BizFancy

While I have many content based sites, making money from Adsense or CPA ads or whatever, I thought it might be prudent to explore why my most successful sites became that way. Exactly what tactics did I deploy in terms of link building or other promotions… let’s find out.

Site #1

This was and still is my most successful site to date. It makes money from Adsense and another ad network. This one site has made me 5 figures a year for the last couple years. I guess it isn’t too much of a surprise, as this is the site I put the most time into. Whereas with some sites, I put in an hour or maybe a few hours into creating and refining the content, with this site I probably spent 25 or 30 hours on content creation over the span of a few weeks. I guess because the subject was one I was passionate about and interested in, in fact, its something I do quite often, that it didn’t seem like hard work at the time. It seemed very much like a true labor of love.

As far as the promotion, I recall that once I launched it, I did several things:

Wrote an article for distribution – This was an extensive how-to type article, nearly 1000 words long. It took a couple hours to write it, but it paid off. I posted it on my site first, then I submitted it to EzineArticles.com and the other major article directories. It was picked up and posted by quite a few niche sites.

Niche Directories – I submitted to several niche directories that specialized in the topic. None of which required any fees. Though one did require a reciprocal link, which I provided.

General Directories – I submitted to Yahoo Directory, since the site was non-commercial. Though it never got in. I also submitted to DMOZ, but it did not get in by my submission. Instead, a few months later, an editor added the site to a different DMOZ category. Interestingly, the DMOZ editor added an internal page of the site. I also added the site to JoeAnt and GoGuides as an editor.

Social Sites – I also submitted the site to Digg and StumbleUpon and a few other social news and bookmarking sites. Though it was a manual submission, not automated, so it was just a few.

RSS Submission – The site has an RSS feed, which I submitted to some RSS directories, like Technorati.

That’s pretty much all I did at launch. I did a few more updates after that, adding another section and updating a few pages. A few months later, I submitted to a few more trusted general and niche directories, created a Squidoo Lens with unique content and contextual links and did another article distribution.

Not long after, it had achieved good rankings on MSN and then on Google for a very competitive phrase. At this point, I stopped doing any promotion, as from my stats, I could see that it was naturally gaining excellent links every single month, often every single day. The quality of the content and the time I put into it paid off big time. The site was mentioned by a major newspaper, was site of the day on a local newscast, was included on About.com as a resource, it was mentioned by people (not me) as a resource on Yahoo Answers, eHow and sites of that nature. Pretty soon it gained blogroll links on major niche blogs.

I really haven’t done any promotion at all in the last couple years and it just keeps gaining traffic!

Lesson Learned —

Putting the time and passion into your content PAYS OFF, eventually. When you have great content, you don’t need to build links or send out press releases or articles or spam other sites with comments and profile links. You get superb quality links, naturally, for free, without any work!

Site #2

This is a bit of a different story than site #1, however, many days, I make more money with this one than site #1, with about a tenth of the traffic!

With this one, I took shortcuts, and perhaps I got lucky. It is a simple 10 page site that is based around an up and coming health product. I hired a (good) writer to create articles about 10 different keyword phrases on the topic, then added them to the site. I properly SEO’d it, of course, but didn’t go overboard. The phrases were not very competitive. All in all, I spent no more than an hour setting up this site. The promotion I did:

Social Bookmarking – I bookmarked it using OnlyWire, once.

Link Wheel – I used 6 unique articles to create a link wheel at 6 of the top web 2.0 sites, including WordPress.com, Squidoo, Quizilla and others.

This is it. That’s all I did, because I had to move on to another project right away.

I don’t know if I lucked out or what, but the site gained the #1 listing on Google for the exact phrase I optimized for with the link wheel. It still has that #1 listing, in fact, it has an indented listing for it.

I have added a few additional articles over the last year or so, but that’s it.

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Interesting, isn’t it? One thing I will say though, neither of these sites were built using WordPress as the CMS. Both sites are built in HTML. I don’t know why, but I don’t have as much luck with content based sites made in WordPress.

Traffic Travis was a bust… buggy and sometimes didn’t give results for certain engines. I’ve switched to Rank Tracker, which is very accurate. The only thing I don’t like is uploading the reports. The reports have too many unneeded files, images and directories. I have to delete certain files before trying to upload, otherwise my server times out or the upload is corrupted. The reports seriously need to be streamlined. I wish their reports were more like Traffic Travis, very simple and clean with no images.

Optimizing your content site for your researched keywords and phrases is another extremely important step you can’t skip over. In order for search engines to find your website under your desired keywords and phrases, they need to show up on your website pages somewhere. This is especially important when are targeting long tail keyword phrases. Here’s how to easily optimize your pages:

First, break up your phrases into small chunks of several phrases each. This also assumes you have prioritized your phrases already, according to importance, relevance and number of searches. Then start integrating the phrases into your site in these areas:

Page title – The #1 most important place for your keyword phrases! The page title appears at the very top of the web browser and appears in the code between these tags: <title> and </title>
Example page title: <title>Free Hand Stitch Quilting patterns for quilting by hand, free hand quilting designs</title>
Notice 3 phrases are included here.

Body text – Write some natural, flowing text for each page, including some good information whenever possible. Include keyword phrases naturally in the text.

Meta information – The meta tags should be filled in for each page. This mainly includes the description and keywords tag, but other meta tags such as copyright, author can also be filled out. Include your most important phrases in the keywords tag and write a concise, but brief description of your site for the description tag, integrating keyword phrases naturally.

Internal link structure – On every page of your website, you will be including links to your other pages. Make sure the anchor text of these links makes sense but also includes keyword phrases. If you have filled in your page titles with proper keyword phrases for every page, then this element should be no problem, as you can use the same text, or shorten it slightly for your anchor text.

File names – Instead of page1.htm or quiltpage.htm, name your page file names with keyword phrases. Example:
hand-quilting-patterns.htm
free-hand-quilting-patterns.htm

Alternate image text – Each image on your website can include plain text that will show up should your site not load all way for whatever reason, if a browser fails to load the image or for people surfing with images off. This is called alternate image text. Inside the image tag, you’ll find this attribute:
alt=”this is the alternate text”
Integrate keyword phrases in this area for your images, but don’t go overboard. For each image, make sure you describe it, whether or not you are integrating keyword phrases. Example:
alt=”hand quilting logo” (for the logo of your site)
alt=”about hand quilting” (for the about us image)
For other images, it’s a good idea to name them properly, example:
alt=”contact us” (for the contact us button)
Be careful not to spam here, 1 relevant phrase maximum for just a few images just to be safe.

Headings – For each page, use a keyword phrase in a heading tag. Example:
<h1>Keyword Phrase</h1>
Insert informational paragraphs here.
<h2>Keyword Phrase</h2>
Insert informational paragraphs here.

Text Attributes – It’s not yet proven that these make a difference with search engines, but they are helpful to your visitors, at the very least. Consider using the following attributes in your text to place emphasis on keyword phrases:
Bold: <b> </b>
Italics: <i> </i>
Strong: <strong>  </strong>
Different font sizes, bulleted lists etc.

These are the main optimization factors for on page optimization. If you use XSitePro, you’ll find it easy to use the SEO tab for each page.