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Archive for the ‘Adsense Challenge’ Category

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.

This challenge began on the warrior forum over at this thread. Now I don’t want to repeat what has been done so far but  I will do a brief recap. For the detail please take a look at the warrior forum thread. I may at some stage compile it all into a free ebook to give away when I get a bit of time. For now though, here are the steps taken.

1. Found a good adsense niche of “European Cruises” by focusing on three things:
   • Low competition
   • High search count
   • Good CPC
2. Conducted some research into the market and found seven categories to use on my blog.
3. Initially for each category, looked for 10 article titles and associated keywords to include in each article.
4. Started writing..

This is basically where I am at as I write this post. I am busy getting some articles together to get the european cruise blog up and running and getting traffic.