|
Posts Tagged ‘SEO Niche’
If not, here’s a quick rundown: SEONitro, a blog network I used to be part of, released a similar statement last week saying that a good number of their blogs too had been deindexed. Some deindexing happens and every network owner will tell you that it is to be expected – but this last move by Google Panda left some serious damage. In other words, this hard of a hit was NOT expected by anyone. I had been using LinkVana since January 1st of this year (I was asked to review it and as such decided to try it out for 4 months). I can’t say I used it as much as I perhaps should have, but either way, I was starting to see drastic improvements in rankings for the sites I did use LinkVana on. Then this Google Panda news hit the net and I decided to wait and see if LinkVana would get hit as well. No news came! Long story short, I started doing random spotchecks on the backlinks I got through their network and yes, some of the blogs my backlinks were on, were indeed deindexed. The majority however – to my surprise – were still indexed. I started doing some research on forums and other users shared similar results. So I figured the only thing left to do was to contact the folks at LinkVana and see how things were looking from their end. They confirmed that some sites had been deindexed, but compared to some other blog networks, the damage to their network was “minimal.” Curious why that might be, I was assured “we do things different from all other blog networks aroun”. Comforting for now, but how will they fare in the long run? We will wait and see I guess. As for myself: I will continue using them until the end of this month. Do they still give me results and do I think it’s worth the money? Yes. No doubt about it! Having said that, the whole private blog network scene has become to risky for me and it’s time (for me at least) to move on to greener pastures. Here’s the thing: It does not matter how high-end a blog network is, if it is shared with hundreds of other marketers to promote hundreds of websites with, it can not ever appear “natural”. Which is just one of the reasons I originally started creating my own blog networks using free blogs. Yes, there you stand the chance of your blog getting deleted by the networks owners but get this: they actually want their users to establish authentic (real) blogs on their network so if you do that, your risk of getting deleted almost does not exist. In other words: if you stay within their terms of use and you create a REAL blog, chances of them deleting your blog are VERY slim. And even if they did, it’s not a big deal simply because it did not cost you anything anyways. I know they are a LOT of work (which is why I outsourced them), but truth is: they work. FACT: I reverse engineered the backlinks on one of my sites last night and it turns out that the majority of my POWER links (as in – links that give my site the most ranking power) came from sites in my free blog networks that I had created 6 months ago. Crazy right? I know! Some of those free blogs now had a PR of 4 – even though I never actually built many backlinks to them other than the ones I usually do (as explained in my free blog network guide). The guide never was a big hit when it came out simply because it told the reader to do some work (as in: setting up free blogs and making some real posts, etc). A common argument: “Why do all the hard work when you can just pay a little money and use a private blog network like BMR, SEONitro, or even LinkVana?” Well… today I think we know why. Because when all the private networks get deindexed, you will still have your very own FREE private blog network you can fall back on. So a long story very short: after this month, if I will start using private paid-for blog networks again, it will be to boost the linkjuice on my free blog networks. That way I have a bit of a filter when hell breaks loose – and my money sites won’t be affected as a result. My money sites are becoming more and more valuable to me and as such I become more and more hesitant in using anything that could potentially harm the long term success of the sites. I’d hate to have to start everything from scratch again – so better do things right the first time! These are just my five cents on the matter. Any thoughts?
Aside from not having friends and family on board with what I was pursuing, my greatest stress was meeting ends needs financially so that I would not starve myself to death. And by starving myself to death, I really do mean that there were days where I went hungry – because I honestly did not have any crackers or rice left and had no money to go buy myself some. It is embarrassing to admit this, but it is the truth. Besides, a humble beginning generally always makes for a good story if one pulls out of it and reaches beyond average heights so… I don’t mind sharing it! You see, the foolish mistake I made was that I immediately relied on my new entrepreneurial venture to pay all my bills as well as feed me. The savings I had accumulated before starting out were quickly gone and here I was: dead broke with not two pennies to rub together. I had lit the candle on both ends. I had backed myself in to a corner. I had burned the bridge behind me. There was no going back for me – I had to make things work somehow. And I did! What was my entrepreneurial venture? I had determined to become an expert in SEO. I read 1 to 3 ebooks/guides on SEO every day (yeah, there are that many out there), listened to all the audio training I could get my hands on, watched every video on SEO that I could find, and was hitting it hard with xRumer, Bookmarking Demon, and other SEO tools like it. What I did not take in to my calculation, was that: SEO takes time! You can not wake up one morning and say “today I will rank my website #1 on Google for make money. Starting tomorrow I will get 100,000 visitors a day and will make $10,000 a day selling high converting ClickBank products.” It just doesn’t work that way. SEO is tedious work and it takes days, weeks, and months to rank for worthwhile keywords IF you know what you are doing. If you are a complete newbie (like I was) you don’t stand a chance in the competitive niches. Obviously it was harder than I had thought. SEO was hard and tedious work. Maybe my friends and family were right: I should just go and get a job like everyone else. Well something inside me (I think it’s called pride) told me to keep pushing. I was so convinced this would work out sooner or later. And it did! In my quest to master SEO, I had learned a thing or two about it and used my savings to invest in some pricey SEO software. I then offered backlink building services (see the modern version of my original SEO service here) to websites owners and before you knew it, I was starting to make more money than I ever made at a job. The Problem: You ever have that? You get so busy helping people that you forget to help yourself? A very wise man once said “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and though I agree with that saying 100%, I also think that we sometimes do more for others than we would do for ourselves. Know what I mean? As an example: When an order came in, I would be all over it and try to go above and beyond to make sure the customer got more than he paid for. Yet on slower days, I could not get myself to build a single backlink to my own site. Looking back, this was one of my greatest mistakes as an entrepreneur and fact is, it is a common struggle among start-up entrepreneurs. You see someone offering to do your graphical work, and yet their website needs it more than yours. You find a copywriter who offers to write you a very high converting sales letter and yet when you read through theirs, you are not at all convinced that it is for you. I guess the question to be asked: do I take the same medicine I prescribe to my patients? It is a lot easier to sell what we have to offer if we are our #1 customer. We want to be different from all the wanna-be’s by actually living what we preach. Just a little something I had to think about today, Konrad
I know that that is NOT something a search engine “geek” like myself should ever confess to, but fact of the matter is, when I started out online, I made that painful mistake more often than I can count. You see, it is not that some keywords can not be ranked for, it’s just: some keywords take a LOT of time and a TON of resources before one gets worthwhile Google ranking for them. Unless you have thousands of dollars in your monthly advertising budget, you should be extremely careful what keywords you commit to pursuing Google ranks for. In fact, why not save yourself all the doubts & frustration and learn to do propper niche analysis? For $9, you can’t go wrong! See: http://empiremarketing.ca/wrong-niche There is nothing wrong with being ambitious and aiming for the TOP keywords, but as Joe proves (see link), unless we do propper niche analysis, we are likely wasting our time and resources by going for the (often) near impossible keywords. Secret Fact Revealed: I am educating my team on this very topic right now. Why? Because I will soon be offering keyword research services to my customers (at extra cost of course). To be honest with you though, keyword and niche research is not hard. In fact, you don’t NEED any fancy tools to do it! Want to be qualified to charge for keyword analysis or simply want to pick better keywords for your own websites (without paying a fortune to have my team do the research)? Joe (you probably know him by now) has put out nothing short of AMAZING stuff these last few months and I have grown to respect him a lot. He never ceases to amaze me with his top notch products/services. The crazy part is, he NEARLY gives everything away… as is the case again with this guide. Anways, check out the above link for more details! Konrad Braun
I know of internet marketers who only promote products or services that bring them residual commissions. In other words, if they can’t earn commission month after month for promoting a product or service once, they will not bother promoting it. The beauty with that kind of a mindset is that you can really build a huge cash-flow business very quickly (if you do it right). The downside is that you are limited to the amount of products/services you can promote. Anyhow… if you are like that or if you simply would like to earn commissions over and over again for work you did once, why don’t you signup for my affiliate program? Sign up to my SEO affiliate program Here I pay a 25% commission on all orders sent my way. If a customer does not sign up immediately, we use cookies to set your affiliate ID so that even if the customer orders anything a year or two later from this site, you get your 25% commission. Pretty powerfurl eh? To give you an idea on how cool this is: one affiliate recommended me on his blog about a year ago and without even doing anything now, he is bringing in 1 -2 customers every week. It might not be much, but the commissions add up very quickly. Did I mention that if the customer keeps renewing their order, you continue to earn the commission? Anyways… this is not a sales pitch. I just thought I would write up this update just so you all know. I get asked almost daily if I have an affiliate program and now you know that I do. Cheers, Konrad Braun
|
Let's Connect
 |
If you are at all in the SEO niche, I am convinced that you have heard of Google’s Panda latest move.
Starting out as an entrepreneur is not always easy – we all know that!
One of the scariest things I ever had to realize was that for some of my websites, I was going after the wrong keywords. 
Recent Comments