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Authority Site Building – May Update

Written by Lis on May 9, 2012 · 4 Comments

OK I’m going to be posting a regular update on the progress of my travel authority site. The updates will probably be about monthly – unless something huge comes along. Frankly monitoring this sort of project more than monthly means I’d probably be doing too much talking and not enough doing – if you know what I mean. Hey at the end of it when I’m making thousands a month from my travel site – maybe I’ll pull all these together and flog the ebook to you guys! Until them – I’ll try to explain what I’m doing, and more importantly – why. I know making the transition from niche, anonymous site, to being out there with a site with your name on it is daunting for many. Well its daunting for me to, but frankly if I can do it, anyone can. Can I do it? No flipping idea, but I’m going to try, stick around for the ride! Background on my Authority Site I’ve written about my overall business plan for this site before. I initially registered the domain on 1 June 2011. I registered it to be the “home” for my self-published books. As I’ve said before [...] Read more »

Pick Myself Up, Dust Myself Off, Start All Over Again

Written by Lis on May 3, 2012 · 23 Comments

Thank you. The last email I sent out to the list was rather long, and had bad words in it. Frankly, I was not sure how it would go down. Given the choice I’d rather have put it on the blog, but there are some conversations I’m not prepared to have “out in the open” any more. If you want to know WTF I’m talking about – sign up for the list (under this post). Its the only truly G-monster proof place I have to chat. (No I don’t believe that Facebook pages are secure either, whatever their privacy settings). What I got was a ton of replies – some from people I’m pretty sure have never actually commented here. Thank you. Its nice to hear that I am sometimes useful. A few days after I wrote my last post my premier travel site got damaged by the rampaging bird aka Google’s Penguin update – maybe. Its weird – its going up and down in the SERPS like front page, not in the top 100, and repeat. Not just for one search term – for ALL of them! There used to be a sandbox when Google wouldn’t rank a site for [...] Read more »

Google Bullshit aka Penguin Debacle on the 24 April 2012

Written by Lis on April 28, 2012 · 15 Comments

Due to the fun of time zones mostly when its the 24th April in the US its the 25th April in New Zealand. In New Zealand and Australia the 25th April is ANZAC day. ANZAC Day is the day Australasians respect our war dead – so I personally think its pretty fucking ironic that’s also the day that Google decided to DISrespect the right of small business to exist on the Internet. By the 26th there were an awful lot casualties including askthebuilder.com – apparently being the poster child for the Adsense team and providing huge amounts of unique and original content is no guarantee that Google might rank you in the search engines. So much for the content is King argument. The winners, fairly universally, appear to be large corporations as domain authority and, quite possibly, large Adwords budgets, trump everything else. Full disclosure: my niche sites got slaughtered. As in every ranking gone from the top 100. My larger sites are generally OK with some oddities like losing the ranking for “passive income” for this one. However I do not think this is a result of the deindexing of Build My Rank, I saw the drop of a few pages [...] Read more »

Using Catalyst Theme To Build An Authority Site

Written by Lis on April 23, 2012 · 5 Comments

The original title of this site, when it was on blogger, was building an online income one website at a time. I figured I’d need about 100 websites. I’ve hung onto the niche website model for longer than most. I may well go back to it. But at the moment I feel like I’m swimming against the tide too much, and I’ve decided to build an authority site – just to see what happens – oh and to make lots and lots of money (of course)! I’ve already have one authority site – this one – but I built it my accident, I want to build this one deliberately. As Regev asked a question in my last Catalyst Theme Review I thought it was time to add a bit to that earlier review – by describing how I used the theme’s flexibility allowed me to achieve what I want to do now, and how I can evolve the site to what I want in the future, without a complete re-design. The Two Main Types of Travel Readers In my view, there are basically two types of people who read travel articles, be they blog posts or magazines: armchair travellers, those reading about [...] Read more »

Postrunner V2 Is Coming – Sneak Peak Review from a Beta Tester

Written by Lis on April 11, 2012 · 16 Comments

Postrunner is the guest blogging system which has been part of the Keyword Academy for several years. Now however its being re-launched as a Postrunner V2. What’s New With Postrunner V2? Well the core of Postrunner is the same as I described in my Postrunner review over a year ago. However Postrunner V2 is a complete re-write of the existing functionality – so it works robustly, plus a host of new features. The whole user interface has been greatly improved – its nice and smooth to use compared to the old one. The key functional changes are: site owners can determine how long an article they want and how many links they allow. No more standard 300 word posts with two links! If you want 1000 words with one link – you specify that at Postrunner will ensure that is all you get. site owners can add a long blurb introducing their site and saying what you will and will not accept – you can link out to a requirements page so you provide potential contributors detailed instructions there is now an author score – this is determined by owners who score your articles. Site owners can restrict access to their sites by [...] Read more »

Internet Business Plan: Making Money with a Travel Blog

Written by Lis on March 30, 2012 · 12 Comments

Back in January I talking about business planning - and at the time I expected to do several follow up plans which would detail business plans for several of my bigger websites. But it never happened. Why not? Frankly – I was stuck! I couldn’t figure out a business plan for my favourite niche – my main travel blog. So I did, nothing. Well I did think – quite a bit, and thought of and discarded dozens of plans. Now, several months later, I do indeed have a plan. If you just CLICK HERE I will tell you how to make $997,999 in the next 7 days while planning your next vacation. Nah sorry – but I’ll tell you what I’m trying to do – who knows it may even work out! Travel Blogging Is Tough My first website (it wasn’t a blog) – was in travel – it never made a cent. I still have the domain, now it makes a few cents with Adsense. My first blog is long gone (I have the content somewhere on the hard drive). It was the classic: this is what I’m doing type trip diary. Then I discovered you could get paid [...] Read more »

Build My Rank Alternatives

Written by Lis on March 23, 2012 · 41 Comments

Bamboo builds strong buildings; links build strong websites; Khao Sak, Thailand

I originally published this post in November 2011 pointing out that people really didn’t understand how to use link networks. I’ve now updated it = UPDATED: March 2012 after Google de-indexed Build My Rank OK guys apparently the world changed and some of you didn’t notice. Ironic really, I’ve heard plenty of people whinging about not being able to get good backlinks. Or asking for alternatives to Build My Rank because the BMR blogs didn’t look “real” and weren’t niche specific. There are two really obvious things that are apparently from Google’s swipe at backlink networks. First obviously backlinks from these networks were effective (otherwise Google would have just ignored them) and, in future you are going to have to play smarter. Build My Rank was not the only network to get deindexed and devalued, it was probably just the highest profile one amongst the make money crowd. SEO Nitro, SEO Linkvine. The sites that have not got hit are generally keeping a VERY low profile. This is quite specific – Google isn’t targeting spammy backlinks from forums, automated bookmarking or the other stuff you can buy for $5 at fiverr. People who have spammed the hell out of their own [...] Read more »

Build My Rank Is Dead – Long Live Links

Written by Lis on March 21, 2012 · 36 Comments

I'd call Google the elephant in the room - but I like placyderms

Build My Rank has been good to me. They’ve ranked my sites for years. It was easy, it was hands-off (I used an outsourcer), it worked. Until some time last night, my time. I woke to find this: Unfortunately, this morning, our scripts and manual checks have determined that the overwhelming majority of our network has been de-indexed (by Google), as of March 19, 2012. Read more here I wasn’t having a good day yesterday – seriously questioning what I was doing online and trying to figure out a new direction. Wizzley wasn’t living up to expectations, I was stuck in a funk of self-doubt and analysis paralysis. When I read the post above I expected myself to freak out. Oddly I didn’t. I know this means I’ve probably lost two sites which I’ve aggressively used BMR on – the same two sites which I’d just received the dreaded “notice of detected unnatural links” message in Google Webmaster Tools. Or maybe not. The more I think about this the more I see the opportunities. I finally know what I’m going to be doing over the next few months. First I’m not going to be doing anything Google would like me to do [...] Read more »

Sorry – Its Been A While

Written by Lis on March 19, 2012 · 13 Comments

Bad, bad blogger. What can I say – as soon as I get some traction going on this site – I don’t update it for 6 weeks, and don’t even manage to get an income report out for my email list! I guess this is why I need to have too many blogs – so I can ignore them on a rotational basis! Why am I ignoring this one? Well, really, because I have nothing new to say. Mum did say, if you’ve got nothing nice to say, say nothing! Nothings much changed. Wizzley is doing OK, but not spectacularly. It would probably do better if I’d manged to get more than under 80 articles up there though! And yes that is my entire output for the year pretty much. Far from surging ahead my income is stalling and slowly declining (thanks HubPages). I will need to pull money out for the flexiloan to pay tax next month – upsetting that. I feel like I am flying blind without Market Samurai. Traffic Travis – is the best of a poor set of choices for monitoring sites. It does OK, its a bit slow, and you will probably need to [...] Read more »

Market Samurai – Rank Tracker Alternative

Written by Lis on February 4, 2012 · 14 Comments

Sometimes you don’t know how much you like a tool until its gone. Although I’ve never been an affiliate for Market Samurai – I’ve used the tool on basically a weekly basis for years – I may have had it for about 3 years actually! I used it to track my rankings – and now changes to Google mean that they are going to probably start charging for ranking data, at the moment its only working it a limited format. If this is all news to you – then check out James’s post on Rank Tracking Software Other Than Market Samurai and Pat Flynn’s Interview with Market Samurai’s CEO Bugger, as they say, in software development, what do I do? (Oh I could rant on about the changes in costs for Market Samurai- but frankly, even if I never use them again – I’ve had enormous value from them for a $97 payment some years ago – I have no problem with them – I understand the problem is Google not them, and I can’t fix Google!) But my issue is that I feel like I’m flying blind with no quick and easy way to check rankings – and worse – [...] Read more »

Pinterest For Backlinks, Affiliate Sales, and Recipes

Written by Lis on January 19, 2012 · 17 Comments

I am liking Pinterest! SY gave me a heads up about why I should use Pinterest ages ago, and sent me an invite. I ignored it. Then she told me I REALLY needed to have a look, and finally I did. I figured it would be a distraction, it was, but what may well be a useful one. First off the site scared the bejeesus out of me – it is very “pretty” – I am graphically challenged and easily scared by people who can do pretty! Apparently a lot of the users are female – I’m not surprised. But even for the non-visual amongst us, and, dare I say it, those of us who don’t have any clues as to “our style”, and no desire to plan a wedding, its kinda cool, and useful. Cool Stuff You Can Do On Printerest Its good for collecting stuff together – I did a bit of baking around Christmas I was forever googling “how to make marizpan” and similar stuff – I found some good recipes – this would have been a good place to keep them all together (maybe next year). You can upload your photos. Its as close to a good place [...] Read more »