Nov 15, 2009

Producing profitable web sites without spending ages writing



by: Phil Wiley
This is all about content.
I've written it as a response to some criticism in my forum this week. A couple of people said that I don't produce enough original content. Right now that's true. I'm not writing a lot. 
 
But I'll tell you what. I'm doing what works.
The sites I've been building for the past few months are producing results. Big results. 
 
My sites, whether they're mini sites or big sites, work. And they bring in a huge income every week from Google Adsense, Searchfeed, and affiliate programs. 
 
So should I care what people are saying? 
 
Yes I should.
Not just because I've been criticized, which is never nice, but because I still believe that the key to long term success is running on-topic content which is unique to your own web site. I don't believe the sites I've built over the past few months are going to keep producing an income for years, where the original content sites I've got will keep working for years. 
 
But I'm making hay while the sun shines and you should too.
Here's how I'm doing it:
Many of the sites that people were talking about were created with Traffic Equalizer and heavily modified with templates, and by changing things with search and replace, to add individuality. Just one of these sites makes more every week than I used to earn working full time in my old newspaper job. (interestingly this site now gets more traffic from the new Yahoo search engine
than it does from Google, where just a few months ago it was nearly all from Google). 
 
I hardly write anything on these sites, just an article on the index pages of each folder/sub directory.
In case you don't know, Traffic Equalizer http://www.ozemedia.com/trafficeq is, in essence, an automated directory builder taking search engine results from your keyword list and building pages around them. Lots of big name marketers are using it to make a lot of money. 
 
I run Google Adsense on the pages, and also put at least one affiliate program on a page. Very often it will be an ebook sold through Clickbank. On some sites I put a number of Searchfeed links on the pages http://www.ozemedia.com/searchfeed.htm but I'm a bit worried about using Searchfeed and Adsense together so I don't do it often, but Searchfeed still send me a check for a $1000 plus each month - which is a nice little side income. 
 
My main concern with Traffic Equalizer has always been that someone else building a page on the same search term could have an almost identical page to mine. Search engines don't like this. 
 
But the good news is that Traffic Equalizer has just been improved. A few weeks ago Jeff Alderson, the programmer, asked me if I had any ideas on how to make it better, and I suggested he try and find a way of getting the site content from more sources and then randomizing the output. This would make it less of a chance that two users would build identical pages. Well he's a fast worker and the new improved version came out a couple of days ago, and though I haven't had a chance to try it yet, I'm sure it's going to work. At least short term to mid term. 
 
The bad news is that I'm not certain of the long term viability of the sites.
They do well for a few months, but if you can't continue getting high quality links to them they tend to drop down the rankings. Also I'm sure that Google won't want the search results to be totally clogged with sites built with Traffic Equalizer, and will eventually change their algorithms to make the pages rank a lot lower than they currently do. If they did this by targeting pages with lots of outbound links but few inbound links it would be damaging to the TE pages. 
 
Having said that, these sites DO work. And Google allow their Adsense Ads to be run on them.
Some people don't like the idea of building writes using Traffic Equalizer because it somehow seems wrong to them. They don't like the "quality" of the sites it produces. But the search engines LOVE the sites. Many of the pages they produce rank very high, and unlike the quite short lived fad of building "smartpages" they don't do anything against the search engines rules. They don't redirect, they don't mislead people. They just build simple directories. 
 
I'm not going to name anyone, but some REALLY famous people in the internet marketing world are doing very well with TE. These people consistently make a huge income year after year by doing what works at the moment. In other words they use the tools which bring them an income. 
 
You should be doing it too Bill
http://www.ozemedia.com/trafficeq 
 
Just one thing to mentally make a note of.
You have to be patient. Unless you already have a few high Pagerank sites you can link to them from, these sites take a few months to take off. During those months you need to keep build new sites.
 
If you get despondent because the sites look like they not going to do well you'll stop building them, and then curse yourself a few months down the track when you realize you could have had 20 more sites steadily coming online. In other words you don't see instant results, but you have to keep building sites and pages. There is no easy option, no quick work around. You work hard at building these sites and success will come. 
 
So - seeing I think Traffic EQ sites won't keep working for years - what about long term sites?
Well contrary to what a few people said in my forum I do still build sites full of articles that I write or pay someone to write. 
 
Right now I'm building a network of travel sites which will be full of articles and photographs of places I've visited. They're going to be mini sites of between 5 and 12 pages, though perhaps as high as 20 pages on some of them because the photographs are going to take up quite a bit of space. 
 
This week Kate has spent most of her time writing touristy type, personal experience articles on London and York. Next week she's moving on to write about Japan. After that it's going to be France. Then she's doing Malaysia, before working on a big site about Australia. We'll be using photographs that I've shot in the past few years in each of these places. And I'll also put together a site on Bangkok in Thailand, which I visited recently. 
 
All the content, both photographs and articles, will be totally unique to the sites we build. They'll be keyword rich and the sites properly structured to please the search engines. I haven't yet decided if I'll build the sites with Traffic Equalizer. If I use TE http://www.ozemedia.com/trafficeq I'll just use it to provide the structure of the site - pages, linking structure - then remove most or all of the outbound links and replacing them with the articles and photos. 
 
Rather than just putting all the content up on one domain I've registered a whole bunch of domain names and I'm hosting them in the countries the site is about ( except Japan because I can't find a low cost Japanese web host ). The sites will then be interlinked to help improve their search rankings - as detailed in Michael Campbell's Revenge of the Mininet
http://www.ozemedia.com/mininet.htm I'm going to the trouble of finding hosts in each country because I think it just might improve the web ranking chances a little. Though I'm not certain on this. I'm quite certain, however, that if they're linked together the way Michael describes they need to be on different web hosts in a different IP range. 
 
Here's what's involved ( so you can see why I take the easy option sometimes and just do sites built with TE http://www.ozemedia.com/trafficeq ) 
 
* First of all I had to do the traveling and suffer all that jetlag. 
 
* Carry a pile of heavy camera gear around everywhere. 
 
* Spend hours at the computer editing the pictures. 
 
* Research the keywords so that I can build pages around search terms that people are actually looking for ( I use Wordtracker to do this http://www.ozemedia.com/wordtracker ) 
 
* Pay Kate to write most of the articles, and get my weary brain into action to write some myself for the places for Bangkok which she hasn't yet visited. 
 
* Decide on whether to run with Adsense, or an affiliate program or both. (I've yet to find a travel affiliate program I'm happy with, but some pages might carry affiliate ads for luggage or books) 
 
* Choose domain names and find web hosts. 
 
* Build the sites and link them together as in Mininet http://www.ozemedia.com/mininet.htm 
 
* Upload them to the hosts by FTP 
 
* List them with Google and Yahoo ( I don't bother about the rest, AOL, MSN and the others will quickly find you from Google.) 
 
By the way I'll probably use Traffic Equalizer on different domains to build pages to direct traffic to my travel network sites. The same way I now use Traffic Equalizer to send traffic to my other mini sites. So what do you do if you want to build content sites like my travel sites but you can't write and don't have an employee who can quickly churn out words? 
 
I think the best way is to sub contract.
There's a lot of talk in the media about how people are losing their jobs because a lot of American companies, as well as many in England and Australia, are outsourcing jobs to India. 
 
Have you thought of joining them and outsourcing your web content to India?
I've just taken my first steps to doing it. But unlike big companies I'm not putting anyone out of a job, just helping create jobs. 
 
Wages are very low in India, a country which has some of the best educated English speaking people in the world. And to us Westerners people work for peanuts in India. According to an article in Computerworld magazine http://www.computerworld.com/careertopics/careers/story/0,10801,91916,00.html?from=story_kc a programmer in India earns around US$7500 a year. ( A programmer in China earns around 20 to 30% less, but it's hard to outsource content creation to China because, unlike India, few people write English well enough) 
 
I'm not the first to think of using people in India to write my web content. While I was researching this piece I found that the giant builder.com has started offshoring authoring of many of its articles to India http://www.newsforge.com/trends/04/03/18/2240229.shtml 
 
So how do you find people in these countries? The easiest way is to use an outsourcing web site. Try these.
http://www.elance.com
http://www.rentacoder.com
http://www.guru.com
http://www.smarterwork.com 
 
Do a search on them for "search engine optimised web content ", "content writing" or just "web content". When I looked on elance last week I saw bids as low $5 per page, but the lowest I saw today was $10 a page. This is still incredibly cheap. 
 
Here's the $10 a page bid - "Thanks for the opportunity to bid on your project! My quote is based on a rate of $10 per article (350-500 words). I'm a marketing professional with over 10 years of experience." 
 
Another possible way to use these sites is to hire people to create new products for you. At the time of writing this letter there are 5 bids for writing a recipe ebook. The lowest bidder is willing to do the whole project for just US$400. In fact the highest bid is just $450. Someone else is willing to write a 50 page ebook on stopping headaches for $8 a page, which also adds up to $400. 
 
Here's another for an ebook about looking after your skin.
Wanted: A ghostwriter for an Informational eBook entitled ""Perfect Skin: Cleansing, Nourishing, Prot ..." 
 
And again someone is willing to write it for just $8 per page "Our bid is based on US$8 per page (250-300 words) with minimum billing of 50 pages (additional pages will be billed at the rate of US$8 per pages) and includes all necessary research and revisions. You will own fullcopyrights. Completion Time: 16 working days." 
 
About the author:
Phil Wiley is the author of the best selling book Mini Site Profits www.minisiteprofits.comand writes the free weekly Letter from Phil at www.ozemedia.comRead About
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