|
Posts Tagged ‘SEO services’
Late afternoon yesterday I decided to shoot a quick video for you and though most of it went well, I did not realize so much background noise would get in to the video. I tried editing it out but there is still quite a bit of the none-stop thunder in the background, including rain, and a siren. While editing it I screwed up the original HD somehow and the visual part of it got distorted too a bit, so I apologize for it not being as crisp as we like to have our videos. Having said that, I think the message is still understandable and for those interested, I do lay out some actionable steps you can take to duplicate my success.
I touched on this topic in my previous blog post entitled “Do Blog Networks Still Work?” but figured I should create a short little video where I talk about what exactly I did in a little more details. So here it is! I would love your feedback and personal experiences in this regard!
These last few months I have been giving my whole online business some thought and concluded that I needed to get rid of a lot of things that keEP me “busy” but are not helping me get to where I want to be 1 year from now – or even 6 months from now. One prime example is the search engine marketing services I used to provide to website owners. It was a great service – customers loved it – and I had great success with it. In fact, providing these SEO services is what allowed me to quit my offline business and start working full-time online. I had systematized the entire service to a point where I had a virtual assistant manage the entire system for me with about 1 hour worth of work a day. And that included customer service (responding to emails, etc). It was going pretty solid – with my highest month being around $6,000 in profit – JUST from selling the SEO services. It doesn’t really matter where you live in the world, $6,000 per month is a decent income, especially if – like in my case – it came in month after month without me really having to do anything. In fact, if I had walked away from it, it would have continued to bring me in a half decent income for months and years to come. Not bad eh? Not bad at all! But getting back to what I was saying earlier: It was nothing more than a distraction to me – keeping me from what I wanted to be doing online. Sure the money was alright, but providing generic SEO services is not something I wanted to continue doing – even if it meant minimal work on my part. Also, Google was starting to make some major changes to it’s ranking algorithm and my once overnight miracle service wasn’t quit as powerful as it used to be. The service was still great, but I just did not want to continue providing it if I didn’t full-heartedly believe in it myself anymore. So at the beginning of this year (January 2012) I got rid of the generic SEO service completely. I cancelled all subscriptions of incoming payments and shut down the entire system – retiring it for good. I still do a lot of SEO and probably forever will be known as “the SEO guy” but I mainly do it now for my own sites and a select few clients who have bigger budgets to work with. It would take a few posts to explain in detail why I stopped providing SEO services, but the short version is: as long as I have customers, I will put their sites as top priority (before mine). Now that I have less than 5 client sites to work with, I have plenty of time, energy and resources to focus on my own sites. Was letting go of a medium-range 4-figure a month income stream really a wise decision on my part? I think so and here is why: If I keep pushing my own sites like I have been these last two months, I should be in the 5-figures a month range before the end of the year – and that from just a handful of my many sites. Oh and get this: it would be without staff (or some of the other expenses that came with running the SEO services for customers) – which means more cash stays in my wallet. So here is my challenge for you: is what you are working on today getting you to where you want to be a year from now? Are you holding on to an ultimate distraction just because it gives you a sense of security for the time being? Maybe it’s time to cut lose the safety boat you are dragging to conserve your energy, time, and resources, and bring the big boat to the shore.
It is true: you used to be able to ping a link and whoala, a day or two later that URL would show up in the Google search results. Not anymore though! Search engines have evolved big time! Can you imagine just how much data Google (or any search engine for that matter) would have to add to their searchable database on a daily basis if they were to show every single link they come across to their search audience? That concept just did not work anymore, which is why Google (and Yahoo!) stopped counting every link publicly. This does not mean that Google doesn’t give you credit for all of your backlinks anymore, no. It simply means: just because Google crawls a link does not mean they will also show records of it when you search for it in their search engine. The good thing is: it makes it harder for your competition to reverse engineer your SEO strategies. The bad thing on the other hand is: it makes it harder for you to reverse engineer your competition’s SEO strategies. Some people get so caught up with the number of links they have to their sites. I myself don’t care. Sure, it’s nice to see hundreds and thousands of quality backlinks to a site of mine, but frankly I don’t care whether or not the search engines tell me how many backinks I have. In fact, the only thing that matters to me is “top ranking”. If a site does not rank #1 on Google for my keywords, I will continue building quality backlinks to it until it does. It is that simple. One thing I do make sure of though is that Google crawls my backlinks. Heck, that is about the only thing I can make them do. A “mass pinging tool” I created for my personal and business use (now available here) was designed to do just that: to take all my backlinks and turn them in to an RSS feed – which it would then push through pingomatic.com using unique IP addresses (check out my PingAutomatic WP WSO for exact details). Does it work? You betcha! Does it get my backlinks indexed? Sometimes. Sometimes not. What it does for sure though – it gets all my backlinks crawled. It keeps presenting them to search engine spiders using unique visitor IP addresses which pretty much forces (in a good way) search engine crawlers to spider them. Whether or not search engines decide to show my backlinks in their search results is beyond me though. There is very little we can do about that – but we can always try, right? I had someone email me recently saying “I ping the backlinks I build and they do not show up in the search results. Yet the backlinks I buy from you keep showing up in the search results. What are you doing differently Konrad?” There are a few things you can do to try and get your backlinks indexed (as in: showing in the search results). It is still not a guaranteed way of making them show, but it does seem to help the process. It’s simple really: First of, make sure that the backlinks pointing to your sites are of utmost quality. If the backlinks are of good quality (and on good quality sites), the chances of Google indexing them are greater. Secondly, build backlinks to those backlinks. This pretty much tells search engines that there is something special about the page where your site’s backlinks are on and it encourages them to index it. Pretty straight forward really! SIDE NOTE: Building backlinks to your backlinks is also a great way to drive lots and lots of link juice to your websites. I use this approach daily – it is effective and should not be overlooked. Now, a lot of people disregard RSS feeds and say they have little to no value, but I strongly beg to differ. You have any idea how much Google spent to acquire feedburner.com (an established feed network site)? I doubt they would suddenly turn around and render the feedburner project “worthless” as far as SEO is concerned. I am a strong believer in RSS feeds. I use them every day to help get my links and backlinks crawled. They work wonders if you use them right, but that is a topic for another time. I hope this gave you some clarification on the changes taking place with the major search engines. Again, don’t worry so much about your backlinks not showing up on backlink checker tools. Just make sure that your backlinks get crawled by search engine spiders and move on to building more high quality backlinks. Don’t get distracted by silly statistics. Instead, focus on what really matters!
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
It’s basically about the fact that it takes time and active labor to build an online business, just the way it would to build an offline business. It was pretty neat and again, if you have not read it yet, I would strongly recommend you check it out. Anyway, moving on to today’s blog-post topic, I want to talk a little bit about focus. I always thought I was pretty focused in my business but I am slowly realizing how that is not at all the case. I always have 5 to 10 full-time projects going at any given time and though that is not necessarily a bad thing, it does have it’s disadvantages. It is something most entrepreneurs struggle with and what I have come to realize is, unless one “systemizes” each project and sees one project through at a time, one quickly burns out and as a result, one leaves a lot of “could be made” money on the table. I want to take that a little further though: what if you are too distracted with “one” project? Example: this site (EmpireMarketing.ca) is my number one money maker and has been ever since I started working online full-time back in 2009. Be it commissions from promoting quality affiliate offers, sales of various SEO service packages, or services for offline clients, this site has done exceptionally well and has been my bread and butter for over 2 years. Sure, I have other projects, sites and products in various niches that bring in steady incomes as well, but when it comes to the big money, this site outperforms them all. But… this site has been – and still is to this day – costing me a ton. I put more money in to it than I care to remember and I probably spent a few thousand man hours on it as well. Which leads me to my point: I need to cut the expenses and focus on the things that will bring this site to the next level. What does this mean?
There is a saying we have here in Canada: a jack of all trades is a master of none. Essentially, why not focus on one service and make it the best out there? My goal is to provide few – but exceptional services. That way I can commit more of my time to creating free SEO training videos and step-by-step SEO guides. In short, sometimes you have to focus within your existing focus to find out what really is worth your while and what is keeping you from reaching the new heights in your business. Have you ever had to “micro focus” on something? I would love to hear your thoughts/feedback! Konrad
|
Let's Connect
 |
Have you ever felt like you were holding on to something that distracted you from doing what you really should and want to be doing? I am not at all talking about things like facebook, twitter, TV or other small things like that (though those can be).
Every other day I get an email that asks the age old question “what is the fastest way to get my backlinks indexed? I am building backlinks and I pinged them but they are still not showing on any backlink checker tools.”
Starting out as an entrepreneur is not always easy – we all know that!
A few weeks ago I made a post entitled “
Recent Comments