Lesson’s Learned
Too many people learn this lesson the hard way… Stay strong.
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Too many people learn this lesson the hard way… Stay strong.
I have been spending the last few weeks building a network of microsites based on specific keywords. Now, even though it is early, I have already been hit by the newest Panda update. In this update, google is targeting single keyword sites and sites that appear to have links from spun content. Unfortunately, that is exactly what a microniche site is, as website dedicated to getting a single keyword to the top ranking. To give you an example, I just published nfsmostwantedcheats.com yesterday in the hopes of capturing some of the gamer traffic looking to beat Need For Speed.
Anyway, according to the press release, Google is trying to weed out any of the highly SEO’d single target sites so that more authority sites can rise to the top of the ranking. Not good news for those of us that are building out an Adsense earnings network. So, with this new update, what are the newest rules to SEO?
First and foremost, strive to create an authority site. What this means to me is that instead of the standard five article niche site, you need to create a ten-article site with related, but not exactly targeted phrases and words. Your content needs to be at least 60% unique and must read like a human wrote it. This means that spun content is off the table, especially if you spin automatically. I use SpinFM on my sites and that is stopping immediately. Add articles that have a similar focus and topic, but that are not SEO’d to the same phrase over and over.
Regarding your off site links, social is quickly becoming king. If you don’t google + your articles, it is time to start. In addition, natural is the only way to go. Mass bookmarks will destroy your rankings; especially if they spike then disappear. A good rule of thumb is to never add more links per day than you have traffic. Believe it or not, the search engine will penalize you for it.
Overall, this new algorithm update adds another level of complexity to the process of creating niche targeted sites. They will still work and I will still be creating them, monetizing them and enjoying the revenue. However, the sites will be a lot bigger and will require a lot more work to rank well.
When I first started in affiliate marketing the first course that I bought was the Commission Blueprint. It went through the ins and outs of this business and the fundamental strategy for the program was simply to find a drop shipper in a niche and build an e-commerce site around it. Use the various SEO and paid traffic techniques to drive traffic and enjoy the large checks as they roll in.
At the time this sounded like too much work. After all, I want passive income, not the hassle of operating an online store. Well, times have changed and it is time to give this approach a try. After all there are millions of businesses on the web that can testify to the effectiveness of this approach.
Why now and what has changed?
To tell you the truth, my biggest producing campaign was pulled by the advertiser last month and it is time to replace it as quickly as possible. This approach is similar to creating an Amazon review or Amazon affiliate site. Sadly the online retailer only pays around 6% commission. However, with your own site you can enjoy profit margins well above 40% for some niches. This makes advertising and promoting a lot more affordable and because you don’t need to hold inventory or pay for people to process orders you can create a very successful online resource without having to hire staff or work ten hours per day.
So, how do you get started and what do you do?
I signed up for a bluehost reseller hosting account with WHM and cpanel access. I use Bluehost for most of my hosting now. The have a huge amount of bandwidth for my autoblogs and offer great support whenever I have an issue. Anyway, the cpanel comes with Softalicious which allows you to quickly install any number of different programs. I use it for WordPress installations, but in this instance used it to install OpenCart onto a new URL that I purchases for this project from NameCheap.com
After installing the open cart script I added a new theme and downloaded the customization modules to make the site my own. I am finding that opencart is to e-commerce what Wordrpess is to blogs. So, I have spend the past three days, about ten hours total, customizing this new page to look pretty and professional. With so many plugin options it is actually quite easy. I have also signed up for a free account on Doba.com which is the primary drop shipper that I will be using.
Once I have uploaded all of the products to the site I will customize the text on each product page so that it has a better chance of showing up during search. I will then submit the product feed to google shopping, amazon and bing shopping. Along with this I plan to place banner advertisements for the myriad of products that are to be included in the store.
That’s just about it. Once I have it up and running and am getting steady sales revenue, I will duplicate the project in another niche. Pretty simple, not altogether passive, but the profit potential is huge.
It is no secret that Google is de-indexing sites that have all of their links from blog networks which is bad news for anyone using build my rank. However, the guys over at offervault just turned me onto a new free service that may be offset the pain that I will inevitably be feeling as many of my autoblog sites start losing rank. The site is the Content Facilitator and their promise is random backlinks from thousands of different sources. The site is really just a credit-based link exchange but they are getting enough mass to generate some pretty decent links in your niche of choice.
Anyway, I signed up for them this morning and because they are keen in growing the membership of the exchange and therefore the number of links available to members, they provided me with the coupon code: DistributeMe
If you do sign up with the Content Facilitator, just add coupon code to your account in the members area and get $50.00 in free credit toward backlinks of your choice.
So far it is too early for me to tell if the site delivers as promised, but it comes recommended for a source that I trust. So, we shall see.
I have gone through the entire Profit.fm course and referred a couple of friends as well. Mike Johnson has over delivered on a very simple concept…. Build and authority site in a niche that people are searching for on Amazon. Simple enough in concept and implementation isn’t too difficult either.
The challenge as always is to create unique content that is search engine friendly. Fortunately, there are thousands of ways to quickly populate a site with good content. Freelancer is one of my favorites because you get good readable content. In addition, I find sitting down to write enjoyable so I will be adding unique content for these sites as well. The Profit.fm course does include a content provider and spinner but I haven’t dug into them yet.
With that in mind I have started creating niche micro-sites. The strategy is simply to build a number of them and the sites that rank well will get built out and become authority creations. I started with epersuasiveessaytopics.com earlier in the week. This is the first small site I have created since the Panda update decimated my autoblog network and my Adsense Earnings (it is currently hovering around $750 per month and used to be closer to $2,500.) I was motivated to do some writing earlier this week so the content on the site is my own.
Over the next few weeks I will season the site, get it ranked and build out the backlinks. After it starts showing up in search I will add the Adsense code and let it ride for a while. These types of sites don’t take a lot to build, but also don’t make a huge amount of money. They are however kind of fun and a great distraction to create on a Tuesday morning. Fortunately, you simply build them and once they rank you can leave them alone. For example howtomakewine.info has been going strong for about a year now with no new content and it delivers a few bucks per day.
To be honest these micr-osites are more of a distraction. I have been toying with using Doba Reseller Network to create a network of niche e-commerce sites. I just haven’t had the time to invest in creating the sites, getting the licenses and setting everything up. The vision I have for the network would be something akin to the Hayneedle commerce network which is built up of a number of small niche-targeted commerce sites tied together under a cohesive brand. Once I do free up some time I have high hopes for this project. However, the income from it will certainly not be passive.