How to make Money Making Download Sites with wordpress ?

Posted on September 1, 2010 by
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My first site which actually made me some money was a download site. I have got a couple of these sites and few are over a year old and like always I didn’t get it rite the first time. After a lot of tweaking and modding , I finally arrived at something that was giving me sustained pleasant results. The site was doing pretty good in terms of SEO and conversions. Today, We’ll be talking in detail how to make download sites work for you. How to do them correctly and how to monetize them.

The Post will be broken down into 4 major parts :

  • Site Structure
  • Site Appearance
  • Plugins
  • Monetization

Site Structure

The structure of your site can basically break or make your download site. There are basically two ways of going through this.  The first one is my favorite and tested. The second one is pretty good in theory and allows you to get email addresses . So its up to you.

Structure 1: This is a very simple and effective site structure.  let me try showing it by a schematic

[ Front Static  Page ] ——-> [ Download List ] —–> [ Download page]

PS: Too lazy to get a fancy graphic done for this one ;)

Lets get into it a little deeper…..

  • Front Static Page :-  This is what is gonna be your homepage. You’ll have a nice 200-300 word post here  with just the rite blend of keywords. Make sure  its a ‘Page’ and not a ‘post’ . You’ll tell them all what you have for offer on your site and have a big ass <h1> tag , heading before the fold which says ” click here to download $whatsoever Now “. The basic aim of your page is to get as much traffic as possible to the next page , download list.
  • Download List:- This is gonna be where you’ll be adding all your $whatsoever. This will also be a page.  I usually like to title this page as my main keyword . First thing, you would need to add a search box on the top of the post. You’ll need to follow it with one paragraph  so that google doesn’t think its all links on the page. The paragraph could be like ” This is our big list of $whatsoever and we work really hard to get you $whatsoever ” and bla bla  ( I bet you get the idea… ) . I usually also like to link back to my homepage from the first line of first paragraph with my main keywords.  You’ll categorize it all properly under different subheadings so your visitors find it easy to get your links. Then you’ll add links. You’ll first need to make ‘post’ with the download link and description and then use the title of $whatsoever as your anchor text on the ‘Link page’ and link to the $whatsoever on the downloads list page .  So our schematic would be something like:-
[Page title ] – Our Main keyword
[ Search box ]
[ Paragraph]
[ Sub heading ]
- $whatsoever Title- links to $whatsoever post
-$whatsoever Title – links to $whatsoever post
-$whatsoever Title- links to $whatsoever post
[ Sub heading ]
- $whatsoever Title- links to $whatsoever post
-$whatsoever Title – links to $whatsoever post
-$whatsoever Title- links to $whatsoever post

I hope that gives you a better picture of what I just said.

  • Download Page:-  I usually like to start it with a picture/screen shot of $whatsoever and then follow it with a description ( usually original )  and then the download links.  ( As simple as that ).

Structure 2:- I found this video back in cpalead and was pretty good too.

Benefits

  • Allows you to get user Email Ids which can later be used for email marketing
  • lesser work

Cons

  • Many of the visitors will give up during the signup itself.
  • Lesser Page views per visitors ( Can hinder , if you intend to use CPM , talked about later )
  • Not as good inner link structure as previous site structure. The list would enable you to have a very pretty inbound link structure which helps ranking for long tail keywords.

Confession :- I have never used this structure.  So it would be wrong to comment on if it works well or not. This is a way of doing it and i thought it would be nice if you people knew about it.  the rest is up to you.

Site Appearance

This is very important aspect of your download site. You have to look legit and dedicated.That extra buck spent in getting a premium theme or a custom banner made could make the whole difference in your conversion.

  • Customize :- Get your whole site around the niche idea you are working around. Get related banners made ,  get a nice relevant nice niche theme or customize one. A good looking sites reflects you are serious about what you do and gives a positive first impression in the mind of your visitors which is really important if you intend to monetize your site with gateways. ( we’ll talk more about it later in the post ).
  • Widgets :- Most of the latest wordpress theme support widgets. I personally believe widgets was a genius idea and has made life of publishers like us a lot more easier. The widgets I like to use on my download sites are the following.
    • Free $whatsoever of the month :-  I usually like to have a text widget rite on the top of my side bar with the title , ” free $whatsoever of the month” . Its usually includes the name of the $whatsoever along with a nice picture. This not only gives a personal touch to the site but also makes visitor feel a little more comfortable about the site.
    • Search Bar :- This usually comes second on the side bar . I usually give the title “Search from our big $whatsoever database “. This gives the users a feeling that the site is huge and also allows easy navigation for your visitors.
    • Recent Posts :- I love using this widget because it not only allows me to get all my latest post indexed but also imparts a feeling of activity to the site which visitors like.
    • Facebook Fan Widget :- Come on, why not have a facebook page for your site and integrate it with your site ? I usually add the facebok fan widget on the site.  It shows ” bla bla number of people like $whatsoever “.  This makes the site look more active and trustable and also allows you to loosely interact with your visitors and them following you. You can share like news and stuff with them on facebook.You could post a status update saying you posted a new game and that might show up on their dashboard and they might visit your site again. ( which is indeed is a good thing ). Facebook widget indeed helps establishing a community feel around your site.
    • Seo Search Term Tagging 2:- This is actually a plugin which is used via widgets. It records the keywords your site gets hits for and then displays it in your side bar.  There are three different widget option via this plugin. They are ‘random ‘ , ‘popular’ and ‘recent’ . I would suggest , you use all of them.  This really helps in boosting your SEO and optimization for long tail keywords. Trust me , it works. ( Personal Experience ).
    • Polls :- Another widget i use is Polls via the WP-polls plugin ( Just google it… ) . It allows you to run polls via widget. Having polls on your site imparts a sense of interactivity which is good and helps.

Plugins

The list of plugins you might need is as follows. Some are basic , some are not so basic but all are free.

  • All in One Seo :- We all know about this plugin ( if you don’t you are just a monkey… ) . You’ll need this to optimize your meta and meta description and all other on page seo factors.  ( I am not gonna be talking seo for now …. )
  • Post footer :- This plugin allows you to add a piece of text at the end of each post/page. This comes in handy when you have a related clickbank product or cpa offer that goes along with the $whatsoever . You could add something like ” You might wanna check this out , it makes your $whatsoever cooler ” . Another cool thing about this plugin is that it has a inbuilt related post function. This displays a bunch of random post below any of your post. This not only allows easy navigation for your traffic but it also good for your on page link structure and seo.
  • Gd Report Post :- This plugin is literally a boon for download sites. It displays a text saying “click here if this post is broken” and every time a post is reported broken an email is sent to you saying which post is reported broken. But the problem is there are always some mofoz who report post for no reason.  This plugin allows you to fix your dead links without going through all of them.
  • Social Media Plugin :- You could have any of the thousands of plugins that allow you to share the file on various social sites.

Monetization

Download sites are usually monetized in 6 ways   PPC , CPM , CPL, infolinks , clickbank and Pay per download.

PPC :- This usually does not do all that great with download sites but if your traffic is huge it does manage to pull in something decent with a shitty ctr. Most of the download sites are illegal and are hence against google’s TOS. This leaves you with the second best PPC company which is adbrite which has very shitty ads.

CPM:- You could do decent with this if you manage to find a good CPM company that accepts you. Our structure is optimized to get more page views ( impression ) from each coming visitors . So we can surely make a decent sum out of this.  CPM and PPC should go hand in hand then you could make your self something presentable.

Infolinks :- The name says it all. It allows you to add incontent advertises and pays per click. It could mean a few extra bucks but can severely screw up your visitors on site experience . I personally don’t use infolinks on my download sites.

Pay Per Download :- It is very simple yet very effective. You upload your downloads to sites such as hotfile etc and every time your file gets downloaded you get paid. The sum may not look great at first but once your site popularity increases the number of downloads would increase and you’ll soon find that your download links are being shared on other sites. I would personally watermark all my  $whatsoever with the site name. This can bring you a lot of direct visitors over a period of time. Slow but very effective technique.

CPL :- Cost per lead , the most effective mode of monetizing download sites. We use gateways provided by networks like dollarade , cpalead and leadbolt to lock our content. So who ever wants to download has to fill a survey before they can download the content. Works very well and can make you bank if you can pull in a couple of thousand Unique visitors a day.

Implementing the gateway

Our site structure allows us to easily to integrate any gateway network in no time. All you have to do is head over to your theme’s single.php and add the gateway code. So the gateway will show up on all the ‘posts’ and not the ‘pages’. The structure I suggested does amazing in terms of conversion. This is so much better then hitting your visitors with a gateway as soon as your homepage loads.  Implement it and you’ll notice the difference yourself.

Note: You might not want to add the categories as your widget on the homepage because the whole post will be displayed without the gateway so please avoid adding categories as widgets on your homepage.

Clickbank:- You can also be promoting related click bank, amazon or paydotcom products on your download sites. The conversion will suck but you’ll still be able to make few sales a month if you are pulling in good amount of traffic.

If you have observed all this monetization methods can implemented simultaneously.  This would allow you to squeeze the maximum out off your download sites. You can make bank. It might take a little toll on your load time though.

All what I have shared today has been learned via months of trial and errors. I have tried to cover all the aspects that go into making of a money making download site. Hope you like the post , If you got any questions don’t hesitate to ask and please subscribe.


[ Sub heading ]
    • - $whatsoever Title- links to $whatsoever post
    • -$whatsoever Title – links to $whatsoever post
    • -$whatsoever Title- links to $whatsoever post
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Dollarade Review : The new CPAlead Alternative

Posted on August 20, 2010 by
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Cpalead recently started being a pain in the ass for all the publishers. They started a massive clean up campaign to clean out all the garbage they have been acquiring over the years. This was not because they wanted to become a better network. They were forced to take such strict action due to pressure from advertisers and mobile carriers. They some how found the cpalead gateway being massively employed on fake and copy right infringing content and threatened to pull out all their offers from cpalead.

I was not banned but they did take away most of the good offers from me. They brought up something stupid then. If i wanted to run those  offers , they would need to manually approve my site. I was like ‘ok’ . Like you people know , I run a network of tv show and download sites , I couldn’t apply. I did need a alternative to cpalead.

I came across dollarade , it was very much like cpalead back in the days. They have all the offers cpalead once had and also had mobile offers available for all the publishers.  My average EPC was close to 0.05$ with cpalead and it jumped up 100% with  dollarade to close to 0.12$ which is quite an leap.

The support staff is pretty nice and always ready to help. Their platform is not all that good as compared to cpalead but they have assured me they’ll be making a lot of changes sometime real soon. I currently have 3 sites with dollarade and will be switching more sites with them really soon . They are entertaining all sort of content except fake content and adult.

The only thing which I am not comfortable is with the NET30 payment schedule they are offering. But its still ok .

This dollarade review should probably help you decide , which network you should put your sites with. I can assure you , you are way better off with dollarade .

Posted in Reviews | 3 Comments

Internet Marketing Stratergies that have worked for me….

Posted on August 13, 2010 by
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I started my internet marketing career as a forum poster and slowly worked my way up. I have made a lot of mistakes on my way up and with every mistake came its own lesson. The more mistakes I made , the more I learned and the wiser i got. Never hold your self because you fear you’ll screw up. Every one screws up. Trust me , everyone .

Today, I am gonna share few strategies that have worked wonderfully well for me and I am sure it will work for you.

  • Buy off you competitors :-  This is what has changed the whole internet marketing scenario for me. I bought off 2 big sites in my niche just as soon as I got established myself. That is the key. Never miss out on the opportunity to buy off your competitors . A double listing for a keyword always helps.
  • Always Squeeze in for a little more:- Wherever possible, chip in as many revenue sources as possible. I am not suggesting you fill your sites with tons of ads and popups though. My download sites are mainly monetized by cpalead and leadbolt. I integrated a few clickbank and paydotcom products just to test them out. I soon started getting sales. This might not be appropriate for affiliate sites which intend to sell products. But having multiple revenue streams always helps.
  • Start Small :- Whenever I start something , I start it small and slowly build upon it. Every market is a different story and it takes a while before you get a knack of what exactly is going on.  Things become a lot more easier when you are not in a hurry and the site is built gradually. It does take patience but its always worth it in the long run.
  • Make time not revenue your benchmark:- People always judge a site by how much it makes but they seldom notice how much time it takes to make that much. I am better of having sites that make 100 $ a month for me with 10 minutes work a day then one that makes 1000$ but takes 2 hours a day to maintain. That is why most of the experienced marketers dread forums as they take a lot of time to maintain .
  • Always have a Plan B :- You should always be prepared for stuffs you think might go wrong. Recently, cpalead ( my major revenue source ) has been going through a rough patch. They’ve been taking one stupid decision after. I knew they would go down one day or the other. So I had a backup plan ready already with leadbolt.  They recently made all their high converting surveys premium , I had to shift to leadbolt because they wouldn’t not allow my sites for the premium offers. Remember, always have a Plan B ready , when you even sense even a faint chance of something going wrong.
  • Keep your competitors close :- Always keep an eye on what your competitors are up to. Promotion strategy , backlinks bla bla bla…. It helps. I usually , like to borrow ideas from my competitor and improve further upon them.  Its saves me time and effort , as starting from scratch is always a pain. Also , never miss out on opportunities to mingle with people in your niche ( competitors ) . It always helps to have them at your side.
  • Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket :- I like to make a lot of sites and keep them hosted at different places. So when a market collapses or a server goes down I always a have a place to get back to and start off from. Similarly, i use a variety of different passwords, all my accounts have different passwords. I know its a pain to remember but it does reduce the risk by a considerable margin.
  • Always know when to fold :- I learned this from my friend william. Don’t push your sites too hard. If it doesn’t look profitable in the long run. Step out,  if you think its probably not worth it. I started off a Rapidshare premium generator site recently and monetized it with cpalead. I had big plans because I knew premium generators does pull in a nice amount of traffic in a short span of time and as a matter of fact it all went according to plan. I saw massive amount of traffic in no time and then I put my gateway on. My conversions were terrible. Soon I realized , I wasn’t even making enough for the rapidshare accounts I was pumping in. I had warez traffic and that does not convert for shit. I didn’t see much prospects for the site so I stopped promoting it.

All the above mentioned points took me a while to realize. Probably, I learned them after making a lot of mistakes. You are bound to screw up , its just what you learn from each ‘screw up’ that counts. Hope, I ve helped.

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Why I think ‘Profile Backlinks’ dont work !

Posted on July 31, 2010 by
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I recently came across this dudes site Paulie Ciara and it seems he gives away free back link packages every Monday. He claims on his site that its all pr 5 +  .  Now let me clarify , when he claims its pr 5 + site , it just means the homepage is pr 5 but the place ( usually the profiles ) don’t really have any PR on them and are neither relevant . So according to my calculations the impact should be very limited or negligible.

Now lets look deeper. Paulie Ciara has widely gone about using the nick name ‘yep1988′ on the world wide web while making his free profile on sites and dropping the links. A quick search on Yahoo Back links didn’t show me much information ( Image 1 ) .

Image 1

That is 112 backlinks and 20-30 of them were from forums  ( I didn’t bother counting them all ).  Considering the fact , Paulie’s site has been around for a while , I decided to take my search a layer deeper. I googled up the foot print he was leaving behind. The user name ‘yep1988′ ( Image 2 ).

Image 2

The results were just as I anticipated 2,640 results which I showed which I am assuming is from all different sources ( Different domains , different ips ). I also strongly feel that the total links would have been something around 5000 and 2,640 were the ones that managed to get indexed

On a closer Look , I found that Mr Paulie was not linking all this pages to his homepage but to a inner page. Now that got me even more curious. That page had no PR. According to my experience , even after spamming high pr blogs with tons of comment you do manage to get a PR of atleast 1. This guy didn’t have even have that.  2,640 different Back links and Not even a pr 1 , something is wrong big time some where.

Lets go a layer even more deeper, His anchor text. He mainly used ‘Free Backlinks’ , ‘free weekly backlinks’ and there were places where he didn’t use anchor text at all. So I now decided to check out the SERPS.

  • He ranks #1 for ‘Paulie Ciara’ ( He has the exact match keyword domains , he is bound to rank for it ).
  • No where on the first page for ‘Free backlinks’
  • #1 for ‘free weekly backlinks’ . Now lets analyze the SERPs a bit. The first 4 search results correspond to a main domain and rest all are just inner pages for forum threads. Now lets look even more deeper, None of the top 4 sites except paulie’s site have the keyword ‘ weekly’ in their title . So he does have an advantage. I firmly believe the other sites there are not even optimized for that keyword.

PS:  All the search engine results were taken using a US proxy.

Conclusion

From all the substance and results I took into consideration , I have come to conclusion that profile backlinks don’t really have a major effect on your SERPs and neither on your PR. But I think relevant forum profile backlinks could have a impact , if you could manage to get them indexed.

Disclaimer

Got nothing against you Paulie !

Posted in Case Studies | 3 Comments

SEO Experiments

Posted on July 7, 2010 by
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The whole site was started with the idea of conducting SEO Experiments and finding out what google is actually all about.  We intend to test different strategies of getting indexed , what kind of links work and what don’t and what should content idly comprise of by conducting various experiments in a very controlled environment by controlling as many parameters as possible.

I would like you people to drop in the comments to see what kind of experiments would you like to see being conducted. I will be sharing all the results publicly and in depth on this site.

Do subscribe or come back often to check back on what is happening.

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