Hamburger Casserole Recipes?

Part of the trick in investing in web real estate is to create properties people want to advertise on. The web is a huge series of tubes, and unless you're on the right one nobody is going to want to put their billboard there, and it's all about billboards and eyeballs.

From looking at advertising lists, advertisers basically want to sell you insurance, houses, and have you file a lawsuit. So if you have an accident while looking at a new house? The web is your friend. And if you have a DUI on the way there and/or contract Mesotheliioma? Even better.

There's more than that. There's quite a bit of hosting services, lasik eye surgery, mortgage refinancing (yes, looks like still a bit of that going on), and of course, payday loans.

(And no, I am not trying to target those words in this article!)

But I was surprised at how big of a play lawyers are making in the keyword advertising business. There must be a really competitive market out there for them. Who knew? Lawyers are the door-to-door salesmen of the internet age.

On the search side, I have spent countless hours pouring over what the average person searches for. And it isn't pretty: as far as I can tell, people use Google to tell them everything except when to go to the bathroom. They probably use it for that, too.

Celebrities are big; really big. But mostly celebrities in trouble. When a celebrity gets in trouble, we want pictures. The old Jon Stewart joke about "naked famous people" is still very true. If you have a pictures of naked celebrites screwing up, you are going to have have lots of internet traffic.

Oddly, there isn't a demand for for advertising on those keywords. Or in other words, the traffic from those pictures probably isn't desperate to buy a lot of stuff in a competitive market. I'm not sure, but "Famous Naked People" is probably more of a volume play. In other words, it's more like watching American Idol than attending a time-share presentation.

Lots of folks are looking for jobs on the net. Or money. One popular search -- and I give this one away to anybody who can make anything of it -- is "free printable fake money." Lots of folks each day ask Google for free money.

Not sure how the Secret Service would feel about the site, but you gotta give people credit. They think Google can do anything.

Of course, my wife and I try to keep on the up and up, finding little pieces of information we can reshape, improve, and publish to people looking for it. Nothing spectacular. For instance, one of our sites, What Is Diabetes? presents lots of information that you can get elsewhere and from better sources, but we try to organize and rework the information in a much more accessible format for folks (and point them to authoritative sources as well)

So the question you're all asking: are you making any money off of this? After about ten sites, yes, we are. Would I recommend this as a hobby business for others? No, I would not. It's a freaking lot of work, to begin with, if you are really looking to provide useful and quality information. If you're just looking to spam, perhaps that's another set of criteria. I know an affiliate marketer who told me six months ago that after just a few months he was making over $3K per day, but that kind of stuff isn't the type of business you want to explain to mom. For what we do, it's beer money. I think most folks would find the time-spent/income ratio to be very painful.

It's also getting to be a highly-competitive business. Companies are using advanced algorithms to determine exactly which subject areas have the most lifetime value for advertising and creating lots of material around them. It really has the feel of the stock market when computers got in and changed everything. Yes, you can still have a very profitable niche. Heck, I have several ideas about moving up to the next level. But these guys play hardball over pennies-per-day. Any newcomers should know that before getting in.

There's also no guarantee -- you could work your butt off this month and have all your work wiped off the search engines next month because somebody better came along. Or even worse, because one of your competitors used a link-spamming program to promote your site, thereby getting Google to dump the entire site from the search results. And good luck trying to find somebody at Google with a sympathetic ear to explain that problem to.

Or Google could just change the way they rank results. Ouch.

Having said that, we're probably going to keep it up. Every week we get emails from people we have helped with our sites, and that's really neat. There's something about having recurring income that makes you go "Wow!"

It's a good feeling.

EDIT: For all of those folks who are ready with a knee-jerk response, like "You, sir, are what's wrong with the internet" -- hold on a minute. Write something lucid and engaging or don't comment at all. This isn't reddit.

There is only so much information in the world: most writers will tell you that there are a limited number of plot lines for TV episodes, for instance (which is why everything kind of looks the same after years and years of TV). There is, however, a very large subset of various audiences looking for information, and each audience needs information in a different format. You wouldn't tell a six-year old about weather in the same way you'd tell a college graduate, although the base information is the same.

We take information, lower it to a 6th grade level, mix in multimedia presentations, and target only that material that the casual user wants. This is different from, say, a organization's website which is targeting a different audience and providing information based on other factors.

I've seen spam sites, with invisible text, hundreds of keywords, the meta description loaded up with garbage. We are definitely NOT writing spam sites. The reader comes first. If we didn't believe we were providing something valuable to the web reader we wouldn't be doing these things. As I said, there are guys making thousands of dollars a day from trash sites. We definitely do not want to do this. And if you think this is what we're about you are mistaken.