Google Search Saturation Case Study: Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities Weblog

A few days back, I said that having 10,000 pages indexed in Google is what you may need to succeed online.(I mention Google only for the purposes of example - Yahoo and MSN are getting equally important these days. Each provides a third of my traffic daily at my main "static" website www.1sthowtoworkathome.com.)

The exact example I used was based on some hypothetical numbers...

If said that if you have 100 indexed pages, get 100 visitors daily and earn $5 per day you can figure out what you likely need to do to earn $500 per day (or whatever your goal is).

But most won't like the answer.

Assuming you want to continue to mine your particular niche. You know you'll have to do 100 times better. Since you average 5 cents per pay per indexed page and you seem to attract 1 visitor per page per day on average, you may well need to work towards having 100 times the number of pages you currently have.

Ouch. That's ... 10,000 pages.

Most people would like to have a neat 5 page minisite and get rich earning $10,000 per month. At least I would.

But life's not that simple.

Bear in mind that you don't have to make 10,000 pages all by yourself.

When I say "pages indexed in Google" they can, I'm told, be articles you've written.

One good article can be posted on 10, 20, or 100 other sites all pointing back to you.

Or the pages could be content posted on your site that others have written or generated by templates.

That's the great thing about blogs. You're mostly commenting on ideas from other websites.

In the work at home or affiliate marketing field, things are pretty saturated, so you may find your field to be much easier to penetrate. That means you may need fewer pages to get your share of the traffic.

I'll give you an example from my field though where one of the "pillars" is Dane Carlson's weblog.

When you check out the stats on Dane Carlson's highly respected Business Opportunities Blog, you'll find the trend I'm seeing more.

Dane has 7,810 pages indexed at Google today. It was slightly over 8,000 yesterday. (Oh well, that's search engine world for you.)


These pages (based on random samplings) are all pages on his own site linking back to the home page. The ones I scanned (not all 7,810!) were from his main site, not links from other places.


His site has excellent Google page rank... PR 5 and very good Alexa traffic ratings of under 90,000.

Dane wants me to tell you that "even Dane with his thousands of pages is still a miserable failure." But actually his site has produced another valuable statistic... another mom able to stay at home with the kids! Hooray! And if he didn't live in Taxifornia, he might even be staying home himself too!

The point of all this rambling?

Start researching your heroes and mentors.

They may NOT have one big site with thousands of pages, though some will.

If they don't I suspect they have multiple sites.

Again, just one site I'm researching that has me very interested has over 60,000 pages indexed in Google. The owner just took a month long vacations so that has my interest. (Can you tell I'm burned out?)

Or you may be an afficianado of some other mentor like James Martell. You'll see one of his killer sites and think in terms of building "the one killer site". But even he will tell people to have multiple sites all tied to ONE theme and with lots of content pages.

Either way, when you start checking into what people you respect are doing on the web, you'll probably find they're putting a lot more content up than you thought.

It may be one mega site... or lots of smaller sites.

To get free search engine referrals they're not just throwing up one page sales letters with order forms at the bottom.

And if they are, it's because they have lots of affiliates promoting their product. The affiliates are doing all the huffing and puffing to get the traffic there.

You're in for more work than you thought.

That's why there's less competition online than you might think if you'll keep at it.

The moral: The journey to a site of 10,000 pages begins with a single blog entry!