How I Got Rich

Build My Rank Goes Down

I never really used BMR much but perhaps that is good thing in light of the recent news from them that they are pulling the plug on their link building service.

I’m still sticking with Link Authority for this type of PR backlink as it works for now but will be seriously looking at new methods of link building for my sites.

Setting up my own blog network looks even better than before!

Where you using BMR and have you noticed any of your sites take a hit in the SERPs?

My UAW Fiverr Gig

Now, if you read my last two monthly earnings reports then you will know my income is heading in the wrong direction and things aren’t what they once were.

So as a way to try and get some extra cash I’ve decided to try my hand at fiverr.com

I have made a gig for Unique Article Wizard where I will generate some articles using Article Builder and then submit them into my UAW account to build backlinks to your site or Web 2.0 sites. Article Builder doesn’t have every category of article so I will pick the closest one to the niche of you site.

Although there are loads of UAW gigs on fiverr I beleive mine stands out from the crowd a little bit as:

• You don’t have to supply an article.
• You can use up to 10 keywords or urls for each of the two links in the resource box.

Being able to use up to 10 keywords or urls means you can mix up the links and anchor text to diversify your keywords a bit more than you could with a regular UAW fiverr gig (or at least the ones I have seen).

If you are thinking of trying UAW but don’t want to splash out $67 per month this is a cheap way to do so.

To place an order click here now.

One Page Sites Can Still Make Money

A while ago I noticed one of my sites that was performing well was getting a bit of traffic from a related keyword in the same niche for which it was not optimised i.e. there was not a page on the site targeting that keyword.

Now a normal person would probably build a page on that site about that keyword with the aim of getting the site to rank better than it was already for that keyword. This should increase the amount of people coming to the site after searching for that keyword as opposed to the few that were finding the site from page 3 of the SERPs.

Exact Match Domains Still Rule

Instead I decided to buy an exact match domain featuring that keyword and starting a new site. At this time I was still in the mindset of having lots of little sites and buying domains whenever I could. This was because even a year ago it was pretty easy to rank an exact match domain with just a few pages on and I still subscribed to the more sites is better than just a few approach.

How Many Pages?

That new site I setup is now number one in Google for its target keyword and is getting about 20 hits a day. This isn’t loads I will admit but the products range in price from £50 to £150 so an average sale can bring in about £5. It makes a few sales a month but the best part is the site, made using WordPress, consists of just a post on the home page that is about 500 words long and has an Easy Content Unit at the top and a related Youtube video and image further down and another page of about 500 words on a related topic/product. It also has a privacy policy page.

What About Link Building?

I have done a bit of link building using Link Authority but have only sent about 5 links it’s way but each link is from a site that has a Google PageRank of 2-5.

Can One Page Sites Still Make Money?

I have a few other sites like this that do make a few quid per month but as you can see it isn’t much in the grand scheme of things. However, if this was for a product that cost £500 or even £1000 then it would be a different story!

I still think having a few bigger sites targeting lots of keywords is the way to go but if you are just starting out then this shows you could get up and running quite quickly with a small site that does make some money. Then I would advise you to reinvest that money on adding more pages to the site to try and get it ranking for even more keywords.

In fact I am going to do what I probably should’ve done in the first place and add a page to the first site targeting this keyword. It can’t hurt to have multiple sites in the Top 10 can it? They are on separate Hostgator hosting accounts.

Link Authority Test

In my last post I asked if anyone has used Link Authority. In that post I mentioned how I was going to add one of my old blogs with PR to the site so that I could get credits in return but it turns out the blog I was thinking of has been downgraded and is only PR1.

Cost of Link Authority

After looking at the pricing I saw that for a one month subscription the cheapest options is $11.64 which is about the cost of two to three pints of beer or $0.32 per link. This only gives you one credit or submission a day but it should be enough for me to test this new link building service out.

I’ve Signed Up

I’ve signed up and am going to test this service on one of my sites that was previously at number 1 in Google for its main keyword and the plural derivative of it but since the Google updates of October 2011 it has now dropped to #3 and #6 respectively.

My plan is to submit one 150 word article a day into Link Authority targetting these two keywords as well as a few variations on those keywords to mix things up a bit.

You can submit more than one article a day but only one article will be posted to their network (unless you subscribe with a daily quota). I just did my first one and it took me 10 minutes to write so I am confident I should be able to do at least one submission a day.

3 Links Per Submission

You can also submit articles which are over 300 words long and you can put three links in them. If you do this you could link to three different sites which might make this service even more cheaper as you are boosting more than one site per credit. Do multiple links from one article have much SEO value?

If the site moves up the rankings I will easily make back my money and will then try the tool out on some more sites. If not its less than a tenner wasted and five hours of my time.

Starting Stats

The site is an exact match domain and the keyword in the domain is the main keyword. As of Tuesday 7 February 2012 my site ranks as follows:

• Main keyword: #3
• Plural of main keyword: #6

I’ll report back in a month with any changes and possibly in-between with my thoughts on this tool as I go along.

Quick update: my first post has been submited and accepted and is on a PR3 site according to the Link Authority report. Pretty good for $0.32!

If you want to sign up with Link Authority you can do so by clicking here now.

If you want to find all the posts in this series I have used this tag: Link Authority Test.

To make sure you don’t miss any future posts sign up to this blogs RSS feed or follow me on twitter.

Anyone used Link Authority?

Sorry for all the “anyone using…” posts lately but I’m trying to find some tools to help me automate and outsource as much as possible due to my lack of time and flagging earnings, just check my last monthly report to see where I am coming from!

I just got an email from the people at LinkAuthority.com perhaps because they are linked to Article Ranks and I signed up with AR once?

It’s free to sign up but sounds like Build My Rank in the sense you submit a 150 word article to their network and you get a link from a PR2+ site for your trouble. I think you can buy credits rather than pay a set monthly fee or submit one of your own sites to the network and then get credits in return.

I’m going to try and submit one of my old sites with PR and see what happens but before I go writing lots of 150 word articles has anyone out there tried this service?

For more info go to LinkAuthority.com (yes that’s an affiliate link!).

Anyone use Get Article Pro?

I recently hired a virtual assistant (VA) from the Philippines via Odesk.com. Her main job is to write articles and then submit them to Unique Article Wizard (UAW). This is quite a tedious process and something I found hard to motivate myself to do so I thought that while I am subscribed to UAW I might as well pay someone to use it for me. The VA said it takes her about two hours to write the three articles and then submit them to UAW with the titles and resource box which contains two links back to my sites. This seems like a reasonable amount of time.

Free Articles from The Best Spinner

I thought I could speed this process up a bit when I heard that The Best Spinner now gives it’s users access to pre-spun articles for free (well, as part of the price you pay for TBS). I asked the VA to check it out but she said there weren’t articles on many topics, especially ones related to the niches my sites were in so it turned out to be a no goer. The Best Spinner doesn’t work on my computer, apparently due to my ISP, so I can’t test this myself.

Get Article Pro

However the VA did suggest I sign up for Get Article Pro which scrapes the web for articles which she could then submit to UAW. It costs $77 a year which if it does what it says on the tin then it will be worth it.

But is this a road I want to go down? Scraping articles, submitting them to UAW for backlinks to my sites?

It certainly would be time saving but would it bring any positive results? Unique Article Wizard seems to be working on some of my sites so I think it is worth using but should I give Get Article Pro a try, what do you think?

Unique Article Wizard: First Impressions

Warning: this post is riddled with affiliate links!

Last week I signed up for Unique Article Wizard. For those that don’t know this is a service that lets you post articles to the blogs and article directories in their network. It’s web based so you log into the site and then enter your article and they do the rest of the work. This might sound pretty simple but their interface isn’t that great.

You can paste in an article in spintax form that you have spun somewhere else, perhaps in The Best Spinner or you can submit an article and two rewrites of that article. This is the option I have used so far and is probably the best for people who don’t like spinning or don’t own any spinning software.

What type of Content can you Submit?

When it comes to submitting an article and two rewrites into Unique Article Wizard the articles and rewritten versions need to have the same amount of paragraphs (seven plus). The paragraphs are then interchanged to make lots of different articles. For this reason paragraph one in each article and rewrite must be on the same topic but written differently. Same for paragraph two and so on. You also need to submit lots of unique titles to help improve the submission rates. For one of my articles I ordered two rewrities of an article I had previously ordered from The Content Authority. This was quite expensive so for the second article I hired someone from Odesk who charged $5 to write a 500 word article and then do two rewrites of it. Both articles got accepted so I guess the cheaper one from Odesk was good enough. Unique Article Wizard also offer an article writing service and charge $9.99 for an article and two rewrites. You could always write them yourself though!

Inserting Links

You can put two links in your article with at least one going in the resource box. This means you can put a link in the body of the text but when I tried this I found that some of my articles had this link removed. For this reason I recommend you put both links in the resource box. You can spin the resource box and the links so you can link to lots of sites and/or pages in one submission.

Submission Rates

You can choose how many times a day you want your article to be submitted. The minimum is 20, I’m not sure what the maximum is but for my articles, so far, I have chosen 50. In the future I think I will do 20 to make it look at bit more natural. It takes a few days for the submission to kick in after you have entered your article but then each day you get an email with a list of the submissions that have been made. So far I have only submitted two articles and both have gotten about 160 submission.

Index Rates

I’ve only submitted two articles so far but for the first article it went down like this:

• Submissions: 162
• Indexed: 95

and the other one went like this:

• Submissions: 159
• Indexed: 99

These are only after a few days of the job being completed so there is a chance more could get indexed over the coming days and weeks. You could always put the URLs of the non-indexed articles into a pinger or indexer and speed things up a bit. A good old fashioned Scrapebox or Xrummer blast probably wouldn’t hurt either.

SERP Movement

I used one submission on a new site and linked to a set of Web 2.0 sites that link to my site. Therefore none of these links went directly to the money site. That site hasn’t moved in the SERPs.

For the other submission I used it on different site. I used one link to link directly to the money site and the other link was spun and linked to one of 10 Web 2.0 sites that link back to my money site. This site moved from #7 to #4 in the SERPs. Although until the recent Google update that occurred mid-October it had been #1 for this keyword.

Final Thoughts

So with nearly 100 indexed posts for each article, and as each article contains two links I got 200 new backlinks to my sites for each submission. This sounds pretty good. But looking at the sites the articles are submitted to, they aren’t the best and if you are not writing the articles yourself it could get quite expensive especially when you factor in the $67 per month subscription fee.

If you have already hired a virtual assistant with time on their hands this might be a good way to keep them busy. Or if you have a cheap source of content who is able to do spinning or rewrites then you could make the most of this tool.

Doing it on the Cheap

One approach could be to write and spin/rewrite a load of articles. Sign up for one month and submit all those articles. Get them published then cancel your account. The articles should stay where they were published and you will have gotten your links and only paid up for one month. You might want to check how many articles you can submit a day and what does happen to your articles once you leave the programme.

I’m going to stick with it for a while as I am using it to try and rank my new Adsense sites but I’m not entirely convinced so far. But the proof will be in the pudding and if it gets my sites ranked and they make money then it will have worked. I guess it all comes down to results and if you can make the most of the tools you are using…

• Link to Unique Article Wizard: http://www.uniquearticlewizard.com/

Alternatives to Unique Article Wizard

A cheaper alternative would be the Article Marketing Robot which does a similar job but is installed on your computer and runs from there rather than being web based. It has a much larger list of sites you can submit to but it will take up your machines resources as it does so. It is a one time fee rather than monthly subscription and they do offer a free 5 day trial so go check it out.

Building a Blog Network

So far out of all the link building methods I have tried getting a backlink from a post on a blog with Google page rank (3+) seems to be the most effective. So after being told many times by people like those at Sitey.net it is worth the hassle to set one up I am going to give it a shot. Buying a post on other people’s blog networks is ok but it would be nice to have my own so I can control how long a post stays on the front page for. I could even sell spots on the network to raise a bit of cash. If I was doing SEO for hire then it would also be nice to be able to have access to my own blogs to get links from.

Getting the Domain

This is probably going to be the hardest part. I could either look into getting an existing domain with page rank (PR) and paying a premium or just registering a new domain at the standard rate (about $10). I’m not really sure where to look for existing domains, I have looked at dropped domains but not had much luck. What sort of prices do existing PR3 domain sites go for and where should I look to buy one? When it comes to buying a new domain and then building up a site which might get PR I’m a bit sceptical. I have quite a lot of sites now, some that are over two years old, and the last time I checked only a couple had PR and none over 1. This tells me that it will take ages and lots of work to get PR for a new site. Am I right?

Hosting the Site

This might get expensive too. Each site should be on a new IP I think. So this sounds like separate hosting accounts of at least paying for each site to be on a different IP. How much would this run to? At the moment I pay $10 a month for Hostgator or about £25 a year for hosting for my newer UK sites. Setup 10 sites and it starts to get expensive.

Building the Blogs

I’m not too worried about this as I have access to some pretty good content writers who would be up to the job of writing for some new sites. It could get expensive if I get too many sites though.

How Many Sites in a Mini Net?

So if I build a mini network of blog sites how many do I need? At the moment I am seeing results from posting to about 20 PR3 blogs. My posts and links don’t stay on the front page for long but the results are ok for what I pay, but not amazing. So how many sites would I need to make to get enough links to rank a site? Would it be cost effective? I’m not doing anything too competitive at the moment so there wouldn’t need to be too many sites. Off the top of my head about 20 sounds possible.

Cost of Setting up a Mini Network

• Domain: £7 (if bought from new)
• Hosting: £25
• Content: £20 (starting with 20 500 word articles)
• Backlinks: £50 (the blogs will need their own links)

I think that is about it. So for each site it would cost about £100 to setup, that is if I bought a new domain. There is also the chance that the site doesn’t get PR and isn’t worth anything. It also might make money of its own if I stick a few affiliate links on it (or is that a no-no?).

If you have lots of sites in the same niche this could work out cheaper as you could link to lots of you sites from the same set of blogs.

Anyone got any experience of building a mini net/blog network for backlink purposes? Do my costs sound about right? Was it worth it?

How to Test Backlinking Methods?

At the moment I am still trying to find some affordable and effective link building methods.

In order to test different types of links I’ve been trying different things on different sites. I guess this is one of the benefits of having lots of sites: you’ve got lots of testing grounds.

But testing one service or approach on one site and another on a different site takes a lot of time.

Sometimes I feel I’d be better off if I threw everything at one site rather than spreading it across many sites.

So far I’ve been doing articles one one site, social bookmarks on another, then Web 2.0s on that one and then forum profiles on this one.

All this has really got me though, is small movements on each site. I can’t afford to do it all on all of my sites but I think I’ve been going at it the wrong way.

Perhaps it is time to try everything on one site and then see if it moves before moving on to the next site. I might not know exactly what worked as I tried lots of things but maybe that isn’t a problem? Maybe there is no one or two things I can do that will move my sites up in the SERPs and I should give up trying to find it.

I guess this is the downside of having lots of sites: that you have too many sites to test things on and end up spreading yourself too thinly.

If you are just starting out in this game I recommend you either:

• Limit yourself to three to five sites and throw everything you have at them (time and money)
• Find a scalable model/method/approach and hire someone else to do it on lots of little sites.

Either way, don’t do what I’ve done and end up with lots of sites on page one or two and hardly any at number 1 in Google!

BackBlasts Goes Live

The other day I did a mini review of a new backlinking service I was trying out called BackBlasts.com which you can read here. If you were interested in the service you will be pleased to know it is now live and prices start from $10 a month.

When I tested the service I used it on two sites.

For one site I linked directly to my site and spread the 1000 links a day over three URLS from my site and used four keywords as the anchor text.

For the other site I set it up so that the links BackBlasts created were linking to some blog posts that then linked to my actual site. The 1000 links a day for this site were split over 10 blogs posts so each got 100 backlinks a day.

After about two weeks of this my sites had moved up the SERPS.

Project One (direct linking) was targetting 4 keywords on my site and this is how they moved:
kw1: #8 to #6
kw2: no rank to no rank
kw3: no rank to #28
kw4: no rank to #43

I’m pretty happy with that. It is an old site (~2 years) which never got any backlinks and never really ranked so its good to see it get some exposure in Google now.

Project Two (using blog posts as buffers) was targetting 2 keywords:
kw1: #7 to #6
kw2: #25 to #20

Not a massive jump but its heading in the right direction. Will be interesting to see if this continues.

The blog posts I am using as buffers have no page rank and I doubt the blogs are that high quality so maybe this played a part? Would it be better to point the links to some more repuatable sites like Squidoo or Ezine etc?

Now that Backblasts has gone live I’m going to sign up for the $10 100 links a day package and point them directly to one of my sites as a test. 100 links a day shouldn’t draw any unwanted attention to me from Google should it?

• http://backblasts.com/