Mailbag Friday 11-25-11
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
And it’s warm in Chicago again! This is really weird weather, but I’m not going to complain. Going to try to head down to the Christkindlmarket in Daley plaza sometime this weekend if I can. It’s this great German holiday market with booths and tents with all kinds of good stuff to do. Should be a lot of fun!
Well, it’s Friday and that means that it’s time to open the mailbag and answer some of the questions that you sent me during the week. With the Holiday, I admit I wasn’t as responsive to email this week, but hopefully I can clear away some questions that I missed right now.
Question 1
This question is from Rian “I’m finding its taking at least a day to write each article – if Im going to put out 100 websites its going to take at least 4 months of writing every day :S Id hate to think it how long it would take to pile out 300 not to mention your goal of 1000. Do you have any suggestions about a quick way to create articles quickly and legitimately?”
Great questions. There are several answers to your question.
You can either:
- Write quicker. When I was writing articles I would aim for one article every 15 minutes. I bought Dragon Naturally Speaking speech to text software and would speak my articles and have the software transcribe it into articles. That let me knock out articles quickly.
- Outsource it. Spend some money to hire people to do it – it can be cheaper than you think. Depending on quality, you can expect to pay anywhere from $3 to $20 per article.
- Use software. There’s software and services that can speed things up. Jonathan Leger has some of these like his jiffyarticles.com I’ve never used them but there you go.
So there’s some options. But my answer is completely different.
I don’t write articles anymore.
Ever.
I wrote one article that’s very generic and can apply to just about any item you are selling. (think generic sales speak). I then created spin text and a php program that spins the article every time the page loads. I use that article with the spin text for every single page of every single website I own.
It’s not quality content…but Google doesn’t like quality content – just look at all the quality sites it killed during the last Panda update.
This strategy allows you to churn out thousands of sites instantly, and make them seem to have unique-ish content in the eyes of Google. Besides, we don’t want good articles, we want people to click Adsense ads and leave your site – not stick around and read your articles.
Question 2
This one’s from Erin “You talk about getting sites banned by Google…but what do you do with them once that happens?”
Good question, and it’s actually one that I get a lot from people who have gotten banned by Google.
First off, there’s two distinctions to make. “Banned” and “Slapped” and they mean two very different things. “Banned” means that Google has deindexed your site, which means they have removed your site completely. Usually this is done after a Google quality reviewer looks at your site and determines that it doesn’t meet their quality standards. You can’t recover from a ban.
“Slapped” means your site is fluctuating in the rankings. You might have been in the top ten rankings under a specific keyword last week, and are listed as the 14,594th site under that same keyword this week. This is normal and no big deal. Sites often fluctuate and you could very well be back in the top ten next week.
If your site really has been banned by Google, there’s not much you can do. The only thing to do is build more sites. What should you do with the old sites? Most people want to delete them and forget about them, even removing them from your webhosting account and not paying to re-register the domain name when it comes due.
But don’t forget, Google isn’t the only player in the Game. Yahoo and Bing will still continue to send a small amount of traffic to your site (yes sometimes a VERY small amount) so your sites can still earn money. As long as they continue to make a few pennies here and there, you should make enough money to at least cover webhosting costs and domain renewal costs every year.
So I say keep them. You never know when they might come in handy for something. But don’t do any work on them, don’t add new content. Instead focus on starting new sites.
Thanks again everyone for the great questions. Keep them coming, and…
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
