Cash Keywords

Stop Using Article Databases and Create Original Content to Expand Your Site Topics -You’ll Make More with AdSense!

Some of us are creating new sites and need a way to fill the site with content – where to begin?  Then others have a site already and it’s doing well with AdSense, but you know it could do MORE, if you could just expand the topics to more pages.

It just seems easier to go to an article database and find whatever you can on a topic and slap it up on your site with AdSense. The problem is 90% of the articles from an article site is CRAP – boring, generic information that barely scratches the surface in 3 paragraphs. Bleh. Plus many of these general topics are lousy for making money with AdSense because the themes need to be more specific to a product or service that someone is spending money to advertise.

If you're looking at expanding your website to include new topics and new categories for AdSense publishing or affiliate marketing, you have to start thinking like a consumer and fill a need or solve a problem. It's easy to just brainstorm new ideas, but if you don't solve what I call an emotional problem or need, the pages you create aren't going to be as effective in making you more money.  Another way to look at it is to take away the reader’s “pain” by providing a simple solution through your content.

Recently, I was asked to take a look at someone's Home Interior and Décor website to help them figure out ways to expand the site topics.  They had 10-20 pages of general articles related to home interior and home design.  The articles had information, but not what someone wanting a home interior problem solved would find interesting or useful. I thought the website had a lot of potential to expand in many directions, however, the owner of the site wasn't thinking enough in depth to create interesting topics.

I use a simple, 3-step process for finding topics to expand my websites by solving the users problems and headaches:

Step 1.  Determine the Users Needs.  In this case, the webmaster needs to think like a homemaker (most likely a woman) and what kind of emotional needs (hassles, pain, inconveniences) they need fixed.  For example, a woman today has a lot of household responsibilities and not a lot of energy to complete the task.  Or they have to clean the

bathtub, and want an easy way to get the soap scum off without strong chemicals or hours of scrubbing.

Step 2.  Think from the perspective of I. "I wish I had more free time." "I wish I could have a clean and beautiful home." "I need some appliances that get the job done faster and quieter." "I want more time to relax."

Step 3.  Meet those “I” needs in step 2.

“Home TV Show Secrets to a Beautiful Interior.” (Need: I wish I had a beautiful home)

“Buy Appliance X and Add 30 Minutes a Day to Your Life.”  (Need: I need some appliances to get the job done faster)

“Hire a Personal Organizer to Organize Your Home for You (Need: I want to relax and enjoy my home)

There are so many different ideas and viewpoints you can take, suddenly you have a ton of options to put on that website and each page can be tightly focused. The tighter the focus, the better you're going to target your user that comes to your site and the more likely they will click on advertising on that page.

Other ideas I came up with for the Home Interiors website:

1. Compare the best vacuum cleaners on the market, their price range, the different models, and what makes each one of them unique and useful for different types of homemakers.

2. Products that help you relax in the evening: New kinds of spas and home saunas and steam showers.

3.  A how-to article on buying and installing new fixtures to give your bath a fresh look.

Service focused sites can use the same technique, too!  I spoke with another webmaster in a very competitive industry – Insurance. Let’s use the three steps to brainstorm new topics.

Step 1. Find the Need.  What are big insurance buyers headaches?

Step 2. Think from the perspective of I: 

1. “How do I pick the best insurance?”
2. “What if I don’t get my insurance claim paid when I need it”
3. “I’m tired of paying higher insurance premiums for nothing."

Step 3. Meet the Need (headache, pain or aggravation gone!)

1. The Right Kind of Life Insurance for Your Family
2. US Insurance Companies Rated Best for Payouts.
3. Decrease Premiums for Your Good Record with These Insurers.

If you look solving someone’s headache and meet that need with good information, you will definitely improve the quality of the content on your website, and find a treasure trove of money making topics.

I know what you are thinking….Where do I get the information I need to fill the topics, and who has time to write all this stuff?  In part two, I will take away the pain of creating new content and finding the information you need to do it, with some ideas on how to do it yourself.

Go Crazy - Extensive List (125+ links) of Free Content Sources - Copyright Free and Cost Free!!

Thinking about making some tips lists, so I was poking around "My Documents" on my machine - where I keep all my best ideas for someday - and I found I had created a humungous list of free content search engines, audio, video, images, and text sources as well as  "discovery keywords" that I compiled some months back.  It's not a perfect list - might have thrown a few oddball things in there that interested me - but it's still alot of free stuff and some good places to go to find more content.  It's the type of information sites where you start here and end up there somehow - like good old fashioned web surfing.

You know, I knew I spend alot of time online just reading and doing my own research, but this proves it.  No wonder there's not enough hours in the day!  Anyway, it's all on Trafficgeni.us and I also wrote some background info on the content and additional information you may want to know.

Next week I'll spend more time looking at documents I created, and wondering why the titles don't describe the contents very well.  Who knows what else is in there.....

Using Articles for Content and Adsense - The Easy Way Out - Part 2

We all want to believe that a resource like the myriad of articles available online is good thing, and it is.  The problem lies in taking a good thing and going overboard with it.  I will get to the point and list some examples that illustrate why I believe using articles for content for AdSense sites is not going to last:

1. In 1999, I worked for a company that offered doorway pages, and you could buy a package that created dozens of optimized pages based on your site's look/feel and get ranked for a number of keywords.  As I recall, they used software to generate the doorway pages and it did work for the short term.  That technique started fading by 2001 as search engines clamped down (although like all my examples, some people still use it, and get away with it.  Usually if you do things manually and not using software to autogenerate, you can fly under the radar or for example building pages by hand, it's not a problem).

2. I am sure there are earlier examples similar to this, but back in 2002 a colleague of mine told me how a mutual acquaintance had taken his self defense site from nowhere to the top on Google by accumulating links.  As I recall, he had accumulated about 850 links coming in after discovering this little technique worked. And boy did it work.  In fact, he didn't need relevant links - a link from Grandpa's Hobby Site was fine - and this was before the Pagerank was even thought about - so all he had to do was keep accumulating. Today this site has only 56 links in Google (but 928 in MSN).

Word travels fast online, and withing 6 months we saw all kinds of sites asking for links, and Google started cracking down on links pages, in particular those created by software that left a definite "footprint."  Then we also saw link exchanges and link farms and while it was good at first, alot of people saw their site lose rankings or banned outright by the time Google was done.

3. More recently, many affiliate programs provided their affiliates with premade, private label/co-branded sites, that had the same content, product descriptions, pictures and included the affiliate links.  It was a handy way to quickly get a new site and promote affiliate products without spending any time or money.  Ask any affiliates using these "co-branded" sites, they have been systematically dropped or losing rankings in Google (and other SEs like Yahoo) over the last year.  The Webmaster forums had lots of complaints on cookie cutter affiliate sites filling Search Engine results and it seemed that nothing would be done about it (however, Google includes both doorways and Affiliate sites in their SEO Guidelines).  Typically it looks like nothing is happening to these sites/pages, then we have a Florida or Bourbon Google update and some people are up in arms that their sites are gone!

Bottom line:

1. Quick and Dirty may work short term, but long term it won't - especially if everyone is doing it AND you are using duplicate content and automated software to go crazy. But be ready and don't complain when the search engines catch up with you.

2. Doing things slowly (or on a smaller scale) is a pain - I know - but do you want revenues 1-2 years from now?  If making money for 3 months is OK, then quick and dirty techniques is fine for you. I have done both, but I know when I want to take a risk - and when I don't.

3. Are you able to keep ahead of the curve with new ideas?  If you keep jumping on ideas after it's been done by other people and well known, you will have a hard time to continue making money online year after year.  I am _always_ looking ahead for trends and new ideas, hopefully 6 months to 1 year ahead. Using ready made articles is not ahead of the curve by any means, and not unique enough content used as is.

Using Articles for Content and Adsense - The Easy Way Out (For Now) Part 1

We recently surveyed some of our users and the topic of Article and "autogenerated" sites and pages came up.  It is the latest trend (more like fad) for AdSense publishers to comb the web for articles and feeds that they can compile into sites with AdSense ads generating revenue.  In order to create these sites, there's software available (sometimes called "autogenerators" or a variation of that "Feed Generator/RSS Feed Software") that will grab articles/news feeds/blog posts based on keywords, and then compile them nicely into a template for your webmastering pleasure. 

It sounds like a nice idea, and it all seems a bit more compelling content-wise than a scraper site using search engine results.  When it comes to being able to quickly develop sites, and have a vast repository of content to draw from, it seems to good to be true.  However, I feel compelled to address this issue based on what as an SEO for the last 5 years, and my personal experience as an Adsense publisher.

I am pretty open-minded to the possibilities of what constitutes content for sites using AdSense.  I do not ascribe to the good/evil, black hat/white hat view of SEO, and I know that in order to make money time is of the essence.  To be honest, I have no desire to push a smarmy, holier-than-thou Content is King message here (there's plenty of that around). But I believe that the users that come to Cash Keywords are smart people that want to have something making money over the long haul. I don't think building autogenerated sites are going to make it long term (even 6 months down the road). I'll outline why in my next post.

What do you think?

Adsense Money in your Mailbox

Finding ideas to create content can be a fun endeavor or an overwhelming chore - either way the question is where to begin.  If you are someone with either plans for a new site using Adsense, or have a website that can utilize any top paying keywords, new ideas are as close as your US mailbox. If you are targeting American buyers, and don't have a US mailbox, then find someone who does ;^) Otherwise your local mailbox will do....

Want to know what sells, or what the lastest popular product is, then skip the Sunday paper headlines and sports page.  Go straight to the ads for ideas on what's hot this month,for example the latest gadgets - Have you seen the new Sony PSP?  Think in terms of what market you are in. What's a better fit, Target or Walmart (I prefer Target as hipper and cooler - Have you ever noticed their stores are _quiet_).

I got a Costco warehouse magazine in the mail with a cover featuring a club for women over 50 - The Red Hat Society. What kind of products did I see in that issue: massagers, glucosamine (for joint problems), recliners, and exercise equipment. Basically, stuff that would appeal to an over 40 market, and an aging US population.

Ad Circulars are also a great source for figuring out seasonal products, and when to start advertising for them. Take advantage of the millions these companies spend in marketing, inventory and sales - they have tested everything for you. If you want your Adsense sites to be a source of income year-round, you need to think about products that do well in late spring, summer and early fall - basically when the kids are out on summer vacation. 

Many websites have a black hole of revenues during the summer, and that doesn't have to happen. It might not be a bad idea to start a file with seasonal ideas, so next year you'll have a head start on the competition.  So this week, grab a cup of coffee, and rescue the ads before they're thrown out.