The Feeder Blog: A Tool For AdSense Publishers

I was having an interesting discussion with one of my readers last night about the whole “virtual real estate” (VRE). The idea behind VRE is simple enough: claim virtual cyberspace “land” by building tightly-focused niche sites that are monetized via AdSense and other programs. Repeat the process continually and eventually you'll make a lot of money. Or so the theory goes. It's an appealing concept and what someone like Joel Comm taps into with his monthly AdSense templates product.

When the reader described his strategy to me, however, I pointed out that he was missing one thing: a blog. Or, more specifically, a feeder blog.

The Feeder Blog

Again, this idea is simple and it's not rocket science. When you're building a series of mini-sites — and that's what VRE is all about — a feeder blog is an easy way to get those sites into the search engines. Feeder blogs are blogs that link to pages on your network of sites.

You may have noticed that many of the top-rated bloggers have secondary blogs where they do nothing but post links to things they find interesting but not worthy enough for a full blog posting. Such a blog is commonly called a link blog and you can see examples of them for Jeremy Zawodny and Robert Scoble. A link blog can be a type of feeder blog.

But not everyone uses link blogs. People like Darren Rowse and Steve Rubel make occasional short posts consisting of nothing but links. (Darren calls it “speedlinking”.) Such blogs can also be feeder blogs. The very blog you're reading is a feeder blog, for example, because I'll occasionally link out to sites I own like Uncommon AdSense, GeekAffiliate, No Debt Is Good, or BlackBerry Developers At Work! to send them additional traffic and to give them the benefit of this blog's high PageRank. (The trick, of course, is to keep the links relevant to the topic at hand, which is not always easy to do. If you can't insert links naturally into the text of a regular blog, either create a link blog to do it or else put the links in something like a “Sponsored Link” section. Either way, don't overdo it.)

The Mini-Site Feeder Blog

The purpose of the feeder blog in the mini-site VRE strategy is to have the blog act as a gateway to the content on those sites. You don't even have to monetize the blog — in fact, not monetizing the blog will make it easier to get it listed in various directories.

Ideally, the blog exists and is active before any of the sites you're going to build. The feeder blog should not link exclusively to your own sites. It should link out to other sites that are related to the topics you're going to be persuing. Each link should include a small text blurb/summary describing the page being linked to and why it's interesting. Make your feeder blog a credible source of information, a compilation of interesting things. Post once or twice on a daily basis — make sure the blog stays active. Use social bookmarking tags (i.e. Technorati) within each post. Make it easy for others to bookmark the posts as well.

Once the blog's been established, start linking out to the sites you develop. Don't stop linking to other relevant sites. Don't vary the pace of your posting, either. Search engines don't like to see hundreds of pages of content show up all at once. Pace yourself. Add content to your sites on a regular basis and then link to those pages as they get added.

The feeder blog is only one part of a good VRE strategy, of course. You should create and submit sitemaps for each mini-site, for example, and update them whenever you add content. You'll want to do the usual SEO tricks on the content. You'll want to get links from other sites to your own, so link building is still important.

The Downside

The downside to this is that it takes some work to run a blog, as any blogger will tell you. However, a simple link blog used as a feeder blog doesn't take too much work. After all, you're probably surfing the web all the time looking for information related to the sites you're building, so it should be easy to find relevant links. You just have to be disciplined about it. Most blogging systems, however, let you create posts and publish them later in the future, so you could always create multiple posts in a single session and then space them out so you don't have to actually do it on a daily basis.

The underlying presumption to all of this is that you're building quality sites. The feeder blog is a way to get search engines to quickly find your content, but if you're publishing crap it won't be long before your feeder blog loses its credibility. This is why I'd stay away from completely automated solutions. (It's perfectly fine to use something like Google Alerts to be notified whenever a new page related to your topic shows up, but you should still look at the page and then decide whether or not to link to it.)

Not all AdSense publishers need feeder blogs, but if you're trying the multiple mini-site VRE strategy it's a good thing to have.

Sponsored Link: If you're looking for ways to optimize those VRE sites for AdSense, Uncommon AdSense is the book that'll show you how.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and
Make Easy Money with Google. His award-nominated AdSense blog is a lot of work to write, but also a lot of fun…

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