Every single day I probably come up with three or four new ideas for websites. Every single year, I probably come up with three or four good ideas for websites. So how do you separate “good” ideas from “notsogood” ideas? There’s definitely a process, which most experienced developers/marketers do without even realising it. I’m going to try and outline my thought process and some of the tools I use to judge whether ideas make it to the web or to the recycle bin.

Consideration 1: Has it been done before?
Sounds obvious, huh? I really hate pissing on peoples’ parades, but working as a consultant I’m probably approaching triple figures for the amount of times when I’ve been told about the “next big thing”, only to have to show people a Google search result page with a dozen established websites already.

If you’re planning a fairly large project, it really does pay to load up Google and hammer it with everything you can think of which might possibly be related to your idea. Oh, your idea’s been done before? No, biggie – My mantra here is: Do it different, or do it better!

Different? That doesn’t just mean the core idea! For instance, you could do the basic idea but target it at a different audience. A great example of this is Sphinn.

Well, here’s the thing – there’s isn’t really a “Sphinn versus Digg”. Sphinn isn’t very much different from Digg at all, however it is aimed at Internet Marketers, which is a crowd that isn’t always welcomed with open arms over at Digg. It seems obvious now, but what would your first reaction be in a pre-Sphinn world if someone came to you and said “I’ve got this idea for a website, it’s a social site where people vote on news stories and…”? It would have been very easy to scrap the idea without further thought.

Better? Surf the web looking for opportunities, just how Danny realised that Digg could be better for search marketers, I could go and find a list of 10 sites now which I could use and say “this really could be better if…” – that’s where these “simple but great” ideas come from. Who 2 years ago thought MySpace would be being dominated by other social network site?

Facebook was not designed as a competitor to MySpace, it began it’s life in the halls of Harvard as a way for students to connect with each other. The idea slowly expanded to more ivy league schools, then universities, then companies, until it has reached its colossal size today. The idea started out with similar premise to MySpace, but again a different audience. It just so turns out it performs the function of MySpace, but in a much better way: Greater connectivity and less spam (for at now at least).

This is one of the reasons we can see MySpace’s brand searches suffer in Google as people leave in their droves and head for Facebook. You can see around 2007 MySpace really began to suffer and has started to decline in search popularity, which spells out a bleak future for them. I don’t want to get into a big MySpace vs. Facebook debate, I want to say: it doesn’t matter how big your competitor is, if you can do something genuinely better, you’ve got a chance.

Consideration 2: Intelligent monetisation

There are a whole bunch of ways you can make money from a website and one of the biggest mistakes I see is people just defaulting to the Adsense crutch. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big Adsense fan, but it has its uses and it’s certainly not a silver bullet solution for monetisation.

Before you even get into monetisation, you should ask yourself the question; should you be trying to monetise a site from the kick off anyway? Obvious monetisation can adversely effect the credibility of your site, or worse yet – drive users away as you sell off the traffic that you’ve worked so hard to draw in.

I’ve mentioned before, I don’t use Adsense on this blog – and I think it’s a pretty good example. I don’t do sponsored posts, sell links or show Adsense because all of these things would drive users away from my blog, which I’m writing to get them here in the first place! I want you here to read this information, not con you into coming here for a few vague tips just so I can pawn you off to the highest bidder.

I imagine most of my readers will know about Adsense, so most probably won’t click on it anyway – so I won’t make much money. I guess I could blend it in and maybe get a few misclicks, but what’s the point in that? When I recommend certain products, or schemes I sometimes use an affiliate link, which I mark as (aff) to let people know what it is. This way, I add value to readers, not trying to get them to buy/subscribe/use something that’s not relevant to the post. If they have to look at it anyway, why not use an affiliate link? They would perform that action anyway. Marking the links with (aff) is just my way of communicating to my readers that they have the option of typing in the URL if they really don’t want me to get a commission – that’s their choice at the end of the day.

If you can “build in” a monetisation stream to your site, i.e. make it part of the integral process that 1) does not require the user to do more than they usually would and 2) still sees the user perform the actions you want them to, you’re on a winner.

There are tertiary methods of generating revenue, which can be very lucrative – but will never be core to functionality, such as CPM (cost per thousand impression) banners. If you run a community based website with 1000 uniques per day and an average of 10 page views, there’s a fair bit of money to be had from site-wide CPM advertising. There’s even more money to be had if you can directly sell these banner impressions to interested parties, rather than the sometimes rather low-paying CPM networks.

Do you like banners, though? When was the last time you went to a site and you thought “Wow, I’m really pleased that banner advert is there!” Rarely, probably never. As a rule of thumb people don’t like banners – however, they can pay the bills, so there has to be some kind of balance.

In the above example, we’re talking about building a community site, which is a damn hard thing to do – to reach that “critical mass” of users, where your user count will self-replicate and you don’t have to have your foot on the pedal to keep the thing alive. So, at these tender stages of your website’s life, is it a good idea to expose people to banner adverts? Unlikely.

Monetisation can be a bit of a gamble and there’s loads of examples we could work through, but there’s a few key rules to keep in mind:

1) Can you integrate your monetisation into the core functionality of your site?

2) Should you be using “push” monetisation straight away?

3) How will your users react and interact with different monetisation streams?

4) How do other sites in your niche monetisation their presence?

5) What actions do you want a user to take on your site and does your monetisation work against these?

6) Have you considered:

> Affiliate deals to monetise content
> Contextual advertising such as Adsense, Adbrite, PeakClick? (CPC)
> Cost per thousand impression (CPM) advertising such as TribalFusion, Casale, BurstMedia
> Having other sites or companies sponsor sections of your website?
> Does your site give to voluntary donations?
> What about subscription based systems?
> Can you monetise RSS or syndicated feeds?
> Can you do sponsored content? (Nofollowed of course!)

What I’m tarting on about is that you can’t make anything without visitors, so put them first. Maybe I should have just written that half an hour ago? (:

Consideration 3: Time vs Profit Ratio

Avid readers of my blog (I love you guys), will know I’m a big fan of “quick buck” ideas. These are ideas which are quick and easy to implement and will earn you a bit of pocket money. When building a web portfolio, diversification is the key factor to income stability. Although I have a few “battleship” sites, I’ve also got a million dingys floating about, so if a few Google bombs go off here and there, I’m still in pretty good shape.

A lot of people ask the question “I want to make money online, should I make one big site, or loads of little ones?” My answer is, both! (and everything between them for that matter). Small sites are a great way of testing ideas, monetisation streams, SEO techniques, designs, you name it. You can increase your overall chance of success by lowering risks early on. If you spend all of your time, money and resources on building your first battleship site and for whatever reason, it sinks – that leaves you in a nasty place. If you can get up and running with a few quick wins, you can use this revenue as a “margin of error” to play with when working on larger projects.

My most successful “dingy” site took about 20 minutes to build, about 20 minutes of promotion and it makes about $300 a month, with no work whatsoever. I’d say that’s a pretty good investment, by whatever yardstick you’re using. So what makes a “dingy” site?

It’s not size that’s for sure. Some of the quickest projects may be database driven sites with a million pages that are built just to catch long-tail queries. I generally class a site by three factors:

1) How long it will take to build, design and develop

2) How many visitors it will take to make the site consistently earn money

3) What ongoing maintenance and time will the site take?

The first is fairly simple and easily written off. If you’re confident you can design and develop the site, you’re onto a winner. A lot of the time, it’s easy to pick up a CMS such as WordPress, Drupel, Joomla or Pligg to smack a site together in no time. A real issue is how many visitors is it going to take to make the site earn money? This depends on our earlier points about monetisation streams, if you’re relying on CPM – it will take a hell of a lot, if you’re relying on single high paying affiliate commissions, probably not so many.

The most important by far for me, is what time, on an ongoing basis will this site eat up? As much as I love community type sites, they take a bastard amount of TLC to get off the ground. With many projects on the go, you really need to do some time planning to make sure you’ve got enough spare (or can outsource), to see these things through. An early mistake I made was building loads of sites and not giving them the attention they needed to grow. You won’t be getting a second chance to impress with a lot of visitors, so make sure you’ve got resources to spare to make it work first time round.

If however, you spend a little more time, you’ll see there are loads of drag and drop projects that you can set up and leave running at no more time expenditure.. Quick wins, like Google navigation queries (:

I hope these seeds give you some solid logic to build on. To be honest, I was going to do a top 5, but I’ve just moved house and I’m on “free city wifi” until I get broadband installed here. Unfortunately “free shitty wifi” would be more accurate as I’m getting about 33.6kbps modem speeds (remember them??). Oh, I’ve also got some dingys to inflate (:

Today I want to briefly talk about how Google works out what navigational queries are, what a navigational query is, and how we can make money from it. It’s a pretty easy concept to get to grips with, but I like it because it’s a fast way to make some party money.

What is a “navigational query”?
When you perform a search on Google, it has to have some kind of stab at what the motivation behind your search is. Lets say you setup a company called “Beds and Mattresses” and you build yourself a cute little homepage. Now when a user performs a search for “beds and mattresses” Google has to work out whether you are generically searching for some beds and mattresses, or if you are specifically searching for that company.

If Google thinks you are searching specifically for that company/brand/website, then your search will be treated as a “navigational query”, which means that website will be given greater preference in the SERPs, and will rank well (normally #1) regardless of the site’s link popularity and authority.

A little bit of proof
If you haven’t noticed this before, the evidence is all around you! For instance, lets do a search for “property in france” – a query with over 30,000 monthly searches.

You can see that the propertyinfrance.co.uk website ranks #1 with a lower PR and way, way fewer links. As a note, propertyinfrance.co.uk also is not the oldest domain, with some the domains in that screenshot out-aging it by 5 years – so it’s not down to that.

To me, that’s kind of surprising, it’s a real estate search term with a decent amount of monthly traffic and there’s a lot of money in real estate traffic. Google doesn’t like doing corrections “by hand”, so I find it odd that these high volume & value terms are not algorithmically bias towards general search, rather than navigational queries. Cheers, Google.

Making money from navigation queries
Okay, so how can we make money from this? First, lets talk about revenue streams. It’s always important to think hard about the intent of your visitors when you’re trying to monetise your site. For instance, I would never run AdSense on this blog – my visitors come here for information and most of them are techy/SEO types. To me this says that Adsense would add no value to my visitors, most of them are aware of Adsense and so I’d get a pretty low CTR (á la Digg users). I don’t particularly like seeing Adsense on SEO blogs because it makes me suspicious of the motives of the author, it almost makes me feel like they are only writing to make a quick buck. I do however give (normally labelled) affiliate links to products or services that I’m currently using and think are decent, when they are relevant.

The point here is, it’s actually going to be easier using a specific CPA offer, rather than a shotgun Adsense approach and hoping somebody will click on one of the contextual ads. The Google Referrals programme, inside Adsense, allows you to browse through these ads and select a specific one for your page.

Google’s “Referrals 2.0″ is basically the CPA part of their Adsense programme – i.e. you get paid when the user performs an action rather than a click. Using Google Referrals 2.0, I set a site up in an hour and within 7 days was making $15 a day from it, with no SEO or extra promotion whatsoever. Here’s how I did it:

1) First off, I scanned through Google Referrals in my Adsense account, looking for a CPA offer. Ideally you want something where you get paid to get someone to perform a free action, as this is dead easy to do.

2) I used the standard keyword research tools to identify how competitive what I thought the “main” search term for this product/service was. I found one with a mere 300 searches per month.

3) Next I registered a domain with the URL exactly the same as this keyphrase.

4) I created a single landing page and made the title, the h1 the key phrase, as well as dotting it around the copy (which must be unique of course). Matching the URL, title, h1 is normally enough to trick Google into thinking the search is a navigational query.

5) I wrote the copy of the page, explaining the product, had a screenshot and put the ad in a nice fat outlined box in the middle of the page – it’s the only external route out of the page.

6) Google can be a bit stubborn when it comes to indexing a single page, so keep at it and build links as you usually would.

The Google Referral TOS is slightly different, allowing you to draw more attention to the advert, since the pay out is CPA, not CPC – read through it carefully and use this to your advantage. I’m achieving a 30% CTR with a pretty poor looking page, and I am converting 50% of these people to the free sign up offer and getting paid $15 a time.

There it is. It’s so simple, it’s so quick and it works. I love these 1 shot quick methods at getting a little extra cash. So 2 hours work should benefit me around $5,000 a year.

If you don’t have an Adsense account yet, here’s a massive affiliate link for you

Time to make some more easy Internets money! This is a pretty fun blackhat technique (as far SEO can be ‘fun’ at least) and what’s best is that it’s more effective than a shotgun full of bees. It’s very little work, it’s a bit blackhat, but you’re unlikely to get banned (you’ll see why later). Enough intro, lets shotgun the puppy…

The Basics
I’m going to assume you already have web hosting, so first thing is to grab yourself a domain. As usual, try and get a domain with a few keywords in, maybe something about girls (this will work for guys too obviously for my female(?) readers.. But I’m going to use girls in this guide because I’m just that way inclined). Oh, if you’re making an adult affiliate site, it might be worth noting that most of the adult programmes pay around 5 times as much for signing up a female member rather than a guy.. So if you want to get x5 more money per sign up, you might have to see a few pictures of cock – that’s the price you pay. (Or I guess you could target the gay market).

Anyway, I’ll let you decide what you want market you want to penetrate (sorry). The most important thing is that you’ll be target niches. The sex game is one of the most competitive areas on the Interwebs, so we have to find a backdoor (sorry). So we’ve got our domain, now we need to do a little “research”.

Affiliate Schemes and Niches
Personally, I used the Adult Friend Finder affiliate scheme (aff link), they provide just about every sex niche that your standard Internet pervert could think of. They’re quite generous with commission, it’s easy to use and the affiliate managers actually respond when you have an question. If you’ve had experience with other programmes, feel free to leave a comment and let us all know.

Once you’ve signed up to AFF and logged in, you can click the “other sites to promote” link at the top and you’ll see they have about another 30 or so sites you can work with. The plan is that we’ll be making 1 site to promote each one of these programmes (don’t worry – it won’t take as long as you think). So have a little scan through the list, keep a notepad handy and write down any search terms that spring to mind. Once you’ve found a programme that “interests” you enough, try and get that domain we talked about with some related keywords in.

Keyword Research
Now you’ve picked your niche, we need to get some search terms. We’re going fairly long tail here so think out of the box a bit and use the usual keyword research tools (there’s a list about 1/2 way down that post). Work at it and try and get about 100 key phrases written down.

We aren’t going to be targeting these key phrases, just so you know – but you still need them. Next, do a bit more research and find half a dozen middle-weight search terms in your niche with a decent amount of traffic, then out of these pick 1 key phrase that isn’t being dominated by other sites. Put this keyword on-page on every page you create.

Now whip up some flat HTML pages using the long tail key phrases we researched earlier. Nothing fancy, just use the page title as the key phrase, an h1 with the key phrase on page, and introduction paragraph page and most importantly: a good meta description that’s alluring. Name the page as your key phrase as well, such as big-boobed-dwarves.html or something. Don’t ask questions, just do it plzkthx

If you’re a smarty pants, make a script to do it for you… If you’re not, enjoy using find & replace.

The Blackhat Magic Begins
Hopefully, you’re still with me and haven’t been distracted by all this “research” you’ve been doing… Here’s where the awesomeness comes in… When I was trawling the Internet for the best Viagra deals, as you do – I came over this beaut:

That’s an Orange search page there, ranking for the search term Viagra. Weird, huh? Clicking on it gives you this:

If you’re not twigging yet, canadians-pharmacy.com has got an orange search page listed in Google, using the site: command to only show results for their site.

How does this work?
The main reason this works so well is because the orange.co.uk has a great authority, so by doing this you are essentially “creating” a page on their website which links to yours. Also, if you look at the search query, it’s:

[keyword] site:www.yourdomain.com

Adding the keyword before the site command will perform a search on your site for this keyword, showing the relevant results. It also keyword stuffs the page for you. The word “viagra” is on that page 15 times, so you’re showing Google a page on a trusted domain that has the search phrase all over it.

What does this mean?
This means you can hijack the authority and trust of sites such as orange.co.uk and use this to rank easily in the SERPs for competitive keywords. Visitors will then click on the orange search results and land on your site (sort of).

How can I do this?
As discussed when we talked about the organic bloom effect, when we build links we are looking at trying to do is get a mix between big authority links and lots of “regular” links to express popularity. The orange.co.uk site already has more authority than Darth Vader at an asphyxiation competition, which means that there’s only 1 ingredient missing – shitty spam links!

Here’s the best way to get your orange page indexed:

Step 1: go to and enter your medium-weight key phrase we picked earlier into the search box (don’t forget to turn the safe search off!!!), followed by the site: operand and your site’s domain. This should produce a search result page that lists all your pages (because we put our key phrase on every page), and you should have page titles covering all those filthy niches. Next, in the address bar, you’ll have a string like this:

/all?p=_searchbox&pt=resultgo&

brand=ouk&tab=web&actualtabweb=web&q=test+phrase+
site%3Awww.digeratimarketing.co.uk&tabRadio=web

(I have searched digeratimarketing.co.uk for “test phrase”). You can strip the URL down a bit removing some of the crap to:

/all?q=test+phrase+site

%3Awww.digeratimarketing.co.uk

I tend to do this to make things a bit easier to manage and it increases the density of your keyword in the URL.

Step 2: Bit cheeky, but submit the URL to Google..

Step 3:Build links (using your medium-weight key phrase as anchor text):

• This is the perfect kind of site to exploit any link laundering sites if you have them.
• Take a look at what sites other people putting links on for this technique. Grab as many of these as you can.
• Spam the shit out of guestbooks. (Here’s a guestbook spammer if you need one – 199Kb)
• Directory Submissions work a treat as well of course.
• You get the idea As many links as possible as quickly as possible

You should be able to rank for most terms within a week using this technique, the anchor text you use in the links you build will produce the title of orange search page in the SERPs.

The finishing move
Okay, so we’ve got a site we can rank in Google via the orange.co.uk search page and it displays our website with our alluring meta description and lists all sorts of naughty things. Now what?

You’ve got 1 of 2 choices here… You could if you wanted, actually build proper landing pages for each one of the html pages we made earlier… Or if you’re lazy, you could simply detect referrals from the orange search page and then automatically redirect them to the AFF landing page.

Bung this code on all of your pages:

This will make sure if anyone lands on your page from the orange site, they will be automatically redirected to the AFF page, with your referral code. Any sign ups will get you the dosh dosh you want

Why this technique is good:

• Your shitty links are doing to the orange page, not your own – so the worst that can happen is the orange page gets removed from the index
• The redirect is based on referrer, which has many legitimate uses. Your not strictly showing users and search engines difference pages – therefore it’s very hard for Google to algorithmically detect and ban you for this
• It’s quick!

This whole process should only take a couple of hours and of course, you can use it for any type of search terms, multiple times… Enjoy

Ending note: Although I am single geek, I only search the Internet for Viagra for research purposes and I’m rarely called a sex pest. I am however looking for a girlfriend so feel free to mail your CVs to [email protected]. Due to the bulk of mail I am likely to receive, I would ask all applicants to bare in mind I may be a while getting back to them. Extras points for search wizards who can manage to Google-stalk my Facebook and such.. Thank you.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently making a front-end for my own personal SEO tools, so I can finally release them to Digerati subscribers. These tools are special. They are not your normal “pay us $20 and we’ll show you a vague kind of thing how Google probably crawls you site” tools. They are, elite SEO tools.

Here’s a quick overview of some of the frontliners:

Link Backrub – This tool will increase your backlinks massively by scouring the Internet for sites that link to you, that are not indexed in search engines. Any links it finds to your site, which are not indexed by Google, it will get them indexed – almost instantly, thus letting Google see all of your backlinks. This will of course, improve your rankings.

Flashdex – This tool will get ANY page indexed in Google within 1 hour – guaranteed.

Social Storm – This neat little bit of script can get a single page – or multiple pages socially bookmarked on the top 20 social bookmarking and tagging sites over 190 times, automatically, from different IPs at random times over the course of weeks. This can give you massive traffic boosts.

StumbleXchange Automator – StumbleXchange is a great site, but it takes so damn long! This downloadable program will automate the entire process for you! No more hours of stumbling other peoples pages, just click and go to sleep!

Link Buster – My favourite tool – This tool will build you over 100 relevant links per month, to any page requested – and it’s not blackhat!

These tools are all working at the moment, but I require a dozen or so experienced testers for them. I plan the official release on 1st November, when the testing and refinements are complete. Due to the nature of the tools, the sign ups will be limited and I most likely will be charging a little fee to access them.

If you are one of the testers for these tools and give feedback on their development, you will have lifetime free access to them. If you would like to sign up to be a tester, leave a trackback to this post by writing your own blog post about these tools. 20 people will be chosen at random, then after a chat, 10 will be chosen to help me test and refine these tools.

Go!

This is a jumbo post which I have contributed to Jon Waraas’ Blog so you’ll have to pop over there to read it. It’s a bit of a biggie (about 3,000 words).

I’ve also been working on that as well as the next part of Making Money With An Affiliate Empire series, so with a bit of luck that should be live by the end of the week..

I also have a special announcement later in the week, which you’ll like. That’s going to be first come, first served though