Refining My Niche Site Process

Posted on September 2, 2010
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Niche Sites | Leave a Comment

Like I mentioned in one of my comments I am really doing some research and refining my niche site process. I am really getting some good ideas and putting them to the test. As soon as I verify that everything that I am learning and implementing works I will start to post it here.

I am really excited about this new process because I think it will make my sites hold their positions longer and not be as susceptible to a MayDay scenario that really through me for a loop a few months back.

After doing a lot of research I came up with my next niche site, Generators For Home Use. In the future I will go over the process I went through to decide this was one that I wanted to move forward with. I did use SEOPressor on this site to optimize my on-page SEO.  I also modified the theme a bit to remove duplicate H1 and H2 tags since I am placing them in the post now wit SEOPressor. This is something I might go back and do on some of my last few sites then to see how it affects them.

Almost everything I am learning is coming from the warriors forum. If you don’t get in there every once in a while you should. Granted there is a lot of crap to sift through… but if you find the right thread you can strike gold too.

Got Another Expired Domain Setup

Posted on August 26, 2010
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Niche Sites | 4 Comments

Maybe about a week ago I won an expired domain called Digital Baby Monitor. After I won it I quickly loaded up WordPress on it with a few ads. Just like that it held a front page position just as it did before I purchased it for the keywords Digital Baby Monitor. I think it is in like position 9 in Google. Tonight I used SEOPressor to optimize my SEO. Of course it told me that I needed more content, H1 – H3 tags, an image with alt text and several other things. So I now have my on-page SEO in order and I just have to wait to see if it rises any closer to the top.

Just Applied SEOPressor to a New Expired Domain I Won

Posted on August 23, 2010
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Niche Sites | Leave a Comment

I can tell you that I am in love with SEOPressor after optimizing my first site with it. I loaded the SEOPressor plugin onto my latest expired domain that I picked up, Danielle Panabaker. I popped in my keywords which are her name into my only post currently on the site and it said that I was sitting at about 40% optimization for those keywords. Now this domain might not be the best test subject since Google did replace the listing with content from my site but no cache was available yet. This site was sitting in the number 7 spot when I got it. It still is in that spot with no cache available but it does show my content in the listing. The content showing is the 40% optimized content.

So step by step I did what the SEOPressor plugin said to do and I am now sitting at 94.44% for those keywords. This plugin literally forced me to write more content then properly set my keyword density. It automatically bolds, underlines and italicizes my keywords throughout the post or page. It tells you to add an image and set the alt text on the image. Actually if you add the image you can have it add the alt text automatically for you. It also makes recommendations for placing your keywords in all 3 header tags. This site has more content then the other sites I have been putting out recently all because SEOPressor told me I needed it.

I think this plugin is exactly what I needed! Someone or I guess something to sit over my shoulder and tell me what I needed to do. In this case I have backlinks in place since it is an expired domain but normally after in page optimization all that is left to do is build backlinks through various methods like article marketing. Maybe after I wait and see were this one moves to with the optimized post I will then add some more backlinks. But for now I am not touching another thing for a few weeks and I will let you know what happens. I am very happy with my purchase of SEOPressor. It will be on every site I create from now on.

SEOPressor Banner Added

Posted on August 23, 2010
Filed Under Helpfull Tips | Leave a Comment

I added the SEOPressor banner on my site. I feel that this tool is going to once again make me successful with my WordPress blogs. My blogs get very low SEO scores by SEOProcessor. I am in the process of updating several.

I get this feeling that I was working my but off promoting a site that was not even optimized properly in the first place. Get you onsite SEO in order with SEOPressor before you start promoting your site and building backlinks.

I will do a full  review once I have more details but I did not want everyone to miss this opportunity. Click through on the banner and watch the video.

Doing Some Domain Testing

Posted on August 23, 2010
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Niche Sites | 3 Comments

I did some research and found a domain that gets 9,900 exact searches per month that was unregistered. The competition is very fierce at 2,660,000 exact results. So I figured I am going to register this domain name and see where I can get it to rank. I mean having the exact keywords in the domain name should help a lot. The site I picked up is Supernatural Season 1 and for reference I think Supernatural is an awesome show.

I think I got a good one… maybe…

Posted on August 20, 2010
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Niche Sites | 3 Comments

I put in a $69 bid at Name Jet for this site, Anna Faris. Two other bidders did the same after me. Yesterday was the end of the auction and the other 2 bidders were no where to be found. So I am now the owner of this site and I have just loaded up WordPress on it to kick it off.

I am excited about this site for several reasons. It was ranked number 3 in Google for the keywords Anna Faris. Unfortunately the site was taken offline about a week ago and Google dropped it from its index. In the past I was able to hold the positions of expiring domains without them ever being dropped. I really hope I can get this one back into Google soon and rank on the first page. I am a little skeptic on this one.  Gtrends show those keywords getting about 3,000 hits per day for the number 1 spot in Google. The Adwords keyword tool shows 110,000 exact searches per month. That is about 3,666 searches per day. I would love to just capture a fraction of this traffic. Who am I kidding I want it all. LOL.

So I think this domain name was a steal for $69 and I just have my fingers crossed that I can get it back into Google and ranking well again soon.

Buying Expired Domains Again!

Posted on August 16, 2010
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Niche Sites | Leave a Comment

So I am back to buying domains again. My latest purchase that is up and running is Schwinn Double Stroller. My main draw to this domain was that it is sitting in the number 1 spot in Google at the moment for those keywords. I am interested to what will happen to it now that I have it updated and ready to go. I have a few others that I am working on but this was the best one that I have landed so far.

I decided to continue to use DropDay.com for my domain research even though it is no longer free and I have to pay a monthly fee to use the service. I made this choice when I could not find an alternate free service that provided the same level of detail.

Overall traffic to a few of my sites is rising but I am still struggling overall. With the changes that Google made back in May you just can’t throw up a site and expect to do well. You need to spend the extra love and do the article marketing and get backlinks. This is the stuff I hate to do so I am either going to have to outsource it like someone recommended in a previous post or possibly buy existing domains that the work has already been done for me.

Man does my head hurt!

Posted on August 2, 2010
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | 4 Comments

I am still spinning my wheels trying to get traffic from Google. Here I was sitting pretty making good money and then Mayday comes along and ruins it all. This is mostly true for me because my sites relied on long tail search results coming from Google. Mayday made changes to those results I guess mainly to weed out thin sites like mine.

Since then I have tried several attempts and have had some ok results but not what I am looking for. I did the Antique Cash Registers site with article marketing and original content posts. It is getting some traffic but nothing like I was hoping for.  I just started the Idiot Talk site and I still have hopes for that since I have 100+ followers on FaceBook but I am having a hard time getting them off facebook and onto my site. So what next?

Well I thought this through and have came up with yet another plan. I really want targeted keyword traffic. That is what works best with my EPN sites. So I am going to do some keyword research and pick just one keyword that gets a fair amount of traffic and focus on driving my site to the number 1 spot on Google for that 1 keyword. Now I have micro niche finder and I use Google’s keyword tool and I always end up picking a good keyword and maybe getting in the top 5 and I get hardly any traffic. Turns out this is usually because those keyword tools are flawed and don’t have correct numbers.  One way is to use Adwords on my new keywords and monitor how much traffic I get but that can be costly. Another way is to use Google Insight and compare your new keywords against some other keywords that you know the numbers on. This is more acurate then the keyword tools and can save you time from setting up a site and marketing it just to find out that you wasted your time for 1 or 2 clicks a day.

So there you have it… my next plan of attack. I would love to hear how others are combating the loss of long tail keyword results in Google.

Am I an idiot?

Posted on July 23, 2010
Filed Under Niche Sites | Leave a Comment

I would like to think not… but that does bring me to my latest creation: Idiot Talk.

I went for something completely different with this site. I custom coded it from the ground up. It is a place to post about any encounters you may have with idiots. I think it could be fun if I can get some people to start posting some original content. To kick it off I re-posted some idiotic stories I found on the web.

I still have some work to do on the site but I couldn’t keep it to my self any longer. My goal with this site is to promote it hard with social sites to get some major traffic.  I would love to see this site reach 10,000 visitors per day. If I can do that I then want to see what I can do with the traffic and EPN. Currently I put up some idiot t-shirts at the top of the page… but I am sure I can drum up some other ideas.

So do your social duties and visit my new site and fan me, follow me and stumble upon me… thanks!

Got the Dedicated Server Running Better!

Posted on July 16, 2010
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So I am feeling better about this whole server thing now.  I think I still have some room for improvement and will still test out my non-wordpress ideas.  At the same time though I have some basic wp sites that load in 1.5 seconds and that is acceptable to me.

I did 2 things to get the load on the server back to normal. The first thing I did was identify the problem areas using my log files. I watched for the accounts getting hammered with cpu usage and then checked the raw logs on those accounts. Over and over again I found that it was bad bots. So I came up with a good .htaccess to block the bots. I don’t remember exactly where I found this but it was not mine to take credit for…

bot code to put into .htaccess

Then I saw both good and bad bots just killing my search script. That script was dynamic and always will return a page no matter what you search for. Google tells you not to include pages like this in their index. I hated to tell them not to crawl those pages but I did with these lines in my robots.txt

User-agent: twiceler
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search

The first one is to block cuil/twiceler… it was something I talked about many months ago. I could probably move that over to the htaccess but cuil listens and doesn’t hit my pages. The other lines tells all search engines (*) to not crawl the pages in the search directory.

To my surprise implementing these changes across all my sites has made huge improvements. I noticed it took a little while for some of the bots to look at the robots.txt file again. Looks like they don’t look for it every visit to your site. The stuff in the htaccess file though will block the bots immediately.

Now I want to shift my focus a little from the technical stuff like this server and get back into what it is going to take to get my earnings back to an acceptable level.  Even though these server problems sucked I am actually kind of glad it happened. I like being on my own server and in control of my own destiny.

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