Here’s just a quick intro to this topic for those unfamiliar with it…

Let’s say you’re building a site about tennis and you run the keyword tennis through the Adwords tool to see which keywords pay more per click than others.

In the example above you see that “atp tour tennis” keyword pays roughly 3 times as much per click as the keyword “andy murray tennis”.

So you assume that if you wrote a page about “atp tour tennis” you would get paid much more than if you wrote a page about “andy murray tennis”.

The main reason why this very likely won’t work is because you cannot tell Google which ads to serve.

This affects you in 2 ways:

1.    Your main keyword has variations that pay less

You cannot guarantee that the ads for atp tour tennis will be triggered even if you include that keyword in all the right places.

For example, the “atp tour” keyword has all these fluctuations in PPC:

So Google might serve ads that were triggered for the keyword “atp tour results” which pays just 0.17 or Google might serve ads just for the keyword “atp tour” for example which pays 0.62.

And since you cannot write 100 and more words around that ad by repeating a single phrase over and over again, you then create tens of different keywords around that ad that can trigger it.

That brings us to the second reason…

2.    Your text around the ad has many other keywords that can trigger ads

If your goal is to trigger ads for “atp tour tennis” you can probably include that keyword max. twice in 100 words before triggering another thing – a penalty for keyword stuffing.

Which means that 94 words will have to be something different around those Adsense ads. And all those keywords can trigger ads.

You might mention tennis scores, tennis association or tennis ranking and all these keywords can trigger lower paying ads.

So your chances of scoring big with a certain high paying Adsense keyword are quite low.

Yes, you increase the chances of getting that ad served if you optimize for such keywords but is it really worth the time and effort to look for such keywords for such a small chance of getting a slightly higher pay per click?

In my opinion, looking at specific keywords and their PPC value in Google Adsense is not a very productive thing.

If you’re interested in getting paid more in Adsense you shouldn’t look at individual keywords but rather the whole niche!

If you choose a high paying niche then the chances of getting low PPC ads triggered are very small.

If you want more proof of how Google serves all sorts of ads that are not triggered by your “precious” keyword, try this nifty Adsense preview tool.

See the ads triggered for the keyword and country I entered.

None of those actually seem to be related to atp tour tennis except maybe the US Open tennis tickets in the bottom left.

So Google may have served the ads from the words “atp” and “tennis” or even “tennis tour” from my long tail keyword.

See Exclusive Tennis Package ad on the left? This one is most likely triggerred by “tennis tour”.

In summary, optimizing for high paying Adsense keywords is a strategy that doesn’t work most of the time.

You’re much better off if you look at the general payout of the niche, start creating quality content and forget about each individual keyword and how much it’s worth.

There’s much more important work to be done to succeed than to waste time on a payout of a certain keyword…

While it’s not spelled out obviously that ad-to-content ratio can be a problem, keep in mind that the Google Panda / Farmer update was designed to combat content farms – which in most cases make money with Adsense.

If you look more closely, you can find this question among many others that are behind the Panda algorithm:

Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?

Vanessa Fox also mentions ad-to-content ratio as one of likely factors behind the Farmer update.

But what’s really interesting is that Google Adsense has changed their best adsense placement tips – but unfortunately I think it’s not that well publicized.

The suggested adsense placement / layout is now like this:

So as you can see the text should be wrapped around the ads or a portion of the text should be placed before the first ad.

If you follow the above link you’ll also see how the ads should not be placed – which is an ad just below the headline that pushes the content down.

Another way that many websites now place their ads is in the right column but still above the fold and / or a banner ad high on the page that doesn’t push the content down that much and is not mistaken for content since it’s not below the headline.

Here are some examples from techcrunch.com, engadget.com and nytimes.com:

All these websites make money with advertising but it’s obvious that they all follow the same principles – which are different than those of Adsense publishers with very aggressive ad placements.

Would these major websites have a better CTR if they placed the ads inside their content? Very likely.

Why don’t they do it? It’s obviously is not the right way to play this game.

There’s no need to know all the answers all the time, you can simply follow those who do well and apply their principles.

It reminded many webmasters that the Internet business is not as reliable as it seemed to be –and that content website model that relies on free search engine traffic is extremely dependent on Google.

I think the large content website model is here to stay for a very long time – it just needs to be done better than 4 years ago.

But there is another option of getting traffic – creating your own digital products and using advertising and / or affiliates to create traffic.

I actually earned my first dollars online with my own digital products and later started learning more about Adsense and affiliate programs.

The Problem Of Sales Letters Being Part Of Your Main Website

But after having been selling my own ebooks and tennis videos for a few years I realized that my sales letter (or parts of them) have been copied literally thousands of times.

There are all blogs and sites that somehow scrape all products on Clickbank, add their own hoplink and take a few sentences from the sales letter to create a small blog post.

Then there are folks who copy the sales letter 100% and then place it on another domain where everything looks like the original except the links are affiliate links.

The problem with that is duplicate content.

And with Google Panda algorithm updates, having original content on your site looks to be more and more important.

The Solution – Separate Domains

I just recently started to combat this problem.

I rewrote my sales letter for one of my digital products (which is a LOT of work), bought a new domain and posted my new updated sales letter there.

Once I updated the link in my Clickbank account, all affiliate links for my product now automatically send visitors to that new domain.

And what’s interesting to see now is how much traffic I get solely from affiliates – since I changed my Clickbank sales letter link on July 25th and can track all traffic from then on.

For this product I get around 100 daily visitors.

Traffic from Clickbank affiliates only

Google, Yahoo and Bing indexed the site in a couple of days and they send an occasional visitor but since there are just a few links to the site that I created from my own sites it doesn’t really rank well.

And yet, I get 100 daily visitors to the site without any need for search engines.

Creating digital products doesn’t have to be a monumental project. Start with a small ebook (like I did) with maybe 25 pages.

Sell it for $10-$20 on Clickbank.

Once you see that there are sales trickling in, consider another ebook or an audio or a video.

What if you had 10 digital products listed on Clickbank and they were really good?

You most likely wouldn’t be a millionaire yet but you would be getting sales without being a slave to search engines.

If you combine that with your main website that drives traffic to all these sales sites, you could be doing really well!

Head over to Shaun Fawcett’s case study on this page to see how Shaun used exact same approach to build on online empire with digital products.

It’s really annoying that this is the reality but unfortunately it is. We’d like things to be easier but they are not.

Today the Sitesell.com’s page on Facebook has been removed without any warning.

If you’re an SBI-er, then you know how long and how hard Sitesell team has been working on their page.

Basically every newsletter they sent in the last 6 months had something related to Facebook. They became experts on getting Likes and traffic on Facebook and taught all of us along the way.

And yet the reality of Internet and life is that bad things happen.

Here’s the mindset and key questions you need to ask yourself to deal with them…

1.    Is it really that bad? Can you handle it?

Sitesell.com has been profitable and getting more and more satisfied clients years before Facebook.

They will keep growing even without Facebook. They CAN handle this.

2.    Is this bad luck or was I lucky before?

I personally really like this one – although it’s tough to swallow sometimes.

In case of Sitesell, I think it’s really bad luck – and their success of getting 16000 Likes was not lucky.

But I remember when Chitika was paying me 0.35 per click in a niche where Google paid 0.15. Eventually they pay per click dropped to 0.14 and people started complaining that “now Chitika sucks.”

In my perspective, we were very lucky to be paid 0.35 per click for some time and that eventually things just stabilized at “normal” levels.

I had some websites with really bad content that ranked well in the past and I earned well – but eventually they stopped getting traffic  from Google.

Again, in reality, I was really lucky in the past and now the reality set in – and what I earn now from those websites is normal.

This way of thinking saves me a lot of stress and headache.

The reality won’t change and looking at it negatively does not change it. It only negatively affects my mental and physical health.

So I’ll adapt my thinking in a way that makes me feel good.

3.    Can you learn from it? Can you do it better next time?

Can Sitesell do it better next time? Or perhaps avoid the mistake?

Is Facebook REALLY necessary for business success? I think in case of Sitesell the answer is definitely not.

In this time and age of Facebook, they need a page there – but it’s more to show that they are in touch with the latest things on the Web.

I really really doubt that Sitesell generated a huge amount of customers through Facebook. Their business model does not work that way.

In fact, most business in my opinion do not NEED Facebook presence. It helps, but it’s FAR from being crucial.

If you look at very high traffic websites and check how many Facebook fans they have, you’ll see that the numbers are laughably small compared to their traffic.

I was looking online on how to make a bruschetta and the second site in Google just for “bruschetta” was simplyrecipes.com.

Their Alexa ranking is 7601. How many daily visitors they get?

According to some online stats they get over 70,000 daily unique visitors. That’s over 2,5 million per year.

They have 8625 fans on Facebook. Yes, very funny.

I’d like to conclude this with two questions…

a)    What are your thoughts on Facebook removing Sitesell page without any warning? And what does it tell you about relying on Facebook or any other site when you have no control over the content you publish there?

b)    Is Facebook really necessary to succeed in online business?

This weekend from Black Friday until the Cyber Monday is also the best earning weekend of your online business in the whole year if you happen to sell or promote products.

I checked my Amazon stats today for yesterday’s Cyber Monday results and I sold about 3 times more items than on average day and the conversion rate was 9,49% which is about 3 times more than the 3,25% conversion rate in October.

That’s just shows you how people know when to shop and how Amazon knows how to sell.

So how did this crazy shopping weekend work for you?

Since non-SBI-ers cannot access the forums I’d like to share here more details on what Stuart and I will be presenting in London from 17^th to 18^th of February 2011.

Here’s what I’ll share:

1. Mindset for success

I’ve been working with tennis players for 15 years on their mental game and it’s remarkably similar to the mental game of the webmasters.

Here’s are just some of the topics we’ll discuss and how they affect your success:
- self esteem issues and the difference between opinions and facts
- perfectionism and how it hurts your success and how to make the best of it
- mistakes and how successful people view them
- and other interesting but crucial things to be aware of: self discipline, shortcuts, time management, motivation and others

2. Finding a niche and assessing its potential with the SBI Brainstormer tool

There are very few SBI-ers who have become financially free with their first and only one website. Most of us will have to start at least one more but in reality probably end up with 4-5 SBI websites to generate enough income to fly to Istanbul whenever we want.

In this presentation you’ll learn:
- how I find niches
- how I assess their potential (I have successfully predicted the income of most niches after 12-18 months)
- what are the numbers of an ideal niche (only my third SBI site was finally selected based on ideal numbers)

I suggest you take a look at this blog post of mine and see what kind of earnings per 100 visitors I get and what most people who comment below get. There’s a big difference!

3. Outsourcing

I’ve tried to outsource various tasks in the last 5 years while building my product review empire.

I’ll show you:
- how I find good writers and how I keep them
- what kind of graphic design I outsourced and what I got
- how to go about outsourcing link building (just asking freelancers to get you links gives you really poor results – you need to do it smarter)
- what kind of research I outsourced and how much (actually how little) I paid

There’s one more topic I might talk about (we’re still discussing this with Stuart) and that’s a blog + website combo.

There have been many interesting and effective things that have happened with my http://www.tennisthoughts.com WordPress based blog and my main http://www.tennismindgame.com SBI website.

I’ll show you:
- how difficult it is to set up a WordPress blog
- what are the main benefits of having a custom blog
- what happens with links in time if you provide quality content on your blog
- where to get some really good links for blogs and why it’s easier to get links to a blog
- how to interlink both sites for the maximum effect

As with all internet marketing products and seminars even this one has a bonus from my side.

I’ll share with you my email exchanges of how I requested link exchanges and got them and how I negotiated better links than offered from other webmasters.

This part will NOT be on the DVD as I’ll you see the exact websites from which I got links. So you’ll need to keep this secret only to yourself after you leave the conference.

This is almost like sharing the best pick up lines that actually work.

If you attend the conference you also get to pick our brains. Stuart and I will be there to genuinely help the best we can. I’m not going to London to party (maybe after the conference) but to help anyone and everyone who wants to be helped.

Ask and you shall receive. I’ll review your site and tell you everything I know to guide you to success. Warning: I speak the truth so brace yourself. But the truth can set you free so there’s your chance.

I also want to mention that I am firstly a tennis coach. It’s my passion and my main path through life. I don’t think I’ll do many conferences like this in the future as it is a lot of effort to prepare for it and I am not looking for any significant financial gain.

So it’s really my good will (and a lot of Stuart’s persuasion tactics ) that I am doing this.

If you’ll want personal coaching after this conference you’ll need to fly to Slovenia. I do have a spare room though so it might not cost you that much…

Here’s what Stuart will share…

Those that know me will know that I am nowhere near as successful with SBI as Tomaz is. However, I am successful enough to have worked for the past 2 years running a multi-lingual, multi-user blog platform in the politics and policy area (think propaganda and you won’t be a million miles away!) that has about 25,000 posts and pages.

I also have had the opportunity to play about with the main website of the company (a 60,000+ page site in 3 languages). I have also consulted for a couple of ecommerce sites and been involved with strategy setting, video and a range of monetisation models.

In other words, I am doing the kinds of things that SBIers do not get the chance to do normally.

I got started by trying to understand why my website didn’t work. About a year later and I found SBI, which I couldn’t make work either. So I set myself the aim of really understanding SEO. That took hundreds of experiments and tests.

Fast forward 5 years and I am now on page 2 for my main keyword ‘stock market’ and competing with the likes of Bloomberg, NASDAQ and CNBC for rankings. (Once you realise that I was building a site about stock market investments, you know why I couldn’t make it work!)

So, what will I be up to at the conference?

Session 1 – The Logic of SEO

As I mention above, it took me years to really get it. But now I do, and I can explain it as well!! I’ll be describing exactly how to make your site as white hat as white hat can be. I thought I had a lot of this figured out – the Google algorithm is actually supremely logical – but in May I had the chance to chat to Matt Cutts and the few questions I was able to ask confirmed that I was correct.

Therefore, I am going to pull back the curtain and explain just what you need to be doing to trounce your competition without them realising how or why. Once you hear it, you will think, “Of course!”, but until you hear it, it isn’t obvious.

Session 2 – Linking Strategies

This is super important. Using the sites I mention above, I have had the chance to build links on a colossal scale. You’d be amazed what can be done. I’ll be explaining as much of that as I can and what the impact can be. I’ll also be explaining the kinds of sites that will enable you to do the same.

To put this in a little perspective, the last time I saw Tomaz in the summer, he and I spent about 10 minutes ‘link exchanging’. I built him about 600 and he built me about 800. (As an aside, Slovenia is lovely, but his spare bed is very hard).

Session 3 – Intermediate SEO

This will be about answering questions and giving answers to some of the great unknowns of the search engine world. Covering topics like duplicate content, PLR, on page optimisation, keyword density, spam and much more. My hope is that the first session will make this slightly redundant, but you never know, and when I have been to other conferences these have been the subjects people really want covered.

Session 4 – Monetisation Models

Tomaz and I shall share this one, but the real aim is to open up some new ‘M’ to people and show how easy it can be. For my part, I do quite a bit of CPA. Tomaz is a star with Amazon (if you can believe it is possible).

Then there is the separate Google AdSense session. Tomaz and I disagree fundamentally about how to optimise AdSense ads. So much so that it was obvious that we couldn’t run a session about this because we would argue with each other! So I pulled a few strings, called in a favour and hey-presto, Google will be taking part! Ta-da!!

This session almost certainly will not be recorded on video. The AdSense people want to actually help us in the session, so there will be a short presentation and then sessions to sit and chat with us in groups to optimise as we watch. Very cool.

As with Tomaz, we’ll be in the bar after the sessions to chat and answer questions. And at lunch time. And over breakfast. And if Edinburgh is anything to go by, in the gents as well… I’m not going to London to party either – been there done that – so I am going to help as many people as possible.

We both look forward to seeing you there.

———————————————————–

Here are also more details on the conference:

The conference will be held on 17th / 18th February 2011 in the Grand Connaught Rooms, Great Queen Street, London. The room we have will hold 65 people classroom style.

The program is still essentially as laid out in the opening post of this thread. That means lots of Tomaz and I giving information, advice and pep-talks about internet marketing, SEO, link building and monetisation. As you may recall, we also have confirmed a presentation and individual assistance from the Dublin based Google AdSense Optimisation Team.

We will be filming the event and editing it down into a format that will be available in DVD. However, the Google session will not be filmed.

The cost of the event will be GBP 200 per delegate to attend the conference.

If you would like to attend:

- This is not for beginners. There are descriptions elsewhere in this thread about this, but if you are very new to SBI and / or internet marketing, this is not for you. Apologies.
- To book, we need you to do a couple of things:

1. Please paypal the sum of 200 GBP to Tomaz (I have dealt with everything so far, he is taking over for a while now) at tmencinger @ siol.net (please remove the spaces). For obvious reasons of admin, we would prefer not to deal with more than one payment from people. Therefore, we ask that you pay in full in advance.

Should you need to cancel, we will refund 150 GBP up to the 15th of January. After that date, Tomaz and I are essentially responsible for everything financially, and we would rather not make a loss. Therefore, should you need to cancel after 15th of January, we are sorry, but there will be no refunds.

2. Send Tomaz an email. This is to help him match payments with people. Please email at the same address as above and include the following info: your name, contact email, paypal email address (if different from contact email), your telephone number, the name of your website (Tomaz may check it!) and whether or not you plan to stay at the same hotel as the rest of us.

—————————————–

If you have any other questions about the conference, please email me!

P.S. We have 32 confirmed attendees so far so there will be plenty of networking opportunities. (In other words, you have a chance to befriend at least 32 internet marketers + Stuart and me – which gives you LOTS of link exchange opportunities. )

When I talk to my friends and people contacting me about starting a home based online business I do manage to convince them that this is a very slooooooow system of earning money but that it becomes almost 100% passive after some time.

While they manage to swallow this hard fact down (they would rather start earning $1000 per month is 3 months ), they still want to know what to expect (on average) after the first year online.

I’ve checked my stats and here are my traffic and earnings of 3 sites exactly 1 year after starting:

Site 1: 763 daily unique visitors, $503 monthly income
Site 2: 239 daily unique visitors, $630 monthly income
Site 3: 991 daily unique visitors, $3389 monthly income

I don’t wish to disclose which site is which so please don’t ask. I’ve built a couple of more sites after that and I wasn’t able to replicate the income of Site 3.

(Note that in all cases my traffic and income grew in the next month and it kept increasing for at least a year. So basically you can double all those numbers after 2 years!)

Most of my other sites do end up earning around $500 per month after 1 year.

Now for some people this is not really worth the effort. I really don’t understand them.

I mean – you work 1 year part time and after one year you are sure of $500×12 = $6000 extra money per year doing nothing! (Of course if you choose to do nothing about the site. If you keep working on it, it will keep rewarding you even more.)

Not only that, this income will with minimum maintenance stay at that level (or most likely even grow) for the next 20 years. How cool is that!

And if you do what I did – which is to start a new site every 6 months in the first 2 years of your online business, you’re going to see some extraordinary stuff happen after 3 years.

Just my thoughts on the topic that $500 per month after 1 year is not much.

I’ve shared more detailed calculations of how much can a home based business earn in my previous article too…

I would really appreciate – and the future visitors to this article too – if you could share your numbers.

How much traffic did you get to your site (or multiple sites) exactly 1 year after starting it and how much did you earn from each site?

And what are your thoughts on earning “just” $500 per month after 1 year of work?

Thanks for sharing!

——————————————-

I’m so worried that all these other sites are so much better and way ahead of me, but I am in this for the long term, I want to fire my boss so bad.

I don’t have your confidence level, or skill with computers and websites, but I do have the burning desire to be free.

How can I keep the fear of failure and fear of the competition from beating me? Actually fear is part of my motivation: fear of having to stay at my day job. Does that make sense?

——————————————–

Here’s how to deal with the fear of failure: what will happen if you do NOT even start the online journey? That’s the fear of staying in your job – and that’s a great motivator.

Also, how can you fail? EVERY SITE that has at least 50 pages makes money. There’s no way you can go in the red.

While we cannot say how much money, it does make money while you’re doing nothing. And that’s very cool.

The site you’re starting is NOT the only site you can build. Why does this one have to perfect?

You’re getting anxious because your creating an almost impossible request on yourself: you don’t want to fail, you want to succeed with your first and only site and you’ve never built a site in your life until now.

See how unrealistic those expectations are.

Start a site, work on it for a year, it will make money. Then you’ll get a better understanding of how this works. You’ll either improve the current one, start a new one or do both.

Fear of competition? Well, if you have no experience then you cannot really trust Brainstormer numbers. But thousands of us do – we build sites based on these numbers. And it works for us.

Start your journey – because you have no other choice.

What you want is to be sure AND then you’ll start. It’s impossible.;)

First, we’re never 100% sure because we don’t know EXACT Google algorithm and second, the ONLY way to be quite sure is to actually look at real hard data.

And you get that by starting a site and eventually seeing some real numbers.

Even with 5 visitors per day you’ll start to understand better how this works because you’ll see for which keywords they found your site and then you’ll start to recognize patterns – how you used these keywords, which pages rank well, how Google finds these keywords and so on.

After that you’ll have some real confidence in the process. But for now, just realize that’s impossible for you to be sure what works. You need to start anyway – and face your fears head on.

I’ve learned a few good tips, met great people and also realized the different levels of knowledge and understanding of participants.

I met Stuart L. in Barcelona and we found out that we share similar ideas about internet marketing and that we both like to delve deeper into more advanced stuff.

The result is that Stuart (the wizard of stocks) and I have decided to put together an advanced internet marketing seminar.

Our intention is for it to be in London, in February 2011. We have not yet picked a week, but if there is enough interest, we shall. We anticipate that it will be a 2 day event.

The SBI conferences in the past have cost the individual a limited amount (plus travel and hotel). We plan the same. Our hope is that attendance will cost in the region of £100 -> £150 per person, but this will depend in large part on the numbers attending and the hotel we locate. We will confirm later.

For those of you that are not aware, we are both professional IMers. I have a number of SBI sites and earn a very good income with my product review empire.

Stuart earns his main income as an internet marketer for an online media where he runs a multi-user blog platform and is involved in online strategy setting, video, business building and management.

We have created an outline programme for sessions as follows:

1. Mindset for success
2. Niche and keyword selection including advanced use of the BI tool
3. Intermediate SEO
4. Linking strategies
5. The logic of SEO
6. Adsense optimisation
7. Outsourcing
8. Monetisation strategies to include CPA, Amazon and Clickbank

Let me emphasize, this will not be aimed at beginners. If you have not yet selected a domain, built a minimum of 50 pages, had your site for less than 1 year, earned any money from your site, etc, this will almost certainly be too advanced for you.

We are presuming that you have a certain level of knowledge and understanding of the AG, the SBI tools and the internet generally. We are not presuming that you are super talented – we are hoping to teach after all – but if you are just starting your internet marketing journey, this will almost certainly be over your head.

We plan to film the event. Not everyone is able to come to London in February – and we would need the O2 arena if you did all come!! – so we will have DVDs available after the event.

Our tentative plan is to simply publish the shortest (in terms of time) one or two sessions in full on my blog so that anyone can watch them. The full event will be between 6 and 8 DVDs that we will sell at a reasonable price later.

Those that have been to events in the past and know us, will know that we do our best to answer questions and help in the hotel bar, at meal times and in between sessions. Those that attend can pitch as many questions as you need at us. For everyone else, there will be the DVDs…

That is the plan!!

If you are an SBI-er and interested in attending, then please reply in the thread we started in SBI forums.

If you’re not an SBI-er, then please comment below and let us know that you’d like to attend. To reiterate, this will be in London in Feb 2011 and is not for beginners in internet marketing. Thanks!

It’s when I make the affiliate sale of SBI. The money earned from promoting SBI accounts to around 1,5% of my monthly income – and it’s exactly because it’s so difficult to make a sale that I find it so cool.

My second most exciting income source is Amazon. The reason for Amazon and why I like to check my earnings every day is because it’s so unpredictable.

I’ve made from $23 per day to over $700 per day – all in the same month. I never know what the number will be when I login to my Amazon affiliate program.

When I earned over $700 in one day, I had to check what happened – because that’s not my average earning. And I realized that someone bought a treadmill which cost $4000 while they had my cookie. That earned me more than $300.

The third most exciting source of income is Google Adsense. It’s my biggest earner and yet for some strange reason I don’t find it that exciting.

It’s more or less very predictable and I keep telling myself to appreciate it more.

My least exciting income source is Chitika. While it pays nice and I can choose to receive the payment to Paypal or check, the income dropped from previous levels and I typically check my earnings only once a week.

My question to you is: Do you also find some income sources more exciting than others or is money simply money, regardless of where it comes from?