Help! My Money Site Has Dropped From Google

June 9, 2009 – 9:09 pm

Oh, how I wish that this had never happened to me - my money site has fallen out of the Google search landscape for its best keywords.  I went from making $20 with this site on Friday to making $3 on Sunday.  My traffic also had a similarly stark decline.  The world is ending, all is lost, it is time to pack it up and go home.

Haha! Not!

Sure, I am a bummed big time by this set back, but I cannot let it get me down for long.  There is just too much to do.

I’m still not entirely sure what it is that I did wrong to make the Google gods smack my site down, but they sure did.  My site did not get de-indexed, it just dissappeared from all the awesome terms that were sending people to my site.  This could all just be the Google shuffle, but it has been 3 days now since my site has been showing up for the terms that I was ranking well for before the smack down.  I’ve never had a site do this for so long so I am getting a little nervous about it.

Here are some recent changes that I made to my site that may have gotten me in some trouble with the big G:

  1. I have been sending well optimized links to an interior page of my post in an effort to rank better for a term.  I was sitting somewhere on page two and decided that I wanted to see what it would take to get pushed onto page one.  So I started sending it one link a day from some “article directories” that I have access to.  I wrote perfectly legit posts in on these directories with an good anchor back to my site.  I varied the anchor text with every one of these links and didn’t even always point the link to the interior page that I was trying to rank, but I did send 10 links to my site in 10 days.   It is possible that this is what got me in trouble.  Maybe I sent too many links too quickly to my site.
  2. I changed the meta description of the blog to read better to a person.  Before I have used one of my site’s keywords way too much and it actually made it a little unreadable.  I thought that it would be better for people who actually read those things if I removed the unnecessary repetition and let more the description appear in the SERPs listing.  I’ve never heard of this type of thing happening before, but it sure would suck if it did.  Ishould probably change it back to see if it changes anything.
  3. I updated to the latest version of Wordpress.  If this is what affected my SERP rankings I am going to jump off of a bridge.

I am pretty certain that I just got too carried away with linking to my site using the “Article Directories” I have access to.  The only other explanation is that the SERPs are jumping up and down for these terms and it will work itself out over time.  I don’t think that later is true since many of the other sites don’t seem to be jumping up and down very much!

I honestly don’t have much of a clue as to what to do to get back in good graces with Google.  So I am planning on adding a lot of new content to the blog, maybe one post a day for as long as it takes, and getting some solid single backlinks to the site.  I hope this gets me out soon and in an even stronger position than before, but I just don’t know.  Only time and hard will tell.

By Steward | Posted in internet marketing mishaps | Tagged , , , , | Comments (9)

My Online Workload Beginning June 8

June 3, 2009 – 9:22 am

It’s time to get serious about making money online.  My day job is ending this Friday (I quit*) so I will have a lot more time to devote to trying to earn a living on the internet, and I plan to use that time very, very wisely.  I have estimated that I am going to need to generate an income somewhere around $2,300 a month, or about $77 per day,  (around $1,800 once you take out taxes and charitable giving) in order to keep my family fed and the bills paid.

This means its time to get super hardcore.

*I quit because I am moving to Louisville, KY to go to graduate school.  I want to keep eating and not have to get a full-time, out of the home job to do so.  I want to work at home so that I can still spend “some” time with the fam.

The State of My Income Online

Over the past two months I have made between $300 and $400 a month, or $10-$13 a day.   I only have two producing sites right now, one that earns between $250 and $300 a month and another that earns between $50 and $100.  I have other sites that get traffic, but I haven’t monetized them yet in the hope that by not doing so I can speed up their rise in the SERPs.

The bottom line is that by the end of December 2009 I am going to need to increase the amount of money that I make online by 7 times.  I am going to need to find an additional $60-$70 a day in 7 months.

Taking a Big Picture Approach

I plan on doing a couple different things to try and increase my online earnings, but before I get into the nitty gritty I wanted to say a word about how I am going to be thinking about what I’m doing. There are two main strategic areas where my efforts could go astray: in the strategy and in my motivation.

Strategically speaking, I want to be using the free time that I have now to the best of my ability.  That means that every moment that I have that isn’t devoted to my family or to my personal well being is going to need to be put into the business.  I’ll be giving up video games, mindless TV vegging, and wasteful internet surfing practices.  Productivity is going to be my number three priority (behind my relationship with God and my family).

Also, I want to be strategic about the things that I am spending my time actaully working on.  I don’t want to spend countless hours writing the greatest posts in the whole wide world or doing “fun” CSS work and template design.  I also don’t want to waste time pursuing a money making method that doesn’t have a good chance at making me some money.

As far as my motivation is concerned I have a feeling that this will be relatively easy.  All I need is a picture of my family with a caption underneath it that reads, “Daddy, we need to eat!”  That will certainly get me moving!

How I Plan On Making the Most Of My Time

So on to the nitty gritty.  I’ve worked out a plan with my wife in order to get lots of work done while still having time to help out with the kid and get packed and ready to go for our move to Louisville.  I’ll be working for sure 7 hours a day, 6 days a week - but more if sleep and time allow.  Each day, I plan on doing the following tasks:

  1. Create 3 500-1000 word posts for niche blogs - I have 16 sites that I had bought last September that I have not had very much time to work on over the past 9 months.  That needs to change and I need to get those up and running pronto.  They are in niches that I should be able to make some money on so I am hopeful that I can turn them into $1-$3 a day each by the end of December, but I want to reach that goal by the end of August.  That will add an additional $16-$48 a day.
  2. Create 3 hubpages as support pages and as a way to generate more Adsense revenue - Hubpages will fit into my strategy on a couple of different levels.  In one way, they will help me reach my goal as stated in #1.  You have to get backlinks to a site if you want it to rank for its term.  But I also want to make money online with hubpages as well (follow the link and read how persistence and being adaptable pays off big time in the MMO/SEO game).  3 hubs a day, 6 days a week, for 13 weeks will generate 234 hubs by the time graduate school starts.  If I can make $10 a day by the end of August and $30 a day with these hubs by December I’ll be stoked.
  3. Create 3 Ezine Articles - The Ezine articles will be used to strengthen my hubs and my niche blogs.  Again, you can’t reach the top of the SERPs if you don’t get links so this will be part of the “grind” that will help me make more money in #1 and #2.
  4. Create 9 mini-blog posts - Links. Links. And more links.  Need ‘em to make money.  These will mainly support the hubs that I create so that I don’t leave a huge footprint for people to go find my link schemes and de-index all my stuff if they think I’m doing something nefarious.  I won’t be doing anything nefarious, but not everyone might think so.
  5. Contact 2 other webmasters a day with link exchange requests -  Have I mentioned that links matter a lot?  Contacting other webmasters and working out a mutually beneficial arrangement with them is going to be giving me a lot of movement in the SERPs if I can work it right.  I may contact more people if I can work out a good system for doing so.
  6. Write 3 250-500 word entries for a “directory” like site I’m experimenting with - I’ve built a professional directory type site for a potentially profitable local niche that has gotten some age behind it.  Its time to do some experimenting to see if adding a boat load of content to the site will give me some more leverage and love with the search engines.  I’m hoping that 200-300 pages of unique content (more if you count tag and category pages) will do something great for my rankings.

In all, there are 23 things that I plan on doing each day.  If I am able to do more once I get into the thick of it I will.  My family must eat!

I am going to be posting what I am able to accomplish each day on a twitter account that I started expressly for the task.  I’ll try to include total time worked each day as well in an effort to share what exactly it takes to get stuff done.  We’ll see what I can fit into 140 characters.

By Steward | Posted in make money online | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

The Hubpage Challenge and MY Hubpages Experiment

May 15, 2009 – 2:55 pm

No sooner had I posted my little update on my hubpages experiment than did Courtney Tuttle, of internet marketing and make money online with keywords fame, started a whole hubpages experiment of his own: write 100 hubs in 30 days.

Like all things Court does, he dreamed big.  And his big dreams have lite a small fire under my butt to get me going on my own experiment and to do so quickly.  To make sure that I get things done and get them done soon, I am accepting the 30 hubs in 30 days challenge.  I have started a brand new account (separate from the account running my original experiment on) with which I will be writing about things related to making money online, finance, and various other topics that I want to test my hand in.

I will use my original account to continue my hubpages experiment.

I have already seen hubpages do great things for helping push a few of my sites up a few slots in the SERPs, but now I am really trying to see if I can make money from hubpages directly.

There has been some discussion on whether or not you should be spending your time putting content on hubpages and if it is good for long term seo.  I think that the best way to look at hubpages and the articles that you write there like this: it is just article marketing that you can actually make money off of directly.  Use it like this and questions on whether or not you should use it will go out the window.

If your interested in joining the challenge feel free to sign up here: Hubpages.com

By Steward | Posted in experiments | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Make Money Online With Hubpages Experiment: Phase #2

May 1, 2009 – 11:00 am

With my first hubpage experiment ending as a limited success* I thought I might add a second phase to this experiment.  In it, I will try to actaully get my original hub (form here on out referred to as Hub-0) to actaully rank well for the main keyword I tried to target with the hub as well as earn some more money via Amazon affiliate sales.

*I had written an update post about this but it failed to get saved.  I didn’t feel like rewriting it so I will give the dirty details here:  I didn’t even rank in the top 200 for the main keyword I targeted but I did make $4.20 in the first 5 weeks of the experiment.  So this made it a limited success in my view.  Now back to this post about making money online with hubpages, phase 2.

Here is an enumeration of the goals:

  1. Rank in the top 10 for the original keyword targeted by Hub-0
  2. Increase earnings to a $1 a day from the all the hubs associated with this make money online experiment

Here is the process that I will be following:

  1. Create 10 additional “sub-hubs” that all target a related long tail of the Hub-0 main keyword
    • Each of these sub-hubs will link back to Hub-0 with the keyword that the sub-hub targets as well as the main keyword for Hub-0 (for potential double indexing purposes)
    • Related sub-hubs will also be linked together
  2. Do one article run on each of these hubs to give it some link juice
    • In these runs, the article will have one link pointing to Hub-0 with the keyword of the sub-hub and one link pointing to the sub-hub with the keyword of Hub-0
    • A run will consist of the following:
      • One Ezine article
      • One submission made through article submission software (probably Article Marketer but potentially Unique Article Wizard if I end up buying a subscription)
  3. There will be no official time limit to this phase of the experiment but I do hope to get one hub created per week once it gets rolling

This will be a much greater time commitment than my previous experiment so I hope that it gives me some nice results (hopefully greater than my $1 a goal).  I think that if I can crack the top 5 results for the Hub-0 main keyword I could end up grossing $20-$50 a month from that page alone.  Time will tell and I will definitely keep you posted on whether or not this experiment makes me some good money online.

By Steward | Posted in intermediate experiment | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

My 2nd Make Money Online Experiment 8 Weeks Later

April 30, 2009 – 3:30 pm

Nine weeks ago I started a more advanced experiment designed to test how effective creating little campaigns targeted at certain long tail keywords would work in boosting your rankings for a related, short money keyword. I originally stated this objective like this: “to rank in the top 10 for the long tail that I have targeted while significantly increasing my rankings for the money term.”

To summarize all the things that I did in this experiment, the first four weeks I spent creating content and linking to that content from several different sources and the past 4 weeks I have been on and off monitoring the results. I created 14 different posts, articles, or hubs that use 17886 words collectively. According to the Yahoo Site Explorer I now have 190 links (up from 89 at the 4 week mark) links pointing to the page that was ranking for the longtail term, most of which are from my site’s domain. Google still shows 7 links just like it did 4 weeks ago.

Now that there has been some time for the links I have built to count in the search engines I think it is time to revisit the rankings:
keyword targets

keyword searches rank prepublish 7 hours 1 week 2 weeks 4 weeks 8 weeks
Pack Gangster Switches Net 1 140 (24) (11) (9) (9) (8) (5)
Pack Gangster Switches Net 2 260 (62) (20) (20) (18) (17) (12)
Pack Gangster Switches Net 3 n/a (56) (19) (17) (14) (13) (6)
Pack Gangster Switches Net 4 210 (-) (37) (35) (17) (23) (9)
Pack Gangster Switches Net 5 140 (36) (13) (8) (7) (10) (4)
Pack Gangster Switches Net 6 480 (-) (60) (60) (29) (9) (10)
Pack Gangster Switches Net 7 320 (-) (139) (177) (142) (98) (62)
Packing Gangster 201000 (42) (37) (42) (27) (27) (27)
Gangster With Packing 54000 (36) (34) (35) (24) (31) (23)

As you can see, I now rank in top 5 for 2 of the long tails and in the top 10 for 3 more. My rankings for the money keyword have also improved significantly, going from 42 to 27 - a move of 15 spots.

I have received 641 page views to this post and have earned $19.86 with Adsense since it was published (around 10 views per day, around $0.31 a day) .

Overall I would say that this experiment has been a success and I am glad that I am currently working on a few different campaigns for this site. I can’t wait until I break into the top 10 for the main money keyword - then I’ll really be making some money online.

By Steward | Posted in intermediate experiment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Link Farms and Make Money Online Experiments

April 13, 2009 – 9:52 am

Engaging in activities that seek to manipulate search engine results (like building a link farm) is against Google’s terms of service and can get you into big trouble with them if they catch you.  With that being said, building link farms is not that easy to detect if you do it well and is done by many people trying to make money online and even by some large corporate entities like the Wall Street Journal.

Since I am a noob, I have only recently begun experimenting with this technique but haven’t had a good starting point to get it off the ground.  As a result, my efforts have been scattered, mostly ineffective (at least so far), and taken up a good portion of my internet marketing time.

I think this could all change with my discovery of a high quality video about how to create a blog farm.  It is an hour long video from Justin over at SEO Zombie that outlines his method for creating a farm that has a low profile and reduces the impact on your “money sites.” If you have an hour and want to learn some of the basics of SEO farm building then you should definitely give Justin’s video a try.

His blog also provide some really good SEO tips if you are interested in how SEO impacts your ability to make money online.  If you are doing a business model that targets free, search engine driven traffic then you are going to need to know how to optimize your site for the search engines - and Justin’s blog offers free information for those seeking to find all the information available on it, not just the party line message of Google and other search engines.

One word of caution about the video is that you are going to have to sign up with an email address - so use the one that you do all your sign ups for but never really check.  That way you won’t get offended when you get opt-in newsletters and whatnot trying to sell you stuff.  The fact that the video is being used as a way to build an email list should not deter you from watching the video - it is great content on how to build a useful blog farm.

I do have some questions about how this whole farming system works, like:

  • How quickly do you begin to see results?  My first foray into farm building did not generate that much improvement in terms of SERP rankings for the targeted keyword.  I do have some hypotheses about why this is (not enough variation in the platform used, links clustered together in time, etc.), but not certain answers yet. It would be nice to hear some answers from someone who knows their stuff to help speed up my own implementation.
  • When is it best to add the links?  Do you just add them to the post right away and then try and get the post indexed or do you wait until the post is index and then add the link?
  • How quickly do you build up the farm?  Do you target a keyword over the course of days, weeks, or months?

That is just a few of the questions I have about it.  Well see how things work out with my own experiments, but if you have any answers I would love to hear what you have to say.

By Steward | Posted in make money online | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Hubpages Make Money Online Experiment Update 4/3/2009

April 3, 2009 – 8:49 am

It has been one week since I started this make money online experiment using Hubpages not as a source of links for other money making sites but as a place to make money in and of itself.  The results so far have been a little slow.  I have not made any money and I am not ranking very well in the search engines.

Let’s take a gander at how I am doing via the criteria I sent out in my initial hubpages experiment post:

  • Is the page indexed? Yes!  The page was indexed within the first 72 hours of the experiment.  I wasn’t looking for super quick indexing on this one but it is good to know that I got in there and got in there relatively quickly.
  • What are my rankings for a series of related keywords? I kind of changed the number of keywords I was trying to rank for from 9 to 14.  Right now I only rank in the top 100 for 3 of the 14 terms and only 1 of them is in the top 50 (44 to be exact).  I think I got a freshness boost when I checked the stats at 72 hours because I ranked in the top 100 for 9 of the 14 words and in the tops 20 for 3 of the 14 words.  I was kind of expecting this - I just hope that the rankings improve over time.
  • How many links do I have? According to Yahoo Site Explorer I have 6 links - 4 from hubpages, 1 from digg, and 1 from one of the Unique Article Wizard submission that I submitted (I can tell it was from UAW because it is at artipot.com, an article directory I am pretty familiar with, and it has the links in author resource box).  Google says I don’t have any links.
  • Am I getting any traffic? According to my stats on Hubpages I have received 27 views on the hub in 1 week -  20 from hubpages, 2 from Google, and  5 from an indiscernible source.
  • How much money have I made? $0.00.

I wasn’t expecting much out of this experiment at this point, so there is not too much to talk about.  I am most interested to see how the rankings change over time and if the Unique Article Wizard and Article Marketing Automation work well.  We’ll see.  I hope this turns into a good way to make money online.

By Steward | Posted in intermediate experiment | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Make Money Online Experiment 2 Update 4/2/2009

April 2, 2009 – 3:47 pm

Today marks the 4th and final week of link building associated with this make money online experiment.  Over the course of these 4 weeks I have written 17886 words over 14 different posts, articles, or hubs.  According to the Yahoo Site Explorer I now have 89 links pointing to the page that I wanted to rank for the long tail of the money keyword that I was targeting.  Google’s link: query show 7 links.  The page sits at a PR 2 since the update literally just happened. (The PR of the whole site jumped to a 3 from a 2 by the way, might be related to the experiment, might now - it doesn’t say)

For readers following along, here is my updated campaign sheet and keyword targets:

Strategy to Rank For Pack Gangster Switches Net

  • write long winded post on with links to other pages targeting other related keywords (3/5, 2524 words)
    • use subheadings of long winded post for hubpages
      • Hubpage 1 (3/7, 1326, links:S1(a), S2(i) )
      • Hubpage 2 (3/5, 1157, links: S1(a), S3(i))
      • Hubpage 3 (3/15, 1268, links: S1(a), S3(a))
      • Hubpage 4 (3/24, 2693, links: S1(i))
    • use hubpages for article runs w/ one link to S1, one link to hub
      • Article 1 (3/10, 699, links: hub1, S1(a))
      • Article 2 (3/6, 623, links: hub2, S1(a))
      • Article 3 (3/20, 476, hub, S1(i) )
      • Article 4 (3/24, 601, links: hub, S1(i))
    • submit to long winded post to a blog carnival (3/19)
  • write post on S2 that targets “Pack Gangster Switches Net” (3/10, 1205, links: S1(a))
    • do S2 article run (3/25, 515, links: S2(a), S2 (i))
  • write post on S3 targeting “Pack Gangster Switches Net” (3/15, 1985, links: S1(a))
    • do S3 article run (4/2, 1504, GCPTT(i))
    • submit to a blog carnival (3/31)
    • write hub for S3 post (3/30, 1310, links:S3(a))

keyword targets

keyword searches rank prepublish 7 hours 1 week 2 weeks 4 weeks 8 weeks
Pack Gangster Switches Net 1 140 (24) (11) (9) (9) (8) ()
Pack Gangster Switches Net 2 260 (62) (20) (20) (18) (17) ()
Pack Gangster Switches Net 3 n/a (56) (19) (17) (14) (13) ()
Pack Gangster Switches Net 4 210 (-) (37) (35) (17) (23) ()
Pack Gangster Switches Net 5 140 (36) (13) (8) (7) (10) ()
Pack Gangster Switches Net 6 480 (-) (60) (60) (29) (9) ()
Pack Gangster Switches Net 7 320 (-) (139) (177) (142) (98) ()
Packing Gangster 201000 (42) (37) (42) (27) (27) ()
Gangster With Packing 54000 (36) (34) (35) (24) (31) ()

What I am finding most interesting about these stats is that my rankings seems to top off two weeks into the campaign.  Just by adding fresh content to the site (which will be a year old in June) that targeted the long tail I made huge surge in the SERPs for that keyword and variations of it.

Then, about two weeks later, I saw a jump in my rankings for the related money keyword.  This could have been a result of the big G finding my site more relevant because of my increased ranking for the long tail or it could be that they just felt like my site should get a bump in the SERPs because they are nice guys.  I can’t really be certain.

The big question though is this: did this experiment help me make more money online?  Well, in March I made $205.77 from Adsense with this site ($6.64 per day). In February, I made $152.44 from Adsense ($5.44 per day).  Now the entire $1 per day increase cannot be entirely contributed to this campaign, but it probably helped.  It may also increase my earnings in the long run because it has certainly helped push me up the SERPs for the money keyword I am trying to target.

I will continue to monitor the rankings for one more week to see if I get a bump in the SERPs between now and then, but I doubt much will happen in just 7 more days.  What may be really interesting to see is where I stand with these keywords a month or two from now.   With my link building efforts complete will the rankings stay stagnant?  Or will my link building efforts continue to improve as more of my links get found and the pages increase in age and authority?

I don’t have the answers yet, but that is the reason for experiments like this - to see if I can make money online.

By Steward | Posted in intermediate experiment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

My First Hubpages Experiment

March 27, 2009 – 9:51 am

I have only recently been turned on to the benefits of using Hubpages to earn some extra money online.  I am not really convinced that it is that great of a way to do it, but I have heard enough people talk about how it is a solid way to get backlinks to a money site that I might as well try and figure out if they can make money on their own.

There are four things that you need when setting up a good MMO experiment:

  1. A niche
  2. A monetization plan
  3. A link building plan
  4. A way to measure results

For this experiment I am going to build a hubpage and try to get it to rank in the top 10 for a search term using nothing but article marketing.

The Niche

I have gone out and done some keyword research and found a relatively non-competitive niche.  The keyword that I am targeting only gets around 8000 searches a month according to the big G and has 17,800 results using and “allintitle: keyword” search parameter.  There are certainly less competitive niches out there, but I think that this one will do for my little experiment.

I have written a 1405 word hubpage that includes several photos and a few videos.  According to my keyword analyzers I have used my main keyword in 1.08% of the article.  I did not spend any time adjusting this - I just wrote what I felt like needed to be said about the keyword I was targeting and wrote naturally.

Monetization

My gut tells me that this is a niche that actaully has a product to sell.  I am expecting people who are searching for this word to want to buy the keyword that they are searching for giving the niche a built in monetization method - Amazon.  I could have chosen another type of niche that would get clicks, but I don’t want my Adsense account to get smart priced from my Hubpages and Amazon offers decent payouts on high priced items (even though electronics are pegged at 4%).

I have had a few problems with gut feelings before, so this could be a big waste of time in terms of money making - but at least once it is done I will have another resource for the farm.

Linking Strategy

This is going to be one of the more advanced experiments because I am going to be using some article submission software. I have subscribed the help of a fellow blogger who runs make money online case studies and gotten access to Unique Article Wizard (UAW) and Article Marketing Automation (AMA) accounts.

If you are unfamiliar with these services, they are a way to do article marketing that claims to submit a “unique” article across the web.  You put some elbow grease into setting up an article that can be spun and each time the service submits the article for you it generates a new spun article.   How unique the article is depends entirely on how much effort you put into it.

There are some theoretical benefits to doing it this that I am wanted to test using this service:

  • Duplicate content, it is claimed, gets discounted by Google in determining the “juice” a link inside that duplicate content gives.  By creating more “unique” content you are going to give Google exactly what it wants - fresh, interest, keyword relevant content.
  • Variation in the anchors pointing to a URL looks more natural.  With these services you can change the link anchors which should prevent your sites from getting flagged for SERP manipulation.  This is key if you actually want to make some money off of something.

Will this provide better or faster results than straight article submission?  I haven’t the foggiest idea but it is worth seeing if this type of article marketing will give me any movement.

The plan is to write one spinnable article and submit it once through AMA and UAW and wait and see what happens.  UAW lets you space out your submissions over time, so the goal will be to get a bunch of links early through AMA and then get a trickle of links through the UAW submission.  The linking should resemble this:

Link Building Long Tail

Link Building Long Tail

Measuring Results

There are some obvious ways for me to measure results that I wanted to make explicit here:

  • Is the page indexed? A page that is not indexed will not be present on any search result pages.
  • What are my rankings for a series of related keywords? There will be a total of 9 keyword that I will be tracking for this hub - 1 is the keyword itself and the other 8 are long tails.
  • How many links do I have? I’ll be using Google and Yahoo to keep track of my links.  Yahoo will definitely report more of them than Google, so I will be most interested in what they have to say.  I have also set up an alert through Google to let me know when people link to my hub.
  • Am I getting any traffic? Hubpages will keep track of this for me.  It won’t be as useful as Google Analytics, Site Meter, or some of the other free analytics software, but it will have to do.
  • How much money have I made? I don’t know if I will make a single cent on this experiment because I don’t know if I will have the rankings in the SERPs to get the traffic that I need.  If I do earn some money it will be easy to track in my Amazon account.

… make money online …

I plan on tracking the results of this experiment for 4 weeks regularly, and then I’ll keep an eye on it for a while but won’t post any updates unless something spectacular happens.

It is time to experiment and see if Hubpages make money online.

By Steward | Posted in intermediate experiment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

SBI! (Site Build It!) Is A Waste of Money!

March 23, 2009 – 11:19 am

Site Build It! May Not Be A Scam, But It IS A Waste Of Money

One surefire way to not make any money online is to spend your earnings before they even make it into your bank account. This has been my number one fear in trying out various internet marketing products, even products that have been endorsed by people that I find very respectable.  So when I heard that SBI (Site Built It) offers noobs like myself the opportunity to create a website for the small, yearly fee of $300 I have to admit that I was a little shocked.  $300 can buy a lot of things for those just starting out trying to make money online.

For those interested in putting a little time and elbow grease into it, there is nothing that you should pay for as a beginner.  You can get free domain names from Blogger, free hosting from Google (because they host Blogger) and free monetization methods from Adsense, Amazon, Commission Junction, etc.  You may have to jump through some more hoops to get the rankings that you want and your site approved for the above mentioned monetization methods, but you can still get by doing everything for free in terms of your domain names and hosting.  Free equals good.

When it comes to the tools that you have access to to make your site optimized for the right keywords or to analyze how your competition is doing things in the SERPs the tools that you need to use do require some amount of work but they are effective.  Again, this is completely free to any person, irregardless of the amount of money that you want to throw around in trying to make money online.

Heck, you can even get tons and tons of information about how to make money from a veritable plethora, a virtual cornucopia of sources.  Just check out this list of all the people offering quality information for free:

  • Griz’s Make Money Online blog - a great resource for using free blogs (like Blogger) to earn a decent chunk of change online.
  • Vic’s Make Money Blogging -  this site is relatively dead, but its archives are a treasure trove of useful information about running an online business
  • Court’s and Mark’s site about making money with keywords - these guys really help beginners understand how to pick and choose keywords that will get them ranked and earning some money.  They teach a system that works.
  • Frank writes about how to earn cash online - he offer free money making templates and ideas about how to generate that little bit of extra cash that you need
  • Justin gives some solid information on SEO more than he talks about making money online, but good SEO means that you are going to make money online unless you choose some gawd awful niche like “coloring activities for blind aliens from Mars” - you don’t want to rank for a term like that because there isn’t much money in it (see it here!)

These are all sites that I have subscribed to and have found the information particularly good for beginners.  There are some more sites that I find particularly useful, but I will build a more comprehensive list later.  For now, just check out these sites and the sites that they link to.

So when it comes down to it, you can get an online presences, do keyword research, and learn about how to use these tools all for free.  When you compare that to a $300 per year price tag you will see that going with SBI! is infinitely more expensive.  Infinitely more expensive!

$300 In Hosting And Domain Names

But what if you want to do want to buy your own domain names and host your own sites (because you love Wordpress or you want to get into purchasing aged domains), how much will $300 get you? The answer is a lot more than one site and some internet marketing and SEO tools.

Hosting can run you under $5 per month, bringing the yearly total up to $60. This $60 yearly expense will allow you to host an unlimited number of domain names. The is a lot of domain names. That will leave you around $240 to spend on domain names or SEO tools. If you just go the make money online for free route and not spend any money on tools then you will be able to purchase 28 domain names for 1 year.

For the price of 1 SBI site, you could build 28 sites with the same exact amount of money. That is freakin’ insane if you ask me.  Do you have any idea how many make money online experiments I could undertake with an extra $300?

Please, if you are a noob (like me!) and want to make some money online I recommend that you cut your teeth with a free blog on Blogger and learn through the school of hard knocks before you invest any cash. Remember, you can’t loose what you don’t spend!

Is Site Build It A Scam?

Websters defines a scam as “a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation.”  Under this definition I don’t think that Site Build It! qualifies.  Just because I have my opinion doesn’t mean that others might also think that this service is pretty scammy in nature.

Here are some more people’s ideas on whether or not Site Built it is a scam:

This is by no means a comprehensive list of all the Site Built it reviews out there (it was borrowed from Site Build It - Don’t Buy It by Griz).  It isn’t even an original list - but if you are considering getting into it then you should definitely read some of these thoughts and opinions on the topic.

SBI Is Not A Scam

Noobs (that is internet lingo for “those just starting out, a beginner”) should steer clear of SBI.  It isn’t worth the money and you will probably be better served by seeing if you can make it in this business by doing if with free tools first.  99% of internet marketing and SEO is hard work - so if you are willing to put in the effort you are going to be successful whether or not you have some hand holding in the beginning.  Sure, I would have loved to have someone come alongside and tell me how to do everything perfectly from day one.  I would be making a lot more money today than I am right now.

But I think the development of my character has been worth a lot of money. I have learned to work hard and to find information for myself.  I still have a lot to learn, but I feel like I have the tools that I need to get the job done.  I certainly wouldn’t have had the same experience if I wasted my money on Site Build It!

By Steward | Posted in scams and money pits | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (12)