Friday, August 31st, 2007
Well, one month ago, on July 31st I’ve started writing articles for this blog, my own little experiment with a blog about making money online. Now, I’m perfectly aware of how crowded the make money online niche is. If you’ve been at it for some time, I guess you just can’t help yourself and start a blog about it. I mean, this occupies all my time. Making money online is the one thing I am passionate about and that I’m talking about with anyone that wants to listen to me. But it’s not just the making money online part, it’s the whole seo/marketing/networking/writing part of it. I enjoy what I’m doing and I couldn’t help myself but join the hordes of bloggers already talking about it. I fully realize that the time I’m putting in this blog would make me more money from something in a normal niche, but I enjoy it, and I can’t say I enjoy writing about many other things.
I didn’t start promoting it till August 9th when I had a few articles up already, and by that date the Shylock Adsense Plugin was ready so I started promoting it. Sent emails to around 10 bloggers I had in my feed reader and soon I started getting reactions and reviews of the plugin from them. Out of those I emailed, Daily Blog Tips, Untwisted Vortex and Cash Quests did articles on the plugin, and I thank them for that.
The biggest success was the article on Gawker Media Revenues, which, though unprecise, taught me something extra about how the blog networks make their money, and got me 269 links to that page, 3-4 from PR7 blogs and some PR6. That, and ~2400 visitors.
That article and the Shylock Adsense Plugin were the main base for the first month. I’m confident that if I had more time to promote the blog and write articles (I really did a half ass job at promotion), I would’ve had much better results.
Here are the stats for the first month of Shylock Blogging (data from Google Analytics):
- 4,504 visits
- 5,813 page views
- 6:53 minutes average time on site
- 149 visitors from Google
- $15.25 made with Google Adsense (from 75% of the total pageviews)
- Technorati Rank: broke 100k, currently at 88,524, with an authority of 64
- Alexa Rank: 221,247 (average over 3 months but I only got 1 month). Rank 139,582 over the last 7 days.
- Subscribers: 43
- 25 posts and 95 comments
- 535 downloads for the Shylock Adsense Plugin (and I stopped promoting it not long after the release, until I launch the next version 2-3 days from now. It’s got a bug for some blogs that it’s fixed in the next version).
All in all, better then most new blogs, but less then I hoped when I started it. Here’s to the hope that next month will be better (though I’m launching my browser game in September so that might be tough).
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Thursday, August 30th, 2007
Making money with mini sites is a way of earning your income online, but I’ll say it from the beginning, it shouldn’t be your only source of income. They rely solely on search engine traffic most of the time, and the algorithms can change at any time. I wouldn’t quit my day job yet if my income would be made only from search engine traffic. Still, they can be nice additions if you choose your niche right.
Mini sites usually have just a few articles, centered around one or more keywords that have low competition and they’re easy to rank for most of the time. They’re the fire and forget type, meaning that you set them up, write the articles, do a bit of promotion and then forget about them. If you choose your keywords right, they can make anywhere from a few cents a day to $10 or more. It all depends on how much work you put in finding the right keywords for them.
If you find some good related keywords with very low competition and you’re interested in the subject, I’d suggest building a blog on top of them and convert those search engine visitors into subscribers. If you have no interest in the subject, muster enough strength to write a few articles and make a mini site out of it. Building a blog requires much more time, but in the long run you get those repeat visitors, and you also have access to Text Link Ads and paid reviews if you promote it. With mini sites you usually have just Adsense and affiliate programs. Another option would be building a community if the term is searched enough. A bit more work again if you want a forum, but it’s an option.
A bit more before we start. I decided to write here the real keywords that I’m going to use for this tutorial, because this is more of a guide, and less of a case study. The fact that I’m saying which they are from the beginning and the address of the mini-site, will mess with the results of the experiment, but at least you get to see everything so you can apply them and make your own mini sites.
Keyword Research
This is the most annoying part for me and a major time drain. It may take a while to find a few keywords that have a sufficient volume of traffic and they’re also easy to rank for. Don’t overdo the study of the competition though. You’re not putting 2 years of work into this, just couple of hours, so the risk is ok.
1. Put some ideas on paper
I usually just look around and write on paper random things that I see or just words that I think of randomly. For this experiment I’ve started with:
how to create, motivation, family, household, warriors
2. Keyword Research
Open up the SeoBook Keyword Tool and WordTracker GTrends and check those keywords in both of them. I usually ran with the SeoBook tool and the free WordTracker tool before GTrends was launched for the guys at the 30 Day Challenge.
Now, GTrends does a very neat thing. First it tells you how much WordTracker thinks the term gets on a daily bases, and you’ll also see a small icon to the right of each keyword. Click on it, and it opens up a pop-up window where you can see the number of results in Google when you search the keyword with quotes, and an estimated number of searches/day from Google Trends. It does this by comparing the graph of a known quantity (how much traffic a certain keyword gets for the 1st place, a number that they know for sure) with the graph of the keyword you’re researching. It sees how many times smaller is one compared to the other and gives you an estimated number of daily searches on Google, which should be pretty accurate.
I usually just use GTrends for mini sites, and once I decide on a keyword I run another check in SeoBook to make sure the Overture numbers say the same thing.
Now, run the keywords you wrote down on paper and check the GTrends tool for everything that looks interesting from the list of related keywords that show up. Don’t forget to click that Stats icon to see what Google Trends thinks of it.
What I wrote down from those results
motivation techniques 100 100,000
weight loss motivation 80 98,000
motivation theory 300 181,000
motivation quotes 425 55,000
motivation in the workplace 60 31,000
definition of motivation 70 1000
theories of motivation 140 85,000
motivation posters 80 12,600
motivation letter 275 144,000
household mold 160 52,000
household insects 135 30,000
household remedies 70 30,000
household cleaning tips 65 13,000
ancient warriors 65 92,000
terracotta warriors 315 200,000
aztec warriors 75 20,700
First the keywords, then the number of daily searches, then the number of results in Google when searching with quotes, like “household mold”.
I usually write in a text file or excel the keywords that have at least 50 searches a day and less then 100,000 results with quotes attached, but it’s a judgement call really. I’ll write down a keyword that gets 20-30 searches/day if the competition is extremely low, and I’ll ignore one with 50/day if there are 50,000 results for it or more.
Ok, now that you have a list of keywords, open up Google and using the SeoQuake Firefox Plugin, check out the competition for each phrase. They might have a low number of results, but the competition might be made of strong websites.
I usually check for PR of the page and the number of backlinks in Yahoo for that page and for the entire site, all of these provided by the SeoQuake Plugin.
Now, after looking at those keywords I decided to go with the warrior related ones for this experiment. They’re not perfect, and not because of high number of competitors, but because on the first pages there are older sites, 5 years old or more. However, to teach you how to make a mini-site, they’re ok.
So, the main page I’ll make it about ancient warriors, and two more articles on terracotta and aztec warriors. This is just for the exercise, so feel free to use more then just 3 related keywords for your mini-site. For this one I could also add roman, greek, spartan, indian, zulu, viking warriors. They all have a number of searches according to GTrends.
Creating The Mini-Site And Writing Some Articles
You can use domains or you can use sub-domains for them. Obviously sub-domains are the cheaper way, but domains are easier to promote. I’ll use a sub-domain for this exercise, ancient-warriors.shylockblogging.com.
Now, unzip the 19 Pages CMS that I reviewed here, and copy the files to your domain. Access the sub-domain and login for the first time with user admin, password admin. Change the password (!) and then start writing your articles.
Use the Google search and document yourself on those keywords. See what Wikipedia has to say, see what the competitors said and look for pictures that you can use. Then compile that information and write your own articles on the subject. Don’t forget to set meta descriptions and keywords for each article. You can do that from the page where you write the article.
You can see the end result here: Ancient Warriors, Terracotta Warriors and Aztec Warriors, the three articles of the mini-site.
Mini-Site Promotion
Now, for the promotion part of the mini-site, I tend to do less when using sub-domains, and a bit more when I use domains. That’s because I spend 2-3 hours to have a mini-site up and running, but I also spend $8 if I go the domain route, and I want to make sure I’m not throwing money away.
I’ve talked about promotion before in this article: Niche Link Building. Take a look at it and use those methods to promote every article on the mini-site with the proper keywords as title. Spend a few hours at once or spread it across a week or two (20-30 minutes a day). Don’t forget to set up Google Analytics on it and then forget about them.
The best way to promote them remains link-baiting. Learn how to master that and you’re set.
Monetization
You don’t have that many options with mini-sites. No text link ads, no paid reviews, no Kontera, no CPM ads. Just Adsense and affiliates.
Adsense - you have to edit the 19Pages template and paste the code there. You can’t put ads inside the posts with this CMS, but you can put them in the sidebar, at the top and at the bottom of the articles.
Affiliates - for this mini-site on ancient warriors, some books from Amazon dealing with ancient warfare or civilizations would probably work. However you’d have to write the content in a way that recommends and promotes those books. Maybe a review of them, telling people what kind of information they can find. I didn’t write the articles for affiliates, I did it for Adsense, so the copy doesn’t really fit, but you can do that. Don’t do just books though. See what kind of offers would fit for those niche keywords that you use.
Final Words
They’re easy to do (couple of hours) and to promote (another couple of hours). They provide residual income but you can’t rely on them ranking forever (if they do rank). All in all they can prove to be a nice addition to your income, but I would never recommend to rely solely on mini-sites to make a living. Create blogs, create communities, learn how to promote affiliate offers or learn domaining. Just make sure you don’t depend 100% on the search engines.
In the next period I’ll continue to update on the progress of this mini-site and on the promotion that I’ll do.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Posted in Uncategorized | 29 Comments »
Monday, August 27th, 2007
First of all, this is not a paid review. It’s in preparation for a series of articles, Making Money with Mini Sites, Step by Step, that I’m going to start tomorrow. I will use 19 Pages for this series so I thought I’d review it first so you can see what it can and can’t do.
What it is
19 Pages is a very simple CMS built for fast deployment of mini sites by the guys from 45n5. It’s limited to 20 pages, index plus 19 articles, because that’s how the creators see mini sites, having 20 pages or less.
Here’s the short presentation/tutorial video from 19Pages.
The Good Parts
Simple to install - It doesn’t need a database, because it stores everything in its files. You just unzip the files and upload them to your host, and you’re ready to go. Log in (user: admin, password: admin), change the password (!) and start writing.
Easy to move - its as simple as moving the files from a host to another
Extremely easy to use - you don’t really have that many options to play with. You write the text, add the meta description and keywords and you’re done.
SEO OK for the most part - I would’ve preferred using - instead of _ for url’s but they’re still SE friendly. You probably can modify these in the .htaccess, but I’m not that technical so no idea there. You can add meta description and keywords so that’s covered too. No need to install SEO plugins like you would with WordPress. The only problem in the SEO department is that not all templates are coded well when it comes to the page title. The default version is ok, but the Made Of Cheese template uses the title from the index on all the pages, instead of using the article title. Didn’t check all the templates to see if there are others with this problem. I hope they fix this for the next release.
Until then, click Edit template and then at the top, in the head section, replace the part marked with red
<title><?php echo $sitename;?></title>
with this: $sitetitle;?
The Bad Parts
These are experienced by me with an older version. No idea if they fixed them yet.
- Deleting the site leaves some sort of traces on the server. I added an index.html and it still kept saying that it couldn’t find the index.php
- On the domain where I used it I had two directories /blog and /forums. The blog worked fine, but I couldn’t access the forums anymore. It took me to a 404 page of the CMS as far as I can remember.
- Doesn’t work in folders, only on sub-domains or on the main domain. So test.example.com and example.com work fine, but example.com/test doesn’t work. Shouldn’t be a problem because most people don’t install mini sites in folders. I imagine it doesn’t work there because of the .htaccess file? Not sure.
- It’s got a limited number of templates to use. They offer custom templates for $49 but that’s too high if you want to have a template fit for a certain niche. If you want a template to use on all your mini sites it might be worth it. If you know how to code I assume you can make one yourself.
Conclusions
All in all, I like it. I like it a lot. It’s supposed to be easy and for mini sites only and it does that well. Extremely easy to use and deploy. I used WordPress for static sites until recently, but I’ll switch to 19Pages for any mini sites I’ll make from now on.
Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow I’ll start the Making Money with Mini Sites, Step by Step series. The first article in the series will be rather long because it will detail every step, so I might not be able to finish it tomorrow.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Monday, August 27th, 2007
I’m posting this on Monday because I had a birthday in the family yesterday, but it still belongs in the Sunday weekly shark bytes. There are plenty of very good articles showing up each week, but I’m really trying to bring in only those from blogs less followed, the hidden gems. So, I will probably not link to John Chow, Problogger or Search Engine Land (read this anyway) because you should be following those yourself.
John Waraas has an article on his black hat attempts and his results so far in Test Results Of SEO Sites.
profitMachine has an article titled 12 Quick and Dirty Ways to Find Profitable Niches.
On SuperAff.com you can read Grasping The Concept Of Online Targeted Advertising. Read and understand what he’s saying because he’s right. You got to put some thought in the way you monetize your site.
A very interesting and long read, an article from January but still nice, 61 Interviews with Founders of Web 2.0 Websites. Interviews with founders from Digg, Facebook, Craiglist, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, Bloglines and more. Check them out if you have the time.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, August 24th, 2007
This is not just about long tail keywords, it’s also about keywords with low competition that you accidentally rank for. If you follow your stats closely (you should), you’ve probably seen visitors coming to different posts from the past with long tail keywords or weirder ones that might still be related to your topic.
I’ll take as example a niche gadget blog that I own. This blog doesn’t have huge authority, it’s fairly new, and from time to time I find it ranking for different gadget related keywords on the 1st or 2nd page without me doing any link building to achieve this. Now, I know many would just be happy because they get a few visitors from those keywords, but I say why stop there? As an experiment I’ve tried boosting my rankings for those keywords with minimal time spent on doing this. I don’t know if I even spent 10 hours for the 6-7 long tail keywords that I tried boosting.
Before this small link building campaign I was getting around 9-10 visitors a day from those keywords, with them ranking from the 3rd place to the second page on Google. Now, I’m getting 35-40 visitors a day for them, with those keywords all being on the first page, some even first or second place. If I spend some more time with them I’m sure I can bring them all in the first or second position, and the beautiful part is that I’m an affiliate for some of those products that I rank for.
Granted, a boost from 300 visitors/month to ~1100/month from those keywords might not seem impressive, but it did require just a few hours of link building and those extra 800 visitors will be coming there month after month since it’s fairly low competition.
So, go check your stats, see the keywords that bring you visitors regularly and check where you rank for them. If you can boost your ranking and double or triple that number of visitors, then why not do it?
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
