UPDATE—

Yes, I am still using the same exact step-by-step plan I lay out in the InlineSEO System to achieve high rankings and traffic from the search engines. I’m using it still for this network (exactly as I show you in the training system) and for brand new sites that I’m building.  I didn’t think to mention this in the report, but everyone seems to continue asking me this same question so I thought I’d address it upfront.

I’ll be using the same SEO system probably for years. It was something I started doing about 10 years ago and still works so no reason to change it   I think the folks seeking out the latest and greatest shiny new ‘quick and easy’ fad are the one’s who will likely see the biggest problems with their search engine rankings.  Unfortunately, all it takes is a 5 minute visit to an SEO forum to confirm this.

Also, this may be the last Truth Files report I publish. I haven’t decided yet for sure, but 18 months of letting everyone take a peek is kind of a lot so I might stop at this point. 

All the best… Lisa

—-

I hope things are going well for you. I realized that I haven’t posted any new updates from the network of sites I profile in the truth files in a while.

So I spent some time putting together another PDF report. I would have just put it together as a blog post, but it turned out to be pretty long. So you’ll have to download it and you can do so here … Truth Files #5.

Anyway, it covers all the earnings from November of 2009 (when I started the network of sites) until May of 2011.  That’s about a year and a half or 18 months. So this should give you a good idea of the work involved in making something like this happen for yourself. You can definitely do it, but it’s not going to make you rich overnight. However, I don’t know of anything else that will either (unless you buy a winning lottery ticket).

Again, you can read the latest Truth Files #5 here.

Lately I’ve been on the look-out for people doing well through content publishing that seem to have my same core values in mind.

I’m hoping I’ll see much faster increases in my business growth if I start branching out and get a little more ‘connected’ with like minded individuals.

Anyway, the most important value I’ve been looking for is people who are building stable, long term businesses and not just trying to make quick cash online by throwing up sites that offer no real value.  

I’ve managed to find a few online entrepreneurs that fit the bill and the most recent is Cary Bergeron. 

Cary’s been earning well into the 5-figure mark with Adsense alone.

He’s sold sites on flippa for as much as $80,000. 

Although I haven’t gotten all the details from him, from the sounds of it, that just scratches the surface of things. 

We agreed to do an interview for all of you and he’s actually organized enough that we had to block out time in between meetings (his meetings, not mine).  

I work out of a home office and hire freelancers, not employees, but I think he does the opposite. 

So anyway, he’s probably going to pass me up here pretty quick I think, although you never know

I found out about Cary through his Adsense training program called the Adsense Guild (I just want to disclose that this is an affiliate link) when I joined it in November of 2010 (just last year). 

Since joining it, he’s already updated the already fantastic training substantially, has a well tended to forum, is offering unique and useful plugins for wordpress, and overall has impressed me completely.

Oh and the best test is that I’ve seen my Adsense income increase directly from what he teaches.

So I wanted to meet him for my own sake and thought you guys would like to hear from him. 

I know there are a lot of people earning substantial amounts from Adsense and content publishing in general (especially since I’ve been actively looking for and finding them), but most of them are way under the radar and you’re never going to hear from them. 

Most of them have no interest in putting together a training program, like what Cary’s done.

You  sent in a lot of great questions for me to ask Cary and I did my best to pry some good content from him.

After speaking with him a couple of times, I’m sure his core values of building a real business from content sites is 100% in-line with what mine are.

So I’m happy to let you know about his Adsense Guild and think if you want to earn money with Adsense you’ll want to consider this program.

He’s growing a great community of people who are serious about earning with Adsense which can be invaluable whether you’re starting out or are already earning. I wish I would have realized that earlier, which is why I’ve been actively seeking out people to connect with now. 

So here’s the interview in MP3 format.  Download and listen to the Adsense interview here.

If there’s enough interest I might even get it transcribed since it runs over an hour.  Either way, it’s well worth your time.

He gives away several ‘golden nuggets’ on earning with Adsense and even certain niches to get into. 

Again, you can download and listen to the Adsense interview here.

I’m confident you’ll get a lot out of this and if you decide you want to learn more from Cary check-out his Adsense Guild here (just want to point out that yes, this is an affiliate link).

Thanks!

I hope things are going well for you.  As you may know I post updates on my Adsense earnings for some of my sites. And I was able to get to right at about $10,000 a month from Adsense alone in 14 months with a few new sites.

Here’s a screenshot since everyone seems to love them …

Anyway, as you can see, it was $9,580.39, so not quite a $10,000 month, but pretty close.  I also put CPA ads on these sites and the grand total for Jan turned out to be over $15,000 total from this network alone. 

I built these sites in November of 2009 which means it took me about 14 months to get here (and yes, the income has continued). So it’s not an ‘overnight success’, but does show what you can accomplish if you stick with something.  These also weren’t the first sites I ever built, I already had a lot of success online so I was pretty confident this experiment would work out (so please don’t try to build this many sites all at once if you’re starting out). 

If you’ll notice from the screenshot, most of these earnings came from 4 sites, mostly because I realized promoting all of them at once would be too much work.  So I’m doing things differently than most everyone else.  Instead of building small sites that target VERY narrow niches, I build bigger sites and focus on quality.

I feel kind of like I’m out there on this ‘build quality sites iceberg’ alone most of the time.  It’s so popular right now for everyone else to build 500 of the 1 page sites and earn $1 – 2 from each one. Or spam for profile links, or throw-up 1000’s of ‘nice site’ type blog comments and other low quality methods for getting backlinks. 

Anyway, I did happen to stumble upon something late last year that impressed me.  I actually do buy pretty much every course on Adsense and a lot on affiliate marketing as well.  If there’s any chance I’ll learn even a little something, I buy it. 

So I’ve bought it all.

This is the ONLY one I feel good about promoting.

I think I’m pretty good at reading through the B.S. anymore since I’ve run an online business for about 10 years now and have been subscribed to *everyone’s* newsletter at one time or another. 

Unfortunately, most of the stuff out there is garbage.

But this one course is in my opinion the real thing. 

It’s called the ‘Adsense Guild’ by Cary Bergeron. 

Cary seems like a great guy, who’s very successful at Adsense and willing to ‘tell it like it is’. He’s not hyping up his course, there’s no bonuses, it’s not flashy and as someone who’s doing pretty well with Adsense, I can say it’s the real deal. 

He’s actually got a paid forum going on and he personally answers the questions.  If you decide Adsense training is for you and you sign up for his online course, you’ll get access to his forum. Right now you get lifetime access for one price (lifetime meaning the life of his training product, not your lifetime or the poor guy’s lifetime

And although the forum has started out slow (because he’s not hyping himself up like he could), he’s constantly growing it and adding to it. It’s very different from the hyped up launch where the guy in charge is raring to go for the first few weeks and then just disappears. 

I’ve been a member for several months and he just keeps adding good stuff to the online training and still personally answers questions on the forum.  So I’m confident he’s not going anywhere.

So who is this guy? 

Here’s just a few successes Cary has to his name:

• He’s sold several Adsense sites on Flippa; one for $80,000, another for $30,000 (and I’m sure there’s more I don’t know about) …. So he’s not building small junk sites, but bigger, highly trafficked and highly monetized sites.  This model is far superior to what most people are doing and teaching.
• He’s got proof of a $20,000 Adsense month and a $1,000 Adsense day. Pretty darn good and I don’t think he’s been doing this for much more than a few years.
• His traffic methods all rely on free traffic, most of it search engines, but some is from social media and list building, which is very smart because he’s diversifying. I’m excited to learn about this stuff as I focus more on SEO and could use some ‘educating in the rest’.
• He’s building quality sites with good content that actually helps people figure stuff out, solve problems, and give them the information they need. If you do this, you pretty much don’t have to worry about Google algorithm changes (like the last update so many people have still been freaking out about).  You’ll get traffic and it’ll just keep growing.

Right now Cary’s offering access to his online Adsense training course + lifetime membership to the forums for one price.  Although it’s more than a lot of courses, I really can’t compare the quality of it to anything else I’ve bought.

And you’re getting access to him. 

Personally, I wouldn’t be OK giving people access to me through a forum for the one-time price he’s charging.  And with the type of successes he has, Cary could probably easily charge $500 for an hour consult. 

You don’t have to pay anywhere near that to get his Adsense Guild + lifetime access to the forum so if you’re interested in earning from Adsense I think this is a steal.

So go ahead and check it out here (just want to point out that yes, this is an affiliate link).

Also, I might be able to convince Cary to let me interview him sometime so if you’ve got questions on the course or what exactly Cary’s doing I *might* be able to get them answered for you.  Just ask your question in the comment field below and if there’s enough interest, I’ll try to interview him.

Again, learn more about the Adsense Guild here (again, an affiliate link, I will be compensated if you buy).

You may or may not have heard, but Google rolled out a major update to their search engine algorithm last week.

It’s impact is being felt by thousands of online businesses and marketers, many of which went from huge amounts of free traffic to next to none.

It’s being talked about all over the web and although I usually don’t have too much to say about Google algorithm updates there seems to be an almost ‘mass hysteria’ about this one.

I’ve been getting emails asking for tips and questions on what I think about the update so I thought I’d address this here.

First of all, here’s a link right to the “Official Google Blog” so you can read all about it directly from the source:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html

The type of sites that were hit the hardest were those that had what they’re calling ‘low level content’ or little unique content on them. Or at least that seems to have been the intention with this update … Google doesn’t always get it right, especially not right away.  But that was the main intention with this update.

Here’s their quote taken right off their blog:

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

So a few of the sites that saw a decline in traffic included many article directories, the biggest one being ezinearticles.com 

That means the folks who were publishing content to article directories and trying to get traffic from people clicking on the link in their resource box likely saw a very significant decline in traffic. 

Although it’s a shame, this was never a very good strategy, because it’s always better to invest in your own business (or website), not someone else’s.  By writing good content and placing it on a site you didn’t own, you were building up someone else’s business in the hopes of getting a little traffic to yours. 

Unfortunately, now the amount of traffic you’d expect to see from this strategy is even lower, making this already bad strategy a real stinker of a strategy now. 

So hopefully you weren’t doing this.

If you’ve enrolled in my SEO training I spent a good deal of time talking about this and why it was a bad idea.  So I really hope my clients and even those of you who read my blog weren’t focusing on this method of traffic generation.

I’ve also spent a great deal of time talking about how you need UNIQUE content for your sites. This is something I noticed made an impact even as far back as 5 years ago.  It’s even more important now. 

I know there are people saying their sites with duplicate content weren’t impacted, but the whole goal of this Google update seems to be to knock these sites way down in the rankings.

Google will eventually get it right.

So if you’ve got sites that you’ve invested time building links to, but don’t have much unique content, I’d start getting some written ASAP.

OK, so how were my sites impacted from all this?  Not really at all. 

The update seems to have been ongoing throughout the month of Feb and most people agree was *officially* rolled out on Feb 24th (that’s also what the Google Blog says so I’m going with it). Here are a few traffic stats from sites during Feb that get ALL their traffic from the search engines…

The average unique visitors to this site per day in Feb was 654.  As you can see, on Feb 24th (the day of the big update), my traffic was higher than average.

I put “Friday and Weekend” on the 25th, 26th and 27th because I ALWAYS see a major dip in traffic every weekend. That’s just how it works with the markets I’m in.  But according to the screenshots, my traffic came back up on Monday so you can see that my traffic is holding up just fine. 

Here’s another screenshot from a different site. This one gets a really similar level of traffic and earns a good deal of money every month…

Average visits per day in Feb for Site 2 was 641.  It’s the same deal, my traffic is holding up for this site.  I looked at a few others and everything seems fine. My earnings are also stable so everthing’s running along fine.

Here’s what I do though … I have unique content that’s written around keyphrases people are actually searching for. I don’t use ANY shortcuts for this other than by doing extensive keyword research and then pay outsourcers to write high quality content on those topics (I used to write the articles myself, but at this point, I don’t really write anything for any sites other than this one). 

I make sure the freelance writers who write my content can write well and will do research on the topic. If the articles I get back are full of typos and errors I don’t use that writer anymore. If the articles don’t include any research or value to them, I also don’t use that writer anymore. The one’s who do those things, I keep giving jobs to, try to treat them right, am happy to be a reference for them, and try to help them out as best I can.

It’s really that simple. 

If you’re writing all your content on your own, make sure the content is readable and has some value to it.  If you do those things then someday in the distant future when Google gets smart enough to figure out which sites offer value and which don’t (and will be put in the ‘low level content’ pile), you won’t have to worry.  Who knows if and when they’ll get there, but that’s their goal.

Here’s another quote from the Google blog that pretty much sums my point up:

“At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

So lucky for me, I’ve been doing this.

I do want to point out that right now it’s easier to figure out which sites have unique content on them than good content at this point, but I can guarantee they’ll get there.  It’ll probably happen by Google looking at how long visitors stay on your pages than with the actual content on your site, but that’s a good indicator of the value a site has to offer and something that would be pretty easy to figure out how to measure.

The other thing I do is to build a lot of backlinks using a variety of anchor text.  This helps things look more natural.  It also gets me a lot of traffic  because each page might rank high for dozens of keyphrases, not just one.

Here’s an example of the type of traffic I’m able to get (again, this one is ALL from search engine traffic)…

Average visits per day in Feb was 2629. Some days I get as much as 3,500+ unique visitors a day.  Even after the Google update, it’s doing just fine.

Again, I marked Friday and Weekend on the 25th, 26th, and 27th because I always get a dip in traffic on those weekend days.  But my traffic was back just as strong if not stronger on Monday. 

As you might guess, I wouldn’t have even noticed this Google algorithm update if it hadn’t been for the emails I’ve been receiving. And that’s where I want you to be as well.  I hate having to worry about things, especially my income so I try my best to safeguard it. It’s up to you to whether you want to safeguard your business or try to outsmart Google.   

Believe me, I’ve tried to outsmart Google in the past, but wasn’t very good at it, so now I just try to think about where they’re heading with their search engine and make sure my sites fit that model. 

It’s actually a lot easier

Another thing I do is make sure I get links from a variety of sources and would like to think most of these sources are on the up-and-up (meaning, I’m not spamming the internet for links).  I’m not 100% convinced this update targeted low level link building (despite what I’ve read online in between the bouts of mass hysteria), but I’m sure Google is heading in that direction.  They’ll eventually get there too.

I’ve gotten a lot of my links from article directories, but I wasn’t submitting articles for direct traffic, just for linking purposes. There’s a huge difference here.  If I were submitting for direct traffic, like I mentioned earlier, I’d be seeing maybe 10 times less traffic right now.  

I’ve heard a lot of speculation about this, but it seems to me even if a site like ezinearticles.com isn’t ranking as high as it was, the links you got from it still give as much weight as they did before.  I’m 95% sure of this due to what I see with my sites so  I plan to still use article marketing as a form of link building.

I’m going to predict that a lot of top article directories will start only allowing unique content on their sites and will have more strict regulations in place for the quality of the content they accept. If they do, then fine, I’ll get unique content written up for the top few and bet that will be worth the extra effort.

And I really only suggest using article directories for backlinks as ONE part of your link building strategy. You should also use directory submissions (despite what you may have heard, they still work), press releases, bookmarking, RSS feed submissions, third party sites, contacting webmasters for links, and other quality link building methods. Plus as your sites start rising in the search engines and people visit them, you really will get people linking to your sites without doing anything as long as you have some quality content. 

Ways of getting links that I don’t think are very efficient include; spamming for forum profile links, spamming blogs for blog comment links, and other stuff I probably don’t even know about.  These are what I consider to be low quality links and I think they’ll eventually not count for too much. But again, I don’t think this update targeted these.  Start diversifying your link building now and you should be OK later on. 

Essentially what I’ve outlined here is basically what I’m doing.  It’s a crash course taken right from my SEO training — the InlineSEO System. It’s what I’ve been doing for a number of years and I’m sure I’ll continue to do for many more in the future.

I’m not getting penalized by the search engines simply because I’m building sites with value.  No algorithm change will EVER be directed toward sites that offer value.  So if you get that right, you will always come out ahead in the long run.

All the best…

Lisa

I really want to thank all of you who read my posts and make comments on my blog. It’s been really nice to hear all the encouragement.  It’s the last day of the month and I’m excited to share with you that I actually did make it to the $15,000 a month mark with the new network of sites in Jan.

It was barely over $15K, but it was exciting to make that goal. I guess it took me just slightly over a year to get there, which is not too bad. I learned a lot and well, even started thinking about a new challenge for myself in the future.

It’ll take me a little while to put up an official post about reaching the $15K month, and I think I might even want to see what happens in Feb before I call the case study closed (it could always take a couple of months to level off and it might even dip down a little especially since Feb is a short month).

So anyway, I’m writing to let you know that I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a report covering exactly what I’m doing to earn money from content publishing.  With all the comments I keep getting and an interview I did a couple of weeks ago I just got really motivated to put something together for you.

I’ve gotten so many folks asking how exactly I’m doing this it just seemed like I could be of some help if I put this together.

It’s funny, but I think because of all of you, the report kind of wrote itself. It’s over 100 pages and took me just under 2 weeks to write. In a way, it’s probably good to get all that out of my system!

So anyway, it’s something I put together in PDF format and although I will be selling it, I don’t want to make the price too high.  I’m planning on offering it for under $30 (at least at first).

It goes over my model of content publishing and so far the emphasis focuses on going from zero to $1,000 a month.  I think to start that’s all I’m going to do because so many people get hung up on the first steps and gaining momentum.

It sounds like many of you can use this information right now so I want to get this report done before I get too carried away with all the other things I could add to it.

I’ll try to get it finished this week or next and will be sending out more information to you once it becomes available.

Thanks and I hope things are going great for you with your business ventures!

All the best…

Lisa Parmley