This rambling how to make money with blogs site deals with making money by using platforms like wordpress to build websites or blogs that actually make money. I deal with SEO and ranking sites well in the search engines to get visitors and make money by providing them with what they were looking for.
Many people have hundreds of individual sites yet still fail to reach a decent daily income. I do not really deal with very small blogs for the most part, with only a few articles on them
I BUILD AUTHORITY SITES
Mostly. I do not have hundreds and hundreds of sites. I have fifty or maybe sixty and over the past year and some change myself and my long term lovely lady (who also has a similar number of sites) now earn a good amount of money each and every day.
This is by far the most beautiful job in the world. Where else can you take the weekend off and still make $1000 dollars or $500 if it is a bad weekend. And that is money you are earning while you go for a beer or chat with friends. So, this is gonna be epic (ish) so you know I deserve some link love for my efforts. Here I will describe exactly how to build yourself a handful of authority sites by going through the process of making a site. Not showing you one of mine, although they are not hard to find, but by describing just how I did it and what kind of return you can expect, even if you fail to make money with your intended main keywords. This is the beauty of it my friends and this is why having authority sites is the best long term goal for continual money making with minimum work long term.
I am not saying that this is the quickest path to make money on the Internet, but I am saying that I believe it is the best long term strategy to rank a site well for a number of very competitive terms and more importantly to keep it there. Sure, little mini micro niches sites can rank, I have done it myself, but they are limited in the number of visitors they get and are mostly focused on just a few keywords. This is all well and good, and will give us a nice return for the work involved, but nowhere near the amount of earning if we build ourselves a site that is an authority for a main term and all the keywords that come under it. Of which there will be countless longtails that will, in time, bring in a huge amount of traffic.
We work quite heavily in certain related fields and have a number of related sites dealing with various items, tips, advice, and all manner of other things. Some topics convert well and some simply do not. The only way to find out is to build up a number of sites. Or, use something like Hubpages to test the waters so to speak.
A note about Hubpages.
I have been on a real downer with Hubpages for almost a year. I built a few and then really never did anything with them. No real backlinks or optimization. They were mostly all built when I was a real newbie a year ago. Heck, I still think of myself as a newbie even though we now earn very good money every day.
But just recently my good lady has been making some good money with her Hubs. She knows how to optimize them for some amazing conversions. In may her Amazon account for Hubpages had an 11% conversion rate for clicks from her affiliate links on a Hub to sales. This month she has an over 20% conversion rate for the first few days of the month. She has shown me her very simple secret to actually getting sales from Hubs via your own affiliate link, rather than just the split Hubpages offers.
Anyway, I am now implementing the knowledge and am also revisiting a few old hubs on a few accounts. But the point is that with a few backklinks Hubpages is about as good as it gets for testing the water in a new niche. Build a few of them, a good few, backlink them up with something automatic, Backlink solutions or MAS are the best, and free up your time no end. Then see what converts well and what doesn’t.
Anyway, let’s get down to it:
Building An Authority Site
This is my opinion, I know others will say that we want to be brandable and to get word of mouth traffic and traffic from our peers. Sure, we want natural backlinks and plenty of them and for some niches this is possible. But the fact is that for many product sites if we set out from the beginning to get links from others within our niche by writing great content we may be seriously limiting our options.
We will then always have to keep an eye on our post titles, ensuring they are not simply full of buying keywords, and filled with amazing content. This can severely limit our profit making in many niches so it is not how I would go about building an authority site. Here is my take on how to make an authority site, agree or not I have spent the last year doing exactly this and I can tell you that it brings home the bacon, and boy is it a fat piggie. Um, yeah, well, enough of that nonsense, let’s make some dinero………..
With a real authority site or a super site we basically have the world at our beck and call. There will come a time when we suddenly get a massive surge in traffic, it won’t happen straight away, it may be six months to a year after we have put in the work. Sure we will be earning in the mean time but nothing like we will after a year or so.
This is why it is very important to not put off until tomorrow what you can do today. Hopefully this post will inspire you a little, or not, that is up to you, but the reality is that the content has to be written and online for it to earn anything. You get content online and it will earn money, and the older the site it is on, and the older the content, and the more time it has had to find a natural position, and to have backlinks then the better it will do, so get writing.
Starting An Authority Site
I know that the rage is for little sites targeting a keyword, but for me that is so boring for the most part. I am not saying that I do not have a small number of little sites that go for a few keywords, but even then I would be hoping to rank well for at least ten keywords not one or two. You run the risk of it simply not ranking well for very long as sites that are more of an authority over take you.
The reality is that a large site is going to have more trust in the eyes of visitors, and also search engines.
So, we want a blog that is going to allow us to be very competitive for a large number of terms that people type in to a search engine. So, we pick our niche. I am not saying that we pick a super tight niche like pine wardrobes painted blue. I am talking about having a site about wardrobes, or whatever it may be.
We want a general term so that we can basically have a never ending supply of articles we can write about the general niche. Now, the beauty of this is that while buying an exact match keyword domain is always beneficial, it is not imperative. Make sure you get good keywords for the domain name, but it is not crucial if you already say have an old site that you have not done much with. Use that and begin to change the content on it.
I have done exactly that with very god effect.
Our authority site is going to be about a general term. So if we can get a good keyword rich domain name then all the better. But then we want a set of good and long term keywords as our site description. You know, the blurb underneath the name of the blog. Have it as a natural sentence saying something like:
Best price pine wardrobes, cheap wardrobes for sale, bedroom wardrobes for sale at the lowest prices online"
Something that gets plenty of keywords in there and that you will naturally rank for over time.
The idea with an authority site is to gradually build content around one central theme. We will cover every keyword there is about our subject. Some will be easy and some will be hard.
Now, how you do your research is up to you, I am not as thorough as many with taking the time to examine every possibility before I write a post. As far as I am concerned the time it takes to do deep keyword research could have been spent writing a few posts. If they bring traffic cool, if not really then they are content and build up the authority of the site. But any post that you write, ultra competitive or not, will bring in some traffic if it has backlinks.
Up to you, I ain’t your Daddy.
For me, unless it is a site that is monetized by adsense solely, then I think too much time spent on keyword research is time wasted. I would rather get on and just cover every buying keyword I could possibly think of for a subject and each more specific sub niche within it.
So, if we are doing wardrobes sure I would do general keyword research to see what the main topics and searches are and I would write them all as drafts on my wordpress blog. Then I have them to write up at my leisure.
So, we buy our domain for a general and fairly competitive term. We have a site description, and we have some primary keywords and a list of what some of the main searches are. I can tell you now that you will be very surprised what you can rank well for, regardless of what a keyword tool tells you or what the results are in quotes for your term, or how much page rank the sites on page 1 of Google have, but hey, we all have our own way of doing things. But you need to write good post titles for easy and hard terms too such just where you get the love from. It is often simply weird quirks of the search engines that give you good rankings for terms that if you looked at the chance of ranking for them then you would not bother.
What is important is to really tackle the niche.
Decide that you will dominate it and you will.
And do you know why?
Because most people simply will not put in the work, and your main competition will be the big boys that have sites that are years old, but you can join them on the front page listings. They are there because there is money to be made, and that is where we want to be too right?
Gaining Momentum
What I have definitely found is that mixing it up in a good old random style is good. One day write 5 posts about pine wardrobes, you know, “Best price pine wardrobes”, ” Discount………” you get the idea.
Then nothing for a day or two, then an odd post, then a month where you write like 50 or even 100 posts.
Mix it up, gradually begin to fill the site up with loads of content. All around a central theme. You want to gradually get content for every sub section there is within a niche. And then you will see some amazing things happen.
You Have Made Your Own Keyword Research Tool
Some of the best money making articles I have online are because I made my own keyword research tool for that topic.
How?
Because I wrote a load of posts about it on my authority site. And then I check my traffic stats to see just how visitors are arriving. And if I have not written a post title with those keywords then I will write one. And if I did not have those keywords written in a row on the post that ranks for them then I will go back in to the post and amend it.
And I will link the original post and the new one together.
And in time I will get a double listing.
I will show up twice on the same page for the search term and will make more money
This is part of the beauty of a authority site. You get lots of content on it, and then you see what terms people are coming to your site for. This means that there are terms that people are actually looking for to buy an item. You know that if you can rank better for them then you will make more money.
You will also gain trust from search engines as you are covering topics very comprehensively. The more content that you have about all aspects of a general niche the more trusted you will become. And then at some point you can write a post for very competitive terms and rank fairly well for the term without even having backlinks for that post.
This can and will happen for a site that is trusted and has some age.
You must ensure that you have plenty of content though. And interlink your site together as much as possible. I wrote about this on the improve rankings with internal links post so take a look. Internal linking is very important, you want lots of links pointing to all manner of other related posts on your site and in time this improves their rankings and better helps you be an authority for the subject.
Make the site easy to crawl for the search bots and boost the rankings of your main posts by linking to them from other posts on your site.
I am not going to get too much in to the actual layout of the site itself in terms of design, I did that in the How To Make Money With Amazon uber post. But I would say that you definitely want to split up your content in to a few categories so that you are seen as having an area that is about each sub niche for your main broad niche.
But really the most single important things is to build your own keyword tool for your topic. And you can only do this by writing the content. A lot of it. And then your stats will begin to show you the terms that people typed in to get to you. Lot’s will not be for many searches. But if you get 1 or 2 people a day and the result for your page is bottom of page 1 or on page 2 of a search engine then you know that if you could rank higher you would get more traffic. So use the term in a new post title and then you have used your very own topic specific keyword tool.
Many of the terms will never show up in the adword tool or wordtracker, yet I have countless terms that I rank well for that bring in tons of traffic and they would never be found without having my own niche keyword tool, my own site and my own private stats.
This really is the heart of building a real authority site. You need to get plenty of content on it. I don’t mean you need thousands of posts I mean you need a good number over a period of time, even 100 posts over a year is a good number. If you have backlinked those posts consistently until they rank well for the keywords in the post title then you will have an amazing number of other keywords show up in your stats that you also rank for.
You need to follow this search engine love.
What has Google told you that you rank well for?
What are you being seen as the authority for for your home page and your individual posts?
Then go with this search engine love.
You need to follow up on it.
If this site began to rank for a terms like say can a blog make money and it showed on page 2 and was getting a few searchers for it then what would I do? I would get some backlinks for that term and I would write a blog post title can a blog make money.
I would be constantly doing this every day.
You have at your disposal a super niche specific keyword tool based only around content that you have written for that niche. Your stats tell you what you are getting search engine love for. You should consistently check where you rank for all the terms that you get traffic for. You should then write a post for that term if you have not already done so. You will find that as you write more content and get more backlinks that you begin to stand out for some terms and are ranked high for them, even terms you were not after. You follow up on this to really dominate. And the best bit is you find amazing hidden magic gems that you would never have even thought of.
If a post you made about, say, what to do to make more sales with Amazon, was getting traffic for longtails like, Amazon money making ideas, or whatever it may be, then either add those words prominently in the post, if you get lots of searches then maybe change the post title, or better yet write a post titled Amazon money making ideas and link the original post and the new one together.
The result will be double listings galore for your site, especially when you send both of them backlinks for the same keywords.
This adds up to massive amounts of very focused traffic and traffic that converts very well. You have an in-house keyword tool that grows and grows the more backlinks you get and the more content that you write. It is never ending and you will uncover some amazing terms that no one else is trying hard to rank for and that you would never have thought of. This is something Internet Marketers would pay a fortune for.
An authority site will after time rank well for anything you put on it and with much less work you can gain many high ranking positions for your terms.
You do not have to think small, think big and be bold and the rewards will be there waiting for you down the road somewhat. You simply can’t do this with a 10 post site that simply targets a few keywords. Target hundreds if not thousands. See what you rank well for and follow up on it.
The reality is that some terms you will simply be given more love than others. Go with what you are being listed for and make it fly.
But you need to get going. Don’t put it off, start it today or better yet expand a site that you already have out in to epic proportions.
Get New Hosting
As you build a site you will find lots of new keywords that you had not thought of. Get a different hosting account and buy those keyword domains. A cheap Affordable Reseller Hosting account is the best possible option and something I wish I had done ages ago but I never wanted to spend any money. The reality is that if you get a reseller hosting account you can use different IP addresses to make new sites that are not linked in any way to each other by IP addresses.
This means that the links on them will give full weight when pointed to your main sites. You can buy domain names for keywords you have uncovered, make a small site about the new keywords, rank them well to get more listings for the keywords and get the best possible quality backlinks at the same time. This really will maximize the amount you can make from an authority site as you get more domains ranking highly as they are on different hosting accounts and you get more listings to make more money.
It is weird I have only just started spending more in this business and the effects have been so obvious I wish I had not been so tight. I now have three different sets of hosting accounts and I wish I had done it sooner. The quicker you get new sites up the better, they can age a while and be of more use after they have been live for six months or so.
Anyway, I know it is tough to spend any money as we all just want to earn it but keep it in mind for the future.
My aim is to have the whole front page of a search engine filled only with my own Internet properties. Imagine the difference in earnings that would make to only being listed once, you get the picture.
Authority Site Tips
Bit of a wrap up before you drop me a dollar in the box at the bottom 
The main thing to do is to simply get on with it. The sooner you get a load of content online the better. You may not like my techniques but they work. You may prefer to go all social and write the most amazing content in the world and get natural backlinks. I have done that on sites and for me personally it simply held me back from writing buying keyword post titles. There are many ways to do it and I am outlining a way that relies on writing many buying keyword post titles that your peers may feel are simply spammy, it will very much depend on the niche.
But however you approach it the basics are the same.
You need post titles that convert in to sales.
You need to build up your own niche specific keyword tool. Your stats.
You need to expand it constantly by using your stats to write more content and to rank better for the hundreds or thousands of keywords that you uncover.
You need to get backlinks after backlinks to every page that you write. If you think that you will rank well for competitive terms with no backlinks then think again. Just do it over and over. You must get links for every post you write.
You can have a site with a thousand posts that will make you nothing unless you put the work in to ranking it well.
So, my take on what an authority site is. For me it is a site that ranks somewhere for every possible subject in that broad niche. It gets repeat visitors because people see it as the resource to go to. It ranks well as soon as I write a new post on it because of the history it has of getting thousand of backlinks to it.
It expands ever outwards as new keywords are uncovered and written about and if you want to learn how to make an authority site then the best way is to start one and see where it leads. You will be amazed how much you will find as you go. You need to experiment with the layout, you need to see what converts the best and go with it, but mostly you need traffic that has come there to spend money. And this means getting people to visit who have come to your site after seeing one of your buying keyword rich post titles show up at number one on that popular search engine people keep banging on about, what’s it called again? Is it Ask Jeeves, nah that’s not it.
Oh yeah I remember now. It is the search engine that sends me hundreds of visitors a day where 1 in 10 of them buys one of my affiliate products and I get a 12% commission, that’s what it is about my reader. There really is no secret to how to build an authority site. It boils down to hard work. Lots of content, backlinks until you feel sick, and visitors that convert in to sales because they are they because they typed in a buying keyword
Anyway, all the best dudes. See you in a year on my Thai Island.
Dave
