Snickering

SuperSite Diary - Week 3 The Linking Has Begun

2009-10-22T20:58:00.001+11:00

Another week has gone by on my SuperSite creation and the posting continues at a steady rate. I’m not quite posting at the frenetic rate I thought I would, but that’s mainly because sanity has prevailed to a certain extent and I am paying some attention to my other sites too. The site is 3 weeks old now and the linking has begun.

My most frequent visitor at the moment is the Googlebot who is visiting a few times per day which is very heartening to see. This means that the site is being indexed at a healthy pace, something that is being reflected by the occasional long tail guest. I’ve been taking not of these long tails and that is the point that I have begun concentrating my efforts in my link building. The idea is that by using those same long tails to get links, I will not only rank even better for the longer tails, the underlying keywords will be taken care of as well.

As far as getting links to the site I have gone the more usual route there with my first EzineArticle post as well as an Infobarrel article. From these two articles I have seen that there have been a few visitors that have found the site by clicking on the links. While that’s not necessarily the point of the links, it is one of the beneficial side-effects that comes out of the link building process.

Over the next week I’ll be carrying on with the regular posting schedule of 2 posts per day and I’ll be carrying on with the link building. This process will be a slow and steady affair, as I’ve said before. The results are never going to be seen in the first few months. Sure there WILL be results but they will be small fry compared to what the site will be capable of if I continue to post content every day for the next year.

So let me see, as of today I have increased the number of posts on the site to a healthy 34. The visitor count is still low at a couple of search engine visitors per day stumbling in. As yet the site is not quite as laser focused as it will be, but that’s only because the content level is still quite low.

SuperSite Diary - Creating Content

2009-10-15T12:33:00.000+11:00

My SuperSite is underway and I have been adding posts as often as my real job and other life commitments have permitted. So far I’m up to 20 posts. As I go I have been interlinking the posts that are related to one another making them accessible from all different parts of the site. I’ve stuck to the plan of making each post longer than 400 words and haven’t found the process particularly onerous.

In terms of the topics for the content I have been targeting keywords that are relatively low competition, trying to choose anything with under 40,000 competing pages when you do an exact search. Some are very low at under 100. This is merely to get a foot in the door and my best chance of getting a high ranking position for some terms.

My list of keywords that I plan to write posts for already exceeds 1,000 and I have only looked at 3 sub-niches with many more to explore. The Google Adwords Keyword tool is particularly useful in finding these keywords and the auto-suggest option when doing a Google search continues to through up more long tails to add to each post. So finding topics to post about won’t be an issue.

After the first couple of days of intensive article posting I have received my first search engine visitor that has found the site through a super long keyword. This is the way I expect most of the visitors will find the site for the next few weeks. What I expect to happen is that there will be an early influx of visitors as the site will rank well in Google because it is new. After a month or so the numbers will drop as the site falls in ranking and finds its true position in the index. This is the phenomenon that has many first time bloggers rushing to the forum to ask what they’ve done wrong and why have their blogs disappeared. It’s totally normal and expected to happen.

For the time being I am concentrating purely on content creation, after all, that’s what your average website owner is going to do day in and day out. It’s only the IMer who goes looking at their stats, constantly checking their stats and generally worrying about things they can’t control like why Google hasn’t indexed this post or improved the ranking because I got that link.

With around 5 posts per day for the first 3 days, the site is building up at a speed that I can sustain for some time. I will be supplementing my own posting with some outsourced content. Fortunately I already make a regular income from my other online sites and I can use the revenue to reinvest into this project. Investing in the business is one of the most important aspects of building the business and as far as I’m concerned, buying content will give me, and the site, the greatest benefit.

SuperSite Diary Starts Today

2009-10-13T10:34:00.000+11:00

What is a SuperSite? A SuperSite is simply a website that contains a large volume of posts targeting specific keywords. It is regularly updated and will (hopefully) dominate the rankings for numerous long-tail keywords.

This diary is going to track the growth of a SuperSite –mine to be exact – recording the number of posts that have been added and tracking the increase in visitor numbers. It will help to illustrate how much work is required and just how patient you have to be before you get any significant results. Here’s the thing, this is going to be a long process and I don’t expect any significant numbers until 3 months down the track at the earliest, and even that’s being optimistic. This is the way Google works with new sites with trust and authority not being bestowed until well down the track.

I am using a brand new web site that is only 2 weeks old. It currently has 7 posts on it which I added in the first couple of days to give the search engines something to chew on. I’ve also sent a couple of links its way to get it indexed and there has been no traffic yet. It’s at the mewling infant stage.

My goal is to build the site to the point where it will earn a monthly income exceeding $1,000. I want to track the progress of the site on this blog to indicate exactly how long it takes to get any kind of results and how slowly the progress is made. It will also indicate exactly how much work you would have to do before you can expect to get any real results.

My intention is that this new site is going to contain thousands of posts covering a diverse range of topics but they will be linked under a broad niche area. To begin with I am going to try to post 5 times per day and the length of each post is going to be at least 400 words. I will target a specific keyword with each post and link them together where relevant.

What I won’t be doing is disclosing the name of the site, nor will I mention the niche that it will be operating in. I’ll simply refer to it as The SuperSite.

Getting Traffic

How soon traffic begins coming to your site and how much traffic you get is going to be an up and down affair until the site has earned its stripes and proven that it will be a consistent performer. Just because there are a few little articles posted to the site doesn’t mean that it will jump to the top of the rankings, no matter how well written they are.

What is going to happen is that the site will rank for some obscure long tail keywords that have absolutely no competition. Due to the number of articles that are going to get thrown up over an extended period of time there will be plenty of chances to start picking up traffic.

Monetization Strategy

I don’t know exactly how I am going to monetize the site. I have a number of options available to me and will test each one out as it grows and builds up the visitor numbers. Just because I think it should make money using one method doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the way it will pan out. The whole purpose of this experiment is to discover what works best.

I won’t be attempting to add any advertisements or affiliate links until there is a reasonable flow of traffic coming in from the search engines.

It’s All About Patience

Where many people fail in their quest to make money online is in the patience side of the process. You see it all the time in the forums, someone asking for this shortcut or that shortcut. Other people are getting frustrated because they are not getting the rankings they expect or the traffic is not coming fast enough.

If you go into this game knowing that the real results aren’t going to come until after a year of work, and I mean hard work, then you will be more inclined to stick with it.

Ginkgo Consulting Thinks Free Hosted Blogs Suck

2009-10-05T00:13:00.003+11:00

So, would you expect that someone who is closely related to an A-list blogger has a few clues about the whole on-line game? You would, wouldn’t you? The basics about ranking and what it really takes to make money online. Or whether a certain blogging platform makes the slightest ounce of difference in whether you can take your blog to the top of the search engine rankings. Basic topics like that.

Well it seems that Darren Rowse, also known as Problogger by the misguided legion of fans who don’t realize they are getting fleeced, is happy to associate himself with a complete blogging noob who is passing herself off as an authority on the subject. Rowse has bestowed the moderator title for his new forum upon a woman who has shared with the wider internet community the enlightening (though completely false) news that free hosted blogs such as Blogspot blogs suck because they are not search engine friendly.

After picking myself up off the floor where I spent 5 minutes rolling around in fits of uncontrollable mirth I felt it would be best if I added my voice to those who know the truth so that such pure bullshit wasn’t spread any further than this. In short, steer clear of Ginkgo Consulting whatever you do, if this piece of complete crap is any indication of what you’re going to get, you’re going to wading though a helluva lot of misinformation.

The chuckling continues with the comments on this particular post with everyone thanking Lara for the informative post, one person sincerely thanking her saying she had no idea that free hosting had such a negative impact on SEO. D’you know WHY you didn’t know that, sweetheart? Because it doesn’t!

Griz takes aim at Problogger.com in general and refutes Lara Kulpa’s ridiculous argument in the best way possible, by simply pointing out that his blog, a Blogger blog, sits at the top of the search engine rankings for the most difficult of keywords you can possibly choose to attempt to rank for, "make money online". Obviously, Lara is the younger sister of the better known Mea…

In her explanation on why she reckons free hosted blogs suck, she demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge in the way the typical search engine user would phrase a keyword search. How embarrassing for her, and how even more embarrassing for the guy who has given her the moderator job at his brand spanking new Problogger forum. Now there’s a forum that’s going to be a doozy of useless information and misinformation spread by a bunch of know-nothing noobs. Good luck with that, by the way.

How about this little test. Let’s see if THIS free hosted blog, yes, a crappy Blogspot blog, can rank for the term Gingko Consulting. Hmmm, wouldn’t THAT be a blow to the old free hosting argument…and Kulpa’s cred.

A Word On Trunks For Sale

2009-05-05T23:12:00.001+10:00

Trunks for sale has some outstanding qualities. In fact, picking your dreamy trunk will be a piece of cake if you know how to check material, zipper, wheel and structure. For storage that makes a statement, these cannot be beat. I'd pay to see that one. Although trunks have been around for thousands of years in China and elsewhere, the most common styles seen and referred to today date from the late 18th Century to the early 20th, when they were supplanted in the market by the cheaper and lighter suitcase. Polycarbonate- or ABS- crafted hardside trunks for sale are lightweight but tough while aluminum trunks are heavy but they offer enhanced security.

Certainly, no one could argue with trunks for sale and you also have dome top trunks. Besides a main spacious compartment, fabric-crafted trunks for sale feature multiple compartments and pockets, enabling us to organize our items efficiently. Our trunk selection on our Trunk Showroom page will usually include rare early Jenny Lind and Civil War period trunks, Humpback, Camelback and Round Top Trunks, as well as Stagecoach Trunks, Embossed Metal Trunks, Steamer Trunks, Wardrobe Trunks, and Flat Top Trunks.

I sense you have some doubts about that. Trunks for sale with elaborated-designed structures offer us great ease of organizing. Trunks are differentiated from chests by their more rugged construction due to their intended use as luggage, instead of the latter's pure storage.

An Earnings Slump

2008-11-16T20:39:00.003+11:00

A Positive Spin To An Earnings Slump

Half-way through the month and the site that has been responsible for bringing in the bulk of my earnings has gone into the Google sandbox resulting in a substantial fall for the month. Having been given a taste of what can be possible with a high ranking site I have been motivated to work hard at building up the links to all my sites. Hopefully, when my time in purgatory is over my sites will all be ranking a lot higher.

The latest way I am getting the links I need is by using a terrific site called Article Marketing Automation. I’ve presented that as an affiliate link because I believe it’s a site that’s worthy of the advertising. I don’t promote many sites across my various websites but this one deserves to get as much exposure as possible. Article Marketing Automation takes article marketing to a completely new level and I’m seeing a huge return on my effort. There’s a free service offered by the site as well as a paid service with a monthly fee and both are definitely value for money.

Back To My Revenue Drop

The amazing thing that has struck me is that, although my revenue for this month has been slashed I’m still making more than I dared think possible a few months ago. It’s incredible to see what a few well chosen niches and some dedication will bring. I’m a believer in the philosopher of taking small steps each day in order to achieve greatness and I am currently seeing those small steps add up to a great deal.

So the plan is to spend the rest of the month writing and spinning articles, submitting them to article directories, as per normal, but also lodging them at Article Marketing Automation.

A Quick Tip On Getting Ideas For Article Topics

I have found a fantastically simple way of coming up with article ideas that you might find helpful. I simply check the search terms used by people to find my site and used them as the title for my next article. I already know that people are searching using the keywords and by putting out an article, I am ensuring that my site will rank even higher for the term.

Article Spinner Software - ArticleApps

2008-10-30T20:35:00.002+11:00

I’m not usually one for gushing over software but I had been looking high and low for a decent article spinner software and ArticleApps has delivered what I needed and a lot more besides. So I’m going to talk about some of the features and you can check it out yourself if you want to.

I have been using ArticleApps for around 3 weeks now and have found it to be a pleasantly flexible piece of software that covers the article spinner aspect of article marketing but brings some other nice features along with it. ArticleApps has enabled me to produce a lot of unique articles in a relatively short period of time – basically what most other article spinners do.

But with ArticleApps you also have a huge database of synonyms, suggested opening, closing and transitional sentences and phrases, famous quotes, common words and a search and replace function.

ArticleApps takes the standard article spinner software and makes it as easy to customise and use. So far I’ve used it as the basis for my last 3 article marketing campaigns and the search engine rankings results have been outstanding.

The great news is that at the moment ArticleApps is available free of charge and from what I can gather, it’s not going to remain free forever.

Commenting to Build Back-Links

2008-10-24T11:07:00.000+11:00

When searching around for different methods of building links to my sites I found that there are any number of suggestions available to follow. Some result in hard to get, but powerful to have links, others may be easy to get but are largely dismissed by the search engines. The important thing to keep in mind is that all links are worth getting whether they’re keyword anchored, relevant site, no follow or do follow, they all have a use in one form or another.

One of the types of links I find useful and relatively easy to get are the links you pick up when commenting on other sites. When most people talk about picking up links from comments, they usually advise visiting other blogs and commenting there. This is fine, but I prefer to visit authority and news sites to build my links. Most, if not all, of these links are no follow links, but don’t let that discourage you from collecting them because many of the pages they come from have solid PR’s – and that’s what I’m keen on getting.

Just by the by, there have been a number of experiments done that have proven that no follow links are, in fact, followed. People have ranked for keywords they used as a comment signature. However, the belief is that they carry less weight than a “do follow” link.

The bottom line, however, is there is no guarantee as to how effective a no follow link will be in helping your website i) gain search engine ranking or ii) gain PR. I am just reporting what I am trying out and the success that I’ve seen in doing so.

The Use of These Links

The links that I gather through commenting on authority sites are pointed to my general purpose blogs, the blogs I maintain with the intention of passing on strong links in the future. I’m not interested in ranking them highly for a specific keyword, that’s what my money site is for. What I’m trying to do is build the PR of the blog. With enough links coming in to these general purpose blogs, they will build their own PR and I can then use them to send keyword anchored links to my money site. This is grunt work stuff and requires a long-term view which is why it is part of a marketing “campaign”.

I’ve found that if you can get 20 – 30 links by commenting at high-PR, high-traffic sites combined with links from other sources such as directories and the odd social bookmarking site, the result is a site with a decent PR.

Why Target Authority Sites?

I prefer to comment on authority sites for a couple of reasons. The first is that these sites typically get a lot of traffic and a lot of people commenting on the stories. This means that it’s going to be more likely that my comment will blend in with the crowd. That being said, I make sure that my comments add something to the discussion and never come across as spam comments so they have no trouble passing through moderation. Secondly, the stories on these sites are regularly bookmarked by the social sites (Digg, Mixx, Del.icio.us and the like) as well as being linked to from blogs so they often end up with a very high PR. It’s the PR from these sites that I’m after.

Are You Getting The Most Out of Your Article Marketing Campaign?

2008-10-08T16:15:00.001+11:00

I had a sneaking suspicion that I was only getting the minimum benefit from my efforts at using article marketing as a means of building links to my websites. I’m even more certain that the majority of people using article directories for the same purpose are making the same mistake. To prove to myself that I was right in my assumptions I conducted a simple little experiment.

First of all, the assumption that I’m making is that the majority of us write our articles, stick links back to our own sites, submit them to one (or more) article directory and move on to the next post or project. We think that once the article is submitted our job at building that particular link is over. If this sounds familiar to you then the chances are the link you thought you just built is not contributing to your site’s ranking.

By checking the backlinks to my website using LinkDiagnosis.com (which uses the Yahoo Site Explorer) I could see that some articles are picked up while others are not. I know how many articles I submitted and I know that they have been accepted by the article directory, but just because the article is live doesn’t mean the links are counted.

A possible reason for the link not being recognised could include the low crawl rate by the bots but I’m inclined to believe it’s more likely to be the fact that nothing is linking to the article that would give it the necessary juice required to pass on and make the links become effective. The live articles that I submitted and have never, themselves, received a link aren’t doing my target site any good.

So in order to test my theory I took an article I submitted to A1Articles.com back in May 2008 that wasn’t showing up as linking to my site. I then sent 5 links to it from a combination of various social media sites and my own sites. I wanted to know a couple of things. Firstly, would the article appear as a link and secondly, how long would it take before it showed up.

The answer came pretty quickly. The next day when I ran the LinkDiagnosis.com check on my site, there was the A1Articles.com, sitting there bright and shiny and new. Now I just have to see how it affects the site’s position in the SERPs. It has also prompted me to repeat the exercise with a few more articles as well as the odd blog post or two.

All of this illustrates a comment made at Make Money Online For Beginners where Griz says something along the lines that to be successful in making money online your effort should be 10% content and 90% building keyword targeted backlinks.

Needless to say this has spurred me on to a flurry of activity with some serious link building taking place. Suddenly, the social sites that I shunned because they send the wrong kinds of visitors to my site have been given a whole new level of importance. They will now be getting links to the very informative articles that I have “just noticed” and am drawing their attention to.

It has taken a little longer to get into my brain than it probably should but this was the wake up call I needed. It’s not enough to simply chuck a whole bunch of articles around to various article directory sites. Why should I put the fate of those carefully crafted, keyword perfect links, to the chance that someone else might link to my article? The only sure way that someone will link to it is if I do it myself.

Now, there are a few things to keep in mind with this little experiment I’ve run. It is by no means definitive, I’ve sent links to one site and checked it using the Yahoo link checking device. This doesn’t mean that it’s going to be picked up by Google and it certainly hasn’t meant that my site will climb the SERPs because of it.

That being said, the mere fact that links that have been sitting there unrecognised for over 4 months can be picked up so quickly has got to make you take notice. Plus there is also the bonus that there are more links sitting out there that eventually point back to my sites. Whether that means they will bring visitors this year or next when the sites they are on improve their PR is unimportant. The important thing is that they are out there raising the authority of those sites for the keywords I have specified.

So how about you? Are you doing all the link building you could or are you only doing half a link building job too?

Adsense Progress After 1 Year

2008-10-01T16:12:00.002+10:00

Going back over my Adsense statistics for the last year and a half or so, you get an idea of the earning potential that is sitting there and is available as long as you go ahead and put some effort in.

Back in May 2007 I only had one website, a little static site that served a hobby of mine and was picking up a little bit of traffic. So I chucked Adsense on it and saw virtually nothing in return, which was to be expected really, seeing as how the site wasn’t optimized nor was it targeting people in any way.

Then in January 2008 I somehow found my way to a couple of blogs that, for the first time ever in my experience, opened my eyes to the possibility that consistent passive income would be possible with Adsense. So I decided to give it a go and wound up buying my first 3 domains that I went ahead and optimised for niches with Adsense as the main revenue source.

The growth in earnings from March 2008 to today has been dramatic and on a consistent upswing with peaks and plateaus that I can connect directly to the amount of effort I have put into them. The increase in the amount of revenue that is coming in is also directly proportionate to the increase in the number of page impressions being reported.

Although I have seen steady growth in my earnings they are still nowhere near what I would term as impressive. However there are signs that there is plenty of room for more growth. None of my blogs that use Adsense are anywhere near page 1 on the SERPs for their chosen keyword. I am still working to push my sites to page 1 and the day any of my sites reaches the first page will give me the confirmation of just how profitable my chosen niche actually is.

Of course, there is an obvious way to increase the number of visitors and, hence, the earning power of the blog and that is to target another keyword and continuing on.

I currently have 4 blogs that consistently contribute to my Adsense earnings each month and I would like to build on this number. There have been numerous tips on how to go about doing keyword research and, similarly, there are numerous keywords to target and will bring in a decent profit. The main thing is to get a new site up and running as soon as possible to begin the aging process. Add good helpful content and a new niche campaign is born.

On his Make Money For Beginners website, Griz emphasises that it is possible to bring in good income using Adsense if you do it right, the key is a perfectly optimized website geared at bringing in targeted search engine traffic. I have found that what he says is 100% true. As the number of visitors has grown, so has my Adsense earnings. As the traffic plateaued because I was working on other projects, so did my Adsense earnings.

The hunt is always on for a new niche that can be dominated with some hard work and well-chosen keywords, so the earnings should continue to step their way upwards. The great thing about experimenting with a new niche is that I can do it using free resources, pour myself into it and get a feel for how far up the rankings I can get.

My SEO Niche Campaign After Week 4

2008-09-23T14:09:00.000+10:00

Today my 4 week intensive exercise on off-page and on-page SEO optimisation ends. For the last 4 weeks I have devoted the majority of my time to my latest new BANS store to fill it with as much content and as many pages as I could, followed by a link building exercise.

The result has given me a reasonable boost up the SERPs and a steady, although not spectacular flow of visitors to my site. Now that the intensive campaign is over I will move on to another store and leave this one to do some maturing. I won’t ignore it altogether but it will now go through on of the most important processes in terms of Google’s ranking, and one of the parts that we can affect the least – age.

The only assistance I can give my site during the aging process is to add a little bit of content every 1 to 2 weeks to tell Google that the site is still alive. I will also keep remembering it in my link building program with a few links here in there to keep pushing it up.

Speaking of links, it’s also worth mentioning at this point that just because you’ve created some backlinks today doesn’t mean that they’re going to take effect tomorrow. I’ve experienced it myself, I spend time organising links back to my site only to find absolutely no sign of them at all and, in fact, my site has started to slide further down the rankings. Just because they haven’t taken effect straight away doesn’t mean you should throw you hands in the air in exasperation thinking that link-building doesn’t work.

The truth is, the links will play their part, all you need to do is be diligent about continuing to build them, don’t get frustrated and worry only about what you can do next to expand your website.

The old mantra of persistence and patience comes into play again.

The Greatest Challenge

2008-09-18T12:55:00.001+10:00

The greatest challenge in the entire Internet Marketing world is displaying the patience and staying power required to get your site to the top of the SERPs for your chosen keyword. It’s all about accumulating links from other websites back to your own site. Not only that, but the links should be relevant to your niche and anchored with the right keywords to hand you the greatest juice.

Many of us know the theory behind how we are going to get our site to number one. True “make money” bloggers know the value of the social media – and it’s got nothing to do with attracting a readership of loyal fans. We know that content is important, but not the most important part of getting to the top.

Above all of these things that we know is the assurance required to know that the results are not going to come overnight. For weeks or months on end, it might look as though the results aren’t coming at all. There is bound to be the occasional feelings of complete discouragement due to the seeming lack of progress and it’s at these times that the overwhelming temptation will be to give up.

The greatest challenge is to carry on building backlinks in the face of this stagnation. The worst thing you can do is to constantly check the position of your site in the SERPs. If it moves higher you run the risk of resting on your laurels and slacken off the constant push to get more links. If it moves lower, you risk getting the wind taken completely out of your sails as you ponder what the heck all that hard work was for. It’s a similar situation if it remains unchanged.

I fall into the same trap. It’s only natural to seek some sort of gratification for the effort that you’re putting in. A rise up the SERPs is the validation I’m looking for to spur me on…but I shouldn’t do it.

I’m in the fortunate position of owning an authority site that sits at numbers 1, 2 and 4 for my chosen keyword where it has been for the last year or so. But it wasn’t always at number 1. In fact, it ranked absolutely nowhere for at least the first couple of years. This didn’t concern me in the slightest because I wasn’t building the website for monetary gain or a desire to rank number 1. I keep the site because it’s about a topic I have a deep interest in.

So, because my focus was on my site rather than the site’s ranking I poured every spare moment I had into it, building it up with valuable information. The links obviously came in and, when I learned a little bit about on-site SEO optimization, the site moved to the top of the tree.

Whenever I feel as though my other sites aren’t making the progress I think they should, I simply have to look at my first website and can see that it pays to think long-term

So what is long-term?

Realistically over a year, unless you’ve got access to a vast source of high PR sites from which you can draw a steady stream of links.

The popular advice given to newcomers to the internet marketing world is to give it at least 6 months. I would prefer that to be even longer, 9 months to a year. Even after 1 year, your site is not particularly old. However, when you get to the end of the year, you will have an idea of whether your chosen niche and the way you are going about monetizing it is going to be profitable.

If you’ve truly spent quality time on your site, optimized it with content and have accumulated links, it will be pulling in decent numbers just from the long-tail keywords alone. After that, the site age is going to begin to play a factor in how quickly it climbs the SERPs.

The point is, it’s all about the accumulation of keyword anchored backlinks, not the number of times you look at the search engine results to see if it has moved. New sites are going to hit the SERPs relatively high up before drifting down for a while. Over time your links will kick in and have an effect on your ranking. It’ll happen when it happens…and not before.

My SEO Niche Campaign After Week 3

2008-09-16T23:16:00.000+10:00

The third week has gotten off to a cracking start because I have reeled in a bunch of solid keyword anchored links with the real prospect of more to come. This has been the result of some developing friendships with other niche bloggers who are also in need of links. Cross-exchanging is taking place and has the potential to become extremely lucrative to all involved if done correctly.

The search engine movement is going to be a flukey affair, with a surge up to a new highest position early in the week followed by a slide back down after the new links were attained. Patience is the name of the game when dealing with rankings and it’s usually best to ignore the Google search engine rankings and simply crack on with the site itself.

So I can expect some movement up the SERPs and with that started, I can expect to see some more traffic growth. But I’m not prepared to sit back on the satisfaction of watching some results from my efforts. I made a pledge to myself that I would get at least 10 solid, keyword anchored backlinks per week for the next 2 weeks. I didn’t want to aim for more than that because it’s always best to keep the number at a level that looks natural and realistic. But 20 high-quality links should kick the site off nicely after the month-long campaign. It means I will be able to move on to the next store campaign without having to worry about this store for a while and let it mature on its own.

The increase in traffic has started to translate into an increase in the number of clicks and this, in turn, has started a trickle of revenue coming in. As I suggested in an earlier post, this particular niche deals in low-cost items so the earnings per winning bid is going to be quite low. IF I can make $1 / day with the store I would consider it a big success. Stores like this one are the workhorses of the empire. If I can raise the site up to the top of the SERPs it should enjoy quite high levels of traffic which should ensure the target earnings.

It’s interesting to watch the results of your hard work unfold and when I’m working hard on a store campaign I get to know all aspects of the progress that is being made. Over the last few days, for instance, I have seen the number of pages that are indexed on Google rising each day which tells me that the Googlebot is visiting more frequently. Not only does this mean that the content I add personally is getting picked up quickly, but also the newly listed products will also be listed quickly.

So with a week to go of my current campaign I am fairly pleased with the results. I now have a store that is rich in content and contains a large selection of unique store pages. My goal of getting 100 unique visitors per day has not been reached yet but I see that the potential is certainly there. As the site matures it should continue to creep up the rankings, and with an occasional push along at weekly to monthly intervals, the top is where it is headed.

BANS Shadown Jumping

2008-09-14T20:30:00.001+10:00

A couple more tremors are going through the owners of BANS sites as the jumping at shadows scenario continues to play itself out. Thanks to the eBay Partner Network’s (EPN) unprecedented failure at displaying basic public relations skills, not to mention common decency, now affiliates are prepared to head for the hills at the slightest sign of negative action.

“BANS Revenue Down This Month – It’s the End of BANS”

The first ripple came in the Build A Niche Store forum with one person posting that their earning for September were down, they had the same number of clicks but fewer bids and commissions. It was all very “how could this be possible, there must be a problem with EPN, this could get me cut from EPN” gloom and doom. The thread was then picked up by others who wasted their time talking about how their earning, too, were down and the conspiracy theorists were off and running.

Personally, my September earnings are higher than any month so far, so I’m decidedly unsympathetic but I do have some advice to those who were looking for demons in the corner.

eBay affiliates earn money when a visitor from your site successfully bids for something. If they are outbid, you get nothing.
Continually checking your stats in EPN is NOT healthy, nor is it productive.
The time you spend agonising over things you can’t change (i.e. past results) robs you of time you could be using to work on what you can change (i.e. your site’s content).

Talk of De-Indexed Sites – Again!

The next tremor came in a separate forum with people speculating that their sites were being systematically de-indexed because they were BANS sites. One example given was a dot info site, which makes this old news, the whole de-indexing of dot info sites has been well documented.

But that didn’t stop the speculation about doom and gloom again about the probable (not possible – probable!) bleak future of BANS sites. As I see it BANS is simply a tool that gives you a well optimised template for presenting a niche store with a gateway to eBay. If your site is filled with plenty of informative, original content, you’re going to dominate whether you’re sending customers to eBay or any other store. Just make your site as content rich as possible.

If it gets de-indexed, make a few changes, add content, create new pages and request re-inclusion. If that fails buy a new domain (what’s 10 bucks, after all) and start again – you’ve already done the research and got the content after all. If the store made you money before, it will likely be worth the effort and you’ll continue to make a profit.

Too many people are seemingly prepared to throw up their hands and scream that the sky is falling, when the sensible course of action is to get your head down and work hard on your site. Just because you made a motza last month doesn’t mean you will next month. Season’s change, so do customer’s needs, the lucky bidders last month may be outbid this month or perhaps now that they’ve bought what they need, they’re not bidding this month.

Whatever it is, stop getting influenced by the day to day fluctuations and concentrate on the important task of working on your site.

My SEO Niche Campaign After Week 2

2008-09-09T08:50:00.002+10:00

It’s the end of the second week of my BANS store build campaign and progress has been steady, if not spectacular, but then, you can’t expect things to take off as soon as you begin building links and store pages - that’s just not a reasonable expectation.

So what have I been doing during the second week to improve the site and increase traffic? Pretty much more of the same as the first week, but now the momentum is starting to become noticeable.

I have gone back over some of the store pages that I threw up quickly with very little content and added more content to each of them. Keywords abounded but the content reads quite naturally. I’ve also gone through and added internal links to the bottom of many of my store pages. This is a significant step to take when building a BANS store because the bottom content area is where you can stuff masses of keyword rich links and content and not affect your customer’s experience in the store. The reason why they won’t be affected is because very few customers will get to the bottom of your store’s page. If they are looking for a particular product they will have clicked on one of the store’s product links and have gone off to buy something on eBay way before they ever reach the stuff down the bottom. Links to selected other pages within the store will give the spiders help in finding all of the store when crawling and won’t hurt on the search engines either.

As far as links have been concerned, I’ve been regularly submitting the directory links at a rate of around 10 per day. This is still just a nightly routine that costs me nothing and, as they say, a link is a link. I have also submitted a couple more articles, 1 to A1Articles.com and 1 to ArticlesBase.com. Both of these articles allowed me to submit 3 deep links to my store which will come in very handy.

My final piece of link work for the week was to submit a couple of store pages to a social bookmarking Pligg site which gave me a further deep link. In actual fact, I should do more of this sort of link building, it only takes a couple of minutes and is worth a valuable keyword anchored link to a page every time.

The traffic to the store has also been rising, although at this point the rise has been small. I’ve gone from getting an average of just under 10 unique visitors per day to between 10 and 20 visitors per day. The change is in the right direction and the climb up the search engines for my main keyword hasn’t really started yet. I’m obviously ranking for a lot more long tail keywords and this is where my traffic is coming from. The number of pages that are indexed on Google is still rising so the site is getting crawled on a regular basis and is picking up the new store pages.

My goal for week 3 is to increase the traffic to between 20 -30 unique visitors per day which can only be achieved by driving the site further up the SERPs. I have made a little pact with myself at the start of the new week to get at least 10 new keyword anchored backlinks for the store by the end of the week.

The only concerning factor out of the exercise so far is that even though the number of visitors has risen there hasn’t really been a corresponding rise in the number of EPN clicks. The fact is I’m not going to make sales if people aren’t clicking through to eBay so I’m going to have to do a little bit of analysis about what it is that is stopping the click-throughs.

One factor could be that I am using one of the new BANS templates and although it looks absolutely terrific when I view the site from home through my IE7 browser, when I get to work and look at the site using IE6 I can see that the page’s formatting is corrupted, dropping my sidebar navigation below the content. I can’t seem to get this glitch fixed even when I applied the suggested fixes so I think I’ll have to go back and reinstall the template. Even if there’s a small chance that this is what is affecting my CTR I should see to it.

The Domain Renewal Register Scam

2008-09-05T22:24:00.001+10:00

I’ve been in the affiliate marketing game for some time now and I know more about SEO than some people and not as much as a whole heap more, I suspect. I also know, pretty well back to front, what I would consider are the basics of setting up a website and that includes knowing the yearly price for a domain registration renewal.

So when I received a snail mail letter yesterday from a mob calling themselves Domain Renewal Group, a company that I knew I hadn’t registered any of my domains with, I immediately smelled a rat.

The letter was introduced as a courtesy to me that , because my website domain is going to expire in a few months (5 months to be precise!) I was being given an opportunity to transfer. The letter actually implores me to “act today!”, that NOW is the time to renew my domain and I should transfer from my current Registrar to Domain Renewal Group.

Then comes the hilarious bit. They tell you to “Review our prices and decide for yourself.”

Why is that so funny?

The prices they quote are as follows:

1 year - $45.00
2 years (recommended) - $75.00
5 years (Best Value) - $145.00

Their 1 year price is roughly 4-1/2 times the price it costs to register a domain. These guys are preying on the unwary newcomer who maybe buys 1 domain and then forgets about it until it comes up for renewal. They’re hoping to get the sucker who looks at a notice titled Domain Name Expiration Notice and simply sends off the payment, no questions asked. They’re hoping that these people remain ignorant of the fact that 1) they have just been fleeced and 2) they have just taken the first step towards probably losing their website.

Reading up on Domain Renewal Group reveals that this mob are known as a scam company who has previously traded under the name Domain Registry of America, a company revealed by the FTC as a scam. Now they’re back with a new name but the same shady tactics in which they go about stealing websites.

Their eventual aim is to get your domain onto their servers. Once there, if you are ever past-due on your renewal, your domain will immediately be taken over by them. Do you think you’ll get a courtesy reminder once your domain registration has been transferred?

As for the fine print on the back of the letter, well it’s got to win an award for the smallest fine print ever recorded. When you get your microscope out to read it you see things like: “You acknowledge that it is your responsibility to keep your own records and maintain your own reminders regarding when your domain name registration or Other services are set to expire. As a convenience to you, and not as a binding commitment, we may notify you via an email message or via your account when renewal fees are due. Should these fees go unpaid, your Services will expire or be cancelled.” Well that answers my earlier question. You ain’t getting a reminder and pffft, your domain will be gone.

If you ever get a courtesy letter from Domain Renewal Group, treat it with the contempt it deserves and bin it immediately. Whether you keep or lose your website may depend on it.

My SEO Niche Campaign After Week 1

2008-09-01T11:24:00.002+10:00

My latest month long niche store campaign has now been in progress for 1 week and I have been hard at work with both on-site and off-site optimization in my bid to attract as many customers as possible.

As a reminder, my online store is a BANS store using the Build a Niche Store software. The advantage with using BANS is that it has been created specifically to rank well in search engines as long as you are prepared to put in the hard work adding useful, original content.

This is the 3rd BANS store that I have developed and the week’s work has largely been taken up with creating as many content pages as I could. At last count I had created 49 new store pages, most of which have been given a solid chunk of content plus the odd image with the aim being to provide the customer with as much useful information as possible. All pages have been optimised with meaningful meta tags, meta descriptions, URL names and h1 headers, all containing my keywords.

Checking on Google I can see that the number of pages indexed have grown from 9 at the start of the week to 54. Naturally, this vastly increases the chances that my store will be found by people searching via a search engine (the best source of visitors).

As well as the work I have been putting into the site itself I have also been busy creating links with the first task every evening continuing to be the daily regime of submitting to directories. I have also posted some blog entries on my own blogs which is a great source of keyword relevant backlinks as long as you don’t overdo it. I have also submitted a couple of my pages to a Pligg site for some more nice deep links. Finally this week I submitted an article to EzineArticles which has just been published. (I’ve also noticed that the article has already been scraped by someone along with my links, so that’s given me an extra source of links). With that original article I will take it and try to spin it to 9 other article sites over the next week.

I have found my site in the Google SERPs for my main keyword and I currently sit on page 20 but I expect to bounce around for a while before it settles down. Page 20 is a start – it’s by no means a good ranking but it gives me an idea of the work ahead of me. It’s pleasing to see that I’m on page 1 or 2 for quite a few long tail keywords so with some work I will be able to push them up into the number 1 spot.

On the stats side of things, the number of EPN clicks per day are still low at under 10. Making money is all about getting visitors to the site and with targeted marketing I expect that the number of clicks will begin to rise as the increase in index listings really kicks in. For this particular niche to be profitable I will be relying on a high volume of winning bids because the prices of the products are quite low. This is compared to my other 2 BANS sites which sell mid-to-high priced goods and the payout back to me is high per winning bid.

The number of visitors is starting to pick up, so encouraging signs there. Earlier in the week I was still only averaging 10 unique visitors per day but the number picked up over the last couple of days which would have been the result of the store pages being indexed.

Work continues this week, particularly with submitting new articles to the top article directories such as GoArticles.com, ArticlesBase.com, A1Articles.com, ArticleAlley.com and IdeaMarketers.com.

ePN Expires Affiliate Accounts

2008-08-26T13:57:00.002+10:00

I want to take a little time out from my series of tracking the SEO progress of my latest BANS store to discuss the recent ePN (eBay Partner Network) expiries that rocked the world of many affiliates on August 20.

ePN Accounts "Expired" Without Warning

As many who are in any way involved as an affiliate with eBay, there was a round of emails that went out explaining to certain affiliates that their account would be expired in the next 7 days. The letter went on to explain that the reason they would be expired was because the traffic they were sending to eBay was not “sufficiently engaged with the eBay site”. In fact the letter looked like this:

During a recent review of eBay Partner Network publisher accounts and site metrics data for clicks your account drives to eBay.com, we determined that the traffic generated from your account is significantly less engaged with the eBay site as compared to the standards set by our other affiliates. While we appreciate your efforts to drive traffic to our Advertiser sites, we do not think that it is mutually beneficial to further our business relationship at this time. As a result, we will be expiring your eBay Partner Network account in 7 days and we request that you remove all of your eBay Partner Network affiliate links by that time. Payment will take place as per the Network Agreement for any traffic driven to eBay Advertiser sites prior to the expiration date of August 27, 2008.One of our account managers will contact you if a more appropriate business opportunity arises to work together again in the future.

Regards,

The eBay Partner Network

Naturally, the place was in an uproar, and not just from those who received the dreaded letter. Fortunately, I was not one of the affiliates who were singled out, but effect the whole ordeal has had on me has been just as unsettling.

Affiliates Can't Control Traffic

eBay has effectively punished affiliates for something that is completely out of their control. As has been repeatedly been pointed out on the ePN message boards, the job of affiliates is to drive traffic to a store, it’s the job of the store to then convert that traffic into sales. The fact that an affiliate is being penalized because, according to the eBay metrics their traffic isn’t buying as much as someone else’s traffic is nothing short of reprehensible.

The flow-on effect will spread far wider than just the affiliates who have been canned with many others now feeling vulnerable to getting blindsided by a company that has demonstrated an unfeeling, unreasonable attitude to the very people they should be working closely with.

eBay Has Destroyed the Trust

The little communication that has been provided through the ePN discussion board really failed to make clear what affiliates can do in the future to avoid falling under the bar set by eBay that marks your visitors as “not sufficiently engaged to eBay”. What has been explained is that none of the expiries were due to people using blackhat methods to drive traffic. This has only served to further unsettle the masses because it infers that those canned were using legitimate SEO techniques to generate organic search engine traffic.

In other words, what every other legitimate affiliate is doing.

Who Knows Who's Next?

Further fear grew as reports started filtering through that a number of the expired affiliates had been loyal partners who had been with eBay for many years and were generating revenue in the field of more than $10,000 per month. These are significant numbers and would have had to come from sites sitting very high in the SERPs.

This probably means eBay has made enemies of a group of people who are very SEO savvy and these people are now likely going to drive significant chunks of traffic away from eBay. Couple that with the hordes of affiliates who, I imagine, are now turning to alternative, more stable, stores such as Amazon to send traffic and I would think that eBay will feel some fallout from this unfeeling move.

As the hysteria was building, another message came through from eBay which, if it can be believed, may ease the minds of a few people.

According to Steve, the eBay correspondent:

Regarding the “unbans”, we’re looking through all of the emails that we’ve received and are making calls on a case-by-case basis by reviewing the sites in detail as well as the metrics….
Also, to provide a little context for the actions that were taken on Aug 20th, we expired less than 300 publisher accounts. While this does not diminish the impact on the affiliates who were affected, it’s a small fraction of the over 90,000 accounts that were activated since eBay Partner Network launched. Moving forward, we want to make sure we’re working as directly as possible with our affiliates by giving more reporting and insights into performance.

However, it still doesn’t excuse the way in which eBay chose to simply expire accounts without disclosing the conditions that they would like to be met and without warning those affiliates who were being targeted so that they might have a chance to work to meet the conditions.

Speaking personally, when I first heard of the culling I thought it was the beginning of the end (it still might be). The wind certainly went out of my sails and the vigor with which I went about building my latest niche store fell away. I’m only 3 months into this caper and August has been a good month for me, having earned more than $500 so far. I’ve left myself open by not yet diversifying my money making ventures, so I’m using it as a warning to line up more options.

But it also highlighted the importance of getting my stores to the top of the SERPs. If / when I do that, it won’t matter quite so much if I lose my EPN account because I would then be capable of chasing my own leads and offering my site for lease based simply on the fact that I am outranking everyone else.

So I have come out of this experience with a resolve to redouble my efforts to work harder on my stores. It has motivated me to build links, add content and maximize my store’s potential.

An Exercise in SEO - Day 1

2008-08-23T22:29:00.001+10:00

I’m documenting the process that I’m going through in a 1 month SEO campaign to take my BANS store from a plain vanilla shell through to a store that attracts a steady stream of organic search engine traffic.

On the first day of the campaign I started off by submitting the site to 10 directory sites. I’ll be doing this as my first task each day. By the end of the campaign I’ll have submitted the store to 300 directories which may give me 10 – 20 links if I’m lucky. It’s all a numbers game and it’s a quick and easy task that may pay off down the track but I don’t expect it to affect the site’s ranking too much.

My next task certainly will affect the search engines. I have added 18 new store pages, each of them containing a different category related to the product I am selling. So far I haven’t added any content to the pages but every URL contains my keyword, as do the meta tags, description and an H1 page header. Every new page will reinforce the relevance of the site for my keyword and is internally linked in a couple of places for good measure.

Statistics After Day 1

Checking my Statcounter stats at the end of Day 1 and I see that there were 43 unique visitors for the day. This could just be a coincidental spike or it could have been a result of a greater presence in the SERPs because of the extra pages. Whatever the case it is a significant jump from the average of 10 unique visitors per day from before. We’ll see how it progresses over the next four weeks.

Moving over to the EPN stats and there were 10 click-throughs for the day which is around average to this point. I hardly expect the clicks to change much yet.

It has only been 1 day and the store is already much bigger and has a lot of potential to be picked up in the search engines. There is still plenty of work to do yet.

An Exercise in SEO

2008-08-22T16:16:00.002+10:00

I have just started intensively concentrating on my next store campaign and realised that this would be a great opportunity to track exactly what effect the work that I am doing is having in terms of traffic coming into the site.

To give you an idea of where I am starting, the store I am about to start working on is in the jewellery niche and the products range in price from below the $1 mark up to the several hundred dollar region. It’s the sort of niche that can potentially get a lot of visitors every day.

I bought the domain back on July 20, put BANS on it, added a little bit of content to each store page and then left it alone while I concentrated on another store for the month. I have done no link building, nor have I added any extra pages to it. I also haven’t done anything to make it a visually pleasing site.

Checking my Statcounter stats, the store has received an average of 10 unique visitors per day over the last month and according to EPN, there have been an average of 8 clicks per day. Pretty abysmal traffic stats, but then, that’s to be expected when you do absolutely no work on your website. It gives us a good baseline starting point.

Over the next month I will try to regularly update the progress that the site is making. I will:

list all of the actions I have taken to boost traffic to the site (links, content, on-site SEO)
report on the statistics to track whether there is any noticeable increase in traffic.

I have no doubt that the traffic is going to increase but by tracking it as it happens we might get a feel for what kind of a lag we can expect between adding content or building links and seeing it reflected in the search engine.

Because this is a reasonably new website there is also a chance that it may find itself in the sandbox. If that happens we’ll see how that affects the results too.

A Monetary Milestone Passed

2008-08-11T13:21:00.001+10:00

I’m still very early on in my endeavours to make some money online, slowly building up my stable of websites, learning all I can about SEO, getting used to building linking strategies and figuring a few things out through a process of trial and error. I’m happy enough to muddle along with my limited time and experience, slowly increasing my average daily earnings and relying on the power of persistence to see me succeed. I’m quite comfortable with the fact that other people are making more money than me and that I could be making more if I simply did x, y and z. The fact is, I’m enjoying the feeling of achievement as I hit each small milestone that I set for myself and taking note of what works and what doesn’t.

The latest noteworthy event last week was my first $50+ day. For most people working the internet for profits, I suspect that this would seem a terribly small figure and my hope is that in a year’s time I will also consider a $50 day to be a bad day. But for right now it’s a figure that is cause for celebration. For the first time I was able to look back on the work I had put into my money and accompanying sites and appreciated the growth that they have achieved. A very encouraging aspect is that my oldest site is only 6 months old and still has plenty of maturing to do.

Adsense Earnings Increasing

I began with 3 blogs that I set up in narrow niches and put some Adsense ads on them with the intention of taking them to the top of the SERPs where they would chug away earning me a handy packet of passive income. (Haven’t we all?) As many would know, it’s not quite that simple and it takes a lot of dedicated work to make a mark in the SERPs depending on the niche you choose. But the money is there and it is starting to flow for me.

One of the original 3 sites has been neglected somewhat I must confess. As a result it is languishing, lost among the also ran sites waiting for the day I find the time to dust it off and hit it with some good fresh keyword-rich content. In the meantime it owes me absolutely nothing because, even with my inattention, the site has earned me back the cost of registering the domain. So it’s one of my sites that still has a lot of unrealised potential.

A second site has really taken off, earning good money every day and building a solid flow of customer traffic each day. The ironic thing is that the bulk of the income doesn’t come from the Adsense ads that I created the site for. Instead I happened to stumble across a closely related keyword phrase that I ranked well for and brought in the targeted traffic – it was a niche within a niche. I’ve really struck gold by sticking a BANS store on the back of the blog which has used the keyword authority that the site had already built and benefited from the SEO features built into the BANS package to immediately nail the search engine for long tail keywords.

The 3rd of my original money sites is quickly developing into an authority blog that requires constant posts to keep it relevant and up to date. It’s a site that is probably taking up more of my time than it should, but then, the traffic is building and the income is growing along with it. Not only that, but I’m learning quite a lot through the research I have to do to get content for it.

So 3 main money sites built to take advantage of the targeted traffic that Adsense ads are ideal for and I’ve intentionally kept my initial goal low by aiming to average $1 per day with each of them. The thing is, the monetary goal is not the focus of these sites. It’s the goal to attract visitors and not just any visitors but specifically targeted visitors who are looking for the kinds of info that the sites contain.

From my short experience, the advice I have been given about Adsense is holding true. The way to earn money with Adsense is to increase the traffic to the site. As the traffic grows, so do the Adsense earnings.

BANS Sites Hold Much Promise

The BANS sites have definitely fast-tracked both my progress and my expectations. Once again I have been able to leverage off the traffic already generated by the work put in when setting up the Adsense sites. Consistent traffic is working just as well with my BANS sites. It is still way to early to tell just how much potential my BANS sites have but the traffic have been very encouraging already. By the way, I’m not talking about thousands of visitors a day here, I’m only talking about 100 – 200 visitors, but because they are actively searching for the products my niches target I am receiving a nice steady flow of income.

So a milestone has passed. I have lots of other milestones set up along the way to my ultimate long-term goal. In reality, the monetary goals are simply a way of confirming the fact that my traffic goals are being met. It also provides a fresh incentive injection as it reinforces the belief that what I am doing is obviously working.

Rebuilding A BANS Store Progress

2008-07-31T11:07:00.005+10:00

A week ago I lost my dot info BANS stores and made the decision to buy equivalent dot com domains to replace them. Actually, to say I lost them is not entirely accurate, the stores are still there, they’ve just been de-indexed by Google’s search engine as part of the anti-spamming “cleansing” being carried out. Yahoo and MSN still rank the stores so the traffic trickles in, but nothing like the numbers I was getting when they were Google indexed.

I’ll be the first to admit, I made a couple of mistakes with the first set of BANS stores I attempted. I bought 20 domains at once, way more than I could comfortably handle effectively diluting my attention to the point where I didn’t know which store to focus on and eventually getting paralysed by what I could see as a formidable task ahead of me. The second mistake wasn’t really my fault because I bought the cheap dot info domains in good faith.

Anyway, I’ve been far more restrained this time and have set to work rebuilding my 2 most promising stores. The first I have thrown myself into with a concerted effort to add as many pages with as much content as I could so that the site itself can be considered useful even disregarding the fact that it sells products via EBay. It already has 55 pages worth of products with another 100 planned over the next 4 weeks.

The early indications are promising and a few days ago, 5 days after creating the new store, the first trickle has been received and, as of yesterday, this particular domain has turned profitable.

As far as I am concerned, money at this point in proceedings is an absolute bonus because I have given myself 2 months to get the store to the point where I had planned to cut it loose to become a passive income earner. I’m still heavily into store page creation and, with over 100 product pages still to add I am expecting to pick up a wide range of search traffic through the long tails I will be generating. Four more weeks of page building and then I can move on to building pages on the second BANS store. This second store incidentally has been created and is currently aging naturally so that, in a month’s time when content is added to it, Google will be more than happy to crawl and index the new pages.

Changing The BANS Home Page

One of the first steps I took when undergoing Rebuild #1 was to remove the auctions from my store’s Home Page. This page is now filled with 1) keyword rich content explaining what the customer can expect to find in the store, and 2) links in the form of product logos that allow the customer to navigate directly to the make of the product in which the store is specialising. This serves three beneficial purposes, the first is that the added content gives me more opportunity to pick up search engine traffic, the second is that, when listed on the search engine pages my site will look like an information-rich site and finally, it makes the store look less like a BANS site.

The Secret of Success

Throughout this rebuilding process I am doing my damnedest to adhere to the single greatest principle to achieving success. It’s the key ingredient to making money online, not only with BANS stores but with any endeavour in which your goals are ambitious. The key is persistence.

If you get nothing else out of this little diatribe, take to the bank that you will succeed in whatever you do if you persist at it.

I have made a commitment to myself to take some sort of action, no matter how small, that will take me closer towards my goal. That action can be anything at all – a blog entry, a new store page, updating a Meta tag on a store page, a link to one of my store pages…anything. Small steps will take you great distances if you take enough small steps.

I’ve been actively working on making money online for 6 months now with limited time availability and minimal budget. I’ve come from a base earnings of absolute zero and can look back now and appreciate the power of all of those small steps I’ve taken. My daily income has grown from a couple of cents per day, up to $1.75 per day in June and over $7 per day this month. This comes largely from 3 sites, 2 of which are BANS and only one of the BANS sites has been around longer than a week. None of my sites have hit page 1 on Google for my targeted keywords, so I still have plenty of untapped potential to keep me motivated to continue taking small steps every day. So far I have dedicated a good whack of my time to 2 BANS stores in particular and they are growing strongly both in the number of unique visitors and revenue produced.

Negative Factors to Overcome

Rather than concern myself over the kinds of things I see others obsess about when I visit the BANS forum – things such as whether the site is sandboxed, whether enough links have been gathered, whether the links have taken effect, whether Google is crawling the site often enough for my liking, whether the niche is too broad or too narrow. None of these things really matter as long as you are prepared to add a little bit (or a lot) of content every day, the store will begin to snowball like you wouldn’t even dare to believe.

Remember, the first couple of months are the toughest as you continually doubt yourself and the work you are putting in. Momentum works wonders the world over and it’s just as effective here too.

To all of those people who are concerned because their store has been placed into the Google sandbox, traffic has dwindled and they’ve become discouraged to the point of giving up I have 2 recommendations. Either add as many pages of keyword rich content as you can while you’re waiting to come out or, if you’ve exhausted all of the products and topics you can, build another store. If you throw yourself wholeheartedly into the next store, by the time you’ve brought that one up to full functionality, the first store will most likely have emerged from the sandbox and be generating good traffic.

A Superb Resource for BANS Store Owners

There are many people creating BANS stores (you just have to do a quick search on Google for proof of that) and there are many factors to consider if you want to succeed in setting up a steady income stream from them. One of the greatest resources for a BANS store owner (in my opinion) is the Build A Niche Store Blog that is maintained by a bloke who absolutely knows what he’s talking about. He is currently mentoring someone and posting the steps they are taking to take a site from lowly also-ran to search engine darling. The blog is invaluable and everyone who owns a BANS site should bookmark it or add it to their RSS feedreader.

The Change From Dot Info to Dot Com is Underway

2008-07-23T15:44:00.003+10:00

My reconstruction of dot info sites into dot com sites has gotten off to a strong start. I’ve set up the first 2 stores and have performed the most important task when it comes to creating a BANS store and that is to replace every single piece of default data – meta titles, meta description, etc.

Restarting has also given me the opportunity to revisit every single page of my store and make improvements to some of the meta tags that weren’t as strong as they could have been. This highlights a task that all BANS store owners could probably perform on a quarterly or half-yearly basis.

I’ve also taken this opportunity – I’m looking at the rebuild as an opportunity rather than a disaster – to adjust a couple of my niches a fraction. I realised that a couple of the original dot info stores were aimed too broadly so I have changed the domain names to zero in on more specific keywords. The idea is to completely dominate a narrower niche rather than struggle to rank well for a wide-ranging niche.

My next step is to revisit my accompanying blogs and websites to adjust the links I had sent out and point them at my new stores. I will also create new blogs to hang off the back of the BANS sites on the new dot com domains. These blogs will assist in increasing the content making it even more attractive to the Google bot. The word is that Google likes Wordpress at the moment and so I expect that a Wordpress blog will help in getting pages indexed quickly and the keywords I will rank for will widen significantly.

I’m still very much in the learning stages when it comes to BANS stores, make no mistake about that, so there’s probably lots that I could be doing better to increase traffic and sales. However, the store that I have had particular success with is a BANS store that I have created with a close association with an established blog. I’ve created advertising banners (just knocked them up in Word) that link to my store and splashed them all over my blog. The banners sort of look like proper affiliate ads, so it’s as if I am linking to a “real” store. I have also taken to devoting the occasional blog post specifically to a product or group of products in the store. This serves the dual purpose of increasing my ranking authority for the particular product as well as helpfully directing potential customers to a place where they can buy these great products.

The Move Away from Dot Info

2008-07-21T01:01:00.001+10:00

It feels as though there is a certain inevitability about what I’m about to post about.

Once again Google has asserted its disgraceful collateral damage-filled approach to its indexing policy with regard to dot info domains. Two more of my sites have been de-indexed over the last couple of days, both of them have BANS installed onto them but both are absolutely loaded with relevant and unique content. Not coincidentally both sites have been picking up links over the last couple of weeks, although only at the rate of around 1 per day at most.

I have some more dot info sites that have BANS loaded onto them but I have done absolutely nothing to them to try to boost traffic and they remain indexed. It appears that the powers that be at Google are quite happy with BANS sites as long as there are no links coming into them. Get a link and you get de-indexed.

I know when enough’s enough. I’ve got 4 or 5 great sites with plenty of content on them and all of them have the potential to earn good consistent money, the proof is in the consistent money I am making from my dot com BANS stores. I’ve conducted my experiment to see if I could salvage the dot info stores and the results tell me to do the smart thing and buy the dot com versions of the domains I already have as dot infos. The content I put together so diligently in setting up the dot info stores can be copied into the new store, after all, the original isn’t indexed so as far as Google is concerned it doesn’t exist. Duplicate content won’t be an issue.

I suppose it serves me right to a certain extent, I probably shouldn’t have skimped on price in buying the 99c dot info domains. But then again there should be no prejudice against a certain TLD just because of a few blackhat creeps. I daresay Google has affected the sties of more legitimate people than otherwise with this blanket de-listing approach.

So what this means is that I am embarking on an intensive rebuilding program over the next month in which I am going to set up 3 new stores, copying the content from my existing de-listed dot info sites. Added to this I am going to set up 2 new stores on the back of existing blogs, one of which gets over 100 unique visitors per day, the other gets around 5-10 uniques per day. And finally, I’ll be getting around to setting up a site that I have had sitting around for 1 month but have been too busy concentrating on building up the couple of dot info sites that have now had the rug pulled out from under them.

In order to help keep me focused on what I should be doing, i.e. putting in work on the sites every day, I will try to maintain a log of what I have done each day and recording it here at the Snickering site.

I aim to have all 6 new stores up and running in 1 month’s time. After this I will concentrate on building links but the top priority is to begin the aging process.

A Little SEO Knowledge Is Dangerous

2008-07-15T16:24:00.002+10:00

Motivation is one of those energies that must constantly be fed to keep it burning bright. It’s also very fragile and is prone to being shattered, particularly if we feel we are being starved of positive reinforcement. The beginning of a new on-line project is sparked by the liberal doses of motivation with all sorts of plans, hopes and aspirations fuelling the flames.

The initial motivation often serves to get the website up and running, the framework is put in place, some content is added and maybe a few backlinks are generated. But it’s often at this point that the motivation begins to dry up. The updates tend to drop off as it all starts to feel a bit too hard, so instead of building on the early work, the project slowly fades away.

But fortunately for bloggers, this is not the end. For, while the blog may be neglected by the owner, an interesting phenomenon is taking place. The blog is aging and in so doing, in the eyes of Google, is increasing in importance and authority. As long as the blogger regains interest in the blog and begins posting again they will find, as if by magic, that their posts land quite high in the search engine rankings.

A little bit of SEO knowledge is an interesting thing, and it can have a destructive effect on your productiveness. Most of us, when we begin our blogging careers do it for fun, to express ourselves or to share our passions. Very few of us give a bugger about our position on the search engine rankings or even try to Google ourselves to see where on the SERPs we are. Instead our energies were 100% focused on one thing, writing the next blog entry meaning we were doing the number one activity to increase traffic to your blog.

These days I continually see forum questions from people who have recently started a new blog (usually their 5th or 6th blog) expressing frustration over the fact that their site hasn’t been indexed yet. Invariably they have written 1 post and then spent the rest of their time linking to it via a social site followed by checking in Google every hour. This is not going to increase the content on your site which in turn will not bring the Google bot calling and checking every hour certainly won’t get it indexed any quicker.

If anything constantly checking your progress up the SERPs or the number of backlinks you’re credited with will have a de-motivating effect on you. Until you’re number 1 it will never seem like things are happening quickly enough, particularly if you’re stewing over it on a daily basis.

So the message that I am attempting to convey in a very round about manner is to trust in the work that you are putting in. Your site WILL get indexed, your ranking for your targeted keywords WILL rise, the backlinks you build WILL count. It will all happen when it happens and it will seem to happen even more quickly if you transfer your obsession for checking your stats across to an obsession for writing your next post.

Hope For Dot Info Domain Owners

2008-07-07T09:40:00.004+10:00

I may be getting way ahead of myself here and could be setting myself up for a bitter disappointment but it seems as though my dot info websites are all beginning to get indexed by Google. I bought 20 dot info domains back at the start of April with the intention of setting up BANS Stores on them. My plan was to set them all up so that the aging process would begin immediately and then go through them one at a time to add content and build links to them. Like everyone else, I have felt the sting of Google’s reticence to index dot info sites.

The reason for my muted celebrations is because I have experienced the flush of pleasure in seeing 3 of my dot info sites quickly indexed only to have them de-indexed a week or so later. I’ve also read reports from other people experiencing the same thing. My hope is that this time it’s different because I’ve taken a different approach with my remaining sites.

On each of the occasions in which my dot info site was briefly indexed and then de-indexed, I had created links to my sites using various social media sites (such as Propeller). As many know, submitting your new site to the social media invariably results in fast indexing and all is well. This was the case with all 3 sites – they were quickly indexed and appeared to be doing well. Then a week later a check with Google (using the site://…) command revealed that each site had disappeared.

Meanwhile, the remaining 17 dot info sites went unindexed and I did very little to them as I concentrated on other projects. After my experience with the first 3 sites I was very hesitant to actively build links to them or do anything that may be considered “unnatural”. The only action I took was to add content pages to give as many keywords as possible for the bots to find.

As I said earlier, I noticed in my stats that a trickle of traffic has started to flow in to each of the neglected sites and so far, all of these sites remain indexed. I have turned my attention to these new sites once again and have begun to increase the content on each of them and am gathering links at a very modest rate.

From my own experience here is my theory on what is happening to dot info sites.

There are no problems in getting your dot info site indexed quickly using the well documented route of linking from a high PR site like the many social media sites that abound the web. But in so doing the site comes under close scrutiny, possibly even through a manual inspection (?) and if they don’t measure up or if they look like a thin affiliate site they get thrown into the sandbox to do their penance.

The sites that you are patient with up front and wait for the Google Bot to visit naturally will take longer to be indexed but once added will remain indexed (as long as the site itself and the links are above board).

It has taken almost 3 months so it’s going to take immeasurable patience and perseverance but the attitude you have to take is that the time spent waiting for the site to be indexed is valuable in giving you the opportunity to create loads of keyword rich content and internal links. It’s difficult to stay motivated for that long without seeing any return, but just think of the head start you’ll have with a website that is indexed with 3 months worth of content and the initial push up the Google SERPs you’ll be getting.

The intention of this post is meant to be a letter of encouragement to all of the people out there who are afraid that the dot info domains they’ve bought have been money down the drain. Already, 3 of the newly indexed stores have earned enough revenue to cover the cost of the domains.

However, my cautious optimism is still firmly in place. Google appears to be constantly adjusting the criteria for indexing and ranking and there’s really no telling whether the crackdown on dot info sites is still in place or whether it’s been eased or removed altogether. As things stand the 3 sites of mine that have been indexed and de-indexed are now the only ones not in the Google SERPs. My feeling is that they’ve been sandboxed, perhaps for 3 months, but they will eventually show up. I’ll be periodically adding content to each site in preparation for their reappearance.

Certain Backlinks Every Day

2008-07-04T14:08:00.001+10:00

I’ve latched on to Google’s Matt Cutts talk with USA Today and I’m going to wring it until its bone dry. I believe there is a workable strategy in following the advice he gives out when he says words to the effect of : “With a blog you can link back to your site and offer links to others.”

This little statement was rather intriguing to me and had me wondering whether I should rethink my entire strategy for building back links. It has opened my eyes to the fact that, without consciously thinking about it I have done exactly as Cutts suggested with a static site of mine. Perhaps it’s because this particular site was purely done for my own enjoyment rather than as a conscious attempt to drive a lot of traffic but I never really gave a lot of thought to building links to improve its ranking. My site is largely a list of links that leads to author bibliographies and book reviews listed on the inside pages. At some point I decided I also wanted to add a news service but felt the format wouldn’t easily fit on the static site. The answer was to create a companion blog which I started on a spare Blogger blog I had lying around.

By necessity most of the posts that go into this blog contain links back to my original website, which is natural because I made no bones about the fact that the sites were closely related. Whenever I discuss a particular author or a new book release or even the book I’m currently reading I link back to the related page on the other site.

The result today is that I now have 2 PR4 sites that are both ranked on page 1 for the main keyword I deal with not to mention numerous page 1 rankings for long tail keywords. It was all done legitimately, it involved many blog posts and deep links sent back to the same site.

So what does this mean for people trying to promote their sites up the search engine rankings? My feeling is that if I can produce these kinds of results without even thinking about it I should be able to replicate it by making a conscious effort to maintain a blog devoted to expanding the information contained on a static site.

So, ever the curious one, I have decided to start a blog that will be devoted solely to sending links to one of my static sites. I’m going to apply this little theory of mine to a niche store posting legitimate, useful content on a daily basis with at least 1 link pointing back to my website. Each post will be at least 150 words long to ensure that it contains meaningful content.

I’m going to be looking at 2 factors after 6 months of persisting with this strategy. I want to see what the Page Rank is for each site and, of course, I want to see how well both sites have done in the Google SERPs.

I believe I can produce a week’s worth of blog posts in one evening of writing, so maintaining the schedule of posts should not prove too arduous. The worst that can come out of this is that the sites won’t rank highly on Google. If that’s the case I’ll still have a couple of sites with 6 months of age on them that can be used for other enterprises.

I’m also going to try a blogging platform I haven’t used before. I’ve opened an account with Blogsome.com and will be trying out the free service. From what I can see it very closely resembles Wordpress but it comes with the bonus of the availability of many of the domain names that have long been taken by Blogger and Wordpress. That means I was able to create the blog using a domain name that matched the keyword I will be targeting. Very nice. The major drawback I can see with using Blogsome is that it doesn’t have Widgets enabled so you won’t be able to put any ads on the site. (If I’m wrong about this, please feel free to correct me in the comments).

I will add one more thing to this post. Maintaining a companion blog to your primary site should just be one of the ways you build back links. The more links you build, the more quickly you’re going to rise up the rankings, there’s nothing wrong with going out and getting whatever links you can. I just have a few concerns about some of the methods people advocate around the traps. Google is forever closing down the relevance of certain backlinks allowing these, disallowing those. If Matt Cutts is advocating a certain method for getting links to your site, then that’s the method I’m going to focus on.

The Secret of Persistence

2008-07-01T10:50:00.001+10:00

If you hang around the Internet for long enough, particularly reading the blogs and forums related to the whole Make Money Online and SEO niches and you frequently encounter newcomers filled with enthusiasm and expectation. You see a few posts from them, questions about how they can improve their blogs to increase traffic and occasionally a proclamation of what they plan to do in the future.

A visit to their website / blog a month later invariably reveals an abandoned site. It may have proved too hard to maintain, they may have become disheartened because they didn’t meet with immediate success or they simply found another interest.

Whatever the reason, they failed to meet the only criteria that will ensure success – persistence.

The secret of success is constancy to purpose. - Benjamin Disraeli

Naturally, there are many ways of measuring success and you may become successful in a completely different area to the one you were aiming at when you started out. After all, as you become more involved in the process of keyword optimization and building your online presence a whole world of possibilities begins to open up in front of you. It’s only natural that your focus might shift a little.

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen. - Frank Lloyd Wright

In my previous post I pointed out how simple it really is to get strong, relevant backlinks for your site every single day. The only obstacle standing in your way is your own persistence. If you are prepared to set aside 15 – 20 minutes per blog every day you will succeed in building the kind of links most people complain they can’t get. Just think, the mere quality of persistence will result in 365 posts after 1 year, all perfectly optimized with authority for the keywords your primary website is looking for.

How Will Persistence Lead To Success?

My first blog was about books. I am an avid reader and wanted an outlet to share my enthusiasm for the books I was reading. I knew nothing about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or how to get ranked highly by Google. Nor did I care. My blog was my own and if no-one read it, big deal. There was no such thing as a posting schedule or a To Do list, I simply read a book and wrote my thoughts about it. But I did it very regularly. When the first comments started rolling in, it occurred to me to do a little investigating about where they came from and how they found my site.

Almost by osmosis I began to learn about search traffic and how to maximize your ranking. The key ingredient behind it all was persisting with the blog. To do something every day, either directly or indirectly, to improve the site’s authority and ranking ensured the site’s success. It (almost) goes without saying that if I had discontinued writing the blog it would not be seen anywhere in Google’s search engine. As it is, I currently hold the first 3 positions on page 1 for my main keyword.

What has gone largely unspoken here is all of the SEO tips, techniques, hints and ploys I have picked up along the way that has helped me to optimize my sites to give myself the best chance to rank highly. But that’s all part of the package of persistence. If I hadn’t have kept plugging away at these sites and been interested enough to read other blogs and put them to use, the success would not have followed.

Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish. - John Quincy Adams

The bottom line is to try to do something, no matter how small or insignificant it might be, to your blog or website every day. It doesn’t have to be an earth-shatteringly important post, it can be as simple as taking a few random notes about something you observed. These notes might become the germ of an idea for your next post.

Whatever it might be, remember that a lot of small pieces add up to one giant, significant piece of work.

Google Upheaval (and Other Conspiracies)

2008-06-26T14:23:00.003+10:00

Speculation is rippling around the Internet in waves of concern over the latest perceived shenanigans from Google. Could it be that Google’s own Blogger blogs are now the latest websites to be devalued in the Google SERPs?

There have been reports of wild swings in the rankings of Blogspot blogs where sites are jumping from page 1 to page 6 and back again. Someone’s playing with the algorithm, possibly disallowing certain types of backlinks to see what happens. Meanwhile, I think we could be fast bearing down on the next Page Rank adjustment.

Something that I have noticed is that Google seems to be picking and choosing which backlinks are going to be counted in the search engine rankings. I get this merely by analyzing my own sites, knowing which links I have tried to collect and which ones are showing up.

Now this next part may simply be filed under conspiracy theory or, perhaps you’re about to be hit by a dose of reality.

What many people seem to forget is that all of the great advice, tips and tricks that are published by authority blogs are also available for Google employees to read. So no sooner does the latest, greatest sure-fire tips on how to get indexed within 10 minutes hit the airwaves than Google has the opportunity to examine it and decide on whether it’s a legitimate use of their search engine.

I suspect Google considers some of the biggest authority bloggers out there as some of their most valuable employees and they don’t have to pay them a cent in income. These busy beavers are toiling away around the world 24 hours a day trying to come up with the next piece of link bait that will have traffic flocking to their site. Articles such as “10 Tips For Instant Google Indexing” or “15 Surefire Backlink Tips Google Will Love” might reveal some brilliantly innovative methods for tearing up the Google SERPs, but they may also highlight grey hat techniques that take advantage of an undiscovered back door hole in the system.

I’ve seen one such instance where I know for sure that this scenario has taken place, I’m sure there have been plenty of others.

* * * * * * *

I have no doubt that the latest trouble many people have been having with getting dot info sites indexed on Google is a direct result of: 1. The cheap sale of domains by GoDaddy.com, and; 2. By people being advised to build up to 100 BANS sites using the dot info domains.

The people at Google know damn well that it’s not possible for 1 person to start 100 sites and set them all up as high quality, meaningful sites that will add value. So what they have on their hands is a sudden influx of thin affiliate sites that will be poorly constructed, most likely neglected and about as near to spam as you’re going to get without actually being spam.

So the reaction from Google, which I hope is just a short-term solution, is to de-index any dot info site that has the look of a BANS / thin affiliate site. Perhaps there’s a content requirement to meet, perhaps there isn’t but from what I’ve heard, people who only have blogs on their dot info sites aren’t experiencing the indexing problems of those with BANS.

* * * * * * *

As Matt Cutts pointed out in the recent USA Today article, it’s not so hard to build back links to a website you’re trying to rank highly with, you simply create a free blog using Blogger or Wordpress and make regular posts linking to your primary site. While everyone else is racing around buying links, submitting to directories, subscribing to every social bookmarking site possible, Matt Cutts simply points us all in the direction we should be concentrating our time and attention on.

And when you think about all the time you spend trying to build links that are fairly poorly optimized to your niche (directories, forum comments, social media) it makes a hell of a lot of sense to use the time to write 1 post per day that sends a deep link (or more) to your own site. You control the anchor text, you control which page you link to meanwhile your secondary blog is gaining authority.

After 1 month your secondary blog will have 30 pages of content, each and every one will be optimized to the keywords of your main site. The links sent out will be full of keyword authority, when the PRs come around your secondary site should pick up a reasonably strong Page Rank giving the links even greater authority. Surely it’s a can’t lose plan – but I’ll bet you virtually no-one is maintaining a secondary blog for each of their main blogs. I’ll bet you most people are scampering around trying to create those crappy, low authority, low link juice backlinks instead.

De-indexing Dot Info Domains

2008-06-22T21:24:00.000+10:00

It has been a pretty turbulent wee for me this week as I’ve copped blow after blow to each of my money blog enterprises. Just as I reconciled myself to the fact that I will be without Adsense for at least 3 weeks I’ve found another way in which I earn money has been rudely snatched from me – again by Google.

Against my better judgement I have bough a string of dot info domains and set them up as store fronts for Ebay – in other words, BANS sites. We all know the difficulty everyone has been having in getting dot info domains indexed, it’s been well documented around the web. I was determined to do whatever I could to convince Google that my dot info sites were legitimate sites in a bid to get them indexed.

I added a blog to the back of the store and began posting content to it, along with links into the store. I wrote articles linking back to the store. I added the link to a couple of social websites and built a few more links from other sources. While doing all of this I kept adding content to the site itself.

The result was that my dot info site was indexed and ranked pretty highly on an uncompetitive niche. I began picking up traffic almost immediately and made a couple of sales within the first 5 days. It was all looking very promising until suddenly, the site was completely de-indexed from Google. It’s nowhere and the traffic was immediately cut off too. Google sandbox maybe? The complete disappearance of the site from the index makes me think it’s more than that.

The small consolation is that the site exists in the Yahoo and MSN search engines…very small consolation. The traffic is virtually nil but at least there’s something coming in.

I have a couple of choices if I want to salvage this particular store, which I’d like to try because I’ve put a fair amount of work into it and it was promising to be quite a profitable one. The first option is to start all over again with a dot com domain and a 301 redirect from the dot info site to the new one. I don’t particularly want to lose the age of the site that has been built into it. You never know, Google might come to its senses and ease up on what looks like a blanket ban on dot info sites.

My second choice is to create a Blogger blog targeting the niche by acting as a landing page with reasonable content attached. I could then invite visitors to enter the store if they want to buy such and such a product. The advantages of choosing this option are that it’s free and, in all likelihood, I would be able to choose a domain name that will contain my keyword. The downside is that the site will have no age on it, a factor that seems to sit very highly on Google’s list of preferences.

My final solution, and the one I have chosen for the short term is to use one of my old general blogs that I had lying around. It was doing nothing so I dusted it off and began posting keyword rich content that is relevant to the store. I’ve found in the past that posts on this site tends to get indexed very quickly and can rank quite highly for these less competitive keywords. I’m hoping that after a few days of good, keyword rich, relevant content I’ll be able to bring a reasonable flow of traffic into my store. The early result looks promising with the first post sitting on page 2 only an hour after posting.

So, as far as it goes, there’s more than one way to skin a de-indexed cat. Although the number of visitors who actually get through to my store will be diluted it’s better than the zero that came through immediately after it disappeared.

* * * * * *

It’s a couple of days later and I’ve been doing a bit of reading on various blogs and forums and I’ve read case after case where the exact situation that I’m in has been experienced by others. The whole dot info thing seems to have moved beyond what I would consider a normal case of Google sandboxing. It seems that Google is slapping every dot info site that looks like a store front rather than an information site. A further observation that has continually been pointed out is that there has been some serious reshuffling going on in the Google SERPs.

Sites that have been sitting on page 1 on Google for a particular keyword, a position that they have occupied for quite some time, are suddenly slipping to page 6. At the same time these sites have experienced no corresponding loss of ranking for their long tail keyword rank. The speculation is that Google has made another adjustment in the criteria it uses to determine a site’s true worth and relevance. Perhaps multiple links with the same anchor text or originating from the same source are no longer being counted. Who knows.

The thing is, if your site resembles what Google regards as a spam site you’re going to lose your ranking position until it becomes clear what the problem was.

So it looks like the game continues. Black hatters look for ways to game Google, Google makes the necessary adjustments to catch the cheats and ensure the integrity of its search engine and we are caught in the crossfire dodging and weaving and praying to God our traffic doesn’t disappear overnight.

Making Money With Niches

2008-06-17T08:19:00.001+10:00

Niche Possibilities

Anyone who has doubts about whether it’s possible to an online profit might be interested in this story about one of my websites. In actual fact it’s a story about the first domain I bought with the intention of turning it into a niche site to make a profit.

Because this was my first attempt to make some money it was sort of a trial to find out whether I could stick at something like this long enough to actually make it work. I did a little bit of rudimentary keyword analysis and found a niche that had a couple of things going for it. It wasn’t terribly competitive and I felt I would be able to write enough content to create more than 5 or 6 pages. The downside was that the keyword I ended up choosing was only searched around 65 times per day. I decided to go ahead and take it on with the philosophy being that if I can make money with this keyword, I can make money with just about anything.

So to the figures. The competition on Google was around 215,000 sites and there were 65 daily searches according to the SEO Book Keyword Tracker. My modest aim was to make back the cost of registering the domain for a year. I figured with my limited SEO knowledge I was going to be on a steep learning curve and shouldn’t aim too high.

I started from scratch on February 1, 2008 and now, 4-and-a-half months later, I am pleased and proud to report that I have earned 3 times the initial outlay for the site. Each month the earnings have increased as has the number of visitors to the site. Despite working reasonably hard on building links I am only ranked on page 29 for my main keyword. However I am ranked on page 1 for a host of long tail and related keywords and it’s these that have drawn the traffic – or should I say it’s these that have drawn the traffic who have bought something from my site.

I have only written 16 posts for the site so you wouldn’t say that I have been diligent with the content, but the success so far has inspired me to add more on a regular basis.

The nice thing about all of this is that I wasn’t really expecting to make any money at all from the site. The benefit to me was going to come in learning what was required to rank highly in the SERPs. The site is now 1 of a growing number of money sites that I am bringing on board. The hope is that, with some careful keyword selection and a little intensive work at the start of each, the sites will be low maintenance money earners that will supply a regular stream of income each month.

As each new site is brought on and a trickle of revenue is achieved, once you begin adding all of those trickles together they have the potential of growing into a significant flood.

Adsense PINs

Cut to a few days later and the kind and friendly people at Google Adsense have switched all of my ads to Public Service ads because they tell me they have sent me a PIN Key. Unfortunately I have seen neither hide nor hair of this PIN Key. According to the Adsense rules, if the PIN Key is not entered within 4 months the ads are switched to Public Service ads.

Needless to say, I shot another request for a PIN Key straight off to Google but it looks like my Adsense revenue has been cut off at the knees for the next 3-5 weeks. All of this can be summed up by one word – bugger.

Getting .info Domains Indexed

2008-06-13T08:49:00.002+10:00

There has been quite a bit of concern, at least in the Internet circles in which I have been moving, about the way in which Google has been treating new .info domains. As you may or may not know Godaddy.com have been running a special on .info domains, selling them for USD0.99 each.

I suspect that sales for the dot info domains have been spectacular with people using the opportunity to stock up while they’re going cheap. Along with all of the legitimate purchases will have come the inevitable spammers who would see it as a golden opportunity to launch a new host of Made For Adsense sites and the like.

I further suspect that Google has also sensed that there was going to be a huge influx of spam sites out of all of this and have taken the cautious approach of sandboxing all new .info sites that it comes across.

I happened to buy a bunch of the domains myself around 2 months ago and, apart from 1 domain that was fleetingly indexed before being deindexed again, none of my new sites have been seen on Google’s SERPs. This didn’t bother me terribly much. I threw up some content on each of them so that at least they were out there with something on them which will have started the all-important maturing process. I had other projects to work on and I have learned to remain patient while my sites age and become more popular with Google. I simply treated the .info snub as a Google sandbox situation on a much more grand scale.

After spending the last 2 months completely engrossed with shooting another of my sites up the Google SERPs I returned my attention to my collection of .info sites. I selected one of them and did a quick check to see if it was indexed yet. Negative.

This was now my new project. I hit the .info site with a flurry of content and links to see what happened. It’s a niche site and I tacked a blog to the back of it, sending internal links to various pages. I submitted the site to Propeller, I linked to it from a couple of my older blogs, I began sending the URL to directory sites and I optimised the heck out of the content that was already on the site. After 2 days the payoff came when I checked on Google and found that the site is now indexed. One or more of my tactics worked a treat and I can now go ahead and add content and build links to get the ranking to improve.

The key to all of this was patience. If I didn’t have other projects to occupy my time there is one other thing I could have done which may have sped the process up. I could have added content, written articles and built links as if the site was already indexed and not concerned myself about Google. Dwelling on something like that really only serves to deflate the motivation and is inevitably counter productive.

Head down, bum up and produce keyword rich content for all it’s worth will convince Google that your site is not a spam site, has something meaningful to offer and deserves a place high in the search engine rankings.

SERPs Progress - Don't Sweat It

2008-06-10T14:38:00.000+10:00

It seems over the last couple of weeks that all of my link-building efforts for one of my revenue sites has had the exact opposite effect on the site’s ranking on Google. I should quickly add that I fully expect this to be a short term aberration and will no doubt see the site continue to climb the SERPs over the longer term.

I have been diligently adding content, writing articles and picking up backlinks to the site over the last couple of weeks only to watch it slide relentlessly lower rather than the expected improvement. There could be any number of reasons for the fall including something as simple as Google’s constant spidering that has re-ranked other sites before it has gotten to mine. However the point of this post is not so much lamenting the link building efforts that I have put in so much as a general warning not to get too caught up in the speed (or lack thereof) in which things happen in the search engine ranking arena.

Whereas my main keyword doesn’t appear to be responding from all of my link building efforts, the traffic that has come to the site has steadily increased. And the reason for this is simple, my long tail keywords have been building as I have been adding content and these long tails are ranking on page 1 or 2. There are many, many long tails generated from my site and they’re picking up all of the more specific search requests that are coming through Google.

Time wasted staring at your Google position can be better spent writing more content, turning old content into an article or even tweaking old content so that it is even more favourably optimised for the Search Engines.

Out of interest I will track the progress of the site as it moves up the rankings again in order to gain a better understanding of what will be more likely to make a difference. One sure bet is that adding more content will make a difference, particularly when the extra (keyword rich) content is joined by another important Google factor – age. The older the site gets the more authority it gains, particularly if it is updated frequently.

Why is a frequently updated site a good thing? It indicates to Google, firstly, that it is a “live” site. Secondly it stands a good chance that the content on the site is the latest, up to the minute stuff that deserves to be seated closer to the top of the SERPs (at least as far as Google knows). Thirdly, as already mentioned the more content you add to your site, the greater the variety of long tail keywords that you’ll be ranking for. Quite frankly, it’s more likely that the visitors who find you from a long tail search are the visitors who are most likely to make you some money.

When Do Backlinks Kick In

2008-06-05T13:00:00.000+10:00

I’ve noticed a few strange things to do with one of my money sites that I am in the process of gathering backlinks for. As we all know, in order to rank well on Google, after you’ve written your immaculately optimized (and highly helpful) content, in which you will have sprinkled a healthy dose of keywords, it’s all about the backlinks you can get. It’s one big backlink frenzy out there as everyone is coming up with all sorts of weird and wonderful schemes that will ensure you will get all the backlinks you need…for a price.

So I’ve been assembling my own backlinks for this site, but I’m a bit mean I must confess and am not prepared to pay for them. I’ve got the time and I’m learning heaps by going through the process. and, anyway, Google frowns on buying backlinks. I’ve been manually submitting my site URL to directory sites, commenting on blogs, participating in forums (fora?) and writing articles.

Each day I tend to concentrate on a different method of building up backlinks, although I am by no means strictly adhering to any pattern. So on Monday I might work through around 20 directories where I will submit my URL. On Tuesday I’m particularly interested in everyone else’s blogs so much so that I am moved to leave comments. On Wednesday I might turn a couple of my blog entries into 20 unique articles that are spread around the various article directories.

While all this has been going on I’ve also been watching the progress of my site as it has been steadily making its way up the SERPs. I first found my site on page 47 for my main keyword and it has been pushing its way towards number 1.

All has been seemingly going well until a few days ago when the site suddenly dropped 5 pages the day after I posted 2 blog entries and a bunch of articles linking back to the site. I was totally expecting the jump to be around the same number of pages in the other direction.

I decided to do a little investigating and checked my backlinks using the Backlink Watch site. What I found was a bit surprising but it has helped me understand a little better how the process works. Some of the directory links had come through, the forum links were there and so were the blog comment links. That’s all well and good, but these links are the least powerful links because they’re not keyword relevant to my site. The links that I was hoping to see were the article backlinks that would have had plenty of keyword authority. The result? Only 1 of my articles was found, an ArticlesBase article and it was listed as a nofollow link.

Now, I’m sure the article links will eventually kick in, although I would have thought the sites on which they were submitted would be crawled pretty frequently by the Google bot. There’s obviously other factors at play here. One thing’s for sure, my Qassia backlinks are being picked up. I had heard some speculation that the Qassia links weren’t being found but that looks to be unfounded.

Naturally, this is all more a question of timing because I can see that my older articles are showing up as providing backlink power for my other sites. So the question is, how long does it take for a backlink from an article to be picked up to pass on some juice to your site? Whatever the answer may be, if you start adding links every day, eventually they will start benefiting your site every day as they are brought to bear on the Google SERP rankings.

Some Blathering About Article Marketing

2008-06-01T15:48:00.001+10:00

While I’m waiting for a visitor to this site I have been busy writing and submitting articles to some of the more prominent article directory sites. In fact, I have a spreadsheet of over 500 article websites – most of which I will never use, of course. Instead I am registered with around 15 of the best article directories that I use to do my article marketing campaigns.

I was lucky enough to blunder onto a very informative site called Article Stop which has done a bit of the hard work and ranked what they consider to be the best 10 article sites around at the moment. Add to this another site that ranked the best 25 article sites back in 2007 and you have a pretty thorough list of quality article directories that should handle your article submission output. Most of the sites discussed have a Google PageRank of at least 4 with the majority showing a PR of 6.

In general I’ve been happy with the directories that I’ve used in terms of speed with which my articles have been published, the links I have been able to include and the reach that they have been able to provide. I don’t submit articles to get clicks back to my site but I can see that there is a fairly steady stream of traffic from them – and I generally play around in the more obscure niches.

Below I will list all of the recommended Article Directories but will also add that I recommend you visit Article Stop because it also contains an extensive list of other recommended sites that would be helpful to any writer looking for online resources.

So if you’re looking for quality, reliable article directory sites, visit some or all of these, sign up and start writing some articles.

EzineArticles.com 6
GoArticles.com 4
ArticleDashboard.com 6
SearchWarp.com 5
ArticlesBase.com 4
iSnare.com 6
SelfGrowth.com 6
Buzzle.com 6
ArticleCity.com 6
IdeaMarketers.com 4
ArticleAlley.com 5
Web-Source.net 5
SelfSEO.com 5
Amazines.com 5
ArticleTrader.com 5
SearchGuild.com 6
WebWorldIndex.com 5
ArticleSphere.com 4
BusinessKnowHow.com 6
PromotionWorld.com 6
ArticlesFactory.com 7
ExcellentGuide.com/article 6
ContentDesk.com 4
ArticleCube.com 5
AfroArticles.com 4
ArticleBiz.com 6

What I’ve found is that I can take one of my blog posts, which might run to 5 or 6 hundred words in length and turn it into a rewritten article in about 30 minutes. I then take that rewritten article, make some changes in every paragraph, give it a new opening and closing paragraph and change the article title. The 2nd article can be written in 15 – 20 minutes and it then gets submitted to a 2nd article directory. I then take the twice written article and work it over again, mutating it even further. Basically, one night’s work – which is when I have the time to work my sites – is enough to write 10 different articles all linking back to my niche site.

There is an unexpected bonus that comes from performing this iterative article marketing exercise. In working on your niche topic so intensively and forcing yourself to rewrite the same article over and over again so that it is unique each time, you invariably come up with some great new topics to add to your niche blog.

Imagine that! You’re writing and rewriting articles to promote your blog and in so doing, you’re being provided with fresh new content to add to your site which can then be marketed by writing more articles. You’ve then created your own self-saucing magic pudding, benefiting both from great content and a growing network of articles.

A Word About Getting Indexed

2008-05-28T11:04:00.003+10:00

My little blog experiment continues and I’m still in the early stages of generating as much content as I possibly can so that search engine spiders can knock themselves out, ranking the site for as many long tail keywords as possible. Speaking of the search engines, Snickering was indexed over the weekend so in the next week or so I can expect a visitor to arrive after performing a Google search. When that happens we’ll have a bit of direction about which way the blog will head.

So by simply writing 3 relatively long posts that were submitted at the conservative rate of 1 every 3 days, the site was indexed within a week. To tell the truth, this is probably a little slow for a Blogger blog – I also started a couple of other blogs following this one and they were both indexed inside 2 days. I don’t believe there’s a magic recipe that will guarantee a fast track to getting your site indexed on the Google search engine. Some people recommend getting a link from a PR3 (or better) site to get quickly indexed. I’ve seen it work sometimes, other times it hasn’t. As long as you post regularly the site will be crawled and it will appear. It’s best not to stress about exactly when it’s indexed, rather keep adding new content as if it has already happened.

When I checked my stats this morning – I use Statcounter.com by the way, it’s free and I highly recommend it for keeping track of how people have come to find your site – I can see that I have had a visitor. But when I checked the “Recent Keyword Activity” page it turned out that the visitor found me by doing a Google Blogsearch. I want to restrict the experiment to the Google search engine itself because that’s the way the majority of traffic will arrive and it’s the SERPs where the true competition lies.

For that reason I’ll let the first search term to find the site – “I am a runner” – go and maintain my vigil. Suffice it to say, though that “I am a runner” has been noted as the first keyword long tail to find Snickering.

This kind of experiment is only really possible because this blog is only one of a number that I maintain and so it’s not a website that I can devote 100% of my attention to. In that respect it’s perfect for this kind of exercise because we should have a good chance of confirming exactly how successful you can hope your site will be if your energy and attention is watered down by other projects.

Obviously the answer is going to be: not as successful as if you were 100% focussed on a single site. But perhaps we can get some firm figures about just how far behind the 8-ball you might be putting yourself.

Many people have spoken in great depth about targeting long tail keywords and it really is a great way to build towards ranking well for your main keyword. As you grab hold of a long tail and wring it for all that it is worth you are also building up your niche keyword authority by association. So, in benefiting from small traffic spikes through your long tail keywords, you’re inching progressively up the SERPs, not only in your niche keywords but in a bunch of even more long tails as well.

This brings up another point. You may never reach page 1 on Google for your chosen keyword, but you may find that it doesn’t really matter. As you continue on in your journey to make a bit on money online, you will more than likely begin picking up decent money through your high ranking in other related keywords that you hadn’t even considered at the start of your project. Speaking personally, this has happened to me on a few occasions as I’ve managed to get websites profitable just a couple of months after starting them and they were nowhere near the top of the search engines for their respective keywords. That doesn’t mean that I stop working building content and links, but it does shape the direction that I’m taking the sites into the future.

This blog differs to others in that I’m not starting with any keyword at all, so the long tails are going to be all over the shop, at least, until I’m given a bit of direction.

Benefits of Casting The Net Wide

2008-05-24T13:53:00.001+10:00

I want to share a little anecdote about a burst of traffic to one of my blogs that was completely unexpected. It’s a little example of how widely divergent content, i.e. long posts, can be an effective way of attracting visitors to your site. I hasten to add, though that in this case the visitors would have gotten absolutely nothing out of my blog and it would have been very unlikely, if I had any form of monetization on it, that I would have gained anything out of it. Actually, that’s not 100% true – I did gain something out of it, I gained a backlink (checking my stats again, I’ve actually gained 2 backlinks).

I am a runner, I run on average 5 days a week. I do it as a means of relaxation. I enjoy it and always have – I think only other runners would understand. For whatever reason, though I have never blogged about running which I have to admit is an oversight on my part because it is a pastime I know a lot about, I would have no trouble posting regularly about running, training techniques, diet for runners, running clothes and upcoming races.

So 6 days ago I decided the lack of a running blog would change. I set up a running blog and commenced talking about my running routes, the race that was coming up, where I went, what I saw, what my running goals are and training schedule. I didn’t really care whether anyone read the blog, I thought it would be useful in the future to look back and go over how I prepared for a certain race – very much like the training diary I’ve kept for many years.

So after only 5 days of blogging I was surprised to find that one of my posts had a comment on it. With a little bit more investigation I was surprised that my running blog was already indexed by Google. How did that happen?

It turns out that my last entry had been picked up by some dedicated fans who linked to my post. You see, while I was running I passed a very famous Australian actor (I’m talking Academy Award famous which should narrow things down for you) who was casually walking down the street without any accompanying pap hounding him or fan fervour. He looked very relaxed and I commented on this in my blog, simply making a comment about how great it was that he was able to walk the streets of Sydney like an average person. But the mere fact that I included his name in my post meant that his fans, who obviously scour the webosphere looking for any news they can about him picked up my post.

One popular blog linked to me and the floodgates were opened. Suddenly my 5 day old site was getting over a hundred hits a day when it would have otherwise still be awaiting its first visitor.

This is not to suggest that you go around stuffing your blog full of names of well-known actors or other popularly searched words in the hopes that you’ll be blessed by a sudden influx of visitors. What it highlights is that the more content you add, the better chance that your site will attract visitors. It’s not only the Google bot that scans your site, real people are on the lookout and if they like what they see, there’s a very good chance that they’ll use you as part of their own content.

The Value of Setting Goals

I’m a firm believer in the power of goal-setting and its effectiveness when trying to achieve tasks of significant magnitude. You can achieve absolutely anything as long as you have the vision, the time, the belief, the direction and the focus to reach your goal.

Each of these important factors is very important in being successful but often times it’s the loss of focus that can undermine your chances of success. A loss of focus can stem from a loss of self belief because it seems that no matter how hard you strive towards your goal, you never seem to be making any progress.

The key to avoiding this feeling is to break down your long-term goal into many short-term goals. The short-term goals are small, easily achievable goals that you can set yourself and each of these small goals will contribute in some way to reaching your larger goal. By focussing only on the short-term goals you will continually experience the gratifying feeling of reaching a goal and the sense of accomplishment that comes with it as you mark each one off the list. Without even noticing it you will have drawn significantly closer to your goal and it should now seem a little less daunting than it did originally.

It’s basically the old saying: “How do you eat an elephant? One mouthful at a time.”

Outlining the Experiment - Part 2

2008-05-20T14:10:00.002+10:00

Firstly, a quick recap of the purpose of this blog and what I’m hoping to achieve. If you’re reading this then you’ve obviously gone back through the archives after reading something that interested you because I’m almost certain that, at the time this was posted, I was on my Pat Malone.

I’m using this blog to derive some numbers and an accurate timeline to chart how long it takes to go from a new blog with zero traffic by consistently adding content. I don’t really want to actively build links to improve search engine rankings, but I will target specific keywords based on how search traffic reaches the blog.

The plan going forward is:

Write long posts (such as this one) outlining what I hope to do and the progress that has been made so far. The intention is to pick up a visitor who has arrived after doing a Google search.
Take the search term used to get here and target it as my main keyword until I have ranked on page 1 for it. I expect this keyword to be a long tail, and so, it won’t be particularly competitive.
Record traffic figures based on 2 metrics: age of the site and number of entries posted.

Hopefully, this will give people a useful indication of how much effort and perseverance is required before you can expect consistent traffic.

The Blog Domain Name

My first inclination was to create a domain name that was relevant to the name of the blog and do all of the recommended SEO techniques on it to try to establish a high ranking for it (after all, there’s only around 41,000 competing pages for “Blog Experiment”). But then, I don’t really want to particularly rank for Blog Experiment, I want to rank for whatever it is Google decides has become most relevant. Driving the specific direction is not what this exercise is about. So where did “snickering” come from? Well, I just opened the book I’m reading at the moment (which happens to be Hold Tight by Harlan Coben, a real corker by the way, Coben is a great author) to a random page and chose the first non-common word that caught my eye. In this case it happened to be “snickering” and it hadn’t already been taken, so snickering it is. The point of choosing an irrelevant domain name is to prove a little theory I’ve had about how unimportant the domain name actually is in respect to pulling in search traffic.

This particular part of the experiment stems from the outrage I felt when a certain so-called A-list blogger – or maybe he’s B-list and I’ve been generous – recently released an eBook espousing the virtues of the domain name and its importance to successful blogging. That he was charging $17.00 a copy was just criminal in my opinion. I had held this guy in high regard and am subscribed to his feed so that I don’t miss a post, but I was extremely disappointed at this blatant grab for cash at his readers’ expense. So we’re also going to see if I can rank highly regardless of the fact that my domain name is irrelevant (unless, of course, I go after candy bars or humorous expressions).

What Will The Experiment Deliver?

What I would like to achieve from this exercise is a solid timeframe that others can expect to follow if they were to simply add content without bothering to actively pursue backlinks. We’ve all read a lot of advice about how to build a successful blog, how to rank highly for popular keywords and how much dedication and time is required before you can expect to get results. For many it’s the last factor that proves to be their undoing.

It seems that a new blog will be born out of a welter of enthusiasm, people put in a bit of hard work and are as keen as mustard. The content will mount up, some traffic will come but it will plateau for a good while. The enthusiasm may wane or the owner may become discouraged and turn to something new, ignoring the blog. Ironically, it’s while the blog has been cast aside that it begins ripening and maturing, developing a crucial aspect that Google seems to prize, it has age on its side. Don’t underestimate the value of age.

So through this experiment I hope to provide regular progress reports about the traffic, the rankings in the SERPs and the keywords that have been picked up along the way. From this, others may develop a more realistic expectation of what they can hope to achieve and the length of time that it will take – and it’s going to take a considerable amount of time.

Adsense Optimization

A reasonably well optimized blog that targets keywords for Adsense can expect to get a Click Through Rate (CTR) of around 1%. Some people will have experienced significantly higher returns than this, others will be lower but my experience tells me that 1% is a reasonable figure. It will also provide a number that is easy to use as an example.

This means that for every 100 visitors that show up on your site, at least 1 of them will click on your Adsense ad. As the keyword optimization zeroes in more specifically at a keyword a few important factors will start to take place. The authority and relevance of your site will increase, the ads will become more relevant to what your visitors will be searching for and your ranking should also improve. Basically, everything should be aligning to enable your CTR to increase. All you need to do is continue to add keyword relevant content to your site to reiterate the authority you have begun to build. For every extra 100 people drawn to the site, statistically speaking, you should be picking up an extra click.

To get to this point, though, that’s where it gets tough. Not many people have the perseverance to stick it out, build the content and target the keywords. It’s all down to putting in the slog work, forget about the traffic figures in the early stages (apart from the keyword stats) and have patience.

Introduction to the Big Blog Experiment

2008-05-16T09:35:00.000+10:00

Welcome, you’ve just walked into my Big Blog Experiment. Actually, the name is a bit of misnomer because at the moment it’s neither big nor an experiment. So I suppose that just makes it a blog. Welcome anyway. The idea behind this blog is an attempt to find out a few things about how Google works and more specifically, the importance of age when it comes to ranking well on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). A secondary important factor in this experiment is the effectiveness of submitting long posts to maximise the amount of content with which Google use to list the site. Once I notice traffic, I intend on chasing the search keywords that brought visitors to the site and let that be my guide as to which direction the blog heads.

What I’m hoping to see is an extended trickle of traffic that will gradually build over time as keywords are established and strengthened. I’ll be logging the numbers at regular intervals along the way, both for my own benefit and for anyone else who may find this sort of information interesting or helpful.

In a nutshell what this blog will do will be frequently updated with long posts – posts of more than 1,000 words (which is going to be my biggest challenge I think) with a view to monitoring how long it will take to draw in visitors from the search engines. By “frequently” I mean I hope to add a new post at least once a week, although the best of intentions and all that means there’s every chance that may slip.

As part of this blog experiment I am going to do absolutely no link building before the first visitor from a search engine comes in. Anyone who is going to find the blog will have hopefully done so by typing a long tail search into a search engine and clicked on my link because it looked relevant for what they needed to know. I would expect their visit to last no longer than a second or two before they realise that all that’s here is a meaningless ramble about what I’m planning to do and how valuable the data I get from doing this will be. At least, I think it will be valuable…to me.

These early stages will be a little like fishing, although with the length of the posts I’m intending to write it will be like long line fishing with many little hooks, a little bit of burley spread around and the hint of a promise of something valuable to be gained.

Obviously this idea has been done before and by people with a hell of a lot more SEO savvy than mine. People have also been very helpful in explaining the value of adding content, most notably a guy by the name of Grizzly who has developed a cult-like following at his extraordinarily informative site How To Make Money Online For Beginners. There you go Griz a little keyword anchored link for your trouble. By reading his blog you get a solid lesson that good, keyword rich content can bring you traffic. But I don’t think many people appreciate exactly how long such a method is going to take and how patient you’re going to have to be.

I have already unintentionally performed this kind of experiment before, a couple of time actually, using a couple of my very early blogs that I maintained purely for my own personal entertainment. One of those blogs was a blog about books. I’m an avid reader and so I decided that I would talk about what I was reading, reviewing books, talking about the authors, stuff like that. I didn’t care whether anyone read what I was writing, I was simply sticking stuff out there day after day, week after week. This is probably the best way to go about your blog, truth be told, because you don’t over think the process and you never get bogged down by checking your stats every half hour or so.

As it turned out, other readers were beginning to tune in and so were other bloggers. My blogroll was growing and I was being added to other blogrolls – all very organic. Then the Tour de France started last year. Now, I’m a long time Tour de France devotee even though, living in Australia it was difficult to catch any of the action until SBS came along and saved cycling fans’ asses.

So, as I said, the Tour de France was starting and I was excited about the prospects of Cadel Evans so I had to talk about it online. The logical thing to do would have been to create a new blog and talk about it there, on a blog that was dedicated to The Tour de France. Instead I just titled my posts with something about Cadel Evans and then made detailed, avid posts about each day’s action, how it affected Cadel Evans and how likely or otherwise it might be that he would take out the overall GC (general classification).

What I wasn’t prepared for was the flood of visitors I received from people who were searching for “Tour de France” and “Cadel Evans”. My blog had absolutely nothing to do with either keyword, I had only posted 1 or 2 articles at this stage, yet the visitors were streaming in. Wow, interesting stuff, I was ranking highly for something by virtue of the fact that my blog had age and produced regular content, but at the time I let that fact pass without following it up. Checking Google now, I couldn’t find my site on the first 10 pages so the fact that I haven’t posted about either again has lessened the relevance over time and Google has adjusted it accordingly.

Looking back now I can see that it was a significant clue towards successfully capturing search traffic. All my blog had going for it was a lot of age and a consistent stream of content that had Google’s bots regularly visiting. Building up the traffic from that point would have been a fairly easy task.

The same happened with another of my blogs. This blog was even less related to…well anything. I just chucked any sort of rubbish on the site and then ignored it for months and months. Suddenly, I decided that I would use the site to send a new site a link (I had become more educated in the ways of search engines by this time). I wrote a very short post that went something along the lines of “Hey I noticed such and such site that looks like it could be going place” and stuck in the link. Well bugger me if the site sending the link hasn’t popped up on the second page of the Google SERPs and the site I was hoping to push was languishing back on page 10.

Site age was playing a huge part on how the site was being treated by Google.

Okay then, that might just about do it as an introductory post. I still want to talk about a few things such as what I would like to do once the traffic begins showing up. But, for the time being, I’ve got all the time in the world and I need content for my next post…