The Last few Months in Review
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I’ve been pretty quiet these last few months, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t busy!   I am writing this post to update people on what I’ve been working on, what I’ve been testing, and what of those is making me money.  I plan on doing a follow-up series on each of these.

 

Outsourcing my Business – At the time of writing, I have 2200 domains that are each  intended to rank for a set of terms and make money through Adsense, as well as sell text links.  These two monetization streams have been the basis of my online business for the last 2 years, and quite frankly, I am bored to death by them.  This boredom results in a lot of money being left on the table –  I realized that in November and sent an email to Scott one of my first generation interns.  I asked him if he’d be interested in coming down to visit me in Mexico, and training him to take over.  Within a week he was here, and he has now taken over all aspects of text link sales and Adsense sites, and even manages the majority of my staff.

 

Adsense – My Adsense revenues dropped by over 80%, and I’ve been having trouble getting it back.  As I had pointed out in previous posts, having a large amount of quality content seemed to be a basic threshold in the SERPs, and I still believe that to be the case.  I did an experiment that near proves it in my book.   I created some auto-blogs using content creature on a bunch of expired domains, posting a few hundred articles to each domain – even without links they started to pick up traffic on both short-tail and long-tail terms.  I am now working on creating a mini-network that automatically adds articles to domains, and adds articles on one of my private blog networks to link build them.  I will start with 100 blogs and keep you updated.  Note that I don’t encourage you to be auto-blogging, and the life expectancy on these sites is not long, but it is a great way for me to experiment with profitable niches on long-tail as well as content thresholds.   If an auto-blog does particularly well I could invest in editing the content and turning it into a clean site.

 

The 15 pages sites are still only picking up long-tail traffic, and not a significant amount of it.  I see this meaning that it either requires more content, or it is a sandboxing issue as they were done on new domains as opposed to expired domains.   The easiest thing would be to make some more 15 pages sites on some existing expired domains.  I’d like to do it, but there’s only so much time…

 

Selling Text Links – This is Scott’s primary focus right now, and this was definitely where I was leaving money on the table.  His first major job was to make an inventory of my sites, and then submit anything that wasn’t already in TLA.  Because TLA has stricter guidelines, this requires writing articles, making banners, etc.  Next, he added about 400 PR3 sites to backlinks.com – I had done an experiment with a couple dozen 1 page sites almost a year ago, and they had done decently.  Their link prices are very low, but they make up for it in quantity.   They have been in backlinks.com for about 1 month now and have sold 250 links.    Backlinks.com is owned by NextNetMedia who owns a bunch of different backlink services, and Scott has gotten chummy with a rep who put us in touch with some programmers on their end so we can add code to the thousands of pages that qualify and immediately be entered into all the networks.  He’s also working with HPBacklinks (same owners as BMR).  I’ll keep you updated as we add some inventory on these networks.

 

The other idea that has me excited is I want to mass add a bunch of “Write for Us”/Guest Posting” pages on my sites that will rank for long-tail terms that link ninjas and link tools will use (niche + guest post, niche + submit site, etc.).  Then when emails come in, we sell inventory privately – “Oh you have a travel site?  Here’s 20 high PR sites in your niche, along with a bulk discount! ” *KaChing*   I used to make a lot of money selling private inventory this way, but then I stopped doing it as the person who was managing this left and I never got around to training a replacement.   Scott or I will post about this as things move along.

 

 

Content Creature – I did this as a way to dip my toes into the product creation and biz-op markets.   It is a tool I created for myself to solve a huge need in SEO (cheap and fast content), and it doesn’t at all hurt me to sell it to others.  My main goal is traffic creation through affiliates, and I plan to take it out of beta and officially launch it  next week (I’m just privately testing some major updates first).

 

Since this is a totally new arena for me, I am paying for training from Brad Gosse who was part of my former mastermind in Toronto and is a veteran at this.  I plan on converting some of that training into posts for you all to benefit from :)   I put it into Beta a few weeks ago, and should be ready to launch the real thing this week!

 

Some short-term plans include:

 

1 – Buying some traffic and split-testing various offers – I’m thinking the main forums , a quick venture into Adwords and AdCenter and maybe even other weird places like SEOQuake’s toolbar.  Any suggestions are welcomed!

2 – Using JVZoo for affiliate pushes

3 – Affiliate pushes through existing relationships (podcasts, webinars, etc.)

 

I will keep you all updated as it’s an interesting business.

 

Private Blog Networks

Many people have been emailing me asking me to setup and sell Private Blog Networks to them,  the majority of these people are busy owners of SEO agencies.  I’ve gotten enough emails to know that I should turn this into a service, but haven’t had the chance to publicize it yet.    So I’ll likely create a page for this, or maybe attend some conferences.

 

So that’s what I’ve been up to!  As usual if you have any questions please leave a comment!

 

Hayden

 

 

The Last few Months in Review
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  1. Only one Question Hayden-

    How do you feel google looks at page with 200 words or so. If we need more pages.. Should we just use more pages with thinner content or keep to 600+ word articles??

    • I think Panda does a good job of discounting pages with thin content, so generally one should aim to have at least 300 words of unique content. I stick to 500 or so.

  2. Hey, Hayden!

    I just purchased five expired domains. It is day three since I purchased them, and I got them all setup the same day that I got them. I used stats checking websites like Cubestat which got four out of the five websites indexed within a day. All of them should be anywhere from PR3 to PR5, and this is based on the links pointing directly to the homepage and not inner-pages.

    What is your experience with the wait time before the domains regain PR? It’s day three and they all say PR n/a. On average, how many days before they regain the “immediate PR”, or PR from links directly to the homepage. I installed the plugin ‘redirection’ and 301’d all links to inner pages to the homepage. On average, from your experience, out of a batch of 10 domains, how many do you think will regain PR before the next toolbar PR update. Thanks!

    • Hey John,

      In my experience, about 20-30% of domains get immediate PR. I’m still not entirely sure on why this is, but I think it has something to do with the domain being parked/unavailable for an extended period of time. They will of course all get their full PR by the next TBPR update. Try to get some subpages on them in the global navigation (IE recent pages) so you can multiple pages with PR.

  3. Thanks for the update Hayden.

    Regarding the busy SEO agencies looking for pre-packaged PBNs, how many sites would you guess the average agency is looking for?

    And do you get the sense they would want each site in that PBN to have unique IP’s and unique hosts?

    • Hey Jeff, it depends on the size of the agency. I haven’t yet started marketing it, but my guess is that you get the sale by going the drug dealer route of try free before you buy. I’m guessing people will want minimum 10 to see any impact whatsoever, likely more. Hit me up if you want to try marketing it, I can show you some of the media sheets I made.

  4. Hola Hayden,

    I’m interested in learning about creating link networks. Are you open to personal training like you did with Scott here in Mexico.

    I live in Cozumel Mexico, and am willing to travel to san luis potosi to get training with you.

    Please, let me know.

    Thanks

  5. Hey, Hayden.

    Thank you so much for answering that last question. I have one more for you, and it’s easy. As far as I understand, the expired domains regain their full linking power once they are purchased and setup. Is this correct? Or, what I mean is, the expired domains don’t have to wait for toolbar pagerank to regain their linbuilding benefits? Thank for the help everything you’re doing here!

    • As soon as the posts are indexed AND ranking for unique terms they are providing their full benefit. By unique terms I mean type some full sentence into Google WITHOUT quotes. If it shows up, you’re golden. Google sometimes has a form of sandboxing especially on new sites, and this is the way to tell if you’re sandboxed.

  6. Hey Hayden,

    With all the knowledge and cash flow you’ve had over the last two years have you done any media buying / CPA type stuff?

    Mobile traffic + CPA seems to be taking off for the past 6+ months.

    • Only for my furniture company, but I do want to get into it with ContentCreature. I am looking into a project right now based on Mobile traffic here in Mexico though :) It’s been on my plate for over a year and I’ve only now found the right technology and business plan for it. Out of the 6 regulars in my Mastermind in Toronto, 4 of them have moved into mobile gaming monetized with advertising interstitials. It’s a booming market right now, probably a big bubble – similar to the group buy market a couple years ago. Anyway for now it is quite profitable and surprising cheap to setup. It’s kind of beyond the scope of this blog but I suppose I could post about it if there’s interest. I’ve actually been thinking of going beyond SEO here, maybe re-brand… any suggestions for names?

  7. Hey Hayden,

    Thanks for the update. I was wondering if you’re still selling off domains that you’ve found but not registered? It’s taking me longer and longer to find good ones of my own! lol

    Looking forward to the release of content creature too – what price point will you be releasing at?

    Cheers

    • Hayden,

      I’d like to have a better understanding about your loss in Adsense income. Have you just written off those sites? Do you plan on building more Adsense sites or do you feel that ship has sailed?

      Matt

    • I use content creature… it can be an autoblog on it’s own you just load 500 keywords into it. The entire reason I made it credit-based was so that people wouldn’t use it as an autoblog.

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