The Future of IM-Style SEO

Traditionally, all great companies have been built with a solid marketing base in which you could successfully turn $1 into $2 and repeat the process indefinitely.  It took money to make money.  Then  the internet marketing industry came and changed everything :)

 Update: Although PBNs still work, they now have a history of being targeted by Google and therefore may not be the safest option. This is why we now focus on creating online businesses that are independent of SEO traffic.

The whole key to the IM industry is the theory that with a little bit of effort and next to no money, you can create a business that immediately began to generate a more-or-less passive income.   It was always a little bit risky, but the smart approach was to reinvest this quick income into safer and truly passive long-term businesses.   6 months ago that meant me spending $20 on 1 page niche sites that had a very strong chance of getting 200% month-to-month ROI within 90 days.  It was like printing money.  But then Google decided they didn’t like the fact that people were ranking organically, and on their quest to have nothing but PPC dominating the SERPs they have waged war on Made-for-Adsense sites (MFAs) and thin affiliates.

So what’s the current approach?   IMO, Google has been combating spam by:

• Reducing the impact of links and anchors via Penguin refreshes

• Turning up the OOP knob (Over Optimization Penalty) – ala the EMD Update.
  • Just like any classic OOP , watch your internal linking anchors, don’t over-optimize your titles and urls,don’t repeat your target keyword like an idiot in your copy, and vary your article topics (not every article should be about blue widgets or mention blue widgets)

• Rising the knob on on-page optimization and making the amount of content indexed an important ranking factor.
  • My thoughts on content threshold and keyword research are here, and I’d like to add again that LSI seems to have been turned up a notch as well (or perhaps it’s just because anchors have been turned down so much).

• Detecting duplicate and low quality content and nullifying its benefit
  • Spun content no longer works (with the exception possibly being Word AI’s Turing spin).  Mashups no longer work.  Yes there are examples of both still working, but these are exceptions and will not last – 99% of it has been killed.

• Boosting  certain types of sites for certain types of queries
  • E-Commerce sites for E-commerce queries (basically any product category within the query string), Lead-gen sites for lead-gen queries (loans, insurance, etc), travel review sites for travel queries (hotels, etc), google+  place page for local queries (any mention of a city name in the query), etc.

• Possibly using user behavior as a ranking factor (and not just through auditioning).

It’s a perfect combination.   They will continue to do the above in the coming months.  And that means you need to respond by adding lots of unique content, and creating sites that match the query types of their keywords (not just articles with Adsense).

More on Content

Content has always been a numbers game, and its ROI has always been based on your visitor value.  Let’s use a couple examples:

Example #1 – The Internet Marketer that is monetizing through Adsense and has a $30 RPM with 2 page views per visitor has a visitor value somewhere around 6 cents.

On the long tail side, a single piece of content could likely be worth about 5-10 new visitors and 10-20 new pageviews each month.  So on the conservative side you’re looking at a single piece of content generating about 30 cents per month in long tail traffic alone.  If you’re buying that content for $3, it will take 10 months to pay it off, but after it has paid off, it will continue to earn.

Example #2 – The SEO that owns or dropships a product and has established a visitor value (aka profit per visitor) of $0.60 (IE an e-commerce conversion rate of 1% and profit per sale of $60).  That’s 5 new visitors per article, with the article paid off in just 1 month.

And that’s just long-tail.  With the recent algo updates, as mentioned above and in past articles it seems that to rank for a given keyword often requires passing a floating content threshold.   My guess is that having a couple hundred pages will allow you to rank for most things (though you will require exponentially more links as your content numbers are lower).    This is great for those developing larger sites, as most of their competition has just been thrown out the window.  Not only that but you are looking at better converting landing pages, lower bounce rates, SERPs that are matched to their query type (IE e-commerce, lead-gen or local), and that helps with every other point mentioned above.

So should we all just drop everything we’re doing and start developing a product?  Well, maybe.  But you have to look at some of the drawbacks of this approach:

It takes time and money:

Like I indicated in my last post, this approach isn’t IM – it is a real business, and like any business it requires an initial investment.  First you need to come up with the infrastructure and supply chain to support strong visitor values.  That means buying/sourcing product and sorting out fulfillment, setting up a sophisticated website, etc.  That can take a significant amount of effort and sometimes a significant amount of funding.  This part of the business usually takes a couple months of effort and you can manage to do it without a huge capital cost.

Then you need to prove those visitor values by setting up high-converting landing pages.  You need to test this with PPC before you even think about investing in SEO.  That’s another couple months and a couple grand to boot.  This is where most of your attempts will fail, as sometimes you simply cannot reach the numbers you want.

Finally once you have the infrastructure and conversions, you can start thinking about using organic SEO.  At this point  you should be seeing a very quick turn-around in your content investment.   But as you can see, this is a big job and it’s only 1 website and only 1 business.   Realistically you can only push out 2-3 of these a year, and likely only 1 will survive.  Not the best odds, but not terrible either.

So what’s the alternative?

The alternative is  doing IM style Adsense article sites with a lot more content.  The keyword research is even more important as you have to work in niches that Google is not filtering, but aside from that the old model still works and is still scale-able, but instead of the bottleneck being links, it is now content.   We’ll do some more math.

If you were to go with VAs doing content for you at say $3 per article including posting and you assumed it would take approximately 50 articles before you could potentially rank for any short-tail terms.   You’re looking at $150 invested per site ($170 with domain fees and other costs).  Generally only about 1/5 or your articles will be targeted to short-tail keywords, that would aim to earn at least $20/mo each based on my calculator.  So $150 to potentially earn about $50/mo in short-tail (estimating a 25% success rate here), and at around $0.30 per pageview on my old RPM example, you’d also clear about $15/mo based on the long tail traffic (and this is not a very risky assumption).  It takes a little bit longer and costs a bit more than before, but it is still do-able, and probably even more scale-able than the old 1 page sites since you are link building far fewer sites and have lower domain costs (and in fact you could start with a very strong expired domain.  The real bottleneck here is having decent VAs that can produce at that rate.  A writer really can’t push our more than about 8 articles a day, so a single writer would be hard-pressed to even push out a site per week this way.  And forget using ODesk/IWriter, it would take up too much of your own time.  To push out the volume you’d need to scale this to 5 figures/mo you’d need an army.  Or would you?

What if a writer could produce 50 articles per day for the same cost?  That’s the question I have been pursuing for almost a year now.  The first thing I analyzed was how a writer’s time was used:

Researching – Basically everyone researches online and collects content.  A 1 hour article generally doesn’t go into in-depth interviews or trips to the library.  Probably 1/4 of the time goes here.

Organizing – Once read, the writer would then generally organize the articles and sub-topics of the articles with key points.

Writing – The writer would then write an introduction, and actually fill out those topics and sub-topics and write.  This part probably takes just 15 minutes.

Posting – Finally the writer has to actually login to WordPress and post the content.

I have spent the last year automating each of these processes as much as possible.  I’m not naïve – I understand that to get high quality content you will always require a human editor, which is why my goal was to create a content tool that was actually an article researcher, something that did everything but adding the actual voice and personality to the post.   I figured if I could  bring a writer’s time down to 10 minutes per post, I could have my writers produce 50 posts/day.  Even better, I could scale up by hiring actual native English speakers to do the writing.   This solves a huge problem – it’s very difficult to find a Filipino or Indian writer that will work for $15-20/day and is completely fluent in English.  North American University students and recent grads however are available aplenty.    I could pay people $100/day and still get 50 articles out of it.

So that’s what I’ve been up to.  And that’s where I feel the future of IM style SEO is headed.  Cheap and scale-able content.   I will be following up with more info on the tool I developed as well as opening up a beta this week.  I’ll also post on a couple other UGC strategies I’ve developed as well (through various link laundering strategies as well as guest posting strategies).

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