I had a long online chat with Nathan Anderson yesterday about his “Niche ATM” sites. This morning, I was thinking about the webinar he’s doing tomorrow, and I thought I’d share with you the beginning of that chat with Nathan because frankly, there’s an important lesson to be learned.
In the video (that about a thousand of my readers watched over the last two days), Nathan shows how he automatically made a site about Auto Insurance — a VERY high value keyword in the Affiliate and Adsense space — and how in about a week it had ranked at #2 for his keyword.
Well, yesterday, I Googled the keyword he had optimized for, which was “Casualty Auto Insurance” and found that his site was now #1 on Google.
(You can Google the keyword yourself to see what I mean.)
On the blog (which you can see below the video after you opt in on Nathan’s site), some people were asking “Won’t the rankings deteriorate over time?”
Nathan replied that they wouldn’t. In fact, they’d rise. (Nathan is replying to a LOT of the blog posts there.)
The weird thing about what Nathan does is that — and I frankly don’t understand this fully yet — his sites rank highly WITHOUT getting backlinks.
So, when someone finally does link to the site, the site rises even more.
Again, I don’t get it, but I don’t have to, because Nathan gets it. So, here’s part of my chat with him from last night. After this excerpt, which is unedited and still includes my typos, sarcasm, and out-of-sequence messages, I’ll share the big lesson with you.
[4/13/2010 7:26:55 PM] MW: Hey there.
[4/13/2010 7:27:14 PM] MW: Just fyi…I googled “casualty auto insurance” and see now that your site comes up first.
[4/13/2010 10:38:23 PM] NA: yeppers. and autoinsuranceaccident.org is #1 now too
[4/13/2010 10:38:36 PM] NA: and casualty is an authority listing as well
[4/13/2010 10:38:38 PM] MW: Hey Stranger
[4/13/2010 10:38:43 PM] MW: Yeah, i noticed that1
[4/13/2010 10:38:45 PM] MW: !
[4/13/2010 10:38:55 PM] NA: a few people backlinked it
[4/13/2010 10:38:57 PM] MW: cool. if only you knew something about seo
[4/13/2010 10:39:01 PM] MW: ah
[4/13/2010 10:39:21 PM] NA: someone asking for a programmer to duplicate part of it in a freelancing site, which is funny
[4/13/2010 10:39:38 PM] NA: and some bookmarks
[4/13/2010 10:39:40 PM] MW: i think you should bid on it!
[4/13/2010 10:40:18 PM] NA: I almost made a comment… but alas, what she’s asking for is so incredibly simple… it would just be petty of me to even comment. it’s not any of the secret sauce.
[4/13/2010 10:40:50 PM] MW: The secret sauce is not on the sites?
[4/13/2010 10:41:00 PM] NA: no, what she asked for isn’t part of it
[4/13/2010 10:41:12 PM] MW: ah
[4/13/2010 10:41:26 PM] NA: and a 6 year old could give her the code
[4/13/2010 10:41:43 PM] NA: funny the coders are estimating like 6 hours or 2 days to do the job
[4/13/2010 10:41:58 PM] NA: when it’s one line of code that they can just copy and paste
The chat went on, and we talked about a lot of things for the next hour, including his SEO research, some work I’m doing with split testing, and how many people are signing up to see his Webinar on Thursday evening. (See below)
But the first lesson that we can all learn from this is that: Time is worth far more than money.
What Nathan was saying (and he later showed me the link to the job posting) was that someone is trying to reverse-engineer this particular sample site that’s in his video. But the thing that they THINK is the “secret sauce” that gets the site to rank so highly is not the secret at all.
So this person is going to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars trying to figure out how to do what Nathan does with his sites so that he can avoid investing in the knowledge that Nathan is offering.
But even after they get the job done, it won’t do what they think it’s going to do. And they’ll never know what Nathan knows because they never bothered to get the information directly from Nathan.
They’ll be struggling forever, wasting their time and wasting their money, when they could have had that knowledge almost immediately, and used that knowledge in their own business that whole time to become more successful.
And so they’ll never be happy, or satisfied…or make the money from their business that they could otherwise make.
I HAVE A CONFESSION: I used to think this way, too. And believe me, learning this lesson the hard way has cost me tens of thousands of dollars.
For example, when I first got into Internet Marketing, I thought to myself “I can develop my own system for sending out emails to people on a schedule — this autoresponder thingy — and avoid having to spend $30 a month.” (I’m a former programmer, by the way, so it seemed “easy”).
And I thought I was smarter and more clever than the people who had created those systems that they had the audacity to want to charge me for.
It makes me laugh now.
I might have spent months or years trying to get this right…all to try to save $30 a month.
I guess they call that “Penny wise and pound foolish“, don’t they? And that’s the second, and perhaps more important, lesson.
It’s an important lesson to learn, and one that will save you thousands of dollars — and perhaps make you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars — if you learn the lesson and use it.
To Your Success,
–Mark Widawer
P.S. If you’re interested about Nathan’s site, and his SEO smarts, and his video…
The ironic thing is that the few links that now point to Nathan’s car insurance site, that earn him $7 in affiliate fees for each referral his site creates, has raised his site’s ranking from #2 to #1 for his keyword. (Notice how I have not linked to his insurance site here, so as not to skew his rankings…but you can find it easily enough on your own).
If you haven’t yet watched Nathan’s video, you should go see it.
You’ll need to opt-in, but it’s worth it to see what he does. The first few minutes are a bit Hype-y, as I mentioned yesterday (but that’s mostly his German-accented interviewer Jorg), but don’t let that stop you. The information Nathan shares is pretty darn cool.
And inspiring.
Once you’ve seen the video, fill out the other form on his site to “apply” to attend Nathan’s webinar this Thursday night, where he’ll show you yet another technique that you can do on your own to increase your rankings for sites you build.