Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I had a domain name for some time now with some pretty useless information on the page but I somehow still managed to get linked (by friends mostly) to make my index page a PR 4. I would like to emphasise that the contents of the page are completly useless to anyone but 1.5 persons on this planet. Normally I put adsense on the page and raked in a staggering 0.71 $ in the past two weeks. 0.5 of that came on the first day I put the site up [eyes glean], the rest came in bits in pieces the rest of the way.
Now, you folks got me all inspired to try and work on it and make some actual money as a webmaster. I have skills in the area but have never worked for my 'own' projects, only for other people/companies/organizations/countries/random.
Please just point me in the right direction if I am wrong.
Starting out from sratch, of course. First thing you need to do is find a good niche (I am trying to do that by using the keyword efficency tool over at seomoz.org). Build content and drive traffic to the site. Now the problem does not seem to be in creating content as I am a journalist by profession but in driving traffic to the site. Using the coveted trial&error method I have learned that you can drive traffic to these kind of sites from other sources than SEs, but this traffic is useless because a) they generally tend not to click the ads (because they did not come to the site for that) and b)they generally tend not to click the ads. Driving targeted traffic (the click on the ads kind) to the site can be done efficently through search engines. Having a high number of untargetted visitors to your site may result in lower earnings than having a low number of targetted visitors. The latter are looking for stuff you have ads for.
So, here is my plan (don't laugh).
After finding a good niche I want to drive traffic to the site and reach my first 100$ in two months. This is the first milestone.
The masterplan is <deep voice> to build a network of highly targetted niche sites (100-150) with the total daily revenues exceeding 300$ in two years. </deep voice>.
Is this possible? Can it be done?
Having a lot of keyword-driven small sites could also make it hard to attract inbound links and search-engine referrals. (And don't even think of linking all of those sites together into a network for SEO purposes; that's a risky strategy for anyone who isn't using boilerplate content and disposable domains.)
Finally, if you're a journalist, you need to think about motivation and career goals. Can you remain interested in knocking out articles for keyword-driven sites month after month, year after year? If you get tired of that, or if your made-for-AdSense strategy doesn't hold up indefinitely (or isn't as profitable as you'd hoped it would be), will you have sacrificed time that could have been spent building a reputation as an expert on a specific topic (i.e., a reputation that could have been leveraged in other ways, such as freelance articles and books)?
To follow up on what EFV says, though there are plenty that will disagree here at WW, generally I think that it is best to have AdSense to add an income stream to (or defray some costs of) work of stand-alone value, ie AS is the icing on the cake, not the cake.
So, congrats on nearly hitting that first magic dollar, and yes I'm sure that you can make $50/month (I made about $300 in my first month I think, but already had quite decent traffic on a several-year-old site), but don't let the tail wag the dog. Do something that stands on its own feet and that will continue to interest you and that you will be a guenuine specialist in.
Rgds
Damon
You're a journalist, so you are presumably able to do research, find interesting subjects, write in a compelling way, know the audience you are writing for, etc. These are your unique skills, your unfair advantage in the competition for attention. Ride them all day long. Do not simply write "content", a term I have come to hate because it usually means the author is writing with a web spider in mind instead of his gentle reader.
In terms of finding a subject area, you need to consider...
1. Your knowledge base and qualifications and interests.
2. Perennial widespread interest in the subject matter.
3. Number and quality and offerings of competing sites.
4. Demographics of your target audience.
5. Demand among advertisers for this audience.
Choosing the proper subject area and theme of your site is important for success (for some of us it may be the single greatest and most important idea we'll ever have in our lives), but do not base your decision on #5 alone (i.e. keyword bid prices). This is your ticket to oblivion.
If you want to make a site for AdSense, in a good way, you also need to consider...
6. What will your audience be trying to accomplish when they're at your site, and does this activity mesh with advertisers' needs? Photo galleries, online games, and community forums, to use a few examples, tend to do dismally for the obvious reason that people are not in a buying/consuming/goal-oriented mode. A site which helps people do research or solve problems can potentially do very very well.
For the sake of discussion, suppose you find a bargain rate of $5 for a 500 word article. Let's say you start each site with a modest 30 pages of content. That's $150. That's a modest sum and within reach of most people.
But multiply the cost of creating a modest amount of content by 150 sites and now you are talking about $22,500.
If you are actually buying domain names, then that will cost $1500.
Can we talk about multiple servers for hosting all these sites?
Adding each site to ONE decent directory can cost you around $30 each. So that's $4,500. But one directory link is not enough to power up your sites, and neither are the links from your friends.
Another consideration is the time spent researching each niche you are building in. You can't really have all the sites in the same niche because it can become difficult to get them all to rank.
That's just to get an idea of what you're up against.
You may be better off building one supersite to begin with. When that site is successful, you will then be in a better position to expand your empire, especially with all the expertise gained from your actual experience.
First thing you need to do is find a good niche
That's so true. But there's a small catch: you won't know whether a niche is good or not until you try it. Puhleeze do not believe that WordTracker is going to give you a real good guess about how much traffic you will get for a given keyword. So, let's revise that first step to: First thing you need to do is find 3 niches that an educated guess says could be good, and be prepared to abandon 2 of them.
Now the problem does not seem to be in creating content as I am a journalist
Bzzzt! Wrong! Off on the wrong foot already! I was a writer and magazine editor for 10 years. Does that background help with making AdSense content? Depends on how quickly you can learn that this is a different ballgame with different rules. Rules like:
If you're not regularly finding surprises in your weblogs, then you're not doing a good job of expanding into that niche's keyword space.
Did I remove the original Widget Polishing article? Of course not! It still had value for its ability to cast Page Rank votes with Google, for its ability to route at least some traffic to a better place, for its ability to garner inbound links, for its ability to convince advertisers of Widget Polish that they should buy ads on my site, etc. If you write for the web, you have multiple audiences, each with different needs to satisfy.
Even if you use nothing but AdSense, it's just plain foolish to have no Plan B prepared in case you get banned, or an algorithm change cuts your profits to a trickle. Too many AdSense publishers don't look at alternative revenue streams out of laziness or fear of the unknown. You might just find out that you're well-prepared to exploit a niche where, for example, the affiliate income possibilities completely swamp the AdSense profits that are possible.
If you go into this thinking your writing background will relieve you from learning a whole new way of doing things, you may be worse off than the non-professional who is just starting from scratch pounding out amateurish content.
Driving targeted traffic [...] can be done efficently through search engines.
So close to the truth, and yet so far. I can bake a loaf of cinnamon bread quite efficiently. But it still takes me 5 hours. How is that efficient? Because I only invest 30 minutes of actual time -- most of the time is spent letting things rise, during which I can be doing other things.
Are you getting the point? You ain't gonna start sucking down that free SE traffic in droves in 2 months. You can get free SE traffic efficiently in terms of your actual invested time, but only if you allow plenty of time for things to rise.
What happens during that "rising time"? Your pages get older, which Google likes. You add content on a regular basis, which Google likes. Your more detailed and authoritative articles garner one-way, unsolicited, inbound links from authoritative sites, which Google likes. And you don't suddenly appear on the scene with a ton of new content interlarded with a few lucrative keywords, which Google doesn't like.
And, possibly the most important thing that happens during rising time is you get smarter. You try a new idea every month and keep listening to your weblogs, and you'll start to get some good ideas about what works for you and what doesn't.
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If you go into this with the "make X amount of money by Y months" attitude, you're most likely going to be disappointed.
How about just saying "I'll spend a year learning the ropes, since this business is quite different than my journalistic background has prepared me for. Then I'll really get serious in year two. If that shows results, then I'll shoot for making some real cash by the end of year three."
Is this possible? Can it be done?
It took me a long time to understand that the longer I give dough to rise, the better the bread tastes and the more I enjoy the fruits of my labor. I feel much the same way about making money off of authoring original and useful Web content.
Sometimes incomplete, not terribly well-written information is more profitable than doing a "good job" of writing.
Actually I don't exactly disagree with it as a statement of fact, but I would never advise anyone to consciously go this route, especially a trained writer. An ability to think clearly and write well is one of the main things that the OP brings to the table (possibly the only thing), and this should be leveraged rather than buried.
But it's unquestionably true that the medium and many of the conventional rules of "good" writing are different online.
But it's unquestionably true that the medium and many of the conventional rules of "good" writing are different online.
Not necessarily. Newyorktimes.com has an Alexa traffic ranking of 50, and most of its content is exactly the same online as it is in the printed newspaper.
Fact is, there's a range of user behavior both online and offline. Take a printed magazine like CONDE NAST TRAVELER : It caters to readers with short attention spans, long attention spans, and everything in between by running a mixture of "front of the book" blurbs and long articles. Ditto for PC MAGAZINE, which has everything from "First Looks" (short mini-reviews) to articles and themed multi-piece features that span many pages. Even a text-heavy magazine like THE NEW YORKER has short features along with articles that many run 100 pages or more.
On my own travel-planning site, I find that in-depth coverage can perform quite well. Last month, a 165-page cruise review with an accompanying photo gallery attracted nearly 18,000 page views--and that was a cruise review that I wrote in 2003, which goes to show the value of "evergreen" content.
I agree with Ronburk that AdSense should be regarded as one piece of the puzzle, not as the entire game. Depending on a site's topic and audience, the publisher may be able to earn more from non-AdSense sources than from AdSense. My site, for example, has three major sources of revenue: AdSense, affiliate sales, and display ads. AdSense represents a nice chunk of income, but it's only one piece (and not the biggest piece at that). If AdSense or any other revenue partner were to dump me tomorrow, I'd still be in business--which wouldn't be the case if I had a made-for-AdSense site.
They don't read textbooks in the same way as they read novels.
They don't read "front of the book" items from GLAMOUR in the same way they as read NEW YORKER profiles.
On the Web, they don't read in one way, either. How they read depends on what they're reading, why they're reading it, how it's laid out, etc.
Just as important, there's no one "they." That's why THE NEW YORK TIMES and THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS use different writing styles and article lengths, and it's why Fox News has a different editorial approach than the BBC.
Knowing how to write, edit, and publish for the desired target audience is what distinguishes a successful publisher from a failure. (That, and the publisher's circulation and profits.)
And for starters... what is better plain HTML or dynamic (i.e. PHP) pages? I know that PHP is server-side and the user only recieves plain HTML (in contraty to JS) but are these things really the same to Adsense?
Adsense and SEO wise, I think I have learnt a lot of things..let me only start now...
Which domains are more search engine friendly, 'brand' domains or 'keyword' domains?
