“You Must Play By The Rules”
A lot of people think that Google’s job in the world is to create an opportunity for them to create a nice business and make a lot of money online.
Google’s job is not this at all. Let me explain:
About 80% of the content on the internet is garbage, and this is not even counting all the bad websites and lame excuses for content. 80% of it is spam. This leaves you with 20% of content, and a lot of this is useless content.
The reason why Google is more popular than the other search engines is because Google ruthlessly eliminates garbage. Google’s job is actually to filter or “thin the herd” for its users. This means fewer advertisers, fewer people attempting to deliver content will get through. Only a few people who deliver the real content, who deliver satisfaction to its customers will be shown to Googles users.
Google is doing its job.
I often read about BANS(“Build A Niche Store”) site administrators who complain about their sites being de-indexed in Google. At first I was a little worried, as most of my first sites where based on the BANS script. After taking a look at some of these “de-indexed” sites I started to see a pattern. These sites had little to no content, or some bad content. Google does not like thin affiliate sites. This does not mean that Google has anything against BANS, but if you think you can buy the BANS software, slap down $10 for a domain name, upload the BANS script, write a couple articles and wait for the money to start flowing, you are sadly mistaken, at least in the long term. You may see some ROI in the short term, but you are pretty much guaranteed that your site will eventually be dropped from Google.
As I said, my first experiences with marketing online was with BANS. eBay affiliate sites are still very much part of my portfolio, I use mostly phpBay now though. I highly recommend BANS for beginners. You will learn a lot by setting up a few stores. I highly recommend combining the BANS script with a wordpress theme. This allows you to add content via the wordpress blog, which Google loves. You need a wordpress theme that has been customized to work with BANS. There are many free ones out there, just Google : “BANS wordpress theme”. I purchased a professional theme from Mark Hensen at thenichestorebuilder.com. He has a great blog that specializes in eBay affiliate sites.
The template I purchased has worked very well for me on several sites. It’s the BANS-WordPress 3-Column Theme. Mark was helpful while setting it up.You can check it out on my BANS site here Classic Trucks here. I built this site last summer. I can try to give you an idea of what these sites are capable of.
I have approximately 40 hours and a total of $400 invested in this site. I have included the BANS script cost to keep it conservative (even though the licence is for unlimited websites) I spent about 160 on outsourcing the articles, 100 in SEO promotion tools and then the registration. The 40 hours entailed keyword research, installation, and promotion.
Promotion takes most of your time. You should be spending about 70% promoting your sites, and just 30% building and tweaking them. I have not touched this site in about 3 months, and it consistently brings me in anywhere from 180-600 per month depending on the time of year. As of today it did in 453.96 eBay commissions and 66.67 in Adsense revenue, for a total of $520.36 for the month of Jan ‘09. We are just starting to come into the season for buying classic vehicles, I expect this site to perform equity well all the way up to the end of the summer.
That’s over $5000 a year for 40 hours work, $120 per hour for my time isn’t to bad. Now please take into consideration I will have to go back and spend some time in the future to maintain it, this includes further SEO such as building relevant back links, writing or outsourcing more articles, posting articles in high ranking article directories, social networking, and forum promotion. I cheated at bit, I was using SEnuke, its expensive but it works really well and saves ton of time. I was able to set up entire mini sites that rank in Google, and have links back to the main site in just a few hours. The extra work will, in turn, increase the ROI even more.
This is probably above average for these types of sites, at least for mine. If you have any experience with BANS or phpBay sites, please feel free to comment. Even if your site only made $100 per month, could you not build 10 of these? 30? 100? I know people who have over 300 affiliate sites and make a very nice living of the passive income they provide. I have chosen to have a smaller collection of well optimized, content rich sites, rather then lots of thin ones. I believe this strategy will be better in the long run.
I still build eBay affiliate sites, but I now use phpBay which is not as user friendly, and takes a bit more work to set up, but allows for much more customization, and it integrates into wordpress very nicely. If you know your way around wordpress and have set up a few sites yourself, then I recommend phpBay. If you are new to this, or just don’t want to spend a lot of time getting a site up, then I recommend BANS coupled with wordpress. You can be on the promotion stage in a few days with the BANS setup. The majority of your time being spent on content.
The majority of my time is now spent on affiliate marketing, using both article marketing, and Pay-per-click. I will be disusing more about these projects in upcoming posts.
There are hundreds of ways to make money online, most of them will make money in the short term, but will not last. If you want long term success that will provide you with years of passive income, you have to play by Google’s rules. The old internet adage “Content is King” has never been more true.
Provide real, good quality content for your users and Google will love you.
Both of these products make me money every day:
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This one makes even more
About the happy affiliate
