Discovering An Opening To Explore
May 7th, 2008 | by ScottIt appears that you're new here, if you like what you read, please subscribe to the news feed or sign up for the Leap eTips news and updates email list. Thank you for visiting :)
An interesting thing happened over the past week that I think makes for a good story to share here. It’s about how I accidentally recognized a market opening that isn’t being completely filled and am attempting to step in and explore the opportunity.
Last Friday I posted on a number of topics, and among them was my disdain for folks selling “neat package” business models that promise wealth and riches with a single mouse-click (or some such similar nonsense in their sales copy).
And in writing about that I realized that every day there are more and more people trying to turn their online time into profits. Some out of a sense of entrepreneurial spirit, but many out of desperation to just make ends meet in their daily lives.
This all got me to thinking about another post I made last year on what I would do if I had to start over again from zero.
I went back and re-read that posting and still believe the strategy I laid out there is sound. Which got me to thinking, are there any good tools available right now that would be helpful for someone in that position?
The first thing I did to answer that question was write down what someone just starting out would need:
1. help finding good topical keywords to build their pages from
2. help to build content rich web pages based on the keywords they find
3. a path to revenue for their pages (like contextual or affiliate advertising networks)
4. help driving traffic to their pages
For #1 there is a fantastic and free tool available at Wordtracker, so that’s covered.
For #2 there are some site building and content generating programs out there, but I don’t care for most of those because they usually leave giant footprints (warning search engines your site may not be original or unique), or they attempt to dupe search engines and visitors by rewriting other’s content… basically most of them work really well for what they do but doom your site to a short shelf life.
So, #2 is something that needs looking at closer.
For #3 that’s easy, Google, Yahoo or any one of dozens of affiliate networks are all free to join, so there’s an easy path to revenue available.
And for #4, traffic, there’s no shortcuts (other than paying for clicks with Google or Yahoo) for this. Traffic just takes hard work to build. But, if you start with good keywords from #1 then with a little smart social bookmarking of your pages (using delicious, reddit, faves.com and similar sites) then you should have a shot at good placements in the search engine rankings.
Add in some basic article marketing and the traffic should start to slowly come and build for you. It just takes putting in the work.
To Recap
Of the 4 things someone starting out would need, 3 have great resources that are freely available to them already. That’s not too bad.
The sticking point is for building great content pages. Sure, anyone could site and manually write good content pages, and I suggest doing that most of the time because it’s the best solution for getting original, quality content.
But I wondered if there couldn’t be some easier way that was also still ethical?–meaning you could generate lots of good content fast but without risking a short shelf life for your web site. What came to mind was mashups
NIMS - Niche Instant Mashup Sites is born
A mashup is simply a site or page that aggregates content from multiple sources and serves it up (displays it) in a single centralized location.
For example, at their core all RSS Newsreaders act as mashups. They let you subscribe to numerous RSS feeds and then you can read them all in a single place.
That got me to thinking about how cool it would be if you could easily create mashup pages based on the keywords you wanted to target, where the content would always be fresh and current. Creating a script like that seemed easy enough, so I began coding.
In no time I had a script that could gather the latest articles and news stories related to whatever keyword I wanted and display them on page.
Then I decided to pull data from the Yahoo! Answers feeds too, because there’s great information there and the point of this script is to get good content for my pages that would be of value to visitors.
And finally I decided to make the pages even more interesting and valuable for visitors by also pulling in the latest videos from multiple sources that were related to my keywords.
Once I had it working I cleaned up the coding a little bit, made it simple and fast to build lots of individual pages with, and began adding in easy ways that users could add their advertising codes into the pages.
When I had it all together I put it up on a demo site (split screen image to show the page in full, and also the same page with all of the features highlighted and described):
And it’s working great! In just a couple of days and with only minimal social bookmarking efforts (no article marketing yet) I’ve already earned a little money with the demo site. How cool is that?
So, how easy is it to use?
You upload the few script files to your domain, edit a couple of options to select whatever advertising sections you want to use, paste in your advertising codes, then edit a couple of options for how the site layout works (to reduce you site footprint), and finally build pages by selecting a couple of options and entering the keywords to target for each page.
The initial site setup should take between 5 and 10 minutes for most people, and then about a minute each for every page you want to create. And from that point on your pages will always have the most recent, fresh content on your topic keywords, which visitors should enjoy and bots should love since the content is always updating.
For more information about the script or if you want a copy it’s available here
Stumble It!
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5 Responses to “Discovering An Opening To Explore”
By James on May 7, 2008 | Reply
Just a quick question here, thanks.
Would pages created with this script suffer from duplicate content filters? It seems like your just grabbing content from other sources, so wouldn’t it be duplicated, or does this script mask that somehow.
By Scott on May 7, 2008 | Reply
Hi James, does technorati.com suffer from duplicate content filters?
And the bottom line is technorati and this script display the same thing on pages, a mashup of content from various RSS feed sources.
So, while nobody really knows how dup. filters and flags work (at least nobody who can talk about it openly) and I can’t say with 100% certainty that this script will always be able to avoid them, the fact is that because the content on pages built with NIMS will always be updating with fresh content coming in from different sources I don’t believe it will be an issue for users.
Just as it isn’t for technorati or any of the other very popular mashup style sites out there.
And if it does become an issue, there’s my reason to create version 2 :)
By Auto on Jul 17, 2008 | Reply
Well it may or may not work well with Google, but i see a problem using this if i’m using MSN as my main “visitor source”. Googles duplicate content filter actually is worst than MSN. Yes, you can get more traffic from Google, but it wouldn’t matter if the pages are not indexed. I don’ think search engines will like this script too much.
By Scott on Jul 17, 2008 | Reply
Auto, so far my first sites using this script are doing fantastic with it in Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Why do you think search engines won’t like this script? They love Technorati, Friendfeed, Swurl, Techmeme, Digg… all of those sites pull content from external sources; which is all this script really does.
If it was scraping or something else black-hat I’d agree that’s a problem and likely something search engines would look for, but this doesn’t do that at all.
It builds topical pages based on keywords or tags, and serves up the most recent and relevant information to visitors for the topic.
It’s simply a mashup script, meaning mashing data on a single topic from multiple sources for the benefit of the visitor. Heck, Google even provides tools for building mashups, so I just don’t see where you think search engines wouldn’t like this?
By Scott Bannon on Jul 17, 2008 | Reply
Just to add because you mentioned about pages getting indexed, I just checked on my first sites I placed this script on and every page of each of them is indexed, and 2 of the sites have green showing in Google’s toolbar.
Now, Pagerank means nothing to me personally because I don’t make money off of it, so I don’t waste my time chasing it like some folks do, but since it was there I figured I’d mention it.
I think the sites I mentioned above show search engines love mashups, and they should because mashups make for great user experiences.
NIMS is just a mashup script that has advertising modules built in so that pages created from it provide a better experience for both visitors and the site owners if you want to think of it that way :)