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Some Updates On My Projects

I’ve been quite productive in the last few days and have been working hard on a couple of my projects… one of them you already know about which is my IT niche site, and the other is a new one just started today! Looks like I still have some way to go before I can keep my attention focused on just one or two sites!

The IT Niche Site

I feel that this one is coming along nicely, and soon I’ll be starting to promote it and get some visitors in. Hopefully Google doesn’t take too long to index pages and organic traffic will also start flowing.

So far I’ve researched keywords, got the domain name, setup the site (I’m using WordPress), written 4 articles, added some Adsense blocks and got my analytics tracking code in. Before the weekend I’d like to get a few more articles on there and drop in some affiliate links.

So far I’m finding this site quite enjoyable and easy to write for, mainly because I work in IT in my day job but also because I am quite interested in this particular niche.
Initial searches on Google and some research using Google’s keyword suggestion tool lead me to believe that there isn’t too much competition at the moment and the search numbers look promising, so fingers crossed I can rank well for some decent keywords. There are also plenty of choices for affiliate offers for this specific niche so I’ll just have a look around and choose whichever I think will convert better and will mean I get paid more!

The New Site

This one just kind of happened by accident today. As I’ve mentioned in a couple of my recent posts I am quite interested in trying out domain flipping. I’ve been reading up on this in the last few days and this morning was doing a little research by looking at what domains people are currently selling and basically following a tip which was to keep up-to-date with the latest technology and trends to give you ideas for domains to flip. As I mentioned earlier I work in IT and I regularly read technology news sites and blogs, and as I was thinking about what “new trends” might be profitable I realised that something I have read about in the last couple of days may well be just what I need. So, I did a bit of checking on available domain names and came across a few that I thought could well work out nicely. Of course, I don’t know for sure that they will as I’m a complete newcomer to domain flipping but I reckon they would turn a profit.

Anyway… I went ahead and registered one of the domains I’d found but instead of flipping the domain straight away, I decided to stick a site up on it and see whether it would be more profitable to hold on to it and monetise it. I’ve been beavering away today and have so far setup WordPress (with a handful of useful plugins), got a design I feel fits well, added some well placed (I hope) adsense and added some content. As this is a bit of a hot trend at the moment I want to make sure I get some more content up there in the next couple of days and get it submitted to search engines. I’ll also go about participating in forums and on other blogs in this niche, and look at other ways I can monetise the site, probably in-text ads and affiliate offers.

If the site gets no traffic and makes nothing in the next 4-6 weeks then I may well try and flip it (not just the domain - the entire site), but either way I really do think that it has the potential to make me a bit of money. Hoping my spur of the moment decision to do the site pays off, but I guess the most I lose is the cost of the domain so it’s not too much of a risk.

What About the Real Estate Site?

Unfortunately with all the work I’ve been putting in to the sites mentioned above, I still haven’t even decided on a niche to pursue, not done any keyword research or anything for my Niche to Riches challenge site. I’d really like to try it, but to be honest at this early stage in my affiliate marketing career I’m not sure I’m ready to try and create a site in a niche I really know nothing about. It’s been much easier for me to come up with ideas and content for the IT and technology sites than it has to even think about this one.

Sorry Empress! I really did want to participate fully in this challenge, but I just can’t see it happening. Maybe when the next challenge comes round I’ll already have a few sites under my belt and feel more confident with dipping into niches where I’m not so knowledgable.

That’s it! It’s been busy but I have been enjoying working on these. You never know, one of these might turn out to be a good little money maker for me… that would be very nice indeed .

How are your online projects coming along?

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Checking Your Pages For Duplicate Content

This is a follow on to my last post about where to get good quality content for your affiliate sites.

These are a couple of tools I’ve found which I think could be very useful if you are using free articles, or content from sites such as Wikipedia, to check how similar your pages are to others.

• Similar Page Checker by webconfs.com
  This tool allows you to compare two pages and gives you a percentage of how similar they are. So if, for example, you’ve taken a Wikipedia article and modified it with some of your own writing (or even mashed it up with free content from elsewhere I guess…), you can check your new page against Wikipedia’s page to see how similar they are.
  Hopefully the lower the percentage, the less likely you will be penalised by Google for duplicate content.
• Copyscape
  This tool allows you to enter your page URL, then searches for other sites which have the same/similar content. You can then click through to those sites and Copyscape will even highlight the blocks of text it sees that is the same as yours.
  I can see this being useful for deciding whether to use a particular free article or not. You can stick the URL of the article into this tool and see how many others out there are using the same thing on their site.

If you have any experience of the above tools, or know of any similar ones then please post a comment.

Creating Good Quality Content For Your Niche Site

OK, so I’ve been messing around with the mechanics of how my affiliate mashup sites will work, but have come to the point where I think I need to start getting some static content (articles, info pages etc.) on to these sites too, in order to get more hits from the search engines for search terms related to my sites.

This may be obvious to most people, and I have heard the term “content is king” mentioned by pretty much every blogger I’ve read in the make money online community, but I think I was maybe slightly naive in thinking I might still get some decent traffic to my sites without having to write lengthy articles or setup a blog for each niche site.

So I’ve been looking into whether it’s possible to get some good content related to my niche for free. There are a couple of methods I’ve come across that i’m interested in:

• Free Articles
  There are a number of sites where you can get your hands on articles on pretty much any subject you need. These can be used free of charge, as long as the article and byline (with any credits to the author and even any links they want to stick in there too) remains as is.
  A couple of examples of sites you can get these free articles from are Articles Base and Ezine Articles, but a simple search on Google for “free articles” show that there are many other sites out there.
• Wikipedia Content
  You can find articles on Wikipedia for pretty much any niche that you’re interested in. The beauty of Wikipedia content is that you can take it and modify it before putting it on your site. So you can start with the base Wikipedia content, then edit it as you like and essentially end up with some semi-unique content for your site.
  Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia license (see the full license/copyright text here):
  “Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement).”

Out of the above two methods for gaining content, I’m leaning towards modified Wikipedia articles. This is for a couple of reasons.

1. To at least have some uniqueness.
2. I’ve heard that Google and other search engines can penalise heavily sites/pages that they deem to be duplicates of other pages on the web. I would imagine a direct copy of a popular article from one of the free article sites could get used by many other sites out there, and so there would be a high risk of your page being penalised as a duplicate. At least with modified Wikipedia articles you have some chance of avoiding this, if you modify it enough.

Does anyone else use either of these to get content for your affiliate sites? Do you always write your own? If so, even on niche subjects you may not be an expert on? Do you use another method/resource?

I’d love to hear any comments on this subject.