Instead of replying to him, I thought that would be a good case study about duplicate content and how to create good content for your site.

If you have questions you’d like me to answer, feel free to contact me.

I have an attorney friend who is looking to add a blog to their site. They were wondering if there was a way to add content articles to their blog, to keep it fresh, without them adding unique content each day.

I told him that it is best to try and write something weekly, but he was hoping to have the page update with some other law related articles… Is this possible?

The Rise and Fall of Duplicate Content

The short answer is “yes”. It is possible and fairly easy to do. Simply install FeedWordPress or WP-o-Matic to your Wordpress blog and start leeching content left and right via RSS feeds. Is this a good thing to do? Certainly not!

First of all, replicating someone else’s content without their approval is called copyright infringement. While it is widely done everywhere online, it doesn’t necessarily means it is ok and you might get into trouble if you copy articles from other websites.

But now let’s assume you have the consent of the article’s writer to place their article on your site. In most cases, the author will ask you to link back to their site to give them credit, which is a common practice. You might think “great, free legit content populating my site every day/week/month”.

Well let me tell you that’s a big mistake because you are now generating duplicate content. And if there one thing Google doesn’t like, it’s duplicate content. Google sees duplicate content as a waste of space and while it might index both articles in the beginning (the original, and the one syndicated on your site), it will sooner or later realize that the content is coming from the author’s site and will start removing the duplicated articles from its index. Even worth, it might even “ban” your site and remove it completely from its index.

Think of it this way. Imagine that both the author’s site and your site are newspapers. Every time the original author writes something in his newspaper, it shows up in your newspaper the following day. Who would buy your newspaper? Right, no one would because they can have the same news from the original source before getting it from you. That’s exactly how Google sees the duplicate content issue.

You may still be a little skeptical about all this. Well, why not try it for a while. Find someone willing to share his articles with you, or use articles from an article directory such as GoArticles and you’ll see how your site will slowly but surely drop in search engines. Been there, done that!

Blogs Are About Hearing Your Voice

People or companies are always very quick at starting a blog because they read somewhere that it’s good for search engines. Yes, a GOOD blog is good for your search engine rankings. If you’re just blogging to replicate content, what value are you bringing to the table?

See, blogs are good for search engine rankings because if you have a good blog, people will comment on it, they will link back to it, and that is how a blog really helps search engine wise. People go back to a blog because they like what YOU have to say about XYZ topic. It’s all about the way YOU say things. They don’t care about reading rehashed articles from another site. They want to hear what YOU think.

On my iPhone blog for example, most people come back to it because they like how I go straight to the point without beating around the bush. They also know my voice. My voice is basically to complain about how restrictive Apple is with the iPhone. That’s my voice. That’s what I am known for and that’s why people keep coming back.

Blogging is about finding your voice and sharing what you have to say with others. It’s very probable some people will not like your voice. Who cares? You can’t please everyone. I know some people don’t like my voice and they call be a whiner. Fine, I’ll take that. I’m an iPhone whino but you know what? Even among people who don’t like my voice, many of them keep coming back to my site. I know that because they often leave comments (including their names) and after a while, I get to recognize them.

Create Your Own Content

Content is king! The best way to have Google love you and crawl your site on a regular basis is to create your own unique content. Yes, it does require some work from you but this is the best way to bring quality traffic to your site.

There are several ways you can easily create original content:

• Write a mash-up of an article you read: you just read a good article? Simply write a little blurb about it and tell us why you liked/disliked this article.
• Pay someone to write for you: you can find freelancers that can write articles for you for very cheap. The downside is you don’t really control the message or the quality of the writing.
• Create a case study: this is what I’m doing here. I took a real life example to create a blog post.

Perhaps the hardest part about writing good content is to find good topics. Once you have the topic, the writing will come quickly. I have a few tricks to find topics when I don’t know what to blog about:

• Yahoo Answers: look for questions asked about your expertise in Yahoo Answers. If someone asks the question there, it’s probably because they didn’t find the answer else where.
• Forums: just like Yahoo Answers, forums can be a good way to find a topic.
• Twitter: I usually find iPhone-related topics on Twitter in seconds. Just go to the search option and type “yourexpertisekeyword ?” If you have a blog about olive oil, search for “olive oil ?” on Twitter. You’ll be amazed to see what kind of questions people may have.
• Other social networks: do the same as I do with Twitter on other sites such as Delicious, Digg, etc…
• Ask: sometimes you can just simply ask your clients/friends/employees what they want to hear you talk about. I sometimes ask my Twitter followers what I should write about. If a similar topic comes back several times, I will write a post about it.

The Bottomline

The bottomline is, as I said above, if you have good content and you have an original way to deliver it (that’s your voice), people will read you, they will trust you, and they will recommend you. In the end you will gain from it not only in the search rankings of Google, but you might also generate new leads, maybe some consulting jobs, or whatever may apply to your industry.

If you’re not ready to make the effort of blogging and you just want to blog to create yet some more crappy content, just don’t do it. You will waste your time and money and it might hurt you more than you will benefit from it.

I feel honored that Attila came to me thinking I am a famous online figure. Compared to other guys like John Chow (he’s a total douche) and Shoemoney, I’m still a noobie though.

Attila is a gamer. He used to be an editor on some well-known site in Hungary but the site kinda died after seeing increased competition from better sites and online communities. Now Attila wants to do stuff online but he doesn’t know where to start. It seems he has huge ambitions too as he’s already looking into hiring writers and developers.

So how would I go about this? Very simple, very inexpensive!

Choose A Topic

Ideally, you shouldn’t have to look for a topic. You should know what you want to talk about online. You have to be passionate about it and be quite knowledgeable. You are an expert at baking marijuana cakes? Talk about it! You know everything about shoes? Write about it!

There are no limits to what you can talk about. If you are passionate about it, chances are there are plenty of other people like you, and these people can be your audience.

Get A Good Domain Name

First thing I would do is buy a good domain name related to your topic. When buying a domain name, it’s always good to opt for the .com extension. Avoid the .net and .info as they are often seen as spam by search engines. Also avoid numbers and hyphens in your domain name. For example, www.Worst-Domain-1.info is as bad as it can get.

A domain name is about $10/year and it is very crucial as it is going to be your branding for the years to come.

Try to insert some of your main keywords in your domain name. For example, my iPhone blog domain name is www.iPhoneDownloadBlog.com. Those are 3 important keywords. Now when you look for “iPhone blog” on Google, I show up number 2-3, depending on the days.

Get Good Hosting

Good and reliable hosting is hard to come by. I personally use DreamHost. The service costs me about $130/year for unlimited sites hosted and tons of bandwidth and RAM (more than I can use). Their customer service is not outstanding but it usually is fast and good enough.

When looking for a hosting company, it’s important you choose one in your country. For example, in the case of Attila, he should look for a hosting company in Hungary. Now if he wants his site to be global and reach people all over the world, then I would go for a hosting company in the US.

The localization of your hosting company is important because search engines (which get you most of your traffic) look at where your site is hosted and give a lot of importance to this when displaying search results. If you are searching for something in Google Hungary, Google will mostly give you results from sites hosted in Hungary. If you’re in the US, Google will mostly give you search results with websites hosted in the US. You get the idea…

Set Up A Blog

The best way to start an online venture is to create a WordPress blog. WordPress is a free software that you can easily install automatically (depending on your hosting company). WordPress is highly customizable and simple, and it is used by the largest sites out there such as TechCrunch and Mashable (that’s clearly a sign).

I always recommend people to start a blog because it is inexpensive, and low maintenance.

Don’t Invest Too Much

A big mistake people often do when starting something online is that they want to invest too much time and money into it. Some people want to have a great looking site, with awesome features, and tons of useless crap. I say DON’T! Go with the simple basic stuff at first. You won’t have readers or visitors for a while, so why waste time and money on something no one will notice.

Besides, it’s good not to invest in your site at first because chances are you will blog for a week or so and you will give up. Sorry but that’s the reality. I think 99% of people who start a blog give it up within just a few weeks.

Don’t Expect Too Much

This point is related to the paragraph above. When you start a blog, don’t expect to get tons of visitors. People who start a website always think that they are going to drive thousands of visits overnight. Reality is that it will take you months if not years to get decent amount of traffic.

My iPhone blog gets between 15,000 – 20,000 visitors per day, just after a year of being online. This is really rare and it is the result of hard work. I was lucky to write a few good articles that got me some attention but don’t expect to get similar results as quickly as I did.

Content Is King

As I just said above, I was lucky to write a few articles that got me lots of attention and visits, and that is the whole point of blogging. Content is king! People will come to your site for your good content. People will return to your site for the same reason. People could leave your site and never come back for that exact same reason too.

Write compelling and unique content. Google and other search engines like unique content. Don’t copy/paste other people’s articles. Don’t become a news site! Get your own voice! My iPhone blog is everything but a news blog. All other blogs out there (except a few) are just about iPhone news.

Why would people come to your blog to read the exact same things as they can read on 2,000 other sites? People come to my iPhone blog because they know I am an Apple hater and that I like to talk about hacking the iPhone. That’s my voice. I don’t always rant about Apple or write about hacking, but it is my main topic and it is what I am known for.

Be Social

Getting your name and content out is great. There are many ways to do this. You can use sites like Digg, Facebook, etc… Personally, I am social on one and one place only: Twitter. I am on Twitter all day, sharing content, talking to people, and helping other people out. By doing so, I am now being seen as an expert in everything related to the iPhone. People come to me to ask my advice. People recommend me to their friends. I even have famous people like Dog the Bounty Hunter and Alyssa Milano recommend me or share my content!

Another thing to do is to connect with other bloggers. Go to their sites, leave comments, touch base with them. If they notice you, they might start talking about you too. It’s not because they are “competition” that you can’t work with them. I share stuff from other iPhone blogs several times a day. I am not just out there to advertise myself. I advertise myself as an expert that can get people the best information, even if that means sending people to my competition’s websites.

Learn SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is easy. No matter what these SEO experts are trying to tell you, SEO is dead simple. The problem is that it’s very time consuming. Learning, understanding and applying the basics of SEO is very simple and you can self-educate you. Subscribe to a few SEO blogs (like SEO Book, SEOmoz) and get familiar with the terms and all the tricks and tips.

Here is a great SEO guide for beginners. Read everything and learn. Once you know more about SEO, you can apply it to your articles to get extra love from search engines.

Conclusion

Blogging is a great way to start sharing your expertise with others and can hopefully lead to generate substantial income. But it’s not easy and it takes time. Most people who start a blog today will give it up tomorrow but it can be very rewarding to those of us who understand it takes time to create a follower base and be seen as an expert. Good luck.

I freaked out a bit because this ClickBank account is my main money-maker and it is really pays the bills.

The first thing that came to my mind was that maybe this website had been banned from Google. A quick Google search showed me that I was still in the index, however my Google ads were not showing.

I opened my Adwords account and realized that my ads hadn’t been showing for about 12 hours. The day before, I had read how an Internet marketer had his Adwords account banned with no explanation and no way to appeal. I started being all paranoid and thought my account had been banned for some unknown reason.

Looking into the account, I then noticed that Adwords was asking me to enter my credit card information again. Strange! I entered the info several times but it kept telling me it couldn’t be saved at this time.

That’s when all this started to look a little fishy. I tried to chat with an Adwords rep, but again, it wouldn’t let me. I then tried the Adwords help center and after a bit if digging, I found a few other people who had been in the same situation. Reading about their experience, it seemed my account was under review.

I pretty much stressed out all day and all night. The next day, while we were driving from Michigan to Illinois, I took my iPhone and tried to chat with an Adwords rep again. This time it worked and just before my 3G connection dropped, the rep told me not to worry that it was just some random account review.

It made me feel better but it still pissed the hell out of me that Google, who gets decent amounts of money from my Adwords campaigns every day, took the liberty to put my account on hold and review it without even notifying me.

The following day, I had yet another chat session with an Adwords rep and she told me the same thing: don’t worry, it’s a routine review, etc… She also told me that the Review Team had been asked to expedite my case and that she would email me before the end of the day to tell me what was going on.

Early evening, I finally received an email that confirmed that my account had been under review and that everything was back to normal.

I was really glad but I was still very upset that they never deemed necessary to notify me my account was on hold. That was almost 3 days with no Adwords and although it didn’t cost me anything, I didn’t make as many sales as I should have during these days.

It really opened my eyes on how dependent I am to Google now. In 5 seconds, they could kill all my online activity. They could drop all my blogs and websites from their index, they could shut down my email service, they could prevent me from making any money since 100% of my income is from my online ventures.

This dependence is really not healthy at all but there isn’t a whole lot I can do. I need Google to make money. Yes, I can use Bing and Yahoo, but realistically, they are not that great from an internet marketing standpoint.

Do you think you are dependent to Google? How?

Before using CB Stats, I used 1password to access my ClickBank accounts because it allowed me to easily store my passwords. It was just a workaround as it wasn’t really straightforward and was kinda cumbersome.

CB Stats made clickbank accounts management easy. Launch the app and add the login information for up to 5 accounts and that’s it. Now everytime you launch the app, it will load the daily revenues for your different accounts for the last 2 weeks.

This is truly a very usefull application. I think what I like the most about this CB Stats is how fast it is. It usually takes 2-3 seconds to load the data, whether on wifi or 3G.

It is very simple. Maybe too simple… Like I said, I like this app, but I’d expect a little more from it…

First, I’d like to be able to store the login info for more than 5 accounts. Most power affiliates or publishers that do business on ClickBank have more than 5 accounts. I personally have only five but I plan to create a new account sometimes this weekend. I think you should be able to have unlimited accounts.

Also I’d like to be able to go from account to account just by swiping my finger across the screen, just like you do to swipe to the next picture on the iPhone. Right now, you have to tap the account number at the top and the numbers are so small that I sometimes tap the wrong one. Not a big deal but it’s another simple improvement that could be made.

Another feature that I would expect to see is the total weekly revenues for the last 4 weeks, like the web version. Finally, I’d like to be able to view paychecks history.

CB Stats sells for $9.99 (download link) and I think that given the lack of features, it’s a little expensive. Now if the developer decided to add new features like the ones described above, that would be way worth the 10 bucks. At any rates, CB Stats is the best ClickBank iPhone application in the App Store at the time.

I know what I’m doing tomorrow – Friday night – at 9pm. I will be behind my computer, on Facebook, to set up my own vanity URL. Indeed, Facebook is finally allowing users to get their own usernames.

Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. People can enter a Facebook username as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google, for example, which will make it much easier for people to find friends with common names.

It’s a good thing to have your vanity URL if you care about personal branding. However, if you’re one of those online privacy freaks, that might not be a good idea…

You will be able to create your Facebook vanity URL on Friday, June 12th at 9.01pm PST by visiting http://www.facebook.com/username/

If you’ve been on planet Earth within the last 6 months or so, you most likely heard about Twitter.

I’m not going to go into details about why you need to be on Twitter but just let me ask you these few questions:
- do you think email is useful to your business?
- do you think a website is useful to your business?
- do you think social media is useful to your business?
- do you think blogging is useful to your business?

If you answered “no” to any of these questions, well, I have to be a little bit in your face and tell you that your business is going to fail. If you don’t take advantage of these tools right now, your competition will, and they will win!

Let’s go back to Twitter… You might not understand Twitter yet. But that’s fine, right now, I’m not asking you to understand it, I’m just asking you to create an account and start using Twitter, just a couple minutes everyday.

It is important you create a Twitter account now so you can register your brand/name before someone else does! Twitter URLs will soon be as valuable as a website URL!!!

It took me a couple months to understand Twitter and really enjoy it and use it as you’re supposed too. These days, I spend hours on Twitter everyday. Yes, hours! Twitter is a great way for me to generate revenues simply by talking to people, and sharing information.

I have about 14,000 people that follow me on Twitter. At any given time, when I say something on Twitter, I can direct about 200 of these people to any website I want. Isn’t that just amazing?

Anyways, I guess the goal of this post was to briefly introduce you to Twitter.

If you have any question or any doubt about Twitter, just ask me and I will do my best to help you out.

If you’re already on Twitter, please follow me http://twitter.com/SebastienPage

Tweet you later ;)

How Did I Find Out There Was A Problem?

I check my Google rankings for the term “iPhone blog” on a daily basis. iPhone Download Blog (my iPhone blog) usually ranks #4. Last Monday though, it was nowhere to be found! Doing a search for “site:www.iPhonedownloadblog.com” showed me I had 27,000 pages indexed but again, the homepage was nowhere to be found. Hmm, that doesn’t smell good…

I then went and checked my Google Webmaster Tools account. It usually helps me figure out quickly if there is anything wrong with any of my sites. Usually, everything is fine. From time to time, I get a little error on one or two of my sites, which in most cases can be fixed simply by generating a new sitemap and resubmitting it to Google.

Last Monday, I completely freaked out when I realized that all my sites were showing errors! All of them! I thought it was very strange but I soon realized that my server had been down for a few minutes the day before and I figured that Google must have tried to crawl my sites at this time and was then enable to do it. I simply resubmitted all my sitemaps thinking it would do the trick.

What the Hell Happened?

As a measure of precaution, I checked Google Webmasters Tools again a few minutes later and saw that Google, once again, was giving me errors. The issue was obviously bigger than I thought. I decided to look into the problem more deeply and realized that Google was giving me a 403 error, which means:

The server is refusing the request. If you see that Googlebot received this status code when trying to crawl valid pages of your site (you can see this on the Web crawl page under Diagnostics in Google Webmaster Tools), it’s possible that your server or host is blocking Googlebot’s access.

It was clear now. DreamHost, my hosting company, had restricted Googlebots from crawling my server. I had had the same problem with DreamHost before so it was just half a surprise…

How the Hell Do You Fix This?

The first thing I did was sending a support request to DreamHost. I tried to be kind in my email but I was really furious. I think it’s very unprofessional of them to block access to my server to anyone without even notifying me. A few hours later, I didn’t have an answer yet… DreamHost is usually fast at replying, but I guess they were not that day…

So I sent them a second support request email, a little more spicy than the first one. A couple hours later I received this email:

Hello Sebastien,

I sincerely apologize for this! This was handled incorrectly, and NOT according to our own policy. It looks like a few days ago you wrote in regarding server performance. It appears part of that was actually googlebot slamming your sites. This was blocked to preserve server stability (which is normal troubleshooting), what didn’t happen, and SHOULD have, was that you were not notified and told how to deal with this. I’ve removed the block, but please see the following article:

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Bots_spiders_and_crawlers

There is a way to slow down googlebot without killing your search results OR the server. This is the preferred approach. We obviously don’t want to hurt your sites.

Again, I apologize for this, and if it helps any, it looks like just an IP range was blocked, and whoever was troubleshooting the server wasn’t really *trying* to block google from your site…just an IP that was causing problems for everyone.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks!
Jeff H

Alright, fair enough… What can I do anyway? So this part of the problem was handled but I needed to tell Google everything was back up so it can start crawling my sites asap.

I resubmitted all my sitemaps again. I also wrote a few new posts on my iPhone blog in order to “prove” Google that the site was still alive and doing well. Finally, I linked to my main sites from various other websites in the hope it would help speed up the crawling process.

Googlebots came back and crawled the sites. The next day (on Tuesday), iPhone Download Blog was back in Google’s search results but it was ranking at about #35 for my keyword. I realized that even though it was back in the index, Google didn’t have a cached image of it yet. I assumed that it would come back and crawl the site again and then generate a cached image.

On Wednesday, still no cache! It was ranking slightly better though, showing up on the second page. Still far from what I was looking for, but at least it was progressing a bit.

On Wednesday night, the homepage completely disappeared from the index again. While some may worry about this, I am now used to it and I know what it means. It means that Google has crawled your site again and it is generating a cached image of it. This usually happens when you create a new page. Google will crawl it, rank it, then it will disappear from the index for a few hours, and finally it will come back for good. It’s like Google is hurrying to crawl it, but then takes its time to analyze it and make sure it’s not crap.

I went to bed that  night confident that my site would be back on the next morning when I get up. Sure enough, it is ranking again, as good as ever, this morning. Yeahhh!!! All my other sites are back too.

What’s the Moral of the Story?

Well, the moral of the story is that you should check your sites often, if not daily. You should make it a habit to check your Google Webmasters account to make sure there is no problem. If there is a problem, identify it and hurry to fix it. Google Webmaster Tools is a great help for this and if you haven’t created an account yet, I suggest you do now.

This little adventure cost me about a 40% decrease in traffic on my iPhone blog. Yes, it hurts! I haven’t measured my other sites loss as they are not as important as my iPhone blog. My money-making sites rely on PPC to drive traffic so it wasn’t a big issue for those sites.

I’m still pissed at DreamHost but you get what you pay for… I considered moving my sites to a new hosting company but it would be a nightmare. I have over 20 sites, most of them being database driven. My technical skills are just not sharp enough to do all this by myself. I guess I’ll stick with DreamHost until something really major happens.

Working From Home Made Me Lazy

That’s true, I’m a lazy ass these days… But I’ve got a good reason why I’m lazy though. I wrote 2 ebooks, both of them in a very specific niche, and I sell them through affiliate marketing (on ClickBank to be precise). One of those ebooks works alright, making me a few hundred dollars every week. The other one actually pays my bills, usually generating one thousand dollars per week in net profits.

When I first quit my job, I said to myself that I would develop one new ebook/affiliate program every month. At the time, it seemed like a very realistic goal. Writing an ebook can take up to 2-3 weeks, assuming you know what you want to write about, and putting up a website with a sales letter takes less than a week.

My laziness started to appear when I realized that my 2 current ebooks make me enough money to live pretty well. I’m not the kind of guy who’s going to bust his ass off to make tons of money. However, if I feel the financial situation is getting tight, I will work day and night to make as much cash as possible. I suspect there are lots of people like me in this world. We’re not hard workers; we’re smart workers.

So what do I do all day? Tough question to answer as I’m not even sure myself. I pretty much spend all my day online, reading news/blogs and on Twitter of course! Not very productive at all… Occasionally, I will take a walk to the post office to send back a Netflix movie. I also go to check the surf on a daily basis, and if there are waves, I will go out and surf for a couple hours.

The Negative Health Benefits Of The Internet

I am starting to realize that spending so much time in front of my computer all day is bad for me. Physically, I’m not as healthy as I was a year ago. The most obvious symptom is that I am constantly tired. I get up at 7.30am, and turn on my computer within minutes. One hour later, I will already be yawning. I was in Costa Rica for the last 2 weeks and I just spent a few minutes a day on my computer during that time. My energy level went way up right away as I used the computer less and less.

Another symptom of the perfect “work at home dude” like me is back pain. I have a laptop and I spend most of my time on the couch. It is very comfortable but it’s not a way to work. My girlfriend bought me a nice office chair to go with my desk but I rarely use it. I constantly have this pain in my lower back; nothing a good yoga session with Tina can’t fix, but it’s still a growing problem that I need to seriously take care of.

I think the internet is also making me socially retarded! When I worked at the office, I had to go out of my house every morning, walk to work, talk to my coworkers and talk to clients. In short, I had human interactions, which are vital to your social insertion… What do I have now? Twitter followers and RSS subscribers! It seems a little pathetic to me.

Being Your Own Boss Is Stressful

When I worked for the man, I used to think that working for yourself would be much less stressful because you wouldn’t have to deal with so many frustrating situations and that you could do whatever you want. I was partly right because now that I don’t have anyone to report to and no one to deal with, I have a much less stress to deal with. However, I have a whole new stress to cope with now: the stress of the paycheck!

If you’re currently employed, you probably don’t stress much about your paycheck. You now that twice a month, you will get a nice check for a defined amount you already know. You are paid the same amount every 2 weeks, no matter what (this applies if you’re a salary employee of course, which I used to be). I didn’t worry about my paycheck before. I knew that 2 or 3 months from now, I will still be making the same amount, and it was really reassuring.

Now I stress a lot about my paycheck because it is completely depending on my results. I am constantly looking at my emails to see if I received this magical email from ClickBank with the subject line “CB Sale”, telling me I just made another $40. Sometimes I have good days where I make $400. Sometimes, like 2 days ago, I have bad days where I make only $50. The most stressful to me is when I have a series of bad days. It completely freaks me out, until everything starts working again and making it up for the last few slow days.

Give Me Some Of That Internet Money

I do 2 simple things for a living: I have my affiliate programs; and I write for my iPhone blog. When people ask me what I do now, I just answer: “internet”. This short and simple answer is usually enough to satisfy the person asking you this question. I choose to answer this because I can’t put a real title on what I do.

Sometimes, if the person is genuinely interested in what I do, he will ask me more details. Explaining online affiliate marketing to a non-business savvy person is kinda hard, even though I try to simplify it as much as I can by saying that “I sell electronic reports and I blog about technology”.

A good definition of what I do though is that “I make money online”. I try not to use this term though because I think it sounds very cheesy. When you say you make money online, people think something like “oh yeah, just like the scammy late night commercials about how I can make money online working 4 hours a day”?

My friend Kayle is funny about it and always asks me to give him “some of that internet”, just like in the South Park episode where the kids try to make money online by having a video of Butters on YouToob.

Two Weeks Later…

Well, it’s been about two weeks since I first started writing this post and things have changed a bit. First, I worked on a new website that is now live and generating additional revenues. This website is part of my previous post about how to hit different niches with the same product. This website doesn’t pay the bills, but it’s still extra money.

The second thing I did is trying not to spend as much time in front of my computer. I now get off the internet for a few hours to read a book or a magazine. I am also starting to run! If you knew me, you wouldn’t believe what I just said, but yes, I do run for a couple miles and I kinda like it. It definitely boosts my energy level.

For the last two days, I haven’t been working from the couch. I put my laptop on the kitchen table and work from there. It’s really comfortable and I get to see what’s going on outside.

Finally, in order to fight my anti-social behavior, and after talking to my therapist who confirmed I need to interact with others (duh!), I am looking into participating in a Toastmaster club. This would definitely help me meet and talk with others.

I guess the goal of this post was to bring me to realize that I can’t just sit around all day and do nothing. I have this great opportunity of making a ton of money and I should take it because it might not last long.

Before I explain you this trick, let me give full credit to Ruben Yau for actually coming up with it. I also want to thank Ruben for replying to my comment/question on his blog so quickly.

As stated above, Google Analytics doesn’t let you see from what specific page your visitors are coming.

For example, instead of showing this as the traffic referrer:
http://digg.com/apple/How_to_install_ipa_files_on_iPhone_and_iPod_Touch,

it will just show you this: Digg.com

That’s not very useful information…

The solution to view the full URL of the referring site is to implement a simple hack that uses filters to place the referrer into the User Defined Report.

Instructions:

Go to your Google Analytics account and click on Filter Manager > Add Filter, and enter the following information:

Filter Name: Full Referrer (or whatever you want to call it)
Filter Type: Custom Filter
Advanced
Field A -> Extract A: Referral (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: leave blank
Output To -> Constructor: User Defined $A1
Field A Required: Yes
Field B Required: No
Override Output Field: Yes
Case Sensitive: No

It should look like this:

Now, if you look at your Traffic Sources, you usually see this:

Too see your User Defined Report containing the full information about the referring sites, click on “Visitors” in the nav bar and choose “User Defined”. You should get something like this:

That’s it! Pretty easy, yet very useful.

On his site, Ruben also explains another option involving tweaking the Google Analytics code, but that seemed a little too complex for me, especially given that this method works perfectly.

Now I’d like to see GA implement this without having us use workarounds. That’s a basic feature that should be included in GA by default. Oh well, with Google, it’s take it or leave it, isn’t it?

I want to talk to you about how I am extending one of my products to different niches. By the way, this post is for people interested in web/affiliate marketing. If you’re not into it, you will find this post worthless.

About 5 months ago, I wrote my first ebook and created a website/sales letter for it. I sell this ebook through ClickBank, which allows me to take advantage of their huge network of affiliates. As a side note, to date, affiliates generate about 40% of my sales for this product. The product in question is a health-related ebook, some sort of “how to cure XXX in 60 days”. Sales are doing great so far!

While I was writing the ebook, I realized that it could hit 3 different niches. I wasn’t sure how to go about it. Should I try to hit these 3 niches on the same sales letter? Or should I create different websites and sales letter aimed at each specific niche? It didn’t take me too long to make my decision to create 3 different products.

Creating different products has the advantage of you delivering exactly what people are looking for when they come to your site, which is the most important thing. You know how it is, people come to a site and if they don’t see exactly what they’re looking for right away, they will bounce. By creating different websites for each niche, I avoid this problem.

What’s great about this technique is that it doesn’t take much time to create the additional sites. Simply copy/paste the first one you created, then change the main keyword.

Let’s take an example. Imagine you write an ebook about “how to cure swine flu”. You will create the website around the “swine flu” keyword. Additionally, you should create 2 other websites to focus on “how to cure H1N1″ and “how to cure influenza A virus”. This way, you will cover every terms people will look for on Google and you will deliver content targeted to these people. The websites as well as the ebooks will be the same, except you will replace “swine flu” by “H1N1″ and “influenza A virus”.

Last week, I created the second website of the series. It was approved by ClickBank on Thursday and I already made a few sales out of it. My goal this week is to update the website and the ebook with the 3rd keyword and get it approved by ClickBank to start generating revenues from it.

As you can see, this is a very simple technique that allows you to increase your reach and hit different similar niches with the same product without reinventing the wheel.

I look forward to reading your thoughts on that :)