Making 100 dollars with adsense is easy Maintaining it is hard

I might sound cocky saying this but making USD100 dollars with adsense is very easy once you know how. In fact, even making 500 dollars or 1000 dollars is not a challenge once you know the make money process behind it. The challenge is in maintaining it.

The story of a typical money making journey

A beginner who is starting his or her journey to make money online will face challenges in knowing what keywords to target, how to get backlinks etc. If they continues to push forward, they will eventually find a couple of niches that they can rank and make money.

This is when things start to fall apart. 

You see, once the money starts to come in, people get excited and see the possibilities of making lots of money online. If 1 site can make me USD100, 10 sites will make me USD1000! (An alternative version is if 10 pages can make me USD100, 100 pages will make me USD1000). Such thought patterns are happening in almost all the blogs that talk about making money, including this one : (

In the excuse of scaling, quality and thoughtfulness are offen forgotten, resulting in websites that have no other reasons to exist except to make money for the owner. Such sites will suffer later on when the algorithm changes.

The latest in such a casualty is Wesly from chasing pace.  His story is not uncommon. Quick success followed by a drop due to changes in site rankings. This story is repeated so often that you know it is not a concidence. We, internet marketers, chase keywords instead of real businesses and that will bound to bite us back if we don't change.

For Wesley's case, even for his niche authority site project, I see very little thought being built into the sites. Yes, the content is real but there is nothing special or different about it. The part that  disturbs me the most is how his entire foundation is based on keyword reseach, instead of finding a gap in the market where it is serving.

Compared Wesly to how Patricia Handschiegel, a figure in the media/telcom/startup world, goes aboout creating her site .  Check out her post on why she started her publishing project:

http://patriciahandschiegel.tumblr.com/post/18868461463/condiment

This is the statement that got me: "There aren’t a lot of mainstream media companies using this format at the moment, but it’s something that I’ve believed digital media would ultimately look like for some time."

Notice the subtle difference in why sites are started? One is chasing keywords while the other is innovating and trying to find a reason to exist. 

What is a quality site

To me, it is simply a reason to exist. It is not about how long your content or even if the content comes from personal experience. Many internet marketers believe that an affiliate site with personal reviews can be considered as quality. I don't agree. If you want personal reviews, there are so many of them in amazon. Why make yours so special?

To me, a quality site pays attention to filling a gap in the market. It is a sumation of not only content, but how it is presented, in what frequency, under what tone and in which kind of medium. These considerations are what real media companies think about. Yet, being website publishers, we totally ignore all this. Our criteria is simply keyword search volume, competitiveness of the keywords, potential money you can make.

This game is a house of cards. It will not stand the test of time. If you care about your site, find a reason for it to exist. Sometimes, content is enough because there is not enough of it on the web. Most of the time, you will need more.

Am I building quality sites?

I say all this not because I am a saint. I build keywords sites as well and find that they often run into problems. If you are here for the short run and just want to make as much money as you can, this model is ok. If you want to build a quality site, learn what is the unique selling propositon of the site first.

It is not easy and I don't have all the answers but let's start this journey, shall we?

Posted in: authority site