Crap is Still King

It is very difficult to give a shit in this business. What I mean by this is, I have provided the Web with sites that I thought would make Google and Yahoo proud. I deliver up good content. I create a website that is pleasing to the eye. You know, do all those things that gurus and busy-bodies tell you to do to provide to the web good and honorable content.

You go to some blogs or forums and there are all these people whining because they keep stumbling upon mountains of spam or websites that are junk. I used to read that and think, “Ok, I will provide the web with relevant content and build sites that are honorable so people will have an interest in coming back to visit. If I build pretty sites and be a part of the web then people will love me and I will make money and have friends.” Bull-effing-sheot.

I use Blogger quite a lot. I do my fair share of XSP sites but sometimes I just get tired of dealing with my hosting account. Blogger is still relevant. Takes no time to set up a blog and get your first article on there. It’s free and I don’t have to deal with getting a domain name and setting up the account. I don’t have to worry about the DB going down or backing it up. Blogger is great to use if you are building a BS niche site on something like donkey cancer, that you know can get clicks but you just don’t have an interest in.

Anyway, there was a time I’d try to fancy that Blogger blog up. I’d use a template that created a WP-esque blog. All pretty and shit. I could add my image banner. Had a nice sidebar. Had nice little blocks for Adsense placement. Just a nice little Blogger blog work of art.

After about 6 months just about any Blogger blog will start rocking the visitor count if you kept adding periodic posts and getting some backlinks. Well I had quite a few of these pretty Blogger blogs that I’d been managing over the last 6 months or so. The content was PLRPro articles dripped in via RSS2B. Plus I added it to AMA and am getting fresh articles via that as well (remember I grandfathered in a shitload of Blogger blogs before they stopped allowing you to use them). AMA really saved me a bunch of time because I stopped having to find time to create my own original content. I put Google Analytics on all of them and watched the visitor count climb. I’d recycle a bunch of the keywords that were used to find the sites to keep those keywords relevant through search.

But funny thing was, I’d check my Adsense and there were like zero clicks coming from these sites. When I say zero, I mean zero. Oh the impression count was nice. Do you enjoy logging in to your Adsense account and seeing like 112 impressions and no CTR? Sucks right?

So at the beginning of the year, figuring I had nothing to lose as these sites were for all intents, losers, I decided to strip the pretty template away and use a Blogger template. A shitty looking piece of garbage blog template. I hated to do this because I had spent so much time trying to make it an important site. So, I manually added the Adsense code back in two places: Top left using the largest square available and a huge vertical banner at the top in the sidebar. I didn’t even bother changing the colors. I left that bright blue link color.

Funny thing happened. I started getting Adsense clicks. A lot of them. One of those Blogger blogs has been my highest money maker this week.

People sit there and preach about the necessity of creating good content for the web. To not pollute the web with spammy sites. To build properties that you can be proud of and show off to your grandma. To create honorable and necessary sites that will educate and inform and entertain people.

I listened to these people. I thought I could matter. I figured if I did right by the web it would do right by me. That if I created quality sites that I would make money.

You know what makes me money? Crap. Utter crap. Ebay/Blogger mash-up franken-sites. StoreStacker stores that I don’t try to modify. Blogs using a datafeed script. Simple and ugly WP templates work best for that. Ugly Blogger blogs. XSP sites that have a large rectangle of Adsense in the center and above the fold within the content.

Honestly the less I try or care the more money I make. I start failing when I try to build “authority sites”. When I try to pretty up a WP blog with a so-called Web 2.0 template my earnings circle the bowl. When I try to make a Blogger blog something more than the shitpie that it is.

There is one problem with this though. You may have a difficult time getting backlinks to these crap sites. I do. Most directories will not list a garbage site. Nobody will trade links with you. You’ll be very lucky if you get a natural backlink from someone referencing your site. About the only thing you can do is write articles and submit them using anchor links or bookmark them. I do with AMA and BMD.

That’s why I have sites for visitors on WordPress.com, Squidoo and other authority sites that I can use to link back to my own sites. When I build a crap site I use one of my WP sites to link back every so often. I weave in a relevant narrative in a post and link back to the crap site. That way I’ll get a fast indexing and at least a PR1 on the next update.

I know many of you are working hard to build up your virtual real estate. You spend hours making your blog look nice. Purchase or designing Web 2.0 blog templates. You believe that people really care about your content on bar stools or cigar boxes. Maybe they do. But from my experience people just want to click around. Nobody really reads anything. I’ve always believed that PLR content was and is crap. Nobody reads that mess. And unless you want friends and not money, you don’t want them to.

I know the difficulty of trying to do your best in this business. We all read the same crap from guburus (goober+guru=guberu). Their salespage and blogs and forums tell us to create worthwhile content. Build authority sites. Build great sites and the money will come.

Yet these same dudes are sitting around collecting your money for membership. For software. For ebooks. I bet they aren’t walking the talk. They tell you what to do to make money yet their money is collected from you. They aren’t the ones in the trenches trying to make their dubious, at best, advice work. They don’t have time to build what they tell you to because they are too busy pimping IM products.

Marketers are not going to tell you to build crap sites. It’s not professional. I’ll tell you that crap is king.

I know that there are people who will write in and tell me I’m foolish. That they are making a killing on their authority site. They sell ads. Makes affiliate sells. Adsense is off the charts. No doubt. But you can’t have 100 authority sites. You can have a couple. If it is a true authority site it owns you. You have to blog it. You have to answer your visitors emails. Pimp your product. Sell ads. Etc. Authority sites take a lot of time. Crap sites don’t.

I’ve resisted being a crap site builder for years. I would love to have an authority site that mattered and made mad cash. But the more I try to legitimize my offerings the worse my earnings get. Throw up some junk and I start making money. Go figure.

I have a ton of crap sites. Sites that I don’t have to do a thing with. Sites that people come and browse and click the eff away. I prefer this. No, it is not really a business model. But it does me just fine.

Tagged as: Adsense, Blogger, EBay, frankensite, Web 2.0