Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

No matter what the “gurus” may tell you… not matter what “tools” they sell you to help you find keywords, build pages, provide templates or host your sites… there’s still a missing “black hole” called traffic. You must have traffic to make money online. For the most part, traffic either comes from your lists, other people lists, free search engine traffic or paid search engine traffic. So why do people offer your more “stuff” to get your sites online quicker without educating you about traffic generation? Because it’s hard!

Take this example of some sites built by Andy Williams (ezSEO)

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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.  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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Good advice. Making money online isn’t easy… it never has been. I’ve always said that. I’ve also said, “it’s not easy, but it is the easiest, legitimate way to make money that I know of”.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 27th, 2006 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Current posts, Adsense tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.