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.

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?

Drip Feed Blasts

Someone posted a link to this thread over on Wicked Fire and after reading the first post I was taken in.

Maybe it is a scam, maybe not, but it does sound like a potential answer to a problem I’ve had for the last two years: How Do I Get Backlinks for my Affiliate Sites?

I’m going to try out what he did to get his site ranking in Google on one of my sites. It will be a site that I’ve added about 60 pages to, each with about 200 words on all focussing on one keyword. The site isn’t on a keyword domain and as yet it is not ranking for the targeted keyword in Google (although it is for a few uncompetitive keywords).

Having all but given up on the site and all non-keyword domain sites I’ve not got much to lose with this site so will be trying out his backlinking method

The backlinking method appears to be using the Red_Virus social book marking service to get your site book marked at a load of web 2.0 social sites and then signing up for the Drip Feed Blast service which for $99 a month will get you 1000 links a day. As 1000 links a day to a new site will look a bit suspect the poster recommends pointing those links to the social bookmarking pages that link to your site you got from the Red_Virus package.

So far I’ve ordered the social bookmarking from Red_Virus at a cost of $19. Once that is completed I will get a months worth of 1000 links a day. This will cost $118 which is about £75.

If it works and the site gets ranked at all or moves up the serps I will be very happy but quite surprised.

But its worth a punt as I’ve not got much else going at the moment regarding backlinks.

At the moment the site isn’t in the top 200 pages in Google for the keyword I am targeting.

I will provide updates or if nothing happens during the month I will post an end of month report. I’ll use this tag on the blog: Drip Feed Blasts if you want to view all posts from this topic.

Fingers crossed!

Back to Work

Well I’ve just had a week off work and am now back in the grind doing the 9-5. I had a great week off, probably didn’t do as much affiliate marketing as I should but it was nice to be a man of leisure and my own boss for a while. I did suffer from my old problem of not doing as much as I should and doing other things that are fun but won’t earn me money like going to the gym, lying by the pool, learning Thai and doing Thai boxing. These were my goals for the week:

Affiliate Marketing Goals for the last 7 days:
1. Try out a mailing list software type service on one of my sites (any suggestions?)
2. Get all my sites up to date
3. Look into outsourcing adding content to my sites
4. Write my ‘two years in affiliate marketing’ post

So how did I get on? Not as well as I hoped but what’s the point in having goals if they are too easy to achieve?!

Try out a mailing list software type service on one of my sites (any suggestions?)

I was going to look at Aweber for my affiliate marketing mailing list but someone suggested mailchimp.com as it is free for the first 1,000 users so it would be an inexpensive way to test out a mailing list. I signed up with them and added a signup form to my busiest site which gets a good few hundred hits a day. My signup form is in the sidebar of the (WordPress) site and not in a popup but it is above the fold so everyone who lands on the site should see it. After having it on the site for about half a week and being seen by maybe 1000 users no one has signed up! The form does look a bit cruddy as I am yet to smarten it up but I am bit disappointed no one has signed up. I will try and jazz it up a bit and see if that helps and then maybe try putting it in a popup, although I don’t want to scare off any customers.

Get all my sites up to date

I didn’t even get close to this. I spent most of the time working on just one of my sites and adding content to it and smartening it up. The site is on page 4 for its main keyword but gets a fair amount of long tail traffic and makes a few sales so my goal is to get it up to page 1 in Google and see if it becomes more profitable. I’ve added some content but no backlinks so not sure if this will help.

Look into outsourcing adding content to my sites

I read a few blog posts on this but still no closer to outsourcing getting my pages formatted with links, ECU and content. Once I do this I think I will move a few steps up the ladder in terms of earnings as I can get lots of content added to my sites very quickly which is one of my main sticking points at the moment – not having enough time.

Write my ‘two years in affiliate marketing’ post

No progress on this. Think I will scrap it as too much work to do and probably not much demand for it! Maybe after 5 years.

Writing Content is Not So Bad

Since I started outsourcing the writing of content for my sites I’ve not written anything substantial at all. Even before I began to outsource this task I could barely face writing any as I had gotten bored of it long ago.

But today I was bored at work with nothing to do so I thought I’d have a go at writing a piece for a domain I’d registered ages ago but forgotten about.

Once I got going I was almost enjoying it and managed to write over 800 words without too much effort. This would’ve cost me about £10 to outsource so I’ve managed to save enough for three pints of beer or 14 Pad Thais from the Pad Thai lady over the road.

I don’t think I will go back to writing my content myself but I will try and remember its not that bad and if I have some spare time it is something I can do.

So if you are putting off writing some content, get on with it, you might just enjoy it!

Outsourcing link building with ODesk – Update II

Just a quick update on my experiences of outsourcing the creation of forum profile back links through ODesk.

One of the first sites I did this for has now moved to number one in Google for the keyword I used for the anchor text in the profiles. The site was previously in the bottom half of page one and first moved to number four or so and then moved up to the top spot.

If I try and see if the links purchased for the site are indexed I cannot see any sign of them so who knows if it was anything to do with these links? Its a bit of a coincidence though.

Although saying that the other sites I have aquired links for in the same manner have yet to show much change in the SERPs but again none of their links are showing up anywhere as being indexed.

I started off using two contractors from ODesk to build my links so I could see which one was the best and then stick with them but they both do the work to the same standard so I have been using them both.  They are both incredibly slow though and even though I put in my ad that I required a turn around of 48 hours for a batch of 120 links they take at least five days. 

Due to them both being so slow and me having lots of sites in need of links I have taken on two more people who applied to my advert but again they are very slow.  Add this to the long time it takes to get the links indexed and you are looking at a long process that could take months to really show and benefits or otherwise.

But paying for the creation of these links is cheap and takes me no time or effort so I am continuing with it for now until I find a better way to get links for my sites.

Can anyone recommend a faster link builder than my guys and has anyone else tried this approach to getting links?

Outsourcing link building with ODesk – Update

Since my last posts about ordering some link building through ODesk I’ve had about 5 or 6 jobs completed. Each one has been for 120 forum profile backlinks to a different one of my sites. The jobs all went through smoothly but I have had trouble getting the new links indexed. I’ve tried pinging the list of urls to the profiles but it hasn’t seem to have done much.

I’ve tried to look for the backlinks by using http://www.backlinkwatch.com/ and the Yahoo site explorer but for some of my sites only a few of the links that have been built show up and for others none of these links show up.

This is a bit disappointing as it seems to be slowing the whole process down a lot.

But on the upside two of the sides I have had links built for have moved up the SERPS shortly after their links were build. One was in the bottom half of page one and moved to number two in Google and the other was at the bottom of page one and moved to number seven on page one in Google. It might be a coincidence but the timing is pretty bang on.

Time will tell if the other sites get the same boost.

In the meantime I have been ordering more links for my other sites and also trying to do more blog commenting to try and improve my backlinking efforts.

Monthly Round-up for August 2010

Don’t think I have done one of these for a while but as I am now back from my holidays I thought I better do a quick one for August.

I was away for the first three weeks of August (as well as July) so didn’t do that much work on my sites but the main thing I have been doing is the outsourcing of the acquisition of forum profile back links (you can read how I did this on this blog). I ordered them in batches of 120 and did it for four of my sites but its been over a week now and the links are not showing up in any backlink checks I’ve done so cannot say if they have made a difference or not. I doubt these links are very high quality but they’ve got to be better than nothing.

I’m still outsourcing written content which is really helping my sites as I’m too busy/lazy to write my own content these days and this way allows me to get good, fresh content for my sites. Have a look on ODesk and see if you can find a good writer if you are interested in doing this.

I still haven’t gotten around to trying out the financial leads through the Affiliate Marketing School as I am still scared of losing lots of money on PPC but I will bite the bullet one day – maybe once some money starts coming through from AWin.

My ‘big site’ is still not ranking at all which sucks. I’ve done about 50 200 word product pages for the desired keyword and its still not on the first 60 pages of Google and judging by some of the other pages in the top 600 the competition isn’t that stiff. This is my first site which does not have the keyword in the domain and I’m now realising just how much a keyword domain helps.

I’ve also started three new keyword niche sites this month after a long time of not starting any new sites. None of them are particularly good niches as they get pretty low hits but they might bring in a few quid each month which is nothing to complain about but not really the road I want to keep going down long term (lots of little sites).

What I am thinking about at the moment is moving from getting a large slice of a small pie to getting a small slice of a big pie. At the moment my sites do quite well in the SERPS (apart from my big site) but the niches are pretty low traffic so even if I get to number 1 in Google and take a large slice of the niche pie I still don’t get much money. But now I am thinking to maybe go after a more competitive niche but aim to get in the bottom half of page 1 and just have a smaller slice of the much bigger niche pie. To do this I will still need a keyword domain but as they are all gone in the competitive niches I might start appending them with buy_____.co.uk or _______store.co.uk as I’ve seen other people doing this. I don’t really like the idea of muscling into niches in which other affiliates are already operating but people are doing this to me now so maybe its time I started doing it too. What do you think readers?

This month my profits were up about 10% on last month which I am pleased about and I will be aiming to do the same next month.

In September I will be mostly working on my Christmas site – it’s only 3 months away!

Outsourcing link building with ODesk – First Job Finished

I just received an email from the guy who I had contracted to build me 120 links using the Angela & Paul packet service thing via ODesk.

I got sent an Excel spreadsheet with links to 120 forum profiles and in each profile my website was given as the users website with the anchor text I had provided.

I have checked to see if the backlinks have been recognised yet using the http://www.backlinkwatch.com/ website but I guess it is too early for them to show up. I will be keeping an eye on this and seeing if my site moves up in the SERPS. It is currently at number two after recently being knocked from the number one spot it had held for a over a year.

I paid $11.11 for these 120 links. I’m not quite sure where the Angel & Paul packet part comes into play but I’m pretty sure I could do this myself if I had the time and the inclination.

I’ve got another order of the same but for another site currently being worked on by another contractor so will see whose work I like best before picking one. Or maybe I will use them both.

At the moment this is the only link building method I am using part from the odd link swap through the a4u forum.

I will report back once the links have settled.

Has anyone else used this kind of link building method or do you know of any other link building methods?

Outsourcing link building with ODesk

After reading about the link building services offered by some of the freelancers that use ODesk I decided to sign up and see if I could procure any of their services.

I have just had my first job accepted and am now waiting to see what happens next.

I am after some of the Angel & Paul packet links but am not too sure exactly what this means so need to look into it.

Will report back when the links are done and see if it makes any difference to my sites in the serps.

If anyone has any tips on how to work with people via ODesk to outsource backlinks please let me know.

Back to work tomorrow…