The Internet Marketing Challenge Blog

Archive for January, 2009

Well, after doing some tests using the fantastic “who sees ads” plugin for wordpress I can now continue with the original $100 challenge again.. For those who don’t know what the plugin does, it basically helps control when and who you show your ads to on your blog. It is reasonably simple to setup and I think it is just what I need for this challenge.

Yesterday my number of visitors for the day hit 120 and 54 of those were unique visitors. Every day I am seeing rises in traffic of around 5%, so still a long way to go but I have been adding more content and done more promoting over the past couple of days so I should see some benefit from that soon.

What is Social Bookmarking?

Contrary to what a lot of people think social bookmarking was not invented as a tool for internet marketers to get backlinks and increase rankings in the search engines. Social bookmarking is in reality a way for internet users to bookmark sites that they love for other people to see and click on. The extension to this is sites like stumble upon and Digg who actually get you to vote for the best bookmarked sites. In it’s purist form this is a great way for people with a common interest to share links to good sites with each other.

Social Bookmarking and Internet Marketing

So, as always us Internet marketers see this as a great opportunity to get visitors to our sites by submitting links to all our sites to the multitude of social bookmarking sites and hopefully people and search engines will see the bookmarks and visit our sites. Simple! Well, the theory is simple but unfortunately as always happens with technologies like this, they get abused. Internet marketers will mass submit all their site’s URL’s in one fail swoop to the same social bookmarking accounts and this results in social bookmarking accounts getting banned.

The Correct Way To Social Bookmark For Maximum Benefit To Our Sites

There is however a right way to social bookmark our blogs and sites and here are the steps below.

1. Open multiple accounts with all the best social bookmarking sites (see list below) by using different email addresses each time. Create some yahoo acounts, GMail etc for these email accounts.
2. Get a list of all your site’s URL’s that you would like to bookmark.
3. Mix that list up with as many URL’s from sites that do not belong to you about 50-50 share, (sites preferably that you like).
4. Split this list up into as many accounts that you have with the social bookmarking sites. (If you have 50 different accounts, create 50 lists of URL’s)
5. Submit 1 list to 1 social bookmarking account.

This is a big task to perform manually and thankfully there are some excellent tools on the market that can do this for you. The best tool out of all of them has to be Bookmarking Demon as it not only bookmarks all the URL’s you feed it but will go out and create all of those multiple accounts with the best social bookmarking sites. You will honestly be very thankful for this. A lot of the tools are monthly charges but this is a one off payment and offers a lot more than many of these monthly fee programs. You can even ping the sites once you have done the bookmarking to get search engine spiders interested. Add to this, the software is continually updated and has a different user interface for both beginners and advanced users. I use it all the time and have seen a lot of success with getting sites indexed using it, take a look for yourself here.

The Benefits Of Social Bookmarking

So what is all the fuss about social bookmarking and how can it really help our sites? Quite simply, social bookmarking works on two fronts. You can get direct traffic as a result of posting your bookmarks to these sites. Many people see those links and follow them to your site. The reality is that I do get traffic as a direct result from the bookmarks but the traffic is more difficult to convert into buyers or clickers on your site. The main benefit of social bookmarking is that you are recieving some high PR backlinks to your sites that get the search engine spiders visiting your sites incredibly quickly, sometimes within minutes. I have had sites/posts indexed in google within 4 minutes before as a direct result of social bookmarking. For some reason google loves social bookmarks probably because they see it as a user’s vote of confidence in a site. This is why it is very important not to overdo it and mix it up with plenty of other sites that don’t belong to you, keep it natural looking and you will stay under the radar and enjoy all the benefits that social bookmarking has to offer.

List Of My Top 10 Social Bookmark Sites

http://www.reddit.com/

http://furl.net/

http://www.clipmarks.com/

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

http://ma.gnolia.com/

http://www.mixx.com/

http://www.fark.com/

http://www.propeller.com

http://delicious.com/

http://digg.com/

Sorry for the lack of posts lately but there never seem to be enough hours in the day sometimes. Anyway, back to the nitty gritty and as you may or may not know, the challenge has changed to getting to 2000 visitors a day by 31st March 2009. I have decided to do this because I totally underestimated the level of curiosity in the cruise blog. Unless I can somehow hide my adsense blocks from the unnatural traffic I will have to leave it off unfortunately.

I am however looking at various options which may mean that I can either put Adsense on the blog or some other form of monetization but for now its all about traffic, traffic, traffic. Here is my latest AWstats for the blog showing the amount of visitors arriving on a daily basis.

As you can see, the traffic is slowly rising apart from the last 2 days where it has tailed back a little. About 2% of this traffic is not what I would call “natural” traffic, so remove the 2% to give a better impression of actual figures.

I am fully expecting the results of some promotion to start kicking in soon and those numbers should begin to rise I hope soon. I am also getting another 100 articles written between myself and my ghostwriter. I am also looking at a lot of articles from the directories and deciding which ones would fit my blog.

As for promotion, I am busily looking for backlinks from various “authority” sites and have so far got a succes rate of around 5% for the emails I have been sending. Some have even given me one way links which is great.

Overall, it has been a strange week and one that has left me with a lot of decisions about the direction of my cruise blog. I am hoping next week should see things move on from strength to strength. 2000 visitors a day seems like a long way off but I know what needs to happen to get there. My next post will describe some more promotion methods using social bookmarking, RSS feed submissions and looking at just how powerful web 2.0 techniques really are.

Here is a little tip that is so effective at getting backlinks that I am suprised more people do not do it. It does involve a bit of work but trust me, it really is worth it if you take the time.

1. In Google, search for your main target keyword using Firefox and have the SEOquake addon.
2. For the top 20 results in google, open each site up in a new tab.
3. Look through each tab and close the tab if they don’t look like a competitor. (Find sites that you would like to aspire to)
4. Go through each tab with SEOquake on and look at the SEO toolbar, specifically the “LD:X” column.
5. Click on the LD:X column and go to the new tab that opens up.
6. In this you will see all the domains with backlinks to your competitors.
7. For now just make a note of each domain (or open in a new window or save as a bookmark)
8. Do this for every open tab until you have a long list of potential domains that will give you a backlink or link exchange.
9. Trawl through all your potential link partners and fire of some emails to them or fill in link exchange forms if they are available on their site.

With link exchanges you usually have to have a link to their site first, so create a new page in your blog for link partners and just create links on there to all your potential link partners first. Make a note of the URL to your link partners page and email your requests with this link in there so that you can show them you have already added a link to them. I have an example letter that has been used to good effect that you can see and edit accordingley in my Cash Cow Guide To Adsense Wealth guide if you own it.

If you have any questions then please start a thread in the 100buckschallenge forum.

I have been asked a few times about what wordpress plugins I have been using for my blog challenge. Here are a list of them and the reason why I use them.

All-In-One-SEO-Pack

This plugin is superb at handling all the boring on page SEO stuff that we all usually forget to do and thankfully it does a great job of it to. It will look after:

1. Optimising your titles
2. Generates all your Meta tags automatically
3. Ensures that you don’t suffer the duplicate content problems traditional with wordpress by only allowing one copy of content to be visible to the search engines.

This plugin really is a time saver and well worth adding to your blogs and best of all it’s free! For more info look here.

Google XML Sitemap plugin

Adding a google sitemap and opening a google webmaster account is a great way of getting your blogs indexed by google and the best plugin available for generating those sitemaps is the google XML sitemaps plugin. You can read more about it here.

Conveythis Translation Plugin

This is a great plugin for getting extra traffic from all around the world. Rather than have your blog published just in English and alienating most of the world, this plugin gives your blog the ability to be displayed in the language of choice of your readers. I have defintely seen an upsurge in traffic from using this plugin. Read more about it here.  EDIT: I have just found an even better translator plugin here..

Google Analytics For WordPress

A very simple but useful plugin for adding google analytics to your blog quickly and easily and without the need to copy and paste code into your files. Just setup an analytics account for your blog and enter the identifier number into the plugin and away you go. Read more about it here.

Caffeinated Content for WordPress

This isn’t free but it is a fantastic plugin for adding content to your blogs. I am not advocating using this plugin for all your content but in addition to.  Caffeineted Content basically uses Yahoo answers and various other sources as a way of generating content for your blog.

In essence you enter in your target keywords and this plugin will bring back all the content and images you need for your blog for the next 5 years or so! However as with everything, there is a right way to use it and a wrong way. The wrong way to use this plugin is to just publish all the results it gives you without batting an eyelid.

The right way to use this plugin is to use the content it retrieves for you as the source for your articles. In other words, it retrieves the content for you and you rewrite basically what it gives you. It is also an excellent way of researching your niche for new ideas, definetly a great time saver. There are other functions provided like re-writing the content it pulls in. I am yet to be impressed by any automatic article rewriter and this one is no different. Read more about it here.

Max Banner Ads

This is a change of opinion from me, I used to use a plugin called Adsense Manager for looking after my adsense blocks because it was the best of the bunch, or so I thought..

I recently came across a plugin called Max Banner Ads which really is very simple to use and has some other handy features like telling you how many impressions have occured and CTR as well.It just simplifies the whole process of adding adsense blocks and other banner ads to your blog. I am currently adding revisions to my cash cow guide to adsense wealth in which I recommended the adsense manager plugin and changing it to this one. The revised copy will be free to all who have previously purchased it.

Very generously, it is free to use but they do ask that you write a review of the plugin on your blog although it isn’t a neccesity. Read more about it here.

That about covers it for now..

Today I have been posting more articles to the blog and I now have a grand total of 15 published articles on the blog. I have just checked in google and they are all indexed in google already.

For each article, my main target phrase when searched in google does not show up yet apart from 2 of the articles which show up on page 3. This is pretty good, especially when they each get on average over a thousand searches a month. Time to push on and get to page 1 by trying to get some backlinks from good sites.

Promotion Activities

1. Published a squidoo lens on Cruises with links back to my main blog.
2. Did some commenting on other relevant squidoo lenses and included backlinks to my blog.
3. Made a shortlist of potential link partners and have collected contact details.
4. Have started to contact potential link partners with requests.
5. Sent 5 articles to Ezine articles, Go and Isnare with various links back to various posts on my blog.
6. Social bookmarked each post.
7. Submitted the RSS feed to many different Directories.
8. Submitted sitemap to google and setup webmaster tools.
9. Created a robots.txt file on my server and allow all robots.
10. Searched for some blogs using comment Kahuna for doing some valid blog commenting with links back.

Results

Today, I am up to 10 unique visitors all coming from google. The keywords they are arriving on are mainly long tail variations of my main target phrases. I will probably wait until I have all my posts done and hopefully getting over 100 unique visitors a day before I start adding adsense blocks.

Things To Do

More of the same promotional activities plus I am getting together a press release to get a buzz going. I am also considering adding a forum and a photo gallery to add some stickiness to the blog.

This is one of the most important processes in getting your site ranked highly for the keywords you want and it does involve a bit of work but it really is worth it. Here is the process listed below..

1. Take one of your target keyword phrases that you want to rank for and search on google using allinurl, allintitle, allinanchor and normal search.
2. Make a list of the all the possible sites you could get a backlink from. Ignore sites that you would have no chance with, (Amazon, Ebay, Microsoft e.t.c..)
3. Do a whois check on each of the sites in your list and add contact details next to each site in your list.
4. Write an email, phone or even a letter to the webmaster requesting a link exchange. Or maybe offer an article (with your backlink). You can even offer to buy a link from them.

Keep doing this for all your target keyword phrases and point the links back to your posts and home page. Try to ensure that all the backlink’s anchor text is relevant to the post you are linking to.

If you manage to get some quality links coming in, not only will you get lots of good traffic from these links but the SEO benefits are fantastic. Please discuss this thread over in the 100 Bucks Challenge Forum.

So 24 hours after the first articles have been posted I have already had 4 visitors today. The keyword phrase searched for has over 500 exact searches a month and a CPC of $0.82 I am overjoyed at this to be honest and even though it is extremely early days this is a good start.

I can’t divulge the keyword phrase at this point, I don’t want to warp the results in any way I hope you understand.

A lot of the traffic in the screenshot above is me but I hope you agree this is pretty good just 24 hours after first posting the articles.

Let’s Get Going…

So, finally my European Cruise blog is up and running and has already had spider activity from google and Yahoo even before I had posted anything, bizarre but I am not complaining.

The progress so far is that I have posted 5 different articles each to different categories in the blog. I have not added any adsense yet and will not until the posts are ranked highly in google.

I have added images to some of the posts and bolded certain keywords that I am targeting but make sure that I don’t overdo this. I hate seeing blatant optimization on websites and you can bet your bottom dollar that google does to. I have also double checked all the articles for spelling and grammar.

At this point, the blog has just a section in the sidebar for categories, Archives and recent posts. I have no external links, adsense or other links. I have also added “About Us”, “Contact Us” and “Privacy” pages to the blog to comply with google’s quality guidelines.

Promotion

Now that the first 5 articles are added, here are the steps I take to start my blog promotion/off-site SEO.

1. Add site to Google webmaster tools
2. Upload google sitemap plugin to create google sitemaps and activate it.
3. Verify sitemap in webmaster tools
4. Submit RSS feed from blog to RSS directories using RSS submit
5. Social Bookmark every post
6. Every post should ping pingomatic
7. Add google analytics to blog use plugin “Google Analytics for WordPress” http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/
8. Start blog commenting with backlinks to articles
9. Create squidoo lenses with backlinks to each category
10. Submit articles to ezine, go articles and Isnare with backlinks to main category pages/some articles.
11. Search top 50 pages on google for your target keywords and email them to do link exchange or ask for link inclusion (paid) back to chosen posts and/or categories.

That will do for starters to get some good spidering and hopefully indexing. Other things I will do as well will be..

1. Blog commenting (NOT spamming)
2. Squidoo commenting
3. Twitter
4. Do a Press Release.

I will also start frequenting forums and get chatting on there with people interested in cruises. I won’t try selling the blog until I get a bit more reputation though.

That will do for now, but the process over the coming weeks will be…

1. Post articles
2. Promote using techniques above
3. Repeat

When I start to see some half decent traffic I will add some adsense blocks but not before. I have added a screenshot of the spider activity below after making the five posts and just social bookmarking.

This is one thing that never ceases to amaze me and it happens quite often. All I have done so far is:

1. Buy a brand new domain
2. Install it on my server
3. Install wordpress on it

That really is it and yet I just checked my awstats and see that both google and Yahoo and sent the spiders to my blog already. I have done no promotion whatsoever, nobody know that this domain even exists apart from myself and dynadot who I bought the domain through. I am not complaining though, I just look at it as a small bonus. Take a look at the screenshot below to see what I mean.