I slapped this link at the bottom of my last post "The Third Tribe Review" and have felt bad because I didn't give it the props it deserves - especially in light of the amount of beginners I get on this site.
Before any of you get carried away becoming an Internet Marketer there are a few basic elements to this game that you really need to know to succeed. One of those basic elements is Backlinks and Allyn Hane has put together a pretty comprehensive post on his site entitled;
Everything you Need to Know About Backlinks
Go read it and watch the videos. There are no sales pitches or promos - it's a straight up tutorial for those looking for real guidance. Learn about Backlinks - it's important.
Cheers,
Griz
Showing posts with label backlinks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label backlinks. Show all posts
Friday, February 5, 2010
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Private Network - 30 Positions
I'm going to keep this simple. You will see an email I received from a long time collaborator of mine below. He and his partners have been building networks for a year and a half now and in fact put together a project for me this past year. The sites are all PR2 - PR5, multiple C class IP's and fresh (they have not been used for any links yet). I seem to open up a can of worms every time I discuss issues of this nature but I know there is a core group of readers that can benefit from such a network. If you understand link building and have a stable of sites in need of some help then this is for you. If you don't understand what this is all about don't sweat it - you're not ready for this yet. I am not being paid for promoting this nor is there an affiliate link - just an email you can contact the owners with. I am not publicizing the name of this network and ask any of you who join to keep it to yourselves. This has a ton of potential if we keep it under the radar and within our community. It is not being publicized anywhere else. And yes - I am the first and only member using it at the moment - so don't screw it up with spam and dumb ass linking strategies. (No I don't use any networks with this site - it's as white as snow in case you were going to check my links... lol)
Here is the email...
Griz
You can mention that people can email us at linknetwork@rocketship.com. Once we approve them we will let them in. The first 10 people to email us will get the service at $107 dollars for their first month and then $127 a month following. The system is based on good behavior, and releases 2-5 posts per day per website you want links for. Users that use the system the way it is intended according to the rules are rewarded with more posts pushed out to the network per day on each of their projects. The network has automation as well, so the more a user is trusted, the more automated their articles will be, which means pushing links out to the network faster rather than waiting for a review.
The reason this network is better than the others is that several of the more popular networks which I have researched have serious flaws which make it easy to uncover all the sites in their networks. This network has eliminated those types of trails. The network is also constantly stocked with fresh blogs. Another feature which we are looking at implementing in the future is posting articles to static websites. This means a whole new dimension to the way Google views those links. Other options COMING SOON include posting to blogs built for only one topic. This means more targeted links which makes them even more powerful. The limit on users allowed to join the network is 30, and once that is filled we will put others on a waiting list to join if/when we open back up.
And that is that - if you have questions fire away but I may dodge a few of them as I no longer like discussing this issue in public. It works. It is how the real money is made. And it is Taboo.
Update: The 30 positions have been filled. You can still sign up on the waiting list in the event of future openings.
Cheers
Griz
Here is the email...
Griz
You can mention that people can email us at linknetwork@rocketship.com. Once we approve them we will let them in. The first 10 people to email us will get the service at $107 dollars for their first month and then $127 a month following. The system is based on good behavior, and releases 2-5 posts per day per website you want links for. Users that use the system the way it is intended according to the rules are rewarded with more posts pushed out to the network per day on each of their projects. The network has automation as well, so the more a user is trusted, the more automated their articles will be, which means pushing links out to the network faster rather than waiting for a review.
The reason this network is better than the others is that several of the more popular networks which I have researched have serious flaws which make it easy to uncover all the sites in their networks. This network has eliminated those types of trails. The network is also constantly stocked with fresh blogs. Another feature which we are looking at implementing in the future is posting articles to static websites. This means a whole new dimension to the way Google views those links. Other options COMING SOON include posting to blogs built for only one topic. This means more targeted links which makes them even more powerful. The limit on users allowed to join the network is 30, and once that is filled we will put others on a waiting list to join if/when we open back up.
And that is that - if you have questions fire away but I may dodge a few of them as I no longer like discussing this issue in public. It works. It is how the real money is made. And it is Taboo.
Update: The 30 positions have been filled. You can still sign up on the waiting list in the event of future openings.
Cheers
Griz
Sunday, February 1, 2009
SEO Software and Link Building
Hi folks. A little bit of everything in this post as I want to tie up a few loose ends and ramble a bit. The basic gist of this post will pertain to SEO - more specifically I want to show you exactly what it is I do in order to take some of the mystery out of SEO.
I want to start off by referring you to a comment left on a post I made in December.
The post was How I Find a Money Making Niche Dec 5, 2008
The comment was by Jez and you can read it below.
I have had a number of emails similar in nature. Since this keeps cropping up I think it needs to be discussed.
Yes - it's true. I get a lot of links simply because I am ranked highly in the serp's. I have lots of friends - they do link to me. What Jez and others don't realize is that I didn't develop all my friends until I was found on the search engines. I didn't (and still don't) use social networks to make friends. I had to get my site ranked well in the first place and I didn't have any help back then. The fact that this blog benefits from friends helping me now doesn't mean that this was always the case. If you think I don't really know how to build links and rank well without the help of my friends you are sorely mistaken and doing yourself a dis-service if you don't heed my advice.
Jez you wondered if I could rank well for a non-bloggy niche like "reactolite spectacles".
Here you go... Reactolite Spectacles
And you can find it ranked number 1 with double indexing in Google.
Click all images to enlarge
As for my link building approach - it only needed a handful of links. None of the links are from friends.
I'm not a one trick pony like John Chow. This blog is successful and makes a lot of money for me but it is not all I do. I created 20 new sites in December just like the reactolite blog - 16 of which are now ranked number 1 for their main keyword. Only 1 is showing any promise as far as having decent traffic. The rest will probably end up on the farm - just like the Blinkweb by Brad Callen blog. This doesn't mean I wasted my time - the farm is quite useful. One of the 4 links I needed to rank the Reactolite site came from the Blinkweb blog.
This is how I find niches - I simply throw up enough sites, get them ranked and see which ones get traffic. Those that don't become useful later on for linking to yet more sites. Over and over. Throw enough crap against the wall and sooner or later something is going to stick.
Folks you don't have to go after the big niches all the time. Learn to get non competitive sites on top of the serp's. If they pan out great - if they don't then use them for linking. Get a stable of a hundred of these simple blogs and you will find that you can chase down the more competitive niches.
Btw - as you can see it doesn't take long (a month) to get a number 1 ranked site and it doesn't take a lot of links if the niche (keyword) has no competition. In fact I have shown you how to rank number 1 in a day when targeting short term hot topics like Asia'h Epperson. Maybe some of you need to put away the "insurance" blog for a bit and hone your skills ranking for "ants scratching their asses".
Simplify things and find out what it takes to rank on top of the serp's for easy niches. Build your confidence and your network at the same time. Baby steps. I guarantee that in a year from now you will be able to get that "insurance" blog on page 1.
Speaking of "a year from now". If you are going to make real money online then get realistic. I started this blog in Dec 2006. I picked a very competitive niche. I didn't expect to earn a dime until I cracked the first page in G. I didn't think I would get there any time soon. I was patient and took my time knowing that a year or two down the road it would be worth it. It's been two years since I started this blog and yup - it was worth waiting for...
For your inspiration. My January income for this free ugly blogger blog...
Adsense income = $3999.36
Project Payday Commissions = $1922.80
Assorted Affiliate Commissions Paypal = $427.39
Assorted Affiliate Commissions Clickbank = $365.91
Advertising Revenue = $225.00
January Total Revenue = $6940.46
Expenses = $0.00
Net Income = $6940.46 usd
Yes - 7k using a blogger blog. Would you stick it out for a year or two for that kind of income?
Total January income for all sites/all networks = $37,213.76 (primarily Adsense and Leads)
Total Expenses all networks = $1029.00
The bulk of my income comes from Blogger sites and all of it is earned by using SEO to rank well in the serp's. The A-list and their readers have never heard of me but I have 37,000 reasons why I don't really care. My system makes money and all it takes is - yup - backlinks. I will beat that horse until everyone of you learn that backlinks and Google are all you need to make money online.
And where do you get those backlinks? Link networks, article marketing, your own farm, friends, social sites (I don't but you can) and our own free resource that keeps growing every week - the niche support page on my Make Money Online with Griz blog.
SEO Software
My last post touched off a discussion regarding SEO Elite. (see the comments - set aside an hour to get through them all. lol) Paul mentioned that he preferred Aaron Wall's Free SEO Toolbar over SEO Elite. (I am not including links as this is not a sales pitch) I mentioned that if there were free tools that could provide the same data as SEO Elite then I would recommend people use them instead. I have yet to check out the SEO Toolbar but Paul assures me it does the same thing as SEO Elite and Fiar was kind enough to send me a sample of the SEO Toolbar rank checker this morning. (Thanks Fiar) I use SEO Elite for a number of things but it is the rank checker that is central to my success online. From what Fiar showed me it appears that SEO Toolbar does provide a useful rank checker and therefor I will suggest you all take advantage of the toolbar sight unseen on my part.
I will continue using SEO Elite as it is paid for and I am accustomed to using it. I bought SEO Elite ages ago when there was nothing comparable. Since then a multitude of free SEO software tools have made their way onto the scene and from the sounds of things SEO Elite has become redundant. If you can find free tools that produce the info you need then there is no need to buy any program just because it has a few bells and whistles that the free tools don't. (I'm leaving SEO Elite in the sidebar just because it makes me a few bucks a month off of search visitors who don't read my posts - anyone who doesn't read my blog is fair game in my books.) If you are a reader of mine - ask me in the comments before you buy anything you see on this site - I'll tell you whether I really endorse it.
The Rank Checker
My comments in the last post brought a flood of emails from readers wanting to know what the big deal was regarding the rank checker. The big deal is that it's what I use to mount a backlink campaign. It tells me where my keywords rank, how fast they rise in the serp's, which keywords need more backlinks and when to add them, how my competition is doing, what keywords they are competing for and which ones they aren't and a whole host of other things relevant to ranking well in the serp's. In short the rank checker is my NASA control center for my linking.
The screenshot below is just a section of the hundreds of keywords and sites I have loaded into SEO Elite's Rank Checker.
You will see instantly how well a site ranks for the keywords and what direction it is moving in (higher or lower in the serp's). It allows me to see if the competition really does know SEO. Below you will see Gary Conn's name. A few months ago he didn't rank worth crap in the serp's (meaning he was all BS before). He has been reading Vic's site and mine (not that he will admit it but I see him lurking) and now he is ranking for the MMO keywords. He is competition. Problogger on the other hand doesn't appear to have a clue about SEO and is really just a social blogger (a really good one) and isn't competition. Jonathan Ledger has a 3 way link program that he sells. Does it work? Nope. How do I know? I've tracked all his keywords and he doesn't rank for anything. His 3 way links program can't be very good if the owner of the program isn't ranked for squat. The rank checker is a great tool for checking out just how well different affiliate products work. If someone claims they are an expert at something and don't rank for their area of expertise they are full of crap. In short I use this tool for spying, for planning my strategies and then for implementing my links. It gives me the feedback I need to dominate the serp's. If you don't think it's important then go back and review my income again. Dominating the serp's IS my income.
Most of you know by now that I don't post often. There are many reasons for this. One is that I make more money not posting - notice the Adsense revenue dropped off over the last two weeks of January? Go through my posts in January and see when I posted. I explained why in one of those January posts. Another reason is simply because I don't have to. The reactolite blog only required 2 posts to rank number 1. What I'm trying to say is this - content is necessary only to the extent that you need something relevant on your sites (targeted keywords). This takes 10% of my time. I spend the other 90% of my time getting links. Posting is a waste of my time unless I need to add keywords to a site or trigger different Adsense ads. Otherwise leave it alone and work on the links. The links are what make you money - not the content. This is true for what I do at least.
I don't think I can simplify my system any more than this. Yes there is lots to learn when it comes to tweaking sites to optimize your income but that is something you can all learn once you have the traffic. Put all that aside and get the traffic first. Create keyword optimized sites - get keyword optimized backlinks. This will bring you traffic. If the traffic doesn't pan out - stick it in the farm and create more. And more. And more. Build your own network and as you grow you will start to dominate the niches that do have traffic. Too many of you are starting out looking for the 1 great niche or doing the MMO thing. This is fine for the long term and you can keep plugging away but maybe you should work on some reactolite type sites just to see some immediate results.
Okay - this is long enough. I want to talk about Google and its move towards social metrics in the next post. Fiar and Gary have both questioned me on this issue and I want to explore it further.
Cheers,
Griz
I want to start off by referring you to a comment left on a post I made in December.
The post was How I Find a Money Making Niche Dec 5, 2008
The comment was by Jez and you can read it below.
Hi Griz,
Problem I have with this post is that 95% of the backlinks to this sites are from blogs / social sites links.... many are from bloggers you know / are friends with.
What I would like to see is a post on link building for a "non bloggy" topic would be very useful... for example... say you had a niche site about "reactolite spectacles"... how would you approach link building on a site like that?
Jez
I have had a number of emails similar in nature. Since this keeps cropping up I think it needs to be discussed.
Yes - it's true. I get a lot of links simply because I am ranked highly in the serp's. I have lots of friends - they do link to me. What Jez and others don't realize is that I didn't develop all my friends until I was found on the search engines. I didn't (and still don't) use social networks to make friends. I had to get my site ranked well in the first place and I didn't have any help back then. The fact that this blog benefits from friends helping me now doesn't mean that this was always the case. If you think I don't really know how to build links and rank well without the help of my friends you are sorely mistaken and doing yourself a dis-service if you don't heed my advice.
Jez you wondered if I could rank well for a non-bloggy niche like "reactolite spectacles".
Here you go... Reactolite Spectacles
And you can find it ranked number 1 with double indexing in Google.
Click all images to enlarge
As for my link building approach - it only needed a handful of links. None of the links are from friends.
I'm not a one trick pony like John Chow. This blog is successful and makes a lot of money for me but it is not all I do. I created 20 new sites in December just like the reactolite blog - 16 of which are now ranked number 1 for their main keyword. Only 1 is showing any promise as far as having decent traffic. The rest will probably end up on the farm - just like the Blinkweb by Brad Callen blog. This doesn't mean I wasted my time - the farm is quite useful. One of the 4 links I needed to rank the Reactolite site came from the Blinkweb blog.
This is how I find niches - I simply throw up enough sites, get them ranked and see which ones get traffic. Those that don't become useful later on for linking to yet more sites. Over and over. Throw enough crap against the wall and sooner or later something is going to stick.
Folks you don't have to go after the big niches all the time. Learn to get non competitive sites on top of the serp's. If they pan out great - if they don't then use them for linking. Get a stable of a hundred of these simple blogs and you will find that you can chase down the more competitive niches.
Btw - as you can see it doesn't take long (a month) to get a number 1 ranked site and it doesn't take a lot of links if the niche (keyword) has no competition. In fact I have shown you how to rank number 1 in a day when targeting short term hot topics like Asia'h Epperson. Maybe some of you need to put away the "insurance" blog for a bit and hone your skills ranking for "ants scratching their asses".
Simplify things and find out what it takes to rank on top of the serp's for easy niches. Build your confidence and your network at the same time. Baby steps. I guarantee that in a year from now you will be able to get that "insurance" blog on page 1.
Speaking of "a year from now". If you are going to make real money online then get realistic. I started this blog in Dec 2006. I picked a very competitive niche. I didn't expect to earn a dime until I cracked the first page in G. I didn't think I would get there any time soon. I was patient and took my time knowing that a year or two down the road it would be worth it. It's been two years since I started this blog and yup - it was worth waiting for...
For your inspiration. My January income for this free ugly blogger blog...
Adsense income = $3999.36
Project Payday Commissions = $1922.80
Assorted Affiliate Commissions Paypal = $427.39
Assorted Affiliate Commissions Clickbank = $365.91
Advertising Revenue = $225.00
January Total Revenue = $6940.46
Expenses = $0.00
Net Income = $6940.46 usd
Yes - 7k using a blogger blog. Would you stick it out for a year or two for that kind of income?
Total January income for all sites/all networks = $37,213.76 (primarily Adsense and Leads)
Total Expenses all networks = $1029.00
The bulk of my income comes from Blogger sites and all of it is earned by using SEO to rank well in the serp's. The A-list and their readers have never heard of me but I have 37,000 reasons why I don't really care. My system makes money and all it takes is - yup - backlinks. I will beat that horse until everyone of you learn that backlinks and Google are all you need to make money online.
And where do you get those backlinks? Link networks, article marketing, your own farm, friends, social sites (I don't but you can) and our own free resource that keeps growing every week - the niche support page on my Make Money Online with Griz blog.
SEO Software
My last post touched off a discussion regarding SEO Elite. (see the comments - set aside an hour to get through them all. lol) Paul mentioned that he preferred Aaron Wall's Free SEO Toolbar over SEO Elite. (I am not including links as this is not a sales pitch) I mentioned that if there were free tools that could provide the same data as SEO Elite then I would recommend people use them instead. I have yet to check out the SEO Toolbar but Paul assures me it does the same thing as SEO Elite and Fiar was kind enough to send me a sample of the SEO Toolbar rank checker this morning. (Thanks Fiar) I use SEO Elite for a number of things but it is the rank checker that is central to my success online. From what Fiar showed me it appears that SEO Toolbar does provide a useful rank checker and therefor I will suggest you all take advantage of the toolbar sight unseen on my part.
I will continue using SEO Elite as it is paid for and I am accustomed to using it. I bought SEO Elite ages ago when there was nothing comparable. Since then a multitude of free SEO software tools have made their way onto the scene and from the sounds of things SEO Elite has become redundant. If you can find free tools that produce the info you need then there is no need to buy any program just because it has a few bells and whistles that the free tools don't. (I'm leaving SEO Elite in the sidebar just because it makes me a few bucks a month off of search visitors who don't read my posts - anyone who doesn't read my blog is fair game in my books.) If you are a reader of mine - ask me in the comments before you buy anything you see on this site - I'll tell you whether I really endorse it.
The Rank Checker
My comments in the last post brought a flood of emails from readers wanting to know what the big deal was regarding the rank checker. The big deal is that it's what I use to mount a backlink campaign. It tells me where my keywords rank, how fast they rise in the serp's, which keywords need more backlinks and when to add them, how my competition is doing, what keywords they are competing for and which ones they aren't and a whole host of other things relevant to ranking well in the serp's. In short the rank checker is my NASA control center for my linking.
The screenshot below is just a section of the hundreds of keywords and sites I have loaded into SEO Elite's Rank Checker.
You will see instantly how well a site ranks for the keywords and what direction it is moving in (higher or lower in the serp's). It allows me to see if the competition really does know SEO. Below you will see Gary Conn's name. A few months ago he didn't rank worth crap in the serp's (meaning he was all BS before). He has been reading Vic's site and mine (not that he will admit it but I see him lurking) and now he is ranking for the MMO keywords. He is competition. Problogger on the other hand doesn't appear to have a clue about SEO and is really just a social blogger (a really good one) and isn't competition. Jonathan Ledger has a 3 way link program that he sells. Does it work? Nope. How do I know? I've tracked all his keywords and he doesn't rank for anything. His 3 way links program can't be very good if the owner of the program isn't ranked for squat. The rank checker is a great tool for checking out just how well different affiliate products work. If someone claims they are an expert at something and don't rank for their area of expertise they are full of crap. In short I use this tool for spying, for planning my strategies and then for implementing my links. It gives me the feedback I need to dominate the serp's. If you don't think it's important then go back and review my income again. Dominating the serp's IS my income.
Most of you know by now that I don't post often. There are many reasons for this. One is that I make more money not posting - notice the Adsense revenue dropped off over the last two weeks of January? Go through my posts in January and see when I posted. I explained why in one of those January posts. Another reason is simply because I don't have to. The reactolite blog only required 2 posts to rank number 1. What I'm trying to say is this - content is necessary only to the extent that you need something relevant on your sites (targeted keywords). This takes 10% of my time. I spend the other 90% of my time getting links. Posting is a waste of my time unless I need to add keywords to a site or trigger different Adsense ads. Otherwise leave it alone and work on the links. The links are what make you money - not the content. This is true for what I do at least.
I don't think I can simplify my system any more than this. Yes there is lots to learn when it comes to tweaking sites to optimize your income but that is something you can all learn once you have the traffic. Put all that aside and get the traffic first. Create keyword optimized sites - get keyword optimized backlinks. This will bring you traffic. If the traffic doesn't pan out - stick it in the farm and create more. And more. And more. Build your own network and as you grow you will start to dominate the niches that do have traffic. Too many of you are starting out looking for the 1 great niche or doing the MMO thing. This is fine for the long term and you can keep plugging away but maybe you should work on some reactolite type sites just to see some immediate results.
Okay - this is long enough. I want to talk about Google and its move towards social metrics in the next post. Fiar and Gary have both questioned me on this issue and I want to explore it further.
Cheers,
Griz
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Credit Cards Make Money Online
The Difference between Professional Marketers and Bloggers
I'm an Internet marketer who uses blogs to make money online. Most of my readers are bloggers who are trying to be Internet marketers. There is a difference. If you think that there is an actual debate over whether content or links are the most important elements in making money online then you are a blogger. If you know that links are all that matters then you are an Internet marketer.
Quality content? What exactly is quality content? Really. Someone tell me. And while you are at it please tell me how a machine can tell if a post is written by the ghost of William Shakespeare or pounded out by a high school dropout. Quality is a subjective term and no two humans will ever agree on what constitutes quality writing never mind a machine doing it.
Content is necessary to Internet marketing in so much as it is appropriate to the niche that is being targeted. Content is little more than using the right keywords in the right places and surrounding them with relevant text. The Google algorithm does understand how to rank sites based on these factors. It doesn't rank sites on the basis of who writes better. Content only needs to be relevant, it does not have to be good.
If you believe that it has to be "quality" content then you are a blogger who is targeting a "social" niche and you want your traffic to return again and again. Why I have no idea. If you have readers then you aren't an Internet marketer. You are a social blogger.
Internet marketers target niches that make money for them. They don't target niches that attract bloggers. They don't use social media. They don't post comments on social sites. They don't chat on forums. They don't write for readers. They build sites that target specific terms and then they spend all their time gathering backlinks in order to rank number 1 on Google.
I'm going to show you why social bloggers don't have a chance against an Internet marketer.
Credit Cards
Vic from Blogger Unleashed has mentioned the keyword "Credit Card" in his posts when trying to explain why making money online has everything to do with links and nothing to do with quality content. Relevant content Yes but quality No.
The keyword "Credit Card" is one of the most contested terms online. The reason is simple. Rank well for the term and you will make money. I am going to show you how to do it.
A professional internet marketer looks for two things when targeting a niche. A keyword that gets a lot of search traffic and a keyword that can convert visitors into buyers. They don't spend 1 minute wondering if the niche will get readers or comments. A blogger looks for a niche that they think gets lots of traffic and then they build a site friendly to readers (meaning "other" bloggers). Later they wonder how they can turn their readers (you) into buyers. They are still trying to figure that one out. (Tell me why you don't buy stuff on the sites you read regularly and you have the answer - bloggers don't spend money.)
Let's look at why the credit card niche is so profitable. And why bloggers fail at dominating these kinds of niches - the niches that make money.
Monthly searches for the term "Credit Card". (Click images to enlarge)
Google's Adwords tool shows half a million searches for the term last month. This is an estimate. Keyword Elite shows 30k - also an estimate. I have said this numerous times before - don't believe the actual numbers. These tools are useful for showing you which terms are more popular but the actual search numbers shouldn't be taken as Gospel. These tools simply tell me that the term "credit card" gets more searches than any other related term (long tails). The Keyword Elite tool simply gives me an idea of Adsense CPC and how many advertisers are available. If the advertiser is paying $11 a click for a search listing then they are probably paying $4-$5 for content ads. This would equate to $2 clicks for you on your Adsense ads. This too is just an estimate and you could see much higher or lower CPC.
Step 2 - Who ranks on top of the serp's for the keyword "Credit Card"?
Here are the top 4 sites. Two of them have the term in their url and two don't. The 4th ranked site has the perfect url and doesn't rank number 1. This just tells me that the 3 sites above number 4 have way more anchored backlinks. It doesn't tell me who has "better" content.
Let's examine all four quickly. Guess what - not a blog among them for starters. They are all static web sites. Second they all have the same content - nothing unique or original. They don't have quality articles - they are simply lead generation sites listing dozens of affiliate links for various credit card offers. Third, they don't have Adsense on them. I'll tell you why that is important in a minute.
Oh btw - they are all "ugly" websites... do you know why? The same reason Google is an "ugly" website - these sites are built for functionality. They don't cater to readers. They want visitors to show up and click a link. They don't want readers hanging around reading and leaving comments or getting sidetracked with all sorts of "pretty" distractions that bloggers like to throw on their sites.
What do you see when you examine these sites? I'll tell you what I see...
I see exactly how Google works.
When someone types in "credit card" in the search engine Google has to decide what the intent of the visitor is for such a generic request. The visitor isn't asking anything. So does Google think the visitor is looking for information on the "history" of credit cards? Or which credit card is the "coolest" looking? Or which CC is the most used? No. Google has decided that the most relevant sites for such a generic term must be sites listing "available credit cards" or a "list of credit cards". They rightly assume that this is what the query is likely looking for. So why doesn't Visa, Amex and Mastercard dominate this serp listing? Because Google knows that anyone looking for such well known brands would simply type in the brand names. Since they didn't Google assumes that the visitor wants options.
If you ask for a history of CC's then you will get a "quality" blog article from about.com followed by a pbs.org blog article. Quality content? You bet. Will they make any money with their quality content. No. And neither quality article ranks for the term credit card.
The point is that all you bloggers need to understand that content has to be relevant to the keyword queried. In this case the most relevant content for the term credit card is a page full of credit card offers and not quality articles about credit cards. The most relevant platform for this info is a static website. You can create a blog and write as many high quality articles as you want about credit cards and I guarantee you will never see page 1 on the serp's for the term. Google is not looking for quality content. They are looking for "relevant" content. Period. A thin on content, heavy on affiliate products website is more relevant for the visitor, for this term, than your brilliant treatise on how evil credit card companies are.
You now know what type of site is needed and what type of content the site should have to rank well for this niche. This isn't my opinion. Google is telling you flat out by its own serp rankings.
So how does the top site get to be the top site. Do they have better content? No. All the top sites have the same content.
The top site has more quality keyword anchored backlinks than the the rest. Period.
All of you that think quality content matters (as opposed to relevant content) think about this. What makes Google rank 4 essentially similar sites differently?
I'll show you.
The top ranked site is creditcardguide.com and this is what it looks like.
Here is a list of some of the backlinks this website has pointing at it. This is compiled with SEO Elite.
I already knew the owner of this site knew their stuff but it only took 2 seconds to confirm it from the backlinks.
Check out the "Anchor text" column in the SEO Elite screenshot. The keyword "credit card" shows up often and is cloaked in various long tails. It's not just the two word term over and over. This site targets "all" the long tails and will rank well for a lot of them. This site gets a lot of search traffic on top of its main keyword.
Note: Most sites will have an abundance of crappy anchor text - the url or the name of the website is the most common anchor you will see. These links come from social networks and friends and other bloggers who don't know anything about keywords. When you see a list of backlinks that have more keywords in the anchor than crap terms you are looking at a site that controls the backlinks either because they own the linking sites (a farm) or they buy links. This site has almost no useless anchors - a sure sign that the owner controls the incoming links.
The red arrows are pointing to three links that tell the whole story. You'll also notice the site has several .edu links. These are all killer links. So did they come from stumblers and diggers? How about do-follow comments? Are they a result of article marketing? Bookmarking? Link exchanging with friends? Now don't get me wrong. Getting links is tough and all these methods do work and bloggers use them to find links for their blogs. But. The pros don't piss around with any of that. You are looking at a niche that makes real money and the people competing spend money to make it. This isn't casual blogging hoping to make a few thousand a month. This is a business.
Let me give you an idea about what kind of money is to be had. If I asked you who one of the biggest advertisers online is what would you say? The financial sector is a huge online advertiser. They spend billions a year doing what banks do - lending money in order to make even more billions in return. Is there anybody in the MMO or blogging niches spending that kind of advertising money? Can you think of any social niche that has that kind of money for advertising aside from the techie sector?
Let's say 500k people search for "credit card" each month and I'm going to be very conservative here. I noticed that the top site has an Alexa rank of 47k which means nothing except that this website does get a number of returning visitors who use the alexa toolbar. These visitors are most likely other marketers checking the rankings rather than real visitors (buyers) so I will lop off half the search numbers. This leaves 250K searches.
Affiliates earn between $25 and $120 for each customer who qualifies for a CC. Some cards pay up to $60 just for a completed application never mind acceptance of the app.
On any given day there could be 8000 people querying Google for the term "Credit Card" and 3/4 (6k) of these searchers will land on the top ranked site. Again being conservative, lets say only 1% click through and fill out a CC offer. That would be roughly 60 sign ups a day. 60 times an average commission of $50 is $3000 per day. $1500 per day if we only use the lowest commission rate of $25. This website realistically earns between $30,000 and $90,000 per month. It could be lower if the search numbers are way off or it could be a lot higher as well. Higher or lower - who spends more time working on their sites - you or the owner of this credit card guide? This owner doesn't post or answer comments. They change some links from time to time and spend the rest of the time lying on a beach buying links. Do you still want to work 7 days a week posting fresh content to keep your readers coming back?
Btw - I mentioned that there were no Adsense ads on the site. This tells you something considering 6000 visitors a day would likely click ads in the 6-8% range. (based on my own experience in similar niches). A 5% CTR would be 300 clicks at let's say - $2 per click. $600 a day - not bad. The fact that they aren't after Adsense just confirms that the commissions from leads is much higher than Adsense produces. (Never bleed visitors away from your main links with lesser links - focus on your money links)
That's a lot of money folks. Would I spend $10k a month buying links if the return was $60k? Yup. And so do real marketers. If you think you can compete in a niche like this without getting a ton of quality links then you are dreaming. If you think you can get those links using all the "social" means at your disposal you are dreaming. If you think writing "quality" content will get you ranked on page 1 for a niche like this - yes you are still dreaming. There is only one way in hell you can compete in this league. You buy links. And you buy better links than the competition. And you buy lots of them and you never stop buying them.
I didn't have to look very far to find the links I was looking for when examining this websites backlinks. The site has a PR6 link using the anchor "credit card". It comes from a non-relevant site but that single link kicks the crap out of a thousand do-follow links you might try to come up with. Here is the page the link is on. http://genamics.com/privacypolicy.htm and the red arrow points to it in the screenshot below.
The linking site itself is little more than a directory - a perfect farm blog used for passing high PR links for a price. The link in question is on a "Privacy Policy" page no less - a PR6 page. There is no reason for the link if you read the text. Can I prove this is a paid link. No. Do I know it is a paid link? I'm pretty sure. There are a few other links spread around the site that don't need to be there as well. Spend some time on Digital Point and you will find all sorts of anonymous sites selling links. This is the type of link you can purchase for a few hundred a month through one of the link brokers you will find on DP. It is a great link. The page it is on is not likely to ever get slapped by G and the competition can't really report it. The link is paid for but it will pass the test because it looks legit.
If you go back and look at a few of the other links I highlighted on the SEO Elite image you will notice the website also has a link from the Wall Street Journal. Very sweet indeed. Is it paid for? Who knows - the WSJ like many media giants is busy trying to make money online too. Do they use a link broker? Maybe. Everyone is looking for a monetization platform that works. The WSJ has a number of blogs that it operates and the link in question is on WSJ's blog "Independent Street". The link is on a fluff post and could be paid for or it could be the result of just ranking number 1 for the term. I have also received a few links over the years from the odd Media powerhouse - the last time was from the LA Times linking to my Asia'h blog. I got the link because I ranked on top of the serp's and the newsblog was looking for what it thought was a fan site. One thing I can tell you - links from the media giants are worth a lot of juice. This one is a PR5 link using the keywords in the anchor from an extremely trusted source. Beat that with your Digg friends.
The last link I want to point out is the http://web.mit.edu/foley/www/ link. This is a anchored keyword link on a PR4 .edu page from M.I.T. The blog is another crappy university .edu blog but the creator knows what he is doing. Can you tell if the link is paid for?
I probably made my point a few paragraphs ago. There is a huge gap between blogging for a few dollars and doing what the pros do. I'm not telling you all to run out and start buying links. I am telling you all to give the content vs links debate a rest. There is no contest - just in your very small pond out on the edge of the Internet universe. Professional marketers know what is needed to make money online.
Links...
And they know how to get them.
And it isn't using stumbleupon.
As for content - let Google show you what is relevant for your niche. Who do they rank on top and what type of content does the site have.
There is a huge gap between what the big players do to make money online and the social methods flogged by your local IM guru. Social traffic is for small players in a very small pond. Blogs can be used to make money online and fortunately for me most of the people using blogs are bloggers and not marketers. While they churn out quality content I churn out keyword relevant content and build links. They write for readers - I write for search engines. They don't make money. I do.
Nuff' said.
Cheers
Griz
I'm an Internet marketer who uses blogs to make money online. Most of my readers are bloggers who are trying to be Internet marketers. There is a difference. If you think that there is an actual debate over whether content or links are the most important elements in making money online then you are a blogger. If you know that links are all that matters then you are an Internet marketer.
Quality content? What exactly is quality content? Really. Someone tell me. And while you are at it please tell me how a machine can tell if a post is written by the ghost of William Shakespeare or pounded out by a high school dropout. Quality is a subjective term and no two humans will ever agree on what constitutes quality writing never mind a machine doing it.
Content is necessary to Internet marketing in so much as it is appropriate to the niche that is being targeted. Content is little more than using the right keywords in the right places and surrounding them with relevant text. The Google algorithm does understand how to rank sites based on these factors. It doesn't rank sites on the basis of who writes better. Content only needs to be relevant, it does not have to be good.
If you believe that it has to be "quality" content then you are a blogger who is targeting a "social" niche and you want your traffic to return again and again. Why I have no idea. If you have readers then you aren't an Internet marketer. You are a social blogger.
Internet marketers target niches that make money for them. They don't target niches that attract bloggers. They don't use social media. They don't post comments on social sites. They don't chat on forums. They don't write for readers. They build sites that target specific terms and then they spend all their time gathering backlinks in order to rank number 1 on Google.
I'm going to show you why social bloggers don't have a chance against an Internet marketer.
Credit Cards
Vic from Blogger Unleashed has mentioned the keyword "Credit Card" in his posts when trying to explain why making money online has everything to do with links and nothing to do with quality content. Relevant content Yes but quality No.
The keyword "Credit Card" is one of the most contested terms online. The reason is simple. Rank well for the term and you will make money. I am going to show you how to do it.
A professional internet marketer looks for two things when targeting a niche. A keyword that gets a lot of search traffic and a keyword that can convert visitors into buyers. They don't spend 1 minute wondering if the niche will get readers or comments. A blogger looks for a niche that they think gets lots of traffic and then they build a site friendly to readers (meaning "other" bloggers). Later they wonder how they can turn their readers (you) into buyers. They are still trying to figure that one out. (Tell me why you don't buy stuff on the sites you read regularly and you have the answer - bloggers don't spend money.)
Let's look at why the credit card niche is so profitable. And why bloggers fail at dominating these kinds of niches - the niches that make money.
Monthly searches for the term "Credit Card". (Click images to enlarge)
Google's Adwords tool shows half a million searches for the term last month. This is an estimate. Keyword Elite shows 30k - also an estimate. I have said this numerous times before - don't believe the actual numbers. These tools are useful for showing you which terms are more popular but the actual search numbers shouldn't be taken as Gospel. These tools simply tell me that the term "credit card" gets more searches than any other related term (long tails). The Keyword Elite tool simply gives me an idea of Adsense CPC and how many advertisers are available. If the advertiser is paying $11 a click for a search listing then they are probably paying $4-$5 for content ads. This would equate to $2 clicks for you on your Adsense ads. This too is just an estimate and you could see much higher or lower CPC.
Step 2 - Who ranks on top of the serp's for the keyword "Credit Card"?
Here are the top 4 sites. Two of them have the term in their url and two don't. The 4th ranked site has the perfect url and doesn't rank number 1. This just tells me that the 3 sites above number 4 have way more anchored backlinks. It doesn't tell me who has "better" content.
Let's examine all four quickly. Guess what - not a blog among them for starters. They are all static web sites. Second they all have the same content - nothing unique or original. They don't have quality articles - they are simply lead generation sites listing dozens of affiliate links for various credit card offers. Third, they don't have Adsense on them. I'll tell you why that is important in a minute.
Oh btw - they are all "ugly" websites... do you know why? The same reason Google is an "ugly" website - these sites are built for functionality. They don't cater to readers. They want visitors to show up and click a link. They don't want readers hanging around reading and leaving comments or getting sidetracked with all sorts of "pretty" distractions that bloggers like to throw on their sites.
What do you see when you examine these sites? I'll tell you what I see...
I see exactly how Google works.
When someone types in "credit card" in the search engine Google has to decide what the intent of the visitor is for such a generic request. The visitor isn't asking anything. So does Google think the visitor is looking for information on the "history" of credit cards? Or which credit card is the "coolest" looking? Or which CC is the most used? No. Google has decided that the most relevant sites for such a generic term must be sites listing "available credit cards" or a "list of credit cards". They rightly assume that this is what the query is likely looking for. So why doesn't Visa, Amex and Mastercard dominate this serp listing? Because Google knows that anyone looking for such well known brands would simply type in the brand names. Since they didn't Google assumes that the visitor wants options.
If you ask for a history of CC's then you will get a "quality" blog article from about.com followed by a pbs.org blog article. Quality content? You bet. Will they make any money with their quality content. No. And neither quality article ranks for the term credit card.
The point is that all you bloggers need to understand that content has to be relevant to the keyword queried. In this case the most relevant content for the term credit card is a page full of credit card offers and not quality articles about credit cards. The most relevant platform for this info is a static website. You can create a blog and write as many high quality articles as you want about credit cards and I guarantee you will never see page 1 on the serp's for the term. Google is not looking for quality content. They are looking for "relevant" content. Period. A thin on content, heavy on affiliate products website is more relevant for the visitor, for this term, than your brilliant treatise on how evil credit card companies are.
You now know what type of site is needed and what type of content the site should have to rank well for this niche. This isn't my opinion. Google is telling you flat out by its own serp rankings.
So how does the top site get to be the top site. Do they have better content? No. All the top sites have the same content.
The top site has more quality keyword anchored backlinks than the the rest. Period.
All of you that think quality content matters (as opposed to relevant content) think about this. What makes Google rank 4 essentially similar sites differently?
I'll show you.
The top ranked site is creditcardguide.com and this is what it looks like.
Here is a list of some of the backlinks this website has pointing at it. This is compiled with SEO Elite.
I already knew the owner of this site knew their stuff but it only took 2 seconds to confirm it from the backlinks.
Check out the "Anchor text" column in the SEO Elite screenshot. The keyword "credit card" shows up often and is cloaked in various long tails. It's not just the two word term over and over. This site targets "all" the long tails and will rank well for a lot of them. This site gets a lot of search traffic on top of its main keyword.
Note: Most sites will have an abundance of crappy anchor text - the url or the name of the website is the most common anchor you will see. These links come from social networks and friends and other bloggers who don't know anything about keywords. When you see a list of backlinks that have more keywords in the anchor than crap terms you are looking at a site that controls the backlinks either because they own the linking sites (a farm) or they buy links. This site has almost no useless anchors - a sure sign that the owner controls the incoming links.
The red arrows are pointing to three links that tell the whole story. You'll also notice the site has several .edu links. These are all killer links. So did they come from stumblers and diggers? How about do-follow comments? Are they a result of article marketing? Bookmarking? Link exchanging with friends? Now don't get me wrong. Getting links is tough and all these methods do work and bloggers use them to find links for their blogs. But. The pros don't piss around with any of that. You are looking at a niche that makes real money and the people competing spend money to make it. This isn't casual blogging hoping to make a few thousand a month. This is a business.
Let me give you an idea about what kind of money is to be had. If I asked you who one of the biggest advertisers online is what would you say? The financial sector is a huge online advertiser. They spend billions a year doing what banks do - lending money in order to make even more billions in return. Is there anybody in the MMO or blogging niches spending that kind of advertising money? Can you think of any social niche that has that kind of money for advertising aside from the techie sector?
Let's say 500k people search for "credit card" each month and I'm going to be very conservative here. I noticed that the top site has an Alexa rank of 47k which means nothing except that this website does get a number of returning visitors who use the alexa toolbar. These visitors are most likely other marketers checking the rankings rather than real visitors (buyers) so I will lop off half the search numbers. This leaves 250K searches.
Affiliates earn between $25 and $120 for each customer who qualifies for a CC. Some cards pay up to $60 just for a completed application never mind acceptance of the app.
On any given day there could be 8000 people querying Google for the term "Credit Card" and 3/4 (6k) of these searchers will land on the top ranked site. Again being conservative, lets say only 1% click through and fill out a CC offer. That would be roughly 60 sign ups a day. 60 times an average commission of $50 is $3000 per day. $1500 per day if we only use the lowest commission rate of $25. This website realistically earns between $30,000 and $90,000 per month. It could be lower if the search numbers are way off or it could be a lot higher as well. Higher or lower - who spends more time working on their sites - you or the owner of this credit card guide? This owner doesn't post or answer comments. They change some links from time to time and spend the rest of the time lying on a beach buying links. Do you still want to work 7 days a week posting fresh content to keep your readers coming back?
Btw - I mentioned that there were no Adsense ads on the site. This tells you something considering 6000 visitors a day would likely click ads in the 6-8% range. (based on my own experience in similar niches). A 5% CTR would be 300 clicks at let's say - $2 per click. $600 a day - not bad. The fact that they aren't after Adsense just confirms that the commissions from leads is much higher than Adsense produces. (Never bleed visitors away from your main links with lesser links - focus on your money links)
That's a lot of money folks. Would I spend $10k a month buying links if the return was $60k? Yup. And so do real marketers. If you think you can compete in a niche like this without getting a ton of quality links then you are dreaming. If you think you can get those links using all the "social" means at your disposal you are dreaming. If you think writing "quality" content will get you ranked on page 1 for a niche like this - yes you are still dreaming. There is only one way in hell you can compete in this league. You buy links. And you buy better links than the competition. And you buy lots of them and you never stop buying them.
I didn't have to look very far to find the links I was looking for when examining this websites backlinks. The site has a PR6 link using the anchor "credit card". It comes from a non-relevant site but that single link kicks the crap out of a thousand do-follow links you might try to come up with. Here is the page the link is on. http://genamics.com/privacypolicy.htm and the red arrow points to it in the screenshot below.
The linking site itself is little more than a directory - a perfect farm blog used for passing high PR links for a price. The link in question is on a "Privacy Policy" page no less - a PR6 page. There is no reason for the link if you read the text. Can I prove this is a paid link. No. Do I know it is a paid link? I'm pretty sure. There are a few other links spread around the site that don't need to be there as well. Spend some time on Digital Point and you will find all sorts of anonymous sites selling links. This is the type of link you can purchase for a few hundred a month through one of the link brokers you will find on DP. It is a great link. The page it is on is not likely to ever get slapped by G and the competition can't really report it. The link is paid for but it will pass the test because it looks legit.
If you go back and look at a few of the other links I highlighted on the SEO Elite image you will notice the website also has a link from the Wall Street Journal. Very sweet indeed. Is it paid for? Who knows - the WSJ like many media giants is busy trying to make money online too. Do they use a link broker? Maybe. Everyone is looking for a monetization platform that works. The WSJ has a number of blogs that it operates and the link in question is on WSJ's blog "Independent Street". The link is on a fluff post and could be paid for or it could be the result of just ranking number 1 for the term. I have also received a few links over the years from the odd Media powerhouse - the last time was from the LA Times linking to my Asia'h blog. I got the link because I ranked on top of the serp's and the newsblog was looking for what it thought was a fan site. One thing I can tell you - links from the media giants are worth a lot of juice. This one is a PR5 link using the keywords in the anchor from an extremely trusted source. Beat that with your Digg friends.
The last link I want to point out is the http://web.mit.edu/foley/www/ link. This is a anchored keyword link on a PR4 .edu page from M.I.T. The blog is another crappy university .edu blog but the creator knows what he is doing. Can you tell if the link is paid for?
I probably made my point a few paragraphs ago. There is a huge gap between blogging for a few dollars and doing what the pros do. I'm not telling you all to run out and start buying links. I am telling you all to give the content vs links debate a rest. There is no contest - just in your very small pond out on the edge of the Internet universe. Professional marketers know what is needed to make money online.
Links...
And they know how to get them.
And it isn't using stumbleupon.
As for content - let Google show you what is relevant for your niche. Who do they rank on top and what type of content does the site have.
There is a huge gap between what the big players do to make money online and the social methods flogged by your local IM guru. Social traffic is for small players in a very small pond. Blogs can be used to make money online and fortunately for me most of the people using blogs are bloggers and not marketers. While they churn out quality content I churn out keyword relevant content and build links. They write for readers - I write for search engines. They don't make money. I do.
Nuff' said.
Cheers
Griz
Sunday, August 24, 2008
An Interesting Developement with Yahoo
I'm not sure when I first noticed an increase in Yahoo search visitors to this blog - maybe a month ago - but when the guests began arriving I did some investigating and sure enough I found this blog was suddenly showing up in Yahoo's serp listings for a few of my main keywords. This may not mean much to those of you who use Wordpress but for those of us who like using Blogger this has had some pleasant consequences.
Until recently it was necessary to use Meta Tags in order to rank well in Yahoo. You have to do a little coding to add Meta tags to blogger as Google (the owner) doesn't include the option in the default set up. This is because Google doesn't use Meta Tags in it's Serp algorithm. By not providing the option in Blogger they have also, if you read between the lines, told bloggers not to use Meta Tags if you want to rank well in Google. Google doesn't completely ignore Meta tags - they know they are there and if you use them like most people do - stuffing repetitive keywords into them, then Google will just write you off as spam. Get your tags wrong and you can hurt your rankings. Don't use them at all and you are safe. This is the primary reason I have long said not to optimize your sites for Yahoo or MSN et al. Google is the search engine you MUST rank well on if you hope to make money online. Don't screw up your Google rankings in hopes of ranking well on other engines.
I have never added Meta tags to any Blogspot blogs. I rank well on Google - they send me a lot of traffic - until recently about 85% of my visitors have been sent here from the Serp's. I used to get the odd visitor from Yahoo or MSN and a few of the other lesser engines.
Something has definitely changed in regards to the Yahoo Algorithm. As I said I noticed a sudden increase in traffic - not huge but noticeable - last month for a few keywords. Since then more and more keywords keep showing up in the serp listings. I have mentioned that this blog ranks page 1 on Google for more than 50 keywords and it appears that Yahoo is copying Google's rankings for all the same keywords.
A few days ago I finally did a little stat hunting because it was hard not to notice that Yahoo was sending me just about as much traffic as Google (turns out to be 50% as much) and my Adsense income has grown as well - partly because of the added traffic but also because my CTR has increased about 4% over the past month. At first I thought the increase was due to the fact that G had stopped smart pricing me. Turns out that smart pricing is only part of the story. This blogspot blog has had the most increase in traffic but I have noticed an increase across most of my deep linked blogger blogs from Yahoo. I still have a lot of other blogspot blogs that haven't seen much increase at all. Have any of you noticed more traffic coming from Yahoo on your Blogger blogs?
Considering I used to get maybe 50 visitors a month from Yahoo the stats below give you a good idea of how much new traffic is showing up. This is from a couple of days ago - Thursday's stats.
Click Image to enlarge.
That's a lot of new daily visitors to this site and I started checking the keywords that were bringing in the traffic. Turns out I was sitting in number 1 spot on Yahoo for a couple of the best terms - "How to Make Money Online" 1st out of a measly 1 Billion 7 hundred and 40 million pages... lol.
I even slipped into 8th spot for the big kahuna "Make Money Online".
The best part about all this is that while they are suddenly ranking me for my main keywords they are also ranking me for all sorts of long tails proving that they are still a crappy search engine and making me money in the process. They are ranking me for all sorts of irrelevant terms that practically guarantees an increase in my CTR. People are coming here looking for "how to make professional estimates" and not finding what they want - exactly the kind of visitors you want on an Adsense site. Most just leave but it appears 4% more of these folks are clicking out using the Adsense ads than my Google traffic is.
The end result is that this blog is now making a very decent buck. I'm not rubbing it in, just reminding a lot of you that Adsense is still the easiest way to make money online. And SEO is all that is needed. In a nutshell this blog makes money because of 2 things; the keywords I have used to optimize my pages and the backlinks that I have which use those keywords in the anchor text. That is all this comes down to folks. I'm not saying only use Adsense - always seek out multiple income streams - but remember that whatever monetization method you use depends on driving not just traffic but the right kind of traffic - search traffic. Search traffic boils down to just one thing - backlinks.
Get the best links and you win.
I'm curious - have any of you Blogger bloggers seen a surge in Yahoo traffic over the past month?
In case I haven't mentioned this lately - quit chasing social traffic folks - the money is in the search engines.
Cheers,
Griz
One more thing... Vic has a video up today regarding his Private Academy Launch. I can't seem to get any voice when trying to play it so if anyone would like to tell me what he is saying please feel free... I'm particularly interested in any mention of the words "Griz" and "Gets a free membership". If all those terms happen to go together in one sentence then please let me know...
Until recently it was necessary to use Meta Tags in order to rank well in Yahoo. You have to do a little coding to add Meta tags to blogger as Google (the owner) doesn't include the option in the default set up. This is because Google doesn't use Meta Tags in it's Serp algorithm. By not providing the option in Blogger they have also, if you read between the lines, told bloggers not to use Meta Tags if you want to rank well in Google. Google doesn't completely ignore Meta tags - they know they are there and if you use them like most people do - stuffing repetitive keywords into them, then Google will just write you off as spam. Get your tags wrong and you can hurt your rankings. Don't use them at all and you are safe. This is the primary reason I have long said not to optimize your sites for Yahoo or MSN et al. Google is the search engine you MUST rank well on if you hope to make money online. Don't screw up your Google rankings in hopes of ranking well on other engines.
I have never added Meta tags to any Blogspot blogs. I rank well on Google - they send me a lot of traffic - until recently about 85% of my visitors have been sent here from the Serp's. I used to get the odd visitor from Yahoo or MSN and a few of the other lesser engines.
Something has definitely changed in regards to the Yahoo Algorithm. As I said I noticed a sudden increase in traffic - not huge but noticeable - last month for a few keywords. Since then more and more keywords keep showing up in the serp listings. I have mentioned that this blog ranks page 1 on Google for more than 50 keywords and it appears that Yahoo is copying Google's rankings for all the same keywords.
A few days ago I finally did a little stat hunting because it was hard not to notice that Yahoo was sending me just about as much traffic as Google (turns out to be 50% as much) and my Adsense income has grown as well - partly because of the added traffic but also because my CTR has increased about 4% over the past month. At first I thought the increase was due to the fact that G had stopped smart pricing me. Turns out that smart pricing is only part of the story. This blogspot blog has had the most increase in traffic but I have noticed an increase across most of my deep linked blogger blogs from Yahoo. I still have a lot of other blogspot blogs that haven't seen much increase at all. Have any of you noticed more traffic coming from Yahoo on your Blogger blogs?
Considering I used to get maybe 50 visitors a month from Yahoo the stats below give you a good idea of how much new traffic is showing up. This is from a couple of days ago - Thursday's stats.
Click Image to enlarge.
That's a lot of new daily visitors to this site and I started checking the keywords that were bringing in the traffic. Turns out I was sitting in number 1 spot on Yahoo for a couple of the best terms - "How to Make Money Online" 1st out of a measly 1 Billion 7 hundred and 40 million pages... lol.
I even slipped into 8th spot for the big kahuna "Make Money Online".
The best part about all this is that while they are suddenly ranking me for my main keywords they are also ranking me for all sorts of long tails proving that they are still a crappy search engine and making me money in the process. They are ranking me for all sorts of irrelevant terms that practically guarantees an increase in my CTR. People are coming here looking for "how to make professional estimates" and not finding what they want - exactly the kind of visitors you want on an Adsense site. Most just leave but it appears 4% more of these folks are clicking out using the Adsense ads than my Google traffic is.
The end result is that this blog is now making a very decent buck. I'm not rubbing it in, just reminding a lot of you that Adsense is still the easiest way to make money online. And SEO is all that is needed. In a nutshell this blog makes money because of 2 things; the keywords I have used to optimize my pages and the backlinks that I have which use those keywords in the anchor text. That is all this comes down to folks. I'm not saying only use Adsense - always seek out multiple income streams - but remember that whatever monetization method you use depends on driving not just traffic but the right kind of traffic - search traffic. Search traffic boils down to just one thing - backlinks.
Get the best links and you win.
I'm curious - have any of you Blogger bloggers seen a surge in Yahoo traffic over the past month?
In case I haven't mentioned this lately - quit chasing social traffic folks - the money is in the search engines.
Cheers,
Griz
One more thing... Vic has a video up today regarding his Private Academy Launch. I can't seem to get any voice when trying to play it so if anyone would like to tell me what he is saying please feel free... I'm particularly interested in any mention of the words "Griz" and "Gets a free membership". If all those terms happen to go together in one sentence then please let me know...
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
A Word of Clarification
I need to clarify a few things from my last post. Unfortunately I was rushed and kind of threw it out there without taking the time to cover all the bases. One of my astute readers quickly brought up the John Chow Google Bomb episode of last year that saw Chow lose his serp rankings because he tried to manipulate the Make Money Online rankings by having thousands of people link to him in return for a link from him.
Here is the comment from AngryCat (Jez)
Jez,
First of all everyone please check out the posts I have linked back to in my "What my readers think " section and see if anything strikes you as illegitimate. All the people I have linked to have "real" posts about subjects related to my niche and I have linked back because I feel the posts are useful to my readers. This is what linking is supposed to be used for.
I am trying to get everyone to start helping each other in a way that will do the most good. I don't want someone with a shoe blog to link to me hoping for a link back. But... if someone with a Shoe blog does link to me and the post is related to my niche and useful for my readers then I will gladly link back to it.
I have hundreds of links pointing to me from my reader's sites. All legit posts and they were kind enough to link to me. None of their posts are "Review" posts. Just regular posts on some aspect of making money online. All of you probably have links from other sites of the same nature related to your niches.
It has bothered me that I have not been able to do much in return for all the kindness I have received. Therefor I decided to include snippets of my readers posts on my blog with a link back for the rest. I have only done so with legit posts. I am not able to do this with those who have given me a blogroll link as they have no relevant content for which my readers would be interested in - ie. there is no snippet to use.
I really should have thought this out before slapping up the post.
My intent is quite simple.
1) Get people who are linking to other sites to start using keywords that will help the site they are linking to. This assumes that they are already going to link to another site in their post. This isn't a request for people to link to sites they wouldn't normally.
2) I should not have used the term "review". I hate reviews! I mean normal posts that people write for their readers. If you write a post about something and link to a relevant site then use the right keyword in the link.
3) Sites that receive links from others can decide how relevant that post is in relation to their readership and if they so choose they can link back in a snippet like I am doing on my blog. In my link back to them I have chosen to use keywords that will benefit them more than just using their name.
None of this is artificial. None of this is gaming Google. If Matt Cutts was to ask me to defend my links I would have no problem.
My mistake was to infer that everyone should start writing reviews of each others sites and send links. No reviews - just your normal everyday posts but when you link out use proper keywords and wouldn't it be nice to know that the other site is likely to send a link back if your post is relevant and useful. Last time I checked G likes useful and relevant links.
This is a legitimate method that we can use to help each other out. I should mention that unlike John Chow - I am not asking for people to link to me just for a link back. I am also not specifying a keyword - just asking them to use a relevant one. I have enough "Griz" links already...
In fact I am not looking for links at all apart from what I normally receive - I am trying to get everyone to start linking to each other instead. I would like to see all the other quality sites I regularly read and like obtain the credit they IMO deserve. The only reason most of you are having trouble in the serp's is because you aren't giving and getting the right links. You all give and get links but few have any useful keywords.
Is Google going to start penalizing us because we start using useful keywords in our links instead of just using people's names?
Jez, you are correct that I am masterminding this. I don't want to and wish I wasn't but for a year now I have tried to get across the importance of links - keyword relevant links and have learned that without a push most people don't act. I was hoping that people would take my lead and incorporate it into their own blogs.
I was hoping that I would see others doing the same thing on their blogs without having to ask them. This hasn't happened. So I'm asking.
I can only be so subtle
... but if I was a PR0 blog and needed a boost wouldn't it be nice if a guy like Griz would send me a link. (I get 10 emails a day asking) Hey wait a sec - he does link out to sites. Oh I see... he sends links to sites that have quality related content and look at that - they happened to link to him in the post. Well I wonder if I wrote a quality post on a relevant topic and linked to him maybe he would give me a link back as well...
... oh and look at this, Fiar has a humor blog related to mine and well he sends links back to quality posts as well... and Frank does too, and Elliot, and Terry, and Lissie, and holy shit everybody does this. Maybe I should get off my butt and write some relevant quality content and let these folks know I exist by linking to them and maybe even helping them out with a good keyword link in the process...
I hope that gets my message across a little better. If you send me a link from a crappy post - I won't link back. If your blog is in a bad neighborhood I won't link back. If you have a spam site I won't link back. If you write something that I feel my readers would find value in or just simply enjoy then I will certainly link back.
I have mentioned a number of authority bloggers that I would like to see join in. Most of them have sites like mine although many in different niches and if I was just starting out I would certainly write posts about them for my own readers benefit. Knowing that they will give me some luv back for my effort is a win win for everyone but I wouldn't write a post about MMO and then link to Fiar's humor blog and expect a link back. As always - be legit. Unless you can create a relevant post don't expect these folks to respond.
As for creating a list if I do then I will post it on the forum where it will remain private. I would rather not have too at all. I would like to start surfing all my usual haunts and see little snippets pop up on their own. If I go to OpTempo and I see a snippet from one of Frank's readers then I will know he's on board. This applies to everyone. There are several hundred of us - start your own reader appreciation section and call it what you want. (We do not want hundreds of sites with a duplicate section called "Reader Reviews" - find a name for it that is different)
If you need links then yes - start writing posts with links to the blogs that have some authority. This means most of you. There are quite a few authority sites in our little group - check my sidebar and notice the rest of the people I have mentioned in these last two posts. We cover quite a few niches.
I am not trying to manipulate G - I am trying to get everyone to take advantage of things they already do but get them to do it right or should I say effectively. Quality posts and links are fine with G - just get in the habit of reciprocating and use proper keywords!!
I could go on and on but will stop for now. I hope everyone has a better understanding of what I am trying to get you all to do. There are a lot of us swimming in this end of the pool and we have the ability to help each other out - so let us do just that. You can spend a lot of time chasing down crappy links or you can be smart and concentrate your efforts on getting good links. Up to you but I have just shown you all how you can do this legitimately.
Jez thanks for bringing this up so that we can do this right.
Cheers,
Griz
Here is the comment from AngryCat (Jez)
Hi Griz,
Not trying to get into an argument here, spoil your plans or chew up your comments page... but the crux of your scheme is this:
"if you write a post about "Making Money Online Selling Shoes" and link to me with a MMO keyword (any main or longtail will do) then I can send a legitimate keyword anchored link back to you"
G does not only stamp on paid links, but any artificial linking scheme aimed at rigging the SERP.
1) This is artificial... these sites would not link together without you masterminding the scheme.
2) You are going for the SERP, hence relevant content / anchored links.
No matter how you dress it up, thats what your doing... and that being the case... IMO... you would be better off using a mailing list than a very public blog post.
Best regards, Jez
Jez,
First of all everyone please check out the posts I have linked back to in my "What my readers think " section and see if anything strikes you as illegitimate. All the people I have linked to have "real" posts about subjects related to my niche and I have linked back because I feel the posts are useful to my readers. This is what linking is supposed to be used for.
I am trying to get everyone to start helping each other in a way that will do the most good. I don't want someone with a shoe blog to link to me hoping for a link back. But... if someone with a Shoe blog does link to me and the post is related to my niche and useful for my readers then I will gladly link back to it.
I have hundreds of links pointing to me from my reader's sites. All legit posts and they were kind enough to link to me. None of their posts are "Review" posts. Just regular posts on some aspect of making money online. All of you probably have links from other sites of the same nature related to your niches.
It has bothered me that I have not been able to do much in return for all the kindness I have received. Therefor I decided to include snippets of my readers posts on my blog with a link back for the rest. I have only done so with legit posts. I am not able to do this with those who have given me a blogroll link as they have no relevant content for which my readers would be interested in - ie. there is no snippet to use.
I really should have thought this out before slapping up the post.
My intent is quite simple.
1) Get people who are linking to other sites to start using keywords that will help the site they are linking to. This assumes that they are already going to link to another site in their post. This isn't a request for people to link to sites they wouldn't normally.
2) I should not have used the term "review". I hate reviews! I mean normal posts that people write for their readers. If you write a post about something and link to a relevant site then use the right keyword in the link.
3) Sites that receive links from others can decide how relevant that post is in relation to their readership and if they so choose they can link back in a snippet like I am doing on my blog. In my link back to them I have chosen to use keywords that will benefit them more than just using their name.
None of this is artificial. None of this is gaming Google. If Matt Cutts was to ask me to defend my links I would have no problem.
My mistake was to infer that everyone should start writing reviews of each others sites and send links. No reviews - just your normal everyday posts but when you link out use proper keywords and wouldn't it be nice to know that the other site is likely to send a link back if your post is relevant and useful. Last time I checked G likes useful and relevant links.
This is a legitimate method that we can use to help each other out. I should mention that unlike John Chow - I am not asking for people to link to me just for a link back. I am also not specifying a keyword - just asking them to use a relevant one. I have enough "Griz" links already...
In fact I am not looking for links at all apart from what I normally receive - I am trying to get everyone to start linking to each other instead. I would like to see all the other quality sites I regularly read and like obtain the credit they IMO deserve. The only reason most of you are having trouble in the serp's is because you aren't giving and getting the right links. You all give and get links but few have any useful keywords.
Is Google going to start penalizing us because we start using useful keywords in our links instead of just using people's names?
Jez, you are correct that I am masterminding this. I don't want to and wish I wasn't but for a year now I have tried to get across the importance of links - keyword relevant links and have learned that without a push most people don't act. I was hoping that people would take my lead and incorporate it into their own blogs.
I was hoping that I would see others doing the same thing on their blogs without having to ask them. This hasn't happened. So I'm asking.
I can only be so subtle
... but if I was a PR0 blog and needed a boost wouldn't it be nice if a guy like Griz would send me a link. (I get 10 emails a day asking) Hey wait a sec - he does link out to sites. Oh I see... he sends links to sites that have quality related content and look at that - they happened to link to him in the post. Well I wonder if I wrote a quality post on a relevant topic and linked to him maybe he would give me a link back as well...
... oh and look at this, Fiar has a humor blog related to mine and well he sends links back to quality posts as well... and Frank does too, and Elliot, and Terry, and Lissie, and holy shit everybody does this. Maybe I should get off my butt and write some relevant quality content and let these folks know I exist by linking to them and maybe even helping them out with a good keyword link in the process...
I hope that gets my message across a little better. If you send me a link from a crappy post - I won't link back. If your blog is in a bad neighborhood I won't link back. If you have a spam site I won't link back. If you write something that I feel my readers would find value in or just simply enjoy then I will certainly link back.
I have mentioned a number of authority bloggers that I would like to see join in. Most of them have sites like mine although many in different niches and if I was just starting out I would certainly write posts about them for my own readers benefit. Knowing that they will give me some luv back for my effort is a win win for everyone but I wouldn't write a post about MMO and then link to Fiar's humor blog and expect a link back. As always - be legit. Unless you can create a relevant post don't expect these folks to respond.
As for creating a list if I do then I will post it on the forum where it will remain private. I would rather not have too at all. I would like to start surfing all my usual haunts and see little snippets pop up on their own. If I go to OpTempo and I see a snippet from one of Frank's readers then I will know he's on board. This applies to everyone. There are several hundred of us - start your own reader appreciation section and call it what you want. (We do not want hundreds of sites with a duplicate section called "Reader Reviews" - find a name for it that is different)
If you need links then yes - start writing posts with links to the blogs that have some authority. This means most of you. There are quite a few authority sites in our little group - check my sidebar and notice the rest of the people I have mentioned in these last two posts. We cover quite a few niches.
I am not trying to manipulate G - I am trying to get everyone to take advantage of things they already do but get them to do it right or should I say effectively. Quality posts and links are fine with G - just get in the habit of reciprocating and use proper keywords!!
I could go on and on but will stop for now. I hope everyone has a better understanding of what I am trying to get you all to do. There are a lot of us swimming in this end of the pool and we have the ability to help each other out - so let us do just that. You can spend a lot of time chasing down crappy links or you can be smart and concentrate your efforts on getting good links. Up to you but I have just shown you all how you can do this legitimately.
Jez thanks for bringing this up so that we can do this right.
Cheers,
Griz
Saturday, June 21, 2008
What My Readers Think
The following links contain articles written by my readers and friends who have been kind enough to write reviews of this blog - How to Make Money Online for Beginners.
What goes around comes around and I want to send back some link luv to those who have supported me and this blog.
I don't always catch all the sites linking in to me so please drop me a comment or email if I haven't added your blog to the list.
It is my intention to raise the PR of this page so that you gain some benefit but this may take a little while. Those of you who write a review using my keywords in the link and are on topic with this blog will be posted on the home page first before being transferred here as new reviews are posted. I will use your keyword in my links when obvious but if you prefer a different keyword please let me know.
Again thanks for all the support and I wish everyone success online.
Norman Sheppard discusses website design and SEO in this post from his Web Design Guide.
Web Design to Make Money Online
More ...
Jackie writes the following heads up for her Internet Marketing Strategies for Moms blog.
Are you Adding Adsense to your Blog Too Soon?
Justin Briggs writes about SEO techniques in his SEO Zombie blog. His latest post discusses some of the things you can do to help your ranking in the SERP's.
How to Rank Well in Google
As I mentioned in my last post, Rand Fishkin outed the #1 ranked site for �SEO Company�. The post did not claim that the site used black hat practices, but it does use fairly obvious link building methods. Their links screamed link anchor text optimization, which is a solid sign that they are manipulating their anchor text. This is something we all do, but Google does not like. Our job as SEOs is to make our links as natural as possible so that competitors cannot publicly out you. So let�s dig in deep here and look at what factors are allowing this site to rank #1 for �SEO Company�. Not only has it achieved a #1 ranking for this term, but it has also received site links. Site links are read as a type of �authority� by searchers because it makes the listing look more important. So how did this site rank number one in Google?
More ...
Here is a well written primer from David's Make Money Online blog. If you are thinking of selling eBooks this is a good place to start.
Affiliate Marketing of Digital Products
Several readers have taken advantage of my Niche Support program on my other blog and even incorporated the idea into their own sites. If you are looking for backlinks for your niche sites then check out Larry's Business Advertising site.
Advertising Business - Online Training
This post comes from the Underdog Blog.
Give it Away Now
This post comes from Simonne's EzMoneyOn.net
Make Money Online with Pay Per Click
This post comes from Martin's make money blogging site called gHacks.net
Blogging Tips
This post comes from Lissie at her how to make money online hubpage.
Making Money Online
This post comes from Terry over at his make money blog - Make Money Blog dot com.
How to Make Money Online for Beginners
Are you looking for Free Joomla Templates
Free Joomla Templates and Themes
This post comes from Pat Doyle's Internet Business Blog and expands upon one of my favorite topics - Adsense.
Is My Adsense Being Smart priced
This post comes from Simon over at his resources for web developers blog called Pingable.
How to Earn Money Online
I have talked at length about not following the advice or lead of the "Gurus". Here is a case in point; Stephen Cronin from his web development blog, rightly questions Seth Godin and the advice Seth gives.
Seth Godin May be Costing You Money
This post comes from Fiar over at his political humor blog - Radioactive Liberty.
To Make Money Online You Need to Know...
This post comes from Jake Dylan who pens a make money online blog called Copymastermind.
Why You Need to Network
This post comes from Bruce over at DayJobNuker who pens a Work at Home Jobs blog and discusses several of his most trusted resources for making money online.
The Most Trusted Make Money Online Resources
One of the most important aspects of making money online is SEO. This involves many things but optimizing Keywords and Backlinking are central to any success you might have. Carla from Wordplay relates her experience with SEO and the importance of keywords below.
Search Engine Optimization 101
This post comes from Bigcat at Traffic Searcher who pens a Free Game Download blog and discusses ways to make money in the casual gaming market as well as how to set up your own money making games site.
Free Game Downloads
This post comes from Justin at SEO Zombie who pens a SEO blog and was kind enough to help me launch my new blog called Make Money Online with Grizzly. This exemplifies why friendships are so important when building your online business.
Make Money Online with Griz
This post comes from an old friend BloggerNoob who pens a make money online blog called Bloggernoob.com and he discusses the importance associated with backlinks.
Know the Value of Links
This post comes from madWAHM who pens the blog MadWAHM.com and she discusses the "Ugly" blog techniques that are known to work for many well known sites in spite of all the hype surrounding flashy looking websites
Ugly Blogs and Websites Make Money
This post comes from Markk who pens the blog The Next Post and discusses the fascination people have with the A-List bloggers.
Do You Follow The Herd?
Here is a short post from a new friend - Zania.
The Best Make Money Online Blogs
This post comes from April and she discusses a topic most of you are familiar with - information overload and who you should be reading rather than wasting time with sites that don't teach you what you need to know.
How to Make Money Fast
Here is a post I liked that probably sums up how a lot of you feel about the "Make Money Online" Niche. I don't know the author (yet) but his name is Beau Hooks and his blog is called tzuvelli and here is the post that got my attention...
The Truth About Making Money Online
What goes around comes around and I want to send back some link luv to those who have supported me and this blog.
I don't always catch all the sites linking in to me so please drop me a comment or email if I haven't added your blog to the list.
It is my intention to raise the PR of this page so that you gain some benefit but this may take a little while. Those of you who write a review using my keywords in the link and are on topic with this blog will be posted on the home page first before being transferred here as new reviews are posted. I will use your keyword in my links when obvious but if you prefer a different keyword please let me know.
Again thanks for all the support and I wish everyone success online.
Norman Sheppard discusses website design and SEO in this post from his Web Design Guide.
Web Design to Make Money Online
I know from experience that designing a site that looks totally awesome but does not engage the principles of search engine optimization will be of no value to you or your client. Why do people want websites anyways? People to not venture onto the World Wide Web in order to remain obscure and anonymous. I have made many websites under the direction of company officials, even marketing �specialists� who are concerned only with wowing their superiors. They want Flash, swooping, flaming logos, dancing menus and wild color schemes. These designs do indeed wow the client and I get paid. Two weeks later I get �the call.� Hey Norm, why can�t I find my website on Google. It looks great but what�s the point if no one is going to see it.
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Jackie writes the following heads up for her Internet Marketing Strategies for Moms blog.
Are you Adding Adsense to your Blog Too Soon?
Here�s one thing I noticed about people who don�t know much about making money online and especially with adsense. The first question they ask, before the first post is published or the first person stops by is �can I put adsense on my blog now�.
I think this question is frequently asked out of fear. Fear of �missing� a click you might get from one random visitor who accidentally finds your blog.
More ...
Justin Briggs writes about SEO techniques in his SEO Zombie blog. His latest post discusses some of the things you can do to help your ranking in the SERP's.
How to Rank Well in Google
As I mentioned in my last post, Rand Fishkin outed the #1 ranked site for �SEO Company�. The post did not claim that the site used black hat practices, but it does use fairly obvious link building methods. Their links screamed link anchor text optimization, which is a solid sign that they are manipulating their anchor text. This is something we all do, but Google does not like. Our job as SEOs is to make our links as natural as possible so that competitors cannot publicly out you. So let�s dig in deep here and look at what factors are allowing this site to rank #1 for �SEO Company�. Not only has it achieved a #1 ranking for this term, but it has also received site links. Site links are read as a type of �authority� by searchers because it makes the listing look more important. So how did this site rank number one in Google?
More ...
Here is a well written primer from David's Make Money Online blog. If you are thinking of selling eBooks this is a good place to start.
Affiliate Marketing of Digital Products
While it is true that there are a lot of marketers who make money - and big money I might add, through affiliate marketing, most of them are not doing it through ebooks. However, as an entrance into affiliate marketing, it may be a good place for you to start. Oh, who am I kidding? The urge to try the Make Money Online �niche� is so strong, it is almost intoxicating to some. After all, you see all these guys cruising around in their Ferraris on all of these pages promising you that you can do the same if you just buy their $197, $147, only $97, but hurry because this offer ends (fake calendar and clock ticking down to indicate urgency).
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Several readers have taken advantage of my Niche Support program on my other blog and even incorporated the idea into their own sites. If you are looking for backlinks for your niche sites then check out Larry's Business Advertising site.
Advertising Business - Online Training
The easiest way to get links for technically disadvantaged and computer illiterate is Grizzly�s MMO blog - Niche Support. After reading Grizzly's blogs I wanted to get involved. My blogs weren�t ready yet but I thought it was a good idea so I E-mailed everybody on the Niche Support page and offered to put anchored links on my sites. I got quite a few takers and gave them links. What I got out of it was some good contacts and tips and I think some gave me links although I didn�t ask for them I appreciate it. My blogs were just started and weren�t really ready yet.
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This post comes from the Underdog Blog.
Give it Away Now
I know we all want the money; most of us want to be filthy rich. And, of course, the economic crisis is in the forefront of everyone�s minds lately. We are all worried about money. Here�s something to put it in perspective though; I�ve seen various different versions of the stats (some higher, some lower), but they all go something like this:
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This post comes from Simonne's EzMoneyOn.net
Make Money Online with Pay Per Click
One of the more or less shared dreams in the internet marketing world is to make fast money. Since we�ve been starting this blog, earlier this year, I�ve joined a lot of forums about the ways to make money on the internet. After a couple of months I understood why there are so many people who never manage to make any money online, not to mention making it fast.
This article is not going to teach you anything, it�s not a tutorial for online money making tools, it is just my need to share a few thoughts with you, thoughts about this strange industry where many people don�t think about themselves of doing something, or running a business, but rather they imagine that they make money olnine.
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This post comes from Martin's make money blogging site called gHacks.net
Blogging Tips
There are three types of bloggers. Those that do it for fun, those that want to become rich and those that do it because they want to market themselves. The first group can do whatever they want and will still be happy with it. The other two groups need knowledge about blogging if they want to become successful.More...
Someone who wants to earn money from blogging needs traffic more than anything else. It is not hard to put Google Adsense on a blog and earn money with it. The ad might not be optimized but it will still earn money if the blog receives traffic. Without traffic, there will be no money no matter how optimized or clever the ad units are.
This post comes from Lissie at her how to make money online hubpage.
Making Money Online
There are a few things I wish I had known when I started trying to make money online. Its taken me almost a year since I decided to seriously make money on-line. I still am not making a full-time income at this game: and I feel as if I am finally starting to understand which way to go. However I think I have finally got to the point that I know what I need to do to create my ownMore ...
This post comes from Terry over at his make money blog - Make Money Blog dot com.
How to Make Money Online for Beginners
How to make money online for beginners is a question that a lot of people completely new to the whole aspect of Internet Marketing type into Google�s search engine and expect to find answers. Here at this Make Money Blog following on from my last post How to Make Money Online Then Blow a Fuse, I�m going to give you some of those answers.
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Are you looking for Free Joomla Templates
Free Joomla Templates and Themes
BlackBear Pro was released today sporting improved styling and collapsing columns for more layout flexibility.
Check the demo here: http://blackbearpro15.joomlabear.com/
You can read more about it here. You can also download it free at this link but you will need to register before the download link will appear. Registration is free and takes only a few seconds - click here to register. Once you have signed up you can download all our templates and post questions to the forum. Enjoy.
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This post comes from Pat Doyle's Internet Business Blog and expands upon one of my favorite topics - Adsense.
Is My Adsense Being Smart priced
Ever since I read that Grizzly had doubled his income by eliminating Smart Pricing from his AdSense, I decided it was well worth my while to see if I had been smart priced too.
In case you don�t know, AdSense�s Smart Pricing is when AdSense reduces the price it pays you per click, based on some not totally understood method which takes into account how well your site�s traffic converts for the advertiser. Some people think it is based on click-through-rate (CTR), but this is not true.
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This post comes from Simon over at his resources for web developers blog called Pingable.
How to Earn Money Online
Chances are that heading made most people move on. Articles about making money online or about How to Earn Money Online are a dime a dozen. People see what A-list bloggers like Shoemoney, John Chow and Problogger have achieved, start up new blogs, start posting about topics with article headings like the heading of this article, and just wait for the money to come in. I know, because, to some degree I was one of these jackasses. I started this blog with the intention to make a bit of money. I wanted 1000�s of visitors, I wanted them to click on my ads and I wanted to make some cash to support my full time job.
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I have talked at length about not following the advice or lead of the "Gurus". Here is a case in point; Stephen Cronin from his web development blog, rightly questions Seth Godin and the advice Seth gives.
Seth Godin May be Costing You Money
This morning I noticed an entry on Sphinn highlighting GreyWolf's Seth Godin Wants to Cheat Advertisers with Fake Clicks post. It discusses Seth Godin's Ads are the new online tip jar post, which suggests that readers should click ads to reward bloggers for their writing. To quote Seth:
"If you like what you�re reading, click an ad to say thanks."
GreyWolf condemns Seth�s advice and rightly points out that anyone following this advice is guilty of click fraud:
"If you click on an ad and your purpose is to make sure the site owner or blogger gets money from the click, and you had no intent to buy or research, that is click fraud."
As you�d expect, given they are Internet Marketing / SEO communities, comments on GreyWolf�s post and on Sphinn strongly condemn Seth�s statement. The majority of commentators agree that this is click fraud. I concur! More...
This post comes from Fiar over at his political humor blog - Radioactive Liberty.
To Make Money Online You Need to Know...
Maki at Dosh Dosh asks readers, �What's the best way to make money online?�
One of the things I like about Dosh Dosh is that it really covers just about every method you could use the internet as a source of income. It�s not just about blogging for money, but includes things like: membership sites, selling your own product, eBay, affiliate sales, and leveraging an existing business. It really is a site about making money online.
Maki went on to ask:
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This post comes from Jake Dylan who pens a make money online blog called Copymastermind.
Why You Need to Network
It�s never easy to get anything in life 100% on your own. The facts are that you need other people to advance whether you�re trying to climb the corporate ladder or Google�s serp. Making connections with others is key to success.
With that said, I�d like to do for my readers what Grizz has proposed to do for his:
I plan to send out links to anyone who has written �an on topic� post about my blog, copymastermind.com. By �on topic� I mean anything related to �making money online�. For example, you could have a �book� blog-as long as your post is about making money selling/writing books or ebooks and you link to me, I will link back to you.
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This post comes from Bruce over at DayJobNuker who pens a Work at Home Jobs blog and discusses several of his most trusted resources for making money online.
The Most Trusted Make Money Online Resources
"If you are looking for ways to make money on the Internet, where do you turn to learn how?
Do you buy an overpriced ebook that some smuck is selling for $49.95? There are tons of them out there and they all promise to �unlock the secret� of how to make money. Please don�t buy those.
Do you read all the how to make money A-List blogs that tell you how they make money online by telling people how much money they make online? Many people waste months of their lives reading these blogs before they figure out they are mostly a waste of time. Save your time!"More ...
One of the most important aspects of making money online is SEO. This involves many things but optimizing Keywords and Backlinking are central to any success you might have. Carla from Wordplay relates her experience with SEO and the importance of keywords below.
Search Engine Optimization 101
"Those who truly seek to understand and implement SEO know it takes study, a time investment and even some experimentation to achieve good results. It also helps if you can follow the advice of someone who has already achieved that success. Actually, that can make all the difference in the world.
When I began this blog, I had no idea what I was doing. I made every mistake in the book, SEO-wise. And I thought I didn�t care whether I got traffic, because I created WordPlay as a showcase for my editorial consulting business. I just wanted a blog that looked somewhat pretty and had interesting content that I could link to my company Web site. But then I made a few tweaks that brought me more traffic. Before long I was hooked on hits." More...
This post comes from Bigcat at Traffic Searcher who pens a Free Game Download blog and discusses ways to make money in the casual gaming market as well as how to set up your own money making games site.
Free Game Downloads
"A quick search of one of my favorite keyword tools tells me that the phrase "free game downloads" gets over 80,000 searches per month. If you could get a good ranking in the search engines for that phrase you would be getting a ton of traffic. Unfortunately, there is a lot of competition for free game downloads so it will we a tough fight to make it to page one. You may want to choose a related long tial keyword for easier pickings."More ...
This post comes from Justin at SEO Zombie who pens a SEO blog and was kind enough to help me launch my new blog called Make Money Online with Grizzly. This exemplifies why friendships are so important when building your online business.
Make Money Online with Griz
"Griz, he�s the guy who ranks on page one for Make Money Online with his blogger/blogspot blog. I�ve been reading Griz�s blog for a while now and he knows his stuff. In addition, he�s a legit internet marketer and a nice guy who likes helping people out. He�s more than proved his worth on his blog, since he ranks for a whole range of Make Money Online terms that hundreds of others would kill to rank for."More ...
This post comes from an old friend BloggerNoob who pens a make money online blog called Bloggernoob.com and he discusses the importance associated with backlinks.
Know the Value of Links
"Google does not condone this, but a lot of web masters buy and sell links. SEO specialists help you buy and sell links. That�s all they do. So, it makes sense to research up on the value of links.
When i first started out, I couldn�t believe how much John Chow was making. I didn�t understand how it was possible. But, I now understand why he makes so much money. It�s because he has a lot of noobie fans. A lot of other MMO bloggers kiss his arse to get some of his crumbs. This whole economy is supported by the ignorance of noobie bloggers."More ...
This post comes from madWAHM who pens the blog MadWAHM.com and she discusses the "Ugly" blog techniques that are known to work for many well known sites in spite of all the hype surrounding flashy looking websites
Ugly Blogs and Websites Make Money
"If you�re spending a lot of time worrying about how flashy, cool and hot your website or blog looks, it may be costing you potential revenue.
Early last year I read �The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites� by Mark Daoust. This startling and provoking read examines the ideas and theories behind why ugly seems to sell.
Now, I�m not talking about �ugly� as in using those huge bolded fonts, in all caps or harsh and clashing colors. I�m talking about ugly in the sense of plain, basic and without frills. Like sites that are extremely clean, simple and highly functional and that don�t focus on design aesthetics, but rather on making their sites unbelievably user-friendly." More...
This post comes from Markk who pens the blog The Next Post and discusses the fascination people have with the A-List bloggers.
Do You Follow The Herd?
"Everyday there'll be thousands of new bloggers coming out of the woodworks and you bet many have one main thing in mind - how to make money online. Many of these bloggers are like regular visitors to the A-list blogs. You would think they have learned a lot from these visits but when you check them out at their own blogs one can conclude that there's a lot to be desired. Pretty dumb! They must be wearing blinkers!
What can you do to be different and set yourself apart? Think differently (out of the box) and be more unique than what the masses are doing." More ...
Here is a short post from a new friend - Zania.
The Best Make Money Online Blogs
"There are thousands of blogs in the Make Money Online niche. Most of them are poor and reading them will not help you learn how to make money at all. Every day, new blogs are 'born', with their writers either saying they 'can tell you the secrets of how to make money online', or that they are 'blogging newbies', who will 'tell you how they are learning to make money' as they go along, but fail miserably." More...
This post comes from April and she discusses a topic most of you are familiar with - information overload and who you should be reading rather than wasting time with sites that don't teach you what you need to know.
How to Make Money Fast
"Lots of people turn to the internet as a way to make money online. However the biggest problem people face is being overwhelmed by information. They read, read and read even more and the end result is total confusion. Months can go by with very little action being taken and when people do get started they seem to think that they�ll make money fast. This just isn�t the case and if you think you�ll be able to give up your day job in a matter of a few weeks you are very much delusional. Unless of course you already have skills in internet marketing and SEO etc." More...
Here is a post I liked that probably sums up how a lot of you feel about the "Make Money Online" Niche. I don't know the author (yet) but his name is Beau Hooks and his blog is called tzuvelli and here is the post that got my attention...
The Truth About Making Money Online
"When I first started researching and learning how to blog I put a lot of time and effort into reading the traditional blogs about making money online. One thing I realized was that none of them really taught me how to make money online. Out of the three hundred blogs that I read, at the time, not one blogger laid out a plan a true strategy for making money online. most of what I learned centered around building readership, RSS, and social media traffic so you can sell ad space. It made sense, at the time. But, selling ad space is not a strategy for making money online, it is a strategy for selling ad space online." more
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Blinkweb - Make Money Online Tutorial - Step 2
In my last post I talked about setting up an affiliate blog targeting a product or service of your choice. I have chosen Brad Callen's soon to be released website creation tool called Blinkweb. If you look at how I set up the blog called Blinkweb by Brad Callen you should be able to see which keywords I have optimized the posts and blog for.
In fact I am optimizing this post for the exact same keywords and I will explain why in a moment.
In step 1 I simply created a quick blog and posted a short article in order to get it live and indexed by Google. To speed up the indexing process I linked this blog to the new blog using the term Blinkweb in the anchor text of the link. Google crawls this blog frequently and follows all my do-follow links. The new blog showed up in the index on the same day. Now while it was in the index it wasn't showing in the serp's for any of the keywords I had optimized it for - most notably the term "Blinkweb". The only term it did show up for was it's URL name. http://callensblinkweb.blogspot.com/. (see image below)
Click to enlarge all images.
This confuses some of you still. You can be indexed and in the sandbox at the same time. The easiest way to understand this is to realize that while Google will acknowledge that it knows you exist - ie. indexing your URL - it won't necessarily index you in the serp's for related keywords - something known as being in Google's sandbox. This means that you can find your blog on Google by searching for your URL but not by using keywords. If you are sandboxed Google will de-list your blog from any of the keyword serp listings while it may or may not list your URL.
When Google has determined that your blog is legitimate and offers relevant content for certain terms it will suddenly release you from the sandbox and your blog will begin to appear in the keyword listings. These are the listings that you would like to rank number 1 for.
My new blog showed up in the keyword serp's on day two. It went from not-indexed for the term "Blinkweb" to number 3 in the serp's. (see below)
Over the next two days it dropped back to 5th and then today it has disappeared from the listings altogether. Does this sound familiar to any of you. I get a lot of comments from readers asking why they show up on the serp's and then suddenly disappear. The answer is that this has become the new normal with the current Google algorithm. I would love to give you an expert answer as to what is happening but I don't know myself - I can only tell you what "seems" to be happening from my own observations.
What seems to be happening is that fresh content plays a larger roll in serp rankings - at least for "busy" keywords - topics that suddenly get a lot of keyword hits. This means that when something new like Blinkwebs comes along there is a sudden fleury of blogs using that keyword. When someone queries the term on Google, it proceeds to build the list. Since there are no old established authority sites for the term everyone gets to play on an even field - at least for a while. In this situation the bot has it easy and simply lists sites based on it's on-page SEO (Is the keyword in the blog's URL? - in the blog's Title? - in the Post Title? - in the post's Text?) This coupled with fresh relevant posts will get your site on top of the index - at least at first. When fresh content slows down and G begins collecting more and more data regarding the keyword other factors begin having an effect on the listings - PR and backlinks come into play. Within a short time Google begins to re-order the list and in time it will settle down to the point that the page 1 listings will remain fairly stable. The back page listings are rarely stable and rankings can bounce around constantly. At least this is how Google has behaved in the past.
At present I have noticed a prolonged shake up in the serp's for old established niches like "Make Money Online" and the page 1 listings for these older niches have been in a state of constant change for several weeks now. This has all transpired at the same time as G introduced the "Personalized Results" serp's which no doubt has some bearing on all this. The end result however, is that it has become normal to get indexed, rank well in the serp's for your keywords, suddenly find yourself de-indexed, then a few days later suddenly appear back in the serp's but usually not ranking as well as you did in the beginning.
I guess I am trying to tell you to not panic if this happens to you. As long as you have a legitimate site then you will re-appear in the serp's but you may go through the disappearing act a few times before settling down. Just be patient and more importantly keep posting and securing backlinks.
Case in point.
This blog took 2nd spot in the serp's for the term "Blinkweb" the day after I posted my last article. It hung around page 1 for the better part of two days and then disappeared back to page 3 or more. Today it is back on page 1 in 4th spot. Now that it is back on page 1 my new blog has left the index. When it returns I hope to get it back on the first page along with this blog and anything else pointing to my site that I can. What I am going to explain now is something that I never see others doing and often wonder why.
Who says you can only have 1 spot on page 1?
I have touched on this in the past - if you are targeting a term then why not increase your traffic by simply ranking as many sites as you can on page 1 - this is especially true for affiliate marketing and when collecting leads. In most of my niches I usually have 3-4 different sites pointing to my money site in the top 10 on the serp's. I have had as many as 8 sites at once on the page and I have several with 6 sites. (Note: - don't do this with Adsense sites)
The reason for doing this is obvious - you will increase your traffic and ultimately your sales.
Since Blinkweb is a new program, page 1 on Google is up for grabs. The most relevant 10 sites will be chosen by relevancy, age, PR and most importantly who has the most relevant keyword anchored backlinks. You can assume the real Blinkweb site owned by the Callen's will probably be one of the top 10 sites but don't assume that they will be number 1. They should eventually as they will get the most anchored links in time but their site is new as well and can be outranked by older authority sites with better links - at least in the beginning.
Now what exactly am I babbling about? I am going to show you why backlinks are the key to everything when it comes to ranking well in the serp's.
Let's think about this logically. In time Google will run out of fresh content for a keyword like "Blinkweb". This is because there is only so much that can be written about it. In fact most of the 400 pages already indexed for the term have pretty much the same content. Every post reads much like mine - this is because the program hasn't been released yet and there has been no new info given about it from the designers. When Google runs out of fresh content it will start to rank the sites based on 1 factor - who are the authority sites? They determine this based on who has the most keyword authority which in turn is determined by who has the most links pointing to them with the keyword used in the link. Those who get links from higher PR sites will have an advantage over those who have low PR links but both will outrank all the other competitors that don't have relevant backlinks.
Knowing that this "Niche" is new also tells me that I don't need a lot of backlinks to rank well and even less if I was to procur high PR backlinks.
So...
I was fortunate to get 4 links to my last post in which 3 of the 4 links used the term "Blinkweb" in the link. One of the links came from a PR4 blog and another link came from a PR5 blog. Apparently 2 high PR links with keyword relevant links is enough for 4th spot at the moment.
The new blog Blinkweb by Brad Callen was fortunate to get 9 Blinkweb links. Several are from high PR blogs and all the links have keyword relevant anchor text. When it re-appears it should rank well. If you clicked the last link above you would have landed on the new blog's Technorati page - currently a no-PR page. It now has a PR4 keyword relevant link pointing at it. If I was fortunate to get a few more high PR links pointing at it then there is a good chance that it might make page 1 of the serp's as well. That makes 3 sites possible.
While we are at it - I mentioned that I have 4-5 high PR sites sending this blog and the new blog backlinks already. What if those blogs were to get a few high PR, keyword relevant backlinks of their own? They could conceivably make page 1 as well - hell that would make 9...
This isn't likely to happen but what will happen is that I will have stronger backlinks all the way down the line which will increase the strength of the keyword authority for the 2 sites that are the ultimate recipients of all this strong link juice - this blog and the new blog. If you get both blogs double indexed then you can easily occupy 4 of the 10 spots on page 1. You will get more than your share of traffic.
This is how I mount a campaign for every niche I target if it is a new topic.
Yes - most of you are not "Fortunate" enough to get 4-5 high PR backlinks. I realize this but want to mention that very few of your competitors are that fortunate either. If you were to create hubpages and lenses and post several articles and send links from some of your existing blogs then you would find that 4-5 low PR links using the proper keyword in the anchor text would get you ranked well compared to most of your competitors who have few links and even less using the keyword.
I noticed a surge of hubpages and lenses created in the last few days for "Blinkweb". I suspect a few of my readers have decided to jump on this niche and good for them. Most are using the hubs and lenses to send links back to their money site which is good but don't forget to build links to those hubs and lenses as well. Don't just get links for your main site - get them for all the sites linking to your main site - spend more time building keyword authority and you won't need as many links to rank well. Your competition will be busy getting hundreds of PR0 non keyword relevant links from do-follow blogs and low link juice bookmarks.
Don't panic if you aren't on page 1 in a week. Be patient and build authority. This isn't short term blogging. If your product or service is a winner it will produce sales for a while albeit usually more when new. If it takes a month to rank on top you will still have a decent run. If you keep building links you will hit page 1 - after an initial burst most of your competition will stop getting links - they either give up or they make page 1 and don't think they need to do any more work.
I have yet to find a product that I couldn't get on page 1 for. Some took longer but in the end every one made page 1 simply because I never stop getting backlinks and backlinks for my backlinks and backlinks for those backlinks as well. My main money site in any given niche may only have a dozen or so quality links but each one of those links has a dozen quality links of its own and so on. I hope you get the picture. If you build a hubpage to send link juice to your money site then build two more to send link juice to the first hubpage. Don't be surprised to one day find all three hubs on page 1 for your keyword.
Ok, a long post to tell you to work smarter and not harder. You don't need thousands of links - you just need a small number of really good links. You can get them by building up several interlinking sites from different venues - hubpages, articles, squidoo, technorati, social sites etc. Any page that links to your money site should be strengthened with keyword relevant links of their own. This pays off by ensuring your main site makes top ranking and more often than not you will rank several of the support sites as well. I do this all the time and have seen the difference in traffic when I get 3-4 sites on page 1. Btw, once you get 1 authority site on page 1 it makes it easy to get other sites on the page as well. Use it to link to new sites.
Keywords
If you read the two blog posts on the new blog you will notice some of the keywords I used. Aside from "Blinkweb" I used the term "Review", "News" and "Video" in the blog description and posts along with "Brad and Matt Callen". Experience has shown me that the quickest way to get traffic is to use "Review", "News" or "Video" in a blog post. When people can't remember the product name they will use names they remember like "Brad Callen". I don't just want to rank well for the term "Blinkweb". I also want to rank well for the term "Blinkweb Review", "Blinkweb News" and "Blinkweb Video". These are terms that will be searched for in addition to the main keyword.
In fact...
The screenshot above is from my statcounter stats and lists the keywords used to find my new blog. Notice what long tails were used?
I normally write really long posts in order to get as many long tails indexed as possible. In a case like Blinkweb I don't have to. It is an affiliate product and as such there will be a limited variety of keywords used when searching for it. A term like making money online may have hundreds of related long tails used in queries but a term like "Blinkweb" is never going to be searched for using more than half a dozen terms. It doesn't require a long post to optimize half a dozen keywords.
At the time my Blinkweb blog was ranked number 1 for "Blinkweb Review", Number 2 for "Blinkweb News" and in the top 3 for "Blinkweb". Not bad for a two day old blog.
The more keywords you rank for the more traffic so don't just target the obvious main keyword.
There you have it. I told you internet marketing is a numbers game. The more traffic you get the more money you make. The best way to increase your traffic is to rank as many sites as you can on page 1 and target all the relevant keywords - not just the main one - with each site. Remember this is possible when dealing with a new product because there are no pre-established authority sites. You can become the authority site if you are fast, SEO properly and most of all build links faster and better than every one else. Yup - it is work but more importantly - it does work.
That's enough for today. I will be adding some pure SEO posts over the next few days which won't teach you a thing. I need a real "Blinkweb" post and a few other pages so just ignore them if you are a regular reader. I will continue this tutorial in a few days after the serp's hopefully settle out a bit.
Till then,
Cheers
Griz
In fact I am optimizing this post for the exact same keywords and I will explain why in a moment.
In step 1 I simply created a quick blog and posted a short article in order to get it live and indexed by Google. To speed up the indexing process I linked this blog to the new blog using the term Blinkweb in the anchor text of the link. Google crawls this blog frequently and follows all my do-follow links. The new blog showed up in the index on the same day. Now while it was in the index it wasn't showing in the serp's for any of the keywords I had optimized it for - most notably the term "Blinkweb". The only term it did show up for was it's URL name. http://callensblinkweb.blogspot.com/. (see image below)
Click to enlarge all images.
This confuses some of you still. You can be indexed and in the sandbox at the same time. The easiest way to understand this is to realize that while Google will acknowledge that it knows you exist - ie. indexing your URL - it won't necessarily index you in the serp's for related keywords - something known as being in Google's sandbox. This means that you can find your blog on Google by searching for your URL but not by using keywords. If you are sandboxed Google will de-list your blog from any of the keyword serp listings while it may or may not list your URL.
When Google has determined that your blog is legitimate and offers relevant content for certain terms it will suddenly release you from the sandbox and your blog will begin to appear in the keyword listings. These are the listings that you would like to rank number 1 for.
My new blog showed up in the keyword serp's on day two. It went from not-indexed for the term "Blinkweb" to number 3 in the serp's. (see below)
Over the next two days it dropped back to 5th and then today it has disappeared from the listings altogether. Does this sound familiar to any of you. I get a lot of comments from readers asking why they show up on the serp's and then suddenly disappear. The answer is that this has become the new normal with the current Google algorithm. I would love to give you an expert answer as to what is happening but I don't know myself - I can only tell you what "seems" to be happening from my own observations.
What seems to be happening is that fresh content plays a larger roll in serp rankings - at least for "busy" keywords - topics that suddenly get a lot of keyword hits. This means that when something new like Blinkwebs comes along there is a sudden fleury of blogs using that keyword. When someone queries the term on Google, it proceeds to build the list. Since there are no old established authority sites for the term everyone gets to play on an even field - at least for a while. In this situation the bot has it easy and simply lists sites based on it's on-page SEO (Is the keyword in the blog's URL? - in the blog's Title? - in the Post Title? - in the post's Text?) This coupled with fresh relevant posts will get your site on top of the index - at least at first. When fresh content slows down and G begins collecting more and more data regarding the keyword other factors begin having an effect on the listings - PR and backlinks come into play. Within a short time Google begins to re-order the list and in time it will settle down to the point that the page 1 listings will remain fairly stable. The back page listings are rarely stable and rankings can bounce around constantly. At least this is how Google has behaved in the past.
At present I have noticed a prolonged shake up in the serp's for old established niches like "Make Money Online" and the page 1 listings for these older niches have been in a state of constant change for several weeks now. This has all transpired at the same time as G introduced the "Personalized Results" serp's which no doubt has some bearing on all this. The end result however, is that it has become normal to get indexed, rank well in the serp's for your keywords, suddenly find yourself de-indexed, then a few days later suddenly appear back in the serp's but usually not ranking as well as you did in the beginning.
I guess I am trying to tell you to not panic if this happens to you. As long as you have a legitimate site then you will re-appear in the serp's but you may go through the disappearing act a few times before settling down. Just be patient and more importantly keep posting and securing backlinks.
Case in point.
This blog took 2nd spot in the serp's for the term "Blinkweb" the day after I posted my last article. It hung around page 1 for the better part of two days and then disappeared back to page 3 or more. Today it is back on page 1 in 4th spot. Now that it is back on page 1 my new blog has left the index. When it returns I hope to get it back on the first page along with this blog and anything else pointing to my site that I can. What I am going to explain now is something that I never see others doing and often wonder why.
Who says you can only have 1 spot on page 1?
I have touched on this in the past - if you are targeting a term then why not increase your traffic by simply ranking as many sites as you can on page 1 - this is especially true for affiliate marketing and when collecting leads. In most of my niches I usually have 3-4 different sites pointing to my money site in the top 10 on the serp's. I have had as many as 8 sites at once on the page and I have several with 6 sites. (Note: - don't do this with Adsense sites)
The reason for doing this is obvious - you will increase your traffic and ultimately your sales.
Since Blinkweb is a new program, page 1 on Google is up for grabs. The most relevant 10 sites will be chosen by relevancy, age, PR and most importantly who has the most relevant keyword anchored backlinks. You can assume the real Blinkweb site owned by the Callen's will probably be one of the top 10 sites but don't assume that they will be number 1. They should eventually as they will get the most anchored links in time but their site is new as well and can be outranked by older authority sites with better links - at least in the beginning.
Now what exactly am I babbling about? I am going to show you why backlinks are the key to everything when it comes to ranking well in the serp's.
Let's think about this logically. In time Google will run out of fresh content for a keyword like "Blinkweb". This is because there is only so much that can be written about it. In fact most of the 400 pages already indexed for the term have pretty much the same content. Every post reads much like mine - this is because the program hasn't been released yet and there has been no new info given about it from the designers. When Google runs out of fresh content it will start to rank the sites based on 1 factor - who are the authority sites? They determine this based on who has the most keyword authority which in turn is determined by who has the most links pointing to them with the keyword used in the link. Those who get links from higher PR sites will have an advantage over those who have low PR links but both will outrank all the other competitors that don't have relevant backlinks.
Knowing that this "Niche" is new also tells me that I don't need a lot of backlinks to rank well and even less if I was to procur high PR backlinks.
So...
I was fortunate to get 4 links to my last post in which 3 of the 4 links used the term "Blinkweb" in the link. One of the links came from a PR4 blog and another link came from a PR5 blog. Apparently 2 high PR links with keyword relevant links is enough for 4th spot at the moment.
The new blog Blinkweb by Brad Callen was fortunate to get 9 Blinkweb links. Several are from high PR blogs and all the links have keyword relevant anchor text. When it re-appears it should rank well. If you clicked the last link above you would have landed on the new blog's Technorati page - currently a no-PR page. It now has a PR4 keyword relevant link pointing at it. If I was fortunate to get a few more high PR links pointing at it then there is a good chance that it might make page 1 of the serp's as well. That makes 3 sites possible.
While we are at it - I mentioned that I have 4-5 high PR sites sending this blog and the new blog backlinks already. What if those blogs were to get a few high PR, keyword relevant backlinks of their own? They could conceivably make page 1 as well - hell that would make 9...
This isn't likely to happen but what will happen is that I will have stronger backlinks all the way down the line which will increase the strength of the keyword authority for the 2 sites that are the ultimate recipients of all this strong link juice - this blog and the new blog. If you get both blogs double indexed then you can easily occupy 4 of the 10 spots on page 1. You will get more than your share of traffic.
This is how I mount a campaign for every niche I target if it is a new topic.
Yes - most of you are not "Fortunate" enough to get 4-5 high PR backlinks. I realize this but want to mention that very few of your competitors are that fortunate either. If you were to create hubpages and lenses and post several articles and send links from some of your existing blogs then you would find that 4-5 low PR links using the proper keyword in the anchor text would get you ranked well compared to most of your competitors who have few links and even less using the keyword.
I noticed a surge of hubpages and lenses created in the last few days for "Blinkweb". I suspect a few of my readers have decided to jump on this niche and good for them. Most are using the hubs and lenses to send links back to their money site which is good but don't forget to build links to those hubs and lenses as well. Don't just get links for your main site - get them for all the sites linking to your main site - spend more time building keyword authority and you won't need as many links to rank well. Your competition will be busy getting hundreds of PR0 non keyword relevant links from do-follow blogs and low link juice bookmarks.
Don't panic if you aren't on page 1 in a week. Be patient and build authority. This isn't short term blogging. If your product or service is a winner it will produce sales for a while albeit usually more when new. If it takes a month to rank on top you will still have a decent run. If you keep building links you will hit page 1 - after an initial burst most of your competition will stop getting links - they either give up or they make page 1 and don't think they need to do any more work.
I have yet to find a product that I couldn't get on page 1 for. Some took longer but in the end every one made page 1 simply because I never stop getting backlinks and backlinks for my backlinks and backlinks for those backlinks as well. My main money site in any given niche may only have a dozen or so quality links but each one of those links has a dozen quality links of its own and so on. I hope you get the picture. If you build a hubpage to send link juice to your money site then build two more to send link juice to the first hubpage. Don't be surprised to one day find all three hubs on page 1 for your keyword.
Ok, a long post to tell you to work smarter and not harder. You don't need thousands of links - you just need a small number of really good links. You can get them by building up several interlinking sites from different venues - hubpages, articles, squidoo, technorati, social sites etc. Any page that links to your money site should be strengthened with keyword relevant links of their own. This pays off by ensuring your main site makes top ranking and more often than not you will rank several of the support sites as well. I do this all the time and have seen the difference in traffic when I get 3-4 sites on page 1. Btw, once you get 1 authority site on page 1 it makes it easy to get other sites on the page as well. Use it to link to new sites.
Keywords
If you read the two blog posts on the new blog you will notice some of the keywords I used. Aside from "Blinkweb" I used the term "Review", "News" and "Video" in the blog description and posts along with "Brad and Matt Callen". Experience has shown me that the quickest way to get traffic is to use "Review", "News" or "Video" in a blog post. When people can't remember the product name they will use names they remember like "Brad Callen". I don't just want to rank well for the term "Blinkweb". I also want to rank well for the term "Blinkweb Review", "Blinkweb News" and "Blinkweb Video". These are terms that will be searched for in addition to the main keyword.
In fact...
The screenshot above is from my statcounter stats and lists the keywords used to find my new blog. Notice what long tails were used?
I normally write really long posts in order to get as many long tails indexed as possible. In a case like Blinkweb I don't have to. It is an affiliate product and as such there will be a limited variety of keywords used when searching for it. A term like making money online may have hundreds of related long tails used in queries but a term like "Blinkweb" is never going to be searched for using more than half a dozen terms. It doesn't require a long post to optimize half a dozen keywords.
At the time my Blinkweb blog was ranked number 1 for "Blinkweb Review", Number 2 for "Blinkweb News" and in the top 3 for "Blinkweb". Not bad for a two day old blog.
The more keywords you rank for the more traffic so don't just target the obvious main keyword.
There you have it. I told you internet marketing is a numbers game. The more traffic you get the more money you make. The best way to increase your traffic is to rank as many sites as you can on page 1 and target all the relevant keywords - not just the main one - with each site. Remember this is possible when dealing with a new product because there are no pre-established authority sites. You can become the authority site if you are fast, SEO properly and most of all build links faster and better than every one else. Yup - it is work but more importantly - it does work.
That's enough for today. I will be adding some pure SEO posts over the next few days which won't teach you a thing. I need a real "Blinkweb" post and a few other pages so just ignore them if you are a regular reader. I will continue this tutorial in a few days after the serp's hopefully settle out a bit.
Till then,
Cheers
Griz
Saturday, April 5, 2008
What are Hubpages?
For the past month I have heard people mention HubPages fairly frequently and thought it was about time I acquainted myself with them. My understanding is that these pages could be used as another means of obtaining coveted backlinks and better yet - for free.
As some of you know I am an avid Golfer and one day I noticed a link pointing to my site from a blog called "Lost Ball in High Weeds" which immediately got my attention as I regularly lose golf balls in high weeds. Now I have no idea if the author of the site is a golfer but his name is "Splork" which is exactly the sound my golf balls make when they hit the water hazards. Needless to say - he had me hooked if for no other reason than the golf innuendos. As it turns out he is a very entertaining writer and I enjoy his blog even though, as it further turns out, he doesn't have much to say about golf. A shame but he is forgiven.
The other day Splork was ranting on about hubpages and I thought what better way to avoid doing any work myself than to ask him to write a post about hubpages for this site. I tried to convince him that this was a good idea as it would give him a chance to win over my readers with his charm and even get a link from me but it wasn't until I threatened to sick Vic on him that he relented and agreed.
With out further ado, my first guest poster and possibly a fellow golfer...
HubPages by Splork
I dig Hubpages. I also dig chicks, snowboarding and chocolate chip cookies, but Griz didn't ask me to write a post about those things. He asked me to write about Hubpages. See, recently I have discovered the joys of Hubpages. These little one page wonders are doing very well for me in ranking for targeted keywords in Google. I am also a fan of Squidoo lens. Griz didn't ask me to write about those either, but I thought I'd mention them to give you a frame of reference of what Hubpages are. Squidoo and Hubpages are very similar. Both services allow you to create one-page sites on your topic of interest. You drag and drop modules to make them pretty and interesting. And you make money with both by sharing in the generated revenue.
Yea, I know, enough of the intro. You don't read Griz for fluff. The reason that I like Hubpages is that Google really likes them. They are liked more than Squidoo lens. They are liked more than Blogger blogs. Do I know all this to be fact? Not at all. What I do know is that when I build a keyword targeted hubpage, it is indexed in Google usually within 24 hours. You say, "So what? I can get my site indexed in record time by linking it to my PR 7 site, submitting an article to the 7 million article directories and social bookmarking with the demon.� To that I say, realize I did nothing to achieve this greatness. Nothing. I built a hub. And then moved on and built another. Look, it would be foolish for me to say that you will get instant indexing for every hubpage you build. You won't. But the vast majority of the hubpages I've built have been indexed the next day. I've had people write in to my blog saying they have been experiencing the same thing. It's just a good time to be using Hubpages. Much like it was using Squidoo before they were slapped around by Google.
Now before you start surfing over to Clickbank to arm yourself with codes for building dog training, pc security and ipod accessory hubpages, let me warn you that the service frowns greatly on affiliate links. Moreover, the hubbers are voracious at reporting spammy hubs. Whereas Squidoo encourages you to use their lens for marketing, Hubpages is not playing that game. They do not want to see more than a couple of outbound links going to your site(s) either. You can point to CNN, Yahoo and ESPN all day long. They just don't want you to use Hubpages for blatant promotion of your stuff.
So is it still worth it to build hubpages? I say yes. They are so quick and easy to build. Here is exactly what I do: I have a ton of PLR. I look through and find a topic I'm interested in building a hubpage on. I then take that topic keyword and do my keyword research. Just like Griz teaches here and Court does over there. I take that keyword and build the hupage with it. The URL and title will have that keyword in it. Think about how Griz taught you about building Blogger blogs. It's the same thing. I rip apart a couple PLR articles and highly modify them. The thing with Hubpages is you want to go for originality and length. You know how Griz is always talking about writing long posts? The longer your hubpage the better. You are rewarded with a higher hubpage score for original content and length. By the way, don't go posting unmodified PLR. The militant hubbers have nothing better to do than surf around reading hubs and flagging those that they think are unoriginal or spammy. After the text has been inserted to a few modules, I start adding modules like relevant videos, news, RSS Feeds, Amazon and photos. I wish I could sound more technical, more authoritative, more impressive, like some sort of hubber savant, but that is all there really is to it.
Yes, I'm sure it all sounds like a pain. But it's not. I know you don't want to write and re-write content. That's the game you have to play these days. I can get through a hubpage from keyword research to publish in no more than 30 minutes. The only reason that it takes a little longer is because I am going for a higher hubpage score. I have no idea what that ultimately means but having a hubpage score of 90 seems better than 50. Maybe I'm just competitive. So I spend time making the articles and content sound more like me and less like outsourced material.
Ultimately my goal is to have hundreds of these hubpages. All laser targeted to a specific keyword. I have seen some hubbers with hundreds of hubpages. One guy I came across has over 600. I bet there are folks with over a thousand. But the funny thing is they aren't keyword targeted for anything. I want to create a farm of laser-targeted, keyword-phrase hubpages. I want to cultivate solid pagerank that I can use to my benefit for my so-called "money sites." (Don�t you hate IM speak?) If you search using a medium to long tail keyword I want you to find my hubpage in Google. Simple as that.
The one downside to Hubpages may be this: They may take potential money away from the site you ultimately want to promote. How? If you have a hubpage and niche blog both laser targeted to the same keyword, most likely the hubpage is going to rank higher in the SERPs, all things being equal. In the hubpage you have a link or two pointing to your site. That's groovy. However, the way hubpages are designed, a visitor may be more likely to click on the Adsense than your link. Hubpages are almost perfect for Adsense.
That isn't bad but you aren't getting a full Adsense payout. It's rev sharing. In case you were wondering, Hubpages payout is more than Squidoo. I doubt anyone believes they will get rich with either hubpages or lens but the extra cash is kind of nice. I've found for Squidoo, the more lens you build the more money you generate overall. Seems obvious, I know, but when people find your lens and like it they tend to keep surfing through your other lens. I have no reason to doubt it won't be the same with Hubpages. But I'd still rather some dude click to my site and buy my affiliate product any day over an Adsense click.
One nice benefit of building hubpages, or even lens, is it gives you a quick and easy way to determine if the niche you are focused on is actually worth your time. If I build a hubpage and can't get ranked, or get ranked but receive no visitors, then I'm not going to bother building a blog or website. Some people use PPC to determine the value of a niche. Too rich for me. I prefer to use organic search and hubpages and lens.
So you want proof of the goodness of Hubpages? Sorry. Can't help you there. It's too easy for people to flag hubpages, lens and Blogger blogs. I don't need the hassle. Anyway, it's free. There is nothing to buy. If it works for you, great. If it doesn't, then you've lost a few hours giving something new a try. I bet you wasted more time figuring out the garbage that is iTunes than you will on Hubpages. But my guess is you will like building hubpages.
The bottom line is this: Hubpages are too easy to build and too valuable to Google for you to ignore them right now. Hard to say how long Hubpages will be a Google darling, but it seems like they are taking the necessary precautions to stay on big G's good side. Time is precious. Court has you keyword sniping. Griz has you building blogs. Vic has you building BANS. I think you need to carve out enough time to build a couple hubpages every day. Again, they are easy and simple. I think the value of having numerous Hubpages could be worth it. I take notice if Google likes something. Google likes Hubpages.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks Splork and folks please stop in and visit him at Lost Ball in High Weeds even if he isn't a golfer.
Griz
Update: A little word about SEO
One of the nice things about having PR is that Google tends to crawl your site fairly often and I usually get new posts indexed quickly. Todays post showed up in the serp's about 10 minutes after I posted it. Within the first half hour I have already had visitors to the site who were searching for info on hubpages. See the screenshots below...
Click to enlarge
I am showing you this to remind you of a few things - if you write long articles and use lots of terms there is no telling what type of term someone will find you with in the search engines (make hubpages with blogger - ??) and if we forget that I am already ranking high for these terms I would now write a follow up post targeting the term "How to build a Hubpage" and concentrate on getting links for it. This term is likely to bring in some traffic in future as Hubpages become more widely known.
This is what I mean by paying attention to the long tails in your stats. They will tell you what type of keywords you might want to target in relation to your main terms.
Also note that there is little competition in the serp's but 2 queries in half an hour tells me that there may be interest in this topic. This is how you can inadvertently come across a niche that others aren't targeting and perhaps make a few bucks from it. Anyone care to outrank me? Maybe use a hubpage to do it...
As some of you know I am an avid Golfer and one day I noticed a link pointing to my site from a blog called "Lost Ball in High Weeds" which immediately got my attention as I regularly lose golf balls in high weeds. Now I have no idea if the author of the site is a golfer but his name is "Splork" which is exactly the sound my golf balls make when they hit the water hazards. Needless to say - he had me hooked if for no other reason than the golf innuendos. As it turns out he is a very entertaining writer and I enjoy his blog even though, as it further turns out, he doesn't have much to say about golf. A shame but he is forgiven.
The other day Splork was ranting on about hubpages and I thought what better way to avoid doing any work myself than to ask him to write a post about hubpages for this site. I tried to convince him that this was a good idea as it would give him a chance to win over my readers with his charm and even get a link from me but it wasn't until I threatened to sick Vic on him that he relented and agreed.
With out further ado, my first guest poster and possibly a fellow golfer...
HubPages by Splork
I dig Hubpages. I also dig chicks, snowboarding and chocolate chip cookies, but Griz didn't ask me to write a post about those things. He asked me to write about Hubpages. See, recently I have discovered the joys of Hubpages. These little one page wonders are doing very well for me in ranking for targeted keywords in Google. I am also a fan of Squidoo lens. Griz didn't ask me to write about those either, but I thought I'd mention them to give you a frame of reference of what Hubpages are. Squidoo and Hubpages are very similar. Both services allow you to create one-page sites on your topic of interest. You drag and drop modules to make them pretty and interesting. And you make money with both by sharing in the generated revenue.
Yea, I know, enough of the intro. You don't read Griz for fluff. The reason that I like Hubpages is that Google really likes them. They are liked more than Squidoo lens. They are liked more than Blogger blogs. Do I know all this to be fact? Not at all. What I do know is that when I build a keyword targeted hubpage, it is indexed in Google usually within 24 hours. You say, "So what? I can get my site indexed in record time by linking it to my PR 7 site, submitting an article to the 7 million article directories and social bookmarking with the demon.� To that I say, realize I did nothing to achieve this greatness. Nothing. I built a hub. And then moved on and built another. Look, it would be foolish for me to say that you will get instant indexing for every hubpage you build. You won't. But the vast majority of the hubpages I've built have been indexed the next day. I've had people write in to my blog saying they have been experiencing the same thing. It's just a good time to be using Hubpages. Much like it was using Squidoo before they were slapped around by Google.
Now before you start surfing over to Clickbank to arm yourself with codes for building dog training, pc security and ipod accessory hubpages, let me warn you that the service frowns greatly on affiliate links. Moreover, the hubbers are voracious at reporting spammy hubs. Whereas Squidoo encourages you to use their lens for marketing, Hubpages is not playing that game. They do not want to see more than a couple of outbound links going to your site(s) either. You can point to CNN, Yahoo and ESPN all day long. They just don't want you to use Hubpages for blatant promotion of your stuff.
So is it still worth it to build hubpages? I say yes. They are so quick and easy to build. Here is exactly what I do: I have a ton of PLR. I look through and find a topic I'm interested in building a hubpage on. I then take that topic keyword and do my keyword research. Just like Griz teaches here and Court does over there. I take that keyword and build the hupage with it. The URL and title will have that keyword in it. Think about how Griz taught you about building Blogger blogs. It's the same thing. I rip apart a couple PLR articles and highly modify them. The thing with Hubpages is you want to go for originality and length. You know how Griz is always talking about writing long posts? The longer your hubpage the better. You are rewarded with a higher hubpage score for original content and length. By the way, don't go posting unmodified PLR. The militant hubbers have nothing better to do than surf around reading hubs and flagging those that they think are unoriginal or spammy. After the text has been inserted to a few modules, I start adding modules like relevant videos, news, RSS Feeds, Amazon and photos. I wish I could sound more technical, more authoritative, more impressive, like some sort of hubber savant, but that is all there really is to it.
Yes, I'm sure it all sounds like a pain. But it's not. I know you don't want to write and re-write content. That's the game you have to play these days. I can get through a hubpage from keyword research to publish in no more than 30 minutes. The only reason that it takes a little longer is because I am going for a higher hubpage score. I have no idea what that ultimately means but having a hubpage score of 90 seems better than 50. Maybe I'm just competitive. So I spend time making the articles and content sound more like me and less like outsourced material.
Ultimately my goal is to have hundreds of these hubpages. All laser targeted to a specific keyword. I have seen some hubbers with hundreds of hubpages. One guy I came across has over 600. I bet there are folks with over a thousand. But the funny thing is they aren't keyword targeted for anything. I want to create a farm of laser-targeted, keyword-phrase hubpages. I want to cultivate solid pagerank that I can use to my benefit for my so-called "money sites." (Don�t you hate IM speak?) If you search using a medium to long tail keyword I want you to find my hubpage in Google. Simple as that.
The one downside to Hubpages may be this: They may take potential money away from the site you ultimately want to promote. How? If you have a hubpage and niche blog both laser targeted to the same keyword, most likely the hubpage is going to rank higher in the SERPs, all things being equal. In the hubpage you have a link or two pointing to your site. That's groovy. However, the way hubpages are designed, a visitor may be more likely to click on the Adsense than your link. Hubpages are almost perfect for Adsense.
That isn't bad but you aren't getting a full Adsense payout. It's rev sharing. In case you were wondering, Hubpages payout is more than Squidoo. I doubt anyone believes they will get rich with either hubpages or lens but the extra cash is kind of nice. I've found for Squidoo, the more lens you build the more money you generate overall. Seems obvious, I know, but when people find your lens and like it they tend to keep surfing through your other lens. I have no reason to doubt it won't be the same with Hubpages. But I'd still rather some dude click to my site and buy my affiliate product any day over an Adsense click.
One nice benefit of building hubpages, or even lens, is it gives you a quick and easy way to determine if the niche you are focused on is actually worth your time. If I build a hubpage and can't get ranked, or get ranked but receive no visitors, then I'm not going to bother building a blog or website. Some people use PPC to determine the value of a niche. Too rich for me. I prefer to use organic search and hubpages and lens.
So you want proof of the goodness of Hubpages? Sorry. Can't help you there. It's too easy for people to flag hubpages, lens and Blogger blogs. I don't need the hassle. Anyway, it's free. There is nothing to buy. If it works for you, great. If it doesn't, then you've lost a few hours giving something new a try. I bet you wasted more time figuring out the garbage that is iTunes than you will on Hubpages. But my guess is you will like building hubpages.
The bottom line is this: Hubpages are too easy to build and too valuable to Google for you to ignore them right now. Hard to say how long Hubpages will be a Google darling, but it seems like they are taking the necessary precautions to stay on big G's good side. Time is precious. Court has you keyword sniping. Griz has you building blogs. Vic has you building BANS. I think you need to carve out enough time to build a couple hubpages every day. Again, they are easy and simple. I think the value of having numerous Hubpages could be worth it. I take notice if Google likes something. Google likes Hubpages.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks Splork and folks please stop in and visit him at Lost Ball in High Weeds even if he isn't a golfer.
Griz
Update: A little word about SEO
One of the nice things about having PR is that Google tends to crawl your site fairly often and I usually get new posts indexed quickly. Todays post showed up in the serp's about 10 minutes after I posted it. Within the first half hour I have already had visitors to the site who were searching for info on hubpages. See the screenshots below...
Click to enlarge
I am showing you this to remind you of a few things - if you write long articles and use lots of terms there is no telling what type of term someone will find you with in the search engines (make hubpages with blogger - ??) and if we forget that I am already ranking high for these terms I would now write a follow up post targeting the term "How to build a Hubpage" and concentrate on getting links for it. This term is likely to bring in some traffic in future as Hubpages become more widely known.
This is what I mean by paying attention to the long tails in your stats. They will tell you what type of keywords you might want to target in relation to your main terms.
Also note that there is little competition in the serp's but 2 queries in half an hour tells me that there may be interest in this topic. This is how you can inadvertently come across a niche that others aren't targeting and perhaps make a few bucks from it. Anyone care to outrank me? Maybe use a hubpage to do it...
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