Day Seven - Site Four

It's raining cats and dogs here and just a great time to get some work in. I've been showing you a scheduled way to put up a number of websites with great content and get them profitable for you by the end of the project.

Today we're at day seven and it's time for website number four. Have you thought about what you're going to create? It is easy to get articles - you just need to make sure they are rewritten to they are nothing like what is currently on the Internet. You can probably do a better job anyway.

Now you'll need five articles, so hope your fingers are rested and you're ready to go. We'll also need a full domain name and website to post the five articles to, so make sure you have that ready to go.

As far as articles, I have to stress again that you need to be thinking of something that many people search for, but where there's not a ton of content already written on that subject. And what is too much? Well, when you search, the results is how many pages that keyword appears on (of pages indexed in the search engine). So even though there are over a hundred thousand results - don't worry - you can quickly get near the top of the heap if there is not a lot of competition (millions of pages).

Take for instance a site I have on Immigration. I registered this domain long ago when a friend of mine from Brazil won the Green Card Lottery and brought his whole family to the United States. Today, I post to it almost everyday and it is well indexed and I already get a return on the site. And it's just going to grow!

How do I know? I am using the same formula that I'm using here. And you'll learn as the course goes on.

My website number four is about foreclosure. I didn't like the topic 100 percent, but I thought with the level of interest on this topic, I'm bound to get some of the traffic doing what I do.

Day Six - Site Number Three Complete

Today you should have site number three up and done and looking complete. I am happy to report, at least when I checked it, the Yahoo Publisher Network ads were working well on my third site about where to find good puppies. The problem with YPN ads is that because of their limited inventory, you won't have as many geo-targeted ads as Google. Back in 2006, YPN was for me, top notch. The ads running were relevant. You got good CTR because of this, and man, the payout was really good - sometimes $5 a click. Those days are gone for now, but the formula I am spelling out for you works well, too. The idea is that you're going to have enough content out in the search engines. I can't stress enough how important it is to be patient and not to cut short or modify the steps.

So today, go back over your three sites and make sure everything is working, links, ads, copy makes sense and looks great. It you want me to take a look at any of your sites, drop me an e-mail.

Tomorrow, get ready for website number four. We're going to get that fourth website up and running with fresh content not found anywhere else on the Internet.

What is Web 2.0?

As promised, the first steps will be out shortly so you can begin your work along with us on monetizing web sites with Google AdSense. But first, a short clip on what Web 2.0 has done and is doing. This is brilliant.

Watch How It's Done - Google AdSense Earnings

You don't have a list, like a lot of those jokers who advertise to buy their package. They got a following because one person who had a list, advertised to that list and thus created a new list... and so on. If there's a way to make a list quickly with a site and a little bit of traffic - I'd like to see it. It just doesn't happen... and therefore the list guys get richer from your $47 or $97 or $997, and you can't figure out how to make it work. Will they let you advertise to their list? Keep dreaming.

So, here's a little experiment that you can surely do, using a website, Google AdSense, some nice content, and some elbow grease... work. If this doesn't work, you're not putting in the work.

I don't expect to see life out of this for at least six months - but maybe we'll get lucky. In any event, this is how it's done and what has been making many a good living for a long time.

I suggest you subscribe and grab a coffee or tea and read up. My next posts will keep you linked on how you can really make money with AdSense.

Let's get started.

How Many Link Blocks Can I Have?

If you create websites specifically for displaying Google AdSense ads, listen up.

Google announced yesterday in their updated Policies, that if you are using their ads on your pages, your pages have to line up with their Landing Page Quality Guidelines. As I've preached, your pages must be of outstanding quality content and very easy to navigate. Anything less, and Google can pull the plug on your "partnership".

Next, they said we can have three link blocks on each page. That's great, because these links often add a lot of revenue on pages that have good content. Naturally, know that when people click the link, they're gone from your site.

Also note that links typically pay less than actual ads.

Blueprint for a Web Based Business

It's a sunny day in Naples, Florida. We did our Saturday morning routine by having brunch down at the magnificent Naples Beach Hotel and Golf Club right on the Gulf of Mexico.

From your table you can gaze out at the sea and take in the gulls flying effortlessly by, the beautiful sailboats that dot the horizon, or a few kids starting their first sand castles of the day.

This is a day I normally take off, but wanted to update you on how well the 90 day challenge is starting off. Actually, I'm changing the name. It runs over 90 days - but I want the title to be more specific to the course.

During one of our discussion sessions, I realized that most are focusing on too many things in an effort to have one thing float to the top as the money maker. And I'm not talking about multiple streams of income. I'm all for that.

I'm talking about trying PPC, Directory submits, link exchanges, ghostwriters, templates, PHP rewrites, the whole gamut. You can't focus on all these and do justice to any. We went over that and it's really a big mistake. Don't fall into this trap yourself, even if you are making marginal profits.

Another thing that came up was again in the area of focus. Most people found after the first few days that the program gets monotonous. And that's the reason that the field is so wide open for people who want to get into this market. Most drop off before payday. You must remain focused and that's why I believe this program is so great. You just do what you need to on that day and wait until tomorrow. But even if it is monotony, you still do it - knowing that if you stick to it, payoff will come.

Will everyone in the program make money? I believe so... but it's really up to what keywords they work with. I am doing my best to help them choose wisely. But remember, not every keyword is a winner. That's why we work with a dozen sites in the course.

Someone asked to sneak a site for people reading here to watch over time, and I've agreed to do that. Stay tuned.

The Ninety Day Challenge

I've decided to take a break from my online work to mentor 10 people for a period of 90 days in how to make a steady income using the Internet.

As you know, I make the bulk of my income from contextual ads placed on websites that are content rich. But many have asked how to get started doing this. And a few have said that the information on this site is over their heads.

So, what I will do is break it down, step by step, for you to easily follow how I create my websites and where I place my ads. We will take real time examples. You'll see how my pages get cached by Google. You'll find out what tools I use. All my secrets.

In order to keep the group small - so I can help each person individually, I've decided to limit it to ten.

Imagine finally getting the blueprint to how to make quality sites and monetize them so they keep making money for you. We'll go over how Google changes the rules, how old school doesn't work anymore.

I'm calling this the 90 Day Challenge. I'll be sharing more details in the next few days.

Prince Keeps Us on Our Toes

In 1991, thousands of people gathered in Maracana Stadium for what was to become "Rock in Rio II". George Michael, Guns and Roses, Debby Gibson, Santana, and many, many more famous rock groups took to the stage January 18 - 27.

But one character kept in character as being the strangest act on the festival. If you've ever done any work with entertainers, you know they can have very crazy personalities. And Prince fit that description to a "T" (or is it ?)

My good friend Carlinhos of Sao Paulo, Brazil, was contracted by MTV to provide the sound mix for Rock in Rio II. Naturally, each band must do a sound check before they go live. These were while the event was closed. Carlinhos made everyone sound great.

When Princes' band ran through their sound check, everything was super. The first few bands went on and MTV had a sweet mix. However, when Prince finally came on stage (he delayed his "entry" by over an hour), his sound people had switched all the inputs to the feed to MTV.

Most sound engineers would take half of the set to figure out the inputs - drums, which were on input 5 through 11 are now scattered in the 18 - 23 range. Vocals were where the keyboards are. And so on.

Carlinhos had the mix nailed in a little under a minute and a half. He figured out which input was switched and quickly labeled it. It was a huge challenge, but Carlinhos was up to it.

Since I started on the Internet in the early 90's (I had my own FidoNet node through the 80's, and ran several BBS's), it is a chore to keep up with change. What used to be a great business model six months ago - today won't float. Many companies, mainly the search engines, are switching the mix - changing the rules. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes because they simply want to improve their game.

There are few models you can implement and just watch them make money. Most of contextual ad businesses take work keeping fresh content and making sure keywords are worthwhile. You can do that by reading blogs like this.

One discussion I had with a marketer recently revealed that his testing with Google showed the search engine literally changing every few hours. Indeed, it doesn't take too much to get penalized anymore. Copied content is probably the biggest sin. From the way I understand it, Google scans everyone's copy of this "new" content. Then it figures out who is the authority site and knights them the king and everyone else a fraud.

When this happens, Google will not return to your site for many moons. It pays to take the time to do it right the first time. If you are not using your own copy, make sure you have someone else write it for you originally.

What is a good way to do this?

Elance.com is one place to find good writers for less than you think. It doesn't pay to write your own sites as a business. You need to have others do that for you. Spend your time researching and developing new websites. Not spam sites - real meat and potato sites that people will enjoy reading.

Make sure in your game plan you have set aside time to learn continuously about your trade. It's important. How many hours do you spend learning the market, and do you think Google is really changing faster than before? Thoughts?

An Update on AdSense Wealth Empire

I received a couple of e-mails lately asking how my work with the AdSense Wealth Empire is going, so I thought I should give you a little update.

I am not at the level Roy and Maayan are at, but am heading that direction. There are some tips that I'd like to pass along to you that may help you get faster into the index, and keep you from Google's Supplemental Index.

You know, if you're treating your online work as a business, you must always be in "learning mode." In the past year, I've seen so many "AdSense" programs come down the pike that it made my head spin. A few were worth looking at; all deserved a few minutes of my time.

One that caught my eye was Joel Comm's AdSense Templates. I know I've been a little hard on Joel for promoting the picture block next to the ad block that eventually got nixed by Google, but he's been in the "same" game long enough to be respected. If you do anything online, you know it's hard to stay up with everything.

The templates Joel sold late last summer had something called HyperVRE in the code. These are PHP scripts that automatically rotate text and RSS feeds on your web page so that it is always showing fresh content. I think Matt Callen invented HyperVRE. I'm a big fan of Brad Callen's work - Matt's brother.

It's funny, but the same time I noticed many (say most) of my pages I created with AWE were already in the Supplemental Index. And, I received a feed from Jim Boykin's blog, where he once wrote about Google's Supplemental Index. Jim's blog led me to a post by "HalfDeck" on "Supplemental Listings". Wow - you gotta read that post from beginning to end.

What opened my eyes was the part about - Meta Tags. I even blogged about Meta Tags here on MonetizeThis. What I noticed about all of my AWE Meta Tags were that they were short... very short - Like: "Get great iPhone information here!"

Oh, man! I should have known better. All 50 pages zapped to Supplemental inferno!

So, make sure your Meta Tags are long! At least 100 words, I'd say.

Okay, next - I learned "why" Joel had all the rotating RSS and text on his HyperVRE templates. I mean, sure - that "looks" cool... but will it benefit readers and more importantly, my ranking in the search engines?

The inquisitive mind that I have, I started researching quality sites that used RSS feeds and how they fared in the search engines, specifically, Google. I was very impressed. Some sites that advertised an RSS feed using PHP even had a PR 7 - without that many backlinks. And, they were cached quickly. But my main question was did their pages end up in Google's Supplemental Index?

I sure couldn't find any.

One thing that really bugged the heck out of me was that Joel had promised a working version of HyperVRE in the AdSense Templates, which I bought, but, alas we only got the light version which doesn't do much of anything. You need the Gold version. Apparently, I wasn't the only one hot under the collar.

But I learned something. I needed the page to look fresh. And, this VRE stuff just reinforced that. I did take some code out of the light version that creates rotating text. This is good for use in your menus or nav area where you can have a little paragraph with "did you know" type of info. Looks nice.

A great script I found for rotating RSS feeds can be found at GoogleRank.com - and it's Free! And one of the best places for feeds I've found is MSN. When you work with their feeds there is none of the search html in the URL. It's the URL to the story so there isn't a way to tell you are using MSN.

Longer Meta Tags (and make "sure" that no two Meta Tags are alike - you must have a different keyword or key phrase in each one. AWE does this nicely.), and have good, current info on your pages.

Your homework is cut out for you; I know mine is.

AdSense Hypocrisy

I am sure Brute had a witty return to Caesar's "Et tu, Brute?" Something along the line, "No, Caesar... not ME!" And yet we know he was caught in the act of being, to Caesar, anyway, a hypocrite. He talked one thing, and yet, he was guilty of the same.

Since the beginning of web servers, we've always had the server logs, which tell where our traffic is coming from. Recently I found a few hits on one of my websites from a site called AdsBlackList. With a name like that - you want to check it out.

In a nutshell, AdsBlackList is a live database of what AdSense publishers who know of this site, consider to be MFA (Made for AdSense pages) advertisers. Typically, these advertisers are looking for the lowest paying click, so it makes sense that if you could, you'd want to blacklist them using the AdSense Competitive Ad Tool.

My site was flagged because the domain name contained the word "four". I'm sure you've seen the AdSense ads with fourtopsites or bestfoursites, etc. These sites contain little, if no content, and have a few blocks of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher ads on them. And many of these types use the AdWords program to drive traffic to their sites.

Everything sounds okay and makes sense until I stumbled on a thread in the Digital Point Forums that discusses the AdsBlackList service and how members are adding sites. So I decided to check out a few of the pages of these members - hoping to find great sites full of content and nothing obvious in the way of blatant ads all over the place.

Here's a few for your enjoyment:

http://environmentalchemistry.blogspot.com/
http://www.healthythings-online.com/
http://www.free-legal-formsonline.com/
http://www.lasereyesurgeryhelp.com/
http://www.freelinksdirectory.net/
http://happy-mind.blogspot.com/
http://www.healthtu.com/

It just hit me as hypocritical that these fellows (and a few gals) would post about doing away with MFA sites when most of their own sites are the very same thing. But I'm sure they would be like Brute and say, "not ME!"

Here's the problem with this sort of thinking.

First, you're assuming that Google does nothing but toss up relevant ads that fit your content and their network location. But there is much more in play.

• Google measures what other pages are on your site you are monetizing.
• Google measures what other pages you are monetizing across your "network" of sites.
• Google measures if the page you are monetizing is a good landing page, based on content, pictures (if you have or don't), tags, size of your description meta tag, inbound links and their quality.

And this is just the beginning.

It's dangerous to think that by blocking sites you'll fool Google into serving better paying ads. Remember that Google also owns the site where you are putting the competitive URL's - they know who you're trying to block.

So, what's the answer?

• Make sure the pages you are monetizing are quality pages, not apparent MFA pages.
• Make sure that if you get links, that you get them from within the content of another, similar site. What?! Yes, that's right - links from link farms or from high PR pages... such as those you see in the left or right hand column of a site, are pretty worthless. Google is looking for links from within a story about your site. For instance... say your site was about Bass Fishing Boats. If I made a link from this site to your site with a URL in the right column, you would get negligible power. However, if I made and entire post about how cool bass fishing is and that your site had the best selection of boats... well, that's a grand recommendation. The type Google "loves!"

Pass this along to a friend and begin to change your own sites this year and you'll see how traffic will rise and so will your Google revenue.

Joel Comm Leads Us Astray

Unintentional, I am sure, Joel Comm released free Google AdSense templates today which are against Google AdSense Program Policy.

Today, Google's Arlene Lee sets the record straight about having images next to ads, something Joel and others claim was the breakthrough in 2005 for AdSense publishers.

Google gives us these images of ad placement that breaks policy:

















and...
























Granted, Joel's pictures are better; still they are placed near the ad block in a way that, as Google says:

If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn't actually being offered. That's not a good experience for users or advertisers.

Joel's AdSense template:


















If you're offering this type of page, now might be a good time to clean house.