How I Got Rich

Getting all my sites to number 1 in Google

This might sound like an obvious goal but for now I am going to focus on getting my existing sites to number one in Google.  Most of them are at number one in Google for their main keyword but not all of them.

Normally I start a new site, put up some content and wait for it to get to number one.  If after a while it is not on page one or close then I leave it and move on.  But as I have vowed to not make any new sites for a while I am thinking I might as well get the sites I have to number one so I can see if any of them will get any traffic.

I have sites for keywords that get, according to the Google keyword tool, anything from 3,000 to 50,000 exact searches a month.  As I’ve now realised the Google keyword tool is not to be believed and does not even give a rough idea of searches.  This has made me think that I might be sitting on a site that gets 100’s of 1000’s of exact searches each month and I won’t know until I get the site to number one.

So with that in mind I am going back to my older sites that don’t rank well and seeing what I can do to get them to number one.

I’ve never really done any work on back links so I might have to finally get around to giving it a serious go.  I will also be adding content which I will probably end up outsourcing as I don’t have much spare time any more.  It is quite expensive at £10 for 500 words but probably cost effective in the long run?

Anyone got any tips for getting a site to number one in Google?

Paying for Backlinks

I’ve been pretty bad at getting backlinks for my sites.  Some of them rank well without them and others don’t but it has never compelled me to go hunting for backlinks for my sites.  I do the odd link exchange via the a4u forum and have tried blog posting but it is so time consuming and often comes to nothing.

Recently I saw an advert on a forum for 100 social bookmarking backlinks for $25.  Turnaround was reported as 72 hours.  There were lots of good reviews of the service so I thought ‘why not?’.

I placed my order picking one of my sites that is about five months old and has never ranked well.  It is currently on page seven off Google although the other day it was on page three.  My order has now been processed so I will sit back and wait for the backlinks to be indexed.  If the page rises in rank beyond page three then I will probably get this done for some of my other sites and start including the £12 as part of the cost of setting up a new site along with the domain name.

I will report back in the next week or so with how the site is doing.

Update: http://www.backlinkwatch.com/ is showing 107 backlinks.  Most of them however don’t have any anchor text so not sure how effective they will be.  The site is now on page two in Google and is number 17.  So far so good.

Update: on page four now.

Atomic Niche Site Update

I started a micro niche or atomic niche site a while ago for an item that retails for about £1000.

I built the site using the product model number as the domain and then put an Easy Content Unit price comparison widget on the home page.  I left the site to see how well it would rank organically and it got to number two in Google after a few weeks.  It was getting about five hits a day but no sales.  I left the site as I assumed the item was too expensive and that not many people were searching for the item.

Recently I have been looking into PPC and AdWords and thought I would give promoting this site using PPC a go using the new things I have learnt in that area.

Today I logged into Affiliate Window and saw that the site had made a sale! The item sold  for £1,158.00 which got me £19.58 in commission.  10% would’ve been nice, or even 5% but in this case I will have to settle for 1.5% thanks to those stingy b*~tards at Dixons!

I think I will setup another one of these sites soon…

I paid for 58 clicks which cost me £12 so I will only make about £8 on this one but it is a start.

Update: I have since made another sale from a different merchant which got me £31.91 commission.  This has come from 68 clicks which cost me £14.69 giving me a total profit of £36.80 so far.  I am happy with that and think I will build a couple more of these sites.  If I had 10 up and running performing like this that would be £300 per month.

Update II: Another sale through today for £852.17 which brought me £17.04 which is about a 2% commission rate.  PPC spend is now at £15.18 which gives me a gross profit of £68.53 and a net total profit of £53.35.  I will definitely be making a few more of this type of site this week.  Just need to find out which merchants offer decent commission rates as 1% is pretty poor.

Update III: Another sale for this site came through today which brought in  £29.88 commission from a sale of £995.99 (3% commission rate).   This brings the gross profit up to £98.41 which after deducting the PPC spend of £20.25 leaves a net profit of £78.16.  The other sites I made in this style after this one are yet to make a sale but it’s early days.

Update IV: Bah! The sale from update III has been decline.  This was £29.88 of commission I thought was comming my way but according the Affiliate Windows data it has been ‘web declined’.  Not sure what that means?

Update V: Another sale for the site, still no action on the other sites though.  This one gets £15.93 commission from a sale of £796.52 although this is still pending.  This brings the gross profit for this site up to £64.88 and with a PPC spend of £21.29 the net profit stands at £43.59.

Where is my site Google?

Yesterday I saw that one of my sites that had recently made it to the number one spot was no where to be seen in the Google search engine results pages (SERPS). This wasn’t one of my main earning sites but it made me realise that this could happen to any of my sites and if it were to happen to a big earner I’d be in trouble!

I hadn’t registered any new domains for a while as I had decided to work on my existing sites and try and get them ranking a bit better. But after Google’s treatment of one of my well ranked sites I decided I better get some more sites up and running to try and spread my earnings across multiple sties and therefore spread the risk of losing a site and a revenue stream

I saw down with my girlfriend and we went through some ideas for niches. Coming up with niches is probably my joint weakest area along with getting links. Luckily she came up with a couple of 40k exact match domains and one 60k exact match domain and a few 12k ones. I registered about five domains and got the first site up later that day. A few of these sites are seasonal and will make most of their sales in the summer months so I am working on getting those up and running first. The others should makes sales all year round so I will get those sites up and running after the summer ones are done. Think I will take some time out this weekend and get them all up and running.

If anyone wants to swap any backlinks get in touch.

Skewing the Stats

Looks like I screwed the pooch today.  I posted a link to one of my sites in the comments section on a blog in the attempt to get a backlink and today the site has now had over 100 visitors from that blog.

Isn’t this a good thing?  Well no its not as the blog wasnt really very related to my niche so none of the traffic will convert and the stats for my site will be skewed for some time to come.

Its not the end of the world but will be rather annoying when it comes to analysisng the data for that site.

Going Back to Old Sites

Due to my impatience to find the perfect the niche I have left a fair few of my older sites by the way side if they didn’t rank well or make sales in their first few weeks.  Today I decided to go back to a few of them and give them some more content and add the new on page SEO techniques I have picked up over the months since those sites were created.  Will it do these sites any good?  Who knows but I guess I will find out in a few weeks.

Does Google keep down sites that are updated after being created with minimal content and pages and then left for a few months?

Does Google look more favourably on sites that were indexed with a good amount of pages and content and were updated regularly ever since?

I guess there is no way to know.

I’ve also spent a few hours today trying to get backlinks for my top two ranking sites.  They are both number two in Google behind an Amazon product page and I have heard Amazon product pages can be overtaken fairly easily as the product pages don’t tend to have many backlinks.  I don’t know the best way to get backlinks so my time was spent looking for dofollow blogs I could leave comments on.  I know you can buy backlinks but I wouldn’t really know where to start when looking for a firm that do this.   Has anyone had any luck in buying backlinks or knows how to get them for free?

My previous post was an attempt at creating some link bait.  I saw the big breakfast challenge information posted to a few websites I read so thought I would add the information here and see if I got any traffic from people searching for it.  Luckily that post got indexed the very same day and was on page one in Google for related search terms.  This got me a couple of hits but as I’m not really selling anything I don’t have much to gain from doing it and it was more of an experiment.

No Sales Today

So far April has been a good month in the world of affiliate marketing, I’d made a few  sales each day through amazon and some sales from sites that hadn’t made a sale yet.

But today I woke up and checked amazon first thing as usual to find I had made no sales the previous day.

I decided to spend my time at work focusing on affiliate marketing rather than my day job and posted on a few blogs to try and get some backlinks although most of them turned out to be ‘nofollow’.

I also singed up for Hub Pages and made two pages for two of my sites.  Not really sure how this works and it something I will look into over the weekend but at the least it should be a backlink and at the best will get me lots of traffic.

Also looked at how I could integrate twitter with a Wordpress blog as this could be useful for getting people to subscribe and then return to the sites.

Someone has offered to write some content for one of my blogs in exchange for a couple of links so will see how that goes.

Finally I looked at how I could get a  ‘email this to a friend’ type tool for my sites in case someone stumbled across one of my sites and knew someone who might find it useful.

Got the next few days off work so will try and hammer as much content for my sites and do some more research on backlinks.

Backlinks

My efforts in the area of getting backlinks for my sites has been pretty weak so far.

I enjoy making the sites and getting them setup and ready to go but when it comes to off-page SEO I am not really sure where to start.

I signed one of my sites up to Link Share and have had a few requests which I am actioned but I found the system quite clunky and you can only sign up with one site so would need multiple accounts – one for each site.

I set up a Google Alert for my niches  and then when there is a new blog post mentioning my niche on the Internet I get an email alert and I go and post a comment on it hoping that I will get a dofollow backlink from there.  Most blogs don’t have dofollow links so not much good comes of this approach.

You can also pay to get backlinks but I am not at that point yet and am unsure of what kind of links they can get you.

If anyone wants to swap links from their site to mine and vice versa get in touch. Here are some the areas I have sites in:

• Sportswear & Equipment
• Kitchen Utensils
• Kitchen Appliances
• Garden Tools
• Grooming Appliances
• Camping
• Ladies’ Clothing

Leave a comment if you want to swap a link and I will email you.