There was a time not too long ago when I was all crazy with building single page sites and selling a single item in each of these sites with the 7 Dollar Script. Building single page sites is easy and once you get the hang of it, it normally will not ake more than 3 hours before you see your sites up and running. Provided of course, you have everything, like your domain name and hosting ready.
To have products to sell, I joined a few PLR sites where once you become a member, you get to download lots of products like eBooks, Articles and scripts that comes with Private Label Rights or Master ReSell Rights. Fees are of course monthly recurring, but it was okay. A couple of sales will cover most of the monthly fees. If you can manage to sell something, that is.
A small recap for those who does not know what are Private Label Rights products and Master ReSell Rights Products. PLR or Private label Rights products are downloadable products like eBooks which the owner or the creator has given whoever has bought the product the rights to change and repackage the product. Some comes with limited rights and some unlimited rights. If you have unlimited rights, you can change anything you want from the cover of the eBook to the name of the author to that of yours.
Master ReSell Rights products on the other hand lets you resell the product at your own price, but you can’t claim credit for the product like changing the author name or re-writing the book as yours.
When you download these products, a lot will comes with a ready made website. All you have to do is insert your shopping cart links, download links and you are ready to launch yet another site selling another product.
Some eye wash before continuing your long journey
Can You Really Sell And make Money?
When you come to think of it, it is really tough to sell a product with a single page site. However, some really do well with these sites, but they have to work their butts out optimizing every site they built and that becomes very tedious and tiring. Those whose sites are successful have to spend days building up links to the site in order to rank for their chosen buying keywords.
For example, if you are selling a eBook on rose gardening, you have to rank for keywords like “How To Create A Beautiful Rose Garden.” When people looking to build a rose garden types in those words in Google, and if your site ranks top for those keywords, you will get almost all the hits. Out of a hundred hits, you might get 5 to 10 sales, because your traffic is very targeted and it only attracts those who are interested in rose gardening.
In theory, if your site just gets that 100 hits per month, and if you sell your eBook for say, $27, there is a possibility that you can make $270 per month from that one site that has only one single page with no updating needed.
So the road to success with this method of making money online is numbers. If you have 50 such sites and 10 makes that kind of money, you will have an income of $2,700 per month. So you keep building to increase your chances of having more successful sites.
How To make These Sites Successful
Links, links and more links. It is a known fact that the more backlinks you get, the higher your site will rank in the SERPs. Since it is just a single page site, devoid of contents like a blog where Google gets lots of chances to index your posts, the only way to build up an authority for your keywords is to get as many backlinks as possible using a combination of anchor text that contains your targeted keywords.
A big block of your time will be spent just on building links. It is a process made even more difficult because people never wants to link to such a site voluntarily. If you have the resources, of course you can buy them, but unless one is confident the site will get the returns, not many will want to spend this kind of money. Thus most go the free way of getting those required links.
Getting Those Backlinks Is Back Breaking
Free ways include submitting the site using the preferred keywords tags to tons and tons of social bookmarking sites, scuttle sites and lately plique sites. To reduce time doing it manually, I bought BookMarking Demon a script that does this submission automatically, for $87. It is really a kick ass script that can get you thousands of backlinks in a short span of time. Some have called this a black hat script, but I don’t consider it one. It only automates our work and is not doing anything illegal.
Another way is Article submission. Write a few different keyword related articles with links to your site and submit them to another ton of Article Directories. Of course there are also scripts available to automate the submissions. Too bought one for another $57 bucks. Some higher end ones can even churn out articles for you automatically. You only need to punch in your keywords, Then there are membership sites that specializes in article submissions.
Now all these are low value links, but the sheer numbers you get makes up for it. Along with these tons of low value links, you will need some quality links to even out. This is the toughest part. Getting Links by commenting on relevant blogs.
Stop. Smell the flowers first
Commenting For Links Is An Art
There are also scripts to automate comments but all your comments will end up in the Spam Bin. The only way you can get good quality links is to do it manually.
You just don’t go to any Tom. Dick and Harry’s blog and start bullshiting away. They will either delete your comment or worse still ‘spam’ you and when that happens, you will be black listed as a spammer by Akismet and all your future comments will automatically end up as spams.
You also do not want to waste your precious time and effort commenting on post that are irrelevant, has ‘no-follow’, has no PR or has tons of other comments in them.
The best place to comment on are from ‘do-follow’ blogs that are relevant to your site. Using SEO Quake, find out the posts that are indexed by Google, preferably one that has some Page Rank and no one else has commented on. Your comment then, will get all the juice. Of course make sure you comment legitimately with some good feed back to that post. Not just one liners like, “Good Post” That is the worst comment you can give.
I did say getting backlinks is a back breaking process, did I not?
Is It Worth All The Trouble?
If you want to make a living that way, that’s is the way it is. Not many can persevere under these pressure. I, for one gave up. It gets really frustrating and stressful. The first phase of site building part is fun. The second phase sucks.
Is It Still Viable To Build Single page Sites?
Yes if you have a mailing list. The conclusion I came to is, single sites are best adapted by list marketers or email marketers.
These people still builds single page sites for every product they sell or are selling. For one, they do not need to do all the things above. They have ready traffic on their list of emails. They do not even need to learn SEO. As long as their list is big enough, like in thousands or tens of thousands, all they need is to set their autoresponders to mass send those emails.
I think every Internet Marketer knows the meaning of the phrase, “The Money Is In The List” That’s why you see those listed bloggers encouraging and luring your to sign up for their newsletters. They are simply harvesting for emails to build up their list.
Then of course, there are also scripts which lets you build up a list of thousands within a few minutes automatically. But then, that is another story for another day.
These days, I sell all my products under one roof, not in a single page site, but in a single blog site. Now I only need to work on one single blog instead of a hundred single page sites. I feel much more relieved and have my hypertension under control.
Good Post – done
Ha ha
All jokes aside, isn’t Google suspicious when you get a large quantity of backlinks in a short time? Especially if you are new domain?
I think I read somewhere that this can be looked as a suspicious behavior and this is what usually fraud sites do.
Ha Ha too!
First, we have ways to cover our tracks when using automated site submission scripts.
Moreover, of all the social bookmarking sites, scuttle sites and whatever that we submit to in one big batch, less than one third of them will give instant approval. It is so even if you do it manually. So the links sorts of just drips in one by one as they gets approved.
Same with the auto article submissions. We also have to wait for individual approval.
Furthermore, if we are still worried, the script lets us set the time span to submit the number of articles we want.
The actual work might take a few hours using those scripts when it would have taken us weeks if done manually, but normally we still have to wait some months before we see the all links actually linking in. Some also gets rejected because the submission is machine generated.
So nothing suspicious here.
We work our butts out for those links.
That trackback above, is this a classical example of that auto blogging script that collects posts?
That’s a typical black hat script written to harvest trackbacks aka links.
What it does is when you write a post, it will look at all keywords in your post, then the script goes crawling all over the Net looking for post which contains any similar words, links it in your post, thus creating a trackback from that post. Trackbacks are looked upon favorably by Google.
Almost similar to the Link Exchange plugin that you are using now and I was using before.
Very easy to get links with that script but also very easy to get “spammered” by Akisment. Used it before and it took less than 2 months before I became a ‘spammer’ LOL!!
Had to write to Akismet to get me out.
And that bugger is greedy. He set the scripts to get too many links for one post. He’ll become a spammer in no time. I was generous, I just deleted the trackback, not spam.
How do you know when you become a spammer or at least Akismet detects you as one?
And also, isn’t this kinda out of your control?
Thanks Costa, nice article
“These days, I sell all my products under one roof, not in a single page site, but in a single blog site. Now I only need to work on one single blog instead of a hundred single page sites.”
What do you mean with this? You pick one general subject, for example gardening and make all of your salespages on one domain?
Do you put extra content on these sites about “gardening” or do these websites only have salespages on them?
what wordpress theme do you use for these site? A special wordpress salespage theme?
Dennis
Hi Dennis,
Yes, somewhere along that line. Pick a general niche, then sell all your related eBooks in one blog. Like for example, you can pick, martial arts, then sell ebooks on all kinds of martial arts under one roof. So now your main keywords is Martial Arts and your various sub keywords can be karate, judo, or whatever martial arts enthusiast are looking for.
I do mine as “blog’ style. That is, I write a short keyword related article of about 200 words, have the eBook cover image at the top, then insert the BUY link at the bottom of the post.
You can also do it CMS style. That is have different pages for your products than have a blog with related contents in the site.
You can use any theme, but I use the Thesis Theme for it’s really superior on page SEO that no other Theme can match.
Thank you Costa for your reply
I like this way of selling ebooks because now you can use the “martial arts” authority of your site to get rankings for the longtails.
Do you also make different keyword targeted posts with the same ebook at the top?
I mean when you sell a karate ebook you make one post which targets “how to learn karate” and with anothe rpost you target “how to be a better at karate” and do for example 10 othe rposts with different keywords and at the top of every page you have your ebook and at the end of the articles your buy button.
And you can do this with all the martial arts ebooks you have and write different keyword targeted articles for every ebook you have on martial arts.
This is the way I understand it.
Dennis
Of course Dennis. You understood well.
You can do whatever as long as it helps bring in the targeted traffic. I don’t think there is ever a standard procedure of doing things.
Just be creative. You can even design your own BUY button. I use different BUY buttons that I design myself for my site.
Thanks
@mitco,
When every comment you make in every blog you visit do not show up, then you know. Start worrying when your comments here do not show up all of a sudden
Somewhat out of our control, but as long as we make good comments and no one marks our comments as spam, we should be ok. If we gets “spammed” once too often, Akisment will start recognizing our IP.
Some says that if you can get your friends to approve your comments when they see you in thier spam bin, you will be ‘released’. It did not work for me. So I had to contact the people at Akismet.com. They were fast to respond though. Two days was all they needed, if I remembered correctly.
Hmm I just noticed a friend today get in my Spam Que… this is weird, as far as I see he isn’t using that plugin at all
So writing to Akismet will just let you off the hook, or they check first if you are legit?
Like I said, it is somewhat out of our control.
Sometimes we might make a comment that the owner of that blog takes offense to or maybe we used a sleazy URL when commenting that the owner do not like and feel like he is being spammed.
As different people have different kinds of mentality and thinking, all these and more can make someone send you to his spam folder.
So the advise is, don’t comment so much! HHAHAHAaa just joking.
As long as you make polite comments, don’t use a sales page or something fishy as your URL, I think we should be OK.
Really do not know the answer to your last question about Akisment.
Hi,
I agree, it’s really worthy to take risks in selling our products…