Are you using small “made for Adsense” blogs as you main source of online earning? You might want to read this article.
The internet changes. Not only the information contained within it, but the rules for thriving within its structure as well. As it changes, it forces one to look at their internet business, over and over again to make sure that all is well. After the Alan Liew incident a couple of weeks ago, and the consequent discussions surrounding the incident, it forced me to look at my own business with a magnifying glass.
If you don’t know the situation that I am talking about, you should probably read my latest post called “An Internet Business Takes a Fall”. Now, when Alan’s site was deleted, there was no end to the speculation as to why. Some said that it was due to SPAM (which was supposedly the “official reason”). Others claimed that he was using too much duplicate content. In fact, a commenter on this blog said that Alan was posting PLR articles to his site. All the possible reasons were discussed and dissected ad nauseum.
Now, I pretty much stayed out of the way and let people give their thoughts, because I tend to learn more by listening than by talking. I also stayed out of it because, in reality, I have no idea what really happened. I did learn a lot from the discussions that I read though. Thanks to those discussions and an excellent post by Griz, from How to Make Money Online for Beginners, some very important things were brought starkly into focus.
Amongst the discussions were several about the strategies that people are using to earn money online. It’s a model that I have used a bit, and it does work… for a time. It is using a system (like the methods I teach here) to find keywords that are easy to rank for and have some profit potential, and building small sites to target those keywords specifically for Adsense revenue. These sights are usually pretty small (5 posts or so). They are made ugly, so that users are more likely to notice the ads and click them, and usually offer very little actually value to the reader. The posts are actually not written for the reader, but for the search engines.
The problem in that is when the site gets a manual review. Someone from Google will actually look at the site, they will see it’s a blog made strictly for earning money with Adsense, and it will quickly fall in the SERPS. That’s actually the best case scenario. People with a lot of these types of sites can have them de-indexed completely and have their Adsense accounts closed. Google wants quality sites at the top of their results, not thin, made for Adsense sites that offer no value to the reader.
So isn’t that what I teach here? Actually, it’s not. I do believe that there is value in information, and if I am willing to do the research on a topic and post my findings, so that someone reading learns from the article, I have no problem with getting paid for that.
When you are building your sites, using the methods that you read about here, it is very important that you offer value to your readers. Write for them. Give them the information that you think they are looking for when they search for the keyword that you are targeting. Take information from several different sources and compile it all in one place. Research your articles. In doing so, you are providing a place where someone can get all of the information they need pertaining to that topic, without having to search site after site to find it. That is valuable.
The problem with this strategy is that it actually takes work. A lot of people recommend diversifying to the point where you have 100 or more blogs in different niches. I have tried that method, and what I wound up with was a few sites that I really tried to treat as “authority sites” and a bunch of sites that were basically garbage. A few months ago, I narrowed my focus again and got rid of most of my garbage sites. I spend most of my work on the authority sites that I have, and the rest of the work on making some of the higher potential “garbage sites” into authority sites. I also still have a couple of niche article directories that I keep going, and I diversify my monetization amongst Adsense, Amazon, clickbank, infolinks, and others.
I guess the message here is that I try to remember that this is my business, and not some “online earning fast cash gimmick”. If I put garbage into my business, I am going to get garbage back out of it, and garbage doesn’t pay the bills. You can use the systems I teach on this site to make thin, MFA sites, but one of two things are going to end up happening: either your MFA sites are going to get Google-slapped, or someone is going to build an authority site in your niche and crush you with it.
Something else to keep in mind is that you should not let this scare you away from using blogging as a main component of your internet business. An authority site does not have to be huge and fancy with lots of media and flash presentations. It is, after all, a blog. It just needs to be quality.
I know I have traveled off the beaten path for the last couple of articles. I did promise one on more link building strategies, as part of the “Earning Online” course, and I will do that one next – I promise.
Related posts:
Internet Business Guide
Nuclear Affiliate Review –
Internal Linking and Why it is
The Keyword Academy Review
Earning Online | Link Building
Earning Online | Growing Your Site
Online Earning with Thin MFA Sites
An Internet Business Takes a Fall
Earning Online | Getting Your
Earning Online Blogging | Your
A Quick Way to Earn Extra Cash
Hi Steve,
I come here from the footer link on learn2earn2.com and that site is completely changed and nothing worth to stay, so are you do that for the owner of leran2earn2.com?
No idea what happened there.
Hello Sunny,
Thanks for dropping by. Yes, learn2earn2 has completely changed. Bryan came to me for help because he was unhappy with a lot of the opportunities that he was still offering on his site. It was also made so that he could not easily add or change content AND he was dropping in the SERPS. I completely redid the site, and put it on a wordpress platform and we are still in the process of redoing everything, adding new content and new opportunities, etc. I hope that when we are done, you will find learn2earn better and more useful than ever.
In the meantime, all of the content from his old site can still be found by using the links at the very bottom of the page.
You have to admit, the site was old and needed a face-lift.
Steve
Thanks for the updates, I agreed with you, the worst one is that site related to time management, it looks like created by a 10 years old kid, no wonder he keep saying not even earn a cent from IM
We are working on that one as well. It actually is a very good product for time management and life management. time is money, right?
meanwhile, if there is anything I can do, please don’t hesitate to ask.
Hi Steve,
Are you changing that powertimemanagementsystems.com?
It still looks non-professional, you should make it like the new learn2earn2
I think should trash the old one completely and rebuild instead of try to add-on to the existing bad silly layout:)
I’ll will mention your suggestion to Bryan, but I think he wants to keep it the same. I think just a few small tweaks will make it much better.
Hi Steve,
Well, I don’t think any site can be successful with that layout
1. Hard to find stuffs, no pull-down menu, no sidebar
2. Too many little square boxes with ugly clip art graphics from 80′s
3. Ugly font sizes/ color combination as whole.
Again the whole site looks like created from a grade 5 student, how can you expected people will interested to see the content behind it. Totally off if compare with today website standard.
All I can say is good luck to the owner
Steve,
Is that http://powertimemanagementsystems.com/ done? not much different to me, you are not even put your own link on footer this time
too UGLY I guess…
It’s not done yet. The server has some issues that need to be addressed. Also Bryan is making some changes to what he wants me to do, so I am waiting at this point.
How old is this blog post? Alan’s site is fine and is still #1 on Google for “make money online”.
The post was on May 7. It is true that his site is back up. I updated the post a few days after his site came back and added a link to his blog post that explains what happened. Alan actually dropped by and commented on it as well. You can find the post here: http://internetbusinessguide.info/an-internet-business-takes-a-fall/
I linked to it in this article, but links are hard to see with this theme.
I have to agree with you Steve. It does take more work to provide more valuable sites, but well worthwhile over the alternative of working hard to build and rank 200 sites just to have them wiped out once they are making money, I would probably want to kill myself at that point.
There are quite a bit of low competition keywords that can be used to build nice sites with valuable info for readers where they will still click on the ads and that will provide a stable and long term revenue that will not be at risk of being wiped out by G or anybody.
There is money online besides Adsense as well, I always say, diversify and never put your eggs in one basket.
And, if you really find some money making “thing” which is not too “kosher” do it quietly, as we all see what spreading the word can lead to.
I’m glad Alan’s site is back, he offers a lot of value and should not have been wiped out.
Truth to that. Getting traffic is the hardest part. If you can get the traffic, monetizing it is fairly easy.
Hi,
I guess the thin MFA site is STILL Good, after you read the latest auction sold at flippa for $42,800 and the site is making $3K/month, but it only have 10 articles and that is it.
http://flippa.com/auctions/103100
Therefore, if you know how to SEO and get traffic, few pages thin MFA site still GOOD.
Maybe that’s why they are selling it.
Actually, the site may be a little thin, but it is a decent looking site on a premium theme with 10 posts. Not what I would consider an MFA site. There are a few things I would do differently if it were my site, but I would think it would pass a manual review by Google’s quality control techs. It is a far cry from a 5 post garbage site on an ugly theme that has become the calling card of MFA sites. The posts are actually decent. Ask yourself this: what do you think people are looking for when they look up CNA certification, or CNA training. Will that site be of interest to them? If so, they are fine. Personally, i would put in some more posts and more navigation above the fold, but that’s me wanting to be safe.
A great example of MFA – http://legal-attorney-lawyer.info/. There are a lot of posts, but it is a scraper – it just takes excerpts from other blogs and considers that a post. There is no navigation except for the Google ads. This site will NOT pass a manual inspection and will be deindexed, and I would not be surprised if the Adsense account was suspended.
Folks, this type of site will not make you money; at least, not for long (if it ever even ranks for anything).