Earn Online CashEarn Online Cash by Going Big or Going Home
There has been a lot of buzz in the ‘make money online’ area over the past week or two between things like BenK’s 100 niche Adsense sites being deindexed to a rash of Blogger deletions, including Alan Liew’s blog which has been #1 for the search term ‘make money online’ for a while (Fortunately, for Alan, Blogger seems to have reversed their decision at this time). Griz, BenK and Allyn Hane recently weighed in on this topic so I decided I’d make a big honkin’ post on the topic too.
Being a fan of the niche site model, I’ve done some thinking on how to proceed. My first conclusion is that Google’s overall strategy, especially Adsense sites, is to either Go Big or Go Home. Is this really the case or is it something else they’re expecting out of smaller sites? Should you only plan to build huge mega-sites? Can smallish sites also be authority sites? Let’s look at what this means for the direction you might want to take in the future with niche sites.
Going Big
To me, “going big” means constructing a large authority mega-site ranging from something really huge along the lines of Amazon or eBay down to smaller, but well funded, operations like TheFind.com and NexTag.com. It could also mean being a social darling like Twitter or Digg, a popular blog like TMZ, icanhascheezburger or Gizmodo, a popular service like Ezine Articles or even niche related popularity like Harmony Central or DZone.
What’s obvious is that most of these big sites are well funded by venture capital money and/or corporate sponsorship, if they aren’t an arm of a public corporation. Generally, they will have more than one person on the staff which might include web designers and developers, authors and a site management team. Occasionally an individual makes it big but, it’s rare and not within the scope of most people’s skills and abilities. Of course, one thing that can really help the individual going this route are business contacts and interconnectivity with other projects.
Another thing that’s annoyingly obvious about some of these sites is that they get away with stuff that us average folks can’t get away with. Some of these sites, TheFind and NexTag in particular, are quite thin and are used to direct traffic to sites where consumers can purchase products. It probably sounds like a familiar business model to you if you’re ever run a BANS site or other such affiliate feed scrapping script. Of course, your site(s) probably got deindexed by Google once they detected it. To me, there’s little doubt that having a few million in Silicon Valley venture capital funding and industry connections will help you considerably if you want to truly go big.
OK, so if you don’t have connections and funding, can you go big? Can you do it by yourself? Yes, I think you can but the road is much longer and you’ll probably encounter some frustration due to time and money limitations. Don’t think that just because you churn out a pretty site with 1000+ pages filled with random articles that this is somehow a golden ticket. It’s not. Going big means that your goal is to build a strong business brand around a single domain or small network of related sites. It means working on developing industry connections. It means leveraging more than just SEO but social media and online and offline advertising as well.
This is certainly a long term project but, if successful, it can have a decent payoff. I suspect the biggest problem people who’re moving from the niche model to the mega-site model will face is that while they may do SEO well, they may fail to build a brand and industry connections as well as developing sufficient content to support the site. Some may attempt scraping, aggregating or syndicating content and such to build a big site but, unless that Silicon Valley firm just handed you a big fat 7 figure check, don’t count on a 10K+ page thin content site having any more staying power than a 10 page one.
Going Home
Well, what if “going big” isn’t a viable option for you for whatever reason? After all, not everyone can pull “going big” off and the success rate, absent massive funding, is rather low. Is having a network of smaller niche sites a non-starter these days? If you don’t want to “go big” do you have to give up and “go home” and not earn cash online? Or, is the niche site network still a viable option?
My take is that the small niche site still has a place. After all, with a little bit of searching around, you’ll find many smaller sites dominating search results, especially in hobby, fan and professional services niches. Many of them are clearly authority sites for their niche in spite of not being “picture perfect” when it comes to the latest SEO techniques or web design. I first suggest that you look at these successful sites and compare and contrast them to the typical Adsense niche site that’s been recommended for a few years now.
The basic fact is how you go about building, monetizing and managing these niche sites is changing.
Right now, I recommend that you avoid using Blogger or creating new Adsense sites. Once things settle down, they may become a good option again. But, for now, you’re likely to get caught up in the backwash of the current storm. This may be a good time to branch off into other areas of Internet marketing ranging from dropshipping to digital product creation and marketing to promoting CPA offers to building an email marketing list. If one of these areas is of interest to you, this is probably a good time to make this move and perhaps return to Adsense niche site building at a later date.
Next, make sure your niche sites, especially Adsense sites, are adding value. Remember, even a one pager can add value where 1000+ pages of scraped content may not. In other words, don’t worry so much about how many pages you have but in how well you’re providing information to visitors to the site. If you do this right, you’ll also enhance your search engine rankings as well by having good on-page keyword relevance and attracting unsolicited incoming links to your site. These natural links can be very helpful when they come from a well known authority site.
Also, as Ben and Allyn mentioned, go with more attractive WordPress themes or HTML templates. Avoid designs that are commonly used in “Google Sniper” or “XFactor” style sites. Not only does this turn off visitors after they’ve seen a number of similarly styled low quality sites but it’s like waving a big red flag to Google’s visual inspectors who might give your site a glance. Since inspectors have a huge worklist to go through, looking “Made For Adsense” may get you deindexed in bulk even if you have excellent content. Unless you’re planning on pursuing a black hat “churn and burn” strategy, it’s time to change tactics and use attractive themes, graphics, videos and other elements, preferably ones that are unique to you.
Another alternative approach to take with niche sites is to explore non-buying informational sites or a blend of both buying and non-buying terms on a single site. Previously, it’s been suggested to only pursue buying terms such as “cheap” or “discount” but now it is also increasingly worthwhile to pull in non-buying “history of” or “how to” terms as well. First of all, it looks more natural to have a mixture of terms. Second, so far as Adsense goes, with the new personal tracking it uses, you’re less likely to see one cent clicks or PSA’s on informational pages. Lastly, informational pages/sites are more likely to attract natural links from authority sites, general and niche related.
Final Thoughts
Basically, you don’t have to “go big or go home”, but you do have to adapt to a chaotic online marketing situation.
No matter which path you chose to take, big, small or a hybrid of the two, don’t allow the chaos of the current online marketing ‘battlefield’ cause you to fall into confusion and either over-react or under-react to the current situation. It’s easy to allow this to happen when conditions seem to be ambiguous or incomprehensible to you. Instead, let go and allow the chaos to become part of your mental processes when you’re planning your next move and acting upon it. Understand that you can’t control everything, that you can’t analyze everything. When you let go just a bit, you’ll find yourself able to perform at a faster tempo than your competitors. While they’re fiddling around trying to figure out how to shave 20ms off of their load time, counting how many links they’re showing in Yahoo Site Explorer or Google Webmaster Tools or worrying about another hot topic in SEO, you’ll have new sites/pages, new content, new links, new traffic, more visitors and more cash earned online simply because you didn’t get bogged down in the mud.
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2 Comments »
Frank, I was waiting to see your take on the recent brouhaha surrounding AdSense. You didn’t disappoint. I appreciate the evenhanded approach.
I remember reading last year that AdSense is 95% of Google’s annual sales, and the Content Network is 1/3 of that. What the cleanup campaign tells me is that Google is willing to take a short term hit in AdSense income from the Content Network in order to protect its long term status as an effective search engine. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone considering the talk of Yahoo and Bing merging if they can ever get it past the FTC. Separately, Y and B aren’t much competition for the G. Together, they would amount to about one-third of the search market, which is a serious threat.
Myself, I’m going to take a hint from Google itself and diversify. I’ll still do AdSense but it won’t be my dominant monetization method. A few AdSense sites, a few affiliate sites, and maybe even start buying wholesale inventory and reselling (but only business to business).
Your advice to let go of control is good. My best sites are the ones that I didn’t plan on being big earners. Something pops up under your nose, and if you’re smart you follow it instead of sticking to The Plan.
Best of luck and keep posting.
LC
Very good post and it really helped put things in perspective for me. Just before this Google update I began my journey down the authority site model and so far it has been failing abysmally. But, I will go on providing great quality content because it will eventually pay off. Even if nobody is seeing my awesome content now, I keep telling myself that eventually they will…at least I hope. Staying positive through all of this is the key I think. I’m constantly fluctuating from positive to negative from lack of positive results. Your post has helped keep things in perspective for me.
I do think there is room for everyone. With enough work and the right mindset there is no reason we can’t succeed. Thanks for helping to keep me inspired!