Applying the K.I.S.S. Method To Your Projects
I figured it was about time I wrote something good on my blog that will benefit all of the readers (there are now over 1300 of you!). I’m about 2 weeks away from launching one of my largest projects to date. I’ve got access to well over 2.5 million viral users, and a launch of tons of sites to target them with. Something for everyone. But the best advice I’ve always followed, and had my project managers follow too, was to Keep It Simple Stupid. When you’re dealing with very large projects, it gets very easy to lose focus and stray from your original goal.
I know a lot of you have no intentions of launching massive projects, but there really isn’t any reason why you shouldn’t, or even can’t. Maybe you’re thinking “well, I just don’t have the time to do it” — yeah, that’s a load of crap and you know it. If you have time to run one site, then you have time to run one hundred. Or maybe you’re saying “I don’t make enough off of my first site to make more”. Wrong again sherlock. You don’t have to have a lot of money to make sites, that’s the beauty of the internet. Things can be made in large quantities for so little. Hell, as long as you have access to some type of hosting, whether it’s free, shared or dedicated, you can do this. If cash is not something you have a lot of on hand at the moment, all you really need is the cash to buy a domain name. Many of you have reseller accounts, or access to places where you can get one for $6. If you can’t afford $6-$9 for a domain, then I want you to leave my site and never come back, because that is just horse shit.
Anyhow, back onto topic.. (I always get carried away when dealing with excuses)
Here is a great way for anyone that wants to make a change in their income stream. The first thing you need to do is plan or create a strategy that you can use, over and over without making many changes to. This will be your barebones structure. Finding a niche too, it doesn’t necessarily have to be something that tons of advertisers spend $50 a click on, it can be something very basic. Too lazy to find one on your own? Step outside for 20 minutes and look around. Everything that exists in our society is part of some type of business niche. Make a list of everything you see, and start researching it online. Familiarize yourself with the top 5 niche industries you’ve picked. Now let’s make this super easy for you. We’ll begin with 1 niche.
As an example let’s use lawn care (not that there are any lawns in NYC..) as our focus niche. Alright, so you don’t know much about lawn care, good, because I don’t know anything about it either. But I do know that the industry is huge, because I constantly see commercials for it on TV. We know that stores like Loews and the Home Depot sell a bajillion different types of lawn care products. So if they focus on it, it must be somewhat profitable right? Alright good, so we have our first niche to work with. Now find a domain for it. Don’t get one of those dashed domains either, because they are annoying to look at, and if you really want return visitors, it’ll be tough to remember the name of your site. So pick something preferrably with “lawn care” in the name. Now make some room on your shared host, or even create a free host, it doesn’t matter, but make sure you have something where it’s yourdomain.com and not lawncare.excite.com, ya dig?
Okay, planning stage now. The goal of this excersize is to make money, and somehow or other make it seem like you know about lawn care. So you’ll need an ad network (YPN, AdSense, whatever) and some content. The best content is always unique content. I’m sure you can find tons of pre-written articles around the internet about lawn care, but that’s going the easy way, and it’s a fairly bad habit to get into. So come up with 10 different topics that cover lawn care. Research those topics on sites that have information about it, and write down 5 main ideas for each of those 10 topics all under the lawn care niche. A main idea only has to be 1 or 2 sentences long, so don’t go writing a novel just yet. Now your job is to create some articles. What you can do is you can look at articles you’ve read already, take each of those main ideas, and structure an article around it. Because that’s what every other article on the topic is, it’s just the same idea put into someone else’s words. This should take you about 2 hours at most, probably a lot less, but I’m factoring in really long smoking/bathroom/coffee breaks, and some minesweeper.
So you have your articles laid out. Awesome, the toughest part is now over. See, that wasn’t soooo tough now was it? And look at the bright side, you have 100% unique content, so high five big boy! But don’t get too proud of yourself just yet, you still have to come up with a layout of the site. Now here’s where it may get a tad tricky, but don’t get scared, because you are in total control over the situation and outcome.
Choosing a layout is tough, because what may appeal to you, may not appeal to many other people. Color schemes are also very important. A very good way to keep it super simple is to just follow the layout of other sites that are ranking well for the keywords of the niche you’re going for. But instead of straight out copying them, just make a “lite” version of it. They obviously have way more content and pages than you, so work with what you have in front of you. Don’t go crazy with it by creating links to pages you have no content for. If you think of a good idea for the site.. WRITE IT DOWN and save it for when you can use it. But for now, keep it as simple and straight forward as possible.
Okay, so you’ve come up with some type of nifty layout, congrats. Now here is where we can make some money finally. Ad positioning. This has to be by far the most important part of the project. I’m sure you were thinking that the content or traffic part was the key.. Well, here’s some advice. There is no king of anything. You know when you read on forums about people saying “traffic is king” or “content is king”, sorry to burst your bubble boys and girls, but the only king around, is me. Joking.. but on a serious note, you can’t do well without the other factors. You can’t make as much money as possible with only traffic and no ads or content, and you can’t make money without traffic but amazing content. You need to have a medium of everything combined. And the part that really boosts your revenue potential is really good ad placement.
Gone are the days where banners needed to be flashy in order to get clicks. Who the hell says you HAVE TO put your contextual ads in a border or table near your content? Google and Yahoo WANT you to make more money, because in turn, then they make more money. So what you need to do is use the tools at hand. Make up a checklist of ways that you can put your ads inside of your content. Have the content and ads meld together so that it seems like the ads are part of the layout and content, and that they aren’t there to annoy anyone. It gets me so angry when I see really good laid out sites or sites with awesome content just waste their potential by sticking to the normal size banner ads because they were too damn lazy to put in the time to concentrate on proper ad placement. So ad placement INSIDE your content is something you need to focus on.
I hope you’re keeping a checklist or laying all of this out in your own special way, because all of this information is going to help you build your first of hopefully hundreds of sites that have on goal, to make you some money!
I know I can clean this post up and make it reeeeally easy to follow, but I’m giving you advice, and the best way to really make things work for yourself is not to go step by step with what someone tell you to do, but to learn how to do it on your own. I’m basically teaching you how to fish, so that you can feed yourself, instead of trying to sell you one or two fish for the moment. Next time, when you get hungry for some money, and you’re finally tired of giving yourself excuses on why you CAN’T do it, you’ll pull out the notepad where you wrote this stuff down, you’ll put it into play, and then you’ll come back here and tell me how correct I was.
Oh yeah, before I’m done, I want to add that you should do some light SEO work. PLEASE do not go overboard. Make sure you have good title tags, SOME alt text tags on your images, and some incoming links to all of your pages, that’s right, not just your index page, and the engines will bring in your traffic. You can also buy some clicks on some of the smaller engines for like $0.01-$0.05 a click if you need instant traffic. It doesn’t hurt to try.
Last part of the step is to create VOLUME. Yes, I say it often, but I’m a strong believer that when you do something correct, and it makes you money, then you should keep plugging away and doing it over and over and over. Use the notes from this post to create your own little network of 100 sites in the gardening or lawn care arena. SEO your sites correctly, and you’ll build up longterm streams of traffic. Keep your ads as part of your content and not just flashy banner things, and your CTR will increase, thus increasing your revenue stream by thousands of dollars a month. I’m serious about those numbers. Following this can literally have you going from a measly $5 a day in revenue and low CTR’s to well over $150 a day. It’s not out of reach at all, and I’ve done it so many goddamn times I can probably recite it in my sleep.
Alright, enough writing. Go do it and stop making excuses for yourself. You CAN do this. Time to make more money for the holiday season. Buy your folks something better next year, instead of the same old green and red colored socks, trust me, they’ll appreciate that hot tip.
That’s a great article Jon. Thanks.
Excellent read. I have my niche. I’m writing my content right now. You’re the man.
Hey Jon, great post. What kind of research should someone do after they have found a niche?
Awesome post - and as always the bluntness of your writing is actually motivating.
When you say create these network of sites, I am assuming that each will have its own unique/individual articles using the same method you used on the initial site, or am I wrong?
Also, was it one of your posts that I read where you said you no longer focus on Adsense, etc. but more so affiliate offerings? Is this project something we should start with Adsense to get a feel for things?
Great post ! Thanks Jon.
ps. Can you break this into series of posts ? So the readers can focus on one stage to another.
Can’t ask for anything more than that Jon, a step by step guide to internet domination.
One question though, what do you consider to be the optimum length for your articles? 100 words, 300 words, 500 words?
Like butter on bread. But i think this is what a lot of readers have been waiting for.
Lawn Care. Lol. Did that in ‘03 ;p
Excellent post j0n. Finally a succesful web publisher lays out his complete system.
Gud jub!
Thanks everyone.. If you have direct questions.. please post them in the radio show section, and I’ll answer them on the air.
Jon, when you talk about 10 topics, and 5 ideas on each topic, does that equal 10 articles (with 5 ideas running through each), or 50 articles?
Mark-
1 primary niche > 10 sub-categories/topics > 5 main ideas PER sub-category/topic = At least 50 articles.
That’s what I thought - thanks
Wow, 50 articles about Lawn Care, that seems a bit overkill, I mean how much can you really do with a lawn.
well toro (number 1 on google) thinks that is not “overkill”
http://www.yardcare.com/sitemap.html - 60ish articles
The term “overkill” should only be applied when SEO’ing the crap out of your site prematurely. As for articles, you need to keep your site updated, so you’ll have to add a lot more than 50 articles over time.. Seriously, just try it. The worst case scenario is that you’ll have wasted some time on something and about $6 on a domain.
Nice article jon - in a strange way you remind me of my old man
Thanks, I think agua..
PS - Everyone, I had a server failure today, but everything is back up and running fine it seems. I’ve been told it was a one time hardware issue and it won’t happen again. Thanks for the emails of concerns by the way, I appreciate it!
[quote]The term “overkill†should only be applied when SEO’ing the crap out of your site prematurely. As for articles, you need to keep your site updated, so you’ll have to add a lot more than 50 articles over time.. Seriously, just try it. The worst case scenario is that you’ll have wasted some time on something and about $6 on a domain.
[/quote]
I really am eager to try your website productions system but time is money, even more then money is
I can spend hours working on the site, but at the oppurtunity cost of earning XX an hour doing my webdevelopment work for clients.
Last year I invested loads of time in a site and it’s income is still at this time pretty disappointing.
Jon, in order to write 50 articles about eg lawn care, would you first educate yourself a little bit by reading like 10 articles on it or would you be prepared to read a whole book about it and write your own unique articles?
Oh btw, I don’t want to leave a negative impression with my last comment, I’m still really excited about following your article and I’m definitely going to start on it next month, when I got less deadlines to meet and stuff.
[...] Jon’s current blog entry is about implementing the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) method in your project management. Jon is planning to launch many sites in the coming months, and he exhorts his readers to do the same. I know a lot of you have no intentions of launching massive projects, but there really isn’t any reason why you shouldn’t, or even can’t. If you have time for one site you have time for a hundred. [...]
[…]Thanks, I think agua..[…] - you thought right - your writing style reminds me of my old man talking straight “Don’t make excuses - just do it”
A wonderful post…missing only one thing. The same thing that every thing I read seems to miss.
Traffic.
Jon, I know you feel that no one part of the process is King, but you can do everything else wrong, have traffic, and still make a tiny bit almost by default.
Without traffic, no amount of money is possible.
Since the Florida update, I can’t rank for anything in any engine. 2 years of nothing but failures to try and develop traffic. Google last Adwords update in August 2005 eliminated my profitable PPC ventures, and I’ve been unable to make them profitable since then.
The frustrating part is that I’ve made over $200K online since 2003, but I’m facing with having to go back and get a job because I’m no longer able to generate any traffic. I have numerous content sites that muddle through with 2-10 uniques per day. Nothing I try seems to change that fact.
I even tried to build a page that was optimized around a keyword that only had 41 search results in Yahoo. Where did my site end up? You guessed it - 42nd.
While each aspect your wrote about is very important, they simply all pale in reagrds to traffic. Nothing is possible without traffic.
Sadly, I’m living proof of this….
Mike
Hi Jon,
You mentioned:
“PLEASE do not go overboard. Make sure you have good title tags, SOME alt text tags on your images, and some incoming links to all of your pages, that’s right, not just your index page, and the engines will bring in your traffic.”
Also you suggest to create network of sites (100+ sites) & you will be able to make $150 per day!
Well, I think that it’s NOT going to be that easy.
Pointing some incoming links to my site pages will not do the job unfortunately!!
It’s more hard SEO working on a daily basis in order to get more traffic & therefore gain more revenue from Ad Networks, etc.!
Thanks & regards,
Mike
Just a quick update.. has anyone tried this yet? If you are trying it, please let everyone know how it’s working. I’ll address the questions and comments from this post on one of the radio shows, but please post your questions in the radio episode 001 blog post instead of here. Thanks!
Hey Jon,
Your system definately works. I used to create a couple of new sites every month but always focused on different niche markets. (so many idea’s, so little time) I was averaging about $100 a day
Since I read your posts on sitepoint I started focusing on one niche market instead. All I can say is wow…what a difference. I’m now earning on average $700 a day with 8 sites all targeting one specific niche market.
The $700 is coming from a combination of adsense, CPM and some other affiliate programs.
“If your goal is to be comftorable, chances are you’ll never get rich. But if your goal is to be rich, chances are you’ll end up mighty comftorable”
Well, I’m always glad to hear about someone using my methods and having it work for them, kudos to you!
gud job activeweb, since you and jon both do this I’d like to ask these questions to both of you;
1. How do you come up with the number of websites you will want to produce for a specific niche
2. are they all different types of websites (community oriented/directories/topsites)
3. Do you normally have just 1 or 2 of those sites in the top 10 in major serps or do you actually manage to dominate the top 5 results or something.
Jon, I’m in the process of building a few websites, following your guideline closely. I’m still developing a template website that runs on a very solid and functional community oriented CMS.
My main issue with productions speed is content though, even at a rate of 1,5 dollar cent per word I need to stash some cash away in order to produce a number of 50-article content websites.
I’m also writing some stuff up myself now and then but that’s really not the most efficient thing I can do with my time and neither does it yield in very high quality content, since I’m not particularly knowledgeable in the niches that I picked.
This is an amazing article. I really am glad l found it! Thank you so much for taking the time to share your knowledge with us. I look forward to reading more of your work in the future
Also, l’ve been poking around on sitepoint // looking for more of your articles, but l can’t seem to find them — any help would be appreciated.
aojon and activeweb,
do you use one ip to host all these (100) sites? meaning do you use a different C block?
i have a small network but have decided not to interlink (except for one feeder) b/c of a seemingly undecided viewpoint on this at sitepoint and wMw… so any experience shared would be of strong value my way.
i’ve considered buying hosting (my network is too small to justify 2 C blocks unless it really pays well), so have been waverying on this one for my last few sites.
(found u through sitepoint, jon - thanks for putting this together- it’s a fantastic resource. grow resources grow!)
thanks eh.
This is awesome. I love KISS and RATS (read all the screen)
To rebuttle a previous poster, traffic is not the most important thing to FOCUS on.
No pun intended, but I recently bought a new lawn, utilzing sod. I wanted to keep the grass green so I went to buy some chemicals at Home Depot. The garden associate and I talked for 5 minutes and she advised me to purchase, instead, a root-growth additive.
She said that focusing on getting a lawn green when it has no roots is only temporary, and superficial.
But, if I were to focus on letting the sod grow awesome roots, then the green would come naturally, albeit 2 months later. But it would be a long term, deep green.
Same goes for content versus traffic. (content = roots, traffic = green)
Forgot to give my link. My blog is located at http://the47.com/wordpress
[...] The basic outline method that I have been following is the Keep It Simple Stupid method. It was a post on Mook Jon’s blog. It pretty much outlined how to make a simple site that was based on article content. I recommend reading it as it was my main motivation to getting started. [...]
Jon,
Do you recommend 1 domain per Niche Web site?
OR
Is it ok to use 1 domain for many Niche Web sites?
I have a nicely aged domain (9 years old) in mind for this project.
thx,
x
[...] Affiliate Marketing is HUGE. Maybe I am the only one who was not aware of it, but I think that Affiliate Marketing is now just starting to come the public forefront. Of course this means that there is probably a lot of competition, which mean more work on your part, but there is still room. Jeremry PAlmer ,who is right now, the poster child for this trend, only started 2 years ago. I ran across this great article that breaks it down to you plain and simple on how to get started. And because I am in a happy mood, here is a ton of resources to get you started: [...]
[...] So far, Marketraise has posted material which I’ve also found on StuntDubl, Patent Storm, Niche Geek, Wikipedia, Aojon.com and others in an attemt to drum up business for their “corporation”. No credit was given to any of the original sources and no indication was given that they were not original thoughts/posts. In fact, they were all signed by the reposter. [...]
[...] Super Affiliate Marketing Blog » Applying the K.I.S.S. Method To Your Projects But the best advice I’ve always followed, and had my project managers follow too, was to Keep It Simple Stupid. When you’re dealing with very large projects, it gets very easy to lose focus and stray from your original goal. (tags: KISS affiliate projects marketing) [...]