Website Building biz

Daily on webmaster forums I hear people asking the predictable question: Why is my cost per click so low? Why is my adsense earning so low? How come I don’t make any money from all this traffic and my ads?

Chances are if you have high traffic and very low adsense earnings (especially a low CPC) you have a terrible niche! Sure, it might be easy to get a lot of hits for celebrities or MP3s, but this isn’t necessarily the niche that is going to pay well for qualified leads.

The key to successful adsense publishing is recognizing quality, in-demand keywords and writing unique content that stresses these keywords. The content should answer the questions that a searching internet user is likely to be asking themselves, and provide an introduction to the commercial services and products relevant to the topic.

What are the good niches? Well, they are the same as the things that people spend a majority of their income on. Real estate, cars, investment, education, medicine, business start-ups, website building, and some niches of technology. Its no big secret, these are the things that people spend more of their money on so this is what the advertisers can afford to pay more on.

Google provides the keyword tool for Adwords advertisers, but its useful for Adsense publishers as well. Of course, write about what you love, but take some time once in a while to remember what sells in that field. If you’re interested in websites and e-commerce, think about the SEO and hosting services that people might pay good money for.

CPC can vary even within a small niche, so being specific helps. If you’re still having problems getting a good advertising rate, you may have an issue of smart-pricing… More on this later, but not from personal experience (knock on wood)

What’s true in the financial markets is true in the website building business, too.

Diversify your holdings!

It might be tempting to pour all of your time and resources into a single website, and it might even be a good idea if you’ve really come across the next big thing. But how will you know it is the next big thing, and do you really expect to develop a super-hit on your first try?
Owning and developing multiple websites have several advantages:

• Domain names, content, and backlinks each appreciate over time
• Sites can be cross-linked for SEO purposes
• Cover multiple topics of interest while keeping each domain focused
• Offset seasonal traffic variations or sudden shifts in the advertising economy of a particular subject

Disadvantages can still exist like:

• Constantly feeling like you haven’t done enough for one site or another
• Leaving potential gold mines undeveloped or under-developed
• Losing focus and getting almost nothing done at all

Ultimately, it could be a personality preference. I say, start a website ASAP and then start another one the next day, too. Keep good records of what you need to work on and search out related blogs and forums where you can get relevant do-follow links for each domain. Write articles at the point where two websites’ subjects intersect - then include optimized backlinks to both domains.

Do you have any experience running one or more websites? Do you wish you had built more when you started, or do you perhaps wish you had just focused on one or two more prominent projects? Let me know what you think!

If you don’t know what Mashable is, its OK. A few months ago I would have said you were missing out big time, but it seems now there isn’t much left to see. Basically, its a blog with some sort of community features (that mostly seems to consist of receiving marriage proposals in your Mashable inbox from people who found you through the community search).

Anyway, they focus on internet news, like anything calling itself 2.0. If Facebook farts, Mashable is there with the latest updates. Every once in a while there is an interesting post or something that can actually help you out with internet marketing - most of the time it looks like they’re trying to fit in as many pages in a day as they can.

So what was so great about Mashable? Why did the inane posts have so many comments and such great discussion? Well it made sense that a website for website owners would give them a chance to put a little link juice to their sites. Mashable was a model of an SEO-friendly blog, at least for its users. Not only did your username link to an editable profile page, it also included a link to whatever website you wanted to link to your account. All of the links followed - much SERPage was had. The profile could be written about any topic at all, and HTML was enabled so you could set up matching anchor text to deep pages on any site.

Well, its done. Its over. If you missed the ride its too late to get on now.

Recently (and I’m not sure exactly when), they’ve decided to set the whole site to “no-follow” and they’ve taken the website links out of your comments. Now your posts take a no-follow link to your profile which is also.. you guessed it.. “no-follow”

At first, the comments were replaced by trackbacks. Each post would fill up with half a dozen auto-generated trackbacks from spammy sites with no content of their own to speak of. In a few days, even these guys caught on and realized they weren’t going to get anything from a link exchange with Mashable.

Am I a hypocrite? Yes, for the moment. I’ve converted two of my three blogs to “do-follow” and this is the only one that hasn’t been modified yet. While this site offers the best payout per visitor, it isn’t my top priority right now just because I’m so obsessive about my favorite topics: politics & education. When I’ve finished my round of software updates, I’ll be sure to add the latest do-follow module to websitebuilding.biz

Why? ‘Cuz that’s how the internet should be. If your comment survives my moderation, it isn’t spam and shouldn’t be treated as such by the search engine spiders.