Mailbag Friday 12-9-11

Hello good people!

Well it finally snowed here in Chicago last night enough to actually cover the ground a bit, but mostly melted (or been trampled into oblivion) already. It’s snowed several times already, but never enough to actually accumulate. I can’t remember such a mild start to winter in Chicago, it feels ominous!

Had another decent earnings day yesterday, I made $86 in Adsense earnings and $21 in amazon.com commissions (3 items purchased for $294 in sales) for a grand daily total of $107. That’s a little bit lower than it has been, but still not too shabby!

It’s Friday and that means its time to open the mailbag and answer some of the questions that you’ve sent me throughout the week.

Question 1

This one comes from Jeff: “Love your site and blog. My question is – Being a newbie, I am looking to get into adsense to start my im career. I have heard that google is cracking down on sites that are solely adsense. Is that correct? Should I not waste my time w adsense? Is affiliate marketing better?”

That’s a really great question, and one I touch on all the time here on the blog. It’s true that Google does crack down on sites like ours. But it’s nothing new. Every six months or so they tweak their algorithm and tons of sites get dumped out of the index. The most recent algo change, called Panda, devastated my sites knocking earnings from like $120 a day down to around $40.

But since then my sites have crept back to near pre-Panda income levels. And sites that I’ve created since then are getting indexed and earning money just fine.

The fact is, this is no business for the weak hearted. I know many people who’ve had hundreds (sometimes thousands) of websites deindexed from google overnight. If you can shrug and start over, then this business is for you. If not, then I’d look elsewhere.

But that’s why I create my sites in the manner that I do, using spun content and thrown up cheaply and automatically. If I ever get booted out of Google, I know I can flip a few keys on my keyboard and start over immediately. If you can adapt, you can’t lose…

Question 2

Emanuel asks: “Hi John, is very inspiring to see you successful in adsense, you are really enjoying your financial freedom. I really appreciate because you want to help other people like me to have the same success, and I wish I can, you are my idol. 🙂

I starting building websites a month ago but still I haven’t got any substantial money and traffic. I started with this website (link removed). I’m building links with an automated tool called SEnuke. The site is new so is not ranking for any of its keywords. It would be helpful if you can give me some advice of my website to see where I can improve it.”

Hi Emanuel! Thanks very much! First off, I would never recommend SEnuke. It’s incredibly expensive and basically a spam tool. Google hates those kind of tools, and if they figure out your site uses them you could very well get deindexed from Google. SEnuke is a tool for someone who really knows what they’re doing, and even then its pretty sketchy (in my opinion).

One thing I would mention is that your site is still very young. It can take 3-6 weeks to really get a site indexed at Google, and then the Google dance begins. So it might just be that you need to wait a little longer to see results.

Also it looks like you’re focusing on a few sites and writing content for each one. In my opinion you’ll never make real money that way. To make tons of money in Adsense it seems like you need to build hundreds of sites and you can’t do that by writing unique content for each of them.

Think of it like this, most of my websites only get between five and twenty visitors per day and might only make .40 cents or $1 in income. I make a lot of money because if you have 300 sites all making $.40 cents each, that adds up to real money. But if you only owned 5 sites, and they made $.40 cents each, you’d never make real money.

Question 3

From Dennis: “Hi John, Good on you for having this site! I have just a couple of questions:

1. I do some html coding and would just like to an example template to one of your sites or just a template on how you do this?
2. Would like to see how and where you add the code using html
3. how many pages are your sites
4. do you use just dot com .org and .net domain names
5. Would you recommend building a site that has less that 500 local searches a month?
6. what keyword tool do you use?
7. Do you do ANY link building at all for your sites?

Great questions Dennis, to briefly answer them:

1. Keep watching, I’ll try to throw together a simple html template in the next week or so…
2. Not sure what you’re asking here, I simply upload my html files to my web server using ftp
3. Infinite: I create my sites to auto-generate unlimited pages based on crawled keywords from various sources – more on this soon
4. No, I don’t use .com .net or .org…I use .info because they rank well and costs just $.67 each at Godaddy using this tip.
5. Absolutely! Why not? For .67 cents to register a domain name, I focus specifically on longtail keywords like that!
6. I sometimes use the free Google Keyword tool – but mostly don’t bother. I just pick broad niches and see what sticks
7. No, I don’t use any link building for any of my sites. Not ever.

Thanks every one for the great questions, keep them coming, and…

Keep on building!

-John
The Marketing Fool!

John Elder is an Entrepreneur, Web Developer, and Writer with over 27 years experience creating & running some of the most interesting websites on the Internet. Contact him here.

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