This is an article that I promised to write over a month ago. Sorry for the delay but I have simply been up to my neck in work during the last six weeks. Anyway, let’s get on with this article. Firstly let me say I have many “sleeper” sites. These are sites with decent brandable domain names with perhaps a dozen articles and a few quality links. I’m happy to let my sleeper sites age till I decide what to do with them. I will add a link or two each month targeting one or two semi competitive key phrases, but in all honesty my sleeper sites receive little attention from me. We all know the value of aged domains plus perhaps more importantly aged back links, so in my opinion it is very worthwhile to have a few sleeper type sites in several different sub niches.
There has been a lot of debate about the old “content versus links” question on PAL which I think ties in nicely with this article. We all know that anybody can rank a page full of garbage if the page has enough quality links. How about ranking for decent key phrases without any links using short articles with call to actions pushing readers to other quality sites?
Let’s take a look at the visitor stats for the site I’m referring to. You can see it is just ticking along with just a little traffic.
Inspired by others I decided to “wake up” this site and try and get it approved by Google News. I simply started to compose sports and general gambling news articles, back dated to cover the previous six weeks. I made sure that all the site articles passed Copyscape plus of course I ensured I followed all the guidelines set by Google before submitting my site to Google News. Over the course of 6 days (well I did have other things to do) I painstakingly composed all the articles.
After submitting the site, just a few minutes later Google email me. I had to confirm that I had met all their requirements and confirm that I wanted Google to review my site in regards to being accepted by Google News. I did this, fired off the email then switched to tasks on my other sites. I was amazed that in less than five hours later my site was approved! I had to wait 48 hours for my articles to be picked up by Google News but as soon as they were booooooooom!
I soon found though that having an approved news site was draining all my time as I was spending far too much time on the site with little reward. You kind of get addicted to generating thousands of views for Google News articles which can be nightmare to convert. Over the next week I generated over 12,000 unique visitors, with I’m ashamed to say only 5 RMP’s. It was clear to me that I had a lot to learn.
Since getting my first site approved by Google News I have had another approved. I have also made great progress in converting the floods of news traffic into RMPs. In my next article I will discuss in detail exactly what you need to do to get your site approved by Google News then in further articles I will go into detail about how to convert news traffic.
