One of the biggest trends on eBay nowadays, is buying a complete established website, that already has it’s product, and all you have to do is advertise the website, and the money will cash in.
Either that or a website that has hundreds of articles, and your Google Adsense code embedded into, so all you do after buying the site is sit down and watch your Adsense balance soar upwards.

Is it really so?
You wish!

First of all, I would say outright that there are sites that are sold on eBay that can bring you a good income, those are the long established sites that already have loads of traffic and customers, but those usually cost at least a few hundred dollars.
Actually, from watching lots of eBay auction, I can conclude that most sites with revenue are sold for 2 to 3 times their monthly revenue, so usually buying them pays off pretty quickly, only question is, do you really have the money to buy it in the first place?

Most users don’t, say they go for the cheaper sites. There you have all the “turnkey” sites.
Yet again, after watching lots of eBay auctions, I can conclude, that the word “turnkey” has two meanings. First meaning is a site that does not require maintenance, that presumably if you only advertise it, you will see revenue.
The second meaning of the word “turnkey” is a copy of an existing website.

As far as I understand, the first meaning is the right one, but some sellers still use the word “turnkey” with the second meaning, and you just have to be careful not to buy a website copy.
The reason is simple, Search Engines do not like copies. Sites that are not loved by Search Engines get less traffic.

Note though, that even sites that are not labeled “turnkey” are many times copies, and you can check it out easily, buy checking the seller’s other items, probably he will be selling a few copies of the same website, and then you can know your website is not unique.

As for the Adsense article websites- in 99% of times I would say stay away! All those articles are harvested from free article directories, and are massively available online. Those sites have no original content whatsoever, and therefore, are useless for your readers.

However, there is a small exception.
And the exception is, if you are planning to open your own website, with original content, with the same theme as the site for sale, and you start off with a site that has 500 pages, rather then a site with 5 pages, you will have much more pages indexed, which will increase your search engine traffic, and at the same time you will not be penalized for lack of original content, since you are going to add some ASAP.

Another exception may occur if you are really lucky, and step upon a website that it’s owner had done some marketing for.
For example, a month ago I stumbled on an auction selling a Pet Care Info website - you can take a look at it here.
The seller had made some marketing, to test his own sites, and he got an amazing PageRank 3, for a site that has no original content at all.
However, the seller forgot to mention that in his sales letter.
Long story short, I want the only bidder, and got the site for 2.95$!
I kept the site in my own hands for a month, hosting it on a server I was paying for anyway, and made 5$ with Adsense.
After a month I figured out I know nothing about pet care, and can not add any original content, so I better off sell the site.
Here’s the link to the Ebay Auction
While writing these lines, the site was selling for 14.95$.
So, I paid 2.95 for the site, hosted it on my own server, so no hosting fees, made 5$ from adsense, and going to sell for at least 15$. That’s 17$ revenue without doing anything at all!
Yes, that’s not huge revenue, but that’s something, plus there are two more days to the auction, and such auctions usually grow big during the last day, so we shall see how much is my site going to sell eventually.

In conclusion, buying websites on eBay is usually a waste of time and money, unless you really know what you’re doing, or buying a site that already has traffic and revenue.

One thing I’m going to do quite often in this blog, is linking to other blogs, and reviewing their content, this will give you some outlook on other people’s opinion, and will give me a good reason to get a back link from the other blog.

Today I will discuss: SEO - Simplified 8 Basic Steps
Please take your time to read his post before you continue reading mine.

First thing I would like to say, is that the author is a professional, you can see this by the popularity of his blog, but for some reason the information he is giving is outdated a few years.

I’ll take a look at each step he is talking about:

Step One - Sticking to one URL
That’s true. Can’t argue. Good point

Step Two - Built Into Title and Meta Tags
That’s true. Can’t say that I disagree.

Step Three - Permalink For Your Posts
Yes it’s true, you should use permalinks, because spiders usually have trouble crawling pages with ‘?’ in their URL, but as somebody commented, you should choose Custom, and write “/%category%/%postname%/” instead of “Date and Name” based, to tell the search engine under whcih category is your post.

Steps Four to Seven
Those are true too, I have nothing to comment.

But then we come to
Step Eight - Link Building
And I think, where was it in the first place?

Come on, every SEO newbie knows that on-site optimization is obsolete, and off-site optimization is 90% of SEO.
In other words this means, that yes, if you don’t follow steps to seven, search engine will not be able to index your site properly, or will not display it under the right keywords, but that is a couple of hours work and you are done with it.
On the other hand off-site optimization, A.K.A. link building is the most time consuming part, and if you don’t have a huge incoming link base, your site may appear under all the right keyword, but beyond page number 10 nobody will ever see your site, and the position your site appears on is based solely on the number and quality of incoming links you have.

So, as to the verdict, the post is good, has true information, but centers on the minor elements of Search Engine Optimization, while forgetting the major ones.

Since I have recently been reading quite allot about blogging, my first few articles will concern making money from blogging.

But before I start teaching you actually how to blog, let’s first take a look at the blogger’s best friend - Google Adsense.
Google Adsense is definitely web’s biggest advertising system, and no matter what your blog deals with, Adsense will find ads to place on your site.

First of all, if you have not done yet:

Just note you’ll need a site with some content to get accepted to Adsense, so if your site is not ready yet, better first add some content, and only then apply.

The nice thing about Adsense is that it crawls your site, figures out what your site deals with, and displays ads that are connected to your site’s content.
This way there’s a much higher chance that somebody will click your add then just placing random ads, and you do not have to hand pick the ads you want to be displayed.

How does Google Adsense do that? Simple- it crawls your site, sees which keywords are used more often, and displays the highest paying ads for those keywords.
Once anybody clicks your ad- you get paid the amount of money the advertiser decided he is willing to pay.

This brings us to the next point - different ads pay different amount of money, or to be precise, different keywords pay different amount of money.
So, if you pick high paying keywords, and make sure their density is high enough for Google Adsense to notice them, you’ll get a killer.

Adsense Pay is a site that lists all high paying keywords.
You can see that there are a few keywords that pay more then 50$ per click, and hundreds of keywords that pay more then 10$ per click.
It will be hard to hit the $50+ keywords, but that’s really not a difficult task to find a few $10+ keywords that you can insert into your site in a density high enough.

Join me tomorrow when I’ll talk about different methods to place Google Adsense in your site, that will give you a high Click Through ratio.
And with Google Adsense - your profit equals Click Through Ratio X $ Per Click , so if you find high paying keywords, and place the ads in the right place, and provided you already have traffic, your profit with Google Adsense is guaranteed.

Hello everybody!

Finally, I had the time to open my own blog.

A little bit about myself - My name is Mihael Zak, I’m a 21 years old Computer Sciences student in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and I am making a few hundred dollars a week, working from home, in my free time, online, without a boss who will tell me what to do, without anybody who can tell me I can not take a vacation.

Wouldn’t you like to do the same?

I know, you probably heard that quite allot, but I will not try to sell you anything this time. This blog is for mutual help only. Only revenue I’m going to have off this blog is Adsense, so don’t be afraid of me pushing you products I’m selling, because that’s not what I’m going to do.

Here I will be teaching you all you’ll need to know about making money online, including but not limited to Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, and eBay Marketing.
I will be posting here daily, so I suggest you to bookmark this page, or subscribe to my RSS feed

Also, I am currently looking for freelance writers to join my team, and write weekly columns, so if you are interested, leave a comment, or contact admin@cashcook.info, so we can discuss it one on one.

That’s all for now,