How I Made $21 For Three Minutes Of Work
Posted on November 22, 2008
Filed Under Adsense
$21 is not a lot of money, but I know that it’s more than many webmasters earn in a week - and since this method made me $21 EXTRA and it is so simple I thought I would share. If someone had the time to do this all day (krap, i wish I had time to do it all day!) it could quickly add-up.
So I’m working yesterday and listening to the radio/CNN/Fox News (flipping around for background noise) and I keep hearing about “the virus that attacked the Pentagon computers” - They talked about it all day - every 15 to 30 minutes. So remembering an idea from Garry Conn that I had experimented with a few times already, I decided to give it another go.
I did a few Google searches on the virus that had gotten into the Pentagon computers and quickly saw that there was only about 10,000 - 20,000 results - and knowing that our site already has a lot of virus-related content I was confident that I could rank very well for some of those searches if I put my mind to it.
I quickly made a simple post about the virus, gave it a URL and Title Tag with the keywords I was targeting, made it a bit keyword heavy (but didn’t go overboard), and ‘bolded’ the keywords a few times. After I created the page/post it quickly received a few comments posted by members (mostly off topic which i have since deleted) but because I’m displaying the Drupal “recent comments” and “New Forum Topics” blocks on virtually every page, I immediately had site-wide links across thousands of pages pointing to the new post. I also added in an extra Adsense block (& custom channel) on the page, and I created a URL channel so I could track earnings on this new page from my site-wide Adsense block that is displayed at the top of every page.
Within less than an hour traffic started to pour in. I did a quick check and I was delighted to see that the page ranked #1 for “Agent.btz pentagon” and ranked #3 for just the name of the virus, “agent.btz” - but mine was the only result that displayed anything about the Pentagon.
All evening I sat glued to my stats and I could see every time one of the news channels mentioned the story because a new wave of traffic came in. This morning the Adsense channels added up to just under $21. My Kontera stats haven’t come in yet, but I’m sure there will also be an extra few $ there also.
If you already have an established site, and do some basic on-page SEO, this kind of popular content building should be pretty easy to accomplish - every day there are dozens of “big stories”. The difficult part is finding the day’s “big” story and keeping your pages/content on-topic with the rest of your site - and not be spammy about the whole thing.
$21 a few times per day or per week, or even $10 several times a day/week can add-up pretty quickly.. Certainly worth a few minutes a day.
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15 Responses to “How I Made $21 For Three Minutes Of Work”
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Now that is an awesome success story Randy! As you said, $21 dollars might not seem like a lot of money, but if one was to actively do this all day, that money would indeed add up real quick.
Thank you so much for investing the time into doing an experiment based off the information published on my article. That is so very cool!
I am going to submit this post into StumbleUpon and share it with my friends so that can come here and read it.
Thanks again!
Best Regards,
Garry Conn
Hey Randy, Garry referred me over here to have a look at this. Well done and some quick thinking! You could easily expand on these steps a little bit and put them in an ebook which you could sell for a small cost.
Great pickup and thanks for sharing.
Murray
Holy cow,
That’s awesome. I will remember this and add it to a few of my established blogs. I think I’d have a heart attack if I made $20 in one day.
Awesome post, thanks for passing along the information.
Christine Senter said:
Don’t make me start whining again… We’re going to get you up to the freaking $100 / day mark!
That’s great man. Great idea for people that already have established sites in that niche.
I may have to give this a test run.
Hello Randy,
Gary Conn suggested that I take a look at your post and I’m glad I did. Thanks for sharing.
What a lot of people seem to not understand about making money on the Internet is that the money usually comes from a lot of little things that add up. $21 extra from one good post idea shows how posting often about subjects people have a real interest reading about can add big bucks to monthly income.
Wow, this is something I need to try out. Well my site isn’t that established yet, but will give it a shot soon.
Thanks for sharing.
Very well done Randy. I loved the article by Garry and continually look for ways to do this myself.
Great Job!! $21 for three minutes work is surely nothing to scoff at. Have you used Google trends to check out hot searches?
Kevin said:
I have tried using Google Trends in the past, but it’s never worked for me.
I think the reason this method worked out so well is because i was able to strike while it was still hot.
The only negative with this method is that it goes as fast as it came.. the story is old-news now and traffic from these keywords has dropped to nearly zero after just 2 days..
I think,that $20 is really enough for me as beginner.:)
wow!! thats an awesome success story!!! It took me months to make my first 21$.
All th best!
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That was initial $21. How much have you made so far? Great job.