23 February 2007

Long leave of absense eh? Well, not much has been happening except starting new sites, developing content and emailing linking partners. I just discovered something last night that I think it very important and worth writing about. Its about keyword competitiveness, SERPS and no. of visitors. When you think about it it actually is quite logical just that I never thought about it.

See, I have this website http://www.creditrelease.com which was the second website that I made. I think its about 8 months old. I did some initial SEO work with it but only soon after I realized that the competition with the keyword "bad credit" is extremely tight and thus I abandoned it leaving the site up and decided to let it age for a bit before I did any more work on it. About a month ago I had a $5.00 click on the site which really sent me off thinking of its possibilities. At that time I already had this very powerful SEO tool (i'm keeping it secret - email me if you want to know) which I used to identify outstanding link partner opportunities. I used it and lo and behold I checked Google yesterday and I'm at No.63 SERPS for the term "bad credit".

You might think thats good but today I got only 10 unique visitors from google despite this ranking. As a comparison when I was about the same ranking for my http://www.richjerkscams.com site I had at least 100 uniques a day. The silly thing is overture states that there are over 100,000 searches for the term "bad credit" (which does make sense) but only about 5000 searches for the term "rich jerk". So the question becomes why is it that with the same rankings my "bad credit" website has very minimal visitors compared to "rich jerk" despite "rich jerk" having only 5% of the searches per month according to overture.

I gave it some though and I think it boils down to two things. Firstly, I think that any information that people are looking for regarding "bad credit" is already well and truely been satisfied by all the sites above me in the serps so very few people will actually click through to see page 6 in google's results. Secondly people are looking for solutions or loans which again is already well and truely satisfied by the competion higher up in the rankings.

So, the lesson learned is this, when looking at keywords to target don't only look at hard facts (e.g. Page PR, H1-H2 tags), you must also ask yourself, has the information that user are looking for already been thoroughly satisfied by the competition. Do the competition already have every single factor about the keyword written about and explained that will make stop visitors clicking through the the deeper pages in the SERPs. Take for example "rich jerk", people are still happy to click through to SERPs Page 10 to find out more information about rich jerk, I think the answer is "yes", because users are skeptical and want to hear as many opinions as possible, whereas with "bad credit" all the information and products that the user needs has already been satisfied by the websites higher up the ranking ladder.

From here the only way I  can see to make money is to actually crack the first page of google for the term "bad credit" to make any significant cash out of my creditrelease site. When they say the competition is just too good, its really true, they've already covered all the angles.

8 December 2006

So, I was watching TV, some documentary about the healing properties of writing a journal. Well, the online equivalent is a blog isn't it? Writing here is surposed to be very therapeuthic and get things off your chest! I didn't even look at it this was, rather it was more of a log for me, but I'll try this blog being a therapeutic outlet for me. Apparently the trick is to use emotive words to express yourself truely.

Ok, so I suppose the operating word for me today is "Overwhelming", I just bought another car today and I think I might be addicted to it. It really isn't a fancy car but its a 1992 Lexus LS400, a bit beat up but I should be able to get it looking quite sweet. See I just have to say that its this job "Internet Marketing" that has enabled me to have this lifestyle, its quite liberating and free really. Its interesting to note that a lot of my friends think I'm a bit of a lier when I tell them I'm earning quite a bit of money just selling adspace on websites, everything is virtual, even the money is just wired in, its nothing but a number on the screen until you realize what freedoms it buys you when you actually spend it. Liberating it is!!!

Oh, one more thing, I've actually got a reader on this blog! I received a couple of emails from him asking me a few questions which really is quite nice. Someone is actually asking me for advice instead of me asking for it all the time. Anyway, I've decided to answer them here for everyone's benefit:

1) Has this been atleast slightly profitable?

• Really, do you think I'm going to be doing all of this if I'm not getting paid well? My earnings are 100% from the internet now and I've actually quit my day job to do this and at this very moment I'm earning a far sight more than being a stupid management consultant for a big 4 company!

2) Is OneStat worth the cost?

• OneStat actually has a free service called OneStat Basic, the details captured are really very good and I think for our purposes is more than enough, you can use the more advanced one but its only benefitial if you have a site selling multiple affiliate products and you want to pin point user movements right across your site.

3)  Do you design your own banners?

• Err, what banners? I don't have banner ads, infact I have no ads at all, I'm not skilled enough to place ads and monitoring them and all that. It really does take a lot of time to get the ads just right before you can do an arbitrage, I think the time can be better spent doing easier things like making new sites and adding content.

4) I like your sales letters, there quite good, have you just been learning how to write those from practice?

• Erm, I used to be used car sales man, I guess I learned a bit about convincing people from there? I'm not going to let the cat out of the bag but if you look at a large sample of sales letter you'll notice all of them have essentially the same elements, when you actually realize what these elements do to the human emotion, you've got the key in your hand.

Ok, that clears the questions.

One more thing I'd like to say though, I've actually decided a while back that I'll change the way of working on websites, it used to be 30% content development 70% SEO, coz, well, I'll admit SEO is kinda addictive, a game of sorts so I indulged, bad me ;)

Now I've decided to go 70% content development and 30% SEO as building a empire of websites actually requires a lot of content, SEO isn't really that necessary that early on. Just build like 10 links and sit on it for while and develop the content. Almost all websites are Sandboxed for popular keywords and really no matter what amount of SEO you do, you can't rank the website. Better just spend the time doing a bit of research and develop good content so your website looks good an professional to both the reader and the Search Engines.

4 December 2006

Hi guys, been a really busy month, managed to develop 3 sites, one complete and 2 still work in progress, its been quite exciting and I've learned a few things. Firstly, there is nothing wrong about developing a site, doing all the backlinks to get it ranked properly then let it sit for a few months before the sandbox effect loosens its grips on the site. Thats what happened to my butterflymarketingscam.com site. Now it is in position 6 and I'm contemplating if I'd happy with No. 6. I'll probably try 3 so the visits get that much more.

And another thing, you can effectively see the results of your site minus google's filters, just goto:

http://roberttaft.com/no_filter.htm

There, enter your site wihout the filters and if your only filter is the sandbox filter and your site ranks, then ust leave your site for a while and develop other sites. It will rank to that position in a matter of time. Just relax.

7 November 2006

Hello peoples, sorry for the lack of updates but my brother had a wedding and its was a crazy few weeks trying to get things in order. Anyway, its all over now and I'm back in the SEO seat.

Anyway, with butterflymarketing, after google spidered last week, I got my site up to the second page of the SERPs, considering that I hadn't updated or even add links to the site for nearly one month, thats pretty good. Looks to be going the way I want it to be.

Imagine creating a site, going for a 1 week SEO crazy time and add 1000 links, then just leave the site. Imagine the earning potential for that, the best thing is I can go sun bathing tomorrow and not do a single thing while still getting paid for people visiting my site. Nice eh? Anyway, google hasn't spidered the site in about a week and the rankings have dropped to the 3rd page. I suspect that once the spider comes along once again then the rankings will jump to an even greater position than before, cross your fingers eh?

Survey-scam is doing quite well! Its contributing very nicely and I've been doing some easy SEO for a few days now, but I'm thinking of writing a PRweb press release to try the the site out of the google sandbox, maybe it will work. Anyway, if I do i'll let you know what the results are. I honestly didn't expect "online paid survey" to be "sandboxable" term. I didn't think it was commercial enough to get it.

I'm starting another site, one that according to my keyword analysis should be one of the best so far. I can't let you in to know about it first but if it gets somewhere I'll let you into my analysis factors so you can do the same for yourself.

Anyway, nanite guys, I need to sleep

Hey guys, back again. Just a simple report now on butterflymarketingscam, Google has me at position 60 now and its been climbing ever so slowly. Looking back at the amount of backlinks I have, I'm pretty sure I have got enough good backlinks to rank much higher, now I feel that the problem is the age of my site and the back links, I suppose its just time for me to sit back and let the site "age" like a good wine eh?

Anyway, I'm still pretty curious about the whole age concept, it could be either the age of the link or the age of the site, my belief is that its to do with the age of the links, it does make sense because it adds legitimacy to a site that another partner site is linking to for a long time. So, its coming nicely, just a matter of sitting back and waiting.

Anyway, my post today is about something I realized I have been doing that is quite stupid, I guess I can confidently say that I'm quite good at SEO, for a newbie anyway, its been less than a year so its great, but guess what. I've been choosing the wrong keyword after keyword. I'm terrible when it comes to choosing keywords, can you imagine, the second site that I made was www.creditrelease.com and guess what my keyword was, "bad credt", I know I should have just shot myself.

Anyway, I'm going to dedicate some time to understand choosing keywords so I don't keep making the same mistakes! So next few months I want to be able to choose good keywords, easy keywords, profitable keywords! Next aim ya!

Oh another stupid thing I did, started my newest site, insurancerelease.com which just started out and guess what, I picked the wrong keyword again, this time its because of my poor memory, I targetted "insurance negotiation" which was a non commercial keyword with almost nobody searching for the term. Again, I should have targetted another keyword, I suppose something like "boat insurance" or something along those lines. The stupid thing is I wasted a good 4-5 days doing SEO for the wrong term, I'm No.5 in google for insurance negotiations now, which is scary since I've just started the site only a few weeks ago.

Lessons Learned
- Keywords are vitally important, they are the foundation for the success of a website.
- New pages can rank well, its not hard especially if it isn't a commercial term, I was no.5 with over
  40million competitors, hows that, for just 4-5 days work and no $.

Ok, just an update. I've checked my rankings again and now www.google.com has www.butterflymarketingscam.com on page 5 with www.google.co.uk has me at the bottom of page 3. To be blatantly honest with you I'm shocked. There are now coming to 5 million other competitors and within a bit less than 2 months I managed to rank this high and with very little work on my behalf. I've to be honest spent about 1 day writing up the site and my reviews and another 2 days marketing it.

So far I've only done 1 SEO campaign for the site which only involved commenting in related blogs. This damn Butterfly Marketing Manuscript thing is correct man. It used to take me at least 6 months to rank but now it takes less than 2 months even if I did a boo-boo with this site and got de-indexed! Read my previous post to find out what dumb thing I did.

Anyway, an update on the adsense front. got 5 clicks from survey-scam, 1 from butterfly, 2 from creditrelease. I did notice one alarming thing, this blog IS FOR MY OWN RECORDS!! more than 50% of the people who visit butterflymarketingscam come and read this. Just go and read my reviews, don't read my blog!

But having said that, this is quite interesting, I'm having people reading what I'm saying, I think I'll put a little comment thing on the side to see if anyone wants to say something.

Well, overall its looking up, oh yeah i've just put up insurancerelease too and did some "test" seo with "add your reponse" type blogs, lets see if there is any effect. Oh and creditrelease is really stagnant, except for some movements in MSN, the keyword "bad credit" is just bad. Don't use it, its so hard to get visitors.

Ok, so I worked over the weekend again and I've completed quite a few blog comments for butterflymarketingscam which I will hopefully see as results in the next week or so.

I saw quite an encouraging thing yesterday, did a SEO Elite search on ranking positions and it seems as though google has released butterflymarketingscam from the sandbox, and put it in ranking 70, however when I checked today it went back to 700 which was quite dissapointing. Anyhow, I believe that this is quite good news as google might be moving my site to a more deserving position than 700++. Just keep the fingers crossed that it'll come back to 70 and with the weekend's worth of about 300-400 comment submits, should get butterflymarketingscam to at least page 6. Hopefully.

Additionally, I also noticed that survey-scam was getting some attention. I also managed to sell my first survey scam item for $20! Woot! Saw 2-3 clicks for survey-scam too. Hope things come along nicely.

Oh!, Just as a note, I paid for PR4 homepage link at the trophey site for both survey-scam and butterflymarketing, mental note to remember to check the link value in the next few weeks.

Anyway, until probably thursday I'll be working on more water filter articles and also trying to do some SEO for survey-scam. BTW, its already getting good results from MSN. Hopefully in the next few months google will follow suit.

Note: Stay off Butterflymarketingscam for a while, too must SEO and google might think its SPAM!

29 September 2006

Ok! My first entry about the SEO journey of my http://www.butterflymarketingscam.com website. Anyway, a brief history, the site has been online for about 1.5 months now and is in quite a dismal position in the search engines.

So, "butterfly marketing" is a pretty lousy keyword, it gets pretty dismal searches but my idea is that it will grow as people see the benefit of it and its "mystique" grow. Its only just new I guess. I have about 4 million competitors in google and a bit of analysis revealed that the competition isn't very high with high ranking sites having few to little backlinks from other sites.

Anyway, on to the SEO history, it was created 1.5 months ago as stated earlier. I put a link sitewide on my other PR4 site (www.richjerkscams.com) and in a few days I got a very nice ranking in page 17, quite happy about that.

Next thing I did was quite stupid, I decided after reading matt cutts page that I would rename all my files on the butterflymarketingscam.com site. BIG MISTAKE! I immediately lost all my ranking and google decided to de-list my site from its index although not ban me.

Well, what to do, I submitted a "re-list" request and within the next day my site got listed back in the index, to check I did a search on "http://www.butterflymarketingscam.com" and resulted in something.

Slowly the rank has been coming back but now I'm still at position No. 645 which is really dismal and gets me no visitors at all from google. Anyway I've decided to stop writing all this down on a piece of paper and put it online so I can remember. Bad memory you see ;)

So here it starts, my journey with this website which if all is right within the next 4-6 months should at least be on the first page of the search engine for "butterfly marketing", I hope so anyway.