I know that when you first get into internet marketing you are tempted by the dark side. You are tempted to just throw up hundreds of spam blogs that try to pick off a keyword like a sharpshooter picks off his target. I understand your temptation but I am here to try to wean you off of it.
I went down that road in the past myself. I learned a lot along the way. One thing I learned is that building spam sites freaking sucks. It sucks the life out of you. You are building total shit and you know it. You are doing it because it is the only way you know of to make money online. You think that banging out hundreds of these whatevermykeywordis.com sites is the only real way to do this. I am telling you that you are wrong.
There is another way.
You can actually build sites that provide real value to people and profit from it along the way. You aren’t going to have the resources to build hundreds of them every year. However, you will be able to maintain a solid dozen or so sites that are actually enjoyable to work on.
The trick is to match a monetization model with an interest of yours. You need to find the ideal monetization method for whatever your particular interest is. Maybe that is directing traffic to a Clickbank product. Maybe that is directing traffic to Ebay’s affiliate program. Maybe that is building a very niche specific website that displays Pay per click advertising.
People go wrong with these mass Adsense sites
A lot of people in the internet marketing business like to build websites that earn their primary revenue from Google Adsense. This is a worthy goal. An awful lot of sites out there are so generic though that their pages end up showing Google public service advertisements.
That is a clear cut sign that you are monetizing the wrong way. You are showing Google ads on pages that have no commercial value. You probably think that every page on your site has commercial value, but you are wrong. If there are no advertisers bidding on the keywords that your page is targeting, then there simply aren’t any good ads to show on that page. If you show PSA on the page, your CTR will totally suck. If you are showing ads on every page, it probably already sucks. This is very common among people who have never looked into the right way to use Adsense.
Your ad network ends up getting priced by Google for its ridiculously low CTR. You end up getting a really low dollar amount for clicks instead of getting top dollar.
Adsense works best when you show the ads only to organic traffic. Then you get much higher CTR. Plus that traffic actually converts for the advertiser. You end up creating a very profitable place for an advertiser to buy advertising. Guess what happens next? Yup. Advertisers start bidding against one another to show their ads on your super profitable website.
If you create a niche site like this properly, you can routinely get clicks that pay more than $1. In fact, you can get ads that pay several dollars per click. If the site is well done and the advertising positioned properly, you could easily maintain an average CTR no lower than 15%. You could have a dozen or so of these kinds of sites earning a few hundred dollars per month each. That is a great way to make bank.
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Totally agree with you concerning Adsense. I just made a post about Adsense
The main key is good quality content. This is why you will find Adsense in Ezine Articles and the like.
To make money with Adsense you need posts targeted at keywords that people are bidding on. Ideally you want high paying keywords. You don’t necessarily need quality content. You need properly targeted content. This is why spam sites still make money. They don’t have good content. They have targeted content.
In the short run, these spam sites make great money. In the long run though, they are widdled away to becoming worthless because of their lack of quality.
If you are going to build spam sites, you are going to have to build hundreds of them and you will constantly need to be adding more and more sites to your portfolio.
If you build sites that actually benefit people, your income will start off a lot (lot) slower. Eventually though, you will have a steady source of predominantly passive income that will last for years to come. The quality site will attract some links naturally. And, your link building will be a lot easier.
I think most people who start off as spammers eventually grow into legit internet marketers who build brandable websites that eventually become quite valuable assets.
Yeah right… But I would rather start as a good blogger rather than a spammer.
Hi Kathy,
Fortunately (I suppose), I avoided the path that quite a few of my friends took in building those hundreds of MFA sites. Don’t get me wrong, backing in the heyday of BANS, I had a couple of sites that I’m not terribly proud of … but they all made plenty of money … lol, until they got deindexed.
Right now, I only have adsense on about 3 or 4 sites. But you’re right, when they do get clicks they’re never for .04-.05 cents.
Quantity is probably necessary if an internet marketer needs quick cash. But for anybody with ambitions of long-term extra income, making “junk” sites is almost always going to eventually drag you down. (IMO)
Todd,
Sounds like you have been doing it long enough to have learned what I am talking about. It is much more satisfying to make more money with fewer sites than to constantly crank out crappy sites that people are pissed they even visited.
Totally agree. I went over to the dark side for a bit, but found it to really not be fun, or right. White Hat SEO is really the way to go, and quality content will always win. It’s a matter of time + content + links to get google domination! Thank Kathy!
Ron
I hit the delete button when I saw that domain name because I knew that the site was going to be one of the ones that I just wrote about not building. Something about that dog picture made me dig it out of the trash though. I let you slide this time because of the comment. I am not talking about white hat SEO. I am talking about legit content. You should dress that affiliate site up a little more. The green header draws my attention away form your Adsense and from your affiliate link. You might be better off with no header at all than that lime green thing. No more approved comments for these kinds of sites Ron – okay?
I removed the Commentluv juice. There was no way I was giving you a keyword anchor to that kind of site. It wouldn’t be fair to all the other people who have tried to get one from me.
I have just started into this webmastering business and I think you are right it is better to have one meaningful sites than making thousands of keywords targetting spam sites.
“building spam sites freaking sucks. It sucks the life out of you. You are building total shit and you know it.” – Well said! The main fun of being self-employed is the ability to do what you like. And only a person totally obsessed with money may like building useless things.
@Simon and Dennis
Thanks for the dittos guys. I think we all agree as does anyone who has ever done it, that building low quality sites on purpose sucks big time. I think that the only real reason people do it is because they aren’t willing to put in the time to learn how to build sites with real value that they can be proud of. It takes a lot longer to make money that way.