For All My Internet Marketing Friends!

Travelling the world and speaking at seminars is

one of my true joys. Some of my very best memo-
ries are times spent with other Internet Marketers
at these events.

This book is a poor substitute for an “in-person”

experience, but you can’t beat the price!

-NA
The Art of the Content Site

Nathan Anderson

September, 2005

What many people don’t realize about Search Engine

Optimization is that beyond a certain level of keyword
research and placement, SEO is just content creation.
Most “high-reputation” SEO firms don’t do a whole lot
more than just keyword research, content creation, and
a linking campaign. In fact, many firms farm out the
keyword research and linking tasks to other companies!

Many SEOs are quite proud of their content creation

abilities, claiming it to be an “art”. They call it “SEO
Copywriting” in order to make themselves feel more
important than they are... when in fact, any monkey
that knows English can perform nearly on-par with these
“experts”.

Quietly sitting at home, hundreds of Internet

entrepreneurs are making a very comfortable living
online. They’re making this living using the fine art of the
Content Site.

To tell you the truth, I’m a relative newcomer to the

game. I’ve only been selling online since 1997, and only
been seriously marketing online since 2000.
The fact is, many people have been publishing content on
the world wide web since the early nineties. Most did so
for altruistic motives... and many more did so as a means
to enhance their name value, and the references to their
business on the internet.

Regardless of the motives, the search engine top results

are packed with listings of content sites.

What does this mean to us as Internet marketers?

The content site model is obviously highly effective with

the search engines.

It does have some drawbacks, though. The typical content

site takes untold hundreds or thousands of hours to
create. And in the past, the traffic was fairly difficult
to monetize; especially for the person not expert in the
intricacies of Internet marketing.

As for the first problem - the untold hundreds or

thousands of hours required to create one of these virtual
ATM’s - there have been some really great advances in the
last few years.

A number of automatic site creation softwares have come

to market, as well as some very effective and simple to
use Content Management Systems (or CMS). These take
some of the tedious tasks of site creation out of the
equation; allowing the site owner or manager to merely
create the content and “dump” it into the CMS.

Some highly advanced softwares actually create some

content for each page to serve as a user resource, as
well as means to early search engine traffic. This content
can be in the form of syndicated articles, newsfeeds, or
optimized search results (as in the case of MetaWebs).

But before we get any deeper into the concept of a

Content Site, let’s look at what “Content” really is.

Content, simply put, is the “stuff” contained in a website.

The type of content that will result in good search engine
rankings is regular HTML text. Content also includes
graphics, photos, video and audio. So a “Content Site”
that is focused on a single topic could have articles about
the topic, pictures about the topic, music on the topic,
and videos about that topic. The important distinction
lies in the fact that the site is tightly focused on a single,
narrow topic; or niche.

By far, the most important type of content, when it comes

to search engine rankings, is HTML text.

HTML text can mean a number of different things when

it comes to the user experience. It can be in the form of
articles or white papers, discussion forums, blogs, product
reviews, and instructional texts. All of it is pretty much
the same in the eyes of the search engines: it’s just HTML
text.
A distinction that we as Internet Marketers want to pay
attention to when looking at these types of text is: a) Is
this content that I or an employee has to create? Or b) Is
this content created without cost by other people? We’re
obviously going to be focusing on b!

So before we lay out an effective plan of action for

creating a content site, we need to discuss some of the
basics of Search Engine Optimization. After all, search
engine traffic is what we’re after in this model. It is highly
targeted, as well as having the wonderful benefit of being
free!

If you already are an SEO expert, feel free to skip this

section. But if you don’t know a lot about it, take the
time and energy to try to really understand this stuff...
I know, I know.... it’s dry and boring! But there are some
things I’d like to discuss in this book that rely on you
understanding a little bit of terminology.

Let’s take a look at On-Page Factors of SEO:

1. The domain name and URL.

2. The title of the page.
3. The meta tags.
4. The readable text content of the page.
5. The HTML code of the page.
6. Freshness, growth, and topic.
This list is made a little simpler when using a page-
generation software or a CMS. You don’t have to worry
about the URL, title, meta tags, or HTML of the page
when you use a site creation software like Metawebs (and
to a certain extent, you don’t have to worry much about
#4, the readable text, either!) When using a CMS, you still
have to pay attention to everything on the list besides #5,
the actual HTML code of the page. The CMS will create
the title and meta tags, but you should check to make
sure that they’re appropriate.

The Domain Name and URL:

The domain name of your site is very important when it

comes to Search Engine Optimization. If someone searches
for “shoes” and your site has “shoes” in the domain, i.e.
www.abcshoes.com, you’ll be much more likely to appear
nearer the top of the list. The benefit is slightly greater if
the domain starts with the keyword, i.e. www.shoesplace.
com. An even more dramatic benefit occurs if your domain
name is just the search keyword alone, i.e. www.shoes.
com.

Search engines are very good at pulling search keywords

out of domain names, so you don’t have to separate them
for the search engines to see them. For example, www.
theshoeplace.com will receive benefit in searches for
“the”, “shoe”, and “place”. You don’t need to register a
domain like www.the-shoe-place.com. In fact, domains
with hyphens (dashes) are sometimes shown to have a
slight downgrading in the search engines from time to
time, so I suggest avoiding them.

When it comes to the TLD, or Top Level Domain, we’re

talking about the .com part of the domain. The benefit or
detriment of the various TLDs like .com, .net, .org, .us, or
.info vary between the different search engines. Google,
for example, has a definite preference for .com domains.
Yahoo varies, but tends to treat the various TLDs rather
evenly. MSN is similar to Yahoo, but seems to give .com
domains a slight DOWNgrading instead of a boost; and
seems to favor .org domains slightly over the other TLDs. I
tend to register only .com domains, because of the Google
preference, and because the consumer is trained now to
look for them and trust them.

The URL of a page on your site includes the domain,

plus the directory (also called a folder) and filename.
i.e. http://www.abcshoes.com/subdirectory/filename.
html . The URL doesn’t appear to have nearly the affect
on rankings that it used to. Naming filenames and
subdirectories with your keyword or keyphrase used to
give you a nice boost, but that no longer appears to be
the case.

The one URL factor that seems to remain constant is the

LACK of a filename in the page URLs of your site. For
example, http://www.abcshoes.com/subdirectory/ will
outrank http://www.abcshoes.com/filename.html . To
accomplish this, merely name your page files as index.
html (or .php or .asp or whatever) and place that file
into the named subdirectory. Browsers all know to look
for an index when directed to a subdirectory. So http://
www.abcshoes.com/fitting/ would outrank http://www.
abcshoes.com/fitting.html

This also accomplishes a secondary goal - keeping the

site upgradable. If you someday decide to switch your
page authoring software to Cold Fusion, for example, all
the files will need to be named with a .cfm extension.
So all you have to do is recreate your files in Cold Fusion
and save them as index.cfm in the subdirectories. You
navigation remains the same, and you won’t have to worry
about the search engines listing your new pages properly,
as the URLs remain the same.

The Page Title:

Your page title is another very important part of the page

when it comes to SEO. Since the search engines can place
a limit on how much of the title they consider in their
ranking, it’s a nearly impossible page element to exploit
or abuse. The words in the title are given more weight
the closer to the beginning they are. Benefit to rankings
seems to drop off completely after 8 or so words.

So the message here is to start your title with the most

desirable keyphrase for the page, and then follow it
with any secondary keywords. There are months when
the statistical data shows TWO instances of your desired
keyword in the title gives even greater benefit, so you
might consider putting the most desirable keyword in a
second time, if it makes sense and looks good.

Meta Tags:

Regardless of what the self-proclaimed SEO experts in

the free forums tell you, meta tags are still factored into
search engine rankings by all three engines. Though the
benefit is not all that dramatic, it is certainly measurable.

The best advice for the makeup of a good Keywords

Meta and Description Meta is to use them as they were
intended. The Keywords Meta should contain a list of
keywords that directly apply to the content of the page.
Start the list with your most desirable keyword first. You
may repeat keywords in the tag if you like, but it doesn’t
seem to give much benefit.

The Description Meta should be a description of the

content of the page. There are a few search engines that
actually use the Description Meta for the description of
your site in their Search Engine Results Pages (or SERPs).
So craft a Description Meta that begins with your most
desired keyword or phrase, and is very descriptive of the
page. Word it so that it is enticing for a searcher to click
through into your site.

The Readable Text of the Page:

An important factor in search engine rankings is the
readable text of the page. Fairly lengthy pages tend to
rank better, so long pages are preferred over short.

SEOs talk a lot about “keyword density”. This is the

percentage of the words on the page that are a given
keyword. If you feel like paying attention to keyword
density, which I usually don’t, a percentage in the range
of 2.5% to 3.0% is good to catch the “sweet spot” of all
three engines. If you simply write about a given topic
using the keyword or keyphrase when naturally needed,
and pay no attention to density, you should be just fine.

When laying out the text on the page, keep in mind that
the first part and last part of the page weighs more than
the center. So start and end the page with instances of
your keyphrase.

The HTML code of the page:

There are a number of “tricks” that can be performed

with different tags in your HTML to improve ranking. Most
of these tricks only give very limited benefit, so I tend not
to bother. But I’ll mention them anyway.

One tag that NO LONGER works in a beneficial way is the

Headline tag or H1 tag. Headlines used to be given greater
weight in ranking than ordinary text, but no longer. In
fact, Yahoo seems to penalize words in an H1.
The image “alt” tag was created so that people without
the capability to view graphics had some sort of text
explanation of the graphic or picture it applies to. It is
still used by vision-impaired visitors. Use the image “alt”
tag to describe an image, preferably starting with your
page keyphrase. ;) Don’t use it improperly; loading it up
with keywords and not explaining the image.

Other HTML tactics are inappropriate to use unless you’re

using frames or other special setups, so we’ll forgo them.

Freshness, Growth, and Topic:

There is some sort of variable in the search engines that

gauges the frequency of how often content is updated
on a web page. I haven’t been able to isolate it in my
research. What is fairly obvious is that pages that go
for many months without changing tend to slip in the
rankings. There is also a lot of conjectural evidence that
pages that update quite frequently tend to rise in the
rankings. So updating content is good.

What is also obviously good is a website that grows. Sites

that are on the rise in the search engines tend to be sites
that increase in numbers of pages on a regular basis. So
adding new content pages to a site as time goes by is
good.

The topic of a page is tracked by at least one search

engine. If that topic suddenly changes, it can drop out of
the rankings for both the old topic and the new. Keep your
pages on a single topic, and don’t change that topic over
time.

Now let’s take a look at Off-Page Factors of SEO:

1. Number of incoming links.

2. PageRank of incoming links.
3. Anchor text of incoming links.
4. Topic of the page of incoming links.
5. Whois information
6. A wide variety of unknowns.

Off page factors of your site’s search engine rankings

include anything that’s not visible in your site HTML.
Most of what we have under some sort of influence is
incoming links. We also have control of Whois information.
The wide variety of unknowns are things we really can’t
know without someone at the search engines leaking the
information... and so far, that hasn’t happened!

Number of incoming links:

The more sites you can get to link to your site, the more
obviously important your site is. Acquiring incoming one-
way or reciprocal links both currently positively influence
your ranking in all three major search engines.

PageRank of incoming links:

PageRank is a proprietary algorithm for measuring,
somewhat objectively, the importance of a webpage.
Importance is a factor of how many sites link to you, and
how important those sites are. All three search engines
use a very similar measurement of importance, though
only Google publicly names theirs (PageRank). So getting
sites with a high PageRank to link to you is more beneficial
than getting a site with low PageRank to link to you.

An estimation of PageRank is viewable through the Google

Toolbar, found at http://toolbar.google.com

Anchor text of incoming links:

Another very important factor for getting your page to

rank well for a specific keyphrase is to have incoming links
to your page that have your keyphrase in the anchor text.
Anchor text is the underlined, blue text that you click
on. Try to get as many sites as possible to link to you with
your desired keyphrase in the anchor text of the link.

There are some cautions with this element. Having all

or nearly all of the incoming links to your site contain
exactly the same anchor text can lead to a penalty.
Vary up the order of the words, if you can, on a decent
percentage of incoming links. Try to stay below 70% of
incoming links being the same anchor text. I generally
split variances up so only a third of links are the same.

Topic of the page that is linking to you:

There is much speculation about the context of links to
your site. If the site linking to you is in the same general
subject area, it is supposed that these “contextual” links
count for greater benefit.

Some people refer to this concept as “Hilltop” or “Topic

Sensitive PageRank”.

There is a similar concept called “Authority Links” where

links from supposedly highly trusted sites count for
greater importance than a regular links.

I have not been able to statistically prove any of these

theories. Not only is it impossible to define an “Authority
Site”, it’s also difficult to define the precise topic of a
site. What limited testing I have done on sites that would
be certainly considered an “Authority” site, such as dmoz.
org and the Yahoo Directory, zero statistical correlation
was found.

Since it is not so difficult to limit linking activities to

sites that are in a similar topic area, it would be wise to
assume that this concept will someday have some effect
in some search engine, if it doesn’t already. So try to get
links from sites in the same topic area.

Whois information:

The Whois database is certainly used in the ranking of

sites. There are a number of different points of use in
a Whois file. One is the origination date of the domain.
The age of a site is certainly used in ranking, especially
in Yahoo. This may be gauged by Whois information, or
just the first incidence of a record in the search engine
database.

Another Whois factor that may be used is the length of

domain registration. It is understandable that a serious
business would register a domain for longer than one
year at a time. Registrations of ten years are common
for larger sites. If there is a benefit, a longer registration
would be desirable.

The country of registration may influence which country

search engines the site may have benefit in.

A wide variety of unknowns:

There may be a large number of other external factors

that influence rankings. Some may be unknowable; some
are certainly difficult to know or measure.

It would make sense that businesses found in the Yellow

or White Pages would be more “legitimate”. It is possible
these databases are used. There are any number of similar
external sources of information that could be used.

----end SEO----
So now that we have a decent understanding of the basic
elements that can affect your site’s rankings, let’s take a
look at the common characteristics that make a content
site successful.

WHAT IS A CONTENT SITE?

The general characteristics of a content site are as

follows:

1. Houses primarily HTML Text

2. Includes elements of interaction
3. May include multiple media types
4. Grows over time
5. Is tightly themed (niched)
6. Takes advantage of personal passions
7. Community = Success

HTML Text

As we discussed earlier, plain old HTML text is what the

search engines currently favor most when calculating
which sites will occupy the coveted top 10 spots in a given
search result. Google, Yahoo and MSN all factor in the
words they find on your site as part of their algorithm.
Yahoo and MSN actually currently give more weight to
HTML text found on the site than Google does, but it’s
certainly important to all spidering search engines.
So if you have a site that is primarily images or flash or
other graphic file formats, the search engines really will
have little idea what your site is about; as they can’t
interpret pictures. Having flash and images on your site
certainly doesn’t HURT your rankings, they just don’t
seem to help.

Whatever you decide to include in your site, try to make

the “meat” of the site straight HTML text.

Interactive Elements

One of the genuine keys to content site success is

INVOLVEMENT. G.W. Gallup recently stated in his work,
The People’s Religion that “America is the loneliest
country in history”. Even though telecommunications
and travel technologies are bringing the people of this
planet closer and closer to one another, the citizens of
the U.S. are increasingly less socially involved with others
in society. Television isolates people from one another.
People increasingly choose to OBSERVE rather than
PARTICIPATE.

The social “hole” that is left in the average American’s

life is going unfilled. Though the average U.S. family
is busier than ever, most relationships are casual and
occasional at best. Parents live with long work hours,
extensive commute times, shuttling kids to sports and
social activities, and little time left for developing
genuine friendships with even their neighbors and church
families.

Increasingly, people are headed online for social

interaction. The Internet doesn’t care what time of day
it is - you can find someone to talk to in a chat room or
forum at any time of night or day. What really makes
the difference in this interaction is the building of a
“community” online. Interaction with the same people
day after day can develop into genuine friendships - even
online. Just ask any member of Metawebs and they’ll
confirm! My best friends now originally came to me via the
Internet.

This is why Interactive Elements can be so important

to content site success. Give people of a very specific
passion the opportunity to interact, and you’ll have
problems keeping people away from your site!

Media Types

Content sites can house all sorts of media types.

Broadband access is making it practical to stream both
audio and video formats of all types across an Internet
connection. Content sites may house many or few
different media types. Quicktime movies, mpeg video,
flash video, mp3 and ogg files are just a few different
video and audio formats that work well over the Web.
The more you have available, the more time people are
likely to spend on your site. It also leads to more people
bookmarking your site and posting links to it from other
websites.

Image, font, and graphic libraries are also popular and

useful to visitors. Make sure you have license to give away
or sell the elements on your site if you choose to take this
path, though.

Audio files can be either music or spoken word. Don’t

neglect the popularity of recorded verbal conversation.
I’ve had recorded conference calls be downloaded
thousands of times; selling products for years after the
call was completed.

Site Growth

One of the most beneficial content site elements, when

it comes to growing search engine traffic over time, is
site growth. The search engines all seem to give benefit
to sites that change and grow over time. New pages also
increase the natural PageRank ability of your site, as you
have more pages with which to link back to your home
page - giving their “vote” to it.

Site Growth also will encourage your visitors to come back

often; not only to click on your advertising, but to add to
the growth of the site themselves. The best content sites
grow on their own - without the owner having to write,
create and collect their own content.

Article collections and blogs are a good example of

ways that a site can grow through your efforts, and your
visitors. A forum is a growing body of HTML text that can
be completely grown by the visitors to the site.

Tightly Themed

The true key to a successful content site that a lot of

inexperienced webmasters often completely miss is the
necessity of a tightly themed topic for your site. All the
areas of your site have to stay “on topic”. For example,
one of my sites is about Aquariums and Fish Keeping. This
is a tightly themed niche, even though there are many
segments of the topic that can be separately exploited,
such as “saltwater aquariums”, or “freshwater aquariums”
or specific species such as cichlids. But all these things are
under the theme of Fish Keeping.

A topic that is too broad will confuse visitors and the

search engines alike. If you like interior decorating, and
you feel that a quality aquarium is an essential part of
interior decorating, fine. Just don’t go into extensive
detail about fish tanks or re-segment that topic on your
interior decorating site. The site should be about the
various areas of interior decorating.

Seriously, when looking at the various niches available

for population on the web, there are literally tens of
thousands of them. Pick something YOU are passionate
about for your first few sites, and the learning curve will
be all that much easier to handle.

Personal Passions

The most successful content sites play upon people’s

personal passions. Although Worker’s Compensation
Insurance may be very important to some people, it’s
likely not something that people are truly PASSIONATE
about. Pick topics that are hobbies, or spiritual pursuits
for the most passionate responses from visitors. For
example, my brother and father are both “Spiritual
Directors”... a very specific Christian position usually
associated with retreats and renewal. They are truly
passionate about the subject; have read every book on
the topic, have every decent website on the subject
bookmarked, and discuss it passionately with others of
their ilk. A site dedicated to this very narrow niche would
likely attract them to participate, bookmark, and revisit
often.

As for hobbies, the previous example of aquariums is a

perfect example. There are a large number of forums
on the subject. In fact, there are highly popular forums
on the various SUB-niches of this topic. One I like is just
about predator fish. Another only focuses on saltwater
invertebrates. Truly an opportunity for passion within a
hobby.

We all know, there are hobbies that people are passionate

about out there that we’ve never even HEARD of!
Collectors of all kinds flock online to find their specific
collectibles, and will pay just about anything to get them!
I even know of one collector that only collects a single
issue of one comic. He has hundreds of copies of a single
comic! You may think it strange, but all kinds of these
niches exist in areas that you’ve never dreamed of.

Community = Success

Any methods you can use on your site that will build a
community on the site for visitors to become a part of
are worth pursuing. New softwares and technologies
are popping up all the time. At the time of this writing,
the latest tech “fads” are WIKIs, MySpace portals,
and podcasting. There are sure to be more of these
opportunities for interaction by the time the first reader
opens this book. Know how to spot them: Any means to
interact online.

An online community can be a really wonderful thing.

I’ve started and managed several really great ones. These
communities can mean an awful lot to the participants,
even though these interactions are merely “virtual”.
Cyberspace gets more palpable with every sunrise.
I’ll elaborate on some very successful methods I’ve been
involved with, and you can choose what tactics to make
your own.

First, I’ve found it extremely beneficial to have a “cost

of entry” to an online community. This doesn’t have to
be in the form of money, but that’s an easy cost of entry
to implement. By instituting a cost of entry, you keep an
enormous unmanageable element out of your community.
The smallest cost of entry would be, perhaps, furnishing
a genuine and functional email address in order to join.
I would NEVER install a forum online without having this
basic hurdle in place.

There is a significant nefarious population online, and the

vast majority can be kept out of your community with a
few basic hurdles in place. Children can be a large part of
this population, believe it or not. It seems like little geeky
12 year olds are all over the ‘Net these days! They like to
pose as adults or members of the opposite sex and cause
problems for the entertainment value. Most won’t risk you
having a real email of theirs, and will steer toward easier
pickings.

This negative population can be even more efficiently

eliminated from your online community by requiring a
credit card payment for entry. Kids are less likely to have
them, and card holders realize that they cannot hide their
identity once they reveal their credit card information.
Monthly fees of all levels are an even better assurance;
but a single credit card charge in order to gain access
does wonders all by itself.

Getting a paypal account is far too simple, so it doesn’t

qualify as a credit card charge. But it certainly is more
effective at deterring the negative population than a
simple email confirmation.

This all leads to one difficulty in this community concept:

keeping your community behind closed doors. Some
of the most successful online communities I’ve been
involved with have been membership-based. That means
that the only people that can even read the forums and
other content on the site are members. This leads to a
corresponding detriment, though: Search engines will
also not be able to visit and index your forums and other
content, so it will not lead to that all-important free
search engine traffic that is one of our main goals.

There is a middle ground, though. A number of

membership site softwares now have a feature that allows
robots from specific search engines to have access. They
still keep the site secure from normal visitors, but allow
entry from the specific IP addresses that Google, Yahoo
and MSN use to spider websites. Pretty ingenious. When
a search engine visitor clicks on a listing that leads to a
private page of your site, they are instead directed to
a membership signup page. I personally find this rather
annoying, but it certainly is effective. A large percentage
of major newspapers use this tactic for their online
versions.

If you do end up with a payment as your “cost of entry”,

the best mindset to take for your paid community is one
of giving. These people have paid to become a part of
your site, so you should do everything you can to over-
deliver. This is especially true of membership sites, where
members will be paying every month for access.

Providing lots of free resources on the site for members

will make them very loyal. If they’re paying $10 a month
for access, yet you give them valuable new ebooks every
month, or discounts to products in your niche, they will
feel that $10 is a bargain. Add to that mix top-level help
in their passion, and a community of like-minded people,
and you’ll be looking at a long-time winner.

I’ll reiterate: Provide Free Resources. It endears you to

the members, and will greatly enhance loyalty.

Metawebs is a perfect example of this concept. Metawebs

members pay up to $997 a month for access to this
software and community. Do you think it would make
members more or less loyal if I were to give things away
for free to the members? Could I have any possibility of
recouping even one or two months membership fees in a
promotion to the group? So why in the world would I try to
make even more money from my members?... I regularly
find the best tools and softwares in the SEO and Content
Site niche and sign up for the affiliate programs for these
products. But I don’t take a commission when offering
them to Metawebs members - I have a special link created
for me that has the affiliate commission for the product
removed, and corresponding discount applied.

So Metawebs members are always getting large discounts

to all the latest information and tools in the industry.
If this makes even one member stay for an additional
month, do you think my efforts are worthwhile? Certainly.

This leads to our next subject: Bringing your best to a

community, even if it doesn’t pay. Constantly scheming for
new ways to mine your community for more money does
nothing but detract from the loyalty and camaraderie of
the group. If you write an ebook on a topic, give it away
to the members of your community! You can make sales to
non-members. Besides, the members of your community
then become your best salespeople. This is especially true
if you have an affiliate program for them to profit from
their recommendations.

When you create resources of all kinds, bring them to the

community. Give them away if possible, or provide them
at a steep discount. One of the bonuses for Metawebs
members are twice-weekly “webinars”. They use the
Voxwire online meeting interface. This software allows
everyone to interact in three ways: With a typed chat
window, by voice, and the moderator of the webinar can
“push” web pages to the group. The audio and typed text
of these webinars are saved and made available for those
that couldn’t attend personally, so no one is left out.

I really try to bring my very best ideas and tactics to these

webinars. I don’t hold back anything. Certainly, if I’ve
discovered a new profitable strategy, I could make money
with it all by myself for a while without anyone being
the wiser. But is that a competition mindset or a creation
mindset? I share all my latest ideas and strategies right
away. I bring my very best to the community, even when it
doesn’t pay, and my members know it. The loyalty level of
Metawebs members is absolutely stunning.

Let’s talk about some of the problems with online

communities. As stated earlier, there are some people
out there on the Web that get their kicks from causing
problems. They’re pretty easy to spot, and take action
upon. Never, ever, ever hesitate to remove someone from
your community and ban their IP! If you receive just one
complaint about someone, you can be nearly assured
that there are 10-20 people who are just as annoyed with
someone, but haven’t voiced it.

Removing problem members from your community isn’t

limited to these obvious “trolls”. There are a number of
people that are primarily negative, as well, but aren’t
intentionally disruptive. These negative personalities
always find the one cloud in the beautiful spring sky. They
will suspect your motives on anything you do. They tend
to talk themselves out of success at every turn, and in so
doing, talk others out of success as well.
My assertion is to remove these negative people right
along with the trolls. If these are paying members, or
there is more at stake for them than just a valid email
address, you might have one email exchange with them
first. Give them a second chance, but never a third.
Tell them that their negativity is not only horrible for
themselves, but also to the whole community. Inform
them that this is their only chance to change, and they
will be removed without warning at any point from here
on.

Yes, that sounds harsh. But these negative personalities

have an immeasurable detrimental effect on your
community. I like to keep one or two around just for
the opportunity to display grace for the person to other
members; but you certainly don’t need to do so. There is
quite a lot at stake for me in Metawebs, so I can afford
that kind of personal attention. You should be doing your
best to limit your time required to manage your sites.

Now that we’ve talked about negative personalities,

let’s talk about positive behaviors. You will have some
members of your community that emulate all the very
best traits you’d like from members. They post in the
forum often, and with positive, uplifting advice. They
attend any webinars or teleseminars and contribute
positively. They offer up their own stuff for free to the
other members. Make sure to reward this behavior!
On most of my content sites, there is a forum. Positive,
uplifting contributors to the forums end up with
invitations to be a moderator. Each individual category
in the forums can have a separate moderator, so you
can reward multiple people on every content site. The
moderator position on a forum is held with some esteem,
as it carries some power with it. The moderator has the
ability to delete or edit posts, as well as ban members. So
you’re rewarding them with the opportunity to do some of
your work for you!

You can reward the positive people in your community

with other special rewards, like eliminating their
membership fee if it’s a monthly paid site. You can
also give them special access to you as the site owner/
administrator... up to and including your primary email
address and phone number (if you choose). This is a
powerful display of trust to a lot of people online. Of
course, there are lots of ways to reward your good
people, just use your imagination!

The last element I want to cover under the topic of

Community Building has already been mentioned once:
Don’t over-mine your membership! I personally know
of several online personalities that send out emails to
their lists several times a week, and they ALWAYS include
an affiliate or other profitable promotion. There is
nothing that will kill a community faster than an owner/
administrator that is seen to be greedy!
If you’re going to be emailing your membership regularly,
make sure at least HALF of your emails are purely non-
profit. Give your members free things as often as you
offer things for sale. Over-mining your community is a
disastrous mistake. Again, keep a giving mindset and
you’ll be much better off.

ACTION STEP

Knowing now what can make a site successful, let’s

formulate a course of action for creating a highly-ranked,
highly trafficked, often-bookmarked, profitable content
site.

The first action I want you to take is to do some surfing via

the search engines. Go search your favorite topics. More
specifically, go search your favorite hobbies, and take a
look at each of the top 10 sites that come up. What are
they?

Are these official company sites that relate to the topic?

I’ve found that usually 3-5 of the results will be official
company sites. These sites are not what we’re after.

Are these traffic directing sites? You can spot these as

pages of search engine results, or article snippets, or just
plain garbage text on the page, along with advertising
links. I’ve found that you’ll typically find one or two of
these types of sites in the top 10, depending on how
competitive the search is. Some may even be Metawebs
sites. But these are not what I want you to take a good
look at, either.

Are these content sites? Do they have areas for

interaction, different types of media, people participating
that are passionate about a very narrow subject? Does it
look like someone has dedicated themselves to this little
passion of theirs... spent thousands of hours creating their
site about their passion? This is a content site. Usually,
more than 5 of the top 10 search results in a hobby area
are content sites.

These are the sites I want you to spend a little time

investigating. Examine the look and feel of the place...
Does it have forums? Are there articles posted? (and who
wrote those articles... the site owner, or someone else?)
Is there a newsletter or other type of email signup? How
do you suppose they are paying their bills? Are there “ads
by Google” on the page? (Adsense) Do they have other
advertisements like buttons and banners?

Seriously.

Stop right now, if you haven’t already, and go do some

studying. Look at these search engine listings and sites
with a less than casual or consumer eye...

Do it now.
Were there a number of similarities between the sites?
You’ll probably come up with a standard pattern; a
“salad bar” of elements from which they all seem to
choose. Not all sites have all the elements, and many add
unique elements besides what is on this list. But from my
observations, content sites usually include some of the
following:

1. Forums
2. Blogs
3. Chat rooms
4. Articles
5. Product reviews
6. Resource directories
7. Newsletters
8. Multimedia archives

Let’s take an in-depth look at how to use each of these

elements:

FORUMS

There are a large number of free or Open-Source forum

softwares available for free download on the Internet.
My current personal favorite is phpbb. You can find it at
www.phpbb.org. It is really easy to install. In fact, if you
use cpanel hosting for your websites, there is a one-click
install available right in the cpanel interface (though
it most likely will not be the latest version). It also has
some really useful management functions built in to make
taking care of the forums minimally time-intensive.

There are other great forum softwares that are perfectly

adequate, such as Ikonboard and YabbSE. I’ve used both of
these several times with success as well.

There are some great forum features that you should

make sure to implement. Avatars are one obvious element
that can be fun. It enhances a community to have a
picture to go with the written words you see. I include a
“head-shot” as my forum avatar whenever I’m personally
participating. These can also be utilized with pretty
whacky humor...

Some forum softwares have what’s called a “warn level”.

This allows a moderator to “warn” a participant if they’re
not being nice, and if they’re not nice often enough, they
get banned. I don’t use this system, as I tend to have a
“no warnings” policy: you be bad, you be gone.

Each user can also set up a “signature”. This is a little

snippet that follows each of their posts on the forum.
Many times it’s a favorite quote, or a statement of the
nature of their profession. I allow members to place a
single link to their site or other resource in this signature
box, as it incentivizes participation in the forum. The
more posts, the more links to their stuff.
When setting up a forums, you’ll need to set up the areas
of discussion. Each major segment is called a category,
and each segment within a category is called a forum.
From there, each forum is split up into topics or threads.
I tend not to use categories - I just set up a forum for
each sub-niche for my content site topic area. If you split
up your forums too much, you tend to dilute your action,
which can lead to stagnation.

You’ll need to set up a forum area for each subtopic or

sub-niche, and then make three or four topic posts. You
can split the sub-niche and make a topic post for each one
if you like, but it looks more natural to post questions,
and then post answers to the questions.

Create 5-10 different logins. I personally have an

employee do this type of work. It’s perfect for a high
school or college kid, or a relative trying to make a few
extra bucks. Create 5 to 10 different personalities, and
then post with each of them to the forum. Have some be
complete “newbies” with very basic questions, and some
more experienced that can answer the questions.

Create a debate or controversy, if you can in your niche.

If there’s a common point of contention in the field, this
shouldn’t be difficult. Have a couple personalities take
one side, and a couple other personalities the other side.
Keep the discussion very civil - you’re demonstrating how
you want people to behave in your forums.
Once a site has some search engine traffic, you’ll notice
people wandering into the forums and participating.
They are far more apt to participate if there’s a point of
contention or debate that they can attach themselves to.
They are also more apt to LINK to the discussion. Natural
links are very valuable.

Does this seem not-so-honest to you? It did to me at

first. But when I realized that I had a couple of sites
with thousands of visitors a month and no activity on the
forums, I knew this was the reason. People don’t want
to spend their time in vain, and posting to an inactive
forum is usually a complete waste of time. You need to
create that activity to give them some value for their
participation. You are creating value with these posts,
seriously!

Once natural search engine traffic supplies the site with

fresh visitors on a daily basis, you’ll see these forums
take off on their own, and you no longer need to “seed”
the forums with an employee or two. Through diligent
effective actions, you’ve created a little community that
is fairly self-sustaining.

Make sure to find those “positive people” and promote

them to moderator of their favorite forum. If you don’t
seem to have anyone that sticks out, you can steal
a moderator from a similar forums elsewhere on the
Internet. Simply type “forums” and your niche topic into
a search engine and you should find several active ones.
Go find an under-appreciated, but very active and positive
poster on these forums and send them an invitation...

“I have a new site with forums on -topic-. I’d love for

you to come and make it your own. You’re obviously very
passionate about the subject, and have a lot of great
things to contribute. You obviously should be a moderator.
I’d like you to be the moderator of the -subtopic- forum
on my site. You can have your favorite people come and
join you; it’s your place. What do you think?”

Occasionally, I have people offer to do so for a fee. It’s

usually nominal, so I generally agree. But most times,
they will either accept or decline immediately. Usually
they accept. It’s a boost to the online denizen ego to be a
moderator, after all!

Again, you’ll need to empower the moderator with

your friendly-forum policy. Tell him that you have a no-
tolerance policy for trolls and negativity, and to ban
members with zeal.

BLOGS

Sorry to tell you, but blogs aren’t magic. They don’t hold
some mystical pull with the search engines as some people
might tell you. They are simply a way to get standard
HTML text onto a web page quickly and easily.

The nature of a blog is, however, very friendly to search

engine rankings. They are updated frequently and grow
over time. These are two major positive elements for
search engine rankings. As long as you continue to make
posts to a blog, it grows and changes.

When setting up a blog, make sure your target keywords

are in the title of the blog. Also, set it up to automatically
archive on a weekly or monthly basis (depending on how
often you will be posting). This creates a permanent page
for every bit of text you type in, and keeps the home page
of the blog fresh and ever-changing.

Another area to set up in your blog is whether or not

to accept comments. I like to accept comments, while
setting the software to not accept links in comments.
Too many nefarious types on the Web look for blog
commenting opportunities to create links to their sites,
including porn and other nasty stuff. I’d rather not worry
about it, so I set my software to not accept links in blog
comments. Blog comments are yet another way to get
OTHER PEOPLE to post unique content to your site for
you. That’s why I use them.

There are a wide array of different ways to automate

your blogging activities. There are softwares that will
automatically do it for you. A few of these include:
1. AutoBlogger - Posts articles and article snippets to your
blog on a regular basis.
2. RSStoBlog - Posts RSS feeds to your blogs on a timed
basis.
3. BlogBurner - Posts links to the pages of your websites
en masse or over time.

I don’t really have a problem with automatically posting

articles or RSS feeds to a blog. This is still useful content
for a reader to encounter. I don’t, however, appreciate
the “junk blogs” that a product like BlogBurner creates.
It’s definitely over the line into “search engine spam” in
my opinion.

The reason for posting these long strings of links to all the
pages in your sites is for link popularity, not for creating
content that the search engines will index. You can
accomplish this manually if you like - Blogging for links.
Every time you post to a blog, you simply post a link to
a page on the site you’re talking about (preferably your
own!). This is made fairly simple if you’re using Blogger
and the Google Toolbar.

You can set the Google Toolbar to have a little “blog this”
button showing. You simply visit the page you wish to link
to and click that button on the toolbar. It opens up a new
blog entry in Blogger automatically, and you can simply
type out a quick post and click “publish”. Then you’re
done. Simply done, you’ve got new unique content on one
site (the site that houses the blog) and incoming links with
good anchor text to the other site. The “blog this” button
actually creates a link to the target site automatically
with the page title as the anchor text - perfect for us.

One quick tactic that you might want to take advantage

of for automating blog entries is autoresponder blogging.
Certain blog softwares will accept blog entries via email.
Wordpress is one of these blog softwares. So you can set it
up with a “cron job” on your web host to check a certain
email address and post emails to this address as blog
entries.

Convenient, yes. But paired with another Internet

marketing technology - autoresponders - it can be a great
automated time saver. Simply split up a bunch of content
into individual posts, and load them into an autoresponder
as individual emails. Then time the autoresponder to
send every 4 or 7 days or so... and send only to one email
address: the blog email address.

With this tactic, you don’t have to remember to blog

every so often. Just handle it all at once. You can use
anything you like for your content for these entries.
Unique content is obviously best, but splitting up an
article into posts works great. I look for articles at an
article archive that include “top ten tips” or some other
format that leads to easily being split up into individual
posts.

You can also write this series yourself, or hire it out.

Content writing is getting really inexpensive lately. Go
to www.elance.com or www.rentacoder.com and see for
yourself. You can get keyword-targeted articles written
for as low as $5 apiece in quantity. A “top tips” series
shouldn’t be a difficult nor expensive bid request.

CHAT ROOMS

The more the interaction on the Web becomes “real

time”, the more interaction we can attract to our sites.
Currently, chat rooms are the most “real time” of the
technologies I use. The Voxwire webinar interface has
more interaction modes, but is only as “present” as chat
rooms.

My wife has been labeled “Queen of Chats” by a number

of my online friends. Why? Because if there’s a chat time
with any group of people she knows online, she’ll be
there. We live in a fairly isolated place - in the foothills of
Southern Colorado. So we don’t get the same amount of
personal interaction that other people do. A chat allows
her to talk to other adults once in a while, even if she
stays home. Talking to three kids all day can really mess
with your head!

So chats are a great way of spending “present” time

with your online comrades. Your community will be
greatly enhanced by providing this type of present-tense
interaction.

There are several good chat clients that are easy to

install. Again, two decent ones come with cpanel hosting,
along with several others in what is called “Fantastico”.
This is a package of scripts that cpanel hosting oftentimes
comes with.

One difficulty with chat interfaces is getting them to “pull

their weight” when it comes to search engine fodder. A
live chat window obviously can’t be spidered and indexed
by a search engine. So how can we get these text-sessions
to help us?

Archive your chat sessions.

Most chat interfaces allow you to copy out the text of

the chat. You can then paste the chat content into a blog
specifically created for archiving chats. You can call it
“The Site-X Chat Log” or something similar. Just make
sure that members know that their chat will be archived,
so they know there will be lasting impressions from their
speech...

Want to take this method a step further? There are chat

softwares that will automatically email you any chat
content at the end of each day. Set this email address to
be the blog-by-email address we discussed earlier, and
you’ve got a 100% automated solution! At the end of every
day, the content of the chat is automatically emailed
to the blog and posted there. The only caveat is that
some pretty questionable content can be posted to the
blog without your knowledge, so be prepared to monitor
this blog or have it monitored by an employee or forum
moderator.

ARTICLES

Articles are a great way of giving your site credibility,

stickiness and search engine content. Many content sites
are solely pages of articles, split up into categories with
navigation.

There are several different ways to use articles.

The first is to post other people’s articles to your site.

Find all the reprintable articles on your niche topic you
can find, and make an article resource area for your
users. This will make your site a very credible source of
information on your niche topic, and will also make your
site very “sticky”. Visitors will stick around and read the
articles, giving you more chance to sell something to them
or get them to sign up for your newsletter list.

What this method is NOT very good at is attracting search

engine listings. Search engines, especially Google, are
getting more and more able to spot “duplicate content”,
or content that is published elsewhere on the Web. They
don’t want to give high rankings to many pages that are
all the same article. They generally give a “real” ranking
to the article with the highest PageRank, and the rest are
dropped.

But you know what? That’s okay. We are using these

articles for stickiness and credibility, not search engine
traffic.

The second way to use articles for your site is to post

UNIQUE articles to your site. These can be articles that
you write, or articles that you hire someone to write, or
articles that a member of your site writes. Unique content
is VERY good for search engine listings, and therefore can
be used to attract traffic.

The third way to use articles is to acquire one-way

incoming links. Submit your article to other sites that
accept them, and make sure to include a “resource box”
at the end of the article. This resource box should contain
a link to your niche site on the topic of the article. That
way, anyone that posts the article is also posting a link
back to you.

And if you want to use both the second and third methods
described above, you can take a little time and re-write
the article once. Post the original article on YOUR site,
to qualify for search engine traffic, and then send the
re-written article to everyone else to use as links back to
you. That way, you are assured that you’ll never lose the
search engine rankings on the article at your site - as it
will be unique from all the rest.

Seek out sites that “aggregate” these articles. www.

articlecity.com is one good example. You can search
through their article database and find topics that exactly
match your niche; as well as submit your articles for other
content site owners to publish for links.

You can also use articles as a powerful pre-sales tool.

If your article is talking about a specific problem that
your product solves, it’s only natural to give a link to the
solution at the end of the article! It should definitely still
be an informative article on the subject, but a link to a
product (that happens to be yours) inside the article can
be very effective in making sales.

Another tactic I like to take with articles is to chop them

up into email messages. A long article, and especially
a “how-to” or “top ten ways” sort of article is very
conducive to this tactic. Split them up into individual
email messages and place them into an autoresponder to
“drip” on list members. These emails don’t need to sell
anything, their sole purpose is to bring people back to
your site (to hopefully click on ads) and to enhance your
site’s credibility and name recognition.

There are lots of other great uses for articles. After all,
they’re the primary “content” when we speak of “content
sites”! Keep your eye out for creative uses. Visit lots of
other content sites for ideas!

PRODUCT REVIEWS

These simple scripts are a great way to get web denizens

to contribute content to your niche site. A Product
Reviews area can be a real favorite - especially if you’re
in a niche where there are lots of different competing
products, and lots of opinions! My perennial example is
aquaria, as it is something that I’m personally interested
in. I typed in “aquarium product reviews” and found this
page, which is a perfect example of what we’re looking
for: http://www.aquahobby.com/e_products.php

Users are able to contribute reviews of all kinds of

different products related to the aquarium hobby. They
make their opinion known, and see their name “up in
lights”. Everyone wants significance in their life, and
being a known person in an online community fulfills that
need. Product reviews give a person the ability to “shine”
(and also brag a bit about what they’ve bought!).

You can find these simple scripts at www.hotscripts.com

for free or very cheap. If you can find one that will easily
integrate with forum logins, you’ve got a sure winner.
That way, only posting members of the community can
contribute to the reviews. You’ll also be sure to have their
email address!
 RESOURCE DIRECTORIES

You’ve seen these on all kinds of sites. Pages or

“Directories” of links to other sites. These can be
reciprocal links, or just useful links to other sites that you
think a person in this niche would find useful.

Again, there are lots of good resources for building these

directories. Link Management Assistant from Duncan
Carver is a nice one. It allows you to keep a directory
on your site and invite those that appear in your link
directory to link back to you. Just make sure to turn
off the PageRank display feature of this tool, as it is a
violation of the Google TOS.

Metawebs is obviously heavily into this category. The

basic content that initially populates a Metawebs site
is directories of websites. These are provided by the
internal search engine at Metawebs - a marvel of modern
technology! All the directory listings are highly relevant
to the exact keyphrase the page is about. They’re also
dynamically updated on a time basis chosen by the site
owner, without any sort of intervention by the user
or owner. So the list of sites is always really fresh and
relevant.

If you’re using a directory script or automatic link

exchange program that allows a person to come to your
site and add their own link into your directory, make
sure to have someone police these links! You don’t want
links to porn or other inappropriate material on your site.
Community members or employees are good for this task
- as it’s really a tedious task for a site owner.

When naming a resource directory, make sure to use a

page name that is fairly unconventional. There are a
number of reciprocal linking softwares that have been
out in use for years now, and the common names they
use for their pages can have a penalty applied to them by
the search engines. For example, never name a resource
directory page “links.html” or /links/ or similar. You’ll
find a lot of pages with this name on the web with a PR0
applied to them (which mean they are penalized, if the
rest of the site is a lot higher PR).

I like to name the directories with the topic of the page -

like /aquariumpartners/ or similar. This way people really
can see what the page is about just by looking at the URL.

NEWSLETTERS

There is some “blurring of the lines” when it comes to

newsletters and articles. After all, if you post a newsletter
to your site, isn’t it then an article? What if you send and
article to your newsletter list... is it then a newsletter
rather than an article?

Simply put, a newsletter is an article sent to a list on a

regular basis.

These can be articles or news items about your niche

topic, but need to be fairly regular in frequency. They
can be written by yourself, an employee, or a community
member.

Again, community members like to “see their name up

in lights”. So they fairly regularly will submit items for
your newsletter, if they know they have a good chance
of getting into it. If they see their article distributed
officially to all the members of the community, their self-
importance and significance rises. Yes, they’re giving you
free content for your site! But in return, you’re fulfilling
some of their basic human needs. Certainly don’t feel
guilty about it.

If need be, hire out the writing of your newsletter. Have a

local employee, or outsourced worker take care of it for
you. Again, you should not be performing all the routine
tasks related to your site. You are the owner!

As I mentioned earlier, you can simply split up a good

article an make it a newsletter series. Long articles,
“how-to”, or “10-ways” type articles are all great
candidates for chopping up for distribution.
Moreover, being consistent really helps. If you really want
to build a responsive newsletter list, load all of these
issues into an autoresponder so they are sent on a very
regular basis. I recommend several autoresponder services
in the “resources” are at the back of this book that are
very easy to use and affordable.

These services will even give you the form HTML to post
on your site for signing up for your newsletter. I like to
put that signup box on every single page of the site - after
all, the list is a great long-term monetizer. Even if all your
search engine traffic goes away, and all the people leave
the forum... you’ll still have your list!

Again, your first priority with your newsletter is to get

your list denizens to know who you are, and know your
site name. Don’t dive right into trying to sell to them. You
want to “drip” on them. Short, informative emails on your
niche topic every few days will make an easy impression.
The only link should be back to your site so they can visit
for more info, and remind them of who you are.

Once you’ve “dripped” on your people enough times

(I’d suggest around 10 times) you can start lessening
the frequency of your newsletter emails. From once a
week up to once a month is suggested, with once a week
being most effective by my testing. Make sure to use an
autoresponder service to deliver these newsletters if you
aren’t “type A”. Being consistent with your delivery can
be very beneficial. Get several ready and load them into
the autoresponder so they go out consistently.

As you come across great affiliate programs and

interesting news in your niche, you can add these into
your newsletters. Make sure not to hit your people with
affiliate links or promotions more than 50% of the time.
They want to feel that they’re getting more free content
than pitch.

MULTIMEDIA ARCHIVES

There are lots of files out on the Internet that qualify as

“multimedia”. You can create a place on your site where
you collect these files and offer them to your members.
The MOST IMPORTANT consideration in this realm is
ownership and copyright. Any file that is labeled clearly
as “open source” should be fine for you to distribute. This
generally applies to open source software. Just make sure
to read any conditions associated with the file.

For other softwares, those labeled “shareware” or

“freeware” are also good candidates. Freeware is
software that can be distributed freely, with not even an
implication of payment by anyone. Shareware is free to
distribute, but the author of the software asks that users
that “use or like” the software send a small payment.

Audio, video, and image files need to be clearly labeled as

“free to distribute” or “public domain” files. Collections
of these files can be very popular. In fact, really creative
files can be the basis of a “viral” campaign. For a
quintessential example of this type of video, check out
www.theinterviewwithgod.com which was created by my
friend Morgan Westerman. It has been viewed over 40
million times as of the writing of this book.

Fonts deserve a quick mention. Font archives can also

be very popular. Again, be VERY careful with licensing
on fonts. Make sure they haven’t been illegally copied
from someplace before posting them freely on a site. For
example, anything from Adobe is definitely NOT public
domain or free to distribute. They charge pretty hefty
fees for the use of their fonts.

USE INTERNET MARKETING PROWESS

We can apply the entire Internet Marketing bag of tricks

to the creation, management, and monetization of a
content site. Keep in mind that the normal content site
owner/manager has extremely limited knowledge of
Internet Marketing. The sites that will be occupying the
search engine results pages with you are not at all a
threat. If you use great relational tactics with your site
members, they will love you more than any of these other
site owners, and you’ll make many times the money they
do.
If you are in need of basic Internet Marketing knowledge,
I would suggest getting a good foundation from www.
netbreakthroughs.com. For one fee, you can download all
kinds of ebooks, audios, and training videos on the topic
from such Masters as Terry Dean and Kirt Christensen. As
of this writing, the forum on the site is inactive as they
are going through a redesign. But if you join in and like
the place, stick around and pay the monthly fee for a
while. It’s a bargain!

You should also be outsourcing all the time-consumers

in managing these sites. Find a family member or local
student to do most of the drudgery. Hire someone from
www.rentacoder.com for more complex tasks. You need to
be the brains behind the operation, not the braun.

A sample of ideas for monetizing these communities:

1. Have community members co-author products with you.

What this means to ME is that the community member
does all the work of creating the product, while I put my
name and site name on it and market the thing! These
Joint Ventures can be very profitable and popular. You
share the credibility of your site name with the author,
and they give you something to sell.

2. Once you’ve collected/created all this specific

information on a single niche topic, you’re in a perfect
position to create a “definitive guide” multimedia set for
your niche topic. Again, don’t do the work yourself. Have
a hungry community member put the thing together and
share in the profits. Use a fulfillment company to produce
and ship orders. Keep it simple!

3. The MOST effective monetization method for these

sites is currently Google Adsense. It is a “pay-per-click”
program. Advertisers pay Google for every visitor sent to
them. Google shares that revenue with you. Explore the
various ad sizes and layouts for one that produces a high
click-through rate. Well chosen ad layouts can lead to
click-through rates in the 20% range. That means that one
in every five visitors to the page are making you income
(which is AWESOME!). There are similar programs in the
works from Microsoft and Yahoo. Keep your eye out for
them.

4. There are all kinds of affiliate programs out there.

Find products from clickbank.com and cj.com to offer
from your site. These programs pay you a percentage for
sales you make for them, so it can be a “feast or famine”
situation. One month you make hundreds or thousands,
the next you make nothing. But you should NOT ignore
these programs. They certainly pay.

TOOLS

Metawebs - Obviously the most sophisticated site creation

system on the planet! ;) Look to the last page of this book
for a detailed description.

Mambo - A CMS or Content Management System. There are

a TON of these softwares available for free or small cost. I
like Mambo best. You may also want to check out phpNuke
or some of the others.

PHPbb - My favorite Forum software. Free, of course!

Easy to install, and easy to administer. Also check out
Ikonboard or YabbSE.

HotScripts.com - This is a GREAT place to find free or

cheap software scripts for your site. Need a Product
Reviews script? Here’s where you get it.

Rent a Coder - The best “bang for the buck” in the

Internet Freelance arena, in my opinion. Not only can you
hire programmers, but site designers and writers as well.

e-Lance - A bit more expensive, but has a more well-

rounded marketplace of freelancers.

One Shopping Cart - A VERY complete suite of tools for

the Internet Marketer, including autoresponders, list
management, shopping cart and other site marketing
tools. Give ‘er a try.

AWeber - Inexpensive and very effective autoresponder

service.
 CONCLUSION

No matter what tools or techniques you use, simply

putting content on webpages is going to get you closer to
your goal. Search engines love content, and so do people!

The most important step for you to take at this point is

to TAKE ACTION. Do something right away. Once you’ve
started a project, it’s a lot easier to move towards that
end goal.

Inevitably, you’ve had some ideas while reading this book.

Go right now and get a hosting account. Preferably, get a
reseller account so you can build more than one site. Find
the DNS settings for your account, and go and register a
domain name and set it to your hosting account settings.
That is the beginning.

Sure, you can spend a lot of time doing all sorts of

research before getting that first domain; and it will help
a little. Getting started right away is more important.

I’ll inevitably add more to this ebook as time goes by,

so check back to the site once in a while and see what
version is available. I hope this has been an informative
and useful experience! Drop me a note sometime at
nathan@artofthecontentsite.com if you’d like to leave a
suggestion or comment!

ABOUT METAWEBS

MetaWebs is a content site creation software. After

years of development and nearly a year in use by over
300 members, I can confidently say that it is the most
sophisticated site construction package available.

It is web-based, running on two dedicated dual-xeon

servers. You can log into the interface and use it from any
web browser. The sites it creates are highly optimized for
search engine rankings.

It actually creates dynamic site directories as its primary

form of content. It creates these directories from
our highly sophisticated internal search engine. The
directories auto-update themselves - providing constantly
updated information. These sites are always fresh and
changing - another element of high ranking sites.

The MetaWebs software is constantly being improved and

updated according to the very latest research on how
the search engines are ranking sites. It’s also updated
with new features and capabilities on the fly. The current
software compared to the software that was released is
completely different - vastly better.

There are two uses for the MetaWebs software and

system:
1. Construct large traffic-directing portals with the
software itself, valuing quantity of content rather than
customization or interactivity. Lots of pages, lots of sites.
2. Use MetaWebs as the basis for constructing highly
interactive community sites. More and more features are
being added to further facilitate this type of usage. This is
the use I recommend - the use outlined in this book.

MetaWebs itself is a highly interactive community site.

It has forums, a WIKI, support ticket system, articles,
instructional videos and audios... really everything we talk
about in this book. I run MetaWebs by the philosophies
outlined in this book.

MetaWebs is not a typical Internet Marketing “hangout”.

It is a community of people that build content sites and
monetize them with excellence. A large percentage of
members are making what many would consider “full-
time income”. A good percentage of members are making
enough income to be considered fairly well-off!

We have a club within MetaWebs called the “Fedex Club”.

The origination of this name is rooted in the fact that
Google used to send Adsense checks in excess of $10,000
per month via Federal Express. They’ve since gotten
a little cheap, and send them via DHL... but the name
persists. This is what I mean by “full-time income”.

It is really my mission to get everyone in MetaWebs, that

is willing to commit to the work, firmly entrenched in the
Fedex Club. Nothing gives me greater thrill these days
than getting an email “application to the Fedex Club”!

If you think that’s something you’d like to do, go check

out the sales page at www.metawebs.com and give it a
thorough looking-over.

You may find that membership is full and closed, as we

limit the number of memberships to 400. If so, sign up for
the waiting list.

Be forewarned, though... this is not a light decision.

There is a substantial investment involved with joining
MetaWebs. We take the price of entry pretty seriously,
as we want committed people to join. We also must be
able to deliver top-level training and resources to new
members to assure all opportunities for success.

See you in there!

-Nathan
http://www.metawebs.com
©2005 Anderson Agencies