Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

100 Blog Posts Week 3 Update

August 17th, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in Content  |  49 Comments

The blog post experiment had a very interesting week… I had some commitments that really got in the way of writing posts. I was able to write some but wasn’t able to do nearly as many as I needed to. I’m WAY behind and am at about the half way point as far as the writing goes. However, the experiment still did great this week. The new posts were able to produce $780.40:

So far the posts I’ve written have made $1831 in three weeks.

I noticed some interesting things this week:

  • People are linking to my posts. I’m not asking, it’s just happening. That’s what can happen if you really get into the mind of the searcher and deliver the information they’re looking for. This is obviously helping and is most likely responsible for a lot of the earnings increase this week.
  • The earnings from posts varies wildly. One post will do really well one day and then won’t produce much for a few days. Sometimes I won’t be able to find the post at all for a few days. It will then come back and do really well again. A lot of people in the comments here as well as in the forums see this happen and freak out. They think that something it wrong. This always happens when you’re dealing with new posts – it doesn’t mean that something is wrong.

I have to laugh because I know that I’m going to get a new slug of comments asking how many ‘readers’ I had on the site before the experiment. It seems like the common explanation is that this money is being made because of existing traffic. This is frakkin hilarious because it shows me how little some people actually know about making money with Adsense. Guys, regular visitors do not click ads and never will. If you think I’m doing this because my ‘readers’ are clicking ads, you obviously don’t understand the game. Searchers are the ones who will click ads and if you want to get ad clicks, you have to draw the searchers.

As a side note, the site I’m working with had less than 10 readers before I started the experiment.

There are no tricks in how I’m reporting this stuff. I know how to find the right keywords and I understand how to write about them. If you’re wondering if I’m somehow leveraging my existing traffic to make this money let me put your mind at ease – I’m not. The traffic on this site is WAY up right now because of the addition of these new posts and it happens to be search traffic – the kind of traffic that clicks ads.

I’m a little surprised by how well this is going and at the same time I’m not. I’ve never added this much content based around solid keywords to a site before. Now that I’ve done this, I can’t figure out why this is the first time I’ve tried it. To me it’s pretty obvious that it would help any site but for some reason I hadn’t connected how much benefit I could get from this.

I think that some of you probably have the knowledge to pull something like this off and others need to learn more about keywords – how to find the right ones and how to target them well. There’s no way I could get these results without knowing what I know about keywords.

Add A Blog To Your Site

May 7th, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in Link Building, SEO  |  6 Comments

A few years ago I created my first website. I didn’t know HTML and I certainly didn’t know about blogging (even though it already existed at the time). Since I had no idea how to put a website together, I fired up Microsoft Frontpage (it was already on my computer) and started fiddling around. A few months later I had a functional, 5-page site.

I put the site online and started trying to figure out how to get links. I understood at least partially that links were the key to success with an online business.

The huge disadvantage that I had was that my little site didn’t get any links for itself. I could have left it online for 100 years and it never would have been found. It wasn’t in Google, wasn’t listed anywhere, and most definitely wasn’t being visited.

I worked on getting links for about six months before anything significant started happening. I didn’t understand most of the methods that could be used to get links so I had to do some really monotonous stuff. I had a job back then and I spent most of my free time searching sites like Linkmarket.net for link partnerships. I didn’t know of any other ways to get links so that was the only choice I had. They were mostly low quality links BUT they still worked and I made a lot of money with that site ($3,500+ per month at its peak).

While I owned that site, it did really well for me. However, getting links for the site was extremely difficult. It was really ugly first of all and it didn’t generate any links on its own.

Blogs have a ton of advantages over static HTML sites and I firmly believe that any site that’s serious about getting traffic with search engine optimization should be a blog or add a blog to their site. If you already have a static HTML site and you don’t want to change it to a blog, add a blog in a subdirectory, i.e. yoursite.com/blog. Here are some of the advantages you can get with a blog:

  • Blogs literally create their own links. When you hit publish on a blog you can expect to get links from blog search engines and other sites. WordPress, Blogger, and most other blog platforms notifiy search engines and other sites that you have published something new and they will link to it. Other sites also find you on blog search engines and will link to you if they like what they see. I sometimes talk to bloggers who complain because their sites get a small amount of search traffic. What they don’t know is that there are people who complain in the static HTML community because they haven’t had a search visitor EVER and that can go on for years with static sites because they don’t create their own links. The owner is on their own to get every single link.
  • Blogs are a lot easier to update than static sites so you can easily focus on producing more content. When I had my static sites I would spend all day trying to figure out how to create a link structure and that was ridiculously frustrating. Looking back I can’t believe I did all that work when I could have been focusing on the content for the site.
  • Bloggers are by far the most generous group of online entrepreneurs. When people complain to me about how hard it is to get links to their blogs I just have to laugh. I would love for everyone to have to work on a static site for a year or two so that they can appreciate all of the advantages that come from blogging. Bloggers are very generous and will help you out if you know how to ask the right questions with respect.

People ask me all the time how much they need to post on their blogs. You need to post as much as you can. Everytime you post you get new links that will help you to get more search traffic. You will also be adding content that will help you to get more search traffic.

What some of you are really asking is for me to set the bare minimum of work that can be done and I would urge you to shift the way you’re approaching it. I would start to think of ways to get as much done as possible and try to figure out how to get satisfaction out of the work itself.

A few years ago I had a partner that I was working on a site with. He would ask almost every day how much more we had to do until the site made a lot of money. All day long it was, “How many articles do we have to write for the site?” or “How many people do we have to email?”. He was thinking about things the wrong way and wasn’t willing to change. I had to walk away from that partnership because I could see that my partner wasn’t willing to pay the price. You can’t expect to make money if you aren’t willing to put in the time.

I have always tried to figure out how to do more and have tried to focus every day on making things better.

Whether you have a site that’s a blog or a site that you have a blog on, your focus should be the same. Post as much as you can or hire someone to do it for you. In the long run, the link juice you gain will pay off nicely.

We’ll be covering more and more ways to get links over the next few weeks as we continue the 30 Days To Better SEO.

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