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.

I’ve done a bit of buying and selling of websites over the years and here is my opinion on some of the popular places to buy websites online:

SitePoint Marketplace – You are most likely to find a legitimate website deal here. The only bad part is that most everybody knows about it, so you aren’t as likely to get a bargain. Ask lots of questions and you should be fine.

eBay – There’s a ton of crappy websites being sold on eBay. Probably 90% of websites on eBay are total crap and have little to no chance of making money. There’s these membership sites like DotComBuilder and Prozilla where people can sign up and easily create any number of websites built on templates and cheap or free scripts. They market these memberships on eBay for people to turn around and create and sell the individual cookie cutter sites on eBay. The problem is that you end up with tons of these sites on there to sift through. You can find many of them at 99 cents starting price and the seller will just make money through the hosting. Maybe at first you could make money on these, but once more than a few people started selling these sites on eBay, forget about it. This is not to say that there aren’t legitimate sites being sold on eBay, but that it’s just hard to find them. You have to look hard and do your research. Take a look at the sellers other items and previously sold items to see if they just copy the same site and sell it over and over. Lots of sellers do this.

Digital Point – There’s tons of websites being sold on here. Unfortunately, this site is also loaded with tons of scammers. There are ways to fake the iTrader ratings, I’ve seen threads in some black hat forums where people ask for or trade fake iTrader ratings, so it’s that easy.  So you can’t really trust the rating of someone who has just joined recently. For me to even consider buying a website on there, the person needs to have been on there for some time. That said, you can get some great deals on here if you are fast. I’ve gotten some domains, websites and scripts for a steal on here. Yet, I’ve also been scammed a few times as well. You have to be vigilant. One thing scammers do is create a website quickly, then send some traffic to it by buying it or faking it to inflate the stats and any Adsense earnings. I bought a blog last year about a sports star. The seller said it had made about $6 from Adsense in the last month. Well, once I took ownership, I saw the stats after my Adsense code had been placed on it. The pageviews numbered at 1 and 2 each day, which is virtually nothing, or likely me looking at the site.

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As you can see, these are generally 3 to 5 words total each. Each of these phrases gets traffic, not substantial traffic like the simple phrase “quilting”, but the reason we target these phrases is that it’s relatively easy to rank for them since there are far fewer competitors. In some cases, you’ll find few if any competitors targeting some phrases that actually get traffic. These phrases are easy to rank for and mean free traffic for you! You’ll want to compile a nice list of as many long tail phrases for your niche as you can find. You will then use these phrases to optimize your website pages. In some cases, you’ll even want to create a special page to target certain phrases. Here are some handy tools to use for finding long tail phrases for your site (each has a free option or trial, but the paid versions are worth the money if you can afford it):

KeywordDiscovery

WordTracker

NicheBot

Here’s what I do:

First, go to stock.xchng, this is my favorite free stock photo site. Now, let’s say that we are doing a site on hand quilting. Simple, let’s search for quilt pictures then. Type in “quilt” in the search box. Some interesting possibilities pop up. There’s a lovely one with a nice variety of quilt colors, we’ll use that one. Now, open up your trusty graphics program, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Gimp, any of these or your other favorite will do. I’m going to use Photoshop. First, we need to size the image down a bit. I usually make my headers around 800 pixels wide, with varying heights, usually around 150 to 200 pixels. Somewhere between there, makes a nice header that’s not too large or too small. Now, we need to size it down to about 800 pixels wide. Then, select a nice section of the image that you want to use for the header. Now, crop the rest out. I like to add a little border to my headers so that the border matches the color of my sidebars and footers, so add that if you like. Now, add the name of your site in an appropriate color and font to the image. Here’s my final image:

Ok, it’s not going to win any awards or anything, but for two minutes of work, it’s not bad. It’s also appropriate to the site and welcoming to anyone interested in home quilting. There’s no mistaking that the site is about quilts! If you put a little more time into it, your results will be much greater. I just wanted to show you how easy it is. There is no excuse for not having at least a decent logo/header on your content sites!

I forgot to mention that I also add a WordPress blog and sometimes a forum as an adjunct to each site. The WordPress blog allows easy updating of the site without having to upload anything and also gets the attention of the search engine spiders. Once I put a site up, I make sure to make regular posts to the blog. I’ll even recycle some content, change it around and rewrite it a bit and include links to my content pages in the post. It’s also handy to be able to announce on your blog when you have added something new to the site and include a link straight to that fresh content. Search engines love that sort of thing.

As far as a layout is concerned, I like to do a three column layout in XSitePro for most sites. This allows for excellent placement of Adsense ads and affiliate ads. I usually put a leaderboard at the top of the site, just under my header/logo, as that’s the most clicked area for ads. I also put some Adsense boxes on each side, usually some 120×600 vertical ads or banner ads. It’s a good idea to experiment with different banner ad sizes, different affiliate ads and different Adsense boxes and placements. What’s good for one type of site may not work as well for another. I also like to place an Adsense search box at the bottom of every content site. Even on sites that I don’t think people would want to search, sites that don’t really have that many pages, I’m always amazed at the amount of searches that each site gets. People love to search your site, they think they will find what they need easier without having to go through your menus and links. Might as well give them what they want and make some Adsense $ at the same time! I find that Adsense search boxes work really well for my largest sites, sites with hundreds of pages. It’s also very handy that you can check your Adsense account for what keywords and phrases people are using on each site. This is imminently useful for creating new pages. If they are searching for it and not finding it on your site, then create a new page for it. And with XSitePro, it’s very easy to add new pages.

In my experience, you don’t have to spend a fortune to get solid hosting for your website. I like the following hosts and packages:

ResellerZoom – You can start off with the Budget package that is $6.95 a month. Generally solid and decent support. I have had 20 sites hosted on a Budget plan for almost 3 years, and am still pretty satisfied overall. A good budget choice.

HostGator – HostGator has a good reputation. I wouldn’t hestitate to use their Baby plan which allows unlimited websites for $7.95 a month. If you’re only going to build one site, then go with the Hatchling plan for just $4.95 a month. I don’t have any personal experience with this host however, but have heard good things.

Try to select a .com domain name, they are generally easier to remember and are worth more if you want to sell your site later. Next, try to include keywords or a keyword phrase related to your site in your domain name, if possible. Keep your domain as short as possible. I see people make the mistake of choosing a domain name that will be impossible to remember or difficult to type, like keyword-keyword-keyword.com or keywordphrase-keyword.com. Try to avoid putting a dash in the name if possible as well. You want a name that will be easy to remember, easy to brand and easy to type in. If we were going with the topic of “hand quilting”, then a domain like handquiltingweb.com would be good. Or perhaps handquiltingonline.com or quiltingcountry.com.

In my experience, the best place to register a domain name is NameCheap. They have monthly coupons for a percent off your new domain registration every month.

Keep in mind that I don’t bother with making junk websites, loaded with scraped content or PLR articles or other people’s content. I’m talking about making a real content website, with 100% or close to 100% unique content. A site that will take longer to get off the ground and make money, but will make money for years and years. If you don’t plan on putting some work and time into your website, then don’t even bother.

Here we go with part 1…

The first thing you need to do is find a niche. This is easy for me… I simply go with what I know and love. Do you enjoy quilting? How about crafts? Or maybe you are a connoisseur of cigars or wine or Maserati’s or a local college team or whales or the old West or whatever. Think about what you like, what you enjoy, what is your passion? First and foremost, pick what interests YOU. This is very important. If you pick a topic that interests you, then the content and care you put into the site because of your passion for it will come through to your visitors, and that will pay off in the long run. It doesn’t matter how niche it is, how specialized a topic, trust me, if you have a passion for it, chances are that there are other people out there in the vast Internets that are also interested in it.