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By Richard Grady
In fairness, this method of earning quick cash has been
around for quite a few months but it is just starting to
trickle out to the masses as more and more people realize
the potential and jump on the bandwagon.
In case you have missed the forum chat, the overall concept
of this opportunity involves using software products such
as Traffic Equalizer to
create websites. Traffic Equalizer and similar programs
work by taking a keyword that you input and then building a
website around this keyword. The end result is a directory
or portal of related links to other websites/articles that
are relevant to the keyword that you chose. Because of the
way in which the automated site is structured, these pages
have a very good chance of achieving high rankings within
the search engines, which of course can mean lots of free
traffic.
So, take things one stage further and add some affiliate
links or Google Adsense adverts to the automated pages and
suddenly these automated websites become sales tools which
potentially can earn money from every visitor, which you
will recall are all coming from search engines for free.
Now the fact is that each site may or may not earn you any
money and the vast majority of sites will probably be doing
well if they bring in $5 of Adsense income each day but
here's the thing - it only takes a couple of minutes to
build a site and once built, it requires absolutely no
maintenance. Can you see where I am going with this?
Basically the speed at which sites can be built means that
you can build lots and lots of sites and if each one can,
potentially, earn you $5 or more a day, this soon adds up
to a reasonable income.
So what is the downside I hear you cry?
Simple. In my opinion, this 'loophole' (or whatever you
want to call it) to get free traffic is not going to be
around forever. Search engines hate to have their results
manipulated in any way and as more and more people fill the
Internet with these directory-type sites, the search
engines are likely to find a way of excluding them from
their results.
I know for a fact that people are making thousands of
dollars a month using these automated portal sites and they
continue to upload new sites every single day (sometimes as
many as 50 or more in a day!) and quite frankly, I don't
blame them for taking advantage of this opportunity while
it lasts. What worries me however is when people build
their entire income around something like this without any
form of backup plan in case the good times come to an end.
Let's look at a similar situation that arose a couple of
years ago. Stephen Pierce (who was unknown at the time in
Internet marketing circles) released an eBook about his
online success. One chapter of the eBook covered something
that he called 'Smart Pages'. There were, quite simply
pages which had been designed in a certain way to rank well
in search engines. They were completely different to the
directory pages I have mentioned above but the concept was
the same - fast, free traffic to your site from the main
search engines.
Smart Pages were big business for, I guess, a year after
Stephen's eBook was published - software was written to
create them, more eBooks were written, I even tested them
and wrote about them myself.
Gradually though their effectiveness started to reduce and
nowadays, I doubt that any serious Internet marketer would
even consider using Smart Page technology. I am sure
however that for that period of a year, a lot of people
made a lot of money from the Smart Page concept.
Just to illustrate this point further, I did a search on
Google today for the term 'Smart Pages' and not one person
is paying to advertise using Adwords for this search term -
not one! How often does that happen?
As I say, the directory sites that TE and other software
products create are completely different to Smart Pages and
do at least have some content but the fact is that they are
being mass-produced and in many cases people are not even
bothering to change the standard page templates that come
with the software. If Google (or any other large search
engine) wanted to exclude the results of such pages, in
most cases it would be pretty easy for them to do and if
your only traffic comes from these very search engines, any
income could stop overnight.
So what is the point of this article? Am I telling you not
to use this technology?
Absolutely not - I have been testing the various software
products available myself to see how well they work so I am
certainly not saying 'Don't do this'. What I am saying is
that you should be aware of the risks. You should be aware
that you 'might' wake up one morning and find that as far
as the search engines are concerned, your automated pages
no longer exist and therefore don't rely on methods such as
these for your entire income. In other words, don't put
all your eggs in one basket - make hay while the sun shines
but be prepared when it eventually goes in.
Plenty of people make a good living jumping from one fad or
craze to the next but it can be a risky business. Just
make sure you are aware of the risks.
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