Niche website search engine update

After about 3 months of developing a niche website which generates a little cash, this is my first update on how my websites are actually doing in search engines. I have been working on 2 websites, but I'm really focusing on just the one. The other one I'm actually leaving to try out things, so for the purpose of this post, I'll just refer to the website I'm currently focusing on.

Surprisingly, there is a massive difference between Google's results and other search engines for my primary keyword. It's been 3 months since I've started this website and I'm 13th in Yahoo, which is great. On Bing, I float between the 2nd page and the 5th. On Yandex, I'm on the 1st page at 10th position!

Google's results are completely different though... my website doesn't even come in the top 1000. So on most search engines I'm starting do rather well, but it's Google which is the obvious target though. I can only assume that it's Google's shift towards authority that is the main difference. Authority is certainly something I'm focusing on, but this will take time to build. How long and how much effort this will be require, I have no idea.

So where to from here? I've sent a few questions off to a friend of mine that's an SEO expert for some advice. I'll definitely post back any useful from that discussion. In the meantime, I'll be trying to develop more authority and create more useful content for my website.

Putting "Purchasing High Pagerank Domains For Backlinking" To The Test

I've been trying some proven SEO techniques, but as we know, Google's algorithms have been changing. Building backlinks through article submissions, social bookmarking and guest blogging may be working for my ranking, but I'm certainly not noticing it. Whatever anyone tells you, SEO is not simple nowadays... well not at least for us.

Some so-called experts have claimed that the best way to rank quickly, is to purchase domains that are already ranking well, create a website relevant to your niche, and then drop a few well placed backlinks. I thought I'd put this to the test.

The higher the domain pagerank, the better obviously. But unless we want to be forking out quite a bit of cash, we should really be starting out with pagerank 2 or 3 domains. These can be picked up for about $20 from GoDaddy. To do this, go to the products->auctions section and search for "closedouts". These domains can be bought outright and you don't have to enter a bidding war. GoDaddy won't give you the pagerank of any of the domains in the resulting list, so you'll need to extract the domains and enter them into a bulk pagerank checker (just Google for one, there are a few). I use Market Samurai's SEO Competition area to get the domain stats.

I've purchased 2 domains, both pagerank 3. So far only 1 has been transferred over (it takes about a week) and I've created a website and linked back to my main website. I'm looking forward to the next domain to be transferred, so I can do the same. I want to still find a 3rd domain to purchase to at least give this theory a full go.

I'll post back once I've done the 3 domains and hopefully with some positive results. I've put a lot of hard work and time into ranking, so it'll be great to see things moving forward.

Email Marketing - A Must Use Tool

Many website entrepreneurs have mentioned that one thing they wish they had done from the beginning was include an email subscription list. Email marketing is a great way to connect with your followers, but often we don’t know enough about it.

I’ve used email marketing for about 2 years and my favourite to use is Mailchimp. It’s easy to use, the support is great, they have a host of features and… they are the only big email marketing company that has a free package. Unless you’re sending to thousands of subscribers, you won’t pay a cent, so it’s perfect for starting out and getting a feel for things without having to splash some cash upfront.

One of the biggest draw cards to Mailchimp (although some other email marketers have this too, but you have to pay for the subscription) is the “signup form”. This form goes onto your website so followers can enter in their details and get added to your subscribers list. Mailchimp makes it simple by providing the html and also a WordPress plugin!

With this plugin, you just need to install it, add your “API key”, and the setup takes you through the configuration process. One problem I did run into was the alignment of the text and text boxes in the widget. I fixed this by adding this bit of code to my style.css file.

#mc_signup_form .mc_var_label {

display: block;

float: left;

width: 100%;

}

Another Mailchimp plugin made by a third party is called “MailChimp by ContactUs”. It allows for a bit more configuration and you’ll need to fiddle a bit to get it right, but it does have a few cool features.

Authorship on your WordPress website

The latest craze in SEO today is all about building authority. Have a look at this article on building authority. One thing that this affects is what you include in your posts on your website.

Once you've verify your email address (which has the same domain as your website) with your Google+ account, then any post on your website that has your name in the byline will be associated with your Google+ account.

Let's break that down a little. First, what is a byline? Simply put, it's the author's name after a post. EG. "by Jevon Coffin-Grey". Secondly, why would you want to associate your Google+ account with your website? Well if you've read the article on building authority, you'll know that creating a social presence is important to your SEO. Your social presence needs to rank well too. So by marking your authorship on posts indicates to Google that you (or really your Google+ profile) is an authority in the niche... and hence your website will grow in authority.

When I posted to my WordPress website, I realised that there was no byline after my posts. Here's how I fixed that:
Firstly, I needed to go to Users->Your Profile in my WordPress admin area and enter my author details. Secondly, I went to Appearance->Editor, because some code was needed. The required was "content.php".(I'm using the WordPress Twenty Thirteen theme, so the file may be different for you)
Here's the code required:
<small><?php the_time('F jS, Y'); ?> by <?php the_author(); ?></small>
This code needs to go into the section of code which displays your post. Below this section will be the code for the comments. In my file, I needed to insert the code above this line:
</div><!-- .entry-content -->
For an example of how this works out, check out the website on Online Business Ideas.

Backlinking Techniques

It's been a while since the last post. Things certainly do move a little slower around this time of the project. The content and backlink creation does not happen overnight and the backlinking area has not been so easy...

Firstly, I tried to create a number of backlinks by creating articles and submitting them to article websites. Yes, this worked and my articles were put up and links to my website were created, but this strategy seems to becoming not as great as it was a few years ago.

Article directories seem be including the rel="nofollow" parameter in article backlinks. This is quite annoying and means the crawlers won't follow that link to my page. Whether that means the backlink is useless, I'm not completely sure, but I do know it would be better without it. I tried to override it with a rel="dofollow", but this didn't work on all the websites.

It was obvious I have need to include some other backlinking strategies... but these strategies will need to be imployed once I am 100% happy with the website content. The reason for this is I will be pretty much asking for backlinks to my website (as a reference to information related to their website) in exchange for listing them on mine. To do this, my content must be great to make them want to list. There a plenty of websites to approach and even is I only get 10 hits out of 200, that's a success. These websites will have decent page ranks and be relevant to my website and therefore, the backlink will be of great value. Creating links from these relevant websites will also drive extra traffic to my website.

Building content for my niche I know little about

This is certainly a tricky part. I know very little about Kung Fu, but the internet has made things a lot smaller...
I decide to write down what I would want to know from a martial art site if I was arriving at it and wanting to learn. The site needs to be targeted at someone that's a beginner (hence the keyword "learn Kung Fu"). Also, I don't have the time to create all this content.
This is when decided to join freelancer.com. An incredible website that allows you to post a project and people bid for the work. This was my first time using it and I was blown away.
I created the spec for the content I wanted written which was six articles covering the history of Kung Fu to fighting techniques and meditation. Within 15 minutes, I had about 10 bids already placed and a few messages directly to me with freelancers telling me why I should pick them. The information wasn't overwhelming either, because I could easily see how they wrote to me (to determine if I thought their writing ability was any good) and also view their profiles to narrow down and create a shortlist. After creating a shortlist, I could request past articles from freelancers too.
It didn't take me long to decide on a freelancer and the content cost me just $50. At the moment, the freelancer has sent me through 4 of the 6 articles already and it is great. His writing is far superior to what I could have written.
The only downside was that my freelancer had no SEO experience like some of the others did. I'm not concerned though, because I can go through the articles myself and insert the SEO I want.
While I'm waiting for the rest of the content, I've simply been organising my site and getting used to the theme I'm using. I'll concentrate on creating backlinks and really pushing the SEO when I have my content. Then it is the exciting part of seeing if the website makes it up the Google ranks.

My niche selected

So I've found my niche at last. "Learn Kung Fu" it is. I'm happy with this, because I know I'll find it interesting which will keep me motivated and the competition is quite low. My only concern with it is that the traffic isn't huge. Still, it has the potential to earn that $10 a day I'm aiming for. Also, I wanted to start off with a niche which isn't too difficult. If this works, I'll tackle something a little more challenging and with a larger earning capacity. For now, my goals are to create a website with good content and get it to the top spot on Google.

I have found a few other similar niches which I'm tempted to tackle simultaneously. I'll focus most of my posts here on "Learn Kung Fu".

I've got my domain now, installed Wordpress and these plugins:
All in one SEO pack
Google Analyticator
Google XML Sitemaps

The "All in one SEO pack" is an SEO plugin that overrides any of the SEO data that is set by Wordpress. It's a must for getting the SEO right.
The "Google Analyticator" sets up Google Analytics.
The "Google XML Sitemaps" creates a XML sitemap. This sitemap will help Google index my website better.

I still have to select a theme for my website. Time to press on...

SEO techniques after Penguin 2.0

Google brought out a major algorithm change when Penguin 2.0 was released earlier this year (mentioned in an earlier post). The algorithms used in Penguin concentrate mainly on webspam and not content and I surely don't want any of my SEO techniques to be seen as spam.

What I've found is that "Authority" and "Anchor Text" are the key players here. Have a look at this article for some good information about these. What's interesting is that Google+ activity about a site is going to help it's rank more and more. Most people will think that the Google+ activity is not going to be seen by anyone, but I'll do it anyway... what ever is going to help my Google rank!

The challenge has started and niche has been found

I've been taking my first steps to finding a niche. The obvious choice for me has been to select a number of topics I'm interested in and see if I can find a niche within any of those. Here's a few of them:

Health and fitness
Surfing
Martial Arts
DIY
Beer
Hypnosis
Magic
Learning/Training

"Health of fitness" was what I started with. Knowing that the exact keywords would show a lot of competition, I went straight for the keyword generation in Market Samurai to try give me ideas of other niche's within this. There's been such a boom in "health and fitness" awareness over the last 10 years that every avenue I seemed to try had stiff competition. I got as far down the road as keywords like "yoga for pregnant woman", but still could not find a viable niche.

I slowly learned that the topics that I had a thought would have stiff competition, did have stiff competition. Time to start thinking a little more creatively.

Although not really an interest of mine, I decided to start my niche searching again with "Maid training", just to see if I could find something with decent traffic and low competition. To my satisfaction, I actually did find something. Not brilliant, but a good start. Here's how I got there:

Within Market Samurai, I typed in "maid training" and hit "SEO Competition". Here were the results:

What immediately got my attention is that the top domains were not taken up by websites dedicated to "maid training" and the URLs that looked more specific to these keywords didn't have great SEO. The page ranks (PR) were all 2 or lower and the page backlinks "BLP" were also really low. The green colours here are a great sign. These keywords showed a bit of promise, but it was time to check out the traffic volumes.

I hit "Keyword Research" and added a few negative keywords like cheap, free, or anything obviously unrelated. I also removed misspelled keywords and anything that had a location in it like "uk". After going through the results I realised that I should also add in common synonyms for "maid", like "nanny" and "nannies". After a decent list of positive and negative keywords, it was time to head to "Keyword Analysis".

As many of the articles I've read before about Market Samurai have advised, I created a few filters... "SEO Traffic" to 100, "Phrase to Broad Match Ratio" to 30, and "SEO Competition" to 100000. It then took the software a few minutes to analyse the keywords.

The keyword "nanny resume" came out with 137 hits a day, less competition and much better "SEO value" than "maid training". "SEO value" is really an estimate of the possible revenue from a keyword everyday. It takes the average Adwords cost per click, and multiples it by the traffic. It's a very clever indicator in my opinion. 

It seemed that "nanny resume" could work, but I needed to check out the SEO competition in more detail, so I clicked the key icon next to the keyword to open a new tab. Here's what the SEO competition looked like for "nanny resume":

The competition looked even better! I found a keyword that I might be able to use. My concern though: Is 137 visits a day enough? I'm not sure, but now I know I can find decent keywords and have a good idea of how to get there. Time to dig a little deeper and find some more. Hopefully I can get a few to widen my options.

SEO techniques... just be careful

I've read some great articles on SEO and had formed some great ideas on how to get to the top ranked spot on Google. Unfortunately, I've had to take a few steps back and think about this a bit more.

Google's algorithms change. Many of the changes are trying to filter out those websites that are trying to beat the system (like Penguin 2.0 which came out on 22 May 2013), but these changes will have knock on effects. This really means that old SEO techniques may not work in my favour. I need to go back and make sure that the techniques I want to use are not outdated otherwise I could find myself struggling.

More on choosing a niche

Over the past few evenings I've been trolling the web in an attempt to find out as much as I can about choosing a niche. I came across a video by Tyrone Shum (the man behind Five Minute Video Marketing) which gives a great overview of pretty much everything I've been finding.

Tyrone also gives a bit of insight into his SEO techniques to get up the Google ranks. It's an hour long video, but if you're just starting out then this video is worth the watch. It will certainly get you heading in the right direction.

He uses Market Samurai which I mentioned in an earlier post. I've also emailed Market Samurai about this challenge and asked if they can somehow give anyone doing this challenge a better price on the software. I'm sure they wouldn't mind a few extra users.

Challenge accepted!

A good friend, Clayton Scott, has taken up the challenge! Check out his blog on the challenge at http://compochallengeaccepted.blogspot.com . You can follow his progress and thoughts there. This is also Clayton's first attempt at creating a site like this, so I'm certain his content will be very helpful throughout the challenge.

Let's hope a few more blogs will be created by others taking part!

Website hosting (and 25% off it)

After a little research into good providers, I've decided to go ahead with Hostgator. Here's why:

Simply put they're affordable and reliable. There's a lot of great reviews scattered around on the internet about them. 

Their basic plan starts at $3.96 a month, but I'll be going for the $6.36 option. This option allows you to have unlimited domains and seen as I'm keen to develop a few of these sites, this fits my needs perfectly. I must point out that both these options come with unlimited bandwidth and diskspace and also a shared SSL certificate.

If you decide to go with Hostgator too, use the coupon "passivecomp" to receive 25% off your hosting as well.

WooCommerce... a great toolkit

I'm certainly no expert on Wordpress, but I have come across a great toolkit. WooCommerce (from WooThemes) seems to be one of the most widely used ecommerce toolkits for Wordpress.

One great aspect of this is the ability to sell digital downloads as well. Here's on overview of it.

 

A quickie for new developers

Those new to website development will be grateful know you don't have to get stuck into html and php learning. Websites do not need to be built from scratch. There are tools that help you develop websites without you having to know html itself. One such tool is Wordpress. 

Wordpress allows you to create your website by simply adding pages, typing in content, uploading images to it, etc. The html is generated for you. The great thing is that if you want something a little more complex on your website (like a shopping cart), there are plugins you can just download and install. These plugins are generally customisable too.

I'm not going to to go into much detail here about Wordpress, because there is plenty information all over the internet about it. Youtube has plenty of tutorials and introductions ( i have posted a nice video a few days ago too). Also, there are alternatives, but Wordpress is the most widely used. 

Choosing a niche for the website

This will never be as simple as just choosing something you like and going for it. Unfortunately, a lot research is going to go into this. When choosing a niche, we need to know how we are likely to fair on Google. Fortunately there are tools out there that can help us with exactly that. These tools will allow us to test out a particular niche/keyword out.... "Keywords" is the big term here.

What we really want to know is whether the niche for our website has a chance to get onto Google's first page and whether we will get good targeted traffic if we are there.

An example? We are thinking about building a site for "cellphone repairs". We could use one of these tools online to work out how much competition there is for the top Google spot when someone types in "cellphone repairs" or something related to it like "cellphone fixing" or "mobile repairs". We also want to know how much traffic these keywords generate. Ideally we want low competition and high traffic.

There are plenty tools out there. "Google Keyword Tool" is one of them and is free to use. I just signed up for a 12 day free trial of "Market Samurai" which looks to be one of the best and easiest to use. You can purchase Market Samurai for $97 (even though they market it at $149). Honestly, I'm hoping the 12 day trial will be enough. Check out this short video on Market Samurai to get a better idea of what I'm talking about.

Getting ready

So we want to build a website that earns us money... great... now what? 

There are number of skills we're going to need in order to do this. Not only skills like website development, but also how to implement SEO, build content, branding, and (probably the most important) how to select the niche for the website.

With less than 2 weeks to go before I dive into this, I thought it would be best to learn a few of the skills I will require and get familiar with some of the tools out there that will make life easier. 

But let's first look at the major steps of building this website and take it from there. Here are the steps I aim to take. These steps assume no outsourcing will be done. I'll decide on whether to outsource particular tasks later.

1. Commit to this (no use being half hearted)

2. Decide what the website will be about (what niche and audience am I targeting)

3. Decide on a look, feel and basic website layout I think will suit this website

4. Find the right development tools (development platform, payment gateway, plugins, etc)

5. Build the website's content

6. Get the website up Google's ranks

7. Add revenue generators

8. Continually work on ranking and other advertising to grow and grow

Following this challenge

Please add your email on the right hand side to follow the posts. Easiest way to keep up to date with what's happening.

Starting my prep soon for the challenge and will post some interesting stuff that will hopefully be helpful for creating a successful website.

Challenge Details and Rules

Objective: Create a website that generates passive income. The goal is set at $10 profit a day. This profit is determined by taking into account operational expenses. Any up front non-recurring costs may be neglected.

Rules: You can use any outsourcing you like, except paid advertising. At no point can you use paid advertising to generate traffic for your website.

Dates: Starts 15 July 2013, Ends 14 December 2013 (5 months)

Who can join: Anyone

Suggestions: Feel free to suggest any rule/objective additions or alternatives. We've got until 15 July to change anything. Feel free to generate your own blog to post about how things are going and the great stuff you're finding. I'll link to those blogs from here.

For those wanting to start on Wordpress, this is a good video on getting started

Challenge Thoughts...

After reading a number of articles on great ways to generate income online, I've decided that passive income sites have to be among the best options. It would be great one day to have a number of sites generating income for me. It may not be millions, but enough to live life without the grind of the everyday job. That said... I decided to approach a few friends I thought would share the same desire and make a little competition of it. This way, a number of different techniques/ideas will be used to generate a passive income site and hopefully we'll all gain good insight into the best approaches. Here I'll post updates on how I'm doing and hopefully get some updates from the others in the competition. Although it is a competition, we'll all be encouraged to share our ideas and methods.