EzSEO Newsletter # 135

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EzSEO Newsletter # 135

Andy Williams

“Creating Fat Affiliate Sites”

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This week:

1. Some fr.ee Graphics you can use

2. More Marcin Articles.

3. How much traffic do I get?

4. Reader’s Question.

5. Other Stuff.

Hi again.

I’ve got some results for you from some of my own sites. These experiments were started several months ago, and are related to using PLR, and freely available articles for building sites. You wont want to miss it.

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1. Some fr.ee Graphics you can use
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I received an email mid-week from the “Adsense Video Guy”. He was saying in his newsletter that a SINGLE person was responsible for his massive sales (I can’t remember the exact amount but it was around a quarter of a million dollars I think) and a 5% conversion rate when the Adsense video course was released. I thought he must mean an affiliate, but then why single out a single affiliate when I remember a lot of super-affiliates pushing the course. What shocked me was when he named the person.

Are you ready for this?

Well he said it was the guy who did the graphics for his sales page. Silly me, I thought it was all those Super-affiliates doing a good pre-sell job and sending him tons of traffic that were responsible for all the sales ;o)

Anyway, the good thing to come out of the email was that the guy that created his graphics was giving away a selection of fr.ee graphics that you can use yourself.

I downloaded them, and there are some that I have already found uses for. If you want to get them yourself, you can from here.

You will need to provide an email address, but so far I haven’t received any emails from them except my download details. Before you get to download the graphics, he will try to sell you a graphics pack, and it is a 0ne time 0ffer (OTO), you wont see them at that price again. There is no oblig.ation to buy, but if you are interested in graphcis like this, they look great.

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2. More Marcin Articles.
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You may remember a few newsletters ago, a subscriber called Marcin Lejman wrote an article I liked so much I recommended it in my newsletter. The article was called “Profitable niches in under 10 minutes”. Well, Marcin has written a couple of new articles I really like. If you missed the first one, there is a link to it from the first of these new articles below.

Here is the first one. Marcin uses Commission Junction together with Google’s Keyword tool to find profitable niches.

The second one uses a couple of great authority sites to help find those niches. Not only that, but these sites can also provide a lot of your content too. Here it is.

I think you’ll find them a good read, and for those who have problems coming up with niches, they are great techniques that I have used myself with great success.

Top Tip:
Marcin used a technique here that I myself use to great effect.

I use this technique in autoresponder courses set up on my niche sites. I give an intro to an article, and tell the reader to go to the web page to read the full article. The article page will have Adsense (or an affiliate promo), so I get a chance to make some m0ney.

Marcin has used a slightly different approach. He contacted me (and probably a lot of other marketers) to see if we were interested in recommending his article. I liked them so much I did, so he gets fr.ee traffic to his page, and exposes more people to his Adsense (without needing a search engine to do it).

It’s something to think about, and a great way of getting people to Adsense pages without the search engines. Can you think of other ways? The more ways that are search engine independent, the more secure your business will be.

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3. How much traffic do I get?
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In September 2005, I started a new website at:

http://bibliotekk.com

This site was set up using an article site generation script, and I have done very little with it except get a couple of incoming links, and get people to add content.

Every month I get a lot of submissions, most of which are rejected automatically because the author has not included a category. If the author can’t be bothered, neither can I. The site is growing at a current rate of 40-50 articles a month, and it takes me no longer than 20 minutes a month to keep updated.

Currently it has PR of just 2. This is intentionally low, as I wanted to replicate what I see as the average amount of effort most beginners put into new sites, and see if it could generate an income.

The site currently has 567 articles. That’s quite a decent sized content site, so how much traffic does it get, and how much Adsense earnings do I make from this?

The results may surprise you.

Average monthly visitors: 300.
That means only about 10 a day.
Of those 10 a day, most are actually people visiting to submit articles. In fact, in the last week, the site was only found via the search engines 10 times. That’s just over once a day. Disappointing eh?

So what about Adsense earnings?

I only put Adsense on this site on March 20, 2006. so it has been raking in the m0ney for about 5 months. If I told you that I would not get much change from a McDonalds Big Mac, you get an idea how poorly this site has done. At least it has almost paid for the domain fee ;o)

This is the point where most beginners would give up, thinking that making m0ney online is too difficult and does not really work. However, that is what separates successful marketers from those who fail - determination to succeed.

The next step with this site is to increase backlinks to it, and monitor traffic levels as backlinks and PR increase. Will it make a difference? Will the site start making a profit? Stay tuned…

OK, a second experiment: I used a tool to create a website out of 100% re-printable articles. These are the articles you get from article directories like ezinearitcles.com. The site was setup in May 2006, and currently runs to about 80 pages. This site also has a PR 2, as I again wanted to mimic a beginners site.

Last month, this site got about 20 visitors (less than 1 a day), and didn’t make enough for the bus fair to McDonalds.

Again, a beginner would certainly throw their hands up in frustration and quit.

The next step for this site would also be to increase the backlinks. However, in this particular case, I may scrap it altogether and create some quality content for it instead.

So, what have we learnt here?

I would suggest there is one main lesson to be learnt from these experiments. Making m0ney from Google Adsense is not as easy as some people would have you believe. You cannot just throw up websites built with fr.ee content, and leave them to make you money. You need to work on the off-page factors to build incoming links, and increase traffic.

I find it funny that more and more software is coming out to speed up site building or article writing, and I myself am going in the complete opposite direction. I am looking for ways to guarantee the quality of the articles I write.

I have set myself a target for all new content I publish. I want to create articles that earn me a minimum of $1 a day (as opposed to the articles on bibliotekk.com that earn me about 0.2 cents per MONTH on average). I have a foolproof method of creating quality content, and I can do a couple of articles within the space of 2 hours.

If I can get to my goal of $1 a day, then a 50 page sites (which could be built in a month) would make me $50 a day, or $1500 a month. The fact that it is 100% quality content means that income is much more secure against the changing search engine algorithms.

Over the period of a year, I should be able to put 10 sites together, bringing my total income of these sites to around the $15,000 a month mark.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? It’s not. The secret is getting to the $1 a day mark per article (on average), and that will only be done with quality content and a lot of work in getting incoming links from quality sites.

My Advice:

* Set yourself goals, and work towards them.
* Don’t get discouraged by “failures”. Turn them round into successes as you have already invested too much time just to quit.
* Don’t take shortcuts. Quality will always win in the end.

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4. Reader’s Question
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I got an email this week, and felt that the answer might be of some benefit to a lot more people, so here it is:

“Dear Andy,
Quick question– once I select my keywords with Wordtracker (sorting them with KRA-WT) do I stick with those keywords permanently… or do I change them every six months?

Two years ago, I got to the top of Google search engine with my keyword phrase. I checked and it is no longer used in Wordtracker. I am getting 8000 visitors a month, and have a 5 % conversion rate. I see from my ftp stats that there are other keywords that bring people to my website. (Basically,
my old keywords are no longer reliable… but does it matter at this point?)

Just wondering if I need to update my keywords… is it worth my time and effort once my website is established and getting good traffic?”

OK. My advice is this.

NEVER change the content of a page that is doing well in the search engines.

Never tweak it, and never change the keywords used on that page. If you do, you are asking for Google to re-assess the page, and you’ll more than likely wish you hadn’t. If you have to change an affiliate link, that is fine, but don’t change the keyword content.

If your market is seasonal, you should carry out the research after the season finishes. Wordtracker keeps data for 3 months (if my memory is correct), so if your season is from June-September, carry out the keyword research in September/October. Next year, repeat the research and see if there are any new phrases you want to target.

Even if you find some of your old keywords are no longer searched for, don’t change the page they are on. Simple write a new page. Create new pages for all new phrases you want to target. Never re-write a page with new keywords.

I have heard a number of horror stories of people tweaking and changing keywords, and it ends in tears more often than not. Remember, minor changes to your pages, or the links pointing to those pages can result in big changes in your rankings, up or down.

OK, I think I got that message across, but what about pages that aren’t ranking well? In this case, check the content is quality, change your keywords, or create a tighter theme on the page, and get more keyword rich links to the page. In this situation there is nothing lost by tweaking, so feel free to do so.

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4. Other Stuff
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There are still some July and August blueprints left. I wont go into details here as there are descriptions on the relevant pages of the Niche Bleuprints site.

There are also a couple of Blueprints from last year still available (October & December). These are currently at reduced prices, and are almost sold out.

Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at my blog:

http://ezseonews.com/blog/index.php

For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:

http://ezseonews.com/archives

Have a great week!

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