I’ve somehow managed to work fulltime online since 2003.

In the majority of that time, I have made most mon-ey by creating websites and selling them.

So I always look at trends and study closely which sites are popular and selling for good amounts.

Then I create sites following those trends and sell them.

It’s probably just that which has allowed me the freedom I’ve had for the last 9 years.

Well around 6 months ago, I noticed a site went up for sale called Blippitt.com

It took 3 attempts for the owner to sell it on Flippa as buyers backed out the first 2 times. [Read more...]

In this post I’ll run through how I make the most out of my blog content.

Years ago, I would add a new post to a blog and that would have been the end of it. The post is added and I move on. If I wanted to use an article for promotion purposes I would write another one. If I wanted to add another post to the blog, I would write another one.

These days I use what I call the ‘Content Maximization’ method.

It involves taking a unique article and getting the most out of it. So here’s exactly what I do:

Step #1 – Write a unique post and add it to your blog

This is self explanatory. You would write (or outsource) a unique article and post it to your blog. Once this is done, you wait until the page is indexed by Google. You can check this by searching for “site:www.YourPageURL.com” and see if anything is returned. If nothing is returned, then the page isn’t indexed yet and you should wait before moving onto the next step. [Read more...]

I’ve been building auto blogs for around 8-9 years now. Even before some of the popular auto blogging plugins such as WP Robot were even created.

I had my own very simple script made that pulled in RSS news feeds, images and also span random paragraphs of content.

Yes, it was simple but it worked!

Since I started I think I’ve sold at least 500 auto blogs, probably closer to 1000. Most of them do make a small amount of money and because you can build them fast, it’s always worth giving it a go.

Now depending on what content your sites are producing, auto blogs might not be worth it anymore for Adsense blogs. If your content is good then fair enough but if it’s just gibberish then you’ve got a good chance of Google knocking on your door and booting you out of their Adsense program.

But one thing that always works is creating sites for other programs such as Amazon. They provide lots of product information that sites can be created in minutes that look great and will appeal to visitors. [Read more...]

So it’s that time of year again, where does a year go?

I’d just like to take this opportunity to wish my readers a fantastic Christmas and all the best for the New Year.

As well as being full of family fun, it’s also a time for reflection. Personally I look at what I’ve done in the last 12 months and what I want to achieve in the next 12 months.

This often involves asking myself ‘What the heck have a I actually achieved in the last 12 months?’ but actually it’s not been a bad year business wise.

There have been lots of plugins and software I’ve released with my partner and my own site building business has also seen an upturn and I’ve now sold $78,829 worth of sites on Flippa.com

And I also have a rough idea of where I want to go, business wise, next year. The focus is going to be on helping people reach their online goals too. This blog will be seeing some action too as I intend to commit and post as much information as I can for you.

So that’s all for now, have a great Christmas and I’ll be posting again next week.

Tony

If I want to invest my time in doing something and want to learn from someone then I need to know that they are getting results from what they teach.

That is crucial and one thing I highly recommend you do yourself.

Anyone can make a rehashed course with old information but people who prove that what they are doing works are the ones to follow.

Which leads me onto this:

Interview with 9 Niche Site Building Experts

9 hugely successful niche site builders have spilled the beans on what they do,
including:

- The precise niches they’re in.

- …and huge amounts more.

One of them is Jan Roos whom I have been following for a while now. Jan has sold more than $1 MILLION of Amazon products and knows more than most people about what it takes to create high converting sites.

Then there’s Cary Bergeron who knows how to create wildly profitable Adsense sites
and flip them for huge profits.

Just these 2 guys alone have taught me a lot.

There are 7 other interviews with experts in their own right too. Here’s the link again:

Interview with 9 Niche Site Building Experts

These interviews could really give you the encouragement and advice you need to
kickstart your own online journey.

Tony

In a recent post I talked about the difference between building small niche blogs or building authority blogs. Each of them has their advantages. But since the Panda update a lot of people now believe that small (thin) sites will drop down the rankings.

Well with anything I do online, I always test and try things myself to prove whether something is correct or not. So recently I started creating small niche Adsense blogs just to test whether they can make money on their own and rank like I would hope.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been making money with Adsense since 2003 but recently I have been focussing on product creation instead of building Adsense sites.

So this was a welcome change!

So I picked out 5 sites to build all in one niche. Created them with one post as the homepage and the normal static pages such as Privacy Policy and Terms of Service etc. Basically they are just one page sites ranking for one keyword.

I built them towards the end of August and every one has made money and is ranking in the top ten of Google for their term. One makes more than $1 a day but the others are more random.

Maybe this is a temporary thing and the Panda update might affect them but to be honest, I’m not bothered! If I can make a site in 2 hours that earns money every month and is an asset I could flip for $500-$1000 then I’ll happily keep building them.

Also, I did very little promotion on these particular blogs too. Nothing like what I do for my other sites.

Now I do have authority blogs too, so I’ve got all bases covered but this was an interesting test. Actually since then I’ve created a LOT more of them and am enjoying getting back into the Adsense game again. So much so I’m creating a course on exactly what I’m doing and how I’m building these small sites and authority blogs too.

So stay tuned for that one!

I guess having more than 200,000 clicks on my Ads and some months reaching 28,000 clicks I must have done something right over the years and would love to share it with others to help them make money blogging with Adsense too.

So are 1 page blogs dead? Well no I don’t think they are.

Tony

Please feel free to post your comments and share on Facebook below:

This post follows on from my post yesterday about ways to make your blog more popular. There is a recently released product which I bought myself called the Trophy Pigeon method.

It’s being sold on the Warrior Forum and you can download it from here. Its concept shows how to get 10,000 or more visitors to your website within 7-10 days of implementing it.

Sceptical?

Yep me too, that’s why I decided to buy it and see what it was all about.

So I opened up the 29 page pdf report, skimmed over the first few pages until it then said how the traffic was generated. At first I said to myself ‘you’re kidding, I’ve known about that for years’ and I was thinking it might just be rehashed garbage that you get a LOT of on the Warrior Forum. It’s one of the methods I mentioned in yesterdays post.

Nevertheless I carried on reading and things started to get interesting. You see, I have used this method myself in the way that everyone else uses it.

But this was different.

The way that Chris (the creator of the method) uses the Trophy Pigeon method is totally different.

Warning – It involves putting more effort in than the standard way of doing it.

But that’s a good thing because most people will put the method to one side and look for something easier.

The Trophy Pigeon method is all about certain types of blog posts. But they are done to get hundreds of other sites linking to them. Not only does it benefit for getting great link juice but the traffic you can receive can easily be as Chris describes.

He often gets up to 100,000 unique visitors within 48 hours of launching this method.

Can you imagine what that traffic can do for your own websites?

So I will be using the Trophy Pigeon method myself and I will report my results here on this blog. If you haven’t grabbed it yourself yet, then I highly recommend you do. You can get it from here.

Tony

Feel free to leave your comments below and post to Facebook:

How to make my blog popular is a question that is asked by hundreds (possibly thousands) of bloggers every year.

They have a great looking blog which they created themselves or paid hundreds of dollars for someone to make it for them, yet each time they log into their traffic stats they see 4 or 5 people have visited the day before.

There’s nothing more frustrating than writing everyday only to see that you’re just getting no results from it.

So what’s the answer?

Well there are lots of answers to that question but let’s look at some ways you can use today to get more traffic to your blog.

Method #1 – Write Quality Content

Sounds obvious right? But in reality SO MANY people get this wrong. The best way to increase your blog traffic is to write quality content that appeals to your target audience.

And it works 2 fold:

Quality content will connect with your readers. They will anticipate your next post and keep visiting your blog. They will also tell their friends about your blog.

Which brings us to the second benefit, people will link to your blog from their own blogs. When this starts happening you open the doors up to lots of ‘link avenues’ that will bring in traffic. What’s even better is the traffic is already targeted to your market.

Writing quality content has multiple advantages in bringing in and KEEPING traffic connected to your blog.

Method #2 – Create Link Bait

This can overlap the previous method but the point of link bait is to create something that other blogs and websites will naturally link to. So it can be a quality blog post, free report, free product, free software. Basically, something of value that will appeal to your target audience.

Give it away and people will link to it.

Top lists work great for this. Just create a list of 10, 20 or even 50 popular things in your market.

It can be the top blogs in your niche, top tips to achieve something, top people you aspire to be like. Hopefully you get the point.

The great thing about this method is it works 2 fold too:

You’re providing a valuable resource, so naturally other blogs will want to link to your top list as it gives their readers more value.

If your top list is a list of other blogs or websites, THEY will want to tell their readers and link to your post. So you will get streams of traffic from the blogs you have listed in your top list. You can guarantee they find your list by emailing them and telling them.

So again, you get 2 excellent new ‘traffic avenues’ with this method too.

Method #3 – Write for Other Blogs

Yes we’re talking about guest posting. You can create content for other blogs and get them to post it. This will of course have a link back to your own blog so you’ll get some great targeted traffic, as long as you choose related blogs to post on.

Bloggers naturally want great, unique content for their blogs. If they don’t have to write it themselves then it’s impossible for them to turn down.

Blogs such as ProBlogger have guest posts on a daily basis. This is because Darren gets quality content and the authors get free traffic from his popular blog.

It’s truly win-win.

So take a lot around and list the top ten blogs in your niche. Send the owner an email introducing yourself and ask them if you can write some unique content for them. If they agree, just be sure to write the best content you can and submit it to them.

Just continue to do this until you have gone through as many blogs as you can find.

Guest posting gives your blog targeted free traffic that can last for years.

I Could Go On But….

Of course this list could continue on and on but hopefully just these 3 methods will give you an idea of how to make your blog popular and get that traffic you have wanted for ages.

Just be sure that your blog is high quality and you’ll keep a large percentage of the traffic coming back for years to come.

Please leave your comments below and share on Facebook.

Tony

Yesterday in this post I mentioned the recent story of travel bloggers Craig Makepeace and Caz Makepeace who were paid by Qantas to follow the rugby World Cup in New Zealand. They had an all expenses paid trip to follow and report on each game.

Why did Qantas do that?

Well because Craig and Caz have a very popular travel blog. Their audience is very active and listen to what they blog about. So Qantas are getting some valuable publicity from a very targeted and very travel orientated community. That’s an audience that is almost impossible to target as effectively with mainstream advertising.

Their blog – yTravel – receives around 50,000 unique visitors each month and they have thousands of fans on Twitter and Facebook that get their updates and therefore visit the blog to see the latest blog posts. So the community they have built up is a very priceless commodity.

That’s why Qantas saw the potential and are probably delighted with the results. It’s also why large mainstream businesses are also waking up to the potential that bloggers hold by building up an active community based around their blogs.

The Car Blogger

Alborz Fallah is another blogger that gets some fantastic opportunities. His blog – CarAdvice.com.au – is one of the largest car websites in Australia. He gets a LOT of traffic and makes a nice amount of money from that one blog. But he also gets to test drive some of the most expensive and fastest cars on the planet when they are released.

This again is because car manufacturers know how effective a positive review would be when he posts it to his blog. So he gets invited to travel all over the World to check out the latest car launches.

So its no wonder his blog was valued at $5M a few years ago. Its value will be far more than that now if he ever decided to sell it.

Inspire yourself to build a popular blog

There’s no better way to get you motivated than to see just how much money bloggers are making from their own blogs. There’s a great list on IncomeDiary here that lists the top 30 earning blogs.

The top 8 blogs earn more than $100,000 every month!

So if you haven’t built your own blog yet or have one that you haven’t updated in a while, grab yourself some new motivation and build yourself a million dollar blogging fortune!

(oh and don’t forget about the nice free goodies you might be offered too once you make your blog popular!)

Tony

I guess many people see traditional ‘blogging’ as one person writing about their expertise or lives on one blog. If they do this regularly then that blog can become an authority in its particular market. They could possibly get a lot of traffic and build up a following and community base then choose whether to monetize it.

That would be what we consider to be an ‘authority blog’.

Niche blogs on the other hand would be smaller blogs built with just a few posts which target a specific keyword or group of keywords. These have been coined with the term ‘sniper blogs’ due to the popular course about building them by George Brown. These types of blogs have ranked well in the search engines in the past, and still do in many cases.

So which is the best model to build, niche blogs or authority blogs?

Well if you listen to the so called ‘seo gurus’ out there, they claim that the recent Google updates (Panda or Farmer or whatever you like to call it!) have shifted what the search engines want to see in their index.

What this means is that sites with larger amounts of content and which are updated frequently will be seen as more beneficial to the visitor. Hence they will be ranked higher in the search engines.

Niche blogs have what are known as ‘thin content’ which means they don’t have a lot of content and are based solely around trying to rank for a handful of keywords. Many experts say that Google will be targeting these types of sites and dropping their rankings.

Although I have seen no real evidence of this myself, I guess you can see why Google would want to do this. There is more chance of a searcher finding what they need to know from a site that has hundreds of pages about the subject as compared to a site that has just 5 pages of content.

So if you look at it directly from the eyes of wanting to rank in the search engines, then authority blogs win hands down.

Drawbacks of Authority Blogs

I can see 2 major drawbacks of running authority blogs. The first is you have to post lots of content and do it regularly. The second is you have to continue to do it even if you have few or little visitors.

For the first option you can of course write the content yourself if you have knowledge on the subject, or you can hire people to post for you. You’ll find no shortage of guest bloggers or content writers on most popular freelance sites such as Freelancer.com.

The second drawback you cannot really get around. Especially if it’s a new blog and you’re just getting started. What you would have to do is just imagine you are writing to thousands of people. This will keep your quality high and also stop you from getting distracted or lose motivation. The main thing is not to check your traffic stats at the beginning.

Benefits of Authority Blogs

The benefits can be fantastic, especially if you want to make money from your blog. If you can build up a following then you can use affiliate marketing or paid advertising on your blog and this can bring in a substantial amount of money.

Money aside, becoming a major player in a market with a following can bring other benefits too. Just recently two bloggers were paid by Qantas to cover the rugby World Cup in New Zealand. They have an all expenses paid trip to travel around the country following each game. This happens with most influential blog owners who get free products to try and review and other goodies too. Check out the story at the bottom of this page.

Back to money, if you ever choose to sell your authority blog, that can be great payoff too. Take Johns Wu who sold his blog for $15 Million. That’s not a bad return considering it was only him that built and posted to it for just a few years.

To Sum Up

So as you can see, the trend will probably swing towards authority blogs rather than niche blogs. This won’t however stop me from building them as they do make up a large part of my income. Especially when flipping them as I do myself. I do also have a couple of authority blogs in the making, so I can get the best of both worlds with my blogging business.

If you want to know how to manage more than one authority blog, check out Nicole Deans great advice.

Tony