First off, most internet marketers do not publicly announce the exact final destination, only the journey. Do not ask me “what is your website?”. All I will say is that I saw a trend online and in the news and built a forum around it. In October I made $3300 from Adsense and direct advertisements. This is chump change. I know people making $60k/month on AdSense alone. I will get there soon. 2012! YouTube money!
Setup your website: Buy a domain with exact or near exact matching keywords. For example HuntingKnivesInfo.com. Use Google AdWords to do keyword research. Install WordPress and all of the standard plugins for analytics (very important, more on this later), webmaster tools, social media, SEO plugins (very important, again, more on this later), Caching (IMPORTANT), AdSense… ok fuck it. All of these plugins are important here is a list:
Akismet auto-fight spam. I did not install this until I was overwhelmed with thousands of comment spam. Blackhaters use tools such as ScrapeBox to blast out thousands of comments. More on this later.
All in One SEO Pack proper tags and meta data is important. Google it.
Google Analytics by Joost de Valk there are tons of GA plugins. I like this one the best because it gives you the option to track out-bound links. I used this data to negotiate my latest advertising deal. In fact I used a lot of GA data across multiple sites to demonstrate value to my advertisers.
Google XML Sitemap I am on the fence with sitemaps these days. It seems that the Google Bot crawls so fast that you do not need this. I do it anyway for good measure. Do not be lazy.
Quick AdSense This plugin is awesome. All you have to do is paste your AdSense code and tell it where you want to appear. Top of post, middle post, bottom of post. You can rotate ads and it also has a widget function. Very cool shit.
SEO Search Terms Tagging 2 This plugin will get you into a lot of trouble. My site got shut down 3 times because of it and the long term effects are yet to be determined. Basically it takes popular relevant search terms and displays them at the bottom of a post. It also has a widget. The kicker is an option that links to an automatically generated search page. These pages get indexed. I had over 400,000 at one point. This meant a few things. Most important, I get a shitload of long tail page titles, in turn, lots of traffic. The caveat is the Google crawl rate. This blows up bandwitdh and wreaks havoc on a shared hosting environment. You will need to pay for VPS or Amazon EC2 and install caching, which leads me to my next plugin.
W3 Total Cache I do not know much about caching so I just enabled everything except the content delivery network (CDN) features.