How to Get .info BANS Sites Indexed

03 May 2010 UPDATE: I have given up on this type of business model. It's a waste of time because Google just de-indexes anything that is considered "thin," ie there is no useful information on it. If they don't de-index a thin affiliate site today, it's only a matter of time. So if you want to make money online I suggest you start creating websites full of really good information.

Original Blog Post:
If you are looking for information on how to get your .info BANS sites indexed, chances are you are like me and bought 100 as per Vic's "challenge." When he said to buy 100 .info domains I have to admit that I was surprised because I have always associated .info domains with spam. However I also thought "nothing ventured, nothing gained."

At first the domains were doing pretty well and getting good trickle traffic. However suddenly, like everyone else, I noticed they had all been de-indexed by Google. I hoped that it would just be a matter of time before they got re-indexed but as time passed it seemed like that wasn't going to happen.

Vic talked about getting links to the .info domains but even this didn't work for me. I selected one of the domains and concentrated my efforts on to it. I submitted three articles with Article Marketer, got about a dozen links from Backlink Solutions, threw some links to it from my own sites, did a few comments and also submitted it to a lot of web directories using Director Submitter. It's still not indexed.

I then find out that the reason the .info BANS sites got de-indexed in the first place is because of black hatters creating about 100,000 .info BANS sites using YACG (Yet Another Content Generator).

Although I own 100 .info domains, I only got around to developing around a third of them when the de-indexing occurred. I didn't see any point in developing any more until I found out what has been happening. Anyway, Vic then talked about using the .info domains as part of our infrastructure in terms of either adding blogger blogs to it or perhaps a scuttle site.

I then had an idea about how to get my .info BANS sites indexed and decided to do an experiment. I have only tried it with one of the sites but to my delight I indeed got it indexed. Here's how I got it indexed:-

1. Installed a blogger blog on the index just as Justin describes on his video about setting up a custom domain with blogger.
2. Wrote a welcome post and mentioned how much I love the particular product.
3. Left a few comments on the Blogger Unleashed contest blogs. My blog looked like a piece of shit and thought that the contest bloggers were more likely to approve my comment.
4. Within a few days my .info blog was indexed.
5. I then waited a couple of days more and installed BANS into a subfolder. I only created a home page and didn't work any individual product pages.
6. I then linked my welcome post to the BANS store and wrote some more waffling blog posts about the product.
7. Within a number of days my BANS store has been indexed by Google and is still there.

My .info site is very much in the sandbox however I do rank on the first page for the words in the domain name. I just need to be getting more links to the site as per normal via Article Marketer and such like.

At the moment I am doing the same experiment but installing the blogger blog into a subfolder named "blog" and will then install the BANS site on the root of the domain. If you install blogger into a subfolder just make sure that you have the ftp address as "public_html/blog", otherwise blogger will install all the files in the root of your domain rather than the subfolder.

If you have any .info domains sitting around I suggest you try what I have detailed above and hope you are successful in getting indexed. I have yet to try this with .info domains that I've already got BANS sites installed but will eventually get around to doing a bit more experimenting. If anyone has their own experiences to share, please let me know. Obviously it's all a bit more extra work doing it this way but who ever said that making money online was easy?

How to Make Money Fast

Lots of people turn to the internet as a way to make money online. However the biggest problem people face is being overwhelmed by information. They read, read and read even more and the end result is total confusion. Months can go by with very little action being taken and when people do get started they seem to think that they’ll make money fast. This just isn’t the case and if you think you’ll be able to give up your day job in a matter of a few weeks you are very much delusional. Unless of course you already have skills in internet marketing and SEO etc.

However if you have no skills in keyword research, competition analysis and search engine optimization I suggest that you just get started NOW. Age of a website is one of the most important factors in being ranked well by Google so the quicker you start creating sites and get them indexed, the quicker you will make money. Although I am still very much learning how to make money online myself, I am at a place financially where most people would like to get to. Put it this way, I earn more than Caroline Middlebrook! And I can bet you that I earn more than the average “make money online” blogger who still thinks that getting readers is what’s needed.

So anyway, let’s get to the crunch. If you know nothing about making money online but want a system that will allow you to get started quickly, then here is my guide and this is what I would do if I was starting again. It should be seen as a fast track method ideal for those with limited time due to having a day job and a family to look after.

1. Decide on 10 topics. I suggest you go to ezinearticles.com for ideas. Basically look at the subcategories and turn these into topics for a blog. Stay away from business and finance topics because these are notoriously difficult to get traffic for. My advice is to look at home, hobbies and leisure because there are plenty of people searching for these topics, there are loads of things you can write about and there are also many advertisers (usually). Try and choose a good cross-section of topics such as:-

Motorbikes
Lawn care
Babies
Tropical Fish
Scuba Diving

2. If you don’t have any money to spend you should set up a couple of accounts with blogger. Don’t have more than 5 blogs on the same account and also make sure that you vary the topics on each account. In other words, don’t have 5 blogs all about tropical fish on one blogger account because this will look a little strange if you happen to get a visual inspection.

If you have the money to spend then buy a domain name and get some hosting with host gator. When starting out will only need Baby Croc but if you are keen to get loads and loads (eg 20 or more) of domains then you should get a aluminium reseller account.

Having the keyword in your domain helps a lot so basically you would make up something like Motorbike Chaos or Lawn Care Fanatics. You don’t have to worry too much about the exact domain name, just as long as your main keyword is in it.

3. You might feel overwhelmed at the thought of writing 5 articles per blog meaning you need to write 50 articles. Don’t worry, if you just want to fast track you’re way to creating blogs what you just need to do is write a paragraph instead of a whole article. Let’s just say you’re creating a blog on motorbikes and you want 5 blog posts written. What you would do is decide on 5 article titles e.g. Harley Davidson Motorbikes, BMW Motorbikes, Kawasaki Motorbikes, Motorbike Helmets and Motorbike Maintenance. Just write a quick paragraph for each article and publish it. You can do your research on the company websites or at ezinearticles.

4. Blogger blogs can often get indexed themselves however you should always try and get at least a few links pointing to your blogs. This is much easier than you might think. Just go and create an account with Mister Wong, Mixx and Propeller and add each of your blog’s posts to these social bookmarking sites. I have chosen these particular sites because they have a good high Google Page Rank and allow you do get indexed fairly quickly. Personally I use Bookmarking Demon 4 to submit to all the sites I want.

5. If you’ve decided to go down the route of creating bloger blogs you will want a way to see what visitors you are getting. I suggest you sign up with Statcounter as it’s fee and pretty good. Just follow the instructions on how to add the code to your blog.

This whole process shouldn’t take you long at all and within a week you’ll probably have 10 blogs most of which will be indexed and they can then be allowed to start the aging process. Once you have followed the above advice you can then start reading more on SEO, keyword selection, competition analysis, back links, blog farms and all the other things that Griz, Vic and Court now teach you.

Go back through your blog posts and start turning them into proper posts of about 500 words or so filled with lots of nice juicy keywords. Re-write some of the articles and submit them to article directories and do blog comments etc. Taking action is one of the most important things you will have to do when learning how to make money online and if you simply procrastinate and read lots of blog posts instead you really don’t have any chance in making it in this business. You might also need to practice building confidence.

Free Ways to Make Money Online

If you want to earn money online but have little or no money then there are a number of options available to you.

Blogger

Blogger is basically the only blogging platform I have found that is free and you are allowed to make money from it in basically any way you wish. You can use Adsense and also affiliate links. Just as long as what you have created is not spam and you have looked at the TOS generally. The disadvatage to using blogger is that you don’t really own what you have created. You aren’t allowed to sell your blog, an if you do sell it you probably won’t get as much for it as you really deserve. Also, who knows, blogger might go bust and you will lose everything. This is very unlikely to happen however because it’s owned by Google and they have a very healthy bank balance as far as I know.

Some people might say that you have an advantage with blogger because it’s owned by Google but I tend not to find this to be the case. However you can get indexed without even getting any links but in order to get ranked in Google you need anchored links.

Wordpress.com

Google really seems to like wordpress.com and you don’t even need to get much in the way of links. The problem is that it’s very difficult to make money from wordpress directly due to them being very strict about this. You can’t have adsense or click bank affiliate links. They do allow other types of affiliate links from the likes of commision junction. Just be careful about how and what you write about. Basically, wordpress.com is for social bloggers rather than internet marketers so be careful not to sound too promotional.

Squidoo

These are basically pages that you can make on just about any topic you desire. You can fill the page with text, photos, video, ebay auction and all sorts of other things. You can get a squidoo lense ranked fairly well in Google but you still need to get back links via normal sources such as blog comments and article directories. The downside to squidoo is that it’s very cluttered and if a visitor arrives at your squidoo lens, they can easily get distracted by all the other links and banners available. However unlike bigger and wordpress.com, you can sell your squidoo lens if you like. I have not done this personally however. I basically use squidoo for the purposes of getting links and just fill my lenses with a bit of text that contains a anchored link plus I also stuff them full of ebay and amazon modules just to pad it out. I make a little bit of money but it’s nothing great.

Hubpages

This is a great way to start making money with Adsense very quickly. However they do take 40% of ad impressions so it’s not as good as having your own website. Of course the benefit is that you can create as many pages as you like and pretty much any topic. If you get some anchored back links to you hubs then google will often rank you very well so it’s easy to get quick traffic. Yahoo also loves hub pages. You need to be careful about what content you create though. If you are going after a overly saturated market such as payday loans or weight loss then you need to make sure that your content is extra special and isn’t just a rehash of everything else. I make pretty OK money with my Hubs and it’s a lot better for me personally than squidoo. Hubpages has a much more simple and clean layout so is better for ad sense CTR.

Of course, in order to be able to make money from these free methods you still have to understand SEO. However using these free methods of making money online will only cost you time and will allow you to experiment with SEO and understand it better. Once you have a basic grasp on making money online you can then spend some money on things that are important - ie links. There are many systems/services that you can buy into but not all of them are worth the money as you can read in this 3waylinks.net review.

High Search Keywords to Encorage Sploggers

I came across this blog post Splogger Experiment and saw that it's a PR despite the fact that it contains really no content other than 5000 popular search terms. I've decided not to copy the whole list but have taken some and mixed them up a bit.

dvd shrink
babelfish
baby gifts
barak obama
hiv aids
crate and barrel
fibromyalgia
cheap holidays
hyundai
ich und ich
watchers web
polaroids of my wife
michael jackson
men sucking men
flights
gumtree
online gambling
mega millions
flash
inns
eminem
lavalife
reverse phone number
picpost
outpersonals
nystagmography
us bank
nzdating
ipod movies
mary carey
nj lottery
daily mail
jamie lynn spears
gifts
discount toys
utorrent
resume
dailymotion
yobt
webcam
acer
rental property
rent
bellasartes y tex
match
spanking stories
playoff tickets
mozilla
plus size lingerie
ottawamulti-media
howard stern
elvis
dream interpretation

Caroline Middlebrook LMAO

Have you watched the latest vid by Vic at bloggerunleashed.com called Caroline Middlebrook LMAO? I'ts all about the fact that there are many bloggers out there who pretend that they have their readers' best interests at heart but really they are only looking for ways to make money themselves. Vic has an unusual presentation style but you'll have a much better chance of making money online with him that you ever will with Caroline.

Caroline herself admits she is having a hard time making money online.

Google Took My PR Again

Just as I was saying the other day how to get your PR back, I looked at Shake it Baby and found that my PR had vanished. I have no idea why as I haven't been doing any sponsored reviews. My only guess is that it's because I haven't deleted my account with PPP and someone at google has been manually checking sites listed with them.

I'm not sure if I should bother asking for my PR back again. I don't sell links so it really makes very little difference to me.

How to Get Your Google PageRank Back After PPP

If like me you did some sponsored reviews with PayPerPost (PPP) chances are you have have your Page Rank taken away. If you want it back for whatever reason the best way to go about this is by either deleting all the sponsored posts over 30 days old or adding the no follow tag to the outgoing links.

When you have done this you need to go into your webmaster console and submit a reinclusion request. All you have to write is something like this..

I was doing paid reviews with pay per post but have now deleted (or added no follow to) the links. I will not do any more reviews so please could you give me my PR back.

Because I was doing sponsored reviews for various companies on my blog Shake it Baby I couldn't be bothered to add no follow to all the posts. So I just added them to the links that I did with PPP (I only started blogging for them laterly). I filled in my request and the following day I got my PR back.

However with Natural Health Remedies I still had to wait a few weeks until the 30 days had passed since writing the most recent review. I only put the no follow tag to a few of the reviews and some weeks after filling in a reinculsion request I still hadn't had my PR back.

I then read on another blog that Matt Cutts had left comments about this sort of situation and the problem stems from the fact that bloggers aren't deleting or adding no follow to all the links. The reinclusion request team see this but don't actually tell you that your request was unsuccessful.

So I added no follow to all the links I could and did a re-inclusion request only to have it granted 2 days later.

So if you have requested your PR back and failed, make sure you have done everything you need to otherwise it probably won't get done. It seems however they base their decision on the use of the word "sponsored" so if you have done a review through blogsvertise for instance, they probably won't notice whether you have deleted the link or not.

How to Get Backlinks with HubPages

We keep being told that we need to get as many backlinks from as many sources as possible. The problem is that it's very easy to spread ourselves too thin and we miss quite a few important details.

A lot of people use HubPages as a variation on EzineArticles.com the problem is that it's NOT. You can't simply write an article, add a few links and expect that to be OK. HubPages is a social site but unlike Squidoo, if your profile score dips below a certain number, all outgoing links have the "no follow" tag attached to it.

Some people still think no follow can help with MSN and Yahoo but if you want to rank with Google it's advisable to get regular do follow links wherever possible.

So How Do You Get Do Follow Links With Hub Pages?

I'm by no means an expert but I have spent a little bit of time looking into it. Basically if you're profile is set to Average (of possibly worse) the no follow tag is attached. When you first sign up you're account will be given a setting of Prodigy but you'll quickly lose this if you're not careful.

Simple steps to follow are:-

Comment on other pages. Don't leave crappy "nice page" comments. Leave something like"I'm terrible at boiling an egg; they always crack. It's probably because I have the heat up too high like you said. I will try out your tips next time."

• Join other user's fan clubs. Hopefully they will return the favor.
• Get links pointing to your pages in hope that you get some traffic. If you have a strong StumbleUpon profile you should be able to get at least 50 hits with just the one stumble.
• Update your pages with images, links, amazon and ebay modules, change the wording of text etc.

I think that's pretty much it. HubPages have implemented this rule to prevent spammers from setting up dozens of accounts. Remember the site is a social site so you need to take part. By doing this you'll increase your score and ensure that all outgoing links are do followed.

Feel free to leave some decent comments on my own pages and join my fanclub. I'll try to do the same for you. Click here to see my profile.

April

PS I'm also trying to get my Ellen Page blog indexed, please Google, visit this link.

Update on Daily Dosh

A couple of months a go I wrote a post about how I used an article as a press release. Well, back when the Google updated the PR I decided to have a look to see of any of the article/press releases has any page rank. Well, the good news is that one of them had PR3. It think that's pretty good going and makes the experiment a success.

Another thing I had been doing to promote Daily Dosh was to exchange internal links and blogroll links with some people on Digital Point forums. This was pretty times consuming and not something I would really like to to again. I had so many people saying "I have a finance site, do you want to trade links?"

Of course I bloody want to trade links, that's the whole frickin' point!!!

Anyway, I now have a blog which is PR3. I get nothing in the way of traffic but I really need to dig more into the long tail terms. I wasn't expecting to get any traffic for the site as it was all going to be about selling reviews and links. I'll update it every now and again to keep it ticking over. Maybe one day I'll start to get traffic. I haven't really been doing the long tail article writing, this my only attempt: How to Get Rid of Credit Card Debt. Don't get any traffic to that article either. But I live in hope.

I'll just keep doing a few re-writes and bookmarking.

Why You Shouldn't Write for PayPerPost

One of the things I was thinking of doing with writing paid posts for PayPerPost. But after doing so many reviews on other websites I have come to the conclusion that it is way too much work for the amount of time writing them. It's also pretty sole destroying writing review after review about payday loans, vacuum cleaners and shopping comparison sites.

It might be a good thing to do if you're starting out and don't have any money. Writing 10 reviews at $10 each gives you $100 which you can spend on something like Bookmarking Demon.

Instead of spending all my energy on writing pointless reviews I have decided to put that energy into writing more articles, re-writing for article directories, squidoo, huppages etc plus firing up Bookmarking Demon everyday.

My routines is pretty much:-

• Long Tail- Find a long tail phrase to write about. Generally I just us Google's keyword tool and don't worry too much about finding out what the daily search amounts are. These are never very accurate anyway. I find terms by typing is stuff like "how red wine" or "what flooring." If I really want to get an idea of serch values I use Free Keywords from WordTraker.
• Research - I then go onto a site like EzineArticles or Buzzle and find a couple of articles on the particular topic I want to write about. I then re-write every single word so that I don't get hammered for stealling content. It can take me a while getting my head around the article but once I've finished I re-write it again
• Re-Write and Waffle - When re-writing an article it's a lot easier than the first time. I can therefore write it much quicker and waffle my way to an extra hundred words. I've been trying to write at least 700-1,000 words whereas normally I would only do 400-500. The reason is that Grizz of Make Money Online For Beginners says that you can get more keywords into an article but without keyword stuffing. It might also make you look more authoritative.
• 2nd re-write - I re-write the article again but not 100%. Normally I only re-write half of each paragraph.
• Submit and Publish - Once I have three versions of each article, I submit one to Article Marketer, one to buzzle.com, goarticles.com, hubpages and squidoo then the longest one will go on my own blog.
• Social Bookmarking - I then load up Bookmarking Demon to submit a bunch of URLs from my sites and other people's.

Lately I've just been concentrating on my Home Improvement blog as this is making the best money but I also want to try and bolster up my Food and Wine and gardening blogs as I kind of ignored them because they weren't bringing in any money. They used to be static sites but I really hate using Frontpage so I converted them into blogs.

In addition to this I also re-wrote some flooring articles and added loads more waffle to create a blogspot blog How to Install Flooring. I don't actually give people advice on how to install flooring, I just talk about why people should install that particular type of flooring. Normally this isn't something I would ever consider doing but ultimately I really just want to make money. If people don't get what they're looking for, sorry.

Anyway, back to what I was originally writing about. I want to find ways of getting passive income. By expanding and promoting the domains I already own, hopefully I will only need to do a little work to maintain them and stop them from dying. If I spend all my time writing boring reviews, this is time I'm not researching keywords, writing, re-writing and promoting. Does this make sense?

Another point is that Google will find out eventually that you're writing for PPP and take your PR away. You might say "oh, who gives a toss?!" But you wouldn't be saying that when all your work dries up. It won't affect your ranking in the SERPs but you won't be making money from any other paid review service either. Your blog no longer has any value for any advertiser. They only care about the little green bar. And the chances are that you're writing review because you're not getting SE traffic and not making any money.

So you're back to square one. Not making any money online.