September 2007

One of the most overlooked opportunities with the techniques we talk about in the free guide “Bend the Web” is that, while a lot of people have to pay for their traffic through pay per click and other advertising, bending the web actually pays you to advertise.

“Advertise” is really not the word. Communicate would be a better phrase here. Because bending the web entails going out to all the hundreds of sites available to us and making connections. Showing up where our target market surfs most. Bringing them back to our sites through killer remote content that builds trust and interest. Yeah, you could consider it advertising, but done right it is nothing of the sort.

Back to the “paid to communicate” part. The best sites for web bending have a high “link value” (LV). This is my index for placing values on sites that I use to grab the attention of people who should be readers over here at FTR, they just don’t know it yet. Sites that have high link values, like HubPages or Squidoo, don’t just pass on a good amount of traffic and link popularity. That’s not enough these days.

High LV sites should also pay you to put your original content on them. You are, after all, building the value of that site and giving the owners more pages to advertise on. It’s only fair they share the revenue since, after the site gets going, WE are the ones that keep it going by donating our time and effort to those sites.

Some people have no sites of their own to promote and are making great side incomes from being prolific lens builders or hub page builders. We, on the other hand, benefit from the revenue sharing and the links back to our authority sites.

We build traffic and search engine rankings by remote reporting on topics in our market niche, but we also build a larger asset base by having our content show up in far more places than just our sites alone.

I encourage my clients to spend real time developing lenses and other remote “satellite” pages with good, original content and not just regurgitate content from their blogs onto other sites. Your web is not just your domain. Real value lies in Squidoo lenses, as proven by the fact that people are actually selling popular lenses in addition to making money from them from shared advertising revenue.

Do You Know The Value of Your Network?

When the day comes that you want to sell your site, you are not only selling the domain and all the content it contains, but all the satellite pages you own on all the sites you’ve built up while bending the web. It would be a mistake of massive proportions to put a price on your site and not take into account all the accounts you “own” on all the different satellite sites that drive traffic and branding to your domain as well.

Those logins should be sold right along with your main domain and should be valued by you and the potential buyers because they have a lot to do with the continued popularity of the site. They are real assets.

How much money can you make bending the web?

You aren’t going to become a millionaire, but you are getting paid to advertise your site. I have heard from clients that they are pulling in a nice $500 to over $1000 per month with revenue share income from their web bending efforts.

Making money to build links. That’s a pretty good deal considering everyone else is paying for advertising. Advertising which brings in very cool leads who are not yet sold on your value to them when they hit your site, I might add. When someone comes to your site from a properly built Squidoo lens, your profile page on Mashable, or any other satellite page they should be far warmer to your content and offers than someone coming through a random Google ad.

So while you toil away (or your outsourcers toil away) at remote content generation and link building, remember that you are building something more than just links back to your main domain. You are building remote assets that increase the value of your domain and more and more often are building a nice residual income with revenue sharing.

Quality Lenses and HubPages Examples

Blog Starter Checklist

How to Write a Powerful Article that Gets People to Read It

Making Money With Cafe Press

Tattoo Ideas - This person has around 150 HubPages and was recently featured on the HubPages blog. She uses the money she earns to supplement her income. Note that she has great feedback and gets a lot more traffic because of the obvious effort she puts into her pages.

Preparing for an Interview

A Recipe Hub

Note the irony that most people who are making pages like the above are not monetizing them beyond themselves. They often don’t have websites of their own but use these services to make all their money online. It might not be much to us, but it is worth it to them or they wouldn’t have so darn many!

Now, if marketers could only get it through their heads that putting OUR valuable content on these pages (not just PLR or junk content) would be of huge value while also linking back to their sites and building link popularity and direct traffic, we’d see the results in a very big way.

I am merely a dabbler compared to the hardcore page builders but I see the results of my efforts in my log files. And I also like to see a bit of extra money coming in each month from revenue shares reminding me that, while everyone else pays for advertising, I get all I want and get paid for it!

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