How I Got Rich

Backlink Update

This month I have been mainly focusing on link building for my affiliate marketing sites. At the start of February I picked three of my sites and started building links for each them. I will work on these sites for the whole month then re-evaluate at the end of the month and either pick new ones or keep going with some of the same ones.

The sites I picked were:

• A microniche, one product keyword domain site that is about number 120 in the SERPS for the two keywords it is targeting. I used to promote this site via PPC before I got booted off of Adwords and it did pretty well so to have it ranking well in Google and getting some hits again would be great.

• The other site was an exact match keyword domain website I started probably 18 months ago. It never ranked well for its main keyword and is currently on page three in Google but it does make a few quid a month so if I could get it on to page one I think it could do OK.

• The last site is one of my ‘big’ sites i.e. it is not a keyword domain site and will eventually promote a wide range of products. At the moment this site is just targeting one keyword and its plural (so two in total) but it not ranked at all for them.

The approach I am taking so far this month has covered a few different areas of link building as follows:

Article Marketing

• Ezine Articles
• Article Rich
• Article Base

I’ve only submitted one article so far to Ezine as although it is regarded as the best by many people it takes an age to approve articles so I am still waiting for my first one to be approved. I don’t want to submit a load that might get rejected until I know I can do it right at least once.

The other two seem to approve articles instantly so I’ve submitted about 10 unique articles to them altogether. Although I’m not sure how much their backlinks are worth?

I’ve also had some articles written for me that the writer submitted to Ezine Articles on their own account that have been approved already so I should get some links from those. Plus I got someone off of Wicked Fire to write 200 articles and submit them to some blogs. This was pretty cheap and the job was completed pretty quickly. The articles seem OK but I cannot vouch for the quality of the blogs they are posted on!

I got another article I had written spun into 250 new versions but have yet to do anything with them as although they read OK they are pretty similar. I think I will look for an auto article submitter tool and send them to some other article sites.

So my article marketing is going quite well, I’m trying a few different things out. I don’t think any of the links have been recognised by Google yet so no idea if this is going to help but fingers crossed.

RSS Feeds

About 99% of my sites are made using WordPress which gives out an RSS feed of the posts. I’ve been adding my feeds to a couple of RSS agregators which in theory will give my new posts an automatic backlink in their directly. I think this could be good if I expanded the list to a few 100 RSS agregators as every little helps (hopefully).

Facebook

I’ve been setting up Facebook pages for a few of my sites and putting ‘like’ buttons on the sites which connect the page with the site. This should get some links from Facebook and give the sites a bit more exposure in the people who like them’s feeds.

Social Bookmarking

I’ve also been submitting my sites to social bookmarking sites. Some manually, some via people offering their services.

Xrummer Backlinks

I think Xrummer is some kind of tool that lets you get loads of low quality links from forum profiles and blog comments. I ordered 5000 of someone rather than buying the software and doing it my self. As these links are a bit questionable in quality I have been linking to articles on article directories that link to my sites rather than link directly to my sites with these links using the articles as a kind of buffer. I did buy a tool called Scrapebox a while ago that I never used which I think does a similar job so will dust off my copy and trying and find out how it works – anyone used it?

I think that is about it for my link building activities. I’ve also been adding content to my other sites too. My earnings have taken a massive hit this month and are less than half they were two months ago so I’m really counting on some of this link building to pay off.

Can you help?

Anyone know a WordPress plug-in that auto posts new posts to a Facebook page? I’ve tried some but couldn’t get them to work.

Anyone got any tips for submitting sites to RSS agregators? Is it worth it, which ones etc?

Anyone know of a good article submission tool?

Which are the best article submission directories?

Anyone know of a good WordPress widget for letting people retweet, like the blog?

What other links should I be looking at?

If you haven’t already, check out fiverr.com for low cost people willing to help you build links for your sites.

Can you do me a Facebook favour?

I’m just having a dable with Facebook and have setup a page for this blog.

Could you, my dear readers, either click on the like button at the bottom of this post or go directly to the page and click the like button. http://www.facebook.com/pages/HowIGotRichnet/198702543477287

I want the ‘likes’ so I can get a decent url and I need 25 to do so (I believe). You can unlike after!

Thank you!

Fun Packed Friday Night

Well its almost midnight here in Bangkok and I’ve spent an action packed Friday night in front of the laptop working on my sites. I’ve been busy adding content and also doing a bit of researcing into building links and how to setup pages in Facebook for my sites.

I’ve setup a page for one of my sites. The site has a WordPress ‘like’ plugin on that when a user clicks on it something is posted in their Facebook feed along the lines of ‘Gavin likes HowIgotRich.net’. Then in theory all their friends click on the link back to the site to see what it is. I’m not sure this last part actually happens but its a nice idea.

Anyway, the Facebook page is setup but I’m not sure how it benefits me. Anyone got any pointers in how to manage a Facebook page to ultimately get traffic back to your website?

Its not been the most fun Friday night but it does feel like I am making progress in my £2 Project and affilaite marketing in general.

Setting up a Facebook page for your site

A while ago I had a look at Facebook to see if there were any ways I could get some free traffic sources. I never really followed it up as it seemed like a lot of work for potentially not much in return.

Yesterday I installed the Like plugin on some of my WordPress sites and once I started looking at the settings I saw that you could link it to an account and setup a page for your site.

I decided to create a page for one of my sites on my fake Facebook account and see if I could get any interest in it.

It seems time consuming so I will give it a little try and see what happens without wasting too much time on Facebook.

Has anyone set up a Facebook page for an affiliate marketing website? Did it bring you much traffic or link juice?

IKEA Facebook Showdown

Check out this video about how IKEA used Facebook to promote themeselves.

Imagine being able to do that with your affiliate marketing sites!

Big Site #1: Comedy Box Sets

I’ve setup and started the first of my two big sites.  It is called Comedy Box Sets and can be found at this address: http://comedyboxsets.co.uk/

I watch a lot of comedy TV serieses and after seeing a profitable affiliate site about a TV series I thought why not try and combine a hobby (is watching TV a hobby?) with an affiliate marketing venture.

I am not too worried about the design at the moment and am going to be focussing on adding content for the time being.

The plan is that as I watch a comedy show I will write a little bit about the series of the episode on the blog and put some links to merchants that sell that DVD.  If there is any merchandise available for the show I will link to that also.  Then there is tickets for standup comedy shows and films that the actors are in.

I know alot of people are downloading TV shows now but I hope there are still some people out there buying DVDs.

I am going to try and promote the site using as many means as possible and have setup a twitter account for it and will probably do a facebook group.  Does anyone know how to get lots of twitter followers quickly? I think I will do a mailing list at some point too.

It is not going to be the most profitable of sites but I hope it will be fun to write and something that will hold my interst over the months and years.

My other big site will hopefully be more profitable as it will be selling a wider range of items at a wider range of prices but I am yet to start that one.

Facebook and Affiliate Marketing

I have a Facebook account that I sometimes use but I have just created a ‘fake’ Facebook account for affiliate marketing purposes and to see how social networking sites can be used in an affiliate marketing context.

What I plan to do is see if I can add lots of random people I don’t know, join lots of groups relating to some of my niches and then post the odd relevant link here and there to my sites and see if anyone clicks on them.  I’m not going to spam random groups and people with my links as this is wrong and there is no point as the traffic will not be targeted and therefore won’t convert.  However if one of my ‘friends’ states they are going to buy a new TV I will reply with a link to a TV affiliate site.

Why the fake account? Simple really, I don’t really want my experiments to show up on my main one and all my links to my affiliate sites to be exposed to the world.

Is it ethical? Probably not to be honest.  What do you think?  Is it stooping a bit too low taking this approach?