I just finished interviewing Mike Spencer about his system for making thousands of dollars a month in Google Adsense…
I love interviewing people like Mike because they’re not “showboats” who need to be up front and center of your attention for branding purposes.
Mike has been quietly raking it in with Adsense for years now, and Matt Garrett, whom I’ve mentioned several times on this blog, told me he’s the most knowledgeable guy he knows when it comes to SEO/Adsense paired knowledge.
When Matt tells me that someone is “high up” in his book as a person to listen to in regard to SEO/Adsense, then I’m all ears.
Mike has to know SEO and Adsense pretty well since his income is largely derived from getting his sites’ pages ranked highly.
So, I interviewed Mike for close to an hour about his Private Adsense Coaching since 5k/month in Adsense residual income is one of my goals for 2009. When we were talking about his system, he mentioned something about SEO that came as a little bit of a surprise to me.
He mentioned that he likes to keep his sites “small” and under 60 pages for best results in ranking his sites’ pages.
I found this rather odd since I always held to the SEO theory that having more indexed pages means a larger footprint out “there” in Internet-land, therefore more feelers being put of there for to attract more traffic.
Kind of like how a gas-guzzling SUV expands your carbon footprint, but in a good way, in my case… I think 
Mike said he likes to build compact sites because the larger the site, the more diluted the link juice of the site becomes, unless it’s one of those true authority sites like Amazon.
Imagine if you have 200 inbound external links to your site. Now, also imagine that the juice of those inbound links are spread evenly across all of the pages on your site. According to this SEO practice/theory, the more pages you have, the less effective your inbound links will be when applied and credited towards your site’s main url.
Kind of like what Obama said to Joe the Plumber when he said, “we take the wealth and spread it around”….
Interesting… and I can see how this would hold true…
I have 2 domain names that I chose to build sites on to promote LinkVana, and Web Prosperity.
The LinkVana blog slowly turned into a link building tips and link building service reviews site since I wanted to keep fresh relevant content on there. So the initial 3 page site for linkvana reviews has now turned into many more pages about related topics. It ranks well without many backlinks to it because of the keywords in the domain name.
The blog about WebProsperity is tight, and on focus and will be a tightly spiralled site.
I’m rambling, I know.. the Ridalin hasn’t kicked in yet….
The point being, that YES, search engines DO like new content and YES, you should add content regularly.
But the goal is to get ranked well, isn’t it? So why not do more, with less effort?
Search engines also love links, and reward sites that get links….. with higher rankings.
So, you can write a ton of content for your sites, or have them written for you, with the hope of getting some long-tail traffic that eventually adds up to a lot of traffic, or just focus on your best KWs and work on getting your pages ranked better.
A tightly spiralled site, SEO-wise, and even design-wise will link to other pages on your site in as many ways as possible.
Think of your website as a tear in you jeans and each time you link from one post to another on your site, it’s as if you’re applying needle and thread to tighten things up.
Sometimes a month or so after a product launches, I will look to see what sites did well in the long-run and what I find is that the sites that did well were either old, aged domains with a lot of inherent link juice, and already have a lot of their pages ranked well.
I also see some new sites that have only a few backlinks, but ranking well due to having a tightly spiralled site. This is proof that on-page optimization can be just as important as off-page optimization…
Some properly built, silo-style, tightly-spiralled sites will outrank other competing sites that are not as well built, SEO-wise and their competitors will never know why… You can easily build silo site structure sites, and you can even take your current old sites and make them go “silo” with a simple plugin. Silo site structure is a way of building your site to make it easier for the search engines to categorize/rank what your site is about.
How do you make a tight SEO spiral?
- Keep the site small in size, have no more than 60 total pages per site unless you’re going to make it a true authority site with a lot of incoming links and unique content being added on a regular basis…
- Inner-linking, or inter-linking - Link to inner pages of your site from other pages on your site whenever possible (which means every post). Example: When you write a new blog post, link to a previous post or page…
- Add to your site’s link juice- this is the power behind the arm throwing the tight SEO spiral….the more external links you have pointing to your site, the stronger the arm is that’s distributing link juice and page rank down to your new posts and pages, if that’s how you want it set up. Silo site structures tend to keep the theme bleeding and PageRank bleeding down to a minimum, but Mike’s method for building sites wants the page rank to be bled from main site down to the pages because he knows there’s going to be a limit on the PageRank bleeding due to him only putting 60 pages, maximum on his sites.
The more pages and posts you have, the more diluted the link juice will be and the more links you’ll need just to keep up with things.
When I learned this, I realized that I’d made some SEO mistakes in the past year or so…
I’d been trying to get ranked for sub-keywords by getting backlinks when all I had to do was just go “wide” with my domains strategy and get a domain name with my sub-keywords in there.
Once I got a good KW-rich domain name, I was page 1 in 3 days for my terms…
Point being, Adsense guys need a lot of domain names in order to target new niches easily…and their goal is to get their pages ranked quickly by throwing a tight SEO spiral.
Please do NOT waste time trying to rank well for keywords when all you have to do is get a domain name with the keywords in there and create some content based on the sub-keywords.
My story: One of my first products was a free report on the top ten internet marketing mistakes. I gave this 82-page report away via squeeze pages, and it converted well, but I wanted to automated that list-building so I tried to get that squeeze page ranked highly in the search engines for the term (internet marketing mistakes).
I wrote some EZAs (ezinearticles.com articles), got backlinks to the squeeze page itself and did many other tactics to make the search engines notice this page. So far, the results were not very promising. The squeeze page wasn’t properly built with all that privacy policy and terms and conditions stuff at the bottom, so it just never ranked well.
So I got a keyword-rich domain name for internet marketing mistakes, made a blog post, pinged it out, and was page ONE in a couple of days… I also wrote an EZA article which linked back to this site, and now I have 2 spots on page one of Google for my terms.
Now I’m practicing what I preach and started to build another internet home business reviews site as a reminder that I may have been wasting time trying to get rankings for domain names that were self-limiting.
Point being, you can do more with less time and effort if you’re willing to spend a few bucks on domain names…
I think it also forces you to ask yourself,
“What is the goal of this site, what do I want this site to do for me, what will I write about, how will I promote its pages and posts etc…”
and asking these questions lends focus to your marketing efforts.
Do not confuse motion with accomplishment, be smart, work smarter, not harder
NOTE: When inner linking, it’s better to open link in SAME window, not open in NEW, but it requires testing to see if sending people off your site via “open in new window” when clicking on affiliate links is a good idea
Download Targeted Subscribers Wordpress Plugin Here
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Dan,
Good article, thanks!
How is your 5k/month with Adsense plan is going on, is the tightly spiral site idea really working for you?
))
You also mentioned you put up a new “internet marketing mistakes” site and it was on page 1 in a couple of days without any backlinks, that’s great!
However, I have looked at the search volume for that keyword in Google and it’s only 170 searches per month plus the site is at the bottom of page 1, so I suppose you don’t get much traffic for that, do you?
So my feeling is that counting on just the keyword-rich domain to bring sensible traffic without any SEO is probably not such a great idea, as the most competitutve domains have been bought out, and less competitive do not bring much traffic. What do you think about this?
YES! Nice to see you know what you’re talking about here…
The tightly spiralled 5k/month with Adsense is coming along slowly (lots of writing) but Adsense will get turned on in about 1 week from now. Instead of dropping all my other activities to go build 60 sites, I’m working on 6 new ones right now so we’ll see how that plays out in a week or two.
Regarding the IM Mistakes blog and SERPS, watch what I do with that site, the on-page SEO will change, but I really did it to prove (once again) that the right domain name choice is the biggest shortcut to ranking well, as you probably know.
Also, I will front-end load that site with backlinks to give it some linkjuice and will use it as a backlinks generating site to my “EZAs”, other blog’s posts, etc…
But really, I just built that site to prove how much time I wasted on trying to rank well with a squeeze page, plus it migh tbe of some use to people who think they, too, ar emaking internet marketing mistakes.
Make sense?
Thanks for the inquiry,
Dan
Oh yeh, absolutely!
We all learn through mistakes in most cases anyway, so at least you now know the answer for yourself!
KW-rich Domain name is great, you are right, but it’s difficult to find one that would have a big volume of searches (a few thousands a month maximum), but even if you are lucky and found that, for the competitive name it’s unlikely to rank well without any link building, cos other people, who have not been so clever or lucky in choosing the right name, will fight for it to rank high with an effective off-page SEO.
So either way, it’s not so easy to make a business out of just “the right” domain name nowadays, but your experiment was quite demonstrative!
With reagard to the Adsense business – The fact that you decided to concentrate on 6 sites instead of 60 is definitely a good move to me, as if you can prove that the idea’s working on a few sites – than it’s just a question of time to sacle it up and earn more. So that’s a smart move of yourse, Dan!
The only thing that puzzles me is that it would be difficult to update 60 sites on regular basis, and, I am sure, you know that for the sites that are not updated frequently enough it is difficult to rank high especially in a competitive field.
So I wonder what’s your plan on the content development – are you planning to hire copywrites to help you with regular updates or what are your thoughts on that?
Tony
Tony,
Yes, it’d be difficult and time-consuming to write to 60 sites daily over even weekly. To write to 60 sites just once a month is 2 posts/day, which isn’t much but a PITA when dealing with niches I know nothing about.
The idea here is to slow down the pace of the unique content addition once site is full of unique content (7-12 posts) and to continually slow it down over time.
When site is making $1.00 a day, that’s $30.00/month and you can get good articles written for you for $2.00/article so your content is taken care of for half the income your sites’ earning.
When site’s earning 3-5 bucks a day it’s even better ROI, but honestly, you can get away with weekly postings at some point.
Regarding the position of my Mistakes blog, you should know that SERPs vary up and down and sometimes disappear, but right now it appears to be ranked in Google #3 for that term ( http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS304US304&q=internet+marketing+mistakes&btnG=Search ) behind a PR 4 and PR 3 posts, and outranking a .com site with the word “my” in front which seems like a limiting factor to ranking well.
At the moment it escapes me what those words are called (delimiters?) that don’t lend wieght to your rankings (words like the, of, by, my if, you etc…)
Anyways, the point has been proven regarding the point that choosing the right domain name will save you a lot of time, and I am doing this with other sites as well.
Back on point, there are plenty of domain names available that will work just fine…
heading over to namecheap.com right now…
let’s see…
OK.. back…
1makemoneyonline.net AVAILABLE
1makemoneyonline.org AVAILABLE
makemoneyonlinenow.me AVAILABLE
makemoneyonlinehow.net AVAILABLE
makemoneyonlinehow.org AVAILABLE
dogtrainingtips.me AVAILABLE
earnmoneyonlinehow.net AVAILABLE
earnmoneyonlinehow.org AVAILABLE
I could do this all day… plenty of domain names available with inherent goodness to them for SEO. As long as KWs are in url of domain name and title you’re stacking the deck in your favor.
I’m a hockey fan, and my team is the Boston Bruins. For years, we had hard workers, “plumbers”, they were called… getting themselves to the playoffs almost every year but never going deep into the playofffs.
A poorly chosen domain name is sort of like that, you’ll need a lot of hard work (read = backlinks)
to accomplish what talent (read = kw-rich domain name) does easily. Combine talent and hard work and you’re golden, right?
.
Tony, I checked your site out and was wondering why you have a calendar on your site!!!???
It’s a cause for endless spider-looping, the spiders go from one day to next, to next, to next week, next week, month etc… and besides the calendar really offers ZERO value to the visitors.
To me that’s like an email marketing specialist not using AWeber or Get Response, but using a freebie autoresponder…
What gives?
Thanks for the warning, Dan. As I am rather new to bloggind and to WP in particular, I didn’t know about that. Will remove the calander now.
The words you were talking about are called stop-words
I agree with you that having a KW rich domain helps a lot and makes site promotion so much easier. BTW, I am currently experimenting with a new KW-rich uk-domain and, if you are inetersted, will let you know in a few weeks how it is going.
As far as the Adsense business is concerned, I think that idea of having tens of sites each earning a few bucks is not that appealing to me. First of all, you would need to drive a lot of traffic even to make a few bucks a day, and that means a big load on server, most likely you would need several powerful servers to run 60+ sites, which in turn means hiring someone to maintain them plus good servers are not cheap as you know.
But those are just technical problems. The conceptual problem is that Adsense doesn’t pay that much (unless you are in a very lucrative and hence rather competitive niche). I am not sure if one can make 5k/month without much investment and overheads (servers, maintainance, domains, content purchasing, perhaps even paying for link building too, as the amount of work for one person is tremendous!)
I personally have been nourishing an idea of making just a few sites that merry offer and demand (e.g. freelance jobs, buyer and sellers, students and teachers and similar kind of sites), where most of the work is done by users themselves, whereas all you need to provide is a good and effective support.
Anyway, that’s me.
But I like your idea and determination with regard to building the adsense network, so I wish you good luck and when you succeed perhaps I could learn from you 
Hey,
I used to think that, too, that Adsense is clicks for pennies when affiliate marketing is more of an art form.
Getting high-rankings is the key here, Get top rankings for terms that get searched a lot, and let traffic come to you. Simple.
The more I think about it,the more I see it as a true business, because I can hire anyone to do these sites just by making a few simple videos, and I can walk away from it and expect a check every month.
But if I don’t email my list they’ll forget about me, and even though people say they hate getting a lotof emials, if you don’t send regularly, you’re ruining a nicely built asset by trying to be too niche.
Anyhoo, that’s marketing, Adsense sites wit hinque content might only make pennies a day, but it is more scientific…
Gather up your KWs list
Choose good domain name
Write unique articles around those KWs..
Get links to your articles /posts until you rank well.
Rinse and repeat…
Simple money-making method and really more of a true business than anything else that ties you to a computer or autorepsonder
Hey, it works!
My new domain http://www.discountcouponsonline.co.uk is TOP7 on its full name on Google.co.uk just 10 days after I put up a site! And according to Yahoo it only had 4 backlinks when it got there (now – 11)! So your assumption is working, Dan.
A drawback however is that it brings negligible traffic even being on top7 (less than a visitor a day), so as I said before Google adwords tool does not seem to give natural searches.
Right, of course that works, simple as knowing what the search engines value. Back in the day, webmasters were metatag stuffing their sites, so the SEs make a change and gave KWs in domain name more weight, and title of sites, too.
Since you saw my Mistakes Blog, I assume you read this?
Using the Google External Keyword Tool For SEO Purposes Is A Mistake
BTW, I’m still #1, sometimes #3 for the KWs that site was optimized for, no big deal.
P.S. If you’re learning something valuable here, a link to this blog from your SEO blog would be appreciated (HINT!, AHEM!)
No, I have not read that article before, but it’s nice to know that have come to the same conclusion as I did, a bit earlier though
))
With regard to learning and a link – yes, I certainly learn something from your blog, as well as from many others. We all do, no matter how experienced we become, don’t we?
And yes, I could certainly put a link to your blog on mine, and I would also appreciate a link from this or the other (IMM) blog of yours.
Hey Man, I went through the same process, funny thing is, what happens in this industry is someone mentions it on a forum, bunch of people go check it out, ….next thing you know there’s these “gurus” telling people about the revolutionary new KW research tool called Google.
Too bad, they didn’t test and research things prior to shelling out flavor-of-the-day nonsense.
I use Wordze for the rare times I need to do keyword research for true SEO purposes, it’s great.
Google is first praised to the high heavens here:
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/945/google-keyword-tool-gets-a-whole-lot-better/
Then reality sets in:
(see part under 1st screenshot of WORDZE on this post) referring to Google Sandbox as the amateurs KW Research tool.
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/726/wordze-review-the-king-of-keywords/
Anyhoo, glad you’re learning something here..
Good content is supposedly the best SEO, so I really shouldn’t have to ask for a backlink, it’s expected if you really do appreciate the content.
And when your content is worthy of backlinks, you can expect that, too
Expect a backlink from me when I see something about LSI that’s new to me, like the 2 quickest and easiest ways to build a silo-structured site with categories designed for LSI (HINT: WP plugin and Google search), and how to quickly do LSI-based keyword research for your sites, although I do think LSI is something it could take forever to figure out and could tie you up for weeks and months.
Let me know when you figure it out, or I can tell you privately how to test this out.
SKYPE me SKYPE aikidoroll
Another interesting thing I’ve noticed is when blog commenters use KWs instead of their names, like (WebProsperity Review, or SEO company or something), the comment is added to that page’s content, but when KWs are used as commenters’ “names” it helps the page itself rank higher if the kws for the bloggers name are similar to what the posts was on-page-SEO0ed for…?
Make sense, or are we delving too deep into the minor issues and minutiae of SEO here?
Thanks,
Dan
I see, you’re taking me for a newbie, Dan?
I am NOT, really. )) I am relatively new to affiliate marketing, but in terms of SEO I could write a book without using any extrenal sources. No kidding 
What you say about the page ranking higher when a commentor name overlaps with the artcile’s content, makes perfect sense to me, as comment name is an ANCHOR! And you probably know, that for good ranking not only having a lot of inbound topical links is important, but having many outbound topical links is vital too! Especially, when those links lead to artciles that expand on the content of referring artcile and provide additional related info. Hope that make sense too?
P.S. Wordze is a paid one and not much cheaper (40 bucks/month) than wordtracker. So I would really use it if I needed it on regular basis.
With regard to Skype, I have an acount, but my laptop somehow doesn’t like skype and keep closing it, LOL )) So we could talk on msn (windows live) messenger, if you have an account there. Mine is velant[at]hotmail.co.uk