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 sensation in our brain telling us that we are on the right track because money is coming in. Just do more and we will see bigger results. That is why we throw ourselves into these dead end projects so fast and furious. Just look at all the Squidoo madness going on now. People are contented grabbing a couple of hundreds or even thousands more before Christmas comes.

Enough of these dead end sites and projects!

Why am I contented with sites that make only a couple of bucks per month when I should be thinking of doing things that bring in millions of dollars.

Yes, millions of dollars. That is only a tiny fraction of the amount of money flowing through the Internet right now. I have  restricted myself enough. Time to really go forward and work on open end sites.

However, open end sites have a big problem. They might not have immediate result. Why? Because they are so open ended that they can go anywhere. This means that you might not be doing the right things during the initial period even though the site has potential.

What if you picked the wrong model?
What if you picked the wrong audience?
What if you picked the wrong product?

Open ended site need time to figure itself up. To be able to experiment and learn what is working and what is not. The good thing is that they can lead to many possibilities which is why they are open ended. Try doing that with bluetorchholder.com.

My early retirement blog is an example of an open ended website. It can go literally into different models. I can sell an ebook, I can create a social network for people who want to retire early, I can sell a newsletter picking the best investment for the week. What I can do with it is not fixed but I need time to figure out where my niche is and how best to make money from it.  However, once I figure that out, you bet that I will be making more than USD10 per month.

How about you? Have enough with dead end sites?

Read more »

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 you couldn't target. Loans, cosmetic surgeries, cars, product keywords, credit cards, hotels etc. As long as you work continuously on getting backlinks that contain your anchor keyword, achieving high rankings is matter of when, not if.

I am afraid things are not as simple now. Certain keywords and niches such as landlord building insurance are off limit and I need to recognise this change. However, that is not saying that I can't make money with niche sites. While most IM folks have gone off the niche site bandwagon and started making authority sites, developing their own products or selling kindle ebooks, I still make niche sites and are earning money from them.

In this post, I like to share what I have learn from 10 months of doing the Amazon 50 site challenges. It is going to be long but hopefully, you can gain something from it.

The steps for making money with Amazon have not change. They still boil down to the following:

• Select a niche
• Pick keywords with high search volume and low competition
• Create content
• Build backlinks to the site

 However, how I go about doing each of the steps has completely changed.

How to select an Amazon niche

Most people combine keywords and niche selection into one process. I don't. I like to examine niches independently from keyword research. In fact, my niche needs to be more forward looking so I look closely at news and forum discussions. That is how I turn up keywords such as glamping.

Most IM folks depend on tools such as adwords, longtail pro, market samurai etc. These tools are backward looking and they are actively mined everyday. To avoid competition, I need to look elsewhere for my gold mines.

So what do I look? News , forum discussions, trend sites, blogs from forward thinkers etc All these represent gold mines that I find gems in. By the time these new niches appear in the keyword research tool, I will be 6-12 months in front of everyone with my content and links.

Using this criteria, my camping site (4seasontent.org) will fail the test. That is why it has not made any money. It is competing in a niche which is saturated with both real brands as well as other IM folks. Just check out this competitor: 4seasontents.org. He or she also doesn't have any traffic as well, thus strengthening my point that it is difficult to compete in niches where there is nothing new to optimise for.

How to chose Amazon keywords that you can rank

After the Google Panda and Penguin updates, learning how to pick the right keywords have become more crucial. In fact, learning what keywords are impossible become more important than search volume. Unlike the past, I now totally avoid certain keywords because I can never ranked for them, no matter how much content I write or how many backlinks I throw at the site.

First rule to remember: avoid product keywords.

Although Amazon is all about products, it is getting next to impossible to rank for any forms of product keywords including category product keywords, brand product keywords and even product model keywords.

Below are some screen shots showing you the Google search results from the amazon sites that I have revealed:

Mini cupcake maker

4 season tent

Gps tracker for kids

 

In every one of these product keywords, you see real ecommerce stores or brands taking the top slots. That was not the case in the past where niche sites or article directories such as hubpages can rank for them. 

I don't know whether this was part of the algorithm changes but from a user point of view, things have definitely changed. As an affiliate, I need to step away from these keywords because I know I can't rank for them no matter how good my SEO skills are. Google has predefined what kind of sites should appear for these product keywords and if I can't be such sites, I will never get into the first page. 

That is not saying that I can't make money as an affiliate. I just need to find other keywords that I have at least some change of ranking. So what is the secret?

Find keywords that requires subjective human opinions

Or what I called humanised keywords. These are keywords that indicate that searchers want to read from other sources besides the brands and the ecommerce stores. They represent areas where niche review sites and personal blogs have a chance to compete in. 

The most common example is the word 'reviews'. Take any product keywords and add "reviews" behind them. You will see a completely different search results.

Let's see one such result when I take one of the keywords above i.e. gps tracker for kids and add "reviews" behind:

Gps tracker for kids reviews

By adding the word "reviews", I now can see sites such as toptenreviews.com as well as article directories such as Squidoo and Article Dashboard. Heck, even my own site is ranked just behind Amazon. This is how I am able to get traffic for my Amazon niche sites even though product keywords have become off limit.

This strategy can be applied to any humanized keywords. Besides 'reviews', other examples include:

• ratings
• recommendations
• best
• all the Q+A type of queries that might lead to a purchase

Hence if you want to make money with Amazon in 2013, learn how to pick these keywords and you will see search traffic.

How to write content for your niche sites

What I try to do is to focus on what information searcher might need with before or after the purchase of the product. This is how I try to add value in all my niche sites. For example, in my minicupcake site, I am starting to include recipes that users can use after buying the mini cupcake maker. In my early retirement site, I created an excel sheet that calculates how long it takes to retire early based on dividend investment alone.

The worst kind of content goes round and round without addressing the main points. I used to write articles that read along these line (if it is an article about interior decorating ideas):

"It is easy to come up with interior decorating ideas. All you need to do is to take a close at your surroundings and try to draw inspiration from them. Most people have ideas not because they thought deeply about it but because they observe all the stuff happening around them. If you want to have more ideas, learn to adopt a different perspective and .... blah blah blah"

Nowadays, if I am doing this article, I will borrow a book from library and learn the different interior decorating techniques. I will then find images to illustrate these techniques and create a long list post.

A lot of work? Yes but I can't take short cuts anymore if I want my sites to survive Panda or other future algorithm changes.

How to build backlinks to your niche sites

I believe in quality over quantity when it comes to backlinks. A couple of value passing links wins over hundreds of spam links. To get those, I used a concept called link sponge.

This concept is similar to link wheels or link pyramids. In case you are not sure what these are, this is how they work. Folks would build web 2.0 sites on public blog networks such as those on tumblr, webs.com etc. Each of these sites links to either another web 2.0 site or to the money making site directly. They in turn will be strengthened by having lots of spam links from blog comments, forum profiles, directory sites etc pointing at them.

The idea is to get these web2.0 sites to absorb all the spam links and point that link volume to your money site. Since web 2.0 can take more link abuse due to their domain authority, they effectively act as buffers to your real site. If you attempt to throw volumes of such spam links directly at your site, be prepared to see it disappear from the SERPs.

So, link sponge works in similar fashion, with one important exception. Rather than absorbing spam links, link sponges are real resources that can absorb authority links. For example, there are many established sites that give out free links to sites that have valuable children resources. If you want to absorb these links, you need to build a useful resource that will be linked by these child friendly sites. Then use this site to link to your affiliate site in the kids market. That will be a hell of a link!

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing will still be well and alive in 2013. There will be always be room for a site to recommend products or services to its reader. The trick here is to learn where to look for niches where you can establish a useful site that isn't too competitive and where you can still earn a nice commission.

Read more »

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 saw it as a pure manipulative practice designed to misguide the search engines. That is not what SEO is all about.

As to whether your suggested SEO practices are sufficient, let me just say this: within each marketing field there are differing levels of expertise.

In email marketing, there are people who has 50% open rate and there are folks who scrape by with 5%. Can we live with 5% open rate? Of course we can, but a good email marketer knows all the practices that makes email marketing more effective for him.

Similarly for SEO. Anybody can live with basic SEO or even no SEO. However, for those who understands and applys it a bit better gets to enjoy a higher success rate.

Basically, SEO is about the following:

- keyword research
- content
- links
- feedback metrics

Any one of the four areas have depths that can make one's SEO more effective. Take link building for example. Most SEOs falsely believed that links are everything and they advise getting volumes of spammy links. The real link builders like Eric Ward understands that the true value of links lies in their ability to pass traffic and visibility to the site. As such, his link practices are safe, generates a return for the site owner and avoids depending 100% on Google traffic.

I shall stop here but I hope you understand where I am coming from. SEO cannnot be dead if you know how to use it effectively.

Read more »

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 income: USD93.48

Compared to the last update where I reported less than USD100 in Amazon earnings, this month's results are quite encouraging.

Why the increase in income

Increase in traffic: After restarting the amazon niche, a couple of sites started to pick up traffic. My mini cupcake site for example is starting to see 15 visitors per day and has earned USD10 this month. Not bad for a niche that I thought is dead.

One site taking off: One of the weird niche in my portfolio of sites made some nice sales. Actually the site only made 2 sales but they are for high ticket items, thus earning over USD80 this month.

More site starting to earn: Maybe it is nearer to Christmas but more sites are starting to earn with the same level of traffic.

What I am busy with

Besides working on my amazon sites, I have been working on my home decor online magazine site, my early retirement blog as well as exploring other affiliate programmes.

My home decor site is coming along nicely. It has about 30 over posts now and I just scored a wonderful backlink. I have been reading Eric Ward's linking newsletter and it has opened my eyes on what is real link building. It has nothing to do with anchor text, dofollowed or PR. Real links give you traffic, visibility in the relevant community and even natural backlinks. This is what I have gotten with this one backlink.

What I did was to find a non profit website which is looking for donations. I donated a token amount and my site was featured in their donations page as well as their newsletter.  This gave me some traffic as over 100 people in the niche visited my site due to the link. Among them, 2 nice folks gave me a backlink each that drove even more visitors. For a small donation, I gained 3 natural backlinks and visibility in the relevant niche. Not bad!

My authority site project

My early retirement blog is still very much in its infancy stage. There are now over 40 articles on the site but traffic is dismal. Less than 10 visitors to the site each day. I don't really know what to do next but to add content and see what happens. I guess a lot of authority sites start out this way especially if they don't do much promotion.

How to make money with Amazon in 2013

Next post will be a much longer one about my experiences in making money with Amazon and what to do to avoid being penalised. The article is almost done and I should publish it next week.

Note: I didn't publish my article on the 10 blogging niches because there seems to be very little interest in it. Too bad as these niches are not your typical long tail niches. They are up and coming industries that represent opportunities for anyone to make money from.

Read more »

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 these sites differently from my past sites. Specifically:

• No more writing keyword stuffed titles that matches the keywords in my domain
• No more getting spammy backlinks
• No more focusing on one set of keywords
• Trying to write something of value to serve the folks coming to the site
• Using different themes

That is basically how I have been building my sites. Although their traffic is not high, it is steadily increasing. The mini cupcake maker site for example has gone from 1-2 person a day to about 5-10 a day. I believe the true potential will come in another 1-2 years as the sites gain more content and age. 

Reason #2: I was lucky

This is definitely one possibility. Maybe the alogorithm missed my sites because I wasn't targeting the ultra spammy niches like finance, legal, home furniture etc. Or maybe I was targeting keywords that had low monthly search volume. Too low for the alogorithm to care.

One key observation

One of the key observation was that none of my sites were pulling in traffic from the keyword in their domains. Let's take the mini cupake site as an example. I have never gotten one person typing in the keyword mini cupcake maker. Instead the following is the list of keywords that are bringing the site traffic.

The above image makes one wonder if this is a good leading indicator to tell you if your site will be penalised. If your site has lots of different keyword combos like the one above, you are probably doing your optimisation correctly. If you are seeing lots of repeated and targeted keywords, you might be getting too aggressive in your SEO.

Anyway, it is still early days and I will continue to monitor the effects of this exact match domain algorithm update.

Hope none of you has been affected. 

Read more »

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 the same mental mode as the readers you want to attract.

A good SEO copywriter produces lots of longtail keywords naturally. By placing myself in the same mental mode as my user:

• I use the same terms they use 
• I ask the questions they ask
• I provide the questions they ask
• I talk about related things that they might be interested in

This is how my content can meet the needs of all those longtail searches without me forcing it. This in turn is how you can increase your longtail traffic.

If you want to hone your copyrighting, set yourself a metric.

For me, every content that I produce, I target to have at least a couple keywords which the content is on the first page of the search engines. I don't care which keywords or which search engines. I focus on getting into the head of my users so that I understand the context, the timing and the reason for their search.

If you practice this long enough, it will come naturally in whatever materials you are writing. I have not completely master it yet but I have improved quite a bit since I first started sharpening this skill. If your niche sites have low traffic after penguin, time to hone your copyrighting skill as well.

Read more »

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 tools such as keyword researcher that helps you identify those long tail keywords and
• buying links to rank all long tail keywords

Take away the link buying option and most folks making money online will suddenly lost their way on how to get visitors to their blogs or niche sites.

If you want to improve your SEO skills, why not learn to build sites without backlinks. If you need some hints, here is what I have been doing to get visitors from search engines without placing links excessively:

How to get visitors: Method 1

Use google news or any rss monitoring tools to see what kind of news are happening in your niche. For example, in my 4 season tent site, I spotted a new trend called glamping tents. This is a new kind of camping trends that combines outdoor with luxury living. Some people hate it while some don't. The key for us is to see how to generate content that spark more interest and searches. Here is the step by step method

• Scan for new terms in your niche
• Identify a few terms and start writing entry level articles that targets beginners wanting to know about these new terms
• Write a couple interesting content that can potentially be shared such as a list post or a contradictory article or even some funny images etc
• Link these new interesting content from the first batch of entry level articles or tell your visitors to search for such information

This method is what I called link and bait. You target the less interesting but easy keywords to pull in visitors and lead them to your more interesting ones so that these can potentially be shared. You can't directly just work on the interesting articles because no one gets to see and share them. You need to build some kind of traffic funnel from the entry level articles first.

How to get visitors: Method 2

Use lots of images that are named and tagged properly with keywords.

A couple of my amazon niche sites are developed this way and have received lots of traffic from Google Image. The good news is that some of them are even buying stuff so image search can be monetised. Remember to use a wordpress plugin that helps to take visitors directly from the image to your post so that your content can be read.

How to get visitors: Method 3

Leverage of popular article directories such as Squidoo to pull in traffic for you. Say I want to build more traffic to my 4 season tent site. I will create a Squidoo Lens that targets a long tail such as the best 4 season tent for 2 people. Due to the authority of these article directories, they can rank without backlinks and pull in traffic from search engines. If the articles have a link back to your site, some percentage of the traffic will click the link and visit your page.

You can do this for multiple long tail keywords and traffic will increase over time.

This strategy was used in the past mainly to get more links but how you should be using it now is to treat the article directories as traffic funnels. This will ensure you write better quality content that will drive folks to visit your site.

Conclusion

Seo might only be about content and links but the way you combine these pieces can lead you to different traffic strategies. If you don't start to explore these different permutations, you will always be one step behind others in terms of your marketing prowess. Time to leave the backlink game behind and see what SEO really can offer.

Read more »