So here is my first update on the race to a thousand posts.
Actually cranking out the articles has been almost no problem at all, but I have since gained some new insight into how I actually make money. As you can see I already have over 260 articles published out of a thousand, and here it is barely past the one month mark. At this rate I could easily finish the thousand post challenge in six months rather than in one year as originally intended.
I am somewhat stubborn and I would love to believe that if I write it and post it on my own site that this will make me money. This is a shortcut my brain is sort of making for me and telling me that “I don’t need links.”
The fact is that I have never made significant jumps in income without building links. If you want to make passive income online then you have to have incoming links so that you rank well in the search engines so that you get free, organic traffic every day.
The experts that I follow tell me that I should be spending about 90 percent of my time building links. Yet I do not take their advice, and instead I spend more like 95 percent of my time NOT building links–but instead publishing content. Content that is not going to make any real money without some backlink work to it.
QUESTION: How fast should new content on your site turn into additional Adsense income?
One expert tells me to wait a year. But I did an experiment some time ago where I put up 40 new posts and built 2 links to each one of them, and this increased my earnings by $200/month, starting in the following month. Due to the backlinks, it only took about a month for the earnings to kick in.
Now obviously there is still value in creating a thousand new posts for your website. Eventually, you have to have both content plus links in order to generate income. My experts that I follow also tell me that “volume matters.” Having a website with over 2,000 original articles on it looks very solid to the big G, and is certainly one sign of authority.
Think about how easy it is for G to deindex a small website that is less than a hundred articles for acting spammy. Now consider the thought of G deindexing something much bigger, like About.com. They would never just yank the plug on a site that big, and probably would not deindex them even if they did some outrageously spammy stuff that would get the little guy penalized. Bigger sites have inherent authority. So there are some advantages to increasing the size of your footprint.
Right now I have 1,250 articles on my main site. 1056 of those articles did not make a single penny over the last 30 days. That is so much wasted potential right there, that really only needs a long, slow, steady link building campaign. Imagine if I built 2 solid links to each one of those articles over the next year. What would that do to my earnings? Talk about activating the long tail of search. But, it takes so much discipline to build so many links, so methodically.
So what do you all think? Should I switch gears and put more energy into link building? Or should I keep content expansion as a major focus of mine?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Given how many current articles you have on the site I would use some of that content generating to build a link or two towards the income producing posts. It is much easier to grow something that has roots than to make a seed sprout roots then grow. Throw 400 links towards those 200 income producing posts and watch what happens. I wouldn’t go about it the same way as that will take more time and effort getting that content on such a wide variety or websites. Not quite like posting an internal blog post.
I understand wanted to keep towards your 1000 articles goal, but that is not the same as doubling your income. For doubling your income on the site focus on the income generation and what it takes for a post to go from page 3 to page 1 for a given keyword. That will make the biggest difference $ wise.
What a tremendous undertaking you have aimed for and I love seeing your results.
Yep I am going to shift gears here. What is the point of having an extra 1,000 posts on your site if they are not making a single penny of income? Not worth it.
As for dumping links into my income producers, that has largely been my strategy up until now (when I did build links). For most of my money terms I own spot 1 and 2.
I make over half of my money from the long tail. With another 1,000 links over the next few months I think that I can get at least a 50 percent boost in income by activating these dead posts.
I have already milked my money posts and boosted them with links to become PR3 pages….added 5,000+ words of content to some of them. They have hundreds of comments for added content to be crawled. I think that route is dead for me until new “winners” surface. Right now I need to “wake up” the rest of the site and that is going to require at least a thousand new links, spread out quite a bit.
The goal is to eventually have 5 solid links pointing at the majority of the URLs on the site. I know one person who did exactly that and their 100 post site is now a PR5….they add new money posts and can rank easily without building a ton of new links. That is the level of link juice that I need to build up to….that I should have built up to a long time ago.
The key now is to go back and to put the work in. Build the links. Yes it is tedious work. But if you do it methodically, eventually the network effect will start taking over and the entire site will rise.
I thought I could bust out a 1,000 posts and have them rank magically. I was wrong. So now it’s time to put some real work in….