A couple of days ago, I visited Flippa, an website marketplace, and I saw so many autoblogging sites for sale that it made my head spin. And, the really weird thing is that a lot of these autoblogs were actually being sold for various amounts (many higher than $100). Some of these blogs were aged and had a history of generating revenue and some were brand spanking new. But, one thing was certain, people were buying them left and right.

I then started thinking, why is autoblogging so hot, is this type of business model that I should consider and is autoblogging the wave of the future? I still don’t know why its hot (except that most people want easy money) or if autoblogs will maintain their stickiness. However, I do know that for right now, autoblogs seem to be working (especially for website flippers out there – hint hint) and since I plan on flipping sites very soon, I plan to jump on the autoblogging bandwagon soon.

Here’s a few facts I learned about Autoblogging

What is Autoblogging?

Autoblogging is a method of creating a completely automated blog, so that you don’t have to regularly update it. This process allows individuals to get fresh content, videos, etc. every day or even more than once a day, and make money through Google ads, contextual advertising, or affiliate links.

How to Create Autoblogs

You create an autoblog using a WordPress blog, a domain name. and a plugin. With this plugin, you are able to pull in content from all over the place. Depending upon your keywords and your niche, you can pull content from different kinds of sites that are relevant to your topic. The plug-ins include links back to those sites so that the owners get credit for their articles or posts.

Some people use WP Robot whereas others use plugins from sites like Unique Article Wizard. Both of these allow you to pull articles from their site to populate your blog. However, WP Robot also allows you to pull videos, twitter posts, amazon products, ebay auctions, yahoo answers, and much more.

How Much Can You Make?

You can make $100 or more selling well made autoblogs. If you keep them, the amount you make will vary depending on your niche. It seems as if the most common amount people make from one autoblog is about $2 per day. This is why marketers typically create hundreds of autoblogs. If they create 100 autoblogs, they’ll make $200 a day, which translates into about $6,000 per month. Not too shabby, right?

What are the Risks?

There are many variables to autoblogging, from the keywords you choose to the content you pull. It’s very possible that more than one blog will be highly successful. It’s also equally possible that several blogs will make no money. In addition, search engines tend to look down upon autoblogging sites and it may be harder to get them ranked or keep them ranks, especially for competitive keywords( or at least that is what I’ve heard).

My Verdict About Autoblogging
Autoblogging can be extremely profitable if its done correctly but it carries some risks. As for me, I am going to give autoblogging a try, especially for website flipping. I don’t think I will keep them for my own niche blogging efforts however for website flipping, they seem perfect.

What do you think? Are you going to give autoblogging a try?

A few writers were chatting in a few forums about content revenues dropping for their niche websites and many of them were concerned about this drop in earnings. I have to be honest with you, my niche sites have dropped a bit but I make up for it by adding more sites. : )

My thought is this – many advertisers are cutting back as such there is less advertising available. The most common ones that are cutting back are real estate and some retail type shops (high priced items). On the same token, financial sites seem to be booming. I truly believe that if you’re considering starting or adding to your virtual real estate empire that you “do it now.”

Here’s why – our economic situation is going to improve and when it does, advertisers are going to increase their advertising revenue and sites will start making more money. People will start buying and the economy will improve. Therefore, now is the time to build up your niche sites, to cultivate them, and keep them going strong. Then, when advertising kicks into full gear, you will be ready to collect your cash.

I also believe that now is the time to get multiple streams of income going on with your niche sites. Do not rely solely on such sites like Google Adsense. Instead you should diversify by using various monetization methods including your own books or products, affiliate links to other people’s products, etc. By doing this, you will be better prepared to weather the storm. You’ll be in a better position to win the internet marketing game.

For those of you that need instant cash, try out Associated Content, Textbroker, Demand Studios, and Bright Hub. I know for a fact that they do pay and can help fill in the blanks when you need more money now.

As you guys know, I’ve been trying to figure out this internet marketing stuff for a while now. Although I am definitely making some progress and have learned ALOT this past year that I’ve been at this, I am no where near where I want ot be. However, I had an Ah-ha moment last night and I wanted to share it with you.

I was cyber chatting with one of my friends last night and  I was telling her that I wasn’t getting enough traffic to my niche sites. Now I was making some sales but I wasn’t making many and I really wanted to increase my efforts. I told her that I planned to write more articles and submit them to Ezinearticles.She then told me that was fine but what I really needed to do was create a niche foundation.

She told me that if I had a good niche, I needed to create articles to Ezines and then create a Squidoo, HubPages, Freewebs and Weebly site all interlinking to oneanother. Each one of these would create a nice little network of sites and boost my rankings, traffic and and sales.

I immediately thought about what she said and realize that this was the ticket. This is one of the things that I hadn’t really learned how to do….create networks…and that this is the missing piece.

I was so excited that I almost couldn’t sleep well. When I fell asleep, I had dreams of PayPal cash flooding into my account.

So, my challenge is to create a ton of these niche foundations for my profitable niches to see if I can increase my efforts. What do you think?

Photo: jscreationzs

As you know, content is king and people love ready-to-go businesses. So why not create some websites based on some original keyword-rich article content that you’ve created based on a niche? You can then create a website using Xsite Pro or Front Page (or hire someone else to design the site) and then sell it for profit.

With this method, you can easily earn a quick $500.00 or $1,000 or more. To increase your income even further, you could secure top search engine placements about 50 backlinks and really see your hard work and effort soar.

Men and women who want to make money on the internet would almost always rather purchase a “ready-to-go” business rather than spending the time to create their own content-rich site. In fact, these sites can be really hot sellers, especially if you have a good amount of traffic going to them before you sell them.

All you have to do is purchase a domain and hosting. (Remember the domain name tips and suggestions.) Create some quality, keyword-rich articles for the site, either offering helpful information or explaining topics. If they’re interesting and good quality articles, the site will function much better.

Create AdSense ads to place on the site, which will make money each time a visitor clicks on them. Also, do what you can to get as many links back to your site as possible. You can monitor the traffic on the site with this free tool found at www.statcounter.com. Depending upon the quality of the content, how the navigation is, how high you’re ranked in the search engines, and the amount of traffic that is coming to the site, you may be able to sell your site for thousands of dollars!

Here are a few places to sell websites:

- http://www.sitepoint.com

- http://forums.digitalpoint.com

- http://www.buysellwebsite.com/

- http://www.vertive.com/sell-website/

- http://www.nonstopprofit.com/

This is one of the best ways to make money for YOURSELF through your writing talent.

A few weeks ago, I was conducting some niche medical research for a friend of mine with a chronic illness, and I came across a Made for Adsense site that was plastered with Google Adsense ads and had about two pages of non-relevant content.

I was pissed to say the least.

It was obvious that this website owner was only trying to make money off his bogus site and was not the least bit concerned about the relevancy of his content or his user’s overall user experience. He was out for the fast buck and didn’t care about his reputation as a website owner at all.

Well, I immediately clicked out of his site, bypassing any Adsense ads ( I didn’t want him to make one red cent off my clicking) and then found another site with relevant site and immediately bookmarked it so that I could return later. I then passed on the word about this other relevant site.

The whole experience caused me to think about the importance of quality content and how certain website owners give other owners a bad name.

The bogus owners probably don’t realize that quality content is king and that they should always provide the best content ever. After all, that is what draws loyal customers and get you the real sales. Instead they are out for the money. What they don’t realize is that they’re leaving bucks on the table.

Consider this scenario. You are a site owner who writes plagiarized material and then throws it on a blank page with a ton of ads to make a few dollars. Yes, you might get 10 exit clicks amounting to a whopping .40 from every visitor. However, if you had provided relevant content, you could have gotten 1-2 product sales from your recommended products. After all, visitors are more likely to purchase products from owners who provide them with quality content and solid information. They view these owners as honest and take their recommendations more seriously.They don’t just click to get off those bogus sites full of ads screaming “give me money”.So, my lesson today folks is to always, alway, always provide your visitors with a good user experience. It doesn’t matter if you have one visitor or a gazillion.

By doing this, you’ll appease your human readers, build loyalty and will be handsomely rewarded for your efforts.

As for that other site Made for Adsense site, I checked it today and it is now deindexed and I say “Good riddance sucker“. I guess Google caught up with your dumb butt and slapped you silly!

Hooray for Google slapping.

Take it from me – in the past few eight years, I have been through my share of web designers. Some have been good (an absolute dream) and some have been really bad (a real nightmare). Arrghhh. Arrghhh. Arghhh. Whew, just thinking about the bad ones gives me the sweats.

Although I would love to learn web design and build my own sites, I honestly don’t have the time. Instead, I choose to concentrate on what I do best – write and let my designers do what they do best – design. And, this works well.I have to be honest though. There are times when I do create my own sites. Typically I do this to evaluate a niche to make sure it is profitable before I go all out and create a powerhouse site. When I create my own site, I use www.blogger.com or www.weebly.com because these platforms require absolutely no knowledge of HTML at all. None. Zip. Nada. You simply click and point and you can have a great looking site.However, there are often times when you need something more advanced and need to hire a professional web designer.Here are some tips to help you make the process easier:

1. Know your budget before you start looking for a designer. Visit tons of websites and evaluate their features. See what type of capabilities you would like to have and know how much money you have available for this project. For instance, do you need an integrated shopping cart or will a 3^rd party processor work just as well? Either way, researching beforehand will help you keep your costs down.

2. Get quotes (and lots of them) from various designers. This will give you a sense of the price range for your project. For a smaller project, look for a fixed price and for a more complicated one, you will probably be given an estimate. Either way, try and hone down the price before you begin working with a designer so that you aren’t in for any surprises.

3. Evaluate prospect’s portfolios which will enable you to evaluate their web designing expertise. Ask yourself these questions: Are the sites aesthetically pleasing? Do you like their layout and style? Once you’re done, compare the portfolio samples with other samples in their portfolio. For instance, does it appear that the prospective designer uses a cookie-cutter approach or does each sites seem original?

4. Interview prospects carefully. This can be done by phone or in person. During the interview you should ask them about the types of clients they’ve worked for in the past, technical knowledge and customer service skills.

5. Trust your instinct. If you don’t have a good feeling about working with a potential designer or team, then don’t work with them. You must be able to trust your designer and can’t believe that they are ripping you off. Your designer should have your best interest in mind. They should work quickly and efficiently and not pad their time for a higher fee.

6. Get everything in writing. Use a standard contract and be very clear about your project expectations, delivery and payment terms, project milestones requirements, etc. For instance, when will the site be delivered? Will you own all the rights to the design once you’re done? Will your designer use a template or stock photos? Will it be search engine optimized? Will you be required to host the designed site on the designer’s host? Will they charge you regular price for any updates? How many changes will be required?

7. Negotiate any discrepancies. Always negotiate any discrepancies in the contract BEFORE you sign on the dotted line. This will help you avoid any unpleasant misunderstandings before you get started.

That’s it. If you follow these tips, you will find the perfect designer. One that meets your needs and that you can trust. And when you do, you’ll end up with a great site and a long term writer/designer partnership that could benefit you both for the long haul.

Over the weekend, I was chatting with one of my best friends about money. I told her if she really wanted to make money online that she should build a virtual real estate empire like mine.

She chuckled loudly and almost fell off her chair. She said, “Are you still making $0.16 a month for all your hard work and effort?”

I proudly replied, “Actually, my virtual real estate empire or niche websites now bring in a residual income of $1000 a month. Yes, they used to make $0.16 a month but now they make much more. And, I make this money whether I am sitting on the beach or cutting my toenails.”

Well, she immediately stopped laughing and asked me to tell her some more.

Here are the tips that I told her so that could get started making niche sites too.

1. Virtual real estate is not a get-rich quick scheme. It is a slow money making process and takes some time and effort. You not only have build quality sites but you have to promote them too. You can’t just throw up a crappy site, slap some Adsense on it and hope to become an overnight millionaire. It just isn’t going to happen. Instead, you have to work at it, every day before you see the benefits of your hard work and effort.

2. Own virtual real estate in higher paying niches. You can’t just build sites on low paying subjects, even if you love them. Although you can have some lower paying niche sites based on your interests, you must also go after the higher paying niches too. After all, it is a lot easier to get 20 people to click on your ads that make 20.00 ($1.00 a click) than it is to get 200 people to click on your ad (.10 per click).

3. Test your market and conduct market research in order to find the higher niches. You should spend about 40% of your time conducting and testing your market before you create your sites. This way, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and energy by knowing if your site will be profitable before you build it.

4. Provide your readers with solid and quality information so that they keep coming back for more. Build content that will motivate and excite. Create sites with “staying power” so that you can get repeat clients and referrals from others.

5. Don’t ignore the rules. Always read and understand your advertisement partner’s Terms and Conditions. For instance, Google prohibits you from clicking on your own ads so don’t do it. If you don’t, your account might get banned.

6. Use different monetization methods when building your sites. For instance, you can use Adsense, Bidvertiser, Kontera, eBay auctions, affiliate products, etc. The more monetization methods you have, the better. This way if one method dries up, you have many others!

7. Always improve. Never stop making improvements to your site. Play around with your ad formatting, try different affiliate products, utilize traffic building techniques, etc. Never stop learning and growing.

8. Don’t lose faith. Virtual real estate is a great way to establish a steady and long term business. However, it won’t happen quickly. Although your sites could make a whopping $ 0.16 the first month, they could very well make $1000 or more a few months (or even a year later). You just have to keep working the process and don’t lose faith.

So, do what I told my friend, go out there and create some niche sites.Once you take action, you won’t be the joke any longer; instead you’ll be an inspiration as you chuckle all the way to the bank!

When I first started building my virtual real estate empire (VRE) over a year ago, I mistakenly believed that the more sites I could build the more money I would make. I fantasized about owning thousands of sites and imagined receiving huge advertisement and commission checks every single month. What I didn’t realize was that it is extremely difficult to manage a ton of websites.Not only do you have to build them (or have them built if you don’t know a thing about HTML and have no desire to learn), but you also have to maintain all those sites and you have to drive traffic to them as well. And that is a lot of work.Without traffic you make nada folks. Plus, if you are constantly building new sites, you’ll have no time to maintain or build up your old ones. So, your VRE never reaches its full potential and you’ll be batty trying to manage it all.

Therefore, I am going to change my focus.

Right now, I have 30 websites, 7 product blogs, and 7 informational blogs. Previously I was just building site after site, marketing a bit and then moving on to the next one. Some of my existing sites haven’t been updated or marketed in a long time.

So, in May, I plan on heavily marketing my existing sites. I need my lower performers to make me at least $5.00 a month each (they need to at least pay their domain and hosting costs). Yes, some don’t even do that (poor things). For the rest, I plan on doubling their income by implementing the same plan.

This new plan is going to work wonders for me. It is going to force me to improve my sites and will help improve my bottom line profits.

So for me, quality of my VRE empire is what counts the most, not the quantity.

Just about every single day you hear Internet Marketers commenting on the importance of choosing the best niche and how you’ll fail if you don’t pick the right one. Some of them advocate picking a niche based on one’s passion, whereas others advocate picking a niche based on the ability to make a profit. My belief is that you should do a little of both. Here’s why.

To me, it makes absolutely no sense to spend all your time writing content for a niche that you hate and it also makes no sense to write content for a site that won’t make you any money. Either way, you simply won’t get it done and will simply procrastinate because you’ll end up losing interest.

As for me, I’ve learned to only choose to make or purchase sites in niches that I have an interest in. When I make a niche site, I choose niches that interest me and are “hot.” I do this by visiting my local newspaper stand, eBay pulse, Amazon, Yahoo answers, or google.com/trends and then using Niche Inspector and Wordtracker. If you want to use a free tool, use http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com.

Next, I input my prospective niches and find about 100 keywords and put them into an Excel spreadsheet. Then, I perform a detailed comparison where I look for keywords with 300,000+ or fewer competing sites and ones that get searched at least 500 times a month. Next, I go to Google and make sure there are at least 7–10 advertisers (as displayed in Google). Then, I head over to namecheap.com and make sure that the primary keyword is available as a domain name. For instance, if I was building a site on dog training for smarties, I would choose www.dogtrainingforsmarties.com.

Last but not least, I make sure that my prospective niche can be monetized in several ways. For instance, I look for complimentary affiliate products, eBooks, or books by visiting Commission Junction, Amazon, Clickbank, PayDotcom, etc. Then, once the niche meets my specifications, I go for it. I then build five pages of solid content, submit five articles to the article directories, and, if it looks like a winner, I go all out by creating more articles, social bookmarking it, etc.

In all, picking a profitable niche isn’t brain science, folks. Just choose a niche that interests you and is profitable and get her done. You can’t make money if you don’t get started. Just like anything, you’ll have some winners and you’ll have some losers. The key to success is to get and stay in the game and keep chugging along with a process that works.

Now get on out there and build those profitable niche sites.