Paid Advertising

"I am currently making more off of paid and offline advertising than I do with free search result placement. Sometimes with some good serps, I make more that way. But my point is if search engines die, my business will still be there and flourishing.
Without search engines, I am making just below 1,000 a day profit.

When I see those update threads I just want to cringe.... Most people put their eggs in one basket and have no one but themselves to blame for that.

Its the free search engine traffic that got me started. But I did not let it stop there. I poured a lot of that back into paid online advertising and offline advertising.

I guess the bottom line, is to make your three year plan be as if free traffic is the thing of the past. That would be my advice.

I am doing so well in affiliate marketing that I am about to jump to the other side of the fence and actually have affiliates working for me.

Bottom line: DIVERSIFY Sites and Advertising Sources." JaySmith

Diversify

"As long as you diversify your sites AND your advertising sources, I can only see the money growing. You will never hear me cry in any of the SE update threads... The main reason I won't is that I treat those results as gravy." JaySmith

Watch your Back

"Continue to keep one, two or three steps ahead of your competition at all times. Ride new trends, even create some new trends. Always look back in the rear view mirror because there will always be someone there to take over your spot as 'hub' of whatever." davewray

Content with Personality

"Sites that put a unique spin on a topic or add personality tend to attract more repeat visitors." Margarita

Become a Niche Authority

"I fell into my niche by accident. I'm at the top of the serps not by SEO, but by simply having worked on my content, become an authority in my niche and generated a lot of regular traffic. In my case there is no shortage of quality advertisers willing to bid to be on my site. I'm also an adwords avertiser so I know what the keyword normally costs, and I'm getting WAY more than that!" david_uk

Niche is Evergreen

"It's my opinion that a carefully crafted niche site can run almost on autopilot, with very little, if any updating, and remain profitable for years." ken_b

A Content Source

"People email me info and I add it to my site. Works great, draws a bunch of traffic, isn't really that much work. Pays modestly well." ken_b

Write Articles on the Fringes

"But there may well be some aspects of your topic that are seldom discussed, or even thought about. Stuff on the fringes, stuff you might not see on every other site in your category.

Now go look at your site, are all those aspects you thought up there?

Now sit down and write, or rewrite, some relevant pages." ken_b

Good Keywords

" use your imagination.

What if you were an advertiser, for what kind of clicks would you be prepared to pay money?

The answer is that advertisors are likely to pay more money for clicks from people that are ready to order their products. People that are ready to order products are people that just have been informed properly by a quality content website and are satisfied by the information they received. So my advice would be to write an online article about something you are a real expert on. Really try to write the best article on the entire Internet about this topic. Be specific and targeted. The more you focus on very specific details, the better. In the meanwhile, be sure there are enough advertisers related to this topic.

If your article is ready, publish it and paste your adsense-code. You might find your high paying keyword this way. It worked for me..." humblebeginnings

Reinvesting AdSense

"All my money gets put back out to writers so they can write me more interesting articles." rj87uk

Motivation

"My cheques usually go straight in the bank.

I have just got back from a holiday to Greece, Italy, Switzerland and Dubai. I had a great time thanks to Adsense.

I think it was even better that I was making money while I swam, baked and had fun in the Mediterranean sun ;)" bts111

Reinvesting AdSense Money

" don't think this is quite what you mean, but my AS money goes on more and better hosting, development time, and new (photography) equipment to let my site(s) grow.

Through sound investment, all of these are really quite fun and things that I would continue to do more slowly as a public service and for fun if AS wasn't there." DamonHD

Defeat Smart Pricing

"Product reviews are another goody." Atomic

Present a New Angle

"You'll need to offer something different - an 'angle' in order to get noticed. When we started our site more than 5 years ago, we had a lot of content and features that weren't available anywhere else. So we got noticed, and linked to. You'll need to find something that we (and our competitors) aren't doing, if you want to make an impact.

We've got a small experimental site in another niche altogether (non travel) that earns more than 10 times as much per page view as our UK Travel site. As a result, we're currently diversifying into other things - we're finding niches that seem to have better earnings potential, and less competition.

Better to dominate a small area - and then branch out, than to fail to get noticed in a more general area." 7_Driver

Let Users Submit your Content

"My site (or network of sites) is a typical example of database driven, user submitted information. The key is to arrange the info submitted by users so others can easily find what they are looking for. It is not easy and certainly not just a few hours of work / day, it is an entire process, our job actually consists in programming, organizing, categorizing, validating and further optimizing the info submitted by users (members)." zoltan

Database Driven Sites!

"mine was a fluke, I had an 'in' in a specific industry, put the site online and it hit a nerve and took off like a rocket. Then it evolved over 7 years and I realized people weren't getting what they wanted easily just like they don't on the search engines so I started mining the data for them with one click search entries into the database and the search engine picked up on all these links and it just keeps escalating.

It all starts with a SUBMIT form tied to a database, my visitors actually built the database and I'm just the programmer. If you can find a way to get people interested enough to submit data to your site, you're half way to a database driven site as getting other people to do your work for you is the hard part." incrediBILL

Database Driven Site

"My site is actually a database displayed as a directory but I can organize and re-organize all my data into useful lists for my visitors based on narrowing the content displaying to more specific topics. I've pre-sifted thru most of the useful keywords and search terms and made 1 link searches so visitors can get very specific things with a single click.

Although my site may be about 'widgets' you can also find lists of 'red widgets' or 'alabama widgets' or 'new york widget repair' and on and on and on. Gives me a multitude of entry points into the search engine and everyone finds just what they want in a few clicks." incrediBILL

Enjoying Feedback Games

"The point is not that you need the most complex support system in the world, but that if you find ways to construct feedback systems for your writing, you'll likely find the task of writing more enjoyable, even for areas that are not implicitly interesting to you." ronburk

Enjoying Feedback Games

"The point is not that you need the most complex support system in the world, but that if you find ways to construct feedback systems for your writing, you'll likely find the task of writing more enjoyable, even for areas that are not implicitly interesting to you." ronburk

Make Work More Enjoyable

" Dividing the work to be done in different ways can have large effects on its enjoyability (e.g., 'mornings I do research and define work items, afternoons I build content to check off work items, and the last half-hour of the day is studying traffic trends.')." ronburk

Fill up the Keyword Space

"you can take boring topic A and map out an initial universe of a couple of hundred search terms, and begin defining work items for each of these terms (e.g., creation of new pages, enhancement of existing pages). Instead of 'I have to write about X', turn it into the construction of detailed strategy and tactics for building content that takes over the complex keyword space (much of it lying undiscovered, initially) that topic X represents." ronburk

Write Interesting Content

" basic curiosity about other human beings can translate into an interest in the wide variety of things that they inexplicably are drawn to." ronburk

Write Interesting Content

" basic curiosity about other human beings can translate into an interest in the wide variety of things that they inexplicably are drawn to." ronburk

Repackage Content by Restructuring

", you may be able to structure the boring material in a unique way, or spend more time devising graphical aids." ronburk

Write on Topics New to You

"Writing about a different topic could be unpleasant because it's unfamiliar, and it's more enjoyable to stick to an area where you already have considerable expertise. One approach to simply be aware of that problem and structure your work as a learning project. For example, when you are learning a new topic, you are in a unique position that experts in the field have lost -- you understand exactly what things newcomers are likely to find confusing and misleading. You're in a great position to write tutorials and introductions and 'how I learned about X' pieces.

In effect, for any unfamilar topic area, you are already an expert at one aspect of that topic: the problem of learning that topic. This can help reduce the challenge of tackling new subjects to enjoyable levels." ronburk

Build Stability

"For me, this is effort done largely instead of things other webmasters are doing, not in addition to. Want to spend time running a link-building campaign? I would rather form relationships with advertisers that result in very relevant one-way inbound links from what Google will likely classify as authority sites for some useful keywords. Want to spend time doing keyword value analysis? I would rather spend time analyzing which advertisers are spending the bucks and pick my keywords up right from them.

Why would I rather spend my time on this approach than the activities most commonly discussed in this forum? Because of my belief that it's exactly what the Smart Pricing system is telling me to do, and will give me more AdSense dollars for the same amount of traffic.

I think Google has been pretty clear about what behavior they're going to reward, so since I'm not smart enough to keep trying to game every new tweak in their algorithms, I would rather just work on giving them what they want. In the case of AdSense dollars, it seems clear to me that they want traffic that converts well for advertisers. In my experience with paper-based publishing, it was awfully hard to figure out what converts well for advertisers without spending some time focussing on, well, advertisers. I see no reason why AdSense should be any different in this regard." ronburk

Adsense Alternatives

"If you don't think you can build the software to display text ads or process the transactions yourself then AdBrite does it for 25% of the loot, but I do it all myself and just pay the $20/mo for the payment processing service." incrediBILL

Serve Advertisers

"The game of serving advertisers is what is going to increasingly separate the winners from the losers in AdSense. The losers are going to get the advertisers who aren't smart enough to figure out how to get the best ROI, and who are paying the least amount of money for clicks. The winners are going to become intimate partners with smart, good-paying advertisers (sometimes without their knowledge!), and are going to be in the camp of folks who notice their earnings and earnings per click going up." ronburk

Build More Sites

"I currently run 10 sites, with #11 in the building process and not indexed yet. I've paid a few writers to write quality articles built around relevant keywords to populate the pages for each site, and I have written many more myself. It's a lot of work, but honestly, it's also a learning process. I feel like I've gone to school on many of the site topics. That's what I was getting at before: don't be afraid to get in there and research a topic, then build a site about it. Time consuming? Sure, but it doesn't have to be that big of a deal. Learn as you go. I'll focus all my time on a new site for a couple of weeks, doing basically nothing else. When I have the skeleton of that site set up, it's just a matter of filling in pages, which I do a bit at a time over a couple of months, as I'm working on my other sites as well.

Remember: most of the people looking for what your site is about are not experts either. I can't tell you how often I get emails from different people thanking me for giving them very basic (but to them, important) information on one of my sites. I think too many webmasters get caught up in thinking their site has to be the end-all be-all, the final word on this or that topic. C'mon, it's a big web, right? Don't try to be everything to everyone, unless that's what you want (and there's nothing wrong with that). Just don't think that you have to be some kind of expert on a topic to build a site about it. I think THAT is what scares too many people off and prevents them from expanding their businesses into other topics.

How did experts attain that status? Someone taught them. When you do research on a site topic, you're learning from someone else. Same thing as the experts - only you're not devoting so much time to get to the expert level. You're just packaging what you've learned and (hopefully) imparting it to others who find your site from a search engine. I remember the first site I built about something I didn't know a thing about beforehand. I was afraid it would be too simple - that people finding the site would not gain anything from it. I was wrong. Trust me, even if you do a little bit of research on the topic, what you then impart will be of major help to someone who knows nothing about it. I know because I got lots of comments about that first "know nothing" site, and most of them were 'thank you' emails from someone who took away something useful from my site. That's very gratifying, and from then on I was unafraid to build sites on topics I knew little or nothing about. Just do it!

Finally, I'll say that I think I'm reaching my limits for a one-man operation. I think about 10-12 sites will be my personal limit. At that point, I'll invest more of the profits into hiring writers and maybe a webmaster to handle the time consuming aspects of running it all. Having said that, I'm sure many others can handle twice as many sites, and some probably can't handle half as many. That's another part of the learning process - you learn your limits. Just don't let the fact that you know little or nothing about something stop you. I feel certain that it does stop too many folks who don't give themselves nearly enough credit." Swebbie

Grow your Revenue Base

"There's a lot to be said for doing something well and carving out a reputation as an authority in your niche. For one thing, you'll have an opportunity to 'monetize' your content in a variety of ways--not just from AdSense. And if your content is 'evergreen,' your revenue base will grow (thereby increasing your income) month after month, year after year.

In a nutshell: There's a lot more to publishing than the Web equivalent of those weekly throwaway ad supplements that arrive on your doorstep or in your mailbox." europeforvisitors

Focus on your Cash Cow

"I have a few sites but I tend to gravitate back to the cash cow as a few updates there tend to generate WAY more revenue then spending a ton of time on the less profitable sites.

I understand the need for diversification but there is also the concept of investing the most where it pays the best, just like in the stock market." incrediBILL

Manage Many Sites

"You just have to take a big gulp and DO IT. Hire writers if you can't or won't take the time to learn enough to write content that will impart useful information. Once you get that first 'know nothing' site out of the way, you'll discover that you've developed a process that you can then repeat. Think Henry Ford and his assembly line. Simple idea that made him a gazillionaire. His IDEA, other people's SWEAT. No different here." Swebbie

Crappy is Short Lived

"In one of the heated discussions we had before on what defines a scraper site, one proponent of scraper sites proudly boasted that he/she is on the way to 7 figure income. The poster admitted that his/her sites are crap. That was a year or so ago.

A few months (or weeks?) ago, I saw a post from the same person saying that he/she now only earns a few hundred dollars or less. The poster said that his/her site took a hit when G cleaned up crappy sites.

Crappy sites = short term
Good sites = long term

Just figure out what you want a year from now. Others may want to make hay while the sun is up and churn out dozens and dozens of crappy sites. If you're for the long haul, though, you'll stick to quality sites" alika