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by: Phil Wiley
This is all about content.
I've written it as a response to some criticism in my forum this
week. A couple of people said that I don't produce enough original content. Right
now that's true. 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. Big results.
My sites, whether they're mini sites or big sites, work. And they
bring in a huge 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 still believe that the key to long term success is running on-topic
content which is unique to your own web site.
I don't believe the sites I've built over the past few months are
going to keep producing an income for years, where the original content sites I've
got will keep 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
Traffic Equalizer and heavily modified with templates, and by changing
things with search and replace, to add individuality. Just one of
these sites makes more every 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 engine than it does from Google, where just a few months ago
it was nearly all from Google).
I hardly write anything on these sites, just an article on the index
pages of each 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 pages around 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 program on a page. Very often it will be an ebook sold through
Clickbank.
On some sites I put a number of Searchfeed links on the pages
http://www.ozemedia.com/searchfeed.htm but I'm a bit worried about
using Searchfeed and Adsense together so I don't do it often, but
Searchfeed still send me a check for a $1000 plus each month - which
is a nice little side income.
My main concern with Traffic Equalizer has always been that someone
else
building a page on the same search term could have an almost
identical page to
mine. Search engines don't like this.
But the good news is that Traffic Equalizer has just been improved.
A few weeks
ago Jeff Alderson, the programmer, asked me if I had any ideas on
how to make it
better, and I suggested he try and find a way of getting the site
content from
more sources and then randomizing the output. This would make it
less of a
chance that two users would build identical pages. Well he's a fast
worker and
the new improved version came out a couple of days ago, and though I
haven't had
a chance to try it yet, I'm sure it's going to work. At least short
term to mid
term.
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 quality
links to them they tend to drop down the rankings. Also I'm sure
that Google
won't want the search results to be totally clogged with sites built
with
Traffic Equalizer, and will eventually change their algorithms to
make the pages
rank a lot lower than they currently do. If they did this by
targeting pages
with lots of outbound links but few inbound links it would be
damaging to the TE
pages.
Having said that, these sites DO work. And Google allow their
Adsense Ads to be
run on them.
Some people don't like the idea of building writes using Traffic
Equalizer
because it somehow seems wrong to them. They don't like the
"quality" of the
sites it produces. But the search engines LOVE the sites. Many of
the pages they
produce 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't
redirect, they don't mislead people. They just build simple
directories.
I'm not going to name anyone, but some REALLY famous people in the
internet
marketing world are doing very well with TE. These people
consistently make a
huge income year after year by doing what works at the moment. In
other words
they use the tools which bring them an income.
You should be doing it too Bill
http://www.ozemedia.com/trafficeq
Just one thing to mentally make a note of.
You have to be patient. Unless you already have a few high Pagerank
sites you
can link to them from, these sites take a few months to take off.
During those
months you need to keep build new sites. If you get despondent
because the sites
look like they not going to do well you'll stop building them, and
then curse
yourself a few months down the track when you realize you could have
had 20 more
sites steadily coming online. In other words you don't see instant
results, but
you have to keep building sites and pages. There is no easy option,
no quick
work around. You work hard at building these sites and success will
come.
_________________________________
So - seeing I think Traffic EQ sites won't keep working for years -
what about
long term sites?
Well contrary to what a few people said in my forum I do still build
sites full
of articles that I write or pay someone to write.
Right now I'm building a network of travel sites which will be full
of articles
and photographs of places I've visited. They're going to be mini
sites of
between 5 and 12 pages, though perhaps as high as 20 pages on some
of them
because the photographs are going to take up quite a bit of space.
This week Kate has spent most of her time writing touristy type,
personal
experience articles on London and York. Next week she's moving on to
write about
Japan. After that it's going to be France. Then she's doing
Malaysia, before
working on a big site about Australia. We'll be using photographs
that I've shot
in the past few years in each of these places. And I'll also put
together a site
on Bangkok in Thailand, which I visited recently.
All the content, both photographs and articles, will be totally
unique to the
sites we build. They'll be keyword rich and the sites properly
structured to
please the search engines. I haven't yet decided if I'll build the
sites with
Traffic Equalizer. If I use TE http://www.ozemedia.com/trafficeq
I'll just use
it to provide the structure of the site - pages, linking structure -
then remove
most or all of the outbound links and replacing them with the
articles and
photos.
Rather than just putting all the content up on one domain I've
registered a
whole bunch of domain names and I'm hosting them in the countries
the site is
about ( except Japan because I can't find a low cost Japanese web
host ). The
sites 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 in
each country because I think it just might improve the web ranking
chances a
little. Though I'm not certain on this. I'm quite certain, however,
that if
they're linked together the way Michael describes they need to be on
different
web hosts in a different IP range.
Here's what's involved ( so you can see why I take the easy option
sometimes and
just 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 that
people are actually looking for ( I use Wordtracker to do this
http://www.ozemedia.com/wordtracker )
* Pay Kate to write most of the articles, and get my weary brain
into action to
write 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've
yet to find a travel affiliate program I'm happy with, but some
pages might
carry affiliate ads for luggage or books)
* Choose domain names and find web hosts.
* Build the sites and link them together as in Mininet
http://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 and
the others will quickly find you from Google.)
______________________________________
By the way I'll probably use Traffic Equalizer on different domains
to build
pages to direct traffic to my travel network sites. The same way I
now use
Traffic Equalizer to send traffic to my other mini sites.
______________________________________
So what do you do if you want to build content sites like my travel
sites but
you 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
jobs
because 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 not
putting anyone out of a job, just helping create jobs.
Wages are very low in India, a country which has some of the best
educated
English speaking people in the world. And to us Westerners people
work for peanuts in India. According to an article in Computerworld magazine http://www.computerworld.com/careertopics/careers/story/0,10801,91916,00.html?from=story_kc
a programmer in India earns around US$7500 a year. ( A programmer in
China
earns around 20 to 30% less, but it's hard to outsource content
creation to
China 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 has
started 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 an
outsourcing web site. Try these.
http://www.elance.com
http://www.rentacoder.com
http://www.guru.com
http://www.smarterwork.com
Do a search on them for "search engine optimised web content ",
"content
writing" or just "web content". When I looked on elance last week I
saw bids as
low $5 per page, but the lowest I saw today was $10 a page. This is
still
incredibly 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 marketing
professional with over 10 years of experience."
Another possible way to use these sites is to hire people to create
new products
for you. At the time of writing this letter there are 5 bids for
writing a
recipe ebook. The lowest bidder is willing to do the whole project
for just
US$400. In fact the highest bid is just $450. Someone else is
willing to write a
50 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 based
on US$8 per page (250-300 words) with minimum billing of 50 pages
(additional
pages will be billed at the rate of US$8 per pages) and includes all
necessary
research and revisions. You will own full copyrights. Completion
Time: 16
working days."
About the author:
Phil Wiley is the author of the best selling book Mini Site Profits
www.minisiteprofits.comand writes the free weekly Letter from Phil
at www.ozemedia.com
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