How to recover from Google Panda 2.6

Google Panda 2.6 just roll out and it is one of the devasting roll out for people making money online. In the Keyword Academy (btw, it is one of the best course for beginner on making money), the members are all reporting traffic and income reduction of up to 75%. My sites are affected as well even though they were unaffected in all the previous Panada updates. Nobody knows what are the factors that trigger Panada as it is all guesswork at the moment. If there is someone telling you that they have a solution for Panada 2.6, run for the hills because nobody got a freaking clue.

Below is a screenshot showing the adsense site that I building in my tutorial post on how to make 1000 with adsense.

(click to enlarge image)

Traffic in the last few days have reduced significantly with many keywords losing rankings. Income is down as well as the site is only earning 200, where it used to earn over 1k. This is not unique. Except for my authority sites, all my other sites have such declines. Overall, I am losing more than 5k due to Panada.

So, for those who are new to making money online, this is a real risk as a business. I am not complaining as I know full well this will be the risk but I thought it will be a good idea to let beginners know as most money making programmes don't highlight such risks.

How to recover from Google Panada 2.6

Frankly, I have no clues at the moment. Our gut feel is to do nothing and see how things changes over time. It is not uncommon for sites to recover after a few weeks. Then again, some sites never recover and this is when you know you need to clean up. If that is the case for my sites, this is what I will do:

• Remove all tag pages: there is some seo theory saying that tag pages might trigger a duplicate content penalty so I will remove them to see if traffic recovers.

• Look at pages that drop off the most and see if they have been optimised well. Most of the time, our sites suffer in rankings due to poor onsite SEO efforts. If you think onsite SEO is just keywords in article titles, page titles etc, you have some ways to go. 

•  Relook at the site structure and see if they have been well optimised. Again, good navigation structure contributes to onsite SEO and might be the factor that can restore your site.

• If all else, I will let the site go and start over. Triggering a panada penality might have a permanent damage to your trust factor and this needs to be rebuilt from scratch. In such cases, it might be easier to start afreash on a new site with no such penalties.

• I am going to buy or build authority sites and start creating some real values (not just content) for the searcher. This is going to a separate post and I am going to detail my approach for making money online after reflecting at it for many months. 

Do I regret getting into online to make money?

Not really. Online is one the rare events that can level the playing field and allow anyone to break out of the 9-5 work and do something for themselves. Life is too short to submit yourself to the company.

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Should I buy product domain names to make money

I got a reader question asking me about whether it is advisable to buy product domain names to search for amazon products and make money. The answer is: it depends. Depends on what is your objective, buying product domains can be a viable strategy to make passive income.

For readers who don't understand the power of domain names, here is a short explanation. Google gives some weight to what is contain in your url in its ranking algorithm. As to what is the weightage, nobody really knows.  The closer your domain name matches the keyword you are trying to rank for, the higher the chance of your site ranking even when it is new. For course, in the long run, it is not really important as there are always ways to put your keyword in your url such as through your post titles. As you site gains authority and trust from google, this will be enough even when your domain itself does not contain your keywords.

 So, coming back to the question. Having exact product name as your domain will help you rank faster in the short run. This is great for amazon as people searching for exact product phrases such as amazon kindle fire are more likely to be a buyer compared to people searching ebook reader or multi media tablet.

However, there is a legal issue with using trademarked names in your domain. There is always the possibility of these companies issuing a cease and desist letter to you if they happen to found out that you are using their brand names without their notice. Of course, in the true spirit of trademark laws, there might be a chance of you retaining the domain if you are not using the domain name to compete with the brand but do you really want to enter into a legal dispute with a big corporate company?

My advice is this. If you understand the risks and is prepared that your product domains might be taken from you anytime, do it for the Christmas season. You can make tonnes of money if you manage to rank these product domains and get people to Amazon. During the year end, people go crazy with amazon purchases and your online income will increase like crazy.

However, if you want to build a long term site, avoid using brand names in your domain. It is better to build a general consumer review site and try to rank for the individual brand names. It is safer and you can target more than 1 brand. The downside is that the site might not gain enough authority during these few months to bring you any sales from the Christmas buying frenzy.

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How to start a new blog and make money

I am going to take a new direction in earning income from a blog. This will be first post on my new approach which you are more than welcome to give feedback on. However, I want to talk a bit about my adsense partnership programme.

My announcement of that programme went well. Much better than I expected as the 10 slots were filled in less than a week. My challenge now is to work out a dashboard through which I can communicate with my partners such that they know what to do every day without direct communication with me. For the rest who didn't sign up in time, I will be posting things here that I am doing with my partners so that you can follow along with you want to. I do hope that I can really help anyone there who needs a push in their attempts to make money with adsense.

 The first thing I am going is to pick the niches to work with my partners. Here is my method of keyword research and selection. I don't use much tools but reply on common sense.

First approach: mine your own stats for buying keyword
I have chosen buying keywords that I know can make money based on my previous sites. I have a couple of general article directories that carry articles which span many different topics. Most of these directories do not have strong authority but if the content on them can rank, it tells me that the keywords they are ranking for is really weak. If I build sites around these weak keywords, the possibility of my partners making fast money is real. If you do not have any article sites, you can do the same thing. Use google to hunt for weak article directories and see what keywords they are ranking for using SEMrush.

Second approach: apply a modifier to create a new category of keywords
Another approach I use is to look at general topics and apply a modifier that can be used on the keywords found in the general topic. For example, if I choose the home decor niche, I will not choose keywords such as chairs, or lighting, or storage as these are too competitive and need a long time to see results. Instead, I pick a modifier such as portable or cute or energy saving and build an entire site around these modifiers. In this case, I will pick a domain such as portablefurniture.com and create articles that attack each longtail keyword such as portable coffee table, portable wire shelving, portable kitchen lighting etc. I find that this thematic approach not only gives your site a unique angle but they are easy to rank for all sorts of longtails. If you pick a modifier that is up and coming, the traffic will be good with little or no competition.

Now that I have done the research and come up with a list, I am facing a dilemma. Should my partners and I create a site that we don't really care about except to make money or should we create a site where we can really contribute to the web? I am now thinking of the latter and I am asking all my partners who have read this to email me your thoughts. If you want to build a site that you can contribute your experience or expertise, you can let me know and we can rebuild that list of keywords to start the site with.

I am facing this dilemma because I want to build something that I can proudly show people. More importantly, it is something that is long lasting and is more energising to work on. Now, I am not saying that all my adsense sites are junk, just that I have very little interest in the subject area.


My new project
This brings me back to the first point, which is my new project. During the past weeks, I have brainstormed through a list of ideas that I can create a blog on. These ideas are i. n areas that I know I can provide a unique voice and perspective, like what i am doing here. Not only I find these ideas very motivating to work on, but I am going to test out some new ideas on getting traffic as well as monetisation. The best part is I can show you these sites so you guys can follow along if you want to.

Now, my problem is which idea to pick. I will list some of them here so that you can give me some feedback if you want to. In a future post, I will write down how I pick topics that I know will have an audience and how to give a unique value proposition to your blog :

Email newsletter business: the most primitive of communication channel and yet the most effective if you get it right. As the old saying goes: 'the money is in the list'.  The reason I want to start a blog that teaches people how to create profitable email newsletter business is that there is a lack of free and detailed information on how to really get started in this business. My approach to building such businesses will not be the typical IM way i.e. just collecting email and spamming people to death with IM products in the disguise of a useful email. No, I will talk it from the perspective of a content strategy i.e. what to write about, how to find unmet information needs in your niche, how to analyse your stats etc. I am not an expert but I am currently doing this in the startup I am involved in so I will be transposing my lesson there to the site.




Email newsletter are a classic form of permission marketing, as coined by Seth Godin. It is a new form of marketing that fits very well into this new economy of ours where we now ignore classic disruptive based marketing such as ads, cold calls, spam emails etc.

In fact, big companies such as dailycandy.com grew out of this model. What I hope the blog can do is to be a starter kit for anyone to create their own dailycandy.com. If you want more reference about this business, you can read these:

email newsletter are serious business
how to start a email newsletter company

We love these jobs: Most of the people I spoke to hated their jobs. However, with the changing economic landscape, new job positions are being created that demands creativity and non conformity. Jobs that demands imagination. Jobs that allow us to be...humans. However, these positions and new job specification are not easy to find as they are scattered all over the place. I hope this blog can collect all the companies that are 'fun' to work with and maybe even do interviews with the staff. Other useful content will include highlighting future career trends and how to maximise one's potential in these new jobs. Over time, the site might evolve into a new kind of job board, one that is filled with jobs which everyone wants to do!

Your daily dose of great marketing ideas: I scan many online marketing blogs and boy, do they suck! I mean, most of them spilts out generic advice and me too headlines that it becomes too painful to read. Blogs such as those by seth godin are insightful but they are too far away from day to day operations. I hope this blog can collect case studies on how real companies are implementing these new marketing concepts that seth godin talks about to give these ideas more meat. I got this idea when I wanted more examples on how to execute these new marketing ideas and could not find a good resource for it. I am sure there many people like me who does online marketing but really needs that daily dose of inspiration from something that is real.

This post will likely turn off some readers because it is my first attempt to gel what I had written in the past before knowing SEO and the current content about making money online. It may seem strange to combine the two but I think that intersection between SEO, startups ideas, innovation, creativity etc will be an interesting road to take. Hope to have you on aboard.

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Beginner course to make money online with adsense

After receiving quite a number of comments and emails about how to make 1000 with adsense, I have been thinking about how to really help more people make a living online in a way that also benefits me. I like to help people but I have my own living expenses to take care of as well. That means I need to watch where I spend my time carefully.

The solution that I have come up with is to have a partnership programme for those who are interested to work with me to earn adsense income online. How this programme works will be very different to how other make money online course function.

• I want this programme to be risk free for the people who wants to join
• I want to work in small groups
• I want it to be more collaborative i.e. not an ebook or video course style

This is how the programe will work:

1. We will create a site together. It can be based on your existing site or it can be a brand new one. If it is a brand new site, I will suggest a niche that I know will make money. I will also teach you how to find keywords, not using the google adword tool. Just plain common sense that I found is working for me. Getting into the right niche is one of the hardest part for any beginner. Nobody will want to reveal their money making niches and keywords. If we work together, you get to see what works for me and I will try to duplicate that for your site.
   
   
2. There is not upfront fees. We will do a revenue share instead. Depending on how much work that is needed from me, I will take anywhere ranging from 30-50%, up to a cap of 1k. For example, if the site earns 2.5k per month and I take 50% share, my cut will not be more than 1k (rather than 1.25k). In this case, I don't make money until you make money.
   
   
3. You will do the writing for the site as well as for articles for either guest posting or backlinks. This is where you need to commit. We will agree on a writing schedule that meets your current time schedule. This where many people failed and where I need a commitment from you to stay focus. Once the site starts to make money, I will invest my part of the rev enue into getting outsourced articles so that you can do less work. However, before the site start generating revenue, you need to put in the work. This is something I cannot help you with.
   
   
4. We will communicate mainly through email. If you happen to live in Singapore, we can catch up once a month to update progress as well as to plan out the next month's work.
   
   
5. I will take no more than 10 partners. This is to keep the workload managable for me and to keep my focus on really helping my collaborators.

This is it. If you want to have someone to guide you through that rough 6 months of making money online then I look forward to seeing your email.

Before I go, here are some topics I intend to write on for this month:

How to make 100 a month with adsense fast (like in 2-3 months)
Why keyword research tools don't work
How to do keyword research

See you in a couple of days!

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How to make money by buying sites with passive income

It has been an exciting April as I achieved one of the highest earnings so far in my IM career. Sorry for the lack of posting as I was so busy with starting new projects. I decided this month to slow it down a bit as I have enough on the plate for the entire year .

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I mentioned about site investing in my previous articles and I will talk more about it this time. However, I am still learning some of the nuts and bolts of buying sites so don’t take my word as the holy bible. It is just my learning points so far in this investment journey. I am sure there will be more in the coming months.

What to look for when buying a site for passive income

• Search traffic: I don’t invest in sites that have majority of their traffic from twitter, youtube and what’snot. I only look for sites that have at least 75% of their traffic from search. This is because search is passive and doesn’t require too much work unless you want to grow. One of the earlier site I bought was a social site and the things you need to do maintain the traffic is just too much work.

What keywords are driving the search traffic: It is not sufficient to just look for sites with good search traffic. Go down deeper to see what keywords are driving the traffic. Be aware of sites that used trend keywords such as events or news. These kind of sites will not have substainable search traffic once the trend dies off.

What you should do is to use a spreadsheet to analyse the top keywords the site is bringing in. See where the site is ranking for these keywords so that you know whether there is any upside to the site. For example, if a keyword is number 8 and is driving a few hundred people per month, you know that by bringing this keyword to the top 3, you can potentially enjoy a few thousands.

In addition, I go a layer deeper and see what big traffic keywords the site may be ranking for but is not showing in the analytics because they are buried in page 3 or 4. For example, a site might be ranking for cheap white ipad accessories. I will take a look to see if it is ranking for ‘white ipad accessories’ or even ‘ipad accessories’. If that site is ranking for these higher keywords, it will be a good push for me to buy the site as I can push these keywords to page one and enjoy.

• Source of backlinks: Check to see if the backlinks can be removed by the site owner. Certain site owners have multiple sites and they used these to support each other. It might be likely that if you buy such a site, the site owner might remove the links from their own network once the sale is completed. This will seriously pull the ranking of the keywords down and reduce the overall search traffic to the site.

• Check the history of the domain: Make sure the domain has not been used to do anything that Google might frown upon such as sex, gambling, drugs etc. You want to buy a site that has a clean history so that you have a good foundation to work on.

• Authority site: This is a personal preference. I like to buy sites that are recognised as authority. This means sites with indented listing such as this example http://www.google.com/search?q=keyword+academy&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a. I like authority sites because they are legitimate and are also easy to introduce new keywords to expand its potential.

• Diversified income streams: It is also a good practice to buy sites that have a different monetisation model. Rather than adsense, you can diversify your income base by buying sites that make money off affiliates such as Amazon or Commission Junction. I bought one recently that is selling software products and I have found that the margins are much much higher than what you will get for adsense.

Where to buy sites from

Most people tend to use flippa to buy sites but this is not where I have gotten the best deals. Hence, this will not be a post about how to buy sites from flippa. This is because there is too much competition and the good sites tend to have over valued prices. The best deals I have gotten come from private sources. This includes hanging out in forum as well as using innovative ways to find good sites. Below is one strategy I used.

I look at the sites listing in the buysellads site and contact those that have good authority but are charging about USD10-30 dollars for their ads. The lowly priced ads means the site owners are not making much money and you have a chance to buy them at a much better valuation than sites that are listed in flippa.

How much do pay for sites

The average norm for me is around 15-24 months range. I never have the luck to buy sites that can break even in 10-12 months. Fortunately, I was always able to push the ranking of the keyword higher than the original owners, which fastens my breakeven.

I find that for higher quality sites, they tend to command a much higher premium than the 10 times industry norm. I agree with such pricing because it is much difficult to build a site that brings in 500 per month than a site that brings in 100 or less a month. This scaling factor is where I think the premium is and is something I am willing to pay.

How to negotiate with site owners

When talking about the price, always stick to revenue as the basis for valuation. Don’t consider potential of the site or how much it cost the previous owner to build it. All these are irrelevant. You are buying the site for its current benefit, not for what it could be or to cover the expenses of the previous original. If you stick to this principle, then the negotiation will be much quicker and the results tend to be more favourable to you.

What are the logistics of site buying

After the deal has been agreed, there are a couple of things you need to do before the whole transaction is completed.

First you need to pay for the site. The most secure way is through an escrow service. It is not complex to use but you might some time to navigate it if you are doing it for the first time. The most irrating thing is that you need to go to the bank and wire transfer some funds from your bank account to the escrow account. Once that is done, the rest can be completed via an online platform.

Next, you need to receive the domain from the buyer. Depending on where the current domain name is registered, the process for domain transfer will be different. This is again a learning process but it is not difficult.

At the same time, you should start to move the site to your own hosting account. If neither the seller or yourself know how to do this, it is better to engage a technical person to do it. I have no technical skills what so ever and I always a freelancer to help me do it to prevent any mishaps from happening due to site transfer issues.

Once the site has been transferred to your hosting account and you have also received the domain names, remember to change the name servers on your domain to your new hosting account. If not, your domain will show a parking page rather the site. Do not drag this for too long as you never know whether Google will penalise the site for having no content and you can potentially lose all your rankings. To avoid this issue, it is always better to transfer the site first, then change the name servers once the content is up for hosting account.

That is all for site buying. I am sure I missed out some points. Please feel free to ask me questions via the comments.

What is next making money experiment

I also want to talk about a new experiment in my next post. I want to see how to make money with a general article directory site, rather than a site that is focus on a niche. There are reasons why I want to do this and I will outline them in more detail in my next post.

Thanks for reading and have fun in learning how to make money online.

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How to earn 1000 with adsense-final money making lesson

This post will conclude my step by step guide to making USD1000 with adsense with a new site. I have not achieved it but looking at the trend, I will hit it by next month. For those who might be new to this site, my goal was to take a site from USD0 to USD1000 within 9 months. The experiment started in Oct 2010 and should conclude by June 2011. However, looking at the data, I will get there in 6 months, rather than 9.

Here are the first two posts in this adsense experiment:
How to make USD1000 with adsense
How to make USD1000 with adsense - money making lesson 2

Ok, for those who wants some evidence of my earnings, here is Feb income

Click to enlarge image

As a reminder, here is my earnings for the previous three months:

Dec: USD87
Jan:USD470
Feb:USD780

So, I have shown that you can hit USD1000 with just one site, within 6 months. It all comes down to picking low competition keywords and knowing how to promote them via backlinks.

Let me state here that this site that is pulling in this amount is not a spam site by any means. All the content are high quality articles that have been written after considerable research. I believe in building assets that will last, rather than writing crap and getting the ban from Google.

Again, this is not the only site that I am working on so it is not even a 100% effort. If you repeat this process 10 times, the 10k per month income is not a dream. Question is do you have what it takes to pull through the earlier days to enjoy the fruits for your labor.

In fact, to show you that the results can be duplicated, I am starting a new site in the same market as this site. My goal is to hit USD500 with this new adsense site by June 2011 and USD1000 by Sept 2011. If I can accomplish this, it should be proof that making money online is a real possibility.

I am currently busy with building 2 big authority sites in the makeup and watches niches. I found some good writers who are passionate about these topics and formed a partnership to create these two sites. I want these 2 sites to be leaders and recognised in their niches so that they can another powerful source of income for me. These are currently not ready yet but once they are, I am more than happy to show them to you.

In terms of site investment, I made one this month in the wine industry. Again, domain investment is very new to me so I am taking it real easy and learning the steps. In my next article, I will focus on how to make money by buying sites that are already established.

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How to earn 1000 with adsense-money making lesson two

Time to post an update on my experiment to reach USD1000 per month with an adsense site. For those who might have missed the post on how to create passive income with adsense, the link will take you to the first post. In summary, I have begin working on a site that has been dormant for a number of months. I started working seriously on it since Oct 2010 and my goal is to hit 1k in adsense by June 2011 (a total of nine months). What I did from Oct-Dec was to add 100 backlinks from postrunner and to add about 25 articles on my sites that target new keywords (new products). In my first update, I also reported on what the site is earning in Dec. Since there was a few days remaining in Dec in that update, the full income is shown below:

(Click on the image to enlarge)

So, USD83 for Dec from a site that I worked on for 3 months. Not too bad. I still remember my first 100 per month took me about 5 months and comes from 5-6 sites. To have this result in a shorter time and with just one site assures me that I am moving in the right direction.

So, what I did I do in Jan? I added 25 additional articles to the site that target new terms. I also started to backlink keywords that are beginning to show promise using buildmyrank. It was a lot of work but the results have, quite frankly, improved beyond my expectations. I initially expect about 150-200 in Jan. The results kind of flew past that:

(Click on the image to enlarge)

USD467 in Jan, from USD89 in Dec. That is a jump of about 500%, which is quite an astonishing growth. So, what did I really do to have this result?

The main driver is learning how to use emering products in your niche. For me, I managed to find 2 TV shows in my niche that talks about new products in every show. What I did was to look at the symbiosis for the show in advance and write new articles that review these products. Because the keywords had very little competition, my site managed to obtain first page rankings for almost all the new keywords that I target. When the showed aired, my traffic jumped and adsense clicks increased significantly. If you hit a really popular product, then you will see the spike as shown in the image above. That day alone, I got USD60 in adsense.

The good thing about targeting new product keywords, rather than news, is that some of them will proven to be long term traffic drivers as consumers begin accepting the products. That is how my site continue to enjoy the increased traffic even after the shows have aired, although the traffic levels will not be as high as when the products just aired.

All this points to an important lesson that I want to highlight here. You need to have processes for your online business. These processes must aim at your highest value adding activities. For this site, the highest value adding activities is new keywords discovery. I know that the more new keywords I target, the more revenue the site can generate. So, I created a routine whereby I will watch the symbiosis at certain nights and force myself to write articles that target these new keywords. Once this process has been established, it becomes a sureway fire to make more money. Without this process, I could have become lazy and the site might not make as much as it does now.

Of course, I intend to hand this process over to my outsourcer once I created a process for her to duplicate what I did. That is how you can scale your business. Do one thing yourself and once you know how it works, formulate a process to hand it over so that you can continue to do other higher value adding activities.

The above points to the fact that most online marketers don't have a business process. That is something I want to talk more in this blog because I feel that most IM blogs do not talk about the business management side of IM. However, to be successful, you need to apply management techniques to really grow your business. It is all about formulating business processes which gives you the biggest value and that recruiting outside help to scale these processes.

One of the thing that I am will be doing more this year is investment into established sites. I know how to make money now so for me, i am willing to buy sites that have traffic so that I can apply my current processes and resources to these sites and grow them. Through this approach, I will definitely hit my 10k a month goal this year and 30k a month goal next year. I have already bought 2 sites and in future posts, I will detailed how I select sites to buy and what to do with them once you have bought them over.

So you find this useful. Do leave a comment as it gets lonely here without them : )

Until my next update, go forth and make more passive income!

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