How I Got Rich

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This post looks at two of my exact match domain sites in the same niche. One of which was badly affected by the April Google Penguin and Panda updates while the other held its page one positions and even improved its rank for some keywords.

 I am using the example keyword/domain ‘football boots’/footballboots.org.uk but it is just an example for the purposes of anonymity.

 Both sites are targeting the same keywords in Google.co.uk and are made using WordPress but have different themes.

 Domains:

• Site one’s domain is footballboot.org.uk
• Site two’s domain is footballboots.org.uk

Hosting:

• footballboot.org.uk is hosted in the USA by Hostgator on shared hosting
• footballboots.org.uk is hosted in the UK by Vidahost

Pre-April Rankings

Before the April Google updates both sites were on page one for the keywords ‘football boot’ and ‘football boots’.

 footballboot.org.uk was ranked #1 in google for ‘football boot’ and mid page one for ‘football boots’.  It also had good rankings for its inner pages like ‘Nike football boots’ and ‘Adidas football boots’.

footballboots.org.uk was ranked #3 for ‘football boots’ and mid page one for ‘football boot’ and some page one rankings for brand inner pages e.g. ‘Nike football boots’ etc. 

Post-April Rankings

footballboot.org.uk dropped out of the top 200 Google.co.uk search engine results for nearly all its keywords apart from very long tails. It is no longer ranking for ‘football boot’ and ‘football boots’.  For some keywords though it is one page one so I don’t think the whole site has been penalised. Just the good keywords I was targeting!

footballboots.org.uk is  now #2 for football boots (up 1) and also #2 for football boot (up a few spots ). Also improved page 1 rankings for brands pages e.g. ‘Nike football boots’ etc.

Let’s Compare the Sites

Content:

footballboot.org.uk: standard ‘about’, ‘contact’ and ‘privacy’ pages plus about seven brand pages like ‘Nike football boots’ etc. and also about 45 product review posts targeting model keywords such as ‘Puma King Football Boots’.

Most posts were about 200-300 words long with an image.  The titles were an exact match to the keyword I was targeting e.g. ‘Puma King Football Boots’.

footballboots.org.uk:   standard ‘about’, ‘contact’ and ‘privacy’ pages plus six posts each targeting a keyword such as ‘football boots’, ‘Nike football boots’, ‘Puma football boots’ etc.

Most posts were 500 words long with an image.  The titles were the exact match to the keyword I was targeting eg: ‘Nike Total 90 Astroturf football boots’.

Age:

footballboot.org.uk was registered in September 2009

footballboots.org.uk registered in October 2009 but was transferred to me in May 2011 as a parked domain and the first content was then added

Affiliate Links:

footballboot.org.uk: pretty much every page had an affiliate link and/or an Easy Content Unit

footballboots.org.uk: just an Easy Content Unit on the home page

Social Media:

footballboot.org.uk: Facebook page with 100 likes, Google + page, Pinterest and twitter account

footballboots.org.uk: nothing

Backlinks:

footballboot.org.uk: every type of backlink going: forum profiles, blog comments, Web 2.0s, article directories, social bookmarks, Youtube, pr blog posts, link wheels,

Total External Backlinks:

Open Site Explorer: 1317 backlinks from 399 domains
Majestic SEO: 1,760 backlinks from 585 referring domains 

Anchor Text:

According to Majestic SEO there were 122 unique anchor texts from the 585 referring domains
Open Site Explorer said: Linking Root Domains Containing Exact Match Anchor Text: 336

footballboots.org.uk: a few OK quality Web 2.0s each with Unique Article Wizard links going to them, a few UAW submissions direct to the site.  It also had some social bookmarks from Social Adr.

Total External Backlinks:

Open Site Explorer: 63 backlinks from 39 domains
Majestic SEO: 102 backlinks from 39 referring domains

 Anchor Text:

According to Majestic SEO there were 28 unique anchor texts from 39 referring domains
Open Site Explorer said: Linking Root Domains Containing Exact Match Anchor Text: 7

Some stats from OSE

Summary:

As you can see these are two quite different sites in terms of amount of content and number of backlinks.

footballboot.org.uk which got down-ranked was my main site in this niche and which I did the most work on.  This is probably why it got affected so badly: it was too over optimised. It had too many links, hardly any variation in anchor text and all the content was product adverts/reviews with affiliate links on all pages.

As it was well monetised I imagine the average time on site and pages visited were very low as people arrived, found what they were looking for and then click on the link to the merchant.  A good user experience in my opinion, but not what Google wants to see.

The smaller site that held its place in the SERPs and even improved a bit since the updates had only one affiliate link on it and hardly any backlinks in comparison. It did make use of tiered linking though, so although there weren’t many sites linking to my site there were lots of links pointing at those links.  This site didn’t have much content but the articles didn’t link to the products they were talking about.

I think the users probably visited a few more pages on this site as there were no obvious links to the products they were looking for so they probably hung around for a bit longer trying to find what they were looking for.  Google probably liked this although I’m not sure the user did!

Earnings post Penguin and Panda

The bigger site, footballboot.org.uk made much more money than the smaller site as it ranked for lots of long tail keywords and specific products as it had more pages and much more links to the merchants.  Every page was monetised so a user was never more than a click away from a potential sale.  Prior to the updates it was getting about 100 unique visits a day and now it is more like 30. Earnings have pretty much dropped off complete now as it isn’t getting any traffic from the generic ‘football boot’ keyword.

The smaller site didn’t make much money but as it wasn’t heavily monetised that isn’t surprising.  Traffic is steadily increasing but it only gets about 50 unique visits a day.  The lack of monetisation has prevented it from making much money though.

Moving On

As a lot of my sites got hit I am ready to move onto to something else but part of me is still interested in bringing them back from the dead. I’ve decided to focus on recovering this site and then if it works try that approach on some of my other sites.

What I’ve done so far:

• Removed affiliate links from the home page and added an introduction article with links to the inner pages of the site which are monetised.
• Added new content: I’ve hired someone from ODesk to write news items on the niche and general non-money articles which I am adding to the site in a bid to reduce the ratio of money pages to non-money pages.
• Dilute the anchor text: the site that got hit has an appalling anchor text profile which I think was the main contributor to my downfall.  The only way I can think of to rectify this is to add more links with generic anchor text like ‘click here’ ‘this website’ and the actual URL.  To do this I have done a UAW submission which should get about 100 links with random anchor text. UAW doesn’t let you use the URL as a link which is a pain.  I’ve also built some more Web 2.0s with generic anchor text and have sent more links to my existing Web 2.0s with diverse anchor text. Finally I’ve signed up with a link building service that builds wiki links to your site each day called Wiki Whirlwind from the people who run Backlink Banzai. This service looks quite good as you can give it 20 urls (from more than one site if you want) and then input multiple anchor texts for each URL or choose their natural anchor text link setting which uses generic link text. It is hands off and set and forget so I will leave it running for a month at least. I only put five of my site URLs into it and the other 15 slots are building linsk to my Web 2.0s which link to this site.
• YouTube videos: I’ve been making a few simple YouTube videos for this site which gets another back link for the site and as these videos rank quite well they’ve also been bringing me some traffic.

I think that is about all I’ve done but my basic strategy is to de-optimise the site.  I feel the site has too many links and would rather not add any more but it is the only way I can see of to water down the anchor text. The new content might bring in some more long tail searches but I don’t really rate long tail traffic that isn’t related to a product that much compared to the exact match money keywords I was previously targeting.

Conclusion

I know this is a very small sample but I thought as I have two sites in the same niche targeting the same keywords it would make a good comparison. The outcomes are pretty much what everyone was saying before the updates and what people have been saying since:

• Keep the amount of links with exact match anchor text low.
• Increase the ratio of non-money pages to money pages.
• Keep the users on the site for longer (even if they don’t want to stay!)

So Over to You:

• Have you noticed anything else from comparing your sites?
• What are you plans for recovering your sites?
• Is affiliate marketing dead?
• What are your plans moving forward?

Services Mentioned in this Post:

• Backlink Banzai
• Easy Content Units
• Majestic SEO
• Open Site Explorer
• Unique Article Wizard
• Vida Host
• Wiki Whirlwind

If you’ve got any old domains or sites lying around with a Google Page Rank of 1 you can now add them to Link Authority and earn credits to post your articles to their PR blogs. 

Previously you could only add sites with a PR of 2 or higher but now PR 1 sites are accepted.

Click here to sign up for free today!

PS anyone using Link Emperor or heard anything about them?

What with all the recent Google Panda and Penguin updates going on at the moment and for the foreseeable future it is becoming increasingly important to be able to track the ranking of your sites in the search engine results pages (SERPS) for all the keywords you are targeting.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you will know I use a tool called Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) to track how my sites are doing in the search engines. With this application you can create unlimited projects for your websites and then in each project you can enter as many keywords as you like for AWR to look for. You can choose from a massive list of search engines to check. Most of my sites are setup to target the UK and as you can choose local versions of search engines such as Google.co.uk it works well with my current portfolio of sites although since the recent Google updates the results haven’t made very happy reading and although they say ignorance is bliss sometimes its better to know the truth!

New Features in Version 8.9

Now, AWR has been around a while but the recent upgrades have included a lot more ways to keep track of your sites positions and presence on the internet. Ranking in Google is still the best way to get exposure for your website but as social media services like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google +1 increase in popularity they are becoming great sources of traffic in their own right. To keep up with the times AWR has thankfully included ways to track your sites positioning and mentions on these emerging platforms. You can now do the following:

• Track social shares for your webpages
• Measure the performance of your Facebook Fan pages
• Monitor your Twitter accounts

All this data is monitored over time allowing you to see your social performance as it evolves much as you can do with your keyword tracking.

Competition Analysis in Advanced Web Ranking

Being able to see what competition you are up against in your niche is pretty handy. There are tools dedicated to just this job such as SECockpit, Market Samurai and Long Tail Pro but you can see how weak or strong the top 10 sites in Google are for a particular keyword from inside AWR. Being able to see some in-depth stats on the difficulty of a keyword is an essential ability to have access to. If you fail to do keyword research properly before starting the chances of making you way to page one in Google are pretty slim no matter how good your content or backlinks are.

Link Tracking

You can also use AWR to analyse the links that are pointing at your site using the data from SEOmoz. This is a great way to see how your backlink profile is looking and get a heads up if any of your backlinks have suddenly disappeared as they might have done if you were using Build My Rank before it got de-indexed by Google. You can also see how many times your keywords appears in the anchor text for the links pointing back to you sites. This will become increasingly popular in the months post-Penguin.

Since the updates to AWR the link reports now can help you keep tabs on the following types of data:

• Most Effective Backlinks – see which links are helping your competitors rank
• Anchor Text Diversity – see how your competitors are using their keywords in their link text
• Links Quality – Get an overall view of your competitors’ link profiles and how well they are rated
• Buffer Sites – See which of the sites and domains that link to your competitors’ sites have got lots of backlinks

There is no doubt that Advanced Web Ranking is an essential tool in my internet marketing arsenal. Its good to see how many new features have been added since I started using it such as the social metrics tracking, competition analysis and the keyword research modules and it can now be considered as a complete seo software application. It is a big application that is for sure but it still manages to run OK on my Samsung netbook. You can stick it on a server if you want it to run externally from your main computer and this is something I would like to setup one day. You can schedule AWR to run at set times so you can set it and forget it and just get the reports sent to you. The only problem with this tool is that it does get a bit addictive and you can end up having it constantly running in the background, checking all you sites but at least it is hands off and saves you the time and effort of going into Google and trying to find you site in the SERPS!

I suppose I better get this over with. One third of 2012 is over and just as things were starting to pick up after the last three bad months Google go and release the Panda and Penguin updates towards the end of the month.  You can read about my thoughts on going forward from the massacre my sites suffered in this post that I did the other day: Starting from Scratch.

To cut a long story short nearly all my sites got down-ranked in the serps and traffic is way down across the board. 

Life After Penguin

I think a couple of my sites are worth trying to save as they are in good niches that do make money. I’ve hired a couple of writers on Odesk to write content for me for two of my sites. I’ve instructed them to go out and find news items and interesting or useful articles and then write their own articles on them. I’ve signed up to Copyscape premium to keep an eye on them too. I will then add these to my sites in a bit to try and balance out the product reviews pages with affiliate links on that make up almost 100% of my content. These new pages should also bring in a trickle of visitors as they might rank for some long tail stuff and make my sites a bit more useful to the average reader interested in the niche. The two writers claim to be able to deliver 10 articles each per week for which I will be hiring them at a rate of about $3.50 per hour for 10 hours.

Does $35 for 10 articles a week sound ok?  

It certainly is a lot cheaper than Text Broker but I guess it depends on the quality of the content. This means my two sites will be getting 10 new articles a week which should bulk them out a bit. I will let it run for a month and see if anything happens in terms of rankings. As well as my sites being almost 100% product review pages I also have a problem with anchor text diversity which probably also contributed to my downfall. 

Dealing with Over Optimised Anchor Text

I’m not really sure to go about rectifying this but when I look at my backlink profiles in Majestic SEO it doesn’t look good! My initial thoughts are to do lots of Unique Article Wizard submissions and some Link Authority ones for the site using not optimised anchor text like click here and other random stuff. But I’m not sure if now is a good time to start building more links.  But if I guess a site is out of the SERPs then I’ve not got much to lose?

• What do you think I should do about my dodgy anchor text backlink profile?

Still Ranking but Not for What I Want

At least one of my sites that got hit hard is on page one for some low traffic keywords so the whole site doesn’t appear to be penalised, just the big keywords that I also happen to be over optimised for. What does this mean?  For some searches my sitemap is ranked higher than actual pages targeting that same search term!

So as you can see I’m not completely starting from scratch but my main focus in terms of my own time will be in working on my big ‘authority’ site.

The Authority Site

I guess like everyman and his dog I will be starting on my authority site soon. To be honest I have already started it this week and am following the 60 Minutes to $100 Days approach which seems like the most solid approach I’ve come across. So far, each day this week I have spent 60 minutes, or more like two hours, writing a good, long article for my site. I’ve got the articles ready to go now but I need to find a domain. I am torn between trying to find an aged domain that has dropped or just go with a new one. I think I will just register a new one as I am raring to go. This big site will be in the fitness/exercise/gym niche which is a hobby of mine.  I read websites and magazine on the topic already so have quite a bit of knowledge to draw from. Hopefully the people I hire to write for my other sites will lead me to a good writer who I can hire to write for me on this project.  I might be putting all my eggs in one basket with this site but let’s hope they are eggs that hatch into something good!

In the spirit of throwing myself into this niche I bought myself an exercise bike for the apartment. I know we have a gym downstairs but being able to exercise indoors with the air con on full blast while watching a decent TV show can’t be compared with the gym!

If anyone can recommend me a good TV series to watch that would be good. Or some good podcasts. Or a video course on how to make money online.  

Starting a Mailing List

As everyone is always going on about how mailing lists can be great sources of income I finally decided to add one to one of my sites. It was one of my busiest sites and I used iContact.com as they have a free trial. Unfortunately just after adding the form to page the Google updates happened and the site lost its rankings and traffic so no one signed up! Are mailing lists really that great?

Getting Started with YouTube

I’ve also started messing around with making videos for YouTube in a bid to a) get traffic from somewhere else apart from Google, b) get some different backlinks and c) add some interesting content to my sites.  I did a post on what I’ve been doing so far: Getting Started with YouTube.

Travelling Affiliate

For the Easter/Songkran break we went on holiday to Langkawi in Malaysia. It was really nice to get away and although I planned to do some work each day I didn’t really stick to that schedule. I blame the lack of free wifi! I do envy the people who can travel the world working from their laptops making money online but I guess living in Thailand isn’t that bad.

Earnings for April 2012

Well April was looking pretty good until the Google updates around the 24^th of April. Not as good as 2011 but better than 2012 so far. Then when disaster stuck I was left wondering if I’d hit four figures or not.

My earnings for April 2012 were £1012 / $1636

They pretty much tailed right off towards the end of the month and it is only £55 up on last month but it’s nice to hit a grand again.

After the recent updates I was pretty fed up and half tempted to throw the towel in. I have to make this work though as my options out here are pretty limited in terms of getting a job and I’m not ready to go home just yet. My long term goal is £2000 per month by June 2012 which sounds like a long way off but as this month has shown I’m only one update away from losing it all.

Earnings Breakdown

The earnings break down like this but most of it, as usual, came from affiliate niche product sites like left-handed-golf-clubs-for-dwarfs.com:

• This blog:                             £45.68
• Product Niche Sites:       £957.78
• Adsense Niche Sites:      £9.25

Who knows what will happen in May. Perhaps my sites will rise from the ashes and hit number one but I’m not so sure.  It is nice to see this blog making a few quid. Perhaps one day I can be one of those guys that makes more money teaching people how to make money online than they do actually making money online. 

Adding £100 a Month Every Month

So I made £1000 and my goal is to reach £2000 in about 12 months. To do that I would need to add £100 to my earnings each month.

Now, if you put a few hours a day every day into this game for a month, let’s say 75 hours in a month. Lets say you also invested £200 per month on content and link building. What sort of return would you expect on that investment per month?

Is an extra £100 per month, then another £100 the following month and so on too much to ask?  I can’t decide if it is or isn’t. How much do your earnings increase each month?

Other Stuff I Did in April 2012:

Read some books: Any Human Heart (brilliant), The Great Gatsby (good but not as good as I’d expected), Forgotten Voices: The Falklands (didn’t know much about this war and this gave a good account of it) and When China Rules the World (still reading this as very long but quite interesting and a little bit scary).

Watched some TV: Finished Breaking Bad season 4. Possibly the best TV show ever. Not sure how they can do another season though? Started on Dexter 6.  Looks a bit rubbish now after Breaking Bad.

Bought a new laptop. Finally replaced the old worn out Samsung NC20 netbook and got a new Lenovo Z470. Its a mid to entry level laptop but has an i5 cpu and 4gb of ram so is like a breath of fresh air. Not sure I approve of Windows 7 though. Should increase my productivity no end…

Goals for May 2012

• Get at least one content writer confirmed and writing for at least one of my sites.
• Do at least 60 minutes each day of solid proper work on my big site.
• Use the exercise bike every day.
• Increase my earnings by £100 to £1100.

Sites and Services Mentioned in This Post:

• 60 Minutes to $100 Days
• iContact
• Link Authority
• Unique Article Wizard

If like me you keep hearing amazing stats about YouTube like “over 4 billion YouTube videos are viewed a day” and that more and more people are using it as a search engine then you might have had ‘engaging with Youtube’ on your to do list for some time.

Well today I decided to get engaged with YouTube and start creating some videos. Seeing as my sites have been bo****** by Google in the SERPS I thought I should try and do something different to get some traffic.  Using YouTube is nice because you also get a backlink from a well respected site that Google loves as part of the deal. 

So What Did I Do?

Well I have to confess, I bought another WSO (this is starting to become a bad habit) after getting an email from a mailing list I am on.  It was only a few quid and claimed to tell all on how to dominate YouTube or something like that so I thought why not?

The process was very simple and I’ve already manage to upload a few videos. Each video is about a specific product on one of my money sites.  The video description has a link back to the product page on my money site. This means I get a backlink from Youtube to my site plus anyone who finds my video from either searching in YouTube or in Google can find their way to my website by following the link in the video.  And we all know how much Google likes to put YouTube videos on page one of the SERPs.

So far I have been creating videos with a free tool called animoto.com and just using their background music and then adding my images and text. You can view an example video here I did for this blog:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WUB69Q9btk&feature=youtu.be

The good news is that after uploading a video into YouTube I did a search in Google for the keyword I was targeting and the video was on the middle of page two only 15 minutes later.

OK, so it wasn’t the most competitive of keywords but it was something people had been buying from my site and searching for to find my site before it got down ranked in the recent updates.  

This looks like it could be a good way to get traffic back that you might have lost from Penguin and/or Panda. A few backlinks and a bit of time could send the video to page one as we all know how much weight Google gives to YouTube videos.

If you want to buy the WSO and get the full guide to creating simple videos for YouTube click here but it really is simple and you can probably get up and running right away. But if you are like me and you need a kick up the proverbial before doing anything then I recommend handing over a few quid and getting this WSO.

Question: have you been doing any YouTube marketing and backlinking and if so does what I’ve said here sound about right?

I keep having this dream before I wake up and it takes me a few minutes to discover it is just a dream and isn’t real.

In the dream I am back in London working my old 9-5 job. I am due to leave for Thailand in a few days but I haven’t told my work I am leaving and I’m trying to think of a way of getting out of my job in such short notice or else I won’t be able to move to Thailand.

When I wake up I am still frantically trying to think of a way to escape the day job and make it out of the country to a life of sun, sand and Singha.

What does it all mean? Maybe it means that due to the recent Google updates and how they affected my sites I might be heading home and back into a 9-5. Noooooo!

Well Google have finally dropped the long awaited but perhaps not quite so eagerly anticipated webspam update known as Penguin. They were kind enough to pull the trigger on this one on the day of my birthday making it especially memorable. They also did another Panda update on April 19 which was nice of them.

I’m not really sure what the update was targeting or seeking to correct or improve but I’ve read it had something to do with sites that were over optimised and had too much ‘SEO’. I guess this was in the form of too many links for the size of the niche and too many of those links having targeted, keyword intensive anchor text. Poor quality backlinks where also targeted I believe.

Whatever the update was doing it managed to annihilate the rankings of my sites.

My sites had managed to avoid the negative impacts of the previous Google updates until one of the Panda updates which happened on October 14 2011. That took out most of my sites wiping them clean of the front pages of the SERPs. Six months on and the rankings for a handful of my sites were starting to get back to how they were and my earnings were starting to pick up again when kaboom! Google struck again and blew those sites and more right out of the park.

I guess after the last update that affected me I should’ve seen the writing on the wall and realised that time was running out for me any my sites but as I’ve had hardly any time to spend on IM in the last six months I tried my best to get my sites ranking again but didn’t start any new projects that might’ve been more likely to weather the storms of future Google updates.

Well that time is here. I will give it a few days and see if my sites bounce right back to page one but I very much doubt they will. I have no reason to think this, I just have a hunch. I will focus on a couple of sites as before and add the odd article and backlink but the majority of my time from now on will be spent on a new site.

My New Site

After watching Nate’s 60 Minutes to $100 Days video course I have been getting my plan together to build a big authority site. This is something I should’ve done from the start but now I have the incentive to do so. In the past its been too easy to put off starting a big site as money was coming in from the niche sites so why bother putting the effort into a bigger site. Well now I’m ready.

I’ve picked a hobby or interest of mine which is fitness/exercise/gym related and will be starting my site any day now. I chose this niche or topic for a few reasons:

• I’ve been going to the gym and training for many years now so its a genuine interest.
• I know quite a bit about the subject.
• I read books, magazine and websites on the topic for my own enjoyment.
• There are loads of products and courses and other ways to monetise this topic.
• I read/post on a few forums already so have access to some people interested in the niche already.
• Its a massive niche and although its already busy it is a big pie with slices for everybody.

I’ve already written a few articles but need to decide upon a domain. The site will be targeting amazon.com to start with but can also promote ebooks, apps and many other products that are either digital or physical. I could even use adsense on some of the pages. Following the guide set out in the 60 Minutes course I will be spending one hour a day on this site which will be spent writing content for the site. I won’t be doing any link building for a while. The aim here is to add good content to my sites targeting long tail kewyords with little competition.

I want this to be a site I can be proud of and put my name to. When people ask me what I do I will be able to say I run a site called “Winning Workouts dot com” (hopefully I will have a better name than that!) rather than I have lots of little websites about things like left handed potato peelers, battery powered automatic sewing machines and so on.

I am excited about this new start. I am also nervous in case all this work doesn’t pay off and I get no visitors or the site gets a Google slap in a future update. I will be looking for other ways to get traffic like list building, social media etc.

I hope the earnings from my existing sites keep trickling in until the new one takes off otherwise there could be some very uncomfortable months ahead!

If you’ve got any tips on getting a site back from the dead please let me know!

How did the latest round of Google updates affect your sites?

Why I think my sites were affected: I think I have about 50-75 sites in various states of completion. Not all of them were hit although the majority were. I have a few sites in the same niche targeting the same keywords so I have managed to come to a few conclusions about why some of my sites were hit and some weren’t:

• Sites where not every post or page had an affiliate link on didn’t seem to get hit as hard as my sites that were pretty much 100% pages with affiliate links on. My affiliate links were cloaked but Google can still see them.
• When it comes to content my sites mainly all had original content or at worse product description rewrites on them. I wasn’t doing anything ‘sneaky’.
• Sites I’d build no links for didn’t seem to get hit as hard as those with loads of links. Although the sites without links weren’t ranking that well to being with. Non diversity in anchor text is something I am very guilty of!

If I had to draw a conclusion from my sites I’d say sites with realistic amounts of backlinks or backlinks done through a tier of Web 2.0 sites and that had more pages without ads/affiliate links than pages with affiliate links seem to have done better out of this than others. Kind of what we already knew was coming but what can you do?

Warning: this post turned into a bit of a ramble so if you want to cut to the chase the main questions/points are:

• Is the Bring the Fresh forum any good?
• Can high PR profile backlinks still work?
• Is UAW the last (mass) link building tool still working?

Another month, another WSO. I must be getting soft or something but I just couldn’t resist this WSO (Warrior Forum Special Offer) for a $7 trial at private SEO and affiliate marketing forum Bring the Fresh.

When I first started out in this game I got all my information from a forum.  It was the affiliates4u.com forum which at the time was pretty busy and had enough info on there to get me started and earning a few hundred quid per month within a few months. Unfortunately that forum is pretty much dead now which is a great shame as it was a good way into IM without loads of people trying to sell you crap like they do on Wicked Fire and Warrior Forum to name just two.

Bring the Fresh Forum

I’d not heard of the Bring the Fresh forums until recently when Nate from Strayblogger.com recommended them a few times as they drop some potent SEO knowledge bombs from time to time. I was tempted but the price was very high so decided to give it a miss. Then when I saw the $7 WSO trial I decided to sign up.

My Thoughts on Bring the Fresh

I have to admit I wasn’t that impressed with what I saw.  There were the ubiquitous success stories of people earning $1,000,000 in a year and the like but mainly it was people trying to flog their link building services as is the case on most SEO or internet marketing forums. What suprised me though was that the most popular one was for profile backlinks from high PR sites. I thought this sort of stuff stopped working ages ago but in the sellers thread there were loads of good reports from happy customers. Although most people were raving about the service, upon reading their reviews they were only commenting on the service that they recieved like the quick turnaround time and the reports given rather than any boost in the SERPs. But people kept buying the service so it must work, right….?

• Here is a link to the service: http://profilelinkservices.com/

As I am a sucker for new services and tools I have given it a try especially as nearly all my sites have been pretty much killed off by the latest Google Penguin update (more on that in a future post).  Could such a service work in this day and age?  What do you guys think?

Is Unique Article Wizard Still Working?

The owners of Bring the Fresh were selling their own link building package which appeared to be a Unique Article Wizard submission on their accounts.  Everyone seemed pretty happy with the service and most people seemed to be using UAW in one way or another. I still have UAW and am still using it along with Article Builder but am only linking to my Web 2.0s and other tier 1 sites rather than directly to my actual sites.  Is UAW the last link building tool still standing?

Anyway, have any of you signed up to the Bring the Fresh forum?  I think if you had some spare time it would be worth a look as there is a lot to go through and there are some glowing testimonials in the form of success stories but something about it left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe it was the high cost of membership, the high price of the in house services or perhaps it was the smell of money in the air.  Who knows…

I was pretty busy during March. Tried to do something most days and even got in the gym a few times. No golf though but AM is my main focus now as I have to get earning again or I will be forced back into the 9-5 and have to start hunting for a day job.  The main things I got up to this month include:

• Buying a PR Domain
• Continuing to use Link Authority
• Adding new content to my sites
• Buying some WSOs
• Setting a new schedule
• Revising my link building ‘strategy’
• Earning some money!

Buying a PR Domain

Buying a PR domain has been on my to-do list for months and months. I wanted to get one to start my own private blog network so I could get backlinks at will from quality sites that I owned. It wasn’t until I read a blog post on Andre Garde’s blog covering how to buy a PR domain that I bit the bullet and bought such a domain. I bought it from the digital point forum where there are quite a lot of people selling PR domains. I think I paid about $20 for a domain with a PageRank of 3. The domain had expired so the site had been lost.  I bought the domain and put it on some spare hosting I have with Hostgator and installed WordPress. My plan was to rebuild the site as it was before but couldn’t find any of the content cached anywhere so gave up on that idea. This purchase was more of an experiment into how the process works and its wasn’t a domain that was particularly related to any of my niches so I decided to plug it into Link Authority (LA) as it would give me three posting credits a day.

Link Authority Update

Since BMR closed down I think a lot of people have gone to Link Authority as it seems like a good alternative to Build My Rank as it is a similar service in that for each post you submit you get one link from a site with PR.  Recently I did a test to see if Link Authority works which you can read here.  I used LA for a month and it moved my site to number one in Google for the two keywords I was targeting. After the test was up I stopped building links with LA as I wanted to see if the site would hold its rank. The test finished on March 7 2012 and as today is April 6 2012 I thought it would be a good time to check on the site.

This is a comparison of the rankings of various keywords on the site from when I stopped building links on March 7 to today, April 6 2012.

As you can see the number one spots have held and there are even a few more keywords that are now number one. This has brought me in a  good few sales so I am more than happy with the results from using Link Authority.  I might add the odd link from now on just to make sure it stays where it is as it is making money.

Changes with Link Authority

After doing the test I started using LA on some more of my sites but during last month LA announced articles will now need to be 200 words instead of 150 for one link and that 300+ word articles will only have two links. They also stated that 2% of the articles you submit will have the links stripped out of them. I presume this is to avoid leaving a massive footprint and reduce the chances of getting caught by Google. This meant more work and writing these posts was taking a lot of my time. I tried to find writers on Odesk but everyone I tried was crap and had their work rejected so I gave up. I’m still using LA but am finding it hard to use my daily quota of 10 submissions per day as I can’t write enough posts in the time I have.

Which is Better: Content or Links?

If you are writing 300+ word articles each day in order to get a link to you site would that content be better off being added to your site?

Is a new page of 300+ words added to a site every day going to be better in terms of increasing traffic than getting one link per day to you site?  This is the question I have been asking myself when writing these articles for Link Authority. Sometimes when I’ve been writing an article for LA and it turns out quite good I’ve added to my site instead. One upside of writing for LA is that you can essentially write the same thing for each post. I don’t mean the exact same article but you could write on similar topics which you couldn’t really do for your site as it would have loads of pages saying more or less the same thing which wouldn’t be great from a user experience perspective. Not sure whether it would hurt rankings or not?  As I have limited time I don’t want to be using my time in the wrong way and not putting the content I write to the best uses but at the moment I am leaning towards adding more content to my sites before building links.  As I was pondering this dilemma I came across an approach to affiliate marketing that seemed to provide an answer to my problem. 

60 Minutes to $100 Days

Now I hate the Warrior Forum as much as the next guy. I don’t really go there that much but when I do I am quickly repelled by all the hype and crap that is posted there by people trying to sell their system, blueprint or push button money making scheme. I’m not saying that that is all there is there but when you just dip in and out its mostly what you find. Some of the bloggers I follow occasionally release products there or WSOs as they like to call them and in the last month I did surprise myself by buying a few of them.  The first one was an amazon product comparison widget for WordPress. It was only $7 and looked quite good so I bought it. I haven’t installed it yet. The second one was a WordPress product review theme that I mentioned here that too looked pretty good and only cost $7.  Needless to say I haven’t properly set it up yet.  Both are on my long to-do list.

A Diamond in the Rough

The third one however was a course called 60 Minutes to $100 Days. The reason I bought it was that not only was it $7 but it was made by Nate Rivers of Strayblogger.com.  I’ve been following Nate’s blog since hearing a podcast he did with Trent from the Online Income Lab and when he released this course I thought I’d give it a go as I’ve been looking for something new to try lately. It is a video course so nothing much to read and you can watch it all in a couple of hours. It was a really good product and although not really groundbreaking in its teachings it did give me something new to try.  The title pretty much sums it up: you work 60 minutes a day for the foreseeable future and eventually you will be having $100 days. I don’t even have $100 days with all my sites combined so if this works I will be over the moon. I am going to give it a go for a few months and see how it pans out but I have high hopes although am healthily sceptical.

My New Schedule

At the start of March I was spending the first part of my working hours writing an article for LA for each of my five main sites. Then adding some content to one of the sites per day and then doing some link building. That was the plan anyway and most days I wouldn’t get much further than writing the articles for Link Authority let alone adding new content to my sites.  Some days I’d do no work as I wouldn’t have enough time to even get started.

Since watching the 60 Minutes to $100 Days course I’ve changed my schedule a bit. The first hour of the day will be spent doing the stuff from the course for a new site I am starting. Then I will add some content to one of my existing sites for each day (Monday site 1, Tuesday site 2, etc). Then if there is time left over I will do some link building.

Revised Link Building Approach

What with all the comings and goings lately in the world of paid links I’ve been thinking of going back to basics and only linking directly to my sites from Web 2.0s sites or quality article directories and then linking to those sites with tools like Unique Article Wizard, Link Authority and Article Marketing Robot. I want to stop linking directly to my sites with links from these networks as Google obviously has them in its sites so I don’t want to expose myself any more than I need to.  From what I’ve read on the blogs and from my own experience Unique Article Wizard is still working and for now I will use it to link to my Web 2.0s sites rather than direct to my money sites. Link Authority works too and I am in two minds as to whether to link directly to my sites or via a buffer site like a Web 2.0, Ezine article or Youtube video.  The reason I am unsure is linking directly to my sites does seem to work and show results quite quickly so you can really see it working but for how long and at what cost long term?

Automated Link Building

I’ve been using content from Article Builder to make my Web 2.0s and it seems to be ok, none have been deleted so far although I’ve not used this content on Squidoo as even the stuff I write myself gets rejected there!  I’ve also been using content from Article Builder in Unique Article Wizard and it means I can do a UAW submission in a matter of minutes rather than writing three articles myself. But this still requires some work so I am testing out a couple of link building services at the moment. I’d rather handover the money and let someone else do the work providing I know there are going to be good results at the end of it.  We’ll see how the initial jobs get on before I decided what to do.  I am still keen to try Backlink Banzai but have not heard that much about it.

Earnings for March 2012

My earnings for 2012 have been rubbish (Jan: £745 & Feb: £718) compared to last year and it is restricting my options when it comes to reinvesting money back into the ‘business’. Due to my lack of funds I launched a fiverr gig which did pretty well but I’ve had to pause it as I’m going away next week and won’t be able to complete and any orders. Plus it was taking up quite a bit of time as people wouldn’t give me the right information when placing an order and I’d have to chase them up, and then there were lots of questions from tyre kickers. It is a good short term solution if you are short of cash but was eating into my time quite a bit but I earned about $100 from it which was nice. I’m not sure I will reopen the gig again but I can see how people make good money from it providing you can sell something which is pretty much automated.

Anyway, if you’ve read this far, well done, if you’ve just skipped all the above then go back to the top and start again!

My earnings for March 2012 were £955 / $1515

To break it down it goes like this:

• Fiverr:                                   £63 / $100
• Adsense niche sites:       £6.50 / $10
• This blog:                             £15 / $24
• Affiliate sites:                    £870 / $1380

Not bad and its nice to be improving after the last couple of month but still about 50% down on my best month from last year.

Plans for April

Well I am going on holiday for about 9 days but will try to at least stick to my 60 Minutes to $100 Days schedule. I will be taking the laptop so hopefully there will be decent wifi at the hotel. I’m going to keep focusing on my top five sites that were my previous best earners before getting down ranked by Google in a Panda update. When I get time I will add content to my Adsense niche sites and any other sites that I think need a bit of attention but the majority of my time will be split across my new site for the 60 Minutes course and then the top five sites.  If I can get one site earning $100 / £63 a day that would be $3000 / £1890 a month and would really change my life. I am a bit sceptical it can be done, especially in just 90 days but we shall see. What do you think?

How did you get on in March and what are you doing in April?

Sites and services mentioned in this post:

• How to Buy a High PR Domain by Andre Garde
• Link Authority
• 60 Minutes to $100 Days
• Nate Rivers’ blog StrayBlogger.com
• Trent from Online Income Lab interviews Nate Rivers
• Article Builder
• Unique Article Wizard