I have been playing around with some ways of getting review sites making cash and have finally got it producing sales.
Here is the rough break down of what I am doing.
1) Pick a niche
2) Create a review page for all affiliate products I want to review with affiliate links
3) Buy some PLR for the niche and break it up into several small text files or ebooks.
4) Create a squeeze page on index of site that offers a mini course/ free info/ whatever you can create from the PLR.
5) Add the PLR to your autoresponder series, Under each part where you provide something free, provide a link to the review page where the reader can get honest opinion of professional products on the market.
6) SEO the review page for review keywords
7) Write articles and drive traffic to your squeeze page
I know its a quick and dirty method but thats what I like. I don't want to be faffing around with sales text and autoresponders for days. Sometimes you can get enough PLR content to fill your autoresponder for a full year, so you are contantly driving traffic back to your review page.
I usually alternate it so one email will direct people to all reviews, the next email may give first line of a specific review and then give link to site.
The traffic referrals from autoresponder make up about 30% of total traffic from site, and also people end up forwarding the emails to their friends so I get new people also.
I add a little cookie stuffing code to the review page also, just so they don't slip through the net.
I have pretty much finished my main project now, so I am going full time SEO on my site network soon.
Next month I will provide some earning updates as this is pretty much make or break time for me. I have borrowed a lot of money to get my various projects off the ground, now is the time to see if they will make me the kind of money I expect.
Sunday 4 July 2010
Wednesday 2 June 2010
How To Outsource Programming
After years spent managing a team of developers, I had slipped up with my own personal project. Here is my account of my mistake with a relaxed approach to using a freelancer, and how I fixed it.
I am having a web application built for the project I am working on. You may know that I used to run a company that sold software development services, so this should be a breeze for me right? Well, it should, but for some unknown reason I took a relaxed approach when using my own money and thought I could just hire a freelancer and explain what I wanted. Ha! I was very wrong.
After 3 months of going round in circles my friend Phil stepped in and pointed out where I was going wrong. For some reason I had left my professional methodology in the office and was taking what people said at face value. I went back to drawing board and developed a simple system (with Phil's guidance, who is much better than me at specifications), for getting software designed with a freelancer without the headache.
Here are the main points:
1. Make detailed specs for everything, never work from converations.
Create a document that describes exactly what you want. Imagine the person reading the document is a little bit retarded. Use examples, and create verbose specs. My original specs were around 10 pages and assumed the developer knew what I was trying to do. After re-writing them they came to closer to 60 pages.
If you have a chat with developer and something changes. Update the spec or ask them to do it. Make sure your spec is always current and keep a version history of all edits. Never leave instructions in a text or voice chat. Make sure there is a document that you are working from at al times. This way if the work doesn't match the document you are in a strong position, and not arguing about who said what in your last conversation.
2. Create prototypes before any code is written
A prototype screen is basically the design of the application, all the buttons and inputs, but it doesn'e work. This only takes a developer a few minutes to put together but will save a lot of time, money and hassle. I found myself waiting several weeks for a developer to show me something, and when he did it looked like a dogs dinner.
This is something that my company always did religiously, and for some reason I didn't ask for it when on the other side of the counter. Prototype screens let you quickly work out how you want the application to look before any coding is done, so when you get a product at the end, it is exactly what you want and expected.
3. Create details "acceptance use cases" ****MOST IMPORTANT****
This is critical! Create a big list of everything the software will do. Break it down into sections. Then tell your developers, once you can do each list, they will get paid.
This is a simple idea but soooo good. All I do when I get my software is get my list of things out and run through it trying to do each task and if any of the tasks is not as described, they don't get their money until it is fixed.
4. Used fixed price, with milestones and demand discounts for late work.
With good specs and acceptance use cases you will be able to create several milestones. These are key parts/features of the software. Each milestone will have an acceptance use case associated with it, and when you can complete all use caseses successfully they get the milestone payment.
By getting all milestones priced ahead of schedule you know exactly how much the software will cost you.
I use Odesk for the work and put it through their system. the developer has to specify a deadline date and if they go over it you have the power to demand a discount due to them not keeping with their deadlines.
It is important to not set your milestones too large or it can cause problems. If you let developers set their own milestones they will try and make as few as possible and get big desposit upfront. I like to make several milestones and offer no payment upfront. I only pay on completion of work. I can do this as I have a good buyer history on Odesk. 5/5 reviews and 5 figures spent on my account. If you have a new account you may need to pay a deposit upfront, just make sure its not too much.
Hope that is food for though
I am having a web application built for the project I am working on. You may know that I used to run a company that sold software development services, so this should be a breeze for me right? Well, it should, but for some unknown reason I took a relaxed approach when using my own money and thought I could just hire a freelancer and explain what I wanted. Ha! I was very wrong.
After 3 months of going round in circles my friend Phil stepped in and pointed out where I was going wrong. For some reason I had left my professional methodology in the office and was taking what people said at face value. I went back to drawing board and developed a simple system (with Phil's guidance, who is much better than me at specifications), for getting software designed with a freelancer without the headache.
Here are the main points:
1. Make detailed specs for everything, never work from converations.
Create a document that describes exactly what you want. Imagine the person reading the document is a little bit retarded. Use examples, and create verbose specs. My original specs were around 10 pages and assumed the developer knew what I was trying to do. After re-writing them they came to closer to 60 pages.
If you have a chat with developer and something changes. Update the spec or ask them to do it. Make sure your spec is always current and keep a version history of all edits. Never leave instructions in a text or voice chat. Make sure there is a document that you are working from at al times. This way if the work doesn't match the document you are in a strong position, and not arguing about who said what in your last conversation.
2. Create prototypes before any code is written
A prototype screen is basically the design of the application, all the buttons and inputs, but it doesn'e work. This only takes a developer a few minutes to put together but will save a lot of time, money and hassle. I found myself waiting several weeks for a developer to show me something, and when he did it looked like a dogs dinner.
This is something that my company always did religiously, and for some reason I didn't ask for it when on the other side of the counter. Prototype screens let you quickly work out how you want the application to look before any coding is done, so when you get a product at the end, it is exactly what you want and expected.
3. Create details "acceptance use cases" ****MOST IMPORTANT****
This is critical! Create a big list of everything the software will do. Break it down into sections. Then tell your developers, once you can do each list, they will get paid.
This is a simple idea but soooo good. All I do when I get my software is get my list of things out and run through it trying to do each task and if any of the tasks is not as described, they don't get their money until it is fixed.
4. Used fixed price, with milestones and demand discounts for late work.
With good specs and acceptance use cases you will be able to create several milestones. These are key parts/features of the software. Each milestone will have an acceptance use case associated with it, and when you can complete all use caseses successfully they get the milestone payment.
By getting all milestones priced ahead of schedule you know exactly how much the software will cost you.
I use Odesk for the work and put it through their system. the developer has to specify a deadline date and if they go over it you have the power to demand a discount due to them not keeping with their deadlines.
It is important to not set your milestones too large or it can cause problems. If you let developers set their own milestones they will try and make as few as possible and get big desposit upfront. I like to make several milestones and offer no payment upfront. I only pay on completion of work. I can do this as I have a good buyer history on Odesk. 5/5 reviews and 5 figures spent on my account. If you have a new account you may need to pay a deposit upfront, just make sure its not too much.
Hope that is food for though
Thursday 15 April 2010
Staying Accountable
First blog post in a long time. Reason I started this blog was to stay accountable to myself and have something to look back over that documented the steps I took.
My main project has taken over all of my time the last few months and been quite stressful. Hopefully that project will be launched in 2 weeks.
I haven't created my autoblog network yet. I have created several micro niche blogs for the purpose of building up adsense and EPN earnings on them. I like the idea of having a nice amount of web property with residucal income as it can be flipped at any point once it has steady income.
With the micro niche sites I am seeing that it is more a case of profit per page. You setup a page that describes the benefit of a product or service, then add EPN or Adsense code to it. People find the page by the related keyword and click through to the product after a quick read of the text.
With EPN I am getting a 10% CTR and £0.12 avg CPC. My adsense CTR is 3.5% right now but I am having some technical problems with my adsense sites that should be resolved in a day or two.
I am seeing that if you get a good keyword and rank somewhere on the first page for it + the longtails, then that page will make about £20-£30/month.
I have a site with about 10 pages and it's making anywhere from £30-£80/month depending whats going on with the rankings.
This site took me quite a while to build and I made several mistakes which I have learned from:
My main project has taken over all of my time the last few months and been quite stressful. Hopefully that project will be launched in 2 weeks.
I haven't created my autoblog network yet. I have created several micro niche blogs for the purpose of building up adsense and EPN earnings on them. I like the idea of having a nice amount of web property with residucal income as it can be flipped at any point once it has steady income.
With the micro niche sites I am seeing that it is more a case of profit per page. You setup a page that describes the benefit of a product or service, then add EPN or Adsense code to it. People find the page by the related keyword and click through to the product after a quick read of the text.
With EPN I am getting a 10% CTR and £0.12 avg CPC. My adsense CTR is 3.5% right now but I am having some technical problems with my adsense sites that should be resolved in a day or two.
I am seeing that if you get a good keyword and rank somewhere on the first page for it + the longtails, then that page will make about £20-£30/month.
I have a site with about 10 pages and it's making anywhere from £30-£80/month depending whats going on with the rankings.
This site took me quite a while to build and I made several mistakes which I have learned from:
- I chose a time consuming format so its not simple to just add new pages. I now am using an easier to follow format that looks good without to much messing around with layouts.
- I made a review site. To get a good review that holds weight it involves going to forums, surveying customers opinions and a lot of searching. From now on I am going down a format that involves describing the product and the benefit of the product then providing the listings for the user to click. This will reduce the amount of time for generating content.
- I tested a lot of plugins. I now have the ideal set of wordpress plugins that works with me and gets the desired results.
- I spent too long on the SEO. For the amount of time I spent on the SEO, the return does not justify it. But what I have done is streamline all my actions into a straight forward system. Now I have a system that a VA can follow and do all the donkey work. I have a second PC which I will use all my automation software on and just leave it going in the corner of the room.
If you forget the time I have put into this project and all the expensive software and server fees I am paying, this project has made a return and paid for the content fees. Soon I will be at 10 micro niche sites. My hope is that this will be enough to cover all my hosting costs.
Here are some interesting figures for profit retun as I see it.
Let's say on average, each page on the micro niche site make £5/month and uses 2 hours of the VA's time submitting the articles for it, here is what the cost/return looks like.
Content Page - £2
Article Pack (Spin template & 11 proofread re-writes) - £7
VA's Time to submit - £3
Total - £12
This assumes that I will be registering domains, installing wordpress and running the seo software myself. So for a £12 investment, I can have a monetized article on my blog. Like I said before, I have a single page that is doing £20-£30 in EPN clicks at the moment but to be accurate we have to take into account the pages that don't do so well. So lets say average return on an article is £5/month. We would lose money at first but quickly regain it over the longer period. So the cost for setting up 10 micro niche blogs with 10 articles each using this system will be:
Domain Cost - £21
100 Pages of content optimised and ranked - £1200
And the return would be, asuming a £5/month average for each article.
100 x £5 = £500/month (£6,000/year)
That's a 491% ROI in first year. Not bad with modest page average, although I will be paying about £1500/year in subscription fees for the SEO services and software and my hosting costs will be about £1200 for the year.
So, to make a decent profit I think I need to have 100 sites, initially with 10 pages, but after I build the network I will go back and add content each month. This will hopefully stop the sites getting stagnant and dissapearing.
Setup costs for first year:
Setup Cost of 100 sites + SEO = £12,210
Yearly hosting = £1200 (although may be more with this amount of sites)
Yearly subscriptions = £1500
Total - £14,910
And I would need to make 8-9 sites per month to get this done within the year.
If each page brings in £5/month, then 100 sites with 10 pages each would bring in £5,000/month (£60,000/year).
Thats a lot of hard work to get it to that stage, but the figures look promising. Once I get to 100 sites I will just go back over and add more content and do more seo to get better rankings in an effort to get the average page earning up. Double it to £10/month and I will be bringing in £120,000 year just from passive sites.
It's a dream, who knows if I will get there. I have made a load of sites already, if I can get 10 sites making £500/mo then I will go for this 100% and scale it.
I had removed my signature link to this blog a while ago, I think I may add it again as its cool to meet people doing the same thing as me.
Saturday 6 February 2010
Wow! Blogs Actually Do Make Money
One of my blogs made £10 today.
I know, big whoop right?
Well... Yes!
I did spend a lot of time on this blog figuring things out but it's autopilot earnings right now. Today was £5 in EPN clicks and a £5 affiliate sale.
All content was outsourced. I just uploaded it to blog, added links and made it look pretty. On the next one I will be able to do it a lot quicker.
It's only a small bit of cash but it makes me feel good, like I am moving in the right direction. I also coded myself an application to generate some traffic to affiliate offers. Got about another hour or two left of coding to do before it's ready to roll. Looking forward to see if it makes any cash.
2am now and I have to go out tomorrow but so hard to pull myself away from my computer, even though I have been glued to it for last 12 hours.
I know, big whoop right?
Well... Yes!
I did spend a lot of time on this blog figuring things out but it's autopilot earnings right now. Today was £5 in EPN clicks and a £5 affiliate sale.
All content was outsourced. I just uploaded it to blog, added links and made it look pretty. On the next one I will be able to do it a lot quicker.
It's only a small bit of cash but it makes me feel good, like I am moving in the right direction. I also coded myself an application to generate some traffic to affiliate offers. Got about another hour or two left of coding to do before it's ready to roll. Looking forward to see if it makes any cash.
2am now and I have to go out tomorrow but so hard to pull myself away from my computer, even though I have been glued to it for last 12 hours.
Friday 29 January 2010
Content Generation
As I am having 5 class c groups of autoblogs I am going to use 5 different methods of content generation. Each class c group of sites will have all 5 different methods. This also means each linkwheel will have all different methods of content generation.
The methods of content generation will be:
Advanced Article Marketing - spun content updated to blog by PRC
Unique Article Wizard - Wordpress plugin to add spun content
Article Scraping - Adding articles to blog by keyword from article directories that allow article syndication. All credits to author left in tact.
Video Scraping - Scraping youtube videos by keyword and adding them.
(For the article & video methods above I will also add RSS feeds from related sites)
Niche Blogger DX - Niche blogger provide a series of articles each moth to upload onto your autoblog. They also say they generate links.
Got a bit more keyword research to do before I get started. Like I said before, this isn't my main body of work so not sure how soon I wil have it up and running. End of next week is best case scenario I think.
The methods of content generation will be:
Advanced Article Marketing - spun content updated to blog by PRC
Unique Article Wizard - Wordpress plugin to add spun content
Article Scraping - Adding articles to blog by keyword from article directories that allow article syndication. All credits to author left in tact.
Video Scraping - Scraping youtube videos by keyword and adding them.
(For the article & video methods above I will also add RSS feeds from related sites)
Niche Blogger DX - Niche blogger provide a series of articles each moth to upload onto your autoblog. They also say they generate links.
Got a bit more keyword research to do before I get started. Like I said before, this isn't my main body of work so not sure how soon I wil have it up and running. End of next week is best case scenario I think.
Thursday 28 January 2010
Step 1
I have purchased 25 domain name. I will host 5 per class c ip address and make a kind of link wheel between the blogs.
I am testing several different ways to generate content so that I can compare results. Will keep you posted.
I am testing several different ways to generate content so that I can compare results. Will keep you posted.
Sunday 24 January 2010
New Experiement: Twitter + Autoblogs
I'm sure everyone has seen the autoblog earning claims:
Each blog make $2/day....
Set up 100/day....
By this time next year Rodney we will be millionaires!
Well...... Challenge accepted!
My own findings from autoblogs so far have been less than amazing. I do indeed get longtail traffic to them but it is usually completely off topic phrases for someone looking for something very specific that I don't have. I didn't want to risk my Adsense account so I was using affiliate clickbank links and the clickthrough has been very low.
Not deterred, I am going to have another go. I am going to try and find some extra ways to monetize the blog and get a little creative.
The formula as it is in my head now is:
Expired domain + wordpress + caffeinated content + autotweeter + atuo follow script + handful of links = enough traffic to make a few bucks a month.
It has been quite a while that I have seen people talking about twitter but no one ever seemed to be making any money off it so I stayed away. I have just been scoping out some auto follow twitter software that supports multiple accounts and scheduling. Depending on how well this works it could be all that is needed to kick start the autoblogs and get some income trickling in.
I wonder if 100 blogs being fed by 100 twitter accounts would be easy to manage? If it makes me $200/day I will be happy. I suppose if it does work I could add automated software for facebook, myspace and craigslist also.
Well, I will throw up a few domains and see how I go. This isn't my main focus but if I setup 2-3 a week in the background while I am doing other stuff I should be able to get an idea if it is going to work.
If anyone else wants to join experiment and share their data, feel free to chime in.
Each blog make $2/day....
Set up 100/day....
By this time next year Rodney we will be millionaires!
Well...... Challenge accepted!
My own findings from autoblogs so far have been less than amazing. I do indeed get longtail traffic to them but it is usually completely off topic phrases for someone looking for something very specific that I don't have. I didn't want to risk my Adsense account so I was using affiliate clickbank links and the clickthrough has been very low.
Not deterred, I am going to have another go. I am going to try and find some extra ways to monetize the blog and get a little creative.
The formula as it is in my head now is:
Expired domain + wordpress + caffeinated content + autotweeter + atuo follow script + handful of links = enough traffic to make a few bucks a month.
It has been quite a while that I have seen people talking about twitter but no one ever seemed to be making any money off it so I stayed away. I have just been scoping out some auto follow twitter software that supports multiple accounts and scheduling. Depending on how well this works it could be all that is needed to kick start the autoblogs and get some income trickling in.
I wonder if 100 blogs being fed by 100 twitter accounts would be easy to manage? If it makes me $200/day I will be happy. I suppose if it does work I could add automated software for facebook, myspace and craigslist also.
Well, I will throw up a few domains and see how I go. This isn't my main focus but if I setup 2-3 a week in the background while I am doing other stuff I should be able to get an idea if it is going to work.
If anyone else wants to join experiment and share their data, feel free to chime in.
Saturday 23 January 2010
Where have I been?
I've gone sooo Guerrilla that I can't even be seen...!
No, truth is I have been M.I.A. End of november my sites got hacked and a few deals I was working on fell through. This comhbined with Xmas and a new years trip to Ireland to see family killed my motivation for doing anything productive (you may not have heard, but the Irish like to drink :) ).
I also employed someone to do some work for me and they have been stalling until finally admitting they are going to keep my deposit and not do the work. I found myself making excuses for my lack of progress when ultimately the buck stopped with me. People let you down, things happen. Even if everything that can possibly go wrong, does go wrong, you are still the one in control, and responsible for making things work!
Luckily last week I snapped out of it. I finished converting my spare room into a home office and got back on the ball chasing the money. Things are getting tight now, I need a form of income before march or I am really going to be in the shit.
Having an organised place to work has helped get my head straight. I know my back is to the wall but I am working one task at a time and not letting it overwhelm me. I try to finish a task everyday, that way at the end of each day I feel like I have achieved something and am one step closer to my goal.
I am going to carry on working on the affiliate sites I set-up but I am not going to do any more. The income from them isn't great and they take a fair bit of work to get looking good. I am going to concentrate on sites for local businesses in the hope of getting a few quick flips that can go towards paying the mortgage.
I still have my big project working in the background but there is constant set back on that so I am not relying on it taking off immediately.
I'll be coming back hopefully over the next few weeks with some positive results and tactics that are proving effective.
Also, if you would like to do a JV I am willing to do all the SEO for a website if someone creates all the niche content. I like doing the SEo more than I like writing about obscure topics so it could work out well and possibly repeat it with several niches.
Anyway, take it easy and I will be back soon.
No, truth is I have been M.I.A. End of november my sites got hacked and a few deals I was working on fell through. This comhbined with Xmas and a new years trip to Ireland to see family killed my motivation for doing anything productive (you may not have heard, but the Irish like to drink :) ).
I also employed someone to do some work for me and they have been stalling until finally admitting they are going to keep my deposit and not do the work. I found myself making excuses for my lack of progress when ultimately the buck stopped with me. People let you down, things happen. Even if everything that can possibly go wrong, does go wrong, you are still the one in control, and responsible for making things work!
Luckily last week I snapped out of it. I finished converting my spare room into a home office and got back on the ball chasing the money. Things are getting tight now, I need a form of income before march or I am really going to be in the shit.
Having an organised place to work has helped get my head straight. I know my back is to the wall but I am working one task at a time and not letting it overwhelm me. I try to finish a task everyday, that way at the end of each day I feel like I have achieved something and am one step closer to my goal.
I am going to carry on working on the affiliate sites I set-up but I am not going to do any more. The income from them isn't great and they take a fair bit of work to get looking good. I am going to concentrate on sites for local businesses in the hope of getting a few quick flips that can go towards paying the mortgage.
I still have my big project working in the background but there is constant set back on that so I am not relying on it taking off immediately.
I'll be coming back hopefully over the next few weeks with some positive results and tactics that are proving effective.
Also, if you would like to do a JV I am willing to do all the SEO for a website if someone creates all the niche content. I like doing the SEo more than I like writing about obscure topics so it could work out well and possibly repeat it with several niches.
Anyway, take it easy and I will be back soon.
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