I started creating a site a few months ago just to find out whether it would be possible to easily get long tail traffic to a new website. That’s the experiment I am sharing with you here.

Mini Sites vs Long Tail Sites

I recently introduced you to the idea of mini sites. Basically what you do is to pick a very specific niche and try to rank for that certain keyword. A golf mini site for example could be centered around the perfect golf swing. You then purchase the domain theperfectgolfswing.com (which is probably already taken) and set up your mini site. Once your site is up and running you add a few, but highly relevant, pages to it. Once you have done that you simply wait for visitors to arrive on your mini site.

Long tail sites are quite similiar, yet completely different from mini sites. With a long tail site you are aiming at a lot broader keyword which is at least getting over 10,000 searches per month. Your goal is not to actually get the site to rank for that broad keyword but to get your individual posts to rank well. The articles of a long tail site are highly targeted and aim at keywords that have no competition.

The Theory

My theory was that the more specific the niche is that you are trying to rank for, the less the competition. That’s what has been mostly transforming the blogosphere, people are blogging about much smaller niches in order to be able to compete.

So here is what I did. I purchased a domain name and set up a blog. I focused the “WordPress Tutorials” niche trying to get some traffic. The site I created is called Downtown WordPress and is all about WordPress tutorials.

The reason why you are relying on search engine traffic, for both mini sites and long tail sites, is because it’s the most profitable. If you get tons of traffic from social media sites then you learn to appreciate traffic coming from search engines.

The Blog Posts

On the blog I started creating rather short posts with long titles. One post was called Speeding Up WordPress by Putting CSS Files in the Header. The post itself doesn’t contain lots of information it just basically talks about how you need to move your CSS files in the header.

After writing the post I optimized it for search engines. That means I added specific meta keywords to it, changed the title slightly and added a meta description.

That’s what I did with lots of posts. I created several of them and used SEO to get them to rank well.

The Issues

The problem with this technique is that it’s rather hit-or-miss method. For some articles you are getting a nice amount of traffic and with others you are getting nothing at all. Furthermore there is no way you can check whether the keywords you are targeting are actually getting traffic because they are way too specific. Even Google Keywords won’t help you in that case.

Traffic

Top Traffic Sources

As you can see I am at least getting some traffic. This is not anything near the figures I wanted it to be but I haven’t worked on the site so much and I think there are only 7 articles on it. So if I keep on writing and adding new articles to it then this could become a site that could earn me a decent passive income. But we will see, I will definitely keep you updated.

Have I Made Money?

It shouldn’t be too hard to make money through long tail websites. All I did in this case was to add some banners to it. But you can of course try out other things. I don’t think I have made money through the site yet but that’s probably because of the low traffic I am receiving at the moment.

Conclusion

I think that long tail sites have potential especially since the competition on the Internet is getting stronger and stronger. You could build long tail sites around some competitive niches and still get some decent traffic to it. Of course the technique highly depends on the number of articles you have on your site, the more you have the better you are off.

Remember that in order to save yourself some time you could actually buy sites that already have lots of content and save yourself time that way. One last thing I want to mention is the huge SEO potential of such websites. Let’s say you have a long tail site with around 500 pages. Now if you were to simply place a link in the sidebar of the blog you would get 500 backlinks to a site.

What do you think? Do you like the concept or do you think it’s useless?

How About Long Tail Sites? is a post from And Break

There are lots of people that claim they can teach you how to make money online. I have bought a lot of products that I thought would help me to make money. Even though I can’t say that a single product didn’t help me at all, there were some products that were far more useful than others.

And these are the products I want to highlight in this post. Just to be upfront, this is by no means a complete review or a review at all, I just feel like sharing my thoughts on the different ebooks I have purchased recently.

Cloud Living

I first heard about Cloud Living through Patrick who said that it was a great product to buy. Because of his recommendation I decided to buy it because I believed it would help me to make money.

And I believe it did. The ebook basically covers two ways to make money: one through blogs and the other through mini sites. To be honest I was way more interested in making money through mini sites because I have tried monetizing my blog and it didn’t work at all.

The book provided me with an interesting way of creating these mini sites. I already knew some of the things such as part of the keyword research, but still it was very interesting. The concept with mini sites is to aim at keywords in Google that are not as competitive and thus easy to rank for.

I tried the strategy and created a mini site and it didn’t work too well. I don’t really blame it on the content of the ebook but more on my lack of skills or knowledge.

Google Sniper

This is the ebook that has helped me the most. Google Sniper is extremely interesting and George covers a lot of things in great detail which is quite useful. Especially part of the SEO strategy was new to me. But also other chapters such as pre-selling were interesting.

I bought the product after failing with the mini site I built using the Cloud Living strategy. One of the main reasons why I think it’s so good is because the things are covered in such detail. That way it becomes easy to replicate them and try them on your own.

So after buying and reading the Google Sniper ebook I created two new websites using the strategy specified in the ebook. This time it did work a little bit better. While one of the websites still doesn’t get any traffic, the other one is receiving some traffic, but it’s still low. The reason why I think this is still good is because none of sites have any backlinks.

Info Product Killer

The last ebook I bought was Info Product Killer. I don’t know how I came across it but after reading the sales page I was convinced that it could help me to make money online. While I have to say that the layout and the organization of the ebook are not so good, the content is still interesting.

The things that were useful to me were the keyword strategy which actually talks about how you should target certain keywords. The other useful chapter was the SEO strategy to rank extremely well.

The good thing when you buy Info Product Killer is also that you get a lifetime membership to the IPK membership site.

After having consumed all the information from the book I started buying yet another site. This time of course combining all the knowledge I had gathered through the other three web sites (I think there were actually more than that). This was only around a week ago.

The mini site started ranking today and so far it looks good. It seems to rank as number 10 on Google for part of the keyword I am aiming to rank for. I don’t even know whether it’s getting traffic or not because I am using Google Analytics to track visitors and only on the next day do you get to see the traffic from today. That’s why I am not sure whether it’s working but so far it seems promising.

Conclusion

Well actually I want to say that I don’t think that any of these products are not worth buying. I think they are, and I think the more you read about making money online the closer you will come to actually achieving it. With every site that failed I got a little bit smarter and learned about how to not do it.

I will be sure to update you on any progress and whether my last site turns out to be a success but so far it does look quite good.

I hope this was useful to you. Be sure to ask me if you have any questions. Have you bought any of these products?

3 Ebooks That Will Help You to Make Money Online is a post from And Break

Google Adsense has been around for a while with lots of people using it. It is easy to use and fast to integrate into your web site and that is what makes it so attractive in general.

Many web site owners use it to monetize their web sites. Some people make lots of money through it, others don’t make money at all. What is it that separates these two types of people?

I hope to uncover this question in this article.

New to Blogging?

Adsense seems to be the tool that everyone uses when they start out as a blogger. To be honest I don’t believe that it’s a good tool for beginners to use. I think that Adsense is way harder to use then most people think it is.

And yes I agree Google Adsense has the huge advantage of being easy to set up. Once you have set it up you also don’t need to worry about having to manage the ads. These are definitely all advantages that make people use Adsense in the beginning. But still most people don’t make money through Adsense anyway.

What Separates Those Who Make Money and Those Who Don’t?

Generally speaking the people that make money in the long run are those that are not afraid to try new things out. I have made the mistake myself when I started blogging. I simply added Google Adsense to my blog and thought I would easily start to make money. Since then I have made $0.63, and that’s within over a year.

Once you have your website running test different things. Try to monetize it using affiliate links, Google Adsense, Kontera, text links or whatever you find suitable. If you find that Adsense is performing pretty well, stick with it but try to optimize it further.

Anyway I think I drifted a little bit away from the topic I wanted to talk about. So why are some people making money?

Usually the key is your niche but also the kind of content you present on your website. If you own a web site centered around web hosting than Google Adsense might work rather well because it’s a market that a lot of people choose to advertise in.

Internet Marketing Niche

The biggest reason why people are not making money through Google Adsense is because they usually write about Internet marketing or how to make money online and simply add an ad unit to their post or sidebar. I think that Google Adsense works particularly bad for Internet marketing websites. Maybe I am wrong but have you seen Google ads on huge blogs like Problogger, John Chow or Copyblogger? You haven’t, have you?

That may be because it’s not such a good way to earn money through your Internet marketing blog. That’s why earlier on I said that you need to do some testing. Test different ways to make money through your blog. There are so many ways you can make money on the Internet, simply try them out.

The reason why Adsense tends to perform poorly with Internet marketing as a niche is there are not a lot of advertisers willing to pay a lot for your visits. Usually internet marketers rely more heavily on word of mouth or social media to promote their products. They don’t spend a huge amount of money on advertising.

Web hosting, on the other hand, is a very commercial topic. Thus there will be lots of advertisers available that use Google to send people to their web site. For this web site, the ads are highly targeted. Therefore people who come to that web site are also more likely to click on that kind of advertisement and the advertisers are also willing to pay more for visitors.

Highly Specific Niches

Adsense works in general very well if the topic you, as a publisher, choose fits into the category within which most advertisers advertise. If you web site’s topic is more general, then your ads are not going to be as relevant and people won’t pay as much money per click, thus you will end up with comparably very little money.
Highly focused and specific niches can really make the difference once you try to make money through Adsense.

It’s Just an Alternative Way to Make Money

Again I want to highlight that Adsense is not the only way to make money through your web site or through your blog at all. I think that Adsense should be seen more like an alternative way to monetize your website, not as the main source of income. That’s the mistake most people make.

If you want to learn more about Adsense and learn about the different ways to on how you can truly make money through Adsense then be sure to read this Google Adsense article I have written at FamousBloggers.

What do you think? Have you made a lot of money through Adsense?

How to Make Money Using Google Adsense on Your Blog is a post from And Break

If you don’t already own any other web sites then it is a lot of work to get your web site to the point where it will start to generate a decent amount of money for you.

In this article I want to give you an idea of what you can do to increase the revenue of your e-business. I myself took the time to analyze one of the most successful businesses on the Internet: Amazon. There are several strategies Amazon uses that you can employ in your e-business to increase your revenue and get it to a level you are happy with.

There are lots of popular web sites out there but what sets Amazon apart from so many other businesses? Why is it so successful at selling products?

One key aspect Amazon has perfected is trust building.

Building Trust

One of the most important aspects of e-commerce is to build trust. If people don’t trust you or your business they are not going to buy from you. Some web site owners make the mistake of trying to rush the customer into buying without having prior established what every person needs, trust.

Word of Mouth

Trust can be conveyed through friends who simply recommend a business to you. People who are told that a product is great believe it as it comes from a person they can trust. That’s the power of word of mouth. You can create word of mouth through excellent customer support or by giving away free gifts, simply be creative. If you want to gain further insight into how word of mouth marketing works than I can truly recommend Andy Sernovitz’s book about How Smart Companies Get People Talking.

Just remember, it’s all about getting people to talk about your business.

Web Site Design

The design of a web site alone can establish trust. Think about it. You are much more likely to buy from a site that has a nice design because it means that the owner cares about the customer. If a web site doesn’t look professional people are less likely to buy from it. In order to have the right look & feel for your web site include lots of white spaces.

Testimonials

Some businesses also focus on testimonials from customers to establish trust. Amazon doesn’t use this kind of strategy since it doesn’t need to, people already know it very well. The practice is rather common among small e-business startups.

If you are using testimonials don’t forget to add the name of the customer you quote. Otherwise people won’t believe you. It’s even better to include a picture of the customer.

Verifications

Trust building can also be achieved through so called verifications. If you have a sign on your web site stating that you are “Paypal Verified” then this helps to build trust. It means that people from the outside trust your business, and that other people should too.

Social Proof

Trust can also be established through social proof. Social proof can be found everywhere. It states that when a lot of people do something then you are much more likely to do it too. Thus statements such as “100.000 satisfied customers world-wide” do create a certain amount of trust, especially if you are able to back up what you have stated.

Navigation

Once you’ve established trust then navigation becomes important, especially for product-based businesses like Amazon. The customer has to be able to find the product he wants within, let’s say, a maximum of 5 clicks.

That’s why you need to have a big search box on your web site. New customers will generally not click through a list of categories in order to arrive at the product they want. They want to find a product fast, i.e. they want to search for it. Therefore two mouse clicks should be all it takes for the customer to find a product.

Also think of it this way. By reducing the number of clicks you also reduce the load on your web server.

The next big part are categories. They are much more important for the returning visitor who has used the web site before and comes back to search the web site for a product to buy. These customers don’t know which specific product, they just might be interested in something to buy.

Especially before Christmas people visit web sites to get ideas of what they can buy as gifts. If you fail to give them ideas than they won’t come back the next time for Christmas shopping. And everyone knows that people spend a lot of money for Christmas. It would be a disaster to miss out on that opportunity.

That’s why it’s a good idea to design your web site differently for Christmas. Give people gift ideas by offering lists of what other people bought.

Follow along for a more in depth discussion of what you can do to give people these gift ideas.

Giving People Ideas as to What to Buy

Especially in product-based e-businesses this needs to be applied. Amazon has been incredible about inventing features that make their sales skyrocket by presenting lots of related products.

First of all Amazon has created wish lists to which users can add a product to. In turn customers can send the link of their own wish list to friends who might buy some of these products for them as a gift.

Another feature they have added to their web site is the special shopping cart.  After you’ve clicked on adding a product to the shopping cart it takes you to a new page where similar products are presented in which you might be interested. Buying on Amazon has truly become more like a personalized shopping tour.

Listing bestsellers is also a strategy to get people to buy more. People tend to buy products other people have previously purchased. The same can be applied to web sites which simply offer information. For example on blogs you commonly see a list of the most popular content. It’s the same concept.

Getting the Sales

Sales are not that easy to make. But still somehow Amazon has managed to increase their number of sales over the last few years. So what techniques does Amazon use to generate sales? Of course there are several but I will only cover the most effective ones.

Have you ever noticed how Amazon keeps the list price on the product page and actually crosses it out?! Then below it lists the “Amazon price” and a line saying how much you actually save.

Now we need to understand what the list price really is. The list price is the suggested retail price (SRP). This is the price that is suggested by the manufacturer to give the retailer an idea of what they should sell the product for. Therefore it is not necessarily the price you would pay in other shops.

In this example Amazon uses a psychological aspect to its advantage. Think about it. Would you rather buy a product that costs $300 or one that costs $350 which suggested retail price is $400 thereby saving $50?! I think you would go for the latter one.

Another strategy Amazon uses is the concept of scarcity. If a product exists 100.000 times does that make you likely to buy it? No. On the other hand if only 5 copies of a product are left does that make your decision whether or not to buy it harder?! It certainly does.

You can easily apply this concept to your e-business. If you only have let’s say 10 copies left of a product then show this to your customers. Simply state it on the web site.

One very important aspect I forgot to mention is to always include pictures of a product. Not using pictures will vastly decrease your number of sales. Everyone wants to see what they are buying.

Customer Reviews

Amazon is so successful partly because of their great customer review structure. First of all only customers who have previously purchased a product can post a review. This eliminates untruthful reviews. Another essential function is the ability to rate the review itself. The simple star rating system makes it also very easy for customers to differentiate between good and bad products.

If you own a product-based web site then include reviews of products since most people decide whether to buy a product based on the experience of others.

Setting Yourself Apart from the Competition

What you, as a business owner, always need to take into account is that there are thousands of other web sites out there just like yours. In order to become truly successful you need to set yourself apart from the rest!

You can achieve this through better prices, special offers or great support. Whatever it is, know your strength! And show this strength to your customers.

Has this been helpful to you? What strategies do you use to make more money through your e-business?

How Amazon Makes Money Online is a post from And Break

In this article I will outline the several different options you have when deciding on how to monetize your web site.

This table lists the most common ways to make money off your web site. If you want to know more about the specific method, then just click on the link and it will explain it for you.

Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay Per Click is an easy advertisement concept. Every time a person visits your web site and clicks on an ad, only then you get paid. That is why it is called “Pay Per Click”, therefore you get paid for every click.

Paid Reviews
The way paid reviews work is actually pretty simple. Advertisers pay you for writing a review about a product or service they choose, which you in turn publish on your blog. Of course criticism of the product or service is good but it should be done in a constructive way.

Banner Advertising
Whenever you see banners on web sites, the advertisement method used on this web site is probably banner advertising. Basically it just means selling ad space on your web site on which advertisement banners will be placed. The size of the banners does not matter and can range from 20×20 to 468x6o pixels.

Text Link Ads
Text link ads are, as the name suggests, advertisements in the form of text links. One of the big differences to other methods of advertising is that it not only boosts the traffic of the advertiser, it also improves his search engine ranking.

The reason for that is that text link ads do not add the HTML link attribute rel=”nofollow” to the ad link. What this attribute usually does is to indicate that a link is of no value, or for that matter that the ranking of the web site in search engines is not increased through the link.

Ever since search engine announced that this way of link building would be penalized, the use of this kind of advertisement has decreased a lot.

Affiliate Networks
Affiliate networks are a bit more complicated than the other advertising methods.

Traditional affiliate networks enable merchants to offer publishers a share of any revenue that is generated by the merchant from visitors to the publisher’s site, or a fee for each visitor on the publisher’s site that completes a specific action.

Basically you earn a share of the revenue of the merchant when you (the publisher) get visitors to take a specific action on your web site.

RSS Feed Advertising
This refers to placing advertisement in the RSS feed, typically it is used by blogs. An RSS feed is basically a stream of articles, written by a particular blog or web site and which can be read through a feedreader. A person can then subscribe to that RSS feed and receive new articles when they are posted.

The advertisement is only placed in the RSS feed, usually at the end of each article.
References and Further Reading:

• 101 Ways to Monetize Your Web Site or Blog
• 28 Ways to Make Money Online
• John Chow’s Recommended Money Makers

If you know more ways to monetize a web site than please let us know through a comment.

Ways to Monetize Your Web Site is a post from And Break

In this article I will give you an idea of what you can do to increase your earnings with Adsense. Note that this is just a summary of the Inside Adsense Optimization series but I hope it will be still helpful.

Adsense Optimization

There are three essential aspects to look at when considering to optimize Adsense.

1. Size of Adsense Units

   The size of the Adsense units does matter. According to the Adsense team the bigger the ad units the better the results. Because of that Google advises to use one of the three units:

   • 300×250 medium rectangle
   • 728×90 leaderboard
   • 160×600 skyscraper

   Not only do they create the highest revenue but by using these formats it will also increase the availability of advertisement because companies usually create ads for these specific units. Try to find 125×125 unit ads, I doubt that you will find a lot of them because companies do not normally use these formats.

2. Ad Unit Design

   The ad unit design is also an important factor when trying to increase your revenue. Some people might be more successful using ad units that stand out from the content but most of us won’t. To increase the click-through-rate and thus your income use the following techniques:

   • Use colors for your ads that blend or complement your sites color
   • No border or borders with lighter colors
   • Save sets of frequently-used colors as a palette

   To sum this up your advertisement should not look like an ad. It should look like it is content which makes sense because people are more willing to click on content related links than on ads.

3. Position of Ads

   The position of your Adsense advertisement also has a strong impact on your revenue. The best positions according to the Adsense team are the following:

   • Above the fold of a page (the section of the page a user can see without scrolling)
   • At the end of an article
   • Aligned with content

   Google also made a heatmap which shows you where the best position for ads might be.

Trying to make money online is not easy but I hope this makes it easier for you.

Increasing Revenue Through Adsense Optimization is a post from And Break

Highlights:

• Open to all publishers
• Book your own ads for free
• Buy and sell ads
• Recurring commission from affiliate referral program for lifetime
• Makes it easy to find advertisers
• Let’s you define regions where ads will be placed
• Nice integration with blogging software – supports WordPress, Drupal, Joomla etc.
• Get paid at the end of each month

PerformancingAds also offers a feature called “traffic exchange.” Every time advertisement is booked on your web site you in turn earn credits. When you have enough credits you can use them to display your own ads on other publisher sites.

Like To Advertise On Blogs?

PerformancingAds is also looking for advertisers. Advertisers currently get $25 off of your first $100 ad purchase, so you should consider looking at it.

PerformancingAds seems to offer some really nice features so that’s the reason I signed up. The ad network seems to be a lot better than Google Adsense since it is especially made for bloggers. Take a look at it!

I’ll keep you posted on my experience with it.

Performancing Ad Network is a post from And Break