Producing profitable web sites without spending ages writing
by: Phil Wiley
This is all about
by: Phil Wiley
This is all about
content.
I've written it as a response to some criticism in my forum this week. A coupleof people said that I don't produce enough original content. Right now that'strue. I'm not writing a lot.
But I'll tell you what. I'm doing what works.
The sites I've been building for the past few months are producing results. Bigresults.
My sites, whether they're mini sites or big sites, work. And they bring in ahuge income every week from Google Adsense, Searchfeed, and affiliate programs.
So should I care what people are saying?
Yes I should.
Not just because I've been criticized, which is never nice, but because I stillbelieve that the key to long term success is running on-topic content which isunique to your own web site.
I don't believe the sites I've built over the past few months are going to keepproducing an income for years, where the original content sites I've got willkeep working for years.
But I'm making hay while the sun shines and you should too.
Here's how I'm doing it:
Many of the sites that people were talking about were created with TrafficEqualizer and heavily modified with templates, and by changing things withsearch and replace, to add individuality. Just one of these sites makes moreevery week than I used to earn working full time in my old newspaper job.(interestingly this site now gets more traffic from the new Yahoo search enginethan it does from Google, where just a few months ago it was nearly all fromGoogle).
I hardly write anything on these sites, just an article on the index pages ofeach folder/sub directory.
In case you don't know, Traffic Equalizer http://www.ozemedia.com/trafficeq is, in essence, an automated directory
builder taking search engine results from your keyword list and building pagesaround them. Lots of big name marketers are using it to make a lot of money.
I run Google Adsense on the pages, and also put at least one affiliate programon a page. Very often it will be an ebook sold through Clickbank.
On some sites I put a number of Searchfeed links on the pageshttp://www.ozemedia.com/searchfeed.htm but I'm a bit worried about usingSearchfeed and Adsense together so I don't do it often, but Searchfeed stillsend me a check for a $1000 plus each month - which is a nice little sideincome.
My main concern with Traffic Equalizer has always been that someone elsebuilding a page on the same search term could have an almost identical page tomine. Search engines don't like this.
But the good news is that Traffic Equalizer has just been improved. A few weeksago Jeff Alderson, the programmer, asked me if I had any ideas on how to make itbetter, and I suggested he try and find a way of getting the site content frommore sources and then randomizing the output. This would make it less of achance that two users would build identical pages. Well he's a fast worker andthe new improved version came out a couple of days ago, and though I haven't hada chance to try it yet, I'm sure it's going to work. At least short term to midterm.
The bad news is that I'm not certain of the long term viability of the sites.They do well for a few months, but if you can't continue getting high qualitylinks to them they tend to drop down the rankings. Also I'm sure that Googlewon't want the search results to be totally clogged with sites built withTraffic Equalizer, and will eventually change their algorithms to make the pagesrank a lot lower than they currently do. If they did this by targeting pageswith lots of outbound links but few inbound links it would be damaging to the TEpages.
Having said that, these sites DO work. And Google allow their Adsense Ads to berun on them.
Some people don't like the idea of building writes using Traffic Equalizerbecause it somehow seems wrong to them. They don't like the "quality" of thesites it produces. But the search engines LOVE the sites. Many of the pages theyproduce rank very high, and unlike the quite short lived fad of building"smartpages" they don't do anything against the search engines rules. They don'tredirect, they don't mislead people. They just build simple directories.
I'm not going to name anyone, but some REALLY famous people in the internetmarketing world are doing very well with TE. These people consistently make ahuge income year after year by doing what works at the moment. In other wordsthey use the tools which bring them an income.
You should be doing it too Bill
Just one thing to mentally make a note of.
You have to be patient. Unless you already have a few high Pagerank sites youcan link to them from, these sites take a few months to take off. During thosemonths you need to keep build new sites. If you get despondent because the siteslook like they not going to do well you'll stop building them, and then curseyourself a few months down the track when you realize you could have had 20 moresites steadily coming online. In other words you don't see instant results, butyou have to keep building sites and pages. There is no easy option, no quickwork around. You work hard at building these sites and success will come.
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So - seeing I think Traffic EQ sites won't keep working for years - what aboutlong term sites?
Well contrary to what a few people said in my forum I do still build sites fullof articles that I write or pay someone to write.Right now I'm building a network of travel sites which will be full of articlesand photographs of places I've visited. They're going to be mini sites ofbetween 5 and 12 pages, though perhaps as high as 20 pages on some of thembecause the photographs are going to take up quite a bit of space.
This week Kate has spent most of her time writing touristy type, personalexperience articles on London and York. Next week she's moving on to write aboutJapan. After that it's going to be France. Then she's doing Malaysia, beforeworking on a big site about Australia. We'll be using photographs that I've shotin the past few years in each of these places. And I'll also put together a siteon Bangkok in Thailand, which I visited recently.
All the content, both photographs and articles, will be totally unique to thesites we build. They'll be keyword rich and the sites properly structured toplease the search engines. I haven't yet decided if I'll build the sites withTraffic Equalizer. If I use TE http://www.ozemedia.com/trafficeq I'll just useit to provide the structure of the site - pages, linking structure - then removemost or all of the outbound links and replacing them with the articles andphotos.
Rather than just putting all the content up on one domain I've registered awhole bunch of domain names and I'm hosting them in the countries the site isabout ( except Japan because I can't find a low cost Japanese web host ). Thesites will then be interlinked to help improve their search rankings - as
detailed in Michael Campbell's Revenge of the Mininet
http://www.ozemedia.com/mininet.htm I'm going to the trouble of finding hosts ineach country because I think it just might improve the web ranking chances alittle. Though I'm not certain on this. I'm quite certain, however, that ifthey're linked together the way Michael describes they need to be on differentweb hosts in a different IP range.
Here's what's involved ( so you can see why I take the easy option sometimes andjust do sites built with TE http://www.ozemedia.com/trafficeq )
* First of all I had to do the traveling and suffer all that jetlag.
* Carry a pile of heavy camera gear around everywhere.
* Spend hours at the computer editing the pictures.
* Research the keywords so that I can build pages around search terms thatpeople are actually looking for ( I use Wordtracker to do thishttp://www.ozemedia.com/wordtracker )
* Pay Kate to write most of the articles, and get my weary brain into action towrite some myself for the places for Bangkok which she hasn't yet visited.
* Decide on whether to run with Adsense, or an affiliate program or both. (I'veyet to find a travel affiliate program I'm happy with, but some pages mightcarry affiliate ads for luggage or books)
* Choose domain names and find web hosts.
* Build the sites and link them together as in Mininethttp://www.ozemedia.com/mininet.htm
* Upload them to the hosts by FTP
* List them with Google and Yahoo ( I don't bother about the rest, AOL, MSN andthe others will quickly find you from Google.)
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By the way I'll probably use Traffic Equalizer on different domains to buildpages to direct traffic to my travel network sites. The same way I now useTraffic Equalizer to send traffic to my other mini sites.
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So what do you do if you want to build content sites like my travel sites butyou can't write and don't have an employee who can quickly churn out words?
I think the best way is to sub contract.
There's a lot of talk in the media about how people are losing their jobsbecause a lot of American companies, as well as many in England and Australia,are outsourcing jobs to India.
Have you thought of joining them and outsourcing your web content to India?
I've just taken my first steps to doing it. But unlike big companies I'm notputting anyone out of a job, just helping create jobs.
Wages are very low in India, a country which has some of the best educatedEnglish speaking people in the world. And to us Westerners people work forpeanuts in India. According to an article in Computerworld magazine
programmer in India earns around US$7500 a year. ( A programmer in Chinaearns around 20 to 30% less, but it's hard to outsource content creation toChina because, unlike India, few people write English well enough)
I'm not the first to think of using people in India to write my web content.While I was researching this piece I found that the giant builder.com hasstarted offshoring authoring of many of its articles to India
http://www.newsforge.com/trends/04/03/18/2240229.shtml
So how do you find people in these countries? The easiest way is to use anoutsourcing web site. Try these.
Do a search on them for "search engine optimised web content ", "contentwriting" or just "web content". When I looked on elance last week I saw bids aslow $5 per page, but the lowest I saw today was $10 a page. This is stillincredibly cheap.
Here's the $10 a page bid - "Thanks for the opportunity to bid on your project!My quote is based on a rate of $10 per article (350-500 words). I'm a marketingprofessional with over 10 years of experience."
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Another possible way to use these sites is to hire people to create new productsfor you. At the time of writing this letter there are 5 bids for writing arecipe ebook. The lowest bidder is willing to do the whole project for justUS$400. In fact the highest bid is just $450. Someone else is willing to write a50 page ebook on stopping headaches for $8 a page, which also adds up to $400.
Here's another for an ebook about looking after your skin.
Wanted: A ghostwriter for an Informational eBook entitled ""Perfect Skin:Cleansing, Nourishing, Prot ..."
And again someone is willing to write it for just $8 per page "Our bid is basedon US$8 per page (250-300 words) with minimum billing of 50 pages (additionalpages will be billed at the rate of US$8 per pages) and includes all necessaryresearch and revisions. You will own full copyrights. Completion Time: 16working days."
About the author:Phil Wiley is the author of the best selling book Mini Site Profits http://www.minisiteprofits.com/and writes the free weekly Letter from Phil at http://www.ozemedia.com/
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