Building A Website & Creating Passive Profits From Public Domain Content

From:
The Desk of Damien Dupont

This is the second of two review articles previewing Module 6: "Developing Passive Profits" of Russell Brunson's Public Domain How To course.

If you have just arrived at this page and wish to start with the first article on this topic, it can be found here: Passive Monetization Options.

This article (part 2) will discuss:

How To Create A Website From A Public Domain Book

In module six of the course, Russell discusses a number of website builder tools that are template driven and will automate the process of splitting a public domain book up into multiple web-pages and index each page sequentially, so that a visitor who reads one page can simply click a "Next" arrow to go to the next page. Each page can include your Google AdSense, YPN or other ads at the pre-defined spots within the template that you place them.

Whilst this certainly makes for very rapid website creation, they do not create the most search engine friendly pages, so this is not a method that I personally employ.
 

The problem with these automated programs is that you cannot customize the urls and meta-tags for each webpage, and these are all important for the search engine ranking of your pages, and hence the organic search engine traffic that you will get from them.

The fictitious example in the image on the right is what I am talking about. This is pretty much what the pages generated by most of these programs look like to the search engines. The blue title is the same for each page (known as the title tag), the description is the same (the description meta-tag) and the url is the same except for the number which is incremented for each page.

Whilst it is much slower, I take the manual route and split each book up into a thousand or so words per webpage, and manually define relevant title & description tags, and page names (urls) for each page of content (yes that's right... this means I actually read every book that I publish!). I also embed affiliate links to relevant programs in addition to my contextual ad code into each page of content.

Once I have defined the content for each page, I build out the site using the Portal Feeder site-builder software and promote it using the promotion tools included with the membership (which includes all the Web2Mayhem tools and training as a component of PF membership).

You can simply build your sites with WordPress or with a program like MicroSoft's FrontPage (included with most versions of MicroSoft office), however FrontPage does not automatically generate either an XML sitemap or a RSS feed for your webpages, and part of my promotion strategy includes syndicating each site's RSS feed to boost the search engine ranking of the pages.

Portal Feeder is quite expensive, but another excellent site-builder program which I believe will also auto-generate an XML sitemap and RSS feed is XSitePro, which (unlike Portal Feeder) is a one time cost as opposed to a monthly membership, although it lacks the promotion tools and comprehensive web promotion training and mentor support of Portal Feeder.

As mentioned, another option would be to use WordPress, which technically is a blog creation content management program, but has evolved to the point where you can now set a static homepage and create pages as well as posts, so for all intents and purposes, WordPress can now also be used for website creation.

The good thing about WordPress is that it is free, it will auto-generate an RSS feed for your pages, and there are plugins that will generate an XML sitemap. Plus there are many free templates and functionality enhancing plugins available for it. I have a personal preference to build websites over WordPress blogs due to the full control I have to tailor my pages as I want with html, but more and more marketers are switching to WordPress. It's just a matter of different strokes for different folks, and what works best for you.

If you choose to create your websites with MicroSoft's FrontPage (included with most versions of MicroSoft office), or with DreamWeaver (a similar but more capable program), or with WordPress (which is free), you can follow the online video tutorials that come included with all purchases of Russell's Public Domain How To course. Volumes 3, 4 & 5 in that video series cover how to use the above three programs respectively.

Ad Formats, Placement, and Tracking

Ad Formats: The information that Russell discusses here is pretty basic. When it comes to contextual ads like AdSense, the best format to adopt in order to maximize your click-through rate is one that blends in with your page content. Achieving this is simply a matter of removing the coloured border in your AdSense (or other program's) settings, so that both the background and border colour of the ad match the background colour of the page. For most websites, this would be white (as seen on this page). The aim is to make your contextual ads blend in as much as possible.

Placement: Again this is pretty basic stuff. Generally the highest converting ad unit will be the one that is placed "above the fold". This refers to the top section of a webpage that is immediately visible to a visitor without them having to scroll down the page. For most users this will be the top 600 or 700 pixels of the page.

So to combine both of the above rules, you should place an ad unit blended into your content towards the top of each page. In the case of this page that you are reading, I have placed a picture and link to the Public Domain How To course in the top spot, because that is the primary focus of this page, and my AdSense units are less important. But you could place AdSense there if that is the primary monetization goal of your pages.

Tracking: The main aim of tracking is to ensure that you are using your on-page real estate in the best way possible by monitoring your visitors' response to different elements on your page. Russell covers his take and techniques on tracking in module six of the course, and in this section I'll mention what I do.

Firstly, if you mouse-over many of the links within the content on this page and look in your browser status bar (if enabled in your browser options, this is generally the bar at the bottom of most web browsers), you will note that most of my links look like this:

http://www.publicdomainmastery.com/presents/nameofprogram

with the 'nameofprogram' changing depending on what I am linking to. I am using a tool called Power Link Generator to manage all of my affiliate links and to generate these links, and I do this for two reasons.

Firstly, PLG allows me to track the number of clicks I am getting on each link, and that helps me to gauge the effectiveness of the resource I am promoting. If I have seven hundred clicks recorded on a particular link, but not a single sale for the product being promoted, that tells me the product is probably a dog (insofar as my visitors are concerned anyway!), and I'd best replace it with another competing and hopefully higher converting product.

The second reason I use PLG is because, as mentioned in the section on affiliate networks, the products and programs that one promotes can be discontinued over time. If you've built a one hundred page website from a public domain book about dog training, and have direct linked to a particular dog training ebook sold on ClickBank within the text of each page on your site, and the vendor later discontinues the product, you will have 100+ links to update! That's a lot of work. But if you use a tool like Power Link Generator, you would simply change your affiliate link in one spot in the PLG control panel for your visitors to be redirected to the new program you've selected to replace the discontinued one.

PLG does a few other things as well, such as allowing you to drop a tracking cookie and bypass a vendor's squeeze page (optin page) and send your visitors directly to the vendor's salespage, but for me the main benefits are the two I just mentioned.
 

Another program I use specifically on pages that I place Google AdSense code on is Matt Callen's AdSpy Tracker.

It tells you a lot about where your visitors are coming from, what keywords they used to arrive at your webpages, which webpages are getting the most traffic, and which ads are getting the most clicks.

The keywords data is extremely useful because it tells you what people are searching for, which allows you both to adapt your content (and ads) more specifically towards what visitors are seeking, as well as to promote those keywords more heavily for the site, and/or create new content pages around those keywords.

Another useful feature of AdSpy Tracker is that it records the IP address of everyone who clicks your ads, so if someone is perpetrating click fraud and multiple clicking your ads, you can block their IP address in your hosting account so that they can no longer access your websites (unless they switch to a different IP address).

How To Backend Your Products

Each time you create a website from a public domain book, you will end up with a bunch of content pages which, if the site is built properly and with a little promotion, will generate a lot of visitors to your pages from the search engines. As already discussed, one way to monetize those visitors is to place advertising within your content, be that contextual pay-per-click, CPA, or affiliate links.

In this section, Russell discusses ways to take your profits from that traffic to a higher level. For starters, you could sell the book itself in either ebook or hardcopy format. So, for example, you might make the homepage of your content site a sales-page where people can order your book (or derivative product), and include a small ad on each of the content pages of your website linking back to the homepage saying something like:

Another thing to do would be to capture leads on your content pages by having a newsletter or e-course optin form on each page through a service like AWeber (which is what I use and highly recommend. I've used a number of services over the years, and in my experience AWeber are the best). You can then promote both your product, or other products as an affiliate, in your auto-responder series. Depending on the niche, Russell discusses how you could also onsell the leads.

How To Get Your Web Pages Indexed In The Search Engines

Most of what Russell covers in this section is a summary and reiteration of techniques that he already covered in module 4 on Traffic Generation. Namely...

As stated at the top of this page, this article is a preview of the content covered in Module 6 of the Public Domain How To course: Developing Passive Profits.

There are a further five modules covering the remainder of Russell Brunson's Public Domain How To system, more than 11 hours of audio content in all, accompanied by transcripts and a workbook. For a preview of the content contained within all six modules of Public Domain How To, subscribe to our e-course below.

Warmly,

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