OIL 008: An Interview with David Anspaugh On How to Succeed Early On with Adsense

OIL 008: An Interview with David Anspaugh on How to Succeed Early On with Adsense

Trent: Hey there everybody, it’s Trent Dyrsmid here from the Online Income Lab and the Niche Site Mastery training site with yet another episode of my podcast. And this one is session 8 and this one I am joined by not another guru but an actual relatively new adsense niche site builder by the name of David Anspaugh.

David, pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome aboard!

David: Thank you it’s an honor to be here Trent.

T: So I don’t remember, the reason I asked I think you commented on my blog. Is that how you & I first crossed paths?

D: Yeah I had an issue, I made a big mistake building niche sites in a certain area. And I made a comment about forum profile and things like that. And then you replied back.

T: Okay and so that was probably, I don’t even remember how ago that was but… so David commented periodically. We don’t know each other very well at all but he’s having some success here. He hasn’t been doing this very long. He’s got a couple of niche sites, they’re making money and I thought I’m sure that my listeners would get a lot of value out of hearing someone who is really, really new to niche sites prodigy but he’s having some success. So that’s kind of why I asked David if he would be kind enough to come on the show and share what he’s doing. So on behalf of my audience, David, thanks very much for making the time.

So let’s start off with the same question I always ask, how did you get started in this business and what do you do in, I’m assuming you still have a regular job so what do you do in the real world?

D: Yeah, well about a year ago at this time, October 1st actually 2010, I quit working with my grandfather because I was working… he owned a multi-million dollar vending machine business and I was moving up through the company and I quit because I was working 16-20 hours a day. There was one day I worked 20 hours, slept in my car just for a quick 4 hours and clock drive back in but…

T: Man, grandpa’s a slave driver…

D: Yeah it was pretty crazy. So he had a bunch of branches around the US and I was moving up to the company to eventually he wanted one of the family members to take over the company. And I thought it was affecting my family quite a bit and I had 2 daughters at that time, now I have 3, but I didn’t see them much. And so family’s really important to me so I talked to my wife and we quit. And I had things set up with another job but that actually fell through. And so we had to move into the mountains of Colorado, went into this small town, I don’t know if anybody’s heard of this it’s called Gunnison, Colorado, 5,000 people here. And we lived with my wife’s parents for a couple of months so we can get our feet back on the ground. And during that time my mother-in-law said what do you want to do. And I’ve always been interested in computers and so I said something around the lines of graphic design maybe web development, something like that. She said use this time, study, get into it and let this be a learning time for you so you can get out there and get a job.

And so I learned, I picked it up very quickly. I picked up HTML, CSS, very little javascript and I started to do some free lance on the side. And nothing real grand journey thing but I would get wordpress themes from themeforest.net and I would like tweak them for people and things like that. But I found out quickly I don’t really like working with clients. You know the whole you email them, they don’t email you back for another 2 months. They don’t know the design very well but they want you to make an ugly website you don’t want your name behind it. So I found that out pretty quickly so I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And so I started searching different blogs.

So January 1st bought my website, my first niche website, and from then on it’s been crazy. As of February I got a job at the middle school. I’m just a custodian at night and then during the day I’d do some freelance still for family and friends but that’s about it right now.

T: So you spend most of your time building new adsense sites, is that correct?

D: Yeah pretty much backlinking takes all my time right now.

T: Alright let’s talk about the very first site that you built. First, do you want to mention that site or no?

D: No, I’ll mention related to it. It’s a job related site. They can search the comments on your site they’ll figure it out.

T: It’s there to be found if you want to look hard enough. So what made you pick that particular niche? What was… explain to me the thinking that were going on during the research process because as you know if you pick the wrong niche in the beginning, even if you pick good keywords within the wrong niche, coz I don’t make distinctions between niche and keywords by the way, and I’m not letting anybody do this. So think of the niche like the industry, maybe it’s weight loss, maybe it’s career, maybe it’s body building or anything like that, that’s a niche.

The keyword is something that’s you know if it’s weight loss maybe it’s how to get six pack abs. So it’s really, really important and I’m actually just putting together a webinar on this. To focus on the right niche first because some niches are just inherently more profitable than others are and then find keywords that are within that niche. So maybe David you can explain to me kinda how you got pointed in the direction that you got pointed in.

D: Okay, what I was thinking in the beginning is just to do exactly what Kathlyn was doing coz she was quite successful at it. And so I wanted a job related coz he’s got his security guard so job related. I picked up a free trial of Market Samurai and pretty much everything I’ve done for my first site was all free except for the domain and hosting. I didn’t have much money and I wanted to see how far I could go without spending any money. And so I picked the niche in the job related. I wanted an info site instead of a product site because of how adsense works. When somebody’s looking for information you’ve got the internet. And so when people were searching for something they wanna know they don’t stop at one spot. They go to a site and then they go to the next site, and then they go to the next site so it’s easier to get adsense clicks for information sites because people want as much information as possible so they come to your site they get the info you give and then I know they’re gonna click on adsense ads because they want more info. And if they see an adsense ad it lights up they click it to get more info. I get the click. So that’s what I was thinking in the beginning.

T: That is incredibly such an important distinction and I wish that somebody would have told me that when I started out because I build a bunch of product sites as anyone who’s been reading my blogs for a while knows and you said something which I really just wanna dwell into as that people don’t make just one stop when they’re looking for information. Man oh man, is that true!

And if you’re promoting a product you’ll be an affiliate like with most affiliate program if you’re not that last stop before they go and actually buy the product you don’t get paid any money. You just got to build a website and they get to read your stuff and they get to go to somebody else’s site and maybe the 4th site down the list they actually made the purchase. So if you think about that for a minute, even if you were ranked no. 1 in the search engine results, they might click your site, they’d read your stuff and go to look at site no. 2, click their site, read their stuff. Then go to site no. 3 and they make a purchase from the 3rd site which completely sucks because in theory you’ve got the best site. You’re no. 1 but you didn’t get paid.

And that’s one of the things once spotlight bulb went on for me that’s why I stopped doing affiliate sites and focus exclusively on adsense because as I’m sure you’re well aware of they wouldn’t buy anything from you. They just need to come read your stuff. Google is gonna put some ads that are really relevant to the information on the page, more likely they’re gonna click it and you get paid.

D: Yap exactly.

T: So much much better more. So you figured out the niche you wanted to be in. I wouldn’t want to focus actually on how you did this without money because I’m sure that there are listeners to this show who are in the same boat thinking how do I get started. And by the way let’s just jump in to the conclusion, this particular site how much is this making a month for you right now?

D: Right now, it took 6 months to get to $300 a month. Right now, it’s almost to $400 a month.

T: Okay so you’re talking about a meaningful amount of money. I mean that’s almost $5,000 a year. That pays for the family vacation.

D: Yeah.

T: Okay. And you’re ranked no. 1 for your keyword are you?

D: Yes.

T: How long did that take?

D: Just about 6 months. There was 1 month I was stuck in no. 3 and I was only making $125 and as soon as I got to no. 1 it shut up to $300 right away.

T: Well of course coz you’re getting so much traffic. Are you using, what’s the domain is it a .com, a .net, a .org?

D: It’s a .com and it has the keyword in there.

T: And does it have a prefix or suffix on the keyword?

D: No.

T: Is it an exact match?

D: Yeah.

T: Okay. Alright so let’s go back to where we just left off. I just wanted to get the conclusion so that the listeners could understand hey what if this site is making only $20 per month coz if it is I don’t wanna know the information. But the site is making $300-400 a month. I think you get 10 of those you’re starting to change your life.

D: Yeah.

T: Okay so you found your niche and you thought okay I need to build a site. What did you do next?

D: Well just from my past I knew a little bit of wordpress and I knew about the themes and so I simply just took this simple folio theme and uploaded it. I went to for the domain and for the hosting I went to godaddy because I knew they had a lot of promo codes. And so I went to godaddy, I found the domain and then I typed in to Google a promo code and so I got another 20% off for both the domain and the hosting. And the rest is with godaddy and with time I’ve noticed isn’t the best hosting solution. They’re great for domains but they’re not the best in hosting solution simply for one reason is because the contacts forms only go to the email accounts that it’s hooked up to. Everything else gets filtered through and especially in the plug-ins in wordpress. With the clean contact form that I’m using it will link to those gmail accounts and everything else gets filtered they wouldn’t even show up and so I tried to contact godaddy about it and they don’t explain why.

T: Okay so you’re kind of the coupon king in the beginning and that’s remarkable that you’re going up. Getting coupons to save 20% that’s great. Alright so now you say you’ve found your host. And by the way for listeners in case you haven’t heard me before I’m a fan of hostgator. There’ll be a link under the podcast here and to be an affiliate make it free to open a hostgator account but I find that they work quite well.

So you’ve got your site, you’ve got your domain, you’ve now installed wordpress so did you write all the contents yourself?

D: I did. I find that very important actually. That goes with actually over time I find that writing your own content you could control the adsense ads on your site. And you can find out the right amount of keyword density and how many times your keyword is found in each article and if you get the right amount you the right ads on your site. If you don’t get the amount then you get even all these $75 credit for google adsense ads. And nobody’s gonna click that whose looking for this job related whatever your niche site is. Nobody’s gonna click those so I found out writing my own content brought me to first, second or even third page of google right away. And there’s 3 things that I found that did that, there was the keyword was in the domain, I did do keyword research you know starting out that’s really very important, but then content, content was just excellent. And so I don’t write that well but I like to control the content and so I write every article on there. I write at least 11 articles starting out all related, and I find keywords that are all related to my main keyword and I just fill the site with my own content.

T: Okay. There’s a whole bunch of details in here that we’re gonna need to get. So you mentioned earlier on the importance of this keyword density to make sure that google is displaying the right ads relevant to the content. What is the keyword density that you have found to be optimal?

D: The keyword every hundred words? So if you’ve got a 500 word article you want your keyword in there at least 5 times and you’ll be able to tell if you look at your site, you’ve written the article, you’ve published it and you put it on your site and you’ve got adsense in there you’ll be able to tell within 15 minutes whether you’ve got relevant keyword density because the adsense ads will show up with the keywords in those ads. You know they are basically relevant.

T: Okay so if you’re using the keyword 5 times in a 500 word article that’s only a 1% keyword density. Many people would consider that to be fairly low. So you found that that actually is sufficient. And you said something that was really cool. You said that within 15 minutes and you’re right coz as long as you have adsense account approved once you place the code into the plug-in and starts to populate the ads so then if you didn’t like the ads are you telling me that you went through and you would tweak your content and then 15 minutes later you’d get different ads and they would be closer and more relevant?

D: Exactly yeah. And it has to sound appropriate, it has to sound consistent and natural. When somebody reads it you can tell if they’re not in this country or their not good English or anything like that. So you could tell right away. And google can tell right away as well. So you just go back and tweak it a little bit. Put maybe your keyword in once or twice more or related keywords even so if you wanted to let’s say on the custodian site just off the top of my head. You don’t have to put custodian but janitor and it still has related ads.

T: And by the way in case anyone doesn’t know what keyword density is it’s just the number of times that you, if you had a 100 word article and you use the keyword 5 times, 5 out of 100 is 5% so that’s how you determine what keyword density is. Many folks on the internet believe that anywhere between 2 and 4% is the optimal for keyword density. David’s the first one who has told me that he’s having success with 1% so that’s terrific.

So now in those, we’re gonna get to the related keywords in a minute but I just want to stick on this for a minute, now when you title the post for that particular keyword obviously you’re titling it with your keyword in the title, do you use any other words in the title? Or if custodian was your primary keyword for that article is the title in wordpress simply the word custodian? Or is it custodian blah blah blah or blah blah blah custodian?

D: If it was just custodian I’d like to write for people so it would definitely have the keyword in it. But usually it’s not alone coz I want to catch in the long tail, catch other people say average custodian salary or how to become a custodian. And then you could even have the states how to become a custodian in Scotts or how to become a custodian in Missouri. Things like that so you come from a lot of ground when you add words to it.

T: Okay and again we’re gonna get to that in a second. But I just have a couple more questions in the primary keyword and the answers are gonna be relevant to all the posts. So you’ve got the title coz when you create the title that’s an H1 tag in wordpress. Are you also being sure to put an H2 and an H3 in that particular article?

D: Sometimes. It’s not a main priority of mine but if I know I have headings in the content in the article itself I’ll switch H3 to H2 just to make them more relevant, more important.

T: Okay. And how about the use of images and / or video in the post? Sometimes, never, all the time?

D: No I haven’t yet used it on the main. The home page I’ve used images to look more professional but in the articles I have not used images.

T: So the article is being all the related keywords, no use of images in those articles?

D: Correct.

T: Interesting. Okay that’s a different way than I do it coz I use images in all of my articles. And then when you put the image in the article in the home page are you putting an alt tag in with your keyword in those images in those articles?

D: Yeah inside in the HTML, in the title, things like that.

T: Okay. So now let’s get to where I kept deluding to this related keywords. How did you choose the related keywords? What was the criteria for their selection?

D: Well, I would start with my main keyword and then within the dashboard of wordpress you would see how people found your site. The stats, google analytics or even like jetpack for wordpress.com. It shows you how people are finding your sites and you could find related keywords simply by already how people are finding your site. You can start with 1 main keyword but then the others just show up through the stats.

T: So let me get this straight. You launch the site first of all with just 1 article and 1 keyword?

D: Yes I did.

T: And then you got some amount of traffic with a 1 article site?

D: Yeah it was 1 article and I would slowly add because I knew people were looking for more information around that article. So I would slowly add instead of just say custodian salary in this state I would how to become a custodian, things like that. If people come to the site they want to go further they could on the site. And so that just opened up a lot of long tail keywords in other areas.

T: Okay so this is different than how I do it. When you first launch this site, this slapping 1 article site, what page did you get and I’m assuming you haven’t done any backlinking yet?

D: Yeah no backlinking yet.

T: Okay so we’ve got a site out there with 1 article, how far up in the search results did you get? Did you get to page 3, 4, 10 and to what page did you get with 1 article?

D: Well it took time but when I put my site up it was at 106th page. And then within a month it was at 86. Within 2 months I had I think 2 or 3 more articles and then it bumped all the way up to the 4th page with 2 or 3 more articles.

T: And the whole time while you’re on page 86 which might as well be 9,000 than 86 you’re getting a bit of traffic, enough traffic, that you can look in your analytics or your jetpack and you can see what other words are bringing traffic to the site. Am I understanding what you’re explaining correctly?

D: Yeah but it’s not much.

T: What are we talking here, 2 or 3 visitors a day?

D: The people? Less than 10. You know less than 10 in a week or something. But that’s the whole thing with me coz I had time. I didn’t have any money I just had time. And so with time people found it and then I would write an article on that wherever they found it with. And then it slowly over time moved up through the ranks.

T: So did it not occur to you, this is the way that I find my related keywords coz like I said I don’t do it your way. I launch a site with 7-10 articles from the get go and I‘ve explained this in my many, many of my training pieces either on my blog or within Niche Site Mastery. But essentially if I’m using the adwords I typically use SECockpit to do this. But I’ll just explain it how you can do it with the free adwords keyword tool. I put in my main keyword and I put in a filter saying that I don’t want any other words that have more than say 500 searches a month and some for as low as 200 searches a month and that’s gonna give me all the long tail that google feels are related to, in this case, custodian if that was my seed keyword and then I sort those related keywords by their CPC and I pick the highest value keywords that have enough advertiser competition to make it worthwhile that’s the little green bar over on the left that are between 2 and 500 searches a month and I’ll pick 6 or 7 articles and I’ll instruct my writers to write articles for those.

Did you not know about that? Or did you just think I don’t want to do it that way?

D: No at first I didn’t. Now and definitely now with my 4 other sites that’s how I go about it. At first it was just I gotta try this out I’m gonna do it for a year and see how it works and it was just slow. I’m telling you it was slow.

T: How bad. Coz I mean I have new sites that when they get included in the search engines they’ll be ranked like 20th from the moment they’re indexed. And then I only have to climb from 20 to 1 so it doesn’t take 6 months. That’s for sure. It doesn’t always have to happen that way. That’s just the nature of the beastle but you know the batch that I launched last week or 2 weeks ago, you know most of them are in the top 2 or 3 pages already and I have not even started actually doing any linkbuilding.

Alright so you now have the 1 page wonders. It’s just funny coz I never heard anybody do it that way. Listeners be clear. We’re not exactly encouraging you to do it that way. Do it the way that I just described and it’ll be a bit faster. Alright so you started to find out some related keywords and you started to write some other articles. When did you start backlinking? How far into the process and if this is radically different from what you do now maybe we can talk about what you do now as opposed to what you were doing then?

D: Yeah within I think the 3rd month I was really, coz I like to over research, and so I was reading for 2 months how to backlink before I even started. And so I started writing more articles on the site and on the 3rd month I started to backlnk and I used a lot of different sites but pretty much only did article marketing and social bookmarkings for this site.

T: Okay. So how did you do, coz you told me you did this basically with no money, how did you do article marketing with no money?

D: I did it all myself. It took me about half an hour to write a 5-600 word article and I would write about 1-2 articles a day and I would submit those. And I didn’t use the best spinner. I didn’t spin them at all. I just from my mind and from what I knew from researching this niche I just sat down, wrote another article, put 2 links back to the site with different anchor texts.

T: Both to the home page?

D: Yeah mostly to the home page which I’ve learned to do it differently now.

T: And in case, I’m interrupting, in case you don’t know what anchor text is when you’re looking at the screen and you hover over a word and it’s got a little line underneath it and you click that word that takes you to some place else, these words you see on the screen are the anchor text. And google places a lot of importance on the anchor text as it points off. I got site A and we’ll call it the custodian site and there are some article directory that you’ve submitted an article to and your keyword custodian down on the resource box on that article you wanna have at least 1 instance of your keyword custodian with a little line so that when people click that it takes them to your site.

Now of the second instance I’m assuming you just picked some kind of related word to use as your anchor text. Is that correct?

D: Yeah.

T: Okay. So you’re happily cranking out 2 articles a day. How many articles did you write then?

D: I wouldn’t say happily.

T: I would say not either. Let’s say cheaply. You were cheaply cranking out 2 articles a day.

D: Yeah it was definitely cheap to do it all myself. You know I didn’t have much money but I had time. And so 1-2 articles a day just you know a little over an hour. I’d submit those to different article marketing sites. And I tried to do the whole link wheel where I would do social bookmarking pointing to those articles which point to my site but I didn’t. I didn’t log this info and so I did a lot of broken link wheels which is good.

T: Yeah absolutely it is. And in a minute I’m gonna show you readers my super ninja new backlinking strategy I haven’t even blogged about this yet but a buddy of mine in another podcast that I’m gonna be publishing before this one. I think it’s session 006. Nate cheered on this and I’ll get on this in a second so don’t let me forget that.

So how many articles did you write? You’re doing 1-2 articles a day, 20 articles? 50 articles?

D: Oh man. I’ve written, there was 1 month I did 80 articles in a month. I cranked about. I’ve done over 250 articles.

T: You know if you want more work writing articles I’d be happy to outsource it to you.

D: No thank you.

T: With your newest site are you writing things yourself or are you contracting it out?

D: Yes I wanna get to a point where I wanna hire a VA, a good VA, where they write quality like I do. Then I’ll hire a VA to write all the backlinking articles for me. But as of right now I’m still doing it.

T: Well okay let me jump into then. This ninja backlinking strategy that I think is absolutely brilliant. So what Nate does, you can go to the Content Authority which is where I get my articles written, and you can get very good quality articles out of native English speaking people. And you’ll pay between, depending on how long the article is, between 2 and 3 cents a word so that’s gonna translate to you about 8-15 bucks an article. So I, for one, place a huge value on my time so I’m very happy to outsource the production of an article. And then what I’ve been doing up to this point is I’d have my VA put that article in The Best Spinner, create multiple versions of it and use those articles to Unique Article Wizard and up to the article directories all on autopilot. Of course cause a lot of money than your approach as David has explained.

But now you can get rid of the use of The Best Spinner if you do this. When you write your article ask for 2 rewrites. The rewrites are cheap. And so now you’re gonna get 3 articles and all the Unique Article Wizard needs is 3 articles. It then mashes them all together to create lots and lots and lots of versions of those 3 articles.

And then the other thing that Nate does is he creates a little, coz google places a huge value on time on site and bounce rate. So one of the best ways that he’s found is to put a little video on each and every page that he puts. So what are you gonna do for video? He makes a 1 minute long powerpoint which basically summarizes, gives the bullet points of the article. It doesn’t much matter. It needs to be interesting enough so that someone will watch it for at least 30 seconds. And then what he does is so when you create a youtube video in the description field of the video you can put a link back to your site. So think of youtube like a web 2.0 property so that it’s like an inner layer of your link wheel and the domain has a boat load of authority so it’s good to have links from youtube. So he takes the article, so he’s got this article, on the page is the embedded youtube video. Out on youtube under the description field it’s linking back to that article and then in this resource box when he punches them into Unique Article Wizard you get 2 links that you can do right? So he links one to the homepage and one to the youtube video. Brilliant!

D: That’s a ninja.

T: That is super ninja. You heard it here first folks on the Online Income Lab podcast. Super ninja backlinking strategy. So I’m willing to bet that you haven’t done that but you should give it a try.

D: Yeah I’ll definitely try that one.

T: Okay so going back to your story 1-2 articles a day, written lots of articles, now do you not use the Content Authority because you didn’t know about it or you just don’t wanna pay for the articles coz you still have all this free time? Why do you do it yourself? I still don’t get it.

D: Yeah well I reinvested a lot of the money that I was making per month into a new computer.

T: Kind of an important tool to have.

D: Yeah. Mine totally crashed. Just had a regular Macbook and it totally crashed. And so I used the amount of money for a macbook pro just recently. And so I’ve also used like fiver, things like that, to outsource some articles. There was even a guy that I met at a summit. He started writing articles for 10 bucks an article for me but it just wasn’t quality enough so I decided to let him go. And so I just haven’t found articles that I feel are high enough quality so I need to keep doing it myself. And I know that it’s the whole entrepreneur problem – you wanna do everything yourself so I have to let go at one point. And I think this next month I’m going to be doing that. I’m gonna be using a lot of money to buy articles. I have to let myself do that.

T: Folks if I had a sound effect for control freak that I could hear right now in my sound board I would be hitting that button. Let me just say do not do everything yourself. The business, this whole business, any business, the only way you make money people is to take advantage of something called leverage. The internet has a ton of leverage because you can build the adsense site one time it may take you x amount of hours to build it but then it will make money for years and years and years. That’s one full form of leverage and that’s one of the things that’s so valuable. Another form of leverage which my good friend David is not yet taking advantage of, shame, shame, shame, is getting other people to do work for you. David go try Content Authority. Pick level 3. If you’re willing to pay 10 bucks an article and then write me back and tell me if you think those articles aren’t good enough because I read every single article that I get written for me and I’ll tell you what – these are good articles.

I’m spending 75 bucks per site on articles but you know what? I can knock a new site out in an hour of my time.

D: You’re using Content Authority on your main site articles or to do backlinking articles for article marketing?

T: The main site articles and then I just have my VA spin the backlinking articles because I’ll be honest with you no human being’s ever ever gonna read those backlinking articles. So as long as they pass copy scape it doesn’t matter. In my opinion and in my experience it just doesn’t matter. It’s all about the links that are down at the bottom. And then by using Unique Article Wizard they do a relatively decent job of making sure that all the links get ping as well. And then we use another service called Linkpushing I think it is or Linklicious, one of those 2, and she feeds the whole list of URLs out of Unique Article Wizard into that to make sure it get ping again. Coz if your links don’t get indexed they don’t exist in google’s eyes. So you need to get them crawled or indexed or whatever term you would like to use.

Okay so what have we missed in your backlinking strategy? What have I not asked you about? What have you done that got you to no. 1 that we haven’t talked about yet?

D: You know I did a couple for my main site, I did a couple of my web 2.0 sites. You know I started my own wordpress.com sites and I put a couple of articles on those pointing back. I just keep it simple, as simple as possible.

T: And that’s what my good friend Nate does as well. I asked him if he’s doing web 2.0 stuff he goes nope. He says all I do is youtube videos and Unique Article Wizard. Now he has a particular strategy though and I should point this out. He’s targeting keywords with a local exact search volume of less than 200. Less than 200. Most people would think how on earth would you ever make money with that? Listen to my podcast with Nate you’ll figure it out. It’s working very, very well for him. And it’s something that I am now doing as well. I’m in the search actually for someone who can create a product for me. So if you’re listening to my podcast episode and you are a good researcher and a good writer I have a job for you. Get in touch with me.

And by the way you’ve mentioned wordpress.com it might confuse a couple of people so I just wanna clarify what that is. When you have, it’s like if you’ve been to blogger or hubpages those are hosted blogging platforms that you can go and get your keyword.blogger or blogspot.com. WordPress is the same and think if you can go to your keyword.wordpress.com that’s correct I belive my VA does this for me it’s different when you’re using a self hosted wordpress installation. What that means so when you build website your niche site is always gonna be on a self hosted wordpress platform. So you go to Go Daddy and register your URL or Hostgator in my case, you register your URL. You create a hosting account. You do the one click install button and it puts wordpress theme application on your host.

That is different from wordpress.com and I’m delivering this point because I know a lot of people get really, really confused in the difference between those two. So wordpress.com is not a self hosted site. That’s not where you wanna build your niche site but it does qualify what’s called a web 2.0 property. And it’s ideal for putting up what I’ll call the one page blog post. Or you’re just taking a spun version or a uniquely written version of an article that you’re targeting the keyword and you’re gonna do that keyword.wordpress.com. It’s gonna have one article on it and that article is gonna be linking back to your money site or your niche site as I call it. Interesting.

So did you put your adsense ads David on right at the beginning or did you wait a while? Tell us about that.

D: I did. I let within a month designing a website that 1 article in the beginning. Now how I do it is that I put at least 11 articles in the first month. 11 articles and I’ll design the site that I want it. And then in that first month I’ll put adsense ads where I feel people are moving their mouse just from past experience. In other niche sites that I’ve seen but yes there’s ads right there right away. That gives me like we’ve talked about before, that gives me an idea how rich my keyword is, how relevant my ads can be and if I need to change the article or not.

T: So in the placement of the ads, in google’s help documentation there’s a thing called the hit map and I’ve blogged about this. I think I have a post how I increased my adsense income by 30% in a day. I think that’s what it’s called so if you go to Online Income Lab and search for that you’ll find the post I’m talking about. I should put a link under the podcast. Google actually shows you coz nobody has more data about where the best place for adsense ads are than google does, they show you exactly where you should put your ads. And it’ll be a little hit map. So did you look at that and simply say well I’m just gonna do what google told me to do or did you kind of reinvent the wheel and figured it out all on your own?

D: In the beginning I did it all on my own. And then I actually read that post that you put on there and a lot of the themes that I used don’t necessarily have the left column. They only have the right side bar. And google says the left is one of the more important spots.

T: It is.

D: Yeah and so I’m going to be playing along with that definitely. But in the past I haven’t. I just put the link ads on top of the header and on the right side bar and then within the contents, on top of each article and within the content of each article. So it’s consistent with the article people are more prone to click. But yeah I haven’t implemented google’s advice yet which may not be the smartest thing but it’s working a little bit but that’s how I have it.

T: Here’s the theme for you to try, it’s free. It’s called magazine basic. I think it’s a spectacular theme. It’s what I’m now using with all of my adsense sites and the reason is it’s super user friendly. In the admin panel you can say I want a left side bar, I want a right side bar, I want the width of the sidebar to be this. It’s just super, super easy to configure. There is one little technical trick that you need to do and if you use this firebug in firefox browsers that you can do this, in the left side bar or in any of the side bars that has this kind of cross hatch background image which looks really nice but I don’t like the way it looks when I put my adsense in the left side bar. So I use firebug to hover over and see what file that was and then just I went into this style.css and eliminated that image so that it was just a white background and so that my ads blended nicely.

Which leads me onto my next question with you, did you do anything particular when you created your ads? Do you do image or text ads? Do you blend the colors? I mean is there anything there that you think work particularly well for you.

D: Yeah. And this goes to your last question as well. The reason I haven’t particularly used the google advice on ad placement is because I’m so heavy on design that it’s just too many ads on those places. I personally think it’s ugly. And so I do spend a lot of time on the color of the ads, even the border of the ads and like you said erasing the background so it’s not this black. You know that it actually blends in to the website itself. So I’m really heavy on design and I go and I pay at least 10 bucks for a shutterstock photo on the site, things like that. So I go back into the html and CSS and I mess with the google ads so their complementary to the header images. And so the color stands out a little bit as a link and people can tell it’s a link which I really like to use blue colors for the ads because you can tell it’s a link. But so it still matches everything else on the site and looks really professional. So people will just come and your bounce rate doesn’t go up because people look at it it’s an ugly design and they’re off right away.

T: Yeah I’m amazed when I’m doing my research for new keywords, you know you’re always looking at the top 10 and quite often if you’re focused on the long tail you’re gonna see that there are existing adsense sites that man! Some of them are ugly. Oh, cow! You know I just think to myself clearly google is not placing any weight on aesthetics when they’re doing their ranking. So did I miss it? Did you say that you use only text only ads or do you let google insert either a text or an image ad because if you said it I didn’t catch it.

D: Yeah I don’t like the images. I just solely use text ads because I can control the color. I can control the design.

T: You know I was doing the same thing as you until Mr. Google sent me an email recently and told me that I was leaving money on the table. And so I have the site howtocleananything.com, I’ll give that one up. It’s a really high traffic site and it’s something like 1,500 uniques a day and 600 in some pages there. It’s an old site. So it’s a great test bed because it’s so much traffic, any change that I do I pretty much can see an impact almost immediately usually the next day. I got a raise. I’d let them put in an image ad in as well as text ads and I got a raise.

D: Really? I totally ignored that email from google.

T: Oh, Mr. Google sent the same one to you. I look at it this way. If google’s telling you to do something you certainly need to pay attention coz I think they probably got more data than you and I are gonna have. So you should check it out and I would say that maybe on different niches it wouldn’t work as well. But on this particular niche, well I’m not talking of 50% raise here, I just noticed because I kind of look at the income everyday it went up by maybe a buck or 2, but still a buck or 2. That’s somebody who gave me maybe a $60 a month raise, that’s a $720 a year raise for just doing like what did it take me 20 seconds to do that. So I’ll take it. That’s another example of leverage folks. One of the reasons that I love adsense so much.

Okay so we’re at 48 minutes. So I always like to keep this to under an hour so we’re gonna start winding down here. So we’ve talked about how you found the niche. We’ve talked about how you built the site. We’ve talked about how you like to write everything yourself and how I think you’re crazy. And you’ve built all your links by yourself and then I think you’re crazy. But I’m assuming please tell me you’re starting to outsource something.

D: Yeah very soon I plan on it. I feel like there’s a tipping point now I’m getting enough money per month where I can totally use it all for article marketing, things like that. I can totally outsource them. And that will be the huge tipping point for me coz it’s gonna leave more time for me to do more sites. You know I have 5 right now. I wanna just bust them out.

T: Bingo! So this brings me to a couple of points that I think are really important for me to make. The topic of outsourcing is huge for me because I’ve been outsourcing almost since day 1 and it’s really important. Concept no. 1 and David you’re gonna have to cover your ears coz you’re not involved like this one. The quality is in the quantity. If David has 5 of the most beautiful sites in the whole entire world and he’s got the best click through rate ever and I mean that he is the adsense man and I am the adsense average man but I’ve got 50 sites, I’m probably gonna make more money than him. And I’m probably gonna have more free time than him.

So I don’t know what your goal is. If your goal is to make the prettiest websites ever do everything yourself. I wish you could see David on video now. He’s having a good laugh. So concept no. 1 people, quality is in the quantity. There is no need for perfection. Good enough will do just fine. Thank you very much. And you can very, very easily achieve good enough with outsourcing. I’m now at a point where, for example launching a new site maybe David you don’t know about this tool, managewp.com. Did you read that post?

D: Yeah actually last night I came across that.

T: That thing is awesome. I used to pay a VA, so here’s what I used to do. I’d find my keyword. I don’t outsource my keyword research. Tried that a couple of times, a couple of different people, never got what I wanted. SECockpit is just so incredibly kick ass it just doesn’t take long to find a niche. I used to then instruct a VA and I did install coz I register the domain and I didn’t want them to have access to my hosting account and I’d do the one click to install a wordpress. And then I created admin account for them where I’d go okay, go in and configure everything. So the content that’s gonna go on the site we’re talking foundation. And I used to pay $30 and then they would put all the content in to the site as well for the $30.

Now I use managewp, I’ve got this template version of magazine basic. I think I told you I used that. And all I need to do is create a new database which is a couple of clicks with the wizard at hostgator. It’s not, I’ve never done it before, the first one I did turned out just fine. And then you use managewp you say take a copy of my template site and just put it in that domain over there. And whamo! In like less than 60 seconds the site’s up. My adsense is already in the header because that’s coded in. The theme is configured all the way that I want it, all the plug ins are in and configured the way that I want it. And so now all I have to do is, and that cost me nothing. Now all I have to do is now I’ve cut my pay to my VA to $12. And for $12 what she does and she was the one who suggested the 12 bucks by the way, I was willing to pay 15 she thought it was worth 12, I love my VA. So I go to the content authority and I get my articles written and then I read every single article. I’m the one that approves or disapproves those articles so there Mr. Control Freak you would love that coz you can just edit them if you don’t like it. And I paste those articles just in raw text into the html tab of the post saved as draft. Now there’s 10, 11, 7, 9 articles all saved as draft. She goes along for 12 bucks and she puts images in, she puts videos in, she just goes and finds videos on youtube if I hadn’t made them myself. She fully optimizes every aspect of that post. Puts a header in, a custom built header from me and finishes the site. And so I’m now, that’s why I’m able to knock sites in maybe an hour of my time.

So quality is in the quantity. You can not achieve quantity if you’re doing everything yourself. I understand in the beginning maybe you have not done this before, maybe you’re not confident it’s gonna work, you don’t want to spend a bunch of money, fine do what David did. But just know in advance that it’s gonna take, how long David?

D: Well since January 1st.

T: Long time.

D: 9 months.

T: 9 months, correct. And you don’t need to do that now. Here’s another side note too. You don’t even have to build websites. You can go to flipper and just buy them but that’s a topic for a whole another webinar and one day I got to find somebody who’s bought a lot of websites on flipper and interview them.

Okay so it’s been a pleasure to have you on the show. I think that this is gonna be a really informative episode especially for some of the newer people and people who are budget constraint. This is your last chance to throw anything else in there. Any other brilliant ideas that you’ve got or realizations that you’ve made? What’s the golden nugget that you wanna close out here or when you visit the Online Income Lab podcast with?

D: You know if I can do it anybody can do it. And it just takes perseverance. You know sometimes it’s just gonna take a little more time depends on where you’re at. Just put the time in. And if you have the money put the money in and it’s worth it. A long run passive income to these niche sites is golden.

T: Absolutely. Absolutely right keywords. And here on the Online Income Lab I hold webinars every single week to teach you exactly how to identify a profitable niche. I’ve got, you register for those webinars, you get access to the keyword training video. It’s like an hour long, shows you exactly how I find all my keywords so there’s no lack of information available.

If you want the full A-Z on how to do absolutely everything, become a member in Niche Site Mastery. You can get memberships just go to nichesitemastery.com you can opt in you get some stuff for free and then you’ll get offers to how are you gonna pay for your memberships. Under this I’ll actually even put a link to what I have a Warrior Special Offer and that’s where I offer a lifetime membership to Niche Site Mastery for its 1/3 of the normal price of a full time membership. So like I said under this podcast. If you’re listening to this on iTunes or wherever just go to onlineincomelab.com/session008 and I will put a link to how you can get access to Niche Site Mastery for that deal.

Alright my friend David it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. We’re gonna have to get you on again a couple of months. I’m gonna put a calendar note to reinvite you on as the David 2.0 now I outsource. And we’ll bring you back and see how things are going for you. So thank you very, very much for being on the show. It’s been a pleasure. And again to all my listeners none of this stuff would make any difference if I didn’t have you to do it for. The fact that you tune in and you listen to these shows and you comment on my blog I love you guys for it. I have a lot of fun doing this and as long as you keep the questions and comments coming and you keep visiting my blog I will keep cranking out these podcasts.