Welcome To Jon Waraas dot Com
Test Results Of SEO Sites
August 26th, 2007 by Jon Waraas


After about a month of doing random tests to build links and get my scraper sites indexed and ranking well in Google I have gathered some results. For all the work I have done to these sites the results look sucky, but I now know what works and what dosen’t. I suggest you do your own god damn tests for your own sites, but here are my results..

Although I haven’t been doing SEO for that long, I am pretty good at it. Developer Hut runs purely off SEO terms, and so is my new network of scraper sites. What I am trying to do is find ways to make monies from the internets purely off seo with no costs for me, other than the tools I will be having built for me. The test I am doing right now is to see how well scraped content works and how well they rank for there long tailed keywords.

I have 22 heavily modded YACG sites.

1 = .net
3 = .org’s
4 = .com’s
14 = .info’s

One of my main conclusions is that the domain extension and age of the site is one of the biggest factors. The site that is doing the best is a deleted .com domain from 2005. The other site that is doing the best is the .net. The .info’s are doing decent, but you would need a lot of those to make up for the .com’s.

If I were to do this on a mass scale, I wouldn’t mind spending $xx,xxx on .com’s on domains. However, I won’t spend that much money if the domains get kicked out of google only after 2 month’s of being in the SERPS. Which leads me to my next point..

..Trying to find a way to keep the little fuckers in the SERPS. I know I could make so much money if I could make them stay in the serps for years on end, just image having 10,000 .info scraper sites each making at least .05 each. Thats $500 a day. I could live off that. But the fact of the matter is that the websites content is scraped, and the methods of getting the sites in the serps are blackhat, which leads to the sites only staying in the serps for a few months.

This will be my biggest obstacle. Finding a way to keep the sites in the serps. I have asked around and it seems like everyone on the getyacg.com forum sites get banned after a few months, however I know some other people that found a way to keep there sites in the serps. But of course they wont tell me how they do it, which makes me go back to the drawing board. I’ll make a blog post about this later.

Back to the stats. I have 22 sites, and after a month there are about 500 pages out of 23,000 in the serps. The sites with 0 backlinks have an average of 25 pages in the serps. The sites with a few backlinks have 100 plus. I have one site that has about 300 backlinks in the serps, but I got 3 blog comment backlinks for that website.

Sorry I wont tell you all my methods for getting the sites in the serps, but I will tell you that I squirt each site, and then I digg each site as well. I then add the links to the digg posts to a rollover site map with authority. Pretty basic.

What I am working on now is having a small network of whitehat rollover sites with authority that randomly grabs pages from the network of scraper sites. Its gonna take a lot of work to make enough rollover websites that will take care of the thousands of scraper sites each with thousands of pages on them, but its doable.

I also need to test how well interlinking works with these sites. Maybe have a few links in the footer that are dynamic that randomly grabs pages out of a database full of urls from the scarper sites? Dunno but need to test that shit.

And sense Im not a programmer it leads me to my next point. If you are a programmer and LOVES to work and party, we have an extra room in the basement callin your name, lol. We already have a designer… and we will make ya rich!

OK back to the numbers, after many hours of work, I have gotten my network of 22 sites pulling in about 100 unquies a day, all from seo and the diggs. And that has made me about 20$ or so, which is about 2$ a day. Yay haha.

Welp Im back to building links and shit for other sites I have been working on, like Sean Kingston and Paramore. Thanks for listening to my random ass rambling..

10 Comments »

Make Money With Scraper Sites
August 17th, 2007 by Jon Waraas


For the last two months I have been researching everything about SEO. You have probably seen me in forums asking a shit load of questions about everything SEO. I love tricking the search engines, its a game for me to find new ways to trick the search engines into ranking my sites. The funnest part is using your head to think of ways to trick the SERPS. I guarantee that the real blackhatters wont tell you how they really get their rankings. Trust me, I have tried. So you have to think up your own ways to get that ranking..

One of my four projects going on right now are scraper sites. A scraper site is a website that scraped its content from other websites. The scraper CMS I use gets its content from wiki and the top 3 searches for the keyword being scraped. The program I use is YACG, which works very well. Its opensource and works great. However, the copy I use is heavily modified. I try and make the scrapped content as unique as I can. I also use an new template for every 10 scraper sites I have.

I really didn’t think that scraper sites worked, nor made money. Oh but they do! After 5 days of having 20 scraper sites launched and doing daily pings for them all I have been making some cash monies. Im up to about $2.50 a day. The crazy thing is that none of these sites have any backlinks, but some are ranking on page #1 on google for some really really good keywords. You will be amazed of the keywords if I showed you!

Now the guys that make a living off scraper sites make thousands and use automated server side programs to ping and get some backlinks for there scraper sites before they get banned by google. Which is usually 2 months. But I want to see if I can get my scraper sites in the SERPS for a long time, and keep building backlinks for them, so thats the next phase of my testing. Right now I have 20 sites and only about 5 are indexed, the rest should be soon. My goal is to get at least 50 backlinks too all of them using BH methods. Then maybe I can start making some decent cash from this.

Does anyone else do scraper sites? Whats your outcome?

24 Comments »

Free Arbitrage Tools On Monday
August 9th, 2007 by Jon Waraas


On Monday I will be launching a new redesign of JonWaraas.Com, which will be totally professional looking. Along with the redesign I will also be launching a tool section with some free arbitrage tools for ya all to use. Just like the free wordpress layout, the tools will help JonWaraas.Com create a bigger community.

The 2 arbitrage tools are pretty kool, and I use them a lot myself. One that you guys will love is the Google Adsense API tool. It is designed to log into Adsense API and keep your real IP from Google. With the tool you can create channels, get code, check stats, and even create more adsense accounts. You need to have a google api account of course.

The other tool will be a custom abri CMS. I use it all the time, and its really simple. It is made to look like a real site, with the homepage looking like a blog. With the backend, you enter shit into a database, and then the tool creates the pages/niches. All you have to do is send traffic to your niche. I made this CMS because Googles likes mini sites rather than one page MFA sites.

Like I said earlier, you will have to create an account at JonWaraas.Com. On Monday I will have the 2 free tools, along with with open source designs for the CMS (Open source so you don’t leave a footprint for google). And I will also have some more free shit for you all.

Enjoy.

9 Comments »

Getting Started: Making Money Online
July 31st, 2007 by Mark


Before I get started, I’d like to thank Jon for inviting me to contribute a post to his blog – Thanks, Jon! I’ll introduce myself because um, you probably have no idea who I am. My name’s Mark and I run an SEO/Online Marketing blog over at www.digeratimarketing.co.uk and like Jon, I’m very much in the Blue Hat spirit – trying to give as much practical advice as possible, while avoiding the fluff and the “buy my shit $89 seo book” crap you get from a lot of SEOs & online marketing types. Oh – and avoiding getting a “real” job too
:)

Making Money Online
Okay, I’m normally write stuff in a “guide” style, but I’ve had a lot of this stuff floating around in my head for a while and it doesn’t fit into the whole “guide style” of things, but it’s pretty important stuff. For those of you who are starting out trying to make money online, be you designers, programmers, marketers, or just sit-in-my-pants-on-the-Internet-till-5am types I’d like to try and widen your horizons in terms of what revenue streams you can set up to purchase that new helipad you’ve been dreaming of. If you’re a bit more experienced and you’re already earning a decent living, perhaps I can inspire you to try something new.

Without further fanfare, I am now going to talk about stuff as it enters my head, starting with:

Community sites

Revenue Potential: Very High
Technical Difficulty: Medium
Promotional Difficulty: Very Hard

Here’s a great hard one to start with! Community sites are definitely one of the best revenue generating projects you could hope for. Unfortunately, they are without doubt, one of the hardest. I wanted to talk about community sites first because it’s how I got started. About 6 years ago I set up a community site for my local music scene and invited a few people to use it, I knew exactly what the site needed as I was making it for myself as well as anyone, it was something I was involved in at the time. I didn’t really know much about Internet marketing or promotion and the site went through a couple of evolutions for about 2 years, implementing ideas and suggestions about what the members liked and didn’t like.

After a couple of years of blindly stumbling through, I noticed (when I actually installed tracking) that my visitors were increasing week on week and I was receiving loads of traffic from Google. Without even trying, I was ranking for core key-terms in my niche, I had dozens of new user-generated pages of content going live every day and I… Well, I wasn’t really doing anything. Fortunately for me at the time, someone sat me down and explained the fundamentals of monetization and SEO. Within 6 months, this one site was earning me more than my day job.

The “Pros” of community websites

  • Absolutely marvellous for SEO – Because of the diversity and frequency of user-generated content, you’ll start ranking for long-tail terms very quickly.
  • Community member loyalty – Once you’ve got your core group established, community members will actively recruit others to join your website. This is really when your site will start to flourish; it will become…
  • Self-sustainable – Which means very little work for you. Once your community is set up, you can select your most trusted members as moderators to police the site and most of the content creation and promotion can be left to your users
  • Trust – If you look after your community you can build some excellent relationships which allows you to use more personal (and more effective) permission marketing, such as e-mail subscriber lists and product recommendations
  • Sticky traffic – Traffic levels on community sites will tend to be very steady, with users returning again and again to take part in the site

The “Cons” of community websites

  • Most community sites fail – Miserably
  • You cannot set up a community site with the sole aim to make money – You’re engaging intelligent people and need to offer them something. If you set out just trying to wring every last penny from a community they’ll get wind of it and bolt before you can say “CTR”.
  • Hard to launch – Community sites will need approximately 200 active users before they become self-sustaining. Most community sites will have a high proportion of “lurkers”, people who will passively interact with the site but not add anything of their own. So you’re probably looking at around 500-1000 members before it will fly on its own, depending on your niche.
  • Lots of competition – As much as I hate the term, with a lot of new “Web 2.0″ sites and mashup sites springing up, you’re going to have to either do something different – or do it better. People have a choice and won’t go for second best, so don’t just try and copy myspace or something!
  • Technically complex – Obviously this is subjective to your skill but the bar is pretty high. The extra interaction of users puts a greater than normal importance on a good, easy to use, rugged design. Most community sites are going to be fairly complex database driven affairs to. So aside from functionality, you’re going to have to ensure reliability too. Downtime will kill any community.

Starting a community site
There are several ways you can get a jump start into making a community site. Both phpNuke and Joomla are popular content management systems which both lend themselves nicely to community websites. One of the advantages of using open source content management systems is that you can get a website going with very little programming knowledge. A lot of extra functionality can be found in the way of plugins or modules, which are either free of very cheap. Of course, if you’re a veteran programmer, you may wish to do something a bit special and custom.

My personal opinion is that CMS are fine for standard community sites and are quite well accepted; it’s the content and the community that really matters. If you have a unique idea which doesn’t fit the community site “mould” you may be better off getting some custom programming done.

Monetizing Community Sites
As mentioned earlier, you really should be embarking on this project with a personal interest or with actual value to add to the topic, going in with dollar signs in your eyes will kill your community before it gets started. I would recommend not employing any type of advertising or monetization until you have your userbase and the site is self-sustaining. You want to keep your users in the site as long as possible and make them come back – you don’t want them either getting distracted by adverts or leaving the site entirely.

Once you are at the stage of monetization, you’ll have some unique opportunities:

Direct Advertisers: Community sites will attract a very specific demographic of people connected to your niche. This is incredibly valuable to advertisers if they can match their product/service target audience to that niche. You can get some of the best Cost Per Impression (CPM) rates going – £10-30 ($30-60) per 1,000 exposures can be asked to reach the “audience in a barrel” you have.

CPM Networks: Although CPM advertiser networks will not pay anything close to direct advertisers, you can make some serious cash here with purely down to page views. Community sites have a high stick rate with people coming back in some cases several times per day and browsing forums. If you can achieve 1,000 visitors per day and fill your inventory at say, $0.40CPM you’ll be earning $600 a month off this one revenue stream.

Affiliate Sales: Within your chosen niche there will be a lot of related products or services that businesses will be eager to sell. Having a user base builds a great amount of trust – more than a pure e-commerce site could ever hope to have. You can use this power of recommendation to select and sell products via affiliate networks, earning yourself commission on each sale. If people like the site, it is also feasible to give them access to a totally generic shop, such as Amazon and ask them to use it simply to support the site. This way they can effectively give donations without having to donate any money directly.

Donations/Subscriptions: There is a lot to be said for the psychology of “status” among social groups of the Internet. You see it all of the time in forums when they use a “ranking” status on forums; normally how many posts you have, which gives some kind of indication to your authority within that community. A lot of sites offer subscriptions based methods whereby the user can pay a monthly/yearly subscription to have special status given to them. As an example, I offered my members custom forum titles when they made a donation of £5 or more. This was received very well as then all other members knew who really was putting into the community and development of the site. Donations are used by many sites as there is a legal different to “selling” a product or service – mainly that the site owner has very few responsibilities on delivery.

My final tip for community sites would be this: always keep your cool and be friendly. It can be hard when you get, well – wankers, for members but you have to treat everybody with respect and dignity. You’re going to be the main “face” for your website and it is important that you don’t overreact to situations and start dishing out bans all over the place and never, ever lose your rag on the forums. It will only make you look stupid in the long run and it will poison your community.

Okay, if you’re still with me, we can move onto:

Affiliate Sites

Revenue Potential: Excellent
Technical Difficulty: Medium/Hard
Promotional Difficulty: Hard

Affiliate sites are one of the best ways to make money on the Internet, period. They take a bucket load of effort to do successfully but they have a whole bunch of stuff going for them:

  • Affiliate schemes generally pay very well in comparison to other schemes
  • Affiliate sites tend to be large and sprawling, making them good SEO projects to work on
  • Having a well ranked affiliate sites will mean a constant stream of income with no expenditure
  • It is often possible to buy search traffic and still make money from the resultant affiliate sales

I’m going to cut affiliate sites short because I’ve already written a detailed guide on Making Money With An Affiliate Empire. So read that if you’re interested in affiliate sites. :)

Blogging

Revenue Potential: Medium
Technical Difficulty: Low
Promotional Difficulty: Medium

There are several ways to start off blogging and they really are separate strategies, so we’ll give them an overview.

Becoming an authority blogger
If you’ve got a subject you’re passionate about and you have knowledge to share, blogging may be the route for you. There are millions of blogs about and it has become something of a fad with every business, man and his dog wanting one.

There are millions of blogs floating around on the Internet with many of them starting and fizzling out after a couple of months, or not even that. It can be depressing pouring your thoughts and hard work onto the Internet only to see nobody give a damn, but there are several critical mistakes you can avoid which can give you a much better chance of success when starting a blog.

Common mistakes when starting a blog

  • Blogs are about people. Your visitors are coming to here what you have to say, so it pays to be candid and honest. If you follow a “company branding policy 772: online communication policy”, you’re going to end up with very dry content which people are going to find hard to read. Your human, let people know it.
  • Don’t just emulate someone. There is a lot of loyalty when somebody chooses to subscribe to a blog. Why on earth would people come to your blog to read recycled news, or your opinions when there is a blogger who has established credentials and reputation in that area? You’ll get a few, but it will be hard. Either find something original to blog about, or find a subject that hasn’t been covered to it’s full extent and rewrite it so you have the best article on the subject.
  • Don’t start advertising too early. As with community sites, you need to build a user base and a lot of trust. If you’re sacrificing usability just so you can get the best Adsense placement, you’re shooting yourself in the foot to begin with. Hold fire on the adverts for a while or people will become suspicious of your motives.
  • Getting started blogging
    After you’ve grabbed a domain name, one of the easiest ways to start blogging that offers the most future expansion potential is to grab WordPress and install it on your server. WordPress has a huge array of plugins and themes available so you can customise the look and functionality of your blog with very little time or coding knowledge.

    Find your way around WordPress is a very simple affair and you’ll be able to get up and running quite quickly. If you don’t have hosting available to you, or your not technically savvy enough to set up WordPress, they also do a hosted version or you can look at the alternative, Blogger which is owned by Google. The hosted versions require absolutely no technical knowledge to set up and shouldn’t cause anybody any problems.

    When you begin writing, it is good to develop your own “style”, which isn’t as hard as it sounds. Just be yourself, say what you’ve got to say and make sure you read over your posts when you’re finished to cut out any typos, fluff or terrorist manifestos that might have slipped in there. You can learn from the Pros here, so have a look at: Seth Godin, Matt Cutts, Blue Hat and Dosh Dosh who all have very unique and different styles of writing, each catering for a different type of audience.

    Promoting your blog
    Before you even do your first post, you’ll want to get a Feedburner account and set up your RSS feed. RSS is really how you measure the success of your blogs: How many people find your content good enough to have it delivered to them every time you write something? Are you keeping these subscribers over time, or are they getting bored of your content? RSS is a trial by fire (no pun) and one of the most challenging things you can do as a blogger is try and get this number up and up. After being bought by Google, Feedburner and all of its functionality is now free so it will give you a whole new load of stats to explore and play with.

    Some ideas to promote your blog

    • Do guest posts. Offer to write articles and posts for other popular blogs (or sometimes even get invited!). This is a great way to dip your to into someone else’s readership and if they like the cut of your jipp, you might be lucky enough for some of them to go and have a look at your blog too.
    • Link to other posts: A lot of blogging software supports “trackbacks” which means if you link to another blog, with a bit of luck you should automatically get a link from the comment section of the post you have linked to.
    • Comment on other blogs: Have a good look through the blogs in your niche and get involved. Almost all blogs allow commenting, which will allow you to put a link back to your website. Search engines aside for a moment, most blog authors will check out the sites of their readers and if you’ve got some good posts the chances are that they will link to you sometime in the future!
    • Interact with your users: If your users go to the trouble of commenting on your blog it is only polite to answer any questions they have and engage them in discussion. This is a great way to get feedback about your blog.
    • Pay attention to your stats: With any site you run, you should be running some kind of stats package such as Google Analytics. This can give you an invaluable insight into what keywords you’re ranking for and even more importantly, what your users are enjoying reading and recommending.
    • Blog the right amount: What’s the “right” amount? Well, it depends on what field you’re in. For instance, I’m in the SEO field and SEOers need to take in vast amounts of information everyday to do their jobs. For this reason, I only post when I have something really worth saying. This (hopefully) builds a kind of trust that if you come to read something on my blog, it will be worthwhile. However, if you’re running blog about the latest happens in the Big Brother reality show, then you’re probably going to want volume – people want information as fast as possible. Don’t just listen when people tell you “this is right, this is wrong”, think hard about your audience and what you’d want from a blog.
    • Submit your blog to RSS and Blog Directories: Submitting your blog to sites like these can have a great impact on your traffic and search engine results.
    • Use social bookmarking: I’ve personally had great success with StumbleUpon, Digg and del.icio.us. Give people the option to socially tag, bookmark and vote for your site, sometimes you get really lucky and you can get a few thousand visitors in a single day.
    • Use catchy titles: It’s make or break with titles. Apart from being a strong factor in your SERPs, they will sometimes be the deciding factor whether your post makes it from the feed list to the browser. For instance, any post with the words “Make Money” in it on Digerati gets four or five times the pick up rate of other posts; you greedy beggers! :)

    Monetizing your blog
    If one thing can be said about blogs it’s that they attract links. Authority blogs are built on great content and will naturally attract high profile citations, trackbacks and bookmarks. That’s going to give you something to sell: PageRank. Many services like Text Link Ads allow you to auction off some text links on your site. One of the most important factors in deciding the value of your ads in PageRank, the higher your PR – the more money you get.

    There are of course ethical (and possible search engine) ramifications to selling links, so a lot of blogs are monetized with Adsense and although it probably won’t pay as well, it is a stable source of income that will fit nicely into most designs. You can get pre-made Adsense optimised WordPress themes from Dosh Dosh.

    Once you’ve established yourself a bit of a reputation there are all kinds of avenues you can explore such as ReviewMe where you can get paid to do a post and review about another blog. The price you charge to do this will again be decided by your traffic and authority.

    Disposable Blogging

    Revenue Potential: Low/Medium
    Technical Difficulty: Medium
    Promotional Difficulty: Low

    Aside from becoming an “authority” blogger, you can use the blog platform to deliver all kinds of content. I have previously written a detailed guide to making money with a video blog. This kind of blogging focuses on what I call “disposable” content. I don’t know if the term is already in use but I call content that can be incredibly popular, but has short-lived appeal, “disposable content”. A great example of this is I Can Has Cheezburger?. It’s a blog… With photos of cats with captions.. That’s it. It is probably more successful than most of us will ever make. The content is funny once and that’s it – you rarely look at the same thing twice.

    You can find yourself a niche such as “Funny Pictures of Bears” or something equally as off the wall and corner it. The great thing about the content is it’s so easy to go viral, after a bit of a promotional push – these things really fly by themselves and you slowly get readers over time.

    Lets compare blog growth by feed subscribers:

    This is an “authority” blog that relies on excellent content to promote itself. As you can see, the blog subscribers “spike” every time there is a new post. The content is popular and it lets lots of links, new visitors and subscribers. This method, as discussed is great – but very hard work and time consuming.

    This is our “disposable” content blog. You’ll notice a much smoother increase in visitors [notice the time span is much greater – so the growth is actually much slower). Each few visitors will pass the content onto their friends and so on. The growth is also curved because you eventually get more subscribers recommending more subscribers.

    The idea here is you don’t have to work too hard on disposable content sites. Although (unless you’re really lucky) their earning potentially is fairly low, you won’t have to invest much of your time on them. This means you can either make lots of them, or devote your time to other projects.

    Splogs
    If you’ve had a bad day and you’re feeling a bit evil, it is possible to automate blogs; especially disposable content blogs. This method requires a bit more technical knowledge but reduces the effort to 0 – but it will have an impact on your earnings.

    With the use of server Cron jobs, it is possible to automate the scraping of other people’s RSS feeds and republish the content on your blog. We are of course, slipping very quickly into black hat land here but I feel it’s worth mentioning because you can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist now can you?

    Splogs can have a variety of uses, some people use them as “backup” fluffer resources for their main sites and others make direct revenue from them. You can easily set up a splog to post 10 new posts per day, the advantage of this being Google Blog Search is very time sensitive, i.e. generally the newest posts will appear at the top of the of the search results so if you have new keyword rich posts going live every 2 hours… Well, you can do the math.

    Getting really naughty – setting up a splog
    I don’t want to go off track too much, so I’m going to give you the bare bones of to win with a splog. I’m going to assume you’ve managed to get your splog set up to scrape RSS feeds (sorry, you’ll have to work that out yourself, the last thing I want to do is release another group of spammers).

    You can get one up on the site your scraping by following a few rules:

    1) Post a couple of really, really good posts on your splog.

    2) Promote these posts hard with everything you’ve got, every social network/bookmarking site you can find, directories, build links like a madman

    3) Let your domain age for a few months and creep a couple of new posts on there. Hopefully by now your domain has a couple of thousand of links and some authority.

    4) Choose the feeds your going to scrape and make sure they’re from newish or low authority blogs.

    5) Set your Cron job to scrape their feed every 1 minute, checking for new posts.

    6) Set up a Feedburner Ping, to ping Feedburner & co the instant to you have new content.

    7) If your blog has more authority, Google should come by and index your content before the guy you’ve scraped, resulting in you ranking and him being buried.

    Tough life isn’t it?

    Right that’s enough of that shady stuff, back on track…

    Traffic Arbitrage

    Revenue Potential: Medium
    Technical Difficulty: Low
    Promotional Difficulty: Low

    For those of you who haven’t heard it, traffic arbitrage is the process of buying traffic and selling it on for a profit. It’s really, really dead simple – but requires a hell of a lot of research to do correctly. Basically, you buy a domain and set up either a parked page, or a page serving adverts (such as MFA site).

    Easy so far? Here’s the tricky bit..

    You need to now research search terms that you can buy on Google, Yahoo or MSN that you can then make a profit on when your adverts get a click. You really need to think out of the out of the box here and try and find terms that nobody else is bidding on.

    This is a full list of keyword research tools I used to help me:

    This is a full list and brief summary of the keyword research tools I use:

    Google based tools:

    Google Keyword Tool
    Provided free by Google AdWords. Shows basic search volumes and related terms.

    Google Suggest
    As you type, Google will offer suggestions. Good related keyword search.

    Google Trends
    Provides useful insights into broad search patterns across the world.

    Google Zeitgeist
    Weekly Google Search patterns and trends.

    SEO Book Google Suggest Scrapper Tool
    Scrapes Keyword Suggestions from Google Suggest.

    Yahoo! based tools:

    Overture/Yahoo! Keyword Suggestion Tool
    Official Overture Keyword Selector Tool.

    Yahoo! Buzz
    Statistics of Top Searched Terms on Yahoo! by Category.

    Overture SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
    Scrapes the Overture Suggestion Tool but includes much more useful information. You can also target by country.

    DigitalPoint Keyword Suggestion Tool
    Used Suggestion Tool and Wordtracker and compares the two results.

    MSN based tools:

    MS AdLabs Search Funnels
    You can use the adCenter search funnel tool to help you visualize how people search by entering related keywords in certain sequences and analyze these search behaviours.

    Other keyword research tools:

    Trellian Free Keyword Discovery
    Another good, free keyword tool. Also offers advanced features on subscription.

    Free wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool
    generates up to 100 free, related keywords and an estimate of their daily search volume.

    Keyword Suggestions by CheckRankings.com
    Shows number of searches, competitors and competing AdWords in Google. Also provides a free ranking monitoring tool.

    Lycos Top 50
    Top 50 keyword list from Lycos.

    Nichebot Classic
    A 3 in 1 keyword suggestion tool: keyword discovery, overture and wordtracker.

    NicheWatch.com
    Find exactly which competitors there are in your niche.

    GoLexa Search Tool
    The Search Tool with Complete Page Analysis for each Result and much more.

    Keyword Lizard
    By Google AdWords Expert.

    Ontology Finder
    Related Keywords Lookup Tool by goRank.com.

    Now, I don’t proclaim to be an expert on arbitrage as I’ve only recently started dabbling in it, doing some really basic stuff such as bidding on misspelings of finance terms, but I have turned a profit. I’ve heard of people spending 6 figure per week sums on PPC arbitrage, so I guess if you’re spending that much money even a 10% profit and you’ll be making $10,000 a week.

    Also, for those of you who think you’ll get your Adsense banned for making arbitrage MFA sites, that’s bollocks. Google are not killing MFA sites, they are simply killing any MFA site that doesn’t give the advertiser a return. Makes sense doesn’t it?

    Shoemoney (wretch) did a good, but rather sickening video round up of arbitrage.

    Methods With No Website

    Revenue Potential: Low/Medium
    Technical Difficulty: None
    Promotional Difficulty: Low

    So, you’ve got this far. If you’re still struggling for something to do, there are ways to make money online without even having to make a chuffing website! How easy is that?!

    Get Paid To Blog – It’s quite possible to get paid just to write blog posts, for existing sites. Many sites will offer you a revenue share if you’re in it for the long term and some will pay you per post. It’s a great way for the casual person to make a bit of cash at the weekends.. It can be fun too!

    Get paid to Digg and Stumble – There’s a program launched a few months ago that allows you to get paid just for voting for stories on Digg and giving sites a “thumbs up” on Stumble. This is probably the easiest way to make money online as you get e-mailed when you have a job to do, the you get paid for merely clicking your mouse.

    Distribute your affiliate link – Why not sign up for a Poker/Casino affiliate, then right an e-book on how to play poker? You can then sell the e-book on ebay for $1 a pop and upload it to bit torrent sites, or share it on P2P networks like Kazaa… Why would you want to do this? Well, PDFs can take links… Such as your affiliate links! It doesn’t matter if the book is being given away free, if you seed it on 10 BT sites, you can easily get 1,000 downloads in a month or two – all you need is 5% of those people to sign up with your embedded affiliate links and the recurring bonuses can keep going for months.

    Be creative! There are absolutely thousands of opportunities to make money online, don’t get stuck in the rut of thinking you have to build site X using strategy Y to result in profit Z. I’ve written this post just to try and give you a brief insight into how I look at the different types of website that are about. I think Maki put it brilliantly when he said you should surf the net like an Entrepreneur – always be on the lookout for opportunities and study other sites to see how they are making money and what they are doing well..

    Maybe you can do it better?

    Congratulations if you finished this jumbo post, big hello to all of Jon’s readers – I hope you enjoyed it!

    Mark
    www.digeratimarketing.co.uk

    55 Comments »

Mini SEO Empire
July 8th, 2007 by Jon Waraas


A few months ago, I spent a whole month studying and reading up on SEO. I learned a lot, especially from having Eli on my MSN so I can instant annoy him. So today someone else has been asking me questions about SEO. He is setting up a mini network to help him rank well for targeted niches, the same thing I have been working on for the last few months.. very slowly. My mini network is very small, only consisting of about 20 very unique sites. But in this blog post, I will go over SEO Mini Networks.. I think thats what there called :)

What is a Mini Network?
Its a network of unique websites that help support each other. Either cross linking each other or having the backing of a huge site. The content can either be unique or scrapped, but preferably unique… thats for best results. The point is to have so many of them that you can cross link them enough to get the SERPS weight you want.

Example:
Say I had a mini network consisting of 500 unique content websites. I then had those backed up by 1 or 2 huge sites. By huge I mean at least 100,000 backlinks. Most of the sites rank on first page for their niche, and their niche gets at least 50 searches a day. So lets see, 500 websites with about 50 searches a day.. thats 25,000 searches a day. Lets say about 5,000 people clicked on your sites in the SERPS. Lets say we monetize with Adsense.. now since we are targeting unique niches and not shitty myspace traffic, we will be getting at least .10 per click. Lets say that 2000 people click ads out of the 5000 people visiting your mini network sites a day.. thats $200 a day. Not bad.

I’d have to say that that is example is a decently big network, maybe taking a year to set up.. You will also make way more money with a mini network with 500 websites. If my mini network got 5000 visitors a day, I would shoot for the 500-800$ a day range with aff sales, better paying niches, etc..

What is the point of a mini network?
The point to running a mini network is to cross link the network and little outside influence on your SERPS rankings… but you can never rely 100% on your mini network. You will have to do some wiki spamming, blog spamming, buying links, linkbait, or however you like to get them links.

How to set one up?
I would first focus 100% on setting up your main “huge” support site to help get things off the ground. Spend lots of time and money in getting good backlinks to the site. Then focus on buying .info and setting up a wordpress blog with unique content that focuses on a certain niche. I shoot for niches that get about 50-100 searches a day. Once you have about 20 mini sites, start getting links for them.

Here are some ways to get links… and yes I am a blackhatter…
1. Spam wiki
2. Spam blogs
3. Spam forums
4. linkbait (wordpress themes, making bullshit news story’s, etc)
4. Keyword Realestate (this one is a biggie, trust me)

Now you should start feeling the power…hehe… you should be getting some traffic, maybe 5-10 people a day per site. But this is where you start the real work.. make more sites!

Once you get a good amount of sites, start cross linking them. Just don’t link them all together like I did with Developer Hut, Inc. Just link the kinda same niche ones together. Then start linking sites from your main “huge” sites you have going on. Now Repeat until you are a millionair.. or at least happy with your passive income :)

I dont make any money from my mini network right now. I have not monetized mine yet. The sites get about 200 unquies a day all together. Which is real shitty for 20 sites. I just havent worked on the backlinks much..im lazy hehe.

20 Comments »

Google Analytics
June 21st, 2007 by Jon Waraas


Please note that the previous Google Analytics interface will no longer be accessible as of July 18th.

Anyone have any suggestions for other good stat tracking software, doesn’t even have to be free. Just need something reliable and not google :)

25 Comments »

Busy Week
June 11th, 2007 by Jon Waraas


I Got some good news. Eli at BlueHatSeo is launching his SEO program tomorrow morning at 9 am his time. I’m very excited to use his program, it is well worth the money, trust me. Im not trying to sell all you peeps his product, but I will like to add that I know that Eli does know what he is doing, he is not one of those ebook lying scum. I have even used his trackback program that he is including (which I wish he wasn’t) it is a very strong tool. But anyways, I wake up at 2 pm tomorrow, and I’m hoping that he will save a copy for me to purchase :) hehe

I got more shit to talk about. This week is a very very busy one for me. I will be finishing up on the outside of my house, I will also be finishing a room in the basement, I am also launching a webmaster related company (its going to be a big deal, trust me), and I am launching another website this week. Woah. I might be pullin a few all nighter. And on top of that, my computer got spyware on it the other day from some bad porn I must have downloaded, lol. So I have to reinstall windows (I’m on my laptop right meow.)

Sooo, are you wondering why I need to finish a room in my basement this week? Well, a reader of this blog recently contacted me because he wanted to get out of his town he lived in… I think for the hell of it, and he was going to move to North Carolina… but.. he asked me if he could come live with me and my roommate cody. I’m always up for new things so I said he could come live out here. Welp, right now he is on his way from Indiana. He should be here in a few days. Which only leave me a few days to wire a room, then drywall, then tape it. haha. Lots of work. He is also a very very very good designer, some of his work is crazy good. I will show you some of his work on my next blog post.

Also, in 5 days the shopautodotca seocontest will be done. I hope to place 1st or 2nd so that I can use the money for a down payment on a Harley hehe. Even if I place 3rd place, that will help for a down payment. It will be crazy even if I do place in the contest, I barley entered about 2 weeks ago, so I have gone from last to 4th place in 2 weeks. Thanks again to Eli for all of his tips and help. I have spent the last month learning SEO, and I have barley started learning. But now its time to make some cash monies.

Ok Ok, one more thing. Next week I will be launching my second company. The first was a buy forum posts type company, this will be much much kooler and better. However, I will be pissing A LOT of people off with it. Im not sure if its going to be successful, but it is the first of its type hehe. I can’t say much more, but I can say that I am working with Firelead for an exclusive affiliate program for the product with them.

Welp, that’s all for tonight folks, keep making that money at home.

13 Comments »

Make Money At Home – Batch 3
June 10th, 2007 by Jon Waraas


Yay its that time again, to give a shout out to all the people who reviewed my sexy blog. And here they are:

Bob Buskirk
Bob Buskirk – He has been IM’ing me for the last 3 weeks to get his blog review done. So here ya go bobby. I’ve know little bobby for a long time now, maybe even a year, Im not sure how long but It has been a lot time. He runs think computers out of his condo in pittsburg. He seems to do well from it, I know he makes at least xxx a day. And around here, that is more money in a month than 75% of the people around here. Well anyways, his website is a few years old, he reviews computers and other technical stuff that companies send him. He also has a blog that he updates almost daily, its fun to read. Be sure to check out Bob Buskirk.

Bob is also suppose to be planning a trip to the caribbean.. and I’m suppose to tag along with him and a few other people. I haven’t heard anything about this for a month or so now. I hope we’re still going?

Beef Jerky
The long time reader Beef Jerky did a blog review for me aswell. His blog is pretty kool, he keeps it up to date with things he is doing. But I have to admit, I would be really scared to show google and yahoo ads on the same page. Maybe his geotargeting is broken, but I do see yahoo and google ads showing on the same webpage. Well anyways, his blog post is here, thanks again.

Turk Hit Box
And finally we have a pretty good review. This time from Turk Hit Box (WTF does that mean?). He reviews the seo part of the website. I would like to add my opinion in however.

Jon Waraas has a permanent link with no nofollow on the sidebar. That’s definitely a nice accomplishment, but it looks like Jon Waraas is trying to imitate Chow’s footsteps. Following is one thing, but imitating is another. I hope he takes my advices sincerely and make his own path.

First off.. nofollow does mean shit. I have tested it, Eli has tested it. It just a kool trend, much like the pagerank. Second, how do I “imitate” John Chow? John’s blog is all reviewme’s and personal updates, not that many blog posts about web related stuff. My blog is more about Internet Marketing.

He also reviews my blog’s seo on his website (I would like to mention that this blog was setup to help me network, not for traffic and seo). I dont really care about the seo on this site, I dont care that I dont have a robot.txt file and that I never use bold. I do however get 1/3 of my traffic through google. But thanks for the tips anyways. Oh and BTW, nice mention of my girlfriend on the end of your review, I think you were going after some seo traffic for the keyword.. jon waraas’ girl friend? hehe

If you would like to get a free link on Jon Waraas dot com, then simply do a small review of my blog and include a link to here with the anchor “Make Money At Home“. Then send me a email so I know to review your blog.

7 Comments »



Many of us are obsessed with starting our own blog that brings in tons of traffic. But the truth is, it’s very tough to start a blog and begin making any real money from it right away. It may take up to a year or so to develop a blog long enough to attract decent traffic. If you’ve tried developing a niche blog-for-profit from scratch, you know that it can be a daunting task. You are the writer, marketer, publicist, and web developer. You have to educate yourself about hundreds of different topics to make your blog successful. One of the advantages of this is that if you do things right, your income is potentially limitless. But let’s say you are not in it to become the next big internet blogging tycoon. Let’s say you’re goal is to make a decent side income from the internet. Consider being a professional blog writer.

About 16 months ago, I started a personal finance blog called Money Crashers, and I spent almost a year blogging faithfully and learning about SEO and wordpress tips and tricks. My traffic was consistently less than 100 visitors per day. I knew that my blog had the potential to grow enormously, but I came to the conclusion that the time required to make the blog better was not worth the income. I decided to sell my blog and become a paid employee for it. I won’t divulge how much I make writing for Money Crashers, but I will tell you that I currently make about $500 per month blogging for other blogs.

There is a huge market for blog networks and other bloggers looking for people to help them write articles. If you are decent at writing and you are passionate about a couple of different topics, you can make some great part-time income applying for part-time blogging positions. The best resource to find bloggers-for-hire ads is Pro Blogger. They have a job board in the top right corner of the site that posts ads for companies looking to hire blog writers.

So, what are you waiting for? You can start making money right away without educating having to yourself on WordPress, SEO, blog monetization, and traffic building.

Written by Erik Check out my personal blog to discuss career development, work, economy, and job tips.

13 Comments »

Sponsoring Skateboarders For Exposure
June 3rd, 2007 by Jon Waraas


Man, I was gonna write this a few days ago. I thought of it right before I fell asleep the other night, I was to tired/lazy to write it down, so I just said it about 20 times in my head so I will remember it the next morning. Well that didn’t work, but the idea did come back to me today while I was walking into Walmart, not sure how I remembered it…but I did.

This is one of those ideas that I know none of you 500 plus blog readers are going to take advantage of. But its a very good idea. The title should have already gave it away, but what I’m talking about is sponsoring skateboarders for marketing exposure. I used to be one of them skateboarders, In fact I used to be sponsored by my local skateboard shop and a local clothing company. For being sponsored and giving them exposure, I would get free skateboards and clothes every once in a while. In return I would talk about my sponsors a lot and they would get exposure in all the skateboarding contest I would go to.

I look back on it and they got a lot more out of the deal than I did. A skateboard deck would cost them about 25$ (they sell in skateboards for about 50$) and I only got a few of those. A shirt costs like 15$ to make, and I would only get a few of those aswell. I did get a bunch of stickers, but those a dirt cheap to make.

Sounds like a good deal? Well this wont work for all websites out there, it would definably would work for a skateboarding related website, and even a socal website like myspace. It would even work for a arcade, myspace site, or video websites. Anything that targets teens.

Say I want to get FunnyLoser.Com some offline exposure. I would go and get like 10 tee shirt made for like $150, then I would have thousands of stickers made for like 300$. Then I would go to the next local skateboarding contest and watch for the best skateboarders there. After they do there contest, I would go and talk to about 5 different skateboarders and offer them a sponsorship. I would cut a deal with them, they ride for FunnyLoser.Com in exchange for some free t-shirts every once in a while, and all the stickers they could ever want. You would give them the stickers and they would take them and stick them everywhere.

They would be very very happy and proud to be sponsored, they would brag all the time and mention FunnyLoser.com in every other sentence they said, trust me, I used to be one of them. And all I would have to do is sent them t-shirts and stickers every once in a while. They would get all their friends to that website, along with their friends, along with their friends… its the ultimate word of mouth marketing!

It wouldnt even cost me that much, maybe $150 a month for shirts and stickers for 5 skateboarders. I know that I pay up to 300$ a month for some of the text links hat I buy. What a great deal.

With all that being said, I know that NONE of you readers are going to do this. NONE of you will! Maybe its because you think its a bad deal? Maybe you dont have enough social skills to talk to people out of the blue? Or maybe you too god damn lazy? Whatever it is, I know that you guys will just sit back and say “Hey, thats a good idea, why didnt I think of that?”

I would love if someone did try this out however, I might even try this out. I think that this is a hell of an idea! If anyone does take advantage of this, post a comment here and tell us about your experience :)

Well anyways… Good luck with your earnings!

15 Comments »

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