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.

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Many people consider building backlinks to a site one of the most important things you can do to help increase search engine rankings. I would say after creating interesting and unique content that this is true. Well really if you build backlinks you don’t have to worry as much about creating unique content. With enough backlinks Google and the other SE’s will still send you traffic.

A lot of people in IM don’t take the time to build up these links and it may be responsible for some people not making very much with their sites or blogs. I have a theory on why this is. First thing building backlinks is a time intensive process and since most people get into IM part time at first then there is just not enough time to build backlinks and create content.

I know this was my problem when I was doing IM just part time. I just did not have time to work on my off page SEO tasks so I let them go. I attribute this failure of mine as the main reason I did not start earning more money earlier in this game.

After I started working on building up some links to my niche sites, that is when I started to see increased traffic and as a result increased revenue.

Lets face it building links is boring. Not only does it take a lot of time, but the actual process of emailing people asking for links, submitting to directories, or social bookmarking is pretty much just boring. Then you have the whole problem that you will keep submitting the same text in all the bookmarks which raises flags at Google.

Well I recently was invited to beta test a program which I wanted to share. I’m not associated with this other than being a beta tester and seeing some great results in just a couple of weeks as a beta tester.

I was invited to try out a new service launching named The Link Juicer and its exactly that.It gives you link juice without you needing to spend hours and hours trying to build links to social sites and other blogs. Its a set it and forget it system.

I’ve been playing around with it on a couple of sites, including the one that I set up for my Hundred Dollar a Day Challenge.( Yes I know I owe you guys an update on my progress there and I promise I will be writing some update posts soon). Well on that blog, I’m up to 50 visitors a day on average with a couple of hundred page views per day. Right now Adsense is about 2 bucks and steadily growing. I’ve done know promotion outside of the link juicer as I wanted to see how the program works for a brand new site. Over all its not bad.

Another cool thing about this system is it allows you to spin your content. So I can create a single campaign and define multiple titles and change the posted content randomly, which makes it look much more natural. Right now I’ve rejumpstarted the traffic on a couple of my other niche blogs and the brand new one for the Hundred Dollar Challenge is starting to take off. The best part about this is I only spent about 30 minutes setting up my campaigns( which you can run 50 of at a time) and then I’ve just enjoyed the traffic.

Right now you can get in the program, but I do think its going to launch soon and from my understanding the first month will be free. This is a pretty good deal to build up hundreds or thousands of backlinks to your site for just 30 minutes time investment.

You can sign up for the their list and they will tell you when you can get your free month. If you are really serious about earning cash on the net and if your traffic is not where you want it, then you will want to give this a try. Sign up for The Link Juicer Trial

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I’ve been neglecting this blog for a while but I had a good reason. This is always been a hobby to me and not something I really used to earn money but that’s about to change one thing that I’m going to do to make my life a little easier is to use Dragon Naturally Speaking in conjunction with live writer for my blogging activities I’ve tried Dragon Naturally Speaking prior to version 10. But I was never able to train it to my voice. Version 10 of Dragon Naturally Speaking is a little different. I just got it last night installed on my computer. My hopes were not high for Dragon Naturally Speaking as with version 8 I was never able to have it understand me with any level of accuracy. Well version 10 is a lot different.

At the moment I am using Dragon Naturally Speaking version 10 to type this blog post. While it does make some mistakes he does understand what I’m saying for the most part. The cool part about this is that typing with Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a lot faster than typing normally. This is one of the reasons I have not really kept up with a site like I should have. I just don’t have the time to keep up with this site because it does not a lot of money and as a result I spend my time on other tasks which do earn me money. But with the increased time I say by using this software then perhaps I can keep up with this site as well as my many others. I’ve never been a fast typist and I’ve always wanted to improve my speed but typing fast is just not in my abilities talking fast is another story. While it may take get some getting used to as I realize I do not tie the same as I speak and it does make some mistakes which I must correct. The four were some instances and as I get used to it I should do a better job and things should flow better.

Of course Dragon Naturally Speaking is not going to help with SEO. So, I will still be forced to utilize my keyboard to perform SEO type tasks. Right now I’m looking at probably 80% accuracy rate as I speak this blog post. Which is not really really bad. The one thing is a kind of messes me up with my flow of writing in this post does not seem like a normal blog post from me. But regardless perhaps I will give it a shot anyway as this is really helping my speed with typing a blog post. Right now I spent less than five minutes on this blog post and from looking at it I have a couple hundred words maybe 250. At this rate I can probably speak blog post a lot faster than I can actually write them. Of course it means my process for writing blog posts will need to change I will need to put it in my heated prior to actually starting to speak the blog post. Well this is all for now I just want to see how this would work out and it looks okay I’m have to do a little editing to this post and I may change a couple worked around here and there but for the most part I’m very please with Dragon Naturally Speaking version 10. So what blogging tools do you use have you considered? Dragon Naturally Speaking it may be worth the money no matter what your accent I have a South Georgia accent and it understands me just fine now. Of course this was not always true with version 8 it was a total disaster. But version 10 is definitely an upgrade.

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