Asia'h Epperson

Make Money with American Idol - Part Two

Last week I started rolling out my Celebrity blogs for another season of American Idol. I also created several new blogs optimized for the final 24 contestants to make it through the Hollywood auditions. I showed you two of these blogs - Asia'h Epperson and Amy Davis so that you could see exactly how I set them up and now I want to show you what has happened since then.

I am trying to teach my readers how to properly optimize their blogs for the search engines in order to obtain traffic and then how to monetize the site once the traffic begins showing up. These two new blogs are meant to be short term money makers but could be long term if I chose to make them that way. I haven't as I simply want to cash in on the burst traffic that American Idol produces each season. The only real difference between short term and long term is that I would hold off monetizing a long term blog until it was firmly established on Google and the content on these short term sites can best be described as crap. A long term blog requires good original content with the hopes of becoming an authority blog in the niche selected.

It has been a week since I created the Asia'h Epperson and Amy Davis blogs.

The screenshots below tell the tale of what has happened as far as traffic to them is concerned. (Click on all images to enlarge them)



This screenshot (above) lists a number of my blogs in my statcounter account. The highlighted blogs show that Asia'h has received 786 page views since last week and Amy Davis has received 231 page views. I left in a few of last years Antonella Barba blogs so you could see that even they are starting to get a dribble of traffic again since American Idol is back on air. I have blacked out several sites that I am working again this year but you can see the kind of traffic that can be had from this. Antonella Ipod Photos? What's that about? I was using Antonella to draw traffic for iPod sales as well as dozens of other products and of course Adsense.

I have mentioned in the past that I create dozens of blogs for this niche and combined they can make a lot of money in a short period of time.

Now let's take a closer look at the kind of traffic Asia'h and Amy have been getting since last week.



The stats above show Asia'h Epperson's traffic. The table below shows what search queries were used on the search engines to find the blog. I should point out that Yahoo indexed me immediately and most of the traffic you see came from Yahoo. Google did not index me until yesterday - at 8:45 in the morning to be precise. The statcounter page below tells me this and it also shows me what search terms (keywords) are being used to find the blog. This is important as it tells me what terms I should be optimizing my future posts for in order to rank high in the serp's. Past experience has told me that the bulk of my visitors are going to be teenage boys - and what are teenage boys interested in... Photos! If I showed you all the keyword stats you would see that most of the keyword searches have contained the Idol's name along with "Pics", "Photos", "Gallery", "Myspace", "Joplin MO", "Father Killed", American Idol" and so on. I have of course sprinkled these terms in my posts which has led me to rank well for them.

Note: I have mentioned writing long rambling posts full of related keywords and this is the reason why. If you only concentrate on one or two keywords in each post you will only get traffic for those terms. The more keywords you sprinkle your posts with the more stuff you have to get indexed with.

Keyword Traffic for Asia'h Epperson



Referral Traffic for Asia'h Epperson




Asia'H Epperson Ranks 6th on Yahoo



Asia Epperson Ranks 5th in Google. (Notice the misspelled Asia - there will be lot's of searches with her name spelled incorrectly so it doesn't hurt to rank for it as well.)



Now the Amy Davis blog stats shown below tell a different story. It did not get indexed by Google until Feb 16 at 9:57 am. Yahoo has not sent any traffic so it either hasn't indexed it or it's so far back that nobody has found it yet. I don't care about Yahoo so I won't pursue ranking on it. (Requires Meta Tags and a few other tweaks but doing so can have an adverse effect on Google rankings - Google will send far more traffic so I will stick with them.)

Amy Davis' Traffic Stats.



The traffic shown in the chart above is almost all referral traffic from other sites. Google only began sending search traffic two days ago. The stats below outline the keyword traffic from Google and the Referral traffic.

Google Traffic for Amy Davis Below - notice the keywords used to find the blog.



Referral Traffic for Amy Davis Below - notice that Technorati has been sending traffic. I have received as much traffic from Technorati in past years as Google. (Note: Blogger Labels are Technorati Tags - Wordpress Tags also serve as Technorati Tags.)



A few pointers before I discuss monetization.

Below is a screenshot of the Technorati account I set up for Asia'h. You will notice that I currently have 8 backlinks pointing at the new blog. This is how to get indexed. Do not submit your blogs to Google - you will sit in limbo for ages. The best way to get indexed quickly is to point some links to your new site from an established site that Google crawls regularly. Note: Technorati only lists links from blogs - not websites. I have more links that aren't shown here. One comes from a Radio station website in Asia'h's hometown of Joplin MO. They incorrectly linked to my blog thinking it is Asia'h's own blog - hehe - how did they get that idea? (See screenshot below Technorati listing)



Of these 8 links on Technorati I am responsible for 7 of them and my new friend Christopher Hedges was kind enough to provide the last one. As a reward for a job well done I will give him a link back using another American Idol finalist that he is targeting - Joanne Borgella.

If you are interested all the Technorati links are from PR3 and PR4 sites and they all use the keyword "Asia'h Epperson" (the links are in bold on Technorati) in the anchor text of the link. This is imortant as that is the term I want to rank well in the serp's. Should I drop in rankings I will muster up some more links like these and also target some of the other keywords that have shown up in the searches. Most notably "Asia'h Epperson Photo Gallery", "Asia'h Epperson Photos", "Asia Epperson Pics" etc. As I said - past experience has told me that these will be the terms most of the teenage boys will be looking for.

The Radio Station Link Below.



Monetization for American Idol

When I created the blogs I did not ad any form of monetization to them. Wait until you are indexed before doing this. Once the traffic started showing up I added Adsense to the Asia'h blog. Needless to say - the Adsense bot gave me nothing but crap as the blog was optimized for Asia'h Epperson only and there are no ads tailored to such a term. No problem. I then went back and edited the original blog and posts. I added a number of keywords for the benefit of the Adsense bot in order for it to give me ads that I know will produce clicks. I added terms like "American Idol", Models", "photos", "Celebrity Gossip" and so on. These terms do have existing ads and by using the keywords in the Blog description and in the posts I was able to get Google to send me the right kind of ads. This can be done with any site at any time. If your Adsense ads suck on your pages just keep re-editing using various terms until you get the ads that produce. (Remember that all of you who get crappy paying ads.)

Note: I am still getting some crappy ads mixed in with the good ads and this is simply because I have yet to add enough content to the site to satisfy the Adsense bot - it is still not exactly positive as to what the site is about. I have not yet monetized the Amy Davis site but will later today.

I always start out with Adsense but will add other monetization as things progress - I need to get a feel for who the searchers are and what they are looking for first.

You will notice in the traffic stats that there were far more searches done on the two days following the airing of last weeks American Idol. You may not think that the little traffic I received means much but I am very optimistic. Asia'h has only received about 5 minutes of air time so far on the show - basically her interview regarding her dad's death and her short audition song. We have not seen her sing anything else. Amy Davis has had no air time at all yet save for a two second clip naming her as a top 24 finalist. Given this lack of exposure I am quite impressed with the number of searches I have seen so far. I assure you that after the shows air this week I will see a surge in visitors. I will of course let you know how that turns out.

Ok - that's enough for today. If you have questions fire away and remember there are 24 contestants at the moment that can be targeted as well as the show "American Idol" itself.

ps.For those waiting for my post on Adsense tips I will be doing it soon but note that I just gave you a few above.

Cheers,

Griz

Tuesday Update

American Idol will air later tonight so I thought I would show you a before and after snapshot of what happens with the Asia'h site. Since posting yesterday I have seen a steady increase in visitors via Google as seen in the chart below...



I have also got my first few Adsense clicks - between $0.35 and $0.70 per click which is decent for this market. Terrible click thru rate though which is why this only pays off with really high traffic bursts. We will see in the morning...