How I Got Rich

Was there a Google Update last night?

Update: seems like it was my SERP tracking tool giving me problems rather than my sites getting dropped. Whoops!

I’ve just been checking the ranking of some of my sites in Advanced Web Ranking and it seems like quite a few of them have been banished from the SERPS. I guess this Google update would’ve happened between February 22 & 23.

Anyone else noticed anything going?

Google Panda 2.5 Strikes!

None of the previous Panda updates have affected my sites except for one site which got knocked down a few places or pages depending on the keyword. It didn’t take that long for the site to return to number one though although it was my biggest earner at the time and I lost a few quid.

Now though, after what I presume is the release of Panda 2.5, my sites’ rankings have been decimated! I checked a few sites the other day to see where they are in the SERPs as I do fairly regularly and I saw they had lost their number one spots for some of their main keywords. The morning I noticed the drop in rankings was the morning I was leaving for a weeks holiday in Malaysia. Not a good way to start a trip!

I was taking my laptop with me but wasn’t expecting to do any work as my sites were doing ok. Now that they are all falling out of the SERPs that plan might have to change.

This month was going pretty well and I’d had quite a few days where I made over £50 but since the drop I’ve only made a few pounds.

I haven’t had much time to read up on what has happened. Has anyone else noticed anything?

What are people doing to try and claw back their rankings? It looks like Amazon has come out pretty well of this from looking at the niches where I have sites.

Never a dull moment eh?

Another Google update?

Has Google done another mini update recently? I ask because quite a few of my sites have made jumps in the SERPs. Anyone else noticed anything positive or negative?

Cheers Google!

Free Links with Dripable.com

There are a few sites that are offering free services to help you get a few more links to your sites. So far I’ve tried:

• IM Automator: free social bookmarks
• Social Monkee: another free social bookmarking service
• 24/7 Backlinks: gives you a lump of backlinks each day

You can see the other affiliate marketing tools I use here.

There are some other backlinking services which give you a free trial and Dripable.com is one of them.

Dripable is a new service that has just launched and creates links for your sites from a range of sources such as “blogs, comments, forums, guestbooks, photo galleries, basic comment pages, and everywhere else online”. This is good if you are looking for a diverse backlink profile. You can schedule the number of links to be built each day and it is very easy to setup.

You simply create a new project and then paste in the list of urls you want the links to point at and then in another text box enter the keywords you would like those links to have as anchor text.

As this is a new service which I didn’t know much about I decided to point the links to about 10 Web 2.0 sites which were in turn pointing to my main site. This was instead of pointing them directly to my main site.

I chose two keywords to target. The site I was trying to get a boost in the SERPs was #7 for one keyword and #44 for the second keyword.

Dripable.com Results

Once my 7 day trial was up I was pleased to see my site had moved up one spot for its main keyword to #6 and up 14 spots for the other keyword to #30.

• KW1: #7 to #6
• KW2: #44 to #30

I can’t tell if the links got indexed or stuck at all but I wasn’t really interested in that. I was looking for a movement in the SERPs to show some tangible results that increased my sites rankings and that is what happened.

It is not a massively competitive niche by any means but a jump in the SERPs in seven days is not to be sniffed at. I wish I had longer to test it and see if there will be a further increase but at the moment I am not sure if I can justify the cost, which isn’t loads (from $47 per month), but there are lots of other tools that have caught my attention recently and I’m having a hard time choosing one. When my earning are a bit more consistent I think I will add it to my set of tools but for now I will put it on the wish list.

If you want to try the free 7 day trial of Dripable.com click here today.

If you do try it let me know what results you get as I would like to see some more test data.

Disclaimer: there is a chance I will get an extra 7 days on the trial for writing this piece but what I have written is all true, I swear!

No longer number 1 in Google!

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.

Big Drops in the SERPS for my Sites

I thought I’d survived my recent Google AdWords banning quite well but after having a look at how my sites are ranking in Google using the Advanced Web Rankings tool I was a little surprised to see that a sizeable percentage of my sites had dropped right out of the Google Search Results Pages (SERPS) for some of their keywords.

My main sites don’t seem to be affected (yet), at least not for their main keywords, but some of my less profitable sites have either dropped right down or fallen off the radar completely.

There are a few reasons I can guess at that might have caused this:

• If Google thinks my sites aren’t good enough for AdWords then they aren’t good enough for the organic search so has penalised my sites there too.
  Likely-hood: probable but the sites that have dropped aren’t all sites I was promoting with AdWords although they are on the same shared hosting package.
• I’ve been buying a lot of forum profile back links and blog commenting back links lately.  
  Likely-hood: again quite likely as these links are pretty weak in terms of quality and most of the sites I got them for had no links before hand and now suddenly have 100 links – although most don’t seem to be indexed.
• I’ve only recently started monitoring my sites in the SERPS since getting the ranking tool.  With the tool I can check how my sites are ranking for lots of keywords and get updates every day.  Perhaps beforehand my sites were jumping around a lot and I never noticed.
• Likely-hood: not too high but fingers crossed this is the reason and it was going on all along.

So how are you sites doing?  Has there been a Google update?

Lets hope it doesn’t spread to my more profitable sites!

Spots #1 and #2 in Google!

As you may have read I recently got a copy of Advanced Web Ranking which is a software application that checks where your sites are in the search engines for keywords of your choice. Since installing it I’ve been hooked on checking my sites for various keywords and after running it for one of my sites I’ve just noticed it is in places one and two in Google for its main keyword.

It is for different URLs – one is the home page and the other is for a tag page but they both lead to my site which is great.

I’m not sure why or how it happened but it should lead to an increase in traffic if I am the top two sites in Google.

I hope I’m not not doing anything naughty though?

Advanced Web Ranking Review

Advanced Web Ranking is a tool that shows you, in great detail if you wish; where abouts your websites are in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for keywords of your choice showing you your website ranking in the search engines of your choice.

I’ve been looking for a tool like this for ages and although I have come across a few in my time none of them have really done what they say on the tin or come anywhere near the functionality of Advanced Web Ranking.

As I have lots of niche sites all targeting different keywords, prior to Advanced Web Ranking I had a spreadsheet I would update at random intervals with a list of my top websites and where they were ranked in Google for their main keyword. But as time went on I stopped updating the sheet as I kind of knew in my head where my sites were for their main keyword. Also because I had to manually hunt down my sites in the SERPs this was a task I often overlooked in favour of other less boring jobs.

But now, with Advanced Web Ranking, I can enter one or more keywords, enter the url of a website, choose a search engine (including which country) and let this app do the hard work for me.

You can specify how many pages deep to check the results for your site. By default it is set to 50 but I set it to 200 to see if it could find some of my long lost sites and see where they were in Google. The more pages to check the longer the searches take though so be warned!

Once the report has run you are presented with a list of the keywords you specified and where your site is found in the search engine results page (SERPs) and which page of your site i.e. the home page or a particular page.

From there you can right-click on a keyword and go to that page of the SERPs to see your site and where it is in the search engine ranking and what the competition is.

You can save your project and come back to it later, adding more keyword or more sites to check against as your site expands which is very handy.

The above is the basic functionality of the Advanced Web Ranking software application but there are loads more features packed into this great tool. You can also choose two or more websites to check at once to see how your competitors rank for the same keywords. You can also view the tops sites for particular keywords. You can schedule the reports to run over night or at set times so they are ready for you when you need them. They also allow you to track the position of your sites in the SERPs over time which is a great feature as often you can miss exactly when your site moved up or down the rankings and if you don’t know when it happened it can be hard to work out why it happened it which is what you really want to know.

Who is this tool for?
Advanced Web Ranking probably isn’t necessary for the person with just one or two sites that are only targeting one or two keywords as you can probably keep track of a setup that small with a simple spreadsheet or text file. But once you start to expand and either acquire more sites or try and get your existing sites ranking for additional keywords a tool like Advanced Web Ranking really comes into its own and allows you to keep an eye over what Google and its search engine friends are doing with your site which for most of us is the main way we get our traffic and thus revenue.

My copy of Advanced Web Ranking also came with Advanced Link Manager which allows you to view the link to your and other peoples’ websites which is turning into another invaluable tool to have when it comes to researching the competition and keeping track of the links going in and out of your sites – especially when it comes to managing and monitoring reciprocal links which the Advanced Link Manager can do. There is also a Keyword Research Tool which I’m sure will come in handy for people looking for a new niche or researching other keywords they could target on their sites.

So would I recommend Advanced Web Ranking? I’ve not been using it for long but it’s already proved its usefulness to me and my sites and I’m sure you will find it of benefit, especially if you have no system in place to monitor your sites in the SERPS.

If you want to know more you can download a free 30 day trial for Advanced Web Ranking from here.

This screen shot below shows a report for this blog and how it ranked for three keywords: ‘how I got rich’, ‘affiliate marketing blog’ & ‘affiliate marketing’ (click on it to view a clearer version):

More Google Keyword Tool Data

A while ago I tried to do some ‘tests’ to see how accurate the Google Keyword tool is and also how much traffic you get for being number one or two in Google.
Read about it here: http://howigotrich.net/tag/google-keyword-tool/

I tried it again recently with a site I have that has been number three in Google for its main keyword for many months but only gets about 3-6 unique hits a day.

After running a Google AdWords PPC campaign for that keyword I found out that the keyword got 273 impressions in one day (I’ve only run the campaign for one day so will see how it goes).

That means that for being number three in Google my site gets around 2% of the searches for that keyword clicking through to my site. This is not a lot!

According to the Google KeyWord Tool this keyword gets 1,900 exact match searches per month which works out at 64 per day. This is over four times less than what the AdWords research tells us.

So what have we learnt? The Google Keyword Tool is still inaccurate but we already knew that but this reinforces the idea and I would urge anyone doing keyword research to use AdWords rather than the Google Keyword Tool before choosing a niche.

Also it tells me that this niche is worth targeting and putting some more effort into as it is getting around 8000 exact searches a month instead of the 1900 reported by the GKWT. But there is also the problem of the 2% click through rate the site is getting being at number three in Google. Will this improve if I get the site to number two or number one? Only time (and some dodgy forum profile backlinks) will tell…

Moving Old Sites Over to WordPress

I didn’t much like WordPress when I first started out in this game of affiliate marketing.  I thought it was too restrictive on what you could post, the themes weren’t that great and it seemed like a bit of an overkill for a small niche landing page.  As my dreams of being a web design were never realised building affiliate marketing sites using HTML and CSS gave me an opportunity to indulge my creative tendencies.  Due to all this I decided WordPress wasn’t for me and I would build my own sites.

But as time went on I kept reading about how Google loved blogs and WordPress blogs in-particular and how well they ranked and were easy to update and customise.  After a while I decided to try WordPress on a few sites.  Besides, my web hosts, Hostgator, gave me access to cPanel and Fantastico which made installing WordPress a breeze.  I installed WordPress, picked a free theme that looked nice and started building my site.  It took me a while to work out the best way to setup the site including how to use the tags and categories in the best way, how to organise the posts and pages and which plug-ins to use.  But once my sites had been up and running for a while I noticed they started to rank quite well.  Once I had seen this for myself I started putting more effort into understanding WordPress and soon after I started work on my own theme.  I found a blank theme that I could modify and shortly after I had my first WordPress theme which I would use for my keyword domain niche sites.  I also created a version that is suited to atomic or micro niche sites.

This has all worked out rather well for me and I can now have a site up and running in less than a day with a few posts of content and all the relevant admin pages (contact, privacy, discliamer, etc).  I am now in the process of migrating my existing older sites into WordPress sites.  So far this has gone well as previously where I had 10 or so product reviews on an HTML page I have now put each product review into a separate WordPress post.  As Google sees each of these post as a seperate page my sites have all grown a lot bigger in page count even though the same content is being used.

The move has been positive for each site I have moved over so far and they have either held their top position in Google or moved up in the SERPS.

From now on I am a WordPress only affiliate marketer.  Although I’ve yet to look at Drupal or Joomla.  Am I missing out on anything?