The Niche Think Tank » SEO

The Secret to Successful Blogging or Marketing.

Larry C. — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:39:26 +0000

Old Dog

I’ve been in the business of making money on the internet for about 10 years now. I started in the dating site niche back in 1997 back when the internet was still young and growing. I wasn’t making any money at the time, but I was running a dating site specific for people with a certain medical condition. I would receive emails with an ad and then I would post it by hand myself and people would then be accessible for dating.

At this stage of the game I didn’t know much about SEO, or traffic or html for that matter but I was doing it. I was also the first and only dating site for this genre of people, so I obviously stood out in the searches. I continued to be a stand out and then I noticed something, there were other dating sites in my niche but they were charging money. I got a little angry, then got over being angry and started to charge money too. This is when I started my marketing career on the internet.

“New” Old Trick

In my years of being in this niche I have had a very nice steady flow of income from this dating site even though there are bigger and better corporate entities around. I come up on the 1st page of Google, within the first 5 results for most if not all of the search terms for my specific niche. So how is it that, even though I am still pretty much the oldest site in this niche; I am not making more money than I am currently?

I decided to go to Compete.com and look up my traffic stats as opposed to that of my competition. I typed in my URL and I had about 250-ish uniques, per month. Ok, not bad I guess considering a lot of traffic is repeat people coming back to check their mail, profiles and see what new profiles are on the site, Ok so it’s a little low but it’s not bad. Right? I then punched in the URL for my competition and my jaw hit the floor. My competition was getting 250, 000 uniques per month, 100,000 times more than I was getting.

The Secret

It hit me square upside the head, Traffic. I didn’t have the traffic. I had gotten so desensitized to the Basics of Traffic, that I forgot to continue with the basics. I hear it all the time, everyday, all day long about “generate traffic”, “marketing”, “more traffic…”, and so on that I had gotten completely desensitized to the fact that I still needed to generate traffic coming to my site.

Even though I am still in the top search engine results, I was not getting the traffic I needed or wanted to make more money. The secret to making money in ANY niche, market or blog, is TRAFFIC. If you have none, you have no money. Period. Sure people search the net for things, but they don’t always search for everything. So what I needed to do was return to the basics of traffic generation.

Forum posting, comment posting, link directories, link trades and talking anywhere and everywhere about my site. I needed to do this so people know it exists and see it, instead of having to go hunt for it. In effect I needed to get it to the point that whenever someone turned around, my URL was in their face. How did I find where to put my URL? I’ll tell you grasshopper.

And the truth shall set you free…

If you go to Google and type in “link: domainurl.com” and hit enter. The domainurl.com is the URL of a competitors site that you might want to know where they have back links coming from. Once you know this, you can go to each of those results and see if there’s a place that you too can post your link and get some back link traffic and page rank. This is one of the EASIEST ways to find good places to put back links. Do this with several sites that you know of and you will have enough places to begin re-marketing your site. This is how I started to get my traffic to go up again, hopefully eventually as much as my competitor in the near future.

Have a great holiday weekend,

Larry

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All in One SEO WordPress Plugin – Video Tutorial

Larry C. — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:49:57 +0000

Here’s the All in One SEO plug in for your word press blog. This is one of the “Must Have” Plug ins for your blog. This is for search engine optimization(SEO). Check it out.

This Plug in is for making a blog a bit more search engine friendly. Most of us want the search engines to “like” our pages, so we use something like this to make it so. Most Websites that are properly coded are SEO Friendly, however when we start using canned CMS sites such as word press or any other type of CMS(content management system) we run into the effects of coding and such on the SEO friendliness of our site. This plug in makes it much friendlier.

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Duplicate Content Hurts EVERYONE

Larry C. — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 20:41:22 +0000

In my quest to learn all I can about Niche Marketing and Niche Marketing Strategies, I have joined a membership site that has a pretty good track record and following. I first learned about this site from Yaro Starak and one of his Podcasts. I listen to podcasts all the time, everyday in fact when I am walking.

Anyway I like the philosophy behind this membership sites method, so I joined. In the style of making money online, they give a prebuilt website kit to all members each month to use as a learning tool. The kits are a bunch of articles for article marketing, keywords for SEO marketing, Graphics and the articles for each site.

Once you get these sites you’re supposed to customize them to be unique and your own. However, as it is with most people just learning or trying to make money on the internet, to trying to get rich quick, they will put up the defacto site and not even change it at all. This not only hurts the other people who are doing the same thing but it hurts themselves as well. Here’s a video I did for this article, which continues after the video.

Google doesn’t like duplicate content in the first place, second the person who had their site up first gets the higher page rank(if they even get a page rank). Anyone after them to put up a site with the same duplicate content will rank lower and lower. The other problem is when someone does a search for this specific topic and they come up with a list of SERPs(Search Engine Results Pages), The see a ton of Clones.

My example is here:

Type this is your google search engine:

Get your free Rose Growing Mini-Course Here

Or just click the link it will open in a new window, and start clicking on the links that you see, no need to delve into each site just click a link and then hit your back button. Go down the list of site and then go to the second page of search results. What you will see here is an army of Rose Growing Mini Courses.

While some of people have taken the time to customize the graphics and text, many of them just threw up the sites as is. Unfortunately some of the sites are half done and still have beagle training stuff still on there and I am sure many of those site owners are wondering why they aren’t getting any sales at all.

Google is going to index the first sites first and anyone that comes after that is going to get SLAPPED for duplicate content and possibly get sand boxed. Now if I started looking for sites that teach how to grow roses and I saw that each site I went to was the same as the 0ne previous I wouldn’t want to buy. I would also get very suspicious of the product being sold, especially if part of it still had some sort of beagle training course on it.

I started typing in combos of the words on the pre made sites and I found a plethora of interesting sites. Some were half done and some were completed but may have missed a “beagle” word here or there. It’s really a shame, because if you really want to learn how to make money online you have to practice also trying to be unique, even in a sea of Rose Growing Sites.

I knew one of the prebuilt sites that were given out were for wine making, so I typed in a phrase for wine making and I found a site which I think is a good example of someone customizing the site to make it unique. The site is here:

http://growgrapesandmakewine.com

Now this site doesn’t exactly follow the model from the member site I belong to, but its close. The member site I belong to have specific ways of doing a website but the point I am trying to point out here is to customize the product site and make it unique. Re-write the content, change the graphics, make it your own and so there is not any duplicate content on the site so no one gets dinged not only by Google, but by a prospective customer.

Something I saw when I clicked on the “our eBook” link, was the great looking cover. It nicely done, and it’s obvious someone took the time to give a great presentation. In many industries including sales and marketing “presentation is EVERYTHING”.

What I am getting at here folks is that if you want to get this right, take the time to customize graphics. Re-Write articles, or write your own, don’t just throw up default packages you may be given. If you do decide to just toss up a defacto prebuilt website don’t whine and moan about how you’re not getting any sales, or that the program you are in is a scam.

Duplicate content hurts not only yourself, but the other people you may be duplicating, and that isn’t right.

BTW The Member site I joined and Really like the Method and Theory of is Niche Profit Classroom 2.0 It’s a pretty cool system, check out the video on the home page.

Enjoy.

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Cash Cow guide to Adsense Wealth

Larry C. — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:39:28 +0000

OK the first review for this site is the “Cash Cow Guide to AdSense Wealth”, by Stephen Crooks. When I was starting my Internet marketing Entrepreneurial Business, I started blogging and was using WordPress. WordPress, a great blogging software, is what we use here on this site but is is also what I use on all of my blogging sites. I have several sites that are not just about making money, they are about health and helping others live a better life. But back to my topic, Stephen was in a forum for internet marketeers selling a guide to Adsense , and he spoke a good talk. I checked out his sales page and liked what I saw, especially after what I read in the forum and I bought it. The main reason I bought the package was the AdSense ready WordPress templates he was giving away. 30 templates that were especially formatted for WordPress, having the AdSense set in advantageuos spots in the templates, and nice looking to the eye. That was the main catch for me. The he included some adsense reports from another person, Jason Oickle. I still have yet to get to the reports by Jason Oickle, but the “Cash Cow Guide to AdSense Wealth” by Stephen Crooks I finally got to. What I read opened my eyes about AdSense, and the way people look at Blogs. By this time I had already been making a nice inome from AdSense, but what I was reading was really going to turn the lights on, in terms of how I looked at blogging and placement of my ads. If you are new to blogging, and want to get a jump on AdSense Income, or if you are a veteran, you should check this out as well, I learned quit a bit fromt his. One thing I liked reading about was the heat maps from Google. This is a definite must read and a sure money maker. Definitely a tool in my bag of tricks.

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The Niche Think Tank » SEO

The Secret to Successful Blogging or Marketing.

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Duplicate Content Hurts EVERYONE

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Cash Cow guide to Adsense Wealth

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