Since the 6 May I’ve published another 13 articles – with five sent but not yet published – so yes most of them have been published in the last couple of weeks! However I now have some regular writers on board so I will hopefully get a more consistent number of articles published this month!
Computer dog?
Rankings As of 2 August 2010
Rankings on (2 June | 30 April ,14 April 2010 in brackets | 8 April 2010)
18 pages indexed in Google (24, 26, 15 |13 pages)
13 backlink recognized in yahoo (13,13 ,6,1, 0)
domain name exact match long-tail: 8 (12, 14, 17 | 17)
main keyword:14 (21, 17, 34 | 61)
main keyword singular: 12 (19 ,19 , 31 | 61)
Sorry I’ve stuffed up the tracking of the cousins – to the point I can’t remember which was which LOL. Suffice to say that they have all improved since 2 June and are now all on page 3 or 2.
Note about the rankings – as I am still only getting trickle traffic – according to scroogle.org I am 14th for my exact match domain name and 22 for my main keyword – or in other words my rankings are hardly stable. So more backlink building for me!
So I guess the overall message here – is its hard to stuff this up – if you miss a week or a month – don’t quite, give up, or (shock, horror) look for a job. Just get on with getting more links LOL
What is the Competition Up to?
Tiffany updated about a month ago her Keyword Academy Case Study
End of the first month with my little Keyword Academy Case Study with the statistics for my new site after a month of Postrunner submissions. Basically the site seems to be growing naturally with solid page 2 rankings for both my exact domain match and my main keyword. I have the distinct feel that the exact domain bonus drops siginficantly down if you have more than two words in the domain (this domain has four).
Supreme Court, Wellington New Zealand
Rankings as of 30 April 2010
Rankings on 30 April (14 April 2020 in brackets | 8 April 2010)
25 articles live 2 still waiting review. Over all iIve had 3 or 4 articles returned after 7 days because the directory owner is asleep at the wheel. When you schedule posts in Postrunner – they are not actually sent to the directory you select until the date scheduled so you may have to wait for another 7 days for the article to be approved.
Of the 25 articles live – all but 4 are indexed. One of those has only been live 2 days the others have been live for over two weeks so I may need to build some links to get them indexed.
I haven’t put Adsense on the site – but I may do soon because I am starting to get trickle long-tail traffic. I have an affiliate product which as so far has had a bout 30 clicks (but no sales).
Hows the Competition Doing?
Alana has battled through hardware failures to update us on her Keyword Academy Experiment
Tiffany’s posted her one month’update at Passive Income Goals
Has anyone got an update? Let me know and I’ll link you here!
This is too early to be doing an update – but I thought some of you would find this interesting. BTW I use the excellent rank checker of Market Samurai to check my rankings with a single touch of the button – saves me a lot of time:
Site launched 31 March 2010
Site indexed 1 April 2010
Cape Tribulation, Queensland
Rankings on 8 April 2010 (14 April 2020 in brackets)
15 pages indexed in Google (13 pages)
1 backlink recognised in yahoo (and its the same directory which got me indexed) (0)
domain name exact match long-tail: 17 (17)
main keyword: 61 (34)
main keyword singular: 61 (31)
cousin keyword #1 ; 47 (63)
cousin keyword #2: > 100(43)
cousin keyword #3 > 100 (>100)
cousin keyword #4 > 100 (>100)
cousin keyword #5: 37 (49)
cousin keyword #6: 71 (60)
cousin keyword #7: 67 (60)
Backlinks Live
Number of postrunner posts live: 7
Number of postrunner posts indexed: 6 one of the most recent ones is not indexed.
Note all those posts indexed organically i.e. it happened without any effort on my part. Whether the site owners built links to the posts I have no idea – but if you have been around Internet Marketing for more than 5 minutes you should realise that this is a truly awesome result!
So who else has got some results to report? Send me the link to your post and I’ll add here or updated us in the comments!
So now we have the keywords chosen, the site installed – now what? Well first – particularly if this is a brand new domain – which mine is – you need to get the site indexed. There is a sure fire way to do this – find a site which is being crawled by Google a lot – and get a link from it. I used Postrunner obviously – and many people there will tell you their site has very fast indexing – most of them don’t lie either. Once I find a site that gets crawled a lot and gets sites indexed easily I carefully document and remember it (i.e. I scribble its name semi-legibly on a post it note and stick it on the white board).
How To Know If A Site has Quick Indexing
Two types of sites seem to get quick indexing in my experience:
authority sites
sites whith lots and lots of updating content
This site is an authority site (google lissowerbutts.com and you will see a listing with more links in it than normal – that’s an authority site). I don’t post very often here – but when I do I am disappointed if it takes longer than 30 minutes for Google to index the post. BTW that works for posts which include duplicate content as well and posts with hardly any words in them at all. Though it take several hours for Google to notice a new Resources page I added.
So once Google loves a site it will love anything you put on it and – for our purposes today – this is the important bit – it will follow any links you add and if the site is not indexed it will get crawled.
To find a site with constantly updating content – just check the cache date in the google index – is it recent, check when it last indexed new pages and compare that to what is showing new on the site.
Is there a link out there? Nope just the Tasman Sea!
Planning a Backlink Campaign
I used to randomly just get links for sites – this is better than not getting links at all, but these days I am a little more organised – mainly so I know what I need to do next on the site. You see I may not be back for a month given the number of sites I have. On my spreadsheet I keep a record of the main keywords and the cousins. On another tab I create a list – date per a line for a fairly heavily link building time frame like this one. Normally I have a column for source (Postrunner, ezineatricles, hubpages etc). Then a note (written, ordered,scheduled), the keyword I’m anchoring on the PR of the site I have sent the article to and the url of the stie (replaced with the article’s url when I have it). With Postrunner is very easy because you can schedule posts to appear on a certain day.
For anchored text I mix it up between the title of the site, the site’s url and cousin keywords. I throw in the odd “click here” and “this site” too – just to keep it looking natural (that’s a Griz tip BTW).
For the sites I chose – I don’t go for just high PR – I used a PR3 to get the site initially indexed – but about 80% of my links are from PR0’s why? Because 80% of the Internet has PR0 sites (a statistic I just made up on the spot).
I decided to go with 25 posts to 25 different Postrunner directories in the first month. I scheduled 9 to be sent out in the first 15 days of the month and the rest to appear at the end of the month. So roughly I went from a post post every 3 days at the start to posts twice a day at the end.
Am I building links too fast – will I get sand boxed (ie thrown down the rankings to live several months in the 100’s) – no idea – I guess you will have to stay tuned to find out!
Oh and before anyone asks – no it doesn’t matter if you only have have the site’s titled used 24.8% of the time not 25% of the time, or you link from 82.3% of PR0 sites! It doesn’t matter if you schedule a post to show up at 4am or 7pm either! Its not that exact guys – ifyou need exact in your life this game with drive you insane.
Articles and Links
Each article I use for these backlinks is a minimum of 300 words, has the main or related keyword in the title and once in the content. I have a single link out to my site – usually in the first couple of the lines of the article. Why so early in the content – two reasons. First the higher on the page your link is the (slightly) better it is for SEO. Second for many themes they will only publish part fo the post on the front page – if my link is in that first paragraph then it will probably hit that front page – the one with the PR associated with it.
I only include one link per an article to my site – Postrunner allows two but as I am only promoting a single site with basically a single keyword (and some closely related cousins) I don’t want to dilute the links.
I keep a copy of every article I use for support – I try to keep them somewhere that I can find them again.
Articles and Useful Links
Question: when is a link in an article useless to you? When the article isn’t indexed. About a month after publishing I go back and check that the article (not the site the actual article’s url – that’s why I made a note of it above) is indexed. If its not its a waste of time. I may get it indexed by sending some links to it – usually from another network I’m a member of. If I can’t get it indexed at all – or if the site has disappeared – its happened to me (but not with Postrunner sites yet) – I take the article (you know the copy I kept) and resubmit it to another site – its not duplicate because its never been indexed.
Tracking Your Backlinks
I quite like seeing what Google is seeing so I use Google Alerts to know when pages on my site are indexed (site:mydomain.com} an when Google recognises a link (link:mydomain.com) – far less common than Yahoo recognising links.
That’s about it really – nothing too complex – I have scheduled the articles out for the rest of the month so I am off to focus on another site for a while.
OK you horrible lot. This is it I am going to prove that this works. You can build websites – rank them in the search engines and retire to the beach to live off the earnings.
I’ve been reading for ages that people love case studies – I know I love reading about case studies to – it sure beats working – but I have resisted doing them because basically I saw them as a lot of work – they are in the discipine that I have any qualifications in – science. In science a case study is an experiment and you learn with experiments whether they prove or disprove the hypothesis.
Internet marketing case studies are different.
If an Internet Marketing case study fails – I make no money But there is really no downside in this experiment – I seriously doubt that I am going to fail to make money. I know that I can rank a site from ziltch to a page 1 in Google within 6 months if I chose the right keywords. If I do that I know I will make money from it (also sadly lacking in many science experiments). So what’s to lose? I will need to be slightly more organised than usual – but that wouldn’t be bad anyways!
So this is what I am goingto do:
start a niche site on a new domain using the Keyword Academy method.
rank it by ONLY using the keyword academy’s guest posting system. Now this is NOT the currently recommended approach in their core videos – but I have a hunch and I know that Mark, one of the guys behind TKA is trying the same thing. I am going to acquire around 25 links/month for the site from GPS.
Report back here every month or so on progress.
So how we are going to measure progress – scientist hiding in my back brain somewhere! Lets try this
number of pages in Google
number of backlinks showing in Yahoo
ranking for main keyword in Google
ranking of related keywords in Google
passive income earned
expenses incurred
It may vary depending what I forget to record from month to month!
The site will start off as a bog standard WordPress site set up as a niche site with arount 5-10 pages of content – I’ll probably launch it on the last day of the month just to keep the figures neat. Well my last day – I’m normally a day ahead on account of the time different and given that I will be away over Easter that will have to be close enough.
Here’s my challenge to you. You can read my every world, hang out on this blog waiting for the next episode – or you could build your own site. No matter how many mistakes you make chosing your keywords and setting up your site and promoting it – you will probably still make more money than if you just read my posts…
The difficulty with these types of case studies is that the biggest variable is niche – its just plain harder to rank in some niches than others. I am only covering one niche in this study. You could cover a different niche. Why not start your own new site (or indeed kickstart an old one you have been ignoring). If you want to report your progress regularly on your blog – drop a comment here and I will link to your posts. Or if you don’t have an appropriate blog – just drop a regular comment here with your progress. What’s the worst that can happen – you make money?
