In my quest to learn all I can about Niche Marketing and Niche Marketing Strategies, I have joined a membership site that has a pretty good track record and following. I first learned about this site from Yaro Starak and one of his Podcasts. I listen to podcasts all the time, everyday in fact when I am walking.

Anyway I like the philosophy behind this membership sites method, so I joined. In the style of making money online, they give a prebuilt website kit to all members each month to use as a learning tool. The kits are a bunch of articles for article marketing, keywords for SEO marketing, Graphics and the articles for each site.

Once you get these sites you’re supposed to customize them to be unique and your own. However, as it is with most people just learning or trying to make money on the internet, to trying to get rich quick, they will put up the defacto site and not even change it at all. This not only hurts the other people who are doing the same thing but it hurts themselves as well. Here’s a video I did for this article, which continues after the video.

Google doesn’t like duplicate content in the first place, second the person who had their site up first gets the higher page rank(if they even get a page rank). Anyone after them to put up a site with the same duplicate content will rank lower and lower. The other problem is when someone does a search for this specific topic and they come up with a list of SERPs(Search Engine Results Pages), The see a ton of Clones.

My example is here:

Type this is your google search engine:

Get your free Rose Growing Mini-Course Here

Or just click the link it will open in a new window, and start clicking on the links that you see, no need to delve into each site just click a link and then hit your back button. Go down the list of site and then go to the second page of search results. What you will see here is an army of Rose Growing Mini Courses.

While some of people have taken the time to customize the graphics and text, many of them just threw up the sites as is. Unfortunately some of the sites are half done and still have beagle training stuff  still on there and I am sure many of those site owners are wondering why they aren’t getting any sales at all.

Google is going to index the first sites first and anyone that comes after that is going to get SLAPPED for duplicate content and possibly get sand boxed. Now if I started looking for sites that teach how to grow roses and I saw that each site I went to was the same as the 0ne previous I wouldn’t want to buy.  I would also get very suspicious of the product being sold, especially if part of it still had some sort of beagle training course on it.

I started typing in combos of the words on the pre made sites and I found a plethora of interesting sites. Some were half done and some were completed but may have missed a “beagle” word here or there. It’s really a shame, because if you really want to learn how to make money online you have to practice also trying to be unique, even in a sea of Rose Growing Sites.

I knew one of the prebuilt sites that were given out were for wine making, so I typed in a phrase for wine making and I found a site which I think is a good example of someone customizing the site to make it unique. The site is here:

http://growgrapesandmakewine.com

Now this site doesn’t exactly follow the model from the member site I belong to, but its close. The member site I belong to have specific ways of doing a website but the point I am trying to point out here is to customize the product site and make it unique. Re-write the content, change the graphics, make it your own and so there is not any duplicate content on the site so no one gets dinged not only by Google, but by a prospective customer.

Something I saw when I clicked on the “our eBook” link, was the great looking cover. It nicely done, and it’s obvious someone took the time to give a great presentation. In many industries including sales and marketing “presentation is EVERYTHING”.

What I am getting at here folks is that if you want to get this right, take the time to customize graphics. Re-Write articles, or write your own, don’t just throw up default packages you may be given. If you do decide to just toss up a defacto prebuilt website don’t whine and moan about how you’re not getting any sales, or that the program you are in is a scam.

Duplicate content hurts not only yourself, but the other people you may be duplicating, and that isn’t right.

BTW The Member site I joined and Really like the Method and Theory of is Niche Profit Classroom 2.0 It’s a pretty cool system, check out the video on the home page.

Enjoy.