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You Only Need One Page to Make Money Online
Friday, November 5th, 2010 at 10:29 pm One of the important points that we make in our Amazonian Profit Plan ebook is that you only need a handful of pages to make money online – in fact, you really only need 1 single page! We find that many people can’t quite grasp this simple concept, and this is generally because they have been told so often that you need to build multiple sites and constantly be adding more and more content.
So often we see people on internet marketing forums who are struggling to make money online and asking for advice on what they should do. The usual responses are to keep building more and more websites. We shudder when we hear this, because there really is no need to do this. In fact, the more websites you build the more work you have to do to maintain them and the more you spread yourself too thin, resulting in more work and little or no money coming in.
Focusing on, and maintaining multiple websites is hard work - in fact, this is something we know about first hand. We have over 20 niche websites and in the past we would spend every waking moment working on them. It was tough going and ultimately it just didn’t work. We never managed to make much money while we were working all those websites at the one time. And we couldn’t understand why – surely more websites and adding heaps of content would increase our income. But no, it didn’t work like that.
Then one day we stopped and analysed what was happening with the websites and it was then that we decided to stop working on all of our websites and start to focus on just one website. And in fact, we didn’t focus on the whole website because even that took at lot of work. What we did instead was focus on just a few pages – I think it might have been three to five pages. And that’s when things really started to change for us.
Focusing on just one single solitary page is all you really need to do – you can make a fulltime income from just one product review. HOWEVER, focusing on just one page is probably not a good idea since the internet is such a fickle environment…Google may decide to change it’s algorithm, your product may suddenly become obsolete or you might get knocked off the top position in Google by a competitor.
So to ensure that you aren’t putting all your eggs in the one basket we recommend that you focus on 5 pages, although you can just go with 3 if that is more manageable for you. When you start to focus like this, good things start to happen. Just try it for a few months and you will see the difference. Simply focus on just 3 to 5 pages and nothing else. That means working on each page on a daily basis for three months.
So your next three months might look like this:
1. Spend the first two weeks choosing products (from Clickbank or Amazon) that you want to promote and write really good product reviews for them. The reviews should be long (approx 1000+ words) and be extremely helpful to your reader. Make sure you choose quality products…you don’t want to promote rubbish.
2. Spend the next 10 weeks getting backlinks/traffic to those reviews until you start seeing sales.
That’s it really!
The process is actually quite simple but what most people will do instead, is this:
1. Spend a day or two choosing products and writing reviews. The reviews will generally be made up of content copied from Amazon or the product sales page. And even if the content isn’t copied the reviews are usually short (around 300 words) and don’t really provide much value to the reader.
2. Spend the next few days getting backlinks/traffic to those pages. Some might spend a couple of weeks if they are really keen.
So what happens next?
Well what invariably happens is the person gives up after a few weeks when they find that there isn’t much traffic coming into the site. They never really focus enough on getting traffic to those pages. They don’t see sales so they move on to another lot of reviews or worse yet move on to creating more websites, instead of reworking their original reviews and working at getting more traffic. Or they buy another e-book in the hope that this will be the one that saves them. This becomes a cycle whereby nothing ever happens and they never make any money … or if they do, it’s not much.
A lot of people trying to make money online follow this cycle because they don’t realise that it takes time but they never actually give anything a chance to work. They give up well before they should. It can take up to three months before you even see a trickle of money start to come in and that’s only if you have followed step 2 and worked on getting traffic every day for at least 10 weeks. Some people might have better success of course and be making money within a month – some might need longer and it could take 6 months. There are so many variables that it is impossible to say when someone will start making money online but the only way you will know is if you are consistent at what you do and focus on just a few pages until they make money.
When you start seeing sales for one of your product reviews, only then should you start writing another product review. There is no point creating more product reviews if the first ones aren’t making you any money….what’s the point?! You are only going to have the same problem. If you have chosen quality products that have been known to sell then there is no reason why they shouldn’t sell for you.
So if you have been struggling for some time trying to make some decent money from your website then try something different and focus on just a few pages for the next few months. If what you are doing now isn’t working then what have you got to lose?
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93 Comments
Sunshine@Manage Multiple Blogs says:
November 5, 2010 at 11:55 pm
Fear is the real reason why people keep building and buying more affiliate products. Afraid of spending too much time on the wrong thing. This fear is really hard to conquer and eliminate.
I agree and am in this predicament after having renewed several domains. Let’s not even talk about the recent halloween season that I missed because my focus was all over the place not to mention literally not knowing which domain belonged to what domain registrar.
Thankfully, I’ve found a tool that will at least let me manage the domain and blog inventory I have at this point while maintaining my sanity.
I hope this will translate into more affiliate income.
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 1:24 am
I think you’re right…fear is a big factor. The thing is that most methods of making money online work if you stick with it long enough. But as you say, people fear spending too much time on one thing thinking it isn’t going to work.
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Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing says:
November 8, 2010 at 10:26 am
The fear comes from the “all in one basket” cliche`.
While it is 100% true, the gurus out there pound it in with a sledge hammer until the peasants are so worked up, they don’t stop with less then 100 sites.
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..What’s Your Email Preference- HTML – HTML w-Template – or Plain Text
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Ken Black says:
November 9, 2010 at 11:39 pm
Good points. But, what about building a list at the same time ? Do you only focus the traffic on getting affiliate sales, or do you use an optin form on these pages also, or an exit pop-up or hover pop-up ? I’m guessing you are using buying keywords also to point at those review pages ? Thanks.
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Tiptopcat says:
November 6, 2010 at 8:54 am
Everything you say makes sense. I would add that another reason people jump from new site to new site is the boredom factor. It is hard to stay motivated to keep writing about the same topic day in day out especially when you think you have discovered a brand new keyword that you feel will bring in even more cash within a shorter space of time.
I am trying to be good am am returning to work on the sites that I already have. Trying not to be tempted by shiny new domain names.:)
Tiptopcat´s last blog ..Earnings For October 2010
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 6:59 pm
That’s definitely true. I suffer from the ‘boredom factor’ hence why we ended up building over 20 websites in the past. I love building sites but I am out of that habit now. We started building another couple of websites about a month or so ago to test a couple of Amazon plugins but we ended up even tossing those aside because we realized that they would just take work. It’s very easy to get caught up in creating more and more instead of focusing on what we already have.
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Tammie Jordan says:
November 6, 2010 at 12:42 pm
Very sound advice! It’s hard to break the cycle of trying to always create THE website that will make you money, and it takes an immense amount of discipline not to buy the next big “product” that “guarantees” you’ll make money.
Dogged persistance pays off every time. Keep working on the sites that are working, let the others sit idly, or (gasp!) let the ones that aren’t making money go!
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 7:02 pm
If a site is already making money then it can make even more money. There is no limit to what a website can make but yes most people can’t help but think that the next website will be the one that makes the big money.
We know that thinking exactly because we went through it ourselves. We kept thinking that we weren’t choosing the right niche so kept moving to the next website. Ultimately it wasn’t about the niche at all because every niche has products that will sell. We just didn’t spend enough time on the first website to make it work.
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Laura says:
November 6, 2010 at 12:53 pm
Really good points. Focus is so tough for newbies, and even for oldies! And I agree, fear that all that focus will be wasted is huge. But having too many irons in the fire isn’t going to get you anywhere either.
Laura´s last blog ..Affiliate marketing case study- Pat- week 7
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 7:07 pm
That’s right. I had an email from someone this morning that said pretty much the same thing. He feared spending 10 weeks focusing on just a few pages and not seeing them work. The thing is, you could spend the next 10 weeks focusing on building website after website and have them not work.
Making money on the internet is a risky business so you have to be prepared to take risks. All I know is that when we stopped building websites and start focusing on just a few pages things started to change for us.
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Kelly says:
November 6, 2010 at 2:24 pm
Everything you said, was me when I started back in April, and it still is for the most part. I had a tag line underneath my title of “Follow Me on My Journey to 1,000 Niche Sites” after a couple of months I changed it to “Follow Me on My Journey to 15k a Month!”, this one I like a lot more!
When everyone first starts in this they do not realize how much work is actually involved and they want the easiest pass to the top, but only work or extremely good luck will get them there!
Kelly´s last blog ..October Earnings plus Site Updates
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 7:11 pm
I love that Kelly…by changing your tag line you have really hit the nail on the head. You don’t need hundreds or thousands of sites to make this work.
I can’t even imagine have a thousand sites – we have trouble managing the 20 we have. In fact, we don’t really manage them at all – most are sitting doing nothing. We just focus on a few pages at a time now.
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Gabe says:
November 6, 2010 at 6:12 pm
I have done this and I have 4 new (~2 month old) sites that are now in the google sand box. They all four had been ranking on the first page of google and two had just hit the #3 spot! In early October they disappeared from google all together, still indexed but not anywhere on top 10 pages. This is very frustrating!!! Have you guys had any issues like this? I’ve read that I should keep building links and content, but it’s scary because I don’t know if I’m just wasting my time continuing to work on these sites. I want to quit my full time job so bad I’ve been getting up at 4:30-5am before work and working all the time my wife will let me after my full time job (only 1hr). Even without these sites for most of last month I hit $525 on amazon. It’s hard enough getting these sites up and ranking and then to have google cut me down at the knees is crushing my dreams/hope ;(
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 7:22 pm
This happens to just about everyone Gabe. My brother rang me the other day because he suddenly lost his rankings. His site is about a couple of months old as well.
I am not sure why Google does this to relatively new sites but they do. You’ve been given good advice to stick with building backlinks.
The only other reason Google may have done this is if you have done something they don’t like. If that is the case, it is going to be hard to get those sites ranked again.
But if you have been doing everything above board then you shouldn’t have any problems. Just stick with the backlinks and the rankings will return.
You’re doing extremely well by making $525 on Amazon especially considering you don’t have much time to work on your sites. You should be extremely proud of yourself.
You are extremely lucky because you have a drive to get this to work. Not many people would get up at 4.30 to work on their websites.
Just don’t give up! This will really be the test for you. If you can continue on despite this you will make it.
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Shirley says:
November 8, 2010 at 11:19 pm
Hi Gabe, I know how you feel. I have had this happen to me twice and it’s really scary. I had several keywords ranking on pages 1, 2 and 3 and they just disappeared. There was nothing I could do but wait and carry on as if everything was alright. Both times mine went missing for about 4-5 weeks then they showed up again.
I know its human nature to keep checking morning and night and maybe in between to see if they are back but it can drive you crazy. If possible its best if you can let it go and check once in a while. I’m sure everything will work out fine.
Shirley´s last blog ..Work at Home Job Ideas for Senior’s
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CCGAL (Janelle) says:
November 6, 2010 at 6:34 pm
I’m really glad you posted this, and I am most appreciative that you broke down the “what to do” into choosing and promoting. So many of the “how to be an affiliate marketer” courses & e-books sell the idea that if you buy their book/plan/course/coaching that you can put up a site and start seeing money in minutes and that you can walk away and leave your little money pumping robot doing all the work while you go off and party hearty.
I saw an interesting thread in a popular internet marketing watering hole the other day, where a person asked the question about how many hours a day internet marketers actually worked. The results were astonishing in light of the sales copy so often touted in that very place. Most who responded were working well over the normal 40 hrs a week, yet this is not something you will ever see in a sales letter, I suspect.
What you say here makes perfect sense to me. Do one thing, do it well, and stick to it. Then you can scale it if you like.
I’m not in the market for your course at this moment, but if I decide to pursue this avenue, I do believe it will be your product I come back to buy.
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 7:35 pm
We used to work very long hours when we were focusing on all our websites. I really don’t want to go back to that again. We used to both work full-time and then spend just about all of our remaining time on the websites. It took around 4 years of this sort of lifestyle before it finally dawned on us that it just wasn’t working.
Now that we focus on only a handful of product reviews at any one time we have so much more time in the day. We still work just about every day but it’s only because we really love it.
Our working day normally starts at around 10am and finishes at around 4pm. In the middle of that we will do a meditation or listen to a self help tape of some sort or go for a walk or go shopping or even see a movie. At the moment we have started doing QiGong so that takes an hour of that time.
Nothing is ever really planned so we can take off if we want. Last week we spent 4 days on the south coast (here in Australia) so we could plan what we wanted to work on for the next few months.
And some of you may be thinking that since we make a full time income from this it means that we can afford to relax and that’s partly true. But we know of internet marketers making around the same amount of money that we do and they are working very long hours.
It’s just more relaxed when you only have to focus on a few things instead of multiple things.
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Dawn says:
November 6, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Timely advise I keep spreading myself to thin with too many sites on the go at once.
And I’m just in the throes of starting another one. A market that I just couldn’t pass by! How many times have you heard that one!
I do try to work every day on my main site because it is my main income earner, but just can’t resist adding another niche every now and then. I’m trying to really settle with what I have and, as you say, work consistently on just a few pages at a time.
Great advise and I shall try even harder to stick with it!
Dawn´s last blog ..Oct 27- Mutaflor- Living With Ulcerative Colitis
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 8:37 pm
LOL, I think we’ve all heard that one Dawn. It’s hard not to keep moving on to something else but I think for anyone wanting to create a full-time income, they really needed to stick to one thing until it works.
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aj says:
November 6, 2010 at 10:17 pm
When you say just work on 3 – 5 pages, are you saying 3 – 5 pages on one blog or spread out over several?
Also, if you are working on them daily what does that entail, adding articles to support the review or doing the tedious process of backlinking? How muchw work goes into 1 page?
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 11:18 pm
The pages can be on one blog or more than one blog. It doesn’t matter. It’s all about the pages, not the sites.
Working on them daily means tweaking them if needed and adding articles to support them but mostly it is the tedious part of backlinking. The backlinking is going to get that page to the top of Google and it’s the part that most people don’t want to do. You have to focus on the tedious part first. If this part is ignored you may as well give internet marketing a miss. Or at the very least outsource it so you don’t have to do it yourself.
The page isn’t going to get to the number 1 spot in Google without backlinks unless the keywords you are going for have no competiton. But that usually means the keywords don’t have much traffic either.
You’re going to have to work for it to get it. We just didn’t suddenly start making money out of the blue. We worked at backlinking…mostly guest blogging. But what happens when you focus on only a few pages is that you have time for it all. Although there is still work to be done – it’s more focused and more relaxed. You don’t have to create tons of content and work on getting traffic for multiple sites and keep building more sites.
The amount of work that goes into it is all dependent on you. You can do an hour a day or 10 hours a day. Either way, you know that it will be highly focused work and that is the key. It’s not a random approach where one day you are working on building a new website and the next day working on backlinks and the next day adding content to a couple of sites and the next day building another site.
Instead you spend your day getting backlinks to those few pages. Then the next day you do the same thing and the next day the same thing and so on. And then once a week you might write a few articles to support those few reviews. And also once a week you might even reread those few product reviews to see if they could be improved with a little tweaking.
It might be tedious but I can tell you now that it works because you are highly focused.
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aj says:
November 7, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Thanks Paula,
In terms of site set up, if you had a site with 3 reviews and a few articles for each one, would each review go on a seperate page?
Or, would the reviews all go on one “review” page and the articles on a seperate “articles” page.
One course I looked at had 3 – 5 small (300 word) reviews all on one page. This course did not add articles to the site or submit them to directories. It was all backlinking, social bookmarking and organic seo.
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 6:39 am
The reviews would go on separate pages.
The articles also go on separate pages and they link back to the review pages to give them a boost.
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Liz says:
November 6, 2010 at 10:32 pm
I’m just starting a new site to add some diversification. Google changes things up all the time and I have one page that is about 12 months old – was ranking great and for the last 2 months it has just about fallen off the map. I’ve done everything right too.
I’ve heard Google is looking for more social backlinks too which adds in a whole other dimension of work.
It’s nice to hear realistic time frame ranges. This is NOT a make money quick deal at all. Just keeping steady and knowing when to make changes or change course.
Fear is a big deal too. I am really afraid my new products won’t pan out, but it really is hit or miss. Some will and some may not. That’s just a reality and nothing we can do can fully guarantee results. This is a full time job to be taken seriously.
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 11:23 pm
If you have chosen products that already sell then there is no reason why they won’t work. Amazon is great for telling you whether a product sells – you only have to look at the number of reviews.
And even for those using Clickbank, you can tell by the gravity if a product is selling.
Generally it has nothing to do with the product. If someone gives up on a website or a niche it is usually because they never really got enough traffic to the page they were trying to promote.
Once the traffic is there and the product doesn’t sell then it is simply time to tweak the page to get it to convert. And at the very least, you can easily change the product on the page to something that does convert assuming it is related.
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Liz says:
November 7, 2010 at 1:03 am
I agree. When I started, I didn’t use Amazon. So some of my products were general and I can tell through Amazon they are not items where people write reviews.
I put your techniques into practice now for new pages and I have seen a difference.
Also, I want to make a correction. When I said this is a full time job – that suggests 40 hours a week – but this is not required. It can be done off hours, but may just take a little longer. I didn’t want to discourage anyone!
Thanks again Paula and Wanda!
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Chaplain Paul Slater says:
November 6, 2010 at 10:39 pm
I like the concept of a product based website. I have two sites that basically make their money from Google (I average about $975 per month.) Now I am ready to launch a site that features products and has visitors searching to buy. I think I will stay with the concept of building a large site of 200 plus pages. I have avoided having lots of mini-sites to have to keep up, with all my efforts given to two or three sites.
-Chaplain Paul Slater
Chaplain Paul Slater´s last blog ..Saying I Hate My Job A Sure Sign You Want To Change Career Direction
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 11:30 pm
If I were you, I wouldn’t bother building another website. Why not take advantage of the sites you already have. If you are making money from Google (and I assume you mean Google Adsense) then you must already be getting traffic to those pages.
If that’s the case then find a few pages getting the most traffic and see if it is possible to include links to Amazon products. You don’t need to write any new content. Just find keywords already on your site that relate to products on Amazon and add an Amazon link to them.
I can see you have already added links to other affiliate sites but try changing some of them to Amazon links. Amazon convert extremely well.
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Jerry Patterson says:
November 7, 2010 at 12:31 am
This post is very timely for me. I began a new site a little over a month ago. The site name and domain name is general and my plan is to write 5 product reviews on this site under the general topic.
I’ve written one review and 6 articles that link internally to the review. I’ve worked on backlinking the site and the review also and now I’m getting a trickle of traffic. At what point should I write my 2nd of the 5 reviews? Should I continue to work on this first review until I make some sales? I plan to write 10 articles linking internally to each of my reviews so I will do 4 more for this first review.
Thanks so much for your help and for the Amazonian Profit Plan.
Jerry Patterson´s last blog ..My Search for a Quiet Air Compressor
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Paula says:
November 7, 2010 at 12:51 am
Jerry, I have to say that you are doing things perfectly. If I were you I would finish those 4 articles first before going on to your next review. However, spend more time on backlinking than anything else.
Then if you can, stick with those two reviews until they make sales before moving on to a third one. A lot of people can’t do this because they have a fear that they won’t work so they want to continually add more reviews. If you can be brave enough to stick with those two then go for it.
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Robert Kay says:
November 7, 2010 at 12:35 am
Hi Wanda & Paula,
I’ve taken your advice and am trying to just focus on this one new site with reviews per your Amazonian Profit Plan (worth every penny, by the way!), but this backlinking thing is so messy. I tried to keep track of my linking efforts in an excel spreadsheet but easier said than done.
Do you have any tips to stay organized on what you need to do next and how to keep track of it all? Do you keep track by the page, by the keyword, or by the site?
Thanks for a great blog.
Robert
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Paula says:
November 7, 2010 at 12:59 am
We actually created a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. What we might do is send out our Excel template to the APP email list. So you should see that within the next couple of days Robert.
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Chris says:
November 7, 2010 at 1:44 am
I have a question. If I wanted to start a generic shopping blog covering a variety of different niches how would I setup the layout? I’m a bit confused on this. I was also wondering how to link one domain’s (specific) content in another domain (generic)? Hope that makes sense.
Chris´s last blog ..Body Champ BRM3671 Review
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 6:46 am
All you need to do is set it up as WordPress blog and create categories for each niche. The product reviews would simply go up as blog posts and you would place each one into the relevant category on your blog.
We don’t get caught up in the structure of a site because we simply focus on pages.
Let’s put it this way, say you have a generic shopping site and one of your review pages is about a dog bed. If someone was searching for dog beds in Google and clicked through to your site they would be directed to your dog bed product review page. They won’t see your home page or any of the other pages on your site since your goal is to get them to read your review and get them to click through to Amazon. You probably won’t ever see them again after that.
So who cares how your site is structured and what your home page looks like. You got them to your dog bed review and sent them to Amazon…that’s all you need to do.
As for your second question I’m not too sure what you are getting at so you may need to clarify.
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Chris says:
November 8, 2010 at 8:21 pm
If I had 2 websites, 1 that is generic and 1 that is more targeted, is there a way I could link the more targeted website content to the generic one’s content?
Chris´s last blog ..Schwinn 430 Elliptical Trainer Review
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 8:32 pm
You might not want to link within your websites. Google banned a lot of sites years ago because of this. It’s probably okay to link between your sites by adding a link on the home page of each but interlinking within the sites pages is probably not a good idea.
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Chris says:
November 8, 2010 at 10:09 pm
Ok thank you for your advice. I do have one more question…lol I’m full of them. I hope this is not too personal but how long did it take for you to reach the income from Amazon that you are making now and is it a combined income from both of you? I hope I wasn’t too forward.
Chris´s last blog ..Schwinn 430 Elliptical Trainer Review
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Paula says:
November 9, 2010 at 12:09 am
We spent around 6 years building and maintaining websites and never made much more than a $1000 a month, give or take.
Then we decided that we needed to do things differently if we were going to make it all work. So we did a few things – the main things were making our reviews longer and more helpful, adding Amazon links to all our reviews and focusing on only a few pages at a time. That was the turning point for us. At that point it took about a year and a half for the money to reach the 10k mark.
The income is combined. We share the workload and everything we make online 50-50.
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing says:
November 9, 2010 at 7:36 am
Backup a sec here Paula,
I’ve done it a lot and plan to more with the new network.
Example: “remember when I wrote about…..”with a link to the other blog.
This is bad??
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..Comment Contests Prize Update- A Unique Idea!
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Paula says:
November 9, 2010 at 5:54 pm
You just need to be a little careful with it Dennis. I was around way back when Google banned a lot of sites for doing this so I just don’t cross link much at all only because I remember the impact it had. You might want to read this:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014381.html
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing says:
November 9, 2010 at 6:06 pm
Hey Paula,
I remember that as well. That was when all the link-wheeling crap and what not first started; the cross links were so blatantly phony they deserved what they got.
The article appears all about relevancy, which is the only way I’d do it.
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..What’s Your Email Preference- HTML – HTML w-Template – or Plain Text
Daisy says:
November 7, 2010 at 3:18 am
Well said! Like many people I am guilty of creating one site after another and never having the time to properly finishing anything.
It hit me a couple of weeks ago and I decided to focus on 4 sites only and let the rest just “sit” there until I am making enough money with the 4 sites. This is already working out for me and your post confirms it. No need to crank out dozens of sites!
Looking forward to the Excel template!
Daisy´s last blog ..Eco Friendly Holiday Lights- Which Should You Buy And How Should You Use Them
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 6:49 am
We did the same thing Daisy. We narrowed it down to a few sites first but we realized that was still way too much. That’s when we decided to focus on just one site and then only a few pages on that site.
So you might find that 4 is still too many.
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Kean says:
November 7, 2010 at 5:18 am
Hi Paula and Wanda,
This is a fantastic post. But I have some reservations on this and I think I know why people are frantically creating more reviews.
While I totally understand the reasoning behind this post, I feel that there is a flaw to just concentrating on 3 product reviews.
By doing this we are hoping that the products we choose to promote are going to be good sellers but as we all know, some products just do not sell better than others despite all the research we have done.
I think the reason why people go out and create more reviews is because they feel that their chosen product is not going to sell as well as they predicted. But most people have this kind of mentality even before committing at least a significant amount of time to getting traffic.
I think all in all, a balance should be strived for when creating product reviews. If a product review still gets few or no sales after much time spent on getting traffic, I would create a new one.
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:04 am
What you say is correct…if a product review gets no sales then you have to let it go. However, most people never get to that point. They never work on getting enough traffic to that page to know whether the product is worth it or not. And when they do get traffic to that page they never test and tweak and rework the review until it does convert. That’s why we give our pages at least 3 months and in fact, we give them much longer than that.
Making money online is risky. You have to be a risk taker to make it online and taking 3 months out to focus on a few pages is risky. But for anyone who has been around for a while and still isn’t making any money and is not likely to make any more in the next 3 months, then it is definitely worth taking the risk.
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Manny says:
November 7, 2010 at 5:29 am
I like this article however one part that’s missing from this is doing the right research. I meam there’s no point working your butt off to find at #1 on Google you only get 20 clicks a day for a review as it would take many years to get to a full time income. It can be tough to pick the right niche / keywords. What are your thoughts? I know you say go for multiple keywords etc but can be hard to rank for too many. Your thoughts?
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:08 am
Definitely right Manny. I was waiting for someone to bring this up because we made an assumption in our post that our readers would know how to do their keyword research.
For us, the most important part is choosing quality products. We do this first before even looking at niches. Then we do the keyword research to see if those products will get enough traffic.
As you say, there is not point getting to no.1 in Google if you don’t get the traffic.
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Bev says:
November 7, 2010 at 7:11 am
Hi Wanda & Paula
Thanks for the timely post. I was just about to start planning a new site, but I think I’ll postpone that till I’ve really got somewhere with my 2 current sites.
Robert, I know what you mean about keeping organized. My head’s been swimming and I only have 2 sites going. I’m using 2 apps to help me get organized. One is a free app called Grindstone where you can time your work and set tasks. The other is called Autoblog Commander which allows you to keep track of your sites – I’ve only just purchased this ($27), so I’m still checking it out really, but so far it looks good. Not sure if helps with backlinks though – I’ll have to check that out.
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:11 am
Definitely stick with what you have Bev. There’s no point creating more and more sites if the ones you have aren’t making any money yet.
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Barb@Spinning Bikes says:
November 7, 2010 at 9:26 am
Hi Paula,
I have 175 niche websites but I’m putting them on the backburner to follow your APP. But … everything I’m reading these days indicates Google is favoring large authority sites for product keywords, making it hard for the little guy to rank. Have you seen changes in your rankings since May Day? If not, what do you think differentiates APP pages from other product keyword pages that have fallen out of favor in the SERPS?
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Bev says:
November 7, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Barb
It seems that we’re not on a level playing field, but I do believe you can compete with the right keywords. I just found that one of my pages is no 1 for a brand name which I was very surprised at because it doesn’t even have any great content, it’s just optimised for one keyword phrase. We just have to plug away at it I guess.
Bev´s last blog ..Energy Efficient Clothes Washer Buying Guide
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:14 am
We haven’t seen any changes in our rankings.
It’s hard to say what Google is thinking. Has Google themselves come out and said that they favor large authority sites? We have small websites and large websites full of content but we haven’t found that product reviews sitting on our large websites do any better or worse than those on the smaller websites.
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Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing says:
November 8, 2010 at 10:36 am
Actually yes, Matt Cutts has mentioned it…..a strong hint and nudge anyway, which is about the best you can expect. lol
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..Do You Always Make Yout Posts Purpose Crystal Clear
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 5:17 pm
Do you have the actual interview for that Dennis? I would love to hear exactly what Matt said.
It would be great to do an experiment on this and create a one page website and see if we can get it ranking.
Google just wants to see good quality content so you can’t tell me that they will rank a huge site full of poorly developed content over a site with only say 20 pages of really well written content.
When it comes down to it, Google ranks pages, not websites. If they ranked websites, every page on our sites would do well. That’s obviously not the case. The reason why some pages do better than others is the amount of good quality backlinks coming into that page. Other factors can help of course but the back links are the most important….at least at this point in time.
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Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing says:
November 8, 2010 at 6:07 pm
Ack I knew you were gonna ask, lol. I went looking then got called away. If I recall, it was one of his videos, if you can find his youtube channel, it might be among them.
I dunno if he responds via his blog, but you can try there also.
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..What’s Your Email Preference- HTML – HTML w-Template – or Plain Text
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 8:30 pm
Thanks Dennis. I will have a look around for it.
Teatree says:
November 7, 2010 at 11:56 am
It’s actually harder to focus on just a few pages instead of many. For one of my best-producing pages, I steadily built a couple of links every single day for about six months before I saw profits.
It was tedious in the extreme. I was fed-up of it. It’s hard to think of something original to write when you are writing your 50th article on your subject. I felt like screaming in the end. I can see why people either give up or are tempted to copy other people’s work.
Teatree´s last blog ..Some thoughts about pagerank
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:20 am
It definitely is tedious. We’ve started to outsource more and more of that work just for that reason alone. But in the past, we did it all ourselves but it was definitely worth it. We wouldn’t be where we are today without the work we put into backlinking. I’d still be at my 9 to 5 job.
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Manny says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:57 am
I will second Paula’s comment on outsourcing….I would not have made it out of the 1st gear without discovering outsourcing as I hate the minute tedious work….Although I love to learn SEO and be up to date and plan seo strategy I have no intention or interest in executing it. You can get a Filipino with good experience for $500 F/t or $300 P/t per month. I would still recommend knowing what to do first so doing it yourself or reading alot until you felt you had intermediate to advanced knowledge as you still have to be responsible for deciding the best SEO tactics and tasks for staff. Why not share a F/T person with someone?
Here are 2 places 1.John Jonas Blog (direct employment) 2.Time to outsource (costs a little more managed by them)
Regards Manny
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Printers - Mike says:
November 7, 2010 at 11:56 am
Google seems so fickle. I have a TV authority site with 10 products and 5 buying guides. One item will rank in the top 10, another is 150. They both have similar backlinks and content and competition. I think site age is VERY BIG factor too. One of my buying guides is #1 in google and brings in some fish. I going out on a limb (not that I had conversions) but a general buying guide with a keyword rich title brings in visitors.
I wonder if electronics and TVs are a good choice. Even with original reviews, you are swimming in a sea of so many competitive reviews that nothing you could do will make you stand out. There are always the 6 authority sites (the cnets, amazon, walmart, etc) then there are the “reviewers.” I guess I could just keep throwing backlinks so it creeps up. I’m not writing any more reviews for that site.
I have another site with printers, I added one review but it sits at position 100 for the item. I should probably backlink it, but I’m wondering if it will help.
I think picking something with less competition is critical. Someone put a site up with [some movie]+[halloween costume] and ranked in two days. It was a $50 costume. The completion was almost non existent.
I get a few amazon clickthrus here and there from the tv site. Also, I’m starting to believe exact domain names are very important too.
Printers – Mike´s last blog ..Canon MF4350D
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:25 am
Electronics and tvs can be quite competitive niches. Also, they can go out of fashion really quickly so you constantly need to add new products to your site. You could spend months getting backlinks for a tv product review and then they update the model.
For this reason, if it were me, I would be focusing on backlinks for generic keywords rather than product specific keywords. For instance I would be going for keywords like “tv product reviews” or “Sony tv reviews” rather than keywords like “Sony Bravia XYZ TV”.
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Kelly says:
November 7, 2010 at 12:11 pm
Boy, is that the truth. I really agree with the person at the top who cited fear as the biggest reason for people to jump around. It really was for me, when I first started. Now that I have more experience, I’m spending less time creating sites and much more time working on getting traffic to the sites I have.
Kelly´s last blog ..Yoga PLR – 5 Articles
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:27 am
Excellent Kelly. Many people spend most of their time on adding content and building more websites. If instead they focused most of their time on getting traffic things would be a lot different.
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Gary says:
November 7, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Paula, your comments are very helpful…and sobering! Concentrating on only one or a handful of pages for 10 weeks would take real commitment! And I guess that’s what you’re saying: you’re not describing a get-rich-quick scheme.
I wonder if you could supply a link to one of your one-page product review sites — or a site with 5 or so pages — that you and Wanda have been operating with some success. It would be great to have an example of the work you’re doing to underscore the points in your post.
Thank you.
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:31 am
There really are no ‘get rich quick’ ways for making money online. Someone might have the secret to making money overnight but if they do they probably wouldn’t tell anyone anyway.
It actually took us 4 years before we started to see some decent money come in and the only reason it took so long was that we kept moving from one thing to the next. If we had focused from the start, things would have been a lot different.
You also might want to take a look at this post:
http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/2010/08/07/can-i-see-an-example-of-your-website/
Reply
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing says:
November 8, 2010 at 10:45 am
I skimmed to see if anyone mentioned it already.
I don’t know how old you are in ‘net years, but I’d say with a pretty good confidence level that the whole multiple sites thing started with the ill-fated lunacy of the MFA (made for adsense) fiasco some years back.
The more ambitious (see: dumber then most) had hundreds running at any one time…..I don’t mean a mere 1-200 either.
Once Google brought the largest smack-down on net history, they picked themselves up and changed the model to niche affiliate sites.
Still not the brightest bunch. They switched from adsense to affiliate products, but still had/have thin crappy sites.
Yes indeed, the authority site is the way to go unless you have the mojo; i.e APP.
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..What’s Your Email Preference- HTML – HTML w-Template – or Plain Text
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 5:22 pm
I don’t think these people were dumb…just desperate. We all just want to make a living online and we want to trust the so-called gurus who tell us that building multiple websites is the answer.
We never did get caught up in the ‘made for Adsense’ type sites but we just as easily could have if we didn’t know any better.
Reply
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing says:
November 8, 2010 at 6:04 pm
Many of them were the guru’s of the time. They in-particular were not desperate, but greedy.
Similar to black-hatters it was largely a case of, “we know it won’t last, just grab what ya can”.
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..What’s Your Email Preference- HTML – HTML w-Template – or Plain Text
Reply
Bridget says:
November 8, 2010 at 3:27 pm
I just want to thank you for this wonderful website. I stumbled upon it today and am so happy I did! I have been working online for 2 months now without making money yet, I know it is a slow process and your stories help motivate me to keep going!
One question – when setting up your WordPress sites do you put your reviews/articles as posts or pages? Or does it matter? I have heard conflicting ideas about which is best and just wondering if you have a preference.
Thanks!
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 5:24 pm
We generally use Pages but the only reason we do that is that we use the Flexsqueeze theme and it allows us to remove the sidebar. Removing the sidebar means there are no distractions for the reader and the are more likely to click through to the merchant.
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Gary says:
November 8, 2010 at 8:44 pm
Thanks for the great reminder.
I had a question, do you use any wordpress plugin to cloak your affiliate links to Amazon?
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 8:48 pm
We don’t really bother too much about cloaking Amazon links only because most people like shopping at Amazon and if they see the link they are generally happy to click on it.
However for a lot of our other links we use the Ninja Affiliate plugin.
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Backlink Bully says:
November 8, 2010 at 8:44 pm
Love your content!
That advice really helped me when I first bought Amazonian Profit Plan
You see, last holiday season, right when Amazon came out with their 2009 hot Christmas Toy list, I found a TON of buyer keywords that got really good searches…
So I went out an bought quite a few domains with the product names in them(probably about 7 or so) and went about building the sites
This was on Nov 6, 2009…I totally remember that day because I was really excited
I think you know where I am going with this…
I spread myself too thin because I couldn’t get all of those sites ranked in time.
So that part of your course really hit home for me so I am very happy with your course and I highly recommmend it
-Mark
Reply
Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 8:50 pm
Thanks Mark – so glad you like the course. And so glad that you are actually implementing it. You will notice a difference when you focus your efforts on just one thing at at time.
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Shirley says:
November 8, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Hi Paula and Wanda,
Another timely post for me.
I have been away in the UK for almost 3 months as my mother was very ill and passed away a few weeks ago. I put everything else on hold during that time. Now I’m back home feeling confused, unsettled and wondering what on earth I was doing before I went away, and where to start again.
I have decided the best place to start is right here and follow this format at least for the next 10-12 weeks and work on just a couple of pages with Amazon products reviews. I needed this clarity!
Thanks again
Shirley
Shirley´s last blog ..Work at Home Job Ideas for Senior’s
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 11:49 pm
So sorry to hear about your mother Shirley. I can see why you are feeling a little unsettled.
Having some time away from your online business may have been a good thing even though it wasn’t for the best of reasons. We tend to work solidly on our businesses without taking time out to see what is working and what isn’t and a break from it can do wonders.
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John says:
November 9, 2010 at 6:15 pm
In a general sense, if I were to write an article a day and submit to ezine articles, would that be an effective link building strategy?
John´s last blog ..Nov 5- Juicing Recipe Gingorapple
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Paula says:
November 9, 2010 at 7:42 pm
We don’t really do much article marketing in terms of submitting to Ezine and other article directories. What we do instead is submit articles to other bloggers and website owners. You don’t get much traffic from this however the backlinks are very strong.
But if you’ve had success with submitting to Ezine in the past then by all means do that. One article a day sounds good to me.
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Paul@detox foot spa says:
November 9, 2010 at 7:32 pm
I’m so glad that you beautiful ladies tell it like it is. I have been preaching those same ideas to my brother for the last year. I have told him in the past to stop reaching for the next best thing and focus on one thing and make it a success before moving on. Now I can show him your blog post to read for himself.
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Paula says:
November 9, 2010 at 7:43 pm
That should be tattooed onto to anyone who wants to make money online so they never forget it….”focus on one thing and make it a success before moving on”.
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Izrul says:
November 9, 2010 at 10:14 pm
Thanks for this wonderful post Paula. Can you explain to me a little bit here? Lets say I’m creating a Product review called “Ultimate Dog Secrets” (just an example). Should I target the keyword “ultimate dog secrets” for SEO purposes or should I target 2 or 3 more keywords that are related to the product like “dog training”, “how to take good care of dog”. etc.
What about domain name? Should we include the product name in our main domain?
But what if the product name has no searches or just a few searches per month, wouldn’t it be a waste of time doing so even though if we manage to get onto the 1st page of Google?
Since you suggest that we concentrate on a few pages, I need to do it right at the very beginning. Hopefully, you can understand my questions above.
Izrul´s last blog ..cat-toilet-training-the-easy-way
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Paula says:
November 10, 2010 at 12:43 am
Your questions requires more of a response than I can give in this comment but here are the basics.
If I were promoting a product about ‘ultimate dog secrets’ then I would do my keyword research to find related keywords to ensure that I would get enough traffic.
Then I would create my product review and try to get those keywords in the review BUT I wouldn’t stress too much if I couldn’t get them in the review because I would rather write a helpful review that makes sense than fill it full of unneccessary keywords.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the domain name. If I could find a domain name with the keyword ‘ultimate dog secrets’ (assuming that is a good keyword) then great…I would be happy with that. If I couldn’t find a domain name with that keyword in it then I wouldn’t worry about it and just get something related.
We have product reviews on websites with domain names that have nothing to do with the product and they make money.
Then I would spend most of my time getting backlinks to my site using the keywords that I found as the text links.
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Vizio XVT553SV Review says:
November 9, 2010 at 10:54 pm
I can identify with this because I also have about 100 niche blogs and sites and I only make about $300/mo from all of them combined. I’ve been at this for 8 years and I have known for a long time that I am spread too thin. However, I have also been looking for what method of making money online that I like the most and suits me best. I’ve tried everything. I have found that I enjoy building blogs and d9ing keyword research. I hate the amount of time I spend online doing this though. I hate writing articles but I outsource this. But if I had it to do all over again after countless hours spent, thousands of dollars spent, and trying everything under the online sun…I would say just stick to 1 website and build it with more content and especially backlinks for several years.
I also appreciate how many replies Paula responds to. Hope you dont mind but I wanted to put this link here for help with backlinking. It is an affiliate link but I wouldn’t mention it if I didnt think it can help. It’s software that finds exact and relevant places to build backlinks according to the keywords you feed it. It saves a lot of time. You can check it out at http://myownbizniz.com/mcc.
I also started to build Amazon products using the exact product model name/number in the domain. I sold my first big ticket item this way. They rank very quickly on the 1st page but you have to build lots of these when new products come out.
Vizio XVT553SV Review´s last blog ..Vizio XVT553SV Internet TV
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Paula says:
November 10, 2010 at 12:54 am
Eight years is a long time to be trying to make it all work for you.
My advice for someone like you who has that many sites is to head over to Google Analytics and find your top 5 pages from all of your sites. So the ones getting the most traffic. And I don’t mean the top 5 pages from each site…just the top 5 in total.
Then rework the reviews on those 5 pages so they are long and helpful. And then just focus on getting more traffic to those 5 pages.
You don’t need to create any new product reviews. Make use of the traffic you are already getting and just rework the content you already have.
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Santel says:
November 9, 2010 at 11:50 pm
Ok, after reading this now I understand the concept and also answered to my long-waited question why I can’t make much money …
Thank for sharing this, I believed I know what to do next to get more income for my family. Appreciate this post!
Santel´s last blog ..Thank to new sponsor- Khmer Live TV Online
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Wanda says:
November 10, 2010 at 12:58 am
It used to be so frustrating when we worked so hard on all our websites, and didn’t make much money. So we would start another website to see if it would be the magic one that would bring in the money.
One day while we were discussing what was happening and what we were going to do next, we went back to basics and did a thorough analysis of our sites. It was at this point that we decided to concentrate on only one site and let the rest sit until we could get to them in the future or flip them, which is another option.
It was also at this point that we hit on our formula for promoting Amazon products, writing good quality, informative reviews and the dreaded backlinking; from there on the money just flowed.
Wishing you every success Santel.
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Tony@EmporiumWatches says:
November 10, 2010 at 12:21 am
This post was a real eye opener for me. I felt you were talking to me, as a matter this is what I had been doing for the 3 years on online marketing and only recently have I decided that I can chase em all, I need to focus and really work my market. Thank you for posting this.
Tony@EmporiumWatches´s last blog ..Invicta Men’s Watch 6620 II – Collection Chronograph Stainless Steel
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Wanda says:
November 10, 2010 at 1:06 am
I think this topic has touched a lot of people, Tony. We all seem to make the same mistakes. Multiple websites = way too much work. Focussing on one site and providing good quality reviews is certainly more manageable and more rewarding. Plus you get to actually spend some time with your family. Working on 20 sites as we once were, meant we never left the computer.
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cisco asa says:
November 10, 2010 at 3:13 am
Paula and Wanda,
Firstly thanks a lot for all the info you give out to us. My opinion is that the 3-5 product review pages that you focus on must be on a trusted and old domain site. The whole website “status” does matter a lot in the eyes of Google. I agree that Google ranks pages but those pages are better to be on trusted and “content thick” websites rather than on new domains with very few pages. Thats why ezine articles rank well on their own. Its because they are on a big authority domain site.
cisco asa´s last blog ..Basic Cisco Switch Configuration
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Paula says:
November 10, 2010 at 5:56 am
Nobody really knows what Google is thinking. We get a few hints every now and then from people like Matt Cutts but other than that it is all pure speculation.
Old ‘trusted’ sites probably do better but its all relative really. You could have an old site but if it has nobody linking to it and it is full of poor quality content then it is not going to rank in the eyes of Google no matter how old it is.
If you have a new site with good quality backlinks and good quality content then it will rank.
Reply
Shaz says:
November 10, 2010 at 5:03 am
Hi Paula and Wanda, I stumbled upon your blog just a few months back and get really hook with your articles and ideas. I bought your amazonian profit plan when it was launched and really glad that I bought it. I have put up a site last month based on your book and now working on to get those backlinks. I hope to see some good results from my site soon ( I don’t know how soon…)
Thanks
Shaz
Reply
Paula says:
November 10, 2010 at 5:57 am
Excellent Shaz. Just keep working on those backlinks. It’s not the most exciting task but it will work if you keep at it.
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We are Wanda & Paula - 2 friends who successfully operate a number of online internet businesses. In fact we have over 20 blogs and websites making money. We have learnt a lot over the years particularly in the area of natural search, SEO and traffic generation. If you want to make a living online then we are here to help. Read more...
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You Only Need One Page to Make Money Online
Friday, November 5th, 2010 at 10:29 pm One of the important points that we make in our Amazonian Profit Plan ebook is that you only need a handful of pages to make money online – in fact, you really only need 1 single page! We find that many people can’t quite grasp this simple concept, and this is generally because they have been told so often that you need to build multiple sites and constantly be adding more and more content.
So often we see people on internet marketing forums who are struggling to make money online and asking for advice on what they should do. The usual responses are to keep building more and more websites. We shudder when we hear this, because there really is no need to do this. In fact, the more websites you build the more work you have to do to maintain them and the more you spread yourself too thin, resulting in more work and little or no money coming in.
Focusing on, and maintaining multiple websites is hard work - in fact, this is something we know about first hand. We have over 20 niche websites and in the past we would spend every waking moment working on them. It was tough going and ultimately it just didn’t work. We never managed to make much money while we were working all those websites at the one time. And we couldn’t understand why – surely more websites and adding heaps of content would increase our income. But no, it didn’t work like that.
Then one day we stopped and analysed what was happening with the websites and it was then that we decided to stop working on all of our websites and start to focus on just one website. And in fact, we didn’t focus on the whole website because even that took at lot of work. What we did instead was focus on just a few pages – I think it might have been three to five pages. And that’s when things really started to change for us.
Focusing on just one single solitary page is all you really need to do – you can make a fulltime income from just one product review. HOWEVER, focusing on just one page is probably not a good idea since the internet is such a fickle environment…Google may decide to change it’s algorithm, your product may suddenly become obsolete or you might get knocked off the top position in Google by a competitor.
So to ensure that you aren’t putting all your eggs in the one basket we recommend that you focus on 5 pages, although you can just go with 3 if that is more manageable for you. When you start to focus like this, good things start to happen. Just try it for a few months and you will see the difference. Simply focus on just 3 to 5 pages and nothing else. That means working on each page on a daily basis for three months.
So your next three months might look like this:
1. Spend the first two weeks choosing products (from Clickbank or Amazon) that you want to promote and write really good product reviews for them. The reviews should be long (approx 1000+ words) and be extremely helpful to your reader. Make sure you choose quality products…you don’t want to promote rubbish.
2. Spend the next 10 weeks getting backlinks/traffic to those reviews until you start seeing sales.
That’s it really!
The process is actually quite simple but what most people will do instead, is this:
1. Spend a day or two choosing products and writing reviews. The reviews will generally be made up of content copied from Amazon or the product sales page. And even if the content isn’t copied the reviews are usually short (around 300 words) and don’t really provide much value to the reader.
2. Spend the next few days getting backlinks/traffic to those pages. Some might spend a couple of weeks if they are really keen.
So what happens next?
Well what invariably happens is the person gives up after a few weeks when they find that there isn’t much traffic coming into the site. They never really focus enough on getting traffic to those pages. They don’t see sales so they move on to another lot of reviews or worse yet move on to creating more websites, instead of reworking their original reviews and working at getting more traffic. Or they buy another e-book in the hope that this will be the one that saves them. This becomes a cycle whereby nothing ever happens and they never make any money … or if they do, it’s not much.
A lot of people trying to make money online follow this cycle because they don’t realise that it takes time but they never actually give anything a chance to work. They give up well before they should. It can take up to three months before you even see a trickle of money start to come in and that’s only if you have followed step 2 and worked on getting traffic every day for at least 10 weeks. Some people might have better success of course and be making money within a month – some might need longer and it could take 6 months. There are so many variables that it is impossible to say when someone will start making money online but the only way you will know is if you are consistent at what you do and focus on just a few pages until they make money.
When you start seeing sales for one of your product reviews, only then should you start writing another product review. There is no point creating more product reviews if the first ones aren’t making you any money….what’s the point?! You are only going to have the same problem. If you have chosen quality products that have been known to sell then there is no reason why they shouldn’t sell for you.
So if you have been struggling for some time trying to make some decent money from your website then try something different and focus on just a few pages for the next few months. If what you are doing now isn’t working then what have you got to lose?
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93 Comments
Sunshine@Manage Multiple Blogs says:
November 5, 2010 at 11:55 pm
Fear is the real reason why people keep building and buying more affiliate products. Afraid of spending too much time on the wrong thing. This fear is really hard to conquer and eliminate.
I agree and am in this predicament after having renewed several domains. Let’s not even talk about the recent halloween season that I missed because my focus was all over the place not to mention literally not knowing which domain belonged to what domain registrar.
Thankfully, I’ve found a tool that will at least let me manage the domain and blog inventory I have at this point while maintaining my sanity.
I hope this will translate into more affiliate income.
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 1:24 am
I think you’re right…fear is a big factor. The thing is that most methods of making money online work if you stick with it long enough. But as you say, people fear spending too much time on one thing thinking it isn’t going to work.
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Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing says:
November 8, 2010 at 10:26 am
The fear comes from the “all in one basket” cliche`.
While it is 100% true, the gurus out there pound it in with a sledge hammer until the peasants are so worked up, they don’t stop with less then 100 sites.
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..What’s Your Email Preference- HTML – HTML w-Template – or Plain Text
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Ken Black says:
November 9, 2010 at 11:39 pm
Good points. But, what about building a list at the same time ? Do you only focus the traffic on getting affiliate sales, or do you use an optin form on these pages also, or an exit pop-up or hover pop-up ? I’m guessing you are using buying keywords also to point at those review pages ? Thanks.
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Tiptopcat says:
November 6, 2010 at 8:54 am
Everything you say makes sense. I would add that another reason people jump from new site to new site is the boredom factor. It is hard to stay motivated to keep writing about the same topic day in day out especially when you think you have discovered a brand new keyword that you feel will bring in even more cash within a shorter space of time.
I am trying to be good am am returning to work on the sites that I already have. Trying not to be tempted by shiny new domain names.:)
Tiptopcat´s last blog ..Earnings For October 2010
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 6:59 pm
That’s definitely true. I suffer from the ‘boredom factor’ hence why we ended up building over 20 websites in the past. I love building sites but I am out of that habit now. We started building another couple of websites about a month or so ago to test a couple of Amazon plugins but we ended up even tossing those aside because we realized that they would just take work. It’s very easy to get caught up in creating more and more instead of focusing on what we already have.
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Tammie Jordan says:
November 6, 2010 at 12:42 pm
Very sound advice! It’s hard to break the cycle of trying to always create THE website that will make you money, and it takes an immense amount of discipline not to buy the next big “product” that “guarantees” you’ll make money.
Dogged persistance pays off every time. Keep working on the sites that are working, let the others sit idly, or (gasp!) let the ones that aren’t making money go!
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 7:02 pm
If a site is already making money then it can make even more money. There is no limit to what a website can make but yes most people can’t help but think that the next website will be the one that makes the big money.
We know that thinking exactly because we went through it ourselves. We kept thinking that we weren’t choosing the right niche so kept moving to the next website. Ultimately it wasn’t about the niche at all because every niche has products that will sell. We just didn’t spend enough time on the first website to make it work.
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Laura says:
November 6, 2010 at 12:53 pm
Really good points. Focus is so tough for newbies, and even for oldies! And I agree, fear that all that focus will be wasted is huge. But having too many irons in the fire isn’t going to get you anywhere either.
Laura´s last blog ..Affiliate marketing case study- Pat- week 7
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 7:07 pm
That’s right. I had an email from someone this morning that said pretty much the same thing. He feared spending 10 weeks focusing on just a few pages and not seeing them work. The thing is, you could spend the next 10 weeks focusing on building website after website and have them not work.
Making money on the internet is a risky business so you have to be prepared to take risks. All I know is that when we stopped building websites and start focusing on just a few pages things started to change for us.
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Kelly says:
November 6, 2010 at 2:24 pm
Everything you said, was me when I started back in April, and it still is for the most part. I had a tag line underneath my title of “Follow Me on My Journey to 1,000 Niche Sites” after a couple of months I changed it to “Follow Me on My Journey to 15k a Month!”, this one I like a lot more!
When everyone first starts in this they do not realize how much work is actually involved and they want the easiest pass to the top, but only work or extremely good luck will get them there!
Kelly´s last blog ..October Earnings plus Site Updates
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 7:11 pm
I love that Kelly…by changing your tag line you have really hit the nail on the head. You don’t need hundreds or thousands of sites to make this work.
I can’t even imagine have a thousand sites – we have trouble managing the 20 we have. In fact, we don’t really manage them at all – most are sitting doing nothing. We just focus on a few pages at a time now.
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Gabe says:
November 6, 2010 at 6:12 pm
I have done this and I have 4 new (~2 month old) sites that are now in the google sand box. They all four had been ranking on the first page of google and two had just hit the #3 spot! In early October they disappeared from google all together, still indexed but not anywhere on top 10 pages. This is very frustrating!!! Have you guys had any issues like this? I’ve read that I should keep building links and content, but it’s scary because I don’t know if I’m just wasting my time continuing to work on these sites. I want to quit my full time job so bad I’ve been getting up at 4:30-5am before work and working all the time my wife will let me after my full time job (only 1hr). Even without these sites for most of last month I hit $525 on amazon. It’s hard enough getting these sites up and ranking and then to have google cut me down at the knees is crushing my dreams/hope ;(
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 7:22 pm
This happens to just about everyone Gabe. My brother rang me the other day because he suddenly lost his rankings. His site is about a couple of months old as well.
I am not sure why Google does this to relatively new sites but they do. You’ve been given good advice to stick with building backlinks.
The only other reason Google may have done this is if you have done something they don’t like. If that is the case, it is going to be hard to get those sites ranked again.
But if you have been doing everything above board then you shouldn’t have any problems. Just stick with the backlinks and the rankings will return.
You’re doing extremely well by making $525 on Amazon especially considering you don’t have much time to work on your sites. You should be extremely proud of yourself.
You are extremely lucky because you have a drive to get this to work. Not many people would get up at 4.30 to work on their websites.
Just don’t give up! This will really be the test for you. If you can continue on despite this you will make it.
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Shirley says:
November 8, 2010 at 11:19 pm
Hi Gabe, I know how you feel. I have had this happen to me twice and it’s really scary. I had several keywords ranking on pages 1, 2 and 3 and they just disappeared. There was nothing I could do but wait and carry on as if everything was alright. Both times mine went missing for about 4-5 weeks then they showed up again.
I know its human nature to keep checking morning and night and maybe in between to see if they are back but it can drive you crazy. If possible its best if you can let it go and check once in a while. I’m sure everything will work out fine.
Shirley´s last blog ..Work at Home Job Ideas for Senior’s
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CCGAL (Janelle) says:
November 6, 2010 at 6:34 pm
I’m really glad you posted this, and I am most appreciative that you broke down the “what to do” into choosing and promoting. So many of the “how to be an affiliate marketer” courses & e-books sell the idea that if you buy their book/plan/course/coaching that you can put up a site and start seeing money in minutes and that you can walk away and leave your little money pumping robot doing all the work while you go off and party hearty.
I saw an interesting thread in a popular internet marketing watering hole the other day, where a person asked the question about how many hours a day internet marketers actually worked. The results were astonishing in light of the sales copy so often touted in that very place. Most who responded were working well over the normal 40 hrs a week, yet this is not something you will ever see in a sales letter, I suspect.
What you say here makes perfect sense to me. Do one thing, do it well, and stick to it. Then you can scale it if you like.
I’m not in the market for your course at this moment, but if I decide to pursue this avenue, I do believe it will be your product I come back to buy.
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 7:35 pm
We used to work very long hours when we were focusing on all our websites. I really don’t want to go back to that again. We used to both work full-time and then spend just about all of our remaining time on the websites. It took around 4 years of this sort of lifestyle before it finally dawned on us that it just wasn’t working.
Now that we focus on only a handful of product reviews at any one time we have so much more time in the day. We still work just about every day but it’s only because we really love it.
Our working day normally starts at around 10am and finishes at around 4pm. In the middle of that we will do a meditation or listen to a self help tape of some sort or go for a walk or go shopping or even see a movie. At the moment we have started doing QiGong so that takes an hour of that time.
Nothing is ever really planned so we can take off if we want. Last week we spent 4 days on the south coast (here in Australia) so we could plan what we wanted to work on for the next few months.
And some of you may be thinking that since we make a full time income from this it means that we can afford to relax and that’s partly true. But we know of internet marketers making around the same amount of money that we do and they are working very long hours.
It’s just more relaxed when you only have to focus on a few things instead of multiple things.
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Dawn says:
November 6, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Timely advise I keep spreading myself to thin with too many sites on the go at once.
And I’m just in the throes of starting another one. A market that I just couldn’t pass by! How many times have you heard that one!
I do try to work every day on my main site because it is my main income earner, but just can’t resist adding another niche every now and then. I’m trying to really settle with what I have and, as you say, work consistently on just a few pages at a time.
Great advise and I shall try even harder to stick with it!
Dawn´s last blog ..Oct 27- Mutaflor- Living With Ulcerative Colitis
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 8:37 pm
LOL, I think we’ve all heard that one Dawn. It’s hard not to keep moving on to something else but I think for anyone wanting to create a full-time income, they really needed to stick to one thing until it works.
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aj says:
November 6, 2010 at 10:17 pm
When you say just work on 3 – 5 pages, are you saying 3 – 5 pages on one blog or spread out over several?
Also, if you are working on them daily what does that entail, adding articles to support the review or doing the tedious process of backlinking? How muchw work goes into 1 page?
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 11:18 pm
The pages can be on one blog or more than one blog. It doesn’t matter. It’s all about the pages, not the sites.
Working on them daily means tweaking them if needed and adding articles to support them but mostly it is the tedious part of backlinking. The backlinking is going to get that page to the top of Google and it’s the part that most people don’t want to do. You have to focus on the tedious part first. If this part is ignored you may as well give internet marketing a miss. Or at the very least outsource it so you don’t have to do it yourself.
The page isn’t going to get to the number 1 spot in Google without backlinks unless the keywords you are going for have no competiton. But that usually means the keywords don’t have much traffic either.
You’re going to have to work for it to get it. We just didn’t suddenly start making money out of the blue. We worked at backlinking…mostly guest blogging. But what happens when you focus on only a few pages is that you have time for it all. Although there is still work to be done – it’s more focused and more relaxed. You don’t have to create tons of content and work on getting traffic for multiple sites and keep building more sites.
The amount of work that goes into it is all dependent on you. You can do an hour a day or 10 hours a day. Either way, you know that it will be highly focused work and that is the key. It’s not a random approach where one day you are working on building a new website and the next day working on backlinks and the next day adding content to a couple of sites and the next day building another site.
Instead you spend your day getting backlinks to those few pages. Then the next day you do the same thing and the next day the same thing and so on. And then once a week you might write a few articles to support those few reviews. And also once a week you might even reread those few product reviews to see if they could be improved with a little tweaking.
It might be tedious but I can tell you now that it works because you are highly focused.
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aj says:
November 7, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Thanks Paula,
In terms of site set up, if you had a site with 3 reviews and a few articles for each one, would each review go on a seperate page?
Or, would the reviews all go on one “review” page and the articles on a seperate “articles” page.
One course I looked at had 3 – 5 small (300 word) reviews all on one page. This course did not add articles to the site or submit them to directories. It was all backlinking, social bookmarking and organic seo.
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 6:39 am
The reviews would go on separate pages.
The articles also go on separate pages and they link back to the review pages to give them a boost.
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Liz says:
November 6, 2010 at 10:32 pm
I’m just starting a new site to add some diversification. Google changes things up all the time and I have one page that is about 12 months old – was ranking great and for the last 2 months it has just about fallen off the map. I’ve done everything right too.
I’ve heard Google is looking for more social backlinks too which adds in a whole other dimension of work.
It’s nice to hear realistic time frame ranges. This is NOT a make money quick deal at all. Just keeping steady and knowing when to make changes or change course.
Fear is a big deal too. I am really afraid my new products won’t pan out, but it really is hit or miss. Some will and some may not. That’s just a reality and nothing we can do can fully guarantee results. This is a full time job to be taken seriously.
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 11:23 pm
If you have chosen products that already sell then there is no reason why they won’t work. Amazon is great for telling you whether a product sells – you only have to look at the number of reviews.
And even for those using Clickbank, you can tell by the gravity if a product is selling.
Generally it has nothing to do with the product. If someone gives up on a website or a niche it is usually because they never really got enough traffic to the page they were trying to promote.
Once the traffic is there and the product doesn’t sell then it is simply time to tweak the page to get it to convert. And at the very least, you can easily change the product on the page to something that does convert assuming it is related.
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Liz says:
November 7, 2010 at 1:03 am
I agree. When I started, I didn’t use Amazon. So some of my products were general and I can tell through Amazon they are not items where people write reviews.
I put your techniques into practice now for new pages and I have seen a difference.
Also, I want to make a correction. When I said this is a full time job – that suggests 40 hours a week – but this is not required. It can be done off hours, but may just take a little longer. I didn’t want to discourage anyone!
Thanks again Paula and Wanda!
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Chaplain Paul Slater says:
November 6, 2010 at 10:39 pm
I like the concept of a product based website. I have two sites that basically make their money from Google (I average about $975 per month.) Now I am ready to launch a site that features products and has visitors searching to buy. I think I will stay with the concept of building a large site of 200 plus pages. I have avoided having lots of mini-sites to have to keep up, with all my efforts given to two or three sites.
-Chaplain Paul Slater
Chaplain Paul Slater´s last blog ..Saying I Hate My Job A Sure Sign You Want To Change Career Direction
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Paula says:
November 6, 2010 at 11:30 pm
If I were you, I wouldn’t bother building another website. Why not take advantage of the sites you already have. If you are making money from Google (and I assume you mean Google Adsense) then you must already be getting traffic to those pages.
If that’s the case then find a few pages getting the most traffic and see if it is possible to include links to Amazon products. You don’t need to write any new content. Just find keywords already on your site that relate to products on Amazon and add an Amazon link to them.
I can see you have already added links to other affiliate sites but try changing some of them to Amazon links. Amazon convert extremely well.
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Jerry Patterson says:
November 7, 2010 at 12:31 am
This post is very timely for me. I began a new site a little over a month ago. The site name and domain name is general and my plan is to write 5 product reviews on this site under the general topic.
I’ve written one review and 6 articles that link internally to the review. I’ve worked on backlinking the site and the review also and now I’m getting a trickle of traffic. At what point should I write my 2nd of the 5 reviews? Should I continue to work on this first review until I make some sales? I plan to write 10 articles linking internally to each of my reviews so I will do 4 more for this first review.
Thanks so much for your help and for the Amazonian Profit Plan.
Jerry Patterson´s last blog ..My Search for a Quiet Air Compressor
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Paula says:
November 7, 2010 at 12:51 am
Jerry, I have to say that you are doing things perfectly. If I were you I would finish those 4 articles first before going on to your next review. However, spend more time on backlinking than anything else.
Then if you can, stick with those two reviews until they make sales before moving on to a third one. A lot of people can’t do this because they have a fear that they won’t work so they want to continually add more reviews. If you can be brave enough to stick with those two then go for it.
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Robert Kay says:
November 7, 2010 at 12:35 am
Hi Wanda & Paula,
I’ve taken your advice and am trying to just focus on this one new site with reviews per your Amazonian Profit Plan (worth every penny, by the way!), but this backlinking thing is so messy. I tried to keep track of my linking efforts in an excel spreadsheet but easier said than done.
Do you have any tips to stay organized on what you need to do next and how to keep track of it all? Do you keep track by the page, by the keyword, or by the site?
Thanks for a great blog.
Robert
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Paula says:
November 7, 2010 at 12:59 am
We actually created a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. What we might do is send out our Excel template to the APP email list. So you should see that within the next couple of days Robert.
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Chris says:
November 7, 2010 at 1:44 am
I have a question. If I wanted to start a generic shopping blog covering a variety of different niches how would I setup the layout? I’m a bit confused on this. I was also wondering how to link one domain’s (specific) content in another domain (generic)? Hope that makes sense.
Chris´s last blog ..Body Champ BRM3671 Review
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 6:46 am
All you need to do is set it up as WordPress blog and create categories for each niche. The product reviews would simply go up as blog posts and you would place each one into the relevant category on your blog.
We don’t get caught up in the structure of a site because we simply focus on pages.
Let’s put it this way, say you have a generic shopping site and one of your review pages is about a dog bed. If someone was searching for dog beds in Google and clicked through to your site they would be directed to your dog bed product review page. They won’t see your home page or any of the other pages on your site since your goal is to get them to read your review and get them to click through to Amazon. You probably won’t ever see them again after that.
So who cares how your site is structured and what your home page looks like. You got them to your dog bed review and sent them to Amazon…that’s all you need to do.
As for your second question I’m not too sure what you are getting at so you may need to clarify.
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Chris says:
November 8, 2010 at 8:21 pm
If I had 2 websites, 1 that is generic and 1 that is more targeted, is there a way I could link the more targeted website content to the generic one’s content?
Chris´s last blog ..Schwinn 430 Elliptical Trainer Review
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 8:32 pm
You might not want to link within your websites. Google banned a lot of sites years ago because of this. It’s probably okay to link between your sites by adding a link on the home page of each but interlinking within the sites pages is probably not a good idea.
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Chris says:
November 8, 2010 at 10:09 pm
Ok thank you for your advice. I do have one more question…lol I’m full of them. I hope this is not too personal but how long did it take for you to reach the income from Amazon that you are making now and is it a combined income from both of you? I hope I wasn’t too forward.
Chris´s last blog ..Schwinn 430 Elliptical Trainer Review
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Paula says:
November 9, 2010 at 12:09 am
We spent around 6 years building and maintaining websites and never made much more than a $1000 a month, give or take.
Then we decided that we needed to do things differently if we were going to make it all work. So we did a few things – the main things were making our reviews longer and more helpful, adding Amazon links to all our reviews and focusing on only a few pages at a time. That was the turning point for us. At that point it took about a year and a half for the money to reach the 10k mark.
The income is combined. We share the workload and everything we make online 50-50.
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing says:
November 9, 2010 at 7:36 am
Backup a sec here Paula,
I’ve done it a lot and plan to more with the new network.
Example: “remember when I wrote about…..”with a link to the other blog.
This is bad??
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..Comment Contests Prize Update- A Unique Idea!
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Paula says:
November 9, 2010 at 5:54 pm
You just need to be a little careful with it Dennis. I was around way back when Google banned a lot of sites for doing this so I just don’t cross link much at all only because I remember the impact it had. You might want to read this:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014381.html
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing says:
November 9, 2010 at 6:06 pm
Hey Paula,
I remember that as well. That was when all the link-wheeling crap and what not first started; the cross links were so blatantly phony they deserved what they got.
The article appears all about relevancy, which is the only way I’d do it.
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..What’s Your Email Preference- HTML – HTML w-Template – or Plain Text
Daisy says:
November 7, 2010 at 3:18 am
Well said! Like many people I am guilty of creating one site after another and never having the time to properly finishing anything.
It hit me a couple of weeks ago and I decided to focus on 4 sites only and let the rest just “sit” there until I am making enough money with the 4 sites. This is already working out for me and your post confirms it. No need to crank out dozens of sites!
Looking forward to the Excel template!
Daisy´s last blog ..Eco Friendly Holiday Lights- Which Should You Buy And How Should You Use Them
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 6:49 am
We did the same thing Daisy. We narrowed it down to a few sites first but we realized that was still way too much. That’s when we decided to focus on just one site and then only a few pages on that site.
So you might find that 4 is still too many.
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Kean says:
November 7, 2010 at 5:18 am
Hi Paula and Wanda,
This is a fantastic post. But I have some reservations on this and I think I know why people are frantically creating more reviews.
While I totally understand the reasoning behind this post, I feel that there is a flaw to just concentrating on 3 product reviews.
By doing this we are hoping that the products we choose to promote are going to be good sellers but as we all know, some products just do not sell better than others despite all the research we have done.
I think the reason why people go out and create more reviews is because they feel that their chosen product is not going to sell as well as they predicted. But most people have this kind of mentality even before committing at least a significant amount of time to getting traffic.
I think all in all, a balance should be strived for when creating product reviews. If a product review still gets few or no sales after much time spent on getting traffic, I would create a new one.
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:04 am
What you say is correct…if a product review gets no sales then you have to let it go. However, most people never get to that point. They never work on getting enough traffic to that page to know whether the product is worth it or not. And when they do get traffic to that page they never test and tweak and rework the review until it does convert. That’s why we give our pages at least 3 months and in fact, we give them much longer than that.
Making money online is risky. You have to be a risk taker to make it online and taking 3 months out to focus on a few pages is risky. But for anyone who has been around for a while and still isn’t making any money and is not likely to make any more in the next 3 months, then it is definitely worth taking the risk.
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Manny says:
November 7, 2010 at 5:29 am
I like this article however one part that’s missing from this is doing the right research. I meam there’s no point working your butt off to find at #1 on Google you only get 20 clicks a day for a review as it would take many years to get to a full time income. It can be tough to pick the right niche / keywords. What are your thoughts? I know you say go for multiple keywords etc but can be hard to rank for too many. Your thoughts?
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:08 am
Definitely right Manny. I was waiting for someone to bring this up because we made an assumption in our post that our readers would know how to do their keyword research.
For us, the most important part is choosing quality products. We do this first before even looking at niches. Then we do the keyword research to see if those products will get enough traffic.
As you say, there is not point getting to no.1 in Google if you don’t get the traffic.
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Bev says:
November 7, 2010 at 7:11 am
Hi Wanda & Paula
Thanks for the timely post. I was just about to start planning a new site, but I think I’ll postpone that till I’ve really got somewhere with my 2 current sites.
Robert, I know what you mean about keeping organized. My head’s been swimming and I only have 2 sites going. I’m using 2 apps to help me get organized. One is a free app called Grindstone where you can time your work and set tasks. The other is called Autoblog Commander which allows you to keep track of your sites – I’ve only just purchased this ($27), so I’m still checking it out really, but so far it looks good. Not sure if helps with backlinks though – I’ll have to check that out.
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:11 am
Definitely stick with what you have Bev. There’s no point creating more and more sites if the ones you have aren’t making any money yet.
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Barb@Spinning Bikes says:
November 7, 2010 at 9:26 am
Hi Paula,
I have 175 niche websites but I’m putting them on the backburner to follow your APP. But … everything I’m reading these days indicates Google is favoring large authority sites for product keywords, making it hard for the little guy to rank. Have you seen changes in your rankings since May Day? If not, what do you think differentiates APP pages from other product keyword pages that have fallen out of favor in the SERPS?
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Bev says:
November 7, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Barb
It seems that we’re not on a level playing field, but I do believe you can compete with the right keywords. I just found that one of my pages is no 1 for a brand name which I was very surprised at because it doesn’t even have any great content, it’s just optimised for one keyword phrase. We just have to plug away at it I guess.
Bev´s last blog ..Energy Efficient Clothes Washer Buying Guide
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:14 am
We haven’t seen any changes in our rankings.
It’s hard to say what Google is thinking. Has Google themselves come out and said that they favor large authority sites? We have small websites and large websites full of content but we haven’t found that product reviews sitting on our large websites do any better or worse than those on the smaller websites.
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Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing says:
November 8, 2010 at 10:36 am
Actually yes, Matt Cutts has mentioned it…..a strong hint and nudge anyway, which is about the best you can expect. lol
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..Do You Always Make Yout Posts Purpose Crystal Clear
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 5:17 pm
Do you have the actual interview for that Dennis? I would love to hear exactly what Matt said.
It would be great to do an experiment on this and create a one page website and see if we can get it ranking.
Google just wants to see good quality content so you can’t tell me that they will rank a huge site full of poorly developed content over a site with only say 20 pages of really well written content.
When it comes down to it, Google ranks pages, not websites. If they ranked websites, every page on our sites would do well. That’s obviously not the case. The reason why some pages do better than others is the amount of good quality backlinks coming into that page. Other factors can help of course but the back links are the most important….at least at this point in time.
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Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing says:
November 8, 2010 at 6:07 pm
Ack I knew you were gonna ask, lol. I went looking then got called away. If I recall, it was one of his videos, if you can find his youtube channel, it might be among them.
I dunno if he responds via his blog, but you can try there also.
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..What’s Your Email Preference- HTML – HTML w-Template – or Plain Text
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 8:30 pm
Thanks Dennis. I will have a look around for it.
Teatree says:
November 7, 2010 at 11:56 am
It’s actually harder to focus on just a few pages instead of many. For one of my best-producing pages, I steadily built a couple of links every single day for about six months before I saw profits.
It was tedious in the extreme. I was fed-up of it. It’s hard to think of something original to write when you are writing your 50th article on your subject. I felt like screaming in the end. I can see why people either give up or are tempted to copy other people’s work.
Teatree´s last blog ..Some thoughts about pagerank
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:20 am
It definitely is tedious. We’ve started to outsource more and more of that work just for that reason alone. But in the past, we did it all ourselves but it was definitely worth it. We wouldn’t be where we are today without the work we put into backlinking. I’d still be at my 9 to 5 job.
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Manny says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:57 am
I will second Paula’s comment on outsourcing….I would not have made it out of the 1st gear without discovering outsourcing as I hate the minute tedious work….Although I love to learn SEO and be up to date and plan seo strategy I have no intention or interest in executing it. You can get a Filipino with good experience for $500 F/t or $300 P/t per month. I would still recommend knowing what to do first so doing it yourself or reading alot until you felt you had intermediate to advanced knowledge as you still have to be responsible for deciding the best SEO tactics and tasks for staff. Why not share a F/T person with someone?
Here are 2 places 1.John Jonas Blog (direct employment) 2.Time to outsource (costs a little more managed by them)
Regards Manny
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Printers - Mike says:
November 7, 2010 at 11:56 am
Google seems so fickle. I have a TV authority site with 10 products and 5 buying guides. One item will rank in the top 10, another is 150. They both have similar backlinks and content and competition. I think site age is VERY BIG factor too. One of my buying guides is #1 in google and brings in some fish. I going out on a limb (not that I had conversions) but a general buying guide with a keyword rich title brings in visitors.
I wonder if electronics and TVs are a good choice. Even with original reviews, you are swimming in a sea of so many competitive reviews that nothing you could do will make you stand out. There are always the 6 authority sites (the cnets, amazon, walmart, etc) then there are the “reviewers.” I guess I could just keep throwing backlinks so it creeps up. I’m not writing any more reviews for that site.
I have another site with printers, I added one review but it sits at position 100 for the item. I should probably backlink it, but I’m wondering if it will help.
I think picking something with less competition is critical. Someone put a site up with [some movie]+[halloween costume] and ranked in two days. It was a $50 costume. The completion was almost non existent.
I get a few amazon clickthrus here and there from the tv site. Also, I’m starting to believe exact domain names are very important too.
Printers – Mike´s last blog ..Canon MF4350D
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:25 am
Electronics and tvs can be quite competitive niches. Also, they can go out of fashion really quickly so you constantly need to add new products to your site. You could spend months getting backlinks for a tv product review and then they update the model.
For this reason, if it were me, I would be focusing on backlinks for generic keywords rather than product specific keywords. For instance I would be going for keywords like “tv product reviews” or “Sony tv reviews” rather than keywords like “Sony Bravia XYZ TV”.
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Kelly says:
November 7, 2010 at 12:11 pm
Boy, is that the truth. I really agree with the person at the top who cited fear as the biggest reason for people to jump around. It really was for me, when I first started. Now that I have more experience, I’m spending less time creating sites and much more time working on getting traffic to the sites I have.
Kelly´s last blog ..Yoga PLR – 5 Articles
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:27 am
Excellent Kelly. Many people spend most of their time on adding content and building more websites. If instead they focused most of their time on getting traffic things would be a lot different.
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Gary says:
November 7, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Paula, your comments are very helpful…and sobering! Concentrating on only one or a handful of pages for 10 weeks would take real commitment! And I guess that’s what you’re saying: you’re not describing a get-rich-quick scheme.
I wonder if you could supply a link to one of your one-page product review sites — or a site with 5 or so pages — that you and Wanda have been operating with some success. It would be great to have an example of the work you’re doing to underscore the points in your post.
Thank you.
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:31 am
There really are no ‘get rich quick’ ways for making money online. Someone might have the secret to making money overnight but if they do they probably wouldn’t tell anyone anyway.
It actually took us 4 years before we started to see some decent money come in and the only reason it took so long was that we kept moving from one thing to the next. If we had focused from the start, things would have been a lot different.
You also might want to take a look at this post:
http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/2010/08/07/can-i-see-an-example-of-your-website/
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Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing says:
November 8, 2010 at 10:45 am
I skimmed to see if anyone mentioned it already.
I don’t know how old you are in ‘net years, but I’d say with a pretty good confidence level that the whole multiple sites thing started with the ill-fated lunacy of the MFA (made for adsense) fiasco some years back.
The more ambitious (see: dumber then most) had hundreds running at any one time…..I don’t mean a mere 1-200 either.
Once Google brought the largest smack-down on net history, they picked themselves up and changed the model to niche affiliate sites.
Still not the brightest bunch. They switched from adsense to affiliate products, but still had/have thin crappy sites.
Yes indeed, the authority site is the way to go unless you have the mojo; i.e APP.
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..What’s Your Email Preference- HTML – HTML w-Template – or Plain Text
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 5:22 pm
I don’t think these people were dumb…just desperate. We all just want to make a living online and we want to trust the so-called gurus who tell us that building multiple websites is the answer.
We never did get caught up in the ‘made for Adsense’ type sites but we just as easily could have if we didn’t know any better.
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Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing says:
November 8, 2010 at 6:04 pm
Many of them were the guru’s of the time. They in-particular were not desperate, but greedy.
Similar to black-hatters it was largely a case of, “we know it won’t last, just grab what ya can”.
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..What’s Your Email Preference- HTML – HTML w-Template – or Plain Text
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Bridget says:
November 8, 2010 at 3:27 pm
I just want to thank you for this wonderful website. I stumbled upon it today and am so happy I did! I have been working online for 2 months now without making money yet, I know it is a slow process and your stories help motivate me to keep going!
One question – when setting up your WordPress sites do you put your reviews/articles as posts or pages? Or does it matter? I have heard conflicting ideas about which is best and just wondering if you have a preference.
Thanks!
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 5:24 pm
We generally use Pages but the only reason we do that is that we use the Flexsqueeze theme and it allows us to remove the sidebar. Removing the sidebar means there are no distractions for the reader and the are more likely to click through to the merchant.
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Gary says:
November 8, 2010 at 8:44 pm
Thanks for the great reminder.
I had a question, do you use any wordpress plugin to cloak your affiliate links to Amazon?
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 8:48 pm
We don’t really bother too much about cloaking Amazon links only because most people like shopping at Amazon and if they see the link they are generally happy to click on it.
However for a lot of our other links we use the Ninja Affiliate plugin.
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Backlink Bully says:
November 8, 2010 at 8:44 pm
Love your content!
That advice really helped me when I first bought Amazonian Profit Plan
You see, last holiday season, right when Amazon came out with their 2009 hot Christmas Toy list, I found a TON of buyer keywords that got really good searches…
So I went out an bought quite a few domains with the product names in them(probably about 7 or so) and went about building the sites
This was on Nov 6, 2009…I totally remember that day because I was really excited
I think you know where I am going with this…
I spread myself too thin because I couldn’t get all of those sites ranked in time.
So that part of your course really hit home for me so I am very happy with your course and I highly recommmend it
-Mark
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 8:50 pm
Thanks Mark – so glad you like the course. And so glad that you are actually implementing it. You will notice a difference when you focus your efforts on just one thing at at time.
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Shirley says:
November 8, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Hi Paula and Wanda,
Another timely post for me.
I have been away in the UK for almost 3 months as my mother was very ill and passed away a few weeks ago. I put everything else on hold during that time. Now I’m back home feeling confused, unsettled and wondering what on earth I was doing before I went away, and where to start again.
I have decided the best place to start is right here and follow this format at least for the next 10-12 weeks and work on just a couple of pages with Amazon products reviews. I needed this clarity!
Thanks again
Shirley
Shirley´s last blog ..Work at Home Job Ideas for Senior’s
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Paula says:
November 8, 2010 at 11:49 pm
So sorry to hear about your mother Shirley. I can see why you are feeling a little unsettled.
Having some time away from your online business may have been a good thing even though it wasn’t for the best of reasons. We tend to work solidly on our businesses without taking time out to see what is working and what isn’t and a break from it can do wonders.
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John says:
November 9, 2010 at 6:15 pm
In a general sense, if I were to write an article a day and submit to ezine articles, would that be an effective link building strategy?
John´s last blog ..Nov 5- Juicing Recipe Gingorapple
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Paula says:
November 9, 2010 at 7:42 pm
We don’t really do much article marketing in terms of submitting to Ezine and other article directories. What we do instead is submit articles to other bloggers and website owners. You don’t get much traffic from this however the backlinks are very strong.
But if you’ve had success with submitting to Ezine in the past then by all means do that. One article a day sounds good to me.
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Paul@detox foot spa says:
November 9, 2010 at 7:32 pm
I’m so glad that you beautiful ladies tell it like it is. I have been preaching those same ideas to my brother for the last year. I have told him in the past to stop reaching for the next best thing and focus on one thing and make it a success before moving on. Now I can show him your blog post to read for himself.
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Paula says:
November 9, 2010 at 7:43 pm
That should be tattooed onto to anyone who wants to make money online so they never forget it….”focus on one thing and make it a success before moving on”.
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Izrul says:
November 9, 2010 at 10:14 pm
Thanks for this wonderful post Paula. Can you explain to me a little bit here? Lets say I’m creating a Product review called “Ultimate Dog Secrets” (just an example). Should I target the keyword “ultimate dog secrets” for SEO purposes or should I target 2 or 3 more keywords that are related to the product like “dog training”, “how to take good care of dog”. etc.
What about domain name? Should we include the product name in our main domain?
But what if the product name has no searches or just a few searches per month, wouldn’t it be a waste of time doing so even though if we manage to get onto the 1st page of Google?
Since you suggest that we concentrate on a few pages, I need to do it right at the very beginning. Hopefully, you can understand my questions above.
Izrul´s last blog ..cat-toilet-training-the-easy-way
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Paula says:
November 10, 2010 at 12:43 am
Your questions requires more of a response than I can give in this comment but here are the basics.
If I were promoting a product about ‘ultimate dog secrets’ then I would do my keyword research to find related keywords to ensure that I would get enough traffic.
Then I would create my product review and try to get those keywords in the review BUT I wouldn’t stress too much if I couldn’t get them in the review because I would rather write a helpful review that makes sense than fill it full of unneccessary keywords.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the domain name. If I could find a domain name with the keyword ‘ultimate dog secrets’ (assuming that is a good keyword) then great…I would be happy with that. If I couldn’t find a domain name with that keyword in it then I wouldn’t worry about it and just get something related.
We have product reviews on websites with domain names that have nothing to do with the product and they make money.
Then I would spend most of my time getting backlinks to my site using the keywords that I found as the text links.
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Vizio XVT553SV Review says:
November 9, 2010 at 10:54 pm
I can identify with this because I also have about 100 niche blogs and sites and I only make about $300/mo from all of them combined. I’ve been at this for 8 years and I have known for a long time that I am spread too thin. However, I have also been looking for what method of making money online that I like the most and suits me best. I’ve tried everything. I have found that I enjoy building blogs and d9ing keyword research. I hate the amount of time I spend online doing this though. I hate writing articles but I outsource this. But if I had it to do all over again after countless hours spent, thousands of dollars spent, and trying everything under the online sun…I would say just stick to 1 website and build it with more content and especially backlinks for several years.
I also appreciate how many replies Paula responds to. Hope you dont mind but I wanted to put this link here for help with backlinking. It is an affiliate link but I wouldn’t mention it if I didnt think it can help. It’s software that finds exact and relevant places to build backlinks according to the keywords you feed it. It saves a lot of time. You can check it out at http://myownbizniz.com/mcc.
I also started to build Amazon products using the exact product model name/number in the domain. I sold my first big ticket item this way. They rank very quickly on the 1st page but you have to build lots of these when new products come out.
Vizio XVT553SV Review´s last blog ..Vizio XVT553SV Internet TV
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Paula says:
November 10, 2010 at 12:54 am
Eight years is a long time to be trying to make it all work for you.
My advice for someone like you who has that many sites is to head over to Google Analytics and find your top 5 pages from all of your sites. So the ones getting the most traffic. And I don’t mean the top 5 pages from each site…just the top 5 in total.
Then rework the reviews on those 5 pages so they are long and helpful. And then just focus on getting more traffic to those 5 pages.
You don’t need to create any new product reviews. Make use of the traffic you are already getting and just rework the content you already have.
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Santel says:
November 9, 2010 at 11:50 pm
Ok, after reading this now I understand the concept and also answered to my long-waited question why I can’t make much money …
Thank for sharing this, I believed I know what to do next to get more income for my family. Appreciate this post!
Santel´s last blog ..Thank to new sponsor- Khmer Live TV Online
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Wanda says:
November 10, 2010 at 12:58 am
It used to be so frustrating when we worked so hard on all our websites, and didn’t make much money. So we would start another website to see if it would be the magic one that would bring in the money.
One day while we were discussing what was happening and what we were going to do next, we went back to basics and did a thorough analysis of our sites. It was at this point that we decided to concentrate on only one site and let the rest sit until we could get to them in the future or flip them, which is another option.
It was also at this point that we hit on our formula for promoting Amazon products, writing good quality, informative reviews and the dreaded backlinking; from there on the money just flowed.
Wishing you every success Santel.
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Tony@EmporiumWatches says:
November 10, 2010 at 12:21 am
This post was a real eye opener for me. I felt you were talking to me, as a matter this is what I had been doing for the 3 years on online marketing and only recently have I decided that I can chase em all, I need to focus and really work my market. Thank you for posting this.
Tony@EmporiumWatches´s last blog ..Invicta Men’s Watch 6620 II – Collection Chronograph Stainless Steel
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Wanda says:
November 10, 2010 at 1:06 am
I think this topic has touched a lot of people, Tony. We all seem to make the same mistakes. Multiple websites = way too much work. Focussing on one site and providing good quality reviews is certainly more manageable and more rewarding. Plus you get to actually spend some time with your family. Working on 20 sites as we once were, meant we never left the computer.
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cisco asa says:
November 10, 2010 at 3:13 am
Paula and Wanda,
Firstly thanks a lot for all the info you give out to us. My opinion is that the 3-5 product review pages that you focus on must be on a trusted and old domain site. The whole website “status” does matter a lot in the eyes of Google. I agree that Google ranks pages but those pages are better to be on trusted and “content thick” websites rather than on new domains with very few pages. Thats why ezine articles rank well on their own. Its because they are on a big authority domain site.
cisco asa´s last blog ..Basic Cisco Switch Configuration
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Paula says:
November 10, 2010 at 5:56 am
Nobody really knows what Google is thinking. We get a few hints every now and then from people like Matt Cutts but other than that it is all pure speculation.
Old ‘trusted’ sites probably do better but its all relative really. You could have an old site but if it has nobody linking to it and it is full of poor quality content then it is not going to rank in the eyes of Google no matter how old it is.
If you have a new site with good quality backlinks and good quality content then it will rank.
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Shaz says:
November 10, 2010 at 5:03 am
Hi Paula and Wanda, I stumbled upon your blog just a few months back and get really hook with your articles and ideas. I bought your amazonian profit plan when it was launched and really glad that I bought it. I have put up a site last month based on your book and now working on to get those backlinks. I hope to see some good results from my site soon ( I don’t know how soon…)
Thanks
Shaz
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Paula says:
November 10, 2010 at 5:57 am
Excellent Shaz. Just keep working on those backlinks. It’s not the most exciting task but it will work if you keep at it.
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We are Wanda & Paula - 2 friends who successfully operate a number of online internet businesses. In fact we have over 20 blogs and websites making money. We have learnt a lot over the years particularly in the area of natural search, SEO and traffic generation. If you want to make a living online then we are here to help. Read more...
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