Aaronchua.com will be no more

For the few readers that I have, this is to inform you that aaronchua.com will no longer be updated. This is mainly due to the EMD penalty which, strangely enough, has affected this site. I have no idea how to reverse this and I have no intention of trying since this is not a money making site for me. I will still be blogging at my early retirement blog so I hope to see you guys there. Thanks for all the time you have spent reading aaronchua.com. I hope you have gain something from it...

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Dead end sites Time to get rid of mine

I wake up this morning, look at my numbers and say to myself "what do the f*ck am I doing?". I had over 100 sites Only of a few are making serious money and I was wondering what am I doing with the rest? Enough! Time to get rid of what I called dead end sites and move on to sites that had the potential to be a real business. What are dead end sites? These are sites that had very limited potential. Example? How about this? Blue torch  holder. How dead end can you get? Limited branding. Limited product extension. Limited audience. So, why make them? Because they bring in money fast. Small amounts but fast money. This creates a tiny...

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How to make money with Amazon 2013 edition

The making money online landscape has changed significantly since Google rolled out Panda and Penguin. Making money with Amazon is no exception. Before the algorithm changes, my Amazon niche sites were pulling in close to USD1000 per month in amazon affiliate fees. They were all wiped out when the changes came. Fortunately, I didn't give up completely and started my Amazon 50 sites challenge. Last month, they are close to making USD250. So slowly but surely, I am starting to earn with Amazon again. Today, I was reading Griz's old posts and they reminded how good the past few years have been. In terms of making money online, there was no keywords...

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Is SEO dead? A claim from Yazekie

There is a blog post in the Yakezie networking claiming that SEO is dead. I have left my comment there but I don't know if it got through because their commenting system is so messed up. So, I will be reposting that comment here in case it didn't go through. No point wasting good content! LOL ********** SEO is a marketing tactic. Just in all marketing tactics, as long as someone knows how to use the tactic well, it will continue to be a useful way to acquire users or customers. There are lots of spam emails but do you think 'email marketing is dead'? Probably not. Similarly, SEO will never die. Most folks who claim that SEO is dead...

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Amazon Challenge #9: Make 200 dollars with Amazon affiliate

Welcome to the blog with ever declining traffic LOL. Yes, the traffic on aaronchua.com has been going down for some time now. In fact, as I look closely at the traffic from April to current, it might seem that the site has been penalised! Really nice Google. The only site where I have real info is being penalised while my amazon niche sites are going up with traffic! Anyway, let's get to the real meat of the article. My amazon sites pulled in a nice income for Sept 2012. Nothing really to brag about but a nice side income nevertheless. Below are the screnshots from my amazon and skimlinks accounts: Amazon income: USD141.96 Skimlinks...

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Google update targeting exact match domain EMD Are you affected?

Typical Google. Launching another update to get rid of folks like us. This time it is targeting low quality exact match domains. Since I have 50 of those for my Amazon 50 niche site challenge, I am already mentally prepared for the worst to come. After checking through the stats last night, none of my sites are actually affected even though all their domains are exact keyword domains. Amazing! There is no obvious conclusion but I am guessing that one of the following could explain why my sites were not affected. Reason #1: I build my sites correctly If any of you have been following me in my amazon challenge updates, you will know that I build...

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How many keywords can you get on page one with one article

How do you sharpen your SEO skills? There are a couple of things that I do and this is one of them. In my previous article on how to get traffic to your blog without backlinks, I mentioned that decreasing your reliance on link building improves the remaining aspect of SEO, which is mainly keyword reseach, copy writing, and developing metrics & analytics. In this article, I want to zoom in one aspect, which is copy writing. Everything else aside, I am not a good writer by any standard. I have poor grammar, lots of spelling mistakes and no voice to call my own. So, the copywriting I am talking about is being able to think and write in...

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How to get visitors to your blog without backlinks

Since Panda, I have been building niches and blogs without using any methods that Google frowns on. Specifically, I have stopped buying or manipulating links to get top rankings in google for my blog. All the amazon niche sites that I have built are done with content and by targeting the right keywords that nobody is bothering to optimise for. In this post, I want to encourage you to sharpen your SEO skills by not building links. From my past experience, building links makes you lazy as an SEO. Everyone just buys them from places such as trafficplanet.com or fiverr or blog networks. Your whole SEO strategy becomes a routine of: using keyword...

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Amazon Challenge #8 When do you gave up on your site?

August is not a great month in terms of Amazon earnings. From the chart below, you can see that only 3 sites made money so far. Fortunately, site #23 earned its first 2 sales and surprising, broken even immediately as one of the items sold was over USD300.  Site #4 and #11 continue to made consistent sales even though their traffic is low. Click to enlarge The question I am thinking about today is this: when do you give up on your site? I was prompted when I looked at the chart last night. If I had dropped site #23 earlier, I will never have earned back its set up cost of USD14. In fact, a similar thing fact to site #5 last month...

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Choosing Amazon keywords based on unqiue selling proposition for your niche sites

Most of us choose keywords based on search numbers, level of competition and commercially viability. With the onslaught of Panda and Penguin, most of us will need to step on our game. The easiest way is to create interesting content that will be shared. So,should that be one of our keyword selection criteria when we decide on what niches to choose? I don't believe in passion sites because it seriously limits what markets we go to. Most offline businesses are not really passionate about their business's core subjects anyway. Instead, I proposed that we choose niches based on whether we can create interesting content that can be shared so that...

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How to rank without backlinks and get traffic to your site

I am not a big fan of building backlinks to get rankings and traffic. Backlinks can often get your site into trouble. Just ask the folks whose sites have been penalised by the Penguin update. Of course, the IM folks are starting to say things such as varying your anchor text to make backlinks effective. To me, that is going to be a short term solution. When penguin 2 or whatever animal comes, don't be surprised if these guys are wipe out just like in the first penguin. So, do I mean that sites don't need links? No, but you don't need as many links as what others have been saying. Links matter when you decide to go for keywords that are solely...

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Amazon report #7 Making new niche sites after Penguin

For folks who might have missed my previous post on how to make money after penguin and panda, I have show you that some of my Amazon niche sites are still making money. Below is an updated chart that shows you my earnings. Click on image to enlarge First, let me take a moment to explain the chart: Niche: Self explanatory KW: keyword search volume for the main keyword Domain: keyword search volume for the domain keyword. Most of the time, this is the same number as KW but in the event that I couldn't buy a Exact Match Domain, I will get a slightly longer domain that still some keyword volume. For example, if I couldn't buy patiochairs.com,...

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Can you make money with Amazon after Penguin and Panda

Did everybody just gave up on making money online now that Panda and Penguin has arrived? I hope not because things are actual much easier now. With Penguin, it is now quite possible to rank sites without ever requiring a single backlink. Just keep your site to 50% natural articles and 50% keyword focus and you will start to see traffic. Seriously. Anyway, the point of this post is to show you guys that despite my amazon sites being penalised, I still manage to squeeze out nearly  USD100 on them despite not touching them for several months. This strengthens my belief that the online model still works out and any investment you made is still...

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Buy and sell domains to make money

I know people say you can't make money buying and selling domains in 2012 because all the good ones are taken. That is true to some extend as all the single word generics such as candy.com, or chocolate.com is taken. However, you can still make money, just like how people can still make money off properties even though they are so expensive now compared to 20 years ago. Anyway, I am not an domain buying expert but I want to start building my domain portfolio. Maybe I will lose a lot of money and maybe I wouldn't. It is hard to say as domain selling can be like a lottery game but I believed if I stick to buying good names, sales will...

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Is Jared Cooper from www.designbyhybrid.com a scamer

Ok folks, don't waste your time reading this post. It is meant for me to do some SEO work to some guy who has been very dishonest in his business dealing with me. Jared copper (email: sales@designbyhybrid.com) of www.designbyhybrid.com first approach me with the desire to buy one of my domain names. Frankly speaking, I wasn't expecting the sales as I bought the domain for development. However, I decided to sell it as I figured that my busy schedule might not allow me the time to fully develop this site. As a result of this thinking, the sale price was finalised fairly quickly. I created the invoice and sent it to him June 16 2012....

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How identifying new niche can create a real online business

One of the key strategies in my online business is to identify new niches that have just emerged. With a new niche, the leverage you can have from SEO traffic is much stronger because the cost of achieving the rankings and traffic is much lower. This is why I wanted to do a post for the 10 new niches or industries that I have identified because I think you can really benefit from them if you take action. Before that list, let me take this post to give you a concrete example of how a startup has cleverly mined an emerging set of keywords to build up a really strong traffic funnels. The startup is called Zapier . You probably have never heard...

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Why the blogging niche sucks - a reply to Justin from adsenseflippers.com

I am really honored that Justin from adsenseflippers.com has left a comment on my previous post: "difference between fluff and quality content". I agree with this particular comment: ".but I also think it's important to remember that just because you get more value out of actionable content...not everyone's in the same position as you." It is very true that different folks are looking for different stuff. So, this post is meant for me to clarify that, FROM MY PERSPECTIVE, why I think most of the blogging/online marketing/making money crowd is fluff.  I am a business guy from day one. When I was a fund manager with the government,...

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DIfference between quality content and marketing fluff: a long reply to tom ewer of leavingworkbehind.com

This was intended to be a reply to Tom of leavingworkbehind.com, who took the trouble to leave a comment in previous post on marketing fluff.  It turned out to be a bit longer than I would have liked as a comment so I decided to flush out my thoughts a bit more and make it into a real post. This was Tom's comment "Hey Aaron,Really disappointed to hear that you feel my blog is going the way of "fluff". I'd love to get some feedback from you on that front - I pour an enormous amount of effort in trying to produce valuable posts every single time, so I'd like to know where you think I'm going wrong.Cheers,Tom" Given Tom's recently...

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Using marketing fluff to get more traffic for your blog

The online marketing blogs are just full of fluff and crap. Sites like thinktraffic.net and socialmediaexaminer.com gets to me because they don't really say anything useful. (I hope leavingworkbehind.com is not going that direction but it seems that way). They make for enjoyable readings but you can't take anything away from their content to use. What you can learn from them is how they can produce marketing fluff that attracts readers and implement them on your non marketing blogs. Most of these marketing or make money blogs succeed because they capitalise on one thing: most readers are lazy. Most readers rather spend time reading about...

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Mid year review of my online business

Anybody out there? LOL I have disappeared from this blogs for a couple of reasons, namely my Turkey Holiday, my grandma passing away and a couple of work distractions. I doubt anybody cares enough about this blog to want to know this but I thought no harm writing these excuses down for not blogging recently. It is now the mid point of 2012. It is a appropriate time to review the progress of my online business. I hope you guys do the same because it is easy to be caught up in the day to day without taking the time off to reflect and to realign on what you are doing. Update on old projects Goal of earning an additional 5k per month: I...

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