Go to the site draft.blogger.com, log in to Blogger and you will see a new tab called Template Designer. Click it and you will find new design templates. It will also allow you to easily change the font, font size, backgrounds and all the normal shit that every single other blog platform and website designer has allowed you to do since  Algore invented the interwebs.

Blogger will continue to be useless for most of your niche money collection efforts. The time you waste building a Blogger blog to link back to your money site will not be mitigated, but at least that fish sweater satellite site will look really sharp.

Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder helps. I find potential keywords in MFN and drop them in MS to see if the competition sucks or not. Most times it sucks. Have you noticed how incredibly competitive keywords are? Maybe I am the exception here but I may find but a few keywords worthy of using in an hour of punching in ideas. I probably would have better luck panning for gold in the drainage ditch across the street.

It’s just a pains-taking exercise. Mostly futile. Sometimes a winner. Whatever. It’s all in the game. You have to start somewhere and grabbing the best keywords you can is just prudent. But for me that’s where it ends. After I get indexed keywords start populating my Analytics. It may be 3-6 months before anything happens. You just have to keep getting backlinks obviously. Some work out. Others languish in the swamp. That’s why we sling ‘em far and wide. But those new keywords are what I start working with.

I came across this excellent article from Wordtracker I thought I’d share. It’s about long tail keywords. Really there is nothing in here that you haven’t read before at Griz’s site. Griz talked about writing long posts over a year ago. This article pretty much says the same thing. But the article gives you a good perspective of “head” keywords – those that everyone targets at the start and desperately want to rank  and “long tail keywords” – the keywords that result in 90% of folks finding your shitty blog. Here’s the meat of the post:

Head keywords remain irresistible to many SEOs and website owners. They want to see their site top of Google’s results pages for them. They become trophy keywords.

Plus, few people want to go through the learning curve required to start thinking about groups of keywords (keyword niches).

But as well as ignoring most searches, head keywords are very competitive. Increasingly, despite Google’s fight against paid links, to get top of Google for the big money keywords you need to pay for your site’s inbound link power. Which we don’t want to do, so…

So let’s learn how to play with the long tail…
How to make a profit in the long tail

How do you make a profit from keywords that bring just one visit a month? Easy, you target lots of them at once – you target groups of keywords (keyword niches). Here’s how…

Let’s start simply with one page. Your SEO might focus on one or two keywords but you’re really targeting those keywords and their long tails. And the more relevant and related words on your page, the more of that tail you can get results for. I love 2,000 word articles. ..

…This long tail tactic is so effective that you can get great results from a page without getting anything from its primary target keyword. E.g. the page mentioned above doesn’t get a top 10 ranking for either swot analysis or strengths and weaknesses. I summarize this tactic as …

Target the head and exploit the tail

This does not mean that you should spend hours stuffing (or just adding) relevant keywords to your pages. That spoils your copy and usually takes too long to be profitable. It means that you:

Plan the structure of your site’s content, organizing it into categories, e.g. sports cars and family cars for a car site.

Allocate (e.g.‘tag’) existing content to relevant categories.

Each category has a category home page, e.g. a sports car page, that lists links to relevant pages on your site.

For each category, find target keywords (of course I really mean keyword niches). E.g. italian sports cars, sports car insurance.

If a keyword niche is big then make it a category. E.g. italian sports cars might become a category. Planning a site’s structure can be a big job.

For each target keyword, commission or write a long article with lots of words.

Don’t sweat on the individual keywords within your articles. Leaving that copy natural will target 1000s (sometimes 10s of thousands) of keywords. The big job is the initial keyword research and subsequent site planning.

Analyze results. Which keyword niches bring the most response? Continue your keyword research – looking for more keyword niches to target.

Word.

So, I got an email from a (or the) product manager at PicApp. I’ll post his email followed by comments:

Hi splork,

First thank you for the original post and for the mind change one as well (-:

Direct feedback from users is the best thing we can get to improve ourselves. The strip on every image is our way of monetizing our service.

Instead of adding ads on top of the images (which we used to do….) we now add a related images thumbnail gallery on the black strip (to encourage the readers to click on and open a photo gallery of related images which is a feature for the users and on the photo gallery we display ads which gives us monetization).

We hoped this would be less intrusive than putting the ad directly on the blogger image. Obviously, your feedback is that the strip is too intrusive and damages the image integrity.

We accept this feedback and will start testing less intrusive options (like a static icon on the bottom corner), the changes should be visible in the coming weeks.

It would be great if you could tell us what you think about the options we’ll display (directly or on your blog) and again, open for any ideas, suggestions or feedback you can give us.

Regards,
Roi
Picture (Device Independent Bitmap)
Roi Gold
PicApp Product Manager

When a company representative makes the effort to reach out and respond to criticism I am always impressed. This doesn’t happen much. I take the time to critique things online and offline. The offline world, especially food companies and restaurants, responds quickly and effectively. Online folks rarely respond. PicApp did and as you can see above they are looking at options. Doesn’t mean that they will be implemented because ultimately their business is to make money, but at least they are listening to end-users.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this tool for use again. I need what it offers but I don’t care for the blaring band across the photos. I made a suggestion in my return email. If you want to use this tool then I suggest you send them some feedback as well. Or make some comments on Lost Ball. They are listening.

Even if you are posting up photos of your favorite actress or something and it shows options for other photos they can view, they still pretty much leave your site for more. It may be free but it’s virtually useless. I mean, who the hell wants a third of the photo covered with an ad? It looks fugly. The only saving grace is that if you use the small photo it doesn’t show the advertisement.

When I came across this application I was at work. I posted a few photos on a blog or two and the advertisement band did not show up. Yea, our firewall pretty much blocked the script it uses to pull the black band ad. I get home and see the ad and think it’s not as great as I thought but hoped that it wouldn’t be plastered on each photo all the time. No, it’s pretty much plastered on each photo all the time.

So back to self creation, theft and ugly public domain freebies.

(Update: I was mistaken. See post on why I think PicApp is annoying)

I don’t know how many of you 7 or 8 readers of this blog bother with photos for your sites. Sadly photos are frowned upon by the nicherati since they tend to grab the visitor’s attention and something crazy might happen like they might not click on an advertisement within the allotted 3.1 seconds. You only get a few seconds to royally piss off a visitor before they click away from your site in frustration. If you add something pleasing like a photo they may hesitate jjuuuuusttttt long enough to ponder your content and site. Only the most advanced nichemaster should attempt to deploy something as distracting as a photo on their site if the click and dash is your business model.

If you are feeling frisky and are willing to risk someone visiting your site and thinking “cool” instead of “oh for fuck’s sake”, then you might give photos a whirl. I know, I know. This is crazy talk. Splork’s off in the damn weeds again. Calm down. Take a breath. It’s not for everybody. That funny taste in your mouth may be just a little bit of vomit. I know how social media effects some people.

But if you want ****GASP!**** visitors to your site instead of click snipers then you should try PicApp. It’s a juicy photo aggregate site that allows you to post all kinds of photos from reputable media outlets.

PicApp has 20 million images from Getty Images, Splash, Corbis and alike, covering sports, news, entertainment, fashion, travel and more. All images are fully licensed and free to use. Images come tagged to improve SEO and promote reader interaction through image photo gallery available with each published image. An easy and seamless experience.

For those that are still with me here, ever create a blog and wonder where to get good photos without worrying if some suit is going to write and ask you to cease and desist stealing their copyrighted photos? You know, the ones you stole off their website to post on yours? Yea. Well now you can get choice photos to easily and legally drop on your blog. This is what we like to call, “fun”. I know. Who am I to suggest you have fun maintaining blogs? You cannot make money posting fun stuff!? You have to post clicks, dumbass.

fun
–noun
1. something that provides mirth or amusement: Using photos would be fun.
2. enjoyment or playfulness: PicApp is full of fun.

–adjective
3. Informal. of or pertaining to fun, esp. to social fun: Adding photos is a fun thing to do.
4. Informal. whimsical: flamboyant: Those photos are definitely on the fun side.

Have a blog on The Detroit Red Wings? Say you’ve been writing commentary on the joys of watching the Red Wings choke on their quest to win the cup and failing despite having the most talent. You write your post and think that a photo from last nights game sure would look nice. Instead of going to the Detroit Lame Press or going to Yahoo Sports and stealing a photo, you can simply use PicApp. Go to PicApp and search on the RedWings. Most likely they will have some good action photos for you to use for your blog. If you are using Wordpress.com then they give you code to paste into your blog. There is even a plug-in you can use for self-hosted blogs though apparently they are working on improving it or fixing it or something.

If you are clever, and really, who isn’t these days? You should be able to figure out a ton of things you can do with free quality commercial images. No more hoping for the best at stock.xchng. Or purchasing overpriced stock photography. In my opinion this is yet another threatening attempt to flush the crap. The web is making it too easy to create vibrant, entertaining and interesting sites. Bored people are always going to be clicking links but at some point they are going to demand something better than tired minimalist click holes for Adsense and Crapbank offers.

The tools I use for finding green keywords are Google and Nichebot. TKA suggests the Google keyword tool along with the Firefox SEO plugin. I’ve been using Nichebot for SEO analysis. Until now. Stupidly I had ignored a tool that does a fantastic job of displaying the SEO stats easily. Traffic Travis.Though I realize that the Firefox plugin does all the work for you for free, the results are not presented very elegantly.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to love about Nichebot. I like that all my projects are stored online for one. But for SEO analysis Traffic Travis easily shines above the competition. I have the pro version. I’m not certain if the free version gives such a comprehensive listing of SEO stats. Download it and see. I’m too lazy.

So you go to Google and get your listing of keywords. Put them in your TKA spreadsheet for analysis. Now you have the keywords you need to check for competition. I used to use Keyword Analysis X from Nichebot. I’ve now been using Traffic Traffic SEO Analysis.

It will show you:

1. Page rank
2. Age of domain
3. Number of back links for page
4. Number of backlinks for entire site
5. Backlinks from .edu and.gov
6. Whether or not it is listed in Yahoo directory
7. Whether or not it is listed in DMOZ
8. Does the title contain the keyword phrase
9. Does the description contain the keyword phrase
10. Does the H1 tag contain the keyword phrase, along with a couple of other items.

For the example above I would not try to compete for this keyword phrase. #1 is a PR6 that is 11 years old with the phrase optimized in the on-page factors. Additionally within the top 10 there is a bunch of sites with a PR4. This is definitely not a green keyword.

Anyway. I have no idea why you would spend $200+ dollars on a keyword tool. Many are digging Market Samurai which is $150 while they threaten to raise the price higher. I wouldn’t be a buyer of that either. I’ve tried it and do not care for it. Too cumbersome for me. The results you need (For TKA anyway) come straight from Google’s free keyword tool. Analysis can be had from a free plugin or a free tool like Traffic Travis.

Keyword research is monotonous and boring work. I’ve never run across a tool that makes it any easier or is successful in giving up the secrets to making money. I’ve spent money for keyword tools and they haven’t made a difference. That’s why I like the simplicity, albeit hard work, of TKA’s method. Google and Traffic Travis is what I’ll be using.

BTW-I have been having some very good success targeting keyword phrases using the TKA method, particularly as I continue to build Hubpages. I snipe a keyword phrase. Write as much as I can stand. Add a few modules. Publish. Go to the TKA blogs and write some snippets. Go to Article Marketing Automation and post an article into the system. And maybe post a quick article at Ezine Articles. Using the TKA method and getting a few backlinks is about as close to a guarantee as I can give that you will find yourself on the first page of Google within a couple of weeks for your chosen keyword phrase.

I may seem like some maniacal retard that can’t figure out which system to flog on any given day. But this can’t be further from the truth. There was a time a year, now maybe two, that I was doing what many do when they want to achieve something in IM: They search and purchase and try anything and never stick to with one thing long enough to see if it works. Information overload.

These days I am relatively calm in my approach to IM. It’s simple. I made it simple. I got tired of the burnout. I like the money but flogging this shit gets old.

Here is what I do:

Money Sites

Keyword research is 95% of my site planning. I use Nichebot, Google and Traffic Travis to find the best keywords possible. I have determined that the Keyword Crash Course Ebook from Court is about as good a reference as there is to get good keyword phrases. I fully use Nichebot to determine the competition I’m up against and whether to move forward with the site.

I build niche websites using PLRPro articles. I use XSP to build the site. Sometimes I use Wordpress, but not much anymore. I build around two of these “money” sites a month. Some work out OK. Some do not. Life sucks that way.

Keyword research and PLRPro are related. I determine which of the 11 niche article packs are the best for me with keyword research over and beyond what PLRPro provides. I don’t typically sit around and try to come up with something to build a money site around. I use what I pay for and already have. I have a lot of content so I go through and see if I can use other article packs and mash things together to overcome the dreaded duplicate content Google curse. I rewrite stuff quickly, title, top, middle and bottom and move to the next article. I firmly believe that no one does more than skim through a niche article so I don’t try to write the next Pulitzer Prize winning submission.

I promote the sites. I write a couple of articles and post them to EzineArticles. I submit them to Article Marketing Automation as well. Using the “spinner” tool I make sure each article distributed is 100% different than the next.

Using free blog sites, I create blogs around the money site’s topic. I drop these into AMA to collect articles. The articles have to be well written and rewritten around 50% from the original. I don’t do a lot of promoting of these blogs and just let the blog and ping facility do its thing and get indexed by Google. I use these for backlinks to my money site. I put affiliate links and banners on these blogs in case they start getting traffic, which happens. If the site is a Blogger blog and I start getting good traffic then I’ll put Adsense on them.

Sometimes I get ambitious and build a Suidoo lens for the niche.

I use BMD to post my URLs to bookmark sites. Google doesn’t seem to regard these links as heartily as they once did, but a link is a link. And this is about the easiest link you can get. And I love the tool.

I submit my sites to directories using a directory submitter tool. I use PGB’s RSS submitter to submit well performing blogs. The best blogs I will go through my RSS directory list and submit them manually. This has always been worth it if they get accepted.

Maintaining these money sites is a drag. After the initial build and promoting I don’t do much more than freshen up the site with an article once a month or get some more backlinks. The site remains in BMD for link building though. If the site is lifeless after 4-6 months I just let it sit there. Sometimes I let the domain expire. I move forward with new sites and work backwards on those sites that do well. Constantly shuffling between what works and what doesn’t.

Ugly is Beautiful

I allow myself some time to experiment with a new technique or plan. It has to be quick and spammy though. Like the Ebay/Blogger franken-sites I build. And it never connects to my money sites.

Lately I’ve been building uuuugly micro niche Blogger sites and populating them with little used and dispersed EzineArticles. Same plan for getting traffic to them. I want to see if I can throw up a Blogger blog and not post to it past the initial slug and just get a bunch of backlinks to keep it indexed and ranked. I targeted one specific long tail keyword. I would write an intro to the article and create my own title. Ultimately I’d like to drop Adsense on there.

I Like to Write

I have Lost Ball, a political blog, two cycling blogs, and five celebrity-type blogs that I enjoy writing. Four of those are self hosted and utilize Wordpress. Lost Ball makes virtually nothing. The political blog makes nothing, but is brand new. One of the cycling blogs makes a little and one of the celebrity sites makes a little as well. The other celebrity blogs are on free blog hosts. Lost Ball has 12 readers. The cycling and political blogs get little traffic. Three of the celebrity sites average 3,000 visitors a day. I even had a day where over 7,000 took a click on one of them. They each are PR3. The reason I maintain them is that I like them and they are fantastic for getting new sites indexed and passing on PR.

Sad But True

I have a TON of Blogger blogs that I am trying to figure out what to do with. They used to get articles from AMA but that option is no more. I have been trying to organize them and figure out which ones are worth salvaging and possibly working more with. Some have gotten hundreds of content posted to them. I’m working my way through each to try to tighten the niche. For instance, if I created a blog for AMA on fitness, I may have articles on yoga, golf fitness, muscle exercises and weight lifting. I’ve been going through and trimming them, based on keyword research, to try to make it a little more niche specific. I also get ideas on building other free hosted blogs based on the number of articles. So if I want to tighten the fitness blog to muscle building but I received 17 yoga articles then it’s time to build a couple of free hosted yoga blogs. And it takes so little time.

Time

I don’t spend as much time building and linking as I should. I’m lazy that way. Burned out even. For me to research and build out a new site might take 6 hours if I just push through it. For each money site. I probably spend an hour, maybe two hours, daily on my vanity blogs. What a time suck. I use BMD two, three times a week. Takes about 15 minutes to set up a new site in it, if you are trying to bookmark all the webpages. You can walk away from it. Rewriting and submitting to EA and AMA takes about an hour for a couple of articles. Creating blogs for a mini-network and getting them installed into AMA takes about an hour for each niche. Going in and adding a link to various sites for backlinks is confusing and a time suck. I need to track this but I don’t want to take the time. I try to make sure not to do weird shit that Google would punish me for.

Closing

Basically all I do is try to find good keywords, write and rewrite articles, build a mini niche site and monetize with affiliate crap and Adsense and get backlinks through white hat and a touch of grey methods. I don’t buy into new systems or programs or any of that shit much anymore. I get curious from time to time and buy something, but mostly I just write, build and link.

I’m sure that there are a lot of cool techniques and methods that folks use that generate tens of thousands of dollars a month. All I know is I’ve tried many of them and watched them get squashed by Google time and again. Building a website, finding keywords that will deliver people to your site, writing articles and promoting your site through various (whitehat) means has always worked. When I stray from that I get frustrated and lose money.

I’ve been a cheap bastard since day one in this business. I figured out early on that green can be made with virtually no outlay in money. I used to have hundreds of subdomains. On every kind of niche topic imaginable. Most sucked ass. Some made a lot of money. And I used all sorts of tools to make the sites quickly. But you only had to pay for one domain to make many. Cool stuff.

I’m pretty sure this is getting harder to do. I’m not certain what Google thinks about subdomains anymore. Maybe there is just so many websites and competition that they dismiss normal subdomains more than they did. All I know is that my own subdomains suck ass. However, subdomains from sites like Blogger seem to do just fine. I also have quite a few blogs on free blog hosting sites and they are listed and thriving as subdomains.

I have/had subs that had PR up to 4 and now they are a bust. I’m not certain any have PR anymore. I wonder if Google somehow dismisses subdomains that are not consistent with the topic of the main domain. And they give a pass to those free blog hosts like Blogger and Wordpress. I dunno, but I won’t be building sites on my own subdomains anymore.

Is anybody else seeing a degradation of subdomains in your portfolio?

I have to say that after Blogger stopped accepting articles from AMA and the demise of my subs, a good portion of my online scheme has begun circling the drain. This is easily remedied, of course. If you are going to do work in the ether of 0’s and 1’s there will be setbacks. It sort of makes me admire those folks who forges ahead building simple sites on domains without all the bullshit. And lord knows I can find myself neck deep in the bullshit if I don’t watch where I’m going.