Mailbag Friday 7-13-12
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Well I had an interesting night last night! I wrote a blog post for my flatplanetmedia.com blog about my first computer programming book that I got when I was eight years old.
I submitted the blog post to some social media sites and within minutes the flood of traffic completely crashed my server. Guess it struck a chord or something!
Well it’s time again to open the mailbag and answer some of your questions from throughout the week.
Question 1
Today’s first question comes from Beth, who asks “A few of my thin sites got hammered in the penguin update, should I convert them to thick sites?”.
That’s a really good question Beth.
There’s an old adage I live by when it comes to Google and their wily ways. It goes something like this…if Google rears it’s ugly head, don’t look back and run away! Ok that’s not very poetic but I just made it up.
Can you dig yourself back from the brink when it comes to a Google penalty or major SERP loss after an algorithm change? Absolutely. People do it all the time (especially major websites). Should you even try? No. Because the odds are extremely low.
Trust me on this, it’s easier just to abandon those sites and start fresh. You might throw a few months of twelve hour days working to bring those sites back, but you probably won’t be successful. And if you convert them into a different type of site, you’re still going to have to convince Google and that’s not easily done.
It costs like ten bucks to register a new domain name. Just do that.
Question 2
Comes from Brent who asks, “Do I have to build thousands of websites like you do to be successful at this stuff?”
Good question Brent. The answer is NO! I tend to take things to extremes but you definitely don’t have to yourself to find success with my methods.
For someone starting out, I always just recommend starting one site at a time. Once you get that one site up and running, move on to the next and then on to the next and then on to the next etc.
Unless you really cash in with a great thick site, you are going to need to build more than one website in order to make decent money. But you certainly don’t need thousands. I know people with twenty to fifty sites who are making really good money with just that few sites.
You can always move into automation in the future if you want to expand into the hundreds of sites level. But that’s really a whole different skillset to learn and certainly not necessary to make money with Adsense.
Thanks for the questions guys, keep them coming. And…
Keep on building!
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
