So as I somewhat mentioned in my previous post on January, February is actually the first month that I went lower in my income from the previous month and for a few good reasons.
I discovered that changing my theme ( I wanted to try a really nice looking wootheme template, similar to the one on this blog) on my main website destroyed my income within a few days in the beginning of February. I then quickly changed back to my old theme and I started seeing my keywords go back up in ranking around the 7th. Since I had a hard time believing my theme could be such a big factor in my rankings I tried it again…. Around the 10th and as you can see, by the 12th I had reached a noticeably lower income again. So I was wondering why. Could my artisteer theme that we recommend in our how to start your website post really be THAT powerful? Since I was leaving to Miami on the 15th I decided to just go back to the old theme, make it a bit better looking and leave things as is. As you can see, my rankings have clearly started going up again but is it really all the theme`s fault?
SeoMOZ had a pro version trial going on this month and I gave it a shot. While they crawled my website I saw something interesting that rung a bell of something in SEO that I learned a long time ago ( I think from SEO moz actually, or another big white hat blog). Too many inbound links can cause confusion for the google bot, or rather I think it simply stops crawling them all. My website has been over 100 posts for a while now and since I had a neat dropdown plugin to the right (sorted by theme/categories) each page actually linked to ALL my posts meaning I had hundreds of internal links per post. I think the problem is that the woo themes made this even worse with all it`s cool looking widgets that added even more internal links. Either way, I changed the widget linking structure in my site around feb 25th and as you can see, I definitely have been getting back all my rankings 100%. I was getting back most of them around the 15th when I put back my old theme but I was still struggling with my more competitive keywords… Now it seems I`m /1 for 90% of the keywords I used to rank #1 for (some new ones joined the family too 😉 ).
Sooo things are looking really good now. Here are some of the other income sources (btw should I bother putting pictures of these?? LEt me know if you really care to see amazon or clickbank)
– $60 random CPA offers that I still am testing
$120 Amazon
~$90 Clickbank
~ $70 infolinks
Something interesting about infolinks, look how much it made on the last day of February! Wow, that’s actually quite decent now. I put it back on my main website a few days ago as part of my ongoing tests to see if it affects my adsense income or not (now that my adsense income is back in the normal range) and $10 in a day is quite good. Also, I have a website with about 500-800 daily visits and a low CTR of 1-2% and infolinks almost helped me double my (somewhat poor) income of $3-10 daily on it. For some reason the infolinks ads do not seem to impede at all my users on that website and they also have a similar 1-4% CTR and a $3-5 ecpm (the adsense one is only a bit higher).
Anyway, I’m soon back home and I can’t wait to work on my websites now towards new things instead of scratching my head wondering how I could be losing rankings because of a simple theme change… BTW for now I’m sticking to my artisteer theme but I might go back to the woo theme to give it a shot and see if the heavy internal links were really the issue. Not sure if I am ready to lose a few more hundred $ doing this though :P.
Hello Alex,
how many adsense account you have? With many accounts how you recive your checks
from google. Because to get money from google you need your real physical address and name of course? No?
If google use bank transfer as well to send adsense earnings to your account?
Simply can you explain a little bit how you manage your adsense accounts? If you dont want to write about that here, please can you answer me to my email address.
Thanks a lot for so much information your site gives to me.
I.E
I only have one adsense account, fingerman has access to more than one from deals with other people but has been closing them down and replacing some adsense websites with CPA offers.
Saw your post on BHW and decided to check out your post. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and inspiring me to continue even though I have done nothing but FAILED these last 4-5 months. I haven’t earned more than $10 dollars total. Im hoping persistance and willingness to learn will pay off one day.
Hello alex, how are you?
Ey man i’ve got questions regarding Internal links… for example i’ve got an adsense site that is making me about $15 per day and in the widgets section i use:
archive and tag cloud ….. do you use any of these in your sites?
No, I don’t really like them but that’s personal choice. Dave likes to use tag clouds which is why we have one as part of a widget with this theme but I just don’t like the look of them nor do I care about putting appropriate tags for my content so I simply do not use it. I usually have categories or recent posts + pages on my right menu. I have been experimenting with putting adsense there but it does not seem to increase my income so I’ll probably take them off and make my website look cleaner.
Thanks for the answer… i will experiment with that, actually im now making a new adsense site and im using some of the tips that you are sharing here… i will tell you back how is working for me ; )..
Great, keep us updated! I try to change things a bit with every new website I create, I have a few more in the making and so does Dave/Fingerman. Currently I’m trying new article services and directory submissions with them.
Hey a question, I was thinking of a niche website idea where I would make different websites with the nutritional information of popular fast food chains (ex. mcdonalds, KFC etc) Just wondering if it would be illegal to write the nutritional information on the site or to copy their nutritional table or anything like that.
Also what do you think about comparison websites? Ex, Sunblock vs Sunscreen
I think you have great ideas, I have some comparison type keywords on my website and they work very well. Not only are they usually great keywords in terms of CTR but also I try to make them really good pages in terms of content and people seem to comment on them a lot. I have some pages on nutritional values of products that I copied from amazon with a link back to them (affiliate link…) I never got a problem and I do not think you would too. Sometimes I add the disclaimer in a caption of “taken from X website” to be safe.
Thank you. I guess my follow up question would be, is it an alright idea to have one article with backlinks to many of my websites? For example, if I have websites on Mcdonalds nutrition, Wendys nutrition and Burger King nutrition, and make my article (for websites like hubpages) named something like “The fast food burger restaurants with the worst nutritional value) while linking all 3 in the article? Or should I still be making separate articles for each?
You can definitely link to all 3 pages from the same article. If you use an article distribution service I would spin the anchor text however 2-3 times, I had times were if I only was optimizing for 1 anchor text it took me much longer to rank.
thanks for the help man
how do you come up with ideas for keywords?
also you were talking about multiple keywords for one page. how do you do this? and wouldnt it be better to pick a broad keyword like ‘blanket’ if you;re planning on doing that?
1. I’m going to join the keyword academy.
2. How much work did you put in a week to start making some good $$$?
3. Did it take about a year?
4. When you hire people to write articles can you just hire them for one to five articles or so?
1. Cool!, hopefully you use one of our links 😉
2. I was first working at least 30-40 weeks for my first 6 months, it’s probably why I managed to make a full time income out of this while )as you will see) some people at TKA are still struggling to make 1k+ a month after 1 year. Ultimately, as long as you put at least 10 hours a week you will see results.
3. I reached the 2k/month point after like 8 months.
4. Yup, at odesk you can just hire ppl for a job. This is what I typically do and then the ones I like I hire them them for more work later on.
Sounds good. I’ll use one of your links. Thanks for the quick reply.
Alex, here is what Woo Themes’ staff told me about your bad experience with Woo theme:
“A change of a website’s design will always impact SEO, especially if it’s not been tweaked as much as the previous design.
Anyway, I don’t pretend to be an SEO expert, but would highly recommend that it’s obviously not *just* the theme that changed and that it still needed to be set up and tweaked accordingly.”
Not sure why you would consult their staff, it’s obvious they would defend their product. Either way, I’m pretty sure the conflict was woo themes and my existing layout/plugins which gave my pages hundreds of internal links due to drop down menus (too many for google bot to follow them all I think). The wootheme just put the problem at the front while it was probably going to be a problem with my older theme eventually as I did more posts.
Anyway, I might try it again in the future, I’m just not ready to test it and possibly lose money again for now, I want to move on to other things for March. I used to increase my income a lot faster back in 2010 and for some reason once I attained $100/day it’s been quite a hurdle to overcome. I really want to reach $150 by the end of June and $300 by the end of 2011.
Hey, this is Tammy from Infolinks. Interesting about changing your theme…and great news about Infolinks on your site. If any of your readers are interested, feel free to email us at [email protected]. We can also help you optimize your links for great monetization.
Have a good one,
Tammy
http://www.infolinks.com
http://www.facebook.com/infolinks
Maybe you can conduct some test on your artisteer theme with similar number of internal links with your woo theme. See if the internal links is really the reason.
Ya that’s another way I could test it, maybe at the end of March. I mean… I love woothemes so I want to end up using that theme, I use some woo themes on a few other websites without problems.
Hello Alex,
what about trademark keywords. Product reviews and other stuff.
Do you have any site that is possibly somebodys trademark, some product review site?
Do you ever had some problems with these kind of sites?
Some suggestions to avoid problems if i have some trademark keywords websites?
Thanks!
I.E
Nah I don’t use “productnamereview” type websites, I see them all over the place. I think you can get a letter from the product name owner to bring it down but since most of those websites are owned by marketers that are promoting that product in a good light (review huh…?) they probably do not.
If you have a trademark keyword website you are trading the EMD bonus on searches for the risk of one day getting banned. I would not do it because my goal is passive income and websites that last for ever but I can see it as being a short term gain idea (and maybe you’ll never get into trouble).
Do you backup your websites with Amazon S3 or something?
I have wp backup plugins sending me backups of my most important sites every week. My main ones are hosted on hostgator and I got hacked a few times in the past but they did a great job at restoring everything quickly.
Alex, how did you get hacked? Was it code injection or server hacked? Before i switched to HostGator i used BlueHost and they were good, but one day i have found that all my websites got hacked. I discovered that .htaccess file was modified and redirecting to index.php created by hacker which contained Eval64 code and that file redirected to malware site. BlueHost suspended my account and told me to fix the problem. I asked BlueHost how could that happen and they told me that i was hacked.
I researched and asked people about this hack and they told me that my whole server was compromised so apparently it was BlueHost’s fault in protection. I told them that and they refuted that. I also had a few times support ending chat. I left them and switched to HostGator which appear more friendlier and i can get support for more problems compared to BlueHost as for most problems they just provide email support.
I heard good things about Hostmonster but since this is a division of BlueHost. I won’t consider them because there is obviously not much difference.
It was server hacked, well they changed my index and htaccess file so that when someone goes on my website from any landing page they get a “hacked by xx” page blah blah. It probably had malware and stuff because I do remember getting my paypal hacked a few days/weeks later. Anyway, that happened at 10am and everything was back to normal by noon. Actually, I think we might just recommend Hostgator over bluehost, we were discussing it and both me and Dave use hostgator and never had problems while I do sometimes hear some complains about bluehosts (I never had problems but I only have 2 websites on their servers).
Hey Alex,
I found keyword, which I would like to rank, but I can’t understand one thing about CPC.
Here is 2 pictures. Which Avg. Cpc is correct?
http://img64.imageshack.us/i/90435641.jpg/
http://img24.imageshack.us/i/83590293.jpg/
Odd, either way go to http://www.spyfu.com/ and enter your keyword there, spyfu is usually a good way to further analyse the CPC of a keyword. Also, you might want to do a quick google search of your keyword. If you see advertisements than you know some people are bidding on ads for it (hopefully you see 4+) so that’s a good indicator that theirs money to be made there
Cost/Click $1.58 – $1.94
Advertisers N/A
I feel a bit sad, but I’ll try to rank this keyword anyway. Thanks for information.
Bribebox, if that keyword does not have advertisers that does not mean there are no advertisers for that niche. It only means that there are no advertisers that are targetting that exact keyword, but to know if there are advertisers in that niche, i think you should check for 1-word and 2-word keywords.
hey alex, I found keyword with numbers in it, would you buy domain with numbers in it?…
the numbers are also in the keyword…would you go on something like that?
I never bought a domain with numbers but I doubt it changes much, especially if it’s part of your keyword. I would not use it as an extension to a domain (like “acnecures” is taken so you take “acnecures1”) because it looks spammy but as part of a keyword I would probably do it.
I have an adsense question. I have added my website to the specific website list in the adsense interface, and in the adsense/YPN plugin you mentioned I have put in my adsense account id. Is there anything else I need to do to link the adsense account to my site to gain profits? Also that adsense/YPN plugin should work on its own right, or will income only happen from the actual code I get for ads from adsense and when people click on that? Just wondering because I am still looking at a 0.00 earnings in adsense with 8 clicks and I know they are not entirely all mine as I have had a few people I know check out the site.
You should not be clicking your adsense ads or let ppl you know “check it out”. You will get banned soon if you keep doing that and google is smart at knowing to not charge those clicks, I remember I click’d one of my ads by mistake on a new page and google paid $0 for it.
0 dollars for that individual click or for subsequent clicks on that ad? smart googles
For only that click. I actually panicked because I did not want google to ban me for self clicking ( I know they can track that easily) so I was happy to see they made it cost $0.
Hi Alex/Dave
Great blog – I’ve got a lot of value from it’s no bullshit approach. I like the clear easy steps you’ve laid out and it’s inspired me to take this up again. Thanks.
One area I’m interested in learning more about is the whole outsourcing side of passive income.
When did you start outsourcing things? What did you outsource? How much do you outsource? What do you currently do yourself?
It would be good to get an idea how to streamline all of the various processes, and at what stage you start outsourcing things from wordpress set up, article writing, backlinking etc.
Thanks again!
I started outsourcing on month 3 or so when I was at $1/day, I had a full time job and at this point I figured writers could write more than I can in the hour I was paid for at my job. Shortly after I started doing article submissions as backlinks and my writers went on to do that too. I still write some content on my websites, usually when I feel I can make a really big quality article for a good keyword, with the google algo change I’m trying to make sure my page is the best content in the top 10 results for that keyword.
Dave had made a lot of money from other areas of IM so when he started SEO he was massively outsourcing article writing and backlinks. If you are new to IM I do not think it’s wise to just outsource everything off the start, you need to learn a lot of it yourself and test things… Also gives you something to compare what you can do vs outsourcers.
We both always setup and manage our blogs ourselves.
What kind of stuff would you recommend a newbie to learn?
Reason I ask is b/c I don’t want to write articles.
Do you give the article writer’s credit when you post their stuff?
Well that’s a broad question, theirs a lot of stuff in IM you can learn about such as PPC (pay per click advertising), selling products online, and the focus of this website which is SEO. So I guess I recommend a newbie to learn about SEO. Finding keywords to build websites on, build your website and then promote it with backlinks.
If it’s guest posts were they want links back to their website in exchange for posting their article on your website yes but if it’s a writer from Odesk or whatever, no. Get ppl form Odesk if you really do not want to write your own articles, I did mine at first (and still heavily edit the ones I get from my writers these days) and I feel it’s important but who knows how much of an impact it really has.
how do u ensure that your workers write up to par (i figure their quality is mediocre, since they must research and parrot off other sites) for certain/new key words? it sounds like you outsource, get a mediocre article, you fix it and basically spent the same amount of time as if you did it yourself
I used to have medium quality writers, recently I hired people from the US who write really well and exactly like I want.
Alex i think having authority website on WordPress platform is riskier than static/regular website because of being hacked. Additionally, static website loads faster than WordPress and uses less resources.
That’s true, but wordpress helps me a lot in terms of customization or plugins that right now for me it’s not something I’m considering. I actually added some security plugins + database backups to my 2 main websites after getting hacked to help keep them safe.
This has been pretty inspirational. I’ve been at this business for a bit, and haven’t really gotten past 5 bucks a day.
I joined thekeywordacademy – its cool – hey dave and alex, can you tell me what usernames you are so I can read your posts on there? – and also can you mention which gurus on there you follow? (so i can read their posts too and learn something)
Thanks!
Please keep updating this blog.
I barely ever post in the TKA forums because they are not very open minded with comments outside of the TKA training guide so besides a few comments I don’t really “share” anything there. Dave does not post there and only uses their tools when I recommended them to him a few months ago but besides 1-2 forums he rarely cares about reading them.
Ya it can be kinda “cult-like” over at TKA. They got some nice tools and nice people though. I’m really freakin pissed at myself — i started about the same time you did (with the goal of making $100 dollars a day) and i got my ass kicked. Learned a lot, but it’s been brutal. In regard to your theme change causing a drop in rankings, Grizz talked a bit about how he has observed a drop in rankings after the swapping of merely one widget. He was saying how speed seems to play a hell of an important role in ranking these days. It would be interesting to check your WebMaster Tools graph and see if you experienced a speed hit on the day you changed your theme.
Ya, TKA is great no doubt, they have great guides but ya I just don’t mention things that go beyond what they teach there because of the cult like mentality. It’s not a bad idea that they have that though, because a lot of people do not work on this stuff 30+ hours a week like I used to do when I first started so if they constantly get distracted with other ideas they will never get anything done…
Anyway, you may be right about the other factors, I’ll see if I can find information on that in webmaster tools.
Hey, what style of blog do you guys have here? I want to ahve the same thing where you can list the titles on the main page, but not show all the content.
also, do you use one adsense account for all your wordpress sites with advertising? i tried it with two and it only shows clicks from one, even if i made income with the other its weird.
it’s just part of the woothemes options. You can use plugins that do excerpts instead.
Yes, one adsense account (in my case at least) and you have to setup tracking to make it differentiate websites in tracking
nice site man,
how much time did you commit to this when you started?
i want to get started!
30-40 hours a week for many months. After that some weeks 10, some weeks 40.
Pretty sure Fingerman was putting 40-60 hours a day for a few months and nowadays he works for 5 hours a week or something stupidly low.
ya if you’re using webmaster tools click SITE PERFORMANCE and you’ll see a graph like this.
http://freenuts.com/images/Webmaster-Tools-speed.gif
If the theme caused a speed issue and that caused you to lose rank, you should see a dramatic speed hit on the day you changed your theme. There was also the February Algorithm change that also hit a lot of people.
Ya I looked for my main website and I got “On average, pages in your site take 4.8 seconds to load (updated on Feb 20, 2011). This is slower than 73% of sites. These estimates are of medium accuracy (between 100 and 1000 data points).” This was also pretty consistent during all of February even when I changed the theme so I guess it was not that. However, it does seem like my site is slow, I suppose it’s mostly because of wordpress, I try to have small image file sizes and I use caching plugins… This one (thelinkback.com) is a bit faster but it still says slower than 55%.
The Feb algo update was not the cause of lost ranking, though so far in march I’m having trouble ranking back for some of my main keywords on my main website but I’m getting the same numbers in terms of traffic ( I guess I am getting a lot of long tail now). My other sites are doing well, I think I’ll put more time on #2-3 this month.
The hostgator techs recommend using w3 total cache.
http://support.hostgator.com/articles/specialized-help/technical/wordpress/optimizing-wordpress
what do you use to check your rank? i usually use MarketSamuraii these days.
In the algo change, oddly, me and fraser both noticed a loss in ranking but an increase in traffic. which tells me that the algo change was focused upon “money words” – possibly keyword phrases of 3 words or less. Though i dunno… he was saying in the forums that he didnt quite see how to interpret that…
Some good advice but that post is more to manage server load and less about website speed optimization,
I used to like market samurai for rank tracking but when I reached 200+ keywords to track for one of my websites (maybe 50+ for others) it takes for ever to check. Also, on my new internet connection in this apartment it seems that it slows down everything so the 5-10 minutes that it does the rank tracking I cannot do anything else, and with 5-8 websites to monitor that becomes a hassle. I sometimes use the free rank tracker from seo moz or traffic travis which is a program I use only for rank tracking since it seems to work really quick. 200 keywords take 30 seconds. The disadvantage as when I’m on free public wifi (like currently) Google bans me after I do one website rank tracking :P.
I was hesitating about recommending market samurai on this blog, I still rarely use it but overall while it feels great as a newbie as I get more advanced everything about it is too slow for me… keyword research, top 10 competition analysis ( I do it manually, but I gotta admit I might revise this now that they connect with majestic SEO) and rank tracker.
I just see a lot of fluctuations in keyword rankings, sometimes I’m #1, then #3, and I see the same with my competition. Been having a harder time to maintain #1
Rank Tracker by link-assistant is by far my favorite rank tracker. I export the data to my own keyword tool for more stringent analysis. But the problem is its pricey and uses a pay-per-month paradigm. I use market samurai to check niche sites. Because of the way MS is coded, its an inherently slow program though. But the interface is really super simple to use so i like it for minor rank tracking. I tend to recommend MS to people starting out cuz its versatile and cheap and you get exposure to a lot of different tools in one package. Even though i dont use most of them anymore, its almost worth its price just as a “learning tool.”
Hey Alex,
What do you think about this link building strategy? Is it worth?
http://www.warriorforum.com/attachments/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/7585d1299742438-follow-linkwheel-diagram-you-will-love-results-kings-seo-chart.jpg
Well it’s nothing special, it’s building backlinks to your own backlinks basically and building up web 2.0s. I basically do that for harder to rank for keywords and it seems to help, it’s just very time intensive so I have only done it for 3-4 keywords in the past. I usually let my web 2.0s age before I link my website from them. I kinda want to hire someone to do this for me, among other things. Gonna have a post up on this topic soon.
@Alex
There is no need to let your Web 2.0s age. They are already authoritative and trusted. Maybe you meant to say that you need to appear natural to Moderators and Google when posting on Web 2.0? I heard that if you register and posts content right away or something, it raises red flag…
Hey Alex, i really would like to know how you judge what keyword is worth going for, but not using TKA. I want basic metrics, PR, what to look in top 10 i.e. how do you determine the competitiveness of keyword. TKA just tells you Green Light or Red Light however for me it is not enough. Just like Micro Niche Finder tells you what is good and what is bad and most “bad” keywords end up being good keywords that people missed.
@rainman
There was a period when Rank Tracker gave free licenses to people.
I agree about web 2.0s like hubpage or squiddo already having trust but sub domain style websites like from wordpress or live journal I treat them as a new website. I already gave my TKA metrics elsewhere.. I don’t use their green keywords metrics, I modify them a bit but anyway, in general I look for keywords to start a website on I look for keywords of 5k+ searches and $1 CPC. For new pages on an existing website I look for 2k+ searches per month. All exact. I usually just check the top 3, see if they have at least one website I can feel I can beat. Ideally something Pr2 or less with under a hundred backlinks (or under a thousand if it’s a website theme keyword).
hey
thanks for all this great info!! you guys should have a Q&A section, i hate having to roll through all these pages to check out oter questions.
how often fo you post articles on your own affiliate websites?
is there a good example website you can direct us to? maybe not your own, but a website that is a good model for what an affiliate or adsense marketer should be aiming for?
Ya you are probably right about the Q&A… Starting to have massive amounts of comments on certain pages like this one.. I wonder if I should break it down with comment pages (something like 20 comment per page).
Most of my websites are not for affiliates, at least not the one currently making me and Fingerman money. Some of them have CPA stuff though. I try to make 1 post on all my websites a month but that’s just how I like things, some of my earlier websites do not have any new posts on them for months so really it’s personal preference. I usually make new posts targeting new keywords, they are not just added for the sake of re-hashing what is elsewhere on the website.
so you spend the majority of the time creating backlinks to your site instead? im looking at a webpage i have now that i want to make money with using google adsense and it’s not first page, but when it does get there im wondering if people will click it, see nothing is there and leave.
thats why i was hoping there was a good example page you could direct readers to.
q&a would be good for sure, you need maybe a mini forum or something
Not too sure what you mean by “if people will click it, see nothing is there and leave.” But…. if people go on your webpage and those who do not click on your ads are always pressing “back” because your website is not very good at providing what they are searching for, that’s not a good long term strategy. Sooner or later you will either get manually reviewed and de ranked somewhat or maybe in the future (or already) google will reduce your rank when it sees people are always bouncing off your website to look at the others. They can already track when people go back to google search results
Wow…just found this site today and gotta say you guys are really giving a lot back. Heck, just from this post and all of the comments you’ve replied to.
Building up that karma big time…stack the karma, stack the paper
Alex, you meantioned that each post was linked from other pages? Did your dropdown plugin was linking to posts and not sub-categories?
Regarding WooThemes, think about e-commerce sites. They have thousands of pages and they have category menus on every page which are linking to every category from thousands of pages. Do they get penalized? I don’t know, but if e-commerce sites have this then why your site shouldn’t.
Alex, I read your post at WF and was wondering how many pages do your top 3 sites (earning the $100/day) have?
I’ve started growing my small xfactor niche sites to authority sites a few months ago and seeing some great results from some of them. I know the others would follow in a few months.
top one (60% of my income) is ~100 posts, #2 which is like 15% is ~30 posts and #3 is 6 posts.
Hey Alex, what’s your Warrior Forum name? Great blog pal, love the transparency. Cheers
Natlex 🙂