Grizzly stopped golfing the tundra long enough to explain what the hell he has been up to the last few months. His minions were glad to hear from him. Apparently he has had to deal with a dust up with the Adsense tyrants and asshole web sewer inhabitants. He got everything fixed, re-arranged and says all is fine now while delivering a cautionary tale about using Blogger and/or Adsense. It was a good post and one that I feel compelled to discuss, as there are lessons to be learned here and I’m feeling a bit preachy.
I don’t understand the need for people to zig with the other ziggers. I hardly ever follow what the herd is doing, to my own detriment. Sometimes I figure out something that works and sometimes I don’t. Not once did I think it was a good idea to put Adsense on a Blogger blog. Have I ever put Adsense on a Blogger blog? Yep. Did it work for me? Not typically. But as picky as Adsense is about putting ads by photos and other obvious places, dropping one center mass on a spammy Blogger blog seemed like trouble.
Who among you bought Nomad’s Guide to Make Money Online? It was essentially a cookbook detailing the teachings of Griz. Nothing was said about making Blogger blogs anything more than Tier 3 or Tier 2 backlink collectors. Those were to link to your money sites.
I have quite a few Blogger blogs. Some link to money sites. Most have affiliate products on them. But I expect every single one of them to be trashed by the fascists at Blogger. I’ve only had a handful terminated but I consider every single one a throw away site. I would never quit my real job because I am making fat stacks due to Blogger blogs. I hardly build anymore Blogger blogs either.
This month is the best month I’ve had with Adsense in a while. It also marks the least amount of websites that I have Adsense plastered on in quite a while as well. I have been moving away from Adsense. I’ll enjoy the fruits of labors past but I can safely say I won’t be adding too much Adsense to future sites. Karma is giving me a big “eff U” as I give a big “eff U” to Daddy G. How I would love to not rely on Google for traffic or money. I look forward to the day when I can say my efforts are Google free.
There are plenty of information sites on dog training, teeth whitening, woodworking, back pain, learning Spanish and the billions of other useless sites begging for an Adsense click. Seems to me future info niche bullshit sites will have a tough time with Adsense glory. I can’t say so for certain but that seems to be the direction things are going. At least that is how it feels to me. It used to be that people were bored and they would click around ads for entertainment. Things were text based mostly. Now the bored people click the next video or music track. There is no way I would make a career decision to get rich from Adsense. 5 years ago that was a great model and if you were lucky enough to scoop up your dollars then good for you. Today Adsense is still very much a money maker but is nothing that I would risk my livelihood over.
Today I am far more likely to affiliate market some product. Whether using Ebay, Amazon, CJ, Shareasale or LinkShare, I prefer to funnel someone to make a purchase and collect a commission. For the most part the affiliate networks encourage you to utilize whatever means necessary to market their products. Want to set up an affiliate blog on Tumblr? Excellent idea. Sell stuff on Squidoo? Yes, please. Sell a toilet lid on a Blogger blog? Why, of course. Will you incur the wrath of some affiliate manager canceling your account since you dropped a product on Blogger? Maybe, but his competitor might not give a shit. Will Blogger destroy your blog? It’s possible but you can build another on another account. The affiliate program is just waiting on you to find another home to sell their product, unlike the fascists at Adsense. Granted Ebay is a little more troubling but they are far easier to get along with on a self-hosted site than Adsense.
Today I am a backlink collector. I do everything I can to get quality backlinks to my so-called money sites. In lieu of quality I get quantity. I use Blogger. I use Hubpages, Squidoo, Ezine and other typical social properties. I use Mass Article Submitter. I use Mass Article Rewriter to spin crap to place on social properties. It’s all about backlinks using targeted keywords in anchor text.
Do I worry about Google de-listing my site for some infraction of their backlink sensibilities. Not really. It’s a bummer but there are other ways that people find my website. Look at your stats. For most of your sites Google is probably #1 with 40-60% of traffic to your site. But if you add up all the other search engines and whatnot there is 40-60% of traffic coming to your site that has nothing to do with Google. Hopefully.
Google hasn’t yet penalized me writing articles for blog networks and article directories and adding a backlink to my site. I will continue to artificially generate interest to my sites.
If Blogger wants to take down my ice maker product site. Fine. Bring it. There are plenty more email variations to create. A quick trip to Ezine and AMA and I can quickly change my resource links to a new Blogger blog full of fine ice makers ready to deliver sweet commissions. But the fact is I don’t have too much trouble with product blogs.
Bottom line is that it shouldn’t have been surprising Adsense has shit on Blogger blogs. No one that I know of except Griz circa 2008 was ever saying it was a good idea anyway. Griz is/was the master and milked that tactic for all it was worth. No one did it better, and as far as I was concerned, assumed he moved on to self hosting long ago. It is apparent that well-known tactics get over-used no matter how good they are, and destroyed in the SERPs. Of course that assumes the tactic is a bit grey. I can’t see you ever having a problem if you are writing original content on a self hosted site and getting quality links. The problem with that is it takes a load of work to make it work and nobody wants to do that so they throw up thin sites. Myself included. So you run the risk of getting outed by the fascists.
The boring, crusty old work is what succeeds. My first, and best, site is now old. Has wholly original content. Hasn’t changed in over two years. Gets backlinks that I don’t ask for seemingly weekly. Honestly I think age has everything to do with the potential success you might have. Find a good niche. Write 30 good pages. Get a few great backlinks. And wait. People expect a site to be a success in a month. Those days are long gone for the average person with average resources. Keep Adsense off the damn thing. Each month build a site. In 2 years you’ll have 24 excellent properties of which most should be real keepers. Stop building 15 sites a month. It’s a waste anymore I think. Relax. Each day of the month write a superb page of content and post it to that month’s site. Do what is necessary to collect backlinks. Every day of the month get a couple great backlinks for a couple of your sites. Don’t over think this shit. Take a full month and figure out what the hell you want to create sites on for the next year.This is how I work my “money sites”. I do continue to fiddle around with Hubpages and Squidoo Lens but the real effort is to the “authority sites”. Dig?
That’s how I’m zagging. I expect most people to continue to sling as much content on the web as humanly possible with all the shitty tools and outdated tactics they can muster. Autoblog away. It’s cool. It’s still a money maker. What the hell do I know. I’m simply focusing on other things.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post as usual and these videos are f’ing hilarious. As I was scrolling down the page I saw the top of the video and thought all right another one! Watched it three times.
Hi Splork, I couldn’t agree more with you. About a year ago I had pretty much my whole blogger blog network removed (multiple accounts) and I saw this as sign to stop dumping MFA crap on blogger and start thinking about how to really make some money.
So while it sucked that my online income had died it was a good time to start running self hosted sites and pushing affiliate products and I think it’s been one of the smarter moves on my part. Now if I have a good day, I don’t get some pencil pushing arsehole inspecting my account, I get a friendly chap in London emailing me trying to figure out how we can double that.
You hit the nail on the head with this one! I’ve pretty much stopped showing Adsense any love last year and started heavily promoting CPA offers, CJ products, and EPN websites via free traffic methods and good ‘ole SEO.
Additionally, last month I performed a test using EPN vs. my established Adsense websites. The results proved to me that for some niches, relying on Adsense is a complete waste of time — especially in my case where I pulled in more money from EPN’s smart click pricing in 9 days than I did for almost an entire month with Adsense.
Well, Splork, it’s nice to read your stuff. Sounds sober enought to make me feel better about my own sites. I agree: plan ahead and be happy with what you have and what you do (but DO!), thus you will be peacefully progressing to whatever goal you might have. Thanks for good writing.
Thanks for reading and watching LMAO.
Paul, that is the cool thing about good affiliate programs. They actually do try to get in touch with you to find out how they can help you make more sells. At the very least they encourage you to ask for help.
Yolanda, thanks for reading. I agree about Ebay. Some days I do real good with the program.
Denis, yea I had to learn to relax. It was like I was in a race to put up as many sites as I could. It was exhausting, boring and ultimately defeating. Thanks for reading.
The one authority site a month idea sounds like an excellent concept. Build sustainable properties with affiliate offers and networks.
With one site every 4-6 weeks, each with 30-40 pages of good content, do you think spending 30 hours a week would be enough, assuming you’re building a couple of backlinks to each site per day along with updating each site with a few pages of content a month (so the site can grow). Outsourcing content would be a good idea once the income rolls in from the initial sites.
And when you see some sites performing better than the others, you can expand them.
Hey Splork! I agree with staying away from the crowds. I have been off trying a lot of different stuff lately. I have also gotten rid of tons of crap niche sites that did not work. I still have adsense on a few to make money and I figure as long as its working, I’m not going to fix it. I am too old to make money off my good looks and feminine charm, so I take the money and run.
Since spamming Myspace I really have not had a lot of luck with affiliate programs. But I do make a couple of bucks here and there.
Stopped by and left a comment on your bike blog. My son-in-law is running with the National Ultra Endurance Race Series this year and had an awesome time at the Tennessee Cohutta 100 race.
Hey James, no way I’m spending 30 hours a week on sites anymore. Maybe 5-7.
Denise. Marketing affiliate products is harder than simply getting someone to click a text ad on the Google network. Though the payout can be far better. It’s hard either way.
Would love to ride the Cohutta course. I don’t have the time to train for a hundred mile mountain bike endurance ride, but I ride over many of those trails they race.
Hey Splork,
I tinkered with Blogger but finally decided that there were way more fish in the sea to mess with than that. Grizzly can keep em (no offense to griz, of course).
As far as everything else you have said, you are spot on in terms of backlink collecting. There are more ways to fry a fish but all in all, if you are marketing online, you need to spend the majority of your time building, a fraction of your time tracking results (and building keyword data) and a fraction of a fraction of that writing new content to build more links to.
It’s a shlog, that’s for sure. And unlike bloggers, who have this vision of making money online through rose tinted glasses, it can be tedious and uber boring to say the least.
And you are right about age. I have sites and pages on parasitic blogs that disappear and suddenly have traffic a year later. Dunno why that is but it is what it is.
Shlog. I like it. Yea, these days getting motivated to get backlinks or write another page of content is like the last thing I care about doing. I’d rather cut grass, clean gutters or just about anything else I can thing of. Tedium is right.
I couldn’t agree more. I pretty much just posted the same thing on one of my sites. I still use adsense, but I diversify. i think the era of making a living posting garbage is mostly ending. I look forward to the day that I can search for information and actually get it.
I actually laughed out loud at the second cartoon. Yes, please. Pie is good.