Month: March 2011

Categories
Blogging Catalyst Paid Tools Product Reviews Tools WordPress

Catalyst Theme Review

Yup its all changed around here again! Well not the content just he look and feel (ie if you are reading this via RSS – click thru !). I had hoped that going from Thesis to Frugal would be my last major change.  However Eric Hamm -the guy who created Frugal – upgraded the product so much – it now has a new name – Frugal is now Catalyst !

Catalyst actually came out just before I took off for a 2 month overseas trip with a 10″ netbook – netbook are good for lots of things but doing site design is not one of them!

When I got back I had a look at Catalyst and upgraded some of my niche sites with it. I liked it – but it didn’t have Frugal’s easy to install front page – with a wide choice of widgets. So I  didn’t upgrade this site. Then back in February Catalyst upgraded to 1.1 – and YES now there are EZI Widgets – which allows a flexible front page – like Frugal’s – but with even more options!

Still I hesitated – this site is a pain – it has a number of different looking posts and pages,  I didn’t really want to think about it.   Finally though I had to bite the bullet and get on with upgrading from Frugal to Catalyst – why?

  1. They have a discount for new sign ups of 25% (and incentives for affiliates) – so use the code: CATWP25when you sign up HERE – discount good to the 31 March 2011; (And yes I get an increased affiliate percentage in March too…);
  2. I think I can add value to Catalyst and do a series of tutorials here that will help the CSS-incompetent, design-disabled of you – you know people just like me!

I’ve already done a post on Catalyst’s SEO Options and I also what to talk about how to use Catalyst with the Keyword Academy’s Postrunner and also how to use it as a static site rather than a blog.

But I guess I should explain how I adapted the look of the site here.  I could have reproduced the look of the old site – but I decided to keep the general layout but change up the details and the look of the site.

From an SEO point of view its important not to make huge overnight changes to the main pages of your sites – or if you do be prepared to accept that your ranking will fluctuate until Google comes to terms with the changes.

How To Make a Catalyst Site Look Like This Site.

  1. Install Catalyst 1.1.1,  then install dynamik child theme and activate it.
  2. Go to dynamik options/import/export – and play around with installing some dynamik skins until you find something you like (I think this is fluid blue).
  3. I kept the same top navbar – but used a custom menu which is new in WordPress fairly recently – much easier to manage the order etc than remembering to change priority on individual pages.  Set the option Core Options/Navbar
  4. I dropped the header image – instead the header is plain text. The graphic of my sitting on the beach is a no-repeat image in the body background.  I played with the header dimensions until they were something that I liked – 930px x 75px
  5. To do the front page and also some of the featured content: I used Ezi Wiidgets and setup a front page with 1/1/3 layout PLUS 2 feature widgets above the content (not showing on the front page but they do on other pages) PLUS a “fat footer” of 4 widgets. Each Widget can be styled separately so I add a custom style to the top of the front page and use Custom CSS to make its background yellow. The middle widget  and the bottom three widgets on the front page are all featuring a single page (excerpts in the case o the bottom 3). This is why Catalyst is so easy to get up and running with – widgets are easy to rearrange and the Catalyst specific excerpts widget makes it easy to feature content from a specific page (an improvement on Frugal where you tended to write the content in text widgets which doesn’t have enough spell checking for me.)
  6. Although much of my site has a single right sidebar some major pages I prefer to minimize distractions on so they have no sidebars – for example any of the pages on the top navigation or the 3 along the bottom of the front page.  I use Advanced Options to create a custom layout with no sidebar – and then edited each page to use the “nosidebar” layout I’d just created.
  7. I’ve put most of my signup and navigational aids in the fat footer which is throughout the site -maybe its a mistake – no one will ever sign up again – but I prefer that stuff out of the way.
  8. I used 2 Ezi Top Feature widgets to create the two boxes highlighted below the header (again with custom CSS to change the background). These I chose to display on posts but not pages.
  9. I created a custom widget which shows grey at the bottom of my posts to display my TKA advertisement.

Hope this helps for someone who is trying to combining a fairly general blog with some rather specific pages!

Categories
Blogging Making Money Online Online Business Passive Income Search Engines

Passive Income – There Is Such a Thing – Who Want’s a Business?

Passive Income - New Zealand Style

Had to engage in the conversation here – Leo – says there is no such thing as passive income he argues that we all should be developing businesses not just relying on SEO to climb to the top of the rankings.

Funny how my name has got associated with passive income – as friends pointed out to Leo (and not saying  Leo isn’t a friend  – merely wrong 🙂 )  I would be in for the argument.

Not Passive Income

OK so lets step back. In the dark times pre-passive income – I used to be a highly overpaid IT consultant – I was paid a nice hourly rate by companies who wanted to upgrade or replace software. I used to work on a salary – a “safe” job right. Yup, it was –  I never got fired from a permanent job – but it was huge, huge millstone around my neck.  You see turning up 40 hours a week – even if the hours were somewhat flexible – meant that I could only travel in the holidays-  I only got 4 weeks annual leave so even with creative use of leave without pay, public holidays and anticipated leave – I could only get away for 6 weeks ever couple of years.

I could afford the travel – but I didn’t have the time – the rules around my presence at work were  my definition of hell.

Business or Passive Income ?

I looked at options – buying a franchise is a popular one around here – but it sounded like buying a job to me (told what to do – lots of bosses (clients) and high overheads (franchise fees)) – no thanks.  Plus, again – you have to be in the country to run the business.

Starting my own business – I never considered it to be frank – I  not only couldn’t sell, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to risk my capital and the failure rate for small business in New Zealand is pretty high (and usually that takes your house too).

I started to look at other options. When I started researching my options I came across the concept that you could invest now and get paid later. I could buy property and get paid rents, I could buy shares and get paid dividends (rarely in my country but the principal is still there).

Passive Income Take 1

This was promising – I did quite a bit of research. In the end we invested in property (my partner was already in shares) – and its worked  for us and continue to do so.

Now some will argue property investment, particularly residential, free-standing, older wooden houses, in earthquake prone countries,  is not passive. They will say houses need to be maintained, tenants need to be  found, managed and got rid of.

Yup – and you can outsource the lot! Case in point – house we own in  small town New Zealand.

Passive Income - New Zealand Style

Here’s the rough figures (all NZ$ – NZ$1 = US$0.75 at the moment – but relatively it doesn’t matter).

Purchase price 2003 – $77,000

Currrent estimated value 2011 $150,000

Unrealised capital gain 6.4% a year

Original tenant left a few weeks ago – yup same tenants for 8+ years – never missed a payment – $140 to $160/week for 8 years.

Gross rental  income: $8320 or 10%  cash yield

Gross yield 16.4%/year (yup that’s why we don’t focus on shares very much).

Now the property does have expenses, we  use a property manager,  pay Council rates and insurance, and of course we borrowed the purchase price so there is mortgage interest as well – but time wise its cost us about  2 days when bought the place (one day deciding to buy the place, one day due diligence, signing papers) and now – eight years later we spent 1/2 day, inspecting the property and arranging for someone to give it a good tidy up.

Is that totally passive income? No

Is it bloody close, the way we do it  – yes.   And even we maintained and managed the properties ourselves (and plenty of larger landlords do) – we would have a business giving a us a ful-time income for a very part-time amount of effort. But we don’t that because between the two of us we are crap at DIY and are too soft to deal with ratbag tenants!

Will this property  be passive income for us for the next 10, 20, 30 years?   Should be, likely to be, unless there is a major earthquake in the region – when it won’t be a total loss – but we will probably get paid out and have to walk away at that point.   Is passive income guaranteed – nope.

So if property investment is so great – why didn’t I stick with it? Well we did – but we stopped buying – why? Risk, to make good money on property you need to gear up (borrow) – to do that you are layering  risk on risk – we got to the level of borrowing against asssets that we were comfortable with – and stopped.

Property is an as passive or active income as you design it to be.

Passive Income #2

My second attempt at passive income you are  familiar with, as documented right here. I rank websites at the top of  the SERPS and make passive income from the advertising on them.   Frankly I never started off to build a business online  – a wanted a passive, long term income – and I have that now. Some of my income is from fairly new sites, some of my income are from sites and pages that I haven’t touched for three years.  Last year I inadvertantly demonstrated that I could do little work for several months have not affect my income.

What’s long-term income though – will my websites still rank in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years? Maybe, maybe not – but every indication to date is that older sites rank and hold their rankings better than new sites. But one of the reason I have many websites is the same I reason I own 5 rental properties in smaller, cheaper places, rather than just 1 or 2 in the fairly expensive city I live in – diversification. If one of my houses is destroyed or untenanted – it hurts but its only part of my portfolio. If one of websites gets out of favour with Google or that particularly niche falls out of fashion – the others are still producing.

Now from what I am seeing – nothing much has changed on the last Google update – my sites are still ranking in the same place more or less, my Hubpages may be a little down  – but that could be coincidence/seasonal too.  February didn’t match my record January month – but I know my pattern is that once I hit a new income record it takes 3 to 4 months to match it again –  in short I am seeing nothing out of the ordinary in my business.

Leo argues that I really should build a business online – a real business with real clients – but nothing has much changed for me – my freedom is still the most important thing for me – and having to be available to clients cuts into that freedom. Having a few clients is fine (and I do) – but ramping it up seems to be just trading freedom for income – a trade I’m not really prepared to make.

Leo argues that SEO will get more and more competitive over the coming years – it could well do – though I wouldn’t overestimate the ability of corporates to adapt – pretty bloody slow in my experience. He argues that I should establish a “real” business which has real followers and therefore not be dependent on search traffic.  I know a little about this – because this blog gets “real”  visitors not just search traffic.  As far as I can tell though -the people who convert are the search traffic.

What I know is that with my silly little sites – I can make a little money – not a huge amount – sometimes $1/day – sometimes more. But even at $1/day lets look at the rate of  return:

Initial purchase of site: (all prices US$)

$8 for the domain

$10-$15 for content on the site Ti

Total: $23

Backlink articles at say $1/each – maybe 30 -90 articles – say $90

Annual profit $243 … annual costs say maybe $20…

No mortgages, no property managers, no rates, no insurance, no risk of earthquakes…

Passive Income – Is It For You? Maybe Not If …

If You Want to Make a Difference

If you want to make a difference in the world – then blogging ain’t where its at – go become a health worker, or a volunteer in a country that needs the help. An engineer bringing clean drinking water to kids in Africa, a researcher finding a cure for cancer is making a difference, me – not so much.

If You Need Money Now

As I have advised many people – if you need money this month, or next month – or even in the next 6 to 12 months – this won’t work for you – it may, but for most beginners it won’t work. It didn’t work for me – I got a job – it paid, it was a crappy job but it delivered what I needed at the time – cash.

If You Have Huge Income Requirements

I remember when I wrote about making $1000/month with Adsense – that it seemed like a lot of money (I hit that milestone almost exactly 2 years later) – $1000/month is a lot of money to me – its not enough to live on – but I could live on it if I had to – its pretty much what the NZ government pays as a pension for the over-65’s and most of  them seem to do just fine.

About US$5k /month would work just fine for me – but I see people making $10k plus in the TKA forums – frankly that’s nice – but its unlikely to ever be me – because I don’t really need the money I will probably never persue it!   If you really need to make a 6-figure salary – again I’d say get a job – just make sure you have the right skills.

Categories
Adsense Online Business Passive Income Search Engines

Farmer Update Fail? Why Google Hasn’t Changed

Tourist Hoards waiting to go up the Eiffel Tower, Paris, France

Looking for headless chook image – could only find hoards of  tourists (close enough I think)! Thought I would do a follow up on my what is a content farm post – as the fall out continues on Google’s recent update – and just point out that human psychology is quite intereting and I am thinking that maybe Google has a number of psyc PhD’s amongst their software geeks.

Tourist Hoards waiting to go up the Eiffel Tower, Paris, France

Google Farmer Update – What Was It?

On or about 1 March in the US results (but will be rolled out worldwide) Google changed their algorithm – they made the unusual step of annoucing  what they had done and Matt Cutt’s is quoted as saying:

This update is  designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

Google claimed to affected nearly 12% of the search results – but a number of us found either nothing had changed, or nothing bad had happened to our sites. As I said in my last post – I wasn’t see much evidence that they had succeeded.

The problem is of course the age old question:

What the Fuck is Quality?

Some people think this site is quality – some don’t –  but I have no qualifications in making passive income online. In fact  I didn’t even make much income when I started this site – but people thought this site was quality – because I was writing about my own experience.

Here’s another site which is really useful: http://www.cure-back-pain.org/ – the site introduces itself with:

I suffered with crippling lower back pain for 18 years of my life. I know what you must endure everyday while living with back problems. I have empathy for you. I understand because I was there myself. I have found my own cure. I now know how wonderful life can be without the huge burden of chronic pain. It is my most sincere wish that you might find lasting relief, as well.

I found the site because Google has started a thread asking people to report if their site has been adversely affected and think this is unfair – the owner of the site above wrote this:

I am so devastated.  My main site and my life’s work, cure-back-pain.org was drastically affected.  I am not a learned webmaster, I am a back pain patient and someone who writes to help others recover.  My site is 5 years old and has often led in the rankings for my topic, back pain and back pain treatment.  I was let go from my “dayjob” in the economic decline of 2008 and found a savior in the fact that I could make a living helping those who needed it most, so I turned to my site full time and found it very rewarding.  I write all my own content and work my site 80 hours a week+. I do everything myself.  I do not syndicate or outsource anything.  All one has to do is read the letters in the Q&A section to see how much I am dedicated to my cause… I could not figure out what I did wrong to suffer such a decline in ranking and then started to research what may have happened and found that many excellent sites (and many not so excellent content farms) were affected. Eventually, I found some advice from my webhost and checked my site for stolen content.  Guess what? I found TONS of sites stealing my 100% original and self written content!  I am shocked and appalled.  This probably has something to do with my dismissal as an authority in the topic I know so well…

I double checked the US SERPs for back pain treatment. At position #4 I found a news result – like who gives a shite if you are looking for treatment why would I care if Barcelona’s soccer coach has back pain??? I found results from webmd and emedicinehealth (also webmd I think), I found an about.com page which quoted scientific results. And I found this little gem on a classic Made For Adsense site:

The quest for effective back pain relief has thrown up some challenges in the modern world. As we move through the early years of the new century, the pace of life is becoming ever more frantic. With every passing day, there seems to be more to do than there ever was before. At the same time, there is little doubt that the pressure …

If I was the owner of back pain treatment I wouldn’t just be “devastated” I would be utterly and totally pissed off and disillusioned. Now we could have a debate about the sites not that pretty – its a standard Site Build It! template, but its the guy’s only income – and he has actually been giving Google exactly what they want – and the kick him in the nuts.  But all is good – in this self-satisfied interview with Matt Cutts and another Google Engineer apparently:

However, our classifier that we built this time does a very good job of finding low-quality sites. Wired.com

In the words of the Speights Ad – Yeah Right. But of course I wouldn’t want to running off and saying that Google had stuffed up – that wouldn’t be scientific or anything -right? So I went to the home of all in-depth research in things of a darker nature in Internet Marketing – and found that the owner’s of splogs and autoblogs  were very, very happy about the latest update.

I could spend hours going through that Google support thread and finding examples – you may have seen that even sites which are quoted as exemplars of Adsense publishers got slammed included Ask The Builder – page 2 of the thread.

On a skim – the sites I saw that were penalised were:

  • large and generally old (5 + years)
  • had had consistent rankings for quite a while i.e. their owners were comfortably making an income from them which they were pretty dependent on
  • some were general sites but most were specialist
  • most had good original content written by either experts or by someone with a passion for the topic
  • high PR (5 and above) sites were affected

Now I hope, and this is sincere, that in many cases the sites in this thread will get reinstated – but the state of chaos currently gives us one clear point:

Google still can’t distinguish original content from scrapped content. If you are are an old, well-ranking site with content your content will get scrapped, copied and re-written – as of today – this may well result in your rankings dropping.

If those sites do get reinstated it will be manually – not algorithmically.

Some are already asking whether this Google update mis-fired and Leo points out the winners from the Farmer update are in fact the scrappers (at least short term). I agree with his recommendation though to build niche sites to fill the gaps. But as Griz points out – fly beneath the radar

So can you still make passive income online? I think so – from where I am sitting – actually looking at the facts, rather than the hype, Google is no closer to cleaning up its search results than it ever was. If I was starting today what would I do? Avoid the niches Griz mentions in his post, avoid having one huge site on lots of different topics, I’d build a bunch of niche sites across a range of topics, build back links to them – and see what worked.  If I site started producing I would seriously look at taking Adsense off it and finding an alternative monetization strategy.

On the other hand you might just be so scared off by the latest furore in our little corner of the Interwebs – that you decide that you really should go out and get a real job and contribute to society of something – go ahead – but consider this – that’s probably exactly what Google wants you to do …

Categories
Online Business Passive Income Search Engines

What is a Content Farm and Why Does Google Hate Them?

Matt Cutts has the best job in the world. He writes one little blog post and puts the whole of the Internet Marketing community into a tail spin – and his latest is a good one – in fact when googling “what is a content farm” the first result was a news result – indicating that the term is hot, hot, hot at the moment.

But WTF is Google doing? Are they trying to destroy all of us who want to make a few dollars of passive income a month? Is the era of making a living online gone forever? Google search is failing – and what Google is doing is a public relations exercise in order to recover some credibility – and the evidence is in the results of the above search.

So what is a content farm I thought? I asked Mr Google (using US results via the nifty Chrome Google Extension tool) – and Google told me –

News results: according to joisic.com:

The term “content farm” is commonly used to describe these sites that add pages and pages of unoriginal, useless information to the search engines database.

and gigaom.com thinks that:

Companies that do this have come to be known — somewhat disparagingly — as “content farms” because of the low rates they pay the people producing their content and because of the factory-style atmosphere of some ventures.

They then go on to quote examples of such companies as including:

Demand Media, Associated Content, AOL (with Patch and Seed), About.com, HubPages, Examiner.com and Suite 101.

Odd list – hubpages.com doesn’t pay me a cent – I get paid from a share of revenue from articles on their site- my biggest payout comes from Google’s Adsense… BTW I never heard of either of these sites I was thinking maybe LATimes or TechCrunch – its not like the discussion is not being had…

But getting on to the very, very best results for my query:

wikipedia: the entry is somewhat shorter than the list of references and says precisely – nothing …
seotheory.com asks What is a content farm and offers an opinion based on personal experience – rather than rehashed content – odd how its coming in at #4 behind the nonsense in front of it.

Next we have the site called – yup – “The Content Farm” – and yes you can find really useful stuff like how to talk to a child (hint first check if he is wearing priest’s clothing …) or how to determine the weight of an Oscar (TM) Statuette – hint – first win one … In fact its a lot more amusing than the usual stuff on ehow and good luck to them I say – and it just goes to show the Exact Match Domain (EMD) bonus still works ..

At position #5 we have a 2009 post from readwriteweb.com age and authority will allow you to rank with little effort at all…

Many people know how to rank in Google’s search results – and Google doesn’t like it. If you missed the broadcast mesage – to rank content in the search results it is easiest if:

  • your domain name matches the search term;
  • failing that the term you want to be found for is in your url and within your article using the basics of on-page SEO
  • build links to your site – some of those links should be anchored using your search term or near relatives to it.

Google is trying to rank quality – but frankly – it can’t.

Lets take a topical example. Christchurch New Zealand has suffered 2 damaging earthquakes in the last 6 months. In September 2010 there was a damaging earthquake which didn’t kill anyone, on the 22 February and aftershock of that quake may have killed as many as 240 people (figures still unconfirmed at the time of writing). So I am in NZ and I know that this story is so big that it has played in primetime on CNN, BBC and elsewhere around the world. There was non-stop media coverage (without ads) for the first 48 hours in New Zealand in TV1, TV3 and Radio NZ – my point is that there is an awful lot of information on the topic – a lot of new information – which can’t have been gamed by the clever SEO’s. So what does Google.co.nz come up with when I ask it the question many have asked me (an ex-Geologist) in the last week:

So in order we have:

  • a bunch of very useful official sites – any query about christchurch and/or earthquake is displaying this in New Zealand at the moment – fair enough but not contextural search.
  • news results from legit  daily newspapers – though it seems a little bit unfair that the UK telegraph  showed up an the NZ Herald didn’t – NONE of these results relate to my actual query –  the cause of the quake.
  • now the first actual search results is from – Yahoo Answers – yeah font of all legit qualified opinion that is – at least the answers on this particular listing are not too outrageous – but its hardly at a technical level – or even a good English level.
  • next we have a pretty awesome photoblog from MSNBC – nice article – nothing to do with the question.
  • the next two  – yup – two results are from suite101 – one of  the supposed farms – the first article has a sub heading which matches my query – but it doesn’t relate to the most recent event – thought Google was better than that – the second article – does relate to February’s quake – was written several days ago (I can tell from the estimated death toll) and there is nothing really about the question I asked in my query. These articles are reasonably well-written but obviously not by anyone who is either anywhere near Christchurch or knows much about Earth Science.
  • Wikipedia is up next – but the link is to the 2010 quake not the 2011
  • Wikianswers makes it into the top 5 with a  little gem – we don’t know in about 300 words.

But maybe that’s the best there is – so I dug a little deeper – here’s a good explanation and another one here and here – of course I only found those because I know that earthquakes are explained by the science of plate tectonics: obviously no one told Google.

Summary for those who skipped the preceding 993 words:

  • Google can’t make a judgement call about “quality” – all it can try and match search terms with content on a site and the authority of that site. It doesn’t understand even the most basic LSI – plate tectonics goes with earthquakes like cheese goes with wine – go figure.
  • Google is doing a bit of smoke screen exercise designed to scare the f*k out of some SEOs.
  • Google can’t even really distinguish between original and copied content  – I wish they would because I am bored with the scrapers stealing my content – but I certainly haven’t seen it improve in the last few days.
  • Google can’t even pick up grammar –  not should it – Christchurch’s mayor has been widely quoted as  “However it is bad news for one of the city’s key sewage facilities. “Our main sewer truck is seriously munted,” Mayor Bob Parker told TVNZ.” – in my mind the quote of the event and exactly right if you are of a certain age and grew up in New Zealand.  So don’t bury it in the results because its not grammatically correct!
  • Google trusts older sites more than newer sites – and PR has almost nothing to do with it.
  • They have (almost certainly) temporarily – reduced rankings for some large content sites. Apparently including hubpages – I say apparently because my long-standing well-ranking hubs are still exactly where they were in rankings.
  • From forum comments it appears those with affiliate sites promoting Amazon/eBay type products have been slapped down and the affiliate site promoted above them. I remember now why I gave up on promoting eBay and Amazon.
  • From my own figures – niche sites with unique but hardly stellar content are still going strong.
  • Go read Allyn for his take on Content Farms for Google to Zap