Stand Out Blogger -

As I mentioned in my $,1000/month goal post, one of the things I will be focusing on to start with is revamping blogs that I currently own – but are not making any money.

So what I want to do today, is take you through the changes that I have made on one of my blogs, after I noticed how bad it looked through the new search preview in Google.

After a comment from the Blog SEO Expert, I have decided that I will be sharing the domains and linking to certain pages. This will make it easier for you to follow – plus give me some link love. :)

Survey Site Makeover

First let me give you a little background on this website.

Surveys For Money was created probably about a year ago, with the intention of turning it into a nice $10/day income earner. Being an Australian domain, I was specifically targeting people from Australia looking for ways to make money from completing surveys and I found a great affiliate website called CheckMyStats that happened to have ‘pay-per-lead’ offers for all the major website.

With most payouts about $1.50-3 per lead (some as simple as an email), I thought that I could easily get 5 leads a day and have a nice little passive income earner.

12 Months Later Results

This blog really got forgotten, and after setting it up and working on it for a couple of weeks – as usual, I moved on to another project.

Income-wise, it has been consistently earning about $5-7/month from CheckMyStats and $1-2 from Adsense. (So probably closer to $10/month than $10/day!)

After doing a little bit of fine tuning and a couple of simple posts, I noticed that the income from this month has already increase to over $20, so I thought it was time for a bit of a makeover to see if we can turn this niche blog into the $10/day earner that it could be!

First Up: Design Makeover!

If you remember my image from my post about Google search preview, you will probably remember how ugly it used to be.

Now I know that design isn’t always important with niche sites, because a lot of ugly sites actually encourage people to click away from your site (meaning money for you).

BUT, I wanted to make sure that this new version of the blog had a legitimate feel as I hope to take advantage of my Twitter account and also start building an email list shortly.

1. New Theme

I took a leaf out of Pat’s book, and decided to use the same theme that he is using on his blog for the niche site duel.

The theme is called SimpleFolio and here is how it currently looks on the blog:

As you can see, it is a lot cleaner. Predominant Adsense unit (but not overbearing), and a couple of great pay per lead offers in the sidebar. And if you visit and scroll down, there are a couple more offers below.

2. Content Makeover

When I first started this blog, it really had no structure.

It was just keyword optimised posts – one after another. Nothing wrong with that, but it just felt a little disjointed.

One thing I learnt from my Camper Trailer website was that instead of just having posts, I found that having my main keywords as pages, and then use my posts to link back to my pages seems to work quite well.

So, looking at how the survey blog was at the time, I had one page (the home page, and blog posts).

I Needed Some More Pages

I wanted to try and gain as much of a foothold into this niche as possible, and focusing solely on surveys would get me a nice start – but I wanted more.

Thanks to Market Samurai, I found a couple of great keywords that related to my niche ( but maybe attracted a different audience).

As you can see, the searches are not phenomenal at all, but competition and most importantly CPC – is fantastic!

So I decided to Structure my site as follows:

• Home Page
  This is currently a general introduction with a few recommended companies. I am hoping to convert this to a sign up page (but will see how it converts). I might just install Popup Domination instead.
• Mystery Shopper Jobs
  While I couldn’t find any decent affiliate products for this keyword (all the Clickbank products are either American focused  – on incredibly poor quality). However, it has quite a decent about of search traffic, and people searching for mystery shopper jobs are usually also looking for other methods of making money as well.

  So for now, the focus will be on Adsense for this page, and hopefully I will be able to convert people to my email list when I start that.

• Paid Market Research
  The thing I love about Market Samurai is that it lets you know about keywords that practically mean the same thing but worded differently. Paid market research is basically completing online surveys – just a different way of saying it (and attracts different people searching).

  This page is an overview of what market research is, and lists a few of the quality companies that are looking for Australian applicants (ones I have tested).

• Paid Online Surveys
  Practically the same as the paid market research page, but reworded for those searching for paid online surveys.

3. Blogging Format

My focus is now to drive as much traffic to my blog pages as possible. So the idea is to do the majority of link building to the pages, and use the blog posts to target long-tail versions of the page keywords and other low competition (almost no competition) phrases and use these articles to link back to the main pages.

4. Adding An Email List

Email lists are great if you have an autoresponder series set up so that you don’t have to remember to write new emails.

The reason I am yet to set up an email list for this blog is because I am still trying to work out how to structure it.

Here Are My Options:

1. Survey Focused Newsletter
   The first option is basically an email list helping to make the most money from completing online surveys. In it I would recommend lead based survey offers.
2. Make Money Online Email List
   This autoresponder sequence I have been using on my franchise niche blog, and it basically an introduction to 7 different ways to make money online (which a Clickbank product for each day).

   This one gets my attention because of the bigger payouts, and the fact that most people looking to complete surveys are most likely going to want to learn about other ways to make money online.

3. Survey List PLUS Conversion To MMO List
   And my third option, is to convert to the survey focused list, and then after a couple of weeks or emails, send them an email about my beginners guide to make money online and try and convert them to that list as well.

Now I am still playing around with the design, and will be testing a few different ads, positions etc. But that is a basic overview of how I have revamped one of my niche blogs.

I hope it has been helpful, and if you have any advice on the email list options, I’d love to hear them.