The Internet Marketing Challenge Blog

The internet is a very intricate place and if you aren’t quite sure what is going on, you will give yourself a bad name and kill more than than you might ever think. Most new online entrepreneurs often take months or even years figuring out how everything works, weeding out all the bad folks and wasting a lot of money. But the good news is that you don’t really have to do that if you know where to go for information.

If you think the internet is complicated, just try delving into the world of blogging marketing. Blogging marketing is one of the most new parts of online marketing and as such, the resources are few. Some of the resources you will find will be full of misinformation and ways to steal your money – so be careful!

The most reputable resource for people who are interested in blogging marketing is Firepow. Actually, it is more than just a resource – it helps you from beginning to end, in developing your product, establishing your blog and finding those valuable clients. It is a software tool that, if you are going to succeed in blogging, you really must have. Not only will you find that your actual blogging is easier, since it automates most of it, but you will also find that you are able to get your message out there to more and more people with less and less work.

The internet is not as friendly a place as it should be and if you don’t watch out, you will be taken. Everyone has at one time or another fallen for a business opportunity that just sounded too good to be true – and it was. Make sure you whoever you trust with your own business is reputable, reliable, and can help you build a long-term, profitable business.

Just a quick update where I am with this challenge.. I now have 5 low hanging fruit type niches up and with around 10 posts on each one and a UAW project setup for each blog. As a sidenote, I have added plenty of variations to the resource boxes in each project to ensure that each post gets some backlinking.

The first 2 blogs I created are now indexed on page 1 of google for my main target phrases which is really cool. The first blog is pulling around 150 unique visitors a day and the second blog is pulling slightly less than that. The other 3 blogs are all indexed and getting traffic for some long tail keywords but the main target keywords are still buried deep in the Google indexes for now.

Not bad results so far and now I am moving onto the next phase also of testing some more difficult competitive but ultimately more lucrative niches.

Well I have now created two low hanging fruit blogs and completed two UAW projects for each of them. The first UAW project has completed it’s first 50 submissions and to my suprise the blog has already got 4 pages indexed in Google! Admittedly, these pages are the home page, contact us, about us and privacy policy pages and none of my other posts but it is a good start. I can’t see any backlinks to the blog yet in Google or Yahoo but it is very very early days.. Googlebot has been visiting as has Yahoo slurp but so far no actual visitors yet.

Today I will be finishing both blogs before moving onto the next three.

So today, I bought 5 domains after researching some “low hanging fruit” keywords. I used micro niche finder to help me find some reasonably searched keywords (3000 – 9000 searches per month), low competition (1000 – 20000 phrase match competitors) and a reasonable CPC associated with it (> $1).. The great thing about micro niche finder is the SOC column which immediately tells you whether you can rank highly for a good keyword phrase.. Priceless!

The domains I bought were all .com’s and had the keyword phrase within it. If i couldn’t get the exact keyword as a .com I just added a word to it.

I then created a wordpress blog with 10 posts and made the first post a static post and also my home page. The home page was optimised for the main keyword phrase. All other posts were articles based on related keywords and subthemes of the main keyword phrase. The WP theme is very basic and simple and has just 1 category. All on page SEO is good (titles, keywords, META stuff, permalinks etc..)

I then created an article and 2 rewrites which I then fired up UAW and entered these articles into it’s interface. The whole Unique Article Wizard system was very intuitive to use and I submitted them within 10 minutes and the articles took me just over an hour to write and rewrite. They were put into the pending review queue and they say it should get approved within the day. i also set the UAW interface to submit to 50 sites a day.

So far so good.. I found UAW very easy to use and I didn’t even look at the tutorials as the contextual help and wizard were very clear. I will now repeat this whole process for my other 4 low hanging fruit domains and report any news as and when it happens! Watch this space…

I have decided to look into various tools on the market that are aimed at getting sites plenty of backlinks and then put each tool through the wringer to see if they actually do what they say they will do on the sales page. The first tool/system that I am testing is Unique Article Wizard from Dr. Noel Swanson.

For those people not aware of what unique article wizard does, it basically takes 3 variations of the same article written by yourself plus resource boxes and creates unique articles from each of them and then posts these articles to various directories, blogs, networks etc for you over a period of time you specify.

Here is the list of steps that I will be taking to test this system to destruction.

1. Choosing 5 domains based on “low hanging fruit” keywords that get reasonable searches but low competition in Google.
2. Creating a 10 page wordpress blog on each of those domains. Each post will be based on a keyword related top the main topic.
3. I will create 1 UAW project per blog.
4. I will not actively go after any backlinks from any other sources.

I will then try for more competitive niches and here are the list of steps I will take…

1. Choose 5 domains based on competitive phrases. In other words phrases that get a good number of searches, have a very healthy competition and plenty of advertizers on adwords.
2. Create a 10 page wordpress blog on each of these domains. Each post will be based on competitive keywords related to the main niche keyword.
3. I will create 1 UAW project per blog again.
4. Once again I will not go after backlinks from anywhere else.

I will run this challenge and keep you all informed about how my sites get on but I will not be revealing any URLs in this case or give any clues to the niche as it does seriously skew the results. Once the challenge is over I will be revealing 1 URL from each test just so that people can see for themeselves. The challenge will be over once the Unique Article Wizard projects have completed and Google has indexed the blogs.

I will be doing the normal on page SEO like keywords in titles, urls etc…

One of the most common questions I get asked is how to build custom wordpress themes? A lot of people with some HTMl skills can throw together a half decent website quite easily but when it comes to constructing a wordpress theme it leaves them scratching their head in bewilderment.

At first site the whole wordpress blogging platform can seem like a black art and the knowing where to start to build a custom wordpress theme can seem quite impossible. Artisteer is a piece of software I recommend to people who want the freedom to build a theme but have little or no coding abilities and it does a mighty fine job. What about the HTML tinkerers out there though? What about the person who would like total control over building a new custom wordpress theme from scratch? Thankfully the answer lies with the most excellent but oddly titled – How To Be A Rockstar WordPress Designer..

This guide and series of tutorials can take you from absolute HTML newbie through to building your own custom wordpress themes by following simple step by step instructions.

It takes you through from learning some PHP and wordpress codex through theme design and into areas like creating basic WP plugins and advanced theme design. It is recommended that you already have dreamweaver and photoshop but it isn’t essential. If you use other coding and image manipulation software then the ideas can be quite easily ported to those software products.

From the first page of the guide through to the end and following the easy to follow tutorials you could have your own custom themes built very quickly and just the way you want them. No more scratching your head wondering how to increase the width of a sidebar or add an optin box, you will know how to do anything to your theme.

The best bit is that the How To Be A Rockstar WordPress Designer package is available for just $29 and trust me, it is worth 10 times that amount.

Okay, just a quick update after the previous update this morning.. My European cruise blog has now managed to get back onto the first page of Google in the UK at least for the keyword “European cruises”. It seems Google has finished it’s current little dance with my blog. I am quite pleased because I was missing the traffic from that phrase plus all the advantages you get from Adsense placement targeting from rich advertisers bidding on that keyword which sent my CPC through the roof on some days.

I hope that all the other Google centres follow suit soon and it ranks in the Google top 10 everywhere again.

Sorry it has been a while since I updated my progress with the 100 bucks challenge but just so you know I had a day last week which hit $76 from this 1 blog which was pretty awesome. Since then unfortunately, I have been at the mercy of the Google dance and have seen the blog drop from the top 5 in Google for the pahrase European cruises down into the deepest darkest recesses of the index. I don’t know why Google do this but I am hopeful it will bounce right back up again.

The upshot of this is that both traffic and Adsense income have dropped back down to between $30 to $40 a day from this blog. During the dance I noticed I am getting a lot more traffic from keywords that it previously didn’t rank for and a lot more long tails as well. This has kind of balanced up the blow of losing all the traffic from the “european cruises” keyword a bit.

Thankfully I am still seeing some great CPC on the blog. I had one click last week of over $4 which was pretty amazing really and my average CPC is around $1 but it does change from day to day.

This is a twist on my previous tactic about link exchanges but it is very powerful in getting backlinks from authority sites..

You will need:

• SeoQuake firefox plugin
• firefox (obviously)
• 10 keyword optimised articles with 2 backlinks to 1 page on your site.

The process I am about to outline is about persuading sites that are already indexed on Google that are indexed already for keywords you are targeting to post an article on their site written by you. It is a very powerful technique but does involve a small amount of effort on your behalf in both the power of persuasion and also article writing skill. The objective is to get the SEO benefit of backlinks from authority sites plus some good direct targeted traffic to your site. Okay here goes..

1. Choose just 1 page on your site that you would like to get traffic to and determine 1 keyword phrase that you would like that page to rank in Google’s top 10 for.
2. Write 10 articles optimised for the keyword in step 1 and with two backlinks to the page on your site you chose in step 1. Also, enure your anchor text is the keyword phrase you chose.
3. Open up firefox with SeoQuake enabled and showing you the toolbar with PR enabled also.
4. Go to Google and set preferences on google to show 100 positions rather than 10.
5. Type in your target keyword phrase into Google and click search.
6. On the SeoQuake toolbar click on the down arrow for PR which will sort the top 100 pages on Google in order of page rank from highest to lowest.
7. On the Google results page go from the top down and look for around 30 sites that look like they might be interested in articles. (See notes below)
8. Open each of those 30 sites in it’s own tab.
9. Look at each of those 30 sites and try to locate their contact details either from the site itself or through whois.
10. Contact each site’s webmaster in turn and offer them either..

• Preferably one of the articles that you wrote earlier to be posted on the page you found from the search or failing that a new page on their site.
• Change some text on an article on their page to include anchor text back to your page.
• A link exchange.

Now the hard part you are probably thinking is trying to persuade a webmaster to do this for you.. What is in it for them? Well, they will probably be more open to a link exchange but when you start offering money under their noses then it becomes a lot more attractive for them. You can expect to pay around $100 if you are persuasive enough to get your article on their site. Also, some webmasters are hungry for new content so before you offer the money they might be open to any new original content. Use money as your last resort… The important part is to try and build a rappore with the webmaster, they probably get hundreds of spammy link requests and your email needs to be personal, friendly and above all emphasize what is in it for them.. fresh content, keyword optimised content, money?? You can even offer them regular fresh content obviously with a link back to your sites.

So what are the type of sites that would be open to this? It might be easier to describe the sites that wouldn’t. Shopping type sites like Amazon, ebay, target would not be open to this and neither would big established names. The type of sites are the ones that have a lot of content, obviously run by enthusiasts and probably just 1 person outfits.

The secret sauce as to why this technique is powerful is because you are getting backlinks from sites that Google already hold in high esteem (page rank) using your target keyword phrase as anchor text back to a page on your site that is optimised for that keyword phrase already. Aim to get 10 of these per page that you want to rank for and it will shoot your page up the rankings..

I can almost here the groans from various people who think of link exchanges as an outdated method of getting backlinks that lead to SEO traffic and direct traffic also. However, when done correctly it is a great way of getting interest from Google and will help to raise your site in the rankings. So what is the correct way of doing link exchanges? The correct way is to look for link exchanges with sites that are seen as tried and tested already by Google for your particular niche.

Here is an outline of the steps I take and then I will flesh out the bones after..

1. List out the top 10 listings on Google for your target keyword phrase.
2. Using SEO quake (firefox plugin) check out all the backlinks to each site from Yahoo and save them in a spreadsheet.
3. For each backlink domain in your spreadsheet that occurs more than once create a new list of those particular domains. TIP: Create a formula to do this for you.
4. Go through your new list of domains and look for a “submit your site” or any link that allows you to submit your site for a link exchange.
5. Fill in your details and follow the instructions on each site for providing a backlink on your own site which will involve creating a partners page or something like that. Make sure your link anchor text is the keyword phrase you used to find these authority sites.
6. After 2 weeks go through all those domains again to see if your link has been added to their site and if it hasn’t remove their link from yours.
7. Think of another target keyword phrase and repeat the steps above.

Seriously, this is a tried and trusted technique I use for getting quality backlinks from authority sites. Another important point to make is that your target keyword phrase should be targeted to 1 page on your site that is optimised for that particular phrase. You should use the link to that page as your URL when doing link exchanges. If you have to provide a link to your home page then so be it but always try to get backlinks to internal pages if possible.

If this all looks like a lot of work it is worth it but if you need a tool to do the same thing in a lot less time then Brad Callen’s SEO Elite has a great project which does exactly the steps I laid out above among many other wonderful things. I imagine many of you may already have this excellent piece of software as all serious Internet marketers should have it as part of their Arsenal in my opinion.

On it’s own this tactic will get you indexed and ranked reasonably well on Google even though you are bleeding the link love back to the site it came from but do not worry.. Alongside the other tactics coming up your site can rise to the top of the rankings for your target keywords.

My next post will go through what I call the Google Top 10 tactic..