momotan - 7:24 pm on Sep 14, 2005 (gmt 0)

You need to spread it around and see what works.

Your options are:

PPC campaigns. Finding good money makers is hard (and costly) but as soon as you hit one, you can expand on it and hit the ROI you want and then just have to manage it. I send most of my PPC traffic to a landing page that pre-sells. It works. Best part is you don't need to worry about the SERP results.

Content Sites. You create or buy articles from a writer. Must be unique content. SEO the hell out of the pages. Then get linked to everyone and his uncle who has the same theme/topic. Then wait. It takes 3-6 months(like planting seeds in the soil) to see results and you are of course subject to the whims of the search engines. It works as well. Patients and the initial time spent on setup is the biggest thing with this option.

Datafeed Sites. Most good merchants have datafeeds. I combine several datafeeds together to turn one of my sites into a big widget mall. Because the stuff is all combined, most of the product pages come off as somewhat unique so the SE's don't kill you with a duplicate content penalty. This is good for merchants that tend to have returns. You don't want to waste your PPC money on sales that get returned so free search is the way to go. For some reason I have found this type of site gets going alot quicker then a content site, but tends to rank lower. Since your creating thousands of pages, you will get plenty of SERP referals on 3-6 word keywords.

Mix all three up and choose a wide range of niches and you should make money.