There are plenty of scams out there and if you are about to pay out a heap of money for anything on the net most of us will do some research. A good way is usually to do a search for ‘xxxxx scam’. You can usually come up with enough information to alert you straight away if the product you are about to purchase is a scam or not.
So, what happens if you do this for ‘Site Build It! a Scam’? You’ll get 46,800,000 results. Seems like a lot right? Until the last few days the results were not dominated by people giving a genuine review of the Site Build It! software but by affiliates pushing the program for their $75 cut of the profit. Purporting to be genuine reviews but all of them being sales pitches for the program. So what happened a few days ago to change this? A blogger called Lis published a post Site Build It Scam and all hell broke loose! To date there are 133 comments on that post most of them praising Site Build It and calling down all kinds of dire punishments on Lis including suing her and contacting her hosting provider.
Now I have never used Site Build It and woudn’t. In my opinion $300 per website is ridiculous when all the information and programs you need for setting up websites and making money on line are available for free. The program appears to do what it says although looking at some of the sites built with it they look very old fashioned, but that’s just my opinion. It is aimed at people with little knowledge of web site building who want an easy way to get started so it could well do just that. What is a problem is that Lis in no way deserved the nasty and threatening response to her post and is entitled to express her opinion in any way she wants without that kind of response.
There seems to be something quite out of proportion for so many people to react in such a way. Could it be that they are making more money pushing the product as affiliates than actually making money on line with their Site Build It! websites?
Now if you search for ‘Site Build it Scam’ on Google the post by Lis is on the first page, thanks to lots of friends publishing posts like this one with a backlink to Lis’s post embedded in the text. In just a few days all those links have pushed her post to page one, showing the power of backlinks and at least when people search now there is one genuine review on the first page rather than ALL fake reviews pushing the product.
As well as Lis’s post have a look at this post and video at Site Build It Review Or SBI Review What Ever! and the post by Griz at Site Build it - Don’t Buy It
And a few more related posts
SEO for Small Businesses – Buyer Beware
When ‘Site Build It’ Zombies Attack
Is Site Build It A Scam? | SBI Review
If you have niche sites that are not getting much traffic it can be tempting to try to boost the traffic by stumbling, digging or adding your post or site to social network sites. However if you are monetising with Google adsense be careful. Google pays you for traffic that not only clicks on the adds but that converts. Not all the people who click on ads are going to buy of course but Google knows what proportion to expect to convert if the traffic is targeted.
That means that traffic coming to your site needs to be already looking to purchase something. You get this kind of traffic from the search engines. If someone is looking for an answer to their problems they will use a search engine to find it - they won’t use stumbleupon or blogcatalog! Stumblers and diggers are surfing, hopping from one site to the next. If they do happen to click on an ad they are very unlikely to buy anything. At least this kind of traffic is not too likely to actually click an ad. A lot of social traffic can lead to Adsense smart pricing
Quote from Googles Adsense Blog (my bolding)
The best way to ensure you benefit from AdSense is to create compelling content for interested users. This also means driving targeted traffic to your site — advertisers don’t gain as much ROI when paying for generic clicks as they do for quality clicks that come from interest in your content. Good content usually equals a good experience for user plus advertiser, which can be much more valuable than CTR. (ROI return on investment - CTR click through rate)
So Google wants targeted traffic. That means traffic from search engines that comes to your site with a purpose in mind. It is also important to have relevant content on your site to trigger relevant ads. This is easier with a niche site and you can tweak the ads appearing by making sure the relevant keywords are in your post titles and content. Use one post per page unless all your posts target the same keywords especially on the home page. Mixed posts targeting different keywords will only confuse the Google bot and lead to irrelevant ads which won’t do you any good.
How do you know if you’ve been smart priced?
All the sites in your account are affected not just the offending site and the cost per click (CPC) will go down to cents. If you see a sharp drop in CPC you could be smart priced. The good news is that if you remove ads from the problem site your CPC should return to normal in about a week or so as soon as Googlebot has reindexed your site. It may be difficult to find the offending site especially if you have more than one that is causing the problem. The CTR is an indication that the traffic is not targeted for the ads but itself is not a problem - you could have a low CTR but high conversion so use it as an indication not a proof that you may be smart priced.
Griz has lots more information at How to Get Traffic to your Website or Blog
It is vitally important if you want to rank well on Google that you know how to get backlinks to your site, posts and pages. Not just any backlinks but relevant backlinks. A backlink from a completely unrelated page won’t do you much good but a backlink from a highly relevant page, even if that page has a low page rank (PR), will help you rise in the SERPS. There are, of course, lots of ways to get backlinks but I’d like to describe two ways I use.
Article Marketing
To get relevant backlinks write an article and include a link to your site with your keywords as the anchor text in the resource box. I’ve been using article marketing with great success. I was using isnare but they have become so slow that I recently signed up with Article Marketer and am pleased with the service. All my articles have been distributed in, at the most, 2 working days and they also check the article for any errors in formatting for things that editors may not like.
ConnectContent
ConnectContent is run by RT Cunningham who has a blog at Untwisted Vortex. This is a great service! It costs just $12 a month. The idea is to form a network of people who can exchange relevant links in posts and pages. You can only get as many links as you give (weighted for PR). It works best if you have a wide range of different types of sites as you can’t be guranteed that there will be someone with a site relevant to yours and you may not get links for all your sites. If you just have one or two sites it won’t work very well and you should probably wait until you have more sites but if you want to know how to get back links check it out!.
As I can no longer use eBay to make money I have been concentrating on using adsense. I’ve put adsense on the eBay sites and I’m making between $900 and $1000 a month from these. However I did not optimize these ads so the CPC (cost per click) I am getting on some of the sites is very low. The reason for this post is to introduce a new site by Griz Make Money with Adsense which has so much useful information that you really don’t need to go anywhere else to learn how to make money online. Griz is an advocate of using free platforms such as Blogger and in making the blogs ugly so that people take one look, think this can’t be very good, and back out, often enough by clicking on the ads to make some money.
Have a look at his site, you will learn a lot as Griz, not only knows what he is talking about but has the knack of writing in a very clear way. Make sure you read the comments, especially Griz’s answers as there is so much information in these.
I have learned so much from this site and his other site How to Make Money Online for Beginners that I want to share this with you all.
Recent Comments