Do One Thing. Do It well.

September 4, 2009

While I was reading through the 1WayLinks.net forum, I noticed a post by a user to a Warrior Forum thread. If you have time to wade through a very long thread, I encourage you to do so.

If you don't have time to wade through it, let me give you the gist:

A user at the Warrior Forum is earning about $300 a day from 31 AdSense sites. He builds unique content and posts articles to roughly 5 article directories (EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com are two of them). He focuses on product-based keywords (e.g. keywords related to Toaster Machines, Ovens, Washers & Dryers, etc.). He targets only on long-tail keywords (three and four keyword phrases that get a small amount of traffic each month from Google).

In short, he's doing a form of what I did in my niche site case study. Focus on small niches and try to achieve a few dollars a day from the site (incidentally, the little niche site in that case study has now earned over $4,200 in AdSense from my 5 hours of work. It averages over $6 a day — twice my goal.).

The author makes a few very important points that I feel warrant repeating:

1. Don't listen to all of the "expert advice" you get from forums. This guy is breaking many of the "rules" you commonly hear about.

2. Don't wait until you find a perfect proven system to get started building your sites — there is no perfect system. Just build your sites and in time you'll fine-tune your own system. (Along the same lines, don't waste all of your time on forums — spend most of your time focused on your work. There's nothing wrong with participating at forums, but don't let yourself get sidetracked.)

3. Once you have a system, stick with it. The original poster made the mistake of getting himself side tracked for a while, and it slowed down his progress. Once he got back on track things picked up again.

4. It's not hard to rank for long-tail keywords. Just a few links will often get you ranked and keep you ranked for a long time.

5. Everybody fails. If one of your sites just isn't working, move onto another one. I can vouch for this myself. I've built many sites that are ranking fantastically, and others that aren't doing what I'd hoped. Focus on the ones that are working for you — don't spend all your time trying to figure out what went wrong with the ones that aren't working.

6. It's better to have a lot of small niche sites than one big earner. It's a lot harder to maintain your rankings for competitive keywords, and in the end you earn less than you would from building numerous smaller sites that take less work to rank and earn more collectively.

That's the gist of the thread — at least it's what I got out of it. It's a great thread, so if you have the time to read it, read it. But the bottom line is:

Do one thing. Do it well.

Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under Search Engine Optimization, AdSense, Blog | 97 Comments

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The advantages of Internet Marketing in a bad economy.

October 15, 2008

Most of the financial news regarding the economy has been pretty dismal over the past few months. Plummeting stocks, failing banks, hundreds of billions of dollars being passed around in the hopes of fixing it all. People are understandably worried about the economy, their jobs, their homes and their credit.

Meanwhile, in the past 3 months my net income has risen 20% even though I've only been working an hour or two per day since my son was born. How is that possible? It's simple: Internet Marketing is very resistant to the economic woes facing other industries. Let's talk about why.

Advertising

Television and radio are kept alive by the ROI (return on investment) of their sponsors, and the commercial web is no different. The advantage of advertising online is that it's far more efficient. When a sponsor puts an ad on a television show or radio program, they can only be vaguely certain of who is watching or listening. Sure the networks provide their own research in demographics and how large their audience is, but much of it is guesswork and impossible to know for sure.

Also, results from TV and radio are very difficult to track. How do you know if the person who just bought your widget was motivated to do so by seeing or hearing your commercial? Again, it's guesswork.

The internet is different. When you place an ad online, you can track exactly how many people saw it, precisely how many people responded (clicked-through) and exactly how much money you earned from it. You can work to refine and improve your ads to improve your ROI as well. It's vastly superior to TV and radio in that regard.

So when it comes time for companies to tighten their belts, it only makes sense that they will focus on the ad medium that has the best ROI.

What does this mean for you, the Internet Marketer? It means that your advertising-driven web sites that use AdSense or other programs will likely remain relatively healthy during hard times. My own AdSense income has not changed much despite the economic troubles, which is no surprise to me. It's also good news for anyone in the search engine optimization business (or related businesses such as pay-per-click), since they, too offer great ROI opportunities.

Selling Information

Another reason that Internet Marketing does well when other sectors are having problems is that people who lose their jobs in those other sectors often turn to the Internet to try and earn a living. When an industry starts having problems, people who lose their jobs in that industry often have a very hard time finding work in the same industry. If they can't find a job, what can they do? Again, many turn to the Internet — the "new economy."

Unfortunately, there are a lot of sharks out there ready to take advantage of these individuals. But for those of us who are honestly offering real opportunities and solutions, we find even more customers during such hard times.

Leveling the Risk

A third reason why Internet Marketing tends to do well even when things look gloomy everywhere else is because the Internet makes it much easier to level your risk. I have customers in 60+ countries. When one country's economy isn't doing so well, another's is flying high, and so I'm less affected. A unique advantage of doing business on the web.

So stay focused on your online business, and remember that you're in a better position to weather the storm than most.

Please leave your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing, AdSense, Blog | 88 Comments

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Niche Site Case Study Follow-Up

May 21, 2008

Well, it's been 9 months since my original niche site case study, so I thought it would make sense to revisit it and see how the site is doing.

If you followed the original case study, then you know that my goal was to earn $3 a day with a small, niche content site. I tried a number of monetization methods, but AdSense was the only really successful one.

To get the site ranked in Google, I put it in the 3WayLinks.net network. I also distributed 10 unique articles to a few article sites (most notably EzineArticles.com). After my last post about the case study, I also submitted the site to a few dozen social bookmarking sites using this software. That's all the link building I've done.

The site has maintained a top ten ranking for 4 of the last 6 months. In January I had some server problems that caused the site to be down for a few days, and that knocked it out of its rankings for two months! That goes to show you how important up-time is to Google. Fortunately I was able to resurrect it by adding a blog to the site. That blog jumped the site back into the top 10.

The site is currently #3 for its primary and secondary keywords, and #5 for a third major set of keywords. To date, it has earned $757 from AdSense, or about $2.75 per day. My goal was $3 a day, and it's well passed that now, but the two months it spent off the first page of Google because of the server problems is currently keeping the overall average down. For the Month of May, the site has averaged $4.90 per day in AdSense, and is set to outpace its best month to date (December 2007) both in earnings and in traffic.

I know you guys like to see screen shots and charts, so here are a few:

May's Search Traffic

May's AdSense Earnings

It may seem amazing, but I'm still receiving some traffic from the original 10 articles I wrote. That's why I always recommend writing articles regularly. If 10 articles can keep traffic coming for 9 months, imagine what 10 articles per month could do for your site's traffic (not to mention backlinks and rankings)?

Lessons Learned

I learned a few important lessons from this case study. One lesson is that up-time is vital to Google. Google doesn't like to risk displaying sites in top rankings if it thinks your site may go down for a few days. That would be a disservice to the searchers, and so your site might get penalized for it.

Second, I learned that if that does happen, and Google knocks your rankings down, you can resurrect them with a blog. Just adding a blog to the site and "drip-feeding" fresh content to the site caused Google to launch the site to the #3 position for its primary keywords. I didn't do any additional link building to accomplish this.

Third, the case study has demonstrated what I already knew to be true: 3WayLinks.net is a long-term network. There were many nay-sayers in the beginning who just knew Google would tweak its algorithm to prevent 3WL from working, and yet, 9 months later it's going strong. The results I'm seeing and hearing from the 3WL members on the forum are nothing short of phenomenal. Are there risks involved? Absolutely. Is it worth taking those risks? I'll let you make that decision.

All in all this has been a very enlightening case study, and I'd love to hear what you think about it in a comment below.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under Traffic, Search Engine Optimization, AdSense, Blog | 97 Comments

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