How I Got Rich

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?

One of my sites that was number one for a good selection of nice keywords has been knocked down the SERPs for most of those search terms!

I have been recently adding some new content to the site that I’ve been writing myself as well as some link building using some article sites and Web 2.0 properties. Nothing too heavy or too dodgy.

The sites that have overtaken me are not new sites and have been on page one for as long as mine has and probably before mine was there.

Has anyone got any tips how can restore my site to the top spots? Should I leave it alone for a while or keep on adding content and links?

Normally I work on a site until it gets to number one (or not) and then I leave it. I don’t tend to work on sites once they are at number one so not really had this problem before.

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?

Now that I’ve got a few link building tools like Sick Submitter, Article Marketing Robot and Scrapebox I think its time I put them on a server somewhere and controlled them from there. This will save my netbook from running red all the time and will prevent my internet connection from crawling to a halt. It will also be handy when I’m at work and have a break and can quickly log in and start or check on a job.

So now I am in the market for a Virtual Private Server or VPS I thought I’d ask and see if anyone can recommend a good service.

Ideally I’d like to pay under $50 a month and be able to run at least Sick Submitter and Article Marketing Robot on it.

I’ve seen a few advertised that sound up to the job but if anyone has any experiences they can share that would be great.

Feel free to drop an aff. link in the comments if you recommend a service.

I while ago I bought Article Marketing Robot which is a tool that lets you ‘automatically’ submit an article to 1,000s of article directories. Stick a couple of links in each article and you soon start racking up 100s of backlinks to your sites.

It’s not quite that simple but with a bit of work it can be done. To try the Article Marketing Robot free trial click here now.

An alternative article marketing tool or service is Article Ranks. The main difference is that you enter your article through their web site and then let them do the submissions. Your article then gets submitted to the blogs in their network and other people’s blogs who have signed up to their service and have opted to have the articles submitted to their sites.

The nice thing about the Article Marketing Robot is that whilst its not free (after the trial) it is just a one off payment. Article Ranks however, While it is free to sign up to, to fully use their service it costs $40 per month. But don’t let that put you off, there are other ways to use it for less!

As I touched on briefly you can earn credits by signing up one or some of your sites for which they will offer you people’s submitted articles. As you accept the articles you get credits which can be used to allow you to submit your own articles to the system.

If you don’t fancy doing this you can also buy credits for as little as $2 and get submitting your articles.

At $2 a pop you can’t really complain and if you just want to use this once for each of your sites it should be a nice way to give them a little boost alongside your other link building activities. It is also a quick and cheap way to diversify your backlink profile and hopefully make it look more natural to Google.

If you use this Article Ranks coupon when you sign up you will get $10 credit which is enough to submit a couple of articles and get the links rolling in: 6140549c6d6ad47e914f02f16ef41aea

My verdict on Articles Ranks? Give it a try, its free and what’ve you got to loose?

www.ArticleRanks.com

Anyone else use using it?

Well it looks like in the last few days the latest Google Panda/Farmer update has been rolled out to the UK.

I think the main point of the update has been to downgrade sites with low quality/non-unique content.

Site with backlinks from sites that have low quality content may also have been hit as those links get discounted.

So how have your sites fared? Mine seem to be ok so far as far as I can tell.

• http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2011/04/12/googles-panda-update-rolls-out-to-uk/

Looks like Google will be ranking pages on how quickly they load (if they aren’t already?).

Use their tool to find out how you can improve your sites before they get the chop in the SERPs:

• http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/

Saying that I just ran it on one of my sites and it pointed out that I was resizing images with HTML so I am off to resize their actual size and save some space.

Thanks Google!

Recently I posted about the Majestic SEO backlink checking service. Here is another one that is slightly different and might be of use to you.

The main difference is you add a list of domains and it will check them all rather than adding a new domain for each of your sites. It then gives you the number of links pointing to each of your sites. With the free version you can’t do much investigation into where the links are from but its nice to see a number.

Anyone paid up to SEO Moz to see their full reports? Its about $99 a month I think.

Once you’ve got your number of links for each site you could then copy and paste these numbers into a spreadsheet and do the check each week or month and see how your number of backlinks are changing.

• http://www.backlinks.in

I don’t think I’ve a monthly round-up for a while but this month it is a welcome distraction from content writing.

My earnings peaked in November and December 2010 with one of my Autumnal sites taking off big time thanks to an increase in the number of people searching for it. But that niche’s popularity was short lived only lasting two months before it went back to getting 30 or less hits a day.

As most of my sites are seasonal when one site is doing well the others take a break and don’t bring in much money. As my Autumnal sites are not making any sales now, this month saw some of my Spring sites come out of hibernation and start getting a few more hits.

Earnings are still down from the end of last year and in March 2011 I made £280 less than I was doing in November and December. Its a drop of 20% which is not what I was hoping for when I set my goal of increasing my earnings by 10% each month.

I guess its a lesson in factoring in seasonality of a product when picking a niche or area to work in. Some of my sites I wouldn’t have considered seasonal when I picked them but after looking at a years worth of data there are definite patterns and its worth also noting that most seasonal niches tend to have short periods of popularity and long periods of inactivity.

If you have a good spread of sites each peaking in different months you could weather the storms but its frustrating to see your sites bounce around in terms of how much money they bring in.

Selling Sites

I made an effort to try and sell one of my sites this month. It was at number one in Google so I emailed the people who are bidding on the keyword it is number one for and asked them if they wanted to buy it. It’s not a great opportunity for an affiliate site but if you are bidding on that keyword it might be nice to also have the number one site to get some extra traffic. I’m not desperate to start selling sites but wouldn’t say no to lump sum of cash that I could reinvest in some link building for my other sites as that is my main priority at the moment.

Earnings for March 2011: £1120

Update: a few people have asked my how much each site makes and things like that. I’ve done this quick pie chart to show how the income is spread over my 50 sites or so. As you can see there are a few that bring home the most money and loads that don’t bring in much at all. The main sites that make the most tend to change each month as the seasons change and things go in and out of favour.

Thanks to a comment from Lee I am now aware of another free linking service called IM Automator.

Once signed up you can submit up to 10 sites a day which each get 15 links.

Like Social Monkee I think this will be a good tool to help get sites indexed and mix up your back link profile a bit.

Its free so is worth a look I think.

Any more sites like this I don’t know about?