Domaining

"Domaining" means buying and selling domains for profit. It's only tangentially related to affiliate marketing in some instances, but in other instances it's extremely pertinent. For example, if I buy a great domain name , I have a couple of options. I can try to sell the domain for a profit over what I paid for it, or I can develop it into a money-earning site via affiliate links or other paid advertising. A third option is to develop the domain into a moneymaker and then sell the domain and the moneymaking website. The third option makes the most sense to me.

I think that the traditional use of the phrase "domaining" usually only brings to mind that first option though. Buy a good domain for less than you can sell it for, and then sell it and make a profit from it. And that's not a bad business model. For example, let's say I register a domain name for the registration fee of $8.95 at Godaddy. And then let's say in 6 months, I turn it around and sell that domain for $500. I've made a $491 profit. That's a huge return on my money in that case. You can't get those kinds of returns in the stock market unless you're really tolerant of risk. And lucky.

But what about the other option? Suppose I launch a 2 or 3 page website, and I get 30 visitors a month to the site. (A combination of 15 type-in visitors and 15 visitors from search engines.) And let's say I'm working in a high dollar industry where I can earn $1 for every visitor to my site. That makes me $30 a month, or $360 a year...for the rest of my life probably. I'm 38, so assuming I last another 30 years, that's $10,800. That's not much over 30 years.

But it's a lot more than $491.

But let's say I work a little harder. Let's say that I write 1000 pages of content for the site, and I still make $1 per visitor. I like to assume that if I have a 1000 page website, I'll get at least 1000 visitors a day. Now that domain name I bought is earning me $30,000 a month for the rest of my life. That's a little over ten million dollars over the course of my life. That's a significant amount of money, even if it takes me a year to get that much content launched on my site.

Most websites though don't make $1 per visitor. A more realistic number might be 10 cents per visitor. (Higher in a competitive industry, but anyone ought to be able to make 10 cents per visitor to their website, I think.) That's still a million dollars over the next 30 years.

How many domains do you need to make that happen? How hard is it to launch and develop those domains with content?

My ideas about domains and domaining come from several places, but the person who got me most interested in domain was Andy Hagans in some of his posts at Tropical SEO. The man makes money the way I want to make money; without working hard at it. He also gave me the idea of taking these high quality domains and turning them into high quality money-earning websites that are worth far more than the domain would be worth by itself.

A couple of other items worth reading regarding domaining:

• How to Get Started as a Domainer
• Domaining Discussions at WebmasterWorld
• Sedo

Speaking of domains, I just picked up a domain about slot machines. I plan to spend some time developing that one into a real powerhouse of a site loaded with useful content. I've already launched a great page there listing 51 slot machine websites, and more content is on the way.

How To Write 1000 Pages of Content

In my last post (Does Google penalize affiliate websites?) I mentioned content rich versus content poor websites. Having a website that's rich in useful content is going to be a long term, smart strategy for getting traffic to your affiliate website via search engine optimization. (If I wrote the post well at all, then I made that point, among other things.) I don't think a website is "real" until it reaches 100 pages anyway.

Here are some reasons why having lots of content is an effective content and traffic strategy:

• Sites with multiple pages of real content are more useful to a single visitor.
• Sites with multiple pages cover multiple subjects and are more useful to a wider range of visitors.
• Sites that are useful to lots of people are the kinds of websites search engines must rank in order to stay in business.
• Internal links matter toward your SEO. So the more pages you write, the more links you have pointing at your other pages. (A 1000 page website which links to your homepage from every page has created 1000 links. There is no better link building strategy than writing content for your site.)
• Multiple pages of content give you the opportunity to present different kinds of advertising and see which types of content make you the most money.

Webmasters who want to know how to write 1000 pages of content are concerned about two things:

1. How do I come up with 1000 topics about this subject to write about?
2. How do I actually get those 1000 pages written?

How to come up with 1000 topics on any given subject

1000 football pages

I like to boil the subject of any website I write down to a single word if I can. For example, I launched a website about football last year. Then I take that single word or phrase and add modifiers to it in order to create subtopics. One example of three no-brainer subtopics related to football is how the teams are set up:

• Football offense
• Football defense
• Foot special teams

That leaves 996 pages of content needed. Two more big subcategories I can think of really quickly are professional football and college football. (And if I wanted to, I could also use high school football as a subcategory.) But that still leaves me with 994 pages of content needed.

That's easy though, because I can subcategorize the category of professional football into 32 teams and give each team its own page. That only leaves me needing 962 more pages of content. (So I have a page about the Dallas Cowboys, a page about the Washington Redskins, a page about the Miami Dolphins, and so on.)

But I can also create a page of content about every college football team in the country. I haven't even started that list yet, but there are 119 college football teams I could write about too. (And finding a list of college football teams was as easy as doing a Google search for "how many college football teams in the USA".)

But that still leaves 843 pages of content needed. It seems like I haven't even scratched the surface.

But each of those subtopics have subtopics of their own. For example, I like to promote posters. So I've also created 32 pages (one for each NFL football team) for the posters that are available for each team. So I've got a hub page for NFL posters, and then pages for Baltimore Ravens posters, Chicago Bears posters, and Detroit Lions posters. Now we're down to 811 pages of content needed.

Another no-brainer subtopic for NFL teams is individual football players. We haven't gotten around to adding that content either, but each NFL team has 53 players on its roster. 53 X 32 teams = 1696 players. Bingo. Now we've got enough content ideas to build a 1000 page site (1885 pages actually). And we never once had to use a keyword research tool to come up with ideas for the pages. Those are all just topics and subtopics.

And a site about football could be expanded beyond that even. We could also write profiles of famous retired football players (likeTroy Aikman or Tony Dorsett). We could write about fantasy football. In fact, a lot of those subtopics might even generate 1000 page content sites all their own.

Finding affiliate programs to promote on a website about a particular sport is simplicity itself too. I already pointed out posters as one possibly applicable revenue stream. Here are some more ideas, off the top of my head:

• Google Adsense
• Ticket broker affiliate programs
• Travel affiliate programs (Hotel rooms during the Superbowl are insanely priced - I'll take 5% of that action any day.)
• Sports memorabilia affiliate programs

But what if you don't want to write about a sport? What if you want to launch a real moneymaker of a site? Suppose you want to focus on products?

1000 pages about satellite tv

Heck, that's even easier. Take the satellite tv dish niche as an example. How do you get 1000 pages of content out of that?

As far as I'm concerned, that one is even easier. Two words.

Go local.

Build pages that focus around the names of locations + "cable tv" or "satellite tv". There are 50 states in the USA. That leaves you with 950 pages to come up with.

Luckily each state has at least 19 cities in it you could write about. (There are actually a lot more than that.) Now you've got your 1000 pages.

But you can't write quality unique content about satellite dishes in 1000 different locations? Actually, I think you probably can with a little bit of effort. First of all, you provide directory listings with the names and addresses of the local cable companies in the area. Then you provide a price and feature comparison that you've researched for each location. Sometimes the cable company might be providing a better deal than the satellite dish people, but at least you're driving traffic. And if you use a combination of Google Adsense and affiliate advertising, you'll still make money. Finally, provide some insight into what kind of local television programming is available in a particular area. The top 20 or so cities in each state surely offer programming aimed directly at the viewers in their area.

What are you interested in?

If you're one of those blessed souls who wants to create a website about a subject just because you're interested in it, you can still come up with 1000 pages. Suppose you're a huge fan of the tv show Lost. Can you come up with 1000 pages of content about that show? I can.

• A page about every character ever featured on the show.
• A page about every actor who ever appeared on the show.
• A page about every writer who ever wrote for the show.
• A page about every episode of the show.
• A page about every novel based on the show.
• A page about the video game based on the tv show.
• Reviews of other sites about Lost.
• Pages about the special features and commentaries on the DVD.

Like Conan the Barbarian? Use the same thing - write a page about everything related to it. Harry Potter? Go for it. Buffy? It's been done, but maybe you can do it better.

Movies

Writing 1000 pages of content for a website about movies would be so easy that it would be almost painful. Just review every movie you've ever seen. Write profiles of directors and screenwriters you like. Build a directory of movie theaters organized by location. Visit them and write unique reviews. Ask your readers to submit their reviews of movie theaters they've visited.

You can monetize your movie site with Amazon links, eBay links, Netflix links, Blockbuster links, and AllPosters links.

How to find the time to write 1000 pages of content

Finding the time to write 1000 pages of content is the easiest part of the whole exercise. All you need is one of two things:

• A year
• Help

If you're willing to work on a site for a year, then you only need to write 4 pages of content 5 days a week for 50 weeks in order to have 1000 pages of content on your site. If you plan on having about 500 words per page, that's an achievable goal.

The other option is to get help writing your site content. You can do that by paying a writer. College students work cheap, and they produce better writing than the folks at Elance. Or you can get people to help write your content free by launching a forum. Every page of content on a forum counts too.

Whether or not your site needs 1000 pages of content is for you to decide. None of my sites have 1000 pages yet. But I think that 1000 pages is a worthwhile goal. I know it's a profitable goal, although it's more profitable in some niches than in others.

Does Google Penalize Affiliate Websites?

The title of this post is "Does Google penalize affiliate websites?", but the title should probably be something more like "Does Google penalize affiliate websites just for being affiliate websites?" I've seen webmasters go to great length to disguise or cloak their affiliate links so that Google won't penalize them for having affiliate links on their site. I think this is a silly waste of time.

I've seen editors at the Wikipedia who have displayed amazing amounts of derision about a site simply because "it's an affiliate site!" (Even though the site in question wasn't even really an affiliate site. I knew the owner, and he made his money via straight media sells. No affiliate revenue period. And the owner of this particular website was a known expert in the field, and the site had 100's of pages of high quality content.)

Do Affiliate Sites Suck Just Because They're Affiliate Sites?

Somewhere along the way, some people got the idea that all affiliate sites suck, are useless, or lame. This is probably because a ton of short-term thinking, opportunistic, and lazy webmasters have launched countless useless web pages whose sole purpose were to draw search engine traffic for the sole purpose of getting advertising revenue or affiliate commissions. But lumping all affiliate websites in with that category is silly.

Gambling Affiliate Sites and Google Penalties

I have some familiarity with the online gambling industry. It's a profitable and competitive niche. And nowhere else will you see a more motley assortment of lame, useless, and content-poor websites. The online gambling affiliate niche is so aggressive and competitive that it's hard to find a good source of information in a search engine on a specific subject, because some of the most competitive gambling webmasters have link bombed their way to the top. If they put 5% of their link bombing efforts into content creation, many of them would have a decent site.

The reason I bring up the online gambling industry is because there is a huge difference between a high quality gambling information portal and a useless content-poor website. That difference is not defined by whether or not the website has affiliate links. It's not even defined by how many affiliate links the site has.

For example, Poker News has affiliate links for online poker websites. But that site has thousands of pages of high quality, useful content about poker. But there is no Google penalty in effect for this site. Try a Google search for the phrase "poker rules" for example. Or "poker strategy". Both are extraordinarily competitive search phrases, and the Poker News website ranks just fine for those phrases.

Compare the content on that site with 10 randomly chosen sites from the search results for a phrase like "online casino", one of the most heavily link-bombed phrases on the Internet. Some of them might have respectable content. But many, if not most of them will consist of pages full of nothing more than affiliate advertisements. After reviewing some of those sites, someone might think that if Google isn't penalizing affiliate websites, then perhaps they should.

But if Google did that, sites like Poker News, which carries affiliate links, would get dinged in the results too. Google would no longer be providing what might be the best results for probably several thousand search engine phrases. That's counter to Google's interests.

Google Does NOT penalize websites just because they're affiliate sites.

I didn't write this post to bash the legions of gambling webmasters publishing low-content sites. I wrote it to point out that Google doesn't penalize sites just because they're affiliate sites. Nor should they.

A side note about linking to gambling sites.

(This is a side note, but I'll often see SEO gurus advise people to not link to sites in the gambling industry because you'll probably get penalized for linking to a bad neighborhood. Being a site about gambling doesn't automatically make a website a bad neighborhood to link to. The advice people should be giving in that situation would involve using discernment to see whether or not the gambling site in question was a quality resource that would be useful for your readers. It might make perfect sense for a site about football to link to an online sportsbook, for example, even if the focus of the football site isn't on wagering. It would make sense for such a site to link to a website reviewing online sportsbooks too. But only if the sportsbook or the sportsbook review sites are quality resources that the webmaster thinks would be useful to their readers.)

SEO Misconceptions and Myths

Being penalized by Google just for being an affiliate site is only one popular SEO misconception I'm tired of hearing about though. Nonsense like "reciprocal links don't work" or "linking is the single most important ranking factor" wears me out too. Reciprocal links work fine if you use your brain before linking to the other site. Linking might be the most important factor in ranking for some phrases, but that's not true for every phrase. Or probably even most phrases.

Why Your Affiliate Site Doesn't Rank Well in Google

If you run an affiliate website, and you think you might have been penalized for Google for having affiliate links on your site, then you are probably being penalized for one of these other reasons instead:

1. Linking to crappy websites.
2. Linking to a bunch of crappy websites which are useless to your visitor.
3. Having no real content on your site. Thinly disguised content masquerading as a "product review" is the worst offender in this case, and my 13 year old son is smart enough to spot this kind of nonsensical content.
4. Poor internal linking.
5. Poor on-page optimization.
6. Any other kind of obvious "link scheme".

Not all of the above are actual "penalties". Some of them are just reasons for your site to rank poorly. Sites that are concerned exclusively with driving traffic to affiliate links don't deserve to rank as well as websites which concern themselves with providing their users with quality information. In the long run, the high quality informational sites will make more money anyway.

How To NOT Be Penalized By Google

What to do?

It's pretty simple. Focus on building a good quality website with good quality content first and foremost. Focus on helping people solve problems. Give them the information they're searching for. Refer them to other quality resources online, and get other quality resources to refer peopel to you.

Once you've done those things, the affiliate revenue is a no-brainer. You'll have repeat visitors and a sustainable revenue stream that will last you a lot longer than a lot of other affiliate webmasters.

And it's more fun to build a useful resource too.

Manifest Linking Destiny

I've been too busy to post anything brilliant here lately, but I've got time today to point out an article that's well worth reading, studying, and thinking about from Eric Ward: Manifest Linking Destiny. Now that's brilliant thinking, and I enjoyed his approach in sharing the way he thinks there. Nothing too explicit, but if you think about it for a minute or two, it'll be one of the best SEO posts you'll read this year.

An Affiliate Success Formula

Some people aren't going to like this affiliate success formula. That's because it requires work, and it's not a get-rich-quick scheme. But this is the simplest formula for affiliate website success that I know of.

Content + Links = Affiliate Success

First, find a big niche. Lots of get rich quick guys tell you that you should tackle a small niche that you can dominate. That's nonsense. You can be an average player in a huge niche pretty easily still. (Big niches include stuff like dating, travel, credit cards, mortgages, etc.)

Then buy a domain name and build a website. Fill it with hundreds of pages of brilliant, useful, keyword-rich content. Update the site often. Add content constantly. Some of your pages will rank as long as you do basic search engine optimization stuff like:

• making sure your keyword phrases are in your pages' title tags
• using your keyword phrases in your pages' body copy
• emphasizing your keyword phrases by repeating them in the copy, header
• emphasizing your keyword phrases with bold text, italics, quotation marks
• using your keyword phrase in the URL string of each page
  

The big SEO secret is that there are no secrets. Just make it clear to the search engine what your page is about.

Then get links from appropriate websites. This will keep the search engines visiting your website. As a general rule, the more links you have pointing at your website, the more important it is. And important sites rank higher.

Don't do stupid stuff like exchanging links with 1500 websites, none of which have useful information. Or spam blogs. You don't need thousands of links to compete; you need some good links.

Then add advertisements for appropriate affiliate programs.

It really is that easy, but it takes work. Most people launch lame content and get lame links and wonder why they fail. Write good content, or hire a good writer. Then get good links. Don't worry if you don't have hundreds and hundreds of links right away.

Do the work and make money. Don't be lazy. Don't take shortcuts.

SEO Blogs You Should Be Reading

This is a list of SEO blogs that you should be reading but probably aren't. I've included what I think are some of the best posts from those blogs here too, along with some commentary as to why I think these blogs are so worthwhile.

SEO Theory

This is Michael Martinez's SEO blog. Many people in the SEO industry seem irritated by Michael Martinez, but I think having someone who's not repeating the "party line" is good for the industry. He's been accused of being deliberately contrarian just for the sake of being deliberately contrarian, and I'm not sure I disagree with that. But unlike some other folks, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing either.

An affiliate marketer or SEO can learn a lot about SEO just from watching what Martinez actually DOES with his blog. (Maybe they'll even learn more about SEO by watching what Martinez does than they will from listening to what Martinez says.) The main lesson to be learned from the SEO Theory blog is that lots of constantly updated content is good. And long pieces of content which repeat and emphasize keyword phrases is also good.

Most webmasters seem to think that 500 words of content is both the minimum and the maximum amount of content on a page or in a blog post. Most of Martinez's posts are 1000 words or more. What benefit does that offer?

For one thing, the more words you put on a page, the more likely it is that a searcher will type in a phrase that exists on your page. You increase longtail traffic.

At the time of this writing, SEO Theory has 443 pages indexed in Google, which is pretty good. (That's more pages than I have on any of my static sites, although I have a couple of forums which have more pages than that.)

Suppose you had 443 pages indexed with 1000 pages on each phrase. Do you think you might receive traffic?

Some of my favorite blog posts from Michael Martinez include:

1. The Infallible SEO Option - One of the best posts ever written about SEO anywhere. Sure, it might seem obvious, but for a beginner, it's not obvious. And so many SEO's out there seem to preach that links are all you need.
2. Building Content For Search - Martinez condemns cookie-cutter SEO wisdom, which is something that desperately cries out for condemnation. He also makes the point that you should use long pages of content when the content calls for it, and short pages when the content calls for that instead.
3. Answers to 100 SEO Questions - The questions and answers are great, but having a page that ranks for 100 different queries is even better. Wondering what you should do with the information from your referral logs? This post from Michael should give you at least one idea for what to do with that info.
   
4. The Great Link Building Mystery Unplugged - A consistent theme in Michael's blog is that getting lots of links and anchor text is only one way to rank well in the search engines, and it's not necessarily the easiest or best way. This runs directly contrary to what a lot of people in the affiliate business think.
5. Hardcore SEO Tips - Another great post. This one and the post above about the infallible search engine optimization method will make almost any SEO better at what they do.

What I really like about Michael Martinez's blog is that it's not aimed at beginner SEO's. Most other SEO blogs on the Internet seem to tackle very basic stuff in very basic ways.

Hundred Dollar SEO

I found this blog through a link at Michael Martinez's SEO blog. Carlos del Rio is the author of this blog. He's a former teacher and part-time artist who brings a fresh approach to SEO blogging. He's obviously a big fan of Martinez's, but I don't hold that against him and neither should anyone else. Some of my favorite posts from him include:

1. Cheap Seo - This is a legitimate concern for a lot of people who want to get started making money on the Internet. Del Rio offers two approaches for getting some SEO done for $100 or less. I haven't decided which approach I like better yet though.
2. Internal Linking Structures - Del Rio describes in some detail some of the different approaches to link structures for websites. His explanation of the silo strategy is the best explanation of that approach that I've read yet. Internal linking structure is a hugely important aspect of SEO that many SEO's never discuss. (Mostly because they're talking about different ways to get external links all the time.)
3. Long Copy Versus Short Pages - Del Rio looks at whether or not you should write long or short copy from another perspective, different from Michael Martinez's. He also discusses the results of a landing page contest which measured conversion rates for a long landing page compared to a short landing page.
4. Link Flavors - Here he talks about some of the different "flavors" of links, including "reciprocal" and "sitewide" flavors. Some people think links of certain flavors (like the two I just mentioned) can hurt your SEO efforts more than helping them. He also examines evidence that on-topic linking doesn't really matter as much as you might have been led to believe, and he gives an example.

Tropical SEO

Andy Hagans is a cool dude and an awesome blogger. He leans more toward the lazy blogging approach though, only publishing something when he has something to say. I'd rather see him post more often, because then I could learn more about how he thinks, but he's too busy living the dream and getting rich. Here are some of this best posts:

1. The Lazy SEO Manifesto - Living the dream, brother! This is kind of the whole point really.
2. You Are Better Than You Think - Some ideas about why you should start acting like a CEO instead of an SEO.
3. Why I Quit Working For Clients - Some people might not know this about me, but I used to work for clients too, just like Andy used to. But honestly, even the good clients can be a pain in the ass when you want to work on your own websites.
4. How to Build an Affiliate Site Worth $1 Million - Should be required reading for every affiliate webmaster/SEO.
5. How to Escape Google's Supplemental Index - Just as relevant now as when Andy first wrote it.

So many more posts from these 3 bloggers are worth reading. And so many more bloggers than this have affected my SEO thinking. I read Aaron Wall religiously for example, and I have great respect and admiration for Eric Ward. I used to read SEOmoz a lot, but I don't read it as often anymore. Lots of good stuff there though, especially in the members' area.

Here's a good piece of advice though. Don't spend so much time reading these SEO blogs that you stop producing content of your own. That's where the real money is: creating brilliant content.

QuickWebCreations.com - Quick Web Creations.com

I found a really cool tool that's available from QuickWebCreations.com for only $7. It's a logo generator that generates Web 2.0 looking logos and graphics. "Quick Web Creations.com" is easy to use - it's one of those point and click type tools that you use online. I'm not good at creating graphics, especially not logos, so I thought for $7, why not give it a try? I'm glad I did.

QuickWebCreations.com specializes in creating what they call "Web 2.0 logos". The idea is that Web 2.0 logos use gradients, shadows, reflections, glossiness and stripes to make their logos look cooler and more modern. I've seen a lot of "Web 2.0" websites which do use some of these types of graphics techniques, so I guess this is pretty accurate.

I've used BannerMakerPro in the past, and I'll use it again in the future. That software cost a little bit more money, but I liked it a lot. QuickWebCreations.com is something that can probably be used easily in conjunction with Quick Web Creations.com.

My favorite aspect of QuickWebCreations.com was the gallery of user-created logos. They present over 4500 different logos submitted from users, and if you like one of them, you can click on "use this style", type new words, and have a logo with a similar look and feel

Please note that I don't normally use affiliate links when I review a product, but I've made an exception in this case. I really like the product, but I think if you decide to use it (and it's only $7, so why not try it?) I might as well make a few bucks from it too.

I hope you'll give Quick Web Creations.com a try and that you'll really like how it works for you.