OIL010: An Interview with Spencer Haws on How to Launch Niche Sites in Bulk

OIL 010: An Interview with Spencer Haws on How to Launch Niche Sites in Bulk

Trent Dyrsmid: Hey everybody it’s Trent here from the Online Income Lab with another day of avoiding a real job. We’re at episode no. 10 of my podcasts. I gotta tell this is one of the most fun things that I do. I look forward to every episode because I have the opportunity every time I conduct a podcast to get to have a one on one conversation with somebody who is typically really smart. And I’ve got another one of those guests on the show today back for a 2nd visit. He’s actually the guest of my very 1st podcast. We’ve got Spencer Haws of Niche Pursuits online. Spencer, welcome to the show.

Spencer Haws: Hey thanks for that intro Trent and I appreciate it very much. It’s good to be back for another session here.

T: Now thank you very much for making the time. So this episode came about as a result of a conversation Spencer and I had I don’t know, maybe a week or 2 ago, something like that. We were exchanging a chat over skype and I’d ask him a little bit about success of a product that he’s recently launched, and we’ll get to that later. And so I said “are you having a hard time launching niche sites while you’ve been occupied on this thing”. He said “no, actually I launched 50 or 40 something last month”. And I said “what? You gotta be kidding me.”

And because for me, as any of you who followed me for a while know I’m really big on outsourcing and I had outsourced literally everything except I just had not yet figured out how to effectively how to outsource the keyword research and for me that was a big bottleneck because between my blog and my niche sites and Niche Site Mastery between moderating comments and ….. there wasn’t much anytime left and to be honest with you doing keyword research is just not one of my favorite activities. I find it mundane and boring and so I seem to have this thing called avoidance behavior and I’m sure some of you can relate to that.

So Spencer explained to me a little bit of what he was doing and since we’ve incorporated that we’re gonna go in to the details here on the show and I actually launched 10 niche sites yesterday. Hardly lifted a finger, gonna be blogging about that. I’m actually gonna make a project. I don’t know what I’m gonna name it yet but it’s gonna be a multi-series blog post ongoing thing. Hey, here are these 10 sites that I launched. I’m not gonna give up the URLs of course but I will talk about traffic and I’ll talk about earnings. I’m not gonna give up the URLs coz I don’t want everybody copying me coz it’s not a cool thing to do. Anyway lots of good information to come and I definitely wanna thank Spencer for pointing me to the resource that he did and we’re gonna talk about that too that enabled me to really get this whole keyword research thing off my plate completely and I gotta tell you my VA, the guys’ killing it. I could have launched 20 sites yesterday I just said whoa I only wanna watch 10 in 1 day.

S: Let’s not overwhelm ourselves here.

T: Exactly. Alright so Spencer let’s talk about, so first of all, how many sites did you launch last month?

S: Right. I did want to clarify. It wasn’t quite 50 although I have launched just about 50 in the past 2 months. In August, so 2 months ago, I believe it was 20 sites. And then last month, for the month of September, I launched I believe it was 31 sites.

T: Fantastic.

S: And this month, as been a little bit busy I haven’t quite launched any at this point but I have about 10 keywords right now that I basically found and I’m ready to go. I just haven’t sort of pulled the trigger. So before the end of the month I may find 10 more. We’ll see but… so this month it’s been a little bit busier but in the past 2 months I have launched about 50 new niche sites using my VA who is helping out a ton. And we’re gonna talk about that a little bit I guess here as well.

T: Absolutely.

S: But what specific questions do you have for me Trent?

T: Well let’s begin at the beginning because the site launch starts with the keyword research and let’s have you share with the audience about what you shared with me about SEMRush and specifically how you’re using it. And I’m gonna preface that by saying here’s the problem that I described to Spencer when we’re having this conversation. I said it’s one thing to create a process which I’ve done this in video format I don’t know how you did it. But basically once you had your seed keyword, apply this filter, do this, do this, do this, it’s fairly mechanical and wasn’t too tricky. But the thing that I was stumbling with it was where do you get all the ideas for seed keyword because you don’t wanna say to somebody “hey, think stuff up.” Because think stuff up is not a specific instruction set and that’s a lousy way to outsource. Now you may get an exceptionally talented VA who could just think stuff up but that’s not a repeatable business system.

When you go to work at McDonald’s they don’t say flip the burger whenever you’re ready. They say flip the burger when the light turns red not a second before and not a moment after. And I look at niche site production like flipping burgers. So what was it that you shared with me and go into as much detail as you like?

S: Yeah and let me sort of preface the fact that I am using SEMRush to an extent with the fact that if I was doing everything myself I probably wouldn’t be using SEMRush just because I do have my own keyword research tool that I have and works great. But if you don’t even know where to get seed keyword ideas SEMRush can be a great place to start. And so what SEMRush in a nutshell is a huge database of keywords that other websites are ranking in google for. So in other words you can type and it does all other things as well. It shows what keywords these websites are bidding on to get advertising or they wanna put up advertising for and all sorts of other data.

It’s a huge, huge database, huge service but what I’m most interested in what I do is I will, for example, type in 1 website like an article directory for example. So I’ll type in goarticles.com in the search field and SEMRush will then pull back all the keywords up to 10,000 keywords, it’s the top 10,000 keywords that goarticles.com is getting their traffic from. And this is great because you see the keywords that goarticles is ranking well for and one of the criteria that I kind of look at is if article directories are ranking in the top 10 I often times feel like that’s a weak keyword. Coz article directories are overall very weak. Usually they don’t have many links built to those articles. So if there’s 1 article out there that doesn’t have any links built to it and it’s ranking in the top 10 and getting a lot of traffic that’s what I wanna know about. Because I think I can target that same keyword and outrank goarticles for that.

So that’s sort of a great thing then you just get tons of keyword ideas so what I’ve done is I’ve hired a virtual assistant to sort of go out and do some of this initial brainstorming if you will. I all have them go into SEMRush and really it almost doesn’t matter what website they type in or what keyword they type in because you can get 10,000 results. So they might type in 1 article directory. I’ll have them export all of those keywords to excel format and then I’ll have them filter out everything that doesn’t have at least a thousand searches per month or doesn’t receive 75 cents to a dollar cpc. And so it greatly narrows down that 10,000 list obviously coz a lot of the keywords don’t meet that criteria. And so then I’m left with…

T: Sorry to interrupt you. Let me just jump in here for a quick second. And the reason that this was so helpful to me was that when you are relying on your imagination you’re not looking at any data. So you’ve got to come up with seed keywords and you gotta type all the stuff in and you don’t know anything about the keywords that are popping into your mind, you don’t know about cpc, you don’t know about search volume, the red lights not coming on and we’re not flipping the burger. With this you’ve got the spreadsheet and you’re just looking at rows and rows and rows of words you already know the cpc and you already know the search volume. So it was for me a huge timesaver and of course I just give that to my VA. Anyway, back to you.

S: You know exactly, that’s a great point to make because in addition, you’re right. The seed keywords that you come up with in your mind, you look around your room, you go over to Amazon, there’s tons of ways to brainstorm these keywords and you still need to do that I guess. But because you get sort of all of the keywords of these sites to rank in for, the variation of the types of keywords they might be ranking for cover a huge spectrum. And so ideas that you never would have thought of in a million years are suddenly presented to you. And so it helps you cover or look at lots of different niches very quickly. And so by having a VA sort of do all that sort of manual work, coz this is manual work. You go in, you export excel spreadsheets and you might combine 10 of these spreadsheets, you might have a 100,000 keywords then you have to go through and sort, filter, maybe you’re left with a couple of hundred keywords whatever.

And so what I do and it’s very easy to hire a VA to do that. It doesn’t take a huge amount of skill for somebody to do that. And even if they’re not good at brainstorming lots of different ideas, if you just sort of give them a list of categories on Amazon or you can give them a list of article directories or a list of other websites if they can’t come up with anything on their own. My VA, I don’t even give him anything at this point. He’s able to just sort of just put in different keywords or websites and come up with keywords and it’s working fine. But if you want to give them that extra guidance you can provide them a list of, here’s a list of categories on Amazon, go and pull keywords for all of this. You can do things like that. But that’s only the initial step. Even though you get those keywords back maybe have the search volume and the cpc in the seed data you still need to obviously see, you need to check them individually to really see if you can rank in google.

T: And that’s an important distinguisher to make. We’re not saying that SEMRush is giving us a list of keywords that we’re gonna build websites for. These are seed keywords. These are ideas for further research and I know Spencer has a tool which we’re gonna talk about today. I use a tool that allow you to sort and filter and analyze competition and once you’ve done that then you’re gonna know what keywords you’re gonna build the website for.

S: Exactly. That’s a very important clarifying point. And kinda how I stated before, like I said, if it was just me doing keyword research I may never even use SEMRush. I use it because it makes it easier for me to outsource that portion of keyword research to somebody else which saves me some time. You know, if you’re a small operation, it’s just you, you don’t have any money to outsource, maybe SEMRush isn’t a good idea. Just stick with your favorite keyword tool. You don’t want to spend any money go with the google adwords keyword tool. Add some little more work takes a little bit more time but you can still do that on your own. I, like I said, simply use SEMRush so that I can outsource that portion of my keyword research so I can spend my time doing some other things. So great point that these are seed keywords that’s really a brainstorming tool to give me ideas that I never would have thought of on my own.

T: Absolutely.

S: So once I get some of those seed keywords and maybe some of this will make eventually great keywords to build the website on but the best thing you could do is maybe take those seed keywords, plug them into your favorite keywords tool, for example my tool is longtail pro. So I’ll pop it into the longtail pro. I might pop in 5 or 6 at a time and generate additional keywords, filter those based on cost per click and search volume and suddenly I’m able to have a greater variety of keywords, different ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. And then I start on looking at doing some competitor analysis for those individual keywords.

T: Now for me when I did this I outsourced all of the sorting, filtering, competitive analysis. I simply created a video that says this is exactly what you wanna see. Were you doing anything different than that?

S: No not very different at all. What I’ve done is I’ve given a copy of my software, long tail pro, to my VA and I will have them do just that. Look at the keywords that meet this certain search volume and cpc criteria and then take those keywords and look at the top 10 competitors in google and any of the keywords that meet certain criteria and I made a very simple essentially for any keyword, let me see how to state this simply, for any keyword that has at least 2 results in the top 10 that have both a page rank of 0 or no page rank and 20 or less links to the page, send those keywords to me.

T: For the final review and that’s something you shared with me and my listeners before. It’s the same criteria that I use and I think why that is so valuable and I think you and I talked about this before so it’s kinda of a barometer. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you wanna do that keyword but it’s a barometer for weakness on the first page. It means that this is really not that competitive to have a niche if 2 of the top 10 are PR 0 with fewer than 10 or 20 links.

S: Exactly.

T: Now for me I then look kinda closely at the top 3 if it’s a 1,000 to 3,000 a month search volume keyword and if it’s 9-10,000 then I’m happy to kinda rank anywhere on the 1st page. And that’s my final go no go decision. Is yours any different than that?

S: That’s pretty similar. I mean that’s essentially it. If it’s really low search volume, you know a 1,000 to 1,500 or something like that you really do wanna be at the top 3, top 5 maybe. Just sort of depends if it’s a really high paying keyword and it only gets a thousand searches maybe I’m happy to be on the top 5. But you’re exactly right. If it’s a higher search volume, 8, 9, 10,000 anywhere around the 1st page is good. So essentially if it’s a low search volume and the only weak sites that I see are site no. 9 and 10 then I’m not that excited about that keyword. But if the same is true for a higher search volume keyword I’ll still go for it.

T: Okay so let’s go coz this episode is about building websites in bulk in production. So let’s move off the topic of keyword research for a moment. We’re gonna come back coz I do wanna give you the opportunity to talk a little bit about long tail pro before we sign off. So now you’ve got we’ll just say 31 keywords for example. And you need to build websites. So what happens next and who does it?

S: Okay. So I found all of these keywords. What I do is I create a spreadsheet that has all the domain names that I purchased. I go out and once I have those keywords I will buy a domain name. If it’s an exact match I get that if not I add a word at the end of it or something like that. So I will put, I have a google doc that I’ve shared with my virtual assistant so we could both see it and edit it.

T: Do you use a spreadsheet or a document?

S: It’s a spreadsheet.

T: Same as me.

S: Yeah spreadsheet. So I will put the list of all the domain names and then I’ll put the list of all of the keywords that they’re targeting and then I go out and start ordering articles to be written.

T: So you do that?

S: Yes I do still go out and actually order the articles over at textbrokers.com, that’s what I do.

T: I switched that up. I’m using content authority which is basically the same thing as text broker and maybe this will be helpful to you, this tip. So I’ve created, I’ll be curious if you can post polls in what I’m doing. I’d love to hear it. So I have a specific, you know when you’re ordering articles there’s a criteria and that’s easy to define, and then there’s a set of instructions that you need to type in. With text broker you can even template them so they’re just saved. But I actually get my VA to order the articles for me coz it’s one other step that I don’t wanna do. And it’s kinda methodical I mean it’s this keyword and here’s the instructions to write the articles. And the instructions are the same from article to article to article and I have kinda 2 types of orders, the main article which I’m doing a fairly long article these days and then the related articles. So is that different from your process?

S: Not terribly different. I mean essentially I guess that’s the same thing. I do sort of tailor my instructions a little bit per keyword. Wish I could think of an example. Just because sometimes the types of articles that need to be written will vary depending on the keyword. Sometimes the keywords are somewhat obscure that if you don’t sort of give a sentence or a few sentences about what sort of approach you’d like them to take. It might be difficult for an article writer to, at least that’s my thought. I’ve just found that the more detailed I am and specific in my article instructions the better quality articles I get back. But you’re probably totally right that I could, I essentially have a template for instructions that I paste in but then I will edit based on the keyword itself. So I’m essentially doing what you’re doing but then I might add a few sentences about here’s how I’d like you to approach this specific keyword.

T: Well, let me read to you what my VA puts in. This is the instructions that go directly to the writer. Again I’m curious to your feedback and I’m sure this will be some help to the readers as well. So let me read it. This article will be the lead article on a site devoted to information about the primary keyword. The primary keyword for this article is the very 1st keyword in the keyword set. That thing is related to the content authority site. The other related keyword needs only be used once in the article as they will be linked to their own articles about each of these keywords. Please use 1 related keyword per paragraph. It should be used in the 1st sentence of the 1st paragraph as well as the last sentence of the last paragraph. The article should contain several headlines and make use of at least 1 listed bullet points. As this article will be on the home page it should accomplish 2 main objectives. It should provide detailed information about the primary keyword so that the site visitor can learn more about the topic or product. It should not direct them to visit other websites. It should let the reader know that this site is the authority site for the primary keyword and encourage them to check out the other articles on the site with the additional keywords that I have provided you.

S: That’s pretty good. Yeah I mean that’ll probably be just fine for most orders I would suspect. Again I wish I had an example or something. I know sometimes there’s just some keywords that, or sometimes there’s just an approach that I would prefer.

T: And that makes sense.

S: Like keyword could be taken 2 ways maybe. Like I, let’s say we’re creating a website on cheap laptops or something. With your instructions they may go in doing exactly what you said using the keyword cheap laptops but they never actually specify any makes and models of laptops. That’s a very sort of generic unuseful article from a reader’s perspective. They might read a whole article that says cheap laptops here, cheap laptops here but when the reader’s done no idea what laptop they should buy.

T: That’s a good point.

S: So I would add and maybe you can do this. I have sort of a paragraph for my template that I add it slightly that essentially says I want specific details. I want exact makes, models. I want prices. I want where they can get it. You know that sort of information. So I might even say I want a list of 3-5 cheap laptops that this person can buy that specifies price, the make, the cpu speed. I might actually list in my instructions I wanna see these stats. And I’m usually not extremely detailed in my instructions like I said it may only be 3 or 4 additional sentences but it is something that takes me 30 seconds to a minute to write.

T: Yeah that makes some sense. Now I think the reason that that doesn’t fit into my instructions is I typically so far don’t promote what I’ll say a commodity type product. I typically don’t build sites for commodity type product because and this is just a belief system that I have and I could well be flawed but I’m thinking as I’m talking here, with where as more complicated things I guess you could make a case like cheap laptops isn’t complicated but people need for example if someone wants liposuction surgery I no way do not have a niche site for liposuction. They might want to do a fair amount of studying beforehand and so it would be easy for an article author to write a fair amount of really informative type information about liposuction based upon the instruction set that I gave them. But as I’m listening to you the first question that pops into my mind is do you build sites that are for what I just referred to you as commodity type products. I know you’ve promoted on the site cheap laptops but metaphorically speaking do you have sites for cheap laptops?

S: Yap absolutely.

T: You do.

S: Yeah there are generically sort of commodity or how do you want to refer to that, you know keywords that might be referring to a cool category like laptops or whatever it might be, baby strollers, I don’t know. But sure if the keyword, essentially if the keyword meets the cpc and the search volume criteria and has advertisers I don’t care what it’s talking about necessarily. I mean I care but it doesn’t matter. It’s just purely informational, specific product, generic product, whatever. So definitely yeah I have websites that are in that category.

T: You see why I love doing these podcasts. Free information for me by making an interview for you.

S: Then you can go out building 20 or 30 sites next month.

T: Cheap laptops baby here I come.

S: That’s right.

T: Alright so we’ve got you now have ordered articles. What’s next?

S: Okay so yes I’ve ordered the articles and those take a few days to get done. At that point I essentially just turn it over to my virtual assistant. My virtual assistant will go into WordPress and I still install wordpress.

T: We need to cover that. WordPress does not install itself and I don’t wanna give my VA access to my hosting account. Thank you very much. I’m assuming as I want the detail. What do you do?

S: Right I manage my own hosting account. So I do go in and click the install wordpress button. I add the add-on domain to my server and get it all set up.

T: Okay so let me dive in with a couple more detailed questions here because I know, again I got this idea from you, managewp.com. And by the way their founder emailed me the other day which was really cool.

S: Yeah emailed me the other day as well.

T: Oh and here I was feeling so special.

S: Sorry (laughs)

T: So what I do is I do exactly what you just described. I create the domains on my server. I do the one click install of wordpress. And then I go into managewp coz I have a templated wordpress site which is the theme that I want, the plug ins that I want. All the settings, all the plug in configurations, adsense ad code pasted in, everything done and I just go clone, clone, clone …. Do you do something different than that?

And when I say clone, clone, clone people say do you know what you’re talking about. When wordpress is installed initially it’s not customized the way I want it and I don’t want my VA to have to do it manually so I’m basically taking a photocopy of this templated, it’s got no content on it, but other than that it’s what I use for every single site. So it’s like making a photocopy bang, bang, bang… so now those 10 sites they all have my theme. They all have my ad code, all the plug ins, all the settings, everything that I want. And then of course I have to add them to managewp first before I can do any of that because you need the plug ins installed. Anything different?

S: Yeah I was gonna ask you a question about that. Do you do that yourself or do you give your VA access to managewp?

T: Yesterday I did it myself but I noticed in managewp that you can put sub users in. So, but here’s the thing, if and maybe you can help me think through this, if let’s say so you’ve got to the point where you installed, you now got 10 completely generic wordpress installs, you either have to create users on them so times 10 your VA or give out your admin password which I don’t, I just create another user for them. And then they could go into your managewp account. They could add all 10 sites to managewp and then they could clone all 10 sites for you. Was that the way you did it?

S: I do not do that and I don’t know if I’m going to. I just haven’t gotten around to it. We could probably spend a long time talking specifically about that product managewp but I currently don’t go in and clone those myself. I just haven’t done it yet. So what I actually do after I install wordpress is I send it out to my VA and essentially tell him to clone previous sites but he does it all manually. So it probably does, and really it only takes less than a half hour of work to put all the settings and get wordpress all up.

T: But times 31 sites that’s 15 hours.

S: Yeah. Hey he’s making more money right?

T: True enough, true enough.

S: I just haven’t, I’m still grappling with whether I should give my VA full access to my managewp account because that has all 200 plus sites.

T: You can segment it. Of course I know you can give them access only to a group of sites so they won’t be able to see anything. I haven’t done this yet I only want to take a look at it yesterday. But again the thing that I struggled with yesterday was I don’t wanna create 10 users manually but maybe that was actually the shorter path because what I had to do was I got my 10 sites, I then had to go and add each site 1 at a time to managewp so they’re all in there. And now I could create a user in bulk. I would create this user and say install all 10 of those sites. And at that point I could have turned it over to him to do the cloning but I’ll tell you the cloning is so fast and so easy that it’s literally like tell us the site you want to clone. Tell us the site you wanna clone and hit the clone button. And the next time you do it you don’t even have to repeat the first step. You just say tell us where to clone it to, clone. Tell us where to clone it to, clone.

S: And just so everyone knows this is a new service. It’s really still in beta. So we’re talking about this now, 6 months from now I may be using a 100%, I don’t know. I’m going through the process, I’ve only been using their product, it’s only been around for a few months like I said it’s in beta. So for any of you users out there figure out what works for you. So currently I still have my VA build my blog individually. And then I have, they have access to my textbroker accounts, they go in, grab the articles, put them on my sites and format them per my instructions. Fairly basic stuff. And they essentially get them built that way. Add the themes that I want, the plug ins, everything. And then that’s essentially it to get the site itself up and running.

T: Okay. At which point they notify you. I’m assuming you probably do some level of QA and keep double check of things. And then if you’re happy pay them.

S: Yeah. Essentially you know it’s within the spreadsheet so as they go they essentially mark that they’re done with this site so I can know if I wanna see how far they’re progressing. I can just go on my spreadsheet, see how they’ve done 5 sites, so far they’ve got 10 more to go, whatever. And yes when they’re done I take a look at the sites and everything. My VA is actually through, I hired through odesk.com and they have the payment set up so it’s weekly. Every Wednesday or something like that. My VA gets paid automatically for whatever work they did the previous week.

T: Yap absolutely same for me. Okay so thank you first of all for sharing your process and comparing it to mine. Obviously listeners you can tell that our processes are essentially the same. There’s a couple of very small details that differ but more or less that’s how you wanted to build the sites in bulk. Now we need to rank the sites in bulk. So can you talk a bit about, and we’re at the 35 minute mark so we still have a bit of time. I’m still gonna live you some time to talk about long tail pro which is helping you with keyword research. Let’s talk about a little bit about the process of how you’re getting them ranked and more importantly or equally importantly how you’re managing the process so that when you’re launching sites in bulk things aren’t falling into cracks. Coz that’s the big thing when you outsource is the communication and management systems that you have in place is, because you’re just emailing back and forth it’s not gonna work.

S: Yeah exactly. So again I use my google spreadsheet to manage this process just like there’s a check box essentially for when they’re done with the site. I also have a few other separate columns for link building. And so when they do tasks they put in that they’re done. Essentially I have them put in either a date or a number or just depending on what it is. So I use, I have recently been using a couple of link building techniques. I use an article network called myarticlenetwork.com that is essentially a blog network that I use to make an article to with your links obviously in the article. They get distributed to other blog owners out there. I think it’s a privately owned blog of networks that they own a thousand blogs and distributes it to the ones that are related to your article.

T: And how long have you been using that one for?

S: And I also am using, I’ve been using that for maybe 4 months, something like that. And I’m also using Unique Article Wizard which I’m glad I have a VA to do that for me. I tell you what when I go in there, when I first tried to create a video of here’s how you use Unique Article Wizard I’ve never used this before I just hit record I just figured this must be easy enough to. I signed up and I knew I didn’t really wanna do it, create a video, I tell you I could not figure out that thing is, I’m gonna say some bad things, it’s clunky, it’s hard to use, it’s not intuitive, terrible interface but the results appear to be very, very good. So I’ve got a VA to deal with that clunky system of Unique Article Wizard for me. I’m enjoying the results. So I almost cancelled my subscription because I couldn’t even learn how to use it myself but luckily I didn’t.

T: I’ve been using UAW myself for, I shouldn’t say I, my VA team is using it. I started using it almost a year ago and I’ve had great success with it. And if you come to onlineincomelab.com/session010 that’s where this podcast will be I will also put a link to my training video where I show you how to use Unique Article Wizard in case you’re interested.

S: Yeah I’m sure if I watch your video it would have helped out but I just tried to use it on my own. I figured I’m a smart guy I can do this. Well I probably could have used a training video first. Anyways, so luckily my VA was smarter than me and figured it out. And so essentially I will submit articles to My Article Network, submit articles to Unique Article Wizard and essentially see how my sites do for the next 30-60 days and then reassess at that point as to whether or not they need some link building.

T: And you’re linking, no link wheels for you. You’re linking right back to your money site, right?

S: Yap that’s the way I’ve always done it exactly. I don’t do any link wheels. I’m linking directly to my sites.

T: To the home page with one of the links then to just one of the other pages or random one other page for the other link?

S: Yeah essentially that’s about it. Most of the links are definitely going to the home page. But I try to, because within Unique Article Wizard you can have different footers to switch out. They’re spun and so yeah some of those to home page some not to home page, things like that but definitely majority is going to the home page.

T: And how about anchor text, all exact match or you’re doing a variety?

S: Yeah I’m doing a variety and I’m actually trying to experiment more with phrase match rather than exact match. I still definitely do lots of exact match and to give a percentage maybe it’s 50% of the links are maybe an exact match. The other 50% might be a phrase match. So for targeting cheap laptops a phrase match might be cheap laptops for sale. Or it might be click here or it might be more. Something not necessarily keyword related anchor text.

T: Okay. I actually, this morning in my reading and that’s why I asked this question, there was an article on SEO, there’s been a couple of things on SEO Moz. White board Friday they did a video on partial match you probably so, I don’t even know I might have got it from you. But there’s another contributor who did an experiment with one keyphrase, it was a 3-word keyphrase, super local competition. He registered 3 new websites, 1 of them was blue sweets, I think yellow sweets and black sweets and the phrase he was targeting was orange sweets. So he figured out that those phrases were kind of innocuous enough it would be a good experiment and then he did the exact same link pattern. He manually built links over a couple of days.

The only thing that varied was one of them was all exact match anchor text. And anchor text by the way in case you don’t know it’s what you see on the screen when you click it. It’s the words that actually make up the actual hyperlink. And for a long time google has placed a fair amount of importance on what those words were and whether they are relative to the keyword they were targeting. So one of them were exact match that only got exact match links. And another one got non-exact match links, just phrases click here whatever. And the third one got a blend of partial match and exact match. And the study took place over I think it was a couple of weeks, if I can find the link for it again I’ll put that link under this podcast just as well. And what he found out was really, really interesting.

The exact match immediately rocketed to the top, no. 1 within like 2 days and then disappeared. And then the one that had no match, click here, never really did very well at all. And the one that made use of partial match and exact match slowly and steadily and consistently climbed the ranks and did very well. So the big lesson there don’t do a 100% exact match because it’s not sustainable. It doesn’t look normal.

S: Right exactly. That’s what I was gonna say. It totally makes sense because google is smart enough to know if somebody is gaining the system they’re gonna 100% use what you’re trying to rank for. So it definitely looks more natural…

T: Wait a minute. Are we trying to gain the system all the time?

S: Well we’re trying to follow google’s rules the best we can.

T: Actually you know you’re right. You’re not gaining the system, you’re just following the rules to your maximum benefit by being smart about it. There’s just no gaining the system in that.

S: Right. Essentially google is telling us through that experiment that others if you’re using the exact match 100% of the time your site is probably not gonna do as well as it could.

T: Okay. Alright so on the topic of link building so then you’ve got to the point the velocity of those links and those 2 different services. If the sites are launched today does your VA immediately starting with both My Article Network and Unique Article Wizard at the same time or is there, what’s the timetable for that one look like?

S: Yeah if he builds the site today it’s usually a couple of weeks before I have him start actually building any new links. Probably just because he usually has a lot of sites to build and then by the time I get around telling him to. Anyways, usually takes a week or two before I have him start building links. And I do have him build the links at the same time. My Article Network gets submitted today so does Unique Article Wizard. And I put the slowest possible distribution on Unique Article Wizard. I believe it’s 20 days or 20 articles per day. If it let me do it any slower I’d probably would. I’d probably do 10 or something because if you’re submitting to a 100 places everyday I mean that doesn’t look very natural in my opinion.

T: Not at all. But the other thing to remember with Unique Article Wizard is that all the recipient sites are human reviewed. So just because you’re submitting to a 100 a day does not mean you’re gonna get published on all 100 if they don’t like your content. And that’s one of the reasons why I think UAW works so well is unlike a bunch of crap directories these are all human run. These folks are volunteers. They want this content. They want unique content because they’re trying to rank in their own directories for whatever their monetization strategy is and they don’t want crap coming on to their site so the sites are active. And so I think that helps them get indexed. But you need to remember they’re not gonna all be accepted.

S: Yes well that’s good point. Yeah.

T: Okay so just for comparison’s sake I’m just gonna very quickly explain what I do. So I have a spreadsheet much like you have. A set of tasks on my site there across the columns at the top, no. 1 site, no. 2 site, no. 3 and off we go. Then on the rows to the left under the backlinking section there are tasks and then the days of delay after launch date. And so each one of these tasks coz I built a whole macro on the spreadsheet, every time I try to create a new column I just copy the last one and so it puts a schedule in there. And so day 1 get site indexed and there’s a link to a page within Niche Site Mastery. Anyone who’s been following me for a while knows that I have a membership site called the Niche Site Mastery. But I actually built it to hold all the training for my own team of VAs. Yeah you can buy memberships now and I’ll put a link underneath. And I direct my VAs to the same stuff you’re reading. So they click this link and it tells them do this to get the site indexed.

And then the next day it tells them to social bookmark and I use a tool called SocialAdr all the pages and post. And also on that same date tells them to submit a variation of the article or a spun version to the top tier article directories that wouldn’t otherwise get your content from like a mass submission tool like Unique Article Wizard. Do you know does My Article Network go to like Go Articles and Ezine Articles and Buzzle and all the other ones?

S: No it’s really a blog network. It’s really not article directories like that.

T: Okay. And then also on that day after social bookmark each of the articles submitted. So she spins an article to Ezine and when it’s approved it gets bookmarked as well. Then we wait another day and then we create an inner layer of anchor sites and then we wait another day and we start a blog blue print campaign. And then we wait another 3 days and we turn Unique Article Wizard on. And when that’s done take all those links and submit them to Linklicious.

So that’s how I do it. Now you’ve heard how Spencer does it. They both work. I have quite good results with mine. I mean I’ve blog about it in the past. I got one of my sites and it’s a beautiful little site that makes me a nice $100 a month. And it was on the first page and has remained in there. It was on the first page within 30 days. It’s in the 4th position right now for a keyword with 33,000 searches per month.

S: Nice.

T: And you know what there’s another lesson there too that I wanna share. In hindsight that site I looked back at it and advertiser competitions are too low I shouldn’t have built that one. And that was like what I thought a day or two after building it but of course I’m not gonna take it down. And so I just let it be. And the great thing in this is that the search volume is so high it made up for it. The site’s making up. I’m making a $100 per month. And I still think there’s some more things that I could do to that site. I haven’t yet added any content to it at all since I launched it though. This is another reason why I think launching sites in bulk is a good idea. The more times you swing Spencer the more probability you’re gonna have a hit, right?

S: Absolutely. And it’s funny that you should mention that. I’m actually half way through a blog post that hits on that very point right there. Just about it really is a numbers game. The more you try the more you’re gonna succeed. And I’m gonna do some comparisons with other industries like I guess where a lot of times you have lots of failures but the winners are really what makes you the money. So it is a numbers game. You can do the best keyword research in the world but still 10% of your site is gonna be total flops. Another 30% are gonna barely pay for themselves. But then you might have another 20-30% that meet or exceed your goals and you’re gonna have 5 or 10% that way exceed your goals that pay for everything.

T: And I’d actually asked, I’d wrote down my show notes to ask you about your $30 a day sites. We got about 9 minutes left and I figured that’s probably enough time for you to give a little bit of a plug to Long Tail Pro coz I do wanna give you the opportunity to talk about some of the success that you’re having with that but if you could answer this question shortly that site, and this was in your recent posts, I’m not asking you to name the site. But that $30 a day site how many and just quickly give the audience what am I talking about this $30 a day site. They don’t know what that is. I’m assuming you know what I’m referring to.

S: Yap definitely. This is 1 of the 20 sites that I built in the month of August that I mentioned previously. 1 of those 20 sites is already making me $30 a day.

T: That’s a $1,000 a month folks.

S: That’s a $1,000 a month right there. And like I said it’s, well 2 things that I’ll mention about it. 1 is I picked a very good load competition keyword. It gets about 10,000 searches a month and I’m ranking right at the bottom of the 1st page. And that keyword brings me in a decent amount of traffic. Not a $30 a day worth of traffic. But what I also happen to be ranking for is a phrase match related keyword. So back to our cheap laptops, maybe I was targeting cheap laptops but I’m also ranking for cheap laptops for sale. And cheap laptops for sale happens to get, or actually it’d be reversed. Maybe I was targeting cheap laptops for sale but I also happen to rank for cheap laptops which gets like larger volume of search engine traffic. And I also happen to be ranking well right now right at the top of page 2 bottom of page 1 depending on the day. And that’s bringing me a lot of traffic as well.

So what specific questions do you have about that site?

T: Just a couple, well really one because we’ve already talked about link building. We’ve already talked about content. What I was curious is as to how many pages of content does that site have excluding of course contact and privacy articles.

S: Yeah it’s actually a pretty thin site. It’s what I just built. It’s got probably 4 or 5 articles that were built on it initially. That’s what it has right now. It started ranking very quickly. Essentially the article on the home page is ranking for both of those keywords and it was doing so within 3-4 weeks after I built the site.

T: How many words in that article on home page?

S: I have to check for sure but between, it’s over 500, 500-700.

T: Are you doing any site with the 2,000 word article on the home page?

S: I haven’t.

T: Okay.

S: I might try that. Is that working for you?

T: Well I’ll tell you how that came about for me. I was listening to a webinar, Leslie Roads was the speaker. He’s SEO brain trust. Been around long, long time. Hard core computer engineer. Nerdy kind of guy but seems to know what he’s talking about. And this was all about panda and how to survive after panda. He really did an excellent job of defining what panda was and he talked about the importance of content over and over. He was talking stressing that 2,000 words mean an article with a keyword density of .5%. I thought that’s different than everyone is saying.

Ironically enough while my VA was discovering somebody’s keywords for me yesterday one of them was in the acne niche. I didn’t choose to pursue that but I looked at one of the sites and this was a pretty decent, more like 12,000 a month search phrase. And there was a site created in April on ctr theme so it was a pure adsense site and it ranked 5th already for what was a fairly competitive term in the world of niche sites which is why I took a pass on the niche. And he had a 2,000, I cut and paste it into word to find the seed keyword density and it was 1,900 words with 12 uses of the keyword. That’s it 12. So that equated to somewhere around half a percent. So I thought it was rather ironic that here I am watching this webinar and then I find a real live example of a really new site that was all ranked so well in such a short time for a fairly competitive niche. So out of my 10 sites 3 of them are getting 2,000 words per article and that’s a $38 article. $38.

S: Yeah cheap.

T: But with a 1,000 a month income that pays for that one pretty quick.

S: It can handle it. Yeah I just, while you’re talking I just checked the word count on that. It’s 750 words.

T: 750 okay.

S: So it’s a little bit longer article than I think a lot of other people are writing.

T: Yeah and that’s another, just in life and in the niche site business, if you want to get different results to the other people are getting and let’s face it that most people are not getting great results because they’re doing the cheapest thing possible there. Using spun content on their niche sites or they’re using English as their 2nd language writers to write these articles for them. They’re all 350 words. They’re making crap basically. If you wanna get different results you need to do something that’s different than everybody else is doing. I would say that if you survey the room full of adsense site builders I would guess you the top earners are spending a ton of money on content. And the people who are not doing so well are not spending very much money on content. Would you think you would agree with that?

S: Probably I would add that the people that are doing well also are probably much better keyword research than the other people as well.

T: Yes absolutely.

S: Just because by far the most important thing is keyword research but you’re absolutely right that if 2 people picked the same keyword, someone spending a little more on content or producing better content they’re gonna do better.

T: And what a segue that is for you to talk about a little bit about Long Tail Pro.

S: Sure

T: So Spencer has come up with a product recently on keyword research tool. And I’m gonna let him tell the story on how it came to be and the special offer they have decided to include for the listeners of this podcast.

S: Yeah Long Tail Pro, if you’re not familiar with it at this point is a keyword research tool that I created really for myself. I was out there using the google adwords keyword tool or market samurai, other tools out there and none of them made it easy to look at lots of different seed keywords very quickly. Market Samurai allows you to punch in just 1 keyword then you generate maybe 800 results based on that keyword. Then you have to go to another page and you input all your filter settings, wait for it to run, then you’ll have to wait 50 keywords. Then you have to go out and export all those, check to see if the domain is available. And if you don’t find any winners you have to start over with one more seed keyword. Anyways, most people are probably more familiar with that process. It takes you a half hour just to go through 1 seed keyword. And honestly the chances of finding a website if you’re looking at just 1 seed keyword is not very good. You have to look at lots.

And so I created Long Tail Pro so that I could look at multiple seed keywords at one time and I could filter automatically based on the criteria that I input. And I could check for exact match domains automatically. So essentially the way that it works is all input, say 5 seed keywords in one box. I’ll check yes please check exact match domains for the .com, .net, .org. And then I’ll check the boxes to filter out any keywords that don’t have at least a $1 cost per click. And have at least a thousand exact match searches per month and then I hit generate keywords. And that’s essentially it. I come back a couple of minutes later and I’m left with just the keywords that meet my criteria whether or not exact match domains are available and makes it much more easier. And so then Long Tail Pro at that point you can click on any of those keywords and it automatically takes you to competitor analysis trail which shows you all the stats that you need as far as backlinks, page rank, site age, other criteria for the top 10 results in google whether or not, and it tells you whether or not you think, or it gives you the stat that helps you determine whether or not you could rank in the top 10.

So that’s essentially what Long Tail Pro is in a nutshell. It’s a tool that I use to help me quickly find lots of seed keywords and makes it just much easier to manage process to find those great keywords that you could rank for.

T: Sounds like it’s a heck of a timesaver. I know Spencer is doing exceedingly well with his adsense business. So very clearly when it comes to keyword research he is an expert. He built this tool for himself. So if you are on or if you’re using Market Samurai now or some other keyword research tool I would wholeheartedly encourage you to check it out. I don’t know do you have a trial or anything like that or is it just buy it?

S: There’s currently no trial. I’ve got lots of videos up those that you can take a look at and see how it works. I’ve got some tutorials so you could feel like you know what you’re doing before you buy. But it is for sale. I just started selling it. It’s been in beta for 3 or 4 months. Lots of users worldwide kinda figure things out and get it working for everyone. And started selling it last week officially and so Trent and I are gonna put together a little package here to allow the listeners of this podcast to get a discount on it. And I’m gonna let Trent determine how long he wants to offer that discount for you guys. But I’m sure I’ll have a link there that can take you to a special page that will create here for Trent to get you on a deal.

T: Yes indeed and there will be a time on it. And some people say why put a time on it? Why don’t you just let it be there forever? And I’ll tell you why. Scarcity is a well known marketing concept. And everybody online and off uses that because we’re trying to get you to encourage you to act now to try to encourage you to buy something that you really should buy? No. I’m not interested in dong that. I’m not interested in ruining my reputation that way. However, if I can get you to act and you can do something that’s good for yourself and that’s gonna help move your business forward and I eliminate the thing that many of us human beings suffer from called procrastination. That’s a good thing for you and I’ll be saying it’s a good thing for me as well. And that’s why scarcity is used.

So there will be some kind of timer I don’t know what it is yet. I’ll get it figured out when you come to onlineincomelab.com/session010 you will be able to get the link for all of the things that we’ve talked about in this episode.

Same thing if you’re listening to this on iTunes. Just come to, but if you can only remember if you’re driving your car just remember onlineincomelab.com and in the nav bar you’ll see the podcast. Press the button and you’ll be able to find this episode.

The other thing that I would like to close off with is if you could take a moment and go to iTunes if you liked this episode and others please provide some positive feedback for the show. I would be extremely grateful if you would do that. It’s a great way for me to get more exposure and bring more listeners and spread the word on how to do anything to avoid that real job and build the business online so that you can join the world that Spencer and I live in and that is what I’ll just refer to as internet lifestyle and that’s the ability to work wherever in the world you want to whenever you want to. And build a portfolio of income producing niche websites that will make money on auto pilot for you so that you can go on and do whatever it is that you like with your time.

So with that Spencer, it’s been an absolute pleasure always having you on the show. Thank you so much for making the time.

S: I appreciate it Trent very much.

T: And there will probably be plenty of comments underneath this. I’m sure that Spencer will check the post and he will also answer comments if you have questions for either one of us. Please, please, please come and make your comments on the post because that’s terrific feedback for us and you’re gonna get an answer fairly quickly.

So parting thoughts and comments Spencer or anything you want to say before we sign off?

S: Yeah just that like anyone I started out small. I didn’t have a virtual assistant. Started 1 website at a time. So all of these that we’ve talked about is something that yes you can do on your own. You don’t need to have a virtual assistant. You don’t need to have Long Tail Pro. You don’t need to have all of these things that we’ve talked about. But if you want to expand your business, you wanna create a real business that can go rapidly these are some of the things that you’re gonna need to do. To hire a virtual assistant, to use additional tools, to make the best use of your time. So that’s just the one caveat that I’ll leave and as with anything as well I’m always evolving so yes this is what I’ve talked about today 6 months from now I may evolve a little bit and do things a little bit differently. So my advice to you to find out what works best for your self. Take what Trent and I talked about today and see if it’s really the best business model for you. And if you can find the better way to do things by all means please do it. Just because Trent and I aren’t doing it doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way.

T: I couldn’t agree more. So again Spencer thank you very much for being on the show. All you listeners I love you guys. Thank you for listening to my shows. Thank you for giving me the feedback. It’s what encourages me to keep going. It’s why I love doing this. So this is Trent and Spencer over and out. Will talk to you again on the next episode.