4 Internet Marketing Cornerstone Beliefs
With the amount of crap on the internet and my plan to build multiple websites to earn money I didn’t want to be part of the problem. So a couple years ago I started with 1 belief “Always Add Value” I believed that whatever I did online as long as I added value I would be helping to make the internet a more awesome place.
This one belief has grown into my 4 “corner stones” when it comes to how I run my website businesses.
If you have found this site than I hope you agree with these.
If you disagree with these beliefs that’s OK.
But, I doubt this website will be for you, thank you for visiting!
ONE – Always add value
For me I didn’t start out with this belief but it is one I try and stick to now. The internet is an awesome place with many great places to share our thoughts and opinions but with the ease of access also comes the ease of spammers to leave crap all over the internet.
If whatever you are doing online does not add value to a human than it is not worth doing.
Link Building Activities That Add No Value & I Don’t Believe In:
- Unreadable Spun Content
- Any automated linking (forum signatures, comment, directory submission, bookmarks, social media)
- Comment Spam (I hate this one, if you are going to leave a comment add some value!)
TWO – Google wants to deliver the “best” result so be the “best”
With so much discussion around how to get to the top of Google for a given search term the one point that often does not get discussed along with the other
You don’t have to worry as much about all the SEO consideration…
- # of backlinks
- Do follow vs no follow
- Likes
- Anchor Text
- Exact Match
- Keyword Density
- Header Tags
- Latent Symatic Indexing
- Bounce Rate
- +1’s
- Time on site
- Internal vs External Link
- …etc
Just have the best content and user experience for a given topic and in Googles own words
Now I know this is a little naïve and the search engines are not at a point where the best automatically rises to the top but we are always getting closer so in the words of Wayne Gretzky “go where the puck is going to be not where it is”.
THREE – My websites visitor is a renewable resource to be developed not mined
I believe there are 2 ways to think about the visitors to your website. The first and unfortunately more popular way is to think of the visitor to your site as not as smart as you and yours to trick into buying an item or clicking on an ad. This thinking leads to exit popups with the close button hard to find, ads covering 90% of the above the fold area of the page and $19.95 get rich quick EBooks that provide little to no value.
FOUR – Enjoy the work that I do
Some people online call this following your passion, do what you love, make money from your offline passion. My definition is to enjoy what I do and since I am a huge outsourcing and process geek setting up systems and managing them is fun. So I can enjoy going into markets I have very little interest in since I find the process of working with my talented team fun! This works for me but for many people I know online they get the most fulfillment by writing about and interacting with a market they share a common interest in.
Since I have adopted these cornerstones I have stopped doing several link building tactics which were working at the time. However, since I stopped those activities Google has rolled out updates which penalize those tactics. I believe following these beliefs will help me build a reliable income from my websites.
If you disagree with these beliefs that’s OK.
But, I doubt this website will be for you, thank you for visiting!
I couldnt agree more with you. I spent almost 1.5 years building up a bunch of horrible websites that were making almost $200/day all to have them taken down by Google.
When I look back it is clear that I was no “adding value” as you say and if I had focused more on adding value than on my silly link wheels my sites would probably still be around making money.
I may have to join you and create my own authority site.
Tiff thanks for sharing your story. Unfortunately I think most people who end up having success online have gone through their phases of black hat/grey hat/white hat.
Best of luck in re-building your business.
Jon, how do you manage to constantly write content on 150 site? i can barely manage 2!
Are you worried at all about Google taking down “thin sites”?
Sam
Hi Sam, the truth is there is no way to write for 150 sites. Of my 150domains I have about 75 that have content and get traffic, the content for these sites are outsourced via ODesk. Some of these sites were affected over the latest Google updates hitting exact match domains and thin sites.
I am not worried about Google taking down “thin sites”, I believe what Google is doing is raising the barrier to entry and when that occurs in a marketplace the results are predictable…
As the barriers to entry increase a bigger share of the pie(visitors/readers/money) goes to a fewer number of entities(websites)
So Google taking down “thin sites” definitely hurts some of my current portfolio of sites but also provides a larger reward for having authority sites that provide real value.
Thanks for your comment!
Jon
Thanks for your thoughts Jon. Got your e-mail. Writing for 75 sites is still quite an amazing fee. I’m trying to write about 5,000 words a week for the next 7 weeks, and we’ll see if I can sustain. 5,000/week, or even just 1,000 words a week X 75 sites = 75,000 words a week! I think I’d probably give up blogging altogether to try and build authority sites.
If Google is changing their algorithims, is it not better to dry and go deeper into fewer sites instead of wider with many sites?
Sam
btw, there is no respond notification option to your commenting system.
Sam, I think I led you astray, I dont personally write all the articles. I do try and write 3-4 really good posts each week and then outsource the bulk of my content creation.
Many of my 75 sites get 1(or sometimes less) article on them per month.
Thanks for the feedback on the “reply to your comment” notification, it has been added.
I’m curious to find out what blog system you are utilizing? I’m having some
minor security issues with my latest blog and I’d like to find something more risk-free. Do you have any suggestions?
I am using wordpress, the key to security is this…
1. Secure password
2. Keep wordpress, plugins and themes up to date
3. Install a handful of the top security plugins like this list…http://www.e3corporate.com/wordpress/essential-security-plugins-wordpress/
Hope this helps & thanks for the comment
I kind of came up with those same conclusions about my own websites without having ever articulating what I was trying to do.
I have a few affiliate marketing websites, that although they’re making money, not spectacular money but enough to give me a few extra dollars every month, I really don’t feel much passion about. I thought that once they started making money I would become more passionate about them. Instead I feel less.
Everything I was doing with them was all about making them good enough to make money. The content I created was good content, but only because I wanted a good website, not because I wanted to help anyone with a problem.
This sort of gets convoluted. I did want to help people, but not because I really wanted to help people, what I wanted was for them to like my content, click my links, buy the affiliate product and earn a commission. Everything I was doing was done to earn that commission.
It was exciting at first, the sense of earning those first few commission checks was heady stuff indeed. But after that initial rush, I don’t know, I guess it starting feeling hollow. Maybe there’s something wrong with me that I couldn’t get excited about getting people to buy some product that I felt zero passion about, but it just wasn’t enough.
Anyway to keep this as short as possible, after some floundering around I realized that one of my hobbies and favorite pastimes would be the perfect niche for me. Ranking won’t be easy, but I’ve found a couple of sub-niches that I think I can do well in.
Writing content is so easy now, the words just flow out onto the page. This last weekend I had a goal of creating 2 new posts of 800-1000 words each. I didn’t quite make that goal. The 1st article is done and posted, but it came in at a little over 1700 words. I haven’t finished the 2nd article yet, it’s sitting at almost 3500 words and will probably clock in at a little over 5000 words when done. I’m not even sure I should publish an article of that length, but it’s some really good work and I hate breaking it up into separate articles and kill the way it flows. (any advice?)
Haven’t made a dime yet, but love what I’m doing. Hoping the money will follow the passion, but we will see.
Anyway, thanks for all the great content you’re publishing. It is some of the best stuff I have ever read on the subject anywhere. Wish I had run across it sooner.
I was fortunate enough to locate your site from a google search and read about PBN…. the more pages I read, the more I realized that I had to get to the beginning… to study the growth of your project(s). I really appreciate your sharing of your thinking and techniques.
daveM