I always thought that it would take a long time for any site to build authority and enough visitors to start earning a decent income, but a few days ago one of my newer sites broke the $1000 a month barrier, right before it´s 7 month birthday.
So in case you have been following my blog from the beginning and was wondering if I were still working online and why I was not blogging here anymore, the answer is “yes, but I have been busy creating some profitable websites!”
Today though I have decided to post here, because I want to share what I did to get a new site to earning $1000 this month as a way of encouraging you to never give up on this fantastic business called Internet Marketing.
I have been a member at the The Keyword Academy for years, in fact, I am going to share a screenshot with you guys, so that you can see my shiny $1000 badge as proof. (remember that that money came from just ONE site I am going to talk to you about in a minute!).
It is actually funny, because this is the first time I applied for a members badge, and even though I make a lot more than $1000 a month, I wanted the $1000 badge because I feel good about the site that is earning me that kind of money, after only 7 months online.
Not sure if you know about The Keyword Academy, but in short, it is a place where you can learn how to make money with websites, how to do the keyword research, setting up the site, how to use the keywords in your content and how to build your links in order to get traffice etc. If you are new to making money online, signing up there is probably the best thing you can do, to get sincere information and find out what really works.
If you are not new to the online business, but you could use some help increasing your earnings, I´d definitely go there too, besides, signing up gives you a free trial month to dig into the forums and material, participate in some webinars and get a real feel of the value of TKA.
Anyways, at present they are making some changes in order to stay in line with the recent Panda shifts and are moving towards building authority sites that will become steady earners, offering great content for your visitors and basically, a safer way to earn your money online, because it will provide a steadier site in the long run.
They used to teach to build sites with 5-20 posts per website and then build links to those posts until you dropped, but now they focus on building sites with many more articles that are longer, so that you can focus on getting traffic through long tail keywords. The backlinking is also changing, in fact, you will spend more time writing quality articles for your websites than actually backlinking those articles, something I really like.
So, January 31st of 2011, I decided to build a website in quite a competitive niche. A niche that most people say is far too saturated and loaded with big gun websites, to ever stand a fighting chance at making money, but I started it anyways, for personal reasons.
I was not even planning on making money with it, actually because I too believed the myth that some niches are just too hard to earn money in. I did do some keyword research, just to use some long tail keywords that had more than 1000 monthly searches but that was about it. I just started writing and writing, and because I love the topic, it didn´t feel that hard to create good content.
Solid content, well researched content, really offering value to my readers. Instead of following all the rules and blueprints, I just started publishing 1 article a day, that could be 300 words long, or 3000 words or anything between that, but offering something interesting to people searching around in my niche topic.
I got one blogroll exchange in order to get my site indexed for it´s main keyword, but that was all I did for linkbuilding.
The continuous new and fresh articles proved to be the best tactic I have ever used, in order to increase traffic and earnings!
In the screenshot below you can see the traffic stats from the past 30 days. As you can see, traffic can vary greatly, and while I would normally freak out about that, with this site it actually makes sense, and because I know the target traffic, I know that the dips come from missing traffic on Saturday, when my target traffic is not online. I used to freak out every time I´d see that dip, until I started comparing all other Saturdays and saw that traffic would go up again on Sunday.
Another traffic graphic, to show the development of traffic during the 7 months my site has been online. July has not shown the growth you´d expect but I think that is mainly due to the fact that the people in my target area started going on holiday, so my topic was less searched for.
I think that will be less off an issue in September though, especially because I have a strategy planned out that should increase traffic growth.
Remember that the first post was on the 31st of January and to be fair, during the month of February I only posted 4 articles, and did not start to really post 5 times a week until halfway through March. After that the stream of fresh content has been growing my site into a steady earner with around 150 articles at present. And my plans are to reach 500 published quality articles before the end is over.
Traffic is growing nicely and it is something I will be working on in the future. Adding lots of fresh content on a daily basis will definitely help, but I will also start going back into posts that are already published, trying to optimize them and add more text and long tails in order to catch more traffic there as well.
Apart from that, I am going to use an awesome tool that I will be talking about in the future, that will not only improve my internal linking structure, but it will also tell me which posts to update and improve in order to stay in favor with the Big G.
The thing I have learned from this site is the main reason for wanting to share this success with you guys, is that it pays off to be really really in to your topic!
There has been a huge increase of mediocre websites online, the so called sniper websites or the MFA themes (made for adsense) that would be build in a jiffy, on EMD´s (exact match domains) to just rank a few keywords and cash in on adsense, and even though that business model might still be highly profitable for many people, you can notice that there is a huge shift going to be towards creating high quality, bulky sites that offer true value to the visitor.
This is only logical, if you understand what Google wants. Their reputation depends on being the best search engine, so if the results that keep showing up on the first page, are crappy MFA websites that offer nothing interesting of value, than they are made to look like a fool.
However, if you create this huge wonderful useful valuable website that gives your visitor exactly what they are after, you are much more likely to start ranking well in the SERP´s (search engine results page) for many keywords, even keywords you never thought would bring your traffic!
In other words, this means that the most succesful way to create an online business, is to focus on the long term, and start creating one awesome site, the type of site you can´t stop talking about, the site that is about your passion, talking about what you love to do and what you know a lot about.
For me personally, it is such a relief to have broken the $1,000 barrier with this site, because it is about a topic I can write thousands of articles about, without ever running out of inspiration! That is such a nice change after having created site after site on topics that not even remotely interested me, but that I created because of the monthly potential showing it could become a real earner.
That old business model does still work, but creating that type of sites just kills your brain!
If you are totally fed up with not earning enough money online and feel like all you do is just struggle to keep your head up high and some money in your pocket, I would really advise you to give the TKA 2.0 new style a chance, it could completely change your life!
Learn how to build a site you can really be proud of and cash in big at the same time!
Over the course of this month, I am going to publish a few more articles to explain what I did exactly to bring this site to where it is, so stay posted if you want to know how to build a successful site as well!
Update: As of October 2011 I am no longer a member at TKA, because after 2 years of membership, I had learned so much that I sort of “gratuated the Academy”.
I will however, keep sending people there if they need to learn how to make money, it is the place that taught me how to do it, and I know it worked.
I will always be thankful to TKA for changing my life and for showing me what to do, in order to create a fulltime income online.
