Progress Report

With 12 posts in my website, I have embarked on my backlinking strategy. So far I have written 2 articles which I have distributed to my selected articles directories. About 80% have been published so far, the rest are either pending or declined. Struggling a little with Squidoo and Hubpages because they are so strict. Although I do spin my article to the best of my ability, their programming still detects the articles as duplicate content. They have really strict criteria.

One possible way that I am going to look at is to publish to Squidoo first and only when it is approved, then I will publish to the rest. We'll see how that goes with my next article. That would eat in to my schedule a little though, so I will have to see if it is worth it, or if I should just drop Squidoo.

Once each post has been published successfully, I would social bookmark each of them. Then once, completed, I would Ping the article.

So far, my efforts seem to have a little impact. After a week of virtually non-existance in Google, I do see my website getting ranked for some of the keywords. Here's a screenshot, with the keywords arranged according to importance:

I've seen the ranking do the Google Dance the past few days and am waiting for it to stop bouncing. It seemed to have stabilized a little today. Being on pages 7, 9 and 10 might not seem all that great but it's only been two weeks and I have only two anchor articles out so far, so I'm happy with the progress.

My plan is to keep posting an article a day until I reach 14 articles. Then I will slow down to an article every 2 days for the next 14 articles, followed by 2 articles a week for the rest of the articles. This should free up my time for other linking methods, to vary my links and make them more enticing to Google.

Initial Backlinking Strategy

I have already got 7 posts in my blog. Almost all of them have been listed but still not ranked. I have seen it ranked on a very minor keyword though.

Social Presence

I have already created a Facebook Page for my website. On this FB Page I will bookmark not just my posts but also articles that I have written for my Anchor Secondary Layer. I am using my existing Twitter profile to create presence for my website posts as well as layers. I have created a Google Plus Page and am using it to create more presence for posts and layers. Lastly, I am using my existing Pinterest account and have created a separate board for my website.

Anchor Layer

For my initial Anchor Layer, I started with Wordpress and have created a blog which I upload unique posts linking back to a single post and the domain. I then created a Blogger blog. What I then do is I spin the Wordpress post and publish it to the same post and domain using a different anchor text. I then created a Squidoo lens and pointed it back to the same post and domain using a different anchor text. I will after that spin the lens and publish it as a hub in Hubpages. I will spin the Wordpress post twice more and publish them in Ezinearticles and Goarticles.

The article will further be spun and used in the following Article Directories:

• Digital Divide Network
• Triond
• Article Rich
• ArticlesFactory

And Web 2.0 Properties:

• Tumblr
• LiveJournal
• SOSblogs
• blog.com
• Weebly

Secondary Layer

The Secondary Layer comes in two parts: Social Bookmarking and Article Marketing. The Secondary Layer points to the Anchor Layer only. For Social Bookmarking, I am using a service called WeOnTech which is a paid service that does have a limited trial version.

For the Article Marketing part, I have yet to source a software that can automate the process for me. Don't want to have to go and publish individually because it wastes a lot of time.

After each Social Bookmarking and Article Marketing session, I would ping the Anchor Layer posts using either Ping-O-Matic or Pingoat.

I have done the Social Bookmarking part and have already completed spinning the Wordpress article into 10 others. I have used EzArticleLink for this which I think is pretty awesome. It's not an auto spinner, there is some manual work to be done but it does create very human articles. I will be publishing the articles tonight. Each article will point back to one Anchor Layer.

To keep track of all this I will use this cool excel tool created by Timothy Ferriss, the author of the 4 Hour Work Week: Ultimate Backlink Tracker. To check my ranking for each keyword I use the most awesome free SERP ranking tool I have ever used: WhatsMySerp

My Progress And Link Building

I has been one busy week. From reading more of Pat Flynn's guides to creating posts, I guess I'm pretty satisfied with my progress.

Progress Report

I've already chosen my niche and primary keyword. Using Market Samurai (Trial), I've managed to find a keyword that targets an average 900 SEO Traffic (SEOT) per day and with 37,500 SEO Competition (SEOC). The first page in Google is only merchant websites and Amazon, so it should not be too difficult to rank if I have a beastly resource. With my primary keyword in hand, I've written 50 posts titles to see if I will be able to manage the posts. The good thing is the niche I have chosen is pretty close to a niche that I once had some success with, so I'm pretty stoked. My new website was set up on Sunday, 14th July 2013 and I published my first post. I must admit that wanting to make it perfect this time round I did spend a little too much time with the Theme but I'm really excited about the theme I used. It's called Discover and I think it goes well with my niche. So far I have published 6 posts, 1 per day. In terms of Backlinking, I've not done much. Just one Profile link at CrunchBase and feeding my RSS to Feedburner. To date, my domain plus 2 posts have been listed in Google but it has not been ranked yet. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Backlinking Strategy

I'm still studying the right backlinking strategy to use. Since being hunted and killed by two cute black and white creatures last year, I'm really worried about any Google backlash. For the initial stage, I plan to build Multi Layer Linking. This is where I have an Anchor Layer pointing to my Website and then an Indirect Layer pointing to my Anchor Layer. This is done to protect my website against spammy links. The Anchor Layer is made up of resources that I have full control over. This includes Top Article Directories, Top Blogs and Top Web 2.0 Properties. For this plan I am going to use EzineArticles and GoArticles as my Article Directories, Wordpress.com and Blogger as my Blogs and Squidoo and Hubpages as my Web 2.0 properties. I will need to create a short 500 word article relating to a post on my website, spin it, publish them in my Anchor Layer and point them to my website. The plan is to have only two keywords per article, one to the domain and one to the post. I'm not supposed to use the primary keyword more than 20% for backlinking. If at any time any Anchor Layer resource gets penalized by Google them all I have to do is copy the content from that resource into a new resource and delete off the penalized resource. The Indirect Layer will consist of resources that I have little control over. This includes Mass Article Submission and Mass Social Bookmarking. All these will point to individual posts within the Anchor Layer. This will take a little more writing and I better get to it. Till next time, Tim Kessler

Keyword And Niche Selection

The main criteria to keyword research is to find a niche where I can do something to help people. Other than this, there are six other criteria that needs to be met by any proposed keyword before further investigation and research is done on it.

1. Search Volume: minimum 3,000 Local Searches Per Month

The search type must be set to Exact Match.

2. SEO Competition: Is there room in the Top 10 of Google?

How difficult will it be to be on the first page and in the first listing? Things to look for include:

• Is the keyword used in the URL?
• Is the keyword used in the Title and description?
• The number of incoming links to those pages and the quality of those links.
• Page Authority
• MozRank
• Page Rank
• Anchor text distribution
• Content on the competing pages

3. The Grandma Test 4. Can I Earn Money In This Niche?

Use these tests to gauge how profitable is the niche:

• Average Cost Per Click. How much are advertisers willing to pay for the keyword? It should be more than $1.00.
• Are the any Google Ads? If there are no ads in a Google Search, it might not be profitable because no one is advertising anything.
• Are there any Amazon products?
• What are the other sites selling? Take note of the products being sold and from what merchant.
• Search for money keywords. These include on sale, for sale, price, affiliate, partners, media kit, product description, equipment, services, products, customer review, testimonial and now available.

4. The 50 Post Test

Try to write down 50 blog post ideas. Start off from the top of my head. Then when I run out of ideas, use the following strategies to gather more post ideas:

• Place the seed keyword in Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find related keywords
• Do a Google search and see what the other websites are writing to gain inspiration
• Go to Amazon and look up related books. Look inside the cover at the content page to get more post ideas
• Search through forums and discussions for problems or issues people are having

If I struggle to gather 50 posts, then I have to reassess if this is a niche I want to get into. 6. Can I Create A Beastly Resource? Can my website be the ultimate resource for my niche that will be referenced as an authority that cannot go unnoticed? All the above is dealt in more detail in this post.

Effective Link Building Strategies

This time it's on a topic which has always got me in a bind. I've always struggled with link building, doing only the most basic tasks and have painfully been penalized for many of them. A lot of wasted time for nothing. Pat in this post gives three very important strategies to make link building effect: link diversity, velocity and deep linking.

Link Diversity

Try to get as many diverse links as possible. These include:

• Editorial citations - a mention in a blog or article
• Resource links - a mention in a list of links in a subject matter
• Web directories - General, Niche or Local. The best being Niche Directories.
• Blog comments
• Forum discussions
• Profile pages
• Web 2.0 article directories
• Author bios
• Image links

Link Velocity

Do not put off link building in big bursts weeks apart form each other. Good link building is done in a consistent pace over time. One good way to do this is to grab the RSS feed from various blogs and feed them into a feed aggregator such as Feedly. Watch for daily posts from these blogs and leave a comment on any new ones for 10 minutes each day. If there is a big list of directories to submit to, break them into little chunks and set aside 10 minutes each day to do them. Spend 10 minutes each day participating in forums.

Deep Linking Ratio

Back linking should not be just to the homepage. A good back link strategy involves a good ratio of deep linking as well. Apart from these three strategies, the anchor text also plays a very important role. The exact match anchor text should be less than 20% of all anchor text. The majority should be branded, partial match and naked URLs. If the brand is an exact match domain, use the URL instead such as www.tinothykessler.com or TimothyKessler.com as the anchor text.

Tactical Link Building

Here are some tactics that I gather from this post which are awesome. I have never heard of these tactics and am intrigued and eager to use them.

Fail Proof Content

It is extremely important to create good content that will be very useful to your readers, and not merely articles to fill up the website. Good content will naturally get linked by readers who found it helpful. With great content, you can begin to market it in a very unique way. First, find the biggest authorities in your specific industry and feed their domains into Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer. Study all the links pointing to their domain. Using their best links, go to that linking website and look for pages that link out to a number of different websites, for example the Resource Page. Go through each of the links and see if you can find ones that have a large number of linking root domains (LRD). You can do this by feeding the URL in Open Site Explorer. If the link with the large LRD is a working page, study their best links for a common theme that you may be able to create content around and get these same links to link to you. If the link is a dead page, use the Wayback Machine to study what was the content that was on that page. You may be able to recreate the content and then get in touch with these webmasters to switch the dead link to your new article instead. Whether those webmasters will link back to your page will large depend on these reasons:

• The domain looks spammy
• The website is irrelavant to them.
• The website is too comercialized
• The content is not up to par
• They no longer update their website.

But it is still worth a try.

Broken Link Building

Go through some of the best links for a competitors website. Scan through the pages of those linked websites and see if you can find any broken links. Then email the webmaster and tell him you've stumbled on some broken links and ask if he'd like you to point them out. If he says yes, point them out to him and introduce your website or post ans ask if he'd like to mention it. These are some awesome ideas which I have never used which I am definitely gonna put into practice.

Pat Flynn's Keyword Research Method

So I've watched a video by Pat Flynn where he disclosed his method of researching and qualifying his keywords. He states that the ultimate goal is to create an online resource that is valuable to the market or niche that we target. He set a few criteria for qualifying a keyword as follows:

1. The keyword should have at least 3,000 local monthly searches.
2. Low competition in Google.
3. Does it pass the Grandma Test. This means that if I get incredibly famous for the niche that I am in, will my Grandma be proud of me?
4. What is the earning potential?
5. The 50 post test. Can I imagine writing 50 posts around this keyword?
6. Is it possible to create an in depth high quality post within this niche that can create a buzz?
7. Can I help people within this particular niche?

To start off, you would have to sign up for Google Adwords to get access to Keyword Tool so that don't have to fill in Captcha and get up to 800 results.
Head over to Seomoz and sign up for free account to gain access to Open Site Explorer for research on backlinking as well as Moz Rank which is a better indication than Google PageRank to see how much authority a site has.
Head over to SEMRush for good analytical data on keywords and competitor's website.
Go to Keyword Tool and key in your seed keyword. Create filters for Local Monthly Searches greater than 3,000 and less than 100,000 and Approximate CPC at $1.00. Match types set to Exact. Then click Search.
Take each keyword one by one and explore them. They have already met search volume criteria. Think about criteria No 3, 5, 6 and 7.
Once you find one which is interesting enough, take the keyword and search it in Google to see if anything stands out right away. Look out for ads, if there are none, it may not be a good money keyword.
Check if there are any products to sell by placing the keyword in inverted commas and adding a money word such as price or affiliate.
When searching the keyword in Google also pay attention to whether the sites on the first page makes use of the keyword in the Title, Domain and Description. If not many people are, then it would make it easier to optimize your website to get it to the top listing.
Also check what kind of brands are there and what are they selling or doing.
If your keyword is location based, try to avoid keywords that have Google Map results because the location results uses up a few placing on the first page and limits the room for listing.

Once you have a good keyword, head over to SEMRush and search there for your keyword. Phrase Match Report gives you great secondary keywords that you could write posts about or another new seed keyword. Organic Results shows the top twenty spots in Google and you could open the sites directly from SEMRush to see what the websites are all about and what we have to do to outrank them.

Copy the URL of the top site and put it into Open Site Explorer from SEOMoz to check out the Domain Authority, Page Authority and Backlinks. Page Authority is more important. Anything in the 20s and below are easy to outrank. Also check out the number of links, the more they have the harder to outrank, best if they are less than 200. Do this for all ten sites from the 1st page of Google. Page attention also to the Page Authority of the linking Pages.

Grab all the URLs into a text file and go to SEO Rank Smart under SEO Tools and use the Bulk Pagerank Checker by pasting all the URLs to check all the page rabks of all the sites. If there are a lot of 3, 4 or 5 it may be difficult to rank for this keyword.

Go to Moonsy to check for the MOZ Rank of each site. MOZ Rank between 2 and 4 is ok. Anything above that is hard to outrank.

If you'd link to watch the video yourself, here it is. Set aside some free time, it is 53 minutes long. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdr1b4J2EjM]]

Keyword Day

I found a very interesting section in one of the articles written by Pat Flynn. It was a unique method of looking for keywords and niches, which he calls Keyword Day. he has another method called the 777 Method which I'll talk about on a separate post. During Keyword Day, you would spend the entire day writing down everything you did and everything that caught your attention from the time you wake up until the time you sleep. From this list, you could come up with a niche that you never ever thought of. Interesting trick, I've got to give it a try tomorrow.

Branding And Domain Names

There have been tons of discussions over the past year about domain name selection, particularly when it comes to Exact Match Domains (EMD) and Partially Matched Domains (PMD). After the numerous Google algorithm scares which involved attacks by cute black and white creatures, everybody is in a huff about whether choosing an EMD or a PMD might affect the ranking of their website in Google.

I must say I had suffered the brunt of the furry creature attack, both Panda and Penguin. My websites never recovered and I eventually had to make the hard decision of shutting them down. At first glance, you might say that it had to do with my domain name selection, which is where I initially lay my blame. Two of my best websites were quickhemorrhoidscure.com (target keyword: hemorrhoids cure) and fish-tank-filters.org (target keyword: fish tank filters). Both were ranked on 1st Page for these keywords and were getting a very healthy level of traffic before Panda and Penguin but after the attack, they almost totally dropped out of Google. Today I know that they dropped because of generally low quality content and irregular updates. But still the fear of EMD penalties still bugs me. Pat Flynn, in his post on Branding and Domain Names points at the importance of creating a Brand, rather than merely targeting keywords in the URL. I would recommend reading the post but in essence, he talks about the 7 characteristics of a brand name and conducting research on the selected brand name. These will be the basis of selecting any brand name to build a URL around.

7 Characteristics Of A Brand Name

1. Easy To Remember: Select something memorable.
2. Not Too Long: Long URLs are prone to misspelling.
3. Easy To Spell: Skip words that are difficult to spell. I made this mistake when I used the word hemorrhoids in my URL.
4. Descriptive: A good brand describes your website with little effort. Anyone reading your URL would instantly have a good idea that your website is about.
5. No Numbers Or Hyphens: This too makes it prone to misspelling.
6. It Has Rhythm: The sound of it rolls beautifully off your tongue. I've always loved the word Google, but that's obviously taken.
7. A .com If Possible: I've heard this many times before. While I did have some good success using a .net URL, many experts still swear by the .com domains.

Lastly, imagine a year or two from now. Can you see your brand being the ultimate resource for your niche? If you can, then you've got yourself a Brand.

The Research

After coming to the ideal domain name, you would have to do a little extra research. What you are going to look for is:

• Does it already exist? Is someone already using that Brand? You can just do a simple Google search for this part. If it does, it would be best to select an alternative.
• Is it a trademark? Avoid this like the plague. I once tried to create a website with a trademark brand name and after spending months setting it up and posting articles, I received letters from a law firm demanding that I take down the website. I was lucky, I could have been sued.
• Is it available? Go to GoDaddy and see if you can sign up for the URL.

This is a simple guide on choosing a brand, domain name and URL. So much more simpler than trying to match EMDs and PMDs.

I Got Blocked By Wordpress.com

I recently changed tactics and strategies for mt Internet Marketing venture. I have been creating websites on the internet for over 5 years but the income that I have received was less than satisfactory, to a point where I had actually given up for a couple of months. Recently I stumbled upon The Smart Passive Income blog by Pat Flynn and he re-kindled the drive to seek an online business in me. But I wanted a way to be able to monitor my progress and at the same time document what I am doing. So recently I began a free blog on Wordpress.com with the sole purpose of documenting my work. Though it contains not a single advert or affiliate link, today it got blocked. So I will be moving all the posts from Wordpress to here. Blogger has never failed me, I should have just journaled here instead from the start. The next couple of posts you will see here are from the old blog. Tim