How I Got Rich

Is oDesk the worst designed site in the World?

oDesk - Crap Desk more like

Probably not but I do find it a real pain to use. Perhaps it’s just me but I find it very hard to keep track of the communications between me and the people who are applying to or working on my jobs.

When you send a regular message those communications are stored in the inbox area which is fine. But then if you send a message when you hire someone via the form that appears when you actually press the hire button all trace of that message seems to disappear. This is a massive problem as usually when you hire someone you send them the full details of the job. To not be able to see what you have sent later on it can be hard to review exactly what you have ordered.

Also sometimes you get an email notification that a contractor has replied to a message you sent, not a message through the inbox but via the Contracts page. You click on the link in the email and you can see the message which is fine. But if you try to find that message again from within oDesk it is nowhere to be seen. That is unless you go back to your email and click on the link and there it is. This again is a massive pain because often the message will include the piece of work they are sending you. If you delete the notification email you have no way of getting back to that message in oDesk.

I assume ODesk make all their money from the cut they take from the payments that are sent via its website between contractor and job poster but with an interface this poor I’m guessing lots of people, once they have found a contractor they like, chose to leave oDesk and work via email use bank transfer or paypal.

Getting out of the Google Bunker

I few days ago I wrote about one of my sites getting struck down by Google. The site was doing pretty well and I’d recently started filling it out with more informational pages as well as general interest pieces related to the niche rather than it just being a site full or products (albeit with unique product descriptions of 300 words each). It was ranking pretty well for a number of search terms then overnight on the 12 of May 2011 it was deranked for a load of those keywords falling out of the top 200. It still ranks for its exact match domain keyword but is now hovering around the bottom or page one rather than being nailed to the top of the SERPs like it was for the past year or so.

I’ve been reading about Kirsty’s experience which sounds similar to mine although on a much bigger scale. For me this is just one site of many but as its fate could befall my other sites I thought I’d have a go at getting it back in the SERPs so if it does happen to any more of my site at least I will have some info or what to do or not to do.

So far what I’ve been doing is the following:

• Create a twitter account I’ve created a twitter account and am in the process of following as many people I can who are related to the niche. Hopefully a few of them will follow me back and maybe one day might retweet my site.
• Create a Facebook page I’ve had the Facebook like buttons on my site for ages but its not been linked to a page so I’ve not been able to track how many people have clicked them. Hopefully I can get some fans and then perhaps get some traffic from Facebook to show social proof to Google and also diversify my traffic sources a bit as 99.99% of my visitors come from Google.
• Keep adding new content I’ve read about people leaving their sites when they take a hit from Google and waiting for them to come back of their own accord but I think I will keep adding content as normal and try and get a new page or post added every few days.
• Keep building links I’m going to keep on slowly building links for this site. For months I never built any links and it got to number one for its main keyword but when I started adding more pages and targeting related keywords I started building links for them. This might have been what triggered the Google slap but it wasn’t anything major like an Xrummer blast. I went from no backlinks for a year to more than none all of a sudden. I will keep adding the odd Web 2.0 property and article or blog post.
• Try and reduce bounce rate On nearly all my site I like to make it as easy as possible for my visitors to get to the merchant sites. I don’t see the point in making them jump through hoops so they can buy a product. I promote a product with a review and an image and often a price comparison and then if they decide they want to buy the merchant is just one click away. I hear Google doesn’t like sites where the visitor only visits one page so I will need to try and create a bit of a labrynth on my site to keep the user there for a few pages before giving them what they want and what they came for.

That should keep my busy for now. Any other ideas of things I should be doing?

Just Can’t Get the Staff

Like MLK I have a dream but mine is a bit more self-centred.

My dream is to one day have everything outsourced to a team of virtual assistants. They’d all be working away unassisted on projects and tasks I had set for them. Occasionally I’d have a brainwave and email them my latest idea “start work on a new site about left handed umbrellas” I’d say and they’d switch their attention to my latest solid-gold idea.

At the moment however I’m a long way off from realising that goal. I’ve got a great guy who writes me content on pay as you go basis. Its just text though and I still need to add the images, links etc and add it to my sites which creates a bit of a bottle neck.

I did get him to format some of his content so I could just post it to my sites and that did work well.

Now that I am trying my hand at article submissions (yeah I heard about Panda) using tools like Article Marketing Robot and Article Ranks I have been looking for someone who can rewrite my existing content at sentence level so I can submit it using those tools.

I posted a job on Odesk and wrote what I thought was clear advert with instructions but some of the dross that I got handed by the applicants but me wince! I’ve found a couple of people that seem to be on the same page as me so hopefully they will turn in some good work but it doesn’t give me much hope of realising my dream to have everything on auto pilot with tasks being carried out by a team of outsourcers.

Has anyone got any good experiences of outstoucing to cheer me up?

Two Months of Link Building

As March draws to end its time to reflect on my second month of link building. Of course I have looked at link building before but never in much of a coordinated approach and only doing very little.

My approach this time has been picking a few sites and just focusing on getting links for those sites for a month then the next month pick other sites and work on those. At the moment I am mainly experimenting so trying out new things to see what works and what doesn’t. Once I find a few methods that work I will revise my strategy so I won’t just be working on a site for a month as this might look a bit unnatural to Google as a site will get a load of links one month then none for ages.

You can read about last month’s effort in my One Month of Link Building post.

Before I start on what I did this month I’ll do a little update on what has happened to my sites that I built links for in February.

The Microniche Site:

This site had its product number as the domain name and was targeting two keywords: ‘model number’ and ‘brand + model number’. At the start of February the site’s rank was #130 and no rank respectively. At the end of February and one month of link building the rank was #41 for ‘model number’ and #70 for ‘brand + model number’.

I didn’t build any links for it in March but some of the links built in February might have taken affect in this month. Rank for end of March: #31 and #117. The ‘brand + model number’ seems to have taken a hit!

Lesson learnt: I threw a lot of crappy forum profile and blog comments at some Web 2.0 properties that link to this site. Perhaps some of them got deleted since the end of February. Unless you are able to blast your site with crappy links constantly your rankings are properly going to fluctuate as links disappear.

The Keyword Domain Niche Site:

I was going after the keyword used in the domain and plural of it.

• Rank at start of February: #25 for main keyword & #27 for plural
• Rank at end of February: #30 for main keyword & #25 for plural
• Rank at end of March (no links built): #16 for main keyword & #16 for plural

Looks like some of the links in February started to take affect this month. These links were a bit more stable coming from article directories and Web 2.0 properties but also a lot of forum profiles and blog comments. If I can just get onto page one I will be happy (for now).

The Big Site:

No keyword domain but targeting a page optimised for the keyword. Targeting keyword and plural of keyword.

• Rank at start of February: no rank for either
• Rank at end of February: #108 & #135 for plural
• Rank at end of March: #18 & #22 for plural

Big jump here! I did get more quality links for this site than I did for the other two which came from articles posted on blogs. I think this made the difference.

So what have I learnt from my first month of link building, one month after it finished:
Links take time to get recognised by Google so don’t expect a quick fix and don’t be discouraged if you don’t see any movement after a month.

It might be tempting to buy ten $5 jobs from fiverr.com getting each of your sites 5000 backlinks but it’s probably better to buy one $50 job for something of a bit more quality that might only get one site 100 links.

As with most things in life quality trumps quantity but if you can afford a quantity of quality you will win.

Right, let’s have a look at what I’ve done in March.

This month I picked a few sites, setup specific goals for them and then tried to build links for them to achieve those goals. Most of these goals were around getting exact match keyword domains (EMD) to rank for something other than their main keywords. Most were two or three keyword domains which were already ranking for number one but now I wanted them to rank for just one or two of the keywords in their domain thus taking them out of their niche and making them more general.

For example:
Getting a site with an EMD of redshoes.com to rank for ‘shoes’ or a site with an EMD of batteryfuzzremover .com to rank for ‘fuzz remover’.

This started off quite well with my sites getting a jump in the SERPS around the middle of the month when the cheap links I was throwing at them took affect but by the end of the month they were ranking a few places worse than when I started!

So mixed success overall. Some approaches work on some sites and not others, some don’t work at all for longer than a few weeks and some seem to work for now.

I think its worth pointing out that although some of my sites saw a rise in the SERPs none of them got to #1 in Google or even page one in Google so there was no increase in traffic and therefore no increase in earnings. You really do have to get onto page one to see any increase in visitors. Page one or nothing seems to be the way.

Next month, in April, I am going to resist from trying out any new things on fiverr.com. Its only $5 a job but as the jobs are so cheap its easy to buy just one more to see what will happen and before you know it you could’ve paid for something of higher quality, paid for some new content or bought a new tool. I’ve now got a(nother) new approach that I want to try out.

My New Link Building Approach:

1. Pick one of my existing sites
2. Make a list of long tail keywords that are related to that site
3. Every day (of the month) write or commission a 500 word article on that keyword
4. Add that article to the site
5. Use Article Rewrite Assistant (free) to spin that article sentence by sentence rather than by synonyms and then:
a. Use Article Marketing Robot (free trial) to submit it to loads of directories with links back to the new page
b. Build up some Web 2.0 properties using the spun articles with links back to the new page
6. Use Social Monkee (free) to get the new page 25 free backlinks
7. At the end of the month buy one high(er) quality back link package that will link to the main site and also some of the new pages

This is going to be pretty hard as I will have to be very disciplined to only work on one site and not any of the others, at least not until I have done my daily task list. I’ll try and do this at least a few times a week as once a day isn’t realistic for me at the moment.

Hopefully the new content will benefit the sites and they may even rank on their own for their targeted keyword and bring in some long tail traffic.

General Observations:

Services like Drip Feed Blast or just buying similar links in small job lots on fiverr.com do work but I think you have to be consistent and keep getting the links as the old ones die off. If you’ve got the money to use this approach along with a few other methods this should work. If you haven’t got the funds to keep it going you will probably get frustrated with your site bouncing around the SERPS as the links take affect and then no longer exist.

Tools like Article Marketing Robot (free trial) make submitting to article directories pretty easy and get some links for little work and is a good way to diversify your backlink profile. There are also free opportunities that come up every now and then to get you a few links here and there such as Social Monkee (free) and 24/7 Backlinks (free) which can also help.

If you’ve got enough money I think you can get most pages to rank for non-super competitive terms.
Hopefully one day when I start getting some disposable income from affiliate marketing that I can reinvest in content and links I will be rich! Until then, have you seen this new gig for 10,000 profile links on fiverr.com…

Time to Try MoreNiche

If you’re bored of promoting Amazon and other online retailers or you are already dominating your niches it might be time to give MoreNiche a try.

I signed up with them when I first looked into affiliate marketing, probably because you got £10 for signing up. But I never got around to promoting them, mainly because their products are quite expensive and when I started I didn’t believe people would spend much money shopping through an affiliate site.

Of course I was wrong and people regularly buy TVs and other expensive goods via affiliate marketing sites.

So after reading a recent post on a4u about a new product they had I thought I’d jump in and give it a go.

Have a look and see if they are something you could promote as the 30% commissions are pretty tempting. Especially as they have a new product out which might be good to get in at the beginning on.

• MoreNiche
• Affiliates4u forum post

I’m still after 7 people to sign up to Social Monkee to get free back links every day!

Maximising a Niche

After reading a few blog posts on people making $1000s a day from amazon.com niche sites I’ve been thinking more about making the most of my niches.

Up until very recently I’d just aim to rank my site for its main keyword (which would be in the domain) and then leave it at that. Sometimes I would add on a few posts or pages or related products but I had no expectations of ranking for those terms and just had them there in case any users who found my site got tempted by the on-page menu.

But after doing a bit of experimenting with backlinks I can see that it wouldn’t be too hard to rank for some more longer tail keywords. So from now on I am going to work on adding related pages to lots of my existing sites and trying to get them to rank.

For example if I had a jack hammer website selling pneumatic drills I would then add a page for Draper Jack Hammers and try and rank for that. Then I would add a page for each brand that makes jack hammers.

After that I would have a look in my Google Analytics and StatCounter stats and see what keywords people were searching for and ending up on my site. Using that data I would start building pages around those keywords so if someone had found my site by searching for ‘jack hammer tips’ and my site was on page 2 for that term then I would build a page around the keyword ‘jack hammer tips’ with the aim of getting it to page 1. The idea being that if one person searched for that term and found my site on page 2 there might be other people searching for that term who might find my site when its on page 1.

Then I would go to Google and type in Jack Hammer and look at what the auto-complete text was. This gives you suggestions of what people will be prompted to search for by Google. Build a few pages for some of the terms that come up.

Next you can do a search for your main keyword such as ‘Jack Hammers’ and then scroll down to the bottom of the SERPS and see what Google has listed under its ‘Searches related to ‘ area. This will give you some more ideas for search terms to target on your site.

Once you’ve done all that you can go out and get backlinks for all your new pages.

Anyone got any other tips for making the most out of a niche?

Getting Backlinks Indexed

As you might know I’ve been doing a lot of link building for the last month and a half. I’ve been trying lots of things out to see if any of them work.

Not much has happened so far and I’m going to give my efforts the benefit of the doubt and say that they will take longer than a few weeks to take affect.

One problem I’ve had is how to find out if my new backlinks have been picked up by the search engines.

I’ve been using the Yahoo Site Explorer which is good for a freebie but I’m not sure how many of the links that are pointing to my site it shows. Also I hear it will be turned off at the end of the month.

I gather that links to your site should be pinged to help Google and the other search engines find them quicker or at all but so far I have not had much luck doing this.

I found a couple of free apps called Pinger and Ping List that claim to do it for you but they take so long (for me at least) to go through the list of urls you give them that I haven’t used them much.

I could just wait and let Google and co. find them of their own accord but today I ordered a job on fiverr.com from a guy who claims he will ping a list of 50,000 backlinks for $5. I put in three orders and sent him just under 150,000 urls to ping for $10.

Now that I’ve done it I am a little bit worried that he might actually be able to do what he claims and suddenly all those links will be picked up by Google and I will be sandboxed to hell! Hopefully it won’t work as well as he claims and just a handful will get indexed. Also only a small amount of those are pointing directly to my sites.

So what do you do to get your backlinks indexed? I also have a tool called Scrapebox which I’ve not used but think I read somewhere it can be used for pinging links?

Also, once Yahoo Site Explorer gets turned off what will you use to track links?

I’ll post back with an update if anything happens to all these links.

Sorry to spam but if you want 25 free social bookmarks a day sign up for the Social Monkee service – if I get 15 sign ups I get a premium account! I’m sure I have at least 15 readers?

Made For Adsense

Has anyone got any experience of making sites for Google Adsense? I think the idea is you build a site much in the same way you would for an affiliate site but then put Google ads on it instead of affiliate links.

I’ve been hearing good things from a few people doing this and am keen to jump in and have a go myself but would like to hear from others that have tried it.

I’m at the stage of find a niche to work in and then will be building a big site around it so its early days at the moment.

Anyone had any luck with this type of internet marketing?

Article Marketing Robot Review

I’ve recently been trying my hand at article marketing as a way to get some backlinks for my sites.

At first I was writing the articles by hand and then submitting them to a few article directories like Ezine.com, Article Rich, Go Articles and Article Base.

Although the recent Google Farmer/Panda update seems to have targeted article directories I am still going to proceed with article submissions as it is a free way to get back links and I’m guessing there is still some worth in it. Also I don’t have that many alternatives to hand when it comes to getting links.

I was finding it quite tedious writing the articles and then submitting them to the sites. It’s not that hard but it’s a bit tedious as you have to fill in quite a lot of forms and you are never sure if they would get accepted. Ezine seems to be the best directory but has a very long waiting time for getting an article approved (with the free version).

Then one day I was introduced to a tool called the Article Marketing Robot (AMR) which will submit an article to 1000s of directories at the click of a few buttons. Although AMR isn’t free it does have a 5 day free trial so I thought I’d check it out. To be honest I wasn’t that impressed with the trial as it seemed to give you access to only 500 directories and with a low success rate of acceptance of my articles I was only getting about 40-50 articles accepted. Plus it didn’t seem as automated as they made out as you still have to enter the Captcha forms for some websites.

I spoke to a few people who have been using AMR and they assured me that it was worth it so I signed up and paid my $97. This was now the most expensive tool I had bought so far and even though the trial wasn’t that great I had high hopes.

Signing up to the full version gives you access to about 6000 article directories. On the first run you have to sign up with all of them which AMR does automatically, doing the confirmation emails and things like that.
For some directories you will have to fill in the Captcha forms but the majority don’t have this and you only have to sign up once.

AMR has a built in article spinner so you can either submit one article to all the directories or set the article up for spinning and let AMR spin it and submit the spun articles to different directories. So far I’ve been spinning and submitting.

Once you chose to submit an article most of the submission is automatic but you will have to enter some Captcha forms for some of the directories. It would be great if there was a way around this but as afar as I know there isn’t. You could choose to not fill them in and not submit to those directories I guess.

AMR definitely does the job but the interface isn’t as intuitive as it could be. It’s too early to say if the links to my sites will help with ranking but if you believe in article marketing this tool is definitely worth a punt. If you are lucky enough to have a ‘virtual assistant’ it would be a good tool to give them and let them get on with writing and submitting 100s of articles on your behalf.

• Link to Article Marketing Robot (affiliate link) with 5 day free trial

One Month of Link Building

This month I have been doing a lot more link building than usual and trying out a few different methods. You can read more about it here. I picked three sites and built links for them throughout the month and now I am going to check how much their ranking improved in the SERPS.

Microniche Site
This was a site with the model number of the product as the domain and it promoted just that one model. The site was thin and had no back links at the start of the month. The site was about one year old.
Rank at start of month for main keyword: 130/not ranked
What did I do: For this site I was targeting two keywords. One was in the domain and the other was brand+domain. I submitted some articles to a few article directories. I got the site bookmarked at 80 social bookmarking sites. I used some other articles to build a ‘link wheel’ for the site which used sites like WordPress.com, Squidoo etc. I then blasted those articles and sites with about 15,000 Xrumer links. None of these Xrumer links pointed directly to my site – just the articles.
Rank at end of month: The site is now number 41 for its domain keyword and 70 for brand+domain keyword.
Evaluation: If I look in Yahoo site explorer hardly any of these links are showing. I’m not sure if that means they are yet to be picked up or have been ignored. Perhaps I need to ping them or something? The site has jumped up the ranks but is still too far down the SERPS to get any traffic. Overall I am pretty disappointed although maybe it is early days and the links are yet to take affect?

Keyword Domain Niche Site
This was a site with a red widgets type domain advertising a single type of product. The site was about 18 months old and had a fair amount of content but never ranked higher than page 3 in the SERPS for its main keyword used in the domain but ranked higher for domain keyword + reviews and things like that.
Rank at start of month for main keyword: 25 for main keyword used in domain & 27 for plural of main keyword.
What did I do: Article submissions, Social Bookmarking, Link Wheels, Pyramids, RSS Feeds & Blasts to Articles (but not directly at site).
Rank at end of month: 30 for main keyword (down 5) & 25 for plural (up 2).
Evaluation: Site actually dropped a few places down the SERPS. There are some links showing in Yahoo link explorer but not as many as there should be. Another fail!

The ‘Big Site’
This was my attempt at a big site started many months ago. The domain does not feature the keyword I am targeting but it has many pages which do target that keyword.
Rank at start of month for main keyword: Not ranked for either keyword.
What did I do: Articles, Blogs, Wheels, Pyramids, Social Bookmarking, etc
Rank at end of month: 108/135
Evaluation: Well at the least the site is ranked now but pages 11 and 14 don’t get you much traffic! Lots of links showing in Yahoo Site Explorer but obviously not enough!

Conclusion
Either these links are yet to take affect, there isn’t enough of them or they aren’t the right kind of links. Not all the links were the best quality I will admit but to be honest I was expecting more from article marketing. Towards the end of the month I did a trial of Article Marketing Robot but did not have much luck with that.

My plan was to work on a couple of sites each month, getting them links, but now that I haven’t had any decent results from this test I am not sure whether to do what I’ve just done on any more of my sites as there doesn’t seem much point.

What do you think readers?

Anyone know a good tool for getting links indexed?