Earn Money Online with Brandon Hopkins

Ezilon.com contacted me recently about a site review for their directory. Initially I didn’t want to do it because general web directories are overrated and boring. They sent me a link to their regional web directory and I checked it out. It is unique! Yes, a unique web directory.

What makes Ezilon Unique

Since Ezilon is a unique web directory I thought I would start with that. What initially makes Ezilon unique is the design. It isn’t just about template based directory script with a million crappy sites and DMOZ listings. It is a web directory that is designed to be used as a directory. Ezilon is ideal for finding a local business since the first way you’re presented with is a clickable world map that takes you to regional based directory listings. I was able to quickly and easily find backup providers in the US.

Submitting Your Site

Ezilon is a paid web directory. Generally I don’t pay for web directories, but this one made me give it a second thought. The reason is the high authority and high PR inner pages. For example if you sell baseball gear, here is a page with 4 outgoing links that is a PR3 and a steady PR 3….not a spammed quickly fading PR 3.

Baseball gear isn’t the only high deep linked PR page. Here are a couple others I found with only a couple outbound links.

osCommerce

Preschool Programs

Dating

Projector

Those type links are not only hard to find with strong PR and limited outbound links, but this site is loved by Google. I don’t know their stats, but I would imagine they get nearly 100k Google referred visitors per month. I see over 260,000 indexed pages, most of them cached. Did I mention the homepage is a PR6?

Subdomain Crazy!

One of the first things I noticed about Ezilon.com was their prolific use of subdomains. I counted about 20 subdomains ranging from country listings to an answer service like Yahoo Answers. Unless you’re site is really large, you shouldn’t need 20 subdomains, one situation in which you could use subdomains is for different languages like Ezilon.com does. Google often treats subdomains as different websites so a subdomain that is for a different language is truly a different website targeting different people.

Ideas and Suggestions

After spending considerable time browsing all aspects of Ezilon.com (and the various subdomains), I noticed a considerable lack of advertising. While this is definitely not a bad thing, it isn’t the best business practice, unless you’re running a pro-bono site. The advertising that I did see was mainly Adsense ads. When you have good page rank and good page views, you should have no trouble selling advertising.

I would suggest targeting specific markets and selling advertising on those pages of the site. Ezilon could sell Miami Beach real estate listings and web directory listings to that market. They could create a process and duplicate their process across the US and the entire world. With Ezilon there are a million different possibilities for upselling and cross selling including homepage advertising and featured category listings.

In addition to the different types of direct selling, they could promote their paid web directory and give out coupons to specific target markets they want to break into. When you give out a coupon to “Company A”, and they sign up, it’s easier to sell the product or service to “Company B”. The sales call would be easy, “I wanted to let you know that Company A is advertising on our website. If you’re interested in advertising as well, I can list you as a featured site and you’re website will display above theirs!” Fear and competition can sell advertising. Company B thinks that if Company A has paid for advertising, I should to. I can be featured above them? Great!

Ezilon has so many PR 6 and PR 5 links, they could easily be selling $2-5,000 worth of text links per month. On this Help Desk page alone (PR6), they could sell a link to any number of help desk companies looking to increase their rankings.

I would suggest starting with an inventory of assets. These assets are mainly high trafficked pages and high PR pages. Once the list is created, start selling!

In addition to the high value assets, there are a lot of other medium quality assets that can be monetized including the Article Submission section. Article Submission services are a great source of passive income.

Another medium value section is the Job Board. It’s a PR 3 with only one untargeted banner advertisement. Even just an affiliate program from Monster or Snag A Job would be better than no monetization.

Now You See…

Ezilon isn’t just another basic web directory with a bunch of junk listings. Their site provides value in a variety of ways and has huge untapped potential! Check out Ezilon Regional Web Directory today!

1 comment

Buying links has long been debated, especially when Google slapped so many blogs in the last year. Personally I haven’t had many issues with Google, but many people had. With that disclaimer, be careful where you buy your links. Most places that sell links have a “footprint”, or an easy way to track which websites are selling links. For example of a footprint, search for “powered by WordPress” in Google. It’s an easy way to find a lot of blogs that are running WordPress. That’s just a simple footprint, but there is a footprint to just about everything.

One place that I’ve found that sells quality links and doesn’t leave a trail is LinkWorth. If you haven’t bought many links then this won’t matter to you, but if you’re in the game to make money, links are vitally important. LinkWorth has some really big blogs on their network for driving traffic, then they have a lot of 2nd and 3rd tier blogs that are great for just snagging a link.

Personally, I like to get one link and go. I think a single link on one domain is just as beneficial as a site-wide link, and possibly even better. Depending on the quality of where the link is posted, you can see beneficial traffic from links that you’ve earned naturally or purchased.

Either way, LinkWorth doesn’t seem to leave any footprints which means it is nearly impossible to find out if the links are natural or paid.

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I was recently contacted by Sound Capital Investments because they were looking to better their online presence.

Who is Sound Capital Investments

Sound Capital Investments is a Real Estate Agent in Houston, TX and also a Mortgage Investment Lender in Houston. Sound Capital Investments offers a variety of loan programs with a focus on the end result and helping you get the best deal possible.

Website Observations

With regard to the Sound Capital website, there is a lot that can be improved. When looking at the code of the website, you’ll first notice that the meta tags and titles are appropriately targeted for keywords. Excellent!

Each page, however, has the exact same title. Each page should be given it’s own title. The title of the page should include a keyword or two, but not duplicated across the entire site. This could be a problem of the coding (php includes) or it could have been an oversight.

However, after the meta tags the site begins to fall apart. After the meta tags you’ll find approximately 97 lines of Javascript. While I’m no Javascript expert, I do know that search engines don’t index javascript and therefore it should be used as little as possible. The javascript powers the loan calculator and dynamic mortgage rates. I would recommend moving the calculator off the main page since it already has it’s own mortgage calculator page. I don’t see the need for so much code especially when the calculator is duplicated on an internal page.

Further down the code are tables, yuck! Since the site uses CSS styling, the tables should be dropped and additional CSS added to keep the same layout. For any mediocre developer this is easy work and should take less than 10 hours. Great developers should be able to do this layout in about 3-5 hours.

The header logo has the following alt code, “alt=”Real Estate Agent for Loans Financing In Houston”“. I would like to see that similar to the main keywords of the site. Something like, “Houston Texas Real Estate Agent”. That keeps the keyword theme of the page consistent while not abusing they keywords. Changing the order a little keeps search engine bots in the right arena for keywords without using them exactly all the way down. Other than that alt tag, most of the others are perfect.

Something else I don’t recommend is using comment tags to hide code. Instead, just remove the code and clean up the HTML. That will also increase the text to code ratio, which is currently at 11.26%. For a site like this I would like to see the text to code ratio closer to 40-50%. That is very achievable especially considering the removal of the table and adding of CSS.

Another issue that I foresee with this site is duplicate content issues. Currently the index page is /index.asp. By using the “Home” button on the site you go to the index.asp. Correct linking should take you back to the root domain, http://www.soundcapitalinvestments.com not http://www.soundcapitalinvestments.com/index.asp. This could also be accomplished with a .htaccess file or even a robots.txt. Speaking of robots.txt, the site is missing one. Instead of not having one, the site should have one that instructs robots to index the entire site.

From what I can tell, the site is fully indexed in Google. In order to make sure it stays that way, I would recommend a sitemap (sitemap.xml). Since the site is fully indexed and it’s a static site, this isn’t 100% necessary right now.

All of those issues can be fixed with a talented developer. My main concern is the affiliate banners for “Ty Coughlin’s Reverse Funnel System”. I don’t know how this spammy looking affiliate site is related to Sound Capital Investments, but is really is turning visitors off to the site. Instead of a professional looking website designed with a goal (real estate loans and sales) in mind, the site now has a second purpose of turning potential prospects away from lending and real estate and into this website that is very ambiguous at best. I would highly recommend removing the advertisements and letting the purpose of the site remain real estate.

Search Engine Observations

While unfortunate, I didn’t expect the site to rank for very many keywords. The site has a Google Pagerank of 0 and very few backlinks. Mainly backlinks from sites that have scraped Sound Capital Investments text. With those stats in mind, I wasn’t able to find the site ranking for any keywords including long tail. That doesn’t mean the site doesn’t actually rank for any, just none that I could find. One of the first keywords the site should rank for is the domain name and company name. It ranks for neither.

Another part that I mentioned that should be repeated is the title tags. They’re all identical as shown by Google in the following screenshot.

Well there you have it.  Sound Capital Investments is off to a good start, but definitely needs some work if they want to compete in such a strong market like Houston Texas Real Estate.

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While products like the Build a Niche Store (BANS) are usually not on my list of things to try, I thought I would solicit some reviews about the product. If you’re not familiar with BANS, the premise is simple, you pick the niche and the script delivers products in that niche through the Commission Junction eBay affiliate program.

Sounds confusing, but you’re basically an eBay affiliate through Commission Junction. The part that entices me is that I know a few niches that aren’t horribly flooded with similar sites. Since I also own a few extra domains with crappy content, it could be a perfect match.  Build a Niche Store claims to be easy to install and if a newbie can do it, so can I.

The price is $97 which is irrelevant because the eBay affiliate program is pretty easy to make money with. If someone signs up for eBay through your link, you get $25. If someone clicks your link and buys ANY product on eBay in the next 7 days, you get 50% of the revenue (not total sale price). By just selling a few items and a few signups you’ve easily made your money back.

I’ve never actually used the Build a Niche Store software but am curious to hear from actual users.

What did you like? What don’t you like?

8 comments