Epic Fail! Google Deindexed Me

I went to check on my Google Analytics stats last week to discover that my traffic had completely stopped. As in, there was NOBODY coming to the site. I know I haven’t posted much lately, but that seemed a little odd. I normally get at least 1500 visitors a month just from Google sending traffic to my old posts. So I did some more digging and discovered that around the end of June, my traffic took a nosedive and never came back.

Analytics Nosedive

I logged into Webmaster Tools, and found that my site mysteriously stopped getting crawled. Then came a couple of hours of wandering around forums and blog posts trying to figure out what happened. Something was blocking Googlebot from verifying my site, but what?

In the end, it was an issue with my .htaccess file. During some site speed optimizations, I inadvertently blocked all traffic from Google’s servers. Oops! That was a huge mistake… I’ve resubmitted my site to Google, updated my sitemap, and am waiting for the traffic to come back now. The moral of the story is, if you are working on your .htaccess file, be sure you know what you are doing!

 

Case Study: Buying A Site on Flippa for Profit

Last month Stackman did a really cool post about buying websites on Flippa and optimizing them for profit. I have created tons of websites from scratch, but I’ve never tried to buy one before. So I took his advice, went over to Flippa and started browsing around. Here’s what I found…

There’s a bunch of crappy websites for sale!

There are good ones as well but you have to really dig through a bunch of crap to find the good stuff. I don’t think I was prepared for all of the retarded sites for sale at outrageous prices, but I got used to it. I ended up bidding on two different sites that I thought had potential.

Flippa

If you haven't ever been to Flippa.com, you should check it out!

The first site ended up being highly competitive, and went for $3,200. I didn’t want to spend that much my first time out, so I let that one go. The problem was it was already too far developed and had affiliate income already set up on it. Honestly I’m not sure why the guy was selling it, unless it had just been sandboxed or something… Anyways, on to the next one.

The second site had about 15 bids on it as well as a Buy It Now price of $500. After doing some due-diligence and researching the niche and the site’s traffic, I decided to go ahead and buy it. I’m sure I could have gotten a better deal by waiting for the auction to finish, but I’m pretty impulsive when I get an idea into my head so I just bought it for the $500 BIN price.

The reason I liked the site was that it had a lot of content already generated. It has over 2,000 pages in it. That saves me a lot of work on the front end so I can focus on getting it traffic and monetizing it. It doesn’t have a blog, so I will probably add one of those shortly and put some more content on it. It also had quite a few backlinks already going to it. It has a PR of 0, but the groundwork is still there. It should be fairly easy to get it up to PR 2 or PR 3 in the next couple of months.

AdSense was the only type of monetization on the site, and there weren’t very many ads at all. I went ahead and placed a 468×60 banner for an affiliate offer in the header, and spruced up the AdSense locations. I will most likely build an email list as well so I can mail offers to my users.

That’s all I’ve got to report for now. I’m excited about the project and hopefully it will be a good long-term source of income. It gets old doing the affiliate campaign grind after a while, so this has been a fresh breath of air.

SiteSnatcher Has Landed

If there’s one thing that Internet and Affiliate Marketers can’t get enough of, it is tools & shortcuts.  Every process that can be automated gives us more time to focus on being creative and the next big idea.  A good friend of mine launched his own set of tools this week, and it is called SiteSnatcher.  I immediately signed up and gave it a test run, so I thought I would share my first impressions.

The first tool I tried was the Blog Commentor.  When you are trying to get a new site indexed and get some link juice to it, one of the easiest ways to do that is to comment on related blogs using your URL to link back to your site.  The Blog Commentor will take any keyword that you choose, such as “golf”, and come up with a bunch of direct links to the posts that you can comment on.  It also has a built in iFrame so that you can just load the blog inside of SiteSnatcher, submit your comment, then hit “Next” and it loads the next blog into the window.  This makes the blog commenting process a breeze, you can knock out 100 comments in short order.

Next I tried out the Site Targeting Tool.  This is designed for PPC guys that are looking for specific sites to target for the Content Network in their niche.  One of the best ways to make the Content Network profitable is to site target instead of just letting Google do it for you.  This can be a tedious process of searching for sites in your niche that are running AdSense so that you can target them.  This tool does it all for you.  Simply put in your keyword, hit go, and it will grab anywhere from several hundred to 1,000 sites in your niche that AdSense on the page.  This can also work as a URL scraper for finding sites to target with PPV.

One thing I will mention is that you need to wait a little bit for the results to come in.  These tools are doing real-time scrapes of lots of data, so when you hit go it can take anywhere from 10-15 minutes to see the full results.  It is all designed to run in the background, so you can set a couple different tools to run, or just work on something else and come back later.

The pricing is based on how much you want to use it.  On the basic package, you get 50 “credits” per day.  As you see in the screenshot above, the Site Targeting Tool take 25 credits to run.  You can run it (or any other tool for 25 credits) twice per day on the basic package.  I think it’s a cool way to test it out without spending a ton of cash.  If you start using it a bunch on a daily basis, then you can get a bigger package with more credits.

All in all I think that this is definitely going to turn some heads.  I don’t recommend products or services very often on this blog, so take it from me, this is a solid service that is only going to get better.   If you do PPC on the Content Network, or PPV, or if you do any type of SEO including the EPN / McJiffy / BANS method, then SiteSnatcher is a tool you will want to check out.

P.S. If you click one of the SiteSnatcher links above, you will go through my affiliate link.  If you don’t want to use my affiliate link, just go to http://sitesnatcher.com.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5

Easy Money with eBay Partner Network – Part 2

By now hopefully you have had a chance to get your website up and running, and if you are lucky your EPN account might have even been approved.  Now there is only one step left to do: get out there and market your new niche website!  You are going to be marketing this website through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), not PPC.  It is the best way to get free traffic to your website and keep it going for months and years to come.

It’s really not too tough, because the search engines are going to do all of the heavy lifting, you just need to make sure that your site is in the best position to get indexed.  The first thing that you want to do is make sure that you have a keyword list that you are targeting.  You probably came up with a decent list when you were researching what niche you wanted to create your website in, but if not, now is the time to create it.  You just need 20-30 keywords that are centered on your main keyword and slight variations of it.  For example, if you were selling Nike Running Shoes, your list could include Nike Basketball Shoes,  Buy Nike Shoes,  Best Nike Cross Trainers, Nike Air Jordans, Nike Socks, Nike Sports Shoes, etc.

Once you have your keyword list, you are going to put those keywords in your Meta tags.  You also want to make sure you write a good two to three sentence Description of your site to go in the Meta tags.  This will be the text that appears in the search engines under the link to your website.  You want to write something that gets people to click on it, such as “Get the cheapest prices on Nike Running Shoes on the planet.  Our list is updated daily, check it out today!”

The next step is to get some inbound links going to your website.  The easiest method is going to be to submit your website to free directories and social bookmarking websites.  The higher the Page Rank of the site, the more juice it passes on to your website.  Adding these links can be a little time consuming, but we are going to stretch it out.  You do not want to go out there and submit 100 social bookmarking links the day after you create your website, this will almost certainly get you penalized or “sandboxed” by Google.  I prefer to let the domain sit for a week or two and then start adding the social bookmarking links in groups of 3-5 per day, just like a site would grow through word-of-mouth or natural backlinks.  If you don’t want to do this grunt work yourself, you can hire someone to do it for a fair price.  This is definitely the way to go if you are cranking these sites out.

The next step is possibly the hardest one: wait.  It takes some time to get these sites indexed and ranking, but if you’ve done your research properly it should not take very long at all to get on to the first or second page of Google for your main keyword term.  Once that happens, the clicks will start coming in to your EPN account and with those, come commissions.  You are not going to become a millionaire with this method, but I have personally followed these exact same steps and made anywhere from $50 to $300 per month from a single one of these sites.  Once you have the first one done, crank out another one!  The key is volume.  $300 x 10 websites = $3,000 for month, and you are 100% profitable because there are no PPC costs.

Now go make some money.

Easy Money with eBay Partner Network

There is no free lunch.  However, there is something I like to call, “A little bit of effort for a lot of return.”  eBay Partner Network is one of those opportunities.  You might have heard about the glory days of getting $25-$50 for free account signups back when eBay had their affiliate program on Commission Junction.  Make no mistake, those days are gone.  However, this does not mean that there is no money to be made with EPN.  On the contrary, it can be quite a nice little extra stream of income.  Let’s look at how it’s done.

Before we go any further, if you don’t have an EPN account, go here and sign up for one right now.  It takes them a little while to get around to approving you.  You can do the setup without your account and API key, you just need to have it before you go live with your site.

First of all, you are going to pick a niche.  There are many eBooks and blogs written just about picking a niche, but let’s not overcomplicate things.  All you are looking for is a small niche, something that gets around 20,000+ searches on Google every month, and it has less than 500,000 resulting pages when you search for it on Google.  To get yourself kick-started, I like to check out eBay Pulse.  The various Top 10 lists they have there for different categories are a great place to start.  If you can’t find anything small enough, then laser target even more.  Too much competition for baseball bats?  Zero in on one specific brand of baseball bats, a smaller brand even.  The more targeted the better, as long as there are searches for it every month.

Once you have picked your niche, the next step will be choosing the platform for building your website.  The most popular options here are phpBay and BANS, but these both come at a cost.  They are worth the money, but if you are looking to just start out with your first EPN niche site, I would recommend McJiffy.  It is a completely free open-source script, and I’ve used it for profitable sites myself.  The rest of this guide will assume that you are using McJiffy.  Once you have got your platform squared away, it’s time to set up your website.

You will want to buy a domain name with your relevant niche keywords in the domain itself.  You also want to have some type of value-based keyword in your domain.  Examples: CheapHuffyBikes.com, PaylessNintendoGames.com, etc.  I would recommend sticking with a .COM or .NET, stay away from .BIZ or .INFO, they look cheap and spammy.  We are going to be promoting our EPN site through SEO, so it needs to be relevant and easy to remember.

Finally, the last piece of the puzzle will be hosting.  It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, I’ve used Hostgator shared hosting for this, just make sure you get the Baby package with unlimited addon domains.  This way you can use the one hosting account to host all your niche sites.  Quantity is the name of the game with this tactic.

Now that you’ve got all the components, it’s time to put them together and build your first EPN site!  Unzip your McJiffy script, and upload it to your hosting account on the root of the domain that you purchased.  There’s just a couple of modifications that need to be made to the McJiffy site to maximize profit.  First of all, use Google Images to find a relevant header image for your website.  You can just leave the green default header in there if you want, but the image will make it look much better.  Second, you will want to write a description of your product and/or website.  Something like, “About Huffy Bikes”.  This doesn’t have to be 100% original, you can grab content from Wikipedia or even the company’s official website and bio, just make sure you re-write it in your own words so that Google won’t penalize you for duplicate content.  Try to keep this description/bio to around 300-500 words.  If you suck at writing, you can hire an article writer to do this for you for very cheap.  Just check around on the various forums.

All of these steps should take you several hours if you are quick, and a few days if you are taking it easy.  We’re going to take a break at this point to let you get started on your website, and pick up next week on Part 2: Marketing Your EPN Site.

Now go get to work!