Internet Gangsters

One of my biggest money making websites had been on a “.info” domain for over a year and was pulling a fair amount of money. I know that “.info” domains are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to quality and they are usually picked up by spammers for cheap. When I initially started the website I didn’t anticipate the amount of revenue I could generate with it and therefore didn’t want to spend the extra money on a “.com”. This was a big mistake!

A dot com domain costs anywhere from $6-10 per year, depending on what GoDaddy promo codes you can dig up, where a dot info domain runs you $1.99 per year. I was trying to save money but had I known that meager $4-8 for the year would have had me pulling in much more money I would have done it right the first time.

Earlier this month I decided it was time for this .info site to get a makeover and a new domain. It was starting to become cluttered with ads that didn’t need to be there, information that nobody clicked on and so forth, plus it was out of season and I wasn’t making a lot of money. First thing I did was secured a brand new .com domain for the website, making sure to use a good keyword. After that was secured, I got a different layout going and setup everything how I wanted. I did a few tests to make sure everything was going well and setup all the plugins and other stuff I needed. Everything was done, I switched the RSS subscribers over the new site, the twitter feed, all I needed to do was make a post on the old site letting people know that we’ve moved and then start updating the new site instead.

Keep in mind that I hadn’t been making much money on this site over the summer, it’s off season for this niche. As soon as I turned on the new site and started making posts there I was getting a ton more visitors than I normally had gotten. I was coming up way higher in SERPs and getting more click throughs which in turn was generating more revenue. I also had more people signing up as followers on twitter and subscribers to my RSS feed. I was certainly happy with the way things were looking.

It’s been about 13 days since I’ve launched the new look/domain and I’ve made more this month than I did all summer. I can’t put a finger on exactly what caused the massive change in visitors, but I’m pretty confident it has to do with the the SEO tactics I’ve implemented as well as the dot com domain. People seem to trust a .com more than a .info. The site is also not cluttered with ads anymore, although there are still a few minor issues I have to fix. Overall I’m amazed at the turnaround of the site over the past few weeks and it seems as though it’s not slowing down.

So my advice to you is if you’re going to start up a website and are debating between a .info and a .com due to the cheaper price, I would always go with the .com (.net if you absolutely have to). Just from my personal experience this month I can tell you that you will regret it if you go with the lesser of the two.

Wordpress is an amazing tool if you want to start up a content driven website without having the knowledge to code something on your own. Actually, even if you do know how to code it’s a simple, quick and easy way to manage a website.

Wordpress can be used in two ways,

1. You can setup a free blog at Wordpress.com which will give you a web address of http://yourblog.wordpress.com, which you can have any domain forwarded to. This will allow you to have free hosting for your blog if you don’t want to spend the money right away.

2. You can download the Wordpress software from Wordpress.org and install it on your own hosting server. This will give you full control over all aspects of your new site. This is the method that I would recommend.

Once you have the Wordpress site setup and ready to go, before writing any content at all, figure out how you want to go about getting traffic to your site. At this point you should not be focused on making money, it will only discourage you when you don’t. You should already have some idea about what the site will focus on, since I’m assuming you either bought a domain or registered a free blog based on the topic you will be writing about. This article is obviously focused on bringing organic traffic to your new website using SEO and a few effective plugins for Wordpress.

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So if you haven’t heard of BANS or Build a Niche Store, it is basically a software/script that creates a storefront completely based on eBay links. It uses Commission Junctions affiliate program with eBay to give you commissions per sale. So basically you find a niche, purchase and setup BANS, tell the software what category to use on eBay to populate the store and that’s it. The software will automatically pull the sub-categories from eBay and populate the website with all the auctions that can be found under it. The idea here is to find a good niche, as always, once you’ve found that, the software basically does the rest. It has many good tools for SEO and to help your site gain some popularity. Some niches will produce sales as soon as you set them up and others will take some work. I purchased the software last week and have since setup 2 BANS sites. 1 of the site is based off of another site I have and gets most of it’s traffic (for right now) from that site. They are both in the same niche but cater to different parts of the niche. The other site I set up doesn’t seem to be doing as well, but I’m not going to give up yet, so we’ll see. In less than a week of setting up the 1st site, it has yet to make a sale, but I have a feeling that will change soon. So I will keep everyone updated on how this experiment is working out.

So, here we are. You have your site all set up and you are ready to take over the internet, but you cant do that without content. Content is king. How do you write engaging content you ask? Well, you could rip off from other sites, which is generally a bad idea and frowned upon by your fellow interneters, so instead maybe let those other sites serve as an inspiration for your writing. Ultimately this is the sort of stuff that will make or break your site, since once visitors come, you need to provide them with a reason to stay. Depending on what your website is about, there is usually some static information about that topic that you can use as reliable subject matter.

For the sake of this article lets assume, you have a site about Scuba diving. There are several different static content pages you could add to your site. Something like common scuba locations would be good, since all new scuba-ers are going to be looking for good places to dive. You could also have a page on how to get certified, because that sort of information does not change too frequently; also good for SEO due to the general keywords in a How-To article.  Also maybe something like general saftey procedures for scuba.  As you can see, this is all good general information related to the topic.  It is static and will provide you a good starting ground for your posts on whatever.  If at first you are not seeing the type of traffic you are looking for don’t give up.  Generating traffic is not an easy thing to do for a beginner, especially if you have a difficult niche.  Remember not to get discouraged because this is one of those areas where persistence pays off.

So in my random forum searching today I came across a few people asking about a site called PopShops. I had never heard of it before, which doesn’t mean a whole lot since I just recently got into the affiliate programs, but it sounded interesting. It’s a site that links up to your Commission Junction, LinkShare.com and a few other affiliate websites and it allows you to create “stores” using the products that you can promote through the affiliate programs.

So recently I started a site using a method that pulls auctions from eBay and displays them on a page and when people click the eBay auctions you will get a commission based on the final eBay costs of a winning bid. I will write a more in depth post about this method and what software/scripts I’ve been using soon, but I just wanted to give you an idea of what the site currently does. So this site that I decided to experiment with PopShops on has recently been getting a lot more hits than last month but not many conversions with eBay. So I felt like it needed a little change so that it didn’t just look like I was pushing eBay ads since obviously people weren’t buying this product from eBay.

So that is the basic background of the site and what I’ve started adding to it to make it seem more like an actual store rather than a blog with eBay auctions. Pop Shops offers 3 different packages that give you different options. First there is a free option, which allows you to setup 10 “stores” and gives you javascript as a way to implement the code on your page, which isn’t very SEO friendly, but if you have good content outside of the products it could work for you and not cost anything up front. The 2nd option is $5/mo which is the one I opted for. This one gives you an unlimited amount of stores you can setup and gives you more options for the code, like PHP, HTML, and ASP. These methods will help with SEO since the actual text from the product descriptions will be visible to the search engine crawlers. This option also removes the “Powered by PopShops” link that will appear at the bottom of your “store” module on your page. This and the SEO friendly code were the 2 big reasons I opted to pay for the software rather than use the free one. If people know the products are strictly affiliate links they are less likely to click them, so let them find out after they have already clicked the link. There is also the Autofeed option which allows you to create a ton of pages automatically based on similar products you’ve already chosen. I haven’t really played around with this aspect of it yet, but I’m sure I will soon. The third option gives you XML feeds as well as another SEO tool that you can read about on the site and it costs $30/mo.

I don’t have too much to report yet as far as how click throughs have done since implementing the new software, but I will keep everyone updated on what happens with this. I’m really impressed with the whole setup they have going on and would highly recommend you at least try out the free version if you want to run some sort of affiliate store.

One of the keys to getting your website higher on the search engine results is to have a lot of other sites linking back to you, but how are you supposed to get links without paying a lot of money? Submit your site to free directories, that’s how. Directories are sites that basically just have a ton of categories full of links, just like the yellow pages in a phone book. Yahoo has one of the best directories, but it’s not free to get your site entered and they usually won’t accept sites that are straight up affiliate sites. If you have some cash, there are a bunch of good paying directory sites that you can find out there, but this post is about the FREE directories out there that will accept your site no matter what. Yes these directories probably will not get you too many hits from people actually clicking your link in them, but what they will do is give you one-way links that the search engines will see, and this is key.

Search engine ranking is determined by a lot of different factors; keywords, links in, popularity, etc. So once you’ve made sure your site is up to par with it’s keywords and all the SEO you can do on your own, it’s time to move on to building links that point to your site and the easiest way to do this is free directories. Link Rain has an incredible list of over 500 free directories that you can submit your site to. Link Rain itself is a directory that you must pay to get into and is for legitimate sites. So you can always go that route as well and pay them to get your site listed, or you can go down this list and start adding your site to a few directories everyday.

By doing this the search engines will see more and more links in to your site and it will help you move up higher on the results pages for whatever keywords you are trying to get higher with. Also, make sure when you submit to these directories, your titles and descriptions contain the keyword you are working towards. For example, if you have a site that sells purple dildos and you want to rank higher when someone searches for “purple dildos” or “adult fun toys” then you want to make sure that you put those words in your description that you submit to the directories. And if you can put it in the link and title as well. Anywhere you put those keywords is going to help. But don’t write a description that talks about “leather and lace” if you’re not trying to help your search results for those terms, it’s pretty common sense.

For you lazy people out there, there is another option. You can pay someone else to submit your site to hundreds of free directories for fairly cheap. Check out places like Digital Point to find someone who will do this for you. But the one thing is, don’t expect to see instant results. You won’t start seeing an influx of traffic until the search engines have had time to crawl all those directories, so expect to wait a few months before you start seeing more search engine traffic generated from these new inbound links. Remember, nobody got rich overnight (other than winning the lottery) so making money on the internet will take some time and effort, don’t expect instant riches. But just think, every link you build back to your page could bring 5 more people, so in the time it takes to build 10 links you could have brought 50 more people to your site over time.

For those of you out there who are so very anxious to combine your love for internet money making and the fantastic browser Firefox, this post is most certinly for you. I am going to show you some of the plug-ins and resources we here at IG use to spend less time hunting for information and more time learning from information.

1.) SEOQuake

What this wonderful toolbar does is provides you will all that information you would spend a good 10-15 minutes hunting for about any website on the internet. The toolbar sits right under your address bar, or wherever you decide to place it and gives you a plethora of valuable information for the budding internet entrepreneur. Information starts at, but is not limited to: Google PageRank and Index Number, Yahoo Links and LinkDomain, the MSN Index, Alexa Rank, the site IP, easy access to the Whois information, Link Density, Incoming and Outgoing links, and a ton more. There are so many options for this toolbar its almost ridiculous.

2.) Web Developer

This hot little piece of code lets you pretty much tear down any website on the internet. You can turn off CSS, add your own custom CSS, disable links, disable images, show borders around tables, view rulers, delete session cookies and buttloads more. A fantastic tool for any web-savvy individual.

3.) MetaTags

Pretty self-explanitory, MetaTags shows you all of the meta-information for any given page. It also can show you MIME type and charset, DTD, root tag, and XML namespace, last modification time, referrer and more. However it does not stop there, arguably the best part about MetaTags is the built in automated search engine submission tool.

4.) EzSidebar

Now, assuming you have a few different plugins installed, your interface can get pretty disgusting looking. While numbers everywhere might be good for impressing your parents or your girlfriend, it most certinly get get annoying when trying to browse. Enter EzSidebar. This little bugger lets you detach your sidebar, and anything that might live within it. No more StumbleUpon, WebDeveloper, ForecastFox bars crowding up your browser, they can now be added to the sidebar, detached and dragged wherever your little heart desires.

5.) StumbleUpon

Chances are, if you are reading this blog you are already going to be aware of this gem. Not only is it the absolute best way to kill time when you have run out of websites to read, but it is a great way to make sure that others are going to see your website. StumbleUpon is a tiny little addon that sits in the bottom corner of your browser with 3 icons (once configured) and lets you sit endlessly entertained. It works by showing you webpages based on your interests that have also been given good ratings by others who like similar things. StumbleUpon has won countless awards, and once you download and install it, you will see why.

6.) BlogRovr

BlogRovr is a neat little application that will fetch posts related to what you are browsing from blogs all around the internet. Rovr sits in the background and pays attention to that knitting pattern you are researching and will go hunt for other knitting related articles through the blogs you tell it to. They then pop up as headlines in the sizeable tray. From there you can either click and read just a summary or Ctrl+click to open the post in a new window. More of an information hoarder then a handy tool, BlogRovr is a great way to find trusted information about any particular topic.

These plugins are just a few that I would consider worthwhile. If you see something I missed, let me know!