Link Analysis & Blogs/Forums

I got a bit ahead of myself with the Day 27 lesson. I shouldn't have actually gone into checking out the competitors backlinks through Yahoo.com. That was actually part of today's lesson, so here we go.

Link Analysis

The first part of the lesson for today is Link Analysis. This is where you use search engines to reveal the link network of your competitors. You start by doing a search for your keyword phrase in Google, making sure you have the Firefox SEO tool activated. This will show a number of things, but the one we're interested in today is the Yahoo page links. This result can be accessed by clicking on the '?' next to the 'Y! Links' link - it can also be automatically turned on for each search by clicking on 'Tools' at the top of your browser, then going to 'SEO For Firefox', then 'Options'. You can then select which results you want to see automatically, and which you want to see On-Demand. By default, all results are set to 'On-Demand'. If you're using Microsoft's Internet Explorer then you should stop using it right now and switch to Firefox. IE is dead, Firefox is the future - of that you can be certain.

The Yahoo links number is the number of links that Yahoo can find that link to the page in question. Obviously we don't know how many of these links are relevant at this stage. The manual way of looking at these links is to go to Yahoo.com. Type in "link:[URL of #1 ranking competitor]", and Yahoo will return all known sites that link to that page. You can do the same with Google but they generally return much fewer results for some reason. Once you have your list you check them out to find which are relevant. Most of the time you can tell just from the blurb that goes with the URL, but sometimes you will have to check out the site as well. There are software tools that allow you to check for relevant sites for more quickly, but as these cost money they are outside the scope of the thirty day challenge. Unfortunately, Rob didn't even name them so I couldn't go to my P2P network to see if I could find them there and give them a try.

Once you find a site that seems relevant the next thing to do is check whether they have 'no-follow' links on their site. When it comes to backlinks, Google will go to your site and be able to find all the pages that link to it from other sources. However, if a link is No-Follow, Google will not record that as a backlink to your site. Some sites put No-Follow in place to dissuade spammers from spamming their sites. By default, if the Firefox SEO tool is active, then No-Follow links should appear in a red box. Some search engines, such as Yahoo, will still credit you with a backlink if you post on a No-Follow link site, but Google will not. Other things to look out for are sites where links have been removed by moderators, or sites, such as forums, where links are not allowed in signatures (or signatures have been turned off completely).

Blogs and Forums

You can also find other niche relevant content sites for creating backlinks by going to Technorati or Google Blog Search. These sites provide the ability to search for blogs in your niche. You can simply visit them, type in your keyword phrase, and see what turns up. In a lot of cases, you will be able to visit the blogs that appear in the results and post a comment which includes a link back to your site. Try using a unique name when posting in blogs and forums, so you can then set up your Google Alerts for that name to make sure the posts appeared, and to add to your comments if necessary. When commenting on a blog or forum always make sure that your comment is relevant to the blog post, so that it adds to it or it is a well thought out opinion. Simply throwing up a link to your site with a "nice post" comment will generally get your comment removed.

For forums, you can search for your niche in Google simply by typing "[your niche] forum". This will generally give you a list of sites that are relevant to your niche but that also contain forums. You can then visit these forums, make sure they allow signatures to be posted, and then sign up and start making your contributory comments. Who knows, you may even find yourself part of the community after a while. In the case of forums it is much better to simply post comments relating to the topic at hand, rather than trying to turn each of your posts into a "look at my site" post. Include a link to your site in your signature, and if your forum posts are compelling enough people will click through to your site anyway. Plus, a link in a signature is a common thing in forums, so moderators will be less likely to consider it spam. In fact, if you've followed along with the thirty day challenge properly, and written your great content, it won't be spam at all.

Other sites to check out and possibly post comments on are Squidoo and Hubpages. To find your niche on these sites you can type in the following 'site:squidoo.com "sign my guestbook" "[your niche]"', and this should produce a list of lenses in your niche that allow guestbook comments.

The Ethics Of Social Bookmarking

Day 20 of the thirty day challenge was pretty easy. No heavy lifting or working with complex machinery...phew! Only two videos to watch and learn from.

The first video was about the ethics of social bookmarking. This video was inspired from some people in the challenge thinking that the more people they had as contacts to social bookmark their sites and spread the "link love", the better. Well, not true says Ed. The problem is that our sites are new and Google knows this. What we are trying to do is market the way the internet works, or more importantly how Google works. That is to say that when any new site comes on the scene it is basically a piece of driftwood in a very large lake (excuse the poor analogy as it goes). It's all by itself, floating out there. As time goes on, if it's a particularly useful piece of driftwood, it will attract water bugs and the like who will take up homes in it's cozy knots, then perhaps frogs will come to feed on the bugs, birds to feed on the frogs and perhaps even the odd slithery snake will come along to take a grab for a bird. Despite that really bad analogy my point is that it takes time for a site to gather popularity, and Google know this. Posting up a blog at 12 noon and then asking 100 of your closest friends on Facebook or wherever to Digg, StumbleUpon, and social bookmark to around 40 sites is only going to send alarm bells to Google - and they in turn will deem the site spam. This is because there are sweat shops in third world countries full of people who are social bookmarking sites by the ton. Google are pretty savvy to this deal so they are on the look out for sites that suddenly have a hundred or so gorgeous friends hanging around them when they turn up to the club. They smell something fishy and it ain't the pate. So they do what they do best, they slap your site upside the head and you are left to play in the sand box. This does you no good and can even hurt those who have social bookmarked your site, as they may get bumped for inappropriate usage of the social bookmarking tools. It happens and it will happen if you try to push your popularity.

So Ed's advice was to only ask the people in your group to social bookmark your site, which I think is just dandy. After I social bookmarked my best Wii games blog I had about 100 people visit the site in one day. That was a big surprise to me, as I never realised that many people would be searching through the social bookmarking sites looking for stuff. No one actually bought anything through my affiliate links, but about a dozen of those 100 did click through to various products I had listed, which is promising. I then sent an email out to my group, who I have heard nary a word from since the TDC started, to ask them to supply some link love to my site. That was on Monday and it is now Saturday and so far I have only heard from two of my group members, but only one of them has actually social bookmarked the blog. I understand that they are probably tied up with life and stuff. Joining all those social bookmarking sites takes a hell of a lot of time. I've only joined 30 of them so far, just because it is so time consuming. I tend to join 10 per day and then bookmark my site with them. So I know what it's like to have so much to do just with the TDC, and I don't have a day job. These guys would probably have day jobs to tend to, plus families and what-not. I'm leaving my expectations low for now, but I hope in time they will get around to it when they have reached the social bookmarking phase of the challenge. Anyway, that's what natural growth is all about anyway, have a trickle build to a stream build to a river. It's very very early days, having only put my blog up last week, and only have 3 posts on it so far, so I'm not actually concerned in the slightest.

The 2nd video from Ed was basically talking about other sites that can be used for hosting platforms. This has come since the drama surrounding Tumblr. People got into a panic about it, understandably, but those who are up on the internet marketing explained that Tumblr is not the holy grail of hosting platforms - that it was just used because Google seemed to like it - but there are plenty more sites out there to choose from.

One great source of Web 2.0 sites, and blogging sites in particular is Go2Web20.net, where you can search for a specific arena of Web 2.0. It lists stacks and stacks of sites and has around 20 different blogging sites to choose from. Also, lets not forget Squidoo and Hubpages. I used Squidoo earlier this year when trying out a niche business so I already have a handle on that. I do plan to expand both my niches into Squidoo at a later date, and have already secured the URLs. I like Squidoo because it is one page that you fill with information and you can add modules for selling and other stuff and that's it. You really only need to update it every so often, unlike a blog that you need to keep adding to. But with a Blog you are forced to add to it so it remains fresh in the eyes of Google, and therefore you can simply take pieces of your blog to use in keeping your Squidoo lens fresh - so long as you change the content somewhat to avoid duplicate content.

Ed threw out a number of platforms to use - Blogger, Wordpress, Hubpages, Squidoo, even Yahoo Answers and Twitter (although he promised to go further into Twitter at a later stage). Also, Ezine Articles was a good place to go to post content and Ed made that one of the action points of the day, to write an article for Ezine. I'm not going to get to that today (I'll barely finish this blog by the looks of it), but I'll definitely post an article in the not too distant future. He told us that as this is the testing phase still, we should not be trying to create our own domains around our niches. Anything where money needs to be spent is not necessary at this time, and goes against everything the Thirty Day Challenge is there for. At this point we don't even know if our niche is worthwhile (well, some people have already made sales and therefore they know, but as yet I don't) so we shouldn't be going off half-cocked (or fully cocked for that matter) until we have more information. It's not about the hosting platform we use, as these sites are interchangeable. It's about having great content across several platforms. There are no quick fixes any more. To make money in your niche you need to research your niche, learn about your niche, and market your niche as a business. Eventually, you will want to be using a lot of different platforms to host your one niche content, all pointing to your affiliate product (or your own product if you're lucky enough), but be sure there are no tricks to get you rich quick using Internet Marketing. I'm all for that, as I'm not concerned about working hard to get sales. My main focus is simply to do what it takes to be able to work from home for the rest of my life - and if that means I have to create business after business, getting maybe only 10% of my income from each one, then so be it. I don't ever want to go back to the rat race.

The Learning Phase

Day 10 of the challenge was about the gathering of information, and beginning to learn about our particular niches. I realise now why Ed had only wanted us to bring 2 niches into this exercise, as the work load begins to increase significantly from here on.

Ed started the day with his usual podcast, and then made a strange little video about doing one last little bit of market research. As he said it was something that was sort of hard to teach, but as experienced Internet Marketers, himself and Dan knew this technique more by looking than actually documenting the process. Anyway, he told us to have a look in Google and search for our niche keywords. We were then to look to the results to see if there were any, or many Web 2.0 results. By Web 2.0 he means results that include Squidoo lenses, Hub pages, Ezine articles, Tumblr blogs, etc...places where people are already using Web 2.0 sites to write about and possibly market niches such as ours. Now the reason I say this was a strange video was because once he had told us about this, saying that if our niche failed after we had done all the previous market research then this would probably be the reason, he told us to ignore what he had told us. I'm assuming he did this because the idea might confuse a lot of newbies (and I would have included myself in that group had I not been part of the Immediate Edge program - now of course, I know all about Squidoo and Hub and Ezine). Adding this into the mix could quite well add a level of complexity to the mix for a lot of people that they would simply crash and burn through frustration at not being able to understand the process at this point, and may very well chuck it all in. Ed made the video as to give full disclosure, so that if someone did do all the research but didn't get any traffic, then he could at least say that he had explained the reason why it had probably happened. I assume he believes that for this challenge it's certainly not an important enough part of the market research faze to be worrying, but at the same time it needed to be mentioned. I have the feeling it may have been more confusing to have made the video and then said to ignore it, but I understand why he had to do it, and I bet if there are experienced members in a team then they could probably go into more detail for the lesser experienced people.

Speaking of teams, I'm not sure if I have one anymore...at the start of the challenge we were all told that teams were the best way, and I got that and so asked to join a team. We got a handful of people together, I think 5 was the magic number, and I sent off an email to the guy who started the team saying I was interested. A few days later he sent out a group email with everyone's details, asking them to confirm that they still wanted on the team, and I sent off my confirmation. Since then I've had received maybe one email from each of them, only in response to me asking if the team was still a team. One of our team members started a Facebook group for our team, and only 4 out of 5 of us have joined it...the guy who started the team is the one who hasn't joined, but in his defense he says that he has been sick and needs to catch up. Mind you, the Facebook group has not had much activity since it was started, and the guy who started it, who is meant to be a member of my team hasn't even added me to his friends list despite me requesting to be his friend several days ago. I really thought there would be a bit more communication between team mates. I noticed in the stages of pre-season that other teams were doing teleconferencing on Skype, and coming up with fun team names, but getting correspondence out of my team has been a little like pulling teeth - nobody seems to want to communicate so I've pretty much resigned myself to doing this on my own. I know what people might say, well if YOU want to communicate then communicate...well, I HAVE been trying, and not getting much in response and I'm not the sort of guy who bangs his head on a brick wall for very long. Ok, that's my rant over...

The rest of Day 10 was about the gathering of information on our niches. For those who have chosen a niche they know little or nothing about, now is the time to learn. That goes for me, as the two niches I have chosen are both areas I know nothing about really. I just hope that as I learn about them I'm able to get interested. At the moment, though, it's just about getting snap shots of information and saving them in Google Notebook, a cool little tool for this exact purpose. Another fantastic technique that Ed has shown us is the way to be notified when new information on our niches comes our way. This process entails going to Google and doing a search for your niche under the Google News site. Now, in Ed's example his niche is "Free Speed Reading", but as it's a sub niche the news results are minimal, so he stuck with the umbrella phrase of "Speed Reading". Once he got his results he merely clicked on the RSS feed icon in the address bar of the browser, which took him to his Bloglines account and he saved the feed. This means now that anytime the word "Speed Reading" appears in a news article, Ed will get it delivered to his Bloglines account. Pretty bloody clever if you ask me. Then he did the same with the Blogs search section of Google and voila! He now has every blog that mentions "Speed Reading". Google, being the mother of all search engines, would pick up most blogs and news articles, and therefore Ed would receive a plethora of content which can be used down the track in the preparation of a product or sales page. Then it's just a matter of reading through these blogs and news articles, and seeing what makes you go WOW, or HMMM, and copying that into Google Notebook, storing it for future use. Hell, you may even learn a little about your niche along the way! Hats off to you, Ed, that's some cool IM shit right there!

So that's where I'm at right now. I'm concentrating on my two main niches, gathering information about what they are and cool things that others might find interesting about them. I haven't forgotten my third niche, and if I have time I will have a look for info regarding that, but it happens to be a niche that I already have quite an interest in, and know a bit about, so it's not imperative that I get stuff down during the thirty day challenge.

So, I'd better stop dribbling and get on with the learning phase