Forum Moderators: martinibuster
This worked very well for me, because hundreds of people who have read my articles linked either to one of them or to my homepage, and so some of my articles are now very popular. Every now and then someone who needs what I offer reads an article and then realizes I'm for hire and inquires, and maybe then I get a contract.
This ended up working so well for me that these days I have to turn away business. My website as a whole gets over a hundred thousand hits a month. My homepage is PR 6, and all my articles are either PR 4 or PR 5. My pages are in the top ten for hundreds, if not thousands of relevant queries, and many of my pages are #1 for lots of queries.
I had some health problems last year and was unable to work enough to get by, so I finally tried adsense. I put it on all my articles, but not my homepage which still is meant for my clients to see. My first month I made over three thousand dollars. I could see from my ad performance report that this was going to happen within a few hours of publishing my first ads. It made me break down and cry.
I have not always made that much. Last month was only eighteen hundred, but April started up again in the last week, coming out at $2100 and I can see how I might make $3k in May.
It's not simply a clean, honest site, my whole reputation as a businessman depends on it. With the expenses I have, I'm not able to quit working (yet!), so I have to run a very clean operation.
I have also worked like a slave on my website on many occasions. A couple of my articles took more than a month to write.
I had this crappy old half-baked HTML design, with poor navigation, inconsistent colors, invalid HTML, formatted with nested tables and the works, but I suddenly lost a contract a couple months ago and was in a really hard way. To get back to work quickly I started paying for advertising with money that was very scarce.
My wife, who used to be a web designer before she went back to art school, had made a really nice XHTML+CSS design for my site, with easy navigation, consistent colors, a nice theme, but when she realized there were over a hundred hand-coded static HTML files on my site, most of them in ancient, invalid HTML, she was too intimidated to roll out her design across my site.
Her templates sat on her computer for over a year until I started paying for advertising. I began to fear that people would click my ads - costing me money - see my half-baked homepage, and just press the back button without even reading what I had to offer. So I spent three solid days, and nights, without sleeping, on a marathon HTML coding session to implement her design.
All I did at first was to redesign my homepage and each of the pages that were directly linked from my homepage, but there were quite a few of those.
My hard work, and advertising gamble paid off. I got back to work quickly enough that by the time I could earn a paycheck we hadn't starved or become homeless yet.
Since then I've been redesigning an article each week. I have about a third of them done now.
So yes, clean, honest hard-working webmastering pays.
I'm now paying to advertise my articles. When I have a new one redesigned, I pay for ads for it. I had adsense on all of them at first, but have been removing it from the non-performing pages. My objective in my advertising is not to drive clicks to my ads, but to bring repeat visitors to my site, and over time build even more traffic as (hopefully) some of these people give me links.
Now, it took six years to get my site to where I was able to earn $3k in my first month of adsense. But I didn't have the first clue about anything when I started out. It wasn't for several years that I really started to devote much time to my articles, when I realized what a difference they were making to me.
I think that if I were just starting out with a totally new website, knowing what I know now, I could get it to $3k in adsense after a year. It would help to have an ad budget, but that's not the most important thing, it's having a site that's worth someone's time and effort to link to. It's having a site that makes people WANT to link it.
My advice, if you're just starting out, is to not post ANY ads on it at all. Not even one! Not for at least a year. Why? I think ads discourage linking. Once you do publish ads, test them for a week or two and then remove them from all the nonperforming pages. A page without adsense still gets linked, drives up the pagerank of your site and is a gateway to your other pages.
When I'm done redesigning my articles, there will be just ONE adsense unit on ONE web page. That single ad unit is responsible for all but about ten dollars of my monthly revenue. I think the other pages will be better at building traffic to my site if they didn't have ads, and I would have already removed their adsense but I have so many that I just don't have the time.
I have become very well aware that I'm sitting on top of a gold mine, just beginning to tap into the vein of ore. I am very inspired to read so many posts here from people who say they were able to quit their jobs because of adsense. I'm not there yet, but it is my objective to quit working my original job within a year and instead make a living - a good, comfortable living - writing content for my site. I've been in the same line of work for seventeen years, and have been self-employed for seven. It's not an easy way to live. I wish I could go back to my younger self and shake some sense into me. But now I see a way out.
So there you have it. Clean, hard work is indeed the key to success on the web.
Mike
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 11:54 am (utc) on May 5, 2005]
[edit reason] it was such a good post - it deserved it's own thread. [/edit]
You obviously don't have an answer for me so why even respond.
If I were to use scraper results in place of my hard earned and respected directory results, what would be the difference?
Nor am I incined to suffer fools gladly - if I believed you to be genuinely obtuse, as opposed to playing games, I wouldn't waste my time trying to educate you.
So there you have it.
I'm not playing this game, dude.
There's some financial guru, I forget her name but she's got a lot of books and she's featured on PBS whenever they have a pledge drive.
Suze Orman
Take spacy's directory. Keep the design and add layout. Use scraped results from various Search engines and replace what she has in her directory. What would be the difference besides time? What would be the difference for advertisers?
Most reputable advertisers don't want to be affiliated with spam/scam/sraper directories. I guess thats my white hat society theory.
I know a few such hand-built sites in my area, not built by me, and they are far more useful (there's not junk, they are better organized, they have comments by the directory builder) than scraper sites targeting the same area.
I think it's a good way to provide some real value to someone who's doing research on some topic, to have already done the work of Googling myself, and to present the best results.
What's funny is that some of these rank well, and all the scraper sites for the topic link to them. I can see that the text they put next to my links is just what shows up in a google listing. I've found hundreds of these show up as referring pages in my server logs.
