I start with keyword lists from adsenseheaven dot com which guesstimates the most expensive keywords to bid on in the PPC AdWords side of the Google ad world. I generally ignore the top 1000, as they are very competitive and saturated. I am not concerned with the top payouts.
I store this data every month in a mySQL database with the previous months data, and over time I am able to see which phrases are consistently in the lists and unlikely to disappear. I call them long term performers.
I cross check each phrase with the number of pages currently indexed in google, to see how much competition there is for a each key phrase. It’s usually easier to land a top 10 first page SERP position if there is less competition for the phrase.
I also cross check each phrase with google trends data which has an RSS feed which is also collected and stored in a seperate SQL database hourly. If an adsenseheaven keyphrase is found to appear in my Google trends history database, it’s flagged as hot. If there’s less than a million indexed pages it’s further flagged as a top candidate for a dedicated microsite armada.
Once a month after the new list is released I analyze the data after it’s been processed and I pick a shortlist of hot key phrases that I am going to ramp up over the next few weeks.
For this lesson the phrase I’ve selected is ‘Acai Berry‘.
The estimated cost for the top position according to the adsense heaven list is $19, and it also appears multiple times in my Google trends history data. That means I’m probably going to make at least $5 for each AdSense click, and there’s a lot of people searching for it.
I head over my favorite registrar and find a domain name which contains the keyword at the beginning of the domain. Contrary to popular belief, the gTLD is irrelevant. I find that .info works just as well as a .com with all things otherwise equal. Get the new domain’s DNS setup, and your webserver configured. Install your favorite Open Source CMS into the Docroot and pick a nice template which looks clean. Avoid dark colored themes. Make a nice graphic for your site logo position which contains your root keyword. (yes googlebots can read keywords with OCR in your site logo images).
You now have the framework for your microsite, and a place to put your articles.
Now we’re going to mine long tail keywords for the selected phrase to use as subjects of my microsite subpages based on the root keyphrase. I use a couple different places for this, a good one for noobs is freekeywords.wordtracker.com. I input the root phrase ‘Acai Berry’ and save the top 50 results into a text file. For this example I’ll limit to the top 5 after the root.
Quote:
| Acai Berry at Wordtracker 7,401 searches (top 100 only) Searches Keyword 4679 acai berry <- ignored, it’s the root phrase 371 acai berries <- variant of root phase 238 acai berry supreme 1 220 acai berry information 2 181 acai berry research 3 149 acai berry juice 4 125 acai berry diet 5 |
You can use however many you want. The more you have, the bigger your site will be, and the more expensive it will be to ramp up.
I outsource most of my article writing to Justin at No Doubt Marketing. I pay them around $8 for each original article, and they are not scraped together garbage. I order 1 article for each long tail keyphrase. In 12-24 hours they’ll begin arriving in a steady stream to my inbox. It’s not uncommon to have 25-50 articles for your project. Your goal is to build a site which contains everything someone would ever want to know about your root keyword. It’s also not uncommon for me to have $500-$1000 into each microsite by the time it’s done. But, I make that back in two days.
There are lots of other article writing services out there, and there is a lot of grey area. Some are more readable than others, and the general rule is you get what you pay for. I spent a few months testing all the top ghostwriters who advertised their services on digitalpoint, and some are very bad. I do not use scraped articles or spun articles from aggregation sites like ezinearticles.
Now you have some original high quality meat for your microsite which is truly original content and is highly targetted for each long tail keyphrase. Create a content item on your CMS for each one, putting the longtail phrase in a H1 tag, the Title, and the Meta description. Do not make the title and meta description identical or the latter will be ignored. Insert the article, and do your html markup to split it into paragraphs, and add floating divs for your google adsense and CPA offers.
Over the course of the next few weeks, repeat this process as your longtail articles arrive. By the third week you will have a pretty large site which is very useful and informative. It doesn’t read like it was written by robots.
At the same time, you work on link building. I will look at who is already ranking for the keyphrases I am looking to rank for, and I will attempt to contact each of the webmasters. It’s easy to do a whois lookup on a domain (firefox has a plugin to do it from serp pages) and fire off an email to them. If they have a working phone number listed (they are required to) give them a call. I have a vonage account so I get unlimited long distance. I also have a telemarketing background so I am good at cold calling webmasters and socially engineering them into adding links.
You will mostly get voicemails, so leave a nice message which is very brief and explains you have a relevant website which wants to become link partners. When you get the webmaster on the phone live, tell him how great their website is, how you added a link to it on your blogroll, and how it would help their rankings to link to your related site which is full of good content.
Some people will tell you to go fuck yourself, so you just move on. There are going to be hundreds of thousands of other sites to contact, so don’t spend too much time with each one. I will ask them for their AIM handles so I can keep track of them. (did I mention I create a new AIM/Gmail for each new microsite?)
There are lots of other ways to get links. I’ve tried most of them, and they all work. You can donate money to open source organizations which have a ‘thank you’ page. Most of them will include a link if your donation is over a certain threshhold. Check for nofollows and disallows in the robots.txt first.
You can do a google blog search for your keyword and post an on topic comment which contains a single link to your homepage. Most places will leave your comment in the moderation cue forever, but others will publish it. You have a better chance of your comment getting published if your comment contains the keywords they are trying to rank for. Blog owners don’t want comments that throw their keyword density off.
You can search for forum posts using google which contain your keyword in the title tags and post a useful something into the thread. Don’t just spam your URL or clearly it’s going to get removed. It’s also a good idea to make a few posts in other threads before you do any link dropping so you don’t have 1 post when you do it
There is roughly 260 million websites which will give you a free blog. Create a new one everyday somewhere new and make a couple posts about your keyphrases. You can take snippits out of your articles and rewrite them into blog posts, or even purchase some of that ‘low quality’ filler articles I spoke of earlier and use that for your free blogs. Be sure to choose good anchors when linking to your main moneysite.
The bottom line is get as many links as you can, and spread them out as far apart as you can. You don’t want to get too many links in a day or it will appear unnatural. So take your time, and work a little bit on each microsite every day. Try to make sure every microsite gets at least one quality inlink every single day from somewhere.
One final observation: The longer a Google AdSense unit has been deployed, the more it’s worth. Some of my top performing units are several years old. I think after a certain time they’re internally flagged and start to show the top paying ads.
