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Profiting from a Wallpaper Website

admin — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 08:36:54 +0000

Creating a wallpaper website can be very profitable; not only can they get a high CTR but they can also get high traffic relatively easily. Visitors to wallpaper websites tend to be internet novices so have very little ad blindness and in turn will often click on well placed ads. These visitors also link back to your website (and hotlink) more often than most people which leads to higher search engine rankings and general refferal traffic. In this article I will discuss how to create a profitable website similar to Naruto Wallpaper running on the script Turnkey Wallpaper Site Creator.

Deciding on a Topic – Search Frequency

When deciding on a topic for your wallpaper website you should take into consideration the search frequency of various wallpaper keywords because in 1-3 months time you could be getting a lot of traffic (1000+ uniques per day) from Google if you choose your keywords wisely. To find out the search frequency of keywords I used the tool Keyword Discovery and searched for the word ‘Wallpaper’ although the tool is plural sensitive so you will also want to search for ‘Wallpapers’. Here is the results of that search (click for full view) –

You should skim over that list looking for keywords which interest you, which you would enjoy creating a site about. The important thing is that the keyword is on the list so we know that people do search for it.

Deciding on a Topic – High Paying

Working out how much the advertisements will pay per click (CPC) in each topic will take a bit of guess work but this Google AdWords Tool can help to make better estimates. When I say it requires some guessing, I mean that when you are skimming over the list from above you should think to yourself “what ads would be displayed?” and “will they pay highly?”. For example, ‘PSP Wallpaper’ will display PSP game advertisements which could pay decently, ‘Free Wallpaper’ would display advertisements for free things which won’t pay a lot and ‘David Beckham Wallpaper’ would display soccer jersey and soccer ball advertisements which could pay well. Once you’ve taken the search frequency and advertisement CPC into account you can decide on a topic.

SEO – Link Building

Assuming you have uploaded some wallpapers and modified the banner to make your website high quality, you should start link building. There is only three link building techniques which I recommend:

Social Bookmarking (StumbleUpon) – StumbleUpon can bring large traffic spikes if the wallpaper and offer are of a high enough standard or out of the ordinary. One wallpaper at NarutoWallpaper.biz brought 5000 unique visitors from StumbleUpon in one day – Sexy Christmas Girls.
High Quality Link Exchanges – link exchanges alone are enough to give you decent SERPs, just do 15 or so link exchanges with high PR and high traffic websites in your niche.
Waiting – if the wallpapers you offer are good you will generate backlinks organically; people will link to your wallpapers and homepage. Also, it takes at least one month from when you do your link exchanges until your SERPs bring any substantial traffic.

SEO – Capturing Long Tail Searches

If you have done some good link building you should have no trouble ranking for long tail keywords. By long tail keywords I mean not hugely competitive; my main target keyword would be ‘Naruto Wallpaper’ or ‘Naruto’ but one long tail keyword I target is ‘Naruto Uzumaki Wallpaper’. To target this long tail keyword I create a wallpaper about ‘Naruto Uzumaki Wallpaper’, upload it to the website then wait one week and you will start ranking for it. To find more long tail keyword you return to Keyword Discovery but this time search for ‘Naruto Wallpaper’ rather than ‘Wallpaper’. Now create a wallpaper for lots of long tail keywords and soon you will have lots of search engine traffic.

SEO – Image Search

Image search engines have the potential to send huge amounts of traffic to a website, even more so for a wallpaper website. NarutoWallpaper.biz gets 400 uniques per day from Google Image Search but amazingly only 10 NarutoWallpaper.biz images have been indexed, and they are only thumbnail images! If Google ever gets around to indexing the 100+ full sized wallpapers the traffic would be astronomical. Although the problem is that Google seems very slow to index images, NarutoWallpaper’s pages get indexed in 1-2 days of creation but the images take months to be indexed. If you can get your images indexed though, you’ll be laughing. Here’s the best image search engines –

Image Search Sites

Monetization – AdSense

Turnkey Wallpaper Site Creator already has good ad placement, the ads tend to receive between 5% and 25% CTR depending on the source of the traffic and the relevance of the ads. For example, search engine visitors convert far better than more general visitors. The ad blocks on the homepage convert well because they are displayed front and center in the middle of the content.

Monetization – Link Sales (Optional)

On top of the AdSense revenue a wallpaper site earns you have the option of selling links. As you may or may not know Google discourages selling links especially if it for the reason of passing PageRank, that’s why this section is optional. Turnkey Wallpaper Site Creator includes by default a Partners section which you could add one of two things, paid links or link exchanges. I prefer to stick with link exchanges and focus on AdSense rather than link sales but you always have the option to do both.

SEO Case Study – NarutoWallpaper.biz

admin — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:41:16 +0000

Search engine traffic is by far my favorite type of traffic; it’s free, the users convert well to sales and advertisement clicks, and you can work towards goals like ranking for specific keywords. In this case study I will explain every step I have taken to bring www.NarutoWallpaper.biz from 0 to 400 search engine visitors per day in just over one month.

Keyword Research

If you are hoping to receive traffic from search engines, you need to be targeting keywords which people actually search for – the tool I prefer to use for keyword research is Keyword Discovery. Before deciding to the buy the domain www.NarutoWallpaper.biz I only knew that I wanted to develop a website providing wallpapers so I searched for the term ‘wallpapers’ in KeywordDiscovery. The most searched for ‘wallpapers’ phrases are ‘wallpapers’, ‘anime wallpapers’, ‘psp wallpapers’, ‘free wallpapers’ and ‘naruto wallpapers’.

Targeting the keyword ‘wallpapers’ might seem appealing with 500,000 searches per month but it will be highly competitive, I like to choose topics with moderately high searches but reasonably low competition. To find out the competition of each key phrase I search for the phrase in Google and look at the ‘Results 1 – 10 of about 2,230,000 for naruto wallpapers’ section. For the top 5 key phrases listed above, ‘wallpapers’ has 88 million competitors – far too many, ‘free wallpapers’ has 8 million – a bit much, and ‘anime wallpapers’ ‘psp wallpapers and ‘naruto wallpapers’ have 3 million – decent. Anime, PSP and Naruto have nice searches per month with achievable search engine rankings since the phases aren’t enormously competitive. Of the three I chose ‘Naruto Wallpapers’ since it seems interesting. Based on the niche I decided on above I bought the domain www.NarutoWallpaper.biz. Having the target keywords in the domain is nice and has some SEO benefit.

More Keyword Research

Each of the sub-pages must target other key phrases within the niche so I return to KeywordDiscovery and this time rather than search for ‘wallpapers’ I search for ‘naruto wallpapers’. The results this time give you ideas for what pages you should create. Naruto is a cartoon series so I created sub-pages for each character in the series, once again searching in KeywordDiscovery for ‘(character name) wallpapers’. Each time I want to create a new sub-page I find the optimal keywords to target through KeywordDiscovery.

Optimizing the Pages

After you’ve decided on the target key phrases for your pages you should make sure then each page includes its respective key phrase in the page title, the URL and the page content. The website I developed for www.NarutoWallpaper.biz is database driven so each wallpaper has a separate sub-page with an auto-generated page title, ‘(character name) wallpaper’.

Getting Indexed

Once the website is up and running you will want to have the pages included in the search engines, to make things simple I will refer to just Google. Google doesn’t index your website unless it finds other websites linking to it, I will discuss building backlinks in the next section. Google does have a submission page but I see no good reason to use it; if you have backlinks you will be added to the index automatically. Having backlinks pointing towards your website will get your homepage indexed along with some sub-pages but to get all of your sub-pages indexed you should create a sitemap, a sitemap is a file listing all of your pages. There are two main types of sitemap, the HTML Sitemap and the XML Sitemap, both will help to get all of your sub-pages indexed but I prefer the XML Sitemap. After you’ve created your sitemap you should submit it to Google Webmaster Tools to help them find your sitemap.

Building Backlinks

As I said above, building backlinks will help to get your pages indexed but the main benefit of backlinks is that they improve your search engine rankings. The benefit of a backlink depends mainly on two things, the quality of the website linking to you and the anchor text of the link. As an example, in the link Naruto Wallpapers ‘Naruto Wallpapers’ is the anchor text so this backlink will help the website I am linking to rank for the key phrase ‘Naruto Wallpapers’. To build backlinks to a new website I start by contacting similar websites asking if they would like to link to your website or if they would like to exchange links with you. To find potential websites to contact I search Google for something like naruto inurl:contact.php. Each related website that links to you helps to boost your search engine rankings. Another method of backlink building is blog commenting or forum posting, if your website is relevant to the discussion you can give your link. Make sure you only display your link if it useful though, otherwise it is spam. Social bookmarking websites like Digg and StumbleUpon can also provide backlinks. Social bookmarking can also be a good traffic source if your website is very useful or interesting.

Wait, Wait, Wait

As you saw in the first image it took 1 week for www.NarutoWallpaper.biz 1 week to start receiving traffic from search engines and 3 weeks to see any substantial traffic. This is nothing to worry about, it’s because the search engine spiders take a while to find all of the backlinks pointing towards your website although some people may blame this delay to the sandbox effect, I don’t believe in the sandbox effect, I think it’s simply a delay while the spiders find the backlinks. While you’re waiting you might like to create some more keyword targeted content.

Statistics and Traffic Tracking

To find out which keywords are bringing you visitors a tracking program is necessary, my two favorite programs are AwStats and Google Analytics both of which are free. The first image was part of the Google Analytics package. As you can see in the first image, the main key phrases bringing me traffic are ‘naruto wallpaper’, ‘naruto wallpapers’, ‘akatsuki wallpapers’ and so on. Once you know which key phrases are bring in the traffic you will want to find out what you rank for each phrase, to do this I use the Digital Point Keyword Tool which lets you track your rankings on a daily basis. If you find a keyword ranking in the top 11-20 you should work to improve your rankings for this term, you will receive far more traffic for a top 10 ranking than a rank 11-20 and there’s not a huge amount of work involved with improving from rank 11-20 to top 10. At the moment I am ranking 11-20 for ‘Naruto Wallpapers’ so once I reach top 10 the search engine traffic will increase a lot.

Repeat

Once the above steps are complete the only thing left to do is repeat them until you reach your desired rankings and traffic. Do further keyword research and create new sub-pages based on this research, keep optimizing your pages and keep building backlinks to the homepage and sub-pages. If your website is of high enough quality your backlinks will grow naturally, you won’t need to do much more backlink building.