Autoblogs - Why so much BS about them?
- Thread starter jvmarket
- Start date
jvmarket
Regular Member
- Dec 27, 2008
- 429
- 767
Ok....there is a lot of questions on how to promote blogs. First let start off by saying we have a staff of people working for us, so things that can not be automated are outsourced to our staff. We do not use all of these sites for all of our blogs.
I've collected these sites of the past few years snd can tell you they are great for link building as well as getting traffic. So how do we use these to promote aout blogs?
1) Pull one article from the blog
2) Spin the content using which content spinning program you like (Our content is anywhere for 40%-60% unique...I'm told anything better than 30% is good)
3) Create resource box with anchor text links
4) Create list of tags (3 or 4)
Submit to the following list.
This will help get you back links and addition to the content you are generating every day. There are programs out there that can substancially decrease the time required to submit you articles. Here is an example of what our content looks like.
You can also submit your content to like:
Traffic Kahuna
Article Marketer
Article Marketing Automation
Seems like a lot of work to promote you blogs...it is but if you can commit a couple hours a day to it you will see results. We also use one article for multiple blogs (time saver...in the resource box link to 2 different blogs)
Add this to the auto generated content for a powerful technique.
There are also people on this forum that will bookmark your blogs for a pretty good price. If you can afford it...take a look at Traffic Android. We have a VA that sets up a weeks worth of work in about 2 hours using Traffic Android.
We've also had some success with Auto Social Poster.
If you dont have the time or the money to purchase some of the tools to help automate the process....find someone to do it for you....bookmarking can be done cheap.
Shit I almost forgot.....RSS to Blog is another program to look in to.
Here is a list of places we submit content to....
Hubpages
Buzzle
Article City
Article Dashboard
Article Pool
Article Base
Article Alley
Swearchwarp
A1Articles
Article Cube
Live Journal
Scribd
Clearblogs
Wetpaint
Zimbio
Tumblr
Bloglines
Helium
Associated Content
Squidoo
I've collected these sites of the past few years snd can tell you they are great for link building as well as getting traffic. So how do we use these to promote aout blogs?
1) Pull one article from the blog
2) Spin the content using which content spinning program you like (Our content is anywhere for 40%-60% unique...I'm told anything better than 30% is good)
3) Create resource box with anchor text links
4) Create list of tags (3 or 4)
Submit to the following list.
This will help get you back links and addition to the content you are generating every day. There are programs out there that can substancially decrease the time required to submit you articles. Here is an example of what our content looks like.
Code:
http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Rene_BridgesYou can also submit your content to like:
Traffic Kahuna
Article Marketer
Article Marketing Automation
Seems like a lot of work to promote you blogs...it is but if you can commit a couple hours a day to it you will see results. We also use one article for multiple blogs (time saver...in the resource box link to 2 different blogs)
Add this to the auto generated content for a powerful technique.
There are also people on this forum that will bookmark your blogs for a pretty good price. If you can afford it...take a look at Traffic Android. We have a VA that sets up a weeks worth of work in about 2 hours using Traffic Android.
We've also had some success with Auto Social Poster.
If you dont have the time or the money to purchase some of the tools to help automate the process....find someone to do it for you....bookmarking can be done cheap.
Shit I almost forgot.....RSS to Blog is another program to look in to.
Here is a list of places we submit content to....
Code:
[url]http://www.Ezinearticles.com[/url]
[url]http://www.dime-co.com[/url]
[url]http://www.articlealey.com[/url]
[url]http://www.articlesta[/url] rs.com
[url]http://www.websition.com[/url]
[url]http://www.ezine-hub.com[/url]
[url]http://www.tss-articles.com[/url]
[url]http://www.abcarticledirectory.com[/url]
[url]http://www.articlenext.com[/url]
[url]http://www.articlesfyi.com[/url]
[url]http://www.a1articles.com[/url]
[url]http://www.article-buzz.com[/url]
[url]http://www.everyonesarticles.com[/url]
[url]http://www.christiannotepad.com[/url]
[url]http://www.articles-at[/url] .smartnetworld.com
[url]http://www.articleclick.com[/url]
[url]http://www.articlecity[/url] .com
[url]http://www.ex-designz.net[/url]
[url]http://www.my-articles.com[/url]
[url]http://www.articles43.com[/url]
[url]http://www.amazines.com[/url]
[url]http://www.articlerich.com[/url]
[url]http://www.articlegeek.com[/url]
[url]http://www.articles3000.com[/url]
[url]http://www.goarticles.com[/url]Buzzle
Article City
Article Dashboard
Article Pool
Article Base
Article Alley
Swearchwarp
A1Articles
Article Cube
Live Journal
Scribd
Clearblogs
Wetpaint
Zimbio
Tumblr
Bloglines
Helium
Associated Content
Squidoo
D
Deleted member 23846
Guest
if this thread is about bs then why are you posting guides im confused?
jvmarket
Regular Member
- Dec 27, 2008
- 429
- 767
What Makes A Good Niche
I'm not going to tell you what I think, opinions are like...you know what I mean, I'm going to tell you what works for us. Here is how we start the selection process:
Traffic - If you plan on making any money you have to have visitors to your blog. I like niches that have moderate to high search volumes. This way I know people are lookin for information on this topic.
Will I Make Money - You need to make sure that you'll have relevant ads plast on your site, in other words don't choose a niche where the are no relevant ads. It also helps if there are affilaite products in the niche as well, not only can you sell them others will place ads on your site selling those products.
I love Google...if I ask Google will tell me anything I want. I just need to know the right questions to ask. Unlike most out the I dont go looking for these list of the top paying keywords. Why? Because everyone else is looking at those as well. I do have a couple paid applications we use for other types of keyword research but I like Google.
Google is vast and if you put a little effort into your search you'll find niches that others have over looked. Go to
put in a keyword, for this example I'm going to use the word "money"
What we see are a number of keywords centered around money. If we look close enough we'll find a number of keywords:
make money
make money from home
earn money
unclaimed money
make money on the internet
earn money online
ways to make money
make money fast
money making ideas
I didn't list the monthly search results or competition because by the time you read this it will have changed and I don't want to hear people complaining that I gave them bad information.
There is an odd keyword in that group, "unclaimed money", if you click on that keyword it will take you to the results page for that keyword. As of this writing there are just over 1.3 million results for that page.
Look over to the right side of the page and you'll notice the paid search results, click on "More Sponsored Links", I'm looking at 82 paid ads...that's quite a few people advertising for that keyword. At this point I like to click on a few of those ads to see what they are advertising. This will let me know if there are any affiliate programs I can promote promote.
The first ad I clicked on is for cashunlimited.com, they have an affiliate program. It looks like they pay $4 per sale on a $10 product...I get too deep into this because im not ready to pick affiliate products yet. The second ad I clicked on is a clickbank product called recordsfinder.net. Well we now know that there will be plenty of people advertising in this niche and we can throw our own ads on there as well.
The research is not quite finished yet, the next place I go is to
By putting the keyword in the box and hitting submit you'll get all kinds of information.
I like this free tool, I now have a buch of keywords in the niche. I also know the search estimates for WordTracker, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. I can see at a quick glance that the top 6 keywords have a combined number of searches over 3600 per day.
Based on what I just looked at I know there is money to be made in this niche. I saw plenty of people advertising and lots of people searching for information. Now lets have a look at what type of content there is out there on this niche.
To do this I go to ezinearticles and do a search for the keyword I just found. I found plenty of content to scrape and if need be rewrite to post in our new blog.
Next I'm off to Yahoo Answers to see what I find...over 600 reslults. Lots of content ripe for the picking.
One more quick check of Squidoo and not only do we find more good content but also some new keywords to look at. Here is one "Kentucky Unclaimed Property" a quick check and we find this keyword has almost no competition and gets 300 searches per month. Though not a lot of searches on its own...multiply that by 50 and you have 15k per month.
So what does all this tell me? Well it tells me I may have found a niche that:
1) Should be easy to monetize
2) There is plenty of traffic
3) Content will be easy to find
Now does this guarantee you'll make money with this niche....Nope I cant guarantee I'd make money with it. The only thing to do is to build the blog promote it a bit and test it.
What about all those other make money type keywords? Research them a little bit, see what happens. I was looking at some of these and it lead me to another keyword "taxes"....wow, look at the number of searches. I'm sure there are at least a half dozen blogs in that list of keywords.
Remember, this all started with a single base keyword "money"
I'm not going to tell you what I think, opinions are like...you know what I mean, I'm going to tell you what works for us. Here is how we start the selection process:
Traffic - If you plan on making any money you have to have visitors to your blog. I like niches that have moderate to high search volumes. This way I know people are lookin for information on this topic.
Will I Make Money - You need to make sure that you'll have relevant ads plast on your site, in other words don't choose a niche where the are no relevant ads. It also helps if there are affilaite products in the niche as well, not only can you sell them others will place ads on your site selling those products.
I love Google...if I ask Google will tell me anything I want. I just need to know the right questions to ask. Unlike most out the I dont go looking for these list of the top paying keywords. Why? Because everyone else is looking at those as well. I do have a couple paid applications we use for other types of keyword research but I like Google.
Google is vast and if you put a little effort into your search you'll find niches that others have over looked. Go to
Code:
http://www.google.com/sktool/#What we see are a number of keywords centered around money. If we look close enough we'll find a number of keywords:
make money
make money from home
earn money
unclaimed money
make money on the internet
earn money online
ways to make money
make money fast
money making ideas
I didn't list the monthly search results or competition because by the time you read this it will have changed and I don't want to hear people complaining that I gave them bad information.
There is an odd keyword in that group, "unclaimed money", if you click on that keyword it will take you to the results page for that keyword. As of this writing there are just over 1.3 million results for that page.
Look over to the right side of the page and you'll notice the paid search results, click on "More Sponsored Links", I'm looking at 82 paid ads...that's quite a few people advertising for that keyword. At this point I like to click on a few of those ads to see what they are advertising. This will let me know if there are any affiliate programs I can promote promote.
The first ad I clicked on is for cashunlimited.com, they have an affiliate program. It looks like they pay $4 per sale on a $10 product...I get too deep into this because im not ready to pick affiliate products yet. The second ad I clicked on is a clickbank product called recordsfinder.net. Well we now know that there will be plenty of people advertising in this niche and we can throw our own ads on there as well.
The research is not quite finished yet, the next place I go is to
Code:
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/?I like this free tool, I now have a buch of keywords in the niche. I also know the search estimates for WordTracker, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. I can see at a quick glance that the top 6 keywords have a combined number of searches over 3600 per day.
Based on what I just looked at I know there is money to be made in this niche. I saw plenty of people advertising and lots of people searching for information. Now lets have a look at what type of content there is out there on this niche.
To do this I go to ezinearticles and do a search for the keyword I just found. I found plenty of content to scrape and if need be rewrite to post in our new blog.
Next I'm off to Yahoo Answers to see what I find...over 600 reslults. Lots of content ripe for the picking.
One more quick check of Squidoo and not only do we find more good content but also some new keywords to look at. Here is one "Kentucky Unclaimed Property" a quick check and we find this keyword has almost no competition and gets 300 searches per month. Though not a lot of searches on its own...multiply that by 50 and you have 15k per month.
So what does all this tell me? Well it tells me I may have found a niche that:
1) Should be easy to monetize
2) There is plenty of traffic
3) Content will be easy to find
Now does this guarantee you'll make money with this niche....Nope I cant guarantee I'd make money with it. The only thing to do is to build the blog promote it a bit and test it.
What about all those other make money type keywords? Research them a little bit, see what happens. I was looking at some of these and it lead me to another keyword "taxes"....wow, look at the number of searches. I'm sure there are at least a half dozen blogs in that list of keywords.
Remember, this all started with a single base keyword "money"
spankythepyro
Power Member
- Mar 7, 2009
- 572
- 95
where did ou get the 15k from? lol I know its an example but each person searching and visiting your website is not going to get you anywhere near $50/visit
make money is crowded btw
make money is crowded btw
jvmarket
Regular Member
- Dec 27, 2008
- 429
- 767
the 15k came from multiplying 50 keywords that get approx. 300 search per month
The post use "unclaimed money" as the example.....that keyword lead me to the following keyword "Kentucky Unclaimed Property"
This post is about finding a niche to create your blog around. I strongly recommend NEVER using any examples you find in forums.
Hope that clears things up a bit
spankythepyro
Power Member
- Mar 7, 2009
- 572
- 95
ah ok I was thinking you were saying $50/impression... I was like lets be realistic here haha..
and yea I know examples here are flooded!!!
and yea I know examples here are flooded!!!
jimmychuang
Regular Member
- Feb 1, 2008
- 269
- 29
content is king or traffic is king??
If you got traffic, even you have a junk website, you still can make money from it.
Adsense arbitrage is an example, when you have quality traffic, those visitors will click or leave anyway, that's how we make money from adsense.
I have not read any real method that can drive traffic to websites. We only read more and more "traffic sources".
If you got traffic, even you have a junk website, you still can make money from it.
Adsense arbitrage is an example, when you have quality traffic, those visitors will click or leave anyway, that's how we make money from adsense.
I have not read any real method that can drive traffic to websites. We only read more and more "traffic sources".
jimmychuang
Regular Member
- Feb 1, 2008
- 269
- 29
By the way, even we have a list of high search keywords, and we have tool to research more keywords, it still means nothing if we don't know how to get them find our blogs.
So what's the point about the keyword tool? I don't get it, really, many times I read those articles about "traffic methods", but turns out "how to find keywords". I just tired of it.
So what's the point about the keyword tool? I don't get it, really, many times I read those articles about "traffic methods", but turns out "how to find keywords". I just tired of it.
Read more about 'long tail keywords' which helps to get google to give you relevant traffic from less competitive keywords.
Build pages around those less competitive but relevant keywords.
If you check your website logs, you'll see these pages will contribute quite a bit to your search engine traffic if you have a website with many pages (say 10k+) in google with different long tail keywords.
jimmychuang
Regular Member
- Feb 1, 2008
- 269
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jvmarket
Regular Member
- Dec 27, 2008
- 429
- 767
I see a couple of good issues we raised. I'd like to share our experience on them, first If you got traffic, even you have a junk website, you still can make money from it.
Autoblogs are a completely different beast than arbitrage. Our arbitrage sites consist o very few pages and are butt ugly. We pay $.06-$.09 per click and average around a 50% CTR (I know that seems high but thats what they average). The ones that have been up a few years get a few organic hits...these have a CTR around 8%.
You can not compare arbitrage to autoblogs....the concepts are completely different.
If you are building an autoblog then it's BH....regular blogs are designed so that a single user post his or her thoughts on a particular subject and then others comment on it.
An autoblog on the other hand is designed to grab content from where ever it can get and automatically post it. Just by its nature an autoblog is BH or at least gray white (whatever that is.)
Back to the 10k posts.....actually its very easy to set up, one person can do it in a few hours if they know what they are doing. Here is a look at that backend of a blog I have not touched since 11/08....this blog was started 8/08 (it's been deindexed so I use it as and example)
Almost 12K ... took a few hours to set up. Take a peek and look at the plugins we are using and you'll see how that much content was generated.
This is a multi category blog...so I could actually put 300-500 posts per day if I chose to. I dont recommend that if you have a new blog, build up to it.
Time for me to go hang from a building for a while
EDIT....as I saved this post it occurred to me that I forgot the link to the blog I was referring to (it's 6:30am here so give me a break...lol)
Autoblogs are a completely different beast than arbitrage. Our arbitrage sites consist o very few pages and are butt ugly. We pay $.06-$.09 per click and average around a 50% CTR (I know that seems high but thats what they average). The ones that have been up a few years get a few organic hits...these have a CTR around 8%.
You can not compare arbitrage to autoblogs....the concepts are completely different.
If you are building an autoblog then it's BH....regular blogs are designed so that a single user post his or her thoughts on a particular subject and then others comment on it.
An autoblog on the other hand is designed to grab content from where ever it can get and automatically post it. Just by its nature an autoblog is BH or at least gray white (whatever that is.)
Back to the 10k posts.....actually its very easy to set up, one person can do it in a few hours if they know what they are doing. Here is a look at that backend of a blog I have not touched since 11/08....this blog was started 8/08 (it's been deindexed so I use it as and example)
Code:
You have 11,990 posts, 4 pages, 7 scheduled posts, contained within 92 categories and 6,227 tags. You have 112 total comments, 0 approved, 15 spam and 97 awaiting moderation.Almost 12K ... took a few hours to set up. Take a peek and look at the plugins we are using and you'll see how that much content was generated.
This is a multi category blog...so I could actually put 300-500 posts per day if I chose to. I dont recommend that if you have a new blog, build up to it.
Time for me to go hang from a building for a while
EDIT....as I saved this post it occurred to me that I forgot the link to the blog I was referring to (it's 6:30am here so give me a break...lol)
Last edited:
jimmychuang
Regular Member
- Feb 1, 2008
- 269
- 29
50% CTR is very very dangerous...
I am wondering if I can still do adsense arbitrage, if the CTR too high, I get banned, if it's lower, I still have risks and probably not making money.
I like the auto blog because I don't have ability to write those topics I know nothing at all, and it fasten the content building, but how long can I see results, and how do I improve traffic and ranking?
I heard that Google really concern about domain age, a website must be live longer to get out of sandbox and start getting higher ranking.
But still many websites ranked high very fast, I know some websites have their traffic go up 500+% in three months. That's the real secret I want to know. I guess most people here want to know how to do it,too.
Internet marketing is not like real life small business, in real life you can see the result fast, you can tell if your plan is good or not within one month if you have past experience, but building a website is another thing, you work and work and work, but still get nothing after 3 months, 6 months...
pdoods
Regular Member
- Mar 4, 2009
- 372
- 101
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/members/27561-jvmarket.htmljvmarket: This thread is a great reading and I think it will save a lot of $ and working hours when doing autobloggin.
So the niche research and keyword research NEEDS to be done for every autoblog to get that Google traffic. Otherwise you rely on Stumbleupon, Twitter, Digg. etc traffic which is worst traffic ever for the one who hopes to see some Adsense ads clicks.
I have two blogs, one is gaming related and other is health. I pull content with Caffeinated Content and through RSS feeds: latest gaming news etc and health news. Gaming blog HAD around 150 visitors from Stumbleupon when I bookmarked it there. Now, it has around 5-10 UV's per day. And zero search engine traffic. And NO adsense ads clicks.
Health blog does have 1-2 visitors per day through Google search coming after some of the content I scraped from Yahoo answers. But NO adsense ads clicks.
SO, the conclusion is: autoblog needs to have a content that has a decent search volume and that content also must rank decently, otherwise assume no search engine traffic. If not, you have to rely on stumbleupon, digg, etc traffic and that ain't going to convert for sure. And if you have to bookmark your posts there regulary to have traffic (which is not converting), can you actually call your blog an autoblog?
But the question is: HOW do you make such an autoblog that posts content which has decent search volume and make that content rank high? Seems quite impossible...
So the niche research and keyword research NEEDS to be done for every autoblog to get that Google traffic. Otherwise you rely on Stumbleupon, Twitter, Digg. etc traffic which is worst traffic ever for the one who hopes to see some Adsense ads clicks.
I have two blogs, one is gaming related and other is health. I pull content with Caffeinated Content and through RSS feeds: latest gaming news etc and health news. Gaming blog HAD around 150 visitors from Stumbleupon when I bookmarked it there. Now, it has around 5-10 UV's per day. And zero search engine traffic. And NO adsense ads clicks.
Health blog does have 1-2 visitors per day through Google search coming after some of the content I scraped from Yahoo answers. But NO adsense ads clicks.
SO, the conclusion is: autoblog needs to have a content that has a decent search volume and that content also must rank decently, otherwise assume no search engine traffic. If not, you have to rely on stumbleupon, digg, etc traffic and that ain't going to convert for sure. And if you have to bookmark your posts there regulary to have traffic (which is not converting), can you actually call your blog an autoblog?
But the question is: HOW do you make such an autoblog that posts content which has decent search volume and make that content rank high? Seems quite impossible...
jvmarket
Regular Member
- Dec 27, 2008
- 429
- 767
Only if thats the only traffic going to the page...we've been at this rate for 2+ years. Your statement that a 50% CTR is very very dangerous...is not entirely correct. It was not my intention to cover all the ways we make money with blogs to to stay focused on autoblogs.
I don't have time tonight to go into detail on how you can improve your ranking or increase your traffic. If you want to get a better ranking from Google ask yourself this.
Am I giving google's clients (the searchers) what they want to see...if you answer yes then in time your site will move up in the ranking. If you are just scraping content...is that want the searcher really wants...a copy of an article they have already read?
These are the types of questions I ask myself when working on a project.
hope this makes sense
Have a great week all!!
j
jvmarket
Regular Member
- Dec 27, 2008
- 429
- 767
With autoblogs it can take time for organic traffic to start coming. I don't always like to wait so we stoke of the fire a bit. I like to crank up the number of post going to our blogs. The question is what content and from where.
If you do some research on Google you'll find that though big G is not a fan of dupe content if you can add some value to the content Google may actually rank it well.
We also take it a step further....we create our own content that we know Google will love based on our testing...we post this content to our various blogs (we spin it...its still 45% - 60% unique) then we promote it a bit so it gets a few links...now big G sends us traffic thats hits a page or two.
What are the benefits of having 3 or 4 hundred post going to your blog everyday? When we publish our own content it gets spidered immediately....
I'm still working on the guide...some of these conversations are giving me ideas of important information that needs to be added.
One last thing...If I build 50 autoblogs (on say 25 different class C IPs) that are targeted to 4 or 5 niches, within a couple months most of them will have a PR of 2. If you buy a few domains with higher PR you can keet or increase the PR by the autoblog method.
Now imagine you have 5 or 6 money sites you want to build links to...I hope you're seeing another use for autoblogs besides just adsense.
Oh...how about selling anchor text links or banner space ads on your blogs.
ok...now I'm done for the night.
j
Yeah see the thing about autoblogging is that it is pretty damn worthless.
Finding a good niche is difficult. Personally I will frequently cruise TDNAM just to look through expired domains to get good ideas. Other times I will just go to the library and browse through the stacks. I look at books and write down a few ideas then I check them out.
A successful autoblog (and I don't make these so I am guessing here) is all about the niche. Bad selection, a few pennies a day, good selection, a few dollars a day.
The problem I have is that if I can make a few $$$ a day with a good undiscovered niche, I would have to be crazy to create an autoblog when I could be earning so much more.
Keyword selection boils down to three factors.
1.)Has to have traffic
2.)Has to be a selling keyword
3.)Has to have low to moderate competition
If you want to figure out how much traffic a series of keywords gets you need to use adwords traffic sandbox, the keyword estimator tool is worthless.
You can buy adwords in order to get the true measure. I prefer this. Just bid very low so you are in like 6th place and you will barely get any clicks. Saves SO MUCH TIME if you have the cash. I have spent all of 0$ to investigate some niches.
jvmarket had an excellent diagram. Write an article and rewrite each sentence 5 times (I wouldn't use synonym adjustment anymore because it is a waste of time to do it all by hand I have found. I have also found over the past few months that rewriting each sentence 5 times sticks almost every time). Submit unique copies to ezine and buzzle, then submit to the 40 or so other PR3 article directories.
You could use like he said UAW or other crappy software to promote the articles, which should give more juice to the higher quality article directory links. I don't do this, because I find it to be too much work.
Submit your site to 100 directories and there are a myriad of lists out there.
If two article runs and 100 directories cannot get you to the top of the SERPs for a keyword you chose wrong.
In a more competitive niche, I would just create a bunch of static sites on different class C IP's and use article marketing and directories to promote those sites which then link back to the main site. Kind of difficult but worth it depending on how much money the niche will bring in.
I am going to give you a perfect example of how you should do it.
This simple site makes about 1K a month I think. ($800-$1200)
He chose 20 or so keywords and wrote some truly crappy SEO copy of around 400 words each, so 8,000 words. A page on each keyword term he wants to rank for.
Fireplace designs would get 17-22 clicks for PPC per day according to google adwords and you need to extrapolate from that. I try to look for between 10-100 PPC clicks per day to find a good niche. Really depends on how much it pays out and competition. There are a lot of variables.
About 3/4 of his links are higher ranking article directories. A sprinkling of social media, but he also has links from a few other fireplace design sites. (clearly a link farm). I think the same amount of juice could be had from 100 or so quality directory listings.
Viola! Clearly 10 of these crappy sites would make around 10K a month.
Point is, it is ALL ABOUT THE NICHE. Who would have guessed fireplace design tips? I would never have. I find niches that I never would have even imagined in my wildest dreams. Just the weirdest stuff that makes you money.
P.S. Remember you want to pick a niche where you can get the #1 slot for at least one money making keyword. The dropoff in traffic after first is incredible. Long tails are good, but keywords bring in the cash.
Finding a good niche is difficult. Personally I will frequently cruise TDNAM just to look through expired domains to get good ideas. Other times I will just go to the library and browse through the stacks. I look at books and write down a few ideas then I check them out.
A successful autoblog (and I don't make these so I am guessing here) is all about the niche. Bad selection, a few pennies a day, good selection, a few dollars a day.
The problem I have is that if I can make a few $$$ a day with a good undiscovered niche, I would have to be crazy to create an autoblog when I could be earning so much more.
Keyword selection boils down to three factors.
1.)Has to have traffic
2.)Has to be a selling keyword
3.)Has to have low to moderate competition
If you want to figure out how much traffic a series of keywords gets you need to use adwords traffic sandbox, the keyword estimator tool is worthless.
You can buy adwords in order to get the true measure. I prefer this. Just bid very low so you are in like 6th place and you will barely get any clicks. Saves SO MUCH TIME if you have the cash. I have spent all of 0$ to investigate some niches.
jvmarket had an excellent diagram. Write an article and rewrite each sentence 5 times (I wouldn't use synonym adjustment anymore because it is a waste of time to do it all by hand I have found. I have also found over the past few months that rewriting each sentence 5 times sticks almost every time). Submit unique copies to ezine and buzzle, then submit to the 40 or so other PR3 article directories.
You could use like he said UAW or other crappy software to promote the articles, which should give more juice to the higher quality article directory links. I don't do this, because I find it to be too much work.
Submit your site to 100 directories and there are a myriad of lists out there.
If two article runs and 100 directories cannot get you to the top of the SERPs for a keyword you chose wrong.
In a more competitive niche, I would just create a bunch of static sites on different class C IP's and use article marketing and directories to promote those sites which then link back to the main site. Kind of difficult but worth it depending on how much money the niche will bring in.
I am going to give you a perfect example of how you should do it.
This simple site makes about 1K a month I think. ($800-$1200)
Code:
http://fireplacedesigntips.com/He chose 20 or so keywords and wrote some truly crappy SEO copy of around 400 words each, so 8,000 words. A page on each keyword term he wants to rank for.
Fireplace designs would get 17-22 clicks for PPC per day according to google adwords and you need to extrapolate from that. I try to look for between 10-100 PPC clicks per day to find a good niche. Really depends on how much it pays out and competition. There are a lot of variables.
Code:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2Ffireplacedesigntips.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=sAbout 3/4 of his links are higher ranking article directories. A sprinkling of social media, but he also has links from a few other fireplace design sites. (clearly a link farm). I think the same amount of juice could be had from 100 or so quality directory listings.
Viola! Clearly 10 of these crappy sites would make around 10K a month.
Point is, it is ALL ABOUT THE NICHE. Who would have guessed fireplace design tips? I would never have. I find niches that I never would have even imagined in my wildest dreams. Just the weirdest stuff that makes you money.
P.S. Remember you want to pick a niche where you can get the #1 slot for at least one money making keyword. The dropoff in traffic after first is incredible. Long tails are good, but keywords bring in the cash.
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