Smart Farmers Don’t Plant One Seed at a Time (and Neither Do Smart Internet Marketers)
May 5th, 2008 by MarkMy ecommerce site is doing well. It’s about two years old now and it’s on pace to do $80,000 to $100,000 in total sales (depending on how the holiday season treats us).
While the site is doing well, there are a couple of things I’d really do differently if I could go back to two years ago when we started. Today I’ll share one with you. In my next post maybe I’ll share one or two more. For now, here is what I consider the biggest mistake we made with our ecommerce site:
We Only Started One
This may not be a mistake with the ecommerce site itself, but it’s a mistake we made with our overall business. Only starting one site had two major negative side consequences:
1. We had all our plans riding on one site. This set us up to be discouraged and frustrated when the site wasn’t making us rich overnight, even though it was growing steadily. You’ll always be discouraged if your goals and dreams attached to a site that will never deliver what you want, at least not all by itself.
2. We moved too slowly. When it comes to Google, a big part of your success involves just sitting around and waiting - waiting for links to index, waiting for domains to age, waiting for rankings to improve. While you’re waiting you can either obsess over each visitor to your site or each adsense click you get, or you can start several other sites and get them on the same growth path as the first.
Think about it. Would it make sense for a farmer to plant just one seed, and then sit and stare at it for months to make sure it grows? “I better make sure this one pans out before I plant any more.” Meanwhile, there’s a whole field of fertile soil being neglected.
Don’t Let Time Pass You By
As we’ve taught you more and more about keyword targeting I’ve had a recurring fear for our readers. The fear is that you’ll do a little “case study” of your own, with one site, and after a few months you’ll get that number 1 spot on Google. It will be a big victory, because you’ll feel like you cracked the Google code, you’ve made it, arrived, etc…but then the site won’t make much. Maybe $3 to $5 per day.
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Personally I think a $5 per day site is something to be excited about when it’s part of a portfolio of ten similar sites. But if you invest 6 months into getting that one site ranked, and then another month or two watching it get to $5 per day, you’re going to be mad.
And if you’re not mad at that point, you should be. Because in that eight months you could have created 5-10 of those sites. And instead of making $150 per month online, you’d be making $1200 to $1500.
How Do You Start Multiple Sites Without Spreading Yourself Too Thin?
To avoid starting a bunch of sites and getting nowhere with them, here’s what I’ll advise:
Find ten great keywords at the very beginning. I don’t think you can build ten sites at once, but you’re better off if you get all ten keywords locked in now, because you can buy the domains and start linking to them and aging them from day one.
Set up all ten domains on one hosting account (to save money), and install wordpress and an seo’d wordpress theme on all ten of them. Create one 300-500 word post (with a post title that contains your main keyword) for each site and publish it.
Get all ten sites into Google’s index. The fastest way to do that is to get even one link from another site that is already in Google’s index.
So at this point you would have: Ten good sites set up and indexed by Google, and now aging. You’re not going to do aggressive link building at this point with nine of these sites, but building the links later will be a lot more effective when your sites have some age on them.
Build the Site with the Most Promise While the Others Age
Now, choose the keyword you feel has the most promise. That might be the one you feel will be easiest to get ranked on Google, or it might be the one you feel has the most potential for profit. You decide.
Once you’ve chosen your most promising keyword, aggressively build that site. Add ten pages of keyword rich content with post titles that will be good for SEO, and start building links like crazy with the right anchor text.
Once you’re finished with the content on your first site, move on to another, write the content, begin building links for that site, and so on. After a few months all ten sites will have content on them, some age in Google’s index, and lots of solid links to them.
Not long after your first site starts making a few dollars a day, the rest of your sites will catch up and you’ll have the supplemental internet income you’ve hoped for.
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May 5th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
This is some really great advice! I am very intrigued by this whole keyword sniping business, and I actually started one site by myself so far based on this model. However, as you say, it’s easy to sit around and see how your one site performs and wait to start more sites. This is definitely wasted time!
I’m going to do some more keyword research and buy a few more domain names right now to get this going! I’d love to hear some more updates on your keyword sniping case studies as well. They’re great motivators!
May 5th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Excellent advice! I also made the mistake of spending all my time on one site for the first couple years. Sure, it makes a lot of money now but if I would have started 10 more at the same time I could have been much further and done it a lot faster.
May 5th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
THANK YOU MARK!!
What a great post, I am at one site now and I was just thinking yesterday that if I could multiply the stream of daily income that is starting to come in on that site by 5 then I would have a great full-time income!!
More sites are needed!! This is great information. Thank you I will follow your advice!!
Olga
May 5th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
This is the encouragement I need…. I have a few sites I bought domains for and I haven’t done anything with. When i started focusing on Link Building Bible, I stopped altogether on one of the sniper sites i made, and I became a pr 4, and jumped up in the rankings after the update…. so, sitting on a site and just letting it age definitely does do wonders.
May 5th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
From reading a line in your post, it sounds like you wait a period of time (6 months maybe?) after getting a sniping site indexed in Google before you monetize it. Is that true?
The line that implies this is as follows…
“But if you invest 6 months into getting that one site ranked, and then another month or two watching it get to $5 per day, you’re going to be mad.”
To really answer my question, how long do you wait until you monetize a sniping site?
Great info in this post, it really does help me a lot.
May 5th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Sorry, didn’t want to mislead. We monetize sniping sites from day one. If it has content on it, I want a block of Google ads on it.
All I mean with waiting another month or two would be that you might have to tweak content and ad placement to before a site will be a consistent earner. Or it may make that from early on, it just depends.
Thanks for helping me clarify.
May 5th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
You may not like to hear this guys, but this is the best post I have read here ever. I have been playing around with starting some affiliate sites and now I am going to get them moving and start on them in the next week.
One thing I am going to look at is, since I am an affiliate of Yahoo is trying there web hosting. I get paid 60 bucks for each new site or new account started which would help cover the cost of the sites for at least the first year.
BUT my question is guys, do you or have you heard of anyone using Yahoo web hosting. Is it any good? I am not going to do it if they are crappy.
Also would you use a wordpress theme for an affiliate site?
May 5th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
I’m going to expose my ignorance and admit I had no idea Yahoo! offered hosting, except for their Yahoo! stores program, which I’ve heard good things about.
I don’t see any reason not to use wordpress for an affiliate site - it’s SEO friendly, and customizes pretty easily.
May 5th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Collin I’ve tried it and honestly it was the hardest-to-use hosting I’ve had. That said, once you get used to it it’s ok. I would give it a shot on at least one site and then go from there. I didn’t love it, but could live with it for that benefit.
Don’t lose your login info because if you do, it’s WAY hard to recover!
May 5th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Thanks a lot guys for the advice. What is the host you recommend Court? I also heard of one that Shawn Collins recommends but I forget the name of it where you get 3 domain names for something around 11 bucks a month. I’ll have to email him to find out unless you have a good one. Keep in mind I am not website builder extraordinar so the easiest system the better for me
May 5th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
The easiest that I have tried Collin is the GoDaddy/ProudDomains.com type host. HostGator is somewhat simple and they are great for hosting a lot of domains.
May 5th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
I use Host Gator now, I have used three others before them I think Host Gator Hosting is fantastic, the service is the BEST and unlimited domain hosting for around 9 buks a month.
I strongly recommend it.
BTW yahoo is having a special right now, 1.99 for domains.
May 6th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
I’ll throw in my hosting experience. I started with Dreamhost, had it for 2-3 years, and loved it, but have had a series of issues with them this year (down time, mischarges, I always hit a CPU ceiling, weird server configs, etc)
I recently switched over to hostgator under Vic advice, and haven’t had any problems with it yet.
If you plan to run several MFA+KW Snipe+Blogs+BANS sites, hostgator seems like decent package. Later if you get a ton of sites going, you can use their reseller package to help manage all the domains. Vic has a code to get the first month for like 1 cent or something like that.
May 6th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Sweet, I will look into it, thanks for the heads up
May 5th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
I used Yahoo business hosting for a while. I did not like it at all. It is much easier for me to use a cpanel hosting account. Plus Yahoo was way more expensive than other sites.
Court has one that he recommends and it is free until you start making money. I use Hostgator personally and love it.
May 5th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Sound advice.
I am in the process of brainstorming a few ideas for sniping and was already considering the suggestions in this post; so that’s confirmed it for me.
If you are going to give the keyword sniping a go, then make sure to plant more than just one seed. Focus on getting them all to grow and hopefully you will see some income for your efforts.
Good Luck
May 5th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
I just started officially on 30 Sites in 90 Days project.
I quit my job to work on this and will keeping weekly updates of my progress. Keyword sniping is a big part of driving traffic to the sites.
May 5th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Thanks for this Court - I am knee deep in Vid’s 100 BANS sites and got a bit confused as to whether I should be doing the whole backlink thing on site #1 - which takes me about a week because I work and then move to #2 - now I have a compromise to get the sites up quiclky and then go back and do the work - Thanks!
May 5th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Hey great analogy there, between internet marketing and farming, i never thought of it like that, but now i have it makes a lot of sense: no one plants just one seed!
May 5th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
A million dollar advice.
Most of us make this mistake of working on a site then looking on the stats if it has done any better. Working on a number of sites together make a lot of sense and I guess you get a lot more work done this way.
May 5th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Hey, your site is too informatics, I read this and get the lot of knowledge about
loans like personal loans, secured and unsecured loans, internet banking and marketing, i never of it like, but now i have it make a lot of sense regarding different loans and marketing.
May 5th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
This sort of post is why courtneytuttle.com is a priority read for me. Well done Mark and Court. I hope you don’t mind empty comments, but I was critical of a post and wanted to show the appreciation I have.
As for me, one sniper site about 4 months old starting to pick up (exciting), and two more ideas floating around. Guess I’ll just do it, rather than think about it.
May 6th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Go for it, Boost. If you’re going to start two more though, you might as well start five. Or ten.
May 6th, 2008 at 12:39 am
I have a question regarding one bit of this post. You wrote “get lots of domains and host them on one account to save money”. Does that imply that you’d do something differently if you weren’t a beginner? In other words, is there a reason why you’d want to host each domain on a separate account?
May 6th, 2008 at 8:47 am
No, Slaven , I can’t think of a reason I’d want to host them all separately. As keyword sniper sites, none of them will have high bandwidth needs, so it only makes sense to host them all in one place.
May 6th, 2008 at 12:52 am
This is really good advice. It’s amazing to me that this is something that would need to be pointed out to people. There’s only so much one can do with a site before you have to “let it bake” while Google does its thing. When that’s happening, we should definitely be off building more sites.
One thing, you said “in that eight months you could have built 5-10 of those sites.” Is that number a little low? Conceivably, one could put out that many sites each month. Even working part time.
May 6th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Good point, Vinny. If somebody really wanted to get after it I suppose they could knock out 5 of these every month while the others are baking. At the end of 8 months you’d have 40 sites, which is great, but my head starts to spin a little when I think of coming back and trying to build the content and the links for 40 different sites. Might as well think big though.
Thanks!
May 6th, 2008 at 12:55 am
great post!
May 6th, 2008 at 12:59 am
Dreamhost also offers cheap unlimited hosting - I think its $100 per year.
May 6th, 2008 at 1:37 am
You did it again! Simple yet brilliant and thought provoking post. Thank you! Please share other things you would do differently if you could go back
May 6th, 2008 at 1:41 am
That’s a good point about getting your domains started so they have time to age. I think that’s one of the MOST frustrating things about a new site. You can have GREAT content. You can even get recognised by google and begin climbing the rankings. BUT, there isn’t a lot you can do to speed up the passage of time.
May 6th, 2008 at 7:25 am
Hello - my first time here. I loved the article and have subscribed to RSS. I have a quick question though. Because I’m new here I’m not sure about your suggestions in previous articles but what would you consider the best methods to make $$ off a simple site with basically 1 blog post on it for x number of months?
About Hosting - I swear I wasn’t going to mention stuff about my company until I read a few of the comments.
I actually own a web hosting company called eVentureBiz. Feel free to check us out.
About Yahoo hosting - oh man, yeah not so great. I’ve worked with their hosting in the past and their control panel and navigation is definitely not easy and probably their biggest problem is tech support. Have an issue, you better be prepared to wait 12 - 24 hours for support to reply.
Anyway, good post and I’ll be digging through your site. Thanks
May 6th, 2008 at 8:39 am
great advice! most of us, like myself, are guilty of planting just one seed at a time. i luv the idea of getting all 10 sites indexed and letting them age while you focus on the most promising one, then moving on to the next. breaking down the whole process to smaller steps and focusing on one at a time makes it much easier and more manageable.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Mark and Court and the community here!
You all have been a great help with your comments with using Yahoo Web Hosting, which I have decided against thanks to your views.
It can be hard enough at times to build your online income and throwing in a new hosting company and learning there system in my opinion could just end up adding slowing down the whole process by adding frustrations where none need to be.
And on a personal side of things, Mark and Court you guys have really done a great job here with your site.I am part of some social sites that do not have the community involvement that you guys do.Which brings me to my next point.I was going to start a small social site using UBD and a theme they were going to build for me a few months back. You both should really look at doing that with this site.The cost was not to bad and it would just be awesome and it would be just huge and I could see it becoming one of the must have social tools ever. This of course is just my opinion though. I have been reading this site for months and the only problem I have though is you guys do not post enough.
Thanks again everyone!
May 6th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
[…] browsing my feeds today, I ran across an interesting post about how affiliate marketers need to start multiple niche blogs at once. This is something I have always practiced and I guess I just took for granted that everyone […]
May 6th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
So what is your ecommerce site? also are you on twitter and if not why?
May 6th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
What a fantastic articles guys! Very valuable information here. These strategies will help me create new niche sites, plus monetize old sites that are just parked, not making any money.
I have one question about link strategies for keyword snipping. For simplicity, lets say I have two niche sites.
Site #1 will target “best widget deals”
Site #2 will target “widget accessories”
In your opinion, will linking those two sites together help with SEO? Or will it hurt in some way (if Google knows you own both sites)?
May 6th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Hi Mark,
I am newbie compared to the veterans I see here.
what is sniper site anyway.
How many domains are recommended under one hosting account?
thanks for thought provoking and motivating article.
May 6th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Great advice! I just discovered this site, and you guy’s have lots of great content here. Very impressed. You’re in my RSS reader!
May 6th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
I view this topic in a different way. There are people who love to build multiple sites and still get to manage it well, but there’re people who are not good at doing so…
I read a concept from this book “Your life, your legacy”. Just like to share some of his great concept. He says there is too way to leverage: “Multiply” and “Magnify”. People who are good and skillful at multiply will develop a great system and duplicate a success of a keyword sniping site to 10, 100 or thousands. But people who magnify will focus on only 1 will try to increase its ranking in more keywords, start adding optin form, promote affiliate products, create buzz and branding with that site.
Just my opinion. I see this make sense. In the IM world, I see both existing and both are great strategies. People who multiply successfully and great are people such as you (Courtney) and Armand Morin. People who magnify are people such as Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak, etc.
So, what I’m trying to say is”It’s not necessary that a smart farmer to plant many seeds at a time” because I have relatives who plant one at a time and sell each of them for a very very high price. I think because it’s scarce that create such values.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
This post is great. Follow these simple steps and than add to it all that Court teaches and you will succeed. I think getting some domains picked out and 1 page on it and than some inbound links is the right idea, than when you come back to add more content a few months later the site has already been working thru “g” datacenters, filters, etc..
May 7th, 2008 at 4:28 am
Very good advice Courney! I’m going to start my first english blog and I’m writting some basic articles. Later I’ll place the theme, but for the moment let’s put some information.
May 7th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Court I noticed you don’t have any seo themes that have the 125×125 blocks. Is there a reason? I’m looking for a new theme for my site and would like a more professional looking theme. I’m looking at this one: http://www.jauhari.net/themes/padangan but after reading your comments about all the added extras in themes I’m a little nervous about getting a theme from someone I don’t know. Any advice?
Jackie Lee
May 8th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
[…] recent post on Courtneytuttle.com, Smart Farmers Don’t Plant One Seed at a Time (and Neither Do Smart Internet Marketers), spurred me to write this blog […]
May 11th, 2008 at 10:16 am
[…] of these is a profound bit of wisdom from Courtney Tuttle, whose excellent internet marketing website is chock full of useful […]
May 12th, 2008 at 5:01 am
This was so cool…Thanks for the info that you given to us bro…:-)
May 21st, 2008 at 7:46 am
[…] лежащие в основе этого поста, вы можете прочитать здесь и […]
June 9th, 2008 at 5:04 am
[…] promised guaranteed income of $15K, I’d like to introduce you to Courtney Tuttle. In his post, Smart Farmers Don’t Plant One Seed at a Time (and Neither Do Smart Internet Marketers) As we’ve taught you more and more about sniping I’ve had a recurring fear for our readers. The […]
June 19th, 2008 at 11:05 am
[…] Mark Condividi : Queste icone linkano i siti di social bookmarking sui quali i lettori possono […]
June 20th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
another great post. i’m starting immediately.
August 25th, 2008 at 6:05 am
I find this article to be so true — it takes so little time and money to start up a one page Wordpress niche site and let it start aging. You pay very little attention to it, maybe adding an article every other week or so and putting it in the regular rotation of your article marketing schedule and directory submitting schedule, and then all of a sudden whamo! It’s on page one. You keep a stable of these sites going and you’re never bored.
September 17th, 2008 at 11:17 am
[…] others then I want to get them started as soon as possible to start the aging process. This is a tip that I got from Mark at Courtney Tuttle’s blog but I have modified it a bit to suit my […]
September 24th, 2008 at 3:19 am
I just wonder where i can find more information about that ecommerce site and how that is constructed?
October 6th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
[…] you want to set-up several sites (like Court’s Internet Marketing School recommends), this is a great checklist to set-up sites quickly. I use a version of this checklist […]