Recently I had a discussion with Josh, who wants to be a Google Whore. Josh got in touch with me with a PM at Digital Point forums. He asked how I was able to start a new site (Laptop Gamers) and have it make money from day 1, while he has put up 44 sites and can barely make anything. Josh has created a blog to write about his AdSense experiment. You can read it here.
Now where did Josh go wrong? He put up 44 niche sites to my one, yet my one site is making more than his 44 combined. From reading his blog posting I can come up with a few reasons why Josh is having trouble. All you future Google Whores might want to pay attention to what I’m about to reveal.
If You Build It They Will Not Come
The key to being a Google Whore is not to have a bunch of websites. The key to being a Google Whore is all about getting traffic. Without traffic, a site makes nothing. This is a numbers game. I know that for every 1000 readers, I am going to get a certain percentage of people clicking on an ad. You can have 1000 websites but if no one visits, it’s going to be really hard to make any money.
The Key To Getting Traffic
The best way to get traffic to a new site is to have other sites in your field write about your site and link back to you. When Laptop Gamers was launched, I sent an email to over 200 technology based sites asking them for a news plug. Many of them gave me the news plug and that started the traffic to the site. Links from other sites were able to bring Laptop Gamers’ traffic to over 6,000 page view in one day. No matter what field you’re in, there are sites that offer news coverage on that field. Your job is to find those sites and add them to your news list. Once you have amassed this list, you will have in your procession a very powerful tool. The news list is the reason I was able to get traffic to Laptop Gamers so fast.
Now just because you sent a request to outside sites asking for a news plug doesn’t mean they’ll give it to you. This leads to the next key to making money on the net.
You Must Have Unique Content
All the contents on Josh’s 44 sites were pulled from “free article servicesâ€. In other words, these articles are available for anyone to use. Your chances of getting a free article plugged by 3rd party news sites are next to zero. Also most of the articles from these services are pieces of junk and not even worth reading. Sites that post news have a responsibility to give their readers good, up-to-date information. I highly doubt a free article on “How to reformat Windows 98†counts as up-to-date information. And if you do send such an article to a news site for consideration, the news site will likely send you back a reply asking you to remove them from your news list.
All the contents on Laptop Gamers are unique, written by myself or one of the other editors. They are articles and reviews of the latest technology hardware – stuff that technology news site are looking to tell their readers about. We help them out by providing them with news and they help us out by posting our news. It’s a win – win situation.
Having a bunch of sites linking to you is the key to getting Google’s attention. Google Page Rank is largely determined by how many sites in your field are linking to you. Get enough and the Google spider will come and index your entire site. That is a very good thing!
Start With One Site
Many people make the mistake of thinking “If I get 100 page views with one site, I can get 10,000 page views with 100 sites!†Remember, if you build it, they won’t come. Get traffic going to the first site before you start on any other sites. We produce content for Laptop Gamers, send out a news release, and get traffic. Then we produce more content and repeat the process over again. Pretty soon, the site will become a huge source of information and will develope its own reader base, and its Google Page Rank will increase. You have to keep updating a site to increase or maintain the Page Rank. It is much better to have one site that is constantly being updated than to have 44 sites that are static.
Write About Stuff You Like
As you can read from the above, creating a money making site take work. There really isn’t an easy way out. In order to get your news posted by news site, you simply can’t use free articles. Since you’ll have to produce unique content you might as well write about something you’re passionate about. The TechZone was never created to make money. That site was started because computers are my hobby. If the site didn’t make any money, I would still be updating it today.
Find your passion, start a site and write about it. Find the news sites that cover your industry, build the news list and send out the news release. That will build traffic and traffic is what makes you money.
Good luck