No nonsense Internet Tips

I was just over at DatMoney where my good friend Jay posted about making money during the holidays. Its actually a pretty good post, but I’m going to have to disagree with Jay on one point.

Now Jay recommends using sites such as shopping.com to find a hot niche or product that people are searching for and then building a blog around the product. Now at the surface this is a good idea, but building a new site for each of these keywords can not only get expensive in terms of purchasing domain names, but since its a new site then its unlikely you will even start to get the traffic needed to make sales.

I’ve seen a lot of people say to build out a small site for each long tail keyword you want to target. I’ve even seen this mention for doing Trend blogging, but I never have really gotten the reason. It just does not make good business sense.

1. If you purchase a domain name, then for a .com you will spend about 10 bucks or maybe a little less per year. Now with a trend, you may not even earn that amount back. Perhaps you could with an affiliate product depending on how many sales you can convert and whether the product continues to be searched for.
2. Even if you don’t purchase a domain name, but instead use something like blogger.com to create your site, then you still have the time it takes to build out the site. Now this may not be much, but if you build out a lot of them then this time can really add up.
3. Now you have either invested money or time or both and you still are not indexed in the SEs, so you are not going to get much traffic if any. So now you have to spend time building links, etc.. to get your new site indexed. I’m not sure if anyone has noticed, but its taking Google a little longer to index items lately.

Now we have another option to accomplish the same thing. Build a single site with a generic domain name. Then optimize individual posts for your SEO efforts. Really after all its not the domain that shows up in the Search Engines, but the individual page is indexed.

Then you can cut out all the additional overhead for each keyword as you only need to build a single page. Also any link building you do will help all your products not just a single product.

This strategy is one where you can also utilize some plugins to help you out. I like a wordpress plugin named ReviewAZON, which allows you to easily add Amazon products to your blog. This plugin not only posts the product, but also the comments left on the product page at Amazon. This allows you to appear that your blog is a lot more popular.

Now you may think that this is duplicate content, but that does not matter, plus if you spend a few minutes writing some keyword rich content at the start of the product post, then a lot of times you will out rank Amazon for the long tail. It may take a little time before you build up enough authority on the domain name to rank easily, but if you give it a little time you will have a domain that you can post almost anything to and it will rank on the first page.

I don’t care what anyone says, the bigger a domain is, they easier it is to rank for individual pages. Look at Wikipedia or Ezine Article. I’m sure you won’t disagree that these two sites seem to show up on the front page for just about any keyword phrase. People will say its because they are authoritive, but I say they are authorities because of the number of pages they have indexed. That is why new pages get ranked so quickly on these domains. Now don’t say that blogger is the same, because someKeyword.blogger.com is not the same as blogger.com/SomeKeyword in Google’s eyes. These are considered different domains.

You may not have the resources or time to build a site of the same size as these sites, but what you can do is to build bigger sites and that will help you. Whether its making money during the holidays or any other time of the year.