PROOF THAT IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME, LONG TAIL METHOD ALIVE AND WELL

LOL....Batten down the hatches laddie. I get what you are saying though.

Attachments were giving me a problem so I'll post these screen shots for anyone who cares.

it's not that I don't believe you can "make money" by loading up a site with content and going for long-tails. I don't think anyone would argue that fact.

The question is, will there be a worthwhile ROI from doing so?

Let's say I go with the cheapest of the cheap and buy content at $3 per 500 word article. Now of course this is going to be complete shit content but just for experiments sake.

That's $4500 bucks for 1500 articles like you mentioned.

I suppose you could have the writer post directly to the WordPress site, but there is still going to be a sizable chunk of labor that goes into figuring out keywords/topics for each article, unless you're just going completely spray and pray and having the writer write whatever they want.

But for the sake of this argument lets just look at pure content cost vs your estimated return.

At $500 a month, you would be 9 months before you saw your money back and that's assuming that everything goes to plan and you start earning basically immediately... So, great, you've put up 1500 pages of complete shit in the hopes that in 9 months you might squeeze your money back out and make a few bucks. You haven't built a valuable asset, and there's a very real possibility that you won't hit your $500 - this is at $3 per article of course!

So let's say we want to actually produce some decent content at $10 per article (i know we could all debate quality vs. cost, not really the point).

$15,000 for your content, and you're obviously going to have to put a LOT of time into the research but we won't even count that.

If everything goes to plan - 2.5 years before you see an ROI (not including your time).

Say you write yourself, 1500 articles, at 30 mins an article, 750 hours, or 31.25 DAYS (24hrs) of straight writing... no thanks...

Now I realize that a lot of stuff can happen when putting that much content on a site, but my point is that just aiming for a TON of content on a site isn't a very smart approach.

You are both leaving some huge things out of your estimates given some decent content.

Returning, referred and social tied in traffic

I have a small niche site which has (4) pages of content, a privacy page and a contact page and its getting around 20,000 unique visits a month. I targeted 1 big hard hitting keyword and am number 1.

Soon it will be tripling in traffic when am ranked 1 spot for my new keyword, it curently sits top on page 2.

I build backlinks, ever now and then, keeping the anchoring different all the time. I like to target big traffic numbers whether or not it a good niche.

I like to use Google Adsense, seems to work with me.

(My Point)

You can have 5 pages of content and attract huge numbers of traffic.

Just to put the workload/cost into perspective.

Mid April i started a new WP blog (with an exact match domain!) on a keyword with 2700 exact match. The keyword is a how to buy product x type question keyword, related to a nice set of products on Amazon that sell in the $200-300 range.

I put up the blog, and wrote a 1000 word post on what to look for when buying said product, did a bit of research etc... I'd say I spent around 3 hours or so including finding the keyword. Over the next few days I added a few 200-300 word posts that are designed to attract a click from the main article to keep people on the site, shared a few bits of content, put up a contact page etc... another 2 hours.

after a week or two I bought some high-pr backlinks, total cost for these on a monthly basis $15.

First week of may the site crept onto the bottom of page 1 and bounced around from 9-6, as of yesterday it sits at #3 so the traffic is JUST starting to roll.

Total UV's for the month - 1219
Total profit from Amazon - $47.82

My pageviews are usually double my unique views (good stick rate) and my visit time stats on statcounter are really good (less than 50% under 5 secs).

My time - 5 hours
My cost - $8 domain, $15 links (X2) = $38 bucks

Now there is no guarantee that Google won't slam the thing tomorrow and I won't make squat, but in my experience this site will make a grand or two at least throughout the year, and I will hardly touch it again. If google does stop showing the love, i'll cancel the backlinks and Because it's an EMD it will (95% of the time) still sit at the top of Bing/Yahoo and I'll get traffic from them as well, especially at Christmas

I guess the only reason I'm getting so involved in this thread is I spent the last year trying to do the long-tail thing after Google completely kicked all my niche sites asses.

I did huge unique content sites, I did curation sites, I messed around with a whole bunch of spammy old plugins... the works.

I did this because I didn't want Google to slam my sites again, wouldn't you know it, on one of my "long-tail" sites that was finally getting around 100-150 uv's a day with NO link building, they slammed it anyways!

Yes you can make some money, but the returns for the work you have to put in make it incredibly inefficient compared to the method I outlined.

I paid for the content. My point is, backlinking in order to rank for a high volume keyword almost always ends badly. That's why I like long tail. Now I wouldn't suggest you go out and buy 1,500 articles, I just happen to have them from my previous sites.


I said I recommend this approach for marketers with a talent for writing and a love/passion for their niche. This method is much safer than building links to rank, than every Google update you'll be sweating bullets hoping you don't get penalized.

Anyways the method works in reality, or at least it did, my income was just over 2,100 before it all went down hill from the links I had built.


In any event this is just a alternative method for a select few.

Thanks for sharing, I was always curious how a site would do with just a solid amount of articles and just let Google decide where to put it. Especially cause I once build a site with around 100 short articles of 300 words each and it was hardly bringing any traffic, yeah around 10 visitors/day.

Here a small comparison to a site that has quite aggresive but decent link building done:

Your site without link bulding:

67 articles, resulted in: 600 visitors/month
Cost of 67 articles: $335,-
Cost of link building: $0,-
Total costs $335,-


My site with link building

25 articles, resulted in: 12000 visitors/month
Cost of 25 articles: $125,- (actually $50 cause I used real garbage content)
Cost of outsourced link building: $360,-
Total costs: $485,-


That's a difference of factor 20 while the price difference is only about 25%

Great job man! Keep going!! And do what works for you .

Hi Nest,

Good for you. I followed your prior threads and started focusing on just content, following the methods advocated by you and Fraser C.

Google "Patrick Meninga" to find his site where he talks about how he sold his authority site for $200K. He just cranked out article after article on a topic that he was passionate about. He feels that a 600 to 1200 world article should bring in at least a dollar a month in advertising revenue.

My experience has been more like $2 per article, but that is with some big hitters, and some that get 0 per month.

Patrick's point is that if you could write just one quality 1,000 word article a day, (and you live a fairly frugal lifestyle) you could retire in 3 years on that passive income. Now if you can write 3 articles a day (as Patrick says he can), your results will obviously be much more impressive, and quicker, but this it the path I'm following with an authority site topic I enjoy.

When the topic is something that you like, it's not really work writing the article. Plus besides hosting, there is zero out of pocket expense (assuming you write all the material yourself and just use free guest posting for backlinks). Obviously this idea of "actual work" is not for everybody, but for guys like me with limited means, but unlimited desire, it's a no-risk plan for success.

Thanks again for this and your past threads Nest.

You know...ever since I started working at this job, I've gained so much weight. (Blame my in-house chef for giving me truffle fries and free soda every day).

I'm gonna start a blog and post daily about me working out and losing weight. And hopefully I won't get burnt out since it'll prolly be "fun".
Since everyone loves to lose weight esp by the summer.

This isn't a flame, but I don't understand why this forum is so gung ho on articles when the majority (at least in the SEO forum) don't like writing articles. Forget all that $5 article crap that nobody will read past the first incoherent sentence.

Let me show you an example of an Adsense site that doesn't care about articles. This isn't my site, I'm obviously not throwing myself to the wolves. This example is a very useful site that I found last night while trying to convert cubic yards to dry gallon volume (don't ask).

Here's the site page I found last night that gave me the answer I needed:

• http://www.asknumbers.com/cubic-yard-to-gallon.aspx

That's a 100% legit & very useful site when you need to convert data to another format. This is basically how simple my own Adsense pages are (example link above).

All this fake article stuff is only happening here on Warrior Forum & similar IM/SEO forums, the real world builds pages to attract & retain traffic. I defiantly saved that website in my favorites & will defiantly return to that same website anytime in the future If I need to convert data.

I've also proven on my own sites that repeat traffic will click Adsense Ads (from my email subscriber traffic). So anyone with the WF Adsense ebook thinking they need to bore their traffic into leaving their web page doesn't have a clue how to create long term earning evergreen sites.

That example link above is an evergreen site that will out last the webmaster & still be earning money 50 years after that webmaster keels over from old age (or whatever).

Nobody owns the data/numbers on that site & it doesn't matter If another 1,000 similar sites exist, traffic only cares about the site they find first so long as the site is useful for the traffic. I'm not suggesting to scrape that example site, my point is the lack of articles & still being a legit site (real world evergreen site).

The advantage of a site like that is the on-page text is laser focused on the niche. Look at that example pages Google Cache (text version), very little text & it's completely legit as far as the Adsense TOS. No 3rd world article writers, no fiverr crap, just content that real people want/need.

Whenever I see talk about article writing for the sake of an Adsense site or SEO (or anything really), I just smile & think If they only new how complicated they're making things.

Again, not a flame here, I realize OP already had those articles, but for anyone else reading this, If your not a writer, there's a million other legit ways to monetize a web page with Adsense.

That being said, all I need is a before after pic, post it on some social book marking sites + FB, and it'll get shared 892398532 times. And boom. Pop that affiliate link in there. Dunzo. Peace!

@mike anthony - I never said that money couldn't be made doing this, and yes when you backlink for larger keywords and do other promotion obviously the earnings go up.

But, with this method, it makes no sense to backlink to every article, considering each one might only get a visitor or two per day in the top 3 as it is... I fail to see the point of that.

So essentially you're backlinking for larger keywords AND writing a ton of long-tails... I guess I'm missing something

The reason I even got my horse into this race is because it was actually one of nests old threads (I didn't even realize it till I looked closer), along with a few other warriors (one of whom I purchased a product from) that were really gung-ho about doing all this long-tail stuff back about a year ago... and the premise is you don't need to backlink at all...

I had just had all my sites thrashed by one of the updates after Christmas so I really got into this long-tail stuff, and wrote, and purchased a shit ton of articles... I did so based on the fact that I would be "safe" from future updates which in the large majority of cases simply isn't true. And even if I had of done some backlinking, nest notes that his site got slapped as well.



Combine this with the fact that if you are writing a hundred articles all around long-tail terms, chances are there will be some corners cut in quality, at the very least the vast majority won't be stellar share-worthy.

I think there are a lot of newbs who will run with this and spend a lot of time and effort on it, and I don't think it's a good idea, and I don't think I'm overstating it all that much.

Do you build a lot of these big content sites yourself?

Well, I like reading my Fellow Warriors experience. I love it because one could prove that they are making money online while other Warriors seem in an inspiration mood without doing anything.

OP was taking articles from his old sites, so I don't know how much time he need to produce these articles. But, at least he could prove that it works.

For ME, I don't do that and won't ever do it even thought because I've spend over $30 for each article for my small niche sites which I've spend $600+ for the 20 articles alone.

I'm not talking about making MFA sites. I said this method is for marketers with a talent for writng and a love/passion for a certain niche/topic. In the past I might have said just make a large site and you will make money, and judging from my old medical site that's true, but right now I'm saying stick with your passion and write about it if you have the skills.


The sites I want to make in the future will naturally be large sites because I love the niche so much I'd never stop creating new content and I don't just mean written content, I mean video, images, apps, games etc.


I know the long tail method works, I get pm's and even if you look in my old thread you'll see plenty of marketers back me up on this technique. It's not for everyone though.

@nest

Had a look at your old medical site and don't see the regular money links on them. I am lost as to how you make money with this site as don't see ads, adsense or other nor do I don't see any affiliate links.

Pardon me for being direct, is there something I'm missing here as to how you make money from it? Or do you just rank it for the traffic as a test?

Right now I have about 170 posts on one of my websites, but I get only 10 visitors per day, on average.

Niche: Personal Development
Average article length: 500 words

Thought I'd update the thread since it's gotten a few more comments, before at the time I made this thread my site medicalcareerblog.com received 640 visit inside of a 30 time period, this was accomplished by using 67 articles that have questions as post titles.

Now this same site has received over thousand visits in last 30 days. Well just about, 1,000 some traffic was from Warrior Forum.







Apologies for the life sized photo lol.

I've been reading through your threads on this topic, since I've been looking for a way to build a passive income via multiple sites with long tail keywords. I'm thinking I'd like to own about 250 of these over time.

I have some questions though.

Keep in mind as you answer these questions, each site would still have original content as according to your plan.

1. How would it impact your sites IF you auto-blogged some PLR into the site dripping in over time, i.e. like 2 to 3 PLR articles a week? (No spinning, just straight up PLR.)
2. How would it impact your site if you used a content curation plugin to pull news and videos into your posts, as well as, have it actually make posts for you?
3. How would it impact your site if you only used sources for free backlinks, like social bookmarks, etc.?

Great job, btw. I'm impressed to find someone that is still beating this drum and making it work!


Rich

I don't know if it's safe but I know for a fact it won't be unique. Why not write your own review? Or mash a few real reviews into one? Before I get blasted for touting poor review methods - I don't even bother with reviews. This is where so many go wrong. If you're trying to affiliate a product you shouldn't be in the business of reviewing it - you are a salesperson or you are not a good affiliate. You're promoting it. Stop being half-arsed, sell the benefits and make it clear to the reader that that is what you are doing. These review site threads annoy me. Nobody really makes a whole site out of reviewing a product. That's where the 5th June penalty kicked in. Apart from Spencer, of course - but at least he added value.

Edit for above post. I realised after getting pulled into a reply to a particular post that I'm in an age-old thread about long-tails that I totally admire. @nest28 my above post was not about any of what you have touted here. Indeed, I happen to make most of my income in almost exactly the way you describe. I see why you're looking out for other avenues and I'm doing exactly the same.

OK Razorhound let's put it like this: you could go a whole lot better than plagiarising existing user reviews at Amazon.

@Nest28
I'm all over your threads man.
You're talking sense.