I have been saving money... and would love to invest $$ in websites Especially if I can develop them and let them take in traffic and make some Asense money every month... hopefully in the tens of thousands! Do you guys have any advice? Also... I was thinking of going big with this spending some good chunks of change... buying serious domains...... established sites etc. and turning them around..... Do you guys have any good tips for someone just starting out, what mistakes to be careful of, etc.?? Any advice is greatly appreciated!! - GoogleLuva
From a lot of other people's opinions, adsense isn't really the way to go at the moment. Lower and lower click prices are driving a lot of people to affiliate marketing instead.
You'll learn a lot by researching this forum. Be very careful with your research, it's very easy to lose your money very quickly. I'd tend to start small and scale up quickly when you have proven your idea.
You can invest all you want, but don't expect any quick results. Depending on your niche, it may take you years to reach the top of the SERPs. Just be patient and keep adding content and features to your sites and you'll succeed. You can actually spend $1,000 in a single day on AdWords and get 7,000-10,000 people to visit your site, but that traffic is only temporary and will not last. After that, if you do not have any great content and backlinks, nobody will come to visit your site. P.S. AdSense payouts are very low nowadays since there are just too many publishers and you only get a small cut from what Google gets from the advertiser. You can only succeed with AdSense if you get at least 1,000 visitors a day.
That may not be representing the true picture overall. Adsense is not gone and there are people earning handsome money from adsense alone. In fact some are earning anywhere from $50 to $100 per day. The general strategy for earning from adsense can be summarize in three steps: Keyword Research Content Traffic Conversions Revenues Lets go a bit deeper: Keyword Research This is the first and the most important part of adsense strategy. The approach should be to find a keyword which has sufficient searches but not sufficient results, and we are interested only in exact searches. Take all the time to research, but DO IT THOROUGHLY and come up with around 20 keywords. Content Once you have selected the keywords, its time for content. Write around 25 articles. You can write it yourself, but it is time consuming and needs lots of patience. That would not be required in your case since you have funds to care of that. Get the articles written by some good writer. Remember to always go for quality articles. Good quality articles, with properly optimized keywords can help you in getting top SERP. Put 5 articles on your site. Use wordpress on your own domain. Wordpress is a very good platform for getting higher results. Wordpress automatically sends a ping whenever a make a new post but you can do it manually just to be sure. Also be sure to input your adsense id appropriately. Traffic This is another important part of the adsense strategy. Traffic is a core feature, and the very reason, of any website. You may put all the best content on your site but that is of no use if there is nobody to see it. And like Steven Wagenheim, the legendary article writer and internet marketer once said, a site without traffic is just like a tiny island in the vast Pacific. The first step is to add your site to your Google webmasters account. Second step is to submit to sites which will get your sites indexed instantly. Then submit your site to the following sites: Google: www.google.com/addurl/ Free Website submission: http://www.submitexpress.com/submit.html (this will submit your site to 20+ top search engines) http://www.submit-away.com/auto-submit.htm http://www.exactseek.com/add.html http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx http://bblmedia.com/addurl.html (total 52 search engines) Traffic is broadly from two categories; paid and natural or organic. We can easily forget about the paid one as this strategy can easily gain from the organic traffic. To get organic traffic, the best way is articles and backlinking. First step should be articles. Submit the balance articles, one by one, to www.ezinearticles.com which may take some time. Once all your articles get approved (remember the advice of getting quality articles), submit them to other article directories (there are hundreds of them). Link the articles back to the home page. Next create 5 squidoo lenses (min 2 or 3) with fresh articles. Link them back to your home page. By this time your site would have been indexed, submitted to most of the search engines, backlinked from www.ezinearticles.com and dozens of sites where the articles were submitted. The site would also be getting a few backlinks from squidoo.com which is very powerful. Conversions Since so much effort has been put in doing keyword research, putting up the site, article writing, submitting to article directories etc, its time to reap the fruits. Conversions are the percentage of visitors that click on an ad, plain and simple. The higher the conversions, the more we make. Conversions are largely dependent on our site layout, and this is one of the keys to the plan. There is no shortage of opinions on layouts i.e. static vs. blog, ad placements, # of ad blocks, etc. Revenues Your site should be doing nicely by this time and you can start seeing some traffic and revenue. This will keep on increasing as more and more of your efforts start materializing and traffic starts increasing. Since revenue comes from clicks, so CPC or cost per click is what will decide the income. There is usually no set criteria to find out how much will be the cost per click. Broadly it will depend on the selected niche. Credit Cards, weight loss, loans etc are known to be generally good earners. www.spyfu.com is a good tool to find out how much will be the CPC If you are content with what you are earning by this time, its fine. Now you can sit back and enjoy the residual income. You can now either do nothing other than cashing your checks, or you can do one of the following: Rinse and repeat with another site. Start with step two of the promotion and that is getting backlinks. Backlinking is another important part of website traffic and getting a high PR. Would not like to delve on the topic because that in itself is another field. The above information is just an overview because it is simply not possible to explain all the steps as it would become an ebook by itself. Still I have tried to give as much info as possible. Hopefully anybody who follows the steps outlined above can expect good results. If you want me to help in any way, be it putting up the site, articles and promotion, submitting to blog directories and more article directories, getting backlinks please feel free to send me a PM. Anil Pandey
Aha, and how many visitors those people have that make $100 a day? You did not read my whole post. They have more than 1,000 a day in most cases. It depends on the niche and the PPC in that niche, but without a lot of traffic AdSense will make you only a few dollars a day. Today, it is much harder to make money with AdSense than say 5 years ago because back then it was easier to bring traffic to your site and the Web was not so saturated.
As part of the agency I work for, we do this for many large private networks or SEO agencies building micro-sites to filter traffic to their client site. I agree with Lotos, its tough out there. Apart from competing with thousands of webmasters and home bloggers with good SEO knowledge, larger digital media agencies buy up hundreds of domains and clog up the SERPs for their one corporate client. I would not say "don't invest" but be cautious. You are competing with both the corporates and the independent webmasters with years of experience in this market. My best advice is that before you start spending your dollars, buy just a few domains (aged domains), get a good content writer and SEO (or an SEO content writer for an all in one service) and see if you can make your mark within 6 months. True, you will not be earning big money in 6 months but it's a test run which will serve as your market research for your business plan before you fully start up your business. Don't rush into it head first and get carried away with those make money blogs and "How I made $1,000 in one day" ebooks and programs. I always say that if a person knew how to do it, they would not teach others to do it for $9.99 but rather keep multiplying their efforts to build themselves a small empire.
I have read what others are saying and I can offer you another solution: build a single website, very small website on a very tight niche, where you can put it in the SERP quickly, then build 2-3 more the same way. You can start seeing some money I would average like $50/month from 3 small sites. Such a site you can build in 1 day. Now it only takes work and patience to multiply and scale, you will see results in 1-2 months, with a few good links for these 3-4 sites. After you see results, and know what you are doing, you can build like 10-15 more sites and follow the same pattern.
This is true that it was easier to earn from adsense earlier but this is perfectly possible now also if some simple steps are taken. Google did not become what it is today just be catering to some big SEO companies. There is scope for everybody. More and more people are logging on to internet. More and more products are being launched. If you have any doubts, try purchasing any LLLL.com domain and you would realize that its damn hard to get a new domain. Just stick to the steps outlined above, you'll go great guns. People, real people, are doing it and getting their checks. The big firms constitute only a negligible percentage of the overall strength. But this will not happen just by getting a domain name and slapping some content on it. You will have to put in some effort. There is so much scope that you will be astonished how people could have overlooked it. FYI, I found that a 5 word keyword phrase has got 30,100,000 general results and ONLY 3 EXACT RESULTS. And I'm sure that you will be able to appreciate the importance of long tail keywords because this is some information where the visitors are SPECIFICALLY looking for information. They know what they exactly want and most probably would not shy away from spending money for it. There is a lot of difference between a person searching for short keywords and somebody searching with a long keyword. To give you an example: "colorado ski resorts" gives 1,620,000 general Google results "list of medium budget colorado ski resorts" gives 33,900 general Google results and "list of medium budget colorado ski resorts" gives ZERO exact results in Google. It means there is no site on the internet displaying this topic. Just think about the potential. If you put up a site on this keyword, it will always be on the top even after other sites do come up. Thats just an example of the importance of following the steps judiciously. And most important of the strategy is keyword research. This is what will get you success. Best Wishes. Anil Pandey
OK, and how many people search "list of medium budget colorado ski resorts". Maybe 5 people in the entire year. I cannot find right now since the keyword tool is down as Google is doing some maintenance. Targeting long-tail keywords that nobody searches is a waste of your time.
Isn't buying 100s of domains an linking them to your website against Google's Terms of Service? I've seen some websites who rank #1 for very competitive keywords bought domains with those keywords and then redirect them to their website. This should be banned by search engines because they're not providing any useful content on those domains, just spamming the Web and tricking the system.
People may not like this idea but research Autoblogs. It is black hat but if you don't mind that there great. -Beau Waddington
I wouldn't suggest you to start investing just like that. You need to get familiar with things before.
better buy an established site. you may get good high paying sites for $100-400 this way you can escape tiring baby development work. your site will be ready yo return your investment.