Showing posts with label blogger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogger. Show all posts

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Backlinks To The Future!

We are now on Day 29 of the Thirty Day Challenge and it's all about backlinks. If you hadn't gotten it from previous posts then here's the scoop. Backlinks are one of the most important aspects to having a good page ranking in Google. Using Ed Dale's earlier analogy that Google is the bouncer and your niche is the niteclub, well backlinks (from reputable sources) are link having someone well known to the club/bouncer put in a good word for your ugly self. If I manage to get a backlink on a site that Google regards as an authority in my niche, it's like someone cool walking me up to the door of the club and saying "this guy is okay, treat him well". Obviously, the more of these cool people you have coming to the door with you, the more likely you are not only going to get in, but also you're going to get a good table near the front of the stage (equals high page ranking).

Now some people think that the more backlinks you have the better off you are, but that's not necessarily so. Quality always wins out over quantity. The best backlinks to have come from authority sites in your niche. If you're selling sausage making tips then you want to get backlinks from sites that at the very least revolve around the processing of meat. Having a backlink to your sausage making tips come from a computer game website is probably not going to do much for you in terms of gaining Google's trust and confidence. If you walk up to the door of the sausage making niteclub with a guy who knows about sausage making and says you're okay - huge plus. If you walk up to the door of the sausage making niteclub with a guy who knows everything there is to know about car parts, Google is not going to care so much. Don't get me wrong, almost any backlink is a help - but if you're going to take the time to submit your site for backlinks then you might as well go to relevant niche sites to do it. To see how to go about doing that you can read my previous blog post.

Now, once you've done the hard yards with authority sites in your niche you can try hitting directories for a bit more of a boost in the rankings. Directories are basically sites that will list your site in a particular category relevant to your niche. Google will take notice of these places, but only in a cursory way. Directory submission is something you should not bother doing manually, as the time it takes will not be rewarding enough. Thankfully, there is directory submission software out there that takes away alot of the time-consuming aspect. One such tool can be found at imwishlist.com - where you can also download an article submitter to place your content on other platforms such as Ezinearticles. I'm a bit skeptical about article submitters because of the duplicate content rule on Google. Basically, Google will penalize anything it sees as duplicate content, and relegate it to the "sandbox" - also known as the Supplemental Index. Basically, lost in the ether.

A great place to go to find directories to submit your sites to is addurl.nu. It has a list of over 800 directories that you can submit to, along with their page ranking (the higher the PR the more "authority"), so you can just focus on the directories that are going to mean more to Google.

One of the good and bad things about directory submissions is that they usually take quite a while to show up. Usually around 3 to 6 months for a free submission, but some work a little quicker. I say this is good because what it means is that you can submit to multiple directories at once without fear of Google thinking you are spam and sandboxing you. If you were to do the same thing with social bookmarking sites then Google would consider you a spammer and drop you like a hot potato.

If all this time and trouble and waiting is too much for you then you can also pay to have your site listed on various directories. This will generally guarantee you a quick listing. If you have plenty of money then you might as well hit the big wig directories - Yahoo and DMOZ. Yahoo submission run at around $300 a year. I'm not sure the price of DMOZ but it's not that much. Of course, in keeping with the principles of the thirty day challenge we do not want to spend any money just yet, so I'll pass on the paid submissions and stick to the free ones.

Another place to acquire backlinks for free is by answering questions relevant to your niche in Yahoo Answers. What is Yahoo Answers? Well, it quite simply a place where people post questions and other people answer them. The asker then picks the answer that suits them as the best. You can build up points for having your answer picked as the best.

When you first go to Yahoo Answers you should click on the 'Advanced' link and make sure the "open questions" is checked. This will then give you the questions that you can still post answers to (once a best answer is picked the question becomes closed for anymore answers). You then do a search for your keyword phrase and see what comes up. If you find something you can answer try and put your keyword in the answer somewhere (but not in a spammy, sales way). You are given a 'source' box that you can then enter the address of your site. If you can be bothered you can also search through the 'resolved questions' and add comments instead of answers. The advantage of Yahoo answers is that it is niche specific, which Google likes. It's worthwhile spending an hour or so every few days going through trying to answer questions and add your backlink. The most important thing here, though, is to make sure your answers are contributive. Don't just post some crap, through your URL in and expect it to be okay. Yahoo Answers is moderated and if you spam you're likely to have your answer deleted and your account suspended.

Ed's Podcast for Day 29 of the challenge talked about the various niches that he's had a look at from other thirty day challengers, and the mistakes some of them had made when trying to get ranked. I really wish I could have gotten my site looked at - but hopefully I'll network someone who knows enough of their stuff to be able to tell me if I'm doing something wrong with my site. For some reason I just can't get it off Page 4 of search results, no matter how many relevant backlinks I work up. My Squidoo lens is holding up okay, but with my next niche I'll definitely be trying a new platform other than Blogger. I thought it would be favored by Google seeing as Google own it, but maybe because it's so big Google don't consider it such a knowledge base after all.

Ed's advice when starting to add content to your platform is making sure you put your keywords in the heading of your blog, to write a decent description in the heading of your blog for Google to pick up. Don't throw too many articles up at once at the beginning. Just make one post and wait for Google to index it before you make any more. Do a little social bookmarking on that one post, but not on the first day and no more than 5 sites every other day. Make sure that whatever platform you use there isn't already a bunch of people trying the same niche on that platform. If so, use another platform. There are hundreds of viable platforms to choose from, so go out there and knock 'em dead.

There is only one more day of the Thirty Day Challenge left for me to blog about - I'll then be carrying on with my new niche idea and documenting my attempts at getting better results with that then I've had with my current two niches.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The Rush Is On For BlogRush

Right about this time hundreds of thousands of people are writing about a new application called BlogRush. Why are they doing this? Well, for one it appears to be an incredibly useful tool for getting traffic to your blogs and therefore they, as bloggers, want to tell the world about it. On the other hand they also want you to click on their affiliate link so that they get your referral. Neither reason is bad, of course. I am blogging this for both the reasons above.

How Does BlogRush Work?

BlogRush is the idea of John Reese, and on the outset looks to be a fantastic tool for building traffic to your blog. The way it works is that you sign up for an account over at BlogRush, fill in your blog details and are presented with a piece of code that you insert in your blog. Then when you view your blog you will see a box similar to the one at right, with a list of other blogs in it that relate to your subject matter. Elsewhere, on other blogs that are in the same subject matter as yours, your blog will appear in the list. For each person that visits your blog in a day, BlogRush will place your blog in their little interface once a day. So if 100 people visit your blog, your blog will appear 100 times throughout the day on other people's blogs. Theoretically, this will increase your blogs traffic which in turn will increase the number of times you appear on other BlogRush interfaces, increasing your traffic - and so on and so on.

The real meat in the sandwich happens when you get referrals. As you can see also on the interface there is an "add your blog posts - FREE" button. If a blogger clicks on this button on your blog and signs up then you get the referral, which means that for each person that visits their blog you get an appearance on BlogRush. So if someone with 1000 visits a day signs up through your blog (that already gets 100 visits a day), then you will appear 1100 times a day (100 for your blog = 1000 for your referral's blog). Then if someone visits your referral's blog and signs up to BlogRush, not only does your referral get the referral, but you do too! In fact, you get referrals 10 deep, which can equal a huge amount of increased traffic. You also get a special referral link that you can simply email to other people to become referrals for you. Sounds fantastic, but there are problems associated with it for some people.

BlogRush Problems?


For one, Internet Marketers like myself don't want people clicking off their page, so sticking an interface that asks people to do just that may not work out to be the best idea. If someone does click on a link in the BlogRush interface the new blog opens in a fresh window, which is supposed to reduce the amount of "click away" that your site will get. IM'ers are worried that this will reduce sales and it's a fair concern indeed. People love to click on links, so giving them something else to click on (other than their affiliate links) that looks nice and possibly has blog titles that are more appealing, might not be such a good idea.

Another concern that I read in Caroline Middlebrook's blog, was that once everyone gets on board the BlogRush train, that referrals will drop off. As she writes:

Most bloggers will optimise their blogs to encourage readers to either read more of their content, or to click an ad, subscribe to the RSS feed, join a newsletter etc. Generally speaking a blogger does not want the user to click out of their blog so I don’t imagine this widget to be prominently displayed on many blogs. You’ll notice that I put it right at the bottom of my sidebar. I may be wrong here as it looks like quite a lot of bloggers are pushing it in order to get the referral links but once every blog in the world is signed up, the referrals will drop off and then it all falls on the shoulders of the readers.

Source


It's a good point, and one that a lot of people who are rushing for a piece of this 'ere BlogRush might have failed to take in to account. Like Caroline, I am a follower of Ed Dale's internet marketing techniques. I've only been on to him since the start of this year when I accidentally came across him on Google, but in a very short space of time I have grown to trust the man and his word. The thirty day challenge is testiment alone to the massive amount this man is willing to give back and when he vouches for a product or service I have no doubts that it is the top of it's game and worth my hard-earned bucks. Anyway, Ed put out a blog post a couple of days ago saying that he would be giving BlogRush a try very soon and will document his results. I know a lot of people will be waiting to see what he has to say on the matter, and I think at this point a large portion of BlogRush traffic is dependant on his opinion.

As it is BlogRush has been so overwhelmed with traffic that they are having troubles keeping up. Originally the stats from using BlogRush were supposed to be up within 24-48 hours, but yesterday a notice was published on the BlogRush site, by John Reese, that said (in part):

The first 60 hours since we launched the BlogRush public beta has been nothing short of EXPLOSIVE. We knew that we were developing an exciting tool that many bloggers could benefit from, but we had no idea how fast the 'word' would spread across the Web.

With this explosive growth has come some challenges, and our entire team is working very hard to solve any potential bug and issue that we've been alerted to. We're improving things at a very rapid pace and we hope to have the entire network completely stabilized very soon.

I would like to ask that you are patient with us during this time and know that we are doing our best to help YOU drive more traffic to your blog and we will soon have things running smoothly.


You can view the rest of this notice if you login to your BlogRush account. If you don't have a BlogRush account you can get one here.

So if the experts end up saying this might not be such a good thing then I will most likely drop BlogRush from my IM sites, depending on their reasons. I do think I'll probably leave it on this site and any other blogs I have that don't produce sales for me, as my initial instinct is that it's a good tool for generating traffic and let's face it, this blog ain't exactly swimming in readers hehe. Time will tell, and you can bet when it does I'll be posting my thoughts about it - and with BlogRush's help I may even get some people to read it :o)

Saturday, September 8, 2007

My First Sale!

Just wanted to write a quick note to say I got my first sale through my best Wii games niche yesterday! I found this out when I went to my Amazon.com affiliate sign in page and noticed that my conversion rate was now at 3.45% instead of 0.00%. When I checked it out I found that through either my blog or my squidoo lens (amazon doesn't tell you where they came from) someone ordered a copy of Resident Evil 4. Needless to say I was very excited. I know this stuff worked already due to the many hundreds of people who have made their first $1 or $10 from the 30DC process, but to actually have it happen to me was amazing! I suspect, due to my BWG blog being sandboxed, that the sale came through Squidoo, as I've had a couple hundred visitors through there already in the last couple of days, and my lens is ranked #670 overall (out of hundreds of thousands of lenses created), and is #19 in the video game category. That's pretty good but it's normal for a lens to shoot up when it's first created, only to slide back down overtime. The trick to keeping it up is to update it regularly, and make sure plenty of people check it out. I need some more people to rank it for me too.

Anyway, Amazon only dish out around 10% commissions, and RE4 is $29.97 so I get a little under $3 for the sale, but it's a start, it's better than nothing, and it's proven to me that this stuff really can work. Hopefully, once I write a review of RE4 on my blog that sale may become one of many - we'll see.

It's a great feeling to have your thoughts confirmed. Onward and upward from here!

Saturday, August 25, 2007

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.