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).

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

I just want to say first off, sorry for not posting much. I admit I am not good at running a blog. 

I also don’t do a good job of moderating the comments. Unfortunately, I’ve got too many things going on so I’m just not as organized as I should be. Even though I get so many really cool comments, there’s always a few in there that are packed with a sting!

Unfortunately, those comments stick with me.

To give you an example, it seems there are a ton of people out there who don’t believe anything about anyone actually making money online. All I have to say is this is a business just like any other one.  So to think no one makes any money with it is about as ridiculous as you can get. I think most of the people who question everything about everyone making money online probably don’t look at this as a business venture. Obviously, it’s taken me some time to get to where I’m at and I’ve been fully willing to show that here. It’s not like this income just happened overnight. 

So anyway, since I know the earnings are what everyone’s interested in, I’ll get to that here in a minute. But I will be the first to admit that I’ve hit a wall with this for the last few months. It’s not like I’m complaining, ‘poor me I can’t get past $10,000 a month from this’, but I’m definitely stuck there (again, a great place to be stuck). 

I don’t know why, but I have a hard time with that number, it’s my ceiling or something.

It’s like how some people think you can’t make money online, I’ve always had this, “$10K a month from anything is a lot and that’s probably all I can make mentality”.  Even worse I find myself thinking, “wow that’s a lot so now I’ll just stop”. 

It’s funny because I can start 3 things and get them each to $10K a month, but it’s traditionally been very hard for me to get one of them past that.

There are a few reasons why I’ve not moved past that mark yet.  They’re kind of relevant to what a lot of people might be going through so I thought I’d talk about them.

For one, I decided to try to revive one of my other products. This was the first product I ever created and the one that got me into SEO in the first place. Most of the time I spent working for the last 3 months was working on that. 

I did do a little with these content sites, but mostly, I just added content to them.  I did next to no backlinking.

Part of my problem was that I thought I’d throw my computer out my window if I had to submit another article. I didn’t have a system for doing it. Even though I have a service I use (distributeyourarticles.com), it still takes time to copy and paste the articles into their system. I also manually submit them to ezinearticles.com 

I realized even though this only takes about 5-10 minutes to do, I couldn’t stomach it anymore.  I had kind of a mental block going on with the idea of outsourcing it (I think I actually thought someone else couldn’t do a good job of it, which is the lamest excuse ever), but finally took the plunge and do have someone set up to do this for me now.

I’m very happy about that and am busy having articles submitted for me.  I’ve also figured out a couple of other backlinking systems that don’t take much effort from me because I’ve found ways to get them outsourced.

It really is a great feeling to know that even when you’re not working your business is not just earning, but actually growing.  I’d like to remove myself from as much of the tedious, repetitious work as possible now and suggest when you start earning from your sites you do as well. I guess it’s kind of turned into my main business goal for 2011.

It’s too easy to get burned out like I did and then not grow. I would have done anything not to have to build backlinks and lost focus.  Which is exactly why I went back to that old product even though I’d probably be in a better place if I hadn’t spent all that time on it.

The content publishing business is so scalable that it’s a real shame not to keep growing it once you’ve got things figured out.  So if you’re stuck where I was do try to let go of some of the repetitious work.  It’s a nice feeling to give someone else a job, people really appreciate it and it’s so helpful to you.

So right now I outsource articles for article directories in bulk and then I get all the resource boxes organized for someone else to submit them.  So it’s not entirely hands free, but it’s getting much closer.

Obviously if you’re just starting out I don’t suggest this, it’s only once you have a system figured out. 

Please don’t take my success for yours, this is essentially a business model, and just like any other business, you’re going to have to figure some things out on your own and will get better and better with trial and error. So during that stage (going from zero to $1,000 a month) if you don’t have the money to spend just do it on your own. 

Anyway, here’s a re-cap of my earnings, from when I started this to what I earned in December…

Month                        Adsense             CPA                   Total

December           -              $82.44                   $0                              $82.44

January               -              $334.20                 $0                             $334.20

February             -              $473.12                $26.65                     $499.77

March                   -              $818.38                $167.87                  $986.25

April                       -              $1,196.77           $814.15                  $2,010.92

May                       -              $2,715.66             $1,430.50           $4,331.16

June                      -              $2,258.39             $2,525.28             $4,783.67

July                        -              $3,275.59             $3,142.88             $6,418.47

August                  -              $4,756.68             $5,670.15             $10,426.83

September          -               $4,395.73             $5,334.43            $10,426.83

October                -               $4,235.51             $4,048.30           $8,283.81

November          -                $5,033.08            $4,773.38           $9,806.46

December          -                  $4,949.60           $5,274.18             $10,223.78

As you can see, I’m still right around $10,000 a month with this network, but not really much more than that.  Honestly, I was really surprised I made as much as I did in December because these sites are not in the type of market you’d expect to receive a lot of holiday traffic in.  I don’t know why October dipped down so much, could be a lot of reasons, but it was still a decent amount of passive income to be making from sites I set up a year ago.  As you can see it did go back up in November and stayed up in December. 

Again, I really didn’t build any links to these sites. I did however add a little content to some of them. Mostly because I have a few freelance writers I didn’t want to lose and I knew they could use a few jobs to earn holiday money.  The extra content was something I could use anyway and was easy for me to get and publish on the sites so that’s really all I did between October and the end of December.

About 90% of the income is coming in from 4 sites now, but the rest are increasing so I’m putting in a lot of effort into building them up over the next couple months or longer. Here is the December screenshot for the CPA program. Sorry I’m not showing them all, some of them I can’t get at this point and really, if you still need proof from me after reading all the other Truth Reports a couple more screenshots isn’t going to help you J

CPA earnings for December:

Adsense earnings for December:

And here are the Adsense earnings which shows a little more as to the breakdown of where the earnings are coming from.  Two sites earned over $1,000 from just Adsense while 1 was very close; $976.19 and another was $653.52.  The rest were much lower.  But as you can see there are quite a few earning over $50 a month.  So that’s what I’m going to build off of in the upcoming months.

The nice thing is its pretty steady now.  Again, I didn’t do much of anything from about October until after the Christmas holiday.   I keep getting people writing in and asking if the traffic to my sites is dropping because theirs is, and well, no, it’s not. But that’s because I put in a lot of work to make my SEO plan stable.  I go after lots of different keyphrases, not just one, and use lots of different types of links.

I’ve also noticed a lot of folks saying my SEO course is over a year old; geez I guess it’s not the shiny, new thing on the block anymore so it must not be good.  And that’s fine, more for me and the ones who want to hop on the old SEO methods with me.  It’s a lot better than spamming the heck out of forums by building up 100’s of useless forum profiles.  Because Google’s never going to be able to sort that out of their algorithms (sarcasm here if you’re not getting it).

I’ve said it before, but the main stuff I use are directory links, article marketing a certain way, with the same article, just different resource boxes (with different links), RSS feed submissions, social bookmarking, 3^rd party sites, and contacting webmasters.  I also have good content on the sites and most of them have over 50 pages (or will soon). Each page is highly optimized because from my experience you don’t need near as many links to rank high when you’ve at least got your on-site sorted out.

I talked about article marketing in the last File, so this time I’ll go over a little about directory links.  There’s a lot of misinformation about directory links out there. Most people say they don’t work, but I don’t see that. In fact, I’ll even pay to have my sites included in pay directories. It’s definitely worth it.

As a trial, because I recently read that an SEO guy I trust thinks free directories don’t work anymore, I did nothing to a couple of my underperforming sites from this network for a few months except free directory submissions.  The traffic went up significantly.  I’ve noticed that anytime I put in a batch of free directories, the traffic always goes up and stays up, but this was a good test to make sure. So I’m confident it’s still working.

I do try to find services that submit to quality directories. I do write a lot of different descriptions and use different titles when I submit my sites.

So maybe that’s the difference between why I see free directories helping my rankings and other people don’t.   I really don’t know how one person can see such good results and another see no results, so there must be something different in the way we’re doing things.

Anyway, Directory Maximizer works if you take the time to set up your site in their account right (lots of different titles and descriptions and do your keyword research).  I wouldn’t use it as the only means for backlinking, but you can definitely add it to your backlink plan if you want to see results over time.

So that’s just one thing I do.  Again, the article marketing method I laid out in the previous Truth File is something I still do and will probably continue to do for the next couple of years if not more. And that’s because it works and doesn’t take hours to do.

Again, the goal with this case study was to get to $15,000 a month and well, I’m pretty confident I’ll be there at the end of Jan or if not, Feb at the latest. I’ll try to make a post here soon after and share a few of the things I’ve learned from this experience with you. Thanks to everyone who’s been following along.  As you notice, I usually try to answer the questions in the comments for a few days after I post so if you’ve got any, just include them at the bottom.

So anyway, thanks to everyone who still reads my blog even though I am one of the worst bloggers ever.  Waiting 3 months between posts is pretty bad; it’s good some of you try to kick me into gear with your comments!

All the best for a happy 2011!

Lisa