5000 Dollars In 45 Days - My IM Voyage

If you have a lot of websites that are making money with Google’s Adsense program, you may have noticed a drop in earnings since May. Webmasters all over the blogosphere have dubbed this Google’s Mayday update and some have called it the Mayday Massacre. This was followed by the June/July Caffeine update. The cumulative effect was to decimate some people’s income and rankings.

So fellow reader, you might be asking yourself “Are small niche websites dead?”. That is a great question. The truth is that good content and useful sites will always have a place in the search engines’ hearts. I know, that’s a vague answer. Let me be more specific.

Tiny niche websites picked up steam around 2 years or so ago. It was discovered that by simply having your exact keyword phrase in the domain name you could outrank older more authoritative sites fairly easily. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, search for this phrase in Google -> red microwave. See that first result? Yep, that’s what I’m talking about. Still not convinced? How about this -> red blender. Look familiar? Google has been looking to squash these sites, especially the ones with the dreaded X-Factor template. Chances are if you have this template still on your site you are just asking for trouble.

Well, now it seems like the party’s over. I have a lot of experience with this. My team and I have built over 4,000 websites in the past 18 months or so and we are seeing the same trend. If you put up a site with very little content and expect to rank just because you have a keyword rich domain name, you are in for a rude awakening. Another red flag is having 3-5 articles ALL with the same main keyword in them. Here’s an example: red microwave, red microwave oven, buy red microwave oven, red microwave oven review, best red microwave. I would suggest that you refrain from doing this.

Right now you might be thinking that the red microwave website is still ranking so why not duplicate it? The problem is that Google has a basic mistrust of new sites. The normal pattern has always been something like this: new site with new content -> Google gives it a new site/content bonus for a few weeks, new site then disappears, people cry “I’ve been sandboxed”, then months later (if you build links and add content), the site reappears and starts to climb up the results. So what’s the moral of the story? Are niche websites dead and if not, how do we build them? Let’s see…

We start with the premise that solid, useful content will rule the day. This means we should strive to become an authority on our subject and bring value to our user’s experience. Google also gives us tools to make this easier. If you do a search on a topic like blenders for example, in the sidebar you will see a link for more search tools. Click on that link and you’ll be presented with another set of links. My favorites are the Google Wonder Wheel and Related Searches. From these, you will discover what Google thinks are topics related to your main keyword. Sometimes the tool is very wrong. Use your common sense here. Anyway, using these tools, you can get complementary keyword phrases and create articles around those topics.

There is a lot more to talk about, but I just wanted to touch on this subject. We’ll get into more details in upcoming articles. Just keep in mind that Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines want useful, relevant content. Create your blog around a small niche and own that niche.

Keyword research is still crucial to your success, however. You will not dominate the search engine results with weight loss as your main keyword. You need to start a bit lower on the chain. Keyword research is part art and part science. If you need help, we have a Niche Research and Content Membership which delivers high income low competition niches straight to your door each and every month like clockwork. For more information and to signup, Click Here!

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TomG.

I get asked this question so many times that I thought I would write yet another post about it. Why aren’t your sites making money with adsense? Why can’t you make a full time living online with Adsense? Well, those are two different questions. I will answer a lot of your questions, so sit down and grab a cup of coffee or tea or soda or something more stiff and I’ll delve right in.

First off, what are your expectations for making money online? Are you expecting to make $1000 per month with no website and no experience? If so, please drop me an email and let me know how you expect to do that. If you are still with me, then a good hard look at your expectations is in order.

If you are looking to build a solid income online, please set aside at least a year to see some results. Yes, a year is the very minimum you need to see income and get encouraged by the results. If you see nothing after a solid year’s worth of effort, then you did something really, really wrong. This is not the business for you. OK, now that the get rich quick online people are gone, let’s get down to business. Am I saying that it takes a year for you to see any income online? No, I am saying that it takes a year’s worth of effort to see any significant earnings. There are exceptions, of course, but let me define my parameters.

First off, I am talking about making money online with websites and free search engine traffic. I am not talking about using paid traffic. For paid traffic techniques, you must look for another website because I really suck at PPC (pay per click) advertising. Alright, let’s get back to our parameters. I would like to say that at a minimum, you should shoot for $1000/month online in a year. That is a reasonable goal. Let’s see what it will take to get there.

I should pause and mention here that you really must have some idea of how to write keyword based articles. Keyword based articles are articles that are written specifically around a keyword that you have researched and believe will make you some money. Generally, you should strive for articles with a length of at least 500 words or more. Your articles should have your keyword phrase in the first and last paragraphs at a minimum and you should have a keyword phrase density of around 1%. For a 500 word article, that is 5 times in the article. There are lots of tricks and methods to writing these articles, but I won’t get into them here as I would like to remain on topic, that is making at least $1000/month in a year’s time.

How many websites does it take to make $1000/month with adsense? That is not an easy question to answer. I will attempt to estimate the number for you. If you are looking at a website with fewer than 20 articles on it, I would say that you should be able to make around $40/month with adsense provided you did some keyword research. So, assuming you can fairly easily make $40/month with a website given a year’s time, how many websites is that? 1000/40 = 25 websites. Each website should have at least 5 articles on it, preferably 10 articles.

How long will it take to write the content for 25 websites? Well, I would take a shotgun approach. I would write 25 articles and register 25 domain names right at the beginning and see which sites take off. If spending around $250 for domains scares you, then test the waters with free websites like blogger.com or hubpages.com. You can write articles and post them on those free sites to see how they fare. If they work, you can then go and register the domain name and create a link from them to your new site. If you write one article per day, you can get all the content written for your first 25 sites in under a month. If you keep writing one article/day for the rest of the first year, your websites will have at least a dozen articles each. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Wait a minute! What am I supposed to write about? What’s a keyword? To answer some of those basic questions, go signup for my free adsense eCourse -> Click Here To Get The Free Adsense eCourse! OK but to summarize, use Google’s free keyword tool to get an idea of traffic volume, cost per click, competition, etc. Once you find a keyword phrase with weak competition that can generate at least $100/month income if you are at the top spot, you’re ready to go.

Once you have decided on the keyword phrase, see if the domain is available. For example, if your keyword phrase is “big ugly gold watches”, then go see if biguglygoldwatches.com is available. If you are using free networks, then see if biguglygoldwatches.blogger.com is available. If not, add some filler to get there. Put the filler at the end. Examples of filler are “411″, “abc”, “online”, etc., like this: biguglygoldwatchesonline.com. Register the domain name and/or put up the free blog and post your article.

Nothing is going to happen without links! Nobody will find your article or website. Since we are depending on free traffic, we need to tell the world about our site. I find the easiest way to get a link to our site is by submitting an article to article directories. One of the top directories is ezinearticles.com. There are lots of others, but I would start from there because Google likes EZA a LOT! Submit an article written around your keyword phrase and make sure you have proper anchor text. Make sure that your links are varied. You don’t want 10,000 links to your website with ” big ugly gold watches” as your anchor text. You want “gold and ugly watches”, “find big ugly gold watches online”, etc.

Once you submit to EZA, wait a couple of weeks, rewrite the article and submit to 10 other directories. Examples include buzzle.com, goarticles.com, articledashboard.com, ideamarketers.com, articlecity.com, iSnare.com, etc.

If you follow this plan, you’ll have one EZA link and at least 10 other links to each page of your site. That’s over 120 links to your 12 article site. If you choose a very low competition phrase, that’s all it will take to get your website to the $40/month level. What else can you do?

Social bookmarking is another favorite of Internet Marketers looking to make money online. You can quickly build links to your sites this way. Currently, digg.com and propeller.com and stumbleupon.com and some others are good for this. Register an account at these sites and bookmark all your articles. Also bookmark your author’s page. If it has an RSS feed, submit it to RSS feed directories. Now, don’t forget to bookmark other sites and stories so that your account does not get closed for spamming.

Blog posting is good for links too. Go to your favorite search engine and find other blogs that are similar in topic. Post comments there and try to get some links back. This will help in your rankings. You can offer to write an article for the blog owner if the blog is popular in return for an in article link. These links are gold!

So, let me summarize. If you want to make $1,000/month online with Google adsense in about a year, find 25 low competition phrases to target that are worth at least $100/month for the top spot. Register or use free properties which share revenue and create your sites. Get links from EZA and other top directories. Use social bookmarking to strengthen your article links. Add more links through blog posting and/or guest authoring. Repeat each month until you have 25 sites with 12 articles each.

I hope this helps you to get motivated and start earning money online. If you need some free help, please feel free to Click Here! Do it today, the clock is ticking.

TomG.

PS - My friend Regina has a post on making money online that she wrote to share some more ideas. Go take a look.

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TomG.