A Simple Strategy to Make Money Online with WordPress

Caroline,

A great article and one area that I’m working on at the moment. I’m too an avid reader of Garry Conn and I think he’s got a lot of knowledge to pass on. I know you are concentrating on a static niche site, but I think it’s easier for me as a newbie at setting up a bunch of niche sites to use a blog, have all the plugins (all in one SEO especially) and publish the content daily with the wordpress time stamp. I’m not saying that I would post everyday, just at the start I would release the posts each day so google and other search engines would know to come back and quickly index my new pages.
Also, thanks for pointing me towards the WP Manager, looks like it might be a good resource to manage the different blogs from.

I’d also be interested how much you would re-write the PLR articles for SEO?

Hello Caroline and Nick,

You know what? It is moments like this that really inspire me to work even harder with helping others. On my site I have a handful of regular reader/commentators, but within this last week alone, I have come to realize how far my broadcast signal carries.

I am so happy to discover the lengths in which my content help, motivate and support others in the community. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to write about me. That is truly awesome and very much appreciated.

Best Regards,
Garry Conn

Caroline,

That is a great article, but your ebook is incredible.
Congratulations for a great product, I wonder why you did not sell it, you might get big bucks out of it!
I love the ideas you have, I will put them to work.
I will come back and let you know how I am doing.

Unfortunately, in Italy we do not have PLR Articles, so I will have to actually write something down and it will take longer, but I guess I can deal with one site per week!

Thanks again and keep up the great work!

Francesco

Another great article Caroline.
Your writing and ideas are very useful. I have just the one blog at the moment. But after reading your ebook I decided that I need to start up some new sites. Blogging did seem to be q bit too much if I had to write and post for several of them daily. So small content websites will be the way forward for me.
Thanks once again.

I found out the hard way that running many niche sites built with wordpress (over 80 on one server) causes extreme loading and will have your hosting company wanting you to upgrade. Since that time I found there are plugins (ie WP-Cache) which help offset the load significantly.

@Nick, so far I have not used any PLR content. I did experiment with it for another niche but I have since abandoned that one. For my current site I write the content myself from scratch.

@Garry, no problem at all, it’s refreshing to see when people really break down exactly *what* they do to make money - it’s an inspiration to the rest of us and shows us that it really is possible.

@Francesco, check out the earlier posts on my ebook project page as on there I explain exactly why I have chosen not to sell the book.

@Ayopeju, that’s great to hear but don’t start so many that you get overwhelmed like I did with my high paying niche experiment where I tried to start three at once and fell flat on my face! One at a time hehe.

Thanks for this great site and your great heart and integrity in being so honest and sharing your experience. It gets tiring to go through so many “huckster” blogs and sites that are no more substantive than tv infomercials or even when a blog author is seeming to be open, to not be hiding behind a curtain, that you still feel you are somehow being played.

I don’t know if people still remember how the Internet was founded on the idea that openness, exchange and cooperation would make the world a better place. All of use owe a great debt that it was such people that first formed and developed the Internet and not Time Warner, etc. or the “little guys” with the same corporate intent of putting commercialization and manipulation above exchange and giving value equal or exceeding.

Please continue being genuine and relating to others. I hope and believe the rewards will come and though I am just starting out, I hope to be a part of that to you.

Very interesting idea. I’d not really considered this option before. I currently have two blogs and another launching on Wednesday. But I know that with part-time blogging, I am limited in how much I can do. Having some static sites may be a great addition to my growing network. Something to think about.

Now I’m off to check out this Garry Guy. : )

Very excited for you Caroline as your eBook is popping up all over the internet it seems! I thought your ebook was great and the idea of creating lots of little income streams is very enticing.

I also like the idea of creating one authority website to use as leverage. Having a value-packed site that gets lots of organic traffic can be a real boost if you choose to start a new website. The idea of leverage makes creating new websites exciting.

Congratulations again on your ebook!

Another angle to look at the million-and-one blogs from is this - how many of you have trouble staying “on topic” on your blog? You’ll think of something you’d really like to write about, but it just wouldn’t be right on your “main” blog, and if you filled your personal blog with such odd posts it would sound like the rambling of a crazed madman.

So what to do? Throw those ideas away, or have a blog for each and every “niche” you have good thoughts for posts on?

Well put together, Caroline. One thing I would suggest regarding the decision between many small niche sites and a large authority site is that you should be doing both. Use the power of all of your small niche sites to build linkpower to a central authority site. For example, a large authority site could be about sports, and then you build niche sites at least once per week about snowboarding, skiing, bowling, etc. Each new niche site serves to “push up” the central site as well as make a little bit of money.

I see some Garry suspended some of his websites… uhm looks like most of them… check out getpaidtocomment.com, pixellinkads.com, topcashjobs.com …

Thanks Caroline for the informative ebook on WP niche websites. I followed the step by step and downloaded all the plugins, etc and this has made my website/blog looked so much better. I like the way you are sharing what you are learning to all your readers and wish you much success in 2008!

@Richard, aww thank you :) Yes I have every intention to continue sharing what i learn and I’m sure if I started to turn into one of those sleazy marketers people would smack me in the head!

@Patrick, yes it is popping up everywhere but that’s not accidental. A while ago I blogged about my email marketing campaign - I started it yesterday and the results started to trickle in right away :)

@Ben, yeah that’s a good point and something I was reading about yesterday on a new blog that I found (http://makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com/). In there Grizzly was saying that he checks his keywords and finds new ones that are related to his niche but not quite on-topic then he starts new sites on those niches.

@Aojon, yeah that is a brilliant strategy if you can do it but it requires that you really know your stuff to be able to pull it off.

Yeah, I’ve considered that. I run AdWords on my online store site, and even though I’ve got over a dozen ad groups going, one group always generates a lot of the clicks. I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up another, smaller, more targetted shop just to catch and cater to those people. Of course, then I’d have to expand my stock in that (rather expensive item to stock) area…

I am on blogger not on WP but last week I made a discovery that prompted me to write Make Money Online Monetizing Blogs: I Cracked the Code.
I believe it is possible to make money (by money I mean enough to sustain a living) using that theory.
My blog covers making money, saving money, and even a bit of blogging advice so I think if I keep writing good content on it while at the same time creating new blogs (one about freebies, one about money-saving tips, one about writing articles…) using PLR, I am on the way to making more money. I am thinking about creating about 30 blogs all linking to each other but I will only do this if it does not stop me writing on my original blog. I have started already, and so far I am not even using PLR so much but I make sure that I try to link to good blogs in my posts.

I currently manage 4 blogs and 5 websites, all using Wordpress. Since I´m a freelance writer, I also ghostwrite for 9 other blogs that are not my own.

Wow, I just found your site via ShoeMoney tonight on my BlackBerry. I could not wait to get home to see it on a real screen. This is great. You are doing exactly what I am trying to do — you are just 4-5 month ahead of me. I am trying several things — blog based authority sites, small static sites, ebay niche stores, afilliate links, etc. I started in December, and I have 3 sites up with 4 and 5 coming up this week. Two sites are PR1 already (I am pretty happy about that).

My “problem” is that I still have my day job. All of this work is getting done from 10PM to 2AM — but I am so excited. I subscribed to your feed, and can’t wait to see your next post.

BTW — I am a SW geek like you. I just switched form b2evolution last week to WP. I enjoyed your ebook very much — wish I had seen it last week. :)

Good luck!

@Mark, yeah day jobs are a nuisance aren’t they. It really annoyed me having to turn up at 9am every day so I quit :p

Interesting post, great read of the day I might say. Keep up the good work!

-Mike

A great article that is the perfect follow-up to your original ebook on doing niche sites with WP.

One thing that stuck with me from your ebook was your comment regarding how it’s better to do such niche sites based on a blog engine given the whole ping mechanism that happens when a new page is created and how various search engines can be alerted of it. Does anybody happen to know if building such niche sites from scratch in WP also has some positive results on the so called Google sandbox effect?

Thanks.

Why not start the niche blog with ezinearticles then post orig content as time allows?

@OnlineSmarts, one thing I am not sure about is whether or not it is possible to use pinging services manually so that if you chose to host your site in another way such as plain XHTML (rather than WordPress), you could still ping them when you update.

@Mark, yup that’s another solution to the content problem though if you used the articles as-is then you would be competiting with the originals in SEO terms so you may not rank so well in Google as EzineArticles has a habit of ranking quite highly. Still as you say, it’s a good source of content in the interim.

I think many pinging services support an API so you could write some php or Perl to ping from your site. I think you could write code to ping feedflare for example, and then you could use feedflare to ping others.

I should also say, that is a reason to use something like Wordpress — so you can leverage the work of other people on things like pinging, adsense, etc via plugins and themes.

@Mark, yeah running a simple site with WordPress is so easy because of the themes and plugins etc. I remember the bad old days when I would try to build sites with FrontPage and I had nightmares!

Hi Caroline, your blog is the only one that captured my attention for more than 5 minutes. I’m spending more time now reading your mind, since yesterday when I discovered it.
Very inspiring and motivating. Thank you!
Your ebook is awesome!

Hello Caroline and Readers,

my name is Nicola and i am an italian internet marketer.

I landed to your website which is very inspirating: my true and sincere compliments for your work, and also for your decision to quit daily job… i am looking to do the same but italian market seems very different and blogging is actually very different here, there are just a few professional blogs and tons of personal blog (with loads of unuseful content)…. so it is difficult to rank the SE pages…. i am brainstorming it :)

Thanks for your great WP eBook, i am reading it.

Ciao!
Nicola

Nicola Boschetti’s last blog post..Collegamento a Internet con ADSL

@Nicola: I think you’ll find most countries have similar signal-to-noise ratios, which is a good thing really.

To me it means if you consistently supply good content that appeals to people, and if you market yourself through the usual channels, you should be able to rise above the chaff.

In this age of ubiquity where an awful lot of people know how to market themselves online, more and more it comes down to how people say something as much as what they say.

Let’s see if Comment Luv figures out my plain ole vanilla RSS feed this time…

I think there’s something in this idea, but I would shift it toward the middle ground between trying to establish one “giganto-authoritative” site and setting 100 static “come-on” sites that really offer visitors little in the way of unique value and which, since they are static, obviously provide little or no reason for people to come back. Why, for instance, would anyone subscribe to (or keep subscribing to) a feed for such a site?

The primary attraction of any blog is precisely that it is a dynamic medium, and *not* static, as Web pages tend to be. In turn, this dynamic-ness, or “freshness”, of content fuels the the primary marketing engine behind a blog, which is the RSS feed that pushes content out to a loyal, and hopefully growing, readership.

Maintaining, say, 10 high-quality blogs does not mean having to be expert in more than one subject, as any subject has at least 10 different aspects on which a blog could be based. And perhaps not even expert in one subject, if you know how to do research and set up some good information-trapping tools.

It also does not mean “answering questions”, necessarily, on every blog. In fact, some of the most authoritative blogs I follow are written by very busy people and do not accept comments, which is perfectly fine with me. I go there to read and learn, not to write.

Bottom line, I think you’re always better off when you make maximum use of the qualities of the tool you select, and when you create real value that people find irresistible. It’s hard for me to see how this idea follows either of those principles.

Incidentally - expertise in many subjects can be acquired and your expertise fairly easily established. I recommend a book titled “Become a Recognized Authority In Your Field In 60 Days or Less!” by Robert Bly, which has many relevant ideas that can be adapted to the virtual space.

@Brian, yes the sites that I talk about are static sites and not blogs precisely so that they can be left alone. This does mean that most visitors will be one time visitors. However you never when a small site may turn into something bigger and of course by using WordPress you always have the option to add a blog later if you feel you have the content to do so.

@Brian — I share some of your thoughts. I’ve been experimenting with something I am calling a “Niche Super-Site.” Starting with what Caroline recommends, I have added a store and news aggregation. I intend to add blog posts at some very low frequency — probably about featured products.

You can see an example here: http://www.historyofelvis.com, and read about the development on my blog.

It’s a work in progress, but I’d be curious to hear what you think.

Mark’s last blog post..Niche Super-Site: Testing the Long Tail Keyword (2)

Thank you, Caroline.

How does your idea differ from setting up a collection of small “business-in-a-box” e-commerce sites? Many of these are nothing but templates that a novice merchant can easily customize (or leave alone, if they wish). Adding content and advertising, etc. is easily done. The bonus is that you also get a shopping cart (with, at least, Paypal service), to which you can add products (think drop-shipping if you want to minimize effort) if and when you want to do so.

@Brian — from my point of view, one of the key things is the open source code (i.e. free). Lot’s of people are wanting to try out internet marketing on a shoestring.

Mark’s last blog post..Niche Super-Site: Testing the Long Tail Keyword (2)

@Brian, hmm I can’t really answer your question as I’ve never tried a “business in a box” site.

Had a couple of thoughts about Caroline’s “forever static” pages versus maybe some ways to freshen them to try to pick up repeat business that are easy enough that the large number of “micro-niche sites” can still be supported.

1. “Special of the Month” - could be “the week”, too, of course…but then you’re working pretty hard with 50-60 sites. By the month, staggering the publish dates across your sites, this might be manageable. The “special” could apply to content as well as ads or products you’re marketing, although obviously the latter two are better.

2. Modify Caroline’s idea slightly by clustering your microniche sites around one or a couple of central “hub sites”. Use the hub for the main content, and be sure to drive visitors back to the hub from the microniche sites, also. Then, just update the hubs with some fresh content or “special deals”, etc. RSS feeds come off your hub, of course.

3. Use something like Snap Shots on your hub site and then, if nothing else, update (add or change) the Snap Shots periodically (of course the contents in the Shots will update themselves, too, if they themselves are dynamic). If you’re not familiar with Snap, which has a one-click-install plug-in for Word Press, here’s the link:

http://www.snap.com/snapshots.php#welcome

(There are other things you can do with Snap, too.)

4. Create a “virtual hub” in the form of a free e-book, with embedded links driving traffic to your micro-niche sites. A simple one-page site with:

a. A good (meaning, good copy) introduction letter moves the book.
b. A section of the page that has “updated information” for the e-book. This is the sum total of the dynamic content.

Example: Your sites are clustered around the “Elvis Presley” theme. Create an e-book about his life, with appropriate embedded links. For instance, in the section on his discography, you link to your “Elvis Discography” micro-niche blog with some interesting further information about, say, his record sales, and (obviously) your Amazon partner sales links to his CDs. This link could be very subtle: “More Information and Available CDs”…or even MORE subtle: “More Information”. As long as there really IS information on this micro-niche blog (and not just Amazon ad links), visitors won’t be annoyed by being misled.

Just some grist for the mill here…

@Brian, some excellent ideas there but they do rely on having a bit of a master plan :)

@Caroline - Yes, they do. The more advance thinking you do about how all of your micro-niche sites can energize one another, the better it is for all of them, and the bonus is that you stand a better chance of achieving recognition as an expert on a subject merely by thinking and learning deeply enough about one micro-niche domain.

Something else, too, is that a system like I am advocating has a better chance of offering real value instead of just throwing up another 100 pages that add to the worthless detritus that’s already out there, i.e. “blogs” where no one actually blogs.

Hello Caroline,
You are the answer to my prayers! I had been thinking of making small minisites on various topics for which I have material ready but making a html based site is such a chore that I thought of going the blog way.

Here I had the problem that I cannot manage blogs on a regular basis - I have several blogger blogs only one of which I get to updating once in a while. So I was looking for some way to make a static blog and today I installed WP and then thought that maybe using the Pages I could do what I wanted. But I wasn’t sure so I went to a forum where somebody had the same problem as me and there was the link to your free ebook.

And what a wealth of information it has. I don’t think I would have found all this without your book. So thanks for writing the book. Now call it synchronicity or what - forgive me if I spelled the psycho word wrong - I was looking for some adsense ready wp themes and found the site which you mention in your book - 18 Adsense Ready Themes - and I downloaded the Blue Sense theme and then I found your site and book where you use the same templaes. Coincidence if you want to call it that. Something like you find what you are looking for. Anyway I don’t want to bore you to death. So thanks again.

Kara’s last blog post..Make Money By Free Calls

@Kara, that is called the Law of Attraction! You found exactly what you needed precisely when you needed it :D Glad you enjoyed the book and found it helpful :)

Hello Caroline,
Thanks. I not only enjoyed your book I am making a minisite thru it. And as a special thank-you I have made post about it on my blog here:
http://incomeresources.blogspot.com/2008/03/simple-strategy-to-make-money-online.html

Tell me if you like it.
All the best

@Kara, thanks for the post :)

ok caroline you’ve convinced me to try making static sites instead of blogs.

i currently manage two blogs — one isn’t really for profit and the other is sort of experimental. but since moving halfway across the globe in early march i haven’t updated either one at all!

the biggest issue for me is getting a significant amount of traffic for each one. followed by coming up with blog topics.

if i were to set up small sites they would have to be about topics i’m familiar with and have some interest in. profit isn’t enough motivation for me to go into a particular topic.

Lexi’s last blog post..Update on my work at home project: The Thirty Day Challenge!

Traffic is most important for a blog or a site. Hope Caroline and some other readers can give some tips

@Lexi, yeah blogging and static sites really are worlds apart - its not just the mechanics of page v post.

@Kara, there are tons of posts in my archives about traffic.

This strategy means that you have to be consistently on the ball and producing content to make the business viable. The authority site product selling business model at least lets you take a week of and the dollars keep rolling in..

Steve Mills’s last blog post..Retune your information stream

Hey Caroline,

You say you haven’t yet come up with topic u know well enough to create some sort of authority site about…

What about programming? I gather you have a background in that area?

Surely that’s a topic you could create a large authority blog on over time?

OR, is it a topic that bores u senseless? :-) Might explain why u gave up your day job to do this? :-)

Anyway, keep up the great work. I enjoy your posts.

Eran Malloch’s last blog post..7 Ways To Make Money With Your Blog (Free Video)

@Eran, no there are a lot of extremely good blogs about programming. I don’t do it any more and I wasn’t an expert by any means so I really wouldn’t have anything of value to say.

I have had the same idea when I first started blog. I thought to myself, why bother making one great profitable site that will take a lot of work and effort when I could make 20-30 small sites that don’t require much work. I have actually done it to some extent and I’ve doubled my investment for domains,etc.

On a side note, it was more work than I thought it would be and couldn’t make much because I didn’t have much time to spend building each site to its potential.

@Millionnaire, yeah I am still struggling to replicate this process in the way that people like Garry have. To really develop the site needs some ongoing work to build backlinks etc and often you wont see results for a while due to the site potentially going into the Google sandbox. I guess with everything online, it always takes hard work :)

Hi Caroline,

I was following somebody on Twitter, followed another and so on, recognized your cmiddlebrook name from 30DC and landed on your blog.

I was actually looking for a good guide on how to set up my first wordpress blog today since I’m a complete dummy when it comes to tech stuff and I’m very lucky to have found your book. You could make some good money selling this but let “good karma” continue to flow. :)

I was debating if I should post here or on your contact page but I think a lot of newbies will benefit from this questions too.

I’m planning to monetize my sites through adsense (BTW, saw your post about Joel Comm. I bought the Adsense Secrets and was lucky to saw another post about the recurring fees and had them cancelled). Sorry, totally different subject.

I’m so out of focus lol.

I hope you don’t mind answering a few questions. I feel like an idiot asking this but I’ll go ahead:

1. I’m a bit confused with the issue of wordpress website and wordpress blog. Does the wordpress static pages become a “website” by doing your method even though it’s still on “wordpress” platform? (I’m actually covering my face so you won’t recognize me)

2. Can I do your method and still post on it once in a while through the “write posts” instead of the “pages” to add fresh unique content and allow pings for the new posts so the SERPS will continue to like it?

3. I only have one domain for now, can I use this method to create subdomains of niche-wordpress sites? I was thinking of making the primary domain a one-stop information blog about different stuff I want to talk about and have links (your blogroll would be great for this) to those niche-subdomain sites. Can this work?

Thank you in advance and more power to you.

@Jo,

1) a website is *ANY* site on the Internet - including a blog. A traditional blog is regularly updated thus creating an ongoing commitment from the blogger to keep working on it. A static site generally provides timesless information that doesn’t have to be updated so the webmaster can just build it and then move onto the next one.

2) Yes you can - I explain that in the ebook.

3) I should think so but I am not too sure what the SEO implications would be!

OK, I will be building my site today based on this. Hopefully in a months time I’ll have some good news to tell you.

Best,

Jo

Well, well, May May.. You have done a great job here. How are you getting on? If I look at the blog you have here, you must be going pretty good. Well organized and, well, I subscribed to your feed too.

Just stumbled on your site and I am enjoying the content. I have a few static authority sites that bring in good money. I am new to the blog world, however, and I am looking to monetize on a smaller scale several niche sites.

I’ve seen several plugins which claim that they can pull rss articles and place them as new posts in your blog. It seems to me that this would be an ideal way to feed the niche to keep good pr. All you would have to do is clean up the seo to achieve good natural rankings. Has anyone tried any of these plugins and what was your success with it?

@TK, I wouldn’t recommend such a plugin - that technique is known as scraping. Its ok if the RSS feed you are pulling from is your own but if you are pulling other people’s content to feed your own site that is known as a spam-blog or splog. Not good at all.

Thanks for this post Caroline.
Very interesting read.
And thanks for the link to gary conn’s post

dianis last blog post..Many Paid Review Jobs

What is the difference in creating 100 different wordpress websites for niche topics or creating one wordpress website with 100 different niche articles? I assume its SEO, but what if the articles had different sub-domains, can anyone shed more light on this?

@YeFind, yes its an SEO thing. When google ranks a page it is not just the page on its own that it ranks, it also considers it in the context of the site as a whole so if you build a tightly focused niche site where every article is closely related then they all rank better for terms in that topic. Of course if you can build a 100 page site on a single topic then you will have a very strong site on your hands! But I assume you mean a site with 100 articles on mixed subjects - that would lessen the effectiveness of the individual pages.