More questions about Article Underground…
A person interested in Article Underground sent me this question…
“Can you make more than $97 a month from Adsense on 40-50 articles? Since they aren’t targeting a specific niche, it’s impossible to use more than a handful of the articles.
Perhaps after 6-7 months, it starts to add up, as you can gradually start using more and more of the articles. Or am I missing something? I’d appreciate your input.”
…and here’s my answer…
“The article pages you used and paid for in month one will still be making money in months 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 etc.
So you don’t need to recover the $97 for each month in just one month. Perhaps your 50 article pages make $1 each per month… you’ll make $50 in months one, two, three, four, five etc. You’ll be in profit after month two. If your article pages only make half that… 50c per month each, you’d be in profit after four months.
The same applies to the articles used in every subsequent month… the profits add up over time… month on month on month after the initial “payback”. 
I’ve made up the numbers for illustration purposes. I don’t know if your article pages will earn $1 or 50c per month… it would depend on the rest of the sites they’re part of and the topics/keywords of the articles.”
Someone please check my math.
The point is, you’re using genuine content to build quality sites for the long term. Once a site starts generating revenue, it will do it for months and months… perhaps years and years… that’s the payoff.
July 4th, 2006 at 6:53 am
What is the value of having 400 articles that 350 other people are using? It is duplicate content unless you rewrite them. If you are going to rewrite them why not just rewrite the free articles available? 350 subscribers times $97 = $33950. 400 articles professionally written at $20 each = $8000. $33950-8000=$25950 times 12 = $311,400. Nice business plan.
July 4th, 2006 at 8:41 am
Aww phooey, Andy!
You know as well as I do that most of the 350 people won’t DO anything with their articles… it’s a fact of life. Of the people who do use the articles, most won’t use *all* of them, so your competition for the articles that you use may only be about 20 people… that’s not going to get you whacked with the dup filter penalty. Look at how many people use and re-use press releases!
(I’ve written about this on the blog before, if you’d like to search for those posts)
And yes, it’s a very good business model. Now deduct processing fees, and then the 50% paid to affiliates for most of the sales (probably more for super affiliates… I don’t know for sure) and then the blog maintenance (deleting spam posts constantly) and time spent dealing with a team of ghostwriters. Oh, and movies, newsletters and other incentives to keeping members on board each month.
BTW, there’s a cost to re-writing 350 articles in time spent… you could be doing something more productive.
Neil.
July 4th, 2006 at 9:05 am
Just a follow up… I took a random quote from a random article from April’s batch of AU articles and plugged my quote into Google… there were 20 matches. So a total of 20 people have used that article and got the page they used it on indexed by Google. That’s in line with my expectations. Personally, I wouldn’t say it was worth re-writing that article to avoid having duplicate content.
July 12th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
Greetings,
What is the benefit of allowing the $97/month fee to continue for the articles? after the first month? Correct me if I am wrong, but if I use and publish 50 articles which each make $1 per month profit nets me $50 per month.. At the end of 4 months I have netted $200 while the articles have cost me $400. Perhaps I publish more and mroe to try to break even… I publish 100 articles which each make $1 per month profit. Looking at one month I am now over the break-even point, but I have not caught up from the first few months of negative cash flow. This does nto take into count the man hours to write and publish and tweak the articles, nor maintenance and webpage submission to the search engines, and not tweaking SEO to try to beat out the other people to raise to the top of the rankings.
I am not sure I buy the fact that the majority of people will do nothing with the articles.. $97 a month is a significant monthly investment, which I think many will try to substantiate by putting in serious time to attempt to make work. I am somewhat leery of joining initially, as I foresee months of struggling with the others who are trying their best, although over time people will drop off (and more will join).
Cliff notes version: Why should I keep up the monthly investment? Why not use the 400 articles I get and earn from those alone? Will Google wizen up and screw us all?
July 12th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
Hi Craig,
You wrote: …”if I use and publish 50 articles which each make $1 per month profit nets me $50 per month.. At the end of 4 months I have netted $200 while the articles have cost me $400.”
Only if you use 50 articles in month one and then do nothing in month’s two, three and four.
This seems to be a common misconception. In month 1 (say, April) you publish 50 articles and earn $50. In month 2 (May), you publish another 50 and earn a total of $100… $50 from the set you published in April and $50 from the set you published in May. In month 3 (June) you publish another 50 and earn $150 in total. In month 4 (July) you publish another 50 and earn $200 in total.
At the end of four months you’ve earned $50 + $100 +$150 + $200 = $500. You’ve paid out $400. You’re $100 in profit… and, using your numbers, can expect to earn $200 per month without adding any further articles/sites.
I hope that’s clear.
Cliff notes: The articles you’ve already added to the web in a previous month can still be expected to earn you money, month after month. They don’t go away at the beginning of the next month.
And, if you don’t believe me that most people won’t actually use the articles, there’s not much I can do about it. My research upholds my argument…
http://www.neilshearing.com/neil-shearing/2006/06/27/more-questions-about-article-underground/#comment-405
July 12th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Hi Neil,
Thank you for qnswering so quickly. I understand better now how the articles add up over the months. A few follow-up questions:
1) Each month, are competely new articles written, or are older articles re-written to keep them up-to-date with the finest searched keywords?
2) Why would the AU authors limit ther profits to 400 users? What stops them from saying they will only allow 400 people to subscribe, but accept more than the 400 to maximize their profit?
3) What stops Goodle and the other major search engines from wizening up and making it difficult/impossible for webpages with articles to be highly ranked, thereby reducing profits?
Thanks again
Craig
July 12th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
Hi Craig,
1: If you are referring to Article Underground, I believe they are 400 totally new articles each month.
2: A limit is probably set to assuage people’s concerns about duplicate content. Accepting more than 400 when you state you will only accept 400 is probably not legal. Mike Liebner makes more sets available if the current set hits 400 members.
3: Google likes articles on web-pages… they are usually good content. As far as I can tell, Google doesn’t penalise people for using articles other people are using. I doubt they will. They have a very effective method of making sure the best pages hit the top of the search engines… PageRank.
Neil.
July 21st, 2006 at 12:55 am
Hi Neil,
I don’t understand why your readers are not getting this concept, but that’s okay, more potential for those of us fortunate enough to be members of Article Underground who are actually using the articles, traffic system and forum.
I’d like to mention that the articles are only one benefit of being an AU member. The traffic system is, imho, an even more important benefit for getting backlinks and helping get your sites indexed. I put up 10 small article sites 2 weeks ago and 8 of the 10 are fully indexed in google using only the AU traffic system. Average “flash to bang” for me in this small test was 9 days. Two of these sites got their first click within 48 hours. Your mileage may vary!
Tamara
July 27th, 2006 at 9:43 pm
My gosh - some of these questions make it clear to me why many will never just get off their butts and do it. This works but you need to get pages out there. I never succeeded untill I stopped asking questions and just got to it.