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.
May 19th, 2009 | by Court | Published in SEO | 35 Comments
We’re back for a long-overdue episode of 30 Days To Better SEO and today we’re going to talk about using HubPages to build clean links. We talked recently about using EzineArticles to get links, and this method isn’t super different.
The whole point of using sites like Ezine and HubPages to get links is to increase your site’s link juice, and ultimately its rankings. You can of course use a bunch of different methods but links from HubPages and Ezine are quite strong, which is why I recommend using them. Stronger links make a much bigger difference in rankings than links from weaker sites.
Steps For Getting Links From HubPages
- Sign up for a free HubPages account.
- Build a hub that’s related to your topic. If you need help, check out the HubPages quick start guide.
- Create a link back to your site, within your hub.
It’s that easy… BUT there are a few things that you should know about getting links from HubPages.
First, they are extremely efficient at not getting spammed. In order to get real links from HubPages you’ll need to create some quality hubs. If your author score isn’t 75 or higher, your links will have nofollows, which take away the link juice. You will have to create a handful of decent hubs to be able to get your score above 75. I would make sure that each of your hubs has at least 400 words of unique content – most of mine have around 800. Yes, that’s a lot but is also the reason that my hubs rank well in Google.
Second, you are only supposed to link out to your site once within your hub. If you link out more than that it will make the hub overly promotional, and it will be de-published until you fix it.
The bonus that comes with this method is that you can use Adsense and affiliate programs to make money with HubPages.
May 11th, 2009 | by Court | Published in SEO | 13 Comments
If you want to establish your site, there is something that you simply must do. You really need to get to know the other people that have sites like yours. You may be hesitant to do this but nothing is going to help you more than getting to know the people in your industry.
Most people sit back hoping that somehow the biggest sites in their industry will magically find them and link to them. Honestly this isn’t just going to happen by itself. It will happen only if and when you make it happen.
There are a lot of different ways to get to know the people that have solid sites in your industry but the first step is simply making a list of the people/sites that you need to get to know. There are a few key things that I would note down when you make your list:
- Name of each site owner
- URL of each site
- Contact information for the site owners
- Whether each site has one author or multiple authors
- If the sites accept guest articles/posts
Keep in mind that you aren’t going to get to know each of these people all at once. You’ll start by trying to get to know that ones that have sites that are more at your level. The people that have really popular sites probably won’t be as approachable because they’re going to have a bunch of people trying to contact them every day.
Finding Sites/Contacts To Add To Your List
There are a couple techniques that I use to make a list of contacts to add to my list:
- Searching Google for my keyword and for related keywords
- Searching Technorati for my keyword and for related keywords
Usually I can add a ton of contacts to my list by going through those two sites. The sites that rank well in Google will be the ones that can help you the most, but will also be the hardest to get help from. The next step in the 30 Days To Better SEO will cover contacting these people so today we’re going to stop here. Make your list!!
