidelines

Combine the search query above with your niche and I am sure you will find many opportunities for getting good links.

Tip #4: leverage the power of social media
Define a stategy for social media. The potential of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+ … is enormous but don’t start without a clear strategy.

Research the internet to get a great idea for these places or simply visit the SBI Forums and read other success stories and try it yourself!

Tip #5: there are no competitors, only friends
It may sound weird, but think about the advantages instead of disadvantages of having other websites in your niche.

If they sell great products you can probably become a reseller (through affiliate programs). If both websites supplement each other’s content, you can make a link exchange. The opportunities are endless. In every niche there is enough space for another great website!

Bonus tip #6: do what you are the best and outsource the rest
Think big, act big. On almost every aspect of internet marketing I found a partner online.

I know I can write content, build links, publish messages in social media land and I can go on for a while. The problem is time. I am combining this online adventure with a fulltime job, so I decided to outsource some activities to speed things up.

Among others I have good experience with Site Build It Certified Webmasters, Fiverr.com and NeedAnArticle.com.

What you can do is first build an online presence yourself. At the time you earn some dollars you can decide to reinvest this in outsourcing activities. This way you can grow your business faster.

5. Your plans for the future?
I’d like to grow my marathon training blog towards a successful business and probably build one or two more in the coming years to secure a steady income.

My ultimate goal: It sounds great, but isn’t simple: becoming free!

Why? I don’t mind working for a boss to a certain extent, but I want to get more control over my life in terms of when and from where to work, when to go on Holidays and for how long, when to visit friends and family and I can continue for hours.

You know, current economy isn’t stable and the future is insecure for many people. I am very determined to succeed and in the future I hope to help others achieve the same!

I wish you all the best and you can always contact me if you have any questions.

Cheers,
Paul

But how to do that is often explained very differently and also very confusingly.

So let’s simplify this is as much as possible.

I’ll be using the SBI’s Brainstormer (the alternative is Wordtracker) and Google Adwords to show you how to build a keyword list in 4 easy steps.

1.    Determine your main theme (site concept) keyword

What is the key keyword of your site? What is the crux of the information you want to share?

This keyword is typically a one or two word keyword (rarely three word).

It can be:
-    tennis, golf
-    barcelona, london
-    digital photography, home theater
-    horror movies, birthday cakes
-    vegan food, baby food recipes
-    herbal remedies, acne
-    home decorating, cleaning tips
-    etc.

2.    Select good keywords from the initial vertical Brainstorm of your main keyword

Let’s choose the example of digital photography. A vertical Brainstorm – sorted by demand – looks like this:

Your goal now is to start building the blueprint of your main site. You’re going to build a small foundation on which you will add more related keywords later.

In my opinion, it’s good to start building your site around one main theme so that when search engines first find your site they know exactly what it is about.

SO what are good keywords?

Based on SBI Brainstormer numbers, I typically select Tier 2 keywords with demand over 1000 and supply below 1000 and Tier 3 keywords with demand over 300 and supply below 500.

This is of course just guidelines – and not rules. Use common sense to deviate from these numbers…

3.    Find related (seed) keywords with Google Adwords

You will need to add more keywords to your blueprint, but as I mentioned before, once you start building your site, start with keywords derived from your main (initial) vertical Brainstorm. (Step 1)

What you need to do now is to find keywords that are tightly related to your main theme.

Login to Google Adwords and go to Keyword Tool (under Tools and Analysis):

Enter your main keyword, uncheck “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” (that is basically a vertical brainstorm if you check the box), Locations should be set to All.

Do a search and something like this will show:

As you can see, the search results start with keywords that include digital photography – which is what you already have from your initial vertical brainstorm in the Brainstormer.

We need to find other related keywords. This is very easy to do – under “Exclude terms” enter your main keyword and click the “+” button.

You will now remove your main keyword from results and see only other related terms. By default, these keywords are sorted by Relevance.

That’s good because we want to see the most relevant keywords to our main keyword based on what Google believes is the most relevant.

I selected some of the keywords that would make the most sense regarding my topic – although all keywords here are good.

You need to go down through this list and write down (in Notepad) ALL keywords that make sense when it comes to the main site concept of your site.

So for example, if you want to teach about digital photography on your site, you’ll want to use the keywords I selected but not keywords like canon cameras or fine art photos or camera.

Find at least 5 to 10 main keywords. If there are much more, choose just the  5-10 most relevant now.

4.    Do vertical Brainstorms on ALL related keywords and complete the blueprint

Now you need to do vertical Brainstorm (in SBI Brainstormer again) on ALL these 5-10 related seed words that you found and select good keywords based on demand and supply numbers.

Once you have this full list of keywords, fill in your basic blueprint by adding more T2 and more T3 keywords / pages.

For example, I did vertical brainstorms on photography tutorial, photography course, learning photography, photo classes and camera lessons.

(Since MKL holds only 1000 keywords, you’ll may have to delete some keywords after each brainstorm so that you make space for more – typically I delete all keywords with demand lower than 200 and supply higher than 3000.)

After applying the filter of demand over 300 and supply below 1000 I got 20 more keywords that are tightly related to my main keyword / theme.

If I repeat the process with other keywords from the previous step in Google Adwords, I can build a list of hundreds more related keywords.

Now it’s just a matter of common sense and logic how you’ll position them in the blueprint.

SUMMARY

While there’s a lot of text above to explain the process (almost 800 words) it really boils down to 4 simple steps:

1.    Determine your main keyword

2.    Do a vertical Brainstorm, select good keywords and build your initial T1-T2-T3 blueprint

3.    Find related keywords with Google Adwords by researching your main keyword and excluding it from results

4.    Select most relevant keywords from the list, do vertical Brainstorms on them, select good keywords and expand your blueprint

Ok, maybe there are more than 4 steps but generally it comes down to 4 main tasks you’ll be doing.

You may be wondering – what about my T1 keyword? I’ve explained before how you should optimize the homepage…

It rarely is more simple than this – but sometimes there’s a topic like Anguilla where almost all keywords in the blueprint are based on this main seed word…

One more exception to this method – in case your main keyword is very broad –like tennis…

If you research tennis in Google Adwords keyword tool and exclude tennis from results, you’ll get very few related keywords.

In that case it’s better to enter A FEW two word keywords for the initial search like tennis instruction, tennis lessons, tennis tips, tennis serve and so on.

Experiment and see what works best for your particular case. What’s important is that you know how to use Google Adwords for keyword research and how it can show you tons of related keywords if you use it correctly.

It is human nature to believe that current trends, especially favorable ones that help us, will continue forever.

John Mauldin, from his book Endgame.

The above quote from the book Endgame is written in the context of the recent global financial crisis where one of the fundamental root causes of the crisis was the belief that real estate prices will increase forever.

Sure, it sounds stupid when you read that right now but when you’re “in the game” and you’re benefiting from such rising prices (by trading stocks, capitalising from increases in real estate, etc.), your smart, logical mind loses the battle with the emotional, hedonistic mind which just wants to enjoy the bliss and doesn’t want to be interrupted by negative thoughts about the future.

As I was looking at many sites affected by Google Panda algorithms in 2011, this same quote came to my mind. And not surprisingly – the graph of affected sites looks very similar to the stock market crash graph…

Here’s why so many websites were reduced to ashes:

Reason #1: Believing that the current trend will continue forever.

Some types of websites were working for a while and while it’s NOW very obvious that these websites are REALLY NOT that good, webmasters (we) actually believed that this was going to work forever.

We did not want to hear our logical mind telling us that it’s not good enough to work for the next 10 years. As long as it works today (“I can see my earnings, so it works! I have proof!”) – it will work all the time.

Reason #2: Energy conservation (survival instinct)

One part of human nature, or actually the nature of all living beings, is the survival instinct – and by that I am referring to survival by energy conservation.

All animals instinctively conserve energy their whole life.

They move only when they have to …  when they have to eat, find food, find a mate, go to the bathroom and teach their cubs how to hunt. Young animals also play a lot but that´s also a natural instinct that helps them develop hunting skills.

A biologist would add a few more details but I think you get the point.

If animals are not hungry, in danger, are hunting, or mating, they DON’T MOVE. They don’t do anything – they just “are”. They stand and breathe, they lie down and simply breathe or they sleep.

We have the same system in place. Our natural tendency is to conserve energy.

Some like to call this lazyness but in fact it’s just mother nature looking for the MINIMUM investment of energy in order to get the MOST OUTPUT.

The “most output” of course differs for every individual. For some it’s just having enough food (of any kind) so as not to be hungry and to sit on a sofa and switch TV channels.

For someone else the most output is striving to provide for their kids without having to ask for help from a spouse.

Whatever the case, subconsciously we are programmed to use as little energy as possible in order to get what we want.

This subconscious programming has caused webmasters (us) to build websites that required minimum invested energy to get the most benefit.

Of course, that approach was successful – but only in the short term. In fact, we can always find shortcuts to get the best result with the least amount of effort.

Except that this approach works only until Google changes the algorithm. Then you’re back to square one.

Problem #3 – Google Panda algorithm doesn’t give us immediate feedback

If I am learning to drive a car, then I get immediate feedback on anything I do. If I turn the steering wheel slightly too much to the left, the car goes IMMEDIATELY to the left.

This causes me to CORRECT immediately and adjust. This type of immediate feedback helps me learn very fast and I learn to drive the car correctly and safely.

In tennis, your goal is to hit a certain target and with every shot you make, you can see where the ball lands and you can make adjustments – longer, shorter, more to the left, more to the right.

You get immediate feedback and you can adjust quickly and learn how to hit the ball the right way quite fast.

With Google Panda periodic updates, you DO NOT get immediate feedback about what you’re doing wrong!

One day things are working well, the next day you wake up in Google Hell.

So what happened this year to thousands of webmasters (and what will continue to happen) is the deadly combination of:

• human nature – believing that when things go well they will go well forever;
• survival instinct – our tendency to expend the least amount of work needed to be put into a website that makes money
• Google Panda algorithm not giving immediate feedback when you do something wrong – but being applied suddenly without any warning

The end result?

Tons of poor websites that were doing fine until (insert a Panda date here) – and stopped getting much Google traffic after that date.

How To Become Panda Proof

Is there a way to avoid this massacre again? Here’s what you should do:

1. Get yourself a Panda punch t-shirt and wear it often. It will keep reminding you of what you’re up against.

If you “fall asleep” and don’t do the following 3 steps, Panda will slap you again.

Promise yourself now, that if you get Panda slapped again, you’ll wear the Panda Killing t-shirt for the whole week without changing it.

And yes, you´ll have to sleep in it too.

2. Be aware of your mind’s tendency to be overly optimistic. If things are going well, that doesn’t mean that they will go on forever.

It just means that at this point in time, Google’s current algorithm ranks your website well. That’s all.

3. Be aware of your natural instinct that always wants to conserve energy.

The survival instinct is crucial for animals (except pets ) which are in a constant battle of survival – the food is scarce and they may be hunted down and eaten.

The same survival instinct was crucial for humans 50,000 years ago in the African savannas when food was scarce. (It still is for most African people.)

Now food is not scarce and we are in no danger of dying from hunger (at least us lucky ones in the western world).

Therefore the survival instinct doesn’t apply to you any more – so ignore it.

Yes, you don’t want to become a workaholic – there’s always a balance you need to find – but there’s also no real danger of dying because of loss of energy.

4. Be aware that Google’s Panda algorithm does not give you immediate feedback if you do something wrong.

Instead of waiting to be Google slapped again before making improvements on your site, know that it is possible that your website is not really the best it can be.

Action Steps

If you’re really aware of the above factors, a simple question lingers in your mind:

Is this website good enough to pass Google Panda’s scrutiny and succeed in the long term?

By good enough I mean the quality of content, quality of design and if the site is easy to navigate and is user friendly.

But worrying every day if your site is good enough won’t get you anywhere. You’ll just be tweaking small details all the time instead of taking on bigger projects that really make a difference in the long term.

Critically assessing your site in comparison to the top dogs in your niche every 6 months is a much better plan.

That’s when you should ask yourself these questions:

Did I do the best I could?

Is this the maximum potential of my capability?

Is this something that I can show to the experts in my field and be proud of?

With this kind of thinking awareness you’ll shift from the subconscious drive to work with shortcuts and from the blind belief that everything will be good forever – to creating something that will be successful in the long term.

The best way to assess your website is not on your own though.

You’re too much in love with your site. You treat your site the same way as a grandmother treats her granddaughter – too lenient!

Instead, do it with a group of people to whom you promise a free drink for every mistake, error or poor thing they find on your website.

The more poor stuff (poorly written content, poorly presented content, confusing navigation, confusing pages, confusing tools, …) they find, the more drinks you owe them.

If you catch them being nice when evaluating your site, they owe you a drink.

Schedule these meetings every 6 months and you’ll never hear from Panda again.

Summary

It is actually very likely that now that you’ve finished reading this blog post you’ll actually agree and see that all this makes sense, but in the long term, your mind’s tendency to be overly optimistic and your survival instinct that always looks for shortcuts will eventually take over again.

Open your calendar now and mark two dates in 2012 where you’ll critically assess your site with a group of friends (who promise not to be nice).

Do it now.

Anguilla is a somewhat deserted place – it caters to people who want to get away from hustle and bustle. It also caters to people who look for luxury vacations.

So there’s not much to do on Anguilla – and that’s why it was so cool to be there.

We simply stayed around the pool (or in it) with a few drinks and had some great laughs, or we went together to a restaurant and spent the evening chatting about life as an online business owner, how we hate Pandas or how to A/B split test which rum punch tastes better.

And escaping from cold Europe or US and jumping into a Caribbean ocean with SBI friends is also something to remember…

Of course, we also had the honor of meeting Ken Evoy, listen to his thoughts on dealing with Panda and what the future of Internet is likely to be.

The BBQ at Ken’s place on Saturday was the pinnacle of the Anguilla conference.

The food was great and the excitement was almost palpable as so many people met Ken for the first time and had to chance to chat with him and Janice and express how much it means to all of us that they put so much effort in helping us succeed.

The conference presenters did a fantastic job of preparing their material and presenting it in a clear and concise way – although Antoinette’s A/B and Multivariate testing presentation caused some brain cells to overheat at some points… (Could someone please send me a pic of Antoinette presenting? Thanks)

Each presentation included some golden nugget of information which will change how I approach certain areas of an online business like preselling better, building more credibility, being more effective, knowing how to split test Adsense and much more.

The full conference agenda can be found on the SBI Conferences website…

Kudos to Kim and Tom for organizing the conference and making it run smoothly from start to finish.

If you’ve never been to an SBI conference before, I can’t really explain what you’re missing. You have to experience it.

It’s not just about the knowledge the presenters share (for free), it’s the feeling of meeting people who are on the same wavelength and on the same journey towards freedom that really deeply connects you with everyone you meet at the conference.

You know that when you sit behind your laptop and build those darn links again that so many of your friends are doing the same battling their way towards freedom and independence – and this gives you that extra motivation and energy that eventually helps you succeed.

The 2012 SBI Conferences have been announced too – end of April or first part of May in New York City, May 25-27 in Rome and September in San Francisco.

You’ve got to do at least one – and see how that accelerates your journey towards freedom.

Here’s just a quick intro to this topic for those unfamiliar with it…

Let’s say you’re building a site about tennis and you run the keyword tennis through the Adwords tool to see which keywords pay more per click than others.

In the example above you see that “atp tour tennis” keyword pays roughly 3 times as much per click as the keyword “andy murray tennis”.

So you assume that if you wrote a page about “atp tour tennis” you would get paid much more than if you wrote a page about “andy murray tennis”.

The main reason why this very likely won’t work is because you cannot tell Google which ads to serve.

This affects you in 2 ways:

1.    Your main keyword has variations that pay less

You cannot guarantee that the ads for atp tour tennis will be triggered even if you include that keyword in all the right places.

For example, the “atp tour” keyword has all these fluctuations in PPC:

So Google might serve ads that were triggered for the keyword “atp tour results” which pays just 0.17 or Google might serve ads just for the keyword “atp tour” for example which pays 0.62.

And since you cannot write 100 and more words around that ad by repeating a single phrase over and over again, you then create tens of different keywords around that ad that can trigger it.

That brings us to the second reason…

2.    Your text around the ad has many other keywords that can trigger ads

If your goal is to trigger ads for “atp tour tennis” you can probably include that keyword max. twice in 100 words before triggering another thing – a penalty for keyword stuffing.

Which means that 94 words will have to be something different around those Adsense ads. And all those keywords can trigger ads.

You might mention tennis scores, tennis association or tennis ranking and all these keywords can trigger lower paying ads.

So your chances of scoring big with a certain high paying Adsense keyword are quite low.

Yes, you increase the chances of getting that ad served if you optimize for such keywords but is it really worth the time and effort to look for such keywords for such a small chance of getting a slightly higher pay per click?

In my opinion, looking at specific keywords and their PPC value in Google Adsense is not a very productive thing.

If you’re interested in getting paid more in Adsense you shouldn’t look at individual keywords but rather the whole niche!

If you choose a high paying niche then the chances of getting low PPC ads triggered are very small.

If you want more proof of how Google serves all sorts of ads that are not triggered by your “precious” keyword, try this nifty Adsense preview tool.

See the ads triggered for the keyword and country I entered.

None of those actually seem to be related to atp tour tennis except maybe the US Open tennis tickets in the bottom left.

So Google may have served the ads from the words “atp” and “tennis” or even “tennis tour” from my long tail keyword.

See Exclusive Tennis Package ad on the left? This one is most likely triggerred by “tennis tour”.

In summary, optimizing for high paying Adsense keywords is a strategy that doesn’t work most of the time.

You’re much better off if you look at the general payout of the niche, start creating quality content and forget about each individual keyword and how much it’s worth.

There’s much more important work to be done to succeed than to waste time on a payout of a certain keyword…

My offer to you regarding Site Build It is the same as I give it to my friends when I show them how I live and work with my home based online business.

I offer to help them out if they buy through my link.

If you decide to buy SBI through my affiliate link, I will:

1. Help you out especially in the beginning phase when you have to decide for the right niche and keywords.

I believe I now have enough experience (I’ve made some mistakes and made some things right) to judge with good probability whether your niche will bring you more than 1000 visitors per day.

This of course depends on assessing the competition which is almost impossible to do if you don’t have the experience of building 5 or 6 sites.

2. Answer your questions later if you get stuck somewhere.

Although 90% of your questions can be answered in Sitesell forums and also on this blog, feel free to email me or chat through Skype or Gmail.

I have made a mistake before where I answered lots of questions to someone who eventually did NOT buy SBI through my link.

Altough I like to help people out and do something good for my karma , I do need to protect myself from people who only take and don’t give back.

3. I will link to you.

Once your site has 50 pages, I will put a 1-way in-content link on one of my related websites which will help you a lot with your rankings.

Note that if you have at any point have already been a customer of Sitesell, you cannot sign up under me. You are permanently assigned to your first affiliate.

If you decide to take my offer (and you were never a Sitesell customer), then there’s only one 100% foolproof way to do it: with the Remote Order page where I enter your details when I am logged into my account.

You’ll have to provide me with your credit card details and I’ll complete the whole payment process. This is the only foolproof system that your sale gets credited to me and that now I owe you.

The smartest and most efficient way of moving forward in any learning process, is to surround yourself with people who have had success in whatever it is you are trying to learn.

For learning SBI!, that would be Tomaz.

Jo from sugarfreestevia.net

You can of course  clear the cookies from your browser and follow one of the links on this blog (or click on the video) to Sitesell.com and head straight to the order page – BUT it is possible that you have a permanent cookie from another affiliate and that my cookie will not override it.

This happens quite often – you have about 50% chance. I leave it up to you.

Or, if you have some questions, Skype me!

And if you already own a Site Build It site, then I’ll answer your questions in return for a good, related, in-content link.

It’s an unexpected and wonderful feeling, but building my second SBI! site is what has led me to fully believe in myself as an online businesswoman. Let me share why.

Commonly received wisdom amongst seasoned SBI!ers is that the first year of your first site is a learning year. Even with SBI!’s help it takes time to figure out all the pieces of the site-building puzzle.

SBI! never advertises itself as a get-rich-quick scheme; rather it’s a work hard, pay attention and you will succeed beyond your dreams kind of system! However without SBI! I estimate it would take at least 3-4 times as long to accumulate the necessary skills and knowledge to be successful online.

Depending on how much time you have to dedicate towards building your first website, it can also take weeks or months (or even years) of elapsed time to find your content-writing rhythm. It’s generally true that once you get the flow of ideas started, writing pages that will interest human visitors and impress the search engines becomes easier.

Many people, including myself, admit to making silly mistakes with their first site. My blunders with my first site, a healthy eating guide called Growing Raw, include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Choosing a domain name that expressed my ideas completely and accurately at the time – but only to myself!
• Not clearly identifying my target visitors, their needs and what they would be looking for – instead thinking only of what I wanted to tell them.
• Biting off more than I could chew – there are at least half a dozen sub-niches within my site that would have worked beautifully as their own focused, clearly identifiable, keyword targeted sites. Alas, my initial site concept is as broad as the Río de la Plata!
• Confusing the search engines with my diverse range of keywords – even with Tomaz’s cherry-picking method in mind it’s hard to justify the spread of keywords and subtopics I’ve used.
• Writing the pages I wanted to write rather than heeding the advice of BrainstormIt!, which very clearly indicated the kinds of pages my visitors were actually searching for.
• Not getting stuck into link-building until Tomaz’s shake-up of everyone in middle of last year – that was at least a year down the track for me and I still have a lot of catching up to do in this area.
• Last but not least, not feeling confident or experienced enough to really find my own voice and write pages full of character as well as information

Phew! So where’s the good news? Well, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Building a second site can give you the distance and perspective to drastically improve your first site.

You won’t even realize just how much you’ve learned until you start building your next site. Studying the Action Guide, osmosis from the brilliant and friendly SBI forums, guidance and enlightenment from grounding blogs like Freedom Ideas and simply hanging around more online gives you a valuable education.

When you are building your own site, you consciously pick up hundreds of clues about what makes you like or dislike other sites you visit. Being more tuned in to web business strategies also helps you identify and pick the best marketing techniques used by successful sites.

All of the research you’ve done feeds into your second site in the most natural and exhilarating way. As you reach each decision point you have so much more experience and understanding to draw on. With ability and confidence, you can successfully apply what you’ve learned.

It’s also an opportunity to revise the parallel choices you made for your first site. For example, building my second site has prompted me to look back at Growing Raw and:

• Update tier 2 and the most popular content pages to better reflect my personality and voice – now that I’ve finally found my online charisma
• Find ways of reaching out to visitors for my most wanted response, seeking harder for e-zine sign-ups, e-book sales and affiliate clicks. Previously I would have to say that I was barely requesting any action at all from my visitors.
• Shuffle the tier structure to better reflect the power of my keywords.
• Regain the passion for my first site as I realise its worth and potential.

Some would argue that this is a case of ‘tweaking’, and they may be right. However, because my interest in my first site was deeply personal as well as professional and financial it is completely worth it for me.

As my passion for the topic becomes more deeply embedded in my lifestyle, the more I wish to successfully reach out to others. You do have to apply the 80/20 rule so you don’t waste time tweaking elements that won’t make much difference though.

Of course, it’s also worth it for me because I can finally see how the site I spent two years of elapsed time building whilst juggling toddlers and part-time work can finally pay a dividend to my family. Traffic for my first site has nearly tripled in the six months since I began my second site. At last this hobby is becoming lucrative!

Bottom line is this. If you’ve spent a year or so building your first site up to 100 pages or more, when you start again from the ground up you can reap exponential benefits. You may find yourself with a fabulous new site to love and a refreshed, reinvigorated and increasingly profitable first site.

While it’s not spelled out obviously that ad-to-content ratio can be a problem, keep in mind that the Google Panda / Farmer update was designed to combat content farms – which in most cases make money with Adsense.

If you look more closely, you can find this question among many others that are behind the Panda algorithm:

Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?

Vanessa Fox also mentions ad-to-content ratio as one of likely factors behind the Farmer update.

But what’s really interesting is that Google Adsense has changed their best adsense placement tips – but unfortunately I think it’s not that well publicized.

The suggested adsense placement / layout is now like this:

So as you can see the text should be wrapped around the ads or a portion of the text should be placed before the first ad.

If you follow the above link you’ll also see how the ads should not be placed – which is an ad just below the headline that pushes the content down.

Another way that many websites now place their ads is in the right column but still above the fold and / or a banner ad high on the page that doesn’t push the content down that much and is not mistaken for content since it’s not below the headline.

Here are some examples from techcrunch.com, engadget.com and nytimes.com:

All these websites make money with advertising but it’s obvious that they all follow the same principles – which are different than those of Adsense publishers with very aggressive ad placements.

Would these major websites have a better CTR if they placed the ads inside their content? Very likely.

Why don’t they do it? It’s obviously is not the right way to play this game.

There’s no need to know all the answers all the time, you can simply follow those who do well and apply their principles.

So often the travels are based around attractions and places to see but in my experience the fondest memories do not come from non-living statues and places but from meeting new people and interacting with them.

My trip would have been far more boring and FAR more expensive if I didn’t know – or got to meet – some wonderful people.

I started my journey on 26th of August at Slovenian airport with my best friend and tennis buddy Urban.

Our goal was of course the US Open Grand Slam tennis tournament. Neither of us has been to the US Open tennis tournament nor to New York before.

The journey was also very cool as I had so many miles from my previous travels that I used some of them to upgrade our seats to business class from Zurich to New York.

Our first stop was New Jersey where I Chantal from unique-reception-theme-wedding-ideas.com lives.

She and her family showed us around and gave us the place to stay.

The hurricane Irene caused us some problems as we weren’t able to explore New York in the first few days but luckily Chantal and I had more time to talk about SBI!, online business and how to convince Google to send more people to our sites and more checks to our homes.

After two days of wonderful hospitality Urban and I then moved to stay with Charles who is a tennis enthusiast. Charles has been following my tennis site for quite some time and he offered us a place to stay – on one condition: that we play tennis with him.

I thought this was the best possible deal in the universe.

Charles lives in Long Island so in the mornings we played tennis and in the afternoons we went to the US Open and watched tennis. You cannot ask for more…

Urban had to leave at the end of the week so I stayed a few more days with Charlie and helped him with this tennis game. If he didn’t have to eat and sleep he would have probably wanted to play 24 hours per day.

I then moved to the city, more accurately to Roosevelt Island where another tennis friend offered me his place while he was on a business trip.

Of course, the conditions were the same: you get the place is you play tennis with me and give me some tips. I reluctantly decided to accept that offer and not pay $200 per day on a hotel in Manhattan.

I got in touch with Melissa from nycinsiderguide.com who was my tour guide for a few days. I got the same horrible offer again: “I’ll show you the city if you show me how to play better tennis.” That really got me thinking.

Since Melissa lives in New York and writes about NYC I probably got one of the top 5 tour guides in the city. I also got one of the fittest ones too.

If you’re overweight and will take a tour of NYC with Melissa, you won’t be overweight after the tour any more. We were fast – but got to see tons of places in a just a couple of days.

Oh, and we also played tennis in a fantastic New York setting – under the Williamsburg bridge. I’ll never forget the noise…

My next stop was Milwaukee where I met David from tips4running.com. David helps me with one of my sites and it was great to meet him and his family after chatting so long just over emails.

I was soon flying towards Houston where I met Ashley (and her husband Casey) who also helps me with one my sites. And that’s the real joy of traveling – meeting people, discussing life, sharing stories and feeling optimistic about future projects.

I stayed two more days in Houston because I had to meet Arturo who is also a reader of my tennis site and with whom we have been chatting about tennis and the mental game over emails for the past 2 or 3 years.

It  was great to play tennis again and dig deep into the game and talk about details and intricacies only players with many years of playing can talk about.

Soon I was off to Ft. Lauderdale where I met Vernelle who is another friend helping me with one my sites. We agreed to keep the project alive and kicking and had a really nice time chatting about life and how funny it works out sometimes.

After that I was off to NYC again where I finally met my friend Andrei who gave me his apartment in the first week.

I did my part of the deal and of course gave him some tips about tennis technique that hopefully will enable him to play with much less effort and much more joy.

My last evening in NYC ended with a nice dinner with Melissa and Azmat from after-car-accidents.com who was eager to join us and share his excitement about SBI and living a free life.

It was hard to stop talking and sharing stories about our journeys but it was really fun and interesting.

It’s one of the best things about SBI conferences besides getting some golden nuggets of information on how to succeed online.

You get to meet people on a very similar journey and sharing experiences and stories is great fun.

I am back in sunny and fresh Slovenia now reflecting back on how memorable this trip was because of all the wonderful and generous people I met.

It’s one of the best benefits of being free and traveling around to world – it’s really about people and how we all are on similar journeys and how we can help each other to take more and bigger steps towards a bright future.

Thanks everyone who helped me along and enriched my life.

It reminded many webmasters that the Internet business is not as reliable as it seemed to be –and that content website model that relies on free search engine traffic is extremely dependent on Google.

I think the large content website model is here to stay for a very long time – it just needs to be done better than 4 years ago.

But there is another option of getting traffic – creating your own digital products and using advertising and / or affiliates to create traffic.

I actually earned my first dollars online with my own digital products and later started learning more about Adsense and affiliate programs.

The Problem Of Sales Letters Being Part Of Your Main Website

But after having been selling my own ebooks and tennis videos for a few years I realized that my sales letter (or parts of them) have been copied literally thousands of times.

There are all blogs and sites that somehow scrape all products on Clickbank, add their own hoplink and take a few sentences from the sales letter to create a small blog post.

Then there are folks who copy the sales letter 100% and then place it on another domain where everything looks like the original except the links are affiliate links.

The problem with that is duplicate content.

And with Google Panda algorithm updates, having original content on your site looks to be more and more important.

The Solution – Separate Domains

I just recently started to combat this problem.

I rewrote my sales letter for one of my digital products (which is a LOT of work), bought a new domain and posted my new updated sales letter there.

Once I updated the link in my Clickbank account, all affiliate links for my product now automatically send visitors to that new domain.

And what’s interesting to see now is how much traffic I get solely from affiliates – since I changed my Clickbank sales letter link on July 25th and can track all traffic from then on.

For this product I get around 100 daily visitors.

Traffic from Clickbank affiliates only

Google, Yahoo and Bing indexed the site in a couple of days and they send an occasional visitor but since there are just a few links to the site that I created from my own sites it doesn’t really rank well.

And yet, I get 100 daily visitors to the site without any need for search engines.

Creating digital products doesn’t have to be a monumental project. Start with a small ebook (like I did) with maybe 25 pages.

Sell it for $10-$20 on Clickbank.

Once you see that there are sales trickling in, consider another ebook or an audio or a video.

What if you had 10 digital products listed on Clickbank and they were really good?

You most likely wouldn’t be a millionaire yet but you would be getting sales without being a slave to search engines.

If you combine that with your main website that drives traffic to all these sales sites, you could be doing really well!

Head over to Shaun Fawcett’s case study on this page to see how Shaun used exact same approach to build on online empire with digital products.